3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  Plus there was an edge, a toughness to Emma, the hardy scuff picked up in the street. She was fearless. Privilege, Alli had reason to understand, made you soft, vulnerable, fearful, as if your body had been turned inside out, pink and pulsing. It was a hateful disfigurement, one she felt powerless to reverse until Emma came into her life.

  Then everything changed.

  25

  “It’s a total blackout,” Chief Bennett said, “as if the Dark Car never crashed.”

  “What about the gunshots on Kirby Road?” Jack asked.

  Bennett shook his head. “Only a small item about a milk truck that caught fire.”

  The two friends sat in Tysons Corner in a small coffee shop with a striped awning out front and bistro tables inside. From where Jack sat, he had a good view through the front window of the leafy side street and the occasional passing car. As soon as he had dropped a thoroughly rattled Armitage off at his office, he called Bennett. Then he ran every red light to get here. The pursuit by the Dark Car, the shooting, and its aftermath had shaken him more than he cared to admit. He felt as if he had entered a new and far more dangerous arena.

  Bennett turned his coffee cup around and around as if something about its symmetry made him uncomfortable. “Someone very high up in the government food chain is spinning the news at a furious clip,” Bennett said.

  “According to your information, that would be the president, the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, or the National Security Advisor. Why in the world would any one of them want me dead?”

  Bennett watched a middle-aged man enter, then slide into a booth where a young woman waited for him. She smiled, took his hand in hers. Bennett lost interest in them.

  “I’ve been in this business thirty years,” he said. “I’ve never run up against a brick wall like this. Jack, I’ve made a career of getting around the brick walls of various government agencies, but this one’s different. None of my contacts can help me—or they won’t.”

  “Too scared?”

  Bennett nodded. “I’m sorry, Jack. I should have followed you, should have protected you.”

  “It’s not your job.”

  “I agreed to have you seconded to Hugh Garner’s band of merry men.” He gave Jack a lopsided grin. “I knew more or less I was throwing you to the dogs.”

  Jack nodded. “You warned me. But it was Edward Carson who asked for me. I don’t see how you could’ve refused.”

  There was an unhappy pause while the waitress refilled their cups. Bennett’s eyes strayed out through the side window, across the avenue. Following his gaze, Jack saw the bottles of wine, whiskey, designer vodkas, aged rums artfully displayed in the window of the shop across the street.

  “I suppose it doesn’t get any easier.”

  Bennett shook his head. “It’s like a siren’s call.”

  “As long as you’re securely lashed to the mast like Ulysses.”

  Bennett’s gaze swung back to him. “I lost my wife because I was drunk all the time; I’m not about to go off the wagon now.”

  “I’m happy to hear it.”

  Bennett poured half-and-half into his cup, along with lots of sugar. That was his treat. “Speaking of wives, you ought to get back with Sharon.”

  “I was wondering why you insisted she come down to the hospital.”

  “To be honest, Jack, she was glad I asked. I think she wanted to come.”

  Jack sipped his coffee, said nothing.

  “I know you’re still pissed about her and Jeff.”

  “You could say that. He was my best friend.”

  “Jack, what he did—he was never your friend.”

  Jack’s eyes slid away, staring at nothing.

  “Sharon did it to get back at you, because she blamed you for Emma’s death. She made a mistake.” Bennett’s voice was low, urgent. “Jack, don’t fuck things up with this girl. She loves you.” He gave a little laugh. “Shit, you’re not the hard-hearted bastard you think you are.”

  As Jack turned onto Kansas Avenue NE, he saw Nina waiting for him. He’d called her while walking out of the coffee shop in Tysons Corner. She leaned against her black Ford, smoking one of her clove cigarettes. She looked unaccountably fetching in boots with sensible heels, dark slacks, and a navy peacoat buttoned up to the chin. She seemed oblivious of the sleet.

