Xi had little tolerance for men afraid to act and accept the consequences of their actions.
“Sir,” the man continued, “Canvas has confirmed that Indigo One is, as suspected, Gerald Michael Goldman, a former special assignment officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Operations Directorate. The American Registry reports that SAO Goldman was killed in an automobile accident ten years ago. We are, uh, pursuing the discrepancy.”
Xi pulled out a small pocketknife, barely pricking his finger and allowing several drops of blood to fall into the path of the miniature army. Then he took out several wooden matchsticks, rolled them in the smeared blood on his finger, and dropped them in as well.
“Status?” he asked as the insects paused in obvious caution, then, forced forward by the smell of fresh death, moved over the unlit matches.
“Alvarez and Goldman are still at large,” the aide said too quickly. “The reports on the traitor Pei’s interrogation are still unavailable. But Canvas believes that Apple Blossom has not been
wholly
compromised as yet; that full containment will be restored within seventy-two hours.” He stiffened as he awaited instructions.
“How is it that an SAO has remained unknown to Registry, to us, for ten years?” Xi’s voice was a bare shadow as he leaned close to the insects as all elements came together over the bloody pile.
“Canvas reports that Goldman has been using the name Xenos Filotimo. Most probably living in an isolated part of the Mediterranean. What the Americans call a
shelved asset.”
“Who chooses now to make his return to the living. I’m not fond of the coincidence.”
“No, sir.”
“Inform Canvas he is to reestablish control of the situation and eliminate both Goldman and Alvarez at his first opportunity.” Xi lit a match, held it for long moments as it burned close to his fingertips, then lightly dropped it into the milling, losing-interest insects. The matches beneath exploded into an orange sulfurous blaze, immolating the insects in its midst; drawing the remainder into the flame and death.
Sighing, he stood, dusted his trousers, and headed deeper into the gardens.
“I wonder if they’ve gotten to the lilies? After twenty feet he stopped, seemed to look up at the stars, even deeper into the instincts that he so trusted.”
“Xenos Filotimo.” The light breeze brought his words back to the aides. “Stranger of Unbending Honor.”
He turned back to his aides. “Full crisis management corps assembly in fifteen minutes, please.”
The aides sprinted off to set the almost unprecedented orders in motion.
Xi slowly followed them, regretting that he would have to put off further inspection of the gardens. But there was something in that name—in its entry into the already thirty-one-year-old Apple Blossom plan at this moment, in this way—that reeked of chaos.
And, to a man like Xi, chaos was unimaginably bad.
The phone was answered on the third ring. “Paradise Café.”
“I want to place an order for delivery.”
“What’s your phone number?”
“Thirteen.”
A short silence. “Just a second.”
Two minutes later another voice came on the line.
“Quattro Cani.”
“Filotimo.”
“Parla.”
“Mi chiami un taxi a New York.”
“C’è qualcosa che non va?”
Xenos looked around the busy diner before answering in a near whisper. “You gonna help or what?”
“Where you at?”
“South of Waterbury, Connecticut; on eighty-four. I got wheels, but strictly short-term.”
A brief silence followed by a whispered conversation in Italian taking place in the background.
“Conosci Bridgeport?”
the Corsican facilitator finally asked.
“I can find it.”
“Prendi il Port Jefferson Ferry.
Two-fifteen or 3:35. Any later you call us. You be met, okay?”
Xenos hung up and casually walked away from the booth.
After circling the diner twice, he stopped to check the cars in the parking lot. All Connecticut plates, none with casual couples eating or resting in them, none with the carefully concealed antenna that would indicate surveillance vehicles. But he couldn’t be sure.
Xenos knew what Canvas knew and vice versa. Nothing could be taken for granted or left to chance.
Swallowing a handful of the aspirin he’d bought earlier, he climbed a low fence, dashed across the main road, and disappeared into a grove of trees. For ten minutes he watched the diner, the comings and goings, then left the grove another way.
