“Lovely, as always,” Smith said politely as he was handed her bra.
“Go to Hell.”
Smith smiled. “Perhaps, one day. Perhaps after you take me to Heaven?”
She simply stared on.
Valerie ignored the leers, the lingering gropes, the mumbled comments as the men finished their thorough search of her. Then she dressed quickly as the elevator restarted.
“Have you been working out, Congresswoman?” Smith smiled.
“Felt like it,” one of the men whispered to another.
Valerie turned toward him. “Get a life or an inflatable girlfriend, asshole,” she snapped out. Then she turned
back to Smith. “You’ve had your show. Now give me mine!”
“Making demands?”
She took a step toward Smith. “I don’t say another word—to anyone—until I see it, she said in low tones.”
If the notion hadn’t been so absurd, Smith thought Valerie might be ready to tear out his throat with her teeth. He slowly reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a photograph.
“You’ll recognize today’s
Times
headline, he said as she took it from him.”
She studied the picture, her expression softening as she looked at the small frightened faces, at the huge bruise on the boy, at the all-too-recognizable pain in the girl’s eyes.
“Bastards,” she mumbled.
The rest of the ride was accomplished in silence.
They trooped out on the eleventh floor and moved down the corridor to their left, Valerie never looking up from her photo.
None of them noticing a thin, blue-sheathed fiber-optic cable slide up and out of the elevator’s ceiling.
Crouching on top of the one private elevator in the building, Xenos ignored the whirring of gears and cables rushing by. He sat there calmly, riding up and down several times without realizing it. His body might be trapped by the confines of the elevator shaft, but his mind was elsewhere, wandering through the more-complex-by-the-moment problem. Reviewing what had happened. Analyzing, interpreting.
Planning.
The doorman and concierge might have been easy marks, might have been people of high integrity. He’d never bothered to find out. But a security guard—now lying handcuffed and unconscious in some landscaping by the side of the building—had been another issue.
The man was more than run-of-the-mill minimum-waged security. He’d been sharp, obviously trained, carrying a backup piece on his ankle and cell phone in place of
a radio. But men like that were anachronistic to Xenos; dinosaurs trained to think and react with one-dimensional thinking.
And Xenos lived in a
three
-dimensional world.
The man’s uniform had been a close enough fit, and his keys easily interpreted. Xenos had let himself in through a garage fire door, then made his way to the lobby by a back hall. Pulling his hat low against the closed-circuit cameras that seemed to be everywhere, he casually waited for the first up elevator, then pressed the buttons for floors nine through fourteen. Noticing that eleven wasn’t listed on this elevator’s control panel.
He left the elevator between the seventh and eight floors.
Jumping from elevator to elevator while in motion required not only timing but luck. Like moving through a maze, he waited to leap lightly from his
up
to the next
down.
To the next up. Finally landing crouched and ready for detection and flight on the secured elevator.
From on top he could easily see the camera installation that monitored the inside of the car, so he never considered getting in. Just rode up and down for fifteen minutes, waiting.
He knew that the guard would be missed at some point—with no idea exactly when that would be. But the road led from the apartment to the tracer; from the tracer to the men, from the men to here.
Next stop, the eleventh floor.
He’d witnessed the humiliating search of the congress-woman. Had heard the words, noted the tensions. But he’d noted much besides.
The men—though vulgar and coarse—had restrained themselves to a large extent.
The man in charge—Xenos thought “Smith” as an alias showed a lack of imagination and he stored that fact away—was far from the casual air he exuded. He was a man under careful control, born from someone else’s orders. A greeter and deliveryman—not a boss.
The congresswoman had stood up to the search with
poise and controlled anger. She showed no resistance, cooperated when asked, but seemed less intimidated by the men than by some threat they held over her.
The way Smith had held the photograph, it was clear that he considered that threat to be an immutable trump card. Almost like the key to Fort Knox.
And from the behavior of all of them, this wasn’t the first time the scene had played itself out.
