The Last Spymaster (48 page)

Ghranditti’s penthouse was quiet now except for the sound of Raina’s footfalls as she stalked around the office. As Jay ended his cell call with Bobbye Johnson, he turned in the chair to watch her stare out the wall of windows then turn toward the desk. She was as restless as a cheetah. She stopped beside Ghranditti’s contoured leather chair, her attention captured by something on his desktop.

She gave him a startled look. “Did you see this, Jay?”

He was beside her in an instant. She was focused on a photograph framed in sterling and standing on Ghranditti’s desk, her hand outstretched but apparently unable to make herself touch it. The photo was the only one there, and it showed a woman who looked so uncannily like Tice’s wife, Marie, that a sickening moment of déjà vu swept through him. But Marie had been dead nearly twenty years, and those were not their children. The man was about fifty, heavyset, and sleek in an oily sort of way.

Shaken, Jay said, “They’re posed like the last formal portrait Marie and I and our kids sat for.” The girl was leaning across her mother’s lap and peering up adoringly at her father. Between the parents and slightly behind stood a son. The third child was a little boy about two years old who played with a blanket at his father’s feet and looked into the camera with a sweet smile.

He could not tear his gaze away from the woman. The features were almost identical to Marie’s. The same height and age and even body build and eyes—green. Slightly unfocused, but definitely sea green, and the longer he studied her, the more sense it began to make in a completely insane way, because the woman sat as stiff as a piece of furniture, just the way Marie used to be the last few months of her life. She was drugged, as Marie was all of the time.

Jay dropped heavily into the desk chair and turned over the photo.
Raina put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and leaned close so she could see, too. On the back was a date six months ago and names neatly printed in a list:

Martin Ghranditti

Marie Ghranditti

Aaron Ghranditti

Mariette Ghranditti

Kristoph Ghranditti

Rage seized Jay. His hands shook as if from palsy. He flipped the photo over and stared again. His family. But not his family. A charade, a farce, a travesty of the living and the dead. His eyes felt hollow. The feeling of violation was as sharp and deep as razor slices to his marrow. He wanted to terminate Martin Ghranditti. If Ghranditti were there, he would be dead.

Raina grabbed the picture and turned it over once more and looked at the list of names as if she could not believe what she had seen. “Kristoph!
Kristoph
is on his list. Ghranditti named his baby after Kristoph!”

“For some obscene reason that bastard has tried to steal our lives.”

“What does this mean!” she demanded. “Why did he do this?”

They gazed at each other. Bright red spots of fury radiated from her cheeks. Her eyes snapped. But there was a sense of illness around her mouth. She was sickened, too. It was not only thievery, it was a violation so intimate and cruel that it was almost unfathomable.

“Come here.” Jay stood and wrapped his arms around her.

She burst into tears on his shoulder. Trembling, he buried his face in her soft hair. They stood that way a long time, their grief for what they had lost and rage for what had been taken by subversion and violence felt like a bottomless pit, unassuagable.

In the shabby motel, Elaine gritted her teeth to keep from crying out in pain and from the sight of poor dead Elijah and Frank. Sitting on the bathroom floor, she worked to undo Elijah’s shoelace with her uninjured hand.

After calling in an anonymous tip to the police that Jay Tice had broken into Martin Ghranditti’s penthouse to hide, Palmer phoned Laurence Litchfield on a cell equipped with a compact voice modifier.

Dragging on a Pall Mall, he stalked back and forth. “Face it, Litchfield. Your people were incompetent. They couldn’t handle a simple job like capturing an old man and two women. Tice has been out of commission for three years. Cunningham’s no operative. And Raina Manhardt spends most of her time behind a desk now. Your failure doesn’t relieve you of your obligation to wire me the first half of my payment!”

Finally she had the shoelace. With her teeth and hand, she wrapped it around her pulsating finger and struggled to tie it, hoping to ease the raging hurt.

