“He stole my wife,” said Hoyle. “Or the woman who might have been my wife. He stole her, and she died because of it. She worked at the mine, helping with paperwork. Leehagen believed that it would be good for her to earn her keep.”
“This is over a woman?” said Angel.
“We’re rivals in many matters, Leehagen and I. I bested him repeatedly. In the process, I alienated the woman I loved. She went to Leehagen as a means of getting back at me. He was, I should add, not always so repellent in appearance. He has been ill for many years, even before the cancer took hold. His medication affected his weight.”
“So your woman went to Leehagen-”
“And she died,” finished Hoyle. “In retaliation, I stepped up my efforts to ruin him. I fed information about him to business rivals, to criminals. He came back at me. I retaliated again. Now we are where we are, each of us sealed away in our respective fortresses, each nursing a deep hatred of the other. I want this thing ended. Even weak and ill, I begrudge him his existence. So here is my offer: if you kill him, I will pay you $500,000, with a $250,000 bonus if his son dies alongside him. As a gesture of good faith, I will pay you $250,000 of the bounty on the father in advance, and $100,000 on that of the son. The balance will be placed in escrow, to be paid over on completion of the job.”
He replaced the photographs and maps in the file, closed it, and eased it gently toward Louis. After only a moment’s hesitation, Louis took it.
The call woke Michael Leehagen from a stupor. He staggered to the phone in his dressing gown, his eyes bleary and his voice hoarse.
“Yes?”
“What have you done?”
Michael recognized the voice instantly. It dispelled the last vestiges of sleep from him as surely as if he had stood in the face of a raging, icy gale.
“What do you mean?”
“The old man. Who gave you the authority to target him?” There was a calmness to Bliss’s voice that made Michael’s bladder tighten.
“Authority? I gave myself the authority. We got his name from Ballantine. He set my brother up, and he was meeting with Louis. He’ll make the connection. It will bring him here for sure.”
“Yes,” said Bliss. “Yes, it will. But it’s not how these things are done.” He sounded distracted, as though this was not a development that he had anticipated or desired. It made no sense to Michael. “You should have spoken to me first.”
“With respect, you’re not the most contactable of men.”
“Then you should have waited until I called you!” This time, the anger in Bliss’s voice was clear.
“I’m sorry,” said Michael. “I didn’t think there would be a problem.”
“No.” Michael heard him breathe in deeply, calming himself. “You couldn’t have known. You may have to prepare for reprisals if the attack is connected to you. Some people won’t like it.”
Michael had no idea what Bliss was talking about. His father wanted everyone involved in Jonny Lee’s death wiped from the face of the earth. How things were done elsewhere was of no consequence to him. He was interested only in the end result. He waited for Bliss to continue.
“Call your men back from the city,” said Bliss, and now he sounded weary. “All of them. Do you understand?”
“They’re already on their way.”
“Good. Who fired the shots?”
“I don’t think that-”
“I asked you a question.”
“Benton. Benton fired the shots.”
“Benton,” said Bliss, seemingly committing the name to memory, and Michael wondered if he had somehow condemned Benton by naming him.
“When are you coming up here?”
“Soon,” said Bliss, “soon…”
CHAPTER TWELVE
LOUIS STARED DOWN AT the man on the bed. Gabriel looked even smaller and more ancient than before, so old that he was nearly unrecognizable to Louis. Even in the space of a day, he seemed to have lost too much weight. His skin was gray, marked with a deep yellow in places where a salve had been applied to it. His eyes were sunken in blue-black pools, so that they seemed bruised, like those of a fighter who has spent too long trapped against the ropes, pummeled into unconsciousness by his opponent. His breathing was shallow, hardly there at all. The gunshot wounds, covered by a layer of dressings, had allowed some of his critical, and already dwindling, life force to dissipate, as though, had he been a witness to the shooting, Louis might have perceived it emerging from the exit holes, a pale cloud amid the blood. It would never return. It was lost, and an elemental part of Gabriel had been lost with it. If he survived, he would not be the same. Like all men, he had always been fighting death, the pace of the struggle increasing as the years drew on, but now death had the upper hand and would not relinquish it.
He had expected a police presence near the old man, but there was none. It troubled him, until he realized that others would be keeping vigil over Gabriel now. There was a small camera fixed to the upper-right-hand corner of the room, but he could not tell if it was a recent addition to the decor. He assumed that they were watching him. He waited for them to show themselves, but they did not come. Still, the fact that he had been allowed to get so close to Gabriel meant they knew who he was. It did not concern him. They had always known where to find him, if they chose.
He touched Gabriel’s hand, black on white. There was a tenderness to the gesture, and a sense of regret, but something else played across Louis’s face: a kind of hatred.
You created me, thought Louis. Without you, what would I have become?
The door behind him opened. He had seen the nurse approaching, her shape reflected in the polished wall behind Gabriel’s bed.
“Sir, you’ll have to leave now,” she said.
He acknowledged her with a slight inclination of his head, then leaned down and kissed Gabriel gently on the cheek, like Judas consigning his Savior to death. He was both a man without a father, and a man with many fathers. Gabriel was one of them, and Louis had yet to find a way to forgive him for all that he had done.
Milton stood in a small office steps away from Gabriel’s room. The door was marked “Private,” and behind it sat a desk, two chairs, and an array of monitoring equipment, including both video and audio recording facilities. It was known in the law enforcement community as the Auxiliary Nurses’ Station, or ANSTAT, and was a shared resource, which meant that, in theory, all agencies had an equal call on its use. In reality, there was a pecking order that had to be observed, and Milton was king rooster. He hovered over the two armed agents, watching as Louis left Gabriel’s room and the nurse closed the door softly behind him.
“Action, sir?”
“None,” said Milton, after only a moment’s hesitation. “Let him go.”
They stood in Louis’s office, Hoyle’s papers and maps spread across Louis’s desk. Louis had added his own notes and observations with a red pen. This would be the last time that all of the information they had would be presented in this way. Once this discussion was over, it would be destroyed: shredded, and then burned. On a chair nearby lay fresh maps, and copies of the photographs and satellite images that they would show to the others.
“How many?” asked Angel.
“To do the job, or to do the job right?”
“To do it right.”
“Sixteen, at least. Two to hold each of the bridges, maybe more. Four in the town for backup. Two teams of four approaching the property cross-country. And, if we lived in an ideal world, a big-ass chopper to take them all out once they were done. Even then, there would be problems with communication. There’s no cellphone coverage that deep into the mountains. The trees and the gradient of the land mean that there’s no line of sight, so walkie-talkies are out of the question for us.”