Blood Trust

TWELVE

“YOU’RE A dead man, Jack, you know that.” Dennis Paull shook his head. “All of you. You and Alli and this kid.”

Jack tried to find a comfortable position, keeping the pain in his side to a minimum. He’d gone to a surgeon. The slash was superficial. His hand needed a number of stitches, and he was on antibiotics.

“Why state the obvious?”

“Because now it’s a race against time,” Paull said. “We’ve got to terminate Arian Xhafa before one of his people puts a couple of sniper’s rounds into the three of you.”

Thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, Jack and Paull sat side by side in the front section of the 757’s luxuriously reconfigured interior. In the cargo hold below them, packed and ready, was the arsenal of DARPA weaponry Paull had handpicked for Chimera’s first assignment.

Alli and Thatë sat in the lounge area near the rear, eating pizza and drinking Cokes. The sight was incongruous and, for Jack, slightly eerie. They were just like two kids at a ’50s malt shop. Looking at them, the terrible events of the last twenty-four hours might never have happened.

Paull glanced at Thatë. “This fucking kid. I don’t like that you dragged him along.”

“I promised him. I had no choice.”

“Sure you had a choice.” Paull’s voice was like granite. “You could’ve ditched him the first chance you got.”

“And leave him to be picked off by Dardan’s men?”

“He carried that Stem pendant.”

“He didn’t lift a hand to protect Dardan.” Jack shook his head. “No, he’s straight, so far as that goes.”

“Still.”

“One day that cynicism will kill you,” Jack said.

Paull grunted. “In our business, there is no sharper blade than trust.”

Jack gave him an ironic smile. “I’ll try to remember that in the days ahead.”

“Still.” There was an insistence in Paull’s voice. “Why do you keep putting Alli in such danger?”

“I don’t do anything,” Jack said. “She does it herself.”

“How big is her death wish?”

“She was a holy terror in the Ukraine.”

Paull shifted, returning to the topic on his mind. “If I’d been kidnapped and held captive for a week, my death wish might be the size of New Jersey.”

So that was it. “She’s fine now, Dennis.”

“So you’ve got enough evidence to clear her on Billy Warren. What about her uncle’s security team?”

“Trust me.”

“Remember what I said about trust, Jack. But of all the people I know, you’re the one I do trust, so I got the fugitive warrant on her frozen—until we get back. I burned significant political capital with the president.”

“I appreciate it, Dennis.”

“Bullshit. You had me over a barrel. Tell me, would you really have refused to come?”

“I said it,” Jack nodded, “and I meant it.”

“You must love that girl more than life.” Paull shook his head. “You really are a fucking piece of work.”

“I appreciate the compliment.”

Paull still had a sour look on his face. “Did it ever occur to you that this kid might have killed Warren and strung him up?”

“It crossed my mind,” Jack said.

“Then why are you letting her sit with him?”

“She can take care of herself. Besides—” He sensed Alli coming toward them.

“Am I interrupting?” she said, plopping down in one of the empty seats facing them.

“We were just talking about you,” Jack said. “What’s the verdict?”

Alli shot Paull a wicked look before she addressed Jack’s question. “The jury’s still out.”

“Meaning?”

“He hasn’t lied to my face, but there’s something he’s holding back. He’s clearly frightened. Dardan’s death has unhinged him in some way I can’t fathom.”

“Do you think he killed Billy?”

“Too soon to tell.”

Jack, responding to the expression on her face, said, “What’s the matter?”

“He doesn’t trust us—not really, anyway.”

“Smart boy. He has no reason to keep trusting us.”

Alli risked a quick glance over her shoulder. “I’m doing my best to change that.”

“Go slow,” Jack said. “The kid’s skittish.”

Alli nodded and stood up. Jack reached out and took hold of her hand.

“I’m okay.” She touched his bandaged hand, and Jack nodded.

She smiled, and went back to rejoin Thatë.

Paull appeared stunned. “What are you two, a team?”

Jack smiled. “Let’s say we have an understanding.”

“Jesus, I wish my daughter and I understood each other like that.”

“Every relationship has its own difficulties.”

