Perfect killer

440. "

Along the left side of the drive ran a sheer wall of fractured, red volcanic tuft. Olive trees defined the perimeter of the outer curb, teasing sightseers with lacy glimpses of the valley floor.

Gabriel audibly picked up his pace now. He was a sharp, tough man who had been Braxton's capable sword arm during his endlessly trying political years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Gabriel later became head of West Point when Braxton resigned to become chairman of Defense Therapeutics.

Braxton bent forward into the steep slope, challenging gravity as if he were heading back up Hamburger Hill.

"I imagine the incoming slugs," he told the interviewer from Forbes. "You never forget that battle separates the quick from the dead, and I always wanted to be the quickest. It's amazing how light your boots can be when you're trying to outrun the devil."

Behind them, the cycle-mounted armed guards paced the duo at a distance.

Ironically, his near-fatal head wound had not come from a hill but from a griddleflat rice paddy in the Mekong Delta when a Vietcong ambush wiped out most of his Ranger unit. The initial VC attack with RPG-7s tore through their two Hueys. Braxton saw the first one go off like a bomb in midair. Braxton, then a freshly minted major and less than a month in country, hung on to his surviving chopper as they pancaked hard into the paddy and came under withering AK-47 fire. Braxton pulled his remaining men together and charged their attackers.

"Did you see the videotape of that old CBS footage?" the first armed outrider asked.

"Who hasn't?" said the second man. "I mean, all that footage with Cronkite's voice showed the American people a real giant. A genuine hero."

The first man nodded. I never get tired of watching it. Talk about inspiring."

On the VHS tape, now copied to scores of DVDs and streamed from the web sites of Clark Braxton's most admiring supporters, viewers watched Cronkite call it "the aftermath of hell": four wounded GIs thigh deep in mud surrounded by black-clad bodies floating in the nearby water. But the image that found an immediate place in the American heart and its mythology was the close-up on Major Clark Braxton's face, particularly the scorched, twisted, foot-long rod of Huey fuselage that had entered his forehead a hairbreadth away from his right eye and emerged from the top of his head. From his hospital bed in Saigon, a rank second lieutenant among the survivors, Dan Gabriel, had told the CBS war correspondent that the sight of Braxton, a man with a hideous wound who should have been dead, broke the nerve of the Vietcong, who were gunned down as they fled.

"He never even lost consciousness," the first outrider said as they moved stealthily up the steep drive. "Jesus! He never even hesitated a second!"

And that look of surprise on his face when the cameraman pointed out the fucking metal sticking out of his head," said the second outrider. "Fucking amazing!"

When he received his Congressional Medal of Honor, Braxton still wore a bandage over his postsurgical wounds. Postsurgical evaluation of Braxton indicated no physical or neurological impairment, a finding consistent with a small number of similar wounds carefully cataloged by medical science. Interviews with his instructors at West Point indicated his actions that day in the Mekong Delta had demonstrated far more courage under fire than expected from a student whom they had once considered better suited for logistical and administrative command. Clearly, they said, battle was where the true man had emerged.

Braxton's legend grew through two more tours in Vietnam. He became the frontline commander the army called on when things got tough. Hanoi considered him so effective they marked him for assassination with a $1 million bounty on his head.

Army psychologists noted that Braxton's mania for collecting began about this time.

Now, as Dan Gabriel's footsteps grew closer, the General picked a memory to sustain himself. This time it was the charge he'd led to rescue a trapped squad of Marines at Hue. He felt his body respond as he visualized the terrain, recalled the clash of weapons, and smelled the stench of spent ordnance and open abdominal wounds. But Gabriel's ten more years of relative youth started to show as the men neared their finish line, another red-and-white barrier laid across the road with a guard hut beside it. Discreetly disappearing into the landscaping on both flanks of the gate was a double row of electrified metal fencing crowned with concertina wire.

At that moment, Braxton's wireless phone vibrated on his belt. With Gabriel's footsteps pounding in his ears, Braxton ignored the phone and urged his burning quadriceps into a final burst of energy, carrying him past the finish line inches ahead of Gabriel.

Braxton broke his pace then and allowed Gabriel to shoot past him.

"You peaked a bit too late," Braxton said as he searched for the precisely sportsmanlike tone the situation demanded. He kept the gloating to himself: it offered nothing to be gained.

Gabriel fell in beside the General. "Thanks, sir."

"Soon," Braxton said as he grabbed his phone and looked at the caller ID, "you'll be beating me." He smiled as a short message scrolled across his screen. The rules he had established with her required no voice mails, no trails. "VT86D," read the short text message.

Braxton worked on suppressing the broad smile he felt within. Vanessa Thompson was dead, and along with her one more of the few remaining barriers capable of derailing his presidential run. He looked at his Rolex. "Okay, we have twenty-five minutes before your briefing."

Gabriel looked at the Swiss Army sports watch on his own wrist. The altimeter function he had selected at the bottom of the hill indicated they had climbed a little more than two hundred feet straight up since passing the gate at the bottom of the driveavay. He pressed the watch's time button, then said, "Roger that, General."

They returned salutes from the guards who buzzed them through the last set of gates, which gave on to a Tuscan courtyard filled with exquisitely tended landscaping. The entire complex, named Castello Da Vinci by wealthy financier Kincaid Carothers, had once sat atop a hill overlooking Siena and, according to painstakingly preserved historical records, had been designed in 1502 by Leonardo da Vinci as a fortified sanctuary for his patron Cesare Borgia.

Leonardo's talents as a military architect have received little attention, but he had designed fortifications and invented weapons far ahead of their time. Borgia worried there might come a time when he would need a Renaissance bunker of sorts, and naturally he turned to Leonardo for help.

Carothers, whose company once exercised hegemony over the issuance of American Treasury bonds, had the entire structure disassembled in 1936, stripped, shipped to America, and reassembled. A briefly wealthy dot-com CEO bought the villa from one of the Carothers heirs before the first Internet meltdown. Defense Therapeutics had purchased it out of bankruptcy for a song equivalent to a coda and two arias. The corporation then signed the deed over to Braxton as a bonus. Framed copies of magazine articles about Castello Da Vinci lined many of the hallways. They appeared mostly in extravagantly snotty home and architectural magazines, and some dated back to the 1930s. One even detailed how Carothers had spent lavishly to prepare the site exactly as it had existed in Tuscany, duplicating many of the tunnels and underground safe-room chambers, leading to speculation that Carothers had once feared a workers' or domestic Communist uprising.

"Okay then, let's hit the showers. You know how I hate to be late." Braxton broke into a slow jog.

Gabriel smiled faintly. The General never arrived late.