Blood Trust

SIX

“WELL?”

“Everything has gone according to plan.”

Henry Holt Carson nodded. His shoulders were hunched against the brittle wind. The sky looked like porcelain and it seemed to him as if the sun would never shine again. Like the residents of Seattle, he was getting used to the gloom.

“Paull is gone?” he asked.

President Crawford nodded. “And, as you predicted, he’s taken Jack McClure with him.”

“Good.”

Carson looked around him. This time of year the Rose Garden was a rectangle of mush and fertilizer, the sturdy rose stems prickly and dangerous as a porcupine’s back.

“I still don’t quite understand,” the president said.

Carson closed his eyes for a moment. A pulse beat in his forehead and he was certain a migraine was coming on. As was his wont, he fought against it. “They were too close to my brother.”

Crawford’s brow furrowed deeply and he snorted like a horse. “Do you think they suspect?”

“I don’t know.” Carson put a hand to his head. Yes, a migraine, definitely. “I hope to God they don’t.”

“But McClure—”

“My brother told me all about McClure’s monstrous brain.”

“Then you know it’s only a matter of time before he figures it out. That can only lead to more blood being spilled.”

“Yes,” Carson said through gritted teeth. He did not nod or move his head in any untoward way. “That’s why I want him gone. By the time he does figure it out, it’ll be too late. The only way to him that wouldn’t cause suspicion was through Dennis Paull.” He clamped down on the migraine but, as always, it was getting the better of him.

“Still, I worry.”

“The American people pay you to worry.”

Carson turned, fumbled in his trousers pocket, opened the silver-and-gold pill case, shook two pills into his mouth, and swallowed them with the little saliva he had left. The migraines seemed to suck him dry, until his tongue felt as if it were as big and unwieldy as a zeppelin.

The president eyed his Secret Service detail, circling the garden like a murder of crows. He took a hesitant step toward his friend. “Hank, I think you’d best sit down.”

Carson waved him off. “I’m fine.”

“Of course you are. But, you know, I find I’m a little peaked.” He sat on a stone bench. “Here, sit down beside me so we can continue our private talk uninterrupted. I haven’t much time before the budget meeting.”

Carson came and sat, holding his body as delicately as if it had turned to glass, which, in a way, it had.

Crawford looked away for a moment, out over the grounds to Washington itself. The White House was like a pearl sitting in the middle of an oyster, peacefully protected. However, today the president felt anything but peaceful.

“I knew this job was going to be difficult,” he said after a time, “and I prepared myself for it.” He stared down at his hands, folded priestlike in his lap. “But as for the complications…” He allowed his voice to drift off like mist off the Potomac.

“Life is complications, Arlen. The higher you climb the more they pile up, until you have one cluster-fuck after another.”

“Well, then, this must be the mother of all cluster-fucks.” Crawford took a breath. “Then again, maybe we’re not speaking of complications at all, maybe it’s compromises.”

Carson said nothing; he was too busy trying to keep his thoughts from being shredded by the cyclone of his migraine.

“Maybe it’s selling the house down the river without even a wave good-bye.”

Suddenly, the president’s words flooded into his brain, and he turned his head ever so gently. “For the love of God, do not tell me that you have cold feet, not at this late date. Fuck, Arlen, I moved heaven and earth with both the party caucuses and Eddy to get you the vice president’s position. We had a plan, from the very beginning we had a plan.”

“No, Hank, you had a plan.”

“Have it your way.” Carson massaged his temples, slowly and methodically. “What mattered then is the same thing that matters now. You hitched your name to my star. You rose as I rose.”

“You need me, Hank.”

The laugh caused Carson some pain. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself? The truth you keep avoiding is this: You need me far more than I need you. If you bail on me now there will be dire consequences. You knew from the very beginning, when you’re in, you’re in for life. Your decision is irrevocable.”

The president shook his head. “That was then. From where I’m sitting now—”

“You’re sitting in the perfect place for what needs to be done. Fate had a hand in this, the same fate that took Eddy from me. Scales of justice.”

Now it was Crawford’s turn to laugh. “What a hypocrite you are, Hank. There is no justice in this world. It’s men like you who see to that.”

OUT ON the street, there was no sign of O’Banion or Willowicz. Jack called in to the Metro detectives’ unit. Willowicz and O’Banion existed, Carson’s lawyer had been read their jackets, but the real Willowicz and O’Banion were on temporary leave. So who were these two masquerading as the Metro detectives, and who were they working for? The only way to find out was to ask them, so Jack sent McKinsey and Naomi out to search the surrounding blocks. Maybe the bogus detectives got careless and left some trace behind, though he doubted it. Those two were hardened professionals who left nothing to chance.

