“Can I carry those?” Julissa asked.
“I’ve got them. You want to wake up Westfield?”
Westfield woke at the sound of his name. He had no bags except for the first-aid kit he’d taken from the Tantallon’s lifeboat, and he wore old clothes given to him by a Portuguese fisherman. They walked down the plane’s metal stairway. The charter company had arranged for a customs and immigration inspector to meet them in the hangar. To Chris’s intense relief, the inspector simply stamped their passports and welcomed them to the United Kingdom without going through their luggage. On the other side of the hangar bay, a smoke-blue Rolls Royce waited at an idle, its chauffer standing by the passenger door.
Less than two minutes after they stepped from the plane, they were in the car and on their way into the city.
“Nice way to travel,” Westfield said.
He was sitting on the wide leather seat facing Chris and Julissa. To his right was a wet bar with its crystal decanters of whiskey and Calvados brandy. There was a soundproof glass partition between the driver and the passenger compartment.
“Edinburgh’s probably the most dangerous place in the world for the three of us to show our faces,” Chris said. “So I thought the fewer people we run into getting to our hotel, the better.”
“Good idea.”
“Also,” Julissa said, “you saw how we just blew through customs. You only get that if you come in by charter. And we’ve got some stuff in our suitcases.”
“Julissa stayed in L.A. to work out your passport. I rented a car and went across the border to Arizona,” Chris explained. “Went to a gun show in Phoenix. Cash on the table, no ID.”
Westfield nodded. He looked at each of them and then let his eyes rest on the other empty jump seat.
“Mike’s not here,” he said.
“They got him,” Chris said. “And his family.”
“It was bad?”
“Yeah,” Julissa said. She was whispering. “I saw it. I mean, I didn’t see it happen, but I saw it after, and it was bad.”
“Do we know which guys?”
“No,” Chris said. “It could’ve been the guy I shot on my doorstep. Or the guys we killed in Golden Gate Park. Or the man you dumped in the Atlantic.”
“I hope it was one of those,” Westfield said. “He helped us get here, though, didn’t he?”
Julissa put her hand on Westfield’s knee and squeezed gently. Chris put his hand on top of Julissa’s.
“A lot of vengeance coming down,” Aaron said. “A lot of payback.”
Chris nodded.
They came into the soot-stained, stone heart of the old city just as the sun disappeared. They were driving on Princes Street, along the sunken gardens built at the foot of the Edinburgh Castle. The castle dominated the city from its volcanic crag, its crenellated battlements and ramparts now catching the last of the light, the Union Jack rippling in the stiff breeze from its pole atop the highest keep. They passed the gothic spire of the Scott Monument, then turned into the porte cochère of the Balmoral Hotel just as the last of the burgundy glow faded from the bottom of the rain clouds.
This was the city of the monster. Chris felt it in his heart, like a roomful of cold air. They were so close.
Julissa used the key Chris gave her to let herself into his room half an hour after they got to the hotel. As she stepped inside, she used her left hand to pull off the silk scarf she’d had over her hair.
“I went downstairs and bought us a bottle of whiskey. There’s a shop just down the street,” she said. When she saw he was looking at the scarf, she added, “I thought it’d be a good idea to cover my hair. But I don’t know. There are a lot of redheads in Scotland.”
She held up the bottle of eighteen-year-old Laphroaig, which was still inside its protective cardboard cylinder. During their four days in Los Angeles she had found a way to securely move funds from her bank accounts in Texas to an untraceable Swiss account by initiating a transfer through a series of proxy servers. Chris could tell she was relieved to have her own money. She had performed the same service for Westfield and had given him his new bank card when he stepped onto the plane in Flores.
She found two crystal tumblers in the bar by the window and raised her eyebrow at Chris. He held up his hand with the tips of his thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart. Julissa poured the whiskey and handed one glass to Chris. They sat in armchairs by the fireplace and waited for Westfield.
