Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
Glancing up, she saw the figure, dressed in a plaid wool winter coat, sneakers, and a Nationals baseball cap. As he leaned over, she fired her handgun. His head snapped back out of sight.
She resumed her climb, keeping to the shadows as best she could. She caught a glimpse of him. He carried the sniper rifle he had used to kill Del Stoddart, a Savage 10FCP. His face was blackened, camouflaged Marine-style. Professional through and through. She fired again as she took the rungs three at a time, but her angle was bad, and she missed. Still, she must have wounded him because she was gaining on him.
He appeared again, closer this time. As she raised her gun to shoot, she caught a glimpse of his face. It was Bishop! He had hired Hoodie, but, clever as he was, he had had a backup plan, which, due to her intervention, he had had to implement. Now, despite her best efforts, Del Stoddart was dead. Having lost her chance to fire, she launched herself upward after him. She called after him, called him by name. He ignored her, heading across the roof. She aimed and squeezed off two more shots.
Seeing him vanish over the parapet, she redoubled her efforts and, soon thereafter, began to lever herself over it. Bishop sprang up from where he crouched and slammed his fist into her chest. She rocked backward, then fired again at point-blank range. Bishop went down and stayed down.
She knelt in front of him. His mouth was opening and closing like a landed fish. His eyes stared at her in disbelief. Blood drooled out of his mouth.
“Look at you,” Nona said. “Look what you’ve become.”
Bishop tried to answer her, but only a thick gurgle emerge from his mouth, along with clots of fresh blood. As he stared at her, his eyes glazed over.
Nona, watching him die, wanted to feel some satisfaction, but at the moment there seemed to be nothing left inside her. Turning away, she sat beside him with her back against the parapet. Hauling out her mobile seemed like a Herculean task. With palsied fingers, she called in. While she waited, she took off her jacket and ripped off a sleeve of her shirt.
As she began to apply this makeshift tourniquet she thought about the last time she had been up on a roof. She and Frankie were seventeen. It was a stifling summer night in New Orleans, when sad jazz, which could have been funeral music but wasn’t, wafted up from below, along with drunken shouts and crazy laughter. Now and again the crack of beer bottles against the sidewalk punctuated the night like fireworks.
She had come up to the rooftop, its thick tar warm as taffy, in order to be by herself. But she saw the tops of some shapes, lumpy and moving in the shadows of the water cistern. Picking her way silently forward, she saw Frankie with a young girl she would come to know as Nikki. Their bodies were coiled together like snakes, but the moment they noticed her, they sprang apart like repelled magnets.
“Nona!” Frankie exclaimed.
“Who the hell is that?” Nikki asked plaintively.
“My twin sister.”
“You never told me you had a sister.” Nikki scrambled up, buttoning her blouse. “What she doing spying on us?”
Nona’s mouth was dry. “I’m not spying.”
“Yeah, I’ll just bet.” Nikki strode past her. “You look like a fucking natural.” She slammed the metal fire door behind her and clattered down the stairs.
Brother and sister stared at each other. The frayed music welled up from the street, lurching as drunkenly as the laughter. A shouting match commenced, a bottle shattered, the music rose to a crescendo of volume. Finally, Frankie put his back against the parapet. “I’ve got a couple of cold Cokes here. One of ’em’s gonna go to waste.”
Grinning, Nona sat down next to him. He handed her a bottle, and she rolled it across her forehead before popping it open and taking a deep, satisfying swig.
“The thing of it is, Nona, you
are
a natural.”
“Shut up.” She took a longer swig, stared at her distorted reflection in the faceted glass bottle. “What, you like that girl?”
“I do,” Frankie admitted.
“She’s a slut.”
“Fuck, yeah,” Frankie said, and they both laughed in such perfect synchronicity it could have come from one throat.
Nona, brought back to the present by the hastening sirens, lifted her head and smiled into the night.
* * *
“T
HE EIGHTH
floor is in lockdown,” Reeder said to his team members as he pocketed his mobile phone. “One more hurdle to overcome.” He studied the architectural plans, then checked his wristwatch. “Mallory, it’s time for you to leave us.”
Mallory, who was dressed for her part, nodded and exited the room at the flyblown motor lodge near Bethesda that served as the group’s staging area.
