The Last Spymaster

by Gayle Lynds

  “This nasty business with Jay Tice reminds me of him. I don’t like it when major figures from our world disappear without even a rumor about what’s happened to them or where they are. Jay’s case is similar, except he’s reappeared—and we don’t know for sure how or why.” Shaking her head worriedly, she marched back toward her office.

  15

  Silver Spring, Maryland

  Amid the dense shadows of her living room, surrounded by the pungent odor of the burning cigar, Elaine stared at Jay Tice in the moonlight. His dowdy cap was gone, and so was his old-man’s slouch. He stood apparently relaxed, but his knees were flexed and his feet were at shoulder width for maximum balance, ready to sprint or attack. As he let the slats of the blinds close, his words hammered her brain:My friends call me Jay. His warmth and charm were poisoned honey. He was already trying to manipulate her, while his gun never wavered from its aim at her heart.

  “Hello, Jay.” She stood up slowly, planning her words, keeping herself calm. He was a dozen feet away. “I’m glad to meet you at last. What can I say to convince you to return to Allenwood?” She glanced down at her gun, still pointed back at the chair. The angle to swing it toward him was wide, at least ninety degrees—

  There was a swift movement of air, and her Walther disappeared, leaving her fingers stinging. Her heart hammered as the muzzle of his Browning cut into her belly and he towered in front of her so close she could smell the scent of old blood on him. Her own gun dangled from his other hand. His entire body radiated danger. She was looking up at the real Jay Tice, a full head taller than she. At his strong features and lined face and piercing eyes. The impact was of power and some deep percolating rage that was capable of crushing anyone or anything in his path.

  Then the threat evaporated in a smile. “My returning to Allenwood isn’t going to happen. At least not yet.” His tone was inviting, collegial, giving the sense of someone who appreciated the other’s presence. The way he inclined his large head and looked at her had an aura of Continental, cufflinked suavity, while his disarming frankness painted him as utterly honest. He was a chameleon.

  And he was gone—across the room, silent and swift, this time to the front window, where he kept glancing at the street through the blind while keeping the Browning trained on her.

  Act relaxed. Don’t fuel his sense of control. “Not yet?” she said. “That gives me hope. Glad you made yourself a drink. I could use one myself.” Keep talking. Keep him talking. “What’s on your mind?” She went to her liquor cabinet. The aim of his pistol followed smoothly.

  As she opened the cabinet, a small interior light shone, illuminating glasses and bottles and flowing out in a dusky arc that showed the figure in the armchair was a dummy like the one in Tice’s prison cell. Wearing her jeans and shirt, it was stuffed with crushed newspapers, too, the edges showing from the sleeves. On top was her bulbous glass vase, the size of an adult’s head, turned upside down. Black electrician’s tape held a SIG Sauer to the chair’s arm, aimed at the door. On the table beside the smoldering cigar lay a miniature recorder-player. That explained the voice when she came in the door. He must have prerecorded “Don’t turn on the light” and used a remote to activate the order. But what showed the supremacy of his tradecraft was the cigar. Its glowing orange coal drew the eye and subtly guaranteed that the shadowy figure was a living, breathing person.

  “Why did Whippet want to wipe me?” He enunciated each word slowly, clearly.

  She opened a bottle of Ketel One vodka. “I don’t know that they did.”

  “They tried at least once. Maybe twice. The second time I recognized two of the operatives when they came after a friend and me at his place. They were Whippet, and it was obviously a wet assignment.”

  “Your friend was Palmer Westwood?”

  He nodded. “How did you know?”

  Suddenly the Langley-issued cell phone in her shoulder bag rang. Laurence Litchfield. Its sound was distinctive from her personal cell. She stared longingly at the bag. It rang again.

  “Your cell?” Tice asked.

  When she nodded, he took three steps and picked up the bag and fished out the cell, never taking his gaze from her. He laid the cell on the floor. Then he rose up. As it rang again, he slammed his heel down with a violent motion. The ringing ceased. The plastic shattered in a loud cracking noise. She inhaled sharply. He dropped the remains into her purse.

