Gaudet worked fast. Weissman had loaded the CD onto the computer and had been uploading it to a remote site. By shutting down the computer he halted the information transfer—whether in time or not, he couldn’t be sure. Nor could he know whether a trained scientist might have learned anything significant from the contents of the CD.
Other than killing the man, there was no immediately available cure for the fact that the good doctor would remember that he had been attacked. There were several ways to create an accidental death scenario, all made possible by the supplies in Gaudet’s briefcase. None would be foolproof, but each would create confusion and doubt. First he checked the wallet. No medical notice cards.
Opening Weissman’s shirt, he was delighted to find a surgical scar. Quickly he checked the lower leg and found two more telltale scars.
He punched a button on his cell. Trotsky answered.
“Screw-up. It’s not Carl Fielding, it’s John Weissman. But we’re in luck. He’s got bypass scars.”
“I’ll make the call. No problem.”
“It’ll look like a setup if you change the name.”
“Use another girl. Simone.”
Gaudet scribbled down the new number and hung up.
He went through Weissman’s briefcase and found a small, unopened bottle of nitroglycerin tablets. Lucky again. Gaudet had them in his briefcase for such eventualities, but it was much better if the victim actually carried them.
He took an envelope with one Viagra and put it in Weissman’s pocket. From his shirt pocket he removed two paper coasters, each with a number written on it. He used the coaster with an A in the corner. He slipped it into Weissman’s wallet. Slapping Weissman about the face, he went to work waking him.
“Come on, John. John. I’m a doctor,” he said in his accented French. The voice displayed the concerned warmth of a physician. As the professor began to regain consciousness, Gaudet popped a Viagra in his mouth.
“Chew and swallow, John. You’ve had a little heart problem—this pill will help. Chew and swallow.”
John made a halfhearted effort at chewing.
“Swallow, John.”
John swallowed. Then he chewed a little more.
“Keep chewing, John.”
Next Gaudet took a syringe containing a gel form of concentrated Viagra solution and put it directly into Gaudet’s nostrils.
He popped two nitroglycerin tablets under John’s tongue. “More pills, John. These will help.”
As he worked, the bug under May’s desk carried a new sound into his earpiece: heavy boots thumping the floor; grunts and words spoken in Spanish. Two men. They were right on time.
Gaudet had worked hard and carefully to set this up. These men believed they had been hired by a Lebanese businessman. It would not surprise anyone that Aziz might have Latins do his bidding. Samir Aziz would not send Arabs—it could take weeks to get them into the country using Middle Eastern passports. Samir would use people already here or hire Europeans or South Americans. It was such an ecumenical world these days, one never knew from which direction one’s enemy was coming.
Gaudet took the CD from the computer. Before leaving he wiped all the gel from inside Weissman’s nostrils.
When he closed the door Weissman was nearly dead. It was unfortunate that Anna had given the man the disk. She had killed this man. Gaudet shrugged. Soon he would kill her.
Sam watched the leader once again start to circle, two of his men on the ground, now groaning, struggling, rising to fight on. There was tension that felt like a quivering note on a steel guitar. And then, as if the place were growing too quiet for the stress, the access door to the roof slammed open.
Two quick shots and someone had put bullets through Grubb and Scott, their foreheads opening like exploding pomegranates. Sam stepped back to defend Anna. Two men dressed in black and masked rushed through the access door onto the roof with guns aimed at Shohei. Sam drew down on one of them and dropped the first gunman with a hit to the chest. Flak jacket, Sam thought. The sound of the strike indicated body armor.
The second man fired. A bullet sliced the air and slammed into Shohei’s upper torso. There was a contortion of his face, a snapping of his body, and a gush of air from Shohei’s lungs, as he crumpled around the wound. Sam shot even before he comprehended, parting the gunman’s head in a red spray.
Things happened in a blur, with the remaining gunman firing too fast from the ground, first at the wounded Shohei, then at Sam. Sam jumped back into the equipment room, thinking of Anna.
Now diving and rolling to escape his pursuers, Shohei left a thick blood trail. The leader and the two others went for Shohei with the energy that comes with a second chance, grabbing him and making such a tangle of flesh that Sam saw only struggling bodies. They were a foot from the roof edge. Sam could not risk a shot into the knotted bodies.
