John must have heard he was having some trouble because the son-of-a-bitch hadn’t minced any words when he made his offer nine days ago. He just needed some help covering his tracks and the legal work that went with skipping out on his life. He had assured Howard that Hannah had plenty of money in her own name from some family trust. But it hadn't seemed that way when Hannah stood in his office.
Howard was beginning to believe that his friend John had told him a pack of lies. It made him feel better to think that since he had given John up so easily. He was willing to break some ethical laws, even a few civil ones, but by God, he'd never have gotten mixed up in this mess if he'd had any idea that it involved guns. What exactly had John gotten him into?
Howard looked at the glowing numbers on the clock: 1:45. The night was never going to end. He continued staring at the ceiling and resenting the hell out of Celia for forcing him into this even though she didn't know a thing about it. He could hear the damn drip in the master bathroom and it irritated him even more.
Finally, he slid back the covers and walked confidently through the dark room. At his age a man knew well the trip from his bed to the bathroom. As he stepped across the tiled expanse to the sink faucet he felt rather than saw the presence.
Before his sensory system had time for any reaction he felt two awful and rapid movements. A hand wearing a rubber glove covered his mouth and the cold feel of steel once again pressed to the side of his neck. The whisper was deadly: "Where's John Masterson?"
Howard started to talk through the hand. Two fingers slid apart to give him working room. In the few seconds it took to give John up for the second time in less than twelve hours, Howard deduced something very important. The steel wasn't the barrel of a gun, it was the edge of a knife. When it suddenly moved across the front of his neck he was surprised that there was no pain. The hand was firmly pressed against his mouth as he felt an explosion of warm liquid on his chest. The dark went black.
*************
Racine quietly dropped the lawyer's body onto the big bathroom rug. He reached over and pushed the faucet knob completely shut, stopping the drip. He stood still, not even his breathing audible until he was sure no one in the house was moving. He could feel the gentle blow of air from a vent across his naked body.
He slid his feet slowly across the tile and peered in the bedroom. He could see the sleeping form in the bed. He wondered what she looked like. Racine stood there for several minutes, taking shallow breaths. Finally he reluctantly turned back into the bathroom. He moved toward the big window over the Jacuzzi.
Once through he grabbed the bag under the window and slipped behind the bushes to the side of the house. He loved these big new houses. Security systems that were junk, windows big enough to push an elephant's butt through and, of course, all the wonderful landscaping. Racine could have slaughtered an army next to the house and no one from the street would have been the wiser.
He pulled a small garbage bag from the rucksack leaning against the side of the house and deposited his latex gloves and the plastic wrap from his feet. It was all he had been wearing. He ran his hands over his smooth naked body and felt no sticky wetness. The lawyer had sprayed forward. He had given up so quickly that there had not been the struggle and messiness Racine had anticipated.
Racine's body was completely hairless and he knew he had left no trace of himself behind. He had shaved his entire body just two hours ago. He quickly dressed and put everything back in the bag. He still wasn't breathing hard as he bent and tied his sneakers. They were two sizes too large and clumsy, but he was careful as he retraced his steps to the street. Once there, he calmly walked the block and a half to his car.
He left the headlights off until he reached the first light. It was blinking yellow at this hour. He drove another five minutes and pulled the car over. He changed his shoes, then reached over the seat and retrieved the St. Louis Yellow Pages and the map. Within a few minutes he knew where he was going and how to get there.
Racine lifted an apple from the seat next to him and contentedly munched it as he carefully drove toward Alton. Once on the main Interstate, I-70, he set the cruise to three miles below the speed limit and allowed himself to think of Anthony Gant. He still couldn't believe the bastard was dead. He wondered how Gant’s brother, Jack, was reacting. That was a dangerous man, not that Anthony hadn’t been a hard-ass too. And Racine really couldn't believe that A. Gant had shared so much of his undercover life with another human being, much less a woman. Pussy. Racine shook his head. Too many men were ruled by it.
Racine wondered what had been in Gant's head. He had run into the other man several times on operations prior to Mogadishu and the two had come close to exchanging bullets more than once due to tactical disagreements.
