by James Phelan
“What do I look like?” asked Walker.
“A big, tired, angry motherfucker who’s trying to get details on the rich guy staying in our penthouse so you can go hassle him. Not on my shift, Jack. Be gone with you, Frankenstein and his monster.”
Silence reigned for a moment as they all realized what had been said. The penthouse.
“That was like some kind of Jedi mind trick,” Hutchinson said to Walker.
“I know,” Walker said to Hutchinson. “You wait here with our new friend. I’ll go and visit the penthouse.”
“Not on your own.”
Walker was already headed for the lifts but turned and said, “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes with an unconscious dirtbag over my shoulder, come looking for me. Besides, we don’t want our little friend here warning our suspect, do we?”
“Listen to you, talking like a cop.” Hutchinson half smiled. “I’ll give you ten minutes. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Ha,” Walker said at the lift lobby and pressed the call button. “We’re the same, me and you.”
Walker got off at the top floor. The corridor was deserted. He looked up the hotel on the CIA-issued iPhone and saw via Google maps that the penthouse had a private rooftop garden, accessible via its own set of stairs. At the end of the hallway he opened a sash window and climbed out, reaching up to the eave and hauling himself up.
The roof terrace was flat and had a glass balustrade fence, which he quietly stepped over before creeping through the garden. The stairs leading down into the penthouse ended in a locked door.
He used Pip Durant’s plastic ID card to jimmy the latch.
CLICK.
The door opened out, and he left it ajar, silently taking in the dark room; all its curtains were drawn. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he was able to make out a large sitting room with chairs and sofas. Walker could see enough to navigate the furniture, and he found the bedroom with its door closed.
Walker opened the door, the latch making a slight clicking sound as he turned the handle. He walked forward, slowly, seeing a sleeping figure in the bed.
Bellamy.
Walker leaned in and clicked on the bedside lamp.
Four hours to deadline.
68
Bellamy woke with a start, his eyes fighting to focus as Walker shone the lamp light into his eyes.
“Game’s up, buddy,” Walker said. He stood over him, lamp in hand, looking for the slightest excuse to brain him.
Bellamy looked from Walker to the door of his room, as if he were struggling to comprehend how his day was starting.
“You got close to your goal,” Walker said. “That’s gotta suck.”
“You really think you can stop me, Walker?” Bellamy said, sitting up and leaning back against the bed head. “You? You’re a dead man.”
“So they keep telling me.”
“Yet here you are.”
“I like to disappoint people.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I’ll figure it out. But first we’re going to chat. I know why you had me killed. Felix Lassiter, too. And Bob Hanley.”
“Oh?”
“To cover your tracks.”
Bellamy raised an eyebrow.
“You had the CIA hit the target and called it as taking out Asad. But it wasn’t him, was it?”
“You tell me, it’s your story.”
“It wasn’t Asad. I know that, because I was there, and I saw him. So, it was a cover. But then, there was a double agent there who’d been working on this from another angle: Louis Assif. He was getting close. If he had really met with the bomb-maker, he’d have been a step closer to making you.”
“So you say.”
“But you’d made the double. You have links with all intel agencies; you called in a favor from DGSE for his ID, and you ordered Heller to kill him. You replaced Asad with a fill-in, obviously not telling the guy that it was a one-way job. You sold that intel—intel that you made up—to the CIA. Then you had the place cooked via Heller to make a whole heap of problems disappear—me included.”
“I can see that you’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Obsessing . . .”
“I haven’t had much else to do, what with having my life taken from me,” Walker said. “And I’ve been wondering: why would you—supposedly an intel expert—have a bomb-maker on your payroll? Why would a guy in your profession be working with a guy like that?”
Bellamy was silent.
“Then I saw the confirmation of the stock options from your money people in Hong Kong—and it made some more sense. You’re buying up stocks before crashing the market at nine-thirty this morning.”
Bellamy watched Walker, still silent.
“But they’re not regular purchases of stocks, are they?” Walker said. “They’re put options. Just like in the days leading up to 9/11. You’re betting against those stocks rising—betting the other way, because you know better. You know that those stocks will crash and you’re going to make a packet out of it.”
“Well,” Bellamy said lazily, “if all this is true, that I do know that something will happen at nine-thirty this morning that will cause the market to crash and those stocks to fall, and if I am linked to those put options, then it would make sense to make a little money along the way, right?” He paused, then said, “But why? Why do this? It all seems a lot of trouble to make a little money.”
“It’s a lot of money. Could be a hundred million, depending how far the prices dive.”
“A hundred million? Please. That might buy a decent jet and the costs to run it for a couple of years. You’re thinking too small, Walker, that’s your trouble. You’re failing to see the bigger picture.”
Walker thought about it. Thought about 9/11. Those in the know made money in put options, but that was just on the side. The real show was the act. Four passenger airliners changed the world and started a war. A war worth trillions of dollars.
What was the show here? A bomb blast? Where . . .
“You know what he said to me?” Walker said. “The guy in Yemen, the words on his lips as he died?”
Bellamy shrugged. “Do I care?”
