The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  But Jackie had a weak spot. Children. She hated watching them suffer, and always had. There had been times after losing a little boy or girl that she had locked herself in the handicapped stall in the bathroom and cried her eyes out. Not often, but often enough, and while she had plenty of scar tissue from plenty of awful situations over the years, the children could still tug on her heart strings.

  It was looking to be another one of those nights. The little boy had come in with uncontrollable vomiting and a temperature that could melt metal. He was in obvious pain, and showed all the signs of septic shock: tachypnea, or elevated respiration rate; white blood cell count through the roof; scorching fever; little heart trying to beat its way out of his chest.

  It was usually the gram-positives, Jackie knew, that caused this kind of thing, so she was surprised and a little worried when the test came back. The bug was gram negative. Gram-negatives could be a real bitch to treat. And this little guy’s infection was system-wide.

  She felt that sinking feeling she always got when it didn’t look good for a patient, and she felt her throat tighten when she looked at the little boy’s face. It was beautiful, angelic even, and his little features were delicate but all boy, and she had to look away and take a deep breath to keep that part of her heart from opening up. Because she knew the little guy didn’t have much fight left in him.

  “How long has he had these symptoms?” the doctor asked, and Jackie parroted what the parents had told her an hour ago, when they brought the little boy in. He was fine when they dropped him off in the morning at Smiley Tots, the one in Alexandria, and he seemed fine when they picked him up, too. But by the time they’d made it through traffic to their home just off of Glebe road, little Gabe looked pale and listless and complained that his middle hurt.

  He threw up in the driveway, and hadn’t managed to keep anything down since then, including water.

  Little Gabe had a horrific, barking cough on top of it. Jackie could have sworn she saw blood in his mouth after a particularly rough fit of coughing. “That’s when I called the CDC guys,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  The doctor nodded. “Good call. Hear anything yet?”

  Jackie shook her head. “Nothing. But we haven’t gotten all the blood work back yet, so they don’t have all the information. I suspect we’ll hear something pretty quickly after the tests come back.”

  The doctor shook his head. “This one came on quick and strong. The kid’s symptom list reads like the syllabus at med school. I don’t have a good feeling.”

  Jackie nodded sadly. “Neither do I.”

  An alarm sounded. Code Blue, the signal to prepare the crash team. There was an inbound ambulance patient who had gone into cardiac arrest. Jackie strained to hear the radio as she ran to the emergency room admissions desk. Five-year-old female, septic shock, vomiting, blood residue after violent coughing fits. The girl woke her parents up crying and vomiting, then collapsed on the floor in the bathroom of their home. She crashed in the ambulance on the way.

  My God, Jackie thought. What the hell is going on?

  51

  “Who are you?” Kittredge demanded. Only, it didn’t sound like a demand. It sounded more like a plea, much more shrill and scared and… sissy than he had intended. Goddammit. Way to take control of the situation.

  Which was impossible, of course. The stranger had duct-taped him to a kitchen chair, his hands bound tightly enough that he felt his pulse in his wrists. His feet were fastened to the chair legs, and his over-forty knees had started to ache. He badly needed to stretch his legs out, which was a strange complaint to have while a tough-looking guy waved a gun in his face, but there it was.

  The man hadn’t spoken a word since his initial greeting, the one that had made Kittredge’s veins freeze with fear. He had bound Kittredge silently at the kitchen table, then retrieved a desk lamp from the other room to shine obnoxiously into Kittredge’s eyes. It felt like a cheesy old cop movie, but Kittredge had to admit the technique was effective. He couldn’t see anything, and he was scared to death.

  But there was hope. The guy wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of taping Kittredge to a chair at gunpoint if he just wanted to smoke him. So the guy needed something. Duct tape and obnoxious desk lamp in the eyes and handgun notwithstanding, Kittredge wasn’t entirely without leverage.

  Now if he could just stop his voice from sounding like a little girl’s when he spoke. He cleared his voice and asked again: “Who are you?” Better, he thought. Much more masculine.

