African Ice (35 page)

So many years of denying himself the luxury of a normal life. So many times pulling back from what might have been the right woman, but never the right time. The memories of his mother, Mary Lambert, before Joe McNeil had destroyed his childhood, still remained locked in his mind. Happy memories. He felt them flooding out as he slipped in the key and unlocked the recesses that held young Travis's pictures and words. He smiled as his mother's face came back to him, healthy and happy. So glad to be with him. At the ballpark with a foot-long hot dog loaded with mustard. On the beach, helping him load the pail with sand to make turrets for the sand castle. In the kitchen, baking Christmas cookies and shortbread. And he suddenly realized that beneath the tough shell he had built, that of the consummate Navy SEAL, lay a gentle and understanding man. A man capable of loving, and accepting love. And then he knew that he and Samantha could make it together despite the atrocities he had suffered. He ground the cigarette out and reentered the hotel suite.

Samantha was still hunched over the computer, staring at the monitor. She turned as he entered the room. He walked over to her, and without speaking lifted her from the chair. He cradled her in his arms and moved into the bedroom. She didn't speak, just smiled.

The afternoon passed and evening swept over the rocky crags and into Lindos. The temperature dropped from over eighty to sixty-two degrees. Samantha wrapped a light shawl around her shoulders and joined Travis in the foyer. They locked the room and strolled through muted shades of twilight to the elegant restaurant that served the evening meal. They ordered shellfish and selected a '99 Assyrtiko Boutari from the wine list to complement the entrée. Conversation came easily and he found himself recounting some of the high points of his early childhood to Sam, something he had never done before. After dinner they settled in with coffee, and she filled him in on what else she had found on the Internet that afternoon.

“The passenger sitting above the access panel to the electrical harnesses was Garth Graham. He was an American, lived in Providence, Rhode Island. That's not a big place and it was pretty easy to find him in the Providence phone book.”

“Where the hell did you find a phone book for Providence? We're in Greece.”

“You don't use the Internet much, do you?”

“You haven't stripped down many AK-47s, have you?” he countered.

“I don't give my men numbers,” she shot back. “Anyway, I got his address from the phone book, then called in a land title search on his house. The registry office e-mailed this back.” She slipped a single leaf of folded paper from her pocket and handed it to him.

“Holy shit, he paid off his mortgage two weeks before the flight.”

“Over two hundred thousand dollars. So I thought I'd try one more thing.”

He waited for a moment as she took a sip of her coffee. “The coffee's good, isn't it?”

“Sam, you've got something. Stop pissing around and tell me.”

“Okay, okay. Kerrigan gave us one thing before we left New York that no one has,” she said. He shrugged his shoulders and motioned for her to continue. “He gave us an account number and the codes to access the money for our expedition. Remember?”

“So—he used the same account to pay Garth Graham two hundred thousand dollars.” He smacked the table with his fist as Samantha nodded. “Lord thundering Jesus, we've got him.”

“Lord thundering Jesus? Where'd
that
come from?”

“I learned it from a Canadian from Newfoundland. New-fies, they call them.”

“That's nice. But no, we don't have him. When I left the account, it purged all the past transactions. Kerrigan must have had it set up to do that. And now he'll know that someone was looking at his account.”

“Can he find us?”

“No. He had it set up with cookies, but I've got a cookie cruncher on this machine. We're safe.”

“Excuse me. What the hell are cookies, and a cookie cruncher?”

“You
are
a dinosaur. Cookies are identification tags that can be transferred to the hard drive of the user entering a web site or a secure site. A cookie cruncher is a program that eats the cookies—kills them dead, so to speak.”

“So the proof is gone from the online banking, but the bank must have records.”

“Offshore bank, Travis,” she countered. “Not covered by the banking statutes that mainland banks have to contend with. In other words, the bank doesn't have to tell.”

“So where are we? We know Kerrigan paid this Graham two hundred thousand to tamper with the wiring on the plane. Chances are pretty good that this guy didn't know exactly what messing with the wiring would do. Kerrigan probably told him it was harmless.”

“If Graham knew Kerrigan was involved with gems, it would be easy enough for him to think whatever it was he attached to the wiring was just a small box of illegal diamonds to be picked up by someone else later.”

