by Mack Maloney
She killed the light and retreated quickly. Down the hallway. Back to the foyer. Whoever had done this might still be in the house. But she could not simply call the police. Not with her job. This could be some crackheads or vagrants — but it could be something else, too. And the local cops weren’t exactly Scotland Yard. She didn’t want them stumbling into places they shouldn’t go.
She composed herself, knowing she had to stay calm and be strong. But how exactly?
Another noise from upstairs. A door closing, maybe. Outside, she heard the fighter jets go overhead again. The fog was growing so thick around the old house, she could barely see her car anymore.
Lightbulbs? Soap?
Finally, she just slumped to the floor.
Iceberg, hell, she thought.
The whole world was going crazy.
Chapter 5
Embassy Row, Washington, D.C. Thirty minutes later
The waiters rolled three carts of champagne into the reception hall to polite applause. There were about fifty guests on hand, the usual crowd for the Portuguese embassy’s weekly Friday night cocktail party. The raison d’être this evening was the announcement of a new EU trade agreement between Portugal and France. It was expected to garner both countries upward of $50 million, mostly in the exchange of costly dinner wines and perfumes.
Or that was the excuse for the gathering, anyway. Most of these events, especially those held here at Portuguese Hall, were just a cover for various European operatives to exchange intelligence. Trade secrets, military assessments, weapons sales. Most people here were interested in things other than Beaujolais and Paree Sourie. The place was crawling with spies.
Among them was an agent of the DGSE, the General Directorate for External Security, France’s equivalent to the CIA. This man, sometimes known by the code name Palm Tree, lived in a world made up of weapons that shot down aircraft. Stingers, Rolands, Hawks — surface — to — air missiles of all shapes and sizes. He bought and sold them like some people bought and sold Merlots. The difference was, he made sure these weapons, purchased either on the black market or in third-party deals, secretly went to organizations that saw eye-to-eye with French foreign policy, even in its most subtle forms.
The French agent mingled, ate frogs’ legs, did a little business, but then left the reception early, meaning before midnight. He had a flight back to Paris tomorrow morning that he had to make. He had to get back to his hotel and check his cables, his faxes, his e-mails. Then he had to pack and get to JFK before 4:00 A.M., for the 5:30 plane out.
He walked out the front door, looking for the embassy’s street captain; he needed his rental car brought around. But the doorman was not in sight; neither were any of his assistants. “Lazy asses,” Palm Tree cursed under his breath. Though his home station was actually in Paris, he’d spent enough time in Washington to dislike just about everyone who lived here. Blacks and foreigners mostly, crude and undependable. He would have to retrieve the car himself.
He walked two blocks, then turned right down a side alley. His car was parked in a private lot one more block away. His mind was on his Air France ticket upgrade … when suddenly two men stepped out of the shadows in front of him. They startled him. Palm Tree wasn’t just DGSE; he was also ex-French Special Forces, a veteran of Chad and Bosnia. Even though Embassy Row was not the safest place in town, he was surprised the two men had come upon him so quickly. Usually his senses were better than that.
But now here they were, blocking his way in the dark alley, dressed all in black, including ski masks.
Palm Tree decided to attack with good humor. He buried his French accent and took on that of a typical D.C. citizen.
“Have you guys seen my car?” he asked them.
A switchblade was up to his throat a second later.
“Hand it over,” the man with the knife growled.
“Hand what over?”
Suddenly a straightedge razor was also at his throat.
“Everything you got,” the second man told him.
Yes, Palm Tree knew the rabble of D.C. — and these two needed to get everything he could give them, as quickly as possible. He pulled out his wallet and his billfold. He took off his gold wedding band — a fake, as he was not married — and finally his Rolex King watch.
He gave it all to the switchblade man. But an insolence that creeps up on robbery victims during the act began to rise to the surface. “Are you happy now?” he asked them bitterly.
“No, we’re not happy,” the first man hissed at him, the switchblade now pricking Palm Tree’s skin.
“What else could you possibly want?” he asked them, authentically puzzled.
They never replied. Instead, the man with the switchblade shoved him to the ground while the other mugger tore the lapel from his suit coat. This uncovered a secret pocket. Palm Tree’s most valuable asset — his personal data assistant — fell out to the pavement.
Palm Tree went to grab for it, but one man’s boot landed squarely on his hand. The other man retrieved the cell phone-size device instead, and both muggers examined it for a second, keeping Palm Tree pinned to the ground. Then they nodded to each other and displayed two thumbs-up. Almost as an afterthought, the first man looked in Palm Tree’s billfold and discovered 300 American dollars, all in fifties, and a similar amount in euros. He crumpled the bills and threw them in Palm Tree’s face. Then he tossed Palm Tree’s other valuables into a trash barrel nearby. Both muggers then spit on him and left, vanishing back into the shadows.
Palm Tree picked himself up, his entire body shaking, especially his hands. He turned for one foolish moment to gather up his money and retrieve his things from the trash can. He stopped himself, though, knowing he had to get out of the area tout de suite, before the muggers realized they’d left most of their booty behind.
He turned up the alley, intent on going back to the embassy for help. But this, too, was foolish. A man in his position did not go looking for help. And certainly not from the local police.
