LANGLEY • CAPE ELIZABETH
The debriefing was held at Langley more than eight hours later, with very few people in attendance. The director’s office was spacious enough to accommodate the small crowd, which included Naomi Kharmai, who had been flown back from Ashland courtesy of the Virginia State Police, Jonathan Harper, DCI Andrews, and Ryan Kealey.
It had been relatively easy for Harper to get Kealey out of FBI custody. Susskind spoke to the D.C. field office’s HRT commander just minutes after the second shooting on F Street, and orders had been relayed from there to the team that was holding him. The handcuffs came off almost immediately, and his Beretta was retrieved from Howson’s body and returned to him. The agents that he rode with expressed regret at the incident, but only reluctantly; the muted apologies he received were next to inaudible. The Suburban in which Kealey was seated departed immediately for Tyson’s Corner, but most of the agents remained behind to secure the scene and wait for reinforcements.
He couldn’t really blame them for arresting him. He had been out on the street in civilian clothes with a gun and no identification, standing less than 5 feet from a man with a gunshot wound to the head. In retrospect, Ryan realized that being confronted by the highly trained HRT operators was a lot better than most of the alter-natives. At least they hadn’t shot him out of panic.
When he arrived at the TTIC less than twenty minutes after leaving the scene, the helicopter blades were already turning. Despite angry protests from Director Landrieu and Joshua McCabe, Harper had arranged for transport for Ryan and himself so they could be immediately flown back to Langley. Unfortunately, that was where the rapid movement ended. They had been forced to wait for hours, as the DCI had been caught up in a lengthy inquisition by a shaken President Brenneman at the White House. Now, seated in the director’s capacious office, the events of the morning seemed like nothing more than a horrible dream.
It wasn’t a dream, though, and Ryan had proven it by recounting his story to Director Andrews no less than three times, all the way from the time he received Harper’s telephone call up until his detainment by the FBI. Kharmai had also been asked to thoroughly describe the events that had transpired in Hanover County. The two junior officers did most of the talking, but they got some of the answers they were looking for as well.
Naomi was seated next to Ryan, while the two senior officials sat in comfortable armchairs on the other side of a low coffee table. She had enjoyed a long hot shower in the women’s locker room upon returning to Langley, and someone had been dispatched to her house to pick up some clothes. Her unknown benefactor had chosen well.
As a result, she looked a thousand times better than she had that morning, and was anxious to learn more about the disastrous raid in Virginia.
Harper was the one to explain it to her. “The Bureau’s Explosives Unit concentrated their efforts on the basement. They found damage consistent with a gas-leak explosion, but leaks almost always originate from the output valve, which is located on the ground floor. So they think that Vanderveen disconnected the fittings to the stove, drilled a hole into the tile and rigged up a hose leading down to the basement. Then he used duct tape to seal off the hole and all the air vents leading out, so that the gas was just trapped down there.”
Harper took a sip of coffee and continued: “They found other evidence that corroborates that account as well. There were pieces of a gasoline can—one of the old-fashioned metal ones—jammed into the walls, and what appeared to be two contact plates and traces of SEMTEX H. He didn’t have time for anything fancy, so he simply taped a block of explosives to a gasoline can, then wired up a battery to an electric cap. The device was set to go off when the buffer was removed from between the steel plates.”
Ryan was shaking his head. “What about the bomb in the van?”
“That one was a little more complicated, though not overly so,”
Harper said. “They only got around to moving it a few hours ago; there were some concerns about booby traps, especially after what happened in Hanover. The ATF guys that are taking it apart all say the same thing: simple, but efficient. He wired up a cell phone to the SEMTEX H, which was concealed in five steel trunks. By the way, you would have been screwed if you’d gone in through the back, Ryan.
He had antihandling devices on the phone and two of the trunks.”
“But not the switch.”
“Not the switch,” Harper agreed. “He didn’t want to risk a prema-ture explosion, so a wrong number to the phone wouldn’t have made a difference as long as there was no power going from the battery to the circuit. You said you heard the phone ring?”
“Yeah, it rang about two seconds after I flipped it.”
“That was Vanderveen trying to set it off. Those few seconds made all the difference, Ryan.”
Ryan felt a little bit sick over how close he had come to being wiped out, along with about eight city blocks. “Jesus Christ,” he said,
“all I did was flip a switch.”
Harper was nodding slowly. “He needed to be able to activate it quickly, but he couldn’t exactly get in the cargo area and start rooting around in the middle of a busy city street. It was the best way for him to do it, and if it wasn’t for you showing up when you did, it would have worked.”
Ryan fell silent. He didn’t want to think about what had almost happened. There would be plenty of time for that later, but Naomi didn’t notice his hesitation, and she wasn’t finished: “What kind of damage are we talking about?”