“What? Because Ghranditti’s people failed, you knew it wouldn’t be easy, so you weren’t going to pay me until yours succeeded?” His words were cold steel: “You’re smarter than that. You don’t want anyone to know you welshed on a deal with me. Here’s what you’re going to do. First, you’ll send people to make a couple of corpses look as if they died in a fight over drugs.” He gave him the motel’s name and address. “It’s Elijah Helprin and Frank Mesa, and you can thank me that they’re no longer trying to turn you into cat food. Second, Cunningham’s with me, so if you want her, you’re going to send that first payment to the account number I gave you, and you’ll do it while I’m standing here talking to you. Otherwise, I’ll let her go.”

The shoelace tourniquet tied, she looked up in time to see a triumphant smile on his face. He was getting what he wanted.

“All right, I’ll check. Hold on.” He lowered the cell, touched buttons, watched the LED, and smiled more widely. He inhaled his cigarette. Then: “It’s there,” he told Litchfield. “Third, I’ve sent the police to arrest Tice and Manhardt. They’re at Ghranditti’s place. . . . I know, but it’ll be more amusing if the police succeed. If they do, you’ll wire me the second half of my funds. Since there’s risk attached to that, tell me where the shipment is, when ownership’s being transferred, and all of the details I need to get in. I’m going to do you the great favor of delivering Cunningham so you can dispose of her as you wish. We don’t want her found dead here, do we?
That’d trigger questions that might lead back to you. A strong suggestion: If Tice gets away from the cops, you can damn well bet that one way or another the bastard will figure out where the shipment is leaving from, and he’ll go there. With Cunningham, you’ve got a hold over Tice. He’s crazy about her. Treats her like his own kid. Jealous, Litchfield?” He chuckled.

She staggered to her feet, judging the distance to her shoulder bag.

“Why will I deliver her? Because I can’t afford to leave details like Jay Tice living. But then, neither can you. I’ll phone just before we arrive. Have a couple of men waiting. I’ll drop her off. She won’t give you much trouble—she’s injured. Once all three of them are on the premises, I want the rest of my money. Agreed?”

She advanced awkwardly. The unrelenting pain was making her dizzy.

He frowned at her, dropped his cigarette, ground it out on the carpet, and lifted his Browning, aiming it at her again.

She paused. As he listened to Litchfield, she pointed to her bloody finger then to her purse. “I may have my little med kit in there. I want antibiotic cream.” And her remaining poisoned darts.

He gave a violent shake of his head.
No.
“Good, Litchfield. I’ve got it. And don’t try to get a look at me when I arrive. That’s worse than welshing. In fact, you have my personal guarantee that none of the top intel merchants will ever do business with you again. Your sources will dry up like autumn leaves.”

Watching her, he snapped his cell closed and crouched over her bag. He unzipped the compartments, then dumped out the contents.

“Hmm. No med kit. Why am I unsurprised? So, what did you really want?” He pushed through the pile. His fingers paused over the paper funnel. “Everything looks ordinary except this.” He looked up quickly, caught the expression on her face. “Ah. So this
is
what you wanted.”

She said a silent prayer that he would stab himself with one of the tips.

But he unfolded the funnel cautiously. When he saw the darts, he peered up at her through slitted eyes. “Bitch.”

“You’re carrying a Browning just like Jay’s. Trying to imitate him, Palmer? Your protégé became your competitor, didn’t he? We both know Jay’s better than you ever were. Probably the best of his generation. Elijah
and Frank knew it, too. Two seasoned ops like them—they not only trusted him, they worshipped him. They took orders from him—not from you.”

He laughed loudly and rolled the darts back into their paper shell and slid it carefully into his sports jacket pocket. He shoved everything else back into her bag. “No, my dear. I carried a Browning first. Jay imitated
me
. Time we left. You’ve got a date with destiny, as the cliché goes. We’ll take your car. I’ve always been fond of Jaguars.”

The hush in Martin Ghranditti’s penthouse seemed charged, like the hot, stifling air before a storm. Jay gave no sign of his unease as he sifted through the papers in the death merchant’s massive desk. Raina was sitting at the office computer, checking Internet history and trying to crack the e-mail password. Her black curls shone like sable in the overhead lights.

