Viking Bay

by M. A. Lawson

  43 | Kay was waiting for Callahan to get off the phone so she could talk to him about the idea she had that might help them catch Mercer.

  It had turned out that Kay had been right about Natalya: While Leonid Titov was busy each day in his little bookstore, his good-looking young wife met a handsome guy named Danilbek, but who called himself Danny. She discovered that he and his older brother—Malik—had been born in Chechnya but raised in America. Natalya and Danilbek fell in love, and during the course of the following year they hatched their plan.

  Natalya knew about her husband’s background, and her lover, who wasn’t the least bit radical, knew a couple of truly radical Chechens in D.C. They came up with the idea of faking Natalya’s kidnapping, getting the money Titov had in savings and some information Danilbek could sell to the hard-core guys in D.C. to make more money. After which, they would live happily ever after.

  Morgan had no problem capturing Danilbek at the motel in Middleburg where he’d been sitting in his car waiting for Natalya to show up. Kay had no idea what happened to Leonid Titov, Natalya, and Danilbek after that. According to Callahan, the CIA was dealing with them and the Group’s services were no longer required.

  Callahan finally got off the phone.

  “Did you look at Anna Mercer’s medical records?” Kay asked.

  “No,” Callahan said. “I didn’t see any reason to. Anna was as healthy as a horse. She never missed work for anything more serious than the flu.”

  “You need to check her medical records. Natalya’s medic alert device made me remember something Mercer said to me the first time I met her. When she told me I had to take a physical before coming to work for you, I told her that I’d had a physical that year. Well, Mercer said, ‘A lot can happen in a year. I should know.’”

  “Huh,” Callahan said.

  “So I have no idea what she meant,” Kay said, “but maybe she’s got something wrong with her that we can use to locate her, like if she takes some exotic drug or needs kidney dialysis or something like that.”

  —

  KAY WAS BACK in Callahan’s office six hours later.

  “Three years ago,” Callahan said, “during a routine physical, Anna had some blood work done and they found her hemoglobin and hematocrit levels were high. This led to the diagnosis of a fairly rare but not really too serious blood disease called polycythemia vera. It’s a condition where your body makes too many red blood cells. If it isn’t treated, it can lead to heart attacks and strokes.”

  “When you say the disease is fairly rare, exactly how rare is it?” Kay asked.

  “Well, it’s not super rare,” Callahan said. “About one person in a hundred thousand has it.”

  “How’s it treated?”

  “Ah, now, that’s the thing,” Callahan said. “The way this disease is treated, if it’s not too bad, is by taking blood from the patient.”

  “Taking blood?” Kay said.

  “That’s right. You just take a pint of blood from the patient every few weeks, and sometimes that’s enough to keep the disease under control. In case you’re interested, the fancy name for bleeding someone like they used to do in the Middle Ages is phlebotomy. So what Mercer has been doing for the last three years, unbeknownst to me, is going to a blood donor clinic and they drain some blood out of her. In order to do this, of course, her doctor had to give the clinic a note saying she had polycythemia vera and phlebotomy was required. Like I said, this disease isn’t that big a deal at the stage she’s at. If it gets worse, she’ll have to increase the phlebotomy treatments, and there are a couple of drugs she’ll have to take.” Callahan moved papers around on his desk until he found what he was looking for. “One of the drugs is called hydroxyurea—I think that’s how you pronounce it—and the other is interferon-alpha, whatever the hell that is.

  “So this could help, Hamilton. In addition to looking for single women buying one-million-dollar–plus homes and who go to fancy spas and like certain brands of furniture, we’ll look for ladies who are being treated for polycythemia vera. And because the British have a national health care system, I figure we’ll have a leg up on accessing medical records. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  44 | “I think we’ve found her,” Callahan said. “Got her with the blood thing.”

  “Well, it’s about damn time,” Kay said.

