She could see the smile hovering on Ian’s face as they gathered speed. What kid wouldn’t smile, considering where he was and who he was with?
They took off, soaring into the sky on the two powerful engines.
“Well, I’m in huge trouble,” Ian said.
“How do they punish you?” Leo asked.
“Grounding. This is, like, grounded for life. Until age twenty-one.”
The deck canted steeply, and the plane shuddered as it rose. Lilith’s eyes moved quickly about, and Leo had the impression that she’d never flown before.
Leo asked her, “How old are you?”
The eyes stopped their nervous hunting, connected with hers. Lilith said, “As old as you.”
Leo smiled to herself. A typical Keeper answer, exactly the sort of thing Miri would have said.
Leo went over to the boy, who was peering out a window, looking back at the rapidly disappearing lights of New York. She got down beside him in the big seat. Lilith watched them with the molten eyes of a cobra. Leo stroked his hair. “Don’t be scared, little boy,” she said, “don’t be scared.”
Chapter Thirteen
Night Journeys
What. In. Hell. Are. You. Saying!” Paul had roared, his voice resounding with the rage of somebody who’s just lost big.
She had cried, choking her sobs past a throat almost closed by fear.
Agony. No other word for it. You try his cell and try it and try it. You get onto the FAA, you scream for the plane’s flight plan—which terminates in the dead middle of the Atlantic. Best guess—a Caribbean destination. Or hey, Europe. Or the Middle East. And what about Latin America—yeah, there’s that, too. In a long-range Gulfer like that, they could be in goddamn Ulan Bator by now.
Agony. You wake up sick with fear and dragging from the worst dreams a human being can know, that your beautiful son is being force fed red blood and gagging and gobbling and, oh, God, loving it!
You start drinking early, and you smoke like Satan at a sermon. You pull in every damn marker you’ve got, you who are an outcast, the wife of an outcast, and you get just exactly friggin’ nowhere, baby.
Tick tock, the hours are passing, and your dear beloved innocent heart is being damn well corrupted and polluted beyond all belief and knowledge.
And you know that the silent man at your side is being tortured by a more horrible torture than even you know, which is the knowledge that if his own son, child of the body and the heart, is corrupted, then he will have to put him to death as if his brilliant angel of a boy was a rabid cur.
They had plotted, planned, worked, performed miracles on their communications equipment. Now, three days after they had started tracking, they were at a sleek Upper East Side highrise, on their way up to the thirty-fifth-floor apartment of one George D’Alessio, Leo Patterson’s very well concealed chief of staff.
The names of Leo’s staff were a skillfully kept secret, and George had proved infuriatingly—and surprisingly—hard to find. But Becky had used her search skills well, and her access to various intelligence databases, and she had identified him.
They came out into a long, ill-lit hallway with a gray carpet and walls. A faint smell of something frying lingered in the air. This building was essential Upper East Side—a lobby that glittered with chandeliers and mirrors, but upstairs the place was as pretty as a prison. Apartment 3541 was a two-bedroom unit. He rented it for $3,700 a month, and lived in it alone.
But when you are breaking in on somebody, you never assume that they are unarmed, asleep, or alone. You assume that they have a nervous dog, a number of supporters, and are wide awake and know you are coming. And they are very, very well armed.
They stopped at the door. It was three-fifteen in the morning, the favorite time for an action of this kind. They carried small pistols and full official fake identification. Also lock picks. They already knew precisely what kind of locks they were up against, and had wax patterns of the keys. Becky had come yesterday to do that prep. She’d also determined that there was no alarm system on the unit. George relied on anonymity to shield him from intruders, foolish boy. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Commercial alarms relied on magnets. Piece of cake.
He was gay, George was, but very private about it. Salon had even speculated that he was Leo’s secret lover. A secret lover was involved, but it wasn’t her. His secret lover was a twenty-two-year-old kid called Bobby Parr. Somebody had spent a lot of money on Bobby to make him look about fourteen. It was legal, though, all of it. Becky had looked hard for a way to haul George in, maybe before the same bored (but now slightly confused) judge who had kindly dropped charges both on Ian and Paul.
