Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  The innermost secrets of the powerful.

  The supposedly untouchable.

  But Barbara Scott prodded them, dragged them, wrenched them into the light from the deepest shadows.

  Janice wondered what she had found out about Belias. Why else would he want her dead?

  At the top of the stairs, the hallway ran left and right.

  She went to the right. An open door that showed another guest room. A closed door down the hall from it.

  Janice moved to the door. Listened. She could barely hear the soft, infrequent click of a keyboard.

  Would the desk face the window? Yes. What had Barbara Scott confessed on her writer’s blog: The book is late because I keep looking at the mountains. So the desk would face the window. The littlest things people confessed online could be helpful to a knowing eye like Janice’s.

  Janice slowly eased open the door.

  The study was big and comfortable. More bookshelves jammed casually with hardcovers and paperbacks shoved in pell-mell, stacks of printed manuscripts, awards on the top shelves. Colored sticky notes stuck out from the pages of books like captured rainbows. A huge window lay directly in front of her, and in front of the window and its stunning view sat a broad oak desk, with an open laptop attached to a huge screen, and a woman—Barbara Scott, her long trademark black hair down past her shoulders. She wore a denim shirt and her hands, for a moment, weren’t typing.

  Janice raised the gun and centered it on the back of the woman’s head.

  She told herself, Maybe this is why Belias wants her dead. Maybe she’s writing about him. About one of us. About all of us. Maybe she knows about the network. Just put the gun to her head and force her to drink the poison, and you’re done.

  The hesitation changed everything for Janice Keene, because then Barbara Scott said, “Well, I do understand your point, Nina. I do. But I’m trying to do what’s right for the structure of the book.”

  Janice froze. No one else in the room. Barbara Scott wasn’t holding a phone.

  Then Barbara’s head tilted slightly, she typed a few keystrokes. “Well, yes, I could move the section on the financial investors up a few chapters…yes…but maybe we could break it into two shorter chapters…I don’t want to give away too much too early…”

  Janice couldn’t shoot her while she was on the phone. She wondered if Barbara Scott could see her, standing absolutely still, in the window’s reflection, a ghost against the mountain looming in the distance.

  “Yes…ha, that’s why you’re such a good editor. Uh-huh…” And Barbara got up, brushing her hair back, and turning her head slightly as she studied a chapter printout on the corner of the desk, scribbled a note in red pen. Janice could see the silver of an earpiece in her ear, the soft gleam of its lit blue light.

  And Barbara Scott sensed her presence and turned. She looked at Janice, her eyes going wide, her mouth a cold, wide O of surprise.

  Janice fired. The suppressor hissed. The bullet caught Barbara Scott in the center of her forehead, and she didn’t scream, but she collapsed onto the soft throw rug in front of her desk. She lay still.

  Janice knelt by the body and she pushed the lit blue light on the earpiece with her gloved hand. The light faded, the call ended. Like Barbara Scott’s life. She checked the wrist, the throat, felt the silence.

  She looked at the laptop screen. A document front and center, red boxes of comments and annotations in the right margin. Barbara Scott’s latest book. It appeared to be about the financiers of Wall Street. She untethered the laptop from the cords of printers and monitor and tucked it under her arm. She dug out the prepaid pink phone Belias had given her and dialed.

  He answered immediately. But he sounded as if she’d woken him. It was strange to think of him…sleeping. Or eating. Or performing human activities.

  “It’s me,” Janice said. “She’s done.”

  “Very good.” He sounded exhausted. Not that pleased. Maybe he was having an off day.

  “I had to shoot her when she was on the phone with her editor; she spotted me. But she didn’t scream.”

  Barbara Scott’s cell phone began to ring; it played a sample of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Nausea gripped Janice; she and the woman she just killed shared a favorite band. The phone’s screen announced NINA ROSENBERG and a number with a New York area code.

  “Her editor’s calling back.”

  “Don’t answer. Don’t worry.”

  “Do you want me to take her laptop?”

  “Why would I want that?” He gave off a crazy little snicker that made her blood chill. He was either insane or brilliant, and she could never decide which. Could you be both?

  “Because…because I thought you must want her dead because of the book she’s writing.”

  “Oh. No. Thank you. Thoughtful of you.”

  So why did you make me kill one of my favorite authors, Belias? she wondered. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Well, since you had to kill her with a bullet, burn the house down, Janice.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think my instructions were fairly plain.”

  “All right.”

  Barbara Scott’s cell phone quit ringing. Pausing to leave a voice mail, Janice guessed.

  “Call me when that’s done.”

  “All right,” she said, and she clicked off the pink phone.

  She picked up the dead woman’s cell phone and listened to Nina Rosenberg’s voice mail: “Hey, Barbara, I think we got disconnected. Give me a call back. I’m in my office.” She did not sound worried or anxious. Janice left that phone on the floor next to Barbara Scott’s body. No more arguments over the structure of the book. Nina could do what she liked.

