“It has been a grand pleasure having you.” Max bowed his head. “I do hope you will return.” He peered at her over his half-glasses and winked. “Good luck.”
As she walked toward the elevator she noticed a young woman seated on a couch beside an older woman, who was laughing at something the other had said. Seeing that the ancient elevator was gone, Sean decided to take the stairs. As she climbed the steps, she was thinking how nice it was to hear people laughing. The two women in the lobby reminded her of how much she missed her mother.
73
The hunter had spent the morning waiting in the van, watching the street. Hawk's partner had passed his position several times, haunting the streets in the district hoping to luck onto the target.
At ten A.M. Hawk had gone into the hotel. He told the manager that he intended to purchase and renovate a commercial building in the area and said he would be looking for a quiet place to live while the construction was going on. The elderly manager took the bait and assured him that the hotel was home to a large number of monthly residents. He had several suites with kitchenettes. The hunter praised the magnificent lobby, the detailed plasterwork, the marble floors.
The hunter had asked, since he would be bringing in craftsmen for the project, how many rooms were available for transient guests. The manager said that floors four and above were for temporary guests. A look at the keyboard on the wall behind the counter told the hunter that twenty-two keys were missing from the pegs that corresponded to the rooms on floors four through eight. He thanked the manager, promising to get in touch as things progressed on his project.
He returned to his van and rested for the next hour. He watched as a cab pulled up in front of the hotel and a well-tattooed young driver went inside for a minute, then came back out. Instead of getting back into the taxi, the driver stood by the cab and looked up and down the street. Suddenly he trotted off down the street. The hunter used the mirror to track the kid after he passed the van and crossed the street. It looked like the punk was lurking outside a convenience store a block up the street. The hunter saw a blond girl, one in a group of nine kids who had left the hotel earlier, stride out from the store and watched as the young driver ran to keep up with her.
The girl seemed upset, pissed off, had her arms locked across her chest, her head tilted down. The young driver hurried along after her, gesturing with his illustrated arms. She crossed the street and walked toward the hotel. As the pair drew closer to the van, their faces filled the side-view mirror and the hunter's heart skipped a beat. There was not a doubt in his mind-the girl was his target, Sean Devlin. Using his binoculars, he read her lips.
Hawk made a call to his partner.
“I have her,” he said simply. “Take up a stationary position across the street from the hotel and keep your eyes open.”
He leaned back and yawned. He couldn't risk grabbing her off the street in broad daylight. He didn't know which room she was staying in. But it didn't matter, because he knew that at eight o'clock she'd be walking back out that door and he'd be waiting with open arms.
74
Winter had no way to keep track of time but, for what seemed like several hours, he had been the captive of a drugged state unlike anything he had ever experienced. While he was shrouded completely in a blanket of catatonia-unable to move a single muscle or open his eyes-his heart was beating and he had no trouble breathing. He was completely aware of everything going on around him-could hear everything perfectly. He could smell, even feel changes in the air temperature. The men who had kidnapped him didn't speak to him or talk at all from the time the driver had given him the shot until the jet landed sometime later. Winter spent the entire flight thinking about his situation and decided that, if he faked the state after it had worn off, maybe he could somehow escape.
He knew that at some point his mother would call Hank looking for him. When Winter failed to show up at the time he had told her he would, she would begin to worry. The trouble was, he couldn't count the times he had told his mother that he would be back at a certain time, and later, when he became involved in something and forgot the time, was made a liar. Lydia knew that he didn't like to wake her unless it was necessary. He worried that she might decide this was one of those times and wait to call too late. Hell, it was already too late the second he got into the Chrysler.
During the time he was under, he had squirreled away his impressions. After the plane landed, he had been carried from the Lear and laid on a gurney, which had been put into an ambulance. He knew it was an ambulance because the man with the syringe had lifted his right eyelid to check his pupil. As they went, Winter heard cars and trucks on either side of them and other sounds indicating they were in a large city.
When the ambulance finally stopped, his escorts rolled the gurney into a building and straight into an elevator. After a short ride up, the elevator door opened and Winter had smelled coffee and heard a television set. The men rolled him a short distance down a hallway, turned into a room, lifted him from the gurney, and dropped him onto a bed, causing the springs to squeak. All he could do was lie there and wait for what would happen next.
Winter kept time by listening to the television.
He heard people walking outside his door, caught hushed conversations that he knew were not voices on the television.
Somebody came into the room.
He felt someone give him another shot.
“Don't worry,” a voice said. “That was just to counteract the effects of the drug. It impedes the ability to move but allows the heart to keep beating.” The voice was peculiar and totally unfamiliar. Within seconds Winter could move his fingers and his feet.
“Let me stress that you are not to try anything stupid,” the voice instructed. “You are inside a fortress with no way out, unless I release you. There are armed men on the floors below us and above us. I know you are familiar with the nature of the men I refer to. The elevator is the only way out and it is controlled by my people. There is no reason for you to try to escape, because no harm will come to you unless you do something idiotic.”
What the man said had the ring of truth.