He had to get to his car, leave quickly, and figure out what to do from there. So he ran down the alley, soon reaching the relative safety of the dimly lit parking lot. The muggers had not taken his car keys; still, he had trouble getting them into the lock, his hands were shaking so much. Somehow the key went in, though. The door popped open and he leaped inside, starting the engine and hastily locking all the doors.
He left the lot with a squeal of tires, screeching down the alley to West Avenue. But it was blocked by a construction detour, so he was forced to continue over West and down another alley. At the end of this side street, a white delivery van was parked half on the sidewalk, half on the pavement. There was only a thin space for him to squeeze through.
He slowed to a crawl and began the tight navigation. As he was halfway past the van, he noticed something strange propped up on its dashboard. A car battery … surrounded by a web of electrical wires.
Damn ….
The van exploded an instant later. The bomb, hidden under the passenger seat, was made up of two pounds of gunpowder and such curious items as thumbtacks, lightbulbs, gelatin, and soap. The tacks provided the outer core of the blast. Three dozen in all, they vaporized the rental car’s windshield and driver’s side window. The soap and gelatin, fused by the explosion, transformed into hundreds of tiny blobs of quasi napalm, igniting everything they touched. The lightbulbs, or what was left of them, came last. Six of them had been embedded deep in the gunpowder. Superheated by the blast, their outer shells evaporated into a cloud of minuscule glass particles that moved with such velocity, they easily cut through exposed skin and bone. This deadly combination tore Palm Tree’s head off in less than a second, leaving his upper torso a burning, bloody mass.
In that eternal second between mortal injury and death, though, the French spy had one last thought: Those crazy bastards … they finally got me ….
Chapter 6
Three hours later
Beethoven’s Fifth …
She couldn’t believe it! She’d fallen asleep on her hallway couch — a very scary thought considering what she’d come home to a few hours before. She was still wrapped in her sleeping bag, still in her street clothes, pistol still in hand. But the couch itself had moved. It was no longer next to the back door where she had positioned it, intending to sit guard, with a clear means of escape, until morning. Instead, it was up against the wall, clear across the hallway. How did that happen?
She froze now, truly realizing what a dangerous thing she’d done. Falling asleep while an intruder might still be in the house? As a highly-trained intelligence operative, she should have known better, should have at least retreated to her car. But then again, she was fairly new to all this, with exhaustion and the weirdness working against her. To make things worse, though, she’d left the back door open and the fog that had rolled into her yard had rolled right into her hallway as well, leaving everything covered with a sticky dew.
Beethoven’s Fifth started playing again …. What was that? She reached down to her ankle holster. Her cell phone was ringing with a newly programmed tune. She looked at the screen and groaned. It was a text message. From Nash. A glance outside told her it was still at least 90 minutes before dawn. What the hell was he doing buzzing her at this hour?
She tried to read his message through bleary eyes: “DGSE op term’d ex prej this PM west ave improv car bmb. Sht hits fan. Call me ths AM plz.”
Li collapsed back on the couch. The long message was in text-speak, a language she could barely understand when she was wide awake, never mind half-asleep. She had begun to attempt a translation when … she heard a noise. It came from upstairs. A definite thud. A footstep, maybe. Or a window closing. Her gun was up, pointing toward the top of the staircase nearby. But then another noise came, this one from the front of the house. She looked down the hallway. A light was coming from her living room ….
She’d always been prone to vivid dreams, especially ones about haunted houses, but Li had never sleepwalked before. That’s what this felt like now, though. Everything — from her troubles at work, to the troubles in the country, to what had happened earlier this night — all seemed part of a bad dream that wouldn’t go away. She stood up uneasily and felt as if she were floating on clouds, where it was really just the fog. Safety off, her gun ready, she glided down the hall to the living-room door. It was wide open this time. She took a half-step into the room. The lamp was still off, as she had left it; the light was actually coming from her kitchen.
She pinched herself to see if she really was awake. What was going on here? Was this old place haunted after all?
She took two more steps in. The light from the kitchen was flickering crazily. She could hear dull clinking noises. Glasses? No — cups. And the sound of water boiling, the mild whistle of steam. Two more steps. Shadows, moving against her kitchen wall. A candle — she could smell the burnt wax. Two more steps. At the edge of the kitchen now. Her breath caught in her throat and stayed there. Two figures were sitting at her breakfast table, their backs to her.
She lifted the pistol up to eye level. Two more steps and she was suddenly right behind them. They were drinking tea. Her tea.
“Don’t … move …” she said with as much gumption as she could muster. Can a bullet kill a ghost? she found herself thinking.
The figures went rigid at the sound of her voice. The fog from outside had somehow surrounded them, too, and Li half-expected them to disappear into it — and then finally she could wake up.
But the figures did not vanish. Instead, they turned around and smiled at her.
And they were ghosts.
It was Fox and Ozzi.
* * *
The next thing she knew, Li was flat out on her back, a wet facecloth draped across her brow.
