Call After Midnight

by Tess Gerritsen

  “Not until I find him.”

  “You can’t find him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The look he gave her said everything. Even before he spoke, she knew what his answer would be. “I’m sorry, Sarah. He’s dead.”

  His words hit her like a physical blow. She stared at him, stunned. “He can’t be dead. He called me….”

  “It wasn’t him. It was a Company trick. A recording.”

  “Then what happened to him?”

  “The fire. That was his body they found in the hotel.”

  She closed her eyes in pain as his words sank in. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this,” she cried.

  “The Company set you up, Sarah. They wanted Magus to make a move on you. They hoped he’d get careless. Reveal his whereabouts. But then they lost us. That is, until Berlin.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s over. They’ve called off the operation. We can go home.”

  Home. It had a magical sound, like a fairy-tale place she no longer believed existed. And Nick was somehow magical, too. But the arms wrapped around her now were made of flesh, not dreams. Nick was real. He’d always been real.

  He rose and pulled her from the bed, tugging her in an arc that ended in his arms. “Let’s go home, Sarah,” he whispered. “First thing in the morning, let’s fly the hell out of here.”

  “I can’t believe it’s over,” she murmured. “I can’t believe you’re really here….”

  In answer he turned her face to meet his. It was the gentlest of kisses, not one of hunger, but of tenderness; it told her she was safe, that she’d always be safe, as long as Nick O’Hara was around.

  Tucked under his arm, she walked with him down the hall, toward the stairs. It would be cold outside. But he would keep her warm, the way his jacket had kept her warm on that rainy day in London. They reached the top of the stairs. The foyer came into view, right below them. And Nick stopped dead in his tracks.

  At first she didn’t understand. All she saw was his shocked face. Then her eyes followed the direction of his gaze.

  Below them, at the foot of the steps, a dark pool of blood was soaking into a blue Persian rug. And flung out across the wood floor, her hair mingling with her own blood, was Corrie.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A SHADOW FELL across the foyer wall. Someone was walking in the sitting room, just out of sight. The shadow grew larger; it was approaching the stairs. Nick and Sarah couldn’t flee through the street exit without passing through the foyer, crossing the killer’s line of view. There was only one other way to run, and that was up the hallway.

  Nick grabbed Sarah’s hand and hauled her toward a far staircase. From the sitting room came a woman’s cry, running footsteps, then two sharp thuds—bullets muffled by a silencer. The hall seemed to stretch on forever. If the killer started up the stairs now, he’d spot them.

  Panic sent Sarah scrambling up the narrow staircase to the room above. They had reached the attic. Nick softly closed the door, but there was no lock. They left the lights off. Through a tiny window came the faint glow of a city night. Scattered in the darkness about their feet were vague shapes and shadows: boxes, old furniture, a rack of clothes. Nick ducked behind a trunk, pulling Sarah into his arms. She pressed her face against his chest and felt the pounding of his heart.

  From downstairs came the crack of splintering wood. Someone was kicking the doors open. Methodically, he made his way down the hall, toward their staircase. Please stop, she prayed. Please don’t search the attic....

  Nick pushed her to the floor. “Stay down,” he hissed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “When the chance comes, move.”

  “But Nick…” He’d already slipped away into the darkness.

  The footsteps were coming up the attic staircase.

  Sarah hugged the floor, afraid to move, afraid to even breathe. The steps creaked closer and closer. With no time left, she searched frantically in the darkness for a weapon, for something with which to defend herself. The floor around her was bare.

  The door flew open, slamming into the wall. Light flooded in from the stairway.

  In that same instant, she heard the unmistakable sound of a fist colliding with flesh, then a heavy thud shook the floor. She leaped up to find Nick grappling with the killer, a man she’d never seen before. They rolled across the floor, over and over. Nick threw a second punch, but the blow glanced off the killer’s cheek. Nick’s advantage had been surprise—he wasn’t a trained fighter. The killer, bloodied as he was, managed to break free and slam his fist upward into Nick’s stomach. Nick grunted and rolled away. The killer dove across the floor toward a pistol lying a few feet away.

