Lethal Experiment

  I looked at her rain-plastered hair and drenched dress.

  “You’re fun,” I yelled. I kissed her.

  “I told you I was!” she shouted, and kissed me back.

  We hugged each other in the pouring rain, two soaked, broken people clinging to their soul mates. We ended the hug and I held her at arm’s length and looked her over.

  “Well, check it out!” I said.

  “What?”

  “You look like you just won a wet T-shirt contest!”

  She followed my gaze downward. “Wow! I should stand in the rain more often!”

  Some people love a beautiful sunset. Others prefer an ocean view. I guess everyone gets a thrill from viewing something they consider spectacular. I know I do.

  She lifted my chin with her index finger until my eyes were back on hers.

  “Spoilsport,” I said.

  We kissed again.

  “I love you,” she said.

  She suddenly pushed back out of the kiss, her eyes wide. “Oh, Donovan, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean that!”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I did, I mean I do—but…I didn’t mean to say it!”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to scare you off .”

  “But you do love me, yes?”

  She tucked a thick rope of wet hair behind her ear.

  “I do.”

  I placed the palm of my hand against the side of her face. She looked into my eyes expectantly. A roar of thunder made her jump.

  “Holy shit, Donovan! Hurry up and tell me you love me! Before we get killed!”

  I laughed. “I love you!”

  She threw her arms around me and hugged me as though her life depended on it.

  She leaned her mouth into my ear and when she spoke, her voice was husky: “I’ve never been this happy in my whole life.”

  I felt the same way, but I wasn’t ready to start wearing a dress over it. I said, “This isn’t pre-marital talk, is it?”

  “Don’t spoil the mood, shithead!”

  “I’m just saying…”

  “Hush!”

  She kissed me full on the mouth while I wondered if “hush!” meant yes or no regarding her marital expectations. Thankfully, Kathleen cleared things up.

  “Relax,” she said. “I love you far too much to marry you.”

  I let that comment rattle around in my brain a few seconds and decided I liked the sound of it.

  “Then, yes. I’m happier than I have any right to be. Happier than I ever thought I could be. Happy as…”

  “No need for a speech,” Kathleen said. “I get it.”

  I brushed some of the rain from her forehead, then held her again. As we embraced, I looked over her shoulder, up the hill, at the Memorial and the chestnut oak and the newly-packed mound where, once again, Charlie’s parents stood praying.

  Jerry and Jennifer Beck’s son had been a rotten, no good, son-of-a bitch who drugged and gang-raped women. He probably helped kill one of them, if the rumor was to be trusted. On the other hand, Charlie had been blessed with good looks and an abundance of charm and the ability to make my precious daughter fall in love with him. At the funeral numerous stories had been told of the generous and loving things he’d done for others, so he must have had some good qualities to go with the bad.

  Standing there in the rain, watching the Becks, holding the woman I’d fallen in love with, I realized I’d never met a perfect person, and only a few that were one hundred percent evil. All of us fall to one side or the other of the line dividing the two extremes, and who could argue but that I fall farther on the wrong side than Charlie? After all, I don’t expect an abundance of warmhearted stories told at my funeral, and if you tried to match my crimes against Charlie’s, he’d come out looking like an altar boy. And yet here we both were, in Springhill Cemetery, on opposite sides of the dirt. Charlie’s mistake had been getting too close to my daughter. If that hadn’t happened, he’d be alive today.

  I’d just professed my love to Kathleen. Somehow she’d been placed in my life at the perfect time to give me a chance to become a better man. I wondered if Kimberly had been placed in Charlie’s life by the same hand for the same reason. If so, had I interfered with some type of cosmic plan?

  There on the hill, Jerry and Jennifer Beck stood ramrod straight, their bodies riddled with rain. Hand-in-hand, with heads bowed, they stared at the mound of dirt that marked the grave of the boy they’d raised and loved and lost.