  “A man was killed here,” the intruder said. Kittredge noted the clipped, hard edges around the man’s English words. A native German speaker. Interesting. The Agency was all about hiring local talent, but so far, this guy didn’t seem to fit the profile. For one thing, Kittredge was still alive. He wouldn’t expect that from anyone on the CIA payroll, based on his experience over the past several days.

  Kittredge didn’t reply. Make him come to you, he thought.

  Then he thought about how foolish it was to bait a man with a gun, and his fear returned in force. He squinted his eyes to see the man’s facial expression, but the intruder was behind the desk lamp, and his features were obscured. Kittredge fought to keep from shaking.

  “Why?” the man asked. “Why was he killed?”

  Kittredge snorted. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t have a damned clue.”

  “Where have you been?”

  Kittredge did his best to look in the stranger’s eyes. “Someone’s trying to kill me.”

  “Why?”

  Kittredge could think of any of a number of reasons, but they all involved three letters: C and I and A. “I really don’t know,” he finally said, wondering if he had waited too long to answer, and wondering if he had been too evasive.

  “Then why did you come back here?” the stranger wanted to know.

  “This is my home.”

  “It is a crime scene.”

  “Not now. No tape on the door. Didn’t you notice when you broke in?”

  The intruder was silent for a moment. “Why did you sneak into your own apartment, dressed like a burglar?”

  “I told you already,” Kittredge said. “Someone is trying to kill me.”

  “If that were true, Herr Kittredge, your apartment is the last place on earth I would expect you to come. Unless you are an idiot. Or suicidal.”

  The stranger inserted his face into the light, deep inside Kittredge’s personal space. The man’s icy blue eyes were hard and focused, boring into Kittredge’s consciousness, searching for either the truth or the lie. He had a tight, square jaw that made Kittredge think of determination, resolve, and toughness. He was old. Fifties or sixties, but he hadn’t begun wasting away. His neck and arms were still thick and muscular. He seemed powerful, athletic, and in control.

  He seemed like a pro, Kittredge realized. “You’re a little long in the tooth for this kind of thing, aren’t you?” he ventured. He had a smart mouth and, along with his attention-craving dick, it frequently created trouble for him. He wondered if he had stepped over the line.

  But the man smiled at him. “Thank you, Herr Kittredge,” he said. “You have paid me a high compliment. I don’t know anyone older than myself in the business.” His smile turned to a glare. “And I know everyone in the business.”

  The man paced behind Kittredge. It was an old interrogation trick, Kittredge knew, but it still unnerved him. And it annoyed the hell out of him that he was unnerved by it. There was no way he was going to survive the Agency assholes unless he figured out how to shed his amateurism, to control his emotions, to keep his head about him. To stop blundering into shitty situations.

  “The man who was murdered here,” the intruder began again. “Why was he here?”

  “For sex,” Kittredge replied without hesitation.

  “With you?”

  “No. With my refrigerator.”

  “Please understand how very, very serious your situatio
n is, Herr Kittredge.”

  “A few things about you gave that away already, Klaus.”

  The stranger allowed a small, controlled chuckle, beneath which Kittredge heard anger and annoyance. “My name is not Klaus.”

  Kittredge smiled internally. Germans hated it when you called them by the wrong first name. Nobody really liked it, but it seemed to be a compulsion with the Krauts he’d met. He felt like maybe he had taken a little power back.

  “You may call me Gunther,” the intruder said. “Gunther Fleischer.”

  “Very well, Gunther,” Kittredge said, deciding to try to keep the momentum shifting in his direction. “Why the hell are you here?”

  “I was fishing,” Fleischer said. “And I seem to have caught something.”

  “What were you fishing for?”

  Fleischer smiled. “Why did you choose to have sex with that particular young man? The one you subsequently killed?”

  Anger flashed. “I didn’t kill him,” Kittredge said. “Neither of us did.”

  “Neither of whom?” Fleischer asked.

  Sonuvabitch. “None of your damned business.”

