Edison shrugged. “Like I said, I’ve known him almost his entire life.”
The VP shook his head, a small grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. He picked up his drink and sipped from it. “Have at it,” he finally said.
***
The elevator was empty. Edison breathed deeply, able to relax for the first time since pulling on his suit a couple of hours ago. The temptation was strong to rouse Nesbitt from his drunken slumber—why else would he have gotten a room if not to party?—and then to hit the road. It would be a simple thing to wake the boss and then ride the elevator to the hotel’s basement parking garage, climb into his Peugeot and head home.
He wouldn’t do it, of course, but it was a pleasant little fantasy, and Edison amused himself with it as the elevator climbed to the fourteenth floor. After a disappointingly fast ride, it braked to a stop and the doors slid open, revealing an empty hallway.
Nunez had told him Nesbitt’s room number was 1408. “Halfway down the hall on the right,” he had added, as if maybe the head of Research and Development might be incapable of reading numbers on doors.
Edison stepped out of the elevator and froze as a room’s door opened—roughly halfway down the hall on the right—and a young woman stepped into the hallway. She was dressed provocatively, in very short shorts, and her lace-covered legs looked impossibly long.
He froze. He couldn’t have said why, but he felt a nearly overwhelming sense of danger radiating off the woman. He guessed she was late-twenties, maybe thirty, but was by no means confident in that assessment. The hallway was dimly lit, and Edison’s visual acuity had been sliding downhill for years.
Something’s happened to Nesbitt. The thought flared immediately, and it made no sense because from this distance he had no idea whether the young woman had even come out of Nesbitt’s room. Still, he couldn’t help how he felt, and he watched as the hooker—she was almost certainly a prostitute, the way she was dressed—glanced down the hallway in the other direction, and then swiveled her head and locked eyes with Edison.
A spike of fear coursed through him and he realized he had never felt quite as old as he did right now. I’m being silly, he thought, and he began walking slowly toward her along the otherwise empty hallway.
The woman tracked his progress for a moment with eyes narrowed to slits. Then she turned on her heel and headed off in the other direction. Edison had never been on the fourteenth floor of the Washington Arms before—had never been on any floor but the first—but he doubted there was anything at the end of the hallway besides a set of fire stairs.
Odd that the scantily clad young woman would choose not to use the elevator.
Then again, this whole bizarre little vignette was odd.
Edison slowed his pace as he became more and more convinced that the young woman had, in fact, exited Nesbitt’s room. It wasn’t hard to believe the CEO would have hired a hooker, but the vibe this woman gave off was distinctly dark. Dangerous. Edison couldn’t put his finger on exactly why he felt this way, but it seemed critically important the woman not discover he was heading to the room she had just come out of.
He approached Nesbitt’s room—as he got close enough to read the number he realized it was same room she had exited—at the same time the woman pushed through a heavy metal fire door at the end of the hallway and disappeared. It occurred to him that she could turn after the door eased shut and watch him through the narrow, wire-reinforced rectangular window and he would never know, but there was nothing he could do about that.
He stopped in front of Nesbitt’s door and rapped with his knuckles, three quick knocks, the sound almost like a violation in the stillness of the hallway.
Waited for a response.
Nothing.
Knocked again.
Still nothing.
Now what do I do?
***
It took some convincing for the platinum blonde desk clerk to agree to disturb Allan Nesbitt. She flat-out refused Edison’s request for a key to the CEO’s room, and only reluctantly decided to accompany Edison upstairs to open the door after Edison had enlisted the help of his new VP friend, Nuñez.
Even after Chris Nunez’s assurance that he would accept responsibility for any fallout over the invasion of Allan Nesbitt’s privacy, the clerk made them wait while she enlisted someone to cover for her at the front desk. She wasn’t about to hand over her room access key to anyone, so Edison was forced to cool his heels for several minutes before getting started back upstairs.
Nuñez, despite agreeing to bear the brunt of Nesbitt’s wrath, disappeared back to the function room and his drink the moment the clerk’s back was turned.
Edison didn’t mind; in fact he preferred it. He hadn’t been kidding about knowing Allan Nesbitt for decades, and he was one of the few people at NCC not intimidated by the CEO.
As he waited for the clerk, he considered what he had seen upstairs. While it wasn’t hard to imagine Nesbitt hiring a hooker, it was hard to imagine him allowing the woman to remain in his room if he wasn’t in there with her.
In fact, it was impossible to believe.
Allan Nesbitt was a loose cannon, and, at least in Edison’s opinion, a man utterly unprepared to guide the fortunes of a company like National Circuit, but Edison didn’t believe even Nesbitt was foolish enough to allow a prostitute the run of his hotel room.
More to the point, even if he was foolish enough to do so, where would he have gone? He wasn’t in the function room, and an attention hog like Nesbitt wouldn’t hide in the hotel bar drinking while a room full of sycophants and suck-ups waited just a few feet away to spend the evening kissing his butt.
Finally, the desk clerk emerged from a back office looking none too pleased. She swept past Edison, glancing his way with a curt nod, apparently an indication he should follow. So he did.