  She moistened her dry lips and said nothing, but all she could think about was escape. She had to get away and alert Litchfield. Tice must be stopped.

  He returned to the window. “You were going to tell me how you knew I was with Palmer.”

  Her hands trembled. She moved them into the shadow to pour two fingers of vodka. “It was a guess. He was your mentor at one time, and you were close. It made sense you’d go to him.” She drank the liquor. It burned from her throat to her belly, but she felt marginally better.

  “Whippet must’ve thought so, too. They tried to wipe us.” He described an armed man in the swamp who had tried to shoot him, then the arrival of more than a dozen who chased them to the river, where they barely escaped in Westwood’s plane. That was when he had recognized the two operatives.

  Cunningham was silent. Hannah had said Whippet arrived after the attack. Either Hannah or Tice was lying. Considering everything, more likely both were. “I have no reason to believe you. If Langley wanted a traitor dead, they could handle it quietly in Allenwood. A common prison shanking over some minor dispute. Happens often enough no one would question it.”

  “True. That’s one of the reasons I’m certain my escape has triggered something. Or it’s interfering with someone’s plans. What happened at Whippet? Who hit them?”

  Her head jerked up. “You did. You arranged it!”

  “Why would I? No, no, Elaine. I had no reason to hit Whippet.”

  “Yes, you did! You just admitted you knew they were after you. You did them first, before they could do you!”

  “I didn’t want butchery. I wanted information.”

  She remembered hearing Whippet’s front door close. “If you know they were hit, then it was you inside. You went in because you knew it was safe—everyone was dead.”

  He shrugged. “I went in carefully. I had to confirm the two men I saw in North Carolina were still with Whippet. They were. I found them—as you said, dead.”

  “What if the police had arrived?”

  “Their sirens would’ve given me plenty of warning. Whippet was my best hope. My one link to find out what’s going on. It was worth the risk.”

  She thought about that—and about how quickly he had taken the gun from her, how quickly he had moved off to the window. Quickly, silently, almost invisibly. And she had not heard him inside Whippet house, either—until he left.

  “I’d been hiding across the street for ten minutes or so,” he explained, his tones persuasive. “I wanted to isolate one of the operatives and get some answers. But when the front door opened, a dozen men slipped out. At first I thought they were part of the unit. But the porch light was off, they moved fast and together, and I saw dark blotches on their hands. Even in the moonlight, it looked like blood. Plus most had that wild look one learns to recognize—crude, like punch-drunk fighters who want to beat the hell out of someone. When I see that, I know something bad’s gone down.”

  The words escaped her lips: “You were right. It was a slaughter.”

  “They’d left the door ajar, which told me they wanted their work discovered—probably to make sure the message got wherever it was intended to go as fast as possible. I didn’t find anyone alive.” He sighed. “It reminded me of La Belle Discotheque when it was bombed. You’re probably too young to remember. It was 1986, West Berlin. Our soldiers used to hang out there, which was why Libyan terrorists targeted it. A couple of people died, and more than two hundred were injured, many badly. Both places had the same sense of devastation.”

  “You’ve left out a key element—me. I was aliv
e. And I heard you leave. You can’t tell me you didn’t see or hear me, because you’re better at this than I am.”

  His voice dropped ten degrees. “I saw you.” From across the room, his gun homed in on her heart. “I repeat, someone’s worried enough to send Whippet to terminate me. And you’re Whippet. The only reason I can see to let you live is if you tell me what in hell is going on!”

  From the passenger seat of the midnight-blue BMW 530i, Jerry Angelides surveyed the narrow street in Silver Spring. It rose like a concrete snake, gray and shifty. The moonlight was bright, the air still warm. That would not last. The night was going to turn cold; Angelides knew it. Trees and cars and lit windows rimmed the street, announcing boring suburbia behind the dark bricks of town houses. They were built in pairs so they could share a wall. In between were pencil-thin side yards.

  Angelides was a connoisseur of environments. You had to know about them. More specifically, you had to know how to get in—and out. As he peered around, he had one of his bad feelings. It was like an itch. Something was going to happen.