“He said, ‘Follow the money.’ And that’s when I first saw it. The word on his cell phone: Zodiac. Along with the date and time.”
Bellamy smiled. “You know your biggest mistake?” he said. “Being a loner. Not telling someone else all this. Not letting others in. Not having a team working against me instead of one lonely, bitter, dead man.”
“What makes you think I don’t?” Walker said. “Maybe there’s a whole department at the FBI working around the clock on this. Maybe the Deputy Director in charge of the New York field office is waiting downstairs, right now.”
“That’s bullshit,” Bellamy said.
“Sounds like you’re a betting man.”
“No, not at all. I just deal with differing degrees of certainty. For instance I know that if you had gone bigger with this, then Bill McCorkell’s meeting with Jack Heller would have gone very differently.”
Walker knew then without a doubt that Heller was working with Bellamy. He also knew something else: the tone and content of what Bellamy had just said showed that he was confident. Confident that Walker could do nothing to stop what was coming at 9:30. Confident that Walker hadn’t shared all the relevant information with anyone. Confident that he was safe, alone in this penthouse, with Walker.
Which meant one of two things, and maybe both. Either that whatever was coming at 9:30 would not stop if Walker painted Bellamy’s brains on the wall, or . . . that they were not alone. There’s someone else in the penthouse. Someone capable.
Walker tensed, then started to move. “Heller,” he said. “It’s all down to Heller. He made Felix as a double and knew that when I got to him I’d learn what you guys were up to; he sent the fake Asad to Yemen, set up the meet. Had one of his operators there to make sure I didn’t walk out alive. All of it. He called the
air strike. He ordered my death.”
Bellamy shrugged. “He didn’t order it; I did. He just gave me the facts and lined up our threats. I gave him the order. He relayed it.”
“What’s in it for him?” Walker said, taking a step to the side so that the door to the bedroom was not in his blind spot. “What is it? He’s going to come work for you when he bugs out of government service? There’s gotta be more than that.”
Walker heard movement from the dark living room, like a person struggling with something heavy.
Bellamy looked from the bedroom door to Walker and said, “Why don’t we go and see who that is?”
Walker motioned with the Glock for Bellamy to head out to the living room. He kept a few paces behind. The desk and reading lamps in the room came on.
“Walker, I think you know who this is,” Bellamy said coolly, calmly.
Walker could see why Bellamy acted as he did.
He had a hostage.
69
It didn’t take Hutchinson long to realize that there was no way he could wait ten or fifteen minutes. Walker could get killed up there; Bellamy could get killed; there could be all kinds of innocent, public collateral damage if bullets started to fly through hotel walls.
“I’m going to check on my friend,” Hutchinson said to the night guy at the desk, writing down some numbers for him. “If you want to call the cops, do it. But do me a favor—if I’m not downstairs in five minutes, call the FBI New York field office, give them my ID number, and tell them to send a tactical team.”
•
Walker took in the scene before him. It took just a second for him to see that he had made a mistake.
A big mistake.
A couple of big mistakes.
Clara was there.
That was his first mistake. He had got too close to her in Rome; they had been seen together, and now here she was, a hostage.
Leverage.
Clara was on the floor, seated against a long sofa, her butt on the carpet and her legs out in front of her. Duct tape was wound around her ankles, and probably around her wrists too, which were behind her back. Another couple of lengths of the black, near-on-indestructible tape were wrapped around her head and through her open mouth as a gag.
She was there, in the center of the room, where she hadn’t been just a couple of minutes ago. That meant that someone had just put her there. That meant that there was at least one other person in the room.
His second mistake was walking into a trap.
Fewer than four hours to deadline and everything had unraveled within the passing of a single second: that’s all it took for Walker to know that two mistakes had been made. Had he had longer, he may have thought of others, such as leaving Hutchinson downstairs, and not dragging Bellamy out with a gun to his head, but he didn’t have the luxury of time.
It was in the next second that he heard movement.
Behind him the skilled motions of a professional doing a good job, light on his feet, the carpet absorbing the footfalls.
WHACK.
Walker slumped to the ground. Lights out.
Il Bisturi stood over the unconscious form of Walker. “There’s a guy downstairs too.”
“Go get him,” Bellamy said. “Quietly. Bring him up here and take care of it. No witnesses.”
“What about this one?” Il Bisturi said, his boot on the back of the unconscious Walker. “Shall I finish him first?”
“No,” Bellamy said. “Leave him to me. There’s something I want him to see.”
•
Hutchinson walked to the lobby’s lifts and pressed the call button, then saw that a lift was already on the way down. He knew that he was heading into a bad tactical situation: approaching a potentially hostile environment from the ground up, alone, without back-up. Just him and his cell phone, going into the unknown.
He shuffled from foot to foot, waiting for the lift, weighing his options.
He started to type a text message to Bill McCorkell.
•
Walker came to. He felt heavy, too heavy to get up, like he was in a lucid state of sleep and his body refused to completely wake. Darkness beckoned, but he forced himself to become alert.
A numb, throbbing pain in his right side. The cut, the stitches.