Reeder heard the car start up and drive out of the motor lodge grounds. Pulling the curtain aside just enough to peer out, he saw the medical supplies truck parked outside. “Now climb into your uniforms,” he said. “In thirty minutes we begin the final assault.”
* * *
D
ENNIS
P
AULL
had a car with diplomatic plates standing by, and Jack transferred to it without incident. There was a man named Weaver in the car riding shotgun with Lorenzo, the driver.
“Good evening, Mr. McClure. Welcome to Rome,” Weaver said after he had made the introductions. “We have made all the necessary arrangements with immigration, so no worries there. Also, we know precisely where this villa is and will take you there now.”
“Who owns it?” Jack said as he settled himself in the backseat.
Weaver shrugged. “Cakra Holdings, whatever that is. We’re running checks through multiple channels, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
“Cakra Holdings is owned by the Syrian.”
“Good to know.” Producing a briefcase, Weaver swiveled around and handed it to Jack. Inside was a selection of handguns. Jack chose a 9mm Beretta. He checked that it was fully loaded. Lorenzo gave him two more magazines.
“Expecting a firefight?”
Weaver shrugged, accepting the briefcase back.
By this time, they had left the vicinity of Fiumicino and were on the ring road that encircled the city, on their way south.
“Anything you need to brief me on?” Weaver said.
“Yeah.” Jack stared out the window. As on the flight over, he was thinking of Annika and why she hadn’t returned his calls. “Don’t get in my way.”
* * *
J
UST AFTER
three
A.M.
, the shift at Bethesda changed. A pair of surgeons emerged from the operating theater on the eighth floor where they had been working on Henry Holt Carson. The pair was met by the duty nurse, who had just checked in.
Alli, who, along with Caro and Vera, had been asleep, was loitering in the hallway outside the situation room where the other young women were still dozing. She peeled her back off the wall and went down the hallway.
“Did he die?”
The head surgeon turned, puzzled. “How did you know?”
“What happened?”
“We had gone in prepared to do a double-bypass, but a third artery was completely blocked. While we were attempting to bypass it, Mr. Carson suffered from another myocardial infarction. This one was massive; he was gone before we had a chance.” Behind him, two nurses pushed Caron’s body out of the OR.
“He’s usually so fortunate,” Alli muttered.
The head surgeon gave her a quizzical look. “We did everything we could to keep him alive.”
Alli was visited by an image of Henry Holt Carson in a wheelchair, a drooling semi-vegetable. “He wouldn’t have wanted that.”
The surgeon nodded in the particular way of a funeral director. “You have my deepest condolences. He’ll be well taken care of by Ms. Mallory, the head duty nurse, until the funeral parlor comes for him. Will you make arrangements?”
Alli looked at him. “Why bother?” But for all her bravado, she knew she would.
* * *
R
EEDER BACKED
the medical supply truck into the loading bay at the rear of Bethesda Hospital. As expected, he was met by Whelan, the head of procurements, and a pair of beady-eyed Secret Service agents, who asked for and received IDs from everyone aboard the truck. There was no doubt that Whelan’s welcome of the crew gave them an excuse to perform only a cursory examination of the truck’s interior before moving on to other matters.
Reeder and his team, carrying a number of legitimate cartons of supplies, were led into the bowels of the hospital. Whelan was one of Reggie’s people on the inside, a man who did his job in sterling fashion while collecting his monthly stack of Benjamins against just such an occasion.
The drugs delivered to the pharmacy, Reeder’s people ripped open the remaining three cartons, each of which contained a backpack. Whelan turned his back as if they did not exist, and the team, slinging on their backpacks, got down to their real work. Down in the basement, while Fillin went to the electrical room, the other two followed Reeder to the bottom of the elevator shaft. He unlocked the access door, and they all slipped soundlessly inside. He was about to give the deployment signal when his mobile vibrated. Clawing it out of his pocket, he saw a text message from Mallory:
C on 8 fl, 2 rms dn from target.
Reeder smiled to himself. Well, how about that? They had been scouring the world for that traitorous bitch and she washes up at Bethesda. Two targets in the same place. It was his lucky day.
* * *
“W
HAT HAPPENED?