Sam saw the remaining gunman jump over and behind a planter box. Without waiting Sam charged the planter and dived, certain the man was popping a clip. Sam hit the middle of the man’s body and took out his eyes with finger jabs. Another strike to the head and the man was finished.
Sam turned to Shohei and saw him head-butting and kicking, throwing his own blood everywhere as he struck. The bullet had ripped a lot of flesh. Sam looked at his eyes, certain that the color of life was fading.
The Frenchmen were pushing him to the edge. Not one of them seemed fearful of dying so long as they got Shohei.
Having no choice, Sam threw his knife into the bodies, hoping he wouldn’t kill his friend. The dull silver of the razor-sharp blade sank deep in the leader’s back. There was a pause as they teetered on the edge; a quiet wind was nature’s sigh before receiving her own. They fell.
Sam stepped to the edge.
His breath caught in his throat. Ten feet below, dangling on a harness suspended by two cables, an aluminum window washer’s platform shone gray and pitted under the dull November sky. All three men lay on the platform. The two had their hands on Shohei’s chest and chin, trying to shove him into space. Sam jumped. From behind him Anna screamed.
The platform shook and swayed with the impact of Sam’s landing. One swift kick and a fist strike and Sam had the two men unconscious. In seconds the leader would be gone forever. There was no key to operate the electric motors that would raise the platform. Reaching down, he found a hole in Shohei’s shoulder and compressed it with his fist. Then a second hole closer to the chest. Shohei coughed. Death was near. His face was ashen. Sam had to move him to the roof.
Then he saw it. Running down the first twenty feet of the building was a row of steel protrusions held fast in the concrete. The entire logic of a twenty-foot ladder on a fifty-nine-story building escaped him, but the fact of it filled him with hope. His soul was now slightly less bleak than the sky. Putting Shohei in a fireman’s carry, he climbed. Anna’s worried eyes peered down.
“Shohei, you look a little bruised there,” Sam said as he laid his friend on the rooftop.
“Never mind,” Shohei whispered.
“It was a great show until somebody brought a gun. You know I’m gonna be really screwed up if you die on me. Damn you.”
“You should take Anna to see the cherry blossoms of Hokkaido,” Shohei whispered.
“Please don’t die on me.” Sam heard his own voice crack.
Sam did what he could to stop the bleeding while Anna used his cell phone. He told her who to call. A helicopter ambulance arrived five minutes later to lift out a nearly dead Shohei.
“I’m going with him,” Anna said.
“They won’t let you.”
“They will.”
“We can’t protect you as well if you do that.”
“I don’t care. I’m going. Do plan B.”
“I have to go get Weissman—we don’t have time to argue.”
“Good, you can save your breath. Good-bye.”
The jet turbines began to whine.
Sam watched her scream at the pilots, gesturing her determination. He couldn’t imagine what she would say to get them to bend an unbendable rule, but he wasn’t surprised when she climbed in.
The Frenchmen had by now all slunk away, or died, or carried one another off. He didn’t care. The only bad guys who’d succeeded in doing any real damage were corpses. There was apparently a second player after the CD who cared not a whit for the French or anyone else.
Anna Wade watched as the medics worked on Shohei.
“Take care of Sam,” he choked.
They ran IVs and got blood started.
“Oh, God,” one of them muttered, trying to stop the bleeding with a plastic bandage.
They injected medicine, got him an airway, a respirator, blood, oxygen, and stuck electrodes to the part of his chest that wasn’t raw meat. Anna saw Shohei watching her from the corner of his eye. His fingers moved like fish fins in calm water and knowing what he wanted, she took his left hand and tried to send her love. But she doubted that he was conscious for more than seconds.
“No,” Anna said mostly to herself. “Please don’t die.”
The monitor that was calling out his heartbeat went flat. The medics grabbed electric paddles. As the life went out of his body they jolted it with current. Again and again they tried.
Shohei never came back.
John Weissman looked to be sleeping at the desk, but Sam feared the worst. He launched a flying kick at the door and broke the lock. In seconds, a small crowd gathered in the hallway.
