This artifact was the last thing Pinky recalled thinking about, before the sky outside the terminal exploded brilliantly once again. A one-hundred-million-volt discharge that dazzled and made her jump and bite her tongue, just as the window wall behind them collapsed in a sparkling avalanche.
A
fter he learned that Betts Waring was planning a trip to Kenya, presumably to join her elusive adopted daughter there, the Assassin had four days to make his own plans.
Betts would be spending a week in England to visit a half sister long unseen. The reunion would take her to the rural Lake Country. The Assassin briefly thought about following her to England, where probably she would no longer be needing the Blackwelder Organization to keep the still-avid tabloid press and fringe lunatics from hounding her. But unfamiliar territory, he realized, would leave him at a critical disadvantage. No, he had to make sure that Betts didn't board the London plane. If he didn't have control over subsequent events, if every move that Eden Waring made in search of her mother was not orchestrated by
him
up to the very moment he broke her lovely neck while watching life fade from her eyes, his chances of success diminished by every unforeseen occurrence.
And Eden Waring did have, of course, certain abilities that had to be accounted for in his planning. An affinity for miracles, perhaps, including the most miraculous act of all: resurrection. He had killed her once, he was certain of that, because he never missed. Yet she lived. Inviting him to try a second time. An invitation that couldn't be refused.
In spite of the success of his subsequent assignment, staging the death of Rona Harvester to look like an accident (thereby elevating the former First Lady, like MM and Princess Di, to elite status in the common people's pantheon of trash mythology:
he watched his Rona tapes nearly every day;
loved
a splashy funeral), his slate, obviously, still was not clean enough for Impact Sector. There had been changes in the high command, but the FBI remained paranoid about psychics. It was Impact Sector's responsibility to deal with them. The Assassin had no illusions about his doubtful standing. He would be welcomed back only if he made up for his galling failure.
The Assassin was, in his covert profession, a genius:
he had killed thirty-seven men and one woman without leaving a single clue to his identity. Four months ago he had boldly taken both Betts Waring and her husband Riley hostage in anticipation of Eden's arrival at the lake house in northern California. Now, although he stood barely twenty feet from Betts in the first-class lounge, wearing a United Airlines captain's uniform, she had not shown the slightest awareness of him. This was another and possibly most important aspect of his genius:
the art of disguise. His face had been reduced to ruin by a splash of lye from his psychotic stepfather when he was twelve. Thereafter, unable to grow hair or eyebrows through scar tissue, with him looking like a poster child for defective genes, his high IQ was easily transmuted into psychopathology.
Only the Assassin's eyes had been spared. In order to go out, even for a visit to the post office or pharmacy, he routinely devoted an hour and a half to building a new face for himself:
nose, ears, eyebrows, hair. For most of his adult years he had been a profitable club act in Vegas, doing female impersonations. A serious disagreement he'd had at the FBI's Sacramento field office, resulting in crippling injuries to two agents, had temporarily made it unwise for him to pursue his art in the limelight.
He was sure that Impact Sector would square that account for him, once Eden Waring had unwittingly helped him clean the last trace of tarnish from his slate.
The Assassin always worked alone. Betts Waring's itinerary had been a cinch to obtain from her travel agent's computer files. Offing Eden's adoptive mom would have been mere exercise for a man with his skills. On most assignments he preferred daytime, and crowds. A busy airport, in spite of the appearance of massive security, was ideal. Airport security was only as strong as the weakest link, and there were plenty of those, all working for just above minimum wage, high school diplomas but no real education, birdseed for brains.
But snatching Betts from under the noses of Blackwelder pros, most of whom were former Treasury Department or FBI agents, required rethinking of his usual routines.
