by M. A. Lawson
She wouldn’t know, however, if the actual finished product would match the pictures for almost a month; it would take that long for the swelling to go down and for wounds from the surgery to heal. She needed to be completely healed before she left the secluded grounds of the clinic because she was planning to go straight to Luxembourg to have her final identity documents prepared—passport, driver’s license, credit cards, et cetera—and she wanted the pictures on the documents to match her new face. The cost to begin a new life—the surgeries, staying at the clinic for a month, preparation of flawless identity documents—was going to be close to eight hundred thousand dollars, and worth every penny to keep Thomas Callahan from finding her.
She didn’t really feel bad about what she’d done—maybe she should, but she didn’t. Did that make her a sociopath? She didn’t think so—but the truth was, the only thing she really felt bad about was Scarlett. She certainly didn’t feel bad about the Khans. When Callahan had devised his grand plan to go after the lithium in Afghanistan, the first thought she’d had was not whether Callahan’s plan would work. No. The first thought she’d had was: The Khans were going to get rich! Why should a corrupt, opium-growing politician and his daughter benefit and not her? The only thing she had to show after serving her country for a quarter century was her little house in Arlington, and yet instead of Callahan rewarding her, he was going to make a couple of foreigners multimillionaires.
She wasn’t going to agonize over what she’d done. While she was healing, she would find a new home—if she could just get past the pain and concentrate. She had decided she wanted to live within driving distance of London, and she wanted waterfront property; she’d never been able to afford waterfront property in the past. She didn’t need a home with five or six bedrooms and a large family room—she had no family and no intention of starting one. What she wanted was a place that had large, open rooms—high ceilings, lots of windows—hardwood floors, a modern kitchen, an enormous master bedroom, roomy bathrooms, a huge walk-in closet, fireplaces in both the bedroom and the great room, and a cute room for an office. She could see the place clearly in her mind’s eye—and she could hardly wait to begin decorating it.
She’d write down her criteria, find a reputable real estate agent, and have the agent begin the hunt. In a month, she wanted to step off a plane at Heathrow and drive immediately to the home she planned to purchase. What she was not going to do was worry about Callahan finding her. She was not going to second-guess herself, worrying that she may have made some sort of mistake. She’d done everything she could to avoid being found, and she would trust that what she’d done was sufficient. Yes, she’d focus on finding a lovely new place to live.
She opened her laptop and found a U.K. real estate site, but then closed her eyes as another wave of pain washed over her. Maybe she should call the nurse. As she lay with her eyes closed, she wondered if Nathan Sterling was feeling any pain yet. She certainly hoped so; it was really Sterling’s fault that Scarlett was dead.
39 | Kay watched from her car as Nathan Sterling stopped his Cadillac Escalade at the main gate of his company’s corporate headquarters. He showed the guard his ID, something that Kay was sure was totally unnecessary, as the guard certainly recognized one of the big bosses—but Sterling was probably following procedures that he had mandated for all people entering the facility.
C&S Logistics had three hundred acres in Marion County, West Virginia, the land purchased with money obtained from their investors—investors who, at this point, were probably disappointed with the company’s lackluster financial performance. A chain-link fence surrounded the property and trees along the perimeter had been left standing to block the view of folks driving past. Kay could see surveillance cameras mounted on fence posts, and she imagined the cameras were monitored from the guardhouse near the main gate.
Aerial photographs provided by Callahan—she had no idea how Callahan had obtained the photos—showed that behind the fence were training areas, including obstacle courses and firing ranges, a barrack, a mess hall, and a two-story office complex with antennae and satellite dishes sprouting from the roof. There were large metal sheds for vehicles, a helicopter pad, and a number of small concrete buildings that she guessed were arsenals for weapons and contained fuel and explosives. She didn’t really care what was in the buildings, however, as she had no intention of attempting to breach Sterling’s headquarters.
She’d been in West Virginia for three days watching Sterling, and the only reason she’d followed him from his home to his headquarters this morning was to confirm that he was sticking to his routine. Each of the three days she’d been watching him, he left his house at six a.m. and didn’t return to his home until about seven-thirty or eight p.m., as he stopped each night at one of the local restaurants for dinner.
Considering the nature of his business, Kay was worried that he could leave at any time, take a trip to D.C. to round up more clients or go someplace overseas where his people were working.
After Sterling passed through the company’s main gate, Kay started up her car and headed toward Fairmount, West Virginia, where she was meeting a man. The route to Fairmount took her right by Sterling’s house. The house was in a new development that had huge brick Colonial-style homes—none less than five thousand square feet—each home sitting on its own three- to five-acre lot. It would take a man half a day on a sit-down lawn mower to cut the grass at some of the places. The other thing about the homes in the development was that each one sat on a small hill, giving the houses the appearance of medieval castles overlooking their fiefdoms. Kay wondered if the hills where the houses were situated were natural or if they’d been created. Whatever the case, Kay had no idea why Sterling, who lived alone, would want to own such a large house.