The deputy director cleared his throat. “Well, there’s no definitive answer. I talked to Bateman—that’s the guy heading up the ATF task force, by the way—and he gave me some round numbers. We would have been looking at serious damage to every building in a four-block radius, plus some varying damage out to twelve blocks from ground zero. That would have included Freedom Plaza and Pershing Park. Estimates, and there is some dispute on this, are between 400
and 500 dead, plus anywhere up to 2,000 injured. The time of day was factored in to that as well; if it had been a few hours earlier, for example, the casualties would have been much lower.”
Ryan looked at his hands.
Director Andrews turned to stare out the window, ashen-faced.
“My God.”
“What about the angle?” Ryan asked. “He was going after the motorcade, right?”
Harper nodded and said, “That’s right. There’s even more dispute over that question. He was definitely going after the motorcade, but it’s not clear if he would have been successful. Bateman thinks it would have worked, but the Bureau’s people are saying otherwise.”
The DCI broke in and added, “He stacked the odds in his favor by placing concrete blocks against the partition. That close to the actual device, it would have pushed most of the force of the blast directly out into 13th Street. I think he came closer than anyone wants to admit.”
Kharmai and Kealey fell silent at the candor of the remark, but Director Andrews was only getting started. He turned back from the window to appraise them carefully. “Needless to say, there’s going to be some serious fallout in the next few weeks. The first choice, of course, would have been to keep the whole thing quiet. After Senator Levy’s assassination and the Kennedy-Warren, the last thing we need are reports of a 3,000-pound bomb nearly taking out the president’s motorcade. If it had just been the evacuation on the waterfront, we could have explained it away. A few heads would have rolled, but we might have swept it under the mat.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. Vanderveen killed two people in his escape, including a Metro police officer. Both of them died in crowded areas, so there’s no way we can play it down. This is going to be headline news for the foreseeable future, so the president’s advisors, in all their wisdom, are trying to spin it into a positive thing, a major success for U.S. law enforcement. No one wants to call it what it really was.”
“A near disaster,” Ryan said.
Andrews nodded in agreement. “Exactly. But it’s out of our hands now, so if they want to play politics, we have no choice but to play along. Anyway, the president is looking to publicly slap some backs.
That means you two. Especially you, Ryan.”
Kealey’s response was immediate and heartfelt. “There’s no way that’s going to happen.” He saw the DCI’s reaction, checked himself, then said, “Excuse me, sir. I just don’t want to have anything to do with it. Besides, we’ve never operated that way, and the president knows it. I don’t want my face on television, and I don’t want to give any interviews. I just want to know what we’re doing to catch the bastard.”
Harper looked up and sighed heavily. “He didn’t get far in the Camry. It was found in an underground parking garage in Anacostia, and in the trunk, the body of a twenty-nine-year-old secretary.” Ryan swore and looked away, thinking about how close he had come to stopping Vanderveen. “He chose carefully; there were no cameras in the garage, no way to immediately determine what kind of car he switched to. The woman was missing her purse, so it took a while to track her down. They started with the neighboring buildings . . .
When they found her employer, they got her name and a vehicle registration from the DMV. Then, of course, they found out that her car was missing. So there’s a nationwide APB out on her Camaro, but no one is especially hopeful. Just taking the woman’s ID gave Vanderveen a two-hour jump on Susskind’s people.” The deputy director paused to take a sip of coffee. Studying Harper’s weary expression, Ryan thought that the man looked exhausted, then realized that he probably didn’t look much different himself.
Harper was still talking. “Since this is all going public anyway, the president has given us free rein to track Vanderveen down. His name is already on the list of Most Wanted Terrorists, and we’ve gotten his face to passport control at every major airport in Western Europe, as well as Africa and Australia. He inadvertently helped us out with that . . . The picture on the Nichols’s driver’s license is probably less than two years old, which makes it much more recent than the army shots we were working with before. We’ve sent those updates to Interpol as well.”
“Vanderveen’s been tied to Iran and Al-Qaeda,” Ryan reminded them. “He has access to money, so he’s not exactly obliged to fly commercially. They might have arranged for a charter months ago, probably to some dinky little airfield out in the middle of nowhere.”
“You think he’s gone, Kealey?” asked the DCI.
“It would make sense, sir. If he stays here, he’s opening himself up to the biggest manhunt in the history of U.S. law enforcement.
Besides, you know as well as I do that if he gets to Iran, we’re pretty much screwed. We have no assets there to speak of, unless something’s changed in the last twelve months.”
Harper sighed heavily. “Nothing’s changed.” He thought about it, then said, “He failed, though. If he’s on his way back to Tehran, he probably won’t be getting a very warm reception.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ryan said. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”
The meeting adjourned five minutes later. Kealey and Harper walked side by side down the hall, neither finding much to say, each lost in his own private thoughts.
Harper, just to break the silence, said, “You’ll be getting a medal, you know. Naomi, too. Probably something pretty.”
Ryan shrugged halfheartedly but didn’t smile. “I don’t really care about that.” He glanced over at the other man quickly. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. It’s just that I really don’t care. Besides, it’s not like I can show it to anyone anyway.”