“Don’t tear him apart,” Paul said.
He watched her slip a plastic key into the first lock. It was a little stiff—these plastic babies made from wax impressions almost always were—but it turned over the lock with a loud click.
“Goddammit!” she hissed, feeling like a damn fool.
“Congratulations,” he whispered, his voice dripping sarcasm. Pros did not click.
She went for the second lock, which was much more complex, and had to file the skeleton a few times before she got a positive result. She opened the door a bare inch, then stuck a wire through. A moment later, the safety chain was hanging free, and the door was wide.
Paul stepped in. Becky came behind him, closed the door. Both standing absolutely still, they methodically surveyed their surroundings. Nothing moving—very well. Next step: Paul put on his night-vision lenses and made the same survey, this time looking carefully for things like tripwires, or somebody sleeping on the living room couch, anything unexpected.
The living space was an L, with a dinette and small kitchen off to the right. To the left was a corridor that led to the two bedrooms.
You would have thought that somebody like this—a professional organizer—would have a spotless apartment, or at least a clean one, but this place was filthy, every surface piled high with dishes, ashtrays, old newspapers, you name it. The only movement was the scuttling of roaches. At night here in chez George, they ruled. Paul took a step toward the corridor, looked into the first bedroom.
For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he was dealing with, but then he understood. This was a dungeon, something used in S&M sex play. He saw a wooden frame, obviously homemade, with wrist and ankle straps nailed to it. There was an open massage table with more straps. On an old desk were two or three dildos, an enema bag in a puddle, and various implements—pliers, razors, a box of salt, and a paddle.
“Jesus wept,” Becky said, her voice barely a whisper.
“An active fantasy life.”
“Maybe we can use it on him.”
“You aren’t gonna get anything out of this scum with torture.”
“I believe it.”
They went toward the second bedroom, hanging back in the hall until they had completely surveyed the space. On the rickety bed lay George and his boy toy, both sound asleep. The difference between them was that George was chained to the bed, and boy toy was as free as the wind and as naked as a plump little piglet.
“Looks like Georgie is the bottom,” Paul breathed.
“You think the chains are real?”
“They’re fastened to the bedframe.”
“Ready to rock and roll?”
“Let’s do it, sweet.”
She took her syringe out of her bag and lifted it to the faint light that drifted in from between the slats of the closed blinds. She stepped silently to the boy’s bedside, found some free space on his upper arm, and swabbed it. The boy sighed a little, as if he thought he had been kissed. Well, he had been, but by a powerful anesthetic. She inserted the needle into the deadened skin, then withdrew it. She stood gazing down at him, listening for his breathing to change. He would wake up tomorrow afternoon with no awareness of any of this, none at all.
She made a hand signal to Paul, who came into the room. Georgie wouldn’t have it so easy. Georgie was about
to wake up eating a gun.
Paul stood over him. He looked down at the stark, handsome features of the professional assistant. Beside him, his friend’s pudgy face was now as slack as a dead hog’s. His breath, which had been rattling, seemed all but gone.
“Coma’s a ten,” he murmured to Becky. Then he pulled out his police special, went down beside Georgie, and shoved it in between his half-parted lips hard enough to chip a few pearlies. The eyes came open, the head tried to turn away. Paul shoved harder, and Georgie went, “Gwulllggg!”
Becky came in with a complicated collection of straps from the dungeon and proceeded to start trussing up boy toy, who resisted her the same way a dead fish resists being lifted out of a creel.
“Okay,” Paul said to Georgie, his voice booming, “we’re feds, but we don’t play by the rules. We’re looking for your lady fair. We know she left the country in her plane. Where did she go, Georgie?” He withdrew the gun a few inches, just far enough to enable him to talk.
