Redbeard stretched plastic surgeon’s gloves onto his monstrous hands, then picked up a Q-tip.
“The downside is that this is gonna hurt.”
“I’ve got friends who have tattoos,” Jeremy said, trying to cover his doubt with bravado. “They said it wasn’t too bad.”
Redbeard reached out with his free hand and then raised the Q-tip.
“That may be, but ain’t none of ’em ever been through anything quite like this,” Redbeard said. The artist reached out toward his unmarked human canvas and Jeremy understood.
Oh my God, he thought. This guy can’t be serious.
“Don’t feel self-conscious about yelling,” the tattoo artist said, getting down to his unique expertise. “As a matter of fact, I’m gonna waive the no-cry rule.”
Jeremy heard the buzz of the tattoo needle.
“’Cause like I said”—Redbeard bit the sterling lip stud between his nicotine-stained teeth—“this motherfucker is gonna hurt.”
Book II
INSERTION
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
— Nietzsche
IX
Wednesday, 16 February
18:02 GMT
1701 Coopers Lane, Stafford, Virginia
CAROLINE WALLER LOVED her husband. That had never been the problem. She’d willingly followed him into the FBI, giving up a well-paying job with the Department of Health and Human Services for a four-year excursion to the Ozarks. When it came right down to it, Caroline recalled, she had been the one to phone the Washington field office recruiter and request an application. All Jeremy had to do was fill in the blanks.
But that seemed like a long time ago as she sat at the top of a sledding hill watching a gaggle of neighborhood kids yelling and screaming in the joyous throes of a day off from school.
The nor’easter had dropped a record-setting twenty-eight inches of snow on Washington DC and its suburbs, shutting down everything from the Capitol to the Quantico Marine Corps Base and the FBI Academy. The timing couldn’t have been worse for a new president facing an awful string of terror attacks, but at this very moment that seemed far away and superfluous to Caroline and her three kids. As with many Virginia storms, the furious snows and winds had given way to bright sunshine and forty-five-degree skies. It was time to play.
“Hey, Mommy! Look at me!” Maddy called out.
Their only daughter had inherited her dad’s spirit of adventure. At the ripe old age of seven, she had already pleaded for a chance to go parachuting. Not content merely to ride her bike up and down the street, she had built a ramp and persuaded her younger brothers to let her jump over them. When the X Games came on ESPN, she decided to “board” a sterling-silver tea tray—a wedding gift from Jeremy’s parents—down the staircase. Fortunately for Maddy, the tray had suffered the worst of the crash, leaving her bent but not broken.
“Sorry, Mommy,” the little girl had cried, lying in a heap on the landing. “I tried to get technical and ended up in a total yard sale.”
“Hold on to your brother!” Caroline called out. Christopher, their middle child, could hurt himself brushing his teeth. Just a week earlier, she’d run him to the emergency room after a close call with a dresser. On a dare from his sister, he’d tried using the drawers as a ladder to reach his piggy bank. The resulting crash cost him four stitches above his left eye and her ten years off an already stress-shortened life.
“Where’s Daddy?” Patrick asked, panting deeply while he waited for his turn on the sled.
“He’s busy saving the world, honey,” Caroline said. It was a line she used all the time now.
“When is he coming home?”
“As soon as the world’s safe, silly.”
“Just like Johnny Rocket, right?” the little boy asked.
“I’d say more like Power Rangers,” Caroline replied. She often relied on the Cartoon Network to illustrate complicated points. In the age of Tipping Point marketing, child psychology came down to knowing which action hero to cite in building a frame of reference.
“Patrick, zip up your coat before you freeze blue,” she added, bending over to brush the snow off his sweater. “If you want to stay out here, you’re . . .”
“Mama! Christopher’s crying!” Maddy called out from the bottom of the hill.
Caroline looked down the hill to where Maddy stood over her little brother, tugging on the sled rope and trying to pull it out from under his prostrate body.