  The Hi-Line had been transformed into the Black Abyssinian Cultural Center. The electronics shop behind which Andre and his crew had beaten the crap out of him was now a ninety-nine-cent store. Otherwise Kansas Avenue looked much the same. It was still filthy and decrepit, no place for the Renaissance Mission Congress. But the old clapboard building, still peeling, still deeply tarnished with mildew, did seem peculiarly appropriate for the First American Secular Revivalists.

  Jack got out of the car and led Nina into the building that held so many memories for him.

  Where there had once been pews and pulpits was now a large work space divided into cubicles by cheap, movable half walls, each equipped with a desk, cordless phone, computer terminal, and the like. A soft murmur of voices filled the area where once a choir had opened up their throats and their hearts to God.

  The cubicles were filled by an eclectic army of men and women whose ages Jack judged to be from their early twenties to their late sixties. They all looked extraordinarily busy. Only a young girl glanced up as they went past.

  Armitage—and presumably Peter Link—occupied a separate office, what had once been Reverend Myron Taske’s rectory. Jack, in the center of the room, looked around. The huge armoire was still against one wall, Taske’s battle-scarred desk was opposite, but everything else was different—modern, sleek, gleaming. Maybe it was the new furniture that made the room look so small, Jack thought. Or perhaps it was his memory playing tricks on him. Either way, as in the Langley Fields buildings, Jack felt a dislocation—as if he were both here and not here. He wondered if that was how Emma felt when she appeared in the backseat of his car.

  By this time, Armitage was behind his desk. “You said you wanted a list of members who had defected over the last eighteen months.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “That’s right.”

  Armitage nodded. “I can do that.”

  His fingertips flew over his computer keyboard, typing in the algorithm that would decrypt the FASR database. A moment later, he was scrolling down a list, cutting and pasting into a new document. He pressed a key, and the printer began to hum. Then it spit out two sheets of paper. Armitage leaned over, pulled them out of the hopper, handed them to Jack.

  Jack was aware of Nina very close beside him, leaning in to read the list so easily, so effortlessly, he felt a stab of envy. For him it was a struggle of the first order. He concentrated in the way Reverend Taske had taught him, remembering the three-dimensional letters Taske had made for him, so Jack could feel them, understand their individual nature in order to recognize them in two dimensions, make sense of their sequences. The letters stopped swimming away from him, began to gather like fish around a coral reef. Jack began to read the names, slowly but accurately.

  “See anyone you know?” Armitage asked.

  Jack, concentrating fully, shook his head.

  Nina looked around, said to Armitage, “Honestly, I don’t get what you’re all about.”

  “It’s not so mysterious, despite what the talking heads on Fox News claim,” Armitage said. “I and people like me don’t want to live in a ‘Christian nation,’ we don’t want members of the Administration to be anointing themselves with holy oil. Above all, we don’t want a president who believes he’s doing the will of God. We simply want the freedom to explore the unknown, wherever that might lead.”

  “Where d’you stand on the human soul?”

  “Several leading scientists around the world who are missionary secularists believe that what we call a soul is in fact electrical energy, that when the body dies, that energy lives on. That’s one of the mysteries they’re trying to solve.”

 
“And God?”

  “God is a personal matter, Ms. Miller. Many of us believe absolutely in God, in whatever form. It’s not God that we’re fighting against. It’s what’s done in God’s name by all the ‘systems of religion.’

  “Here, let me give you an example from history.” He rummaged around his desk until he found a hardcover book titled Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “These are the words of William Blake, the eighteenth-century English visionary:

  ‘All Bibles and sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors:

  That man has two really existing principles, viz., a body and a soul.

  That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the body, and

  Reason, called Good, is alone

  from the soul.

  But the following contraries to these are true:

  Man has no body distinct from the Soul—for what is

  called body is that portion of the soul

  discerned by the five senses …

  Energy is the only life, and is from body, and Reason is

  the bound or outward

  circumference of energy.’”

