He still waited.
She looked at him. Her eyes glittered in the moonlight and her voice was sure, low, coming from the back of her throat and from the pit of her belly. “Let’s kill him, Dev. Henry McGee. I want to kill him. You can kill him and I can kill him and then we’re really bound. We’ll be together, our hands will be dipped into the same pool of blood. Our bond.”
He saw it, saw it in her voice, in her eyes in the moonlight. He saw everything in that moment.
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and squeezed his hand.
“We’ll kill him.”
29
Trevor Armstrong trembled. He had been trembling all night. The police interrogation had made him tremble. The cold man from the government who was probably with SAS had made him tremble. They had penetrated him too roughly. They had taken him apart and left the pieces on a table.
A wooden table in the cellar with an empty vial that smelled of nothing.
“They died but we can’t tell how or why. Not yet. Just dead,” the government secret agent had said to him. He had a thin, pale face and pale eyes and there might not have been any blood beneath his skin. “The point is — who wanted to kill them? Or did whoever it was want to kill you?”
It was the last thought that frightened him finally. He had expected a strike at the airline, not at himself. Were they insane? What would it profit them if he died? And then he thought of Carl Greengold.
Carl Greengold wanted the airline and Trevor Armstrong was all for letting it happen. Not in so many words, but there it was. Carl Greengold specialized in the Wall Street business of taking companies over and then taking them apart and dispensing the pieces like bits of meat to various other dogs of business war.
How much was Euro-American Airlines worth exactly? There were a certain number of planes, repair shops, real estate, a reservation system, slots in the form of gates owned at key airports in the world. London was key, so was New York. What was the business worth? Trevor Armstrong had figured it out at almost the same time Carl Greengold in New York figured it out: The company was worth more than it cost, in the form of price of shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Be quick in a buyout of the airline and the share prices would still rise but there would still be so much profit left over in taking the airline apart.
But before you tear an airline apart, you milk it. You crush the unions, strip services, skip amenities, fake maintenance, and squeeze all the intangibles out of it. When you’ve made your money and more, then you make even more by tearing the airline apart.
That’s as far as Trevor had gone. He owned forty-one million dollars’ worth of stock in EAA and he had borrowed nearly all of the money to buy the shares. He owed back nineteen million. Twenty-two million profit. On paper. At the moment. For the time being.
He poured a glass of Glenlivet and drank it neat. He was sitting in the parlor of his home, which was now guarded by police. The ambulances were gone. The dead had been taken away to the place where the dead were taken. His dog had been personally buried by his secretary, Jameson, in the garden behind the house. Four dead. Five, counting the dog.
“Have you had any threats, Mr. Armstrong?”
He had shaken his head over and over. He had called Carl Greengold and then canceled the call when he thought about it — what could he tell Carl Greengold that wouldn’t drive down the price of EAA in the morning in New York? Terror against an airline, a shaky sort of thing but shaky things were always terrifying the stock market. Especially as Carl Greengold was waiting to buy up the final lots he needed to take the thing over. Wouldn’t Carl Greengold like the price of the shares to drop further, even if he lost a little change on the deal? After all, the net worth of the airline was still there. Still so much money. So many planes and jobs and slots to fill.
The fire roared in the fireplace. He could hear the policemen outside his home. They exchanged muffled words with each other, they talked on squawky radios. It was surrealistic.
He thought of his little dog. He would fire his security chief, Dennison, in the morning. No. He couldn’t do that. He had to lie low.
Everyone was pledged to keeping this quiet. The secret agent from the British government emphasized this. No one wanted the general public to know that four people had been mysteriously killed in a house in Mayfair by methods not known to the police. Or the government. They suspected some sort of nerve gas but… where the hell did terrorists lay their hands on nerve gas? Bombs were so much cheaper and more plentiful. The secret agent didn’t say all these things to Trevor, just enough to make Trevor see there was no point in arousing the general public.
Trevor, with trembling hand, again poured whiskey into a glass. He was dealing with a crazy man, he thought. Or he was dealing with Carl Greengold.
He saw it then. Carl Greengold. “Ruthless” was a term overused on the Street but Carl Greengold had once killed a man in his offices in New York, a crazed and desperate man who had lost in a Carl Greengold deal, a fucking nobody and it had been called justifiable homicide before the corpse was cold. But still…
Carl Greengold, forty-four years old, had killed a man. That was taking a life, not taking a risk or a contract or taking over a company. Dead was dead.
If it was Carl, then why send a man like that ridiculous Cassidy fellow who pretended to be the FBI to give him a warning?
Trevor saw the logic of his question. He got up from his leather wingback chair and crossed to the mantel and stared into the fire. Bits of oak from a tree that had reached its two hundredth year before being chopped down were burning. Four people had died in his house. He felt sick, sick from whiskey and from dread.
After the police had cleared the house, he had snorted a line of cocaine through a plastic straw in the bathroom under the stairs and then thrown the straw into the fire. The police had been all through the house but they had not discovered the cocaine. Just as well, another fine mess of troubles. The cocaine alerted him to every nuance of the situation but in no way did it make him happy. The whiskey made him dull at the edges and that made him happy now, to have his thought processes slowed.
Dead. People were dead. Servants, but still people.
“Mr. Armstrong.”
He turned too abruptly at the sound of the voice. Dennison, chief of security, his face as white as chalk, even in the fiery shadows of this room.
“What do you want?”
“I talked to Jameson when he was burying the dog. I’m sorry about the dog, sir.”
“So am I.”
“Sir, Jameson said you had a visitor to your office four days ago. An FBI man.”
Trevor wished his hand would stop trembling. He wanted to cut it off because it betrayed him.
“What about it?”
“He said… the man acted in a peculiar manner and demanded an off-the-record conference with you. You didn’t tell me, sir.”
“There was nothing to tell you.”
“What did he say to you, sir?”
Silence. The fire crackled. The room was alive with dancing ghosts made by shadows and flickering lights.
“Sir?”
“I don’t think it concerns you, Dennison.”
“If it’s related to the security of the airline, sir…”
Trevor Armstrong realized he would have to lie to this thick-necked Englishman who was his employee. It grated on him.
“Dennison.”
“Sir?”
“What I am about to tell you is in the strictest confidence. I’ll relay it to you because Jameson broke a rule about confidentiality and you deserve to be put in the picture. Now.”
Trevor cleared his throat.
Dennison waited like a policeman, back on his heels, his hands folded across his lower belly. Respectful and silent and waiting for an answer.