Deception (26 page)

Brown, beside him, was starting to move. He was circling around behind the man. Perhaps he could take care of it without making noise. Look how easily he had calmed the dog.

Yet Brown was too late. For even now the man was backpedaling, turning, breaking into a run. Heading back toward the house, where Keyes could see the five people pinned, in the bright light, like statues in a museum exhibit.

Aim for the body
, he thought.

He fired.

At first he thought the gun had exploded in his hands. His wrists bent back painfully; the sound seemed impossibly loud. Then he realized that the gun had not exploded at all. That was the recoil, the noise of which Brown had warned him. How on earth could one fire two shots at a time, Keyes wondered, when even a single shot produced such a violent reaction?

The man stopped running.

He paused. His legs buckled.

Keyes watched, staring.

The man tumbled into the pool with a terrific splash.

The five people in the house scattered.

2.

At the sound of the shot, fear closed Hannah's throat.

She found herself staring at her own wavering reflection in the mirror-windows, struggling to draw a breath. The people around her were similarly frozen, in tableau: the Saudi sitting on the couch, the Russian standing, the man with whom she had traveled halfway around the world in the process of standing—all staring at the glass, trying in vain to look through themselves into the night beyond.

In the next instant, they were scattering.

The bodyguard in the doorway was the first to move. He was coming toward the couch, reaching for his charge. And the Saudi was moving to meet him, as if some elemental force were bringing them together. The taller man was wrapping his body itself around the smaller one, enveloping him, dragging him toward the front door.

The Russian was also moving—but aimlessly, stepping toward the piano and then pausing, lost.

Her eyes flicked to the American, her traveling companion. He was sinking. To Hannah, he looked like a balloon with the air leaking out. It took a moment for her brain to process what she was seeing: a trained man dropping to the floor, out of the range of fire.

She tried to do the same. But the fear was also paralysis, and she couldn't move.

There came the sound of a splash.

The dog was barking again.

Where was the book?

In the man's bag, of course. And the bag was on the couch, where he had been sitting. For the first time, he and the book had become separated.

Move
, she thought.

Now the American was slithering across the floor. He was going for the light switch, Hannah realized. The Russian was still lost, walking in circles. The bodyguard and the Saudi prince were already gone.

She looked from the bag to the Russian to the man reaching for the light switch. Her eyes kept moving and rested on the fireplace, on the wrought-iron poker leaning up against it.

Her paralysis broke; she reached for the poker.

The lights went out.

3.

Brown was racing around to the front of the house.

Keyes stayed where he was, aiming the gun across the top of the pool at the living room. The people there had scattered—except for the woman. She was petrified, looking blankly out at him goggle-eyed. He sighted on her. His hands were still shaking. He tried to take aim.
Aim for the body.
To his left, the dog was letting loose a volley of hoarse, panicked barks. He ignored it.

His finger tightened on the trigger.

The lights went out.

He lowered the gun, blinking.

In a moment, his eyes would adjust to the starlight. But for now all he could see was flickering ghost images, the remnants of the lights inside the house. He could hear the surface of the pool, hissing softly and somehow luridly.

He stepped to his right, away from the dog, moving far enough that he wouldn't fall in the pool. Then he lurched forward, following in Brown's footsteps.

4.

Something was coming at Dietz.

After hitting the light, he became aware of the thing rushing in his direction. He fell back into a combat stance, from instinct. But the shape was rushing past him, clumsy in the darkness, making for the front door. It was the Russian, Ismayalov.

He passed Dietz, knocked into something—the something fell to the floor, shattered loudly—and kept going.

So close
, Dietz thought.

They had been within minutes of making the deal. He had been within minutes of securing his future, of putting it all behind himself and escaping somewhere with Elizabeth Webster. And now it was falling apart: the Saudi already gone, the Russian going; intruders outside. Armed. Who were they? Keyes? Ford?

But it was not too late. As long as he had the book, he could still make things right.

Yet the room was pitch-black. In a few seconds, his vision would adjust. But for now he could see nothing but shapes. Better than being under bright lights, offering himself as a target. But frustrating nevertheless. For he had had to let go of the book. And the woman—

—where was the woman?

He was conscious of a shape, in the place where she had been. The shape was moving. Something heavy dragged along the floor, rasping. Dietz reached for his pistol. But the pistol was in the bag; the bag was on the couch.

He stepped forward. His shins rapped against the coffee table, painfully.

To his right, whistling up into the air and then coming down …

5.

Hannah heard the man walk into the coffee table.

She hefted the poker. She raised it above her head. She thought of the suburbs outside of Istanbul, the way the man had put his hands on her.

She swung the poker down with all the strength she could muster.

Her first thought was that she had missed. There had been only a quiet sound, after all; whatever the poker had hit had a lot of give. It was not the solid rap she would have expected, at putting the poker against the man's skull. Instead, it felt as if the heavy iron had sunk into the pulpy flesh of a watermelon.

She tried to raise it again, to take another swing, and was surprised when the poker refused to rise.

It was stuck in something. Then the something it was stuck in was folding, collapsing, and the poker was torn from her hands.

She backed up until she hit the cool stone of the fireplace. Then she stood, listening to her own shallow breathing. Except for her breathing, the room was silent.

Slowly, her eyes began to filter out shapes in the black.

First she saw the piano. Then the coffee table, closer. A lump was half on, half off the coffee table. The lump, she realized, was the man she had hit with the poker—motionless.

The book was beyond him, in the bag on the sofa. But she couldn't make herself move forward, within reach of that lump. Instead she began to tiptoe in the other direction, toward the foyer. Her feet found the steps. She climbed them backward, still staring into the gloom.

Outside, an engine was starting.

The dog kept barking.

