Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  The plane landed, drove to a smooth stop. I saw Belias get out, speak to the pilot, then walk toward the house. I snuck up carefully on the pilot. Maybe he was just a paid flight jockey, maybe he was a network member. He was inspecting the engine of the plane, going through a postflight checklist to kill time, and he didn’t hear me until I was ten feet behind him. He startled, surprised, but I hit him hard in the throat and slammed his head against the fuselage. Three times. In the movies they make it look easy. It is not that easy or that quiet to render someone unconscious. I eased him down to the cold ground. He was armed, a gun under his coat. So not a flight jockey, probably a network member who had a pilot’s license, doing his master a favor. It would be hard for him to fly with a concussion.

  I moved toward the house.

  And then I heard a gunshot and a scream.

  I ran up to the house. Curtains and screens insulated the interior from view but I could hear the roaring coming through the other side. They were killing each other, I guessed, but right now I needed them both alive.

  I threw a porch chair through the window. The curtains fell back enough for me to see Belias on the floor, a bloodied shoulder wound, and Felix standing above him, the gun pointed at Belias, starting to turn toward me.

  I jumped through the window and fired. The bullet caught Felix in his gun hand, a bright red awful blossom between two fingers. He screamed. Belias scrambled across the floor. He must have weapons he had stashed here. But Felix was the greater danger. I was blind with hatred and rage. I lost my cool. If this had been a CIA operation, I would not have allowed myself. But this was me, who’d only tried to help a poor young woman who begged, Help me, in the dark of my bar, scared out of her wits, and tried to make my world safe for my son, and now it was a whole chain of deaths and maybe Mila dead and my so-called friend Felix had shot her and betrayed me.

  Felix could see it in my eyes. I would kill him with my bare hands.

  He knew it was life or death. He’d swallowed the agony with adrenaline and switched the gun to his nonfiring hand, and if you’re not used to it, the gun is practically useless. He tried to fire at me again and I kicked the gun. The weapon went flying across the kitchen and he tackled me. We staggered through the shattered window, separating as we hit the ground.

  I levered the gun up to shoot, fired twice, but Felix yanked my aim away from him. He screamed like a kid who’d been cheated on the playground, hammered blows to my groin, my throat. He knew what he was doing. Mila and Jimmy had trained him. If I underestimated him, I was dead.

  He tried to pin my arm and so I did a flip jump to untwist his grip. I got free but I landed on my back and he kicked me savagely in the ribs. Something broke and pain bolted up my body. He did it again and I tried to writhe away. The patio had ornamental bricks in the bare, snow-lapped flower beds.

  Felix grabbed a brick and lifted it up high, his bloodied hand seizing my throat. He was ignoring the agony. He was going to bash my head into a jelly.

  Belias shot him in the other hand. He keeled over, howling, both hands punctured, the hot fresh agony countering the rush from the first shot and his need, apparently, to kill me and Belias both.

  “No, no,” Felix bleated. “Sam, help me.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I hate a betrayal,” Belias said, leveling his gun at both of us with his good arm. Blood puckered his shoulder, dotted his blanched-looking fingers. “Felix. Where is Diana’s video?”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “We never found it. And she’s dead, so she can’t tell you.” His words were a broken bray in his pain, but he spit them with defiance.

  “She’s what?”

  “Dead. Holly killed her in the bar. When you were recruiting Sam to switch sides.” Spittle flew from his lips.

  Belias kept the gun on me; there was really no need to keep it on Felix, with his ruined hands.

  “Sam? True?”

  “I didn’t know Diana was dead. I didn’t have contact with him after…Vegas.” I stared at Felix. “You shot Mila.”

  “I didn’t shoot her…I wouldn’t…No.”

  “You shot her and you left me to die,” I said.

  Felix shook his head. “I let you live. I was supposed…”

  “Supposed to what?” I asked; then I thought I knew.

  Belias stared down at him. “Who are you?”

  “The nobody who’s bringing you down,” Felix said, courage in his voice. “Truly and finally down.”