  It earned him a fist to the jaw. The blow caused a bright light to flash inside Kittredge’s head and an instant headache. His neck stung from the whipping of his head. Tears involuntarily formed in his eyes.

  “Herr Kittredge.” Fleischer put a hand on either arm of the chair and leaned in close. Kittredge could smell Fleischer’s breath, which was sweet and healthy, and he withered beneath the man’s hard, frank, I-don’t-give-a-shit stare. “It is of no consequence to me,” Fleischer continued, his eyes never wavering from Kittredge’s, “whether you live or die.” He walked behind Kittredge again and leaned in, once again invading Kittredge’s personal space. “I leave that choice to you.”

  A long moment passed, during which Fleischer paced and Kittredge considered his predicament.

  Fleischer wasn’t on the Agency payroll. Of that, Kittredge was relatively certain. He was also convinced that Fleischer hadn’t been lying earlier: the hard old man really was on a fishing expedition. He was searching for something. Maybe the same thing that Kittredge was searching for.

  “I don’t know who killed that man or why,” Kittredge finally said. “Since then, someone has tried twice to kill me.”

  “As I mentioned before, Herr Kittredge, I find that difficult to believe. Home would be the last place you would go if your life were truly in danger.”

  Kittredge shook his head. “I now have a full appreciation of the risk,” he said, his irony sufficiently thick to break through any language barrier.

  “Tell me what was worth the risk to you.”

  Kittredge hesitated. He didn’t know why. Fleischer obviously wasn’t a cop. “A gun,” he finally said.

  Fleischer laughed aloud. “Mein Gott, ist das unglaublich lustig!”

  “I understand German,” Kittredge said, a little peeved at being the object of derisive humor.

  “Good,” Fleischer said, his laugh turning harsh. “Then you know what a scheisskopf I find you to be.”

  Fleischer reentered the light in front of Kittredge’s face. “I sense we are approaching a crossroads, Peter Kittredge,” he said, his mouth a straight, hard line. “Which direction we take is entirely up to you. But you should know that I am, among other things, a butcher. Either I will find you useful, or I will pass you through a meat grinder.” He resumed pacing. “Again, the choice is yours. But there is not much time left for you to convince me of your utility. We will leave here before sunrise, one way or the other.”

  Kittredge had spent enough time around bad men to know one when he saw one. Fleischer had the icy gaze of a killer, and Kittredge had no doubt he was mentally, emotionally, and physically capable of making good on his threat. “What do you want to know?” Kittredge asked.

  “Mathias Kohlhaas,” Fleischer said. “You know him.”

  Kittredge shook his head. “I don’t, actually, but I saw the newspaper article.” He could sense this was not a satisfactory answer. It was the truth, but it would clearly not suffice for Fleischer’s purposes. Kittredge kept talking. “The article caught my attention because it mentioned Copenhagen.”

  Fleischer stopped pacing. “You know Copenhagen?”

  “No,” Kittredge said. “Not at all. But the detective who interrogated me asked if I had ever been to Copenhagen. I didn’t understand the question at the time, and I asked him why it was important, but he wouldn’t give me an answer.”

  “Do you understand now why it is important?” Fleischer asked.

  “I think I’m starting to understand. I think the cop wanted to know if Sergio’s death was related to this Kohlhaas guy’s death.”

  “Were they related?” Fleischer asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kittredge answered honestly. “But I have to say that they seemed remarkably similar. I mean, there were no signs of forced entry. Both guys were killed in a bed, presumably while they slept. There weren’t any real leads in either case, at least according to what the newspapers said.”

  “You believe the newspapers?” Fleischer asked.

  Kittredge shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe, honestly.”

  “Who is Sergio?” Fleischer asked.

  “The man who was murdered in my bed while we were at breakfast.”

  “We?”

  Sonuvabitch, I did it again. Kittredge cursed his lack of mental discipline.

  “Yes, we,” Kittredge said after a pause to compose himself. “A girl.”

  Fleischer was suddenly very interested. He invaded Kittredge’s personal space again. “Tell me her name.”

