by David Jacobs
“Deeply regrettable to be sure. You have my apologies. But it was the only way to ensure our getting together for a meeting which is bound to be profitable to both of us.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“It will be. You are a man of the world, so you will understand that sometimes one’s plans are subject to sudden and dramatic reversals. That’s business.
“I welcome you to my house. Not my house, not really. It belonged to the late Max Scourby. As you can see, he spared no expense in arranging the equipment necessary for your—our—transaction. Nothing has changed, except that instead of doing business with Senors Scourby and Lewis, you will be dealing with myself and my brother.”
Zane’s smile was as meaningless as it was polite. “No offense, but Max Scourby and Orne Lewis had a certain credibility and track record in matters of this sort. A certain trust existed, if only on the basis of similar transactions successfully carried out by both parties. If they said they could deliver, they did so. Charming though you most certainly are, you and your brother are an unknown quantity as far as I’m concerned.”
“I understand your misgivings,” Marta said. “Trust is so hard to come by in this unhappy world. You would like some sort of a guarantee. A bond of security. I am prepared to offer that to you.
“You smile. Perhaps you doubt me? Quite all right. I am not offended. Your opinion will change when you are made aware of my principal sponsor in this undertaking. The partner of myself and my brother. I give you a name that will mean much to you:
“Annihilax.”
Adam Zane’s sky-blue eyes narrowed; his jaw muscles flexed involuntarily at the naming of the name.
A name that meant nothing to Dr. Hugh Carlson. He was scared, dazed, and confused by the recent violent reversal of fortune. He took a certain comfort in the fact that he’d been neither manhandled nor abused. He knew this:
He was better off in the hands of his murderous captors than he would have been several hours ago in the custody of the two Los Alamos Sheriff’s Department deputies.
Or in the hands of CTU’s Jack Bauer. The late Jack Bauer.
He was, he knew, still a valuable commodity. The question was: Did his captors know it? For now, by conscious choice and nervous temperament, his way was to walk soft and keep a low profile while events shook themselves out and manifested themselves to give him a clearer picture of where he stood.
Annihilax? No, the name meant nothing to him. But it certainly carried weight with Adam Zane, and that meant something to Carlson.
“Annihilax? Yes, that would change things. If true,” Zane said. “I’ll go so far as to admit that rumors have reached me that Annihilax is alive and operating in this theater—but you’ll have to prove it to me.”
Marta Blanco’s green eyes glittered. Her red lips curved upward at the corners in a kind of secret half smile. “You have met Annihilax. That is not a question, but a fact known to me and you. You two have had dealings in the past. You are one of a very few who has seen the true face of Annihilax and lived.”
“Seeing is believing,” Marta Blanco said. She indicated a door at the opposite end of the room. It was arched and made of ironbound wooden planks. It opened, creaking on its hinges. Framed in the doorway stood a figure.
“Meet your true host. Annihilax welcomes you,” Marta said.
The figure started forward, entering the room, moving out of the shadows into the light. Moving slowly, deliberately, though not without a certain dogged stiffness.
Seeing the newcomer, Hugh Carlson was literally rocked on his heels by the shock of revelation. He cried out:
“My god! Carrie!”
Carrie Carlson advanced into the room, walking with a slight but noticeable limp. Favoring her left leg. She walked stiffly, wielding a cane in her left hand.
She wore a lightweight blue blazer, white blouse, gray skirt, and low-heeled blue-black shoes. Her hazel eyes looked yellow in the light; they glowed. She seemed serene, self-possessed. Her rubber-tipped cane made soft thudding noises against the tiled floor as she advanced.
She crossed to the others, stood facing them. A tight smile curved her lips. Her gaze shifted from Zane to her husband and back again.
Zane stared at her, studying her with a furiously intent frown. “My dear Jane, can it really be you?”
“Have I changed so much, Adam?” Carrie Carlson asked.
“Frankly, yes.”
