98

Alcatraz

Jason was putting the final touches on the banquet table.

“Melissa!”

He glanced over his shoulder. The head of catering was staring at him. He pitched his voice high. “Yes?”

“Make sure her chamomile tea is hot,” the woman said. “They said she’ll want it piping, and she needs it now, before she starts speaking.”

Jason nodded. “You got it.”

A screech of feedback outside the white catering tent indicated Hayes was just about to begin. Everything was happening exactly on schedule, following to the letter the plan that had been put into place one year earlier. Geppetto would have retrieved his gun from underneath the toilet bowl of the third stall men’s room, where it had been taped. The gun had never been fired, the bullets specially constructed so they carried no scent. The dogs that had swept the island would not have discovered it.

Clancy Johnson would be in position.

The killers were three deep: If one failed, the next would step up.

Gina Hayes’s life was no longer hers.

Jason was the first player up in the three-man killing team.

He began to prepare Senator Hayes’s tea. With specially gloved hands, he dabbed the Polonium 210, a radioactive poison 250,000 times stronger than cyanide, into three of the teacups. It would be a gruesome death drawn out over several days as Hayes was poisoned from the inside out, her organs failing, skin splitting and weeping, her hair shedding in clumps, vomiting when she wasn’t shitting her brains out. The poison was a favorite of assassins as it was undetectable, easy to smuggle, untreatable, and didn’t begin working until well after the killer had left the scene.

The ensuing chaos, particularly if Gina Hayes was elected president tomorrow, would turn the country, if not the world, upside down.

Chaos was the ripest soil for the Hermitage’s seed.

Finally, Jason would be good enough.