She’d never fainted before, and judging from the size of the bump on her head, she never wanted to again. Only slowly were her surroundings coming into focus, illuminated by the light of another candle. She was no longer in her kitchen. The walls around her now were painted cruddy green, the ceiling a hideous navy blue. There were two open windows off to her left, bare light and fog streaming through both. To her right, a painting of somebody’s steamboat paddling its way up the Potomac. Spiderwebs covered the vessel’s name.
That’s when she realized she was still in her house. But she was upstairs, on the second floor, the place she always feared to tread.
And finally, she was aware of two worried faces looking down at her.
Fox and Ozzi …
They really were alive ….
She pulled them both down to her, as if she were going to smother them with kisses. That would have been very unlike her, though. She was glad, if totally flabbergasted, to see them but shocked that they were actually here. In her house. Going through her stuff.
The bastards ….
She didn’t kiss them — she knocked their heads together instead, eliciting a painful crack! Both fell backward, stunned. Li started kicking at them, furious that they had scared her half to death. And these were not wild kicks, either. She’d dabbled in Tae Kwon Do. And she knew how to hurt a guy.
Both men tried to disentangle themselves from her, abandoning their effort to lift her up from the floor. Li tried to get to her feet … but suddenly many hands were on her, grabbing her wrists and ankles, trying to hold her down. There were more people in the room besides these two — at least three more. Li saw gloved hands, boots, black uniforms, face masks. Self-preservation took over now, her training really kicking in. She began to fight them viciously even though Fox and Ozzi were pleading with her not to. Somehow she knocked the candle over, causing the room to go black. She never stopped throwing punches, though, connecting with jaws, stomachs, knees, crotches. She was almost on the verge of winning the brawl when two more figures appeared, inexplicably climbing in through one of the open windows, inexplicably soaking wet. They quickly joined the fray. Only with their extra help was Li finally wrestled back to the floor.
“We are not going to hurt you!” Fox kept shouting at her. “Just let us talk to you ….”
Finally, Li stopped struggling. She was on her back again, looking up this time at a sea of faces illuminated by the beams of two powerful flashlights. Her eyes darted around the room; she could see more of it now. In one corner, two M15A2 rifles, the civilian clone of the military M16, were leaning against the wall. Both had bayonets attached to their muzzles with thick rubber bands. Next to them was a large hunting rifle, complete with an electronic gun sight. Next to the rifle, a jumble of laptops sitting atop a spaghetti pile of modem wires. More M15s were hanging off the coat stand beneath the big painting. And everywhere on the floor were junk food wrappers, soda cans, blankets, empty ammunition boxes, newspapers, and cigarette butts. Li was shocked. The room was a freaking mess, far worse than anything downstairs.
“Jesuzz!” she finally gasped. “How long have you people been up here?”
The embarrassed reply from Fox was: “Three days, going on four ….”
Then she spotted another pile of refuse down near her feet. Empty packages of Jell-O gelatin. Bright red shotgun shells emptied of their gunpowder. A box of thumbtacks. An empty package of Ivory soap …. Her mind went into overdrive. Suddenly Nash’s text message was back in her head: DGSE op term’d ex prej this PM west ave improv car bmb. Translation? A French intelligence agent had been killed in D.C. last night by an improvised car bomb.
Li began fighting again. This time she was just plain scared. She knew what was needed to make an improvised car bomb — and most of the ingredients were on the floor in front of her. The intruders held her down firmly, though, while Fox kept imploring her to take a deep breath and just listen ….
It took more than a minute, but she fin
ally settled down a third time, exhausted and out of breath. Her mind was racing now, her heart beating right out of her chest. Ghosts in her house? A French agent killed? Was any of this real?
But then, for some reason, she started counting faces. Fox and Ozzi. And now five others. Seven in all …. Something was beginning to come together here. Seven Americans killed in the supposed plane crash over the Caribbean, including Fox and Ozzi. Seven people now standing over her … including Fox and Ozzi.
“How?” was all she could ask them. “How come you weren’t all killed, like they said you were?”
Fox just shook his head wearily.
“Sorry, Li,” he said. “But that’s top-secret ….”
* * *
They finally let her up. One of the masked men went downstairs to make her a cup of tea; another helped dust her off. Then Fox and Ozzi brought her into the next room, closing the door behind them. Outside, it had begun to rain.
They were in the master bedroom. Li had been here only once before, the day she first moved in. With its ancient four-poster bed, decaying lace curtains, and cobwebs everywhere, the place was just too creepy for her. Ozzi lit another candle as Fox led her to an old dilapidated divan, sitting her down with a plop. Then he and Ozzi pulled up chairs in front of her. For a long moment, the three friends just stared at one another in disbelief.
“I just can’t accept this, Major,” Li finally said. “I mean, I know what’s going on. You faked your own deaths somehow, and came up here to kill this Frenchman? Why?”
“Because he deserved to go,” Fox responded coldly. Ozzi grunted in agreement.
“But you’re already escaped prisoners,” she shot back at them. “Am I right? Now you’ve become murderers, too?”
“It’s not like that,” Ozzi told her, adding. “not exactly, anyway.”
“You just ran a car-bomb attack inside our own country, for Christ’s sake!” she cried. “How does that make you any different from a bunch of terrorists?”