Authors: Gayle Lynds
“They’re investigating now,” she said. “They’ll discuss what they learn later today.”
Tucker sighed. “Let me know what happens.”
Ending the connection, he turned in his chair to peer out again at the long line of maple trees. Instead of soldiers ready for anything, for a moment they looked dead.
Montgomery County, Maryland
No other cars were in sight when Eli Eichel turned the gray Dodge van onto the drive leading into the Esti Hunt Club. He was smiling to himself, eager. Soon he would have three more limestone pieces.
“We’re late?” Danny asked. He sat slumped in the passenger seat, playing a video game on his iPad.
As usual, it was just the two of them, the Eichel brothers. There was a time when Eli would have resented the loneliness of it, wished for a wife again, for friends.
“No, we’re fine,” he told Danny.
“I like it here.”
“I know, Danny.”
“There’s no color.” Danny looked up long enough to sweep his big hand across the windshield, indicating the grayscape of barren trees standing in white snowfields.
“Color depresses you,” Eli said.
Danny sighed with pleasure. He was understood, and Eli knew that was all that mattered to his younger brother now.
Small and wiry, Eli had Levantine eyes and olive skin, and could pass for a Middle Easterner or a Creole, a southern Italian or a Corsican. He took pride in his physical advantages and used them constantly. He was sixty-five years old.
Danny was a decade younger, tall and hulking, with a thick body and an overlarge bony face anchored by a protruding jaw. When he was a child, he had been teased brutally for being so much larger than the other boys. In truth, the teasing was triggered by his lack of interest in them. He would not join their war games or soccer or other sports where his unusual size could help them win. Still he came home with bloodied cheeks, bruises on his back and legs, because he had let them beat him, unable to comprehend their emotions or confusion, himself unable to martial anger or outrage against them. He failed reading and history in school. He did not bar mitzvah. But within the family it was recognized he was blessed, and the rabbi agreed. Danny had one enormous God-given talent—he could build and fix anything. In particular, his eye-hand coordination was a marvel.
Ahead stood the club’s lodges and cabins with their steep roofs. The white Explorer SUV and the black Cadillac limousine were parked in the same places they had seen from their sniper lair, and the corpses were lying on the drive in positions the living could not sustain. It was like all other kill zones, eerie.
“Wow.” Danny stared out the windshield again. “We did all of them within seconds.”
His eyes bright, Danny leaned forward, grasping the dashboard. He always got charged up by their kills, and this had been a highly accurate and efficient one. They had used the best rifles—Silent Assassins, the nickname of the British-made L115A3 Long Range Rifle, renowned for taking out insurgents in Afghanistan a mile away. Today’s firing conditions had been nearly perfect, with clear visibility. The wind had died down just before the Padre had appeared. Only the low temperature could have been a problem, but they had accounted for it.
Eli stopped the van. Danny and he grabbed their AK-47s and climbed out.
Danny lumbered to the nearest corpse.
Eli assessed the silent buildings, the juniper hedges, the trees. There was no sign of his inside man, Tom
á
s Lara. “Tom
á
s!” he shouted. “Tom
á
s, come out!
¿Como esta?
”
Suddenly there was the noise of thumping. The SUV rocked, followed by shouts from inside.
Danny peered in a window. “Here he is, Eli. His feet are kicking, and he’s yelling. He thinks he’s angry, but I think he’s frightened.” At the age of twelve, Danny had been diagnosed with autism. Over the years, he had taught himself to assess expressions, skin colors, and eye contractions and dilations to deduce others’ emotions.
“Thanks, Danny.”
Nodding, Danny stepped back, and Eli opened the door. Lara lay on the floor, hands and feet bound. A big man, now he looked small.
Eli glared down. “What happened?”
“It was that bastard Judd Ryder.” The man’s eyes blinked rapidly. “He jumped me. He was going to kill me. I—”
“Where are the pieces of the tablet?”
“Ryder stole them. I could not stop him.”
Eli glanced at his brother. “Check the Padre. See if he still has them.”
With a nod, Danny trotted off.
Eli continued to study his man. The problem with buying someone’s loyalty was you could never pay enough. There was always the risk someone would offer more or threaten them so much the money lost importance.
