Inside Out

  “As soon as we can get a dog in here we'll search the woods and try and round him up. The Highway Patrol has River Road closed tight, so he ain't driving out.”

  “Please,” Sean pleaded, indicating Sam Manelli, whom she was kneeling beside. “He's badly hurt.”

  “Radio EMS we have four for immediate transport,” Chet ordered. “Tell the coroner he might want to bring a big truck because there's bodies scattered all over the place.”

  Sean slipped a bullet-ruptured throw pillow under Sam's head.

  Winter told Chet, “You get Hank from the boat shed?”

  “He's probably on his way to the hospital by now,” Chet said as he pressed a towel against Winter's thigh to stop the bleeding. “Clue me in, Winter. At first blush it looks like the guy out on the deck and gal in the hall killed Sam's men with those H and Ks, then came up after . . . who—Sam and Russo?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “Who the hell do you think sent them?”

  Sirens announced the arrival of patrol cars. Blue strobe lights reflected in the outside windows.

  “I'm not sure,” Winter lied easily. There was no way he was going to repay Chet for saving his and Sean's lives by involving him in the other side of this mess. Winter figured that the woman cutout he'd killed might be the hitter from Richmond that missed Sean there. “Do me a favor and bag her SOCOM for ballistics.”

  Chet glanced at Sean, who was holding Sam's hand. “Weren't we supposed to be rescuing her from him?”

  An EMS crew arrived, and as Sam was being lifted onto the cot, he looked down at Winter and winked.

  A pair of EMT techs rolled a gurney containing Russo from the room.

  Winter nodded.

  “Who shot the man out on the porch?” Chet asked.

  “I did,” Sam said. “I went down kicking ass. If you don't remember anything else, you remember that.” He grimaced in pain. “Somebody, get this gal away from me.” He released Sean's hand and closed his eyes.

  “Let's move him to the wagon,” the EMS tech said.

  Sean's eyes filled with tears as she stood and watched her father being rushed down the hall. She knelt beside Winter and took his hand.

  “Are you all right?” Winter asked her.

  She shook her head slowly. “I'm not sure what all right is.”

  “Let's get you out of here,” an EMS who had been wrapping Winter's leg said. Two men lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him out. Sean followed. As the crew took Winter from the house toward an ambulance, they passed by another. Inside, one technician was writing something down while another gave Sam Manelli CPR. Despite the chest-pumping charade, it was obvious there was no longer any reason to rush the gangster anywhere.

  Chet stuck his head into the ambulance Winter and Sean had just entered. “Hey, Winter, the other guy's making a run for it. He fired on the helicopter. I doubt his armor is going to be very effective against the M-60.”

  “He in a black Suburban?”

  “How'd you know that?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Hold up,” Chet told the ambulance crew. He had his phone to his ear, listening. “He's on River Road heading west,” Chet told Winter. “The units east of here are joining the pursuit. Okay, he's heading for the roadblock. Wait . . . he left River Road and he's heading up the levee.”

  “He gets in the river, you'll lose him, Chet,” Winter said. “Tell them to stop him.”

  “Okay, Bird One,” Chet said into the microphone. “You are authorized to use lethal force to stop that Suburban.”

  Seconds later, the cloudbase in the western sky suddenly took on a muted orange tint. “That's all, folks,” Chet said.

  106

  Looking out over the tank farm, Lewis watched the fireball climb. Lewis knew how cops thought, how they acted. Figuring that all of the highway patrol prowlers available had chased after Tomeo, he pulled out from among the piles of garbage. Lewis had figured the authorities would have no idea of the exact size of the force they were opposing. In the pandemonium, while the cops were focused on Tomeo in the fleeing Suburban and the bloody meat they had left in and around the lodge, Lewis could have led a herd of elephants out onto River Road. It was possible that Tomeo had bailed out of the vehicle before it exploded. It didn't matter to Lewis because it wouldn't change anything. Tomeo was on his own.