Harper laughed a little at the way he had phrased it as they approached the elevators. “Not this time, Ryan. This is one of our few public accomplishments, our day in the sun. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts.”
Kealey didn’t respond right away, once again lost in his own little world. Finally, he said, “You can mail it to me, John. I’m going home.
Tonight.”
Harper found himself nodding in agreement. “Landrieu won’t be happy,” he observed. “He’s already pissed that you came here instead of getting debriefed back at Tyson’s Corner.”
“Fuck him,” Ryan said. “Fuck him. He fought you on that ID thing, and I really needed it. I was ten seconds behind Vanderveen when those guys from HRT drew down on me. I don’t have anything against them . . . They were just doing their job. If I could have shown them something, though, we might have been able to catch up to him. Hell, I know we would have been able to.”
“He’s probably done, anyway,” Harper observed, steering the conversation back to the TTIC director. “Brenneman threw a lot of the blame for the senator’s death and the Kennedy-Warren at Landrieu, and a lot of it’s sticking.” He hesitated, then said, “I really did fight him on that, you know. He was going to shut you down the whole way, Ryan. I had to compromise.”
“I’m not blaming you, John. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just sick of people like Landrieu. There’s a thousand like him in Washington, and they all seem to hold the most dangerous jobs.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Harper said, and realized that he meant it. As the elevator doors opened on the first floor, they stepped out onto the clean white marble, and he turned to give the younger man some last-minute advice. “Get back to Katie, Ryan. I’ll handle the fallout over your speedy departure. You did a hell of a thing today, so think about taking some of the credit for it, okay? And don’t worry about Vanderveen. He’ll turn up sooner or later.”
“I still want that bastard, John.” Ryan hated to break his promise to Katie, would dread trying to explain it to her, but the words had come out unexpectedly, and he knew that he meant them. “I want back in. Officially, I mean.”
Harper smiled. It was what he had wanted to hear. “We’ll talk about it in a few days. Until then, get some rest and go see your girl.”
“If I can even catch a flight,” Ryan said, with more than a little frustration. “That storm passed us, but I heard it’s headed north pretty fast. By the time I get to Dulles, they might have the airports—”
He stopped when he saw that the other man’s smile had turned into a big grin. Harper shook his head, handing Ryan a card with a number on the back. “Got your cell phone?” he asked. Ryan nodded.
“Call that number when you’re ready to go. I’m the DDO, Ryan.
Sometimes you forget that.”
Kealey was about to ask what he meant by that cryptic remark, but instead just reached out to shake the other man’s hand. “Thanks, John. I’ll see you Monday.”
“Have a safe trip. I’ll meet you at the main gate when you get back. Call it 9:00 AM.” Harper was looking over Ryan’s shoulder. “I think someone else wants to have a word with you.”
Ryan turned to see Naomi Kharmai standing a few feet away, wearing a nice smile and looking good in a white pantsuit that contrasted well with her caramel-colored skin. She tilted her head and said,
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?”
They sat across from each other in the dismal cafeteria, which was mostly empty at this late hour. Awkward silence at first, as Ryan left his coffee untouched, and Kharmai rolled a mug of tea between her shapely hands.
“Just gonna run out on a girl, huh?”
He looked up. She was smiling, maybe a little bit sadly. “I’ll be back next week, Naomi. You’ll get tired of me in no time.”
“I thought you wanted out. I thought you were out.”
“I can’t leave. Not while he’s still out there.”
She thought about that, was about to say something, then decided against it. “Are you going into the CTC?”
“That’s where you work, right?” She nodded. “Then no.”
She scowled as the grin spread over his face. “Seriously.”
He shrugged. “Probably. That’s where I’ll have the most access to resources, so, yeah, I think so.”
She smiled, and they both fell silent. Finally, just to make conversation, Ryan said, “They’re giving us medals, you know. Pretty ones.”
She shrugged, and what followed kind of surprised him. “That’s not so important to me. I don’t know why . . . I always thought it would be.”
He read in her eyes that it wasn’t an act. She meant the words, and that surprised him even more. “Harper likes you, Naomi. You got noticed on this, so take what they give you and smile for the cameras, okay?” She looked up to see if he was making fun, but his face was completely sober. “I’m not trying to be arrogant, but I don’t need this job, and I don’t really want it all that much either. It’s more time away from Katie, because she’s back at school in the spring and won’t be able to come down here with me.”
He paused to take his first and only sip of coffee, then said, “You, on the other hand, have the goods, Naomi. You could go high here . . .
You couldn’t be DCI, because of the nationality thing, but just about everything below that is open to you. I mean, you could definitely head up the CTC. To get there, though, you’re going to have to fake it once in a while. You don’t care about the medal . . . This is one of those times. It’s in your best interest to play it up a little bit, believe me.”
She took the advice for what it was worth, flattered by the compliment, wishing that he hadn’t brought up the other woman. I want you to come home with me! she wanted to scream, and it must have been all over her face, because his words were followed by a long, awkward silence.