Danny reappeared. “The Padre doesn’t have the pieces.”
“Thank you, Danny,” Eli said. He leaned his AK-47 against the SUV, took out his jackknife, and sawed the ropes that bound Lara’s wrists and ankles.
“Muchas gracias.”
Pushing himself up, Lara leaned back against the vehicle’s wall, rubbing one wrist then the other.
“Did Ryder know about the limestone pieces?” Eli asked, keeping his tone mild.
“Yes, of course. Why else would he take them?”
“How did he find out about them?”
“He did not say.”
“Did he know about me?”
Lara shook his head violently. “No, no!”
“His information about the pieces came from somewhere. From the Carnivore, Seymour, Krot, or perhaps it was from the Padre himself?”
Lara looked away. “I think it must have been the Padre who told him. Yes, the Padre.”
Eli felt an itch at the bottom of his spine. He turned to Danny. “Is he lying?”
Danny nodded. “It wasn’t the Padre.”
Lara’s eyes widened. Sweat broke out on his forehead. “Then I … I must have been the one who said it. But I can help you find him. The Padre had him investigated. Everything that was learned is on the laptop in the main room of the lodge.” He pointed with his thumb.
Without being asked, Danny broke into a lumbering run.
Watching Danny’s back, Lara said eagerly, “I just remembered that Ryder must know something about the Carnivore. He asked whether the Padre was trying to find the Carnivore.”
Eli said nothing. He simply stared down at Lara.
The man adjusted his sitting position. A drop of sweat slid down his temple.
There was the sound of running feet on the drive. Danny was returning.
“This was the only computer in the lodge.” Danny showed them a Toshiba laptop.
Eli took it and handed it to Lara. “Find the material about Ryder.”
The man opened the machine and searched. “Here is the file. You will see many pictures.” He offered up the laptop.
Looking at the screen, Eli saw Ryder’s name with documents listed beneath it—early childhood, college, the army, retirement.
“Put it in our van,” he told Danny.
Again Danny left.
“How did the Padre find out Ryder or Blake might lead him to the Carnivore?”
Wiping sweat from his face, Lara was eager to help: “It was an equity kingpin named Martin Chapman. His relationship with Ryder is written in the report.”
“Where is Chapman?”
“He has a horse farm here in Maryland.” Lara related the location and described it.
Eli felt an odd ache and the beginning of a thrill. He aimed his AK-47.
Horror radiated from the man’s face.
“No! Madre de Dios, no!”
With a smile, Eli fired a burst into the traitor’s heart. Blood exploded, spraying the SUV’s seats, windows, and floor. Not bothering to close the door, he jogged away. The cold air felt fresh and sleek, a slipstream.
When he reached the van, Danny was waiting in the passenger seat.
“Call Karel,” Eli told him. He jumped behind the steering wheel and tossed Danny his iPhone. “Tell him he can sanitize the place now. You and I are driving east, to see a man named Martin Chapman. He’s going to help us find Judd Ryder.”
Ryder stood in the snow high above the hunt club complex, listening to AK-47 gunfire reverberate across the hills. At the same time it sounded from the cell phone in his hands. Before that, he had heard the entire conversation between Tom
á
s Lara and Eli Eichel, sent from the cell he had hidden in Lara’s front jacket pocket. Now it appeared Lara was dead, and the Eichels were not taking his corpse with them.
Shaking his head with frustration, Ryder closed the phone and slogged off, leaving the hunt club behind as he headed through the pines and down the other side of the hill toward where he had left his pickup.
He phoned Tucker Andersen.
“Have you heard from Eva?” Tucker’s tone was worried.
“Not a word. What’s happened?”
“She called the Farm this afternoon to say she had a family emergency and didn’t know when she’d be back. It could be the truth, but I’m not ready to believe it. I’ve sent a man to watch her house. I phoned her parents. They said they hadn’t heard from her in a month. Does she have a boyfriend?”
“Not that I know of.” Ryder kept his voice even while emotions pumped through him.
“I’m sorry about this, Judd. I know you’re fond of her. It’s entirely possible I’m wrong to be concerned, and she’s fine. Now tell me what happened there.”