A ringing in his head.
He made a list of what he could feel and see.
He was face down on plush carpet.
It was dark but for the dull light of a lamp in the next room.
His head ached, his ears were ringing . . . He had been struck, from behind.
The hotel. Bellamy . . . New York.
His hands were behind his back and his wrists taped tightly together, one on top of the other, while his legs were straight out and his ankles stuck together.
Clara.
Walker rolled over. He saw that Clara was in the same position as before. Her eyes locked on his. They were desperate. They were the eyes of a professional, not a lover. The look said that this situation was going to hell, fast, and that any and all drastic action had to be taken. It also said that action or not, the odds were against them.
Walker looked up to Bellamy, who stood over him, smiling, now fully dressed in business suit and tie. How long have I been out?
“Let her go,” Walker said.
“That’s not what’s going to happen here,” Bellamy said. “You know that.”
“She’s got nothing to do with this.”
Bellamy was silent.
Walker rolled onto his back and looked up at him. “What do you want?”
“I want things to go to plan,” Bellamy said. “And now that you’re here, like this, I’m sure that they will.”
“What do you want with me?” Walker asked. He could tell that Bellamy understood the unspoken qualification: what do you want with me alive?
“I want you to know what a failure you are,” Bellamy said. “I want you to realize the new world that you’re leaving behind.”
Bellamy crouched next to Walker. He slapped him a couple of times; short, sharp taps to the side of the head. “I want you to go knowing that. And I want you to go knowing that you could do nothing to protect the women you care about.”
Walker wondered about Hutchinson. Bellamy had sent Durant to kill or capture Eve, and Hutchinson had foiled him. Maybe Bellamy didn’t know that yet. No news from Durant did not necessarily signpost that the mission was a failure; it was just no news. Walker wondered how much time had passed while he was out.
As if in answer to his unspoken question, Il Bisturi came into the room, dragging behind him the bound and gagged form of Hutchinson, and then the night clerk. He propped them up next to Clara. The clerk was taking in the scene and starting to hyperventilate. Il Bisturi dropped him to the floor with the butt of the pistol cracking behind his ear.
“Ah, now it’s getting interesting,” Bellamy said. Then to Hutchinson, he ordered, “On the ground.”
Il Bisturi pressed the silenced pistol into Hutchinson’s back. The FBI agent complied.
Bellamy taped Hutchinson’s wrists and ankles as he had done to Walker, and then did the same to the unconscious hotel clerk.
“Why?” Walker said to Bellamy as he watched him wrap the tape.
“Because,” Bellamy said to him, “I want you to witness your failure.”
“Failure?”
“Sometimes in life, we get what we want, and sometimes we get what we need. Il Bisturi here is going to give you what you deserve.”
Bellamy dragged Walker over to the sofa, where he sat him against the furniture, next to Clara, then turned on the television to Fox Business.
Bellamy opened a case. Walker ignored the television and took in the details of the case: black, about the size of a regular briefcase, made of some sort of hard plastic or Kevlar or carbon fiber—something near indestructible, even if dropped from an aircraft. Designed to store sensitive equipment, to protect what was locked soundly inside. The case was lined with pointed foa
m—like the inside of a pistol case—so the contents would be held tightly, immovably in place.
This case did not contain a weapon. At least, not an obvious one.
Bellamy reached into it and carefully removed what looked like an ordinary cell phone. He held it gingerly, as though it were precious.
“Did Asad make that for you?” Walker said, trying to buy conversation. Asad could make a car bomb the size of a cigarette case . . . what’s he going to do with that? He watched as Bellamy carefully placed the phone in the inside breast pocket of his jacket.
“You really don’t remember me, do you?” Bellamy said. He looked at Walker. A blank stare going both ways.
“It’s Zodiac, isn’t it?” Walker said. “It’s the first step in Zodiac—that tiny device will set in motion the first of twelve attacks that will ensure INTFOR becomes the big boy on the block.”
Bellamy smiled. “As much as you think you know, you’re wrong.”
“I know you’re mad,” Walker said. “Delusional.”
“Maybe, but you know what I know?” Bellamy said. “I know it all. I know that you’ll be dead soon. I know what’s coming here, and I know what’s coming there.” Bellamy pointed to the TV screen, which showed the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. “And make no mistake, Walker. This time you’ll be graveyard dead.”
Walker saw the time on the television.
Two hours to deadline.
70
McCorkell and Somerville touched down at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport. Their helicopter lifted off immediately and headed out to the west over the Hudson. Soon another helicopter would touch down: a VH-60N WhiteHawk operated by the HMX-1 Nighthawks squadron. Today that aircraft would be designated Marine Two, the call sign of any US Marine Corps aircraft carrying the Vice President of the United States.
“The place is locked down for the VP’s arrival.” Somerville looked around. “What’s our move?”
There were a dozen uniformed NYPD officers either in or around their squad cars by the road entrance. Four blacked-out Chevy Suburbans were parked, their Secret Service agents milling about. A small gaggle of news crews were kept at bay, bustling around their tech vans.
