He looked closer and thought he saw the faint trace of a footprint in the blood. It wasn’t large enough to help with the investigation, which was probably why Royce hadn’t mentioned it. He moved to Anna’s desk and sat down in her chair. Her computer had been removed for examination by Royce’s people, but her desktop was still covered with things she’d been working on. The only difference was that each item had been sealed for evidence.
Shaw picked up one bundle. Through the plastic he saw Anna’s precise handwriting in the margins of the typed pages. He had joked with her more than once that she was an inveterate scribbler and annotator; that she never saw a piece of writing she couldn’t comment on. He put it down and picked up another bagged stack.
The documents in here purportedly showed that Anna had been engaged in putting together elements of the Red Menace propaganda. Even though her fingerprints were supposedly all over the documents, Shaw knew the idea that Anna had helped propagate the Red Menace campaign was ridiculous. And if he had any doubts as to Anna’s involvement they were dispelled by these pages not having a single mark from her pen on them. Anyone who knew the woman well would have spotted that glaring omission. Yet Shaw was aware that that would hardly be conclusive proof for the rest of the world.
They must have pressed everyone’s fingers against the papers after they were dead. And they’d shot Anna in the head, even though the chest wounds would’ve been fatal. And I will take great pleasure in killing every single one of the heartless bastards.
He also suspected that every computer in the place had had incriminating files downloaded onto it. Careful scrutiny might show that they had been put there on the day of the killing, but if someone really knew what he was doing they might never be able to prove that.
He wasn’t going to tell Royce his doubts about the evidence because he wasn’t sure how all this was going to turn out. While he made a show of working with Royce, he knew that his and the MI5 agent’s interests were going to diverge at some point. Royce wanted merely to arrest whoever had done this. Shaw simply wanted to kill them.
Feng had admitted that the Chinese government had ties to The Phoenix Group. So was someone trying to make it seem as though the Chinese were behind the Red Menace? But who would do that and why? Russia against China? What maniac would want that global scenario to play out?
And Anna had been caught right in the middle. But why had they chosen the Phoenix Group out of all the places they could have targeted? Was it just a coincidence that it had ties to the Chinese government? No, it can’t be.
The killers had obviously found out the connection, which must have taken some legwork. Yet there must be tens of thousands of entities with ties to China spread all over the world. Why here? Why Anna?
He went to the shelf and picked up one photo. It’d been taken the night he’d proposed. Anna had gotten a waiter to snap the picture of them together, with particular emphasis on the new engagement ring on her finger. Her smile, so full of the bright future ahead, made him forget about the pain in his arm, because the agony in his heart hurt so much.
He suddenly realized he couldn’t stay here for another second. He pounded down the steps and threw open the front door. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, his lungs hard as stone. The image of Anna falling dead back into that room, the imagined vision of her killer standing over her and Shaw far away and helpless seared his brain.
He rushed past the officer on duty and catapulted out onto the street, where a split second later he knocked a person flat to the pavement.
He reached down to help, an apology ready on his lips, an apology he would never deliver. He merely gaped.
Katie slowly got to her feet. “We need to talk. Right now.”
CHAPTER 58
NICOLAS CREEL HAD HAD A BUSY DAY even for him. He’d ridden on his private jet from Italy to New York and then on to Houston where he’d picked up his executive sales team. They spent the considerable flight time going over last-minute details for their upcoming high-level sales presentation in Beijing.
Creel was now in his stateroom staring at a picture of a man he’d just been sent, along with accompanying details. His name was Shaw and he was working on The Phoenix Group massacre. He was attached to a highly secretive international law enforcement agency; though Creel had been informed, the agency often went outside the law to achieve results. Shaw was one of their best operatives and he apparently had a personal motivation to solve the crime. That was troubling. What was even more irritating was the e-mail he’d just received from Caesar. He had men watching The Phoenix Group building of course. And they reported seeing Shaw and Katie James going off together. He’d instructed Caesar to have them followed. He didn’t want this man Shaw to interfere with James’s unwitting role in his plan.
He returned to the jet’s conference room where his executives were putting the finishing touches on a sales pitch that they hoped would lead to the largest defense contract China had ever awarded to an outside firm. Actually, this was only the opening salvo, Creel alone knew. When the events in London were more fully explained to the world, the Chinese would understand quite clearly the precarious position in which they stood. The Asian Dragon would become a bull’s-eye for the Russian Bear. And the communists would triple their weapons order if for no other reason than to ward off the madman Gorshkov. With any luck, they’d be in bed with Ares Corp. for the next two decades at minimum.
That would have been plenty for most businessmen. But not Nicolas Creel. The Beijing piece was only half the equation.
After China, Creel would continue flying west and visit Moscow. He fully expected much resistance from the former Soviets, who as yet did not see a great need for the latest and greatest in military hardware. They, like the rest of the world, had ceded the field to the Yanks, who simply outspent everyone. Yet Creel was one of the few, perhaps the only visionary who saw that that need not be the case forever. World powers came and world powers went. The Americans had been on top for a very long time, at least by recent historical standards. They were due to be overtaken. Whether by the Russians or the Chinese, or both, Creel didn’t really care. He just wanted to be the one to arm the next superpower.
He would not dwell on, or even mention to Gorshkov’s and China’s defense ministers, the issue of Russia versus China and the heightening tensions between the two nations. Instead, he would take a more positive tack. This is your time, he would tell both countries. This is your century. You must seize it or someone else will. He would let their respective imaginations fill in the identity of that someone.
His underlings could sweat the actual numbers and details. He was along for the ride to deliver the closer, to put into clear perspective what was at stake for both countries. And trillions of dollars were at stake for Ares, because once Russia and China undertook a substantial rearmament, so would everybody else with dollars to spend and egos to defend. That would include the Yanks, who would most certainly see their world leadership rank being usurped. What was a few trillion more in debt anyway? It wasn’t like the Americans could possibly pay back what they owed already.
Creel swiftly ran through the numbers in his head. National debt at about ten trillion dollars, not counting the Social Security accounting charade. Just interest on what amounted to America’s credit card debt was over $300 billion a year, along with $700 billion in defense spending, which totaled a full trillion annually, or about one-third of the total budget. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid costs were well over $1 trillion, collectively. Welfare and unemployment expenditures were about $400 billion. That left a paltry few hundred billion dollars for everything else. In the grand scheme that was chump change. And every day the Yanks went hat in hand to the likes of China and Japan and Saudi Arabia essentially begging for money to finance their consumption. Creel had long ago figured out the ending to that song. He had to because it was in his business interests to know. Despite the Americans’ well-deserved reputation for ingenuity and resilience, the veteran businessman knew that the dollars never lied.