"Hey," Tony breathed, freezing them. Laika looked at him, and he gestured to the door, then doused his light. Laika and Joseph did the same. The lights coming in the window gave just enough illumination for them to see each other as shadowy forms. She heard the footsteps coming down the corridor and hoped that whoever was approaching had not seen their lights or heard them.
Taking out their weapons, the three moved next to the door, Laika and Joseph on the right, Tony on the left, the side on which the door would open. A light went on in the waiting room, shining through the frosted glass pane of the inner office door. On the floor, the shadow of a man grew larger as he approached their hiding place. Then the door opened and someone stepped inside.
"Don't move," Tony breathed, as he thrust the butt of his pistol against the back of the man's head and placed his free hand firmly on his shoulder. Laika and Joseph came around the door, pointing their pistols at the man.
The man obeyed, holding perfectly still.
"Turn on the light," Tony said to the others, as he patted the man down, but they could find no switch inside the room.
Finally the man spoke. "I use the light from the waiting room. Anything brighter might be seen from the street." His voice had the flat vowels and the slightly trilled Rs of a Scot.
"He's clean," Tony said, stepping back, but keeping his gun trained on the man's chest. Laika opened the office door all the way, and the secondary light was enough for her to get a good look at the man. He was tall and seemed to be in his mid-thirties. The face was angular and not unhandsome. He was dressed in dark slacks, a collarless dark blue shirt, and a plain dark green baseball cap with no logo.
"You tried to kill us," said Laika. "Poison us."
"Aye, I did. The fact you're here shows there's no use in denying that."
"Why?"
"Why? You know all too well. I only tried to do to you what was done to my brothers. Or do you kill so many that you've forgotten already?"
"Your brothers?" Then Laika realized. "You're Kyle McAndrews."
The man almost smiled. "So that's how you know me, is it?"
"Up in Plattsburgh," Laika said. "You were with them."
"I should have been with them. I was late. I think God made me late on purpose, so that there would be someone left to avenge us on you."
"We didn't kill your friends."
"My brothers," he said. "You, your organization, what difference does it make? You work for him, there's blood on your hands." He nodded toward the thin mattress on the floor. "May I sit down? I had a long walk up here from your warehouse." Laika nodded, and he sat carefully, his long legs bent in front of him so that his chin nearly touched his knees.
He took off his baseball cap and set it on the edge of the mattress, then ran a hand through his dark hair. "Went all the way down there to make sure you were dead, but then your car was gone. I don't mind telling you I was very disappointed. So I came back here to try and decide what to do next."
"Do you mean how to kill us again?" she said.
"Yes. Really, you'd be better off dead. You have no idea who it is you're looking for, no idea at all."
"Who?" said Laika. "Then it is a person we'll eventually find?"
Now the man did smile, a thin smile that somehow showed both anger and pity. "Who," he repeated, "or what." He shifted his weight until he was crouching and picked up his cap, turned it in his hands, and set it back down so that it was resting on top of his hand. "If you had any sense at all, you'd forget all about this—"
And then he moved. He leapt out of the crouch, directly at Tony, flinging his cap into Joseph's face and bringing up the long knife he had hidden under the mattress, and then under his cap. Tony fired, the silenced pistol coughing once. Laika saw the man stagger, but the initial force of his charge kept him moving. Then Laika fired and simultaneously heard three quick bursts from Joseph's pistol.
The Scotsman flew to the side as Tony fired again, but Joseph's bullets made the second shot unnecessary. The man they knew as Kyle McAndrews crashed into the far wall with five bullets in his chest and side. Three were Joseph's, one was Laika's, and one Tony's. The tip of the long knife had missed Tony's face by inches, and that knife remained clutched in McAndrews's dying hand as he slid down the wall, leaving a smear of red behind.
Laika was the first at his side and took the knife from his hand. His eyes were looking into the middle distance, where he must have seen death coming. His mouth was panting as he tried to draw air into bullet-riddled lungs, but he seemed to be trying to say something.