“Possibly. There're lots of explanations and Kerrigan's devious enough to think of every possible one. Anyway, whatever it was Kerrigan designed worked exactly as it was programmed to. It started two fires, one right at the seat and the other at the next junction box along the line, three feet into the cockpit. Then the FDR and CDR fail when Kerrigan's little tool shuts down the power. With the cockpit power gone, they're flying blind. No instruments, no visibility.”

“And that explains why they turned away from the airport, Travis.”

“I don't see that.”

“The data recorders were still functioning at 22:22. That's when they turned away from Halifax. The pilot still had instruments, still had control of the plane. Then, four minutes later, the power to the cockpit was cut off. By that time, they were already too far from the airport to recover.”

“Christ, he thought of everything. So the pilot knew he was in trouble, but his professional opinion was that they had enough time to circle, dump the fuel and make a controlled descent into Halifax. Then wham! Kerrigan kills them all. Fucker!”

The guests at the next table glanced over at Travis. He shrugged his shoulders at them and turned back to Samantha. “I still don't see why the investigators never found this.”

“They did. All this information came from their investigation. Like I said before, they saw a plane crash and looked for a reason. We saw the cause and looked for how he did it.”

So Kerrigan was even more of a monster than they had envisioned. That he had slaughtered at least two mining expeditions was horrific. And the guilty finger was beginning to point to him as the cause of a plane crash that had taken 229 lives. He had tried to kill them in the vile jungles of the Congo and on the streets of Cairo. Tried and failed. Now a trail of dead bodies lay strewn across the Congo and amidst the chaos that defined Cairo. Travis had seen the carnage of battle many times, never enjoying it. But this was senseless slaughter at its worst—lives for diamonds. Kerrigan had to be stopped. But with the power his vast wealth gave him, he was almost invincible, at least on American soil. The authorities would be reluctant to press charges against such a rich and upstanding citizen without definitive proof. And what they had on Kerrigan was anything but definitive. Circumstantial at best.

Two thoughts swirled in his mind. First, that Samantha was right, Kerrigan would hunt them down and kill them. And second, no one was going to stop him. So for the sake of self-preservation, it was up to them to bring Kerrigan down.

But how?

New York was cloudy and dull, intermittent rain falling on the medley of buildings that made up the world's most famous skyline. Taxis did a brisk business as they kept the Wall Street business execs dry. Street vendors rolled out the canopies and shutters, and Central Park had a reprieve from the masses as they stayed indoors. Moods matched the weather and tempers flared. The city needed the rain, but after two weeks of late spring sunshine, New Yorkers were happy to have a taste of summer, and the overcast skies were not welcome.

A white limo moved with the traffic in south Brooklyn, heading from JFK toward the Manhattan Bridge. The car entered the bridge and rose above the East River, giving its passenger a panoramic view of the city. The Statue of Liberty was visible briefly through the spans of the Brooklyn Bridge, then gone as the car descended off the bridge and into Manhattan. Eight blocks shy of ground zero, the limo pulled over to the curb. Patrick Kerrigan instructed his driver to pick him up in two hours and slammed the door. He strode quickly to the building entrance, irritated by the dampness creeping into his bones. If he'd wanted rain, he thought, he would have stayed in London. He caught the executive elevator to the sixty-third floor and rejoined the corporate world of Gem-Star.

“Welcome back, Mr. Kerrigan,” the receptionist greeted him.

“Thank you, Anne. Is there anyone here to see me?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Shaw has been waiting in your office for twenty minutes.”

Kerrigan nodded and walked down the hall, saying the perfunctory hellos to his staff as they greeted him. He reached his corner office, entered and closed the door behind him. Garret Shaw sat in an easy chair close to the window. He set the
New York Times
on the coffee table next to the chair when Kerrigan entered. An idle cigarette burned in an ashtray beside the paper, smoke curling lazily through the stagnant office air. Kerrigan gave Shaw a disapproving glance.

“I've asked you not to smoke in my office,” Kerrigan said icily.

“Funny, I always seem to forget that.” Shaw reached over and ground out the cigarette, snapping it in half. “I get bored when I have to wait for people.”

“Traffic was bad from JFK. The rain slows things down.” Kerrigan reined in his tone, remembering he was talking to the most cold-blooded killer he had ever met. Getting on the wrong side of Garret Shaw was not only stupid, it was fatal. “Do you want coffee?”

