Conference call from Brussels, Belgium
“Hyperion here. Is there news about the operation, Cronus?”
“This is Atlas.”
“Prometheus. I’m on.”
“Themis. Christ, what an ungodly hour!”
“Ocean here. Let’s have it, Cronus.”
“Very good. Then we’re all assembled. This is Cronus. Atlas asked to be brought up-to-date. I should think you can blame him for the invigorating hour. The answer is that we’ve passed successfully through this critical stage. Sansborough was attacked a second time. Mac was there and witnessed it. She handled herself well. Her tradecraft is adequate for what we need. Afterward, he made contact. She’s agreed to help….”
Aloft, en route to Paris
The jet was a Gulfstream V, debugged and fully fueled, the luxury aircraft of choice for global high rollers. The eight passenger seats were individual chairs that swiveled, each equipped with a multichannel telephone and an outlet for data services via satellite. Of course, there was a powerful onboard PC with wireless Internet connections, too, in a communications center aft. Since the pilot and copilot were busy in the cockpit, Liz and Mac had the rest of the sleek, fast jet to themselves.
At the miniature bar, Mac made a martini in a tall-stemmed glass and poured himself a Red Tail ale. “Belvedere vodka, just as you requested,” he announced, pleased with himself. He gave it to her and settled into the chair beside hers, his hand wrapped around his beer glass. His sigh had the sound of relief in it.
She drank, grateful for the good alcohol and the simple concoction. It would be a long journey, close to eleven hours from takeoff to touchdown, although they were going over the North Pole, the fastest route. The pilot figured they would arrive in Paris no later than 2:55 P.M. local time, perhaps earlier, depending on conditions.
Mac was looking at her. “You’re going to be a big help. You’ll buy us time.”
She was surprised by his earnestness. There was something about him she liked. Maybe it was all that experience that seemed to have tainted him in his own eyes but made him more palatable in hers. Still, he worked for Langley, was a veteran of that duplicitous world. In fact, she realized suddenly as she drank again that something he had said earlier was not quite right…did not fit in with what she knew. But hard as she concentrated, she could not place what it could have been and when he had said it.
Then it was pushed from her mind by another disquieting thought. “What makes you think Sarah’s still alive?”
“If they’ve killed her, there’s a good chance we’d have heard. Corpses have a way of surfacing.” He glanced at her and then away. “You’re right. We don’t know. But we’re going to act as if she’s alive until we damn well find out different. Look at it this way: Alive, they’re working to keep the kidnapping buttoned down, too. That’d help account for the utter silence in the underground.”
“Of course, even if you deliver the files, the odds are they’ll kill her.”
He shrugged and stared down into his ale. “We’ve got to work as if she’s alive and as if the Carnivore kept files.”
“Good.”
Liz tried to settle back, to relax, but her mind kept fixing first on Sarah and Asher, and then on her responsibility for the trouble they were in now. Without a second of suspicion, she had jumped at the Aylesworth Foundation’s invitation to apply. It had arrived less than a week after Mellencamp’s death. That had launched her sham existence, and she never questioned the coincidence. It was her fault, her weakness, because she had so desperately wanted to be free of her past and find some way to live in an unfamiliar world. Perhaps even to be happy. Now Sarah and Asher were paying.
Mac pushed his table aside and stood up and reached into the overhead bin. “I’ve got something for you.”
He lifted down a metal lockbox, tapped a numerical code, and removed a Sig Sauer like his, 9-mm and compact, much favored by U.S. intelligence operatives. A beautiful weapon, or so she would have thought back when a lethal machine was something she could call beautiful.
He held it out. “It’s untraceable. I was going to bring your Walther—”
Her brows raised. She looked down at the pistol without touching it and then up at him again. “On top of everything else, you cracked my safe?”
“Couldn’t find your gun anywhere else. You may need a weapon. Since I was already there, I figured I’d bring yours. But then I realized it could be used to identify you if anything happened in Paris, God forbid. That wouldn’t be good for Sarah either. So I had Langley arrange for something untraceable to be waiting for us at the plane. This is it.”
“Where’s my Walther?”
“I left it in your glove compartment.”
She sighed. “I don’t want a gun.”
“You almost got killed twice today. Don’t be an idiot.”
“Idiocy is thinking a gun can actually solve problems.”
“In the right hands, a gun can save lives.”
“That’s a tempting appeal,” she told him soberly. “If violence is for something good, then it’s good. If it’s for something bad, then it’s bad. That’s what Mussolini thought—‘There’s a violence that’s moral, and a violence that’s immoral.’ And we know how he turned that philosophy into dictatorship and a partnership with Hitler. The problem is, violence isn’t some kind of impartial raw material like butter or steel. It’s not ethically and politically neutral. Just because someone thinks a cause is worthy, that doesn’t mean the violence that’s ‘necessary’ for the cause is worthy.”
He frowned. “Let me get this straight. All violence is bad. Period.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“Even when it’s used to stop worse violence? Mob violence, despots, genocide?”
“Look, the only reason the world has such a problem with violence is because we let it. We romanticize it by creating myths about killers like Bonnie and Clyde. We institutionalize it by forming military and police forces and intelligence agencies. You can see this mythologizing in all kinds of small ways. One of the saddest examples I found was the dying soldiers in Vietnam who used to ask medics for a last cigarette, although they’d never smoked. They were reenacting heroic scenes they’d heard about happening in World War Two and seen in Hollywood movies. Romanticizing their own deaths. Heartbreaking.”
“Thank you, Professor Sansborough.”