“What the fuck—”
The gun went back, taking chunks of tooth with it, causing groaning and much gobbling against the barrel. “I told you we don’t play by the rules. So I’m gonna pull out the gun again, and this time you’re gonna tell me what I want to know.” Again, he withdrew the barrel.
“Please! Jesus! I’m hurt!” He spat, and Paul slapped him.
“Swallow it. Where is she?”
“What is this about?”
Translation: he knew. Paul pistol-whipped him hard enough to cause a cry, but not hard enough to grant him the brief respite of unconsciousness.
“Jesus, Paul,” Becky said.
“Take it easy,” Georgie gasped. “Gimme a chance.”
Paul swung the pistol back.
“Gimme a chance to talk! Jesus fucking Christ, you hurt me!”
“So talk.”
“They went somewhere in Europe or the Middle East. They refueled in the Azores. I know because I wire-transferred more funds to one of her credit cards. Oh, Christ, what is this about?”
“You’re gonna go to your grave never knowing the answer to that question. Now, I am gonna ask you again. We know she refueled in the Azores. We know she took off headed for the Middle East, which is where we lost her. Where did she go, Georgie, boy?”
“I haven’t heard from her.”
Paul had hit him the first time with cool method and not a whole lot of power. If he did it again, though, it was really going to hurt the guy, and Paul didn’t like that. He’d hurt too damn many people in his long career. He said, “Your buddy’s not in too good shape.”
George’s eyes started darting around frantically when he realized that his friend was comatose. Becky raised the now-empty syringe into his view. Paul said, “One more dose, and he’s off to meet his maker.”
“Oh, no, don’t. Don’t, please!”
She turned the syringe, moved it toward the boy’s neck.
“He’s a wonderful, special person!”
“Mr. Wonderful’s gotta die so El Bitch can keep on keeping on. That’s a damn shame.”
Becky sank the needle into Mr. Wonderful’s neck.
“Talk.”
“No! Please!”
“She go to Libya? Iraq?”
Becky prepared to push the plunger that would send exactly nothing into boy toy’s bloodstream. “Okay,” Paul said. “Kill him.”
“No! No, wait! Oh, for God’s sake. Listen, I think she went to Egypt.”
“We checked Egypt. No cigar.”
“The plane didn’t land in Egypt.”
“It did.”
“Hold up,” Paul said to Becky.
From his years of experience, Paul was reasonably sure that George wasn’t lying. If they lied, they relaxed. They always believed the lie would work. It was the truth that they distrusted, that made them prepare for another blow.
The problem was, they had checked every airport in Europe and the Middle East, and had not found Leo’s Gulfstream registered as either landed or having passed through. It had not been tracked by either European or Israeli ground control, nor by the Israeli military, which watched every plane that crossed north of a line from Algiers to Bahrain—assuming that the information CIA had gotten from them was genuine and complete. Given the tormented and complex relationship between American and Israeli intelligence, one could never be sure.
Could the plane have gone down? Anything was possible.
Unless—“Did Leo have her passport?”
He nodded.
“What about her friend?”
“I don’t even know her name.”
Paul pulled back. “We’re done,” he said to Becky.
“Done?”
“We’re done!” He began to leave.
“We don’t—”
“Yes, we do.”
She followed him out. From the bedroom behind them came a rattle of chains and a loud cry, as Georgie realized that they were both tied up.
“You forgot something,” she said.
“Sorry,” Paul said as he hurried back into the bedroom.
“Jesus! I thought you were gonna leave us like this!”
“Why, Georgie, I’d never do that.” He taped up the creep’s mouth. Only when his boyfriend woke up, which would be a good ten hours from now, would they be able to raise anything approaching an alarm. They’d have to attract the attention of somebody going down this sound-deadened corridor. Fine.
“What’s the story?” Becky asked as they entered the service elevator they’d come up in.
“Egypt.”
“Egypt says no.”
“Somebody was bribed.”