He had spent the better part of three days prowling San Francisco's international airport in various faces of altered dimension and contours to avoid a biometric matchup from a three-dimensional scan of his bedrock face, available from FBI files. He had tickets for various destinations, hand luggage filled with mundane traveler's needs. With the aid of a tiny digital camera in one earpiece of a CD player and a scarce, very expensive black market device called "Open Sesame"—concealable beneath a Band-Aid—that instantly deprogrammed and sprang locks ordinarily accessible only to magnetic-striped key cards, he probed SFO's security. One of the call girls who worked an airport hotel where international crews stayed provided him with a stolen pilot's ID, which he transformed into an authentic badge of his own. At three A.M. he was virtually invisible as a stoop-shouldered Hispanic man vacuuming the carpets in United's first-class lounge.
There was no need to leave bodies at the scene of the abduction. He didn't want it to look as if Betts had been kidnapped; he had enough problems with the Bureau already.
Or was he still keeping score in a game he had lost a long time ago?
It was the occasional flash of rationality that caught him unaware, that made him pause while staring at his raw scarred face repeated in the cruelly revealing makeup mirrors. A cave-in around his heart while confidence vanished from his undertaker's eyes. A time when his mind, like the Badlands he came from, was a sparsely settled place. If he didn't look away quickly from the bright mirror-trap at these times his body became catatonic, death collecting in his throat.
Now he was looking, not into a mirror, but a wall of tempered glass, glazed with faces like the dead from his past, among them himself.
The thunderstorm that had shut down operations at the airport was unforeseen, but it would be useful. A gift from the gods.
Betts Waring had been heavier, with frizzy-tizzy hair, a few months ago but had tamed the mop and made herself over, into a hard old beaut of a woman with hair now a natural wolf-gray, short and stiff as the bristles of a military hairbrush.
She'd done it for him
, the Assassin thought, recalling with affection how Betts had cooked breakfast for him at the lake house, played the piano, eager to please and keep him happy, her fear evident in throbbing pulses.
Betts was about to make him happy all over again.
He wasn't quite ready to make his move when the window wall shattered from concussion, but he adjusted smoothly to this diversion. Everyone was on their feet with jangled nerves as rain poured in. During his tour as a janitor in the wee hours two nights ago, the Assassin had prepared the carpet, seeding it with a chemical that reacted with water to produce a colorless but noxious gas. No need now to use the laser in his gold cigarette lighter to activate the sprinkler system in the lounge; the rain blowing in would do.
The Assassin pressed a mask concealed in the palm of one hand against his false nose and waited, eyes on Betts and the Blackwelder ops. The two dozen people in the lounge were scrambling, grabbing hand luggage, purses, laptops, and heading for the door. Confusion, but no panic. Then the gas rising from the soaked carpet hit them like a fast-moving medieval plague.
Coughing, choking, vomiting. Half blinded by their tears and disabled by retching, the two men from the Blackwelder Organization lost contact with Betts Waring, who was in no better shape, down on one knee, unable to breathe.
The Assassin pulled her to her feet with his free hand and walked her to the emergency exit, Betts stumbling, red-faced, gasping, puking.
The alarm went off when he opened the door, as if it mattered. Down two flights of iron stairs then, using both hands to keep Betts from falling.
"I'm with the airline. We're trained for emergencies. Had to get you out of there."
Betts, desperately sucking cleaner air, didn't argue or resist him. He opened a door at field level. Two tugs and a van with a bar of yellow lights on the roof were parked beneath a metal canopy. Rain lashed them as he pulled Betts to the van and seated her inside. She was rubbing at her eyes, still choking. He went around, got in behind the wheel, took a syringe from his shirt pocket. Betts's distress had lessened, but she didn't see it coming. Jumped and tried to pull away from him at the sting of the needle in the neck muscle. Looked at him, momentary fear in her eyes because of the syringe; and he was holding her very tight. Then she lost focus, went slack in his grip. Thirty seconds, and Betts was out.
