“Are you denying that you know the lady?”
Shaw hesitated.
“I already know the answer to that question, so don’t lie to me, damn it.”
“How did you know?” Shaw said impassively, even as he glanced curiously at the uniformed police sergeant.
“I’m a bloody intelligence agent, that’s what I do.”
“I haven’t seen her lately. And I have no idea where she-” Shaw froze as the tech walked past him and down the stairs.
Frank faced off with Royce. “If you’ve got a problem with leaks, Royce, why don’t you discuss it with your people?” he said. “Because there is no way in hell that Shaw is the source for that story.”
“I can’t believe any of my lads would have anything to do with it,” Royce said indignantly.
While Frank and Royce were arguing Shaw grabbed the sleeve of the sergeant who’d issued the warning about the bathroom.
In a low voice he asked, “How long has that toilet been broken?”
The sergeant gave a weary smile. “Ever since we got here, sir. Right inconvenient. Locked up it was. Pipe broke, or so’s I could see when I finally got the door open. It’s an old building after all. And not like those poor folks ever had a chance to get it fixed. So I locked it back up. Now the gents got to go to the basement to take a pee ’cause the only other loo is for the ladies on the first floor. Though some of the lads have been using that one too. Guess it don’t matter now, does it?”
“Exactly where is the first floor ladies’ room located?”
“End of the hall, furthest from the stairs, near the rear of the building.”
Shaw walked down the hall and saw the nameplate set into the wood of the door: William Harris. He looked at the room where the copier was. It was equidistant between Harris’s office and the locked bathroom.
Royce came thundering down the hall with Frank scurrying after him. “Shaw?” Royce said. “I want the bloody truth!”
Shaw looked down the stairs, the mental images racing across his brain. Even if Lesnik had misspoken and had used the basement bathroom or even the ladies’ room on the first floor instead of the locked-up one on the second it couldn’t have happened the way he said it had. Katie said he’d told her that he’d heard shots when leaving the bathroom. The assault team was already on the first floor covering both ends by then. Coming back from the basement and especially the first floor he’d have run right into them. He’d be dead. He’d never hid in the copier. He had probably never been in the building.
And it all came down to where you took a leak. Or didn’t take a leak.
He sprinted down the steps, leaving Royce to scream after him, but he never heard the curses raining down on him. He called the number Katie had left him.
“Come on, answer, answer the damn phone.” It rang three, four, five times. Shaw was sure it was going to go to voice mail. Sonofabitch!
“Hello?”
A rush of relief hit him when he heard her real voice. “Lesnik was lying,” he said.
“What?”
“On the day of the killings the toilet on the second floor was busted and the door was locked shut. He’d have to have used the one in the basement or the first floor near the rear entrance. He would’ve run right into the killers. He’d be dead. He was lying about the whole thing. You were set up, Katie.”
There was only silence on the other end. He wondered if she’d hung up on him.
“You’re sure?” she said shakily.
“They briefed him well otherwise. But for the slip about the john, which they obviously forgot to check and assumed it was working, and a bit of luck, I’d never have known.”
“My story. It was a lie?” she gasped in disbelief.
“Where are you?”
“I can’t believe this. I can’t. I told that idiot Gallagher I didn’t have corroboration.”
“Katie, where are you?”
“Why?”
“Because now that you’ve written the story you’re dispensable.”
“I’m safe.”
“No, you’re not safe! They probably know exactly where you are. Now tell me.”
She gave him the address.
“Do not open the door to anybody. And be ready to run.”
He sprinted into the middle of the street, stopping a taxi dead, ripped open the door, hauled the surprised passenger out, jumped in, and told the stunned driver exactly where to go. The diminutive cabbie took one look at Shaw’s massive size and glowering expression and the taxi roared off.
CHAPTER 67
ONLY TWENTY MINUTES HAD PASSED since Shaw’s call when the buzzer on the entrance to Katie’s building went off. She ran to the door of her flat and spoke into the call box.
“Shaw?”
“Yep.”
She hit the button to release the door and then froze. Had that been Shaw’s voice? In her excitement she’d just assumed…
From down below she heard measured footfalls coming up. That didn’t sound like…
She bolted the door, grabbed her hastily packed bag, and looked frantically around for another way out. There was only one. The window overlooking the back alley.
