With the next skyburst, she saw the shrub-bordered path to the Octagon’s rear door.
“Hey! Who goes?” The chauffeur jumped to his feet, toppling the chair off the brick steps.
“Jake, Jake”—her voice was friendly, soft, reassuring—“it’s Leslie, Leslie Renfro; no cause for alarm.”
“Miss Renfro, what the hell are you doing here? Strict rules tonight, no visitors.” His hand had left his weapon. He knew her voice. He saw her young face at the same moment the elongated barrel leveled against his chest. A second thut, little more than the rush of an African blowgun, then a third, and she stepped across his body into the rear hall. The bag eased from her shoulder; she stood silently, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the interior light. The Octagon was without a sound . . . no . . . easing forward into the stairwell she heard a book being closed, the rustle of paper. He was on the second floor.
Her left hand ran before her up the banister railing, guiding her up the steps, to the level and turn of the landing, and the rise of the second flight. She stood in the doorway of the room where he worked for nearly a minute before he turned, sensing her presence.
“Miss, Miss Ren—Leslie?” His mind was centuries in the past, his pen on the future, at the moment he focused on the woman who had penetrated his solitude. The light of the chandelier fell across her face, the shadow of her neck, the flesh at the opening of her white blouse. His physical attraction for her had been intense from the first evening they had met aboard his ship in Malta. She had frozen his most subtle advances. His good judgment had prevailed, but his attraction remained strong.
“Leslie, you’re looking lovely this evening, my young friend. What are you doing here? Where on earth did you find that gun?” His eyes had traveled from the vee of her blouse, to the skirt he had never known her to wear before, to the incredible weapon she cradled in her bare arms. He rose, offering to take it from her. His face suddenly lined with concern. “Has there been some trouble, at the hotel . . . on the street? You’re alright?”
“Sit down, Thomas Starring.” It was 9:30 P.M. The fireworks splashed with mounting intensity against the glass of the Treaty of Ghent Room. Her voice was deep in its dark, ordering tone, her words so unexpected that he retook his chair before realizing he had accepted her command.
“In half an hour, Thomas Starring, your Towerpoint Mayan will be blown apart with a force that will shatter the entire Chesapeake Bay. In half an hour, a mine will destroy your Towerpoint Partner. A third mine will blow your catamaran. You must know that now, Thomas Starring. In half an hour, you will be dead.”
He looked at the muzzle of the gun aimed at him, raised his eyes to study hers, his hands planted on the arms of the chair. She’s drunk . . . some sort of breakdown . . . too much pressure today, the visit, the rushed pace of early dives . . . too young for all of that. Good God, always the unexpected!
“Leslie, put that gun down, over here on this table.” He half rose again. “Jake!” His voice carried out into the rest of the mansion. “Jake will take that for you. We’ll get Sullivan down here to help. Everything will—”
A single bullet ripped through the priceless rug beneath his feet. “Sit down, Thomas Starring. When you are dead, we will publish our report to the world. We will tell the people of your crimes and of your punishment. The world will rejoice at your death and the destruction of your empire. You are the ultimate criminal, Thomas Starring. Your sister paid for her crimes. You will now pay for yours—after you have written your confession.”
Starring’s face was set, the gray eyes flashing, his thoughts surging in anger now at this interloper who threatened him. “Jake!” He could not understand the lack of response, until the ugly automatic weapon waving him back to his seat gave him the answer. He reached slowly across the desk for the brass letter opener. A fresh kaleidoscope of colors sparkled through the mottled glass.
“Push it away, on the floor!” The machine pistol trained on his hand.
“See here, Miss Renfro”—his voice was at its sternest, the boom he sent across the board room—“I have absolutely no idea what has brought on this sickness, these hallucinations. You need help. I want to get you that help. Frankly”—his lips were apart, teeth set—“frankly I am annoyed. I want you to leave immediately! You have inexcusably intruded. Please go!”
“Take a fresh sheet of paper, Thomas Starring. We have twenty minutes.” His hand drew back from the blunt knife. She swept it away. “Write!”
