The morning had begun like any other. Having announced his retirement from Delta Force, Captain Peters, J., had drawn Pentagon duty for the balance of his enlistment. In less than two weeks, he would permanently exchange his spotless, razor-creased uniform for an artist’s smock. His paintings, acrylic on canvas, were selling very well not only in a gallery in Georgetown, but in New York and Los Angles as well.
No longer would his wife, Laurin, worry about his frequently unannounced absences to places he could not mention and from which he stood a good chance of not returning. If his artistic success continued — and the galleries in the aforesaid cities had no reason to think it would not — Laurin would soon retire from her Washington lobbying firm. Her largest client was the U.S. Army, whom she represented before the various Congressional committees in the ongoing interservice rivalry for funds.
It was tragic but not accidental she was in the Pentagon that morning. She had just stuck her head into the cubicle that served as Jason’s office.
“Hi, soldier! Buy a girl a cup of coffee?”
Jason glanced at the coffeepot behind his desk, a device that produced a viscous fluid more akin to motor oil than a drinkable beverage. “Sure. Let me finish up here a minute. Go on down to the canteen and I’ll meet you there.”
“Better yet, I’ll step and fetch. Be back in a minute.’
He watched her turn around. His interest in what he described as the world’s most beautiful ass had not diminished in the six years of marriage. He wondered sometimes if birth of the child she was carrying — but not yet showing — would change that.
He never saw her again.
Almost as bad — they never identified her body.
Unlike most 9/11 families, he had no grave to visit, only the very contemporary memorial erected on the west side of the Pentagon. Whenever he was in Washington, he took time to visit, leave flowers with a card bearing her name, knowing they would be collected and discarded by the grounds crew at the end of the day. It was the only way he had of giving Laurin back her identity, if not her life.
The gaping hole in his soul filled with a burning hatred of terrorists of any stripe and a mounting frustration of his inability to strike back. That opportunity came out of the blue a month or so later when he was invited to visit the Maryland offices of Narcom, a secretive company whose sole client was the U.S. intelligence community. Narcom took on jobs too politically sensitive, too dangerous, or those requiring plausible deniability.
The assignments paid obscenely well. Better yet, all Narcom’s fees, and hence Jason’s, were, by special agreement, tax-free. Aware of the suddenness with which political winds shifted and bearing a healthy distrust of government in general and the IRS in particular, Jason had made his accumulation of wealth as hard to find as possible.
The best part of the job, though, had been the work. Assassination, kidnapping, any sort of dirty trick devised by the warped minds in Washington. Most directed at the same ragheads responsible for Laurin’s death, those who violently mindlessly perverted a religion and culture that was perfecting algebra when Europe was still burning heretics.
Job satisfaction indeed.
But the work hadn’t exactly made friends. Revenging honor was a driving force among friends, associates, and relatives of those Jason had dispatched to their reward of seventy-two virgins. Although he no longer worked for Narcom, extremist nut bags had long memories.
From time to time, he had taken the occasional assignment, more out of boredom than need. That had caused problems with Maria, the Italian volcanologist and ardent pacifist, who, from time to time, shared his life. Now, as was frequently the case, she was on an expedition, this time to study an eruption in Indonesia, leaving Jason to the care of Mrs. Abigail Prince, his grandmotherly housekeeper.
Mrs. Prince had a genuine fondness for Maria, although her Anglican background viewed the relationship as sinful. Hardly a day passed some reference was not made to marriage, in spite of both Jason’s and Maria’s clear disinclinations to commit matrimony at this point. Though she scolded constantly, the woman also held an affection for Pangloss, a large, shaggy, and nondescript dog Laurin had rescued from the pound. Jason suspected she had chosen him because, ugly as he was, adoption by someone else was unlikely. Finally, there was Robespierre, a one-eared tomcat that simply appeared one day after being the obvious loser in some feline dispute. Since no one owns a cat, Jason had been at a loss as to where he might return the animal.
Jason was looking forward to the dog’s eager greeting, even the disdain with which cats view the world. For that matter, he had been looking forward to giving his iPod a rest while he enjoyed his favorite Italian Baroque composers, Vivaldi, Corelli, Bononcini, Albinoni.
All of this he had eagerly anticipated on two different airlines and a ferryboat. Now his homecoming would have to wait. Or at least the one he planned, wait until the question of that yacht was resolved. He doubted anyone intending him harm would have arrived in such an ostentatious manner, but the man in the Mercedes hadn’t been exactly covert, either. He hadn’t lived this long without being cautious.
He—
“Looks like we’re here!”
The wagon was stopped in front of the three buildings in a U, made up of twenty-three rooms in what had been a sixteenth-century farmhouse and outbuildings.
Mr. Frache had his hand out. “That’ll be two pounds, three.”
Jason instantly regretted jumping to the ground. His shoes were now full of very wet snow. He reached into his pocket, produced a clip of bills, and peeled off a five. “Keep it. Thanks for the lift.”
The driver’s smile spread across the weathered face as he touched the bill of his cap with one hand and shook the reins with the other. “Thank you, Mr. Peters!”
Jason took in his surroundings.
A place he had passed or visited hundreds of time now might as well have been on the backside of the moon. The white stone facade, moistened by snow, had become a dirty gray. The five windows across the front were blind eyes staring not onto a manicured sweep of lawn but an arctic plane. The lush, green trees on the hills visible behind the hotel were a hostile thicket of sharp black daggers sheathed in snow. There was no ambiance of the rustic chic hospitality for which the hotel was known. The scene suggested harsh indifference.
Jason picked up his bag and went around to the rear where the swimming pool was like a thermal spring, leaking steam around the edges of a canvas cover. Chairs, recliners, and tables, misshapen with lumpy snow, reminded him of animals gathered around some African watering hole. Low hummocks indicated where summer’s rosebushes were hiding.
He took a step, his socks squishing with melted snow from his ill-advised leap from the wagon. He toyed with the idea of stopping to ring them out. Frostbite was the last thing he needed. No, it would take him less than twenty minutes to reach his house from there.
What exactly he was going to do once he got there? Well, that depended on what a reconnaissance turned up. At the moment there was something he missed even more than Pangloss and Robespierre: His .40-caliber Glock.
10
Should Jason take the road? Though a mixture of ice and slush, the snow was not as deep, the going would be easier. So would spotting him were someone looking for his arrival. If trouble was waiting for him, he’d be an easy target. By the time the track reached his house, though, it was sunken, not visible from his windows. Bag in hand, he set out down the shallow Dixcart Valley that pointed to his home like a gun barrel.