“Nevertheless.” Paull glanced after Alli. “What’s the secret?”

The secret, Jack thought, is Emma, reaching out to both of us from her unquiet existence beyond the grave. But that explanation would mean nothing to Paull.

“There is no secret.”

“Sure. It’s personal. I get it.” Paull nodded absently and took a swallow of single malt from a glass that sat by his right elbow. “Do you know why the Warren boy was murdered?”

“I now know that Dardan gave the order.”

“Why?”

“Billy Warren had something going with Arjeta Kraja, even though Arjeta belonged to Dardan. That’s more than enough cause for a man like him.”

“So Dardan had him whacked.”

“Wouldn’t that tie everything up in a nice, neat package.”

Paull stared at him. “You think not?”

“You bet I think not. Dardan had Billy Warren tortured. Why? To teach him a lesson before he died? I doubt it. No, Billy was tortured for the usual reason: information. Either he had discovered something about Dardan or he was in possession of something Dardan wanted. I think Arjeta knew it, too, because Billy told her the night he was murdered. Remember that Alli got a panicky call from Billy, but when she went to Twilight, she saw them disappearing together into the shadows.”

Paull flexed his shoulders. “So what’s the information?”

“That,” Jack said, “is the ten-billion-dollar question.”

NAOMI AND McKinsey stayed late at the office, fact-checking the backgrounds of the three Fortress employees, plus pulling together a timeline of the murders from whatever other notes and intel they had gathered so far.

“There’s nothing from the forensic report on Alli’s room at Fearington,” McKinsey said.

Naomi picked up a plastic evidence bag. “Except this damn vial the roofies were in.”

“With her fingerprints on it.”

“And no one else’s.” Naomi shook the bag and hard light glinted off the yellowish plastic. “Jack thought that was odd and so do I.”

“Setup?”

Naomi nodded. “But who? And why?”

McKinsey looked at the whiteboard, where various possible motives were written out, and shook his head.

“How’s your look-see into our friends, the bogus O’Banion and Willowicz, coming?” she asked.

“It isn’t. The Metro police who interviewed us today took me off that. They say since the real Willowicz and O’Banion are on leave it’s an internal matter.”

“Do you believe them?”

“Metro police does not harbor spooks, Naomi.” He shrugged. “They’re two men without names.”

She glanced up. “Meaning?”

He shrugged. “For all intents and purposes they don’t exist.”

She looked vexed. “They must exist, just not under the names Willowicz and O’Banion.”

“Not our job now,” he said.

“It pisses me off,” she said, “those two running around, doing whatever the hell they please.”

“Leave it, Naomi. We have bigger rats to run down.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. The air system rattled and hummed, a cleaning cart rumbled down a hallway outside their office. A tuneless whistle approached, then was gone. The place stank of hamburgers, stale sweat, and anxiety. Silently, they got back to work. The hands of the wall clock ground slowly forward.

Around midnight, McKinsey said, “We’re never going to find Arjeta Kraja.” He threw a cup of cold coffee in the trash. “You know that, don’t you?”

She sighed, suspecting that he was right. “She’s probably buried deep.”

“More likely chopped into pieces.”

Naomi sat back, surveying the mess of papers, reports, and crime-scene photos, which now seemed to whirl before her eyes like a pinwheel at a carnival. “One person killed Billy Warren and both the guys at Twilight. The MO Jack found proves that, and yet we have not one solid lead.”

“We don’t have even a ghost of one. We don’t even have a motive. I mean why were these people murdered? What did they know? Carson’s going to be asking us questions and we’re not going to have any answers.”

“Fuck him.”

“You say that now.” McKinsey stretched. “Fuck this, I gotta get outta here.”

Naomi realized that she was fried, too. Besides, she had another agenda to tend to. “I’m starved. Let’s go get something to eat.”

“Really? You want to hang out?”

“I want to eat.” She rose, grabbing her coat. “You coming or not?”

He got to his feet. “Sure thing. I wouldn’t miss a date with you for all the porn on the Internet.”

She smiled inwardly. She couldn’t wait to get him hammered.

