Washington, D.C.
Helene Reichmann waited for the maid to pour coffee. Afternoon sunlight glittered off the rings on her fingers as she added artificial sweetener to her cup. Her hands were well manicured, but despite all of her efforts they betrayed her age. She was seventy-one, although with cosmetic surgery and a rigorous exercise regime, most people thought she was in her midfifties.
After she had sipped her way through the first cup of coffee, she poured a second cup, picked up the television remote and selected a news channel.
A terrorist action in the Middle East led the news, followed by a breaking story about a local murder. Her interest sharpened as images flashed across the screen. Hot coffee scalded her fingers.
Normally it was the international news that most interested her, particularly the complicated weave of politics, greed and madness that drove various terrorist factions. Ever since she was very young she had been fascinated by the reasoning behind violence, the murky layers of anger and ideology. Invariably, there was one motivating factor: greed.
It was a motivation she understood very well. From the icy port of Lubeck and the ramshackle collection of tin huts Marco Chavez had called a refuge to the well-ordered opulence of her husband’s mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, the lesson had been hammered home. Money was power. It changed lives, altered destinies and gave one the ability to create the future.
She set the cup down, barely registering the dark droplets that had spattered the expensive fabric of her cream suit.
Paul Seaton was dead.
The back of her neck crawled as the story segued into a brief biography of Seaton. Robert Onslow, another cabal member, had died several days ago of a heart attack. His death had been a surprise. He had been fit and healthy and hadn’t had any previous record of heart problems, but he had been seventy-five. She hadn’t gone to the funeral; nor, to her knowledge, had Paul or the other two surviving members of the upper echelon of the cabal, Stephen Ritter and Alex Parker. To do so would be to court media attention and discovery, and it went against the agreed code.
As always, she had made sure the code was adhered to by sending one of her people along to surveil the event and provide a list of the participants. Sometimes the finality of death stirred up old allegiances and loyalties and, with the increasing age of the ruling members of the cabal, she was ever vigilant.
There was no ambiguity attached to Seaton’s death: it was murder. A .38 caliber bullet in the chest, another in the head. According to the report, the killing of the reclusive media magnate was brutal and senseless. No evidence of theft had been found, although Seaton’s desk had been rifled through, so it was possible something of value had been stolen before the killer had exited the house.
With a jerky movement, she switched the television off and walked out into the hall. Mail and newspapers she hadn’t yet had time to peruse were neatly stacked on a mahogany side table. She picked up the Post. Her gaze was caught by an advertisement on the front page, and any idea that two deaths within a week could be a coincidence dissolved.
She stared at the advertisement for a photographic service specializing in restoring old and damaged films—a cipher that belonged to another place and another time. Although the World War II cipher once used by German Intelligence had been used since. During a seven-year window when the cabal had first established itself in the States, before they had cut their umbilical cord to Chavez, they had used it to coordinate the trafficking of drugs and weapons with the cartel.
Discarding the Post, she picked up the Times. The advertisement was also featured on the front page. She studied the seemingly random arrangement of numbers and letters within the body of the advertisement. The first was different from the second. Lopez, in his arrogance, was communicating with her, but until she could find the key—
The sound of a voice jerked her head up.
She stared blankly at her personal assistant. Her driver was parked out front, waiting. She had appointments, meetings to attend, a four-o’clock briefing on the upcoming OPEC summit followed by a press conference. “Thank you.”
Her voice sounded distant and hollow, but it was reassuringly precise. The facade she so effortlessly maintained was still in place.
She skimmed the advertisements again as she strode to her suite and changed. She hadn’t made a mistake. Lopez had murdered Seaton and placed the ads on the front page of two major daily papers, where she couldn’t miss them. The lead time for inserting advertisements was usually several days before publication, which meant the murder had been planned and precisely timed to coincide with the advertisements.
For the first time since the book had been stolen in Cancun, raw panic squeezed at her chest. The security leak that Taylor Jones had represented was irrelevant. Lopez had the book. He wanted her to know how much power he had over the cabal.
She had always suspected that Marco Chavez had set her up in Cancun. She had searched for years, and hidden the fact that the book had been stolen. Admitting the loss would have created an unprecedented situation, one that Ritter, her second in command, wouldn’t have hesitated to exploit. He would have demanded her execution.
Over the years, when no blackmail attempt had been made, the fear that the book had been stolen by Chavez had subsided. Gradually, she had come to believe that the book had been discarded along with the rest of the contents of her bag and had probably ended up at the bottom of a landfill.
Now the murders and the coded advertisement confirmed that her first instincts had been correct. Marco had outmaneuvered her. He had had the book all along.
Now Lopez was exacting his revenge by killing the cabal members, one by one.
Two of the five upper echelon had died the past week, both killed by Lopez, leaving herself, Ritter and Alex Parker. She could tell the remaining two cabal members, which would buy them time to get to safety, but if she did that she would have to admit that she had lost the book and hidden that fact from them. That she had thrown the entire upper echelon of the cabal to the wolves in order to preserve herself.
In a way, she decided, Lopez was solving her problems for her.
From the moment she had lost the book, the cabal, an organization that in recent times had become increasingly unstable, had become a threat to her. The threat could no longer be condoned.
The cabal was finished, but she would survive.
Lopez thought he held all the cards, but she held the most important one.
She knew who he was going to kill next.
She joined her assistant on the front steps. Outside, the day was sunny and warm, but the air had a crisp bite. In contrast to the lush, overblown display of spring, the roses, grouped in a formal arrangement around the front portico, were skeletal and barbed.
Her driver opened the rear door of the waiting limousine. “Where to this afternoon, Madame Ambassador?”
“The White House.”