  Lewis kept the windows rolled up even though his nose was assaulted by the lingering stench of cigarettes, dog, and the old man's fetid body odor. He drove to River Road and aimed the Ford truck toward New Orleans before turning on the headlights. He hoped that the mattress and other trash didn't tumble out of the truck's bed and draw unwanted attention.

  107

  Sean had held Winter's hand from the time they got into the ambulance until they had wheeled him into the emergency room at Charity Hospital.

  At the hospital Winter heard from one of Chet's deputies that the cutout had been ambushed by the chopper at the top of the levee. His armor hadn't been any help, especially considering that the Suburban's overlarge gasoline tanks had gone up, incinerating him after he had been riddled by most of the 7.62-mm rounds the M60 fired directly into his windshield from rock-throwing range.

  The nurse gave Winter a shot of something that felt icy cold. He was unable to concentrate on anything at all—the crisp pain in his leg evolved into a dull pressure as the overlapping voices faded to whispers and trailed away. Winter was aware of the gentle lapping of water against the raft he found himself floating on—lying out in the warm sunshine, someplace far, far away. . . .

  Winter was alone in a corridor that seemed to stretch for miles in either direction. The door he had come through had vanished, Winter watched as a small speck grew into a person. As the figure drew closer, he could see that that it was a young man, seventeen or eighteen, wearing fatigues and a green beret.

  Before he could clearly see the soldier's features, Winter knew the young man was familiar to him. Even the uniform didn't mask the cocky stride, the set of his friend's shoulders. Greg Nations was not merely younger than he had been when Winter first met him at Glynco—he was altogether different. Only the eyes were the same. The jaw was rounder, the nose wider, the cheeks fuller, and even the ears angled at nearly ninety degrees from his skull.

  “Greg?” Winter said. “I thought you were dead. They told me you were dead.”

  Greg skirted him and kept going.

  “Greg!” Winter yelled. “Greg, wait! Where you going?” His heart was breaking. Grief and a sense of overwhelming loss filled him. “Don't go! Talk to me! Please!”

  Winter caught up to him in a few strides. He grabbed Greg's shoulder and turned him so they were face-to-face.

  The soldier was no longer Greg Nations. The soldier was now Lieutenant Commander Fletcher Reed, but where his eyes should have been, there was smooth skin, eyes crudely drawn on with a dark marker pen.

  Winter woke with a start in a real hospital bed. Sean was curled up in a chair beside him, watching him.

  “Bad dream,” he said.

  “Do you feel like listening?” she asked him.

  “Of course,” he said truthfully. He wanted to hear everything she had to tell him.

  108

  “I would have told you about Sam,” Sean began, “but from the time I was old enough to understand, my mother drummed into me that I should never tell anybody he was my father. It was my first and best-kept secret.”

  Sean studied Winter's face for a reaction, but he just nodded and smiled weakly. “I can understand why you might keep a thing like that to yourself.”

  “It was because my mother was afraid that Sam's enemies might kidnap me to hurt him. He had a lot of enemies always looking for an edge. My mother met Sam while she was at Newcomb studying painting. She was in a club one night and he saw her. He pursued her and she thought he was exciting. One thing led to another and she got pregnant. She told me that Sam was her first experience and she didn't take the necessary precautions.”


  “Good thing she didn't,” Winter said.

  “Sam wanted her to marry him, but she knew it was impossible. She was a free spirit and knew he would have smothered her, plus there was the danger angle. She ran away and lived with her aunt in Boston and had me. Sam showed up at their doorstep and my mother said that he picked me up and cried from joy.

  “My mother refused to return to New Orleans, but she agreed to let him support us and to form a trust for me, which he gladly did. It's grown over the years and it allowed me to have a nice life, paid for my education, and supports me still. Because Sam loved me, my mother agreed to let him be involved in my life.

  “Sam spent Christmas and my birthdays in Boston with us, and I used to spend summers here in New Orleans with my mother. Sam's men all thought she was his mistress. That way we could stay in his house or at the lodge, and except for having to use different last names and lie about where we lived, it was fine. Bertran Stern, his lawyer, knew who we were, and we communicated through him.”

  “I remember that on the porch that night, you told Angela and me your father taught you how to shoot guns.”

