The Sixth Man

by David Baldacci

  Her security detail would be powerless to stop them.

  That was all right. She didn’t need them to be stopped.

  They had a warrant, she was sure of that.

  She shook her head, took a breath.

  They were right at the door. They pounded on it.

  “FBI,” one deep voice said. “Secretary Foster, please open the door.”

  She lifted the Glock to her right temple, positioning herself such that she would fall onto the couch. She smiled. A soft landing. She deserved that. It was fortunate that she had taken two Valium. That made things far less stressful. Anyone contemplating killing herself, she thought, should take advantage of the product.

  The FBI gave one last warning. She could envision the hydraulic ram being placed against her front door. It was hundred-year-old reclaimed wood. It would not yield easily. She had a few more seconds.

  She wondered if Harkes would be with them. She wanted to look into his eyes one more time. She would beat him still. She wanted to see the triumphant look ripped right off his face as the bullet slammed into her head. But he probably wouldn’t be.

  The coward.

  The powered ram head hit the door once. It splintered, nearly gave way. With the second pop it did.

  The door burst open.

  The men rushed in.

  Ellen Foster smiled at them and pulled the trigger.

  Only nothing happened. She pulled the trigger once more. Then again. And a fourth time.

  James Harkes strolled in, walked past the FBI agents arrayed around the woman, and stopped in front of her. He took the gun from her.

  “You don’t get the easy way out,” he said.

  She tottered in her heels. “You son of a bitch!”

  She slapped him.

  He didn’t flinch. He just stood there, staring at her with contempt. She finally looked away.

  “These men have something they need to tell you.”

  He stepped aside as they came forward, read off her rights, and cuffed her.

  As they led her away, Harkes called out, “One more thing.”

  She turned to look at him.

  He held up the gun. “You should’ve checked to make sure someone hadn’t taken out the firing pin, Madame Secretary.”

  CHAPTER

  87

  SEAN LOOKED DOWN at the number on his phone. “It’s Colonel Mayhew, from the Maine State Police. I phoned him earlier but he didn’t pick up. I left a message for him to call me back.”

  Sean answered and explained things to the colonel.

  Mayhew was understandably happy with the results. “You tell those people down in D.C. to make sure those bastards never see the light of day.”

  “I will, sir,” said Sean with a grin.

  “Damndest thing,” said Mayhew. “Can’t figure it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Finished the autopsy on poor Eric.”

  Sean’s stomach slightly tensed. “Gunshot wound, right?”

  “Absolutely. No doubt of it. Right to the chest.”

  Sean relaxed. “So what’s the problem?”

  “Well, it was a .32 slug. Same type that killed Dukes and your friend Ted Bergin. But the really strange thing is it was a contact wound. I just can’t figure how Eric could have let them get so close to him without getting off one shot. I mean—”

  But Sean was no longer listening. He was running.

  He was running not for his life. But for the life of the person he cared for above all others.

  “Feel better?” asked Michelle, as Megan came into the room dressed in fresh clothes.

  “The shower felt great. I think I’m halfway human again. And thanks for having my clothes sent here.”

  “No problem. After we failed you up in Maine it was the least we could do.”

  Michelle glanced out the window. In an SUV parked out front sat three FBI agents. There were two more in the rear yard of the safe house. For the first time in a long time she felt reasonably safe.

  “Where’s Edgar?” asked Megan.

  “In the kitchen cooking.”

  “Can he cook?” asked Megan.

  “That would be a definite yes. I’m sure you’re hungry. I guess they didn’t feed you much.”

  “Proverbial bread and water. I still can’t believe I got out of there alive.”

  “It was complicated.”

  “I’ll go see if I can help him. My mother always told me if I really wanted to get married I needed to know my way around a kitchen.”

  “Don’t believe that for a minute.”

  Megan walked into the kitchen while Michelle, always restless when no action was called for, simply paced.

  On her second sweep around the room, her phone rang. It was Sean.

  She started to answer, but never got there.