  Chapter 25

  “What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done?” Kathleen said.

  “Excuse me?”

  It was night, New York City, dry clothes, The Spotted Pig gastro-pub, 11th Street. The menu features casual pub fare with an Italian accent. We’d been enjoying the slow-roasted king salmon.

  “The scariest thing you’ve ever done,” she repeated.

  A newsreel of horror began playing in my head.

  “I don’t know what brought this up,” I said, “but the short answer is, trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  “Oh, stop being such a tough guy. How bad could it be? I mean, I know you get information from gangsters and you work for Homeland Security. But you’re basically an interviewer, right?”

  For obvious reasons, I’d given Kathleen a highly sanitized explanation of my role with Homeland—more of a Clark Kent version of my job description. While I do conduct interviews for the government and other shady people, they’re either long, drawn out affairs involving pain and torture, or short, one-question events that end with bullets or lethal injections.

  What’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done, I thought to myself. I wondered if Kathleen had forgotten about the time I killed three men during one of our lunch dates a few months ago.

  “You go first,” I said.

  “Okay.” Kathleen works for an ad agency. By her smile I knew this was going to be good.

  “On Monday I’m getting full custody of Addie.”

  “What? That’s terrific!”

  We touched glasses together to mark the occasion.

  “That’s not so scary, though,” I said. “You’re going to be a great mom.”

  “That’s not the scary part,” she said.

  I waited.

  “I gave my notice yesterday.”

  “Excuse me? You’re quitting your job?”

  She nodded.

  “But why?”

  “I’m going to buy a proper house for Addie. Nothing fancy,” she added. “I mean, I’m not going to squander all the money you so generously gave me. But I want Addie to have her own bedroom and bath.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said. “But why do you have to quit your job?”

  “The house I want isn’t in New York.”

  “It’s not?”

  “It’s in Virginia.”

  “Virginia.”

  “We’re going to move to Virginia.”

  “Virginia,” I said. “Why?”

  “To be near you, silly!”

  She was beaming.

  “Well, say something,” she said. “Are you surprised?”

  To say the least.

  At that precise moment, my cell phone rang. Darwin.

  Darwin said, “How’s it shakin’, Cosmo?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your traveling name. Cosmo Burlap.” He laughed. “You like it?”

  I covered the mouthpiece and whispered “business call, be right back” to Kathleen. I hurried away from the table and found a semi-quiet corner outside the bar.

  “You’re catching a commercial flight from Denver to Dallas.”

  “What? When?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That’s no good for me. I’ve got some things going.”

  “Don’t even start with me, Creed. You haven’t had a fucking assignment since I can’t remember when. But you need a staff of geeks for one of your ridiculous research projects, or a chopper in West Bumfuck to take you to a hospi
tal? Who’s the guy you call?”

  I sighed. “You.”

  “Who always comes through for you? Say it!”

  “You do.”

  “Damn right I do. You need a drone to drive your car? You need your non-Homeland crime scene sterilized by midnight? You need a fucking Hummer-mounted, pulsed energy weapon flown to California on two hours’ notice?”

  “You made your point,” I said.

  “Goddamn right I did. You want to keep your cushy lifestyle?”

  “I think ‘cushy’ might be a stretch.”

  “Get your ass to Denver tonight!”

  “Can I use the Gulfstream?”

  “Lear 60.”

  “Nice equipment,” I said. “What’s with the Cosmo?”

  “Cosmo Burlap. The name you’re flying under in first class.”

  “That your idea of a joke?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Pretty sad, you ask me.”

  “Hey, you want to switch jobs? Any fucking day, my friend. How about this: I fuck the accountant and you deal with Donovan Creed, the nut job. The day we switch jobs you get to make up the funny names.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “This a bad time for you? Interferes with your love life? Prevents you from making an extra million bucks? Gee, that’s too bad. Fuck you!”

