The Greater Good

by Casey Moreton

  “Have a nice flight,” the attendant said without a smile and without any eye contact.

  Brooke’s heart was still pounding. The flight was packed nearly to capacity. She saw only one empty seat besides her own and assumed she was one of the last to board. How lucky she had to have been to get a seat on the flight was too eerie and frightening to think about at the moment. She found her seat, in the rear, one row up from the toilet. She stowed the backpack under the seat in front of her, then settled in for the flight. Almost immediately, a flight attendant pulled the outside door closed and locked it. Brooke let out a long, slow breath. She’d made it by inches.

  Within minutes, the plane rolled away from the gate. Brooke put her face to the window, snow skittering across the runway. They were out there somewhere. Whether her clever little plan had bought her a few extra hours, she could only guess. But sooner or later they’d figure it out. She was certain of that. And she was just as certain that it would most likely be sooner rather than later.

  44

  AT LEAST HETHOUGHT HE WAS AWAKE.BUT IN THE DARKNESS,Joel couldn’t say one way or the other with any certainty. The pain in his head—his jaw, more specifically—had roused him to consciousness. There was a heavy stench of fuel. His mouth was taped shut, and his hands were bound awkwardly behind his back. He opened his eyes, but whatever they’d put over his face left him shrouded in blackness. There was no moving his arms, legs, or head. He felt as though he were encased within a cocoon.

  They were moving, though. He could tell that much. It had to be the truck, he thought. He had to be in the truck. His jaw might be broken. For the moment it was difficult to tell. But the pain was not dimmed by his trappings or by the darkness. The pain was very real and quite present. He hadn’t caught the face behind the gun, and the man who knocked him out was someone he’d never seen before in his life.

  In the void of the all-consuming darkness, up was down and here was there. But the solid surface beneath him was a point of reference, and he knew he was lying on his back. Somewhere beneath him, the tires of the truck were rolling over fairly even terrain. Who had him, andwhy, were questions for debate. Where they were taking him, and what would happen when the truck finally rolled to a stop, was of more immediate concern and worthy of a greater level of speculation.

  He swayed with every turn, his spine absorbing the brunt of each anomaly the road’s surface had to offer. He was terrified but amazingly calm. Perhaps on some level, the past week had prepared him to endure such a bizarre scenario. Or perhaps some small part of him understood that he was here for a reason.

  Boxxen Road ran north to Courtney Avenue. Courtney ran east to west. The Mazda turned onto Courtney Avenue, taking a westerly heading. It sped past Slatter Road, and St. John carefully watched the street signs flick by his window. The sun was edging toward the horizon, burning the overcast day a fiery orange-pink. Wind rattled the radio antenna sticking up from the hood.

  He drove with one hand on the wheel, and one hand gripping the console between the seats. He figured there was a half an hour to forty-five minutes of daylight remaining. Enough time to make a cursory sweep, put together a rudimentary plan, drive the car several blocks away, and park it where it wouldn’t draw unwanted attention. The gun still bothered him. Firearms made the work so much simpler. If the girl’s family was home with her, and he had to assume they would be, the task of dealing with them by hand would add another dimension of stress and leave him open to too many variables. The issue would have to be addressed.

  Birchlawn Drive came up on his left. He slowed the Mazda at the brick gate entrance to the street. There was an ironwork design inlaid against the brick. Ivy had grown in tangled vines, spreading across the gate. Snow lay in uneven dunes along the top edge. He stopped the car, glancing behind, gauging the flow of traffic. A single vehicle sped past the two-lane blacktop strip. Traffic shouldn’t be an issue, he concluded.

  Most of the homes had big lawns. It wasn’t an overly developed plot of land, perhaps two dozen homes. Most were two-story dwellings, with asphalt shingles and long front porches and very few distinguishing architectural features. All in all, it was a bland finger of suburbia.

  The house at 87 Birchlawn Drive had a single level with a separate garage. A cement walk led from the driveway to the front porch. Of the three windows overlooking the front lawn, lights were visible in two. The home was set against several acres of woodland, separated by a notched-post fence.

