He felt angry at himself for even thinking it. He had grown to like Nora. She reminded him of… her. And Nora was a force of nature in her own right. Bright, gorgeous, accomplished, fun, and nothing short of amazing with a man’s lever in her skilled care. Two at a time, even.
Come to think of it, Nora was very much like… Maria.
There. He’d finally allowed himself to speak her name, if not aloud, at least in the confines of his own head.
Maria had been a Venezuelan VSS agent. A spy. Maria had killed people. Maria wasn’t a good person, Kittredge told himself. Except that she was an amazing person, one whom Kittredge couldn’t get out of his head.
Jesus, am I busy repeating history? He shook his head, slowly at first, and then with more vigor, hoping to clear the cobwebs. It just made him nauseous. He thought a hot shower might help.
The waiter came by and asked how he’d like to take care of the tab. “Charge it to room 624.” He rose, left a few coins on his placemat, and walked toward the restaurant exit.
He walked right past the stranger in the blue raincoat, the same guy who, Kittredge could have sworn, had peeked over his shoulder in the computer alcove earlier in the morning.
Kittredge tried not to show his alarm, but he also knew how badly he was in need of developing a believable poker face. There was no way the stranger didn’t notice Kittredge’s alarmed reaction. Was that amusement in the man’s eyes? Kittredge suspected so, and it pissed him off, but then the stranger was smiling, and so was Kittredge, and two steps later Kittredge was past the man’s table.
The whole thing left him with a strange feeling.
He had another feeling, caused by a full bladder, so he made his way to the men’s room. He took care not to stumble, as his state of inebriation had grown a little bit beyond buzzed and now teetered on officially drunk. Helluva condition at seven a.m., but what the hell else was he going to do? Suffer through the shakes? Not today.
He relieved himself, washed up, left the restroom for the elevator lobby, punched the elevator call button, climbed into the car, and pushed the button for the sixth floor. The elevator’s upward acceleration was slightly vertigo-inducing in his condition, and he reflected that maybe a nap wouldn’t kill anybody.
The door dinged, and Kittredge turned down the hallway toward his room.
He lifted his eyes from the floor.
The stranger from breakfast stood in the middle of the hallway, looking at him.
Kittredge felt his ass clench with fear. There was something in the man’s eyes that was unmistakable, something hard and cold and animal-like that Kittredge had seen before.
He ran.
13
Gunther Fleischer, butcher of man and beast, cut an incongruous figure hunched over a computer screen. Research was the price he paid to earn the right to unleash his inner beast.
His friend, the one with the barracuda problem, hadn’t been overly specific about the nature of the troubles he had been having. But that was precisely as Fleischer liked it. In fact, it was how he demanded things had to be. He liked to take an unbiased approach to every client’s situation, particularly now that business had slowed and he had time to savor the hunt just as much as he savored its payoff.
More often than not, clients were right about being pursued, but wrong about who was pursuing them. A fresh set of eyes was usually helpful, and more often than not, clients were surprised by who was behind their troubles. Because the kind of people who hired Gunther Fleischer were also the kind of people who made lots of enemies.
Today, Gunther busied himself learning the basics of an industry to which he had very little previous exposure. Except as a customer, of course. Everyone was a customer of this particular industry at some point or other.
His friend was in pharmaceuticals, trying to develop a new drug. The man had an angle that nobody else had, some sort of secret sauce, something that nobody else was even attempting, much less bringing to market. That much Fleischer had surmised, based on oblique statements that his friend had uttered before Fleischer could cut him off in order to preserve his objectivity.
It was more information than Fleischer wanted, but honestly, the information didn’t help much. It didn’t tell Gunther who the enemies might be. It really only established one possible motive for one possible set of assholes behind his friend’s travails.
But it was probably a whale of a motive. Drugs were expensive, if the Wikipedia articles Fleischer had devoured were even remotely accurate. A billion euro to develop a new one.