  It was a bad time. Callie was counting on me to track down Tara Siegel in Boston, something I’d planned to do tomorrow after getting a good night’s sleep. I’d had a long day, what with the funeral, Kimberly, the rainstorm, the flights, the late dinner with Kathleen. Last thing I felt like doing tonight was pulling a four-hour flight to Denver with a turn-around to Dallas.

  I said, “What do you mean, ‘fuck the accountant’?”

  Chapter 26

  The girl sitting next to me kept glancing at my jewelry. We’d just gotten settled into our seats when—there, she did it again.

  “Business or pleasure?” I said.

  The corners of her mouth turned slightly upward. Not a smile, exactly, but not a frown either.

  “Business, I’m afraid. You?”

  “The same. By the way, I’m Cosmo.”

  She gave up a quick laugh that made her eyelids crinkle at the corners. Then looked up and saw me not laughing. “Oh,” she said. “You’re serious.”

  I showed her a wan smile. “I curse my parents daily. How about you?”

  She giggled. “I don’t even know your parents,” she said.

  I shared the smile. “Good one.”

  “Thanks. I’m Alison. Alison Cilice.”

  “Cilice with an “S?”

  “With a C,” she said, and spelled it for me.

  It never ceases to amaze me how much personal information total strangers reveal about themselves in casual conversations on an airplane. In less than three minutes I can get almost anyone to tell me where, when and how to kill them.

  “Nice to meet you, Alison. What sort of work do you do?”

  “Oh, Gawd. It’s so boring!”

  I laughed. “Try me!”

  “Okay. You know the Park ‘N Fly’s?”

  “The parking lots by the airports? That’s you?”

  She laughed. “How old do I look? No, I don’t own them. I’m their internal auditor.”

  Alison was about thirty, had an easy manner with men. Darwin probably had all the sexual details in a file on his desk.

  “You must travel a lot,” I said.

  “Every other week.”

  “How many locations?”

  “We’ve got nineteen lots across the country,” she said, “so I stay pretty busy.”

  “I bet a lot of managers hate to see you coming.”

  “Serves them right if they do,” she said.

  “Do you always find irregularities?”

  “Always.”

  “That means you’re good at what you do.”

  She smiled.

  I looked away a moment and stretched my hands in front of me so she could get a closer look at my sparkles.

  “Nice jewelry,” she said.

  I looked back and watched her eyes take it all in: the Presidential Rolex on my left wrist, the four-carat diamond ring on my right hand, the lack of jewelry on my left ring finger.

  I said, “Let me guess: the company parks you at one of the airport hotels, and expects you to stay put the whole week.”

  She looked surprised. “How’d you guess?”

  “We’re living the same life. This is my first trip to Dallas, so naturally they’ve stuck me at the Airport Marriott.”

  “For real? Me too!” she said.

  “Not such a huge coincidence. The pilots and flight attendants will probably be there too, along with half the salesmen on the plane.”

  She thought a minute. “Now that you mention it, I have seen a lot of the same people where I stay.”

  Alison had great hair, a pretty face, and a flirtatious personality. She dressed well enough to hide most of the extra thirty pounds she carried, though her use of jewelry was a bit over-the-top. She wore rings on her fingers, numerous bracelets on each wrist, diamond studs in her ears—and probably elsewhere. I wondered how long it took to get all that shit off before going through the metal detector.

  Neither of us spoke until we were wheels-up and had to answer the flight attendant about our drink orders. I asked for a cabernet, Alison wanted a Diet Coke.

  “You ever get to see much of the cities you visit?” I said.

  “I’m usually too tired for night life,” she said. “But I might hit the hotel bar for a quick drink once in awhile.”

  “Let me guess: mojito?”

  She laughed. “Yuk, no. I’m a cosmo girl all the way.”

  I gave her a look. “Are you making fun of me?”

  She put it together. “Oh, Gawd no!” she said, giggling. “But your name and my favorite drink: now there’s a coincidence!”

