So Hartley had made all the phone calls, placed all the bets. The man had given him the number of what he said was a Swiss bank account to finance his transactions, and sure enough they had all gone through smoothly. Now it was time to make that one last phone call, to the number the man had given him, and the die was cast.
He dialed it.
Instead of an you.”
“And now we know why,” said the Refrigerator behind him.
Hartley sat, his mind racing. He knew he was in a lot of trouble, but after all he hadn’t killed the pizza boy. They could take paraffin tests or whatever more sophisticated procedures they were using these days, which would surely show he hadn’t fired a weapon. He could explain everything.
“Two pops in the head with this baby.” Hartley turned to see the Refrigerator holding up the gun. “Pro job—nice shooting, Senator.”
“Senator Hartley,” said Whippet. “I’m not going to fuck around with you. Unless you play ball with us, not only is your political career over, not only are you going to jail for the rest of your life, but your good friend from across the aisle, Jeb Tyler, is going to be heartbroken. At a time of national crisis and peril, to lose one of his closest and most trusted advisors, with an election coming up…well, I’m sure you agree that this unfortunate incident couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time. Which is why he’ll feed you to the dogs.”
Hartley nodded dully. “Am I under arrest?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it arrest,” said the Refrigerator.
“More like day care,” said the Whippet.
“It’ll be fun,” said the Refrigerator. “We can bunk down out here.”
“Just the three of us,” said the Whippet.
“Four of us,” reminded the Refrigerator. “Until your playmate gets back in touch with you or the Boss says otherwise.”
“No, you can’t mean…” shouted Hartley as the implications sank in. “Not that.”
The Whippet smiled. “I’d think about it twice if I were you,” he said.
Hartley was about to protest that he was thinking about it when he felt the snub nose of the .22 pressed up against the back of his head.
“In fact,” said the Refrigerator behind him,” I’d think about it twenty-two times.”
Chapter Thirty-one
FALLS CHURCH
They were waiting for him by the time he got back from Camp David. The unmarked government car had dropped him at a Washington Metro station, and he had made it home from there, covering the last bit on foot.
From the outside, everything seemed all right. But Devlin knew it wasn’t. To a man living in the shadows, the smallest speck of light is like a laser beam: the front curtains were ever so slightly wrong.
Devlin had multiple ways into his house, but he needed to know the right one.
He took out his car keys, held down the alarm security CCTV feed to his BlackBerry.
Front hall, side hall, LR, DR…empty. So far so good. But he still didn’t like it. Second floor. Empty BR. His private study was locked and unmolested. That told him something right there: these guys know enough not to touch it.
He had no idea who they were, but it almost didn’t matter: two makes in two days was double-plus ungood. Somehow, somebody had gotten hold of his private address. Or somebody with access had leaked it. Same difference.
He punched another button—the trunk lock, followed in quick succession by two clicks on the lock button. That activated the 180-degree infrared scanner, which would give him a rough look at the interior. If their hearts were beating, he’d see them.
There—three of them, one on the first floor and two on the second. Under the circumstances, the cellar door was the best way. He pressed the code on his house keys and it silently slid aside. There was a pair of infra-red goggles hanging on a hook in the darkness by the door. He grabbed them and put them on. He also took off his shoes.
Weapons: inside each of his back pockets he slipped throwing knives, and slid a K-Bar knife in its scabbard down the back of his jeans. Under each armpit he placed twin Glock 37s, with a pair of Colt .38s revolvers in special pockets sewn into the front of his jeans. A concussion grenade rounded out his ensemble.
There was what looked like a light switch at the top of the basement stairs. And it was. But if you moved it from side to side in a Morse Code pattern that spelled out his real middle name, it opened the door into the interior of the house. And then it temporarily disabled every electrical system except those on batteries.
He was inside, in the dark, where only he could see.
The man on the ground floor had his back to him, and that’s the way he died, Devlin’s K-Bar slipping easily between his ribs and puncturing his heart. It was a nice, clean kill, no sound, only instant death. Devlin wondered briefly if he knew the guy; he cared not at all whether he had a family. Everybody had a family, except for him.
Now—fast. Up the stairs, pulling the grenade, arming it, tossing it. The phosphorescent flash would temporarily blind them. He was, once more, the Angel of Death, deputized by God to decide which of his two visitors would live, however temporarily, and which would die.
As every soldier knew, time slows down in hand-to-hand combat even as it moves at warp speed. Man One had fallen to his knees, grabbing his eyes, so Devlin shot him in the head—no sense wasting a bullet on a Kevlar vest—and moved on to Man Two.
Not immediately visible, but it didn’t matter. He’d be where, for some reason, they always tried to hide. The bathroom. Pressing another button on his keys, Devlin activated all the interior door locks. Then he hit the gas. Each of the rooms in the house was equipped with nerve gas, hidden behind the green eye of the smoke detectors. It disabled the person but kept him alive and conscious, and able to talk. Most of the time.
