“The thirty-year Château de Montifaud XO,” Winters said. “Two, please.”
“Very good, sir.”
The waiter disappeared through a doorway hidden in the golden walls. Bookcases of bound leather spines surrounded us, with a Greek-themed relief lining the twenty-foot ceiling and a palatial Persian carpet covering the floor. The private library could have been the set for a Jane Austen movie, or it could have been Mr. Darcy’s actual house. Most important, this library was rentable to members. Brad Winters and I were dining alone.
“It’s good to be back at the Travellers Club,” Winters said, running a cigar under his nose. The club had a strict no-smoking policy, but that too was rentable.
“Indeed,” I said, still slicing my rare filet mignon, although it was so red it barely needed the knife. I was still working on my glass of 2006 Les Forts de Latour, a Bordeaux red, but I couldn’t begrudge Winters the premature digestifs. He had pushed his steak away five minutes ago, barely touched. And the thirty-year Château de Montifaud cognac was impeccable.
From the outside, the Travellers Club looked like all of London’s most prestigious social clubs: unassuming. There were never any signs or other markings on these venerated two-hundred-year-old institutions. There was only a nineteenth-century building with an address: usually St James’s Square or Pall Mall. In this case, 106 Pall Mall, a five-minute walk to Buckingham Palace. Inside, as the library attested, the club was a time capsule of Victorian splendor.
“I’m sure you have questions about the meeting today, Tom,” Winters said, rolling a cigar in the flame of a wooden match. It was a Cuban. Nicaraguans were better, but Winters had never truly known cigars.
Finally, the invitation. I chewed slowly, laid my knife and fork carefully across my plate, and touched my lips with my cloth napkin. God, I was a million miles from the Tip Top and its rowdy crowd. I couldn’t help but wonder if Wildman was having a drink there for lunch right now.
“Who is Kabir?” I asked, starting at the beginning.
Winters laughed. “That’s Sir Basrami-Heatherington to you, Dr. Locke, a descendant of a long line of British-Indian bankers dating back to the British East India Company in the 1700s. Now a senior banker, although senior to what even I am unsure. One of the most powerful men in England, and possibly the world.”
“He who controls the purse strings,” I said.
“Oh, that bank controls much more than purse strings,” Winters said casually, still rolling his cigar. “He trades in power, not money. It’s not even technically a bank.”
The waiter returned with our digestifs. He looked at my plate, but I signaled that I was still working. It was the best meal I’d had in six months. I wasn’t going to waste a bite.
“Leave us, please,” Winters said, as he relit his cigar with a six-inch wooden match and puffed smoke toward the gilded ceiling. “We will ring you if we need assistance.” A small silver bell lay beside his snifter.
“Now,” Winters said, turning to me with his cigar, “to us.”
He raised his cognac. I raised my wine.
“You put together the nuclear deal. Why?”
“Because it was inevitable. It was the wisest move for the Saudis, or more specifically for an ambitious prince with the right connections. I saw that Abdulaziz was going to reach that conclusion himself, and soon, so I gave him a push.”
“How?”
“We infiltrated his organization, had a trusted aide whisper the idea in his ear. I have been close to Abdulaziz for years, his most trusted outside contact. Once he made the decision, he would ask for my help. We knew he would need outside assistance structuring the finances, help on the delivery, and—most of all—utmost secrecy, since he was concealing this from his own government. That is one of the primary services I sell: plausible deniability.”
“How much did it cost?”
“In this case, one billion dollars. Ten percent of the deal price.”
I swallowed hard on the number, but Winters ignored it. He was puffing hard on his cigar to get the ember started. Eventually, he shook out another match.
“How did you slip that much through the international monitors?”
“Kabir can manipulate SWIFT.” The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, is the brain stem of international banking. It’s the conduit big banks use to wire money to each other.
“SWIFT is airtight. Impossible to hack or manipulate.”
“Nothing is impossible to hack or manipulate. We’ve done it. Besides, money is fungible. There are far more precious things.”
“Like nuclear weapons?”
“Precisely.”
“But the deal went sideways. The Paris convoy was hit, and the nuclear weapons controller stolen. Only Khalid knows where it’s hid, and I assume he’s dead now.”
“You’re right about Khalid being dead. Not much else.”
He waited for me to pick through the clues. If Paris wasn’t the mysterious Khalid, then who else had the knowledge and the skill for such a high profile . . .
“You,” I whispered. “You stole the briefcase in Paris.”
Winters grinned. “Yes, an Apollo team ambushed the Paris convoy. I have the briefcase.”
“And you framed Khalid for it, and I assume had Mishaal murdered.”
“Just to dust my tracks.”
“But the Istanbul hit didn’t go as planned.”
“No. Farhan escaped before we could snatch him and his assets.”
“So you hired me to find him.”
“Among others. But yes, I saw the chance to kill two birds, as they say: get the key and get you back in the game.”
I hated Brad Winters right then. For the smooth ease with which he made the pieces fit together. For the assumptions he was making about me. I hated him even more because they seemed true. I had been slumming it in Iraq, and for what? Saving one life while a hundred more are killed. Trying to get in bed with a bartender. Hoarding a warehouse full of cheap rugs. My efforts were pitiful.
But worst of all, I hated Winters because he reminded me of myself.
“So now you have the briefcase that activates the nuclear weapons, and the key card that activates the briefcase. But you don’t have the weapons.”
Winters held up a satellite phone. It was the one I had taken off Farhan in Sinjar. He had confiscated it from me at Camp Speicher. “In a few hours, the captain of the freighter will text this phone the exact location and time of the dropoff. Apollo teams are prepositioned, awaiting my orders.”