The elevator ride to the fourteenth floor was spent with the clerk voicing her displeasure. “Men like Mr. Nesbitt value their privacy, and it’s against hotel policy to barge into their rooms uninvited, unless there’s a serious emergency involved.”
This time, Edison was thankful for the fast ride and he more or less ignored her, avoiding her wrath by nodding and murmuring bland words of agreement at strategic intervals. He was barely listening, thinking instead about the sense of danger he had felt upon seeing the young woman leave Nesbitt’s room.
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open, Edison eerily certain the same woman would be standing at Nesbitt’s door waiting for them, ready to do…something.
But of course the young woman wasn’t in the hallway. No one was in the hallway, and the desk clerk marched down it like an avenging angel, moving much faster than Edison had earlier, much faster than his nearly eighty-year-old legs could carry him now. It seemed that, with her goal in sight, the platinum blonde was anxious to get this distasteful task over with and back to the safety of the front desk.
She stopped in front of Room 1408 and cast a dark glance back at Edison, then rapped primly on the door. “Mr. Nesbitt,” she said loudly. Edison briefly considered telling her he had already tried knocking and calling out to him, then decided not to bother. She was clearly not going to be influenced by anything he did or said.
Her knock went unheeded and she tried again, and by this time Edison had finally caught up with her.
She glared at him one more time, apparently in the event he had somehow misread the earlier evidence of her displeasure, and then said, “You realize we’re disturbing all the other guests on this floor.”
Edison had no idea how to respond, so he said nothing.
The clerk savored her victory for a moment and then said, “Well, he’s your boss, go ahead on in.”
Then she slid the key card into the receptacle. The lock clicked and a green light flashed and she pushed the door open slowly, stepping back to allow Edison to pass.
Despite the sense of danger he had felt upon seeing the hooker leave Nesbitt’s room, he was completely unprep
ared for the sight that greeted him just inside the door.
Nesbitt lay on his back, arms stretched out to either side as if beseeching God for help that would never come. His wrinkled dress shirt was partially unbuttoned, his necktie thrown across the messy bed. His sheet-white face was contorted in a rictus of agony and Edison could see he wasn’t breathing.
Could see he would never breathe again.
He took one step into the room and stopped, and the impatient desk clerk tut-tutted behind him. “Well, is he in there?”
She stepped around him, saying, “What the devil’s the prob—”
Then she screamed. The sound was high-pitched and persistent and reminded Edison of an electric drill being operated at maximum RPM. He had the absurd notion that he should warn her she was disturbing all the other guests on the floor.
Instead, he ignored her and bent to check Nesbitt’s pulse. The exercise was pointless, but he did it anyway. Edison was surprised by the sense of calm he felt when he knew he should be panicking.
His knees had just hit the carpet when the muffled whump of an explosion drifted through the hotel, shaking the high-rise structure on its foundation. The noise provided a bass counterpoint to the shrill screams still being shrieked out behind him.
Explosion in the banquet room, Edison thought as placed two fingers lightly on Nesbitt’s carotid artery. The thought was more or less random; there was no reason for it. The hotel was massive, the explosion could have occurred anywhere in the building, including from one of the floors above, but he knew it hadn’t occurred anywhere else in the building. It had occurred in the room in which he had been sitting not fifteen minutes prior.
The desk clerk stopped screaming, her shrieks cut off mid-breath. She stood stock-still, mouth hanging open, like someone had flipped a switch to cut off the power to her brain.
Total silence fell for what was probably only three or four seconds but what felt like an hour. It was as if every single person left alive inside the building was holding his or her breath, exactly as the shocked desk clerk now seemed to be doing.
Then the screaming started from downstairs, the sound soft but clear. It built in intensity and was soon joined by the platinum blonde, whose brain seemed to have powered up again.
Edison stuck to his task. There was nothing he could do for the victims he was certain were strewn around the banquet room, but he couldn’t simply leave Allan Nesbitt without confirming the man’s death.
It didn’t take long. There was no pulse.
Edison took a deep breath and calmed his shaking hands.
Tried again.
Nesbitt was still dead. The young woman he had seen exiting this room had killed him.
There was nothing more to be done here.
Edison stood, wincing at the pain in his arthritic knees. He reached for the desk clerk’s elbow and began leading her out of the room.
He closed the self-locking door behind them and the clerk said, “But Mr. Nesbitt, he’s—”
“The police will want to know nothing’s been disturbed,” he said gently, and the woman looked at him wide-eyed and uncomprehending.
She turned for the elevators and Edison shook his head. “We’ll want to take the stairs,” he said. “We don’t know where the explosion occurred”—although he thought he did—“and we don’t know how much damage has been done. We don’t want to be trapped in the elevator if the power goes out.”
The woman continued to stare at him as if he had suddenly begun speaking in tongues, and Edison led her patiently to the doors at the far end of the hallway—the same doors Nesbitt’s killer went through, he thought.
He only hesitated a moment before pushing them open and beginning the long climb down to the lobby.