  Armitage closed the book, set it aside. “What William Blake is saying is that there is no evil inherent in human beings. I believe him. The story of the poisoned apple from the Tree of Knowledge is a fiction created by men who, from the first, sought power over others by keeping them ignorant.”

  Nina said, “Still, I don’t understand your preoccupation with finding the meaning of things. What if there is no meaning?”

  “Keeping yourself in ignorance is the Church’s idea,” Armitage said calmly. “Knowledge is wisdom, Ms. Miller. Wisdom is power. Power provides individuality.”

  “It also feeds the ego,” Nina said. “An excess of ego breeds chaos.”

  “Come on.” Jack took Nina by the elbow, moved her toward the rectory door. “This guy can debate you until Gabriel comes calling.” As he hustled her out the door, he said, “Thanks for your help, Armitage.”

  “Anytime.” Armitage was already back to work, scanning his e-mails.

  “I just may take you up on that.” Jack closed the door softly behind him.

  As soon as Jack and Nina left the FASR offices, a young woman in her early twenties got rid of her current call. She was pretty, dark of hair, fair of cheek. In fact, in looks, size, and age she was remarkably similar to the homeless girl Ronnie Kray had picked up off the street for the use of her left hand, the girl who was now moldering in his refrigerator.

  The pretty FASR worker dialed a local number. Almost immediately, she heard the familiar male voice on the other end.

  “Yes, Calla.”

  “He just left,” Calla said into the receiver.

  “You’re certain it’s him,” Kray said.

  Calla looked down into the open drawer of her desk. Among the pens, pencils, erasers, paper clips, and spare staples was the small photo of Jack McClure Kray had given her. It had the same flat, slightly grainy look as the photos of Alli Carson that hung on the wall of Kray’s house in Anacostia.

  “Absolutely,” Calla said.

  “Tonight. Same time, same place.” Kray broke the connection.

  26

  “Goddamnit!”

  Secretary Dennis Paull rarely lost his temper, but as those who worked closely with him could attest, when he did fly into a rage, it was best to say, “Yessir!” and get out of his way.

  “Goddamnit to hell!” The Secretary of Homeland Security had his cell phone jammed so tightly to his head, circulation was being cut off to his ear. “The occupants were roasted alive, then.”

  He listened intently to the harried voice on the other end of the line. The call had come in just as he was about to go into a debriefing with the POTUS, the Secretary of State, and one of the ranking generals—he forgot who, they all looked, spoke, and thought alike—who had just returned from the successful arm-twisting of the Russian president, Yukin. The POTUS was jubilant. He told Paull to get his fanny over to the West Wing, that they were all going to gorge themselves on beluga caviar, a parting gift from Yukin, who had knuckled under to the president’s agenda.

  Paull had been on his way to see his wife, not that she would recognize him. But when he failed to see her during the week, his heart broke all over again, and thoughts of their courtship and early years together would flood through him like a riptide, threatening to spin him away on whatever mysterious current had snatched her away from him. For an insane moment, he had contemplated the unthinkable: defying the president, sitting with Louise, holding her hand, willing the puzzlement out of her eyes and mind, willing her back to him. But then his survival instincts, honed by decades inside the Beltway, came to the fore and saved him.

  Paull was about to say something but caught himself in time. He was standing on the blue carpet that led to the Oval Office. He was surrounded by polished wood paneling, cream paint, and the hushed sounds of a staff that ran like a well-oiled machine. Like the emanations of magnetic north, he felt the waves of power so close to the Oval Office. He was not fooled, however; the power lay in the office, not in the man who temporarily inhabited it. He strode down the hall, and then ducked into a small room, an extra office that was deserted. His phone was specially designed by the magicians at DARPA, ensuring that his conversations would sound like gibberish to anyone picking up the bandwidth. Nevertheless, he was cautious about his own voice being overheard.

  “You’re sure they’re dead,” he said into the phone.