  “That picture of me with the duck was taken one winter when my mother and I came down and he took me hunting the first time. I didn't like killing birds, but I did it for him. He made sure I was skilled in defending myself in every possible way.”

  “I got a taste of that on the beach.”

  Sean laughed. “You sure did. He made sure I learned karate, defensive-driving techniques, and a lot of other survival skills normal girls don't need to know.”

  “If he was so protective, how could you have believed he was trying to kill you?”

  “I never knew him that well, and it's sad that I didn't. My mother, a beautiful and vibrant woman, never dated another man. A few years ago she confessed to me that it was because she didn't want Sam to think for a moment that she would betray him in any way. She told me that the one unpardonable sin in Sam's eyes was betrayal. She said that he would kill anyone who betrayed him, and I knew she was totally serious. I knew from a hundred sources that Sam had killed friends and members of his own family who had crossed him. I didn't think about it until after those men came to Rook and you said Dylan was working for Sam. Then I assumed he thought I had betrayed him with Dylan. But I never told Dylan that Sam was my father. I planned to eventually, but the time never felt right.”

  “Russo knew you were Sam's daughter.”

  Sean nodded. “When I met Johnny, he was working at Sam's vending company and he was nice to me. At some point, Sam told Johnny that I was his daughter. I had Johnny's private number because in the last few years Sam used Johnny to communicate with my mother and me. Sam trusted Johnny, but he never should have trusted anybody from his own world.”

  “You didn't ever mention Sam to Dylan?”

  “The only way Dylan could have known about my connection to Sam was if someone who knew told him.”

  “He worked for Sam. Maybe Sam told him.”

  “Sam told me Dylan didn't work for him. He said he'd never met him and that he couldn't believe Dylan was bringing him down with lies. Sam assumed I had told Dylan about him and that Dylan lied about killing those people for Sam so he could get a deal with the government.

  “If Dylan was killing Sam's enemies for someone, it could have been Johnny, because they would have had the same enemies. Sam was effectively out of the crime business, had no reason to kill anybody, but Johnny did. Maybe Johnny set it up so Dylan knew enough about me to get close to me.”

  “I'm sure it was something like that,” Winter said.

  “I knew what Sam was. One night when I was ten, I looked out a window at Sam's house and saw him knock a man to the ground and kick him until he was unconscious, while two of Sam's men watched. Sam was smiling like a lunatic the whole time he was beating that poor man.”

  “That's terrible. I don't blame you for keeping your relationship secret.”

  “I just want what I've always wanted—to live a normal life without ever again having to lie about anything to anyone.”

  “You deserve that,” Winter told her.

  109

  McLean, Virginia

  Ten o'clock in the morning found Fifteen in the basement of his house sitting on his sleek Italian leather couch, his feet on a matching ottoman. The cigarette smoke swarming around him caught the flickering light cast by his television set, which was showing a nine-ball championship between two female opponents. He knew that the Asian champion, his favorite, would win, because he had watched the tape at least a dozen times. Now, like never before, knowing the outcome of the contest was comforting.

  His frown deepened as his eyes moved from the champion-to-be leaning over the pool table to make a shot on the three ball to the coffee table where an ashtray, piled high with butts and ash, kept company with a vase filled with an explosion of silk flowers. The table was also littered with newspapers detailing the explosion in Manhattan and the intelligence reports on the New Orleans fiasco.

  Herman Hoffman had passed on to all of his people the belief that they were untouchable, because the organization had been designed to be both too valuable an asset to the government and too dangerous to screw with. Now that invulnerability was ancient history—a blood-splattered myth.

  Since he had met with his liaison at the CIA two hours earlier, Fifteen had been sitting alone in his basement weighing his options, smoldering over the mistake he had made. He cringed at the memory of the smug, sawed-off CIA lackey who had passed on the CIA director's threats, knowing that Fifteen didn't dare do more than sit silently and take the man's insults, one by one, nodding all the while like a shell-shocked imbecile. A month ago no one would have dared confront him, much less dictate to him.