  As the BMW’s tires thrummed along the pavement, he told his driver, “That’s it, Rink. That’s Cunningham’s place. Stop here then go find someplace to park. Make it legal. Don’t want any cops.”

  Rink hit the brakes, and Angelides and Billy got out and walked around a dark Honda and crouched. Over the hood, they studied Cunningham’s place as the BMW cruised off. Angelides noted her front yard was little, about the size of an old-fashioned matchbox.

  “Hey, there’s no light,” Billy said. “It’s awful early to go to bed. I’ll bet she’s not home.”

  Billy was a nice-looking guy, neat in his sports jacket and pants. Billy had short brown hair trimmed just a little longer than a military cut, like Angelides’s gray hair. He also wore a black pearl earring in each ear, but then, he was young, like twenty-two.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Angelides advised. “See that red Jag down the street? It’s the right license plate, so it’s hers. Mighty fine-looking piece of machinery.”

  “She might be visiting neighbors,” Billy suggested. He pulled out his 10mm Colt semiautomatic, a duplicate of Angelides’s.

  “Uh-huh.” Angelides took out his Colt and a GPS tracker. “Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. That’s always a mistake. You gotta think ahead, but don’t jump ahead. Okay, you take the rear. If there’s still no light, break in, but be careful. Anything looks hinky, give me a warning call on the cell. If you can’t talk, it’s okay. I’ll see your number and know it’s you and come around. Otherwise, I’ll give you ten, then I’m going in the front. We’re gonna learn all we can about this little lady. First thing, we look for her. Second thing, we look for stuff about Tice.”

  Elaine stared at Tice’s weapon, fighting back fear. Think. “Somehow you’ve discovered I’m your hunter. Since you’re here now, you probably heard me call into Langley at Whippet, too. You figured there wasn’t going to be enough time to question me there, so you decided to wait for me here. How did you find out about me?”

  “I have my sources.” He checked outside and stiffened. His words snapped: “Close the cabinet. The light’s small, but it’s a hazard. We have to leave.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Shut the doors,” he ordered. “Now. You’ve got visitors. Come here and look.”

  His worry seemed real. She set her glass inside the cabinet and closed it and ran across the room. She tipped up a slat and stared.

  “There are two,” he said. “See them?”

  The older of the pair marched down the sidewalk, while the other watched the street. Both held guns low to their sides, where they were less noticeable.

  “There was no surveillance when I arrived,” he told her, “and I wasn’t followed.” He hurried across the room, grabbed a backpack, stuffed her Walther into it, and stuck the lit cigar into the whiskey that remained in his glass, stopping the odor. “That means it’s you they want.”

  Keeping hope from her voice, she said neutrally, “They could be Langley.”

  “If they were, I’d be out the back door by now.”

  “They could be yours. This could be a movie you’re producing to fool me.”

  “Why would I bother? My smartest move is to leave you to entertain them while I get away.” He snapped the SIG Sauer free from the armchair.

  She peered outside again. The first man had stopped at her Jaguar. She tensed. “One of them looks as if he’s planting something on my Jag. Right rear fender.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Langley, does it?” When she was silent, he asked, “Large or small?”

  “Can’t tell. The other one’s moving. It looks as if he’s headed toward my side yard.” She moistened her lips. “Who are they?”

  “They were with the gang that massacred Whippet.” He put the SIG Sauer into the backpack. “I’d say they’ve come to finish the job.”

  16

  As Cunningham bolted through the shadows to the dummy and ripped out newspapers, Tice attached a wireless audio receiver to his tape recorder. Then he helped her ram the papers into the fireplace, leaving the area with no trace that anyone had been here recently—except for the lingering stench of the cigar. Nothing to be done about that.

  He shoved the whiskey glass into her hand. “Dump it into the kitchen trash.”

  She slung her bag across her chest, and he led her at a trot through her dark living room and into the hall, carrying his Browning and the backpack. He slapped on his reading glasses, took a small box from the backpack, popped the box open, and removed what looked like a triangular kernel of corn, except that it was a dull black color.