  “Hey, they hunted for bin Laden for a decade; I’d call four months pretty damn good. I was really surprised at how many rich, single women in their forties are buying expensive homes in England. I’m willing to bet that most of them got their money when they divorced their husbands because they were fooling around with younger women.”

  Kay just made a face in response to that piggish remark.

  “Anyway,” Callahan said, “a woman who is supposedly forty, according to her passport—which would make her five years younger than Anna—gave blood at a clinic in London for the purpose of controlling polycythemia vera. There’s no record of this woman ever giving blood before. This same woman purchased a waterfront home two months ago for one point two million pounds, which is almost two million U.S. dollars. The place is near a picturesque spot called Viking Bay, which is near Margate, about eighty miles east of London, and not too far from the famous White Cliffs of Dover. She also bought a dining room table identical to the one Mercer had in her home in Arlington.”

  “I thought you said Mercer had her blood drawn every month or so.”

  “She used to,” Callahan said, “but her disease isn’t that severe, she’s not on medication, and she may have been willing to take the risk to have it drawn less frequently. Plus, like I said, she went to a clinic in London, about an hour and a half from where she lives. All I know is, I think this woman could be Anna Mercer.”

  Callahan reached across his desk—the effort made harder by the size of his gut—and handed Kay a picture of a woman with short blond hair who Kay thought looked about thirty-five, only four years older than her.

  “This woman doesn’t look anything like Mercer,” Kay said.

  “I know that,” Callahan said. “But it’s like I told you, I was almost positive she’d get plastic surgery to change her appearance. Her weight and height match Mercer’s, and I had a couple of surgeons here in D.C. compare this picture to Mercer’s old face and they said a good surgeon could make her look exactly like the woman in the picture.”

  “What do we need to do to confirm it’s her?”

  “DNA or fingerprints. We got Mercer’s DNA when we searched her house, and we obviously have her fingerprints.”

  “Okay,” Kay said, getting to her feet. “I’m heading over there tomorrow.”

  “You don’t need to go. There are people in England I can use to follow her and get fingerprints off of something she touches.”

  “I’m going. I don’t want to wait around forever for somebody to prove it’s not her, and if it is her, I need to come up with a plan for dealing with her.”

  Before Callahan could object, she left the room. Because her back was to him, she couldn’t see the smile on Callahan’s pale face as she walked through the door. She would have hated that smile, because it meant she was predictable.

  —

  KAY WALKED ALONG the beach in front of a house belonging to a woman named Abigail Merchant. There was no sign of spring in the air here on Viking Bay; it was a gray gloomy day, the wind blowing at about twenty knots, the rain slashing her face. Kay was wearing yellow rain gear, the hood covering her head.

  The house Merchant had purchased wasn’t that all that impressive from the outside; that is, it didn’t look to Kay like a two-million-dollar home, but it was seaside property with a magnificent view. Kay knew that the inside of the place, however, would look like something featured in one of those glossy magazines that showcased the homes of people with money and good taste. Kay had seen Abigail Merchant’s credit-card statements, and t
hey showed that in a two-month period Merchant had replaced hardwood floors, knocked down walls to expand the great room and the master bedroom, and replaced every appliance and fixture in the bathrooms and kitchen. She must have used a bullwhip on the contractors to get so much work done in such a short period of time.

  Kay had yet to see Merchant, because after Merchant completed the remodeling job, she decided to take a vacation. Merchant was staying in a five-star hotel in Majorca, enjoying the sun and getting a treatment at a spa every day that cost about four hundred bucks. She spent three hundred dollars on one meal and she dined alone. She had a flight to return to the U.K. the day after tomorrow.

  Kay had considered breaking into Merchant’s home, where she was sure she would be able to find something with Merchant’s fingerprints on it, but in the end decided not to. Merchant had a good security system that included cameras, and although Callahan had assured her that he had a guy who could get Kay into the house without setting off the alarms, Kay wanted to confirm that Merchant was Mercer before she broke the law and invaded the woman’s home. Again, according to her credit cards, Merchant dined out practically every day even when she was at home, and Kay was confident she’d be able to acquire a glass or a knife or something with Merchant’s prints on it.