“Yes.” He was subdued, placed a sheet in front of him, studied her more with his mind than his eyes. “Miss Renfro, you mentioned my sister—”
“She was in a white suit that night, Thomas Starring. The bullets from this gun entered her brain, her nose, her jaw, her throat, and the cavity where there was no heart. Does that confirm your top secret reports of her capital punishment? Justice was not served. She did not confess before she died.”
Renfro, or someone close to her, had killed Connie! Goddamnit! He did not sense fear, rather a challenge to be met. He burned. He had been taken. She was not the innocent . . . she . . . Christ, hard to know, hard to fit it all together . . . but that gun. He had been briefed, Don’t resist. The expert on hostage survival reappeared in his mind, the Trade Center briefings. . . . “What would you like me to write?”
“Confession, all capital letters, at the top of the page.” She moved one step closer, to monitor.
“Confession? . . . Yes.” He penned the word in large letters, “Yes?”
“I, Thomas Madison Starring, confess the crimes for which I am about to die . . .”
Don’t resist . . . the briefings, the words of the expert . . . where the hell is that damned chauffeur . . . dead? “You know my middle name?”
“Do not talk, Thomas Starring. Read what you have written.”
He read the line.
She resumed. “. . . to murder, to imperialist repression . . . and to the most vile criminal acts against the innocent people of the world. . . .”
The words, utter insanity; her voice, so calm. He continued to write.
“I confess to plundering the innocent. I”—she followed as the pen scratched the line—“. . . confess to the plunder and wanton destruction of the earth and seas. . . .”
He placed the pen on the table, looked through the upper panes at the man-made thunder and lightning bursting in the sky, contemplated his leap at her, time to end this.
“Sixteen minutes, Thomas Starring.” Her voice was harder. “I confess to these horrendous crimes.”
Starring wrote, laid the pen down again with a look of total contempt.
“I confess”—now her words rose, emotion surging in her throat,—“to the vicious murder of Commander John Lloyd Renfro, and to the vicious murder of his wife, Mary Jessica Renfro—”
“Goddamnit!” He leapt from the chair. “That’s totally false crap!” His face trembled with emotion; he had shocked himself with his words. The bullet passed through the leather arch of his right shoe, through the foot into the floor. He fell sideways, horror stricken at the red oozing through the leather and the lace, even before the pain.
“Sit down, Thomas Starring. We have thirteen minutes.” She placed the silencer against his face. The stench of cordite burned in his nose. “Take off your belt . . . now!”
He obeyed.
“Strap it high above the knee, as high as you can . . . tight!” She repeated her parents’ names.
Starring’s face was white. He bled, but he still could not write those impossible lies. “Miss Renfro.” The room was spinning . . . My God, I’m passing out . . . He pushed himself straighter. “Miss Renfro, I have murdered no one!” He steadied himself, probed her face for understanding. “Put that weapon away. You have wounded me. You . . . you couldn’t have killed Connie. We both need help. I . . . Jake!” Still silence. “I treasure you, Leslie”—his voice caught with emotion—“and all that you have done for me, for Towerpoint. . . . .”
“Write!” The
pistol leveled at his head. He carefully recorded the words dictated to him for a third time.
“These names, who . . .?”
“You are the murderer of my father and my mother!” She had control again. The condemnation was cold and hard.
“My young friend—”
“No more. Write! There are ten minutes.”
“Renfro, Renfro . . . your father? He was the one who lost his life in the storm . . . your mother?”
“Murdered by you. You would not know, would you? Nom the gas of the oven, the destroyed soul, a spark of God ground beneath your obscene heel. Write!”
Starring stared at his shattered foot. The bleeding had stopped; pain was jolting through his leg. He had expected more blood. He twisted in agony. The pain surged upward through his hips, his spine, thrashed in his head. He forced his eyes to hers again. “I . . . I didn’t murder your parents, Leslie, you poor child. I mourned your father. We established a fund.” His face was chalk beneath the crystal.
“Drink your glass!”
Again, he obeyed, draining the sherry.