When they were all together, Chris spread a map of Edinburgh on the dining table. He used a red pen to circle the law firm, Stark McCallister Fanning & Stalker. It was a four-man firm near the end of High Street in Old Town, a few blocks from the castle and close to the old courts. High Street followed the spine of an ancient volcanic ridge for a mile, ending at the gates of the castle. Because the sides of the ridge were so steep, instead of cross streets, it was cut by dozens of winds and closes—narrow stone staircases that wound between, and underneath, the eight-hundred-year-old buildings that crowded up either side of the ridge. There was a close on each side of the building that held the law offices, and the map showed one of the closes led to a hidden courtyard behind the building.
“Looks like we could get in from all four sides,” Westfield said.
“Maybe five.”
Julissa rotated her laptop so they could see the screen. She had zoomed in on the building using satellite photos from Google. “The closes are so narrow I think we could jump from roof to roof and get in through the skylight windows on the top floor.”
“That would keep us out of view of the street,” Chris said.
“But first we need to figure out if he even uses the office. He might work from home,” Julissa said.
“You got a picture of him?” Westfield asked.
“Yeah.” Julissa took a manila folder and passed out the pictures she’d printed in the business center of their hotel in Los Angeles. The first photograph was at least twenty years old. Chris came across it in the online directory of the Scottish Bar Association, and it showed Howard Stark, III on the day he became a member of the bar. It was a grainy black-and-white photograph, enlarged too much for its size, and showed a young man in a pinstripe suit with a mane of blond hair combed straight back from his forehead. He had a square chin and wore heavy black glasses.
Westfield looked at the first photograph in the folder and then turned back to Chris and Julissa.
“I was kind of hoping it’d be Stark. The thing I saw on the ship. But this is just a man.”
“Who ages like a man, if you look at the next picture,” Julissa said.
The other photograph was only two years old. Julissa found it by searching Google, which had turned up a page from a magazine published by the University of Edinburgh. It showed Stark, his faced lined and sagging beneath his eyes, his blond mane retreated and grayer. The nose that supported his gold-rimmed bifocals had blossomed from an additional twenty years of whiskey. The caption under the photograph stated Howard Stark, III, Esq., (Law ’75), delivering the Annual Tetlow Lecture on Admiralty Law.
“The important thing is to get the syringe into him without him noticing,” Westfield said. “I wouldn’t know they interrogated me if the guy hadn’t told me what was up before he did it. The only thing I remember is him telling me, and then the needle. Then nothing.”
“How long were you out?”
“I don’t know. By the time I finally got to shave at Father Silva’s house, I had maybe seven days of beard growth. That’s starting from Galveston, the last time I shaved. Then I drove across West Texas and the thing got me early in the morning on the second night, in Carlsbad. I spent a little over twenty-four hours in the lifeboat. So that leaves up to five days I absolutely can’t account for, other than snatches in the body bag.”
“Jesus, Aaron.”
“But I think if one of us just comes up behind him and gives it to him in the neck, he won’t remember a thing. And then we can ask him anything we want and dump him in hi
s own bed, and he’ll never be able to raise an alarm that we’re here and asking questions.”
“So at the very least we’ll need to know his routine and know where he lives. If he’s got a wife or a girlfriend or a maid, we’ll need to get her out of the way,” Chris said.
“It sounds like a couple days’ preparation, at least,” Julissa said.
“It’ll take a lot of ground work. We can use Google maps and satellite pictures all we want, but we’ll have to get out there and go into buildings and figure out the space. So we gotta make sure we don’t get caught while we’re trying to lay a trap,” Westfield said.
“We thought of that too,” Chris said.
Julissa brought a suitcase to the table. She pulled out the shopping bags from Los Angeles, then opened the concealed compartment at the base of the suitcase, where Chris had put the disassembled guns. Chris handed Westfield a shopping bag and a plastic bag full of gun parts.
“Can you put that together?”
“What’s it supposed to look like when it’s done?” Westfield asked.