  In the garage she found two gallon jugs of gasoline. When she went back inside the house, the main house phone was ringing, the answering machine kicking in, and as she splashed gasoline on the books and the wooden floors, she heard a voice say, “Hey, Barbara, it’s Nina. Is everything okay? We got disconnected, but I guess you know that, and I thought I’d try you back in case it was your cell phone that died.” No, it wasn’t the cell phone that died, Janice thought. “Hope I didn’t make you mad with the suggestions. Call me.”

  Janice spread the gasoline throughout the downstairs and heavily in Barbara Scott’s study. She threw a match she found in the bathroom down in the puddle in the study, and the gas-soaked rug burst upward in a fiery fist. She ran downstairs and did the same in the den. The whomp of fire was so intense she felt the heat like a slap. She ran on to the kitchen and turned on the gas stove. Then she crawled through the closest open window. It was a wide, broad porch and she started to run, and she was holding the horse’s reins when the blast heaved the roof into the air, collapsing back onto the burning innards.

  This was an isolated area, but soon enough the neighbors would see the curl of smoke in the sky.

  Janice staggered, ran. The horse whinnied, wide-eyed, the ancient fear of fire holding him in a grip. She opened the gate, and the horse cantered out, nervous.

  Janice ran. The weakness from the cancer gripped her muscles by the time she reached the car. She leaned against the door, suddenly fighting for breath, fighting for energy. She couldn’t dawdle. Diana’s face swam up through her exhaustion and she got into the car and she tore onto the road. She drove past Barbara Scott’s refuge. Flames exploded from every window, from the broken roof, from the shattered doorway.

  She drove, cranking the oldies radio station high and loud, a Doors song, “The End,” blaring in her ears. She got back on the highway to Portland. Her hands shook. She wished she could call her daughter but then she didn’t; she didn’t want to hear Diana’s sweet voice when her head was crammed with murder and arson.

  Belias didn’t want Barbara Scott’s book. He didn’t want her notes. It made sense; this book was already written, already read and commented upon and in Nina Rosenberg’s editorial hands, so there was a copy in N
ew York and on her backup servers, and so…the book didn’t matter.

  Maybe.

  She pulled Barbara Scott’s laptop out of her backpack. She’d disobeyed orders by bringing it; surely it would be missed in the wreckage of the fire; a writer without a laptop was like a painter without a brush.

  But she had it now, and maybe it held the answer to why Belias wanted her to kill three people in three different cities.

  Why do you need to know? she asked herself. You don’t need insurance.

  Maybe Diana will. He’s being forced to help Diana once I’m gone; he didn’t pick her the way he normally chooses those he helps and who help him. He’s…inheriting her. It wasn’t the same. Diana might need every advantage.

  Janice aimed the car west and drove to a Portland airport hotel, where she had checked in on Wednesday. The long drive calmed her. She parked and she wondered if her clothes smelled of smoke. She kept sniffing herself and started to imagine she reeked of fuel. She worried about the horse, running free.

  She went into her room and undressed. In the shower the reaction hit her, and she sank to the porcelain, the hot water spattering on her, the tile hard against her back. She didn’t cry but she felt sick, remembering the surprised glance of Barbara Scott, the blank realization that her life, her dreams, her hopes, her fears were all drawing to an immediate and nonnegotiable close.

  If not you to do it, someone else. Barbara Scott was dead the moment Belias decided she was dead. His decision was what fired the bullet, not her finger on the trigger. Diana will never know a real trouble in life. You did it for her. It had to be done.

  She told herself this four or five times, and she felt the strength return to her limbs. She stood and rinsed out the hotel’s gloppy shampoo and dried off. She dressed, hurried downstairs, and put her smoky clothes in the washer. Then she came back upstairs and called him on the pink phone.

  “I’m back in Portland.”

  “Well done. You need to get on a flight to Las Vegas.”

  “But…” She could hardly say, I just put in my post-kill laundry, I have to finish it.

  “The second target is in Las Vegas, Janice. You just took the first step for Diana’s safety.” He coughed. “Get on the first flight you can. It’s not like either of us has a lot of time. Destroy the pink phone; I’ll call you later on the blue one.”

  Janice was silent for a moment. “She seemed very surprised. Like she didn’t see danger coming at her.”

  “I’m sure she was,” Belias said.

  The laptop lay on her bed. If she confessed to taking it, now was the time. He would tell her what he wanted her to do with it. She wiped her lip with the back of her hand.

  “This one was easy,” he said. “The next one won’t be. Bring your A game.”

  They’re never easy, Janice thought. Never.

  16

  Friday, November 5, morning

  THE PHONE JARRED ME AWAKE. Not my cell phone, the bar’s phone, which had a line feeding up to the apartment. I clutched at it. I thought I could smell food cooking. My body ached and a headache pounded. You always feel a fight more the next morning; the bruises blush in the dawn. “Yes?”

  “Hello, is this Sam Capra?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “This is Louisa Alcazar with the Chronicle. I’d like to interview you about last night’s death…”

  “No comment.”