Winter felt the muscles in his face coming back under his control, and he lifted his eyelids. Slowly, he turned his head to see the man who sat on the bed next to his. What he saw startled him. Deep burn scars covered the left side of the man's face and neck like they'd been applied by someone with a blowtorch and a plan. The crimson wig on his head could have been modeled by a child out of straw. He was dressed in what appeared to Winter to be a velour sweat suit.
The disfigured man stared at Winter through eyes so pale they looked as though they had never been fully colored in.
Using a gloved hand, the man carefully put a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a Zippo. He exhaled languorously. “You will be able to stand up in a minute and will suffer no adverse effects,” he said companionably.
“I understand,” Winter said.
“My name is Fifteen. I know everything about you. I know about your long-suffering mother, Lydia, your dead wife, your blind son, Hank Trammel, and just about everybody left on this earth you care for.”
Winter had known truly lethal men. He knew their smell, the acid they stirred up in his stomach, and the foul taste of copper they put in his mouth. And he knew instinctively that this man was a creature of the pit. He was a man who told people to kill, liked doing it, might sometimes do it himself. Maybe this creature was an interrogator.
“This building belongs to a man named Herman Hoffman. I believe you would know him as the old general that the boy George Williams mentioned to you.”
“Is he your boss?”
“No.”
“Are you CIA?”
“No, not specifically. That shouldn't concern you. Let me say that we service specific needs they and other agencies have, and the relationship is mutually beneficial.
“I have examined your conversation with Fletcher Reed about Ward Field and the
cutouts. I have acquired Reed's evidence. He mailed a copy to your director and had a duplicate cleverly hidden in his office. All record of his computer incursion has been obliterated. Reed's misguided efforts went for nothing.”
“What did you do to him?” Winter asked, resigned to the inevitable now.
“He thought some of my men wished him harm and he hit a tree in his panicked attempt to evade them, shortly after you last spoke to him.”
Fifteen ground his cigarette out in a metal box and snapped it shut. “All that remains is for the Bureau to release the preliminary findings from their investigation. You are familiar with some of it, I understand. The evidence in the hands of the FBI is fact-incontrovertible proof. Believe me, not even Greg Nations himself could prove his innocence now.”
“The evidence is all lies.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Why are you helping Manelli?”
“As far as Manelli's participation in this”-he shrugged-“that's between Hoffman and Mr. Manelli. Only what concerns me is of interest to me.”
“Why did he bring me here?”
“He didn't. I brought you here to reason with you to accept the inevitable. I want you to understand that by pursuing this you are only a threat to yourself. Hoffman's operation with Manelli was a rogue carried out by his group, which you managed to cut in half. I had no advance warning before Ward Field and Rook Island, and I've had teams rushing all over the country just to stay even with the mess the old man made. I can't tell you the resources that have gone into cleaning this up in order to protect other interests that matter far more than this does. Herman used his power shamelessly, his men irresponsibly, and lost four extremely valuable individuals to your gun. This was very disturbing to me, to all of us.”
“Think how disturbing it is to all the people they killed.”
“Whoever runs the country does so because we make that possible by removing obstacles, keeping the path free of threats to our country's security. For fifty years a few of us have been fighting a very necessary war. Every instinct I have tells me to let my men bury you, but I believe enough innocent people are dead. I would rather persuade you how futile any attempt to oppose us is and let you go on with your life.”
The man who had been at Winter's front door stood in the hallway, holding the silenced SIG Sauer casually at his side, its barrel down.
“I am going to tell you how Herman obtained the intelligence it took to pull off the assaults.”
“To illustrate to me how powerless I actually am.”
“Exactly,” Fifteen said.
Winter sat slowly up and put his feet on the floor. He felt light-headed from being incapacitated for so long but no other ill effects from the drugging.
“If you make any heroic moves, you will be killed. If you grab me, my people will shoot through me to kill you. Even if you managed to get out, my people would visit your mother and son before you could hail a cab.”
Winter felt a surge of rage. “Can you tell me where I am?”
“I'll show you.”
75
“You are on the fifth floor,” Fifteen told Winter as they stood near the elevator. “Herman Hoffman, our host, is known as the Dean of Shadow because he oversaw the CIA's post-World War Two dark operations. After the Bay of Pigs, he realized there would always be politicians around to muck things up, so there needed to be an independent organization that could operate under the radar, a constant force presence in an ever-changing world. He developed the psychological testing that insured a steady source of talent, drawn from the pool of civilians applying for admission to the armed forces. Mostly he wanted men and women who, but for a few minor flaws, might have been great additions to the Special Forces.”
“Like psychopathic personality disorder?”
Fifteen frowned. “A cheap jab, Winter. He wanted intelligent, motivated individuals who would dedicate their lives to a larger picture-be loyal to their controllers knowing only that their jobs were necessary without being in the loop with the decision-makers. Every armed forces recruit takes a battery of tests, and those tests have questions embedded in them that set off triggers, draw our interest. Of every twenty thousand of those men and women, perhaps twenty are selected for more in-depth testing. Out of every hundred who make it through the process, one or two might make the grade. Sometimes none of them do. There are units scattered all over the world, ready to respond at a moment's notice.”
