“It’s Agent Savich,” Deliah Alcott called from behind her son. “Let him in, Liggert.”
Liggert gave Savich a look that threatened mayhem and stepped back. He turned on his heel and walked away down a long corridor, and didn’t look back. Deliah Alcott said, “Are you here about Brakey’s ankle bracelet? It must have fallen off his ankle and he can’t find it anywhere. He wanted to call you about it, but I told him it was too early and he should keep looking, he’d find it somewhere. But now you’re here.”
Voices sounded from behind her. Deliah said, “Everyone’s in the kitchen, eating pancakes. It’s a Saturday-morning tradition. So are you here about the bracelet?”
“Yes, I’m here about the bracelet.”
“Then come on in. Are you hungry?”
Pancakes, she’d said. “Yes, I’d like that, Mrs. Alcott. It’s very kind of you.” Savich followed Mrs. Alcott down the long back corridor.
The Alcott kitchen was enormous: a long pine table stretched down the middle of it, covered with a bright blue tablecloth. Brakey sat at the table with the rest of his family, eating pancakes, but his head was down. When he looked up to see Savich, he jumped to his feet, nearly knocking his chair over. “I was going to call you, Agent Savich. My ankle bracelet’s gone! I swear I never tried to take it off. I swear!”
“I know,” Savich said, “and you don’t remember getting out of bed, is that right?”
“No, no. I’m sure I didn’t get out of bed.”
“Then don’t worry about it, Brakey. Sit down and enjoy your breakfast.”
He looked around the table, pulled out his creds, and handed them around. He introduced himself to Liggert’s wife, Marly, and to each of the six children, listened to their names. All looked under the age of ten, he thought, with Tanny the oldest. He looked into her strange green eyes. She was one of Liggert’s children. The other children had grown quiet, not knowing what to make of him, but Tanny was staring at him hard. Liggert sat at the head of the table, his wife, Marly, a thin, anxious-looking young woman, on his right. Jonah was next to her. Where was Jonah’s wife?
Savich said to Jonah, “Your wife doesn’t like pancakes?”
“She’s working, the feed store in Plackett. She’s the assistant manager.”
Deliah clapped her hands. “Children, everyone sit down, more pancakes coming up. Tanny, please set a place for Agent Savich. He will join us.”
She turned back to spoon more batter into two big flat skillets. Everyone listened to the batter hiss and sputter.
Liggert said, “Why’d you come back so soon? It’s about Brakey’s bracelet; you’re not here for Mama’s pancakes.”
“That’s certainly a side benefit,” Savich said as he sat down next to Deliah Alcott’s place at the other end of the table. Tanny slid a plate with three stacked blueberry pancakes in front of him. Savich breathed them in, smiled up at her. “They smell great. Thank you, Mrs. Alcott.”
Ms. Louisa sidled her wheelchair into the kitchen and pulled up close to the table, a child on either side of her. She nodded to Savich and said in a scratchy drawl, “Well, Marly, did I lie? Isn’t he a looker? As for you, Liggert, don’t go all huffy and stick your knife in his gullet just because Marly appreciates the look of the man. That wouldn’t be polite.” She grabbed a bit of a child’s pancake, and stuffed it into her mouth. She laughed. “At least let him enjoy his breakfast first.”
“That isn’t funny, Mother,” Deliah said as she flipped another pancake.
Marly sent a nervous look at her husband, who was busy forking down a pancake, ignoring her and ignoring his grandmother.
Ms. Louisa said, “The boy’s here for a reason, Morgana. I’m helping him out. So now you’ve met both of Dilly’s older boys, Liggert and Jonah. They’re buff and loud and tough, aren’t they? Their daddy was as tough as they were once, but later on he wasn’t, not at all. Like I told you yesterday, Dilly was weak.”
“That’s not fair, Mother,” Deliah said patiently as she turned another pancake. “He was the strongest man I’ve ever known. After the first Gulf War, he simply couldn’t abide violence.” She said over her shoulder, “He was in Iraq. It . . . changed him.”
“It changed a lot of people,” Savich said.
