by Tom Abrahams
The assassin bit harder into her lower lip, drawing blood, and picked up the scalpel with her right hand. Holding its handle as she would a pencil, she pressed the carbon steel blade against her wrist and dragged it upward toward her forearm. Blood leached to the surface, coloring the two-inch cut, which ran parallel to a trio of scars.
The scars were similar in length, the thin bands of fibrous tissue resembling a violent cat scratch. Each one, however, was a deliberate exorcism. Together they symbolized a ritualistic rite of passage, a masochistic joyride she’d long employed to cope with her enviable existence.
The assassin wasn’t in the Mayflower Hotel by choice. She hadn’t straddled and executed Horus because she wanted to do it. The tattoo on her shoulder wasn’t the dark design she would have picked among the options in the tattoo artist’s répertoire.
The assassin was a puppet whose strings were always taut. In the five years, three months, sixteen days, twelve hours, thirteen minutes, and eight seconds since she was pulled from a pool of her own vomit in an underground New York City nightclub, her life had not been her own. Unlike those who controlled her, the assassin had no manifest destiny.
She was a slave with invisible binds she could not break, mostly because she was unaware they existed. Instead, she soldiered from one assignment to the next without question.
Plant a listening device in a congressman’s Georgetown brownstone? Done. Seduce an intelligence analyst at the FBI for access to his encrypted data files? No problem. Dress as a man and knock on the hotel room door of a former presidential cabinet member to put a bullet in his prostitute girlfriend? Check.
She was among a kaleidoscope of assets netted for the kind of black-ops, off-the-books work her country often employed under the guise of patriotism and freedom. Each of them had their own unique skills. She was the best among them.
For every asset admired for her beauty, she eclipsed her. For those feared for their lethality, she was more poisonous. For the ones admired for their intelligence, she outsmarted them. Her handlers secretly called her “Bourne”, after the popular Robert Ludlum spy.
She would have snapped Bourne’s neck before he could remember his name.
And despite the briefings, which spoke of national security and protecting liberty, she knew the missions were more about power, money, and the control of information than anything else.
She knew Horus talked too much. He’d stumbled, through arrogance or stupidity, out of the cage marked “asset” and into the one labeled “liability”. It was a mistake, or a call for help, she’d witnessed so many others attempt to make.
Some waved umbrellas at the paparazzi. Others shaved their heads. Still more claimed they were clinically bipolar or suffered from exhaustion as they entered “rehab”.
The assassin laughed every time she read a news account about another emotionally wayward young star or starlet. It was their weaknesses, the shallow vulnerability of artists, that forced her handlers to rethink their recruitment techniques.
That was how they found her. She had no aspirations beyond the next empty bottle of vodka. She was a nobody, a fundamentally brilliant, beautiful, pathologically soulless nobody.
They put her in a cocoon and nourished her. They broke her free of her addiction to pain-numbing and helped her embrace its sting. Pain, they taught her, was proof of life. It was validation that her heart, as it were, was beating and pumping blood.
They did other things too while she was in the cocoon; things she couldn’t remember exactly but which triggered her impulses and put her to work. When she was ready, when the metamorphosis, in its Kafka-esque glory, was complete, she emerged anew.
She was a butterfly. Mesmerizing, delicate at first glance, but lethal to her predators.
The assassin was immaculately conceived and judiciously deployed. While she awaited her next assignment, she took the bottle of peroxide and squeezed it over the wound. Wincing, she licked her lips, relishing the metallic taste of her blood as she dabbed the bubbling wound with the washcloth.
She applied a dollop of Neosporin to her wrist and then, one handed, managed to apply the bandage. The assassin looked up at herself in the mirror, her bottom lip swollen and red, the faintest gloss of moisture in her eyes.
It was time for room service.
*
Matti sank into the ergonomic chair at her cramped desk in the West Wing. It was one of a series of offices sandwiched between the president’s dining room and the chief of staff’s expansive space.