"An . . . andra . . . andra . . ." The syllables rode up from his throat on bubbles of blood.
Laika ripped open his shirt to try and give him CPR and keep him alive long enough for him to say what he had to say. But when she saw Tony's bullet hole directly over his heart, she knew death was only seconds away.
There was something else on his chest, and she examined it as his speech faded, and the rise and fall of his chest ceased. It seemed to be a tattoo, but done with red ink, and it was not until she wiped some of the blood away that Laika realized it might have been branded on rather than tattooed.
The image, though worn, was identifiable as two people riding on the back of an animal, probably a horse, although the beast's head was directly where the bullet had pierced the flesh. Laika's attention was drawn from it momentarily as McAndrews's last breath hissed away through his teeth. Then she looked at the others.
"It's a symbol of the Knights Templar," said Tony. "I've read about them. They boasted about the poverty of their order by making their seal two knights riding the same horse."
Laika picked up the knife and looked at it. On the hilt was the same symbol, much clearer than the brand on McAndrews's chest. "That's an old knife," said Joseph, looking over her shoulder. "See the way it's joined together?" He ran a finger delicately along the blade. "Probably Toledo steel."
Joseph's voice shook, and Laika looked up at him. "Are you all right?" He nodded. "That was fast shooting," she said. "You probably saved Tony's life."
"Yeah," Tony said quietly. "I hit him, but he kept coming. Thanks, Joseph."
Joseph pressed his lips together and nodded.
"Tony," said Laika, "go through his pockets, lining of his coat, anyplace anything might be hidden. Joseph, you lift his prints. I'll check the suitcase."
When she opened it, she found underwear, socks, a zippered bag with some toilet articles, three large rolls of fifty-and twenty-dollar bills, and something bulky rolled up in a sweater. She folded back the layers of wool and found a carved wooden box nine inches square.
The surface of the box was covered with intricate designs of swords, knights, garlands, and crosses. A small metal clasp kept it closed. Laika opened the clasp and slowly lifted the lid of the box. Inside, lying in a bed of velvet, was a wooden cup.
Laika lifted it out and knelt there, holding it. Its dark wood gleamed, and she thought she could see not only her reflection and that of the room around her, but something else moving in that almost fluid blackness, faces and forms drifting nearly into focus, but passing away before she could be confident of their reality.
After an indeterminate time, she became aware that Joseph and Tony were near her, looking into the dark, shining depths of the cup with the same intensity she had brought to bear on it. "What is it?" Tony said in a whisper.
"A cup of some sort," Laika said. The shape was simple, almost homely. There was no base, no fluted stem. It was a wooden cup, shaped like the kind of plain jelly jars that her mother would wash for the family to use as drinking glasses. It was about eight inches high, and slightly wider at the top than at the bottom. The wood of which it was made was a half inch thick, and it seemed thicker at the bottom so that the extra weight would help prevent it from tipping. It was solid and practical and sturdy.
"The Knights Templar," Laika said, trying to remember things of which she had read, and with little interest, a long time before. "Weren't they the guardians of
. . . ."
"Of the Holy Grail," Tony said. "Yeah. They were."
"Okay," said Joseph, and she could hear his voice trying to break the spell that the wooden cup seemed to hold over all of them. "Okay, let's not get carried away here. We've got a guy with a Knights Templar brand on his chest, and we've got an old cup, and that's all we've got for now."
For some reason, Joseph didn't sound as dubious as Laika had supposed he would. Though the words were those of a skeptic, she had the feeling that he was saying them because that's what they would expect him to do. And even though he seemed insincere, she realized that the words, at least, were correct: they would run the risk of making an absurd mistake if they jumped to conclusions at this point.
"You're right," she said. "But I think we should have this cup and the box examined and dated, if that's possible." Then she thought about what the man called Kyle McAndrews had said: "Your organization . . . you work for him, there's blood on your hands."
"And I think," she went on, "that we should have it done by someone not directly connected to the Company."