  Blood spurted from the slash in her arm. It would have been her neck, but she had seen the knife an instant before it struck and flung out her arm. The blade cut skin, muscle, and tendon.

  She dropped the phone, fell back, looked up and saw Edgar Roy coming at her again.

  But then she realized he wasn’t coming at her. He was throwing himself in front of her. No, at something else. At someone else.

  He crashed into Megan Riley as she attempted to strike at Michelle again with the large kitchen knife. They fell together on the floor, large man on top of petite woman. It should have been over at that point.

  But Megan Riley was obviously no ordinary woman.

  She was, in fact, the fail-safe.

  Roy groaned and rolled off her when her knee slammed into his privates. She was up in an instant and caught him with two crushing kicks to the head that flopped him over flat on his back. He lay there semiconscious, with blood pouring down his face from a deep gash in his skin.

  She raised her knife for the killing blow but never got a chance to land it.

  Michelle hit her with a kick to the knee. Only it wasn’t a clean shot because as she was about to land it, she slipped in her blood, which was pooling on the hardwood floor.

  Megan grimaced, glanced down at her injured limb, and then exploded forward on her good leg and smashed an elbow to Michelle’s head, whipsawed around her opponent, and kicked her legs out from under her. Michelle fell hard, her head banging off the floor. She moved an instant before Megan slashed again with the knife. The blade punched into her thigh instead of her gut. Megan twisted the hilt sideways, and Michelle screamed as the blade ripped her flesh. She kicked away at the other woman and scrambled to her feet. The two women squared off, each favoring their injured wheel.

  “I’m going to kill you,” said Megan.

  “No, you’re going to try,” Michelle shot back.

  “You should have seen Bergin’s eyes right before I shot him in the head. He looked as surprised as Carla Dukes did when I killed her.”

  “I’m not an old man. Or a big, slow woman.”

  Megan smiled wickedly. “Yeah, but you’re also bleeding to death.”

  Megan made a couple of slashing motions with the knife but could not get through Michelle’s defenses. Michelle grabbed up a floor lamp and twirled it in front of her like a nunchaku. She advanced as Megan fell back, outmaneuvered for the moment. But when Megan leaped toward Roy with her knife held high, Michelle had to throw the lamp at her to defend him.

  The brass neck of the lamp struck Megan across the face, cutting a deep gash in her cheek. Blood poured down her face. She fell sideways over Roy, but was on her feet a moment later, the knife held in front of her.

  It was an instant too late.

  Michelle’s shoulder hit Megan in the gut, and both women torpedoed over a table and into the wall, popping holes in the drywall with the force of the impact.

  Michelle, unfortunately, hit a stud in the wall, cracking her collarbone.

  Sensing this injury, Megan landed a blow right on the damaged bone and Michelle slid backward, holding her shoulder and breathing heavily.

  Both women s
lowly stood, each with a damaged leg, but Michelle had blood pouring out of two large wounds. She could feel her heart pumping harder and harder with each clench of the muscle, throwing more and more of her blood onto the floor with nothing to replace the loss.

  She drew a quick breath. She didn’t have much time left. She feinted a charge, and Megan stepped back. Michelle launched, aiming at Megan’s knife-wielding arm.

  But in her weakened state she arrived a second too late.

  Megan flipped the knife to her left hand a moment before impact. As the women fell backward Megan slammed the knife deeply into the other woman’s back.

  They hit the floor and Megan kicked Michelle off, rolled, and stood on a single wobbly leg.

  Michelle tried to rise but then fell back to her knees. The knife was still in her. The blood now poured from three wounds, the last one in her back being the most damaging. She was seeing fuzzy images in front of her, and her breaths were becoming increasingly labored.

  I’m dying.

  She reached behind her, and with her last bit of strength she pulled the blade free.

  She eyed Megan, her breaths coming in quick gasps.

  “You’re dead,” taunted Megan.

  “So are you, bitch,” snarled Michelle, blood pooling in her mouth and garbling her words.

  She threw the knife.

  It missed badly and hit the wall, falling harmlessly to the floor.