  Still stunned by the last blow, Nick couldn’t move fast enough. The killer’s fingers closed around the gun. Desperately Nick lunged for the other man’s wrist, but he could only reach his forearm. Slowly, inexorably, the barrel turned toward Nick’s face.

  Sarah didn’t have time to think, only to react. Nick’s death was inches away. She sprang from the trunk. Her foot shot up in a clumsy arc and connected with the killer’s hand. The pistol flew up and clattered somewhere beyond a pile of boxes. The killer, thrown off balance, couldn’t fend off the next blow.

  Nick’s fist caught him squarely on the jaw. With a look of total surprise, the killer fell backward. His head slammed against a trunk. He slumped to the floor, knocked out cold.

  Nick staggered to his feet. “Get going!” he gasped.

  She led the way down the attic staircase to the second-floor hallway. Nick was a few paces behind her. Shattered stained glass from the Tiffany lamp littered the carpet. As she sprinted toward the stairs, she suddenly thought of Corrie’s body in the foyer. It made her sick to think of running through the blood, but she’d have to do it to reach the front door.

  She headed down the stairs, forcing her feet to keep moving. It would take only a few steps to cross the floor, then she’d be out. She’d be safe.

  She didn’t see the man waiting in the foyer until it was too late. His movement was only a flash, like a snake striking from the shadows. Pain clawed her arm. She was wrenched sideways, into an embrace so tight she couldn’t scream. A gloved hand and the heartless gleam of a gun swept past her field of vision. The weapon was not aimed at her; it was aimed at the top of the stairs, where Nick was standing.

  The gun went off.

  Nick jerked backward, as if punched in the chest. Blood blossomed across his shirt. Sarah screamed. Again and again she screamed Nick’s name as she was dragged toward the door. The cold night air hit her face. Bright lights blurred past, and then she was thrust into the back seat of a car. The door slammed shut. She looked up; a gun was pointed at her head.

  Only then did she see Kronen’s face, the pale blond hair, the waxy smile. In a thousand train stations, in a thousand cities, he had waited for her. It was the face of her nightmares.

  It was a face from hell.

  * * *

  VAN DAM WAS still sitting by the phone when Tarasoff called him with word of the bloody fiasco. O’Hara was in the emergency room. The Fontaine woman hadn’t been found. Shaken by the news, Van Dam managed to sound appropriately upset.

  After the call he rose and began to pace the room. He was uneasy. He worried about this newfound link to the F. Berkman company. That transfer of funds to a contract killer had been incredibly careless. Now Potter sniffed blood, and the persistent little bastard would never let up. Roy Potter was like a dog with his teeth sunk in too deep to let go. Somehow he had to be thrown off track; Van Dam’s future depended on it. If the old man were captured, he was likely to be a pragmatist. He would use whatever chips he had to bargain for freedom. And what he had was information: specifically, names. Van Dam’s would be among the first revealed.

  Events were piling up too fast. If the worst happened, would he have time enough to escape?

  Prison. Van Dam shuddered. Soon after Claudia’
s death, he’d thought about prison, about being shut away in a small, dark room. He’d thought of the four walls, pressing in around him. He’d thought of unwashed bodies and rough hands and things that happened between men who were trapped together. He’d been terrified by those thoughts, and now the terror returned.

  He decided to pack, just in case. In minutes the suitcase was ready. He considered his sequence of action. Lock the door. Take the stairs. Hail a taxi. He’d go straight to the Russian embassy. It was a move he’d reserved for only the most desperate of situations, a move he’d hoped to avoid. He’d never cared for the Russians. He wondered how it would be, spending all the years of his life in a dreary Moscow flat. God, no. Was that what lay ahead?

  But surely the Russians would treat him well! They made special arrangements for defectors, gave them large flats and abundant privileges. He wouldn’t be left to starve. He would be taken care of.