A goddamned billion. That was a lot of bread, man. Fleischer wondered how it could possibly be true, until he read more about the process. Fleischer was far smarter than average, and he was also terrifically good at reading between the lines. He soon felt that he had a reasonable handle on the way the drug industry worked.
Trial and error produced weak preliminary results, which spawned further adjustments to the chemical formulation, most of which failed, but on rare occasions, a compound or collection of compounds showed sufficient promise to move forward to lab testing, then animal testing, and then, finally, after the right officials were bribed and the right studies commissioned to produce the right results, pharma companies paid through the nose to conduct human trials.
But that was less than half the battle, because more than half the time, human trials were inconclusive, or worse, showed negative results. On occasion, drugs were scrapped completely at this stage, and pharma companies wrote off hundreds of millions in losses.
On other occasions, however, the pharma guys got smarter about the questions they asked the studies to answer, and they got smarter about who they paid to perform the studies, and with patience, persistence, and just the right amount of pressure applied to regulators and scientists alike, sometimes they even managed to release a drug for public consumption.
And it didn’t end there. An army of attractive young pharmaceutical reps then gave thousands of blow jobs to thousands of doctors, who suddenly felt far more confident in the new drug’s efficacy. And millions of Euros worth of carefully crafted advertising taught consumers how to ask for the shiny new drug by name. Five years later, if the company was luckier than average, they’d turn a profit on their absurdly large investment.
So the math was easy. If Fleischer’s friend had found a way to circumvent several hundred million euros worth of muddling around, searching for something that worked on some heretofore intractable disease, people would be lining up to steal it from him. That’s what I would do, Fleischer thought, if I were stupid enough to run a pharmaceutical company these days.
But Fleischer couldn’t have been the first to figure this out, he reasoned, and there were undoubtedly important state secrets protected less carefully than pharmaceutical formulations that could turn into the next world-changing drug. His friend would certainly have taken mammoth measures to keep word from getting around.
But what if word had gotten around? How could that have happened? There was always the possibility for an honest mistake somewhere, but with this much money at stake, those odds were low.
If there ever was the perfect scenario for an inside job, it was this one, Fleischer surmised.
Which meant that he had a phone call to make. He looked at his watch. Nearly ten on a Sunday morning. But he suspected his friend would be at work, in spite of everything. His friend was that kind of guy.
14
Kittredge couldn’t put his finger on exactly why the guy in front of his room gave him the panicked feeling he was experiencing. Perhaps it was his brief but brutal exposure to both US and Venezuelan clandestine operatives, both a lifetime ago and yet still very fresh in his consciousness. It was the kind of thing one wasn’t likely to forget, and it wasn’t the kind of thing one was ever anxious to repeat. Those were very bad people.
So Kittredge dashed down the hotel hallway in the direction opposite his room. He heard footfalls behind him, which told him that his instincts had been correct: the guy w
ho’d sat down beside him in the computer alcove adjacent to the hotel desk had taken more interest than usual in Kittredge’s activities, and their nearly simultaneous arrival at the breakfast buffet wasn’t mere coincidence, either.
Fear sobered his mind, but alcohol still impaired his athleticism, and Kittredge wasn’t a track star to begin with. He feared the man was gaining on him. He passed the bank of elevators, and ducked through a door beneath the exit sign just beyond. He found himself in a stairwell. The door slammed shut behind him, betraying his passage, though he was certain his pursuer was close enough to see exactly where he’d gone.
Kittredge bounded down the stairs as quickly as he dared. Speed was important, but so was avoiding a face-plant onto the concrete landing.
He was a floor and a half down when he heard the door slam above him. His pursuer was still giving chase. Over the sound of his own breathing, and of his own feet pounding into the cement stairs, Kittredge heard his pursuer’s footfalls on the floor above him. Christ, this guy’s moving fast. Kittredge knew he’d be caught. There was no way he would outrun the guy.