Then she was in the foyer. The front door was open; silver light trickled in. She was moving for it when a sudden rattle of shots came from directly outside.

She screamed, and backed up again.

Up the stairs, to the second floor? But she would be trapped there. In the other direction, deeper into the house? Or back into the living room?

She went back to the living room, the echoes of her scream ringing in her ears. Now she could see more clearly. The man was still slumped over the table, still motionless. The poker protruded from his head.

She moved around him, toward the couch. One foot slipped in something wet. She lost her balance, caught it again. Then the bag was there, right in front of her. She grabbed it and hugged it to her chest.

A car was pulling away. She listened as the sound of the engine dwindled.

Quiet descended on the house. The dog's barks were receding; the engine sound was gone.

Hannah reached into the bag. She found the book, dug past it. Her fingers closed around the grip of the gun. She withdrew it, moving the bag to her other hand.

Silence.

She stood in the darkness, her heart pounding in her throat.

6.

Keyes came around the front of the house, and hesitated.

Brown was there: feet spread, aiming the gun in his hands at the windshield of the oncoming Mercedes. Beyond him, another car was disappearing down the driveway. The men in the house, Keyes thought, had reached their cars. The disappearing Rolls belonged to the slight man who had been the first to move, with his bodyguard. And the Mercedes must have belonged to the other, stockier one: the Russian.

As Keyes watched, Brown began to fire. He squeezed the trigger in bursts of two. Somehow he managed to absorb each recoil, to keep holding the gun level. He fired deliberately, as if enough deliberation might somehow stop the Mercedes from running him down; with each shot his wrists flicked up gracefully.
One-two; three-four; five-six.

But the car didn't slow.

It took Brown full-on.

Keyes saw his body roll over the hood, over the windshield, soaring up into the air. A long, lissome moment passed before he hit the ground again. The thud sounded dull and meaty.

The Mercedes screamed off down the driveway.

Keyes moved forward. But he knew even before he'd crouched beside Brown that the man was dead. He started to search for a pulse, then took his hand back when he saw the angle of the neck for which he was reaching.

The engine revved throatily, then diminished. Nothing rose to replace it except the eerie whistle of the wind.

Presently, Keyes gained his feet. After all the noise, the silence seemed preternatural, suffocating. He looked at the door of the house. The door was ajar.

He licked his lips.

He stepped toward the door.

The foyer was quietly, coldly empty. He pushed his way in. The house creaked around him. Before him, a staircase led up. To his right was the room in which the meeting had been going on. That was where they would be, he thought; however many of
them
there were.

He considered turning, leaving, limping back down the driveway to the 4X4. But he had come too far to give up now. Instead, he stepped cautiously into the living room. There was cold all through him. His heart itself seemed to have turned to ice; it beat clumsily, thuddingly.

He stood, staring at the room before him, and his eyes began to pick out details.

To his left: a body slumped over a low table. To his right: the piano, hulking in the dimness. And directly before him: a figure.

The figure held something, trained on his chest.

Keyes started to bring up the gun, to wrap both hands around it, preparing himself to absorb the recoil with a flick of his wrists, as he had seen Brown do.

Then the something whispered.

7.

Hannah squeezed the trigger.

There was only the smallest, thinnest sound. Perhaps the safety was on, she thought distantly. Perhaps that was why the gun hadn't fired. And yet there had been an impact, in the fine bones of her wrist. Before she even realized how strong the impact had been, she had dropped the gun.

The man standing before her gasped.

He staggered backward. Something heavy fell from his hand, making a wet sound as it hit a puddle on the floor.

He reached out a hand to support himself. He leaned against one wall, shakily.

Hannah cradled her right wrist into her body. The wrist throbbed. She had broken a bone there, she thought. So the gun had fired, after all.

The man kept leaning against the wall. Gingerly, he began to lower himself toward the floor. She could hear a rattle in his breath. He slipped; then he was lying on his side, curling into a fetal position.

A moment passed. His breathing slowed, rasping.

She waited.

The time between breaths lengthened. At last, he gave a long, agonized inhalation. Five seconds passed, and the breath had not come out. Ten seconds; twenty.

There was no sound but the wind.

Hannah raised a hand, shuddering, and covered her eyes.

TWENTY-SIX

1.

The lake was in eastern Maine and the cabins were in the trees on its bank, screened from view by balsam and pine.

As Roger Ford approached the cabins, he inhaled appreciatively. The trees were pungent, sharp and clean in a way that artificial pine scent could never be. It occurred to him that he didn't spend nearly enough time out of the city anymore. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had managed to get away almost every other weekend—hiking or camping or fishing with old friends. Now he spent all his weekends in the office, or so it seemed; and the old friends had fallen by the wayside, or so it seemed, dropping off the face of the earth one by one.

He gave his head a small shake, and checked his watch. In an hour, they needed to be back at his car in the parking lot on the far side of the lake. A half hour after that, they needed to be aboard the private Gulfstream that would return them to Langley. So now was not the time for reverie.

He kept moving, picking his way carefully over the forest floor. It was autumn and the leaves underfoot were turning to mulch. In his Italian loafers and tailored business suit, Ford was hardly dressed for this. He was thirty pounds overweight and ten years past his prime; as he moved, his breath started coming harder. Perhaps this was why he never found the time to get away anymore, he thought. Wilderness only threw his physical limitations into sharp relief.

The woman was sitting in a rocking chair on the cabin's porch, holding a closed book in her lap.

She looked well, Ford thought as he drew closer. Her hair had been cut short and her body had achieved a slight softness. When he had first seen the woman, her body had been too hard, too angular, from a lifetime of strict diets and regular visits to the gym. Now, after a month by the lake, she had grown more natural—more at ease with herself, he thought, although of course he couldn't truly know how she felt.