She looked over her shoulder and, certain nobody was around, unlocked one of her desk drawers. Her hand trembling, she rummaged through the mess of notepads and briefing guides to find an unmarked bottle hidden at the bottom of the drawer.
Matti gripped the bottle with one hand and palmed the top of it with the other to force open the container. She shook two blue oval tablets onto the desk and then shoved the bottle deep into the drawer. She locked the drawer and then slid a half-empty bottle of water toward the edge of the desk.
She considered the consequences of taking the pills longer than she weighed those of not taking them. She popped both of them in her mouth and followed them with a swig of room-temperature water.
She sat there watching her hand, her finger spread wide. Slowly, as if magically, the trembling subsided. With her steady hand came a feeling of calm. She inhaled deeply and smiled. Matti suddenly imagined she was in a warm bath, the water relaxing every tension or ache.
Taking two pills was new. It was double the dose her doctor prescribed in the days after the Capitol exploded. He told her it was a temporary fix for her anxiety. After a couple of months, he stopped prescribing, fearing she was becoming addicted and using the medication as a permanent crutch.
He was right.
Now she paid a ridiculous amount to a guy named C-Dunk on Seventh Street Northwest. She had little guarantee the “bennies” C-Dunk supplied were Xanax at all or whether they were a mix of valium and sawdust compressed into a pill with blue dye number two. She didn’t care. As long as C-Dunk’s junk calmed her nerves and eased the shakes, she was good with it.
They helped her sleep without dreams, without the retelling of the day her world changed. Even though she didn’t see the Capitol explode and collapse as it happened and never watched it replay on television, her nightmares provided a moment-by-moment account.
She could see, as if floating above it, the violent blast and its aftermath. Atop the rotunda, two hundred sixty-nine feet above the Capitol’s east front plaza, the Statue of Freedom dropped to the rotunda floor, rupturing it. The cast-iron globe upon which she had long rested snapped. The encircling words E and Pluribus were separated from Unum.
All thirty-six windows surrounding the dome were shattered. The sandstone walls extending upward forty-eight feet from the rotunda floor and the separating Doric pilasters were crumbled such that the fireproof cast-iron upper half of the walls collapsed upon them. Each of the eight niches, containing large scenes depicting the Revolutionary War and early exploration, were unrecognizable, fragments of the canvasses smoldering amidst the rubble.
The statues and busts lining the walls were reduced to large chunks of marble. Vinnie Ream’s Lincoln and Houdon’s Washington were indistinguishable from those of Garfield, Grant, or Hamilton. The gold replica of the original Magna Carta, a gift from the British government in 1976, melted from the explosive flash of heat.
There was a thirty-foot-wide hole in the floor where President Foreman’s casket was perched upon the catafalque. He would have no burial at Arlington. In her dream, he called to her. He blamed her. He told her the nation’s pain was her doing. She was a failure and a disappointment.
More importantly, and more grounded in reality, Matti blamed herself. She couldn’t reconcile the loss of life, the stain on her agency, her inability to stop the threat. Matti was a wreck. A sleepless, dysfunctional mess who barely coped from minute to minute.
President Jackson knew about Matti’s
anxiety. She gave Matti the number to her physician. She arranged for the consultation and the months of therapy.
Matti told her boss she was improving, she no longer needed the counseling or the drugs. She was coping and President Jackson told her how proud she was of her honesty and her recovery.
But Matti wasn’t coping without the drugs. She wasn’t recovering. She needed them.
So she calculated carefully, the good outweighed the bad. It was black and white. And despite knowing her mother’s addictions were her own undoing, Matti took the risk.
Sitting alone at her desk, all was good with the world. For the moment.
CHAPTER 8
LEONARDO DA VINCI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
FIUMICINO, ITALY
The dead Russian was right. So far, the contents of the bag were undetectable. Neither the agents nor the dogs sensed anything as Jon Custos worked his way through the security checkpoint. It was a gamble, taking it as a carry-on bag through a major international airport. Custos thought it better to test the promise now than later, when it really mattered.