  “Truly and finally?” Belias shot him. The shot was loud and clear in the quiet. It caught Felix between the eyes and he snapped back to the ground.

  I looked up at Belias. His shoulder was bloodied but he seemed in control of himself. I had busted ribs and so we might still be evenly matched.

  But he had a gun and mine was on the ground, a few feet distant. About the depth of a grave.

  “Kevin,” I said.

  “Only you get to call me that now,” he said. “Sam, what a shame this is. I told you I wanted a partner. I wanted you, Sam. We could have been brilliant together.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked,” I said.

  “Did you see that he set up video equipment in there? I guess Janice’s digital confession gave him the idea. He told me I was going to name all my network on tape. What an odd revenge. You’d think he’d just kill me.”

  “I have Diana’s video. The one Janice made for her. Holly told me where it is.”

  “Holly?” I could hear a shift in his voice toward panic. “Where is she? Did you hurt her?”

  “She’s alive. Stashed away. You want her back?”

  His tongue worked inside his cheek. “Maybe you and I can work out another deal.”

  Like we could trust each other. “Doubtful. I have two things you want, and you have nothing I want.”

  “Wrong. Remember, it wasn’t the CIA who got me your file. It was someone who wanted me to recruit you and then hand you over to them.” He raised a palm toward me in surrender. “You have a very dangerous enemy. Wouldn’t you like to know who it is? We could draw them out together.”

  The story took shape in my brain. Small bits that had made no sense before. But instead I said, “I have no reason to trust or believe you.”

  “But I just saved your brains from being gushed all over my patio.” He smiled at me. “I mean, that counts for something. Why would you want to bring me down? My people and I, we didn’t hurt your friend Mila. Felix did. You know I can give you what you want, Sam. You want power, you want money, you want to make everyone who ever hurt you pay? You know I can do it. Knowing that—it has to count for something.”

  “Yes, I know you can.” I made my voice reassuring. Like it was a vote of confidence. Because he had. He had made his scheme work. He could do the same for me.

  “Well?”

  I threw the dirt from the flower bed in his face. Simplest trick in the book. He was leaning toward me and the dirt impacted his eyeball. He gasped and I scrambled to my feet, pain stitching my side, grabbed at him, catching the I Ching ring he wore, and yanked him off-balance as he fired the bullet between my feet. I grabbed and slammed the brick Felix was going to brain me with into his knees as he staggered back.

  “I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with you.” I yanked the gun.

  He jumped back through the shattered window, stumbling into the kitchen proper, and I saw him grab a knife from the rack.

  But I had the gun now and I steadied my aim.

  He opened a door, it blocked my view. I thought, He can’t hide in a pantry. But I heard a ripping noise and then he ducked out, holding a length of cable.

  I could smell the sudden, rich odor of natural gas, the deadly hiss of a heater emptying into the air.

  I hate smart people.

  He turned and he ran.

  I cut through the house, knocking over the sad little camera and tripod.

  I could smell the gas flooding into the house.

  I charged a
round the corner and Belias slashed at me. My forearm opened through the jacket and the shirt.

  I couldn’t risk the shot.

  But Belias was used to people who gave up. He was used to those who wanted life easy.

  He was not used to me.

  Belias swung the knife back at me as the blood spurted from my arm, and I blocked it and powered his arm against the wall. He didn’t drop the knife. The smell of gas was growing, fast, and panic flashed in his eyes. He hadn’t thought about the broken window near the leak, that would buy us a bit more time, but he wanted out. He was still stuck in his trap for me.

  But then he got lucky. The devil is always lucky.

  Or I got bad. He slashed the knife across where Felix had hurt my ribs and the pain was blinding. I felt fresh blood spurt along my side.

  “Where’s the video?” he yelled.

  “Where you will never get it. You kill me, I don’t check in, it’ll be on YouTube in a matter of hours.”

