The island of Majorca, famous for its beaches, celebrities, and all night parties, was still mostly agrarian throughout its interior. A few good highways connected the coasts and a few more serviceable roads linked the villages, but throughout much of the island the roads were rough and narrow.
The pace was Old World. Farmers typically stopped their trucks to speak with their neighbours. It was a slow, peaceful existence that carried on much as it had when Giancarlo Bartoli's father built his great house atop a high plateau overlooking successive terraces of olive trees.
Robert Kenyon had never appreciated the farm. It was too quiet, too isolated. He and Luca had brought parties to the house to make life bearable when they had come to the island as young men. The first time he had gone to the farm with his new identity - the old life cut off and left behind - David Carlisle understood what Giancarlo loved about the farm. Not long afterwards he had arranged to lease the property from one of Bartoli's companies. For the past several years he had spent as much time as he could here. The farm was safe. He did not have to consider the chances of an accidental meeting with a face from his past or shuffle passports at border crossings. Here something was wrong if the neighbour did not pass by his front gate at ten in the morning and come back at eleven. The wine was good. The rocks were challenging and the heat, even in springtime, baked out the fears that gnaw at every fugitive.
At this point the isolation of the farm was more than a luxury. Helena Chernoff was missing. As they had last spoken before she went after Malloy he could only imagine that she was undergoing interrogation. It was perfect nonsense to think anyone could resist interrogation. In the end everyone talked. Everyone! One measured courage by the hour in a situation like that.
Chernoff's Christine Foulkes alias would be exposed. When that happened people would want to talk to all the paladins. They would all confess to knowing nothing about Chernoff's involvement, but they would
meet
with investigators. Since the death of Robert Kenyon, they had all been careful to avoid any sort of public contact with David Carlisle and Christine Foulkes, having sent their representatives to the annual meetings of the paladins. They could claim - and no one could prove otherwise - that they had no idea that Foulkes was Helena Chernoff or that David Carlisle was in fact Robert Kenyon back from the dead. Carlisle, on the other hand, could not survive even a cursory investigation. He was going to have to slough off his identity and start over. Most of his cash was safe, he had already moved his money into banks that would not give him up without a fight, but his less liquid investments, some fifty million pounds tied up in real estate, were going to be lost. The cost of doing business.
Luca was coming to Majorca on Monday with three pristine passports - less than forty eight hours to wait. Even if Chernoff broke quickly, which wasn't likely, he thought he had that much time. Of course he wasn't sure. She might have worked out a deal. For the sake of a private cell with a window she could have told them where they could find him. Still, waiting here was better than risking a border crossing. His current aliases might already have been flagged. Even with new passports his troubles were not completely behind him. Phone numbers and safe houses he had once trusted could now turn into traps. His friends and contacts might be under surveillance or ready to give him up for the sake of their own freedom. Virtually anyone he had ever known had become a potential threat. So it was not just a change of name. He was going to have to start over.
Majorca, Spain
Wearing night vision goggles and body armour, Ethan and Malloy worked their way up the terraced hills of the Bartoli farm under a pale half-moon. They finally stopped on a ridge just over a hundred metres out from the perimeter wall. 'This is the area,' Ethan said, checking his navigator. Besides an Army Colt at his belt, he carried a DoubleStar Patrol rifle with a silencer. The attached night scope was a Morovision-740 G3. The gun was configured like the popular M-4 that U.S. tank squads used. It had a short barrel and an abbreviated banana clip similar to the Kalashnikov. He carried several extra ammo clips, though neither of them expected him to need them. Loading the first clip, he chambered a round and took his first look through the scope. 'Nice,' he whispered. He was looking, Malloy knew, at a night landscape that had suddenly turned green. A red pinpoint of light functioned as the gun sight.
'You can check the sighting out here.' Malloy pointed across the terraces to a place about equidistant to the house. He double-checked the area for life forms to be sure. It looked good. Ethan settled the gun on a tripod mount and set the selector to fire a single round. He took a moment to steady himself and then squeezed off one shot toward a stand of gnarled olive trees. The silencer was state of the art. Only the mechanism ejecting the shell made any significant noise. Ethan tampered with the scope and then tried again. After a third shot he said, 'It's good,' and turned back to the house.
Malloy carried a MilCam LE thermal scanner. It was capable of finding heat images - even through some walls. On his first scan of the house he found no one on the ground floor. In what Kate had called the master bedroom on the second floor he discovered the heat signatures of a man and woman, both in the same bed. At the gatehouse, some eighty metres south of the front of the house, he found two males in separate bedrooms. According to Kate the gatehouse was used for security personnel, usually Bartoli's people when he came to the farm. Otherwise the gatehouse was unoccupied. These people were undoubtedly Kenyon's bodyguards.
Malloy handed Ethan the thermal scanner and pointed toward the house, letting him get a fix on the man and woman. 'What do you think? Irina Turner?'
'In the best of all worlds it is,' Ethan whispered.
Malloy used his cell phone and heard Kate's voice, 'Yes.'
'A man and woman in the master bedroom. Two men on the second storey of the gatehouse, separate bedrooms.
'Three minutes,' she said.
He told Ethan, and began scanning the yard. There was a broad well-lit expanse of lawn at the front of the house, then the gatehouse and perimeter wall. Beyond the wall to the east was a rocky patch of pastureland leading to a natural rock wall and a mountain wilderness beyond it. To the west the plateau continued for nearly half-a-mile before rising abruptly into a mountainous terrain. In this area Malloy found some buildings, including a caretaker's cabin. The caretaker was in bed with his wife, who was also the housekeeper and cook. According to Kate, this was a working farm, but other than the caretaker and his wife all the workers came from the village three miles down the mountain.