Shaw nodded and Kerrigan called through to his secretary. A few moments later she appeared with an insulated pot of hot coffee and two cups, then disappeared with equal efficiency. Kerrigan offered his guest cream and sugar but Shaw declined. “I took these off Ms. Carlson two days ago,” he said to the assassin, dumping the small satchel of rough diamonds on the table. “But things did not go well in Cairo.”

“What happened?”

“O'Donnell's dead.” Kerrigan watched Garret for any sign of emotion. Nothing. “His entire team is wiped out. McNeil killed them all.”

“Single-handedly?” Shaw asked, raising an eyebrow. “Impressive. How many men did O'Donnell have with him?”

“Seven, including O'Donnell himself. McNeil did have one other guy with him in Cairo, but he's dead.”

“So it's just McNeil and Carlson,” Shaw said thoughtfully. “I think that we should review the cost of taking care of these two, considering Mr. McNeil's apparent skill levels.”

“I've already thought of that,” Kerrigan snapped. “I'll pay you a million up front, today in fact, and an additional four million if McNeil is eliminated and Samantha Carlson delivered to me alive and well.”

“Five million dollars. That's a very generous offer.”

“I'm a generous man.”

“No, you're not,” Shaw snarled, rising from his chair. “That's the last thing you are.” Shaw waved his arm at the extensive trappings that furnished the corner office. “You're ruthless, no different from me, except you don't pull the trigger or stick the knife in. You pay people like me to take care of your dirty work while you reap the rewards. And the payoff for finding Samantha Carlson alive must be huge. I'm sure the five million has very little to do with killing McNeil. The treasure is the woman.” He moved quietly about the room as he spoke.

“What's your point, Garret?”

“I want five million up front and another five for bringing her in. Ten million or I walk out of here an unhappy man. And I don't think you want to make me unhappy.”

Kerrigan shrugged his shoulders in deference. “Five, ten, the amount is not that important to me. If it were, I'd be pissed off at you. But you're right; the girl is worth that, and more. I agree to your terms.” Kerrigan walked over to his wall safe and opened it. He took stack after stack of cash from the safe, then closed the door and slid the picture back in place. He handed the pile of money over. “Five million dollars.”

Shaw placed the cash in a valise. “Any idea where they were heading when they left Cairo?”

“Israel, I imagine.” Kerrigan sat down at his desk. “Now if that's all you need, a lot of work seems to have piled up while I've been gone.”

“I'll keep you up to date.”

Shaw's Audi was parked a couple of blocks north of Kerrigan's building and the rain picked up as he walked, falling at a steady pace by the time he reached the parking garage. He left the garage, then Manhattan. He drove north on I-87, through the Bronx and Yonkers, then past Scarsdale and toward the east bank of the Hudson River. He cut north again on the number nine, a minor roadway that paralleled the jagged edge of the river. He slowed to the speed limit at Tarrytown, then again at the entrance to Sleepy Hollow. He cut off the main drag at one of the entrances to Rockefeller State Park, then took a quick right into a secluded driveway. Two sweeping turns through dense, but well-manicured vegetation led to the main house. It was a character home almost two centuries old, but painstakingly restored to its original beauty.

Shaw switched off the engine and left the Audi in the driveway. He entered the house through the unlocked front door, calling out for his groundskeeper. The man heard Garret and came loping over from the flowerbed he had been attending to. Shaw handed him two hundred in cash and told him to take the rest of the day, and tomorrow, off.

He watched the gardener leave in his older model Ford truck, then returned to the house. With the gardener gone, he was alone. He dumped the contents of the valise on the table. It spilled over onto the floor, all the cash in hundreds. Five million dollars. He thumbed a few of the wads, then quickly bored with the exercise. Money held little fascination for him, but what it bought was wonderful. Like the house. He had wanted to be closer to Kerrigan than his home base in Los Angeles, but he hated the congested feeling Manhattan gave him. He didn't mind large cities, in fact he rather enjoyed them, but New York was too much. He decided on Sleepy Hollow because of its name. It was sexy, dangerous. He found out afterward it had been North Tarrytown until as recently as 1996. But that was of no matter; he still liked the quaint village, and the natives seemed to accept him. Just another New Yorker trying to escape the rat race.