Ryder paused, collecting himself. “First, the limestone pieces aren’t random—they’re part of a tablet, or at least that’s what Eli Eichel said. I checked the three pieces I have. They fit together and seem to form a corner, but of course I don’t have a clue what the cuneiform says.”
“Just one more reason to wish Eva were here.”
“Yes, maybe she could read it. Here’s a shocker—Eli Eichel said the Carnivore, Seymour, and Krot know about the limestone pieces, too. Who are Seymour and Krot?”
Tucker swore. “This is getting to be a
Who’s Who
of assassins. They’re old war horses who got their starts during the Cold War, too. Seymour has used many names. He’s formerly Islamic Jihad. Same with Krot. He’s ex-KGB.”
“Swell. I wonder whether they want the tablet pieces, too.”
“And how many more pieces there are, and who has them?”
Ryder was halfway down the hill. “Before he left, Eichel shot his undercover man to death.”
“Did he take the body?”
“No, dammit. I can’t listen to any more conversations, and of course the bug’s still with the corpse, which means I can’t track the Eichel brothers either. I got the license plate number.” He related it. “They stole a laptop from one of the lodges because it had background information the Padre’s people had dug up about how to find me. Probably about how to find Eva and you, too. So now they’re going to the source—the man who told the Padre we worked with the Carnivore—”
“Martin Chapman,” Tucker said instantly.
“Yes, that arsehole.” He heard the fury in his voice, then the sense of irreplaceable loss. It does not matter what others say, what the criminal evidence against your father is, if he put you on his knee and listened to you when you were young, took you fishing, never missed any of your football games, and told you he was proud of you even when you rebelled by choosing a different direction for your life, your father is still your father, and Judd had loved his. But his father had also been a member of a group of international businessmen led by Martin Chapman that had not only skirted the law but broken it many times, making large personal fortunes in the process. Still, his father had had a line he would not cross—he would not hurt U.S. security. When he discovered terrorist money might be flowing through the Library of Gold, the organization that was central to the powerful group, he had told Tucker. As a result, Chapman had ordered his death.
“You’re planning to go to Chapman’s place,” Tucker realized.
Ryder took a deep breath, controlling his rage. “I figure it’ll take me a couple of hours to get there. I’ll be in touch.”
Washington, D.C.
Tucker Andersen was sitting at his desk at Catapult, reading the file on Danny and Eli Eichel, when the phone call from Bash came in.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“At the hunt club.” Bash’s tone was strong and angry. “We were too late. The club’s sanitized. No cars, no weapons, no blood, no bodies. No breathing people either. The place looks like any well-tended sports club after a snowstorm. We searched the buildings and didn’t find any computers, files, records, or any sort of information to tell us more about the people that supposedly died here.”
“Jesus.” A knot formed in Tucker’s chest. “What else?”
“I made some phone calls and tracked down the company that maintains the place. The manager said they were sent in a few days ago to put it in order. All their business with the owner is handled by telephone. His name is Sabino Zaragosa.”
“That’s the Padre’s name.”
“No surprise there. So now I’ve got a bunch of pissed-off Langley people on my hands. They want to know why in hell Catapult has wasted their time and government money sending them out here on a wild-arse chase.”
Tucker hesitated. Not finding anything incriminating at the hunt club gave Bridgeman the excuse he needed to withdraw support for Judd and the investigation, and to tar Tucker with a very thick brush. Frowning, he sorted through events over the past few hours. That was when he remembered Judd had said he had planted an open cell phone and a tracking bug on Tom
á
s Lara.
“I’ve got to make another call. I’ll get back to you.” Tucker hung up and dialed.
Judd’s voice was tense. “Yes?”
“Check your tracker for the bug you left on Lara. I want to know where his corpse is.”
“Shit. The body isn’t at the hunt club? Hold on. I have to activate the tracker again.” In seconds, he was back. “The bug’s either been turned off or it’s dead. In any case, there’s no signal. What in hell’s going on, Tucker?”
“The hunt club’s been sanitized. I was hoping the cleaners had missed the bug you planted so we could figure out where the corpses and other evidence were taken. But then, hope is the last bastion of the frustrated.”