She hurried down the slope, past a mob of older neighborhood kids who had barely even noticed.
“Get offa my sled!” Maddy scolded her brother, who was hollering earnestly now, holding his breath between sobs. Caroline counted seven seconds between bleats and knew it must be serious. Anything more than a three-second breath hold usually meant trouble.
“Leave the sled alone,” Caroline called out. Where the hell was Jeremy, anyway? The last she had heard from him was an answering machine message in her office.
“Something came up,” he’d said, relying on the same three-word excuse he used to explain every disappearance. Something came up never shed any light on where he was going or when he’d be back. She never knew anything about the missions—how dangerous they’d be, whether they’d take him outside the country, whether they’d render him insufferable among the raging mood swings.
“It’s all right, sweetie; Mommy’s here,” Caroline cooed, trying to calm the injured little boy.
“I think it’s his arm, Mom,” Maddy said. Doctoring had never been one of her aspirations, but she knew plenty about crashing.
“Is it your arm?” Caroline asked.
“I . . . think . . . it’s . . . broke . . . Mom . . . ,” the little boy managed to say between lung-clearing sobs.
Damn the FBI, Caroline thought to herself, kneeling down over her son, reaching into his snowsuit for signs of trouble. The Bureau has ten thousand agents they can call on to fight their war on terror. Why does it always have to be my husband?
JORDAN MITCHELL LOVED the Berkshires for their peace. Having spent most of his professional life in New York, he relished the quiet passage of seasons, the way Mother Nature moved relentlessly on in spite of man and all his efforts to harness her. He’d never been a religious man, but he understood some greater power in the first buds of spring, the way frost glistened in a morning sun, the last calls of geese flying south.
Neighbors might have argued that Mitchell’s Bell Jet Ranger he-licopter seemed somewhat incongruous to their Norman Rockwell idyll, but that would imply he had neighbors. And he didn’t. Mitchell’s South Egremont estate—a stone great house and outbuilding cluster called Longpath—covered nearly seven hundred acres. The nearest house stood almost a mile away.
“Your lunch, Mr. Mitchell,” the housekeeper announced, toting a wooden tray of salmon over watercress with pine nuts and couscous. The Borders Atlantic CEO always ate more heartily at Longpath, where he felt infused with vigor.
“Thank you, Mrs. Hartung.” Mitchell looked up from the new Alexander Calder biography and pointed toward the corner of his desk. Rich sunlight poured in through windows whose leaded glass had sagged with age.
The stiff, heavyset woman set the tray down and shuffled out. Anna Hartung and her husband, Gerhardt, had lived and worked more than forty years at Longpath. Mitchell’s father had hired them right off a merchant ship from Argentina. Any suggestions that they might have been hiding from a darker past would have fallen on deaf ears. The Mitchell patriarch valued allegiance over all else, and Nazis were known for that.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Mitchell,” Trask said, nodding to the housekeeper as he entered. The old woman shuffled right on by, not interested in a newer generation of servants.
“Is it?” Mitchell asked, laying down his book. “I’ve been too busy to notice.”
“So have I, for that matter,” Trask replied. He knew when Mitchell would tolerate retort and when he wouldn’t.
“Thought you might want to see what I’ve been up to.”
Mitchell knew, of course. He had heard the helicopter arrive half an hour earlier. His only question was why Trask hadn’t arrived sooner.
“Well, open it, then!” Mitchell barked. Though hungry, he had completely forgotten about the rapidly cooling repast.
The chief of staff carried a brightly polished mahogany box, inlaid with fruitwoods, white gold, and birch. A large circle in the middle of the top bore elaborate engravings, including the initials AWH.
“The box alone is worth the trouble,” Trask said, twisting the case in filtered sunlight and watching the wood grains dance. “It’s magnificent.”
But Mitchell had no interest in the box, and Trask knew it. He lifted the top to expose .56 caliber English horseman’s pistols—two pristine examples of eighteenth-century European gunsmithing, cut from black walnut and turned Damascus steel.
