The kitchen looked normal, aside from a work surface that had nineteen large bottles of bleach, an excessive number of meat cleavers hanging from hooks in the ceiling, and clothes racks that were standing next to radiators and had animal skins draped over them.
“What you got for us?” Augustus handed Sheridan a mug of coffee and lit a cigarette that was wrapped in paper as black as his long hair.
Sheridan wondered whether he should drink the coffee, because consuming anything in this place seemed unnatural. “Right now, I haven’t got anything for you. Very shortly, though, I may, and I need you to be ready when that happens.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man.”
Elijah interlocked his fingers, outstretched his sinewy arms, and cracked his knuckles. “Age, nationality, and name?”
Sheridan answered the questions.
“The guy who’s been all over the news?”
“Yes. You got a problem with that?”
“Nope. How much does he weigh?”
Sheridan frowned. “What?”
“Simple question.”
“I haven’t had the opportunity to put him on a scale.”
“You know his height and build?”
Sheridan shrugged. “Over six foot. He’s big. But athletic. Doubt he’s got much fat on him.”
Elijah glanced at his brother. “Should we assume two-ten to two-forty pounds?”
Augustus nodded. “I’m thinking so, and that means at least three days in the chest.”
“I’d say four and a half to be on the safe side.”
Sheridan had no idea what they were talking about. “The chest?”
Augustus inhaled deep on his cigarette. “Chest freezer.”
Elijah added four spoons of sugar to his coffee and slowly stirred the drink. “Few months back, me and Augustus conducted a forensic analysis of the site of our last kill. We thought our methods were good enough to cover our tracks, but we were wrong and found traces of the target’s DNA. Not much, but enough to get us the needle. So, we’ve further refined things.”
Augustus said, “Day before it happens, we turn up the empty chest freezer to maximum cold.”
Elijah added, “When it’s at its lowest temperature, we sedate Cochrane.”
“And put him in a see-through bag.”
“Body length.”
“Sealed over the head.”
“Then we strangle him.”
“No blood.”
“Dump him in the freezer.”
“For four and a half days.”
“Body’s going to be rock solid after that.”
“Easy to put through the wood chipper.”
“Then easy to feed to the boars.”
Sheridan smiled. “All trace of Will Cochrane and his DNA disappeared.” He stood, checked his watch, and decided he could be back in D.C. in time to get showered and changed before going to the FBI ops room for Marsha Gage’s briefing to her newly assembled task force. “What’s your price?”
The twins answered in unison. “Fifty thousand.”
It was money that would come out of the Agency slush fund under Sheridan’s control.
The CIA officer nodded. “You’ll get it once your pigs have turned Cochrane into shit.”
TWENTY-SIX
Ellie Hallowes got out of her hotel room bed and stared at the cell phone.
Goodness knows how many times per day she’d looked at the cell’s screen, desperate to hear it ring or receive an SMS, her mind crying out for Will Cochrane to make contact. But every time she glanced at the blank screen it further reinforced her belief that Will had either decided to turn back and flee, or died in the wilderness somewhere in Europe.
That would mean she’d never see him again. She didn’t like that prospect one bit.
And it would mean she would either have to stay quiet about her suspicions that Antaeus knew about Ferryman, or she would have to tell someone else. But who? She recalled what Will had said to her in Norway.
Be very careful. Trust no one.
Maybe she could speak to someone outside the U.S. intelligence community. Perhaps the attorney general or someone like that. She’d seen it happen in the movies, but had never been told how it worked in real life. No instructors on her Agency training course had said to her, “Look, if one of us is a traitor and you can’t trust anyone, then this is what you need to do.”
And even if she did speak to someone who was wholly independent, she decided that nothing would come of it save her being severely punished for meddling in affairs she wasn’t cleared to know about. The president himself had signed some of the documents she’d read in the Ferryman files. So had Senator Jellicoe, Charles Sheridan, and Ed Parker.
Powerful people.
All men.
With huge vested interests in Project Ferryman because it would give them fame and glory when it served up Cobalt’s head.
She wondered if Helen Coombs had established that Ellie had deliberately gotten her drunk so she could temporarily steal her identity. If she had, no doubt Helen would report it immediately to the Agency, and Ellie would be grabbed by CIA heavies and locked in a cell. So much depended upon Will getting into the States to meet with Ellie. And it had to happen fast, or everything she’d done and hopefully Will had done would be a waste of time.
She changed out of her nightgown into a bathrobe, started running a shower, and switched on the TV. After flicking through the channels, she settled on a news network’s story about a bomb attack in Kabul that had left twenty-two dead and three times that number mutilated. A security analyst was saying that the bomb used was sophisticated, containing military-grade high explosive. The type of bomb, Ellie mused, that would be expensive to buy and would be used by terrorists with access to a stack of cash — money that in all probability came from Cobalt.
The anchor cut short the analyst and announced the show was going live to Washington, D.C., where there was breaking news.
Ellie gasped as she saw a grainy black-and-white close-up shot of a bearded Will Cochrane’s face. At the base of the screen were his name and a text feed that stated, WANTED FUGITIVE IS IN UNITED STATES. ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DO NOT APPROACH. IF SEEN, CONTACT FBI OR POLICE.
Ellie’s heart was pounding, her body tingling with adrenaline.
The show cut live to a female reporter who was close to the FBI’s headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Standing next to the reporter was a man Ellie didn’t know. He was wearing a suit, held an umbrella over his head, and looked pissed to be standing out in the rain and darkness so early in the morning.
The reporter announced, “I’m with a spokesperson for the FBI. Sir, we understand from Senator Colby Jellicoe’s televised appearance at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Cochrane is a member of Great Britain’s MI6 intelligence service.”
The man nodded. “That’s correct.”
“So can you tell us why Cochrane’s on the run?”
“Something he did in Norway while operating on a joint CIA-MI6 mission. But I’m not privy to the details.”
“You’ve confirmed Will Cochrane’s been sighted at the Canadian border crossing into Maine. Do you have any other confirmed sightings of him?