Blood Trust
( Jack McClure - 3 )
Eric Van Lustbader
It was once said that you must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible . . .
Alli Carson has been through her own personal hell. With her father, the President of the United States, recently dead and her mother in a coma from a terrible accident, she has poured herself into her training to become one of the best FBI agents at the Fearington Institute. Her inspiration and solace comes from the one man with whom she has ever felt a kinship, National Security Adviser, Jack McClure. But when Alli becomes the prime suspect in a murder at Fearington, a wide ranging investigation is triggered, involving local homicide detectives, the secret service, the FBI itself, and Alli’s own uncle, the billionaire lobbyist Henry Carson. And yet nothing is what it seems.
What follows is a treacherous journey that leads Jack and Alli into a complex web of lies and deceit. Using Jack’s unique gifts to see the through the labyrinth of manipulation, their investigation leads them into the dark heart of the international slave trade, tied to a powerful Albanian crime lord whose ability and influence in global terrorism grows with each day.
The two find themselves in the crosshairs of vast global enterprise, one that lurks in the shadows of power and has infiltrated Washington and their lives in ways neither of them could ever have imagined. And hidden deep among it all sits a terrifying criminal mastermind, someone fueled by a hatred that can never be quenched, and a mind that knows neither feeling nor mercy.
For Victoria
PROLOGUE
Vlorë, Albania
TWO YOUNG women running. They look like girls, little slips of girls as they fly down ancient cobbled streets, past the blind facades of stone houses, darkened by another of the frequent blackouts. Pale candlelight flickers against windowpanes, medieval and mean, a city within a city. The younger is a girl, barely thirteen, though taller and more filled out than her companion, yet far short of womanly.
Cathedral spires, still silvered in moonlight, ignore the thin thread of red dawnlight tingeing the eastern sky. Stars glimmer defiantly like blue-white diamonds. There is no wind at all; the stillness of the trees is absolute, the shadows they cast impenetrable.
An old man, thin and brittle as the branches above his head, is roused from his drunken stupor by the anxious click-clack of shoes as the women cross his small square. He stirs, regarding them from the stone bench that serves as his home. His arms are crossed over his bony chest as if in reproof. Noticing him, one of the women stops abruptly, slips off her shoes. Now both barefoot, they silently flee the square like shadows before the rising of the sun.
They enter an evil-smelling alley. Garbage overspills dented cans. A creature lifts its head, growls, baring its yellow teeth. Its ears are triangular, and very large, making it look more like a jackal than a dog. The women swerve out of its way, race to the far end of the alley. The street beyond is nearly as dark. It is littered with ripped signs, shoes, and caps rioters left in their haste to retreat from the truncheons and guns of the advancing militia.
They turn a corner, the taller woman now in the lead. The smell of roasted corn and the sharp odor of urine assail them. Halfway along the street, the taller woman stops in front of a door. About to knock, she hesitates, turning to look into her companion’s eyes. Emboldened by the nod of encouragement she receives, she raps sharply on the door with her scabbed knuckles. No sound, and reaching past her, her companion slaps the flat of her hand insistently against the wood.
At last there comes a stirring from inside the house, a scraping followed by a hacking cough. The door opens a crack and a woman with gray-streaked hair and sunken cheeks opens her ashen eyes wide. She is gripped by the look of a hare who sees in the fox’s presence its imminent death.
“Liridona!”
“Hello, Mother,” the taller woman says.
Her mother gasps. “What have you done? Are you insane? How—?”
“I escaped.” Liridona gestures. “With the help of my friend, Alli.”
For just an instant, the expression on Liridona’s mother’s face softens. Then the abject terror returns and she says to Alli, “You stupid, stupid girl.”
“Listen, your daughter was a prisoner,” Alli says.
Liridona’s mother says nothing.
“Did you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Her eyes are fixed on a spot above her daughter’s head, as if she is willing herself to be far away.
Alli turns Liridona around and pushes up her shirt to reveal a constellation of weals made by cigarette burns.