  Kay left the beach and walked between the home of Merchant and her neighbor to the north. The houses in the neighborhood were all about a hundred and fifty feet apart but not enclosed by fences. Technically, Kay was trespassing, but she knew Merchant wasn’t home to challenge her, and if Merchant’s elderly neighbor—a woman who used a walker—came out to shoo her away, she’d apologize and be on her way. She’d say she was just trying to get up from the beach to the road that passed in front of Merchant’s house and didn’t want to walk all the way back to the place that allowed the unwashed masses access to the beach.

  All Kay was doing on this visit was a general recon. She wanted to see the house, the beach, and the neighborhood. As she passed between the two houses, she kept her head down and the raincoat hood pulled tight around her face; she knew there was a security camera on the front of Merchant’s home, over the garage, facing the street, and a second camera on the back of the house, facing the beach. She didn’t want one of the cameras capturing a clear image of her face.

  She walked up to the road that passed in front of Merchant’s house. She knew that at night the road wasn’t heavily traveled, and she could see there weren’t any nearby streetlights. Merchant did, however, have a light near her garage door. She stood a little longer on the road looking at the garage—and a plan began to form. She walked back to her rental car, tossed the wet raincoat onto the backseat, and climbed behind the wheel, thankful to be out of the wind and rain. She couldn’t help but think that if she had stolen fifty million bucks she sure as hell wouldn’t have relocated to rainy old England.

  She took out her phone and called Callahan’s man, the one who had briefed her on Merchant’s home security system. “Are you sure the garage isn’t alarmed?” she said.

  “Yes, dear. The door between the house and the garage is alarmed, but the garage roll-up doors aren’t, and there are no cameras or motion detectors in the garage.”

  Just like Nathan Sterling’s garage, Kay thought.

  “But,” the man said, “do you see the floodlight that’s about halfway between the center of the garage door and the door to the house?”

  “Yeah,” Kay said.

  “That’s a complicated light. It contains a motion detector that turns on a camera installed in the base of the light. The motion detector also turns on the light. So if someone approaches the front door, the motion detector activates the camera and the floodlight, and the camera videotapes whatever set off the detector. But there’s a flaw in the system, or at least I think it’s a flaw. You see . . .”

  “Tell me about the flaw later, but start thinking about how I can get into the garage,” Kay said, and hung up.

  There was no point spending too much time worrying about how to get past Merchant’s home security system until she confirmed that Abigail Merchant was indeed Anna Mercer.

  —

  MERCHANT WAS BACK from Majorca, and at seven a.m. the morning after she returned, Kay was parked down the road from Merchant’s house in a Toyota sedan. Kay didn’t expect Merchant to leave her house at such an early hour, particularly as she’d just gotten home from a trip, but if she did, Kay would follow her and try to obtain her fingerprints.

  Sitting with Kay in the Toyota were a man and a woman. They were all drinking coffee purchased from Starbucks; Starbucks had spread across the planet faster than any virus. The woman was in her sixties, dowdy, plump, and matronly. Her name was Blanche, or so she said. The man called himself Robert, was in his twenties, had longish hair, glasses, and looked rather wimpy. Both Blanche and Robert were dressed casually, but well enough to enter upscale restaurants and retail stores.

  Callahan had provided Blanche and Robert when Kay told him what personnel she needed. Kay knew that they weren’t employees of the Callahan group; they were, instead, people Callahan had on retainer and used when he needed them. Kay didn’t like the fact that she was working with two strangers, and all she could do was hope that Callahan had vetted them properly. Kay also didn’t like that these two had seen her face, and she intended to talk to Callahan later to understand what he was doing to make sure they didn’t someday give her up to the English bobbies. Unfortunately, she had no choice but to use them, as she couldn’t allow Merchant to see her face.