Ms. Louisa cackled. “But would you look at how Dilly bit the big one. He didn’t croak it like a man should, he got himself run down by a stupid car and a driver who didn’t care enough to stop and see if he was still breathing. It’s a cruel world, Morgana, a cruel, cold world. You should be glad two of your boys can take care of themselves.”
Brakey burst out, “I can take care of myself, Grandma, most of the time. Agent Savich is here because he thought I’d escape, isn’t that right? You know what happened to my ankle bracelet, don’t you?” He suddenly fisted his hand around his fork. “I didn’t kill anyone else, did I?”
No one died, Brakey.” Savich turned to Deliah. “Sorry about breakfast, but please tell Tanny to take all the children into the living room. I don’t think they should be here for this.”
She gave him a long look, then nodded toward Tanny, who started to protest. Deliah overrode her. “Everyone take a last bite. The pancakes will be here when you get back. Now all of you go with Tanny to the family room. Watch TV, all right? I’ll call you when you can come back.”
After the children had filed out of the kitchen, Savich said, “I showed all of you except Liggert the drawing of Stefan Dalco.” He called up the photo on his phone, handed it down the table. Liggert only glanced at it, shook his head, impatient.
Savich looked around the table. “I believe one or more of you know who this man is, you recognize that sketch but aren’t telling me. Why? Because you want to protect this person who calls himself Stefan Dalco? He is one of you, or someone you know? I have seen this man. He is a psychic and he appeared to me in a dream as he did to Brakey and Walter Givens, and now Charles Marker. Dalco wanted Sparky Carroll and Deputy Kane Lewis dead, and he told them what he wanted them to do, forced them to commit murder and then forget all of it.”
Brakey said, “Charlie? What does Charlie have to do with this? Is he all right?”
“Charlie Marker is in the hospital, Brakey. He has a gunshot wound, and he’s in surgery. He tried to shoot Agent Hammersmith and me a little while ago in the pine woods about ten miles west of here. Charlie obviously got the bracelet from you early this morning, though you don’t remember that. He used your ankle bracelet as the lure to get us to follow him into those woods.
“Charlie will probably pull through, but like you, Brakey, and Walter Givens, I’m sure he won’t remember anything. Dalco sees to that; it’s one of his orders.
“Again I know one or more of you know this murderer, or you are this murderer, and I intend to find out which of you it is.”
“This is nuts,” Liggert said, and half rose from his chair.
“Sit down!”
Liggert’s face filled with rage, but he saw violence in this FBI agent and he slowly sat down again.
Jonah stared at Savich, his head cocked to one side. “Charlie Marker shot at you, this morning, in some woods ten miles west of here? That stand of thick pines, next to the field they cleared?”
Savich nodded.
“It sounds like the McCuttys’ land,” Jonah said. He looked around the table. “My grandfather used to own that land. All of us know it very well, but so do most people in town. Agent Savich, you can’t really mean you think one of us got control of Charlie’s mind, made him try to kill you? Come on, I mean, that’s crazy.”
“It sounds crazy, yes,” Savich said, “and Stefan Dalco is afraid I’ll prove it. He’s afraid enough to try to kill me. He won’t succeed.”
Deliah was on her feet, her palms pressed flat on the table. “It’s frightening to think anyone has such powers, especially for a Wiccan. I believe that if this person does e
xist, the evil he does will be returned to him, his own powers will be turned back against him. I wish we could help you find him. You know I would do anything I could to help Brakey. The simple truth is we can’t.”
Savich said, “You can’t? And what does that mean? I see, it’s the Wiccan party line. Don’t get involved, trust that bad people will have their evil turned back on them. Karma in all its glory.” He banged his fist on the table, rose. “One of you knows full well what’s going on here, possibly all of you. I will find out.” Savich looked at them dispassionately, then he turned on his heel and walked out of the kitchen.
ABOARD THE TGV, TRAIN À GRANDE VITESSE
NORTH OF LYONS, FRANCE
TWENTY-FOUR KILOMETERS
The newly appointed French Ministre de l’Économie, Marcel Dubroc, drummed his long, thin fingers on the armrest of his solo seat. He wanted to enjoy some rare privacy, and so his aide Luc, with his interminable notes and suggestions, sat behind him. Still too close. He could still hear Luc on his cell phone, wallowing in his mistress’s voice, no doubt gloating about being the new power behind the throne.