According to the dossier provided by Callahan, Sterling had divorced his wife of twenty-five years soon after he was forced to retire from the army. Apparently, the wife had been something nice to have hanging on his arm when he thought he still had a shot at being a general, but he shed himself of her four months after he left the service. He was also estranged from his two grown children, a boy and a girl. Phone records showed that until two months earlier he’d frequently called a forty-year-old divorcée who lived in nearby Clarksburg, West Virginia, but was no longer calling her.
The impression Kay had of Sterling when she met him in Afghanistan and they argued over whether she’d be permitted to have a gun was that he was an arrogant prick with a low opinion of women. She wouldn’t be surprised if this contributed to his breaking up with the lady from Clarksburg. Maybe she was reading too much into a single encounter—but she didn’t think so.
She had no intention of misjudging Sterling, however. He may have been almost sixty, about Callahan’s age, but unlike Callahan, he was in excellent shape. He trained with his mercenaries, jogged and lifted weights almost every day, and he looked as if he weighed the same as he did when he graduated from West Point. His scholastic records also showed that he wasn’t a dummy—he graduated in the top ten percent of his class—and, like most high-ranking military officers, he’d gone on to receive postgraduate training. Lastly, he was an excellent shot with both a rifle and a pistol, and he always went about armed.
She would not underestimate Nathan Sterling.
—
KAY DROVE into the parking lot of a supermarket called Shop ’n Save in Fairmount. She was driving a long-body, white panel van, the type painters and plumbers tend to use. On the roof of the van was an extension ladder, but it was just for show. Kay had no intention of using the ladder. She checked her watch. It was seven-thirty. She was right on time.
At seven forty-five, a vintage 1984 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, maroon in color with a massive chrome grille, parked next to Kay’s van. A serious-looking little guy in his sixties with a face like a prune—sour and wrinkled—stepped from the Cadillac. He was wearing a black trilby hat and black-framed glasses, th
e type with lenses that change color depending on the light. In his right hand was a small gym bag.
He opened the passenger-side door of Kay’s van; his legs were so short it took some effort for him to get up into the passenger seat. Probably because of his size and the hat, Kay thought he looked like a onetime jockey, although she was pretty sure his primary occupation had never been riding the ponies.
“You Betty?” he asked Kay.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I’m Archie.”
Yeah, right, Kay thought. We’re both a couple of comic book characters.
“You got the two grand?” Archie asked.
She pulled a roll from the front pocket of her jeans and handed it to him.
“Okay. Let’s go,” Archie said, for some reason thinking he was in charge.
Kay drove back to Sterling’s place and stopped in front of a black, wrought-iron gate that barred the entrance to a long driveway that ran from the main road to Sterling’s home. On a post near the gate was a box that contained a doorbell button, a mesh screen like you see on intercom systems, and a keypad. If visitors came, they could push the doorbell button and tell Sterling they were there, and Sterling would open the gate from inside his house. A second option was he could give trusted visitors the code to the keypad to open the gate. The way Sterling opened the gate, however, was with a remote control he kept in his car, and Kay was betting—or hoping—that the same remote opened the door to his three-car garage.
Archie told Kay to turn the van around so the rear of the van was pointed at the gate, then he and Kay crawled between the front seats and into the back of the van. Archie then opened the van’s double doors and from his gym bag he took out a device that looked like a TV remote, except it was about twice the width of TV remotes that Kay had used. He jacked a cable into one end of the remote and then jacked the other end of the cable into a black box about the size of a smartphone. He pointed the remote at Sterling’s gate and Kay saw red lights start to run across the screen on the smartphone-size box. Thirty seconds later, maybe less, Sterling’s gate started to open. Kay knew from watching Sterling that the gate would automatically close in ninety seconds.
Archie closed the van’s back doors, disconnected the cable from the remote, and handed it to Kay. He dumped the cable and the other device into his gym bag. Mission accomplished.
They drove back to the Shop ’n Save parking lot in silence and Archie stepped out of the van. Before he closed the door, Kay said something that probably didn’t need to be said, as Callahan had vouched for the little guy, but she said it anyway: “You know what will happen if you talk to anybody about this.”
Archie sneered at her, slammed the door shut, and strutted back to his Cadillac.
Kay couldn’t help but smile.
—
KAY DROVE BACK to Sterling’s house, pointed the remote at the gate, the gate opened, and she drove through it. She figured the best thing to do at this point was to be both quick and direct—there was no point in sneaking around.
Sterling had two neighbors, one to the north, one to the south, but because all the homes sat on such large lots, the neighbors’ houses were at least half a mile away. If a neighbor happened to look out, he or she would see Kay driving through the gate in the type of vehicle a contractor might use. Hopefully, the neighbor would then think that Sterling had given the contractor the access code to open the gate. Most likely, however, nobody would even see her open the gate and go up the driveway.
When she reached the top of the driveway, she pointed the remote at Sterling’s garage and smiled when the garage door opened. She had a backup plan if the remote hadn’t worked on the garage door, but now she wouldn’t need to use it. Next, she just sat in her car and waited to see if an alarm would sound. None did, which is what she’d expected.
