Blood Flag: A Paul Madriani Novel (42 page)

“I think so, I’ll have to look,” says Joselyn.

“Do it,” he says.

She walks to the phone and picks up the receiver.

“Hello?” She fumbled around as if she was having trouble finding the speaker button.

“Joselyn, it’s Zeb Thorpe here. You’ve got to get him up and standing. Out of that chair.”

The sniper on the roof watched as he got the first glimpse of the target rising from the chair. The crown of his head came up like the sliver of the moon at the bottom frame of the glass in the window.

“Sorry, you must have the wrong number,” and Joselyn hung up.

The rising target disappeared from the glass. If she had kept the conversation going for two more seconds, Pack would have been dead.

“Who was it?” asks Tony. He has his hand on the gun.

“Somebody looking for Madelyn. He sounded drunk.” She looks at me.

Madelyn was the code name given to Joselyn by Thorpe when we were hiding out from the cartel man Liquida. Thorpe has given her a message. The problem is, I don’t know what it is.

Tony settles back down. “It’s gettin’ late, let’s hurry up and eat.” He picks up the pistol and points to the pasta bowl.

Suddenly he has the gun in his hand. If he wanted to eat, he would have picked up his fork.

Joselyn heads back to the table and grabs the bowl again. She turns and starts to walk toward me to go behind my chair and Tony stops her.

“Other way,” he says. Tony doesn’t want her approaching from this side of the table, getting between us, providing me with a diversion.

Joselyn looks at me. She knows something is coming. He’s positioning her for a clear, close shot, in tight where even he couldn’t miss. She turns and heads away, around the other end of the table, and starts walking toward him.

He watches her every step of the way. She has his undivided attention. My right hand, a finger at a time, creeps over the edge of the table toward my fork on top of the napkin. Tony doesn’t see it. He’s fixated on Joselyn. As she draws closer he doesn’t move the muzzle of the gun. Instead he leaves it where it is. Why cause a panic? Just like a professional, he waits. He wants her right up next to him. Then he’ll move like lightning and put a bullet in her head.

She gets there. She knows it’s coming. There’s nothing she can do until she says, “Why do you want the key? Don’t you understand that your father’s Blood Flag is a fake?”

The expression on Tony’s face is one of bewilderment. He sits there looking at her, certain that what she’s saying can’t be true. He turns to look at me.

“You wondered what we were talking about in the kitchen. Now you know.”

“You’re lying,” he says.

“No. It’s the truth,” says Joselyn. “We couldn’t figure out how to explain it to you, the fact that Dr. Edward Pack never thought enough of his own son to share the secret with him.”

The look in his eye as he turns the muzzle of the gun toward Joselyn says everything. All of his fury is suddenly focused the other way, turned on her. I lift the fork above my head and plunge it with all of my strength into the back of Tony’s left hand. But for the hardness of the oak table I would have nailed it to the surface.

Tony howls like an anguished wolf. Fork still protruding, he draws the wounded hand toward his chest, turns in his chair, and instantly brings the gun toward me. Tony cocks the hammer, preparing to annihilate this newest source of pain.

The pistol’s huge bore, like a dark tunnel to the afterlife, just comes into focus as a flash of motion at the other side of the table shifts my vision. Joselyn, with fire in her eyes, catches the electric kettle with the lightning sweep of her arm. She dumps the scalding hot water into Tony’s lap.

Like a wounded animal caught between two predators he shoots out of his chair. His face is a map of pain. Instinctively he clutches with his forked hand toward the steam rising from his midsection. The impact of the sniper’s supersonic bullet erases all expression from Tony’s face. It leaves him standing, for an instant, suspended in space, and trails in its wake a shower of glass and a cloud of fine red mist that settles on Joselyn and me.

SIXTY-ONE

L
ess than a week had passed following Tony’s timely death when Joselyn and I traveled north to visit with Frank and Ida Leon, Sofia’s parents. We wanted to tell them what had happened, how their daughter had died at the hands of fate. The only sliver of justice in any of it was that her killer was now dead.

He left in his wake a trail of innocents, including his own children, who are traumatized, and a bewildered wife who now realizes that the man she married, Tony Pack, was a stranger she never really knew.

Part of what we were told by Tony was fact, and part of it was lies. We suspect that Dr. Pack was not fearful regarding anything he received from Fish or anyone else. He was, after all, propelling the fraud to invent the flag. The fear on his part was a fiction invented by Tony, to conform to what we already knew about Robert Brauer. Brauer was in fact afraid. Perhaps it was because he didn’t want to participate but couldn’t say no to his old buddies. He knew if they got caught they were looking at prison time. He certainly didn’t want to have his daughter involved. There were other reasons for fear as well. His house had been burglarized. He knew what they were looking for. He may have also realized that Ed Pack’s death and the accident that killed Walter Jones were the result of homicide and that he was on the hit list. He had reason to fear.

We debated whether to tell the Leons about Sofia’s condition at the time of her death, the grandchild that was never to be. In the end, Joselyn handled it as delicately as she could, and for reasons of her own. She told them how it happened. She did not provide them with a name. With all the senseless violence that had already occurred, the last thing she wanted was to inspire a blunt act of reprisal by Frank Leon on behalf of his dead daughter. Instead she assured him that justice would be done.