  This had been no coincidence. Darwin hadn’t just saddled me with a ridiculous name out of spite or boredom. He’d been showing off , trying to impress me with the depth of his preparation. I wondered about the surname he’d given me: Burlap. I slipped my credit card into the slot and waited for an internet connection. It took me a couple tries to make it work, but when it did I plugged in my phone and typed “burlap” into the search engine. I learned that burlap is a breathable fabric made from jute and vegetable fibers. I learned that its resistance to condensation protects its contents from spoilage. I read a little further and discovered that burlap is sometimes used in a religious ceremony called “mortification of the flesh,” during which believers wear an abrasive shirt called a cilice.

  As in Alison Cilice.

  For the hundredth time I made a mental note never to fuck with Darwin.

  Alison said, “You doing some research?”

  “Part of the job,” I said.

  “Which is?”

  “I’m a jewelry salesman.”

  “For Rolex?” she said, drawing out the word.

  “Among other top brands,” I said.

  I slid my watch off my wrist and handed it to her and wondered if she could tell it was the real thing. Judging by her eyes, my guess was she could.

  “It’s really heavy,” she said.

  “Much bulkier than the Piaget in my case,” I said. Her smile grew wider than I would have thought possible. Her eyes took on a dreamy glaze and she held the tip of her tongue against the bottom of her upper lip and tapped it in a way that seemed sexually suggestive.

  “I wonder if we’ll run into each other in the bar one night this week,” she said.

  Completely in love with Kathleen, I had no intention of bedding this plus-sized jewelry whore. Still, I had a part to play on behalf of national security.

  “I’m positive we’ll not only meet, but share a drink as well,” I said.

  “You’re that sure of yourself?” she said, holding that same wide-mouth smile.

  “I am. Or my name isn’t Cos
mo Burlap.”

  She burst out laughing. “Oh Gawd!” she said. “You poor man! Tell me you’re lying.”

  Chapter 27

  Here’s the story on Alison Cilice:

  Several days before I shared a flight with her to Dallas, Alison Cilice’s image was captured by a Denver Airport parking lot surveillance camera in the company of a suspected terrorist named Adnan Afaya. This, according to Darwin.

  “And guess who Afaya has been linked to?” Darwin said.

  At the time I was in a hurry to get back to my dinner with Kathleen at The Spotted Pig. I said, “Just tell me, okay?”

  “Fathi.”

  That got my attention. “Father or son?” I said. The father, being the UAE diplomat, was virtually untouchable. The son, on the other hand…”

  “Abdulazi,” he said. “The son.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Thought you might be.”

  Last Valentine’s Day, Callie and I thought we’d killed a woman named Monica Childers by giving her a lethal dose of botulinam toxin. This was a contract hit ordered by Victor. As it turned out, Victor had two reasons for killing Monica: first, he wanted to test his army’s ability to divert a spy satellite, which he used to view the hit, and second, he wanted to see if his antidote for botulinam toxin would work. His people found Monica’s body and managed to resuscitate her. Then, having no further use for Monica, Victor sold her to the Fathis, to be, as he put it—their sex slave. I asked Victor if Monica was still in country and he basically said that the Fathis had fucked her to death.

  And that has stuck in my craw ever since.

  I can just imagine my psychiatrist, Ms. Nadine Crouch, asking, “Since you tried to kill her, why do you care how she died?”

  It would be a good question, and I’m not sure I’d be able to supply a credible answer. But for whatever reason, it pisses me off . Maybe it’s because I’m a counter-terrorist and I don’t like the idea of terrorists raping American women to death. Maybe it’s because I felt used by Victor, or because Monica turned out to be a decent person who didn’t deserve to die that way. In the final analysis my subconscious reasons aren’t important. What’s important is that I made a decision to punish the Fathis, father and son, for what they did to Monica. And maybe this link to Alison Cilice could put me in a position to do just that.