  “Did you have a connection to the victim?” she asked and I hung up. I wondered if I should have just said no. The phone rang again seven seconds later. I answered. It was a television station. I repeated the no comment and hung up. I pulled myself with reluctance from the warm sheets and looked out the narrow window. Two news crews were filming on the street. A self-defense death in a nicer bar in Haight-Ashbury was news. A new day after a dreadful night. Sleep had given me a momentary peace. Then I thought of the Rostov brothers, dead on two different floors, a man in black who seemed determined to make an unholy deal with me, a young woman running for her life with me as her impromptu protector.

  Life, messed up in one second.

  I called Leonie on her cell.

  “Sam,” she said, answering after one ring.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Daniel? I didn’t call last night because I didn’t want to wake him or you…”

  “I hardly slept.”

  “You’ll be safe there, and this will be over soon.”

  “What happened?”

  I gave her the edited version.

  “You said you’d just run the bars for them,” she said after a moment.

  “I don’t have a choice. I’ve made an enemy and the guy won’t let it go.”

  “Or you don’t want him to let it go, Sam. You’re back in your element.”

  “Is that really what you think of me?” I said.

  “Yes. Right now. Because I’m hiding in a hotel in Los Angeles with a cranky, tired baby.” I could have handled Leonie’s words better if she yelled them. But she was quiet, stony, and that was more effective.

  “Mila will watch over you.”

  “You mean Jimmy. He said it was better we stay close to him. He’s here in town. He is down the hall from us.”

  Jimmy, Mila’s English boss in the Round Table, a man I’d never met. “All right. It’s only a precaution. This guy may not come after me.”

  “You don’t believe that. I can tell it in your voice.”

  “If he does, I’ll deal with him and you and Daniel can go home.”

  Her unusual silence made me worry. I knew she was upset. I knew she wanted to go home.

  “Kiss Daniel for me,” I said to break the silence.

  “I will.”

  “Will you put the phone up to his ear and let me talk to him?”

  “He’s asleep, Sam.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to you later, then.”

  “Good luck,” Leonie said and hung up.

  I would have to talk to my, um, boss. Handler. Better angel. Queen of pain. Call her what you will.

  I dialed her number, and when she answered, I was at first unsure it was Mila, her voice a sleepy, languorous growl.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Sam. The press wants to talk to me.”

  I heard a rustling of sheets as she sat up. She muttered something in Romanian. I’m fairly sure it was a string of curses.

  I was not supposed to attract attention. I was not supposed to be noticed by the authorities. “Details. All of them. Leave nothing out.”

  I told her the story. She said nothing for thirty long seconds.

  “Are you still there?” I asked.

  “If this is simply friends of Felix who have gotten in trouble,” Mila said, “then it’s not about the Round Table, and we pull you out.”

  “Felix said you would say that.”

  “Felix is a smart man although I am questioning his taste in friends.”

  “She asked me for help,” I said. “Then she helped me.”

  “Then you are even. How sad that you lack basic math skills.” Her voice hardened. “You have other concerns.”

  I’d already decided on my angle with Mila. “I can’t sit here or go home and wait for retaliation. The man in black sees me as a threat. I’m going to find out what this is about—for my sake, for your sake.”

  Mila’s accent thickened in anger. “No, you are not.”

  I lowered my voice. “You wanted me to find out who poisoned Dalton.”

  “Too much heat now.”

  “Fine. But I didn’t save Diana so they could just kill her today or tomorrow. Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys?”

  “I am standing with the ovation. Tomorrow is Official Sam Day. How much news are you on?” Rarely, when she got flustered, Mila’s usually impeccable English got tangled.

  “Reporters are calling me. News vans are filming outside. I’m not sure I can vanish.”

  “One moment, Sam.”

  She put he
r hand over the phone, but before she did, I could hear the barest tinge of a man’s voice. Soft, quiet. I heard the words, “Let him sort it out if he feels he must. He’s a big boy, he can stay out of trouble surely.” A man’s voice, a husky baritone, with a refined British accent.

  It must be Jimmy…

  Well, it was none of my business. But I felt an odd tug in my chest. And then I ignored it. I waited. Whatever conversation she was having with Jimmy stretched into three long minutes before she came back onto the phone.

  “Sam? Very well. Identify who this man in black is so we can evaluate him as a threat. Daniel and that useless nanny woman are staying here in Los Angeles. No one will find them.”

  “Thank you.” That nanny woman. Mila loathed Leonie. I think Mila thought attachments would distract me from work, but Leonie and I were just friends. We’d briefly been more than that, in a time of great stress, but now we weren’t—it was too soon after Lucy. My ex-wife. “You know I have to help this woman, and I’m going to. With or without your approval.”

  “Find out who this man in black is and nothing more. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand you,” I lied. “The CIA took care of scrubbing my job history. The press won’t break my background, neither will the police.”

  She sighed. “I will get on a plane to come help you.”

  “I can handle it, Mila.”

  “Sam.”

  “Yes?”

  “It is never an easy thing to kill a person. Ever. Even a bad person who wants to kill you. Ending a life, it always sticks with you.”

  I cleared my throat. “He looked me in the eyes when he died. Like maybe I was going to change my mind and unstab him.”