“What’s the matter with you?” she says. “We need your help. We’re both in terrible danger.”
The older woman has averted her gaze. “I know that better than you.”
Alli can tell that beneath the mother’s mechanical tones lie glimmers of pain, fury, and, worst of all, resignation.
“Will you help us get to the ferry for Brindisi? In Italy we’ll be safe.”
“You’ll never be safe.”
Alli is undeterred. “Please. We have nowhere else to turn.”
Another cough explodes from behind Liridona’s mother. All at once, the door is almost wrenched off its hinges and Liridona’s mother is shoved out of the way to make room for a huge, hulking man dressed in a sleeveless undershirt and pajama pants. His darkly bristled cheeks and close-set eyes give him the appearance of a wild boar.
He spits heavily, then, stepping out into the street, he peers beyond them, looking both ways. “Foolish girl!” His hand lashes out, striking Liridona across the face. “Go back to where you belong. You’ll get us all killed!”
As Liridona cowers, Alli shoulders past her. “This is your daughter.”
The boar-man glares at her.
Liridona flinches, then bursts into tears. “I tried to tell you,” she sobs.
Alli says, “She’s your child, your flesh and blood.”
He takes one more look around. “Christ!”
He hurriedly steps back into the shadows of the doorway and slams the door in their faces.
Alli pounds on the door with her fist, but to no avail. She is about to try to find another way in when her gaze is drawn to the eastern end of the filthy street. The sun, rising, spills its light along the cobbles like liquid fire. Out of that dazzle emerge two men armed with handguns. The instant they realize they’ve been seen they sprint toward the two women.
Alli grabs Liridona by the back of her shirt, whirls her around, and pulls her along. Liridona stumbles after her as they run in the opposite direction. But they are already winded from their long run, and the two men gain on them at an alarmingly rapid clip.
Up ahead, Alli hears the chiming shouts of sounds like a demonstration. Changing direction, Alli heads them toward the boiling knot of students occupying a nearby plaza ringed with rugged hawthorns and lindens. Like the trees, banners rise ahead of them, calling for bread and clean water, decent sanitation, heat and light. Power! Power Now!
Young people are everywhere, piling into the plaza, fiercely determined expressions on their faces as they begin to chant in unison. The raw, seething power of youth shakes the lindens like a sudden storm, and it seems as if hope is rising as inexorably as the flowers of spring.
Grabbing Liridona by the hand, Alli plunges into the maelstrom of bodies. All around them, the air shudders with the angry shouts of the demonstrators. Fires are being lit, fueled by the garbage piled in the gutters. Acrid smoke swirls, mingling with a fog that seems to have risen from the sewer grates, overrunning the streets and the plaza like an army of vermin.
A great shout erupts as a group of about ten young men rock a car back and forth, harder and harder, until,
with their combined strength, they upend it. The massed shout gains hurricane force. There the car sits like a turtle on its back. Someone opens the gas tank.
At almost the same moment, the morning trembles to the high-low wail of police sirens. Everything starts to happen in double-time. A length of rag is inserted in the car’s gas tank, its visible end lit; the mass of humanity seems to hold its breath.
The car explodes just as the militia appears, pouring out of fog-bound streets into the plaza. Harsh orders, magnified through a portable amplifier, are fired like flares over the heads of the protesters. Then guns are fired, and the melee commences.
Among it all, Alli and Liridona dodge and sidestep their antagonists, sweeping aside fluttering banners, leaping over the fallen, trying to keep themselves from being trampled by the mob, which flows first one way, then another. A clear line of sight is all but impossible, eyes tear from the smoke and debris.
It is then that the two men appear out of the blur of bodies and faces. They grab Liridona and, as Alli tries to attack them, one of them slams the side of her head. She staggers, loses her grip on her companion, and, slammed by rushing bodies, goes down facefirst. Sprawled on the ground, she is kicked and struck by fleeing feet and tramping boots. She almost loses consciousness, but, gathering herself, manages to regain her feet just in time to see the two men dragging Liridona away.