They went to Marco’s, a red-sauce Italian joint straight out of The Godfather, except the food was indifferent. It did, however, have the advantage of being close to the office, not to mention cheap. Plus, it had a first-class bar.

The kitchen could have used a lesson or two from Pete Clemenza, Naomi thought sourly as they took their seats around a table with a red-and-white-checked cloth. She was something of a foodie, a frustrating trait for someone on her salary. How many restaurants had she been forced to pass by because she knew she couldn’t afford even a Caesar salad or a crudo appetizer?

They started out with whiskey shots. Then, typical of him, McKinsey opted for a cheap wine, which Naomi immediately countermanded, choosing a bottle of Chianti, which at least would not take off the roof of her mouth. When it came, McKinsey attacked it like a roast turkey, downing a third of the bottle before she had finished her second glass. They discussed the case, the fact that all three Fortress employees seemed to check out. Naomi asked him what he thought of the information in the dossiers and he shrugged, as if to say, You’ve seen one dossier, you’ve seen them all.

“I must say you’re taking this case very personally,” he said.

“And that surprises you?”

He shrugged again. “A bit. On the Ranch, you’re known as the Ice Doll.” The Ranch was the Secret Service “clubhouse,” a male-chosen name that set her teeth on edge. It only proved her male compatriots’ arrested adolescence.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s face it, Naomi, you don’t get involved—in anything.”

“Shit, Pete, I know code words when I hear them. What your young boys’ club means is that I won’t go down on any of them.”

He stared at her for a moment, then burst into laughter. “You know, you’re probably right. They ride me about that all the time, which I guess is a compliment.”

“A shit-handed compliment if I ever heard one.”

He shook his head. “I can’t figure out why you ignore the fact that you’re beautiful—and smokin’ hot.”

“That’s because you’re not a woman,” she said tartly. “You go through life thinking you’re hot, and that’s exactly how men treat you. Boobs, butt, legs, beyond that they won’t see an inch. Do you have any idea how hard I have to work to get men to take me seriously?”

“Not really,” he said dryly. “All I see when I look at you are boobs, butt, and legs.”

“Bastard,” she said, and they both laughed.

New glasses and a second bottle of wine appeared, a Lambrusco this time. The waiter poured a little into her glass to taste. She swirled it around, smelled it, then took a sip. It was fine, and she nodded her approval.

McKinsey made a face. “But, see, this is what I mean. You can be such a fucking snob.” He swigged down some of the wine. His eyes had a semiglazed look and his hair seemed unkempt. “Honestly, I don’t know why I put up with you.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

He began to scan the menu. “Well, I could request a new partner, but no one else would have you.”

Naomi buried her face in the menu and decided not to show how deeply he had stung her.

He set aside the menu. “Besides, no one else would come up to your standards.”

She raised her eyes to see his tight grin. Everything about Pete was tight. He was one of those people who worked out at the gym three nights a week. If he wasn’t in the Secret Service he’d have been a professional gym rat without any socially redeeming value whatsoever.

They gave their orders to the waiter, who gathered up their menus and departed. That left the two of them staring at each other. The bustle all around them seemed not to exist, or to be muted out of all proportion. Though it was far too late for a normal dinner crowd, this crew was anything but normal. They all worked for the federal government; three-quarters of them—maybe more—were spooks of one sort or another. They were a clannish lot: the field agents over there, the intel parsers over here, the code breakers huddled in back like a bunch of old ladies. A table of four bosses—who knew their real ranks?—was in the center of the crowd, anxiously being observed by everyone out of the corner of their eyes.

“The Bishops are in the process of rearranging the board,” McKinsey said. Bishop was the internal name for the bosses, from departmental chairs to ministry honchos to the secretaries in their lofty nests high above the fray at the president’s side.

“They’re always rearranging something,” Naomi said. “It gives them something to do.”

McKinsey nodded. “Stratagems within stratagems.”

Speaking of which, Naomi thought, what stratagem are you involved with? She put a smile on her face. “Pete, we’ve been partners for a couple of years. What do we know about each other?”

He shrugged. “We always have each other’s back. What else do we need to know?”