He heard the sound of a body falling. Gun drawn, he unlocked and opened the door an computers into lockdown/self-destruct mode; if anyone tried to access them, all data, right down to the keystroke loggers, would be destroyed. It would not be lost—he had mirrored sites at Internet dead drops all over the world, but he would not have the same ease of access to the material. Still, it would have to do for now.
He grabbed only what was necessary: the books his father gave him and the picture of himself and his parents in Rome.
He set the charges on the house. If anyone besides himself tried to enter, the whole place would implode in a controlled demolition. If the clean team really was FBI, he might be able to get Seelye to make sure everybody left the site alone, and down the institutional memory hole it would go. Still, he’d probably never go back there to live again.
If he was going to put a full-court press on Milverton, he needed help. He needed somebody he could trust to do the job right. There was only one such person he trusted. Maybe the time had come at last for a meeting. For he was already formulating a hypothesis. That the Edwardsville school operation had been a feint he had long been certain. It was a jab, a softening blow, to set up the knockout punch that would come at the end of a series of combinations, each of which would stagger the country a little more until finally it fell over.
Devlin punched up Eddie’s number, and waited. The cutouts worked smoothly, the line rang. And rang. And rang. No answer. Damn.
He knew Eddie had a family, had a little girl he adored, supposed he was out right this minute with her and her mother, doing the things family men who could afford to turn off their cell phones actually did. Sometimes, in fact, he wondered why Eddie stayed on this job, in this racket, when he had so much more to live for than, say, Devlin himself did. A little girl…
He wondered what it felt like to have a little girl. To have a creature he could unconditionally love, and who would love him back because she didn’t know any better, who didn’t ask anything from him except unconditional love. He probably would never know.
He tried again, this time on Eddie’s secure hot line. Family or no family, this was no time for fucking around.
> Same result: no answer. Where the hell was he, anyway? He decided to leave a message: “Whaddya know, whaddya say?” Eddie would know what it meant, what level of security he would need to use to get in touch with Devlin and, most important of all, just how damn urgent this thing was getting.
There was a flight leaving from Dulles to LA soon, and he was already booked on it. He’d dispose of the bodies along the way. He felt bad about the woman, but she was part of the job.
Chapter Thirty-two
LOS ANGELES
The fountain was dancing and Dean Martin was singing about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie. The Asian tourists were cell-phoning photos of themselves back to Taipei and Tokyo. The chubby Latina girls with the tramp stamps above their ample muffin tops pretended not to notice as the rich Iranian girls—some of them headscarved,…
The head was staring right at her, the eyes wide open in the astonishment of sudden death. She had just enough strength to reach out and brush it away; it wobbled like a pumpkin on a splayed, bloody axis, then spun, rolled and tipped over.
“Mom?” she said. “Mama?”
Everything was really quiet. Those might be screams in the distance, and those might be moans closer by, but she couldn’t tell; her ears were still ringing. After what seemed forever, she realized that the distant screams were sirens, and that the sirens were getting louder.
There was something heavy and unmoving lying across her. Her mother, she knew, was also nearby. It took her a while to figure out that the two things were one and same.
Jade struggled a bit, then managed to slip out from beneath Diane. Death has no emotional meaning to a child of Jade’s age, other than as an abstract concept, and so in her mind it was perfectly possible for her mother to be both dead and with her at the same time. Diane’s face was turned away from Jade, but the back of her head was missing. That was the worst part. That was how, in her stunned and bloody state, she knew.
“Mama,” she said trying to turn her mother’s face to hers. “Mama?”
Aside from the missing eye, it was her mother’s face, the face she knew and loved so well and so much. Whatever the wounds Diane had endured—the autopsy report would later show that she was hit by eighteen separate pieces of bomb shrapnel, shattered glass, and assorted other objects demolished in the blast’s progression from fountain to store—they had come so fast and so furiously that she would have had almost no time to really suffer. She would have died knowing that she still held her little girl in her arms, that she could still protect her, and that, no matter the evil that men could fashion, she was still her mother.
Chapter Thirty-three
LONDON, ENGLAND
Emanuel Skorzeny and Paul Pilier had checked into the same hotel, the Savoy, but under different pseudonyms. In general, Skorzeny preferred never to alert either the authorities or the media to his presence in their countries. In the U.K., there had been that little bother over some insider-trading allegations a few years back, which had engendered a considerable amount of ill-will toward him until the Skorzeny Foundation suddenly found several high-profile projects on which to lavish equally high-profile support, and then the prime minister had embraced him on camera.
Still, to avoid the undue scrutiny of the Fleet Street paparazzi, they had taken the Chunnel, where they could spend the half-hour trip under the English Channel in the comfort of Skorzeny’s new Jaguar XJ Portfolio, then motor their way to London from Folkestone.
The Skorzeny Foundation could be found in the forefront of nearly every fashionable cause; from Darfur to land mines to female genital circumcision, there was hardly a position it took that did not meet with the enthusiastic approval of the editorial board of the New York Times. I. Then he opened the door.
It was she. “Good day, Miss Harrington,” he said, ushering her in.