“A Micro-Uzi.”
“Jesus Christ, where’d you buy that?”
“We got it off the guys Chris shot,” Julissa said. “The other two are just regular Glocks. They all load nine millimeter and we have four hundred rounds in the other bags.”
“What about the rest of this stuff?”
Westfield reached into the bag and pulled out a man’s wig and a pair of sunglasses. There was also a prepaid cell phone with a wireless earpiece, a pair of compact binoculars, and a Timex watch.
“Don’t tell me we’re going to synchronize watches,” Westfield said.
Before the end of the night, they did.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Julissa stood on the parade ground in front of the castle gates. Behind and above her, the cannons of the Half Moon Battery kept watch over Old Town. She used the high-powered lens of her camera to look down the Royal Mile as she walked, stopping now and then to actually take a picture. Summer crowds of tourists strolled Lawnmarket Street with their shopping bags, or stood in groups around kilted bagpipers. Men were assembling a bandstand just below the castle walls; banners fluttered on every lamppost from the castle to Hollyrood Palace, a mile down the ridge. Behind that, the extinct volcano Arthur’s Seat echoed the castle in ridges of exposed rock and green grass and brambles of heather.
Julissa wore a blonde wig, black jeans, a tight-fitting sweater and leather boots with good soles. Other than the camera, she carried a small black backpack. She expected she might be running today. She looked at the hands of her watch. It was ten seconds to one o’clock.
She counted down the last five seconds. When she reached zero, an artillery piece mounted high in the castle fired with a sharp crack. This was the One O’clock Gun, fired daily through the decades so ships at anchor in the Firth of Forth could set their clocks.
It wasn’t just the ships that set their clocks according to the gun.
She was on the south side of Lawnmarket, at the traffic circle in front of a coal-blackened Scottish kirk. She picked up her camera and looked across the traffic circle and down the High Street, focusing on the door to Ensign Ewart pub. Three and a half minutes later, which was about average, Howard Stark, III came out the door, stepped around a crowd of tourists, and walked down the High Street towards his offices.
Julissa cupped her hand over her mouth and spoke into her wireless mike.
“He’s on his way.”
“Got it,” Chris said. “Will you have time?”
“Just.”
She shoved the camera into her backpack, and ran.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Four minutes after one o’clock, Westfield walked out of the darkness of James Court, a narrow alleyway running between the old buildings pressed nearly wall to wall along this part of the Royal Mile. Chris was at his side. Ten steps from the end of the alley, they saw Stark pass on the sidewalk. They came out of the close and fell in behind him, walking fifty feet away. A couple pushing a child in a stroller was between them for half a block, then stopped at the window of a pub. Chris and Westfield stepped around them and closed the gap just as Stark reached a red-painted door and raised a ring of keys. The glass transom over the door was painted in gold script: Stark McCallister Fanning & Stalker, Counselors at Law.
Westfield was wearing a light summer jacket and reached into his pocket to feel the syringe. He held it in his fingers and used his thumbnail to pop the plastic cap off the tip of the needle. He looked at Chris and nodded.
Stark found the key—a piece of wrought iron that may have been hammered on a blacksmith’s anvil in the eighteenth century—and slid it into the keyhole. As he turned it in the lock, Chris stepped around to Stark’s right shoulder and Westfield came to his left. Pressing up to Stark, Westfield used his left hand to jab the needle into Stark’s neck, pushing the plunger with his thumb. Just as quickly, he pocketed the syringe, took the key from the unlocked door and pocketed that. Then he and Chris had their hands under Stark’s armpits and they moved him through the open door. The building had a whiskey shop at the street level and the door through which they’d stepped opened on to a stair landing that would lead up to the law firm’s offices. Past the offices, on the sixth floor, was a vacant space under construction. Stark jerked twice in a weak attempt to get away, then went limp. They had to hold him up to keep him on his feet. The stairs were narrow and barely wide enough to fit the three of them abreast.