He found no pulse in Weissman’s neck. Lifting him out of the chair, Sam laid him on the floor. Weissman’s lips were blue, his pupils dilated; he had a dead man’s pallor. Sam began compressing his chest. An officeworker knelt next to him, accepting a small part in the grotesque theater unfolding before them.
“Breathe into his lungs. Two breaths for five beats,” Sam said.
Another man came to the door.
“Call an air ambulance,” Sam said. “You must go through the government to land on this roof.” He gave the man the number. “Tell them what’s happening. Tell them it’s for Sam.”
This time it was eighteen minutes before the med techs were down from the roof with a gurney. They took over, but Sam knew it was hopeless. He didn’t want to think about the meaning of it all: Weissman’s wife; his kids; the grandkids, the family dinners; holidays. The shared joys were now gone because Sam had decided to stick him in a room instead of taking him to the roof.
The police had arrived and were clearing the area. Sam threw open the drawers, looking for the CD and knowing it was fruitless. His only hope was that the material had been transmitted to Harvard in time.
He walked to reception, passed a uniformed cop, but May was nowhere to be seen. Obviously the detectives hadn’t arrived yet. With his cell phone he dialed John Quarries, an assistant director of the FBI in Washington, DC. It took him three minutes to explain that he had stepped into a nest of bad people and was going to need somebody big to vouch for him. Some minutes later he had Quarrles’s assurance that the New York office of the FBI would tell local law enforcement what it needed to know about Sam’s and Anna Wade’s involvement in the deaths.
Jeremiah Fuller sat in his living room with his eldest daughter, her husband, Marmy, and his two grandchildren. Stacy made a pitcher of iced tea while he checked the steak on the grill and came back inside.
“Okay, Dad,” his daughter said, “it’s clear that your disease has taken a turn for the better. Can you give us a clue what they did to force the remission?”
“Who cares what they did?”
“Well, do you even know?”
“Actually I don’t. It’s part of the program. They don’t tell you exactly what they are doing. That’s why they do it in the far corners of the earth.”
“That seems unethical to me.”
“But look at the results. I need the pills in my dresser drawer or I get awfully jumpy, but that’s the only downside.”
“I just can’t believe it. Before this you could barely remember that you went to the store for milk. Now you can memorize a dozen digits. More than any of us.”
“Ain’t it grand?” he said, and excused himself to the bathroom.
Life was good. He was in love with his wife for the third time and all his kids were more or less flying straight and level. Entering the master bathroom, he saw that the window was up an inch. Funny, this time of the year, with the cold weather, Tracy didn’t normally leave the windows ajar. He closed it.
He urinated, still a little worried about the slow flow. “If it’s not your brain, it’s your prostate,” he muttered.
In the mirror he checked his teeth, found the piece of meat that had been bothering him, wet his toothbrush, and gave a quick brush. He winced—something seemed to have stung his gums. He looked closely at the brush and saw a tiny wire. As he did so, his chest felt a terrible compression, his vision blurred, he swayed on his feet, and he knew that he was falling and that he would die.
There was an extraordinary brilliance and exhilarating warmth. In the brightness he called out to God.
Four men were dead, one of them a close friend. Instead of sitting depressed and drunk or mourning, Sam took a cab down to Greenwich Village and walked into Babbo, a restaurant known for its out-of-the-ordinary cuisine. Sam was after the Brandiso, a delicious white fish cooked with fins and head, then deboned to order.
The place was a relatively simple, long hall-like affair, white-walled and with upstairs and downstairs dining. It was described as Italian Nouveau cuisine—Italian for those who liked Italian, and Nouveau for those who enjoyed perfectly looped lines of avocado paste on bone-white china impeccably designed with a colorful arrangement of vegetables and greens that even included a flower.
Sam knew that a Babbo care package would help Anna find her equilibrium. He had persuaded Lenia, an assistant chef, to put together all the makings of a Brandiso dinner that Sam would bake at Anna’s.
With the loss of these good men, he didn’t care if he ever ate again, much less whether it was gourmet fare, but he knew it was expedient that they keep living in every sense. Anna might not understand at first, but soon she would feel the same.