With the bag still slung over his massive shoulder, he handed the gate agent a Mexican passport. Its green cover was worn from use, the pages stamped full of international destinations: Istanbul; Washington, DC; New York; Moscow; Cairo; and others. The photograph and the vital description matched Custos. Everything else was fabricated, but it was done to such a degree that even the most skilled at detecting fraud would never have known. It was a real passport in every sense of the word.
“Gratzi, Mr. Vasconselos.” The agent smiled, her cheeks bubbling. Custos took the passport from her and moved to an empty seat near the boarding entrance. He had some time before his flight, but he couldn’t get away from Rome fast enough. He secretly hoped sitting near the gate might facilitate the flight’s departure.
Jon Custos was a ghost. Whether he was traveling as Jose Vasconselos or Giuseppe Garibaldi, Custos was a man who lived in the shadows and worked for those who ruled from them. He was ethnically ambiguous, born of Roma stock. His parents were nomads who traveled from place to place, eking out an existence off the backs of others.
From an early age he had a gift for subterfuge, for ignoring whatever moral line might exist in others. Custos was always stronger than the others his age. He was the first volunteered for the worst of his clan’s jobs: pickpocketing near police stations, thieving on tourist-heavy trains, fencing counterfeit goods to new customers.
The adults in his tribe knew he was fearless. They could see the black in his eyes, his pathological stock, every time he opened his mouth and lied about the truth. His father was proud and, because of his son’s skills, became a part of the chieftain’s inner circle. Custos was an asset.
He was smart and innately gifted at language. He picked up English and Portuguese from listening to tourists. By age thirteen, he was fluent in five languages, including his native Rromanës.
When he and the lesser-skilled children would swarm an unsuspecting target, he could gauge their nationality and speak their language. That engagement gave the others the extra seconds they needed to rifle through pockets and bags without notice.
Custos was a prize for any woman in his kumpania, what his people called a caravan or group. He was the favorite of the Phuri Dai, the senior woman in their band, and she chose for him a beautiful girl to marry. They were young, but arranged marriages for teenagers was customary. A large, ornate wedding was planned southwest of Rome on Isola Sacra.
Sixteen-year-old Custos was not interested. He wanted a life beyond the confines of his tribe and his extended family. Before sunrise on the morning of the wedding, he took a pocket full of euros from his father’s bedroom and left. He never saw his family again.
He wandered around southern Europe for close to two years, beating paths from Florence and Milan to Zagreb and Dubrovnik. Custos was always a meal away from hunger and a pick away from jail. He was happy. At least he thought he was.
It was when a wealthy man caught him pickpocketing atop the Acropolis in Athens that Custos’s new path was forged.
The target was an Englishman, a cane in his left hand, an expensive Savile Row suit draping his large frame. He seemed distracted by the ruins, reading the informational placards outside the Parthenon’s roped exterior, but he caught Custos by the wrist with his hand still inside a satin-lined pocket.
Custos tugged against the mark and tried to run, but the Englishman was strong. He said nothing to Custos, looking into the boy’s eyes. His lips, pressed together, spread into a smile.
“Let go,” Custos said, twisting wildly, trying to free himself. “Let go!”
“Calm down,” the man said softly, as if trying to calm a wild horse. “I’m not going to call the police. Calm yourself and I’ll let go.”
Custos’s eyes searched the man’s face. He didn’t seem angry or upset like most of the tourists who nearly caught him. There was something fatherly about him. Though Custos didn’t know what to make of it, he stopped tugging and stood still with the man’s hand still gripped around his wrist. The sun, blazing between the columns of Pentelic marble, was as unrelenting as the man’s grasp.
“That’s better,” the man said. “Now, I promised I’d let you go, but first, I have a couple of questions for you. Clearly, you speak English?”