”
“A hit-and-run,” the Syrian said. “It sometimes happens in Rome, but only, I’m told, to tourists.”
Annika stared down at the body of her grandfather. She was very still. Iraj’s men stood back at the corners of the coroner’s cold room, which was windowless, metallic, bleak. One of his lieutenants had made inquiries, handed over packets of money to ensure that no one would be around when the boss arrived. Outside, unseen, the nighttime glow of the city turned the sky a livid purple-gray, as if Rome were in the midst of a thunderstorm.
“He must have stumbled crossing the street,” Iraj said. “It’s terribly dangerous here for an old man.”
“This isn’t possible.” Annika’s face was as white as chalk. “He can’t be dead. After all we have been through together, it’s just not possible.”
The Syrian put his arm around her. “I’m truly sorry, Annika. He was an invaluable ally. Frankly, I don’t know what I’ll do without him.”
“Neither do I.” Tears welled up.
B
ETHESDA HAD
a bank of three elevators. Reeder and his two men each went to a cable and, drawing on thick work gloves, began the dangerous process of climbing hand over hand up the parallel cables. Once or twice they were able to ride on the top of the cars as they rose from one floor to another, but for the most part they were fully engaged in the arduous task of ascending by hand to the eighth floor.
Twenty minutes after they had begun, they reached their goal. Before exiting through the service door, they donned gas masks and checked their sidearms. Then they drew small canisters out of their knapsacks. Reeder checked his wristwatch, counting down the seconds. Then he nodded to his team and, in perfect unison, they moved out.
* * *
T
HE VILLA
was lit up like an airport.
Weaver leaned forward, checking his .357 Magnum. “Looks like they’re expecting us.”
“If they’re being that vigilant,” Jack said, “we’ll give them something that meets their expectations.”
Weaver turned to face him. “Like what?”
Jack smiled and gave Lorenzo instructions. The driver nodded. It was very quiet—too late for birds, too cold for crickets or tree frogs. Fog lay pale and low, like a sleeping girl, wrapped in a ghostly cloak. Inside the villa walls, rows of pencil pines nodded their heads in unison. Outside, the deciduous trees spread bare-knuckled branches, grasping fingers, disfigured by pain and time.
Lorenzo motored slowly, with the headlights extinguished. At that moment, Jack felt his mobile pulse. He had a text from Paull:
Herr located.
He immediately deleted the text and pocketed the phone.
Several hundred yards on, Lorenzo pulled off the road and rolled the car to a stop.
“A little farther,” Jack said.
“Right here will be fine,” Lorenzo said, as he shot Weaver. Jack had just enough time to raise the Beretta before Lorenzo turned and squeezed the trigger of his handgun a second time.
Jack was slammed against the backseat, then his torso canted over as he was assailed by waves of vertigo, and he plummeted headlong into impenetrable blackness.
* * *
A
LLI WAS
in the toilet attached to the situation room when she heard Vera and Caro start to cough. Then her eyes began to water. She heard a flurry of shots being fired, then a kind of vibrating silence. She turned on the cold-water tap and, grabbing three towels, soaked them in water. When they were saturated, she tied one over her nose and mouth, then ran out. The tear gas was worse. Vera was already on the floor. Kneeling, Alli tied the second towel over Vera’s nose and mouth, then she did the same with Caro, who had been trying to crawl off the bed with the sheet over the bottom half of her face.
Alli, gun out, sprinted into the hallway. All the Secret Service agents were shot or coughing up a lung. Smoky gas was coming from the fire stairs; she’d get no help from the agents stationed there. She pulled the alarm lever on the wall, but nothing happened. Her cell was useless, as well—no signal. Grabbing a sidearm from the closest agent, she returned to the situation room, and wrapped Vera’s hand around the grips.
“Keep Caro safe till I get back,” she said in Vera’s ear.
When she returned to the hallway, she had just enough time to register figures moving when one of them took a shot at her. She ducked back, then, lying flat on the floor, eeled out and squeezed off two shots. The first threw the shooter back against the far wall, blood spurting from his chest. The second gunman aimed and fired at her, forcing her back inside the situation room.
“What’s happening?” Vera’s voice was thick, muffled by the wet towel.