Highest Order

by David Archer

  Borden stared at her. “Okay, I never would have guessed on that one. That is something entirely new to me. How do you do that? How do you pretend to be somebody’s girlfriend?”

  “Well, they have to fill out a lot of information for me,” she said. “I memorize it, like some personal stuff so he can talk to me about things, so it looks natural if anybody’s watching.”

  “And how did you get into this line of work?” Borden asked.

  “Well, it all started because I wanted to be an actress. Unfortunately, you have to have some way to pay the bills while you’re waiting for that big role to come along, and I was waiting tables when my agent got a call looking for someone to play a girlfriend for a certain movie star. My agent called me and asked if I wanted to give it a try, I did, and word kind of spread. I started getting calls from other celebrities, and—well, it pays pretty well. I’ll probably keep doing it until I get a decent role on a TV show or something.”

  “That is amazing,” Borden said. “I honestly have never heard of such a thing before. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can understand why just about any man would like being seen with you, but…”

  Jenny looked at him, smiling. “But, what?”

  “I was going to say,” he said, “that I could understand why a man would want to be seen with you, but if it was me, I wouldn’t want it to end after dinner.”

  Jenny winked. “It doesn’t always,” she said. “I mean, you know, if I really like the guy.”

  Borden smiled. “Well, now, I’m not trying to brag,” he said, “but I might be a bit of a celebrity, myself. If I wanted to hire you as my professional girlfriend, what would it cost me?”

  Jenny giggled again. “I get five hundred dollars an hour,” she said. “And only for the hours that I’m seen in public with the client. If anything happens after that, it’s always off the clock.”

  “Ah, I see,” Borden said. “And was it a client you were supposed be meeting here tonight?”

  “Well, no,” Jenny said. “It was actually somebody who asked me out for real, but I guess he changed his mind.”

  “That is such a pity,” Borden said. “I really can’t imagine who would stand you up. I mean, after all, there are men who are willing to pay just for the pleasure of your company, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” Jenny said. “Of course, it’s also nice to just be asked out on an actual date, once in a while.”

  “Oh, I’m sure. Tell me, what would you do if one of your celebrity clients were to ask you out on a date?”

  “Oh, that’s not allowed,” Jenny said. “It’s part of the business, I can’t actually date someone who’s hired me for this kind of work. Kinda frustrating, but that’s how it is.”

  “Well, in that case,” Borden said, “let’s forget about me hiring you to be my professional girlfriend. I’d much rather, if you wouldn’t mind, ask for an actual date.”

  Jenny looked down at the bar, smiling and trying to give the impression that she was blushing. “You would?”

  “I would indeed,” Borden said. “I’m very serious. Would you consider accepting if I did?”

  Jenny tilted her head up so that she was looking at him sideways. “I’m Joni,” she said. “Why don’t we see how tonight turns out, okay?”

  Borden broke into a huge smile. “Joni,” he said, “I’m Tony. Tony Borden, United States Congressman from Texas.”

  Jenny let her eyes go wide. “Oh, seriously? Oh my goodness, I should’ve recognized you. I know who you are, you’re awesome.”

  They sat at the bar and talked for quite a while, and Jenny made sure to keep an eye on Marco, who was sitting at a table toward the back of the lounge, and Noah, who was seated on one of the couches in the lobby of the hotel. Noah was holding a newspaper, but he kept glancing at the television that was on the wall in front of him. Anyone else would have gotten the impression that he was completely oblivious to his surroundings, but Jenny knew that he was watching her every second.

  After an hour of sitting at the bar and talking, Borden suggested they go into the restaurant for dinner. Jenny agreed, and allowed him to take her hand as they walked from the lounge to the dining room. The hostess smiled and led them to the table, and Jenny watched as Noah followed her into the restaurant and took another table, joined by Marco a few minutes later.

  Two hours later, Borden held Jenny’s hand again as they left the restaurant and went to the elevator. Marco and Noah took positions in the lobby, just watching the elevators.

  On the fifth floor, Jenny allowed Borden to lead her into his room, and then she let him pull her close for a kiss.

  “Tony, this is awesome,” she said. “If anyone had ever told me I would get to meet you, I would’ve said they were lying. Listen, you mind if I use your bathroom to freshen up just a little bit?”

  “No, that’s fine,” Borden said. “Go right ahead. I’m going to get rid of this jacket and tie, if that’s all right?”

  Jenny smiled at him and winked. “That’s fine,” he said. “You’ll be getting rid of more than that, shortly.”

  She stepped into the bathroom and closed the door, then begin taking off her dress. She stripped down to her underwear and hung the dress on the back of the door, then waited another minute before walking out in bra and panties.Forty-five minutes later, Noah and Marco saw her step out of the elevator. They waited until she had walked out the door and climbed into the passenger side of the SUV, and then both of them walked out and started strolling in opposite directions.

  The news broke shortly before midnight, when Borden’s brother called the hotel desk because he couldn’t get an answer in the room. A maid was sent up to check on him, and entered the room when no one responded.

  She stepped inside, and then suddenly began screaming. Several people came running down the hall to see what was wrong as she came rushing back out. She barely made it to the hallway before throwing up.