  Blame it on ego. Herman's and his.

  Herman had set the failure in motion, but Fifteen had blown it all with the deputy in New York by playing games instead of just taking care of the business. All he'd had to do was leave Massey there paralyzed and set the explosives for ten or twenty minutes, instead of toying with him. He had put the deputy into a sealed building with no way out, knowing that he would eventually open that refrigerator if only to scrounge some food. Fifteen had someone stay in the neighborhood until after the bomb went off, to ensure it did. The detonator was set for twenty seconds, not even enough time for Massey to piss his pants. How could he have escaped and ended up in the basement? It wasn't possible, but obviously it had been too possible. It was so damned unnecessary. He had known better, but he had given in to his own stupid arrogance.

  Fifteen still couldn't believe that of the eight heavily armed cutouts who had tried to kill Massey on two occasions, he had killed six of them. In total, of the hundreds of rounds they had fired at him, the best killers on earth had managed to put a grand total of one bullet into the deputy's leg. And Fred Archer was dead—all that grooming wasted.

  He had honestly believed that it couldn't get any worse, that he had fixed everything Herman had screwed up—had total control of the situation at every turn. Massey's death in that building would have sealed the blame, divided it between Greg Nations and Massey. Manelli's and Russo's deaths and the retrieval of the GPS from that computer would have insured that everything was settled, that the cutouts were out of peril. But that was not to be. Every time he thought he had everything back on track, there was Massey tossing another crowbar into the gears and him running to put it right.

  Using information Massey and Fletcher Reed had collected, the director of the USMS, Richard Shapiro, had effectively derailed their dark ops train. Shapiro had the CIA by the nuts, and the agency had reacted by threatening to cancel Fifteen's organization's operating license, cut his ties to intelligence, and even throw Fifteen to a congressional oversight committee. The last threat was a bluff. There was no way the CIA could afford to have the cutout cells made public. But there could be a private reckoning—a bullet in the ear, a knife in the jugular, a heart attack, or perhaps a sans-pa
rachute halo jump into the Atlantic.

  Shapiro had somehow gotten his hands on the Global Fifty GPS from Sean Devlin's computer, and unbelievably, knew what it was, how it was used, and that the CIA owned the technology. He said he could prove that Archer's evidence against Greg Nations was fraudulent. Massey had told Shapiro everything he'd learned about Herman Hoffman and Fifteen, and about the existence of the cutout cells.

  Fletcher Reed's computer printouts were a map to the members of the cells. And there was the matter of the fingerprint cards from Rook, which matched those of four long-dead soldiers whom Reed identified. Fifteen was still sure he could have gotten all of Shapiro's evidence back if the CIA would have let him—an action they had expressly forbidden.

  Fifteen looked back up to the tournament on television. The Asian player had a beautiful, lithe body and coldly calculating eyes.

  Shapiro had offered a compromise the CIA had accepted. In return for holding back his evidence, Shapiro had wanted very little. He asked for WITSEC to be cleared, Gregory Nations to be exonerated, and the cutouts to refrain from any further hostilities against Winter Massey and Sean Devlin. He suggested that the FBI might arrest a Russian Mafia leader—they had one named Dobrensky they decided was perfect—who would be linked to the dead cutouts, men who would still be identified as Russian mercenaries. Dobrensky would be tried for conspiring with Manelli to furnish the talent to kill the protected witness. Attorney General Katlin would get a nice show trial and everything would be tied up with a big red bow for the American public. To explain how the mercenaries found Rook Island and the WITSEC airplane, it had been decided that Avery Whitehead, a bachelor nobody was particularly attached to, was to play the money-corrupted villain who had sold the intelligence on the WITSEC locations to Manelli.

  Fifteen knew that the compromise would work to everyone's satisfaction. The organization would stay in business, with Fifteen overseeing the cells, although the CIA would have tighter controls on the organization—the inevitable consequence of Rook Island and Ward Field. Fifteen suspected that Herman had done everything he had done, knowing that it would alter, if not destroy, the organization he had fathered, the thing he had owned and couldn't stand to see survive him.