Eventually, though, she decided to spare him. It was clear that he wanted to go, and making him suffer wouldn’t change his mind.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you Monday,” she said.
They both stood up. “I guess so.” Then they were looking at each other for a long moment, Naomi waiting, hoping that maybe he’d lean in and . . .
It didn’t happen. Instead, he just reached out to lightly touch her arm. Then he turned and walked out of the cafeteria.
She looked after him for a long moment, a number of expressions mixing on her face. When he passed through the doors and disappeared from view, she sat down to finish her tea, and tried not to think about it.
When Ryan called the number that Harper had given him, he was reminded for the first time in a long time just how much sway the man really had. It was easy to forget, because there was nothing flashy about the deputy director’s personal lifestyle; although he lived in a nice house and dressed well, he took his wife to the same resort in Colorado every year, and drove a six-year-old Explorer with 100,000 miles on the odometer.
When it came to his position at Langley, though, Harper had the power to move mountains. Five minutes after placing the call, Ryan was met at the main gate by a dark-suited man who, after introducing himself as George, showed him to a glistening black Mercedes with tinted windows. Judging from the way it hunkered down over its wheels, the aggressive-looking sedan was also fitted with armor plating in the door panels and engine compartment.
George opened the rear door, but Ryan shook his head and climbed into the front. He didn’t want to get too used to this kind of treatment, and wondered for a moment if Harper had gone through the trouble as a favor, or to intentionally remind him of some of the perks to be found at Langley. Ryan smiled when he decided that the occasional chauffeured ride in an armored Mercedes didn’t really compensate for the government salary because, after all, it was the salary that determined your actual living conditions. Maybe not for him, but certainly for most government employees.
He was forced to reevaluate that assessment, however, when they squealed onto the runway at Dulles International. He couldn’t believe they had been cleared onto the tarmac, and was even more surprised when he realized that he would be returning to Maine on one of the Company’s Gulfstream executive jets.
He turned to his driver and said, with a hint of a smile, “You must get a kick out of driving this car, George. You have a hell of a job.”
The other man, burly and stoic throughout the whole trip, couldn’t help but crack a smile of his own. “That I do, sir,” he said. “That I do.”
It wasn’t long before the G-V had reached its cruising altitude of 41,000 feet, and they were streaking north at a little over 561 miles per hour. Ryan knew he should kick back and enjoy the ride, and he did, at first, but being all alone almost 8 miles up soon became a little unnerving.
When he noticed that the cockpit was shielded by only a privacy curtain, he drifted up there to reassure himself that someone was actually flying the aircraft. Both men seemed to welcome the company, and it turned out that Steve Kearns, the pilot, had been flying jets for the Agency for almost seventeen years.
“Where was the last place you flew to?” Ryan asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
Kearns grinned imperceptibly. “Can’t tell you that.”
“Where are we going now?” He honestly didn’t know.
“Can’t tell you that either.”
The grin spread, but Reynolds, the navigator, laughed and said,
“Portland International Jetport, sir.”
That was good news to Ryan. Portland was much closer to Cape Elizabeth than Bangor was, which was where he usually flew in and out of.
“I’m surprised they didn’t shut down the runway,” he observed.
“That place isn’t really built to handle traffic in this kind of weather.”
Reynolds nodded in agreement. “That’s true. Of course, we’re more than 10,000 feet over the worst of it right now. Things are getting pretty messy on the ground, though. Half the state is out of power, and they had to kick in the generators at PWM. The storm is pushing out a little bit due to the Canadian jet stream, but it’s still pounding the east side of the state. We’ll be okay, though the landing might be a handful. Hey, Kearns, you do know how to land, right?”
The pilot shrugged. “I tried it on Microsoft Simulator ’98 once,”
he said, smiling broadly. Ryan noticed that Kearns was one of those people incapable of keeping a straight face when telling a joke. “It didn’t work out too well.”
Reynolds, surveying something on his myriad screens, looked up and said, “Well, I hope you learn fast. We’re about ten minutes out.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ryan said, a little shocked. “We just took off.”
The pilot smiled. “Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate travel.”
The landing, as Reynolds had predicted, wasn’t fun at all, even though Ryan had tightly strapped himself into one of the soft leather seats just aft of the cockpit. He got up on shaky legs after they rolled to a stop, poking his head up front to thank his couriers. Kearns looked a little pale, but both men acknowledged his words, which were difficult to hear over the pounding rain on the fuselage.
“Did you guys hear anything about my transportation on the ground?” Ryan yelled over the roar.
Kearns said, “You’re going to Cape Elizabeth, right?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s only about twenty miles,” the pilot said. He was grinning again, and the color had returned to his face with the landing out of the way. “That isn’t much of a walk. I have an umbrella if you need it.”
Reynolds shook his head with a rueful smile and turned from his console to face Ryan. “You need to find Andreno in the security office, on the second level. He has a key for you. I guess you have the car for the weekend, but it’s due back at Langley on Monday.”
“Andreno?”