The same security company provided security for all the houses in Sterling’s development. In the basic security plan, which it appeared Sterling had based on the size of his monthly bill, all the exterior doors were alarmed, including the door that permitted entry to the house from the attached garage. The roll-up garage door, however, was not alarmed. In addition to alarms on the doors, the windows on the first floor of the house were alarmed, and inside the house there were weight-sensitive detectors located beneath the floor in strategic places. The concept was that if an intruder was able to get into the house by crawling through a window on one of the upper floors, and if the intruder weighed more than a house cat, he would set off one of the floor alarms.
If the alarm system was set, or “armed,” the owner had sixty seconds to disarm the system after he entered the house by punching a six-digit code into a keypad. If the system wasn’t disarmed in sixty seconds, then a Klaxon would go off, making a god-awful racket, and a signal would be sent to the security company. The Klaxon would sound for ten minutes; with luck, the noise alone would scare off any intruders and alert the neighbors. At the same time, the security company would call the house to see if the owner had accidentally set off the alarm; if no one answered the landline in the house, the security company would call the owner on his cell phone and simultaneously call the cops. It usually took the cops about fifteen or twenty minutes to show up, and when they did, they’d walk around outside the house looking for signs that someone had broken in.
Kay wasn’t concerned, however, about the Klaxon going off or the cops coming, because she had no intention of entering the house and attempting to disarm the security system. What Kay was worried about were cameras. If the homeowner wanted to pay the price, the basic security package could be upgraded to include cameras installed both inside and outside the house. If an alarm sounded, the security company would look at the cameras to see if there was an intruder in the house, and the cameras would have a record of everything they’d videoed in the last twenty-four hours. The security cameras could also be monitored by the homeowner via the homeowner’s smartphone or laptop.
But based on the size of Sterling’s security bill, Kay was pretty sure he only had the basic package and didn’t have cameras installed. She hoped. She put on a baseball cap and sunglasses and then, like an old-time bandit, tied a bandanna around her head to obscure the lower part of her face. She stepped from the van and walked along the front of the house checking for cameras. She didn’t see any, and she would have, because cameras installed by a security company were usually very obvious; the company wanted potential intruders to see the cameras.
Kay had one final task before she left. She walked into the garage, and the first thing she did was check for cameras, and again she didn’t see any. The center bay of the garage was where Sterling parked his Escalade, and it was empty. In the bay closest to the house was a BMW Z3 sports car, the top down, a set of golf clubs in the abbreviated backseat. The third bay of the garage contained a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a snowblower, storage lockers, a workbench, and a rolling cabinet containing a bunch of tools.
What Kay didn’t see was a great place to hide.
Kay left the garage, got back into the van, and used the remote to close the garage door. Her reconnaissance of Sterling’s place was complete; she was now ready to kill the man. She started the van and drove back toward the main gate, which opened automatically as she approached it, and turned in the direction of the motel where she was staying. She could have taken care of Sterling that night but decided not to, for one simple reason: the meteorologists were predicting rain tomorrow and rain would be good; she just hoped the weather bozos were right for once.
—
BACK AT HER MOTEL, she called Callahan and gave him an update. When she finished, he said, “Are you sure you’re going to be able to do this, Hamilton?” Kay hung up without answering.
It was too early for dinner and she was feeling restless, so she changed and went for a three-mile run. As she was running, it began to rain. Good. She took a shower, dried her hair, and changed
back into jeans, a simple white pullover sweater, and her running shoes—practically formal attire for dining in rural West Virginia. She opted for a chain restaurant that was within walking distance of her motel. Before leaving her room, she put on a baseball cap and a lightweight jacket because the rain had picked up, which again was good as far as she was concerned.
She ordered a pre-dinner martini; she wasn’t exactly celebrating—it was too early to celebrate—but she was feeling pretty good about the way things were going. She was nervous, of course, because something could always go wrong, but she wasn’t afraid. She had confidence in her skills.
What she was worried about was the question Callahan had asked her: Would she be able to kill Nathan Sterling when the time came? When she’d killed the drug dealer Marco Alvarez and three of Marco’s men in Miami, it had been an act of self-defense: They were shooting at her, but she shot them first. They started the fight; she just finished it. She’d never been in a situation, however, where she’d executed someone.
It wasn’t a moral issue for her, not really. Nathan Sterling deserved to die for killing Ara Khan, and she knew, as Callahan had said, that there was no court of law that was ever going to find him guilty and sentence him to death. But would she be able to pull the trigger when the time came? The problem was, she couldn’t see herself doing it. She could see Nathan Sterling kneeling on the ground, her holding a gun to the back of his head, him begging for his life—but she couldn’t see herself pulling the trigger.
What should she do? Call up Callahan and tell him that she didn’t know if she could do it? No. That wasn’t right. That was just passing the buck. If she backed out, Callahan would find someone else to do a job she knew needed to be done but that she didn’t have the courage to do herself. So. It was decided: She’d do what she’d agreed to do and she’d live with whatever the consequences might be. Which made her wonder: Was this the reason she’d been hired in the first place, because Callahan knew—even if she didn’t—that she had the necessary coldness to be an assassin? Whatever the case, it was time to stop agonizing. She needed to keep this simple for herself, because if she had doubts she was liable to fail. Doubts led to hesitation, and hesitation could be fatal.