It was a good thing the stupid fuck was dead. Racine would have killed him for free. As it was he could amuse himself with Gant's alter ego, Neeley. That thought was exciting enough to force him to push it away and focus on the Masterson's. After John he planned on going straight to Manchester and doing the bitch. The only catch was Nero's order to bring Mrs. Masterson in alive. Not only would that make it more difficult, but it zeroed out the possibility of immediate job satisfaction. And there was Senator Collins to consider. Fucking politician could fuck up anything.
Racine wasn't tired at all, even though he'd been up now for over twenty-four hours. The flight had been enjoyable due to the extra attention of a pretty young stewardess named LeAnn. Racine didn't even wonder any more about the women who found him intriguing. All his life he'd only generated two responses in the fairer sex. Utter revulsion or a base sexual heat with the preponderance toward the former. He had long ago decided it was something in them and had very little to do with him. He simply ignored most women and the few that fell to him blindly, he usually took.
On the plane he had played it slow and easy with the girl but he had suspected it would take little effort to do her right there in the toilet. He regretted the expedient nature of this business prevented him from getting her phone number. His name for this op, even though it was an alias, was on the passenger roster. Someone could remember him and the last thing he needed was more crap from Nero. Thinking of the lost opportunity with the stewardess as he left the plane made him relish the idea of killing the old blind fart in the damn office of his. Bashing his brains out with that stupid phone or his voice wand. Or maybe just blocking off the hole in his throat.
Racine checked his watch as he drove by Masterson's dumpy motel. Racine parked his car at the end of the building, as far away from the office as possible. He put a fresh pair of gloves on, and then got out of the car.
He moved quietly through the darkness, avoiding the few lights. There was a light on in room 27 but he didn't care. He held his heavy Desert Eagle against the side of his leg and pressed against the cheap door. He didn't have to jam any of the locks and before the door was fully open, he knew why.
Masterson was gone. Racine locked the door with gloved fingers and spent a couple of minutes on a thorough search of the room and bathroom. There were clothes in the closet. A passport for John Masterson was inside a shoulder bag hanging on the bathroom door. That meant John was still in town. Racine smiled. He'd come back for John. There was someone else who could occupy his time this early morning. He left the room and headed for his car.
**************
Neeley held the silenced pistol in her right hand, muzzle pointing across her lap at John Masterson's right leg as he drove her truck. She didn't expect any trouble from him, but it paid to be safe. John was grasping at the possibility of making a deal with Nero like a drowning man at a life preserver. He obviously assumed that Neeley had some way of contacting this man whose name she had just heard today.
"How did you know Gant?" Neeley asked.
"I was in the army," John said. "I met Gant on a mission."
"What kind of mission?"
John nervously laughed. "Lady, if Gant didn't tell you, then I sure as shit ain't telling you. Watch the tape." His eyes shifted over. "You'd better have it. You don't want to play games with Nero."
"I know where it is," Neeley said. "Gant said you had the 'what'. Is that 'what' in the briefcase?"
John nodded. "Yeah. But it’s a lot less powerful without the videotape. That's why I was scared knowing Gant was going to die. I didn't trust that he'd send someone here. I was afraid the tape would be gone with him."
Neeley had been watching the road. She wished John would stop playing "I've got a secret" but she knew Gant had played it also. Whatever they were covering up had to be both very powerful and dangerous. She would get to the bottom of this when they got to the house and Hannah.
“If Gant called you, how come you didn’t run right away?”
John’s eyes shifted and Neeley knew whatever he was about to say was going to be a lie. “There were things I had to do first.”
"Turn here," Neeley ordered, while wondering what he was keeping back from her.
"The house is--" John began, but Neeley cut him off.
"We're not exactly going to walk in the front door," Neeley said. "That's not the smart way to do things."
Hannah had tossed and turned for hours with an occasional dozing off, but she was too angry to sleep. It would be light in a couple of hours and if she could just sleep now it would be enough.
She had just punched the feather pillow into a more pleasing shape when the shrill ringing of the phone ended all pretense of sleep. The voice on the other end was more of a shock than the timing of the call: John.