“So, we go to Egypt.”
They returned to Ian’s apartment and booked a flight to Cairo on Air France, with a stop in Paris to meet Jean Bocage. They would fly together from there to Cairo, where they would be met by the head of the Egyptian Special Environmental Police, General Adel Karas, universally known as Kari. Paul had never worked with him. They didn’t take their guns, only what electronics they’d managed to pry out of Briggsie. He couldn’t absolutely flat turn down a mission to recover their own son, not even Briggsie. Bocage and Kari had to provide the weapons, though.
Paul and Becky sat side by side in business class, silently waiting out the long midatlantic hours between JFK and Paris.
“Why did you do it, Paul?”
“What?”
“Set Ian up the way you did.”
“I didn’t.”
“Bullshit. If you’d left well enough alone—”
He turned toward her, his face stricken. “Jesus Christ, look what happened! He was just goddamn fucking magnetized to them!”
“If he hadn’t felt so humiliated and ashamed, maybe he wouldn’t have gone.”
“The boy was kidnapped!” He threw himself back against his seat. “Fucking kidnapped.”
She fell silent, regretting the fight. Paul had not caused this to happen. The blood had caused it, that mystical, fearful blood of theirs.
As the plane droned on, Paul would fall asleep—which was something he had done very little of since Ian’s departure—and when he did, she would hear him moan.
It was a bedroom sound, full of heat, not the moan of a man tormented by loss. Finally, it got loud enough to begin to embarrass the other passengers.
She shook him awake.
He opened his eyes. “Uh, yes? Oh—what…”
She leaned close to him, kissed his cold, slack lips. “You were dreaming about the vampire,” she said, knowing that it was true and unable to conceal the sadness in her voice.
“I love you,” he said.
Yes, she thought, the same way you’d love a good hunting dog. She wanted him right here and now, in this airplane, in front of everybody. She wanted to proclaim it to the world, to the vampires, and above all to that damn blood: this man is mine.
“It’s the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Makes goddamn Blaylock look like a nun.”
> She squeezed his hand, but did not reply. She couldn’t, not without revealing her sadness to him, in the tears that would fill her voice.
He wanted to be loyal to her, but it was hard not to at least in his imagination contemplate what it would be like with that gorgeous creature. His desire, though, was like something that had been grafted into his brain by some mad scientist. It felt alien and unreal, even though it stirred him like no other feeling he’d ever known, not even his feeling for Miri.
He slept again, and was disturbed again by images of the vampire, her breasts like smooth snow peaks, her eyes as merry as a child’s and as slow as a tiger’s. The danger was what did it, made her irresistible. The dark side of the feminine was there, he thought, to teach you who you really were.
“Maybe she’s just a dream,” he said when he woke up.
“A nightmare.”
Outside the window, he could see the City of Light, gray and vast in predawn rain. They landed, then, and as he faced the reality of Ian’s loss in this new place, Paul thought that she was exactly right about that. No matter how much it sweated him, the dream of the vampire was indeed a nightmare.
Jean came forward out of the crowd as soon as they cleared customs. His embrace, in the French manner of greeting, marked much more than a simple reunion between friends. The three of them had faced death together. That made you more than friends.
“Paul,” Jean said. “Please accept—” Then he saw Becky and fell silent. He embraced her, the continued silence speaking his admiration for her, and his respect for the sanctity of their marriage. Paul suspected that Jean had loved her, once. Maybe he still did. “We’re ready to go,” Jean said. “Unless you wish to freshen up—a shower, perhaps, in the VIP suite?”
“Let’s keep moving,” Paul said. It turned out that the Egyptian air force was providing transportation from here to Cairo. The plane, a small official jet, was waiting for them in the private international area. On the way, Bocage said, “You will meet Kari. He is on the plane. He is—well, you will meet him.”
“I’ve heard a lot about him.”
“I have worked with him for years, Paul, my friend. He is—he is like you.”