The food came and she sat back until the waiter had left. She glanced down at her food and knew that she’d made a mistake. The red sauce looked too much like blood and the meatballs—well, she’d rather not even go there.

McKinsey was already forking up his veal parm. “What’s the matter?”

Naomi sighed and put her fork down. “I just lost my appetite.”

He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “This isn’t like you, Naomi. What’s gotten under your skin?”

“Just about everything,” she said, “from what was done to Billy Warren, to four dead bodies in the space of twelve hours, to Alli being the prime suspect in Billy’s torture-death.”

He looked at her steadily. “You have a soft spot for that girl, don’t you?”

She returned his gaze, part of her looking inside herself. “I was with her when she lost her father, when they brought her mother aboard Air Force One. Losing both parents in the space of a year. I feel for that girl. Her world’s been turned inside out. And now this mess.”

“We’ve all been through shitty times, Naomi.” He popped a wedge of veal into his mouth. “She’s no different than the rest of us poor fools.”

Naomi clamped down on the urge to say, There’s nothing the same between us and Alli, but, instead, sticking to her agenda, she said, “You’ve been through tough times, Pete?”

“Sure.” He rolled his shoulders, the way all gym rats did. “One time, when I was eight, or maybe nine, I got lost. I mean really lost. My parents had rented a cabin in the Smoky Mountains. This was before the blood and guts of the divorce started flying, but already they weren’t getting along. I guess they thought the vacation would do their relationship good. Instead, the isolation just brought home to them how unhappy they were. They fought—every night they fought, worse and worse. I couldn’t stand it, so I left.”

He speared another chunk of veal and cheese. “It’s not like I was running away from home or anything, but I had to get out of there. I was so upset, I didn’t think, didn’t take a flashlight or even a jacket. I ran into the forest the way you run in a nightmare, without sound, with your heart pounding so heavily you’re sure it’s going to explode and rip you wide open.

“I remember the moon, that cold light breaking through the pine branches, making little pools of light that winked out too fast. Otherwise, Jesus, it was as dark as a pit. After a while, I ran out of breath, so I stopped, bent over, hands on my knees, panting like a sonuvabitch.

“Sometime later, I stood up and looked around. I had no idea where I was. Worse, I had no idea from which direction I had come. I had no one, nothing to guide me home. Hell, right then, I didn’t have a home.”

He held the forkful of food but it hung in the air, suspended, not going anywhere. McKinsey was lost again.

“What to do? Naomi, I tell you, I’ve never been so scared in my life. I was flooded with adrenaline. I heard all these strange sounds, amplified to an almost unbearable level, I saw leaves tremble as unseen animals moved through.”

He put down his fork and looked at her. “Have you ever seen a bear in the wild?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It’s a pretty fucking amazing thing. That’s what came out of the underbrush, Naomi, a bear. A black bear. A man-eater.”

“What happened?”

McKinsey put his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together. “Here’s the thing: you never know what a bear is going to do next. There are no signals you can read. Its behavior is totally unpredictable. And that pretty much sums up life in general: It’s so fucking unpredictable you’ve got to do everything in your power to protect yourself from being eaten alive.”

Naomi stared at him, and it was some time before she realized that he had given her his motivation for having some kind of arrangement with Fortress Securities. You’ve got to do everything in your power to protect yourself from being eaten alive. This told her why, but not what. What was Pete doing with Fortress, and was it a coincidence that this was the company whose head was in bed with Henry Holt Carson? Naomi didn’t believe in coincidences. In her world, a belief in coincidence got you killed.

“How did it end?”

McKinsey finished off the bottle. “It didn’t end, but I see what you mean.” He laughed, showing her his teeth, ivory-colored and even. “The moment it saw me the bear reared up on its hind legs. He and I, perfectly still, stood looking at each other. I was aware of something breathing just below me. Later, I realized it was my body. Abject terror had taken my mind away from the danger. How long we stayed like that I can’t even guess. Eventually, though, the bear went down on all fours, turned, and crashed back through the thick undergrowth.”

McKinsey licked his lips. Naomi was pleased to see that he’d had more than enough.