When he reached the fourth floor landing, Kittredge charged toward the door leading out of the stairwell and into the hallway.
Locked.
Sonuvabitch. The man’s steps were getting closer. His pursuer was still closing the distance. Panic rose in Kittredge’s chest, clouding his vision and threatening to evacuate his bowels. He turned away from the door to run again, a futile gesture but better than standing at a locked door like a frightened child, but something caught his eye. A keycard reader, positioned on the door lock.
Kittredge reached into his pocket and fished out his wallet, just as his pursuer’s two feet pounded hard on the landing one half-floor above. Kittredge had mere seconds.
He tried to fish his room key from the credit card slot in his wallet. His hands shook. Fear robbed him of the necessary dexterity. The pursuer started down the last half-flight of stairs, and Kittredge forced himself not to look, forced himself to stay focused on getting the damn door opened.
He freed the keycard from the slot in his wallet and jammed it in the slot in the lock, magnetic stripe facing down. He ripped it out again. Green light, please, goddammit, just unlock the damned door.
Red light.
Kittredge shook with fear. He howled something intelligible at his pursuer, now a few feet from him. He jammed the keycard into the slot in a last desperate attempt to open the door. He pulled it out as deliberately as he could force himself to move, acutely aware of how close his pursuer had gotten.
Green light.
Kittredge threw the door open, stepped through, turned, grabbed the door handle, and pulled it toward shut with all of his strength.
The door hinge was pneumatic. It resisted his efforts. He pulled harder, his eyes darting to the man lunging toward the opening, oh shit he’s going to make it, he’s going to catch me. A panicked howl came from his mouth and he braced his left foot against the doorjamb for more leverage.
The man’s hand shot forward to stop the door’s travel, his fingers wrapping around the edge of the steel fire door, his face contorted in a snarl.
Kittredge pulled for all he was worth. He had all the leverage. The door shut, and he watched the pursuer’s fingers retreat just in time to avoid being slammed against the jamb.
Kittredge looked through the small glass window in the door. “Wait! I just want to talk to you!” the man yelled through the glass.
Kittredge turned his back to the door and dashed down the fourth floor hallway, hotel rooms moving past his vision in a blur. What kind of asshole chases someone down two flights of stairs for a conversation? It was clear there was more than a friendly chat on the man’s mind.
He stopped at the bank of elevators and mashed the up button. He waited. His heart thudded in his chest, and he struggled to catch his breath.
Why the hell am I waiting for the elevator? He took off running again, opposite the direction of his arrival on the fourth floor. He rounded the corner in the L-shaped hotel building, and noticed another stairwell at the far end of the hallway. It became his new destination.
He heard a door slam behind him and around the corner. It echoed down the hall. Had the pursuer gotten in? Kittredge ran faster, bounded through the stairwell door, paused to close it quietly, and then turned toward the stairs.
Which way? The obvious move would be to run down toward the lobby to escape the hotel. Which meant that his pursuer would likely go downstairs, once the man figured out Kittredge was no longer on the fourth floor.
Kittredge ran up the stairs. The fifth floor passed. Then the sixth. His floor.
It was at the sixth floor where alcohol, adrenaline, and fear combined to produce a behavioral non sequitur. It suddenly became important to Kittredge to retrieve his belongings from his hotel room on the sixth floor, pursuer be damned. Would the man suspect Kittredge had done this? Doubtful. It was an unexpected move.
And stupid, as it turned out. It took just a few seconds to dash to his room, unlock the door, grab his backpack and half empty bottle of vodka, and run out of his room into the hallway.
Into the waiting arms of the man in the blue raincoat.
“Relax,” the man said to Kittredge. “You’re going to be fine.” It was a strange thing to say to someone after you’d just chased them through a hotel, and alarm bells continued to ring in Kittredge’s head. Kittredge had a strong sense that the precise opposite was true. He wasn’t going to be fine at all, not if he let this guy have his way.