  The police were called moments later, and one detective was quoted by a local news station as saying that they had never seen such a horrific crime scene. Congressman Anthony Borden had been sliced and stabbed so many times that he was almost completely unrecognizable.

  As they watched the coverage on CNN and heard the quote, Jenny looked over to Noah. “What do you think? Will they get the message?”

  “Coming right on the heels of Andrews’ death,” Noah said, “I suspect this group is starting to wonder just who or what is coming after them. That’s exactly what I want them thinking.” He looked at Jenny in the eye. “Very good job,” he said.

  “He was a talkative fellow, too,” Jenny said. “Once he understood what I wanted, he was more than happy to give me names. Senator Dennison, Senator Lawrence, Congresswoman Bennett; oh, he also mentioned some names at CIA. Oberlin, Richardson, and Brent. All of them are handlers, he said, which is how they get a lot of their intel.”

  “Good.” He turned to Neil. “Who’s next?”

  “Well, there is something exciting coming up in the next couple of days. Day after tomorrow, you’re going to have five of the names we’ve got all gathered in one place. It’s a meeting of the joint committee on immigration, and it includes Lisa Vincenzo and Bob Majors from Congress, along with Senators Perkowski, Lindemann, and Dennison. There are several others from both the House and the Senate on the committee, but none of them are on our list except Senator Duckworth, and he’s on the DNK roster.”

  “DNK?” Noah asked.

  “Yeah,” Neil said. “The Do Not Kill roster.”

  Chapter TWENTY-TWO

  Perkowski’s phone had been ringing since before dawn, to the point that he had been almost unable to get anything else done since getting to his office an hour earlier. Lewiston and others had called, demanding his reassurance that the deaths of Andrews and Borden, coming so close together, were unrelated and purely coincidental.

  Unfortunately, Solomon Perkowski wasn’t sure he believed that. The police report, which he had managed to bully someone into fa
xing to him, described a scene that was so chaotic and horrifying that it was almost beyond belief. If the investigating detectives had actually recorded exactly what they saw, it seemed to Perkowski that Anthony Borden must have been the victim of a half dozen knife-wielding killers.

  The problem was that the hotel was loaded with security cameras, and it was easy to track Borden’s movements after he arrived there. He had first gone to his room and visited the bathroom, then went down the elevator and into the lounge. Three separate cameras were able to see him sitting at the bar with a young lady, a brunette, but none of them caught her face. Her hair was arranged so that it kept her face in shadow, preventing the cameras from even capturing her profile.

  Sometime later, Borden escorted the young lady into the restaurant, but this did not improve the situation. A close look at her body language indicated that she had steered the hostess and Borden toward a particular table, where a single camera could only capture her from the back. Borden’s face could be seen clearly, and he was obviously enchanted by his companion.

  And then they left the restaurant and went to Borden’s room. The detectives were excited, because they were sure that one of the many cameras in the hallways would get a clear image, but the girl seemed fully aware of each camera’s location. She kept her face down and turned completely away from each and every one, all the way up to the point where she entered the room with the congressman.

  Forty-five minutes later, she left alone. Once again keeping her face completely out of view of any camera, she went directly to the elevator, got in, and rode down to the ground floor, then exited the building without stopping. She got into the passenger seat of an SUV driven by what appeared to be another young woman, and disappeared into the night. Security cameras on the outside of the building were unable to get the license number of the SUV because it was obscured with mud.

  Inside Borden’s room, they had found Congressman Anthony Borden laid on his back on the bed. He was naked, and his wrists had been secured to the headboard with fur-lined handcuffs, and his ankles tied to the legs under the foot of the bed with nylon ropes. In his mouth was something called a ball gag, a rubber ball that was secured into his mouth by a strap that went around the back of the head to hold it in place.

  Both he and the bed were covered in his own blood. Borden’s chest had been flayed, sliced down the center and across from shoulder to shoulder, and the skin slowly peeled back to expose the muscles and viscera underneath. Someone—undoubtedly the young lady seen in the video—had taken the time to slowly slice away the tissues that held the skin in place, peeling it back a little at a time. The agony would have been unbearable to Borden, but the medical examiner speculated that he probably didn’t last very long. Between shock and exsanguination, it was doubtful that he survived more than twenty minutes of such torture.

  Afterward, for no reason anyone could determine, he had been sliced in various places all over his body. It was almost as if the cuts were random, with no particular purpose. And when that was done, the girl had gone and taken a shower before leaving the body right where it lay.

  What kind of woman could do something like that, and then nonchalantly walk away as if she’d just had a good time? The thought sent a shiver down Perkowski’s spine.

  One of the detectives speculated further that it appeared as if Borden was being questioned. The torture, he believed, was meant to elicit information. This led him to the conclusion that Borden, United States Congressman, had been the victim of a Russian death squad.

  Perkowski slammed the file shut. There may have been a death squad involved, but he was damn certain that it wasn’t Russian. The only question in his mind was who, among all of the countries that spied on America, could have found out that Borden was part of the Ascension Project.