  Kay was surprised when Merchant’s garage door rolled up at eight a.m. and Merchant’s black E-Class Mercedes-Benz, this year’s model, backed out. Kay started her car and followed the Mercedes.

  Merchant drove to Broadstairs, an oceanside town a short distance from Margate, and parked near a gym called Elite Fitness Studios on Thanet Road. Kay could see the exercise machines inside the place through its front windows. Merchant got out of her car carrying a large gym bag. She was wearing a beautiful leather trench coat over a robin’s egg blue jogging suit. Her short blond hair was a bit mussed, as if she hadn’t combed it before she left her house, and she didn’t appear to be wearing any makeup. Kay watched Merchant walk to the entrance of the gym, and she arrived at the door at the same time another woman did. Merchant and the woman chatted briefly, then Merchant graciously held the door for the other woman.

  Even though she’d spent hours with Mercer, sat numerous times no more than two feet away from her, Kay couldn’t tell if the woman was Mercer. She’d been sure that if Merchant was Mercer, something would give her away: the way she walked, the way she held her head, maybe a gesture when she talked. There wasn’t anything she’d seen so far, however, that allowed her to draw a conclusion; it appeared that she just hadn’t paid enough attention to those sorts of details when she’d been with Mercer.

  Well, there was one superficial indicator that the woman could be Mercer: The leather trench coat she was wearing had to have cost over a grand. Merchant definitely had Anna Mercer’s taste for expensive clothes.

  “We’re just going to have to sit here and wait until she finishes her workout,” Kay said to Blanche and Robert. “Why don’t you two go get breakfast? I’m buying. Oh, and take a leak, because I don’t know when you’ll get another chance. Be back in half an hour.” Actually, Kay just wanted them out of the car; Blanche was a talker, and Kay wasn’t in the mood for listening.

  Three hours later—while Blanche was going on and on about something one of her grandchildren had done and when Kay was about to strangle the woman if she didn’t shut up—Merchant stepped out of the gym. Kay doubted she’d been exercising for three hours, and wondered if she’d had a massage or taken some steam. Whatever the case, she looked marvelous: hair perfectly combed, makeup perfectly applied, glowing with good health. She was still wearing the leather trench coat, but not the jogging suit. Instead, she had on a burgundy-colored
skirt, a white sweater, and gorgeous knee-high leather boots that matched the trench coat.

  Kay followed as Merchant drove to Margate and parked near the Ambrette Restaurant on King Street and sauntered inside.

  Perfect.

  “Okay, guys, you know what to do,” Kay said to Robert and Blanche.

  “Righto,” Blanche responded, and she and Robert left the car. Blanche entered the restaurant first and Robert followed her in five minutes later.

  Kay had already discussed with them what they should do if Merchant went to a restaurant: Blanche would try to get a table as close to Merchant’s as she could, and as soon as Merchant paid her bill and left the table, and before a busboy could scoop up a glass or cup Merchant had used, Robert would knock the dishes off his table or blunder into someone else’s table, making as much of a commotion as he could, and when everyone in the restaurant was looking at him, Blanche would snatch the item.

  An hour later, Merchant left the restaurant and Blanche came out five minutes after her.

  “Well?” Kay said as soon as Blanche got into the car.

  Blanche handed Kay a wineglass wrapped in a cloth napkin.

  Two hours later, Callahan informed Kay that Abigail Merchant was Anna Mercer.

  —

  “DO YOU HAVE A PLAN?” Callahan asked, and Kay heard the sound a cigarette lighter makes. Kay could see him sitting at his desk in Washington, his pale, heavy face, his battered loafers on his desk, blowing smoke at the ceiling as he waited for her to respond.

  “I’m not going to kill her,” Kay said. Before Callahan could object or ask her why not, she said, “I want her to suffer. A bullet in the head just isn’t good enough, at least not for me.”

  What she had just said to Callahan wasn’t the whole truth: She did want Anna Mercer to suffer—she wanted her to suffer greatly—but that wasn’t the only reason she wasn’t willing to kill her.