“So when Herman says kill six sailors and six deputy marshals, they just do it?”
“Yes.”
The room was furnished with a large TV, couches, tables, chairs, and a blank blackboard. A short wall separated the rec room from a kitchen, reminding Winter of a fire station.
“No windows,” Winter noted.
“This light is a blend of fluorescent and incandescent to simulate daylight. Follow me,” Fifteen said cheerfully. He led Winter back the way they had come after leaving the bedroom.
“This is the bathroom, and just here…” Fifteen opened the door beyond the bathroom. “Our ordnance room. Sorry I can't let you go in, but feel free to look.”
The room played host to stacks of machine guns, rifles, shotguns, handguns, and crates of bullets and other weapons, including grenades. There was also an open case of Semtex, the Eastern Bloc's version of plastic explosive, with about half of it missing. It was as harmless as modeling clay unless it was detonated by a nearby blast or one of the detonators stacked in a small box beside the crate.
“Very impressive,” Winter said.
“Just hardware. I'll show you what's impressive.”
Winter stood next to a garbage chute, while Fifteen opened the door at the end of the hallway. Fifteen led Winter inside. Three computers, along with assorted electronic equipment, filled a U shape of counters. On one of the computer monitors, a screen saver performed a series of optical illusions. Fifteen moved its mouse and the screen changed to show a satellite overview of a section of the Eastern Seaboard with four yellow dots on the screen.
“These are connected to CIA, FBI, and NSA supercomputers, as well as to our spy satellites.”
The man carrying the handgun came in and whispered something to Fifteen.
“I have to go upstairs for a moment. Please relax until I return. Just so you know, the phone isn't live, and the computers will not allow you access.”
“No problem,” Winter replied, bewildered.
“My man will be outside until I return.” Fifteen closed the door behind him, leaving Winter alone in the communications room.
Winter turned his attention to the computer screen. Even without names to identify the dots' locations, he knew pretty much what they signified. One of them was Washington, another Rook Island, a third was Richmond, and the fourth dot Ward Field in rural Virginia. He clicked on one and the screen went dark, the CPU turning itself off.
A stack of sixteen-by-twenty-inch photographs beside the computer caught his attention. The first one on the pile was of Rook Island. Winter's heartbeat quickened. He located the safe-house roof, tennis court, pool, beach, and trees-and the radar station beyond them. The picture had no date stamp, but the shadows told him that it was a morning shot. Obviously, these people not only could get the pictures from space, but they could get the CIA to task or aim spy satellites for them.
The next shot was of Ward Field and had been taken Friday morning, when he was there. He knew by the ruined hangar, the techs in the debris field, the FBI's tents, and because the Lear was parked in the field beside Shapiro's Gulfstream II.
The Arlington shot had been taken at night. He made out the roof and parking lots of a building he was sure he recognized as the U.S. Marshal headquarters. Winter didn't understand the significance.
The final shot in the stack was a grid of streets and the tops of buildings; he assumed, because of the river, it was probably downtown Richmond because the fourth dot had appeared on that city. He could make out cars and even a few people. Th
e shadows and the orientation told him that it was a late-morning or late-afternoon shot. Someone had taken a grease pencil and circled what appeared to be a pay phone.
Winter was so intrigued by the pictures Fifteen had wanted him to see that he almost forgot he was in enemy territory.
An eight-by-ten photograph alone on the counter next to a printer distracted him. This was not a satellite picture, but one taken on a city street from ground level. A woman with spiky blond hair, dressed in black and wearing glasses, had been snapped as she exited a doorway, the name HOTEL GRAND etched into the glass window over the door. Despite the difference in her appearance, Winter recognized Sean immediately. He remembered the phone call to him at home the day before, the traffic noise-these people must have gotten information from the NSA, who intercepted the call and located the phone which led them to her, in Richmond.
He had to find out why they still felt a need to track Sean and convince Fifteen to call the dogs off her-unless it was too late.
He opened the door expecting to find the guard, but the hallway was empty. “Hello?” Winter called out. Nothing.
His watch told him it was 4:15. He opened the bathroom door, hoping to find the guard in there. The room was occupied, but not by the guard. Two corpses sat on the tiled floor, their backs resting against the wall. He knelt down to inspect them. Both wore ballistic vests under their coats. The emaciated men looked like winos. The closest had greasy hair and a nappy beard. His hands were callused, the fingernails caked with filth. He was dressed in new clothes, and the corner of something stuck out of his vest. Winter pulled out a foreign passport and opened it. The picture wasn't that of the corpse but showed a younger man with long hair and angular features. The name on it was Alexis Philipoff, a Russian national.
Winter slid the passport back inside the dead man's vest and hurried to the elevator. He pressed the call button. Fifteen had said he was going upstairs, but the car was rising slowly from below. The door opened and Winter got into the empty car. Before he could press a button, the door closed and started up.
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