  When he was a boy in West Virginia, he and his mother had lived in a two-room shack owned by the mining company. His mother would dump their trash in the woods out back, and when he went to use the outhouse at night, he’d hear the rats, hundreds of them, an army watching from the darkness. He’d do anything to avoid that walk to the outhouse. He would huddle in his bed, fighting the cramps, the urgency. For Van Dam poverty had been more than uncomfortable; it had been horrifying.

  He was too deep in thought to notice the footsteps in the hallway. The sudden knock on his door made him jerk around in fright.

  “Yes?”

  “Status report, sir. May I come in?”

  Shaking with relief, Van Dam called through the door: “Look, Tarasoff just called me. Unless there’s something new…”

  “There is, sir.”

  Some instinct made Van Dam slide the chain in place. He opened the door a crack.

  Just as he did, the door flew open and slammed into his face. Wood splinters rained on the carpet. Van Dam staggered backward, almost knocked senseless by the pain.

  He tried to focus. A man was standing in the doorway, a man dressed entirely in black, a man who should be dead. Van Dam’s gaze slowly took in something else, something the man was holding. Why? he wanted to scream. His whole universe shrank to the size of a small deadly circle, the mouth of a gun.

  “This is for Eva,” said the man.

  He pulled the trigger three times. Three bullets ripped into Van Dam’s chest and exploded.

  The impact hurled Van Dam to the floor. His scream of pain dribbled to a gurgle, then faded to silence. He had one last, brief image of light as he lay there, a few short seconds that filled him with wonder. It was only the glow of a hotel lamp. Then, bit by bit, the light was blotted out, like dusk falling gently into night.

  * * *

  SARAH HUDDLED ON the wood floor and hugged her knees to her chest. Her teeth were chattering. The room was unheated, and the green satin dress provided little warmth. She had been thrust into darkness. The only light came through a small window high above; it was moonlight, glowing through the clouds. She wondered what time it was. Three o’clock? Four? She’d lost track of the hours. Terror had turned this night into an eternity.

  She closed her eyes tightly, but all she could see was Nick’s face, his look of surprise and pain, and then the blood, spreading magically across his shirt. A terrible ache rose in her chest, an ache that flooded her throat and spilled out into tears that ran down her cheeks. She dropped her face against her knees, and the tears soaked the satin dress, turning it cold and wet. Please be alive! she prayed. Dear God, please let him be alive!

  But even if he was alive, she was beyond his help. She was beyond anyone’s help. In the darkness it had come to her: She was going to die. With this certainty had come a strange peace, a final acknowledgment that her fate was inevitable and that struggling against it was hopeless. She was too cold and tired to care. After days of terror, she at last saw her own death drawing near, and she was calm.

  This new peace brought everything sharply into focus. Without panic clouding her every perception, she could study the situation coolly, clinically, the way she once had studied bacteria beneath the lens of her microscope. She concluded that the situation was hopeless.

  She was being held in a large storeroom on the fourth floor of an old building. The only way out was through the door, which was now bolted solidly. The window was for ventilation; it was small and too high to reach. The smell of coffee permeated the air and she remembered the roasting ovens she’d seen on the ground floor, and the loading platform, covered with burlap bags stamped F. Berkman, Koffie, Hele Bonen. At the time she’d shuddered, thinking that one of those burlap bags could easily conceal her body.

  There might be some small hope from the fact this building was not a residence, but a business. Workers would have to show up sometime. If she screamed, someone would hear her.

  Then she remembered that it was Sunday morning. No one would be coming to work today. No one except Kronen.

  She stiffened at the creak of footsteps. Someone was climbing the stairs. A door opened and banged shut. Through the cracks she saw light shining from the room next door. Two men were speaking in Dutch. One was Kronen. The other voice was low and hoarse, almost inaudible. The footsteps crossed the room and headed toward her door. She froze as the bolt squealed open.