Sam allowed Lenia to include some cream sauce for a side of pasta and a marvelous mushroom salad. He listened carefully as she explained the presentation, although he had no intention of following directions when it came to that. It was ghastly enough to think of flavors and appetites or anything of warmth and comfort in this time of mourning. But the fellowship of those who were fighters was imbued with an unwritten rule that allowed remembrances but no funerals. The mourning would be private; this dinner was to be a celebration of the life lived and a commitment between the survivors to keep on living.
As he waited for Lenia to finish he called Anna.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I think so.” Then she was silent.
“Anna?”
“I’m sad. And I’m worried about Jason. We need to do something right away.”
“We will.”
When Lenia emerged, she paused a moment to look at him. Taking the bag, he kissed Lenia on the cheek, gave her a hug.
“Take care of yourself,” she said. “And come and see me when I can cook for you.”
It was when he walked onto the street, the cars beating the air into a steady whir, their lights tracing white lines and red bubbles in the night, that he realized he was struggling to answer a question that he only barely understood. As the cabdriver made a blur of the electric light marquees of New York up Seventh Avenue and through the incredible bustle of Times Square and onto Broadway, he gave up the pondering and decided to act.
He called Paul.
“Remember what we heard about six months ago—that Wes King believed someone had gotten to his software codes?”
“Yeah, but we figured we couldn’t tie it ... you know, just a coincidence.”
“I was tired. Now I’m not. I want to dig it out.”
“But we’ve got everyone, every resource, dedicated to figuring out DuShane Chellis and Samir Aziz ... and how to extract Jason.”
“While you are doing that, in spare moments, I want any connections between Suzanne’s case and this one. Anything.”
“Got it.”
“How are we doing on Jason?”
“Good. The Canadians are on board.”
“Did Harvard get the transmission from Weissman?”
“They got a lot. Some of it is encrypted. Quite a bit actually. They’re working on it. You can call Carl at home tonight.” He gave Sam the number.
They talked as Sam rode up Broadway to the Upper West Side. By the time he arrived at Anna’s block, he was satisfied that all the minds at work in his office were focused on the right issues.
Inside Anna’s building a security man, dressed in blue blazer and gray slacks, greeted him as he approached the counter. Another armed security guard wearing a side arm and crisp blue uniform sat in the corner.
“Whom will you be visiting this evening?”
“Anna Wade.”
“And you would be Sam with no last name?”
“That would be me.”
“I was told you won’t be showing us any ID,” the man said with a tone of disapproval. “But you might tell us Anna’s favorite flower.”
“Herb’s lilies.”
“Go on up.”
Engrossed now in how exactly he would conduct the next couple of hours, he floated in his mind while his feet took him without thought to her door. Amidst all the death he began to think about being close ... making love. He imagined seducing Anna over dinner. Shohei would approve, of that there was no doubt.
The man in the hall in front of her door, a contract private investigator, looked like he could wrestle alligators. The man knocked for Sam, and Anna opened the door.
“You feel afraid,” Sam said.
“Kind of shaken up. They were good people and now they are dead because of complications in my life. But still I want to get Jason, to act, before something else happens.”
Sam carried his package into the kitchen and put it on the counter. “It’s easy to jump off a cliff. It takes more effort and planning to climb one. We gotta climb the cliff and it will take preparation.”
“What do we do?”
“We’re already doing it. I’ve got a team assembled to get Jason out of Canada. We’re doing surveillance to see how much soldier power they have around him. We’re lining up the psychiatrist, a guy in Seattle. There’s a whole lot to this and we’re going full speed, but if we just roll on in there without preparation we may tip them off, fail, and lose Jason.”
“I guess you have a point. It’s hard to wait.”
“Right now we’re going to make ourselves eat, breathe, drink in Shohei’s honor.”
“You say that so easily.”
Sam removed the baguettes along with the mushroom salad. “Knives?”
“In there,” she said. She sighed, seeming to resign herself to Sam’s plan, and got out some olive and garlic hummus to go with the bread.
“Let me tell you what we’ve found out.”
“Okay,” she said as if willing to wait but not convinced.
“Pots and pans?”
“There.”
