Unless the country does a complete turnaround, in thirty years or less the Yanks will be finished. That’s why I’m buying euros, yen, yuans and rupees and looking to expand my clientele well beyond the land of the free, home of the brave. No one with that much debt is free and the home is mortgaged to the hilt. Still, they can enjoy it while it lasts, credit card their way for another couple decades anyway. Future generations will have to pay the piper and all hell will break loose when that bill comes due.
Clearly, several other major defense contractors would get a piece of the global pie, but Creel’s firm was perfectly positioned to get the bulk of it. It would be the crowning jewel of his lifetime. His company would be saved, his legacy ensured. And, most importantly, the world’s natural equilibrium reinstated.
It was everything he could have hoped for. And they were almost there.
Yet he kept going back to the photo Caesar had sent him. His gaze burned into the tall man’s eyes. Creel didn’t like those eyes. He had made several fortunes by reading correctly the expressions, the poker faces of his opposition. And he didn’t like this man’s at all. In fact the eyes he was looking at in the photo seemed very familiar to him. As he glanced into a mirror hanging on the wall opposite he suddenly realized who it was.
They remind me of me.
Creel sat back and listened to his sales team drone on as they covered 550 miles an hour on the way to sell peace and security at the end of a tank muzzle to another satisfied customer.
And yet his mind kept going back to those eyes. And that man. Only one man for sure. Yet sometimes it only took one to bring it all down.
Creel would never let that happen. He was not afraid of much, but one thing that terrified him was uncertainty. That’s why he’d hired Pender, who made the world believe what Creel wanted it to believe. It was often a war of attrition. You made up the truth and then buried the real thing under so much garbage that people grew weary of trying to dig through it and instead just accepted what you offered. It was the easy way out and humans were programmed to always go that way. After all, there were bills to pay, shopping to do, kids to raise, and sports to watch, so who had time for anything else? Yes, you cover every base, but sometimes something or someone slips in and undoes it all.
But not this time.
No, not this time.
CHAPTER 59
“TAKE ME TO SEE THIS GUY,” Shaw said to Katie as they sat in his room at the Savoy. She had just finished telling him about her meeting with the Pole.
“I can’t do that,” Katie replied. “I promised.”
“I don’t care what you promised. He’s a material witness in a murder investigation.”
Katie looked out the window where Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and the pie-shaped London Eye stared back at her with the narrow Thames in the foreground. “You don’t think I know that?”
“Okay, tell me his name then.”
“Yeah, right. How about I show you his picture and give you his mailing address while I’m at it?”
“This isn’t a joke! People have died.”
She whirled around. “Don’t throw that crap in my face. I do the journalism thing for a living, okay? Ever heard the phrase ‘source protection’? Journalists invoke it every day. Some even go to prison in defense of it, which I happened to have done in the past. So save the guilt act for somebody else.”
Shaw looked down and Katie realized she had gone too far. She sat across from him and said quietly, “Look, there’s no one in the whole world who wants to find Anna’s killer more than you do. And I want that too. But I’ve got a job to do. I’ve been assigned to write about this story, and I have to go about it as a professional.”
“You tell me what the guy told you, and you expect me to stop there? Why tell me at all if you won’t take me to see him?”
Katie sat back, kneading her fists into her thighs. “I wish I had a stellar answer for that, but I don’t. I just wanted you to know. I guess I just wanted you to say he’s telling the truth.”
“Do you believe him?”
“The details I told you, the copier, the bodies near the front door, the guy named Bill Harris? Can you verify that since you were in there?”
“The copier on the second floor and the bodies near the front door, yes, that’s all accurate. I’ll check to see if the storage in the copier was big enough to hold him. I didn’t get a complete roster of the dead, so I can’t vouch for this Harris guy, but it’ll be easy enough to check that. You said he entered and left through the back?” Katie nodded. “Then that’s why we didn’t see him on the video footage. It only recorded the street entrance.”
“So he seems legit,” she said hopefully.
“He would also know all of those things if he were in on the murders.”
“I thought of that, but he didn’t seem the type. He’s basically a skinny little Polish kid scared out of his mind.”
“Who just happened to walk up to you on the street in front of the murder scene? Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“It would be, but he heard me talking to a cop. Pegged me as a journalist. And it’s not so unusual for a survivor to come back to where it happened. Guilt and all.”
“You sound like you’re trying very hard to convince yourself.”
“Trust me, I’m going to check this guy every way there is.”
“So what do you want from me?” Shaw asked.
Katie let out a breath. “You’ve pretty much confirmed for me that he was in there. I think, well, I keep working on the story.”
Shaw rose and stared down at her. “What the hell are you talking about? What story?”
She looked back at him with equal incredulity. “An eyewitness to the London Massacre? Don’t you think that’s newsworthy?”
“Katie, he said the killers were speaking Russian.”
“Yeah, so?”
Shaw looked very troubled as she eyed him suspiciously.
“Is there something you haven’t told me?” she said.
“I’ll only tell you if you promise not to write the story.”
“I can’t do that, Shaw. I can’t. I won’t! This is news.”
“Even if it might start a world war?”
“What world war!” she exclaimed.
“If I tell you, you can never repeat it, to anyone, anywhere, including in print. Those are my terms. Take ’em or leave ’em.”
Katie hesitated for an instant and then nodded. “Deal.”
“They found evidence inside the building that purportedly shows The Phoenix Group was behind the Red Menace campaign.”
Katie sprang out of her chair. “What? You’re sure?”
“Sure the evidence was there? Yes. What it really means, I don’t know yet.”
“And my eyewitness also overheard the killers saying they were there on orders from Gorshkov.”
“Damn it, why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Look who’s talking about holding things back? Like you, I tend to keep things close to the vest. But if The Phoenix Group was involved in putting together the Red Menace campaign, that would explain why the Russians on orders from Gorshkov attacked the place.”