After she’d left, Ed nodded at Catherine. “Thanks. Think I needed that perspective.” For the first time today he felt his shoulder muscles start to relax.
TWENTY-FIVE
Sheridan could hear the boars grunting and squealing before he stopped his car at the end of the forest-lined track, in front of the remote farmstead. It was eight P.M., and the CIA officer knew it was the exact time the fifteen swine got their evening feed. He’d witnessed it before, and it was a terrifying and frenzied display of gluttonous savagery. Because their owners had crossbred male boars with domestic pigs, the boars were twice the size of their wild cousins, had large tusks, coarse hair that was painful to touch, and the strength and ferocity to shred a man to pieces in minutes. As Sheridan stepped out of his car into the sodden night air, the animal screams began to sound like hysterical pagans witnessing a sacrifice.
The sounds revolted him.
Not least because the boars’ favorite food was flesh.
The officer shivered, turned on his flashlight, and walked on, trying not to get his expensive shoes and suit trousers muddy. The complex was in West Virginia, approximately one hundred miles west of Langley, in forested, sparsely populated countryside; it had five main buildings and a cluster of outbuildings. As he headed toward the farmhouse, he passed the barn and could smell the boars’ stench, a combination of musk, piss, and shit; a brutish odor that oozed from three-hundred-pound beasts whose sole joy was to indulge in an orgy of bacchanalian feasting.
The houses in the town of Springfield, Maine, were all spread far apart from each other; between them, trees ensured that residents had privacy from their neighbors.
Some of the houses had garages where owners’ vehicles could be locked away, but others didn’t. Will walked from one property to the next, checking the driver’s seats of the cars and their distance from the brake and accelerator pedals, and glancing around to ensure none of the houses’ lights came on because someone had spotted him.
At the seventh house, he found a vehicle with a driver’s seat that looked to be in the position that Will would put it in if he were driving it. He faced the house, could see no signs of an alarm system, so ran around the side of the house and entered the backyard. Placing his head against the back door, he listened for a moment and heard nothing save the rain. He turned the handle — unsurprisingly, it was locked — and withdrew his lockpick set.
One minute later, he was in the kitchen. It was silent. He stayed still for ten seconds, listening for any signs that people were awake and allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
On either side of him were two large rooms. He turned his flashlight on and quickly checked both; they were empty.
At the base of the stairs, he turned off the flashlight and stood still, listening again for any indication that an occupant had heard him and was getting out of bed to grab his shotgun. He slowly moved up the stairs in total darkness while praying the floorboards underneath were not creaky.
On the second floor, there were four rooms that had open doors. He moved to the nearest doorway, crouched down beside it, and glanced inside. It was a study, and no one was in it. He repeated the same drill in the next two rooms. Neither was occupied: one was a cluttered storage room, the other a bathroom. He crouched beside the last door. It had to be the bedroom.
Breathing deeply, he stuck his head into the room.
Inside were a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a bed that was empty.
The owner was not at home.
Will opened the wardrobe. Though the position of the car seat suggested its driver was approximately the same height as Will, there was every possibility that its owner was fat or thin. But after checking the length and waist size of a pair of jeans, Will was relieved to see that they were a good fit. Together with the pants, he grabbed a shirt, sweater, and underwear from the drawers. He’d need a coat as well, and he’d spotted four of them hanging on a rack on the first floor.
He made ready to leave, but paused by the bathroom.
It looked so enticing.
Should he?
He entered the windowless room, shut the door, and stripped out of his clothes.
After filling the sink with hot water, he quickly sponge-washed his body and hair, brushed his teeth with a spare toothbrush, got dressed in his new clothes, grabbed his old ones, went downstairs, and turned the flashlight back on. He chose a winter jacket that looked warm and sturdy but nothing like the kind of thing a man would wear if he’d received specialist military training and was on the run, and moved back into the kitchen. Beside the trash can was a roll of plastic bags. After removing his guns and all other items from his dirty jacket and placing them in his new coat, he chucked all his clothes in the bag. He’d dispose of it somewhere a few miles away. Then he opened the refrigerator and grabbed some food.
He reckoned the clothes he’d stolen and the guilt of eating the man’s food called for two hundred dollars’ compensation. He withdrew three hundred and left the cash on the table.
As he walked fast away from the house and the town, he felt rejuvenated. Just as important, he looked like an ordinary American civilian and not like the man who’d been seen in Nova Scotia and at the New Brunswick — Maine International Avenue crossing.
He was now confident that he could blend in and get to D.C. within a couple of days by train, bus, or other public transportation.
Trouble was, he was also aware that he could be heading toward his downfall.
Being in the presence of the two men always made Sheridan feel uneasy. Augustus and Elijah were fifty-two-year-old twins and looked nearly identical, with straight shoulder-length black hair, bodies that were diminutive yet very strong, circular spectacles, galoshes, and all-in-one overalls that were covered in pig meal and crap. Though they looked a bit odd, Sheridan supposed they would look harmless enough to anyone else who could see them making mugs of coffee in their kitchen.
But most people didn’t know what Sheridan knew — that they were former members of the CIA’s Special Activities Division, where they’d specialized in psychological warfare, physical and mental experimentation on foreign prisoners, torture, and execution. They’d honed their skills during every covert and overt war that the States had been involved in during their service. Few people in the Agency had known about their existence, and those who did rarely liked to talk about their role. They were an unpalatable last resort, and were tolerated by CIA senior management in the same way that psychopaths are tolerated in the ranks of an army when every able-bodied man is needed to stave off a country’s obliteration. But that had ended nine years before, when the twins went too far on a mission in Afghanistan by reenacting the medieval English punishment of hanging a person to near death before emasculating, disemboweling, beheading, and chopping the person into four pieces. It was done in front of a suspected terrorist who they wanted to confess to a roadside bomb attack against U.S. soldiers. Ordinarily, the hanging, drawing, and quartering might have been hushed up by those members of the Agency who knew about the twins and their work.
But the victim was the eight-year-old son of the alleged terrorist.
They’d gone way too far. Even by the standards of Agency men who had no qualms about sticking their hands in blood and guts to get secrets so that they could protect the American way of life.
Sheridan had stepped in to save their necks, arguing that Agency interests would not be served by making what had happened public, and also suggesting that the twins could still be of use to the CIA, albeit completely off the books. The Agency agreed that the twins could return to the States and live off their pensions. It also said that the twins could not be used again, on or off the books. That hadn’t surprised Sheridan, because the Agency says stuff like that a lot, even when it doesn’t mean what it says. In situations like that, what the Agency doesn’t say is more important, and in this case it didn’t say that Sheridan wasn’t allowed to meet the twins again. So for nine years Sheridan had been the twins’ sole point of contact with the Agency, and he’d drawn upon their skills to do the really nasty stuff that nobody wanted to know about. In particular, anyone on U.S. soil whom the Agency didn’t like could be made to vanish when Sheridan involved Augustus and Elijah.