“Do not move!” She read what he had written, returned it to the table. “The final sentence: I am guilty of these crimes, accept death as my just punishment, and call on the innocent people of the world to rise against their oppressors.” His hand was still, his face twisted in pain and revulsion.
Thut, another bullet sliced through the embossed leather of the Treaty of Ghent table, splintering the side in its exit.
“You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re sick, a sick animal! You are part of the cancer that is devouring the civilization mankind has carefully shepherded through two millennia—”
“No, Thomas Starring. You almost deserve pity. You are the cancer, the virulence that destroys. What chance has the individual against your power? What chance has this earth you march across with your billions, plotting its desolation, shaping its ruin as a sterile monument to your greed?—fascist, imperialist pig that you are, Thomas Starring. Write!”
He wrote, head propped against his left hand, fingers locked in the elegant white hair. Across the table, the text of his stockholders’ address lay scattered, scarcely begun. She again examined his work. “Sign and date it. We have eight minutes.”
Two policemen, one plainclothes, the other uniformed, had spotted Sweetman, moved in on him as he struggled through the crowd packed on the sidewalk, the street, seated and leaning against the White House fence. He had all the earmarks, “Up against the fence; spread ’em!”
The crowd in the immediate area forced itself back, attention split between the rockets and the new, electric excitement of the arrest. Sweetman, streaming with sweat, knew he had to be quick: two, three seconds from the first shouts before their frisking hands hit his weapons. “Lieutenant!”
Who the hell knew the rank of a plainclothes cop?
“Lieutneant, left rear pocket—ID Check it now!”
The searching hands produced the leather badge cover. They blurted apology. Sweetman destroyed them with his glare, pocketed the badge, and was gone, swallowed by the crowd. He broke across the street, through the expanse of green honoring the First Division, a wake of curses and complaints as he hurdled the picnickers and the lovers in the grass.
The mob was still thick on Seventeenth Street. He waded across, turning right, north, along the front of the Corcoran Museum. If she’s there, she’s armed . . . if he’s not dead already! Christ, there may be two . . . a lookout?
He rounded New York Avenue. Fireworks illuminated the brick mansion at the end of the block, and then faded into blackness. He dashed to the far side of the empty avenue, broke stride to catch his breath, to study the random pattern of dim lights on the first and second floors. Alive . . . Lancaster’s going to want them all alive!
His pistol was out of its shoulder holster. He pressed against the brick wall, crept toward the front steps, froze until the next silver burst shimmered down into the night. No one! He strained to spot any sign of life . . . no one. Up the stone steps in four bounds . . . Locked! He listened, still silence. Sweetman vaulted the stair railing, dropped to the grass, and moved north along the Eighteenth Street wall until he came to the open courtyard door. The thumb of his left hand found the destroyed padlock.
“Give me the confession. You must move, now!”
The effect of the sherry had gone. Starring’s stomach was twisted in nausea, his body laboring under the surges of pain. “I’ve done what you have asked.” He was terrified by the tremble of his hand. He brought it to his brow to wipe the sweat away. “For whatever purpose, you have the words you have dictated. Please, I urgently need a doctor. I am bleeding to death, Miss Renfro.”
“On your feet.” She moved behind him, placed the silencer snout of the Skorpion at the back of his head. “On your feet. No more talk!”
“I can’t—God . . . I . . .”
She fired twice at the fish-eye mirror. The glass sprayed through the room. He heaved himself up, crashed to the floor in pain.
“Get up! The next one will be into your other foot. Think of John Lloyd Renfro. Think of Mary Jessica Renfro. Their noble deaths will give you strength.” She backed up two steps. “Out into the hall, up the stairs!”
Starring’s mouth fell open in horror. He had told himself that he must play along, play for time, for the unknown, for life. Jake, someone had to deliver him from this insanity. But . . . the stairs . . . “My foot, I can’t put weight—”
“We have five minutes, Thomas Starring. Your foot will then no longer be a problem. Crawl!”
