She parked and took another look around before mounting the steps to her front door. Turning the lock, she opened the door and, drawing her Lady Hawk from its thigh holster, stepped inside. Closing the door softly behind her, she double-locked it, then stood for some time with her back against it, listening to the house breathe. One by one she identified the homey sounds of the hot-water circulator, the refrigerator condenser, the heating fan. Then she sniffed the air to see if there was the trace of an odor that didn‘t belong to her or her things.
Satisfied at last, she flipped the switch and the entryway and hallway were flooded with a warm, yellowish light. She let out the long breath she‘d been unconsciously holding in. Moving silently through the house, she checked every room, every closet on the ground floor; she made sure the door to the basement was securely locked. Then she ascended the stairs. Halfway up, she heard a noise and froze in midstep, her heart hammering in her breast. It came again, and she identified it as a branch scratching at the rear wall, where a narrow alley ran behind the row of town houses.
Resuming her climb, she took the staircase step by step, counting down from the top to make certain she bypassed the one tread that creaked. At the top of the stairs, something happened. The hot-water circulator cycled off, and the resulting silence seemed to her eerie and ominous. Then, like an old friend, it returned, reassuring her.
As she had on the ground floor, she moved from room to room, turning on lights, checking behind furniture, even, she thought, idiotically, under her bed. There was nothing and no one. The window to the left of her bed was unlatched, and she slid the semicircular tab home.
Her Black River laptop was on the back shelf of her closet, under a line of shoe boxes. Picking her way across the room, she turned the doorknob, pulled the door open, and stepped in, leading with her weapon. She swept one hand across her hanging clothes, dresses, suits, skirts, and jackets all familiar to her, but which had now taken on a sinister aspect as curtains behind which someone could hide.
No one jumped out at her, causing her to expel a small laugh of relief. Her gaze moved upward to the line of shoe boxes on the back shelf above her hanging clothes, and there was the laptop just as she‘d left it. She was reaching up to grab it when she heard the sharp crackle of breaking window glass and the dull thud as someone landed on the carpet. She whirled, stepped forward, only to have the closet door slam shut in her face.
Her hand went to the doorknob and pushed, but something was keeping the door shut, even when she put her shoulder to it. Stepping back, she fired off four shots at the knob. The sharp scent of cordite tickled her nose, and her ears rang with noise. She pushed the door again. It was still firmly shut, but now she had other things to think about. The light filtering in from the tiny gap between door and frame was systematically vanishing. Someone was taping up the gap.
And then, down at floor level, the slightly wider gap began to go dark, except for a space that was soon filled by the open end of the crevice attachment of her vacuum cleaner. A moment later a portable generator coughed to life and, with a mounting horror, Moira sensed the oxygen in the closet being sucked out. Carbon monoxide was being pumped in through her own vacuum cleaner attachment.
When Peter Marks found the Metro police report on Moira Trevor he was dumbfounded. He‘d just returned from the White House, where he‘d had a tenminute evening interview with the president regarding the vacancy at the top of CI. He knew he wasn‘t the only candidate, but no one else at CI was talking. Still, he assumed the other six heads of the CI directorates were in line for similar interviews, if they hadn‘t already answered the president‘s summons. Of them all, he figured Dick Symes, the chief of the Intelligence Directorate, who was the interim DCI, would get the post. Symes was older, with more experience than Peter himself, who had only recently risen to the hallowed level of chief of operations under Veronica Hart‘s tragically short tenure as DCI. She hadn‘t even had time to vet candidates for deputy director, and now she never would. On the other hand, unlike Symes, he‘d been handpicked and trained by the Old Man himself, and he knew the reverence in which the president held the longtime DCI.
Peter was not certain he wanted the Big Chair, anyway, simply because it would take him another giant step away from the field, which was his first love. “No matter how high you climb,” the Old Man had told him, “you never outgrow your first love. You simply learn to live without it.”
On the other hand, maybe having doubts about occupying the Big Chair was a way of insulating himself from disappointment in the event he wasn‘t chosen to succeed Hart. Doubtless that was why he buried himself in the Moira Trevor files the moment he sat down at his desk. The Metro police report, almost perfunctorily brief, wasn‘t part of the stack of printouts and electronic data his staff had amassed for him; he‘d had to go looking for it himself. Not that he was looking for a police report per se, but having exhausted the so-called leads overflowing his in-box, he had decided to go on a fishing expedition, just as he‘d learned to do when he was a rookie field agent.
“Never rely on intel other people feed you unless you absolutely can’t get it yourself,” the Old Man had lectured when he‘d first brought Marks into the fold. “And never, ever rely on other people’s intel when your life is on the line.” Excellent advice, which Marks had never forgotten. And now, behold, the Metro police report from yesterday describing a two-car crash in which a man named Jay Weston, a former employee of Hobart Industries and current employee of Heartland Risk Management, was killed and Moira Trevor, founder and president of Heartland, was injured. Two oddities: First, Weston hadn‘t died from injuries sustained in the crash; he‘d been shot to death. Second, Ms. Trevor had claimed- loudly and repeatedly, as the first-on-the-scene officer wrote-that a uniformed motorcycle cop had fired the shot through the driver‘s-side front window into Mr. Weston‘s head. Basic forensic evidence at the scene confirmed Ms. Trevor‘s story, at least as far as the shot was concerned. As for the motorcycle cop, the report went on to say that no such department individual was even in the vicinity anywhere near the time of the shooting.
When Marks came to the end of the report, there was an even more baffling oddity. There had been no follow-up, no reinterview of Ms. Trevor, no investigation into Mr. Weston‘s recent whereabouts that day or into his background in general. Apart from this brief report, it was as if the incident had never occurred.
Marks picked up the phone and called the appropriate Metro precinct, but when he asked for the author of the report, he was told the officer, as well as his partner, had been — reassigned. No further information was available. He asked for Lieutenant McConnell, their immediate superior, but McConnell refused to tell Marks where they had gone or what had happened to them, either, and no amount of threats could open him up.
— My orders come straight from the commissioner himself, McConnell said with no rancor, only weariness in his voice. -That‘s all I know, pal. I only work here. You got a beef, it‘s with him.
For a minute everything went black, then powerful hands gripped Arkadin beneath the armpits and hauled him roughly off the Muscovite. When he blindly rushed back toward his antagonist he received a kick to his rib cage that caused him to fall short, to wind up on his back gasping for air.