by Tom Clancy
Ricci closed his eyes, tightly holding the bottle. In his mind’s eye he saw a scale, like the kind you saw in pictures of blindfolded Lady Justice. Nichols, Grillo, Simmons, and Rosander on one side. Roger Gordian and the rest of the planet on the other.
The whole damned planet, yes. Billions of possible victims of a germ that, in the end, because of the sacrifices of those he had led on his mission, had claimed only one good man in a small corner of Latin America.
The balance seemed to tip lopsidedly in favor of the mission having been a success ... and for Ricci it would have been no less successful if he himself had perished with the men who had bled out their lives behind the gray concrete walls of Earthglow.
World’s end. Last stop on the civilization express.
Ricci gripped the bottle. He could handle the losses, handle giving up the measure of blood that seemed periodically due to keep whatever was good and worthwhile about existence from falling into darkness. Harsh and unfair as he sometimes found the bill was, he’d always made his payments with a kind of bitter, uncomplaining dependability.
The problem for him now, though, was that the scale had been jiggered. Somebody had fooled with the weights, tampered with the balance, thrown the whole damned system of measurement into question.
The killer ...
Ricci would never again call him by the name Wildcat, would never again lend him the dignity or power that name endowed....
The killer was free, out there somewhere beyond the drawn shades of his apartment, breathing air that his victims could no longer breathe, feeling the sunlight that was warming the ground atop their graves.
The killer ... and whatever nameless, faceless, task-master he served.
Happy Thanksgiving, Ricci thought, and pulled the bottle closer, pulled it right to the edge of the table, right up against his chest.
I start out hugging a drink, three hours later wind up wrestling with one. Like that Bible story, when Christ wrestles with the Devil in the desert....
He looked at the bottle, held the bottle in both his hands, and moistened his lips with his tongue. Thirsty, so thirsty, so eager to wash the grinding pain from inside him.
But the killer was still free. Breathing the air. Out there in the light. Free.
Ricci sat at the table a while longer ... he wasn’t exactly sure how long. Then he sighed, pushed back his chair, rose to his feet, lifted his quart of expensive pure malt whiskey off the table, and strode across the kitchen to carefully set it into the wastebasket beside the sink.
What the hell, he thought. What the hell.
He had work to begin after the long weekend was over, work that might finally set the balance right, and it wasn’t the sort of thing that would be easy to pull off with a hangover.
Wondering what he was going to eat for dinner with all the supermarkets closed and not a scrap of food in his fridge, Ricci went to the window and opened the shade to let in what remained of the day.
In one corner of Breugel’s painting on the main floor of the Prado, a cart ridden by the servants of Death is shown rolling implacably toward a woman who has fallen across the path of its wheels, her hands clinging to a distaff and spindle. These tools of the spinner represent the unpredictable drawing out and twisting of life’s threads. They are also symbols of femininity, for in antiquity spinning had been a woman’s craft.
Unable to make himself leave Spain without once again viewing the masterwork, Kuhl stood before it now and thought of his lover, of the softness and delicacy of her body, and then sharply recalled their last moments together.
He had not wanted to let go of her.
Hours before he’d taken her to the countryside southwest of the city, they had been pressed together in their hotel room, sharing splendid intimacies behind its closed door. He had touched her eagerly, greedily, wanting his flesh to remember. And then, afterward, he had suggested they take the long drive down into the Castilla y León, where the old churches and castles stood upon the hills.
On a lonely and beautiful stretch of road, Kuhl had pulled over and sat beside her for a long length of time. Then he’d asked her to walk with him under trees brown with autumn, his arm around her waist as they left the car.
It had been an exquisite place for her to die.
Kuhl had done it quickly, not wishing the pain to last, one hand over her mouth to muffle her cries, his other hand tightening on her throat.
He remembered her straining against him, and then feeling the pulse in her neck quiet under his fingertips.
The struggle had been brief.
There had been tears in her eyes, he remembered.
Even after life was extinguished, and her surprise and fear turned to emptiness, there were tears.
Bearing her to a thickly wooded notch in the hills, he had covered her body so the animals would find her before any man ever could. And then he’d left her, and gone back to Madrid.
He had not wanted to let go of her, but she had known too much. He saw that. What if she had been caught?
The danger to him had been great.
Unacceptably great.
Now Kuhl took a snatch of breath, studied the Bruegel painting for a short while longer, then turned away from it and strode down the hall toward the museum exit.
The world offered hard choices, but it was still under his feet.
In the end, for him, that was what truly mattered.
EPILOGUE
BOLIVIA
NOVEMBER 23, 2001
HE HAD SPENT MILLIONS. TENS UPON TENS OF MILLIONS . And every last dollar had been wasted.
Harlan DeVane sat on the veranda of his expansive Spanish ranch house in the Chapare region of Bolivia, staring out at the cattle fields in silence, watching his imported heifers graze on the grass with plodding bovine contentment. Once, perhaps, some primal forerunner of the beasts must have had at least a spark of driving fire in its breast. But that had been bred out of the species when their free-roaming herds became livestock, their migrations became limited by the corral fence, and their inborn fear of the predator was dulled to a birth promise of certain slaughter.
DeVane watched them, thinking that he could walk across the pasture to where they were gathered in a patch of green, put a gun to one of their heads at random, and fire, and that the others were apt to go on chewing lazily or produce some lowing sound of momentary bafflement as the victim dropped in a heap among them with what little brains it possessed leaching deep into the dirt. All of them unaware of the fate that had narrowly missed being theirs. All incapable of appreciating that they lived by a simple fluke.
His eyes at once motionless and searching, his thin features caught in the ever-still space between thought and expression, DeVane suddenly recalled a string of words from an old leather-bound volume in his library: What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
He breathed, as always, without a sound.
These were idle musings, and there were far more important matters to occupy his mind. Matters from which he could only divert himself temporarily, for they were bound to catch up with him, tearing at his false peace like the swipe of claws in the night.
The Sleeper virus that was to have gained him a fortune beyond any ever amassed, prestige beyond any imaginable height—given him the power to steer the sun across the sky—had brought him instead to abject humiliation. With the inhibitors now as commonly available as aspirin, his customers had paid vast sums for genetic triggers that were worth less to them than dust. Some had targeted victims by the hundreds, the thousands, and more. He had wanted only the death of a single man, Roger Gordian ... and none had gotten the thing for which they had put their good money down.
So what was left for him now? What goddamned pipes and timbrels?
Humiliation. Ignominy. Clients who had become enemies by the score.
And because of Siegfried Kuhl’s ineffectiveness, his failure to eliminate Gordian even by brute, overt force of hand, the
very strong chance that the careful screens that ensured his anonymity, that allowed him to roam the world free, would begin to be peeled away.
DeVane closed his eyes and slowly, slowly bent his head back so it was exposed in full to the strong, tropical sun. The rays stung his pale, almost colorless skin, and he knew it would not take long before he burned.
He sat there and did not move.