Sweetman’s heel squashed down on the lifeless muscle of the chauffeur’s arm. He saw the blood, a shiny pool of black. He pulled his second pistol from its holster, held his breath . . . voices, too faint to understand, still no move to intercept him. Okay, alone. She’s probably alone . . . where? He crossed the threshold. Not down here . . . a laboring sound, a woman’s voice. “Upstairs! Three minutes. Ten stairs more!”
There was another deep groan, dragging, thumping. Sweetman darted to the far side of the stairwell. He could see them now. The fireworks’ reds and greens had bounced from the glass of the architect’s headquarters, flashed through the rear windows of the Octagon, illuminating the two figures, one low on the stairs, the other erect.
“Move, you pig! To die on these stairs is to die a pig’s death. Die with the glory and respect you so desperately crave. Faster! Your ships will go down with honor.” Her words fell like hail. He struggled higher. “Do you want to die moaning at my feet?”
No shot from here . . . Renfro, got to be her, and, she’s got me if I try to make it up the stairs. Sweetman eased back out into the hallway, searching the ground floor . . . cupboard, plates, goddamned dining room. He returned to the hall. Door . . . closet? . . . He explored the space with the heel of his hand, taking care not to bang the weapon . . . not a closet. His hand had found the base of a railing . . . stairs! He pulled the door closed behind him, lit a match. A narrow, triangular stairway cut upward at sharp angles through the gloom to the upper floors. His thumbs checked his weapons, both safeties off. He started up, one shoulder sliding along the outer wall to guide and steady him in the darkness.
The stairway door was open again at the second floor. He kept climbing. Their voices began to return. He continued, easing up step by step. His muscles locked! A shaft of red and gold; it was gone, light from the reflections in the sky, long enough only to reveal the crack of the opening at the third floor landing.
“One minute, Starring! On your feet! On your feet!”
He hauled himself up by the railing. “I cannot . . . reason with you . . . I am not guilty . . . of any crime. . . . You, you are guilty! You and the slime who tear down, tear down, never build. Love is not founded on”—he shuddered, clung to the bannister—“your hate and destruction. You shame and disgrace your mother and . . .”
“Your time has come, Thomas Starring. Jump!” The gun barrel swung over the railing. “You ha
ve the same vision into the future that those you murdered must have known. Your ships are exploding now, torn and sinking, more deaths of more innocents, and the blood is on your hands. Enter the vision. Jump!”
He was fully erect, turning away from her toward the void of the well when his face contorted, a puzzled expression, and he crashed down against the banister on the third floor landing.
“Drop it, Renfro, goddamnit!” Sweetman burst onto the landing, snapping off two warning shots, the 9mm ASP trained on her. She spun, flipping the Skorpion to automatic with the first flash of his pistol. A spitting line of bullets tore along the wall, closing to stop his charge. Her foot turned in Starring’s stomach. The Skorpion flew from her hands; she plunged back first over the railing. The machine pistol rattled to a stop at the base of the second floor stairs.
Sweetman pressed four fingers against Starring’s neck. The heart was pumping. He had fainted, saved his own life. From the third floor of the Octagon, the agent could see by the twist of the form on the marble below that Leslie Renfro was dead.
At first light, the helicopter came in low toward the Towerpoint Octagon, rippling the water around one of the two Coast Guard patrol boats lying off the catamaran. In the night, the Towerpoint Partner had been lost at sea. A second explosion, with no loss, had churned the waters of the bay. The Mayan, well up-bay, had been halted. A Navy SEAL team was conducting an urgent inspection of the enormous hull. Sweetman was met on the flight deck by the Octagon’s captain, cleared through the Coast Guard checkpoint, and escorted to the main deck center well.
Head’s body was the first to emerge from the habitat. Shrouded in a rubber bag and lashed to a wire basket stretcher, it was taken to the ship’s reefer to await shipment ashore. The rich July orange of the sun’s upper curve had broken the horizon by the time the ship’s doctor had Oats Tooms ready for the trip to the surface. Details of the terror had been kept from him. Still fully conscious, he was buoyed by the knowledge that Starring had survived. The questions that dogged him would soon be replaced by the impact of the attack’s shocking magnitude.
A Death in Geneva Page 27