Wading deeper into the growing madness, she fights her way after them. The car fire has spread, and one of the hawthorn trees becomes a column of flame, its widening plume of smoke a dark banner rippling ominously over all their heads. Alli coughs, her lungs burning. A young woman hits her in the face, a boy drives his elbow into her side in his panic to get away from the militia. The armed men wield metal truncheons, which rise and fall in concert like a thresher in a field of wheat. She gasps and continues on, reeling and in pain, but she will not allow Liridona out of her sight. But the fog, a metallic brown from gunpowder, garbage, and the grit of the streets, thrusts itself against her like a living thing. She is buffeted by the currents of running people. Screams find her as insistent as the tolling of bells from the cathedral, which seems to watch indifferently with its elongated El Greco face.
Alli loses sight of Liridona altogether, and her heart beats even faster in her chest as she plows her way through the mob, nearer now to the mass of truncheons lifting and falling, to the sprays of blood and bone, to the tilted bodies, to the cries of pain and terror.
Then she spots one of the men, his tall frame sinister as a bat, rising for a moment above the heads of the students. Her way lies directly in the path of the militia. There’s no time to circle around, so she plunges ahead until she is close to the line of truncheons, advancing en masse like a phalanx of Roman soldiers. On hands and knees, she makes herself inconspicuous, crawling through the melee, squirming through the legs of the militia until she eels her way through to the other side.
Regaining her feet, she looks around, sees the men pushing Liridona around a corner. They are no longer in the plaza. She is on the fringe of the mob, running as fast as she can toward the corner. Running with her heart in her mouth, running toward the sudden roar of gunshots that spurts at her like sleet from around the corner.
“No!” she cries. “No!”
Hurtling around the corner, she is jerked off her feet. She stares into monstrous eyes. One is blue, the other green. They regard her as if each has a separate intelligence, both cold as permafrost.
For a moment, she is paralyzed by those eyes, or, more accurately, the twin intelligence behind them. And she thinks, Not him, anyone but him. Then, from somewhere out of her sight, she hears Liridona weeping, and, like glass shattering against stone, the spell breaks. But the instant she tries to struggle free, the barrel of a gun is shoved into her mouth.
“Once again, quiet,” a voice like a constricting iron band says. “Before the end.”
The air shivers.
PART ONE
BLOOD SPORT
One Month Ago
You can’t have a pact with God and with the devil at the same time.
—The Skating Rink
, R
OBERTO
B
OLAÑO
ONE
Washington, D.C.
“SHE’S DEAD.”
These words, spoken by his daughter, jerk Jack McClure out of sleep.
Covered in sweat, he turns in the darkness of his bedroom. “Emma?”
The faintest cool breeze stirs the hair on his head.
“She passed by me a minute ago, Dad. Or is it an hour?”
Hard to tell, Jack thought, when you’re dead.
“Emma?”
But the ghostly voice was gone, and he felt the sudden lack of her. Again. A great abyss on whose edge he teetered like a drunk reeling out of a bar. He drew a breath, gave a great shudder, and lunged for his cell phone. Punched in the number of Walter Reed Medical Center and heard the familiar voice of the night nurse.
“Mr. McClure, how odd you should call at this moment. I was just about to dial your number.” She cleared her throat and when she began again her voice had taken on a formal, almost martial tenor. “At two fifty-three this morning, the former First Lady, Lyn Carson, expired.”
“She’s dead.” The echo of Emma’s voice caused another shiver to run down his spine.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the night nurse said.
“Have you notified Alli?”
“I haven’t yet, but as instructed I’ve called Mrs. Carson’s sister and her brother-in-law.” She meant Henry Holt Carson, Alli’s uncle. “As well as Secretary Paull, of course.”
“Okay.” Jack thumbed the sleep from his eyes as he swung his legs off the bed. “I’ll take care of informing Alli.” He padded toward the bathroom.