"Hannah, it's me. I have to see you right now. It's important. I'll come through the back. Just let me in the patio doors, OK?"
Hannah stared at the phone in disbelief, trying to think of something to say, but the phone had already gone dead. Hannah quickly pushed back her covers and shivered in the cool air. After belting her robe, she moved to the security alarm pad by the bedroom door. She punched in the code so she wouldn't set off the hall sensor.
By the time she got to the den, she could see John's form filling the partitions of the French door. She noticed a couple of things as she opened the locks: John's eyes were wide and frightened looking and there was someone behind him.
John seemed to propel himself through the doorway even as Hannah had the knob in her hand. He pushed her back until her legs hit an Ottoman and she dropped into a seated position. John kept going and rolled onto the carpet, his hands behind him.
In the dimly lit gloom from the outside security lights, Hannah noticed something around his neck and wondered what it was. At that moment her eyes left John and she saw that the other person had followed John into the room.
The woman kicked the door shut and walked out of the shadows until she was standing in front of Hannah. Hannah looked down and saw what she had in her hand: a wicked looking gun with a bulky barrel.
"John, what is going on?" Hannah demanded, feeling strangely calm in spite of the strange circumstances of his return.
The woman leaned forward. "My name's Neeley and yours is Hannah Masterson and I suggest you shut up and do what I tell you if you want to live."
Neeley then motioned to her two prisoners to move over to the couch. Hannah now noticed that John's hands were tied behind his back. There was a rope around his neck and Neeley had used that to move John through the woods.
When Hannah and John were seated on the couch, Neeley turned off the light and then sat on the edge of the coffee table, gun still pointed.
"I'm sorry, Hannah," John said.
"What is going on?" Hannah demanded once more.
"It's a long story," John said.
"One I want to hear also," Neeley said. "We've got a problem."
Hannah was still looking at her husband. "John, who is this woman? What is going on? Where did you go?"
Neeley leaned forward and spoke very clearly, biting the words off as if she were speaking to a wayward child. "If you want to live, shut up and listen." That caught Hannah's undivided attention. "We don't have much time. John has a story to tell us and once we hear it we need to make some decisions."
“Listen--” John began, but Neeley pulled the hammer back on the gun.
“I want to know what happened.”
John’s eyes shifted between the two women, and then he sighed in defeat. “All right. I was in the Army. In the Engineer Corps. A dumb second lieutenant. My area of expertise was oil pipelines. Pretty boring stuff. Putting in my time to pay off my ROTC scholarship.”
Hannah’s eyes were boring into her husband, as if she were trying to see beyond the words he was saying and was looking at someone she’d never seen before.
John continued. “Then I got a visit from this guy named Bailey in August ‘93. He had orders assigning me to him. He didn’t say why. We flew overseas to Germany. I met Gant in Berlin. As soon as I met him I knew I was in over my head. Like Bailey, he wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he sure had a lot of weapons. They told me that he would take care of me.”
“Who was Gant?” Hannah ignored Neeley’s look and concentrated on her husband.
“The man who was in charge of the mission,” John said. He pointed at Neeley. “She knows-- knew-- him.”
“Keep going,” Neeley ordered.
“They told me that they wanted me to listen in on a meeting and judge the viability of what I heard. I didn’t have a fucking clue what they were talking about and no one busted their butt to inform me of anything else.
“We flew out of Berlin aboard military transport. To a staging base in Saudi Arabia. There, in the middle of the night, Gant wakes me, makes me grab my gear and drags me to a waiting Combat Talon—a modified C-130 cargo plane. There was some sort of all terrain vehicle with big tires strapped down in the cargo bay. An army version of a dune buggy with lots of cans and stuff tied off on it.
“We got on and the Talon took off. We were in the air a long time. They were flying low level, below the radar. I knew we were over Africa, but had no clue exactly where. The plane was jerking around so much I got sick, puking my guts out into the barf bags the crew gave me. Gant, hell, he slept most of the flight.