Custos nodded. He looked around at a family of Americans staring at him. They stood at the edge of the path between the placards and a waist-high wall. He thought they looked ridiculous with their sunblock-streaked cheeks and their baseball caps. He cursed himself for not having picked the high-sock, Bermuda shorts-wearing patriarch of that family. Custos figured if he had, he’d be halfway down the granite peak and on his way to the camouflage of the National Gardens near the city’s center.
Athens was a city of ruins, both historic and modern, but the gardens were beautiful. He could escape both his pursuers and the Mediterranean sun within its expansive canopy. Only the hum and rumble of buses, taxis, and motorbikes on the ridiculously crowded streets nearby would interrupt the solitude he could find there.
“What other languages do you speak?”
“Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Rromanës.”
“Rromanës? So you’re a Gypsy?”
Custos bristled at the term and tried to yank his wrist free from the bigot’s grip. By now, if he’d picked the right mark, he’d be grabbing a coffee in Monastiraki, hiding in plain sight amongst the throngs who rushed between the shops and restaurants lining the narrow alleyways.
“I’m sorry.” The man tightened his grasp and loosened the condescending sarcasm. “Did I offend? Perhaps I should call your people Roma or Romani? Traveler maybe? Regardless, I now know your stock.”
“What do you want?” Custos spat. “If you don’t call police, what are you doing?”
“What do you call yourself?”
Custos hesitated before answering. “Jon.”
“Jon what?”
“Custos.”
“Perfect.” The Englishman laughed. “So perfect.”
“What?” Custos was confused. Nobody had laughed at his name before. “Why you laugh?”
“Your last name is Latin for the word guard.” The Englishman chuckled. “And given the job offer I have for you, it fits.”
“You have a job? Good money?”
“Yes,” the man said. “Can I let go of your wrist without you scurrying off like a gutter rat?”
Custos nodded and the man freed his wrist. He pulled it to his chest and rubbed the bruise.
“Good, then.” The Englishman leaned on his cane. “Let’s walk to somewhere shaded where it’s not so hot. We can talk about my offer. Past the entrance gate there is a nice frozen lemonade stand. I’ll even buy you two. You like?”
Custos was fascinated by the man, by the possibility of a job and its good pay. There was something about the Englishman that gave Custos hope. It was an unfamiliar feeling for a boy who’d lived his life off the achievements of o
thers.
The man walked alongside him and they started their descent down the steps and through the Propyla. He put his free arm around Custos and introduced himself as they passed the Athena Nike Temple to their left.
“I am Sir Spencer Thomas,” he said. “And I have a feeling we’ll become fast friends.”
The man was right.
Now, years later he sat in an airport, enlightened and on the verge of completing the biggest job yet on behalf of his mentor. He closed his eyes and sucked in the airport’s recirculated air, thinking about the work he still had to do. There wasn’t much time and there were so many moving parts. He trusted everything would fall into place as it always had.
“Volo trentatre vincolao per Barcelona,” the gate agent announced into the loudspeaker, “salirà a bordo in cinque minuti.”
Custos stood from his seat, anxious to leave. His flight to Barcelona was boarding in five minutes.
CHAPTER 9
GOODE COMPANY SEAFOOD
HOUSTON, TEXAS
Holt spotted Karen the instant she stepped into the restaurant. She was without a hint of makeup, and Holt wondered why he’d left her without saying goodbye or why he’d not called her sooner.
“Hello, you!” He leaned in to kiss her cheek. She smelled sweet, a hint of something floral at her neck. “You look amazing.”
“Uh-huh.” She turned her cheek to the kiss. “You say that to all of the girls.”
“I mean it this time.” He knew it sounded crass, but he didn’t care. Holt was there for one thing. Maybe two. But that second depended on whether or not she forgave him his trespasses.
“Do we have a table?” Karen asked. “I’m hungry.”
Holt raised a finger to the hostess, telling her his guest was here and they were ready to be seated. He turned back and flashed a smile at Karen. Her arms were folded across her chest, purse draped over one shoulder. Her subtly highlighted hair was pulled back tight into a ponytail.