“It’s unimportant to me whether you think I’m reality-challenged. I’m not going to carry a gun. I know about violence. Been there, done that. Now I’m a scholar in the subject, too. I’ll be damned if I perpetuate it.”
He shrugged. “It’s your funeral. Literally.”
He studied her, but when her expression did not relent, he returned the Sig Sauer to the lockbox. The jet gave a shudder and small bounce as he pulled out a Nokia cell.
“This can’t kill anyone.” He held out the phone.
She took it. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s got special scrambler capacity hard-wired into it, and no numbers are ever recorded. I have one just like it. I’ll be watching you in Paris, following whenever possible in case you run into trouble. If you won’t carry a gun, you’ll make my job harder, but my shoulders are broad. Since it’d be stupid to be seen together, we’ll have our secure cells to stay in touch.”
“I don’t expect you’ll have to rescue me. I was a pretty fair operative in my time. But you’re right: There may be other reasons to talk. What’s your number?”
He told her, and she memorized it. She would not program it into the phone, in case it fell into someone else’s hands.
“One last thing,” he said. “Asher told us you and Sarah hadn’t seen each other in several months. Did you know she’d cut her hair?”
“No.”
He handed her color photos that had been printed off a computer. In the first, Asher and Sarah were smiling widely, their arms wrapped around each other, standing ankle-deep in surf on a golden beach. In the next, they were chasing down the sandy shore, and in the third, Asher was tossing her into the ocean. Their delight in each other shone in each picture. A lump formed in Liz’s throat.
“These give you different angles of her hair,” he continued. “Think you can duplicate the cut?” He held out scissors.
She took the scissors. “Where’d you get the photos? From their house?” They lived in Malibu, about seventy miles south of Santa Barbara. Close, but distant enough that she and Sarah had not seen each other as often as they had intended.
He nodded. “One of my people broke in. They sent the pictures digitally.”
“Figures.”
To the Company, nothing was sacred, even the Constitution. One director once explained to Congress that the agency could not always honor it. That was another problem with violent men and institutions: They tended to destroy what they were created to preserve, the shell more important than the substance.
She headed back to the bathroom, where there was a mirror and good lighting.
Santa Barbara, California
It was nearly ten P.M., and Kirk Tedesco was angry, worried, and drunk as he sped toward home in his Mustang convertible. Where was Liz? They’d had a date, but she had disappeared.
After he and the dean finished their consultation in the garden, he looked everywhere. She was too damn skittish, always had been. He had not admitted to the dean that she thought their relationship was more about friendship than sex, and the sex was far from frequent enough. When he discovered her car was gone, he called her house, but only her answering machine responded. With luck, she was waiting at his condo.
Disgusted, he drank three stiff bourbons, a big improvement over the watered-down affairs he had been nursing all night. Terrible to disrespect Jack Daniel’s that way. Still angry, he had stumbled out of the dean’s house to his Mustang, lowered the convertible top, and, with a burst of acceleration from the big V-8 engine, took off down the dark foothill street.
Now he was cruising the 101, heading south to his beach place near Summerland. Traffic was light. More cars were going in his direction than north, which was the way it usually was at this hour. People were heading home to L.A., or planning to get there in time for a few hours of hotel sleep before morning meetings.
He was just thinking about that when he realized he had a faithful follower. He liked that—another driver who wanted to go the same speed as he. Both on cruise control, each watching for the Highway Patrol. The other car looked like an SUV, because its headlights were high. He glanced at his speedometer. He was locked in at seventy-eight miles an hour, just where he wanted to be, and so apparently was the other guy.
The wind whistled past, a warm night wind that tasted of the Pacific. The moon was shining out on the ocean, casting a silver funnel across the dark water and fading at the edges into gray. He liked that, too. Nothing should be black and white. It was too damn dull. He turned on KCLU, his favorite jazz station. But instead of music, a National Public Radio report was on, so he tried KLTE, his favorite rock station. Ah, yes. That was more like it.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in time to Head Shear and again checked his rearview mirror. He did a double take. The SUV’s headlights were closing in, bombarding his car with light. There was something unnerving about his follower—not just the sudden blazing speed but also the headlights, which were so close and high now that they seemed predatory.
He touched his accelerator, pushing out. As he passed eighty-five miles an hour, he checked his rearview mirror again. The SUV was even closer. Unbelievable. What in God’s name was the guy smoking?
He forced himself to sober up, or at least to feel more sober. There was no traffic here as they climbed the long hill that would dip down into Summerland. Off to his right, the ocean shone quietly in the moonlight. With a rush of air, he moved his car out of the left lane and into the right. He did not bother to signal, and he did not slow down. Let the bastard pass at supersonic speed.
But the SUV did not pass; it followed him into the slower lane. Kirk’s heart thundered, and his mouth went dry. Almost paralyzed, he stared into his rearview mirror as the headlights loomed closer over his open Mustang, until with an abrupt motion the SUV bashed his car’s tail.
Kirk jerked and yelled. He slammed the accelerator and tried to move left, but the SUV swung around and paced him, cutting him off. He had been too slow.
As he shook his head, trying to clear the alcohol, the SUV abruptly crashed sideways into his convertible. Bellowing with outrage, he fought to control the steering wheel, but it ripped itself from his grasp.
Terror filled him. As the car hurtled through the guardrail, he realized he was going to die. Screaming his lungs out, he gripped the steering wheel as the Mustang shot over the high hill and crashed across the railroad track and down through chaparral, small boulders, and native oaks. One collision after another hurled him back and forth against his seat belt. As the car flew over a final precipice and nose-dived toward the shadowy shoreline, he let out one last piercing shriek. He felt one more moment of blinding impact, and then nothing.