“Then the plane slows down and descends even further as the back ramp opens. Gant cuts the straps holding the all terrain vehicle and tells me to get in the passenger seat. As soon as I was in he told me to buckle up. I strapped in just in time. The 130 touched down on the desert floor, rolling. Gant cranks the engine as the ramp lowers even further, until it’s just about a foot above the sand. It was night and there was sand blowing everywhere and I couldn’t see a damn thing. Gant had on night vision goggles and his hands were on the wheel.
“We’re still moving and Gant throws the thing into gear. Scared the shit out of me as he hits the gas and we literally fly out of the back of the plane, hit the desert floor, bounce and then he’s tearing ass away, even as the plane accelerates and lifts off. Whole thing took less than thirty seconds from the plane touching down to it was back up and we were driving away.
“I had no idea where the hell we were.”
John came to a halt, beads of sweat on his forehead. Neeley glanced at Hannah. She was surprisingly calm, still simply staring at her husband.
“And then?” Neeley prodded.
“Gant drove for about an hour, then parked in a wadi. I helped him throw a camo net over the all-terrain. All he was doing was issuing orders, not explaining a damn thing. We grabbed our rucksacks and climbed out of the wadi toward a ridge about a mile away.
“It took us about two hours to get a spot just below the top of the ridge. We maintained listening silence after radioing in that we were on the ground in position. We broke that silence only twice in the ten days we were on the ground.” John’s voice was flat now, his sentences clipped as he recited his story.
“It took us two nights to dig the hide site. We hid under camouflage netting during the day. God, the sun was hot. And that hole--” he shook his head. “It was six feet wide by four feet front to rear and five feet vertical from the small slit that we looked out to the bottom. The overhead cover was made of small metal rods with canvas on top. Gant covered the whole thing with sand before sliding in. The site was set on a ridge looking toward the compound.”
“What compound?” Neeley asked.
“I saw it the first day as we hid. A cluster of buildings in the middle of nowhere. Pickup trucks with machineguns in the cargo bed coming and going. A chopper flew in that first day. Russian design, but that didn’t mean dick in Africa.” He looked up at Neeley, backtracking slightly. “Gant finally told me after we had begun digging that we were in the Sudan, about fifty kilometers south of Khartoum. That a meeting was supposed to take place in the compound soon—he wasn’t sure quite when—and we were going to listen in.”
Neeley felt the sweat on her hand, between the flesh and the plastic of the pistol grip. Gant had never told her he’d even been in the Sudan, but she had a good idea who they were trying to listen to. During the early nineties the Sudan was a hot bed for terrorists.
John continued. “With our backpacks, radio and water cans crammed in that hole, it was almost impossible to move more than a few inches in any direction. The smell was the worst part. We urinated in a small cup and carefully dumped it out the left front into the sand. We collected our feces in small plastic sandwich bags and buried it in a narrow trench Gant dug in the rear bottom.” John gave a short laugh. “There wasn’t much shit because we only brought enough food for one cold meal every day. Hell, we’d both lost ten to fifteen pounds by that last day, maybe more. I’d never done anything even remotely like it. But, Gant, it was like he was on vacation. He was so calm about it all.”
Neeley remembered how gaunt Gant had looked when she met him in Templehoff. Masterson’s recitation—he’d done this before and she knew when—his debriefing after the mission.
Hannah cut in. “All this—“ she waved her hands indicating Neeley and John, “is about something you did before you met me? That’s why you ran away?”
John nodded.
“It has nothing to do with me?” Hannah pressed.
“I’m sorry,” John said. “I thought—“
“Finish the story,” Neeley said, checking the glowing clock in the kitchen.
“Gant--” John Masterson shook his head as he remembered . “He could handle doing that. Sitting in that fucking hole, shitting in a bag. It drove me nuts.” John nodded, thinking back. “Gant’s biggest concern going in had been water. He’d tied down four ten gallon cans on the all terrain. Every three days he went and retrieved one. By that last day only one still held a little bit of water. I was getting nervous but Gant didn’t seem worried. He’d check the satellite radio twice a day, just listening.
“So we sat and waited.