Now that I thought about it, the phone hadn’t been confiscated. Everything else I owned had, but Winters had pointedly asked me to give it to him. He was already thinking of this moment. He wanted me to realize that I was the one who had given him the vital missing piece. How little I had always understood. How easy it had always been to manipulate me, even now.
“Why do you need nuclear weapons?”
“Thomas,” he said, shaking his head like he was so disappointed. He took a puff on his cigar, for dramatic effect. Brad Winters lived for the dramatic effect.
Well, that and the power to control the world.
“Go to the window,” he said.
I stood up and walked to the windows. They overlooked Waterloo Gardens, catty-corner to the Duke of York Column. It was a leafy sanctuary available only to members of Pall Mall’s social clubs.
“What do you see?”
I scanned carefully, trying to puzzle out what he was after. It had stopped raining, but only just, so hardly anyone was out. Two gentlemen smoking cigars with tumblers in hand under a canopy, a servant carrying drinks, an elderly couple leaning on each other as they walked.
Farhan and Marhaz.
They sat on a bench beneath an ancient oak tree, Farhan with a trimmed beard, Marhaz with her nine-month belly protruding beyond her shirt.
“Let me share with you some wisdom,” Winters said, taking a drag on his cigar. “Loyalty is key, but sentiment is not loyalty. Sentiment kills.”
I stared at Farhan and Marhaz. He touched her belly.
“There can be no loose ends.”
Winters was right, of course. If his father found out Prince Farhan was alive, even ten years from now, the whole careful plan would collapse. But if he never discovered the deception . . .
That was when I realized, too late, that the merciful thing would have been to run, to leave the young couple in Sinjar to their own fate. I was death. I was the crushing power of the state. The final test of my loyalty, of my acceptance back into Winters’s family, would be killing Farhan, Marhaz, and their baby girl. But even if I didn’t do it, someone else would.
“Kill the sentimentality, Thomas,” Winters hissed. “Kill the weakness.”
I stabbed him. I picked up the steak knife and jammed it through his hand, cracking through his bones until the blade lodged in the leather upholstery and wood underneath. Before he could scream, I punched his larynx with a spear hand. His other hand reflexively went to his throat for protection, clearing my way to his torso. I dropped to one knee, pounding his solar plexus with a palm heel strike. He crumbled forward, making an exhalation-gasping sound. As he fell, I maneuvered behind him, wrapping my right arm around his throat in a vise grip and locking it in with my left arm, Marine style, and choked him out. His body flailed then went limp. I released him, unconscious, back into his overstuffed chair.
I relieved him of the satellite phone, his watch, and his cash. I straightened his tie and leaned his head against the chair’s upholstered wingback, as if he was asleep. I pulled an antique book off the shelf and laid it across his belly, as if he were reading it. I looked at the title: The Golden Woof: A Story of Two Girls’ Lives. Kinky. Carefully, I placed his left hand on the cover and tucked the right under the pages, hiding his injury.
“Sir, is everything satisfactory?” the servant asked, as I pushed through the golden door into the hallway.
“Let the gentleman rest,” I said. “He has had a stressful day. I am going to make a phone call outside.” I showed him the sat phone for effect. “Please don’t disturb him until I return.”
“Very well, sir,” said the footman, and he disappeared.
I saw Farhan and Marhaz as soon as I exited the club’s basement entrance to the garden. They were holding hands on a wooden bench, recessed in the shadows. Farhan’s beard made him stand out in the damp lushness of Waterloo Gardens, and the elderly English couple were eyeing him suspiciously.
“Come with me,” I said to them, barely slowing down. I saw Farhan start to speak, but Marhaz rose slowly to her feet, her hands on her belly, stopping his objections.
We walked swiftly across the garden to the far exit, as I contemplated my next move. I hailed a cab as soon as we hit the street, pushing Marhaz and Farhan in before me.
“The Harley Street Clinic,” I told the cabby.
“Aye sir.”
I stared out the window, watching the gardens recede. Farhan and Marhaz must have been in shock, because we had gone three blocks before they asked what I was doing.
“We’re going to the best private hospital in London,” I said. “You’re going to tell them you are having complications with your pregnancy. You are going to stay there—both of you—while they do tests. You understand that, Farhan? You are not to leave the hospital room. Not even for a sandwich.”
“Why?”
“Even if they say the tests are fine, Marhaz, and advise you to go home, you stay. Do you understand? You stay until you have the baby.”
“Winters?” Farhan asked. He knew a snake when he met one. Smart man.
I nodded. Then I smiled. “I stabbed the bastard through the hand.”
Farhan laughed.
“Anything else?” Marhaz interrupted. She was a doer. I liked that about her.
“Yes,” I said, turning to Farhan. “Call your father. Tell him what’s happened. All of it.”
“No—” Farhan said immediately, but Marhaz was there again, a hand on his elbow.
“Do we have to?” she asked.
I nodded. “He’ll forgive you,” I said, and I meant it, or at least hoped it, because I didn’t know Prince Abdulaziz. “He’ll be happy to have you back, because when you tell him what happened, he’ll have someone else to hate.”
We were coming to a busy intersection, with buildings along both sides of the road. Pedestrians flooded into the street, a dozen anonymous people hurrying God knows where, and God alone cares.
“What about you?” Marhaz asked.
“I’m walking,” I said, opening the taxi door and stepping out into the traffic. I didn’t look back. I just walked. There were cameras on every corner, security monitors on every inch of sidewalk, but I wasn’t worried. Winters would never report me to the police. And by the time he had spun up Apollo Outcomes to find me, I’d be gone. I wasn’t sure where, actually. I didn’t have a plan. But I felt better than I’d felt in six weeks, six months, maybe even six years. The divine sounds of Fauré’s Requiem filled my soul. The piece was a death mass that ended in a musical ascension, the sinner rising into heaven and God’s merciful grace.