The Charlemagne Pursuit (49 page)

NINETY

M
ALONE OPENED HIS EYES AND KNEW WHAT HAD HAPPENED
. H
E
rubbed a throbbing knot on the side of his head. Damn. Dorothea had no idea what she was doing.

He heaved himself up and caught a wave of nausea.

Crap—she may have cracked his skull.

He hesitated and allowed the frigid air to clear his brain.

Think. Focus. He’d set this whole thing up. But it wasn’t playing out as expected, so he shook himself free of unwanted speculation and found Dorothea’s gun in his pocket.

He’d confiscated Christl’s, identical in make and model. When he’d returned it to her, though, he’d taken advantage of the situation to load the blank magazine that had originally come from Dorothea’s. Now he popped the fully loaded magazine into the remaining Heckler & Koch USP, forcing his foggy mind to concentrate, his fingers to move.

Then he staggered for the doorway.

S
TEPHANIE WAS IMPROVISING, USING WHATEVER SHE COULD THINK
of to keep Charlie Smith off balance. Diane McCoy had played her part to perfection. Daniels had briefed them on how he’d sent McCoy to Ramsey, first to become a co-conspirator, then as an adversary, all to keep Ramsey in constant motion. “
A bee can’t sting you if it’s flying,
” the president had observed. Daniels had also explained that when told about Millicent Senn and what had happened in Brussels years ago, McCoy had immediately volunteered. For the deception to have any chance at success, it required someone at her level, since Ramsey would never have dealt with, nor believed, subordinates. Once the president learned about Charlie Smith, McCoy had easily manipulated him, too. Smith was a vain, greedy soul, too accustomed to success. Daniels had informed them that Ramsey was dead—shot by Smith—and that Smith would appear, but unfortunately that was all the intel offered. McCoy confronting them had also been part of the script. What would happen after that was anybody’s guess.

“Back to the front,” Smith ordered, gesturing with the gun.

They walked to the foyer between the two front parlors.

“You have quite a problem,” Stephanie said.

“I’d say you’re the one with a problem.”

“Really? You going to kill two deputy national security advisers and a high-level Justice Department agent? I don’t think you want the kind of heat that’ll bring. Shooting Ramsey? Who cares? We certainly don’t. Good riddance. Nobody’s going to bother you on that one. We’re a different story.”

She saw that her reasoning had struck home.

“You’ve always been so careful,” Stephanie said. “That’s your trademark. No traces. No evidence. Shooting us would be totally out of character. And besides, we may want to hire you. After all, you do good work.”

Smith chuckled. “Right. I doubt you’d use my services. Let’s get this straight. I came to help her”—he gestured to McCoy—“tend to a problem. She did pay me ten million, and let me kill Ramsey, so that buys her a favor. She wanted you two gone. But I can see that was a bad idea. I think the wise thing is for me to leave.”

“Tell me about Millicent,” Davis said.

Stephanie had wondered why he’d been so quiet.

“Why is she so important?” Smith asked.

“She just is. I’d like to know about her before you go.”

D
OROTHEA EASED FORWARD TOWARD THE TWO DOORWAYS
. S
HE
pressed herself close to the corridor’s right-side wall and watched for any change in the shadows ahead.

Nothing.

She came to the doorway’s edge and quickly stole a glance inside the room to her right. Maybe ten meters square, lit from above. Nothing inside except a figure lying propped against the far wall.

A man wrapped in a blanket, wearing an orange nylon one-piece jumper. Dimly illuminated, like an old black-and-white photo, he sat cross-legged, his head inclined left, and stared at her with eyes that did not blink.

She was drawn toward him.

He was young, maybe late twenties, with dusty brown hair and a thin angular face. He’d died where he sat, perfectly preserved. She almost expected him to speak. He wore no coat, but his orange cap was the same from the one outside. US Navy. NR-1A.

Her father, during times when they’d hunted, had always cautioned her about frostbite. The body, he’d said, would sacrifice fingers, toes, hands, noses, ears, chins, and cheeks to keep blood flowing to vital organs. But if the cold persisted, and no relief was found, the lungs eventually hemorrhaged and the heart stopped. Death was slow, gradual, and painless. But the long conscious fight against it was the real agony. Especially when nothing could be done to stop it.

Who was this soul?

She caught a noise, behind her.

She whirled.

Someone appeared in the room across the hall. Twenty meters away. A black form, framed by another doorway.

“What are you waiting for, sister?” Christl called out. “Come and get me.”