  “They had no time to get out,” the man on the other end of the line said. “And believe me, no one short of Superman could have survived that blaze.”

  “How the hell did this happen?”

  “The best I can tell, McClure pissed them off. He got on to them; he sicced his ATF pals on them. They couldn’t believe it, so they went after him.”

  Paull rolled his eyes. Why did he have to suffer these incompetents? But he already knew the answer. Incompetents were who this Administration hired. “And,” he prompted.

  “They got a little overzealous.”

  Paull had to count to ten before he could say in a low voice, “You call firing handguns on the parkway ‘overzealous’? This wasn’t a termination mission, for the love of Mike.”

  Silence on the line.

  Paull felt as if his eyes were bugging out of his head. “It sure as hell wasn’t a termination mission.”

  “Sir,” the disembodied voice replied, “they sure as hell thought it was.”

  “What about your car?” Nina said.

  Jack drove south on Kansas Avenue. Considering the gray BMW, he thought it best not to be driving his car the rest of the day. “After we’re done, you can drop me back here.”

  “It may be nothing but a burned-out husk by that time,” Nina said.

  “Or it might not be there at all and I can requisition a new one.”

  “Har-har.” Nina banged down her door lock. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Take a look at the list.”

  Nina took up the two sheets Armitage had given them, her eyes scrolling down the list of names. “What am I looking for?”

  “Known criminals.”

  “Let’s see.” Nina ran her forefinger down the list on both sheets. “Nope. Nothing shouts out at me.”

  Jack made another turn, onto Peabody Street NW. He checked the rearview mirror. He was justifiably paranoid about tails. “Try the second sheet, fourth name from the bottom.”

  “Joachim Tolkan? What about him?”

  “Twenty-five years ago, his father, Cyril, was a notorious criminal in this section of the District.” Jack put on some speed. “Ran numbers, drugs, and explosives out of the All Around Town bakery.”

  Nina laughed. “That’s where I get my croissants and coffee. There are maybe a dozen of them throughout the District.”

  “Back in the day,” Jack said, “there was only one.”

  Perhaps Nina heard something in his tone. “You knew the father, this
Cyril Tolkan.”

  “He murdered someone.” Jack slowed as they approached the old tenement, home of the original All Around Town bakery. “Someone close to me.”

  Nina frowned as Jack pulled to a stop on Fourth Street NW between Kennedy and Jefferson. “This isn’t some kind of personal vendetta, is it, because we have no time for extracurricular activities of any nature whatsoever.”

  Jack was sorely tempted to describe in detail Hugh Garner’s manhandling of Peter Link, but decided against it. Instead, he said, “I have a hunch. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll drop it and we’ll be back to square one.”

  He knew he was on edge. Why would any of the four order him tailed and attacked? Was it Armitage they wanted silenced? The state of unknowing was not a pleasant one for him. He resisted the urge to call Bennett; he knew the chief would contact him as soon as he had dug up anything of substance.

  A bell sounded as they entered the bakery. The place was much as he remembered, full of the delicious swirl of butter, sugar, yeast, baking bread. He remembered in vivid detail the first time Gus had taken him here. In his mind’s eye, he could see Cyril’s goons standing around, reading the racing forms, waiting for their orders to dispense drugs or weapons, pick up payments, and if the envelope was a little light, to deliver a bloody payment of their own. He remembered the balding man behind the counter who gave him a chocolate-chip cookie. And Cyril himself, with his dark, olive eyes, his Slavic cheekbones, and his sinister air. Today, however, there were only a couple of elderly ladies buying their daily bread. They smiled at him as they walked out with their sweet-smelling purchases.

  “Name’s Oscar. Can I help you?”

  A short, squat man in a baker’s apron, with a monkish fringe of hair around the circumference of his milk chocolate scalp and a wide flat nose that must once have been broken regarded them with curious eyes and a welcoming smile. The current All Around Town bakery was a couple of light-years from the shop Cyril Tolkan had presided over.