He stayed behind, preferring to check the crime scene without distractions. While he studied the two new victims, his mind was feverishly at work. First Billy Warren gets himself tortured and killed, but not before the perp goes to the trouble of setting Alli up as the killer. Then Arjeta Kraja goes missing. Billy, Alli, and Arjeta were all seen here at Twilight, and now the manager and bartender, the two people who might have had some information about the trio, wind up murdered by two goons pretending to be O’Banion and Willowicz.

He bent down to check that his finding here with the bartender was the same as the one he’d noticed on the manager. Yes, it was true: In both cases the bone just below the left eye socket had been fractured, just as it had been on Billy’s face.

He recalled the fracture beneath Billy’s left eye. Ever since then he’d been going under the dubious hypothesis that Arjeta Kraja had killed Billy. After all, excluding Alli, she was the prime suspect in the triangle, and, further, if she were in love with Billy, she’d have reason to want to pin the murder on Alli. It was a shaky premise because the fracture was precise. It couldn’t have been made by someone in a rage. Further, the theory didn’t explain Billy’s torture. If she loved him, she might, in a rage, kill him. But torture him? No way.

And now, with these two murders, the hypothesis was evaporating altogether. Arjeta Kraja killing these two in league with O’Banion and Willowicz? It didn’t track for him. Of course, O’Banion and Willowicz could be behind all three murders, but how to explain the deliberateness of the fracture?

The bogus O’Banion and Willowicz were obvious muscle; working stiffs. Someone far more clever than they had mapped out this scenario. Something was horribly wrong, but even with racking his brain, he couldn’t figure out what. He didn’t have enough pieces of the puzzle yet.

One thing was for certain, however: The link between these murders and Billy’s completely exonerated Alli. So he called in to his office to get the crime scene covered. He directed them to have the three corpses sent to his old friend Egon Schiltz, an ME he trusted absolutely. He was about to head out onto the street in search of McKinsey and Naomi when an image flashed through his mind, and he turned back.

The manager’s left hand was on the table, the palm open as if offering something when he was killed. His right arm hung down at his side, partially obscured by the table. Jack went around and took a longer look at what his brain had glimpsed the first time. The manager’s left hand was a fist, so tight the nails had scored bloody half-moons in the skin of his palm.

Crouching down, Jack pried open the fingers one by one. Something bright and shiny dropped to the floor. He picked it up and, rising to his feet, took it over to the light streaming in through one of the windows flanking the front door. It was a small metal badge, such as one would pin to a lapel or a collar. It was octagonal and had some writing on it, but all Jack’s brain saw was the shape. The writing itself was a tiny whirlpool of moving units. He tried to concentrate, as Reverend Myron Taske had taught him to do, by creating the entirely quiet spot in the air just to the right of his head. He tried looking at the badge from that viewpoint, which allowed him to calm the whirlpool of mysterious symbols, painstakingly turn them into the three-dimensional letters he had learned to identify, so he could read. All he could discern was that the badge contained no words in English. As to what language the words might be, he had not a clue. He had learned to speak many languages, perhaps in compensation for his difficulty in reading, but it was moments like this, when he was confronted by the wall of his dyslexia, that still vexed him.

Fighting the intense frustration and helplessness that threatened to overwhelm him, he picked his way to the plate-glass window, as if daylight and the passing traffic could calm him. He wondered why the club manager had been so desperate to hold on to the badge, to keep it hidden from his killers. At the same time, he was calculating who to take the badge to—a linguistics professor, an expert in local criminal gangs, or an underground slacker. The possibilities were virtually endless and made his head hurt.

He stared out the window. It had begun to rain, rather a soft gray mist that muted colors and softened edges so that everything seemed the same, like time-abraded soapstone, the present already faded into a past that could never be retrieved.

All at once, he felt a cool breeze stroke his cheek.

“Emma?”

“I’m here, Dad. It seems easier to be near you when…”

Jack, hearing his dead daughter’s voice in his head, stared at the corpses.

—When I’m near someone dead, I understand.

“Not dead. Newly dead. Before the body has cooled. While the spirit is still undecided about whether to go into Darkness or into the Light.”

—But, you, Emma, you’ve chosen neither. How is that possible?

“How is life possible? How is any of this possible?”

—I have no answers, Emma.

“Neither do I.”

—Nevertheless, I’m happy you’re here.