“He doesn’t visit many Web sites,” she said. “Mostly real estate. Whatever his password is to his e-mail, it’s not the usual family names. I also tried
money, guns, high-tech
, and a lot of others.” She spun in the chair and gazed at him. “Don’t you think Bobbye Johnson should’ve e-mailed or called by now?”

“I’m worried, too. As for this desk, my verdict is that it’s mostly for show. Ghranditti did almost no work here. There are household bills and orders from caterers and florists, that sort of thing.” He leaned back in the chair and laced his fingers behind his head and yawned.

She paced across the carpet, leery and restless, and picked up Ghranditti’s family photo again. “That bastard. I suppose he’s to be pitied.”

“Probably. I still want to tear out his throat. Personally.”

“Me, too. Why did he do it?”

“Each of those names has ‘Ghranditti’ carefully printed after it. There was no need for that. He did it to put his stamp of ownership on them as if they were pieces of property. Land. Cars. Dish towels. He owns them. He’s paying me back.”

“He is?
Why?
”

Suddenly he felt old. “I’d suspected Marie was having an affair, then I decided I must be wrong. I told myself I was overreacting because I had a beautiful wife. Still, there were afternoons I’d get home early and find the kids with a sitter—or alone. They were too young to be left alone. Marie
had never been like that.” He was silent. “Marie and I grew apart somehow. We both knew the marriage was dead. Then I found you.”

She skinned off her denim jacket, tossed it onto a chair, and sat on the desk, facing him. “You may not know this, but there’s another link between Ghranditti and Marie—he used to sell black-market pharmaceuticals, so it’s likely he was her supplier.”

His jaw clenched. “Makes sense. He could keep her dependent that way.”

“It’s also likely he knew she’d signed up for drug rehab. At the same time, you said Palmer thought he was the trafficker in the DEADAIM operation. So those were two very large bad events for Ghranditti—he’d just lost a fortune, and he was threatened with losing his girlfriend, too, because if she cleaned up, she might want nothing more to do with him. On the other hand, if he wiped you, he’d get revenge, and he could keep your wife. So I’ll bet Ghranditti’s the one who had the bomb planted under your car. When the wet work went bad, it would’ve driven him nuts knowing he’d liquidated her, and he’s been stalking you in his own weird, crazy way ever since. All you have to do is look at that family portrait to know how much he wanted her and hated you. It’s got to be him who blackmailed you into prison.”

Repressing a shudder, Jay inclined his head and studied his hands, remembering the feel of death between them. “It’s logical.” He looked up. “There’s at least five years between his second child and his baby, Kristoph. That’s a big gap for a man who plans everything, and it tells me that if he’d known about us earlier, he would’ve blackmailed me earlier—and had the baby then. His Kristoph must be about two years old now. That means he was conceived a few months after I was arrested—after someone told Ghranditti about us.”

Raina leaned forward. “Palmer was one of the very few who knew about us. As Moses, he told Ghranditti. Then he blackmailed you into prison.”

He could hardly feel his heart beat. He had modeled himself after Palmer—Palmer’s sharp intelligence, his wise habits, his common sense.
They had decades of trust between them. When he was young, he had often wished Palmer were his father. It was unthinkable the older man would betray him—or anyone.

He sighed heavily and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he admitted the truth: “As soon as we found out Ghranditti was handling the Majlis shipment, Palmer would’ve been nervous as an elephant with a bellyache that if we captured Ghranditti, Ghranditti would let something slip, and eventually I’d have to realize he was Moses.”

“That means Palmer was the rat inside DEADAIM, too.”

His jaw flexed angrily. “Yes, he has to be Moses. He hadn’t had a big operational success in several years, so not only did he look like a hero for thinking up the idea of cutting his gold medallion into pieces, it appeared he’d enabled us to keep going so we could pull off the triumph Langley wanted.”

“The pig betrayed both sides to get what
he
wanted—renewed prestige and the job of ADDO.”