Kodiak Sky

CHAPTER 20

Liam Sterling walked along Constitution Avenue through the late-afternoon humidity of Washington, DC, all the while taking copious mental notes because he never wrote anything down. Written notes created evidence, and evidence was his sworn enemy.

Sterling wore a faded blue Minnesota Twins baseball cap, a dark-red faux beard, and a layer of false padding below his gray University of Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt. He walked a little slowly and a little hunched over, careful to make his movement seem stiff. And as he moved east along Constitution toward the Capitol, he licked a double-scoop chocolate ice cream cone he’d just bought from a street vendor near the Lincoln Memorial, making certain to allow a few drops to fall on his shirt as he looked around and shook his head in apparent awe. He was trying hard, though not too hard, to look like an anonymous, middle-aged tourist from the Midwest who was visiting the nation’s capital for the first time.

That was the key to carrying off a disguise, Sterling knew. Not trying too hard to look like someone you weren’t. Trying too hard was a dead giveaway to the trained eye, and Sterling was never so arrogant to think that he might not finally be discovered one day. He hadn’t yet, as far as he knew, but there could always come a day.

He glanced south toward the Washington Monument. One more mission and he was out of this racket. He’d decided that last night on the long plane ride from Lima to Dulles.

It had been less than twenty-four hours since he’d finished his meeting with Daniel Gadanz at the jungle compound in Peru. But he already had people coming toward Washington from multiple locations around the globe. They were converging from faraway places in roundabout ways to minimize detection, because if any of America’s intel groups caught a sniff of the hell heading toward them, they’d put this city on lockdown immediately.

Some of the people Sterling had called to help him were most certainly on intel radar screens. If the authorities put the pieces together, they’d shut down the federal government right away, and civilians would be required to show identification on nearly every street corner. Active troops and National Guardsmen would be swarming everywhere searching for the assassins. It would be that intense. And there would go the mission.

Sterling already had his bloodhounds scouring the world for Bill Jensen, but no luck so far. The world was a big place, and Gadanz had been quite certain about Jensen being resourceful. But it was early yet. There was still time to acquire that target, which would mean another twenty-five million dollars.

One of Sterling’s trackers had located Jack and Troy in Connecticut. Sterling could have both of them killed within the hour if he wanted, but killing the brothers now would send all the other targets to ground, and he couldn’t have that. Everything had to be perfectly choreographed if he was going to maximize his reward and, perhaps just as important, he realized, maximize his self-satisfaction at carrying out the greatest attack ever on the United States of America. It would end up being far more momentous than 9/11 or the Holiday Mall Attacks. So he was going to wait on killing Jack and Troy Jensen, even if they were exposed right now.

He smiled a little as he hesitated and turned to the north to gaze at the White House. Marine One was landing on the back lawn. Life is good, he thought to himself, watching the large olive-green-and-white helicopter touch down and whip the tree branches and grass around it into a frenzy.

It surprised him that there was only one chopper. There should be at least two, he figured, three if they were going to be really careful. Those things would be so easy to bring down with a surface-to-air missile, which almost any idiot could obtain these days. If there were two birds in the sky, the president would have a slightly better chance at surviving an attack. The idiot using the SAMs might not hit both of them.

Then he spotted three other choppers hovering to the east.

Daniel Gadanz had been true to his word. The twenty million dollars he’d promised as a down payment had already arrived in Sterling’s UBS account in Basel, Switzerland — Sterling had checked on his cell phone immediately after wheels-down at Dulles a few hours ago. And he’d already moved the money from UBS to an even lower-profile account he maintained in Antigua, in the financial world’s ultimate black hole.

So he had the down payment, and there was so much more to come.

And he had a high-priced call girl back at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, sleeping naked between the Egyptian cotton sheets of the comfortable king-sized bed.

Sterling took another lick off the chocolate cone as he watched the rotors atop Marine One continue to rotate. Yes, life was very good. And it was only going to get better.

Now if he could just figure out who Gadanz’s source was on Red Cell Seven. That would make everything perfect.

Sterling began walking along again. He would definitely take responsibility for killing Bill Jensen and the president. Jack Jensen, too, he’d decided.

He hated the Wall Street bastards with a passion.

The little girl lay on a single bed made up with all-white linens. She had delicate facial features with large brown eyes, and she was very pretty — except that her black skin was scorched with awful, blood-splotched sores.

As the camera moved in closer, tiny drops of blood began oozing from the outer corners of both the little girl’s eyes. It looked as if she were literally crying blood. Maybe she was, Sterling thought to himself, as the camera panned back again and two doctors dressed in light blue containment suits moved to either side of the bed.

They bravely took her fingers in their gloved hands as she stared up at them with a near-lifeless gaze. She was probably so far gone at this point she no longer felt the terrible pain of the virus that was consuming her from the inside out, turning her flesh into an awful gray mass of waste.

Sterling stopped the video. It was the third time he’d watched it, and it had the same chilling effect each time. He shook his head, impressed. Daniel Gadanz could be very creative when he wanted to be.

He put the laptop down on the hotel room bed and shook the prostitute’s leg hard. She was young, beautiful, and passionate, but she slept too much. Yes, he was about to earn three hundred million dollars. Still, he was paying her a lot of money, and she damn well needed to earn it.

“Wake up,” he ordered harshly. “It’s time to fuck.”

She lifted her head up slowly off the pillow and yawned. “Again? Already?”

Sterling’s eyes narrowed as a thin smile edged across his face. He was going to enjoy killing this one, much more than he had Sophia. This one deserved it.