  In his mind, St. John pictured the rear of the home. A cement patio. A sliding patio door that led into a dining area or the kitchen or a laundry area. After dark, this is where he would enter. He would find the fuse box, either in the garage or mounted to the wall along the patio. Cut the power, enter the home.

  The videotape was the only thing that mattered. The rest was unfortunate collateral damage. The tape would get Megan back safe and sound. Nothing else was relevant.

  The Mazda crept past the house and on down the lane. Birchlawn Drive merged into Birchlawn Elbow, a sweeping curve a half a mile in length. He pulled into a driveway in the middle of the elbow, and turned around.

  On the return trip, he again slowed, studying number 87, its red vinyl siding glowing in the gloom of early evening. He then turned his head for an instant, making a cursory glance down Eberhard Street, which ran perpendicular to Birchlawn. He could see a handful of homes sprinkled among the gnarled oaks.

  A van was parked two hundred meters down Eberhard. He slowed farther, rubbing the window with the sleeve of his coat. There was a man in coveralls stationed at the top of a telephone pole, tools dangling from his belt. He seemed busy with what he was doing.

  Headlights turned into the road up ahead, and a Jeep Wagoneer eased past the Mazda in the narrow rut in the snow that acted as the other lane. By now he had crept past Eberhard. The light of day was fading fast. It was a quarter of six. He needed to get busy.

  Back on Courtney, heading east, St. John was soon back at the edge of town. Businesses were closing shop for the day. He spotted several strip malls along the way. He stopped at a convenience store and purchased a sixteen-ounce bottle of water. He unscrewed the lid, took a long drink, then emptied the remaining contents onto the ground, tossing the empty plastic bottle into the passenger seat.

  The Mazda motored through three lights, then pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall. One of the businesses listed on the tall sign by the road was what he needed. GIBBIN’SGUN ANDPAWN. St. John parked and walked across the expanse of slush and ice. He kept his face downturned, his hands in the warmth of his coat pockets. The sign in the window said Gibbin’s was open till six-thirty. It was now a hair after six. An electronic chime announced him as he entered.

  A man as wide as an ATM machine sat on a stool behind a glass counter. He had a beard and a diamond-stud earring. His fingers were laced and resting on the shelf formed by his gut.

  “Hep’ya, friend?” the fat man asked.

  St. John half-smiled and nodded. In the glass case in front of the fat man were row after row of handguns. “I’d like to look at a few of those.”

  “What’s your flavor? American? German? Russian?”

  St. John moved his eyes over the selections. There were some decent guns in there. He saw a nice .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, but that was a heavy gun, and loud. No he wanted something light, and something more easily muffled. Then he spotted the one he wanted.

  He tapped a knuckle on the glass. “Let me see that one.”

  “The SIG-Sauer?”

  St. John nodded.

  The man unclipped a tangle of keys from a belt loop on his enormous waist. He unlocked the sliding glass door, pushing it to one side, and reached inside the glass display case to retrieve the .40 SIG-Sauer automatic. He set it on the counter, the metal gently clacking against the glass.

  St. John handled it, eyeing it for a moment, then aiming it at the wall. It was cheaply made and lightweight. He liked it. He owned several, but this one wouldn’t be a
dded to his collection. It would be used then discarded.

  “You sell ammo?”

  The man licked at the curls of beard beneath his lower lip. “I got a box or two I could let go of, yeah.”

  “I’ll take one box, plus the gun.”

  “I’ll need to run your ID through the computer.”

  St. John produced a driver’s license, one of a dozen bogus documents he carried at all times.

  In the car, St. John loaded the clip and stashed the ammo box beneath the driver’s seat.

  It wasn’t until he’d set the SIG-Sauer on the passenger’s seat, under the map, and started the car, that he realized that the sun had set. It was dark now save for the lights of town. If all went smoothly, he hoped to be done with this mess and on his way back to the car by 7:30P .M.

  He easily retraced his route back down the highway, then onto Courtney Avenue. Birchlawn Drive passed on the right. The car’s headlights washed over the brick and wrought-iron gate, and he continued on.