“Then the activity in the compound picked up. A convoy came from the north, from Khartoum. Ten pickups with machineguns and two Land Rovers with tinted windows. Around a dozen people got out of the Land Rovers and moved into the main building while the ones on the pickups took security positions all around.
“Then the helicopter came and a half dozen people off-loaded, including several Westerners. They went into the same buildings. Gant pulled out this device—some sort of laser. He aimed it at the building, at one of the windows. They’d painted them all black, so you couldn’t see inside but this laser could pick up sound vibrations off the glass. He hooked it up to a laptop computer. Then he plugged in two headsets, handing me one.
“I put it on. We could hear what they were saying in there.” John barked a bitter laugh. “They were negotiating. About a couple of oil pipelines.”
“From Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea and to Pakistan,” Neeley said.
John nodded, surprised. “Yeah.”
“Across Afghanistan,” Neeley added.
John nodded once more. “Which at the time the Taliban ruled. That was one of the groups there at the meeting. There were also a couple of Pakistanis. For their end of the one pipeline. And some Saudis about their end.”
“And the Americans?” Neeley prompted.
“The head of Cintgo, who was supposed to build the pipelines along with a couple of his people. And to broker the deal, Senator Collins.”
“Shit,” Neeley muttered.
Hannah spoke up. “Was Bin Laden there?”
The other two turned to her in surprise, so she quickly explained. “It was in the papers and magazines. He hung out in Sudan in the early 90s. He—his construction company-- even built a highway there. Before they kicked him out and he went back to Afghanistan. Everyone knows that.”
“No,” Neeley said, “everyone doesn’t know that.” She turned to John. “Well?”
John’s eyes took on a distant look. “Yes, he was there. Brokering for the Taliban. Cintgo was worried about security for the pipelines in Afghanistan. The Russians had tried to build one in the country when they occupied it and the Mujahadeen, led by Bin Laden, had cut it so many times it failed.
“Gant was on the radio with someone. Telling them what he knew so far. Someone named Nero.”
“Who’s Nero?” Hannah cut in.
“The guy who runs the Cellar,” John said. “The organization Gant worked for.”
John looked at Neeley. “I could hear them through the headphones. And I figured out pretty quick that Gant was there for more than just listening. The laser device also could paint the target.”
“’Paint’?” Hannah asked.
“Designate whatever it’s pointed out as a target,” John explained to his wife.
“But Collins was there,” Hannah said.
“No shit,” John said. “I’ve thought about it over the years, then one time I was watching the Godfather and it came to me—Collins was like that police captain that those mob guys brought to that meeting in the Bronx. To insure safety.”
“Except in the movie they killed the cop,” Hannah pointed out.
Neeley was surprised at the other woman’s comments. She’d gotten over her surprise about her husband rather quickly.
“Well, Nero wasn’t going to kill a senator apparently,” John said. “Nero told the Navy jets that were on station to head back to their carrier.”
“Did Gant tape this?” Neeley asked.
“No.”
Neeley was surprised again.
“They all reached a basic agreement to build the two pipes,” John Masterson continued. “Then the meeting broke up. Collins and the Cintgo guys got on the chopper and flew away. The Pakistanis drove away. But we were still listening. That’s when we learned then that the Taliban had made a secret videotape of the meeting. It was in the possession of a guy named Sheik Hassan al-Turabi.”
John fell silent. Neeley gestured with the Mod-59 to Hannah. “Go make us some drinks.” Neeley went to John and untied him.
Hannah walked to the wet bar and fixed three drinks. Her hands were still, her head clear. She came back and handed one to the other two and sat on the other end of the couch from John with her own drink. For some reason learning that this wasn’t at all about her, but came from something before her time with John out-weighed the betrayal of his leaving and his lies. She felt strangely free of responsibility.
“And?” Neeley pressed.
“At the time it wasn’t that big of a deal,” John said. “The proposed Afghan pipelines. Dealing with the Taliban. Hell, even I’d heard Cintgo was trying to do this. You could read it in the trades. And we’d been supporting Bin Laden for years against the Russians.”