Alan Pauling was dead and wedged up against the door.
“She must have shot him and used him as a kind of door wedge,” Kim said.
Vincent nodded his head thoughtfully. “Why can’t I find a woman like that?”
In the tense silence of the Oval Office, President Kimble waited anxiously for the telephone to ring. He was almost totally sure that Kiefel would call off the murder of Grant if it meant saving his own life.
Almost.
Now, he watched as the young woman brought the coffee into the room. Her name was Veronika Fischer, but it had become Veronica Fisher when Kiefel had arranged for her to apply for the job six months ago.
“Just put it down there,” Kimble said without a smile. A lot was riding on the next few minutes. If Kiefel didn’t comply he knew he would have to give the order to kill him.
Veronika gently placed the coffee on the small table either side of the couches in the center of the room. “Would you like me to pour the cream and sugar?” she asked in a faultless Maine accent. Her beautiful smile sealed the deal.
“Yes… thanks — one sugar only please.”
The former spy and mercenary gently poured the cream into one of the cups and filled the rest of the cup with hot, fresh coffee until it was almost at the brim. Then, with equally placid movements she spooned one rounded teaspoon of sugar into the warm drink and smoothly stirred until the grains had all dissolved and the coffee was ready for the President.
He watched her as she picked up the cup by the rim of the fine china saucer and stepped slowly over to him. She gave him another one of those smiles. He could get used to those, he thought.
Kimble continued to stare at the phone as she gently placed the cup and saucer on his desk. He barely noticed when she broke protocol and moved around behind him to return to the tray in the corner of the room.
He was about to ask what she was doing when she made things a little clearer by drawing her leather belt off her waist and slipping it around his neck, pulling it as tight as she could.
“Mit freundlicher Empfehlung von Herr Kiefel,“ she said with cold hatred.
Kimble spoke not a word of German, but he knew from the last word what was happening and he knew why — his attempt to blackmail Kiefel had gone badly wrong.
He kicked out against the heavy desk and reached up with his hands, but she was pulling the belt so tight he couldn’t even get his fingers beneath it to pull it away from his neck. It bit into the flesh on his throat and pushed down hard on his windpipe.
He tried to call out, but the constriction just wouldn’t allow it, and now he felt the blood pooling in his head, making him dizzy.
“Margot!” he croaked as the belt crushed down on his windpipe. “Margot, get help!”
With a final burst of energy he managed to stagger up from the chair and drag the woman halfway across the room, where he spun around and fell backwards. They both fell down, the woman first. Her back smashed into the coffee tray and the shattered crockery pushed into her back. She cried out, but never let go off the belt.
Kimble turned again, driven by the base instinct to survive and using his heavier weight to gain some superiority against the woman, but it was too little too late. They tripped back over and this time went forward with Kimble’s face smashing into the small coffee table. It collapsed under the weight of the two of them, its daintily carved mahogany legs buckling outwards and snapping into splinters.
“Margot! Call the Secret Service..!”
They rolled twice more, and Kimble was able to look under the couch through the open door leading to Margot’s office. He strained as he stared out into his executive secretary’s room and realized all hope was gone when he saw Margot’s dead body on the floor. A look of abject terror was frozen on her face by the nascent rigor mortis, and a telephone cord was still digging deep into the soft skin of her throat.
Now, he could feel the weight of the woman as she tightened the slim leather belt around his neck, her knees pushing into the small of his back and stopping him from moving. The blood rushed into his head as he strained for the final breath he would ever take, and then his world began to fade.
His last sounds were that of the woman whispering something in German… “Sie werden als Verräter sterben…”
Her words were drowned out by the sound of his own tortured breathing, and then the room began to go dark. At first, his cortisol-flooded brain told him the lights were fading, but then he realized with a last gasp of horror that he was losing consciousness.
His last sight was that of the Presidential Seal on the rug, now seen up-close with his face pushed into the carpet weave.
An ignominious way to die, he thought, and then it was over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Hawke and Scarlet used the cover of night and the shadows caused by the beams supporting the radar arch above the helipad to move unnoticed toward Jakob. He was fitting the canister to a manned helicopter drone, and the Englishman moved silently forward and raised his silenced weapon, ready to shoot him.
Then a car backfired on the West Side Highway. Hawke cursed — another curfew breaker, or looters maybe.
Jakob spun around instinctively and saw Hawke and Scarlet in the shadows just a few yards from him. In a second the German bodybuilder leaped into the helicopter and raised the collective, slowly lifting it into the air.
Hawke and Scarlet fired at the chopper drone but realized with horror that there was a chain gun fitted to the front of it. They dived for cover behind a lifeboat when Jakob opened fire on them, holding the manned drone in a steady hover about fifty feet above the yacht. The downdraft from the blades lifted water from the pool and sprayed it all over them as the heavy duty rounds from the chain gun drilled into the deck, tearing up the polished teak and shredding the fiber-glass sides of the pool.
Inside the drone, Jakob was laughing hysterically.
“We have to stop him!” Hawke yelled. “The canister is attached to the bottom of the chopper. They’re obviously planning on flying through Manhattan and releasing it into the atmosphere there.”
“What do you propose?” Scarlet shouted over the sound of the rotors and chain gun. “Using your martial arts skills to karate chop the bullets away?”
“No… Actually I want to use you as bait…”
“You’re so romantic, Joe — I almost wish I never had to set eyes on you again.”
“But I know you’d miss me,” he said.
“Only if I sneezed when I pull the trigger.”
Hawke gave her a look, and then without another word, Scarlet leaped up from their cover behind the lifeboat and sprinted toward the front of the yacht. Jakob immediately turned to fire on her, giving Hawke the chance he was looking for. He ran forward and gripped the starboard skid of the drone with both hands, as if he were about to do a chin-up exercise, and then pulled himself up until his body was hanging over it.
Scarlet disappeared inside the yacht, and Jakob gave up the chase. He turned the drone toward the Manhattan skyline and began to gain altitude rapidly. Hawke clung on for his life. He knew he had seconds to make the decision of whether or not to let go — either he let go now while he was still low enough to survive the fall or he would be forced to hold on for the whole ride — whatever that meant.
In his mind there was no decision — if he let go now Jakob would be on his way over Manhattan in seconds and Kiefel would have won. Wherever this thing was going, Hawke knew he was going along for the ride, and his eyes desperately stared with more than a small degree of terror at the canister he had seen Jakob fitting to the base. If that thing opened its deadly cargo while he was hanging onto the drone, there was going to be a perfect life-size statue of Joe Hawke on the bottom of the Hudson River.