“Perhaps these names will jog your memory: Chen Li Chang. Principessa Senta Loquasto. Einar Saknessum. Count Bozzo-Corona. General Auric Frobe. Sir Percival Pickering—”
“Enough! No need recite a litany of the roster of the dead.”
“They were all alive before you contracted me to liquidate them, Adam.”
He eyed her like a jeweler appraising a valuable gem of dubious provenance. “You’ve had face work.”
“What woman my age hasn’t?” Carrie Carlson countered.
“I suppose it’s the context more than anything else that throws me—you’re the last person I’d suspect of being incarnated as an American suburban matron.”
“Which is why it works, no? Only here I’m not Jane—it’s Carrie. Though not for long.”
She turned her yellow-eyed gaze on Hugh Carlson. “I don’t know which of us is more surprised, you or I. For three years I’ve moved heaven and earth trying to find the mole in INL, and all the time he was living under the same roof with me.
“Of course you don’t understand. It just goes to show that there are no strangers more mysterious and unknown to each other than a husband and wife who share each other’s bed. Not that we’ve been doing much of that lately. Thank god.
“You really had me guessing. I never suspected that you were the traitor. Never thought you had it in you. In a way I’m impressed. I fool others, I’m not easily fooled. Especially after the others in the cadre started dying off. Your doing—thanks to Lewis and Scourby. They were protecting their investment.
“In the end I thought it would be Nordquist. That’s why I tried to have his wife and daughter kidnapped, to use as a lever over him if we couldn’t get our hands on him. I faked my own kidnapping to muddy the trail, and maybe squeeze some secrets out of you. Never dreaming you were the arch-traitor. I must say, my respect for you has gone up.”
Annihilax was Carrie Voss Carlson. Real name Jane Miller. The sole daughter of a wealthy family in the American Midwest. Parents of good, solid stock, well-established old money. Her father was an international banker; her background, cosmopolitan.
Early in life Jane Miller discovered she was not like the others, children or adults.
She was completely lacking in empathy. There was a curious blankness at the heart of her being. A lack of emotion regarding the pain and suffering of others. A hangnail to her was more real, more painful, than somebody else being crushed to death in an auto wreck.
Her emotional life was rich, intense, and vividly alive where her own wants and desires were concerned. But as for the feelings of others, playfellows, siblings, relatives, suitors—nothing. Other people were no more real to her than a set of paper dolls. If they got in the way, you just cut them out of the picture.
Her mother and father were sane, normal, loving individuals. Young Jane suffered no physical, sexual, or mental abuse. Her childhood and adolescence couldn’t have been more idyllic—for her. For those around her, should they stand between her and something she wanted—a toy, a trinket, a school prize, a boyfriend, an honor, office, or position—a chain of inevitable fatality soon overtook them.
People kept dying all around her: a schoolgirl who was the ringleader of a clique who snubbed her; a teacher who threatened to report her for cheating on a test; a camp counselor who’d caught Jane and a cabin mate sharing a too-intimate encounter; a dowager aunt who’d made Jane the beneficiary of a considerable fortune in her will but then had the bad grace to keep on living.
Jane Miller had the benefits of a fine education. Swiss boarding
schools, a finishing school in France, university studies and travel in Madrid, Munich, Vienna, Paris.
Pleasure she took where she found it, from beautiful people of either sex. But no pleasure matched the thrill of a successful murder.
Brains, beauty, a gift for languages, and a relentless amorality sent her drifting in the half worlds of drug, vice, and crime. Her talent for killing proved to be not only pleasurable but extremely profitable.
Jane Miller could abide no master. She would answer to no one. To avoid falling under the thumb of any crime boss or spymaster she created an alter ego, an assumed identity.
Her studies had focused on European art history, particularly of the medieval period. In the millenarian and eschatological writings and esoterica of the Middle Ages she’d encountered the dread figure of Annihilax, the Exterminating Angel, who would snuff out the lives of kings and commoners in the End of Days preceding the Last Judgment.