Was
playing itself out … on the eleventh floor.
He still didn’t know the connection between what had happened and Paolo DeBenetti. Or even if there was one. The men and Alvarez might be part of some other mystery, nothing to do with Corsicans or missing students. Maybe someone had leaked. Hell, there were more than enough groups within the
community
that wanted him back in the fold.
Or dead.
It
was
very likely that word had leaked about his search for the boy. That old cells—hungry for an old familiar body—had merely set the tracer in place to find and locate the man on top of the elevator. Alvarez and their hold over her might even be peripheral or unconnected to an effort to bring him in or take him out. Two disparate intelligence operations run out of the same headquarters, having nothing to do with each other.
But coincidence and survival were uneasy lovers at best.
His decision made, he lightly grabbed the service ladder, allowed the elevator to slide out from beneath him, then eased into the crawlway above the eleventh floor.
If anything happened to him—and it usually did, he thought with bitter humor—any events during the next twenty-four hours in the private elevator would be captured by the video tap he’d installed in the elevator’s camera cable. Captured and relayed to the VTR in his car. And if he didn’t check in with his “safety”—a double-blind contact that the Corsicans had provided called Quattro Cani—the car would be privately LoJacked, and the tape sent to Franco in Toulon.
What happened then, Xenos didn’t care about. Because
if it happened, it meant he’d be dead. The nightmare, the pain, the wandering finally over.
Overall, he thought, a not-wholly-undesired solution.
The smallish conference room was clean, designer-decorated, comfortable, but utilitarian. Alvarez sat on one side of the table, calmly going over some files, as three men sat across from her waiting patiently. It might have been a legislative conference or the reading of a will.
Smith stood in the corner, watching the scene, bored, his mind turning over the problems he had to deal with after this meeting was over. Nothing major, just the routine of being middle management in a sophisticated multinational operation.
“Congresswoman?” one of the men at the table prompted.
Valerie closed the file, then looked up. “It’s mostly right. I think he called it the ‘Apple Blossom colloid,’ though. Not ‘collaboration.’”
“You are prepared to attest that this is a fair and accurate representation of the statement made by Source 24601 to you on the twenty-third?”
She sighed. “I am.”
“Then will you please write words to that effect on the bottom of the last page and then sign the document.”
Valerie did as she was told, then sat back. “Is that it?”
One of the men smiled warmly. “I hardly think so. There’s still the matter of Source 24601’s movements in the hours between your meeting and his end.”
“Goddammit! We’ve covered that three times before!” For the first time in the last two hours her anger had a voice. “I told you everything I know, gave you everything you want! For two goddamned weeks!” She slapped the tabletop hard enough to make the file bounce and Smith step forward.
Another of the men waved Smith back.
“We appreciate your cooperation, Congresswoman. And we understand your schedule conflicts. But we must be—”
“Cooperation?!” She jumped to her feet hard enough for her chair to topple backward.
“Mentirosos!
You’re not getting another word until I get what you promised!”
Smith came up behind her, grabbing her shoulder, trying to force her down into another chair. Her elbow flashed back, pounding into the side of the man’s head. He toppled backward as though he’d been shot.
Before he could regain his balance she grabbed his left arm, twisting it violently inward and back. His head smashed down onto the edge of the table, his mouth seeming to bite the wood as his arm painfully gave way from the pressure.
Smith’s muffled scream filled the room as Valerie pulled his Glock 9mm from its shoulder holster, released him, then worked the slide. A moment later she was pointing it at the shocked men across the table.
The men from the elevator came rushing in, guns drawn, but froze when they saw their boss sprawled in a bloody heap across the table, and the gun unwaveringly moving from one of the men’s heads to another.
“Put the gun down, bitch! one of the elevator men screamed out.”
Valerie ignored him, concentrating her aim on the center man across from her. “It’s over, she said in low, deadly tones.”
The man simply nodded seriously. “If you wish, in a slight German accent.”