“Magnificent,” Mitchell gasped. He held them in his gaze for a long breath before reaching out to handle them.
What Trask had delivered were the very weapons Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had used to settle a dispute over honor. On July 11, 1804, the two political enemies faced each other on the dueling ground in Weehawken, New Jersey. One of these pistols had ended Hamilton’s life and Burr’s career in office. Now both of them had found their way to Mitchell.
“Now to answer a question I’ve always wanted to find out for myself,” Mitchell said. “Which one is it?”
“The one on top,” Trask answered. “That’s what the family says. There’s no way to be certain, unfortunately, because the weapons have been outside the family for almost four decades.”
Mitchell knew their provenance. After more than 160 years, a descendant had sold them to Chase Manhattan Bank. The Borders Atlantic CEO had leveraged the sale only after considerable effort.
“How many times do you think someone has pulled this trigger since that fateful day?” Mitchell asked. He lifted the stout weapon from its red-velvet resting spot.
“The family says they never did,” Trask told him. “And I doubt the corporate owners ever did.”
Mitchell paid meticulous attention to the history of the weapons he bought. Guns only interested him if they came with a story.
“So it was the other that killed Philip,” Mitchell said. Hamilton’s nineteen-year-old son had been shot down in an 1801 duel with the same set of pistols. Family lore held that the man on the ten-dollar bill had not wanted to take a chance on dying by the same barrel, so he chose it against Burr.
Mitchell held the pistol in his hands for a minute, turning it back and forth to drink in every visual detail. He raised it to his nose and inhaled, trying to detect remnants of the powder or lead ball.
“Present!” Mitchell called out the words Hamilton’s second had uttered that fateful morning. He pointed the gun toward the window—his own father had demanded great attention to firearms safety—and pulled back the hammer.
They stood just ten paces from each other, the executive thought. Close enough to spit. Hamilton’s heart must have been racing as he raised his gun hand, then settled it on his adversary’s heart. Could he hear the echo of the shot that had taken his Philip on that very spot? Did he expect death to come for him? Did he really intend to miss on the first shot as he had told his son an honorable man would do?
Mitchell looked down the barrel and touched the trigger, which discharged immediately with a bright metallic click.
“Hair trigger. Just like the books say,” Mitchell observed. Some said Hamilton missed on purpose. Others argued that improper handling of the hair trigger caused the gun to discharge before Hamilton took effective aim.
“They were his pistols,” Trask argued. “He would have known their individual personalities.” This was an important yet unanswered question of history, after all. Had this founding father died for honor or fallen to poor aim?
“He was also a politician,” another voice interrupted. It was a woman’s voice, a sound Trask had never heard in a situation like this. “Ready, aim, fire—right? I mean, what the hell do politicians know about gunfighting?”
Mitchell turned toward a tidy woman with short hair and bloodshot eyes.
“Pleasant trip?” he asked. The visitor had just driven up from New Jersey.
“You wanna play with guns all day or get down to business?” she asked, ignoring his courtesy. This woman wasted no time on small talk. Mitchell liked that.
“Tea for the lady,” Mitchell said to Trask.
“Black,” she added.
“Of course.” Mitchell smiled. How appropriate for a woman everyone seemed intent on calling GI Jane.
BREAKING AND ENTERING had never struck Satch as something he’d be very good at. Working at the Home Depot had kept him happy the past few years. It was steadier work than roofing and a whole lot cooler during those summer months in Little Rock. He’d fallen into the work honestly, however, and it had treated him well. The money stunk, but the rewards of eternal salvation seemed worth the risk.
“It’s a bloody keypad,” his partner whispered. Ollie spoke with a British accent and swore too much for Satch’s liking. Bloody may have been a reverent allusion to Christ’s blood, as Ollie claimed, but it sounded base and disrespectful to the hulking former roofer. God’s name was not to be taken in vain, even during burglaries.