Annihilax became her nom de guerre, her war name. As Annihilax she plied her professional assassin’s trade around the world, earning a place among the top-ranked assassins of the killer elite.
It was in Africa that she met her Waterloo, in one of the fractious mini-states of the Congo region. A mineral-rich province where the status quo was threatened by an upstart rebel leader and his horde of hungry, well-armed troops. A West European industrial cartel that controlled the lucrative mining concessions from the complaisant and infinitely corrupt provincial government hired Annihilax to eliminate the rebel warlord.
Posing as a freelance journalist, Jane Miller established herself in the provincial capital and began building her clandestine network of mercenaries and assassins. One of her contacts on the scene was Murad Ali, a Pakistani agent. He had lots of money and connections.
Jane Miller became his mistress. Murad Ali liked to talk, especially afterward in bed. She learned that he was a high-ranking officer in Pakistan’s all-powerful Inter-Service Intelligence, the military intelligence organization that not so secretly ruled Pakistan behind the scenes. Possessing the atomic bomb and seeking to augment its own stockpiles, the ISI had assigned Murad Ali to this war-torn Congo province to acquire yellowcake, a product of the region’s uranium mines that could be refined for use in atomic weapons.
Among his boasts, Murad Ali confided to Jane that he’d been one of the debriefing officers of Dr. Rahman Sayeed, late of Ironwood National Laboratory in Los Alamos. After being released from custody for time served while awaiting and during his abortive trial for espionage, Sayeed had returned home to Islamabad. He had indeed been guilty of atomic espionage against the United States, and told his eager auditors in the ISI all he had learned during his American sojourn.
Among the intelligence windfall was the intriguing revelation that he had not been the only atomic spy seeking to pry loose Ironwood’s secrets. Sayeed’s delvings into the computer files had detected the presence of a second, unknown master spy who’d been working for years subverting the system and downloading critically restricted data relating to the PALO codes, the digitized fail-safe overrides that could shut down via remote control the launch of any land-based nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.
The identity of this master spy was unknown to Sayeed, although he’d confided the other’s existence to his lawyer Max Scourby. The idea being that if things went badly for Sayeed in his case, he’d have something to deal with to prompt the prosecution to lighten his sentence in return for the PALO espionage revelations.
As it had worked out, the government’s case had fallen apart under the weight of politics and a bad press, and Sayeed had not had to play the trump card regarding the PALO codes as a get-out-of-jail card. In due course he’d passed the information to his ISI debriefers. It was a tantalizing nugget but they were in no position to capitalize on the lead, and so it had lain fallow all this time.
Finally reaching the ears of Jane Miller during a bout of postcoital pillow talk as she lay curled up beside Murad Ali in his bed. He had no idea that she was Annihilax. He believed her cover story, that she was a freelance Western journalist covering the Congolese provincial turmoil. And a shameless slut, like all American women, which suited him just fine.
For once in her career Jane Miller had bitten off more than she could chew. Annihilax could not deliver on the contract to kill the rebel warlord. The warlord struck against the capital in a boldly unsuspected move, taking it and unleashing an orgy of looting, rape, and murder.
Thousands of refugees fled the city, racing for the safety of the border. Murad Ali had been slain by a rebel machine gunner, dying in the streets while Jane Miller watched. Like any other ordinary fugitive, she had to run for her life.
A river marked the border between the revolt-torn province and the relative safety of its nearest neighbor. It was there, in a hamlet on the wrong side of the river, that Jane Miller crossed paths with Carrie Voss.
Carrie Voss was an American relief worker for an international philanthropic organization helping feed the starving Congolese masses. She was an only child whose parents were both dead and who’d long ago lost contact with her few aging, distant relatives. She’d been caught up in the rebel onslaught and had to flee for her life. She was roughly the same age and physical type as Jane Miller.
Annihilax saw her opportunity and took it. She cut Carrie Voss’s throat and stole her identity papers. While making the river crossing, she was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round. She woke up in a field hospital where she was being treated for her injuries. Passing for Carrie Voss, she was airlifted to safety and repatriated to the United States under her stolen identity.