“Kill us, another said casually,” and it
will
end. We will be dead, and a moment later so will you.
“But go to your grave knowing this,” the third added. “Your son—so young, so strong—will die in inconceivable pain over a long period of time. Your beautiful daughter”—he pulled a school picture of the young girl out of a file—“will be given over to men like Mr. Smith here. And when they are done with her—if she survives—her death will make your son’s look pleasant.”
The German-sounding man smiled. “Pull the trigger,” he said in an almost inviting tone, “and take that with you to eternity.”
For long seconds the gun remained steady, then slowly, almost painfully, it began to shake. She didn’t resist as it was pulled from her hand.
“Gusanos,”
she moaned as she was forced down onto the table beside Smith.
A woman came in, ignored the scene, handing a slip of paper to the center man, who put on his glasses to read it. “Get him out of here.” He gestured at Smith as he began to read.
“Sir?” The gunman holding Valerie on the table looked uncertain.
The German-sounding man handed the note to one of the others as he accepted a new note from the woman courier.
“Congresswoman Alvarez,” he said without looking up from his reading. “Normally I would allow this—this out-burst—to pass with only the warning you have already received.”
He handed the note to his colleague who had passed on the first note. “But this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated at this stage of our relationship.”
He thought for a moment. “You are free to go,” he suddenly said. “But there will be a price. To you. To your son. Perhaps to your daughter. And you will not know that price until next we meet.”
He began to confer in whispers with his two colleagues, then noticed she was still standing in front of them. “Good day, madame.”
Valerie was led/dragged from the room, silently crying—a wilted version of the woman who had arrived.
After five minutes of quiet discussion, the other two men left the room as the German-sounding man picked up the telephone that was plugged into a random scrambler. He dialed a number, waited, then entered the correct code for that day and hour.
“Canvas,” a slightly accented voice said across the electrically cleaned line amid chirps, whistles, and static.
“This is number five.”
“Yeah.”
“I have just been informed that Apple Blossom’s man has been located in an intensive-care ward at Columbus Hospital. He is in a coma.”
“I know,” Canvas said brusquely. “He’ll be dead before midnight.”
“Most efficient.”
“Why you pay me,” sweetie. An angry pause. “Was there a
reason
you called?”
“A guard, one of
yours
, has been reported ten minutes overdue from his rounds.”
A long silence. “Let me talk to Smith.”
“Mr. Smith has been”—he paused as a one-word note was passed to him from a colleague—
“incommoded
for the present.”
Another silence. Then: “I’ll take care of everything. Leave the building, go to safe house number four, and wait for my call.”
“As you say, Canvas.”
The line went dead.
Nine hours later, just after midnight, and after four thorough searches of the building by reinforced guards and after the unconscious guard had been found, revived, and questioned, Xenos emerged from the eleventh-floor crawl space.
It was a simple matter to climb down the service ladder to the basement, let himself into the service dock, and leave the building. He never encountered any guards, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had.
They would have simply and silently died in the night. Their last sight an angry man covered with grime carrying a nylon backpack.
Few answers had been found. Far more questions had been asked. And he still had no idea if the operation he’d stumbled into had any concrete connection with the disappearance of a nineteen-year-old boy who owed the Corsican Brotherhood either $100,000 or a law degree. But he did know two things, engraved in granite and in his mind.
Someone—the Corsicans, Paolo, the interrogators,
maybe even Alvarez or someone yet unknown—was dragging Xenos back into the life and world that he’d forsaken years before out of a need for spiritual and moral survival.
And for that,
someone
had to pay.
The next morning, he arrived in Washington, D.C.
The Longworth House Office Building is dark at the best of times. Its dark woods, high ceilings, windowless corridors, too few ceiling lights with every third bulb removed for energy conservation, long ago caused it to be dubbed “the Congressional Cave. It is a place for new members of the House on their way up, old members on their way out, and the usual one-termers that came and went every session.”