  “This is an audio transmitter,” he told her. “It’s got special adhesive on one side. Lick it, and it sticks like a bad debt to anything. Attaching it activates it. With luck, I’ll be able to plant it.”

  “You have a plan?” Her voice was tight.

  “I do. Grab a towel out of the bathroom. Take the dark one.” He dropped the box into the backpack and slid the kernel into his pants pocket and returned his reading glasses to his shirt pocket.

  She snatched the navy terry-cloth towel from the guest bath. “If I had my Walther, I could help.”

  He shook his head, barely acknowledging her words. In the tiny kitchen he grabbed a flare-legged barstool and laid it on its side some four feet from the outside door. It partially blocked the path to the rest of the town house.

  “Always give them something to focus on besides you.”

  “I know.” She dumped the glass of whiskey into a container under the sink.

  He scanned the room. The door was so close to the wall that there was no way either one of them could hide behind it. White moonlight streamed in through the oversize window above the sink, leaving a black shadow on the kitchen’s far side. Cast by the leafy tree in her rear yard, the shadow undulated with the wind.

  He yanked her inside the shadow just as a face appeared at the glass, peering warily inside. It was the young man he had seen out front. With a quiet curse, she tugged her black jacket shut over her white T-shirt and adjusted her shoulder bag. The kitchen was so small that there was no way to escape deeper into darkness.

  He put his mouth against her ear. “Move with the shadow. If we’re stationary, we’re more noticeable.”

  Side by side, they shifted with the rolling darkness. Her tension was palpable. From the window, the man inspected the interior for what seemed an interminable time. He had a cheeky face, young but watchful. Tice studied him for a sign he had seen her gesture. But at last the head disappeared. Tice kept himself loose. He glanced at Cunningham. She nodded. He sensed fear, but she remained composed.

  There was the scratch of picklocks, and the door opened cautiously, hinges squeaking. A hefty Colt in his hand, the intruder stepped up and across the threshold into a rectangle of moonlight that illuminated the overturned stool. He closed the door. As Tice had expected, the man leaned over to move it out of his way. Ti
ce touched Cunningham’s arm and pointed and gestured.

  She gave a single nod, and they sprinted. The intruder turned, his weapon in one hand, the stool in the other. She flung the towel over his head. As he grunted and jerked with surprise, blind and helpless, Tice crashed the side of his hand down hard onto the back of his neck. The barstool thudded to the floor, and the gunman collapsed to his knees.

  Cunningham tore his Colt away as Tice kneed him in the chin. The intruder’s head snapped back, cutting oxygen to his brain. The towel slid off. His eyes were open but abruptly blank. With a low groan, he pitched forward, resting on his cheek like an exhausted baby. His eyelids closed.

  Tice knelt and emptied the man’s pockets. “He’ll be out for a while. Throw me my backpack. Do you have a key to your pantry?”

  “I used to. I’ll look.” She ran to the backpack, tossed it to him, and in three quick steps was opening a kitchen drawer.

  He heard her pawing through it. “Nothing useful here except his cell.” He dropped it into his backpack.

  He took out the kernel-shaped audio transmitter and licked it and stuck it to the underside of the man’s shirt collar. He checked Cunningham. She was still digging through the drawer. The Colt was on the counter. He would deal with that later. She pulled out a short leather strap. The loop at the end was torn open, the key gone. She muttered angrily and resumed her search.

  Tice rose stiffly and opened the pantry door. He dragged the unconscious man inside and dumped him beside a box of laundry detergent.

  “How about that key?” He closed the door.

  “I’ve got it.” She ran toward him, the key in one hand, the Colt in the other, her expression determined. She would not give up the weapon easily.

  He watched the Colt warily, but as long as there was another killer outside, he would make no move to take it.

  “Lock the pantry,” he ordered. “Keep the key.”

  She rushed around him as he returned the stool to its place beside the counter and slung his backpack over one shoulder. As the lock clicked into place, he studied the kitchen one last time. Nothing appeared disturbed. He opened the rear door just as he heard the front door open. His chest squeezed.