  Three-quarters of a mile farther down, he turned left onto a well-graded dirt track. The road wasn’t marked, but the headlights soon spotlighted a wooden sign affixed to posts in the ground that read Elmdale Reservoir. And fifty feet to the right, the road dipped into a marshy lagoon. He considered this for a moment, then backed the car under a natural arch formed by the vegetation. The tires of the front-wheel-drive spun in the previously untouched snowpack.

  He killed the lights, drowning his surroundings in cold obscurity. He gathered the .40 automatic and the empty water bottle, stuffing them in coat pockets. Then he put on his camel hair gloves and opened the door. His foot crunched down through six inches of crusty powder. He hoped there would be no problems getting the car out. The walk up the dirt track to Courtney Avenue would be the worst leg of the jaunt. There was no traffic on Courtney. He hurried across, hopping the ditch, slipping into the wooded acreage. It was time to find the videotape. Time for Brooke Weaver to die.

  45

  BERTRUMSTOTT’S FACE WAS PITTED WITH ACNE SCARS.THISwas his one and only distinguishing physical feature. He was lean and muscular from daily laps in the exquisite Olympic-size marble swimming pool that overlooked the Caribbean Sea, but his well-toned body wasn’t nearly as noticeable as his savagely pockmarked face.

  He was standing in white cotton pants, a warm tropical wind fluttering his unbuttoned white silk shirt, leather sandals on his feet. He stood in silence and was nearly motionless. The flesh around the craters in his face had flushed to the color of ripe tomatoes. The tail of his shirt snapped in the breeze, matching the motion of the national flag of Belize hoisted high atop a pole that rose from the aggregate stone walkway along the perimeter of the terrace. He was a man whose personal fortune was more than he could hope to spend in a thousand lifetimes, but at the moment he burned with wild rage. He held a cordless phone at his side. He needed to quench the tide of emotion rising from his chest before he spoke again.

  The swimming pool was built into the massive terrace facing out to sea from his island. A dozen teenage girls dotted the pool-side, all of them very scantily clad. The girls did not live on the island. He imported them from neighboring countries, shipping them here for his pleasure until he bored of them and sent for a fresh batch. The girls were scared to death of him, but the money he paid for a week or a few days could last their impoverished families an entire year.

  The sun was down, but the terrace was lit up like a Sunday afternoon. The moon hung like a jewel over the Caribbean. Just out of reach of the light were his armed guards. The guards were dressed in green fatigues and carried Uzi machine guns. All had formal military training. The guards were not permitted to touch the teenage girls, but they gathered in the bushes near the pool to catch a peek.

  The phone call was from Julius Albertwood. Albertwood had bad news.

  The deep gray orbs that were Stott’s eyes were flooded with absolute fury. Somehow everything they had methodically plotted for so many years had begun to unravel. Ettinger’s weakness should have been foreseen. Looking back on it now, that seemed obvious. And if not obvious, it should have at the very least been taken into consideration. In hindsight, the reality of what they’d overlooked in their selection of Ettinger as part of the consortium goaded him fiercely.

  The consortium had thought long and hard over their choice for the vice president slot in the Yates administration. In the end it had come down to money. Ettinger had money. His father-in-law was a billionaire. Ettinger wanted to sit at the Big Boys’ table in D.C. Coming to the table attached to Yates’s hip would put him next in line for the presidency. What theyhadn’t considered, though, was that if he ever wearied of politics, they couldn’t hold money over his head. No dollar amount would impress him.

  Yates, on the other hand, had been the perfect choice. Yates was nothing but a fish. He swam in their toxic stew. He was their pet. Yates’s payoff was yet to come.

  Ettinger had been fully aware of the arms sales, and was fully supportive. But when he’d finally caught wind of the truth behind the Lyndon Peel scenario, the tide seemed to turn. Much of Stott’s rage was for himself. That was the hardest thing to take. Albertwood had come to him some time ago with concerns about Ettinger. He was suspicious of the vice president and filled with anxiety over whether he could be trusted any longer. Albertwood’s advice was to do away with Ettinger as quickly as possible. But Stott had hesitated. They’d given it several months, to watch and wait.

  Then they struck.

  They struck too late.