Chapter 43
There was a sudden hush in the room, as though, like Kyle McAndrews, they all had stopped breathing. "Are you taking what he said seriously?" Tony said. "About . . . the Company being behind the assassinations?"
"I don't know," Laika said. "I don't know why he'd have said that if he hadn't believed it. Why would he have tried to kill us otherwise?"
"Maybe," said Tony, "because we were on the trail of something he didn't want us to find. Something the Templars didn't want revealed."
"I feel a conspiracy theory coming on," Joseph said, but Laika still didn't feel his heart was in it. "Tell you what," he went on, "I've got a friend at the Metropolitan Museum of Art I met some years back, doesn't have a thing to do with the Company. I'll take him the cup and the box—the knife, too, for that matter, see what he makes of it. In the meantime. . . ." He looked at the body on the floor. "What do we do with Mr. McAndrews?"
Laika nodded. "We do need to get rid of the body. No one should know what happened here, and no one should know about that brand. The twelfth man of that group should vanish completely."
Tony sighed. "Leave it to me. Let's get his clothes off, and everything here packed into that suitcase."
They did what Tony had suggested, and Laika examined the Bible on the floor. It was a King James version that had been printed in the 1980s, and there was nothing at all distinctive about it, but she put it into the wooden box, along with the knife and the cup, and placed it back in the suitcase.
"He's got no ID at all," Tony said. "Just the single key to the building, and a lot of cash sewn into his clothing. Traveled very light."
When everything was in the suitcase, Joseph carried it out of the room and down the stairs, while the others followed. As far as they could determine, no one saw them step out into the street.
"Go to the car and go back to the warehouse," Tony said. "I'll meet you there when I'm finished." Then he turned and headed toward an all-night drugstore whose lights were shining feebly a block away.
"What's he going to do?" Joseph asked, as they watched him go.
"He'll buy plastic garbage bags, a meat saw, and maybe some acid. There were sinks in the building, maybe even showers or tubs. The water might still be turned on, if he's lucky. Even if he's not, all that's left will be blood." She looked up at the building. "We need to find out who the owner of this building is. It might help us learn more about McAndrews, if that's really his name."
"You don't think it is?" Joseph said as they headed for the car.
"Apparently he's used a series of aliases. There's no reason why Kyle McAndrews wouldn't be just another one."
At the warehouse, they continued working on reassembling the sculpture in its proper configuration. As she worked, Laika was unable to stop thinking about Mc-Andrews's accusation, and about Richard Skye.
It would not be unlike Skye to order an assassination, but was he capable of the slaughter of eleven men? She was afraid he was. And if he'd been responsible, that meant there was much about the Plattsburgh case he was not telling his operatives.
It logically followed, then, that he didn't trust the three of them. And if that were the case . . .
Laika looked around the warehouse, at the high ceiling, the concrete block walls that rose everywhere except for the wooden paneling that separated the warehouse from the anteroom. She looked at the smooth surface of the wood intently. Then she dropped the iron bar she was holding and walked away from the sculpture, toward the wooden wall.
"Christ, Laika," said Joseph, turning off his torch and raising his goggles.
She tossed her goggles aside and stopped a foot away from the wall. She scanned its surface like a laser, leaving nothing unseen. Then she noticed it and felt furious that she had not seen it before.
Eight feet up there was a small hole that had been drilled in the unfinished paneling, no bigger than a quarter inch across. She also saw the ghosts of lines where the piece of paneling had been removed with a keyhole saw, then replaced and smoothed over with a combination of sawdust and putty. It was crude work, but good enough that none of them had noticed.
"There's a bug behind the paneling," she said to Joseph. "Sonofabitch."
"Christ, who?"
"Let's dig it out and see."
They wheeled one of the metal stairways over. Laika climbed it, loosened the sawed-out piece easily with a few raps of a hammer, and pulled it out with the claw. She reached inside, wiggled the mechanism back and forth, and freed it. Then she took a long look at the tiny microphone. "This is not pretty," she said, disabling it and handing it to Joseph.
"What do you mean?" he said, examining it carefully. "This looks like standard Company issue."