Solicitously he cleaned vomit from her chin with a baby wipe and sprayed scent in the cab of the van so he wouldn't smell her until he had the opportunity to clean her more thoroughly. He drove at a leisurely pace beneath the belly of a parked 747, seeing the lights of emergency vehicles heading toward him. He used an exit gate near the freight terminal. Four minutes later he lifted Betts from the airport van and put her into a rental car he'd left behind the Dumpsters of a fast-food place on route 82 in Burlingame.
The rain had let up some. The Assassin smiled at Betts, who snored mildly in the seat beside him. He noticed then that she'd lost a shoe somewhere. No matter. He already was anticipating home-cooked meals in their hideaway. Waiting for Eden Waring to come to Betts's rescue, and at last reveal her secrets to him. For months (with the ardor of a stifled romantic who had conceived his unobtainable woman and kept her in a hollow of the heart, consumed her in a lifetime of longing) the Assassin had yearned for the return of Eden.
But the question remained:
how did one lay a ghost for good?
LAKE NAWASHA,KENYA
OCTOBER 13
1145 HOURS ZULU
S
ix of them made the short trip from Shungwaya to the Naivasha Country Club for Sunday brunch:
Tom Sherard, Bertie, Eden, and Jean-Baptiste, her date for the afternoon, in Tom's Discovery, with Etan Culver and his model wife Pegeen following in a Land Cruiser.
Sunday brunch at the club was always an event in their neighborhood. From the terrace, past pink clouds of bougainvillea and pastel jacaranda, there was a view of the lake and water-skiers raising graceful plumes in the afternoon sun. Celebrity-spotting on the terrace was a discreet but popular sport. Movie and rock stars, the occasional crowned head. Today they had a junketing U.S. Senator and his entourage, the old boy half drunk and loud and oblivious of the excellent food and calm beauty of their surroundings. There were also a Swedish ballerina and a magician, with whom Eden made unintentional eye contact. He smiled, seemed to wonder momentarily where he knew her from; then his attention was engaged by a member of his party.
"Illusionist," Bertie said. "Name's Lincoln Grayle." She was alert to something in Eden's expression. Bertie leaned over and whispered in Eden's ear while Jean-Baptiste was looking the other way, talking to Pegeen. "Want to meet him?"
"You know him?"
"I know everybody," the globe-trotting Bertie said. She excused herself and walked toward the table for eight where Lincoln Grayle was the centerpiece. Attracting wide attention with her stature, the toned fluency of movement, happily aware of herself, pride in the wealth of a young flawless body.
Eden knew she had seen Grayle before, although she wasn't much interested in magicians and their art. TV, probably. One of the women at his table was wearing a light windbreaker with the stylized NBC peacock logo.
Grayle stood up at Bertie's insouciant approach. Well,
hello
! Air kisses. Never know who you're going to run into.
Habari gani
, darling. Hey, Linc, if you've got a minute—
His turn to excuse himself. He was Bertie's height, six-one, slender, exceptionally fit. Probably had to be something of a contortionist in his profession, Eden thought. Black hair brushed back, glossy and thick enough to retain its shape in a brisk wind without sprays or pomades. A well-basted desert tan. On the surface, that hip male look Eden didn't much care for. But, judging from the mind's-eye snapshots she collected in a few seconds, possibly he didn't have the self-centered vapidity of the he-model caste. Coming closer; Eden was aware of quick, lively eyes. Curious about the world outside himself. An observer. And closer; he bit his nails. One other thing they had in common. The withheld intensity, or complexity, that reveals itself in unexpected ways.
"Lincoln Grayle, Eve Bell."
Gracious smile, a nod, only a moment to appraise each other before the introductions went around the table, Tom last.
"Gregor here at the club told me you know every inch of Kenya and Tanzania," Grayle said.
Tom shrugged. "That covers a lot of territory. It was probably true of my grandfather, who was a professional hunter and guide. He settled in Kenya a little more than a hundred years ago."
"I understand safaris are banned now."
"Hunting game was banned in '77. About two years after I earned my license. But all types of safaris are still available, from bird-watching to eco-tours. I can recommend a couple of guides, if you're interested and have the time."