  …If and when you hear my taped statement, please forgive me. I’ve turned out to be neither a good brother nor a good citizen…

  If the package from Beacon was indeed the taped statement referred to in the email to Nelson Ettinger, and if the videotape escaped their grasp, the floodgates would burst asunder. There would be nothing left to say. Yates would be useless, and he would be left to fend for himself.

  Albertwood had called to say that Brooke Weaver was on a plane to Chicago. Smart girl, Stott thought. Chicago. Clever. Again, they should have suspected such a move. Ettinger had made the first chink in their armor. Now the girl was opening them up for the takedown shot. She was going to Senator Peel’s boy. If she made it to Jefferson Peel, he would drive a sword through the heart of the consortium.

  Belfast was on his way to Syracuse. A wasted trip. It would do no good to send him on to Chicago. Finding Weaver in Chicago would require more than one man. Belfast was of no further use to them now. He’d become nothing more than a liability. It was time for Belfast to check out. The girl in New York, Megan Durant, was of no value without Belfast. And this other man, Joel Benjamin, who R’mel identified as the man he’d seen with Belfast, seemed to be nobody at all. Why he’d taken Belfast at gunpoint was a mystery. But there was no time to waste on further investigation. The time had come to destroy them all.

  Albertwood had a crew on a private jet heading for Chicago, as well as the small crew in Syracuse watching the house and waiting for Belfast to make his appearance. At this moment, as Stott bathed in the sweet smells of the island, Albertwood awaited the final word to give his people the go-ahead to put the entire matter to rest.

  Stott went down the gently sloping steps to the edge of the pool. One of the girls sat with her legs dangling in the water. She reached out and caressed his legs with her small, soft hand. He stared down at her with a look of indifference. He bought and sold human life as easily as cheap farmland. He could have the current harem slaughtered, use their corpses to fertilize the island, and never be required to answer for his actions.

  The fact that he’d so effortlessly manipulated the most powerful government on the planet was laughable. His money had not so much bought an American president as it had the American people. It was their money that funded his empire.

  At that thought he nearly smiled. But another thought interrupted: the videotape.

  He walked to the edge of the low wall that bordered the crest of a sheer hundre
d-foot cliff. Seawater foamed amid the rocks at the base of the cliff. Enough was enough.

  Stott raised the phone to his ear, and said simply, “Do it.”

  46

  AFTER THE ORDERS WERE GIVEN,NEWBURY CLOSED THEcell phone and set it on the console. They were sitting in the dark of the van, the varied-colored lights of the monitoring equipment twinkling like stars from a distant nebula. Newbury sat still in the swivel chair for a few seconds before turning to Adair.

  “What?” Adair asked, the twinkling lights reflected in the whites of his eyes. “What is it?”

  Newbury’s throat was suddenly dry. He stared at the man beside him, then turned back to the console.

  “They want us to kill Belfast,” Newbury said.

  A gust of wind shuddered over the van.

  “Our orders are to kill Belfast and burn the body.” Newbury blinked, a fearful vacant stare revealing his anxiety.

  Adair keyed the radio. “Get in here,” he said.

  It took a couple of minutes for Watkins to unclip his harness and skim down the length of the telephone pole. He jerked open the van’s sliding door. Flurries eddied around his shoulders. He started to speak, then caught his tongue as he looked in at his partners. They were dressed for combat. Watkins clambered inside and heaved the door shut. He snatched the hard hat off his head and clanked it against the rear door, then unzipped his coveralls.

  “We are going to kill Belfast,” Adair said flatly.

  Watkins froze midzip and looked up at their faces.

  Newbury nodded.

  Adair and Newbury were zipped into their skintight jet-black neoprene bodysuits, each with a digitally calibrated night-vision monocular over one eye.

  “You’ll wait here,” Adair said to Watkins. “If it looks bad, we’ll call for you.”

  Watkins looked unsure.

  They each were aware of the legendary assassin Belfast. Belfast had come to kill, and now they had been instructed to intercept and destroy him. This was not what any of them would have cared to hear. Finally, he swallowed, then offered a single, hesitant nod of acknowledgment.