“That’s all I know.” The navigator shrugged. “How many can there be?”
Ryan realized he was right. “Yeah, it’s not that big of an airport. Or jetport. Whatever.” Reaching in to shake their hands: “Thanks, guys.”
“Not a problem. Drive safe.”
The jetway had already been extended to the outer door with a resounding metal-on-metal clank. Reynolds came back to open the door from the inside, and then Ryan was in the elevated tunnel, nodding his appreciation to the jetway operators before moving forward to the bustling terminal.
The open space was filled with stranded passengers, and Ryan reminded himself once again to thank Harper for cutting what would have been a severe headache out of his trip. Navigating his way through the occupied seats in the terminal, he quickly found the cramped office and asked for Andreno, who turned out to be the chief of airport security.
“Yeah, I got your key right here,” the heavy man said with a grunt.
“Mercedes . . . nice.”
Accepting the key and some verbal directions, Ryan left the office and headed for the underground parking garage. The car that was waiting for him was very similar to the one in which he had ridden to Dulles. Sliding onto the cool black leather, he grinned like a little boy when he turned the key and the engine purred to life.
Soon he was leaving the parking garage, the sound of the powerful engine ripping off the concrete walls like thunder, mixing with the hollow boom of the rain outside. With the wipers going full blast, he accelerated down International Parkway, the bright lights of the Mercedes cutting a swath through the dark swirls of rain, then turned left on Johnson Avenue before reaching I-95 South a few minutes later.
As he drove, he couldn’t help but think about the upcoming argument with Katie. She would probably be furious that he was going back on his word, but he knew that he had to track down Vanderveen once and for all. It was an argument that she couldn’t win; he was going back to the Agency either way, but there were a couple of things that might make it easier for her. He had gotten her the ring, after all, and maybe he could dangle the use of his BMW in front of her to keep the argument as short as possible. He knew she loved that car almost as much as she hated her Corolla.
Ryan had been thinking about that, too. At the risk of spoiling her, he knew that she had her eyes on a new Volkswagen SUV . . . Shit, he couldn’t remember the name. Tureg, or Tourag, maybe . . . something like that. It was pretty big, though, and solidly built, which was all he cared about. Katie was not very skilled behind the wheel, and while he teased her constantly about it, he secretly agonized over her frequent trips to and from Orono. He remembered how excited she’d been after seeing the latest model in the parking lot at the grocery store . . .
Why not? he thought. It would be worth it just for the look on her face. Tomorrow, a Saturday, would be a good day for that. He’d slip away in the afternoon and go see the dealer in Augusta. He wondered if she would notice if he had a roll cage installed . . .
The random thoughts began to fade as he left the highway in favor of the narrow side roads running along the coast. Harder going here, as the towering trees carried over the road and blocked out some of the rain, but also some of the light, which wasn’t all that much to begin with. The road was covered in fallen branches, too; some were almost as big as small trees, so that he had to brake a few times and swerve sharply once, which rattled him almost as much as the bumpy landing had back in Portland.
The house came up fast on the left, the steep roof showing up now and then through the evergreens from a distance. He was pleased to see lights in the windows, which meant that Katie was there and they still had power.
Ryan was glad she was home, and it took him a few seconds to realize how relieved he actually was. She had nearly broken his heart by walking out on him at the hotel, and they hadn’t spoken in the few days since that incident. He’d had a good idea how she felt, though, and had decided that the best thing was to give her some space. Surely it would have blown over by now. All he cared about was seeing her. He had wanted to call to let her know he was on the way, but she liked surprises, and he liked surprising her. The Volkswagen would top them all, he thought with a grin. Again he was reminded of his idea for a sunset ceremony on the Mediterranean. Lots of plans . . .
The argument first, though. There would be no getting around that, but maybe it wouldn’t last too long. It was only fair to be up-front with her about it.
Then he found himself thinking about what his profuse and heartfelt apology would most likely result in, and decided that the argument could definitely wait for one more day.
The one disadvantage to the house on Cape Elizabeth, he thought, stepping out of the Mercedes and into the storm, was the fact that it didn’t have a garage, not to mention the fact that the distance from their improvised parking area to the front door seemed much farther on a moonless night during a torrential thunderstorm.
Ryan finally made it under the awning, the raindrops beading and rolling from his thin leather jacket. Although his jeans were soaked around the ankles, his feet were still dry in his waterproof Columbia boots.
Sliding the key into the door and turning the handle, he immediately realized when he stepped inside that the house did not seem as brightly lit from the interior. In fact, apart from a dim glow at the top of the stairs, the only light he could see was coming from the kitchen directly in front of him. Then he heard her moving around, and an involuntary grin crept up on his face as he silently moved down the hall to sneak up and scare her.
Stepping through the doorway, though, he was surprised to find that she wasn’t moving anywhere. Instead, she was sitting at the dining room table and staring up at him with a terrified look on her face.
Her bottom lip was trembling, and her dark blue eyes were filled with tears.