Westfield looked at Chris, who put his hand to his ear and spoke to Julissa.
“We’re in the stairs and on our way up.”
Over his own earpiece, Westfield heard Julissa’s response. He could hear the wind blowing across her microphone and her voice was nearly breathless.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
Chapter Fifty
Julissa jogged across Lawnmarket at a crosswalk, then wove through the crowd until she got to the Ensign Ewart. She walked down the steps into the sunken pub, nodded at the bartender, passed the row of men on stools sipping their pints, and headed for the ladies’ room. She stepped inside, closed the door behind her and turned on the light. There was a door to a janitor’s closet crammed between the tilted toilet bowl and the wall. She opened this door, stepped over a mop bucket and into the dank, chemical-smelling space, closed the closet door, and in the darkness fumbled until she found the handle for the sliding door at the back. This opened onto a dimly lit stair landing. She slid the door shut, then bounded up the stairs, using the hand rail as a pivot point at each landing so she could swing around and start up the next flight of steps without losing any forward momentum. She hurtled up the stairs to the fifth floor without meeting anyone.
At the top, she stood on the banister, leaned over the empty space above the descending stairs, and unlatched the dormer window that looked north, towards the Scott Monument and the Firth of Forth. The weighted window slid two feet and jammed, but it was enough. She jumped and got her head and arms through, then found finger holds on the underside of the sill. She pulled herself out and stood on the angled slate roof. She ran east, parallel to the Royal Mile but five floors up, running just past the roof’s ridgeline. She vaulted over a cluster of Tudor-style clay pot chimneys, ran down the mossy slate slope and leapt over the five foot gap where Milnes Court cut between the old buildings. She landed a foot away from the edge of the moss-slick edge, but her boots had good traction and she never even paused. She ran up the steep incline of the new roof, over the crest and down towards the dark crevasse where James’ Court close made its passage between this building and the next. This was an easier jump; the next roof was newer and had a rougher texture to its slate so she could run without fear of sliding over the edge and off a hundred foot drop to paving stones.
She stopped at the skylight she had marked with a blue chalk X two nights before and knelt down, breathing hard. No more than a minute had passed from the time she last spoke to Chris and Aaron. Now
she keyed her mike and spoke to them again, her voice breathless as she gasped for air.
“I’m at the skylight.”
“We’re almost to the landing,” Chris said.
“I’ll be there.”
Julissa took off her backpack, reached inside it, and took out a diamond-bitted glass cutter and a plastic suction grip bar. She spat on the suction cups, stuck them to the middle of the skylight, then used the wheel of the diamond cutter to etch along the lead soldered edge of one of the skylight panes. When she had gone all the way around, she braced her knees on the roof and pulled hard on the suction handle. The sound of the pane breaking loose reminded her of stepping on a frozen puddle. She lifted the pane free and set it gently on the uphill side of the skylight so it would not slide away. Then she pulled the release trigger on her suction grip, put it back into the backpack, and pulled on a pair of heavy-duty leather gloves. She looked at her watch. It was 1:06 p.m. Exactly two minutes had passed from the time Chris and Aaron had stepped out of James Court in pursuit of Stark.
She shouldered her pack, grabbed on to the frame of the skylight, and lowered herself until she was dangling by her arms. She could feel the sharp remnants of the glass against the leather palms of her gloves. The floor was six feet beneath her. She let go and dropped, landing on her feet and falling to a crouch so she hit the wooden floor with almost no sound at all.
They’d discovered the top floor of this building was being remodeled. Stacks of clean sheetrock took up one corner. The walls were bare studs with exposed electrical conduits. There was a table saw and a water-cooled tile saw. Julissa stood, turned around quickly to be sure the work crew was truly gone, then walked to the door. There were three sets of deadbolt locks, all of which could be opened from the inside without a key. She flicked them back one by one, then pulled the door open.
Westfield and Chris were coming up the last flight of stairs, supporting Stark in between them.
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