M
ALONE REENTERED THE BACK CORRIDORS OF THE BATH HALL
and heard Christl call out to Dorothea. He turned left, which seemed the direction from which the words had come, and made his way down another long corridor that eventually spilled into a room forty feet ahead. He advanced, watchful of open doorways to his left and right. He gave a quick glance inside each as he kept moving. More storage and work spaces. Nothing of interest in any of the gloomy alcoves.

In the next to last one he halted.

Someone lay on the floor.

A man.

He entered the room.

The face was of a middle-aged Caucasian, with short rust-brown hair. He lay prone, arms at his side, feet stretched straight, like some human form of petrified rock, a blanket flat beneath him. He wore an orange navy regulation jumpsuit with the name johnson stitched to his left pocket. His mind made the connection.
EM2 Jeff Johnson, Ship’s Electrician.
NR-1A.

His heart gave a sudden leap.

The seaman seemed to have simply lain down and allowed the cold to steal over him. Malone had been taught in the navy that no one froze to death. Instead, as cold air enveloped bare skin, vessels near the surface constricted, reducing heat loss, forcing blood to vital organs.
Cold hands, warm heart,
was more than a cliché. He recalled the warning signs. First a tingling, a stinging, a dull ache, then numbness and finally a sudden whitening. Death came once the body’s core temperature fell and vital organs shut down.

Then you froze.

Here, in a world with no moisture, the body should have been perfectly preserved, but Johnson had not been so lucky. Black scraps of dead skin hung from his cheeks and chin. Mottled yellow scabs caked his face, some hardened into a grotesque mask. His eyelids had frozen shut, ice clinging to the lashes, and his last breaths were condensed into two icicles that hung from his nose to his mouth, like the tusks of a walrus.

Anger at the US Navy swelled inside him. The sorry no-good SOBs let these men die.

Alone.

Helpless.

Forgotten.

He heard footsteps and retreated back to the hall, glancing right just as Dorothea appeared in the last room, then disappeared through another doorway.

He let her go ahead.

Then followed.

NINETY-ONE

Smith stared down at the woman. She lay still in the bed. He’d waited for her to pass out, the effects of the alcohol working as the perfect sedative. She’d drunk a lot, more than usual, celebrating what she thought would be a marriage to a rising captain in the US Navy. But she’d chosen the wrong beau. Captain Langford Ramsey had no desire to marry her. Instead he wanted her dead, and he’d paid handsomely for that to happen.

She was lovely. Long, silky hair. Smooth, dark skin. Beautiful features. He folded back the blanket and studied her naked frame. She was thin and shapely, offering no sign of the pregnancy he’d been told existed. Ramsey had provided him with her naval medical records, which indicated an irregular heartbeat that had required two treatments over the past six years. Hereditary, most likely. Low blood pressure was also a concern.

Ramsey had promised him more work if this job went smoothly. He liked the fact they were in Belgium, as he’d found Europeans far less suspicious than Americans. But it shouldn’t matter. The cause of the woman’s death would be untraceable.

He found the syringe and decided the armpit would be the best injection point. A tiny hole would remain, but hopefully it would go unnoticed—absent an autopsy. Even if an autopsy occurred, there’d be nothing in the blood or tissue to find.

Just a tiny hole under the arm.

He gently grasped her elbow and inserted the needle.

Smith recalled exactly what happened that night in Brussels, but wisely decided not to share any details with the man standing six feet away.

“I’m waiting,” Davis said.

“She died.”

“You killed her.”

He was curious. “Is all this about her?”

“It’s about you.”

He didn’t like the bitter edge in Davis’ voice, so he declared again, “I’m leaving.”

S
TEPHANIE WATCHED AS
D
AVIS CHALLENGED THEIR CAPTOR.
S
MITH
might not
want
to kill them, but he certainly would if need be.

“She was a good person,” Davis said. “She didn’t have to die.”

“You should have had this conversation with Ramsey. He’s the one who wanted her dead.”

“He’s the one who beat the crap out of her all the time.”

“Maybe she liked it?”

Davis advanced forward, but Smith halted him with the rifle. Stephanie knew that with a single pull of the trigger not much of Davis would be left.

“You’re an edgy one,” Smith said.

Davis’ eyes were suffused with hate. He seemed to hear and see only Charlie Smith.

But she caught movement behind Smith, outside the bare window frame, past the covered front porch, where bright sunshine was soothed by the winter cold.

A shadow.

Moving closer.

Then a face peered inside.

Colonel William Gross.