Valerie sat behind the wheel of the car on a dirt road, engine running. She was more confused, more frightened, more drained than at any time in her life. The blood and tension of the last few hours now manifested as complete exhaustion and she fought to keep her eyes open.
Easy, actually. Since every time they closed, her mind conjured up images of broken and bleeding children crying for their mother to save them.
Cursing her for deserting them.
She jumped when she heard the passenger door slam shut.
“Let’s go,” Xenos said quietly as he slumped down in the seat. His wounds and injuries kept him perilously close to full collapse, only his will keeping him functioning. But for how much longer he wasn’t sure.
“Where to?”
“South on eighty-four to Bridgeport.”
Valerie dropped the stolen car with the stolen plates in gear. “And then?”
Xenos coughed up blood, his face paled, he began to sweat heavily. “They’re looking, so until we can get out of the country or they stop looking, we keep moving.”
“God,” Valerie mumbled under her breath as she pulled onto the highway, “when does it stop?”
Xenos exhaled deeply, then painfully turned toward her. “You committed yourself when you put the gun in the case,” he said flatly between coughs and blood bubbles forming at his nose and mouth. “No going back.” He closed his eyes as he tried to settle himself more comfortably on the seat. “Never any going back.”
“But it can’t go on forever.” Valerie concentrated on changing lanes every few minutes as she’d previously been instructed. “I don’t think you realize what’s going on. You see…”
“I don’t want to know!” He opened his eyes, fury and something else—despondency, maybe—firing there. “Goddammit, I said I’d help you. I’ll do that. But I
do not
want to get involved. I don’t do that shit anymore. I’ll get you safe and in contact with people who can help you, but beyond that, you’re on your own! I’m just not involved in this, right?”
Not for the first time in the last few hours Valerie began to question the sanity of her companion. “How can you say that? How many people have you killed, have
we
killed? Do you really think that madman, that
Canvas
guy, is going to let you just be uninvolved?”
“He’s not a madman.”
She could barely hear him between the bloody coughs and his lifeless voice. “What?” She handed him a bottle of water.
Xenos drank half the contents in one swallow, poured the remainder over his head. “He’s not a madman. Just a working stiff.”
Valerie hoped the man wasn’t becoming delirious. “Hey! Stay with me!” she yelled as he seemed about to pass out.
“Colin, er, Canvas,” he said as he blinked himself back, “is just a guy being paid to do a job. He doesn’t have any feelings about it. Won’t take things personally or get angry. He’s too good for that. He’ll just—” Another hacking fit silenced him for the moment. “He’ll just sit,” he continued after a minute, “think, analyze, plan for all contingencies.”
“Jesus.”
Xenos somehow managed a smile. “Less prone to accidents than he was.” He reached up and turned the rear-view toward him, carefully watching the following traffic as he continued. “I was an accident. A minor course correction. A thing he’ll make allowances for in the future that won’t essentially change his plans.” He studied the cars behind them. “Change lanes and speed up.”
Valerie did as she was instructed while trying to comprehend what the man was explaining as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
“If I stay out of his way in the future,” Xenos continued slowly, “he’ll stay out of mine.”
“Why the Hell would he do that?”
Xenos shrugged. “Call it professional courtesy.” “Who
are
you? How do you know all this? Christ! You talk about it like it’s a couple of lawyers on a civil divorce case! Like it’s all a goddamned walk in the woods!”
Xenos smiled, painfully but fully. “I like that,” he mumbled as he began to lose consciousness again.
The blood trail was strong, vibrant in the gray soil. Each droplet leaving an oval indentation, segregating a given footprint from all the others in the dirt.
Jerry moved quickly but smoothly. Gliding through the brush alongside the trail, eyes searching for more of the
traitorous gore, ears straining to pick up any sound; mind counting down the time he had left before he would have to give up the search.
And fail.
But failure was not allowed in the program. Nothing short of complete success was accepted, so he continued on.
A pure predator on the scent.
The drops led off the road, toward a small barn behind an abandoned farm. Calculating how much time he had left, the possibilities of being observed and interdicted, the possible countermoves of his, well, quarry, he moved.