She threw it open and peered out. It was a two-story drop. In the movies there would’ve been a convenient fire escape or mounds of soft garbage down below, but in real life there never were. And she had no time to knot sheets into a rope. What there was on the alley level was a guy, a big guy wearing jeans and a rugby sweater and reading a newspaper in the fading light while sitting in a beat-up lawn chair.
“A hundred quid if you catch me,” she called out.
“Pardon me?” he said, gazing up at her quizzically.
She climbed onto the windowsill, her bag slung over her back. “I’m going to jump and you’re going to catch me. Understood?”
The man dropped his newspaper and stood up looking around, perhaps to see if this was some sort of prank.
“You say you’re going to jump?”
“Do not drop me!”
“Oh, dear Lord,” was all he could manage.
There was someone right outside of Katie’s door now. She heard something pushing against the wood. For an excruciatingly long moment all she saw was Anna Fischer, positioned just as Katie was, and the bullets ripping through her body. If only she’d jumped an instant sooner.
“Here I come,” she called down to the man, who was hopping around, his thick arms flying in all directions, trying to best gauge her trajectory. “Do not miss!” she added firmly.
She leapt and a couple seconds later she and the man tumbled down in a tangle of arms and legs. Katie got to her feet, all body parts seemingly intact, and except for a bruised arm and cut shin she was fine. She shoved five twenty-pound notes into his hand, gave him a kiss, and ran for it.
She turned the corner and headed away from her building. She didn’t look back and didn’t see the man change direction and head her way. She didn’t see the door of her apartment building fly open either as another man hit the street and hustled after her. But she could feel their presence and picked up her pace. Should she start screaming? There were plenty of people around. But what if they had guns? They’d shot poor Lesnik with a million people around. She desperately looked for a cop yet saw none.
She never saw the third man, because he was ahead of her but coming her way. He was the safety valve in case the first team missed, and it looked like he would get his chance. He slid the syringe from the sleeve of his coat, uncapped it, and held it ready as he picked up his pace.
CHAPTER 68
THE TAXI TURNED ONTO THE ROAD and Shaw scanned the street. His gaze caught and held on Katie. Her look of terror was clear. She was running. He caught sight of one of the men behind her. But there would be more than one.
And then it happened. Shaw saw a glint of sunlight reflect off the object in the man’s hand. He jumped from the rolling cab and sprinted forward.
Katie and the man were inches away from each other. He
drew back the syringe and then swung it forward, aiming for her belly.
Katie gasped as the fellow in front of her was knocked aside by a far larger man. She felt something slide across her arm. She looked down and saw the needle as it missed going into her by a bare inch. Then she watched as Shaw grabbed the man’s hand, bent it forward, and buried the needle to the hilt in the man’s chest, the plunger pushed all the way down. The man looked in horror at the thing sticking out of him, pushed Shaw away, got to his feet, and ran down the street. His lips were already starting to grow numb as the drug began its lethal journey through him. Caesar had not opted for ricin, the poison fired into Bulgarian Georgi Markov’s leg using a spring-loaded umbrella. What had entered the man’s body was a massive dose of tetrodotoxin, a substance over a thousand times more lethal than cyanide and for which there was no antidote.
He would be dead in twenty minutes.
Shaw grabbed Katie by the arm and they sprinted to Euston Station, jumped on the Tube, rode it to King’s Cross, ran back to daylight, and grabbed a cab. Shaw told the man to simply drive and then looked over at Katie.
She hadn’t said one word to him, not while running and not in the Tube. A terrible thought seemed to grip him. “The syringe, it didn’t…?”
She put a shaky hand on his arm. “No, it didn’t. Thanks to you. How did you know?”
“More luck than anything else.” He sat back against the seat.
“That was the third party back there, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “That was the third party.”
She glanced out the window as the cab struggled along in London traffic. The afternoon was quickly turning to dusk. “Where are we going?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Shaw?”
“I heard you. I just don’t have an answer.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you about Lesnik.”
“So am I,” he said bluntly.
“I shouldn’t have written the story.”
“No, you shouldn’t.”
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?”
“Looks that way. And I told you not to leave where you were staying.”
“They were in the building. I had to run.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I-” Katie stopped. She did not want to tell him that she’d jumped from a window and managed to survive. Unlike Anna. “Through the back. Do you have some sort of plan?”
“I have a goal. To stay alive. The plan is still coming.”
“It’s clear now that Lesnik was working for this third party. They killed him and tried to kill me. For all I know they somehow got the Scribe to hire me and then dropped Lesnik in my lap. I knew it was too good to be true. Damn it!” Katie slapped the seat.