“Sir, is there anything—?”
“At the end … did she regain consciousness?”
“No, sir, she never did.”
“Stay with Mrs. Carson.” He squinted as he turned on the light. “I’ll be right over.”
* * *
“IT’S THE end of an era,” Dennis Paull said as he and Jack stood by Lyn Carson’s bedside.
No one knew that better than Jack. Ten months ago, he had been in the vehicle following the president’s limousine in Moscow when the limo had skidded on a patch of ice. Almost everyone in that car, including President Edward Harrison Carson, had died. All except Lyn Carson, who had slipped into a coma. Despite two surgeries, the first on board Air Force One, the second here at Walter Reed, she had failed to regain consciousness. Both procedures had succeeded only in prolonging her twilight life.
“Did you call Alli?”
Jack nodded. “Several times, and they said they’d get the message to her.”
“What about her cell?”
“Fearington has a strict policy about cell-phone use.” Fearington was the FBI Special Ops school in Virginia.
“Even for this?” Paull shook his head. He was now Jack’s boss. He had hired Jack after President Carson’s fatal accident. Jack, who had worked for ATF, had been tapped by Carson as a strategic advisor immediately following his old friend’s inauguration. That all ended as abruptly as it had begun, and Paull, seeing his opportunity, had scooped Jack up. Now Jack tackled the antiterrorism assignments that daunted Paull’s other agents, using his dyslexic mind to unravel puzzles no one else could handle.
“Rules are rules.”
Paull took out his phone. “We’ll see about that.” While he was waiting, he said, “You must’ve moved heaven and earth to get her in there.” Then he held up a finger. “No answer.” He closed the connection.
“Fearington periodically goes into lockdown as a drill.”
Paull nodded and put his phone into his pocket.
“But the truth is Alli did her own heavy lifting,” Jack went on. “She passed the entrance exams with the highest marks they’d seen in more than a decade.”
“Smart little thing.”
>
Jack snorted. “It takes more than smarts to get into Fearington. After her father was killed, she wouldn’t talk to anyone, even me. She curled up into an emotional ball. But there was so much anger inside her that when I took her to my gym, she slid on a pair of boxing gloves and started pounding the heavy bag.”
Paull laughed. “I’d like to have been a fly on the wall.”
“Yeah, she almost broke her right hand. Then I began to teach her how to box and, damn, if she didn’t pick up all the fundamentals right away. At first, she didn’t have a lot of power, as you can imagine, but then, I don’t know, something clicked inside her. She was like a ghost—it seemed as if she could anticipate my punches. She has this ability. By reading a person’s face she knows whether they’re lying or telling the truth. Now she’s extended this ability to knowing what they’re about to do.”
“So she put the boys down?”
“Did she ever!” Jack said. “But admiration wasn’t what she got from a lot of her classmates.”
Paull nodded. “I can only imagine. Fearington’s a men’s club. Didn’t you warn her?”
“Well, I reminded her.” Jack sighed. “Not that it did any good. She was determined. No one and nothing was going to get in her way.”
* * *
ALLI CARSON was pulled from sleep, roughly and without warning.
“Get up, Ms. Carson. Please be good enough to rouse yourself.”
Alli turned over, opened her eyes, and was almost blinded by the fierce glare from the overhead light. Who had turned it on, who was barking orders at her? Her mind, still fuzzed with the dream of Emma’s face glowing in the light of—what?—a streetlamp, a full moon, an unearthly luminescence?
“What is this? I don’t under—”
“Please do as I say, Ms. Carson, quickly, quickly!”
“Commander Fellows?”
“Yes,” Brice Fellows said. “Come, come, there’s no time to lose!”
She sat up. The oversized T-shirt she slept in was black, covered in white silk-screened skulls. Though twenty-three, she looked more like sixteen or seventeen. Graves’ disease had interfered with her growing, so that she was slight, almost pixieish, just over five feet in height, her tomboy figure more suited to an adolescent than an adult.
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