For that, Joselyn had her own plans, a form of social castration that would be relentless and far more painful. She leaned on Thorpe and got him to hand over the raw data on the DNA from the FBI lab, the DNA profile from Sofia’s soon-to-be child as well as that of Ricardo Menard, showing him to be the father. Thorpe never told her where the DNA from Menard came from, about Herman’s and my involvement, but he gave her his anonymous blessings to use it. She was free to do so as long as she didn’t disclose the fact that the information came from FBI lab results.

Thorpe knew that the DNA on the fetus was accurate and he was confident regarding the materials Herman and I had collected from Menard at the castle. If Joselyn used the DNA findings to expose Ricardo and he sued her for defamation, the only way he could do so was by putting at issue the precise profile of his own DNA. Thorpe was sure that subsequent tests would serve only to confirm that he was the father.

He also relayed to Joselyn in confidence information that the hammer might be about to drop on Menard. He explained that local authorities had intelligence videos of a place in the hills outside Las Vegas where nefarious activities took place between wealthy, powerful men and young women. According to Thorpe, Ricardo Menard was a frequent visitor. If they were lucky, they might get him.

For Joselyn, this involved too many ifs or mights. She was looking for something involving words like
definite
and
certain.
She would have bombed the Bavarian hideout had I told her where it was. As it turned out, she has something more surgical in mind.

Two months ago, on a quiet Monday afternoon, one of Herman’s investigators delivered a sealed envelope addressed to Paige Menard under the caption “PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL.”

Inside the envelope was a carefully censored copy of the FBI’s lab report on the DNA from Sofia’s unborn fetus and Ricardo Menard. The chilling effect of the cold, clinical findings and the undeniable conclusion that Ricardo was the father was amplified by the disclosure that the information was about to start making the rounds of the various social networks, including several exclusive Internet sites frequented by Mrs. Menard and her circle of friends.

As far as Ricardo’s fortunes were concerned, the envelope dropped on his wife had the same effect as the bomb they called “Little Boy,” which was dropped on Hiroshima. It produced an instant mushroom cloud of lawyers hired by Paige rubbing Ricardo’s nose in copies of their prenuptial agreement. Within a month Ricardo was back in Costa Rica picking fruit, hiding from creditors, and wondering who now held the keys to his spiffy new boat.

As for Emma, her trial and tribulations are over. The news following Tony’s death, that conclusive evidence linked him to the murders of two people, Sofia Leon and Nino Toselli, started a cascade that eventually unraveled the state’s case. Reports of Robert Brauer’s involvement with Edward Pack on the counterfeit Blood Flag, including details of the contract they signed, caused prosecutors and police to start backpedaling in Emma’s case.

The disclosure by the FBI that they had reason to believe that Tony Pack was responsible for three other murders, including that of Robert Brauer, put the final stake through the heart of their case. Three weeks ago, the district attorney dismissed with prejudice all charges against Emma Brauer. Tonight she sits at home on a quiet street in San Diego, relaxing and watching reruns of
I Love Lucy
with her dog, Dingus.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are a number of people who provided encouragement and support and who made the writing of this book possible.

Most of all I wish to thank my assistant, Marianne Dargitz, who for more than two decades has provided not only her energy and unflagging support for my work, but her encouragement, which has guided me through difficult periods. Without her constant efforts and attention to detail, none of this would have happened.

Thanks to Josh Davis for his advice and editing regarding all things high-tech and, in particular, elements of the story concerning computer technology.

Among others, I wish to thank my publisher, William Morrow, and all the people at HarperCollins, without whose unstinting care and love of the written word and for book publishing as we know it, my work as well as that of others would not see the light of day. Most of all I thank my editor, David Highfill, whose friendship over many years has been a constant source of encouragement and pleasure. I thank his editorial assistant, Chloe Moffett, who, over the course of this work, fielded my phone calls and handled many technical aspects during the transition from paper to digital editing.

I thank my agent, Esther Newberg of International Creative Management, and my New York lawyers, Mike Rudell and Eric Brown of Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo, for their constant attention and guidance to the business aspects of my publishing career.

For their caring interest, love, and constant encouragement I thank Al and Laura Parmisano, who have always been there for me during good times and bad. Last but not least, for her constant and unconditional love, I thank my daughter, Megan Martini, who for me makes all things possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEVE MARTINI
is the author of numerous
New York Times
bestsellers, including
The Enemy Inside
,
Trader of Secrets
,
The Rule of Nine
,
Guardian of Lies
,
Shadow of Power
,
Double Tap
, and others featuring defense attorney Paul Madriani. Martini has practiced law in California in both state and federal courts and has served as an administrative law judge and supervising hearing officer. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

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ALSO BY STEVE MARTINI

The Enemy Inside

Trader of Secrets

The Rule of Nine

Guardian of Lies

Shadow of Power

Double Tap

The Arraignment

The Jury

The Attorney

Critical Mass

The List

The Judge

Undue Influence

Prime Witness

Compelling Evidence

The Simeon Chamber

NOVELLA

The Second Man

CREDITS

Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover photograph: Washington Monument © Stephen Carroll /Arcangel;
swastika flag © Paul Bucknall /Arcangel

COPYRIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

BLOOD FLAG
. Copyright © 2016 by Paul Madriani, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.