The man had one hand on each of Kittredge’s shoulders, and he stooped down to look Kittredge in the eyes. The hotel room door slammed closed, locking them both out in the hallway.
Kittredge felt pressure on his shoulders, pushing him back toward his hotel room. The man smiled. “Just take it easy.” But there was something in the man’s eyes, some tightly controlled malevolence, that freaked Kittredge out.
He panicked. He twisted to shake his shoulders loose from his pursuer’s grip. He swung the half-full vodka bottle toward the stranger’s head.
But he was no pro. He missed wildly. Worse, he telegraphed his move. The pursuer ducked slightly, waited for Kittredge’s vodka-bottle-bearing hand to pass harmlessly overhead, and then performed a judo move that had Kittredge tasting carpet before he could let loose the curse word on his lips.
In one fluid motion, the stranger stomped on Kittredge’s back, ripped the room key from Kittredge’s hand, opened the door, repositioned, and dragged Kittredge toward the opening.
Kittredge yelled at the top of his lungs and kicked his legs free. In a flash, the stranger kicked him in the ribs with the toe of a steel-toed boot. The air left Kittredge’s lungs in a rush, replaced by a searing, burning pain. Kittredge curled his body around the pain in his ribs, surprised by its all-encompassing intensity.
He felt his body sliding across the carpet again, and saw the door frame approach in the corners of his vision. If he gets me in that room, it’s over, Kittredge thought. He’d spent time in the “care” of torturers and killers before, and had a large area of scar tissue on his back to prove it.
“Help!” He screamed the word as loudly as he could muster, then braced for impact. The stranger’s fist descended hammer-style toward his face. Kittredge twisted his head at the last instant, turning the killing strike into a glancing blow that still hurt like hell.
Kittredge thrashed, screamed, kicked, and flailed his arms. He had no plan. He had no experience. He had no hope, really, but he wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
Suddenly, the stranger stopped pulling his body into the room, stopped beating on him. The man seemed to focus elsewhere, at something across the hallway and down a few doors.
Kittredge hazarded a glance in the direction the attacker was looking. He saw a cleaning lady. She had a cell phone pressed to her ear. He heard the word “Polizei” come from her mouth.
Kittredge’s attacker moved with lightning sp
eed. He tore down the hallway toward the cleaning lady. He was on her almost instantly, his arm swinging in a vicious arc, landing with a wet, stomach-turning crunch. The lady’s legs buckled.
Kittredge didn’t wait. He grabbed his keycard from the spot on the floor where his attacker had dropped it, leapt to his feet, and sprinted down the hallway in the opposite direction. He rounded the corner in the L-shaped building, running headlong toward the stairwell at the far side of the long hallway. He didn’t bother looking backwards as he plowed through the door and bounded up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
His heart pounded, and sweat poured from his forehead. He felt clammy and faint, but he kept going, running past the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors, his gait slowing as the exertion caught up with him. He wasn’t in good shape, and his habitual binge drinking did little for his stamina. He was almost relieved when the stairway ended at the tenth floor.
Signs advertised a fitness center. Irony. Kittredge swiped his key for access to the tenth floor hallway, then loped toward the fitness center, a medium-paced jog now the fastest pace he could manage. He swiped his keycard again, opened the fitness center door, bounded inside, and shut the door behind him with a whoosh.
Exhausted, he sank to the floor, noticing for the first time the collection of overweight men and old ladies strolling on a row of treadmills. They stared open-mouthed.
Kittredge didn’t care. He was alive.
For the moment.
15
Viktor Kohlhaas’ stomach churned with a mixture of fear and rage. He looked at the caller ID on his personal cell phone, the cell phone that wasn’t listed in any directory, the one that Franklin Barnes had assured him was as private and secure as a cell phone possibly could be. He recognized the first six digits of the telephone number in his caller ID. The man hadn’t left a message. But Kohlhaas heard him loud and clear.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 92