“Let’s start with the therapist Grace has Jason seeing. Dr. Galbraith. We found that he went to Harvard, apparently has no publications, at least of note, has practiced for twenty years, is considered an expert in memory loss, has seen a number of celebrities, and has been credited with some remarkable cures. We found several associations with public figures including a couple of press releases where he was named and quoted. Two of the stories concerned people I know and want to talk with because they were said to have made remarkable improvement. One of them was in bad shape.”
“Were these clients of yours?”
Sam smiled. And set about getting the fish on a greased baking pan.
“Confidential, right?”
“I’m interested in talking with a guy named Jeremiah Fuller. Apparently Galbraith was Fuller’s doctor, and Fuller suddenly got his memory-building capacity back in the midst of a nasty bout with some sort of memory-wasting disease. We’ll see.”
“I can’t relate that to my brother.”
“Neither can I. But we’ll look into Jeremiah Fuller nonetheless. As for Grace Technologies, Interpol is interested in them. I think that’s because of a link to this arms dealer, Samir Aziz. We think Aziz sent the two gunmen on the roof—we think they were after the CD-ROM.”
Sam told her what they knew and she listened intently. With the fish baking in the oven, he put some water in a pot and set a colander over the water.
“Why would an arms dealer be associated with DuShane Chellis?”
“Computers are the foundation of all modern weapons systems.”
“And Jason’s work would be relevant if it makes the computers smaller.”
“Or the rockets more accurate. Small and accurate are important in weapons.”
It was too soon to cook the pasta or put on the vegetables. The fish would take twenty-five minutes.
“We still haven’t talked about my terms.”
“Well, obviously I still want to hire you.”
“You aren’t exactly a team player,” he said, watching for her reaction.
“I’ll work on it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve had the same agent since nearly the time I started acting.”
“My dog loved me and forsook all others.”
“Now you’re being a smart-ass. Do you know what we’re arguing about?”
“Not a clue.”
“Well,” she said, “how do I hire you? Do we do some secret society thing?”
“You have to have a sponsor—and don’t give me a hard time.”
“Sounds like AA.”
“It isn’t. It’s practical and it’s my system.”
“Okay, well, that’s Peter, right?”
“Right. And it’s a minimum fee of five hundred thousand dollars, but that counts toward my twenty-thousand-per-day fee. That covers my time and basic staff time at five staff man-hours per day. More than that and it’s two-hundred-dollars-an-hour staff time. The good news, I suppose, is that my fee drops to five thousand per day after I have put in sixty days.”
“What about the days you’re not working exclusively on my case?”
“I prorate, but you’re my only case at the moment.”
“So how much, in the end, does it really cost?”
“It usually runs six or seven hundred thousand a month if we’re working steady and I’m not using a lot of independent contractors and staff. My average fee per case for all cases has been one-point-four million. Cheap compared to what you get for a movie.”
“I’d like to ask how often you do pro bono, but I’m afraid you’re gonna bring up that we don’t do free movies.”
“Or even give refunds on the bad ones.”
“Ooh, you’re nasty tonight,” she said.
“I do maybe a free job a year or several little ones. Poor people don’t usually have particularly complex problems.”
“All right. You aren’t cheap, but okay.”
“Well, that’s not all. You have to agree to my contract.”
“What’s that?”
Sam put on the vegetables and peeked at the fish.
“Let’s sit on the couch. You should be comfortable when you hear this.” Sam took the two glasses of wine and Anna carried the bread and cheese. They sat close.
Sam explained the contract at some length, watching Anna’s brow get tighter and tighter. Finally she summarized:
“I have to shut up about you forever, unless I get your permission to offer your services to a friend or an acquaintance, and to ensure that I don’t make any untoward disclosures I have to post a deposit of one million dollars in stocks or bonds in Switzerland. My heirs get the stocks and bonds and all earned income and appreciation upon my death, and so I lose the use of my money unless you give consent for its removal.”
“Hey, if you fall on hard times I can be reasonable.”
“You get to know all about me while you attempt to tell me nothing about yourself. Notice I said attempt. If we have a legal dispute, it is decided by arbitration in the Cayman Islands. And if a court says that is not enforceable, we have arbitration in Las Vegas, Nevada, in front of a list of arbitrators all of whom, no doubt, know and love you, and if that’s not enforceable, it’s arbitration in front of the American Arbitration Association. Who’s working for who here?”