OUT ON the street, McKinsey and Naomi split up. McKinsey went east, Naomi west. McKinsey had been seconded into the Secret Service after a stellar six years as a Marine in first the Horn of Africa and then Fallujah. Again and again, he had engaged the enemy at whites-of-their-eyes range and lived to not tell the tales. Those grisly tales were locked away in his brain, under lock and key demanded by the various security acts his government imposed on him. He was proud of those secrets, proud of the kills he’d made in the service of his country, for he fervently believed in protecting America, whatever it took. He would have willingly given his life for that belief, but, when it came to war—and specifically guerilla warfare—he was too smart, too wily. The Marines were sorry when he was rotated out for the second time. Then the DoD decided it had a more important task for him.

McKinsey walked easily and loosely, without a trace of military bearing, blending perfectly into the foot traffic on the streets. At the same time, his well-honed radar—an ability to sense anything out of place on the field of battle or in enemy territory—combined with his keen sight to vet each person he glimpsed, even if it was only for a second. He quartered his immediate environment with military precision while appearing to window shop. It was important, he knew, to check the interior of shops, cafés, and restaurants, because contrary to how movies and television shot these things, foot chases were more often slow and plodding, more a question of thinking like your prey than being faster with foot and gun.

He paused in front of a café, thinking he’d spotted Willowicz, but a waitress moved out of the way and he saw that he was mistaken. Nevertheless, he entered the shop, checking the L-shaped space in nooks and crannies not visible from the street. Then he went into the men’s room, checked all the stalls, before finding his way back out onto the street. He was now a number of blocks from Twilight, having moved in an expanding spiral from the locus of the nightclub. He went into a public garage and looked around.

Clear.

NAOMI’S TREK west soon took her past several boutiques and a medium-sized restaurant, which she entered, ignoring the manager, picking her way around the tables and banquettes, searching for any sign of O’Banion and Willowicz. She checked the kitchen, where workers looked at her curiously, sullenly, then she backtracked to the men’s room. She was neither shy nor squeamish. Taking out her ID, she held it in front of her as she kicked open the door and strode in. One man, at a urinal, jerked around, wetting his polished brogues. A younger man, at the sink, looked her up and down in the mirror and gave her a wolf whistle. She grinned at him, then turned her attention to the stalls.

Naomi had come to the Secret Service because her older brother had expected such a career path for her. She adored him; he had brought her up after their parents had died in a plane crash over the Himalayas. She had been six, a vulnerable age. She had missed her parents terribly, particularly her mother. Her brother hadn’t been able to do anything about that. Instead, he had instilled in her a sense of self-worth and of purpose before he had shipped off to Afghanistan. Eight months later, he had been returned home in a body bag.

She had chosen the Secret Service, partly because she could not bear to leave D.C., which was her hometown. An orphan had to feel close to something from her past, and, for her, the District was it. Still, she missed her brother, who was still her best friend. She was closed and she knew it; after her brother had moved to New York, she had isolated herself. She had some acquaintances, a couple of drinking buddies, both male and female, and an employee of DoD whom she counted on from time to time for a booty call. That was it. Except for Jack McClure, for whom she had been carrying a torch ever since they had first met when he was in ATF and still married to that bitch, Sharon. Now that he was officially on his own, though, she found that she lacked the skills, or tools, to let him know how she felt. The fact was, she was as terrified as she was attracted—a cul-de-sac from which she had yet to extricate herself.

Finding neither of the false detectives inhabiting the dank stalls, she retraced her steps to the kitchen, passing through it, and out the back door into a grim alley lined with garbage cans. A Dumpster hulked not far away and, because she was nothing if not thorough, she lifted up the green top and peered in. Using a metal rod she found in the alley, she held her nose and stirred the garbage, jamming the rod into several spots. Garbage and more garbage. She dropped the rod, closed the top, and visually checked either end of the alley.

Choosing one end at random, she moved off.

WALKING UP the garage’s ramp, McKinsey thought about the Horn of Africa. That dungheap was never far from his thoughts. Fallujah had been blindingly bright with danger, and any number of his buddies had perished there, most in terrible ways he’d rather forget, but in Fallujah he knew the enemy, even when it was a hurt teenager packed with explosives. He could smell death in the air, and he knew how to deal with it.

The Horn of Africa was an entirely different story—a morass of terror and betrayal. Death lurked not only in every shadow and around every corner, but in the brilliance of sunlight, an extended hand, a warm smile, a whisper of friendship and support. Nothing was as it appeared to be. It was all dark theater, complete with masks, trapdoors, and unknown ringmasters out to skin you alive and string you up for the vermin to feed on. In all his travels around the world, McKinsey had never felt the sting of such implacable, bitter hatred as he had in the Horn of Africa. He liked it there; it was like living on Mars.

Soon enough he reached the topmost level, and walking to the gray late-model Ford, he pulled the passenger’s side door open and got in.

“What the fuck?” Willowicz said. “This McClure bastard is going to screw everything up.”