She saw that McCoy had spotted him, too, and wondered why Gross didn’t just shoot Smith. Surely he was armed and, apparently, McCoy had known the colonel was out there—two guns flying out the window had certainly conveyed the message that they needed help.

Then it occurred to her.

The president wanted this one alive.

He didn’t necessarily want a lot of attention drawn to this situation—hence there wasn’t a cadre of FBI and Secret Service here—but he wanted Charlie Smith in one piece.

McCoy gave a slight nod.

Smith caught the gesture.

His head whirled.

D
OROTHEA LEFT THE BUILDING AND DESCENDED A SET OF NARROW
stairs back to the street. She was next to the bathhouse, beyond the plaza that stretched out in front, near the cavern’s end and one of the polished rock walls that rose hundreds of meters.

She turned right.

Christl was thirty meters away, running through a gallery of alternating light and dark that caused her to appear and disappear.

She pursued.

Like chasing a deer in the forest. Give it room. Allow it to think itself safe. Then strike when least expected.

She passed through the light gallery and entered another plaza, similar to the one before the bathhouse in size and shape. Empty, except for a stone bench upon which a figure sat. He wore a white cold-weather suit similar to her own, except his was unzipped in front, arms exposed, the top half rolled down to the waist, exposing a chest clothed only in a wool sweater. His eyes were dark hollows in a shallow face, the lids closed. His frozen neck had craned to one side, his dark hair brushing the tops of ashen white ears. An iron-gray beard was streaked with congealed moisture and a blissful grin danced across closed lips. His hands were folded peacefully before him.

Her father.

Her nerves racked into numbness. Her heart pounded. She wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Corpses were meant to be entombed, not sitting on benches.

“Yes, it’s him,” Christl said.

Her attention swung back to the danger around her, but she did not see her sister, only heard her.

“I found him earlier. He’s been waiting for us.”

“Show yourself,” she said.

A laugh permeated the silence. “Look at him, Dorothea. He unzipped his coat and allowed himself to die. Can you imagine?”

No, she couldn’t.

“That took courage,” the disembodied voice said. “To hear Mother speak, he had no courage. To hear you speak, he was a fool. Could you have done that, Dorothea?”

She spotted another of the tall gates, framed by square columns, sealed with bronze doors, these swung open, no metal bar holding them shut. Beyond, steps led down and she felt a breeze of cold air.

She stared back at the dead man.

“Our father.”

She whirled. Christl stood perhaps seven meters away, with a gun pointed.

She stiffened her arm and started to raise her weapon.

“No, Dorothea,” Christl said. “Keep it down.”

She did not move.

“We found him,” Christl said. “We solved Mother’s quest.”

“This resolves nothing between us.”

“I totally agree.

“I was right,” Christl said, “About every single thing. And you were wrong.”

“Why did you kill Henn and Werner?”

“Mother sent Henn to stop me. Loyal Ulrich. And Werner? Seems you’d be glad he’s gone.”

“You plan to kill Malone, too?”

“I have to be the only one who walks from here. The lone survivor.”

“You’re insane.”

“Look at him, Dorothea. Our precious father. The last time we saw him we were ten years old.”

She didn’t want to look. She’d seen enough. And she wanted to remember him as she’d known him.

“You doubted him,” Christl said.

“So did you.”

“Never.”

“You’re a murderess.”

Christl laughed. “Like I care what you think of me.”

There was no way she could raise her gun and shoot before Christl pulled her trigger. Since she was dead anyway, she decided to act first.

Her arm started up. Christl pulled the gun’s trigger. Dorothea braced herself to be shot. But nothing happened. Only a click.

Christl seemed shocked. She worked the trigger more, but to no avail.

“No bullets,” Malone said, as he entered the plaza. “I’m not a complete idiot.”

Enough.

Dorothea pointed and fired.

The first shot caught Christl square in the chest, piercing her thick arctic wear. The second bullet, also in the chest, challenged her sister’s balance. The third shot, to the skull, caused her forehead to burst red, but the frigid cold instantly coagulated the blood.

Two more shots and Christl Falk sank to the pavement.

Not moving.

Malone came closer.

“It had to be done,” she muttered. “She was no good.”

Her head turned toward her father. She felt as if she were awakening from an anesthetic, some thoughts clearing, others remaining cloudy and distant. “They actually made it here. I’m glad he found what he’d been searching for.”

She faced Malone and saw that a frightening salvation had seeped into his thoughts, too. The exit portal drew both of their attention. She didn’t have to say it. She’d found her father. He hadn’t.

Not yet.