Veil of Civility

Chapter Sixty-Nine

David Kemiss turned off Reas Ford Road onto Graemont Lane, the gravel drive his home shared with three others, though they were spread widely apart. The headlights of his navy blue Cadillac illuminated the thick pine forest on the side of the road as he steered the vehicle around the street's turns and into the cul-de-sac his driveway ran off. As soon as the brick columns that marked his driveway came into view he heard his cell phone ring and brought the vehicle to a stop as he reached for the device.

"Dammit," he breathed, as it rang for a third time and he struggled to remove it from the pocket of his coat, which was draped over the passenger seat. "Kemiss?" he said abruptly as he flipped open the phone and brought it to his ear. Hopefully this was the call he'd been waiting for.

"Sir, it's Allan Ayers."

Kemiss sighed loudly. The caller wasn't who he'd hoped. He was waiting to hear from Lukas Kreft, who was supposed to be helping him eliminate a potential witness. It had taken nearly twenty-four hours for Kreft to get men in place who could do the job and when they had finally arrived at Lane Simard's residence, they'd found only the man's hired nanny. In a last ditch effort, Kemiss himself had placed a call to Simard to learn the man's location. By now Simard should have been dead for twenty-four hours, but still no word had come from Kreft.

"I think I've found them, sir," Ayers said, after several seconds of silence from Kemiss.

"You think? I'm not interested in what you think you've found."

Ayers was silent for a moment, only the sound of his breathing coming over the line.

"Well, get on with it!" Kemiss ordered.

"The information is nearly a sure bet. I've tracked down all the properties in Ireland that are or ever have been owned by McGuire & Lyons Industries or any of their executives. There's an old manor house in an out of the way place called Mullaghmore, just over the border from Northern Ireland."

"And you're positive that they're there?"

"I entered all of the properties into the ToRuS program, so I'm as positive as I can be without actually seeing them."

"What the hell is Torus?"

"The ToRuS program is—"

"The shorthand version."

"It tracks the usage of utilities such as water and electricity. It's designed to tell when there's been a rise in usage, which normally means the presence of guests. In this particular property that's very significant because as near as I can tell the place has been vacant for quite some time."

"And it's your working theory that Fintan Maguire has taken Declan McIver and his wife to this house?"

"The program has found a large spike in utility usage at the property, so yes, that's what I'm thinking."

Kemiss smiled and breathed out a short laugh. Declan McIver seemed to have nine lives, but sooner or later he'd run out, and by Kemiss's reckoning, it was about that time. No matter how good he was, the man couldn't dodge every bullet that was fired at him indefinitely and his friends had to be running out of places to hide him. "Send me the information on the property. I'll make sure there's no way they can get out of there this time."

He ended the call and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. This cat and mouse game was getting tiring. While he enjoyed rising to a challenge, this kind of stuff had never been his forte. His idea of a challenge was racing a rowboat on the Potomac or now, in his later years, a spirited game of racquetball, not facilitating teams of assassins. That kind of stuff was for someone far below his pay grade. Hopefully the men Kreft had found to take care of Lane Simard had been successful and were up for another job in Ireland. Only this time, if Kemiss had anything to say about it, there'd be a lot more men involved. Taking out a simpering bureaucrat like Simard was one thing, but taking out Declan McIver would be far more difficult if the events of the last week were any indication of what to expect.

Kemiss took his foot off the brake and allowed the Cadillac to move forward onto the drive. Hitting the accelerator as the driveway ahead of him began to incline towards his house, he swore to himself as he noticed all the lights in the three story mansion were off. Wasn't anyone home? They'd better be. He hadn't wasted all of this time driving just to find an empty house. He turned towards the home's garage and pushed the button on his overhead console to open the garage door. The door shifted and raised a few inches before returning to the closed position.

"Now what the hell?" he said, raising his voice though no one else was in the car to hear. "Can't even leave the garage door unlocked when you know I'm coming home?"

The frustration he constantly felt with his wife was mutual, he was sure. Theirs had become a marriage of convenience and had ceased to have anything to do with love a long time ago. At times he wasn't sure if it had ever had anything to do with love, but he guessed at some point they had at least liked each other enough to have had two children together. Now it was all about mutual benefits. He was the Senator with the beautiful stay-at-home wife and well-mannered children and she got to play rich socialite in venues around the country, and sometimes around the world.

He slammed the Cadillac into park and pushed open the door as he grabbed his coat and took his keys from the ignition. Walking around the house to the front porch, he inserted the key into the door and pushed it open. Just as it had appeared from the driveway below, the house was completely dark.

"Hello?" he called, as he stepped inside and pushed the door closed with his foot. The house was big, but not big enough for the sound of his voice to echo, though he imagined it doing so in the obviously empty first floor. "You know, I don't ask for much but a little respect would be great. If you're not going to be here you could at least call and let me know. It's not like I had any work that I could be doing or anything."

He set down his coat and keys on the oak table in the foyer and turned on a lamp. He knew that the regularly scheduled family night they had been observing for years really got on his wife's nerves and that she would rather be elsewhere. So would he, but their two boys loved it and, aside from using it as a political check mark during election years, that was why he insisted that the tradition be kept alive. The boys were the only good thing that had come of their union, in his mind, and they were still too young to realize that their parents' relationship had disintegrated. Maybe that time had come and his wife, who spent more time with the kids than he did, had realized it and finally found the excuse she needed to end their weekly pow-wow.

"Well, screw you, too," he said, as he started towards the stairs that would lead him to his third floor study. He could still do all of the work he needed to do from home, but he preferred the distractions that came with the Washington D.C. lifestyle. As he placed a foot on the first step, he looked into the darkened living room beside the stairs and stopped. Rolling his eyes and letting out an audible sigh, he said, "Don't tell me. It's time for one of our talks, right? Jesus Christ, Mary Ellen. How many times do we have to go over the same stuff? You'd better want a divorce this time."

He stepped off the stairway and down into the sunken living room where the figure of his wife was seated on their leather sofa. "You know, you could at least answer me. You could at least tell me the boys are asleep before I go cussing through the house." He stepped further into the living room and as he did, a glint of light caught his eye. He narrowed his eyes and looked closer at the shadowy figure sitting on the couch.

"Oh!" he said, as he stumbled back, realizing the woman's mouth was duct taped and her hands and feet were bound. He turned quickly towards the doorway. As he stepped back up into the foyer with a hand out for his car keys on the table, he felt something cold press against the back of his head from inside the living room. Raising his hands and turning around slowly, he saw the barrel of a suppressed handgun.