“Use the sequencer,” Satch urged in a muffled voice.
Ollie reached into a large duffel bag and pulled out a device the size of a calculator. They’d been told to expect a card swipe and had brought an appropriate magnetic access badge. The keypad would pose no significant hindrance, but it would slow down an operation that hinged on extremely tight tolerance with regard to time.
“Five bucks says I take it down in less than thirty seconds,” Ollie said, expertly attaching the device to a black keypad next to a steel-casing door.
“Just open it,” Satch responded. He didn’t care for gambling, either.
Click.
The door opened, and both men silently thanked God for speeding things along. Once through the door, Satch and his London-bred partner moved quickly down a wide corridor lined with classrooms. They turned right at a T intersection, then right again to a door marked HENRY VOGT CANCER RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LAB 4. Beneath the room indicator blazed two warning signs: BIOHAZARD and the yellow, black, and red sign for radiation hazard.
To the right of the door sat the card swipe they had expected to find earlier.
“We got five minutes,” the Londoner advised, moving quickly past it into a university research lab. The place smelled of industrial disinfectants, stainless steel, and stale coffee.
Intelligence indicated regular physical patrols by a seventy-year-old former cop who used the seven-buck-an-hour job to pad his retirement check. He would pose no real problems, but neither burglar wanted to hurt the old codger if they could avoid it.
“Southeast corner,” Satch said. “Let’s go.”
He pulled a red-lens penlight out of his right front pocket and twisted the head until it illuminated their path in a foreboding glow. Both men’s hearts raced with adrenaline as they crossed the dark, windowless room. It wasn’t the difficulty in this black-bag operation as much as the consequence. Discovery would compromise the larger . . .
“Ssshhhh!” Satch whispered louder than most men talked. Something had caught his attention—someone else’s noise.
He tucked the penlight into his armpit, stranding the two men in the middle of the room. When nothing happened after a few seconds, he turned his light back on and started toward the vault.
“Don’t be so paranoid,” the Brit said. “We don’t have time to . . .”
Creeaak . . .
The lab door opened, spilling in fluorescent light from the hallway outside.
“Somebody in here?” a curious voice asked. He sounded more annoyed than alarmed at first, as if he was used to having students steal in after class.
When th
e lights flashed on, however, the man’s curiosity quickly turned to fear. There in the middle of the lab stood two men dressed in custodian’s uniforms. Under normal circumstances, this might not have bothered him, but the semiautomatic handgun coming out of the short man’s belt line made this anything but normal.
“Lab four! Break-in!” the security guard yelled, raising a handheld radio to his mouth and keying the mike. He had no gun of his own; it was the only thing he could draw.
“Doggone it, old man,” Satch growled. “You hadn’t oughta done that.”
JORDAN MITCHELL PLACED the instrument of Alexander Hamilton’s death back into its red-velvet resting place and motioned for Trask to leave them. Ordinarily the senior aide would have thought fetching tea beneath him, but not today. Despite Trask’s intimate access to his boss’s personal and professional lives, there were still some areas that both men respected as off-limits.
“I’ll be back shortly,” was all Trask said. He took the gun box and pulled the door closed when he left.
“You didn’t answer me about your trip,” Mitchell reminded his new guest. She stood in front and to the right of him, just inside the shadows of a pleasant sun. “It’s not small talk I’m after. I want to assess your mental state.”
“My mental state is fine,” the woman said. She looked up at the stuffed animal heads above them.
“You have been busy, with little sleep.”
“Yes. I don’t need much.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well, how is he?”
Mitchell reached for his lunch. Mrs. Hartung had served it peppered, with fresh Hollandaise, the way his father had always liked it. Mitchell had told her a dozen times that he preferred salmon neat, but she paid no heed.
“He lost an eye. Sounded weak and kind of disoriented.”
GI Jane brushed hair away from her face. She looked road weary despite her claims to the contrary.
White: A Novel Page 16
