FORTY-EIGHT

“Jesus Christ, mister, are you okay?”

Monk heard the voice as though it came from a long way off, above the tremendous din in his head. Wedged between the passenger seat and the floor of the Saab, he managed to turn onto his back. Now he could see the dirty underside of the truck.

“What happened?” he yelled. “What the hell happened?”

“You went right under the lift gate!” the same voice hollered. A man’s voice. “Right underneath the truck!”

“It’s a miracle you’re alive!” A woman’s voice this time.

Now Monk remembered.

Just before impact he’d somehow hurled himself to the floor of the car.

Then he realized the top was gone … the entire top half of the Saab was gone. The truck had peeled it away like opening a can of sardines.

But he was alive.

As a matter of fact, he wasn’t even scratched.

He pushed himself up and looked to his right, toward the voices.

“What are you doing?” a woman said. “You’ve got to wait for the paramedics.” Now Monk could hear the whoop of an approaching siren. “You could be bleeding inside. You can’t move until they check you out.”

“I’m not hurt. Help me out of here. Pull the door open and get me the hell out of here.”

Monk heard a grinding screech as they jerked the passenger door open. He crawled through it, then out from under the truck. A crowd had gathered, faces staring. Monk turned back to the Saab. Christ, he thought. He’d never heard of anything like this. Even if the automatic choke was completely broken, it should have released long before this happened.

He turned back toward the car, suddenly needing to see for himself.

With the Saab wedged under the truck like that, he couldn’t open the hood, so he’d have to go underneath. He bent over and crab-walked under the truck, then dropped to his knees next to the right front tire of the Saab. He could hear a siren getting louder, then stopping somewhere beyond the crowd. The paramedics were here, and they’d grab him before he got a chance to look. He dropped to the ground and scooted under the car, straining to check out the throttle linkage in the semidarkness. His eyes opened wide when he saw what had been done.

It was close, but Monk got away before the paramedics could stop him.

He was around the corner and into a taxi before they knew it.

Now, half a block from the trolley barn, he reached for his cell phone, then stared at it. The phone was turned off. Damn it, when had he done that? He hit the power button and saw that he had voice mail. Good, he thought. Lisa had finally come to her senses.

But it wasn’t Lisa.

It was Eleanor DeWitt’s voice, and she sounded terrified.

“Christ, Puller!” she whispered, just loudly enough for him to hear. “I think there’s someone here! Someone trying to break into my apartment! You’ve got to help me! Oh God, Puller, how soon can you get here?”

Monk held on to the phone as the cab arrived at the barn, as he threw a twenty-dollar bill at the driver. He didn’t wait for his change before sprinting to the door, opening it, and dashing into the garage. He took the Ferrari. Kendall Jefferson would kill him, but Jefferson could get in line. The flaming red Enzo could do two hundred miles an hour, easy. The only thing in his way would be the traffic.

He punched Eleanor’s phone number as he waited for the gate to lift out of the way, but there was no answer. He threw the phone aside. Shit. What had he done to her? How could he have let her down this way?

The gate finally rose high enough for the low-slung Ferrari. Monk shot under it and into the street. He turned left toward GW University, his foot dancing on the accelerator pedal as he looked for holes in the traffic.

She was dead when he got there.

The door was standing open, and in her office off the living room, Eleanor was lying on her left side next to her overturned wheelchair. A crusty brown hole bisected her forehead, a single long drip of dried blood extended to her left ear.

Monk backed up through the door and grabbed for his gun before realizing he was being foolish. The killer was long gone. Monk went through the door again and moved directly to her body. “Oh, Eleanor,” he said, then looked away. When his eyes returned to her, he felt an icy weight in his stomach. He forced himself to look at her far longer than he wanted to. An image formed in his mind, the face of a billionaire. His gaze swept the room. It was untouched, and that was not good. It meant that Eleanor had put the pictures she’d downloaded for him out in plain sight, that Sung Kim hadn’t had to search for them at all.

Monk turned suddenly and left the room, strode directly to the front door and through it. By the time he reached the Ferrari his body was quivering with fury and remorse. There was only one thing he could do for Eleanor now. There was only one thing he could do for himself.

In her home in McLean—in the bedroom she’d converted into a home office—Bethany Randall sat at the desk under the window, staring into the backyard before picking up the phone and dialing quickly.

“FBI,” a woman’s voice said. “How may I direct your call?”

Bethany told her, and a moment later a second voice came on the line.

“This is Agent Sands.”

“It’s Bethany Randall.” She waited for a response, but there wasn’t one. “I think we better talk.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you, not anymore. Not since Puller made his choice.”

“I’m not talking about Monk.”

Silence. Sung Kim gave Lisa a few seconds before continuing.

“I have videotape. You thought you were safely hidden in my yard, but the security camera caught your whole act.”

“Videotape?” Lisa paused. “Should I have some idea what you’re talking about?”

“Another question like that and I hang up. Do you understand me?”

Seconds ticked by.

“What do you want?”

“To talk to you, Lisa, that’s all. To try to work this out between ourselves before it gets any worse.”

“I told you I have nothing to say.”

“Well, I won’t keep you any longer then. I’ll let you go back to work while I take this up with your boss instead.”

This time the silence was twice as long.

“Where?” Lisa finally responded. “Where can we meet?”

Bethany told her, then hung up the phone, sat back and gazed out the window into the backyard she’d grown to love. A few moments later she opened the right-hand desk drawer and pulled out her contact-lens case. She set it on the desk and opened it up, then took her time slipping the brown lenses over her eyes. From a deeper drawer she pulled out her long brown wig. She would put it on in the bathroom, after she’d pinned her hair to the top of her head and fastened the skullcap into place.

Then she opened the middle drawer and pulled it all the way out to the stops. She slid open a narrow compartment hidden in the rear wall of the drawer. Reaching through, she pushed her one-time pad aside to get to the cell phone. She couldn’t add Lisa Sands—couldn’t add a second FBI agent to her mission—without talking to Pyongyang. It was dangerous to risk another call, but she had no choice.