He continued scanning for the heat signature of a lookout, but the hilltop was quiet. About a minute or so after the call to Kate, Malloy heard the distant whine of a small plane. He swept the scanner above the house and saw the dark, cold forms of the boulders that fortified the back of the Bartoli farm. The rocks rose up almost vertically for a couple of hundred feet. Beyond the boulders he could see only a wilderness of more rocks and steep ascents - safe haven for a climber. The boulders were probably three hundred metres away — still in the outer range of Ethan's gun.
He brought the scanner down across the perimeter walls and stopped at the gatehouse for another look. The two males were still quiet. At the house, Kenyon was tossing in his sleep.
Malloy heard Kate on his headset. 'I'm at five hundred metres.'
A moment later the security lights around the house blinked off - the whole mountain crashing to black.
David Carlisle had not slept well since leaving New York. He wanted to blame the flights from Hamburg to New York to Majorca with the six time zones each way, but he knew better. The truth was he was suddenly vulnerable. Worse still, there was nothing he could do but wait it out. Two sleepless nights had just become three.
He got up and trudged through the dark to the master bathroom. As he washed his hands in the well-lit room he studied his face in the mirror. For eleven years he had been David Carlisle, even to his closest friends. Lord Robert Kenyon was dead. He had wanted no slip-ups and above all no rumours to the contrary. Not once had anyone called him Robert. He even thought of himself as David Carlisle. But that was easy, really. A name was not a part of the essence of a man. Change the name and the man was exactly the same creature. The inner voice had no name, as he had only realised once he killed Robert Kenyon. A name was a convenience for the world to use, not a way into one's self. Curiously, however, he now understood that a name fixed one in the world. Without it, his essence continued unaffected, but there was no connection to anything. That meant at this particular moment he was quite suddenly without identity and therefore without anchor. Was he David Carlisle the fugitive? Or should he think of himself in terms of his next alias - whatever name and nation and family Luca decided to give him? Or had he become the resurrected Lord Kenyon - despite the name on his new passport? On the Most Wanted lists he would surely be Robert Kenyon with all his titles included. One could only imagine how the tabloids would play the whole thing up with the inevitable sobriquet of the English Assassin. And yet, as none of this had happened, was he still David Carlisle?
He snapped the light off. The
me
, the
I,
and the
you
of his inner thoughts, the holy trinity inside one's head, had never been blurred before. Aliases had never been more than tools, but now he was not sure: he was a man on an island living on top of a mountain. . . nothing more.
He made his way back to his bed, checking the digital clock. Twelve-fifty. The dead of the night and here he was thinking about rubbish. It was actually a fairly decent time to go to bed if he had not been so tired from the last two sleepless nights. His shoulders hit the mattress and his eyes opened. This was insomnia. He smiled. There had been a taunt in the old days when one did something especially despicable to a woman, I
hope you can sleep at night!
Talk about tripe! Guilt had never kept anyone awake. No, fear and worry were the culprits. He looked toward Irina without seeing her. She had done her best to exhaust him earlier and now slept the sleep of the just - murderous bitch that she was. He could still remember watching her face as she executed the Spanish and U.S. federal officers in that Newark parking garage. She
liked
it. For him killing had never been pleasant. One killed for a reason and when one had finished with it that was it. Other than the adrenalin that came of one's natural fear of getting caught or killed he felt nothing at all when he took a life.
Instead of turning on his light and reading, as he probably would have done had he been alone, he lay quietly in his bed trying in vain to empty his mind. Nothing to worry about. The world was going to go on no matter what happened. He was going to make it as he always did - or perish as everyone must. No reason to lose sleep over it.
For Irina starting over had always been part of the overall plan. She had taken a third of Jack Farrell's fortune for her troubles and gave up a life of confidence games in the service of one of Hugo Ohlendorf's captains. In return for her troubles she got a new identity and a seat on the council. He had taken her new passport to her in New York and they had got her out of the country with only a little hair dye to modify her looks. She said she found it liberating to be someone new. Of course when she had said it she was still revelling in the blood and stink of murder.
Was
it liberating? He thought back to his first days as David Carlisle. There had been some pleasure, he had to admit. Coming back to murder those who had come after him was an especially liberating experience, but on the whole it was a mixed bag, certainly not something he had ever wanted to do twice in a lifetime.
He looked at Irina's shadow next to him. She could have moved on after a day or two at the farm. That had been the plan originally - a bit of celebration and then they were to separate so she could get on with establishing herself in her new life. Once they knew his situation had become precarious, she had decided to stay. He might have thought of her as loyal if he had not known human nature so well. Irina was positioning herself. Helena was suddenly gone. Someone was needed to replace her. Who better than her protégé? She had even mentioned taking over Hugo Ohlendorf's network. At least there was no shortage of ambition.
He could not say how long he lay in that twilight between dreams and consciousness as he tried to work through things that ought to have been settled. There were some moments when he might actually have crossed into sleep, but he kept coming back to consciousness. Call it a crisis of identity. Then something happened. A sound. He came awake suddenly and listened. No. Not a sound. That wasn't quite right. He had been listening to a sound - and it had suddenly ceased. The house was too quiet. Then it came to him. A pump had been running. Mid-cycle it had stopped. He turned and saw his digital alarm clock had gone black. He looked out the window and saw the grey sky. The security lights that always shone at night had been extinguished.
Someone had cut off the electricity.
Majorca, Spain