“Go on, Pete.”

“That fucking bear.” He shook his head. “I never saw the bear again.” His voice had lowered, causing Naomi to lean across the table. “But, late at night or early in the morning or just as the sun is going down, I can hear it breathing close beside me, I can smell its foul breath, feel its huge presence, like an eclipse, like death.” He looked at her bleakly, his eyes red-rimmed. “There’s no way to escape it, you know. None at all.”

JACK AND Alli sat together talking softly. All around them was the stillness of movement found only in an airplane.

“Tell me about Billy Warren,” Jack said.

Alli shrugged.

“What attracted you to him?”

“He was nice—honest. He wasn’t grabby, like the other guys around me. And there was something old-fashioned about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for instance, he liked ice-cream sodas, not Jell-O shots. And, despite what he did for a living, he was a kind of neo-Luddite. He hated computers, hated how easily data could be hijacked, substituted, even faked. Give me a pen and a sheet of paper any day, he used to say.” Her expression turned pensive. “It was horrible what happened to him. I mean, he was a good guy, Jack. He just wasn’t for me.”

“There are lots more guys out there, Alli. And you have plenty of time.”

She looked away, abruptly uncomfortable.

EMMA CAME to Jack in the darkness of the plane, while everyone around him slept and he was staring out the Perspex window at the unending darkness. Far below him, great ships plowed through the waves with their cargos of oil, electronics, washer/dryers, and cars. Men smoked and ate, slept and joked and played cards, or watched porn on their portable DVD players. That was another world, one he’d never been a part of, even when he was younger. He’d been born an outsider and an outsider he remained.

He felt his daughter first as a waft of chill air, then as a stirring of the hairs on his forearms, and then she was beside him, while, three rows back, Paull sucked in deep drafts of sleep.

“You were there, weren’t you,” Jack whispered, “in that underground house of death?”

“Yes.”

—Why?

“I have no choice in these matters. I’m tied to death, recent death, when it involves you or Alli.”

Jack ran a hand across his face, as if he could scrub away this hallucination or manifestation of his mind, or whatever it was.

—I don’t want this. I want you safe.

Emma laughed.

“If there’s a safer place than this, I don’t know about it.”

I want to hold her, Jack thought. I want her back. He spoke to her instead.

—These murders are linked. I can see a pattern forming, Emma, but there aren’t enough pieces yet to put in place. Like who tortured and killed Billy Warren. Like who killed those two men at Twilight. I’m sure Dardan could have answered those questions.

“Dad, I thought you’d have gotten it by now. I’m not a seer.”

—You can see certain things. You knew about your mother and me.

“I’m connected to both of you. How could I not know you were splitting up?”

Jack didn’t understand a thing about this arrangement. How could he; it was beyond human ken.

“You don’t miss her, Dad, do you?”

—I don’t, no.

“But you do miss Annika.”

—You’re wrong, Emma.

“I’d like to say I don’t mind that you can’t admit it to me, but the fact is I do.”

—She’s evil.

“You know that’s not true.”

—She murdered Senator Berns.

“How many people has your friend Dennis Paull murdered, I wonder?”

—Self-defense or mission-specific. All understandable, all within protocol.

“Oh, Dad, protocol? Really? Okay, if you want to go that route. Annika’s murder was protocol: mission-specific—for her grandfather.”

—Now that man—Dyadya Gourdjiev—is the devil.

“As opposed to her father?”

Jack sighed. The late, unlamented Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, who had stolen her away from her mother and kept Annika locked up, committing unspeakable acts of sexual violence on her body.

—It’s all in the past, so what’s the point?

“From where I stand, there is no past, no future, no present. It’s all the same. Time is just something human beings made up to keep themselves from going crazy.”

He smiled.

—Were you always like this? So damn philosophical?

She laughed.

—Yet another aspect of you I missed, Emma.

“Everybody missed it, Dad, except for Alli.”

He was suddenly very tired.

—I want to sleep, but I don’t know whether I’ll be able to.

His daughter smiled her translucent smile.

“That I can help you with.”

She spread her arms. His eyes closed.

“Rest now, Dad.”