  As Michelle sat there helplessly on her haunches, her life rapidly draining away, Megan lined up the kill shot: an elbow strike to the back of Michelle’s neck that would shatter her medulla and instantly end her life.

  She leaped to deliver this final shot.

  And Edgar Roy pivoted.

  In his one-of-a-kind brain it was suddenly thirty years ago and Edgar Roy, then only six years old and the object of his father’s sexual assault, pivoted. And struck. The man fell. The eyes turned glassy. The breathing ceased. The man died. Right there in the farmhouse kitchen.

  Then, like an old black-and-white TV suddenly transformed to an HD flatscreen, the old images vanished and Roy was squarely returned to the present.

  The six-foot-eight Edgar Roy slammed the kitchen knife he’d snatched off the floor into Megan Riley’s torso with such force that the petite woman was lifted a foot off the floor. A moment later the staggering velocity of Roy’s thrust catapulted Megan Riley violently against the wall. She struck it hard and slid down to the floor. She looked dumbly at the knife buried to the hilt in her heaving chest; the other end had cut her heart nearly in two. She attempted to pull it free. Her hands were around it. They gave one tug and then stopped. The fingers slipped off the handle. Her arms fell to her sides. Her head leaned against her shoulder. She gave one last shuddering breath.

  And then she died.

  Edgar Roy stood there for a few moments.

  I pivoted. My sister did not pivot. I buried the knife into my father. My sister did not. I pivoted. I killed the beast. I killed my father.

  His long-lost memory, his only such one, was finally back with him.

  He rushed to Michelle’s side and checked her pulse.

  He couldn’t find one.

  The door burst open.

  He turned to see Sean and his sister standing there.

  “Please, help her,” cried out Roy.

  Sean raced forward. They had phoned for an ambulance on the way over, just in case.

  It had been a good call.

  The EMTs flooded into the room seconds later and started feverishly working on Michelle. It did not look good. Too many pints of her blood already lay spilled on the floor. They rushed her out on a stretcher, and Sean climbed into the ambulance right before the doors clunked shut.

  The FBI agents started assessing what had happened inside the safe house that had turned out to be anything but.

  Roy sat slumped against one wall. His sister knelt down next to him. As an agent came up to them she said, “Give us a minute, will you?”

  The Fed nodded and backed off.

  Roy glanced at the bloodied Riley, who sat dead against the other wall, the knife still sticking out of her. She looked like a large, ghoulish doll on display.

  “I killed her,” he told his sister.

  “I know.”

  “She was trying to kill Michelle.”

  “I know that too, Eddie. You saved her life. You did the right thing.”

  He shook his head stubbornly. “We don’t know that. She might still die.”

  “She might. But you gave her a chance.”

  He looked down, seemed as though he might be sick.

  He looked up at her again. “I killed Dad.”

  She sat down beside him, took his head, and leaned it against her chest.

  He said, “All this time I couldn’t remember. I… I just thought you had done it. You’ve… always protected me.”

  “That time, Eddie, you defended yourself. And you saved me. You did the right thing. You did nothing wrong. Do you understand that?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Eddie, do you understand that? You did nothing wrong.” She said this last part with urgency.

  “I understand.” He swallowed a sob. “They took away my St. Michael’s medal.”

  “I know. I can get you another one.”

  He glanced over at dead Megan. “I don’t think I need it. Not anymore.”

  “I don’t think you do, either.”

  He started to cry and his sister held him.

  The melancholy sounds of the ambulance carrying the horribly injured Michelle Maxwell dwindled away until there was only silence.

  CHAPTER

  88

  THE HOSPITAL ROOM was colder than any morgue Sean had been in. It was dark, too. Most of the lights came from little machines that were making weird noises, signaling life or heralding approaching death.

  He sat hunched over in the chair, his hands clasping hers, his forehead resting on the bed rail.

  Michelle Maxwell was covered by a web of IV lines filled with things Sean had never heard of flowing into her body and carrying other things away.

  She had died three times. Once in the ambulance. Once on the