And standing directly behind her, wielding a razor-sharp knife and a terrible smile, was William Vanderveen.
He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t real.
It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be real because it wasn’t rational; Vanderveen had the contacts to get out of the country almost immediately, but had decided instead to drive more than 450 miles, with every police officer in the country out looking for him, to come here?
It just didn’t make any sense . . .
And he didn’t look anything like Claude Bidault. That meant it must be a dream, because there was no way that he would have had time to drive all the way from Washington to Maine and remove the heavy beard and the tint from his hair. It just wasn’t possible . . .
was it?
He instinctively reached for his Beretta, then went cold when he realized that it was sitting on the passenger seat of the Mercedes.
All the tools in the world, but nothing at hand when he needed them most. And no one to blame but himself.
“Hello, Ryan.”
Said conversationally, in the tone of voice that Ryan remembered from so long ago, and the same voice that chased away the last of his desperate hopes. This was not a dream.
“Will.” He tried to keep his voice steady, but it was almost impossible.
The smile grew wider. Vanderveen tilted his head and said, “It’s hard for you to call me that, isn’t it? You want to say March, don’t you?” The flat side of the knife moved slowly across Katie’s throat, but Vanderveen’s vivid green eyes never strayed from Kealey’s face.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, Ryan. You can call me what you like. It doesn’t make a difference. Not here. Not anymore.”
The man’s gaze was almost hypnotic. Kealey broke it with a huge effort, forcing his eyes down to Katie’s. She was pleading with him, the tears finally breaking free and streaming down her cheeks. “Ryan . . .”
Vanderveen looked down when she spoke, but his head came up very fast before Kealey could move. “She’s stunning, you know. I couldn’t have chosen better for you myself. Her eyes are so . . .” He put on a show of searching for the words, the knife doing little circles in his hand. “Expressive. So full of life. It can make an otherwise plain woman seem very beautiful indeed. And Katie here was never plain, was she?”
Ryan noticed, with some strange clarity of vision, that the weapon Vanderveen was holding had come out of his own kitchen drawer, a 41⁄2-inch Kyocera paring knife, much like the one he had brought into the detention center. It was dancing in rhythm with the killer’s words, but never strayed more than 6 inches from Katie’s throat.
He dragged his eyes away from them, searching for something, anything he could use as a weapon.
It was useless. Three feet to his right, a slate-topped counter that had nothing to offer. He could charge, but it would never work, he would never get there in time. Vanderveen would start cutting her the instant he moved.
And outside, pounding through the exterior walls of the house with its own incomparable rhythm, was the sound of the building storm.
He had to say something. “Listen, she . . . You don’t need to . . .”
The other man was watching him intently, but Ryan stopped, and something clicked in his mind. When he opened his mouth again, the pleading note was gone. Instead, he spoke the truest words he knew. “If you do it, you won’t be able to run far enough.”
“There it is,” Vanderveen said, genuinely pleased. “That’s what I wanted to hear. It’s good to see you can still get your back up.”
Ryan took a quick step forward. Before he could take a second, Vanderveen had pulled Katie out of the chair in a blur. He held her tight against his chest, his left arm wrapped like a steel bar around her slender waist. The tip of the knife was digging hard enough into her skin to draw blood.
“No, Goddamnit! Don’t—” Ryan stepped hard on his rising panic.
He snapped his hands up and tried to keep his voice level. “Just let her go, Will. She has nothing to do with this.”
“Wrong!” Vanderveen snarled. “She has everything to do with this.
You made her part of this when you decided to play hero today.”
Ryan couldn’t find the words to respond. Katie was crying hard now, stricken by the helpless look she saw in his eyes, struggling to find words between her heaving sobs: “Ryan, don’t let him . . . hurt me . . . please.”
“It’s okay, Katie,” he managed to choke out. “I’m here. I’m here.”
“That’s very touching,” Vanderveen remarked. “But I’m getting bored now, so let me ask you something, Ryan: Was it worth it? Was it worth the fleeting gratitude of a few hundred people you’ll never even meet? If you could go back and let them die so she could live, wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you do it in a heartbeat?” He waited for some kind of response, but Kealey couldn’t focus on anything but the look of sheer terror and desperation on Katie’s face.
Vanderveen was visibly disappointed. “Let’s try it this way,” he said. “Do you remember the first time you ever saw her?”
Ryan knew what the man was doing, but he couldn’t help what happened next. The image appeared in his mind before he could stop it: Katie, legs curled up beneath her, hair shimmering golden brown in the sun, a pretty smile and inviting blue eyes, sitting on the grass in Orono.
Vanderveen’s gaze had become even more focused. When he saw Kealey’s eyes cloud over, remembering, he smiled again and said,
“That’s it. Hold that thought . . .”
Ryan snapped back in time to catch the last part of the sentence.
“. . . and watch this.”
Then, with a single, powerful thrust of his arm, Vanderveen pushed all 4 1⁄2 inches of the blade into the right side of Katie’s neck.