Marcel looked out the window at the straight shot of highway running parallel to the high-speed rail track. At three hundred kilometers an hour, the highway, the trees, and the fields beyond passed in a near blur. He saw a beautiful red Ferrari, guessed it was traveling at two hundred kilometers an hour. It looked like it was going backward.
He saw an attendant place a plate of croissants on a passenger’s table and realized he was hungry. Why not celebrate a bit? He could hardly jump out of his seat, shout, and wave his fist in the air. He drew a deep breath, settled back in his seat to enjoy the moment, and ordered an espresso and a croissant.
He’d won. He’d planned to head this office for the past five years, had worked hard to achieve his goal, and at last the power, the influence, the public exposure were his. It hadn’t quite settled into his bones yet, the actual knowledge he’d finally arrived, but it would, beginning with the meeting this afternoon when he would drop the hammer.
He was now Ministre de l’Économie—would it be his legacy? For the moment at least, he was content, but who knew what would come his way in the future?
He thought of his ex-wife, Nichole, that unfaithful bitch, and smiled so widely his jaw cracked. At the time, rage had swamped him when a friend had told of seeing her and her lover in an out-of-the-way restaurant in the 5th Arrondissement, trading saliva over couscous. But no longer. Even though his teenage son, Jean, had blamed him for breaking up the marriage to his mother, the little pisshead, Marcel knew he’d been too young to understand, but someday he would.
His new office would be his private revenge. His ex-wife wouldn’t be the woman on his arm at the elegant events that would make up many of his evenings—rather, he pictured a succession of beautiful women, perhaps more interested in his office than in him, but who cared?
His present lover, Elaine, was quite beautiful, and she basked in his new position as Ministre de l’Économie. Should he consider marrying her? There was no rush.
FIFTEEN KILOMETERS
He put portable headphones over his ears, tuned in to a streaming music service as he waited for his coffee. A mad song came on that only a French teenager could appreciate, but now he wrapped himself in the jagged dissonance of the notes as the two male vocalists wailed and screeched unintelligible words in his ears. The vicious sounds made him think of his upcoming meeting that afternoon with Antoine Bardon at Marcel’s office in Bercy. It would be their final meeting, and he was quite looking forward to it. He would ever-so-pleasantly tell Bardon about his new budget, about to be approved by the president. Marcel had cut off all the farm-equipment subsidies Antoine Bardon had received yearly and promptly stuffed much of the money into his own fat pockets, millions of euros he used to facilitate foreign bribes through his bankers and trucking businesses. Marcel had tracked down the paper trail of the stolen federal money, laundered through a small bank in Marseilles, and now he had the power to bring him down. At last. Marcel couldn’t wait to see the look on Bardon’s face when he showed him the proof. For all practical purposes, Antoine Bardon would be gone, perhaps to prison, certainly dead to the French government. So what if Bardon let it out that he’d been one of Marcel’s ex-wife’s lovers? Everyone knowing that would only make it sweeter. Maybe he could call his ex-wife, tell her what he’d done to her ex-lover, offer to tell her which prison he’d be spending his retirement years.
Marcel found himself tapping his fingers to the music and smiled. He held all the cards now.
It was all over but for the shouting, and he planned to shout really loud after the meeting with Bardon. He’d walk out of his new, beautifully paneled conference room in Bercy and into the glorious Parisian sun. And call the media.
He’d won.
FOUR KILOMETERS
An attendant recognized who he was, was properly deferential, bowing so low he could have fallen on his face, but the TGV ran too smoothly for that. Marcel nodded his approval and the attendant disappeared. He sipped the bitter, hot espresso. It was delicious. He bit into his warm croissant, frowned a bit. It wasn’t quite as moist and fresh as the others he’d enjoyed on the TGV. No matter, he was too pleased with himself. Perhaps he would tease his friend, the Ministre de Transportation, Jean LeMarc, about it when next they met.
ZERO KILOMETERS
Marcel Dubroc had no warning he was about to die. His world disintegrated.