Kicking in a side door, he fired short bursts at every movement. His orders were completely clear: this traitor and his family were not to get back across the border into the deep East. The damage that they could then do, he’d been briefed, would be cataclysmic.
Lives would be lost, he’d been assured.
America, all America, was depending on him, he’d been conditioned.
In his first series of volleys two dogs, a horse, and a middle-aged woman died. In the next … a running teenage boy.
Then the father, the traitor, the hunted.
The victim.
Jerry felt nothing, was numbed—by a rapidly depleting energy reserve, the adrenaline of the action, by drill. By something else as well.
These weren’t people—he’d been trained—they were the enemy. To feel anything for the enemy was, in and of itself, a treasonous act.
Swallowing more of the Agency’s
unofficially
encouraged (but officially banned) nepenthe—a highly addictive Middle Eastern drug that “tranquilizes the soul”—he paused waiting to feel the effects of the latest dose take hold before the last wore off.
Slowly he felt the drug—created in the time of the Pharaohs and improved by Nazi experimentation—crawl into his brain. He began to sweat and shiver, felt an erection
grow then dissipate, felt the emotions of the moment slip away into a gray void that he was barely conscious of.
Men under the influence of “black mooders” were said to be able to do anything—torture close family members, kill lovers, spouses, children, anyone—without ever feeling a moment’s guilt or psychic pain afterward.
Ever. As if the event were not a memory, but something dimly recalled from a news article read decades before.
But the body’s tolerance to nepenthe began almost with the first dose. So, on each occasion, more would be needed to guarantee what Herb called “the freedoms of actions” necessary to “be a good soldier.”
Some days, it seemed there would never be enough capsules in the bottle, Jerry thought as he waited for his body’s temperature to return to normal and his pulse to ease.
With a deep breath, he quickly and thoroughly returned to the task at hand. He searched all three bodies, then began the next phase of the operation.
Cyrillic writing was spray-painted above the man’s corpse, indicating that he was a traitor to the Soviet Union; his tongue was cut out and shoved in his pants. His dead wife’s skirt was pulled up above her waist, her underclothes ripped away, then she was turned over as if shot trying to escape a rape. Cocaine was planted on the boy.
As the healing haze of the drug began to seep through him, Jerry surveyed his work, then turned to leave. A rustle behind and to his left caused him to throw himself to the ground. He quickly rolled to his knees, turned, and fired a burst… just over the head of a six-month-old baby hidden in the straw.
For twenty minutes, narcotics, orders, conditioning, and frayed humanity fought for control of the man who had killed twenty-nine times before.
Cleanly.
Professionally.
But never—completely—dispassionately.
Eight hours later the Stasi—the East German secret police—raided the barn, quickly concluding that the KGB
had killed one of their own … for what would undoubtedly be their own reasons. They would carefully search the scene, gather evidence, then set the old building alight, an improvised crematorium for the man, his wife, and his teenage son.
The next day, an infant would be left at the gate of the Sisters of Hope mission in Toulon, France, with a note that read simply:
I’m sorry.
Valerie violently lurched the car side to side, forcing the man back up. “Goddammit, I can’t do this without you! Whoever the Hell you are. Talk to me, dammit!”
More coughing, his features wincing from the pain.
“You’re
what he wants, what his employers want.” You stay loose and moving and dangerous, and they’ll have to negotiate. Canvas will make that clear to them. Another fleeting, spasmodic smile. “If he doesn’t kill you first.”
Valerie shook her head in confusion and shock. “He sounds like a bloody robot to me. Put in your nickel and he kills,” kidnaps, whatever.
Xenos nodded. “So long as you keep the nickels coming.” He pointed to the left fork of an interchange. “Bridgeport off ramp.”
“Then?” Valerie was beginning to sound as washed-out as the wounded man beside her.
“Just do what I say, every time I say it, exactly like I say it, and you and your children will be fine. I’ll get you out of the country, someplace safe. Get you in contact with people that can help you.”