Before he could fully grasp what had just happened, Ryan heard an anguished scream and, not recognizing it as his own, broke forward across the wooden floor, completely focused on taking the other man’s life. He was oblivious to Katie’s reaction.
Her eyes opened wide and her lips parted, but no sound emerged. She tried to pull away from her captor as her legs went out from under her. Then she crashed forward against the side of the table, her right hand coming up to feel for the source of so much searing pain.
Suddenly she found herself on the floor, kicking out frantically, trying to find some air through the choking sensation of blood in her throat. She had sudden sparks of insight, brief bouts of lucidity that brought her the terrible truth. She tried to push it away, but the facts were fighting through . . . She had been hurt, seriously hurt, and the nearest hospital was 20 miles away, and she couldn’t breathe, and Ryan wasn’t looking, didn’t see how bad it was, and she couldn’t breathe . . .
Kealey and Vanderveen were struggling for control of the gun that had materialized out of nowhere. Wrestling for control of life and death, one driven by rage and despair, the other by a hatred born of many years—a visceral evil that was the sum of many parts, traceable back to no single point in time.
The .40 roared once, then came sliding across the polished wooden floor, pulling through a thin trickle of blood before coming to rest beneath the refrigerator. Vanderveen made a quick decision as Ryan went for the gun, getting to his feet and throwing his full weight at the back door once, then twice before the lock broke and he burst out into the storm, just as two rounds splintered the door frame where his head had been a second earlier.
Passing the door, Ryan glanced quickly to make sure that the other man wasn’t lying prone in the mud, ready to spring back up and into the kitchen. He saw a distant figure merge with the dark, then disappear through the sheets of rain.
With the door open, the sound of the storm was deafening as he went to Katie and kneeled, pulling her close. Her shoulders were over his thighs, the back of her head resting in the crook of his right arm. As he held her, he felt her left hand reaching out to find his, the long fingers gripping tight to squeeze out the pain.
Ryan didn’t try to remove the knife; it only would have hurt her more and made the bleeding worse. Her lips parted as she tried to speak, and when she turned her head toward him, a thin trickle of blood ran down the side of her mouth. Although she couldn’t make any words, he knew that she was in agony because she was still kicking weakly and the tears had not stopped building.
Worse yet, her luminous blue eyes were losing some of their animation, and when he put his face close to hers, he couldn’t feel her warm breath on his skin.
“Katie.” He wasn’t sure if she could still hear him, and it was hard to tell because her face was blurred by his own tears. “Don’t go, Katie. Stay here. God, just . . . stay with me. Please . . .”
It was all he could say. He wanted to tell her he loved her, that he was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come.
Instead, he held her close and rocked her back and forth, refusing to believe that he would not hear her laughter, her voice, or see her beautiful smile ever again. And still rocking, as gently as he could, until the light finally left her eyes altogether, and she died in his arms a few moments later.
Vanderveen was tearing along the path through the woods, dis-oriented and full of adrenaline. Despite the fact that he had not slept in almost three days, he had never felt more alive. For the first time in seven years, he was actually glad that Kealey had survived the bullet in Syria. It was so much more fitting for it to end here, and now, perhaps, Kealey might understand something of his own pain . . .
The pine and oak trees were all around him, the pines still full and green, the oaks nothing more than towering, writhing arms of tremulous wood. He was already soaked to the skin, freezing cold, and the roar of the ocean was like a living thing. He had his bearings now, heading forward to the great dark expanse of the Atlantic, feet pounding in the mud as he raced, unknowingly, toward the edge of the towering cliffs.
Kealey emerged from the back of the house at a dead sprint with Vanderveen’s gun in his hand, moving fast toward the water. He was numbed by what had just happened. It couldn’t last, though, and cutting through the emptiness was the inescapable truth: that he was responsible for all of it. By putting the hunt for William Vanderveen ahead of Katie, he had killed her just as surely as if he had stabbed her himself, and he couldn’t get the image out of his mind: Katie, kicking and writhing on the floor, trying to cry out through the blood that was filling her throat, the hideous gurgle that had emerged instead. God, no. No!
Vanderveen spun around when he heard what might have been, carrying high over the howling wind, a scream of agony and bottomless pain. The sound brought a smile to his face. Kealey was coming.
The path had ended in a wide clearing, several solitary fence posts standing guard on the perimeter. The mud was churning around his feet as though attempting to swallow him whole, but far more terrifying was the precipitous drop that ended the world just 10 feet in front of him. The sky above was in constant motion, twisting black clouds lit bright by sheets of lightning, the thunder pounding hard just seconds later with enough force to make the ground shake. The wind was icy cold and constant, bringing silver streaks of rain in from over the tortuous swells of the ocean.
He tried to think. Kealey had his gun, and he was without a weapon. He had to get out of the clearing immediately.
Directly behind him, where the path turned into the underbrush, Vanderveen heard the unmistakable sound of splashing feet.