A lengthy recuperation followed, including facial surgery to repair her damaged face and therapy for her wounded left leg. The left leg never healed properly and left her with a permanent limp, necessitating the use of a cane.
The world’s intelligence services believed that the assassin code named Annihilax—gender unknown—had died in the Congo. Jane Miller was reborn as Carrie Voss.
She had a purpose.
The thought of the PALO codes obsessed her every waking hour. They were the Holy Grail of atomic secrets; their possessor could alter the balance of world power. A goal worth pursuing.
She relocated to Santa Fe, using that city as a base of operations from which to make her forays into Los Alamos. As Annihilax she’d established a number of secret Swiss and offshore banking accounts that now supplied her with funds for her quest.
Intelligence was the key to all successful field operations. She learned everything she could about Ironwood and its key scientific cadre. Fortune had smiled on her with the advent of Dr. Hugh Carlson. Carlson, a much-married man, was currently between wives. Jane Miller had contrived to make his acquaintance at a fund-raising dinner for the Santa Fe Opera, of which he was a devotee. She was attractive, intelligent, and a master of sexpertise. Carlson fell hard and they were soon wed. He already had several grown children, and between them and the alimony payments he forked out to his ex-wives, he had no interest in starting a family, which suited Jane Miller’s purposes just fine.
She immersed herself in charitable work, especially the philanthropic Good Neighbor Initiative. This served several purposes. It allowed her freedom of movement, the ability to come and go at all hours of the day and night, under the pretext of having to attend to various good deeds and related chores.
Two, it was an invaluable intelligence-gathering activity. In the hospital charity wards, the battered women’s shelters, the substance abuse clinics, the halfway houses for probationary convicts, and so on, she received firsthand information about the criminal half worlds of vice and corruption throughout the county.
She learned names and addresses of likely recruits for a new network she was building, a criminal support system to empower her quest for the INL mole and the PALO codes. Just as she had done elsewhere to stage her Annihilax operations, she now constructed a new crime cartel. It was in this manner that she had come across Helen Veitc
h, the homicidal ex-nurse she had ultimately sent on a mission of murder against Jack Bauer. But that came later.
The most important step in creating her new network was contacting Marta and Torreon Blanco. She targeted Marta first. They had a commonality of interest, both in crime and in uninhibited same-sex partners. They formed their first alliance in bed. Jane Miller had the advantage. Marta Blanco was all passion and fire, grand gestures and romance. Jane Miller was ice-cold, an artist at counterfeiting the lineaments of desire and gratification.
To one of her fine-tuned instincts, the Ironwood kills signaled that the lab mole was not alone, that he had partners on the outside, and that his secret-stealing plan was nearing fruition. The death of scientists in the inner cadre eliminated them as possible suspects for the mole.
Her underworld contacts tipped her that the hidden hand behind the violence was Varrin, the gang leader. Who was behind Varrin she did not know but was determined to learn. The Ironwood situation took a deadly turn when Rhodes Morrow put Peter Rhee and Harvey Kling to work on his secret investigation. Part of that was her fault.
She’d been using a burst transmitter to send coded messages to some of her old contacts in Europe, feeling out the ground to see who was still around and could afford to broker a deal for the PALO codes. She didn’t have them yet but it was only a matter of time, especially once she tracked Varrin’s overlord, identifying him as Max Scourby.
That made sense.
Scourby had been Sayeed’s lawyer and was in a position to know plenty. Either he had contacted the Ironwood mole or the mole had come to him. As a top criminal attorney, Scourby had the connections to create and control a goon squad to protect the mole, which he had done by working through Varrin.
But the burst transmissions had put Morrow on the track of Jane Miller. Not yet, not directly; but the fact that he knew the transmissions had come from her Shady Grove neighborhood and that he’d set up a detector in the Parkhurst house meant that he was getting dangerously close.