  Light burst in brightly from the next room. She fought to see the faces of the two men standing in the doorway, but at first all she could make out were silhouettes. Kronen flicked on the wall switch. What she saw in that initial flood of fluorescent light made her cringe.

  The man towering above her had no face.

  The eyes were pale and lashless and as lifeless as cold stones. But as the man took in her appearance, his eyes moved; it was his first sign of life. She realized she was staring at a mask. The face was covered by a featureless shield of flesh-toned rubber. Only the eyes and mouth were visible. What hair he had left grew in wispy white patches on a naked scalp. With a macabre touch of fashion, he had swathed his neck in a bright red silk scarf.

  The lashless eyes settled on her face. Before he spoke she knew who he was. This was the man called Magus. The man Geoffrey should have killed.

  “Mrs. Simon Dance,” he said. The voice came out in a whisper. His vocal cords, like his face, must have been scarred in the fire. “Stand up, so I may see you better.”

  She cowered as he grabbed her wrist. “Please,” she begged. “Don’t hurt me. I don’t know anything—really, I don’t.”

  “But you do know something. Why did you leave Washington?”

  “It was the CIA. They tricked me….”

  “Whom are you working for?”

  “No one!”

  “Then why did you come to Amsterdam?”

  “I thought I’d find Geoffrey—I mean Simon—please, let me go!”

  “Let you go? Why should I?”

  Her voice stopped working. She stared at him, unable to think of a single good reason why he should let her live. He would kill her, of course. All the pleading in the world wouldn’t change things.

  Magus turned to Kronen, who was looking profoundly amused. “This is the woman you spoke of?” he asked Kronen incredulously. “This stupid creature? It took you two weeks to find her?”

  Kronen’s smile vanished. “She had help,” he pointed out.

  “She found Eva without help.”

  “She is smarter than she looks.”

  “Undoubtedly.” The mask turned back to Sarah. “Where is your husband?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You found Eva. And Helga. Surely you must know how to find your own husband.”

  She bent her head and stared down at the floor. “He’s dead,” she whispered.

  “You’re lying.”

  “He died in Berlin. The fire.”

  “Who says this? The CIA?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe them?” At her silent nod, the man turned to Kronen in fury. “This woman is worthless! We�
�ve wasted our time! If Dance shows up for her, he’s a fool.”

  The contempt in his voice made Sarah stiffen. To Magus her life was worth nothing more than an insect’s. Killing her would be as easy for him as rubbing his heel in the dirt. There would be no regret, no pity; all he’d feel would be distaste. A knot of anger tightened in her belly. With sudden violence her chin came up. If she had to die, it wouldn’t be as an insect. Swallowing hard, she lashed out at him defiantly.

  “And if my husband does show up,” she said, “I hope he sends you straight to hell.”

  The pale eyes in the mask registered a faint flicker of surprise. “Hell? We’ll meet down there in any event. An eternity together, your husband and I. I’ve already felt the flames. I know what it’s like to burn alive.”

  “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “But your husband did.”

  “He’s dead! Killing me won’t make him suffer!”

  “I don’t kill for the dead. I kill for the living. Dance is alive.”

  “I’m just an innocent—”

  “In this business,” he said slowly, “there are no innocents.”

  “And your wife? What was she?”

  “My wife?” He stared off, as though suddenly hypnotized by something on the wall. “My wife…yes. Yes, she was an innocent. I never thought she would be the one…” He turned to her. “Do you know how she died?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened. But can’t you see it had nothing to do with me?”

  “I saw it. I watched her die.”

  “Please, won’t you listen—”

  “From my bedroom window, I saw her walk through the garden to the car. She stopped beside the roses and waved. I have never forgotten that moment. How she waved. And smiled.” He tapped his forehead. “It is like a photograph, here, in my mind. The last time I saw her alive…”

  He fell silent. Then he turned to Kronen and said, “Before morning move her to a safer place. Where she cannot be heard. If Dance does not come for her in two days, kill her. Make it slow. You know how.”