"That," said Laika, "is what's not pretty about it. Somebody's keeping tabs on us, and either they stole that bug from the Company, some rogue supply person sold it to them, or—it's the Company itself."
"Skye?"
"Mr. Control Freak himself. I suggest we search the rest of this place, then the car, and finally the apartment. If it's Skye, he could have bugs everywhere."
But though they looked, they could find nothing else in the warehouse—no cameras, and no other mikes.
Tony walked in two and a half hours after they had separated. He looked exhausted, and Laika noticed some dried blood around his fingernails.
"Nobody will ever find Kyle McAndrews," Tony said. "And if they do, no one will ever know who he was. Now, if you two wouldn't mind, I'm really tired. I could use a night of flat-out sleep." Then he seemed to notice that they were on the ladders, but nowhere near the sculpture. "So what are you two doing, shall I say, climbing the walls, for lack of a better term?"
Laika climbed down and told Tony what she had found and what she expected. "I think that's all too possible," Tony said. "Skye's a user. I never mentioned this, because I couldn't confirm it, but a field agent told me once that a friend of his had been on a mission that Skye had backed, and then backed out of. He scrubbed it because of political pressure, and left this guy and another agent in a damn war zone, when he could've gotten them both out safely. But if he had, he'd have lost face in the Company. So he wrote them off. They were expendable, not just to the mission, because we always know we're that, but to his career. Like I say, I never got it confirmed, but that's what I heard."
"Skye's a weasel," said Joseph. "He'd sell out his own mother if it meant even a slightly vertical move."
"All right," Laika said. "I tend to agree with you. But we don't know for sure it was him—"
Tony pointed at the bug in Laika's hand. "I know that bug well enough."
"Materiel has gotten outside the Company before," she said. "But just in case, I think, even more than before, that we ought to ... be discreet in what we report to Mr. Skye. Now, let's get some rest. But we won't say a thing about any of this on the way home, and not at the apartment, either, until we give it a clean swe
ep—agreed?"
They were all too tired to talk anyway. Tony played the radio on the way back to Manhattan, an oldies station that was playing all-night doo-wop. By the time they got to 72nd Street, Laika was singing along softly.
"I thought you were an opera gal," Tony said, as he pulled the car into the garage under the building.
"There's more to black culture than Leontyne Price and Kathleen Battle," she said.
Even so, she put on her headset and listened to Price's Tosca as she drifted off to sleep.
When she awoke, it was ten o'clock in the morning. Tony was sitting by the brightest window with a cup of coffee and a book. He had already swept the apartment, except for Laika's room, and had found nothing, so Laika felt she could talk freely. "Where's Joseph?" she asked.
"He took the cup and the knife up to the museum to see that friend of his. He was up pretty early—I don't think he slept too well last night. Kept tossing and turning." Tony shook his head. "I'm starting to think he has something against putting bullets into people."
"I'll try and pretend you're joking. He probably did save your life last night."
"I could've evaded that knife. Still, it helped. He proved himself. I don't feel as much at risk with him anymore."
"That's big of you. I don't think he's any more afraid than we are. He just doesn't like killing, that's all."
"When you're in the field, you don't have much choice in the matter."
"Not in the doing," said Laika, "but you have a choice in the liking. Do you like it, Tony?"
He met her gaze evenly. "No. I don't like it, Laika. But when I have to do it, I do it, and I don't even think about it. You don't like or dislike what you don't think about."
She nodded. "Joseph will be all right."
"I guess so," Tony said, standing up to get more coffee. "But he thinks too much."
Joseph came back at noon. He looked more pale than usual, and didn't smile as Laika greeted him with, "So what's the news from the museum?"
"Umm. . . . strange. The news is rather strange. David—this friend of mine?—is in antiquities, and when I showed him the cup, he hemmed and hawed, but came to the conclusion that it definitely could be first century A.D. If it's not, he said, then it's an extremely clever forgery. But he couldn't explain why anyone would make a forgery of such a . . . nondescript and plain cup.
City of Iron Page 26
