That first night, Biddle promised her a hundred thousand pounds if she would do a simple job for him and then swear herself to secrecy. He was associated with the U.S. Government, he told her, and she would be killed if she ever disclosed a single word. She knew he was lying, of course, because she already knew he was working with Abu Sayeed. Either way, she didn’t give a damn.
After that, she met with Biddle several more times to discuss her assignment. Their encounters were always in London, in hotel rooms rented for that purpose. From the beginning Biddle’s evolution was obvious but steady. He started out cold and impersonal, barely making eye contact, but by their third meeting, as though some scab of rectitude had been scraped away, he stared at her with almost desperate hunger.
By their fourth meeting, Biddle’s distraction was almost painful. Finally, Anneliës stood and began to remove her blouse. With a cry that seemed part guilt and part release of his frantic desire, Biddle reached for her.
That first time, he trembled like an adolescent and ejaculated in seconds. Afterwards, he sat with his back to her on the edge of the bed, sobbing and begging her forgiveness. She ran her fingers through his hair and told him how good it had been. When he left, he gave her ten thousand pounds.
From then on, they met at least every two weeks. Each time, Biddle arrived with an aura of desperate need, but after they had sex he would kneel beside the bed and pray. He made her sit against the headboard, her hands folded, eyes closed, and head bowed until he said, “Amen.” In his prayers he called her names, like “filthy whore” and “diseased cunt,” but when he finished he would hold her and stroke her hair. It was incredibly strange, but she endured it because she also sensed opportunity.
Now, with Biddle’s plastic case in hand, she went back to the bedroom, removed the cordless phone from its base, took it into the kitchen, and turned on the overhead light. She pulled the back off the phone then used a pair of tweezers to remove a small chip from its foam bed. She attached it to the phone’s wiring as she had been instructed, then replaced the back. With the phone once again on its stand in the bedroom, she searched for Brent’s second phone, which she found in the living room on the floor between a packing box and the window.
She took it to the kitchen, installed the second chip, and was about to put it back together when she heard a noise. She looked up to see Brent, naked, weaving, holding the doorjamb for support.
“What are you doing?” he croaked.
Her heart pounded, but she smiled and cocked her head. “Clumsy me,” she said sheepishly, holding up the backless phone and covering the small plastic case with her arm. “I dropped your phone.”
He blinked, fighting the drug. “Are you leaving? I know I had too much to drink. I’ve never been unable to… please don’t go yet.”
“I’m not leaving,” she said, standing up and coming over to put her arms around him. “I thought of something I have to do and was going to leave a reminder on my answering machine.”
He nodded. “Okay,” he rasped.
“Go back to bed.”
He turned and stumbled down the hall, and she sighed in relief. When she checked a moment later he was face down on the mattress, snoring loudly. Back in the kitchen, she finished putting the phone together, turned it on, and dialed the number of the FBI’s Manhattan office from memory.
After two rings a man answered. She recognized the voice.
“It’s working,” he said. “Get out of there.”
Anneliës turned off the phone then found a piece of paper and wrote Brent a note saying she’d had a wonderful time and promised to call soon. She pulled on her dress and carried her shoes as she let herself out.
SIXTEEN
NEW YORK, JUNE 26
THE MOMENT THE ALARM WENT off Brent felt the sharp stabs of sunlight through his eyelids and his head starting to pound. He reached out and whacked the clock radio then lay perfectly still, afraid he’d be sick if he moved another inch. A few glasses of wine—how was it possible to feel this bad?
He recalled Simone and winced. Horny and impossibly gorgeous—at least that’s what he remembered—only he’d been so wasted that he wondered what she really looked like. He let his hand creep across, found the bed empty, the sheets cold.
He cracked one eye, enduring the pain, viewing the wreckage of his clothes where he’d tossed them the night before. “Simone?” he croaked. There was no answer. After another second he stood and stumbled into the bathroom. He peed, brushed his teeth, and then managed to hold down several glasses of cold water he drew from the tap.
Back in the living room, he looked around at his jumbled moving boxes and wondered if it had been a fantasy. Had a beautiful woman really walked out of his kitchen bare-ass naked? Then he remembered what happened next—absolutely nothing because he had passed out. It seemed like a bad joke, he thought as he spotted the scrap of paper atop the clutter on his dining table. “Thanks for a wonderful evening. I’ll call you. Love, Simone.” No phone number. No kidding! Like he’d ever hear from her again. If he didn’t feel so bad he might have laughed.
He stood there a moment until he remembered something else—DeLeyon, his Little Brother! Today was their monthly game of hoops! He put his hands to his head. He’d never survive. He had the shakes, the cold sweats. He’d have a heart attack if he tried to dribble a basketball.
He gave up thinking about the pain because he couldn’t break a promise to DeLeyon. He staggered back into the bedroom, and five minutes later, wearing shorts and a tee shirt and carrying a fresh shirt in a canvas bag, he caught a taxi to the West Side. He climbed out at Riverside and 125th Street and stumbled down through the narrow band of Riverside Park to a concrete basketball court shaded by tall sycamores and oaks and bordered by the West Side Highway. A game was in progress on one end of the court, while at the other end, a huge African American kid in a sleeveless tee shirt stood with a basketball held loosely against his hip and an impatient look on his face.
“Yo, y’all late!” he called when he caught sight of Brent.
“Rough night,” Brent mumbled.
DeLeyon screwed up his face. “You wish!” he said, starting to dribble the ball. “Prob’ly went to a movie by yo’seff and overslept.” He cut loose with a jump shot and swished the chains that hung in place of a net. He was sixteen, beginning to grow into his size, his arms filling out with ropes of dark muscle, his bony little kid face taking on a sculpted maturity that was still full of youth but also a soulful depth.
The Big Brother thing had been Harry’s idea. He’d said it was more for Brent than his Little Brother, that it might keep him from becoming too much of an egotistical Wall Street asshole, at least slow the process a little. For almost five years Brent had flown down once a month from Boston and headed to the Upper West Side to meet DeLeyon, who had grown from a gangly kid to his current six-five. DeLeyon had miraculously managed to survive his boyhood on the Harlem streets, even though some of his posse hadn’t. His life had been hard enough to make bad choices awfully tempting, but most times he’d managed to make good ones. He slept at his grandmother’s some nights, other nights at his mother’s, and sometimes even at his father’s—depending on where it was safe or who was sober.
No matter what else was going on in his life, Brent always showed up because these once-a-month meetings were pretty much the one constant in DeLeyon’s life. Regardless of his own efforts, he gave the kid all the credit for staying on track. In addition to being a superb athlete, DeLeyon had excellent grades and the brains to go Ivy. Brent already had the coaches from Harvard, Yale, and Brown looking.