“That’s what I think we have here. Maybe the Goddess is a movement rather than a person. There are plenty of people who feed off that sort of thing. They don’t actually have to be the ones throwing Molotov cocktails as long as they can watch the fire on TV.”
Vox pursed his lips and considered. “You say you’re at a five with this? When you get to a seven I’ll give you assets; until then you’re flying solo. But … update your Goddess report and send it to me. I’ll make sure someone at Homeland pays attention to it.”
“Thanks, Hugo.”
“This is good work, kiddo. Even if this turns out to be nothing, this is very sharp stuff.” He stood up and walked to the door, then half-turned. “You may not want to hear this—I know things are kind of weird between you two—but your dad will be proud of you.”
Interlude Nine
McCullough, Crown Island
St. Lawrence River, Ontario, Canada
Four Months Ago
As promised, the limousine was waiting at the curb. A driver in traditional livery stood by the open door. A second man, identically dressed, stepped forward to take their bags. Both were slim, fit, and Korean.
Toys caught Gault’s eye, flicked a glance at the driver, and then affected to scratch his ribs. Gault did not need the cue. He’d already seen the bulge of the driver’s shoulder-rigged pistol. The other man, too. Nice cuts to their jackets, though. Most people would never have guessed either of the Koreans was armed.
Gault did not have a weapon. Toys, he knew, carried a knife in his left sleeve. Gault had seen his friend use that knife several times. Few surgeons were as precise or dispassionate.
Once upon a time Toys had been Gault’s employee, a combination executive secretary, valet, and bodyguard, but that time had passed. Events had occurred that forever changed the dynamic of their relationship. Now they were more like brothers. Or fellow refugees. Gault was at least nominally the alpha of their two-man pack, but that position was held now by mutual consent rather than financial or personal power. In the same disaster that had scarred them both, Gault had discovered an emotional blind spot that had nearly proven fatal while Toys had demonstrated terrifying personal power.
They got into the car and settled back. The driver and the other man sat in the front with the Plexiglas screen closed. The limo was next year’s model. Very expensive and nicely outfitted. Toys poked around and found unopened bottles of Cerén vodka—a superb El Salvadoran brand—and vermouth. Toys set about making martinis.
“Stirred, not shaken,” he said as he handed one to Gault. It was a private joke. Although Toys loved watching the Bond movies—for eye candy of both genders—it irked him that Ian Fleming had his hero order his martinis to be made the wrong way. By shaking the mixture, the bartender created air bubbles that turned the martini cloudy. More crucially, shaking also caused the ice to release too much water, thereby bruising the flavor of the vodka. A perfect martini should be stirred gently for thirty seconds, then chilled properly and served stingingly dry and cold. Toys always made perfect martinis.
They sipped.
“What are the odds that this lovely car is bugged?” asked Toys. He said it in a normal tone of voice.
Gault smiled thinly. “I would be disappointed if it wasn’t.”
They settled back and sipped their drinks and said nothing else during the drive.
THE TWO KOREANS took them to a small airport and ushered them onto a private Gulfstream G550. Gault was impressed. He had planned to buy one of those for himself before his plans had gone to hell in Afghanistan. The sleek jet came with a $59.9 million price tag. It had a range of sixty-seven hundred miles and all sorts of lovely bells and whistles, and though it was designed to accommodate up to nineteen passengers in great comfort, Gault and Toys found themselves alone in the cabin.
The second Korean came in to attend to drinks and to take their orders for dinner, and when the food came it was superb. The first course was a crème brûlée of foie gras that they washed down with 1990 Cristal champagne, and that was followed by several small but delicious dishes, including tartar of Kobe beef with Imperial Beluga caviar and Belon oysters, and mousseline of pattes rouges crayfish with morel mushroom infusion. The accompanying wines—a 1985 Romanée-Conti, a ’59 Château Mouton Rothschild, a ’67 Château d’Yquem, and a ’61 Château Palmer—inspired great respect from both of them.
“Well,” said Toys as he sipped Hennessy Beauté du Siècle cognac, “I think we can submit a new definition for ‘ostentatious.’”
“Mm. Are you complaining or commenting?”
Toys sloshed the deep-amber-colored liquid in his glass. “This is two hundred thousand pounds a bottle. I’m not a cheap date, Sebastian, but they had me at the crème brûlée.”
“You think they’re trying to prove something to us?”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course. And notice that we’re both saying ‘they.’ Not ‘he,’” Gault said. He sipped the cognac. It was delicious and it soothed the aches in his damaged flesh, but he would never have spent two hundred thousand on it. His devotion to brand names did not extend into mania.
“Well, to be fair,” Toys said, “our American friend was always grandiose, but cultured … ? Not so much.”
“And he has no excuse for it. He’s new money, but he went to the very best schools.”
“You’re new money.”
“Yes, but if you didn’t know it you couldn’t tell. You can tell with him. At a hundred paces, too. Table manners of a baboon, and he keeps his mouth open while chewing. And he has that thing where he speaks like a college professor one minute and a dockworker the next.”
“You do know that he can hear everything we’re saying.”
Gault merely smiled.
“So,” said Toys, rolling the cognac back and forth between his palms, “the question is ‘why?’”
Gault shrugged. “A demonstration of conspicuous ostentation makes its own statement, don’t you think? After all, no one needs to own a jet like this. There are plenty of less expensive aircraft that are more than opulent enough for the few hours their owners and their guests spend aboard them. To put it crudely, the price tag is a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone who can’t afford it, and much more so to those who can almost afford it.”
“Mmm,” mused Toys. “Then tell me this, O mighty sage, why are we being treated to such luxury? He doesn’t owe us a thing, not even sanctuary.”
Gault merely shrugged. He was pretty sure he knew. He closed his eyes and remembered a sultry night a dozen years ago. He and Eris in a Belle Etoile suite at the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris. The two of them naked, covered with bites and scratches, the bed and nightstand wrecked, sheets torn and tangled, and the air heavy with the smell of wine, perfume, and sex.
“One day,” she’d murmured to him as they lay together on the floor, their feet propped on the edge of the bed they’d fallen out of during their last deliciously ferocious bout of sex. And it was sex. No one could call what they did lovemaking. It was too violent and immediate and selfish for that, and it had served them each and satisfied them both. “One day you’ll be a king, lovely boy.”
Gault was propped on one elbow, his head resting in an open palm while he used his other hand to trace slow, meaningless symbols in the sweat between her heavy breasts.
“A king?” he mused, his voice still carrying some of the East End London of his youth. “No way that’s possible, but I’d like a knighthood. That would be brilliant.”