  How do you scare the devil? You drag his evil into sunlight. I didn’t even know what was on the video but the thought of it was enough to scare him. “Sam, call your people, tell them I trade you for the video.”

  “They won’t.” I was bleeding. Badly. I fell to one knee.

  He kicked me in the shoulder, and I sprawled on the floor, clutching the gun, scared to fire as the gas filled the house.

  Even with me hurt he was done with risk, it was time to run. He hurried out the front door.

  I thought he must be searching for my car. But no. Through the window I could see him running toward the plane.

  He knelt by the unconscious pilot, kicked him out of the way.

  Mila. I thought of Mila.

  I managed to get to my feet, every breath an agony, bleeding badly. I stumbled out of the house, the gas smell rich as awful and unwelcome perfume, running toward the runway. Then onto the runway.

  Belias started the plane, began to taxi down the little strip. Toward me, the only way to go.

  I stopped, steadied, and fired. You have to play hurt. You have to take the obstacles as they come. Belias and his people never got that.

  I emptied the gun into the plane and the range was barely there and I’d missed.

  It was a small plane. A small target. He rose into the ashen sky and then circled back toward me and I thought, Get to your truck, and I tried to run but I staggered and I fell, looking toward the clear slate-gray sky.

  Smoke.

  The first little black finger of it curled out from the plane, and I heard a noise that didn’t sound right and he was swinging back, trying to bring the plane back and land and probably run right over me as I bled out on the ground. But then it dipped and rolled, and I thought, through the clear air and the broken window of the plane, I heard him scream.

  I didn’t see it but he must have smashed into the gas-filled house because then the world exploded, hot and bright even behind my shut eyes, and I crawled toward the woods as the dry winter grass began to burn, began to burn faster than I could crawl and I heard Mila saying, Samuil, you stupid, get up, get up for me and Daniel, and I staggered across the ice-cold creek and fell down by my car, trying to remember Benny’s phone number.

  I think I called Mila’s number instead because the last thing I heard other than the rising hiss of the fire on the other side of the creek was Jimmy’s perfect voice, demanding to know what I wanted.

  Part Seven

  Last Days

  78

  Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, Taos

  BENNY, AFTER GETTING ME TO A DOCTOR who worked for the Round Table and could keep his mouth shut, went to go release Holly Marchbanks from her prison basement. He came back and told me the cellar door had been broken. The bodies of Janice Keene and Wade Rawlings were still there. I told him to leave the bodies where he found them.

  I wondered how quickly Holly would run. Fast, it seemed. Within twelve hours she dropped out of sight, her kids vanished, and the San Francisco police began to make very unpleasant noises about the missing Glenn Marchbanks. They were already making noises about the unidentified body with the broken neck left in a park. Soon enough they would know it was Diana, and they’d be looking for Janice.

  Shortly after Glenn’s picture appeared in the papers, a witness at The Select reported that the missing man matched the description of one of the assailants in the bar. They found Glenn’s DNA on the plank Diana used against him.

  So Glenn and Diana were tied together. You can imagine what people thought—the beautiful, young woman and the powerful, wealthy older man. Audrey Marchbanks began to make a lot of noise about a conspiracy against her husband and then went silent. Maybe her family realized they had much of Glenn’s money, and it was justice of a sort.

  Benny got me home to New Orleans. Jimmy told me to stay the hell away from Las Vegas. I might be recognized by the police. They were treating Lazard’s murder as a revenge killing for bad investments, calling it almost a savage gangland-type slaying, and looking for a man who looked like me. I might have to sell the Vegas bar, buy a new bar in a new city, give Gigi a job elsewhere.

  Mila held on by a thread. Jimmy moved her to a private hospital and told me it was none of my business where.

  “Felix is dead,” I said. “Like you asked.”

  “Thank you,” Jimmy said. “But it won’t fix her.”

  Leonie and Daniel came home then, and they were good medicine. I lay in bed, recuperating, Daniel curled next to me. Leonie wouldn’t let him sleep there for fear I would roll over on him and I didn’t argue with her. I’d put her through enough, and him.