Kealey turned the corner and stepped into the empty clearing. He was buffeted hard by the wind, which didn’t seem to be going in any one direction, but the USP Compact was up and steady in front of him. He had dropped the magazine on the self-loading pistol on the way out of the house to see that it contained four bullets. That meant that Vanderveen had not reloaded after his bloody escape from F
Street, as only three rounds had been fired inside the house. There was one in the chamber, though, so he actually had five Federal 155
grain Hydra-Shok rounds with which to kill the man, and he planned to use every last one of them.
He wasn’t sure if that would be enough. In the recessed lighting of the kitchen, Vanderveen had seemed almost inhuman. Part of it was his appearance. It had been Ryan’s first close look at the man in almost eight years, and he clearly hadn’t lost a step in that period of time. If anything, he looked even stronger and leaner than he had during his time as one of the most capable soldiers in the U.S.
Special Forces community.
More than that, though, was the fact that Vanderveen appeared to be driven by something far more powerful than his natural physical strength. It was the way his eyes burned with that strange light that others, not knowing better, might have mistaken for ambition, religious fervor, greed, or any other kind of overpowering emotion.
Kealey was under no such illusions. He knew that Will Vanderveen was driven by hate, and hate alone.
For Ryan, these were not specific thoughts, but vague considera-tions that drifted on the edge of his tortured mind. In the confusion of fact and fiction, however, he was able to grab hold of one thing that may or may not have helped him: When it comes to that man’s eyes, it all looks the same.
Listening to this strange epiphany in his head, everything else went quiet for a minute. The shrieking wind seemed to drop to a murmur, the storm fell blessedly silent, and he heard footsteps coming fast behind him.
He turned without looking, the gun coming up. As he fired, he felt a stinging in his face. Then he was falling, but still on solid ground.
The muzzle flashes were lost in a sheet of lightning that briefly turned night into day.
Did I hit him? Ryan didn’t know, couldn’t see as he stood and wiped what might have been water out of his eyes. He hadn’t counted the number of rounds he had fired, wasn’t sure if it was two or three.
He didn’t know how far he might be from the edge, and he was still trying to get his bearings when something slammed into his left side.
He felt his ribs give way with a sickening crack.
The breath left his lungs in a rush as he crashed to the ground.
Ryan tried to face the other man, but still couldn’t see much more than a vague outline through the blood streaming down over his forehead and into his eyes.
He became aware then that Vanderveen was towering over him, but when he blinked, the man was gone. Ryan wondered why until he realized that the gun was no longer in his hand. Staggering to his feet, his vision cleared momentarily and he saw a dark figure scrambling across the clearing, the outstretched hand reaching for an object in the mud.
Ryan took two steps forward when the pain hit him like a hammer in the side. His ankle felt like it had been crushed in a vise, but somehow he was still running as Vanderveen turned with the gun, getting off one shot before Ryan hit him low and sent him tumbling out into space.
Vanderveen reached back for the ground, shocked to find that it wasn’t there. He was caught by a sudden downdraft and carried away from the cliff wall, pelted the whole way by stinging beads of rain.
Looking up, the clouds were getting very far away, and when he began to turn in midair, his eyes finally locked onto the churning waters below.
The impact came, crushing the breath out of his lungs as the ocean sucked him down. He was instantly paralyzed by the cold, but it couldn’t last; the pain followed a split second later, rippling through his body in an agonizing wave, pulling him back from the brink of conciousness. He struggled for the surface as the darkness closed in around him.
Ryan was still in the clearing, less than 2 feet from the edge. He lay motionless in the freezing mud, trying to take account of his injuries.
He knew without looking that most of the ribs on his left side were broken. His ankle didn’t feel right at all; he remembered that it had almost collapsed when he tried to run on it. Gingerly, he reached up to touch the jagged cut on his forehead when he was stopped by another sudden pain.
It didn’t take long to locate the source. Vanderveen’s last round had caught him in the right side. Pulling back his jacket and lifting his shirt to expose the neat hole, he saw that it was bleeding slowly but steadily. Carefully reaching back with his right hand, he felt for, but didn’t find what would have been a much larger exit wound.
He wasn’t sure how much damage the bullet had done, and after thinking about it for a while, decided that he really didn’t care.
Vanderveen was finally dead, but at what cost?
Katie.
He had been numb to this point, but the sense of loss he suddenly felt was far more painful than the injuries he had sustained.
Lying there in the damp, he idly wondered how long it would take for him to join her. His eyelids were already getting heavy, and the cold didn’t seem as pronounced as it had been a few minutes earlier.
The pain wasn’t as bad either. Not nearly as bad.
His right hand moved up and away from the hole in his side, drifting over a lump in his jacket. He felt delirium coming on, so he double-checked to make sure he had not imagined it. No, there was definitely something there. He pulled it out to see: his cell phone.
Ryan put his head back in the mud and thought about it. If he called now, they might make it in time. They might not. He didn’t know.
Was it important?
Why should he care?
A few minutes later, he returned the phone to his pocket and settled back to wait.