  “Nora Jane Martin,” Kittredge said, using all three of her names as if she were a serial killer. “Economist at Kleinmann Holdings here in town. I met her and Sergio on the same night. We spent the night together.”

  Fleischer paced again. “And then you opened the door to let a man inside your apartment. A large man.”

  Kittredge shook his head. “No, not at all. We had sex. We slept. We woke up and had sex again in the morning. Nora and I went to breakfast. Sergio stayed in bed. When we came back, he had— ”

  “Had his throat slit,” Fleischer interjected.

  Kittredge shook his head again. “No. His skull was bashed in. They used my umbrella stand.” He motioned with his head toward the entryway, where a pile of umbrellas sat lined up on the floor, parallel with the wall. “Somehow they didn’t get any fingerprints on it, and they didn’t smudge my fingerprints, either. I think the cops still think I did it.”

  Fleischer spoke again, this time in a quiet voice with an ominous undertone. “Answer me carefully, Herr Kittredge. And truthfully. Your life depends on your answer.”

  Kittredge watched Fleischer’s eyes. He felt malevolence. No, worse. He felt… indifference. Fleischer truly didn’t care whether he killed Kittredge or not. Kittredge trembled in spite of himself.

  “Who killed the man in your bed?”

  Kittredge forced himself to look in Fleischer’s eyes. “Believe me, man, I wish I knew. My week would have gone much differently.”

  Fleischer studied him a long time. Kittredge held his gaze. “Kill me if you want,” Kittredge said. “But you know as much as I know.”

  “Did you leave the door unlocked?” Fleischer asked. “When you went to breakfast. With the girl.”

  Kittredge shook his head. “No. The police asked me the same thing about a dozen times. I’m sure it was locked.”

  “But no one broke in.”

  “Right,” Kittredge said. “Nora forgot her purse, but she said she didn’t see anyone, and she’s sure she locked the door behind her.”

  That revelation piqued Fleischer’s interest again. “Where is Nora now?”

  Kittredge shook his head. “I don’t know. Things… are a little iffy between us right now.”

  “Explain.”

  Kittredge demurred.

  Fleischer informed him that he had the rest of hi
s life to reconsider.

  Kittredge capitulated. He told Fleischer the story, the whole thing. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He kept talking, unburdening himself, telling Fleischer about Nora’s interrogation, about the way Kittredge had tracked her down and showed up at her apartment, about their sleeping together, about the man whose body now rotted in the basement trash compactor, and about the lies Kittredge had told Nora to shield her from the truth, or, really, to shield him from her knowing the truth. He talked about his search for a Copenhagen-born Sergio who was now dead, trying to piece things together from clues the police detective had dropped during the interrogation.

  Kittredge also told Fleischer about what he had subsequently learned from Jürgen Strauss: that the man Kittredge had stabbed and dismembered was a US Consulate employee. Which, Fleischer didn’t have to be told, was shorthand for CIA agent.

  He almost blurted out the Venezuela connection and his eternal fealty to the CIA, but something stopped him. Fear. He was afraid of what Fleischer might do if he knew.

  The sun had nearly risen by the time Kittredge finished. Fleischer sat on the edge of the kitchen table. He eyed Kittredge a long moment, inhaled deeply, and exhaled. The iciness in his eyes was gone, replaced by a serenity that Kittredge found unusual and slightly unsettling.

  “Herr Kittredge, this is very interesting.”

  Fleischer moved behind Kittredge’s chair again, something that hadn’t ceased to be annoying and disconcerting. He heard a metallic click. A knife opening. He panicked, thrashing about, unable even to move the chair, so tightly was he bound.

  Fleischer laughed in his ear. “Relax, Herr Kittredge.”

  Kittredge felt a tug at his wrists, then a ripping sound as the knife tore through the duct tape binding his hands together behind his back. His hands were free. He brought them in front of his body and rubbed his wrists to restore circulation.

  “I find our interests momentarily aligned,” Fleischer declared. “As long as this remains the case, we will work together.” It wasn’t an offer, or a request.