But Jimmy hadn’t been able to get the blonde out of his mind. There was something about her, a vulnerability beneath the stone-hard exterior, that had made him want to help her. He didn’t like being in other people’s debt, especially since he reckoned the Colombians had actually hired her to kill him-they had hinted as much, saying that Alonso Larengo didn’t have a high opinion of him. If that was the case, she’d taken a big chance. You didn’t want to fuck with people who hired killers-even the brokers had been known to set up hits on hired guns who stepped out of line.
Vlastos made himself a Greek coffee, stirring the mixture in the briki as it came to the boil like his mama had shown him. The aroma made his nostrils twitch in anticipation and he burned his lip when he tried a sip too soon.
‘Gamoto!’ he yelled. He ran his tongue over the burnt area. But still the woman with the short blond hair and the high cheekbones stayed with him. Her easy skill with the weapons and her mastery of him should have turned him off. What the fuck was wrong with him? The bitch would have shot him without a moment’s hesitation if he’d made a move. Christ, she’d shot the gun out of his hand to teach him a lesson. He should have put a contract out on her for that humiliation, even though no one else had witnessed it. What if she had talked?
But he knew she hadn’t. For some reason, she had acted as his guardian angel. He couldn’t forget that.
Jimmy Vlastos was in love with a ghost. For that reason, he would act on the request he had received from her by email. If killing Xavier Marias-whoever the hell he was-would improve his standing with the blonde, he’d do it in an instant.
‘Come on,’ I said to Mary Upson. ‘This place isn’t safe.’ I turned to Colonel Singh, who was being held up by two of his men. ‘I’m going to get help. Can you hold on here?’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’ He eyed the line of trees on the other side of the road. ‘I am seeing a very adequate defensive position.’
I left him to it, taking Mary’s arm and leading her to the Toyota’s passenger door. I put the Kalashnikov on the backseat, catching sight of the rucksack that Sara had left there. The edge of Abaddon’s laptop was sticking out. I started the engine and checked the sat nav monitor. The next town was less than ten miles away.
‘You don’t have a cell phone, do you?’
Mary shook her head. ‘I wasn’t wearing much on the cross, if you remember.’
‘Shit, sorry.’ I looked over my shoulder and pulled away. ‘Are you okay?’
She raised her shoulders. ‘I guess.’
‘I’m sorry about your mother.’
‘Yes, well, I suppose she went the way she wanted.’
I thought of the elderly woman’s self-inflicted death, her body falling into the coffin. ‘I’m sure she’d been conditioned.’
Mary laughed bitterly. ‘I’m sure she hadn’t. She’d become very strange.’ She let out a sigh. ‘It’s me who should be sorry, Matt.’ She touched my arm lightly. ‘I didn’t realize Gordy was going to shoot at you and that woman from the car. He fired at you in the barn, as well.’
I remembered the look on her face as she’d driven past us. ‘It’s all right. I imagine you thought I was responsible for your mother’s death.’
She took her hand away and bowed her head. ‘No, Matt, it wasn’t that. I…I was jealous. You and the blonde woman looked so…I don’t know…so right together, as if you’d known each other for years.’
I should have realized that Mary would have been jealous. That had been why she had betrayed me after I’d escaped from the camp in Maine.
‘Who was she?’ Mary asked softly. ‘Where is she now?’
I told her, the answer to the former question needing rather more words than the latter. I had a flash of Sara’s body as I’d left it on the roof in Hades. What would happen to it?
When I’d finished, we were approaching the small town. Mary dabbed her eyes with the cuff of her shirt.
‘I’m…I’m so sorry, Matt. Now you’ve lost them both.’
I tried to banish that thought from my mind, not least because putting Karen and Sara together felt disrespectful to the mother of my son. But she was right-they had all gone into the darkness and I, in my desolation, was left in the light.
‘What now?’ Mary asked, as I pulled up at a pay phone.
‘I’m calling the FBI. You can make a run for it if you like, but you haven’t got anything to hide. I won’t tell them about you and Gordy.’
She looked around, taking in the clapboard houses and the almost deserted main street. ‘No, it’s all right. I’ll back up whatever you say.’
I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy. There was a lot she didn’t know, and Peter Sebastian would go through my story with a fine-tooth comb. I got out and headed for the phone, catching another glimpse of the rucksack. If I wanted to find out who had hired Abaddon, and who was behind the camp and the Hades complex, I needed to see what else I could find in the laptop.
Ah, fuck it, I thought. I was tired and I was hurting inside. I’d turn the computer over to the Feds and let them work it out. Mary was right. It was time to be straight. There had been too many secrets and lies.
Arthur Bimsdale had been lying on the sofa in Peter Sebastian’s office, completely unconcerned by what he had been ordered to do with his boss, when his cell phone sparked into life. He glanced at the clock on the wall. 7:20. It was time to start the first working day of his new life. Five minutes later, he had registered the news from Texas, spoken to the Acting Director of Violent Crime (an over-the-hill bureaucrat who hadn’t even gotten into the office yet), and arranged a Bureau plane to fly him to Waco. He would be picked up there by an agent from the Dallas field office, which was liaising with the Houston team.
In the car to the airport, Bimsdale ran through what had happened in the last twelve hours. Although he had begun to realize that Sebastian was acting inappropriately, the speed with which events had taken place had come as a surprise. The secret training given to CIA operatives working inside other government agencies had stressed that nothing might happen for long periods, but also that everything could change in the space of a few hours. When he’d been recruited at Yale by the Agency (he’d never got used to calling it the Company, as the old hands did), he had been happy to be included in the so-called Double Helix branch-operatives whose first loyalty was to the CIA, but who would take career positions elsewhere. He was never bothered by the idea that, technically, he was a turncoat. The country’s security took priority over all other considerations.
He looked at the Potomac as it slid seaward under the George Mason Memorial Bridge. That water was where Peter Sebastian’s grip on the Rothmann case had begun to loosen. If the Nazi conspirator had been found after jumping from his boat into the Anacostia River, things would have been very different. The attack on the President would probably have gone ahead-it was unclear whether the conditioning program developed by Rothmann’s sister could be reversed on the spot, and Rothmann himself might have refused to give such a command. But subsequently, if he had been in custody, so many complications could have been avoided. The Agency would have found a way to take charge of Rothmann, probably arguing that he was technically a foreigner because his father had been illicitly allowed into the U.S. (by the CIA itself, but never mind-there had been orders from the White House). He would have revealed all he knew about the conditioning program, whether he wanted to or not-modern truth drugs were very effective-and his infantile Antichurch would have been terminally disrupted.
As it was, Sebastian had been reduced to using the clearly unstable Englishman, Matt Wells. From the little he had been told earlier, there had been a slaughter at a facility that should never have come to light and Heinz Rothmann was dead, which was hardly the optimal result. It was unclear whether Wells had killed him as threatened. He should never have been employed to find Rothmann, given what had happened to his partner and their son.