  On second thought, there were two questions. Who could have figured that out, and how much information did he give up before he died? And as for the seemingly random cuts, Perkowski didn’t believe they were random for a second. This was an attempt to send a message, a message that only a very few would ever understand, and he—Perkowski—was one of them.

  His phone rang again.

  “Perkowski,” he said, answering.

  “It’s Ed Mikesell,” said the caller. “Sol, have you heard anything more about Borden? I’m getting rumors that he was pretty much skinned alive.”

  “He was,” Perkowski said. “I just read through the police report. The poor bastard was tortured, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it was to get information out of him about us. Somebody knows what we’re doing, and they’re targeting us.”

  “Who could do that, Sol? Who could possibly find out and do something like this to Tony?”

  “That,” Perkowski said, “is what I intend to find out. What I can’t understand is why whoever did this isn’t trying to expose us. Why kill a congressman?”

  “Especially right after we lost our founder. You know, some of our friends are saying Andrews’ death wasn’t as accidental as it seemed. Do you think someone actually managed to kill him?”

  “Secret Service and DOJ are crawling all over it, but they haven’t found anything to indicate actual foul play. The only weird part is trying to figure out how bees got into the air conditioning, but there have been stories of bees making hives in ductwork before. I gather they’ve gone through the entire building and haven’t found anything that they can conclusively say indicates somebody got in who shouldn’t have been there.”

  “I don’t know,” Mikesell said. “It just seems pretty strange that he drops dead, and then somebody plays slice and dice with Borden. Have they got any leads on who did that?”

  “All we know is it was a girl, a young woman,” Perkowski said. “She was a pro; she obviously knew where every security camera was, and never let a single one of them get a look at her face. The police say she was about five foot one, five foot two, weighs maybe a hundred pounds, and she apparently charmed him into letting her secure him to the bed. Tony always was one for the ladies, and I’m not surprised if he went for some of the kinky games out there.”

  “Good God,” Mikesell said. “What a way to go, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Sol, should we be worried? What if it’s really about Ascension?”

  “Well, I’m personally sure it was,” Perkowski said. “I just can’t figure why someone would do this; you’d think anyone who caught wind of Ascension would want to get in on it, not kill someone for being involved. Blackmail would have made more sense than murder, in this case.”

  Mikesell agreed, and then said he’d check in later. Perkowski was glad to get off the phone.

  * * * * *

  Allison was also fielding calls that morning, and each time her phone rang, she wondered if it was going to be one of her new masters, demanding to know where Camelot was. She had to remind herself repeatedly that she was succumbing to the same thing that made a guilty man think everyone could see the guilt on his face, even though no one could possibly know what he’d done.

  The only difference was that she knew she’d be suspected once it became obvious that someone was targeting the conspirators. They had gone to great lengths to make sure she was under control, and if they started to believe she wasn’t, then she would probably find herself facing an executioner of her own.

  Dying didn’t scare Allison. It was dying before she had accomplished her mission that would give her nightmares. Unfortunately, the mission was out of her hands.

  The phone rang again, and she picked it up instantly.

  “Allison,” she said.

  “Allison, it’s Barbara,” said Senator Holloway. “Just want you to know, there are some rumblings going on about Borden. Just about everyone involved is starting to think there’s a connection between him and Andrews.”

  “Oh, gee, I wonder whatever makes them think so?” Allison said, sarcastically. “Guilty conscience much?”

  “That’s funny,” Holloway said. “I’d laugh, but I’m afraid someon
e might think I was laughing for the wrong reasons. Borden was butchered. All it’s going to take is one or two more, and there won’t be any doubt that it’s got to do with the Ascension Project. Everyone involved is nervous, including those of us who are trying to prevent this thing from happening. Your boy does know that some of us are on your side, right?”

  “Absolutely,” Allison said. “I gave him the list of names you gave me, of our allies within the organization. None of you will be touched, I promise.”

  “I’m counting on it. It’s bad enough to know that our compatriots in the conspiracy would be happy to see us dead; I hate to think we might be targeted by the good guys, too. Seriously, Allison, what about Andrews? Was that Camelot’s work?”

  “Now, you know how it works,” Allison said. “I can neither confirm nor deny any such action, nor the existence of any such operative.”

  Holloway chuckled. “That’s good enough for me,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  The call ended and Allison hung up the phone.

  * * * * *

  “The meeting is scheduled to take place day after tomorrow at the Lincoln Club in D.C.,” Neil said. “It’ll be held on the rooftop patio, and the interesting thing about that is that the Club is housed in a three-story building that’s surrounded by buildings that range from five to fifteen stories tall.”

  “Which means,” Noah said, “that I can have an excellent line of fire. What about weapons? If it’s happening in two days, that doesn’t give me a lot of time to get a rifle and sight it in.”

  “According to Wally, that problem can be solved at the gun club in Silver Spring, Maryland. You go in and ask for Billy Daniels. When you’re told he doesn’t work there anymore, you ask whatever happened to his wife, Lynette. That’s supposed to be a signal that Wally sent you and you can be trusted. They’ll set you up with any weapon you need and you can take care of sighting it right there.”