4
Tracie Tanner hated meeting CIA Director Aaron Stallings at his home. Hated everything about it, from the sheer size of his palatial house in the DC suburbs—just how does a career civil servant, even one as high up the food chain as Stallings, ever make enough money to afford all this?—to the arrogant, dismissive attitude the boss affected every time he spoke to her.
The most galling part for Tracie was the knowledge that, as CIA director, Stallings had the leeway to dispatch a tech team to Tracie’s apartment to install a secure phone line any time he wished. Within a matter of hours, this cloak-and-dagger bullshit could be dispensed with, and Tracie would have the capability of receiving instructions from her handler in a far easier and more efficient manner.
It was never going to happen, though. In an agency renowned around the world for Black Ops—ironically, what people thought the CIA was up to often went far beyond what they were actually doing—Tracie Tanner was, quite possibly, the blackest of Black Ops operatives, the most covert agent on the payroll.
Nobody at the agency—besides Stallings—was aware she had been rehired after successfully rescuing kidnapped Secretary of State J. Robert Humphries a few weeks ago. Nobody with any oversight over the agency—meaning the United States Congress—was aware she had been rehired, either.
Her handler was none other than Director Stallings himself. And Stallings was far too savvy to put his career at risk by discussing covert operations over a telephone line, secure or otherwise, when those discussions would take place with an off-the-books agent working directly under him.
CYA was the order of the day for government bureaucrats everywhere, but that truth was no clearer anywhere than inside the CIA. And no bureaucrat was better at covering his posterior than Stallings. His long career was ample proof of that fact.
So for the foreseeable future, the current scenario was unlikely to change, despite the fact that for Tracie, driving to a meeting with Stallings was like suffering through a root canal with no Novocain.
She doubted it was ever going to get any easier. But she had no choice than to put up with the aggravation, because it was either endure the distasteful CIA director or find a new job. He had made his feelings on that issue abundantly clear when he went against agency policy and rehired her after canning her for insubordination during the investigation into the Humphries kidnapping.
And, despite all it had cost her, she still loved her job.
She breathed deeply and knocked on the closed door to Aaron Stallings’s home office. He had told her on the phone to enter through his home’s unlocked front door and come directly to his office, which she had done.
Mrs. Stallings was nowhere in evidence. If she was home, she was upstairs, a situation for which Tracie was glad. It would have been difficult to make small talk with the wife of a man she detested—and who detested her in equal measure—without her disdain for him being obvious.
“Come in,” came the order. Tracie opened the door and stepped through, moving directly to the chair he had placed in front of his desk. She sat without waiting to be asked. She had played this game before.
“Director,” she said coolly, and for the first time, Stallings lifted his gaze from a mountain of paperwork covering his desk. Tracie had to admit, the man might be a distasteful worm, but he was a workaholic distasteful worm.
CIA Director Aaron Stallings—at least when Tracie was around—had the perpetual look of a bloodhound whose food bowl had been taken away. He was a large man, overweight, with fleshy jowls that had a tendency to jiggle when he talked, his features turned down in a semi-permanent scowl.
Again, at least when Tracie was around.
He stared at her for a moment and then surprised her by turning his attention to her hands. “Quite a nasty bruise on your knuckles,” he said, narrowing his eyes and looking at the back of her right hand.
“I’ll survive.”
“How did you get it?”
“I slipped in the shower.”
“Really. You wouldn’t care to reconsider that statement?”
“Nope.”
“It wouldn’t have had anything to do with an altercation outside the Congressional Steakhouse last night, would it? Because according to witnesses, a
petite young woman with flame-red hair, in the company of a very large black man, single-handedly laid out two young men without even breaking a sweat.”
“I’m sure I’m not the only redhead in the DC area.”
“The witnesses told authorities this redhead knew what she was doing.”
“Look,” Tracie said. “Hypothetically speaking, if I had been the woman involved, those two snot-nosed little punks would have had it coming. If I had been the woman involved, that beating would have happened only after they continually harassed a very nice man and then threatened me with bodily injury.”
“If,” Stallings said.
“That’s right, if. But let’s face it. I could never get reservations to the Congressional Steakhouse; it’s one of the toughest scores in Washington. So it had to have been some other gorgeous redhead.”
“Nobody said she was ‘gorgeous.’”
“That’s because it was dark out,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Anyway, I doubt you called me here just to discuss my…I mean, someone else’s…adventure last night.”
“No I didn’t,” Stallings agreed. “But before we get to that, let me just say this: be careful. Use a little discretion. Publicity is something you don’t want and we don’t need.”
“Understood.” Tracie wanted to be angry with the director, but in this case she couldn’t manage it. He was right. The first rule of covert ops was to stay under the radar. That was true in foreign countries and it was just as true here in the States.
In fact, given her situation, it was probably more true here. And she had come dangerously close to having her face splashed all over the news last night.
“Anyway,” Stallings continued, “were you too busy not kicking two racists’ asses last night to watch the news?”
“I saw the news. Which portion of it are you referring to?”
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 52