Amanda Harrington kissed him lightly on both cheeks as she breezed past him in a rustle of silk and a zephyr of expensive perfume. There was, alas, nothing overtly affectionate about her greeting, just good manners and good breeding. After all, they had seen each other last night and had much urgent business to discuss.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, reclining unbidden on the sofa in the suite’s plush living room.
Skorzeny forgave Amanda sins that others would have to pay for. He walked to the bar, which was always stocked to his order, and poured Amanda a drink. It was one of the many ways in which this impossibly poised woman was a throwback to the great beauties of the 1940s and 1950s. Unless she was swimming, riding, or playing tennis, she never wore anything other than dresses and proper shoes. She had her hair immaculately done up every day. She never used a four-letter word, nor suffered one to be used in her presence. There was not a single tattoo on her glorious body. She would, he knew, have one drink and then get down to business, or brass tacks, depending.
Indeed, Skorzeny knew, the only flaw in her life was her inability to have a child. In that respect, she resembled the majority of her European sisters: resigned to sacrificing the Continent’s future to the immigrant hordes, in order to savor their Pyrrhic victory over the patriarchy.
Skorzeny handed her a shaken, ice-cold gin martini and stepped back to admire her as she took the first sip. Really, she was magnificent. She was the only woman in the world on whom he would gladly wait.
“When did you hear?” she asked.
“Just now,” he said.
“Luckily,” she said, “I’ve come prepared.”
One of Amanda’s few concessions to modernity was the array of electronic gadgets she habitually carried with her. As one of London’s most successful stockbrokers, she had worked her way to the top of the heap at the firm of Islay Partnership, Ltd., living proof that London’s reclaiming the title of the world’s financial capital was no mere jingoistic, John Bull dream. She worked all of the hours that she was not sleeping, but she did so without ever calling attention to the fact. In her professional life, as in everything else, she was the very soul of discretion.
That was why he had snatched her away from Islay and made her as chairman of the board of Skorzeny Foundation. That, and one other thing: her impossible beauty. Amanda Harrington was the kind of woman that not even his money could buy, which was why he kept trying. Emanuel Skorzeny had never met anyone he couldn’t purchase, or at least lease, and he was not about to break his unblemished record now.
She laid the instruments out on the table, occasionally flicking an eye at the running stock tables on the Sky News ticker. Still sipping on her martini, she punched in instructions on her battery of BlackBerrys, and at one point had not one but two cell phones working; there was something distinctly comic about her holding each of them to a separate ear as she talked, but Skorzeny was too much of a gentleman to laugh.
“Hand me the remote, would you, pleaseerrys on “silent.” Dutifully, he handed it over. No one who knew him would believe that the great Emanuel Skorzeny would heed a woman, even one as spectacular as Amanda Harrington, but there you were.
She turned up the sound and changed channels. It didn’t matter where she landed, the coverage from Los Angeles was everywhere. “Good God,” was all she said, looking at an aerial shot of the blast radius.
The Grove lay near the city’s geographic heart, and so its destruction affected the freedom of movement of all Angelenos. With both Third Street and Beverly Boulevard knocked out, two of the city’s most important east-west arteries had been cut; the north-south streets of Fairfax and La Brea were similarly affected. Gridlock was expanding outward, a ripple effect that would soon engulf Beverly Hills to the west, Hollywood to the north, and Los Feliz to the northeast.
That, however, was the least of the city’s problems. The Grove itself was a complete loss, and the historic Farmer’s Market as well. The CBS broadcast center was a smoking ruin and had temporarily knocked the network off the air. American networks were notoriously squeamish about showing dead bodies, but the Europeans felt no such Puritan compunct
ions, and even from this height, one could see that body parts were liberally strewn over a quarter-mile radius.
“Horrible,” said Amanda.
“Yes,” said Skorzeny softly. “We have to do something.”
“Already underway,” said Amanda briskly, knocking back the last of her martini. “I’ve rearranged our positions on the New York Stock Exchange in order to limit our exposure to—”
“That’s not what I mean, Miss Harrington,” said Skorzeny. “I mean, we have to help these poor people. Now.”
Amanda caught the shift in tone, but kept her voice level. “I’ve anticipated that, sir. At your word, I’m prepared to go public with a variety of Skorzeny Foundation initiatives, depending on the reaction of the American government. We can immediately make large cash donations to local hospitals and charities and, through our contacts in various European governments, we are also in a position to offer official aid if the Americans request or accept it. Further, our supply ships—”
“Yes, yes,” said Skorzeny softly. “I mean we also have to act politically, through our contacts in America, to ensure that the government of the United States is as good as its people. I’m afraid President Tyler has been something of a disappointment.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, making a note. “There are several senators and congressmen who benefit handsomely from our largesse, and I’m sure—”
A knock at the door. “You may enter, Monsieur Pilier,” said Skorzeny.
Paul Pilier stood in the doorway; his imperturbable face showed no emotions. “I was wondering if you had any instructions for me, sir?” he said.
“Who do we have on the ground in Los Angeles?” he asked, pronouncing the name of the city the old-fashioned way, with a hard
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