“Did Lesnik say anything that might give us a lead on who hired him?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I checked out his background. That was legit. He seemed like a sincere guy. His father was killed by the Soviets. He probably held a grudge and these people exploited it.”
“But that gets us no closer to the truth.”
“We need to go underground to have any chance of finding out what’s really going on.” She looked at him. “Know anyone who can help with that?”
Shaw already had his phone out. “I might.”
CHAPTER 69
THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN one of the happiest days of Nicolas Creel’s career. After years of work, and one enormous and recently manufactured international crisis, both the governments of Russia and China were about to sign contracts with Ares Corp. and its subsidiaries to the tune of half a trillion dollars with plenty more to come down the road. It was a testament to the centralization of defense contractors in the modern age that countries on either side of a dispute would buy their weaponry to destroy each other from essentially the same outfit. Yet Ares did not pick favorites. It was an equal-opportunity provider of weapons of mass destruction and always would be.
The final catalyst for the successful deal had occurred when President Gorshkov had sent a strongly worded demand for a public apology to Beijing. And the man also wanted money, in the billions, for the damage done to Russia’s international reputation. Beijing, not surprisingly, had not agreed with that position. They sent an equally forcefully worded reply to Moscow stating that the Chinese weren’t involved in the Red Menace machine, and thus owed the Russians nothing. Predictably, international relations between the two behemoths went downhill from there at a remarkably brisk clip.
Other countries had stepped in to try and broker a peaceful resolution to this mess. The United States naturally took the lead role, but since the Chinese government was basically financing America’s consumption by buying its debt, Washington had little recourse when Beijing told it to back off. The Russians accused the Americans of being in China’s pocket for this same reason. Consequently, the U.S. ambassador to Russia was told to stand down or pack his bags when he implored the Russians to do nothing drastic.
France next tried to step in, but Gorshkov would not even return the French president’s phone call. The Germans remained silent. Berlin obviously didn’t want to get dragged back behind either a new Iron Curtain or a Titanium Coffin. Britain was in an extremely delicate situation. If Russia had been behind the massacre and China had been operating the Red Menace campaign from London, the poor Brits didn’t exactly know what their role or response should be. And when initial diplomatic channels had been opened with China over the matter, the communists had been as stern in their denials of culpability as they had been with Russia, and ended by telling Downing Street to keep clear of the dispute.
The entire world was now arming for a third world war. The new amount of business would be the biggest in the history of the world, the vice chairman of Ares Corporation e-mailed to Creel, his glee evident in every word of his message. “What a stroke of luck, this Red Menace thing,” he’d added.
Creel read the message once and then deleted it. What a stroke of luck indeed. He made a mental note to find a new vice chairman to replace that idiot.
The cold war was back and better than ever. With a series of deft moves and remarkable planning he’d reshaped the planet’s power structure to where it should be. The pissants in the Middle East had immediately tried to suck the world back in, doing a version of “Hey, what about me, I’m still bad news,” by cratering another mosque in Baghdad, bombing a market in Anbar, and killing all of eighty civilians and two U.S. grunts. The world’s collective response had been swift and unmistakable: “Don’t bother us, we’ve got real problems. Millions could die!”
Ironically, Creel had made the world far more civilized by getting back to a “real” war mode. That was his plan, after all.
Not a shot fired.
And the money poured.
And the savages without a conscience put in their place.
It is the hat trick. Thank you very much.
It had never been about the money, really. It had been about the world. Nicolas Creel had just saved it.
Yet still, there was something wrong.
He was currently standing on picturesque Italian soil, the beauty of the Mediterranean coast spread out before him. The mother superior was next to him, resplendent in her lovely white robes. She was beaming, as she looked over preliminary plans for the building of a new orphanage to replace the one that had been constructed right after World War II when there had been a large number of orphans.
Speaking in Italian the mother superior said, “It is beautiful. And you are a beautiful man to have done it, Nicolas.”
“Please, Mother Superior. It was the least I could do. And I can assure you I will benefit spiritually to the same degree that the children will by having a new home.” He said all this in fluent Italian.
Creel was proficient in many languages; he’d learned them solely to gain an edge in business. Some of his biggest deals had come about simply because he could say “Please” and “Thank you” in his customers’ own tongues
.
Yes, this should have been a time of great triumph for Creel as he strolled around the site where the new orphanage would be. But it wasn’t.