  “A week in LA. It was sort of a vacation,” she said. And Leonie fed me good food and brought me my favorites from the restaurants of the city, but the food had no taste, and only Daniel could make me smile for those first few weeks.

  I rested and I got better, and I thought about what had happened and Felix’s unexplained betrayal.

  I went to San Francisco as soon as my strength was back.

  Benny and I stepped into The Select. Still closed, still shuttered. This bar was done, under this name. I felt bad for the employees. Maybe San Francisco had gone bad for me as well.

  All because of this.

  The lipstick case.

  Diana had hit Glenn Marchbanks in the face with her purse; it was a detail I had forgotten while fighting Rostov. And when Felix and I cleaned up after the fight…I went to the lost and found box.

  A silver lipstick case. I hadn’t opened it. I’m a guy. It was lipstick.

  I opened it and there was the USB drive. I took it upstairs to the office and powered up Felix’s laptop. For the first few minutes, I looked for answers to Felix’s betrayal in the computer’s data. But everything was gone. Everything was pristine, like the laptop had just come out of the box. He must’ve scrubbed this machine before he and Mila followed me to Vegas.

  Then I slid the lipstick drive into the port on my laptop and I watched Janice Keene begin to speak, signing the death warrant for Glenn, Belias, Felix, Diana, and maybe even Mila. I watched the video twice. Twenty minutes. She laid out the whole network, crimes she herself had committed, prominent people she suspected of being involved, how Belias’s exchange of favors worked, a plea for her daughter to accept this world for her own good. It would have been just enough to break them.

  And I thought about what had been said at the Nest, Felix saying, I let you live, and then, I was supposed…, and then the lie I thought he’d told me. The enemy Belias told me we shared.

  Then I picked up the phone.

  I had some people to see.

  “You’re not Belias.” The Second Gentleman, Frederick Henderson, stood on the trail not far from Taos, where he’d met Belias before. It had been an ordeal to get the Secret Service detachment away from him; he finally told them he had to speak in private to an old girlfriend who wanted to embarrass the Henderson family, and they were in fact waiting for him a mile back on the trail.

  “I re
present Belias,” the young man said. He was tall, lean, dirty blond hair, blue eyes. He was well dressed in wool slacks, good shoes, and an expensive-looking navy jacket, a dark scarf. Like the desperate up-and-comers crowding Washington, Freddy Henderson thought. But he moved stiffly, as though recovering from injury.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “It’s done. Belias is done. Actually, he’s dead.”

  The Second Gentleman stared at him.

  “So, if you had any thoughts that he’d help you get rid of the president so your wife could step up, abandon those. She’ll be resigning. A tragically short tenure.”

  Henderson began to sputter. “She will do no such thing. Are you insane?”

  “According to some. I have his phone records, which showed a GPS record that he met you here, on your own property. The fact I know where to meet you, like he did, ought to give you serious pause.”

  Henderson wiped a trembling hand across his mouth.

  The young man continued, “She resigns. Or she gets named. We have all of Belias’s network. All of them. Every name. Two I’ve confronted committed suicide within hours.” The young man’s words hung in the cold air. “She resigns or she gets named along with the rest.”

  “But…it’s not fair.”

  “That’s what you were so afraid of. Life not being fair. You have a week.”

  “What if I can’t convince her?”

  “Then I guess you’ll see what happens.”

  The well-dressed young man turned and walked slowly off into the forest.

  79

  Seattle

  I HATE HOSPITALS.

  Jimmy and the Round Table had flown Mila to a private clinic in Seattle. Jimmy called me and told me that Mila had asked for me, so he relented on letting me see her. I gave my name at the front desk and waited and waited and then I waited some more. I looked out the window at Mount Rainier, shrouded in gray. I read four magazines and I tried not to jump out of my skin. Then a tall woman in a suit, very lovely and cold, came into the waiting room—it was more like a library at a spa; there were no other families waiting alongside me—and asked me to follow her.