THE LIBERTY HOTEL
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Saturday morning
Samir Basara enjoyed the silk slide of Golden Slope chardonnay down his throat. He’d been surprised and pleased to find it in the small refrigerator in his suite, but he’d stayed at the hotel before and they knew it was one of his favorites. It was from a small boutique winery in Napa Valley, and very different from the heavy, overripe fruit taste of the Algerian wine he’d been raised with. He remembered his father striding through the family vineyard in Coteaux du Zaccar, fondling his Carignan and Clairette blanche grapes, whistling, giving orders, drinking a good amount of his profits. His preference had always been what they called their burgundy, but it wasn’t burgundy at all, rather a heavy mongrel blend. No one ever pointed that out to him, they were too scared of the old man, as Samir had once been, a very long time ago.
He remembered his mother carping and whining after his father had struck her, Samir so used to it he paid it little mind. He couldn’t wait for the day he left his family and Algeria, bound for Paris and the Sorbonne. He’d been unhappy in Paris as well, because his Algerian French accent was mimicked with a contemptuous twang, and he was looked down on, despite his family’s money, his academic success, and his good looks. He practiced his English, anxious to leave the French bigots behind him, and went on to take his doctorate in economics at Berkeley, California. He’d found his home at this fascinating place where he could say anything he wanted—the more outrageous, it seemed, the more he was considered to be an intellectual and accepted, the women always eager to sleep with him. And the wine was good. At Berkeley, he hadn’t been an outsider. He’d been embraced. He might have stayed on if he hadn’t known he was destined for greater things.
His three sisters, the worthless cows, had reveled in the rich lifestyle their father’s lands provided and had all married moneyed Frenchmen and enjoyed the fruits of Paris. But not Samir. He had chosen a different path. It had all come to him so gradually, it seemed, spawned in America, in the belly of the enemy, and there surely was irony in that.
Every year he traveled to Algeria to visit his father and mother, always during Ramadan. Last year Ramadan had fallen in July and a surprise awaited him. His father was lying in bed, his left side paralyzed from a stroke, and his mother now ruled the household. He was no longer a happy alcoholic who struck out when it pleased him, he was now a supplicant.
His mother glowed.
Another irony. She’d talked mostly of wanting him to marry, about wanting grandchildren from her only son. All his father wanted was a drink.
Samir took another sip of his chardonnay, let it settle first on his tongue, then slide smoothly down his throat, and he smiled. Perhaps he would marry someday, perhaps Lady Elizabeth Palmer. He saw his dark hands on her smooth white flesh, heard her screaming his name when she came. What would their children look like?
His parents believed he was a big-shot intellectual, and he was, actually, a noted speaker and a professor at the London School of Economics. But he was much more than that. Neither of them had a clue that the man they called Hercule, the nickname his grandfather had bestowed on him, was also known as the Strategist, a shadowy figure, feared and spoken of in whispers, a man whose reputation continued to grow throughout Europe and the Middle East for the simple reason that he could always be trusted to fulfill a contract for any job desired, from an assassination to an exploded building. Jihadists believed him to be one of them, and Hercule knew his plan, his Bella, was a terrorist’s wet dream and would make them admire him even more. What they didn’t know was that the destruction of the West’s sacred cathedrals, for him, the Strategist, was something else entirely. In the future, after three or four of the world’s famous cathedrals had fallen into ruin from his hired bombers, all it would take was the threat of a specific target cathedral, and the payoffs would become a source of huge revenue to him.
He remembered Imam Al-Hädi ibn Mirza had christened him the Strategist after a particularly intricate plan he’d devised to kill a Shiite banker in Syria who was helping to fund Hezbollah. Hercule had profited handsomely from that plan, seizing a shipment of large bills before the man died in a hail of bullets. The imam never learned that detail. The imam thought of Hercule as a committed genius who would help him bring the world to Islam, a true believer to whom money meant little. So did dozens of hardened fighters who had worked for him and who feared his name. He’d heard one of his most trusted, skilled men, Bahar, call him the iron fist inside the imam’s velvet glove. Until he decided otherwise, for the moment, he would continue to be tied to the imam.