“The heart dart leaves a mark? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, a tiny red dot on the skin. Easy to miss. Goes away quickly, though.”
“So? Clean?”
“Yeah, maybe. I still don’t like the timing, but yeah, I suppose he just had a heart attack brought on by excessive sexual exertion. Happens all the time. I guess.”
“You guess? You never guess. What’s wrong, Brick? Tell me what you really think.”
“Hell, I don’t know, Alex. Maybe nothing. Maybe it is what it is. But a couple of troublesome details. My guys found heart meds in his pants pocket. Little silver heart-shaped pillbox from Tiffany, monogrammed. So. This coronary was no surprise attack. Nitro pills and beta-blockers in his pocket? We checked. He’s under the care of the top cardiac specialist in Paris. He feels a heart attack coming on, first thing he does, he tells the woman to call his doctor and to go get him his damn meds, right? Like, right now?”
“Anybody ask the woman that question?”
“They will tomorrow morning. I’m having her brought back in to the Prefecture for another interview. So, anyway. Who the hell knows? That’s my latest tale of mayhem and mystery. Let’s order some dinner and you tell me yours.”
Hawke took ten minutes and told Kelly everything Ben Sparhawk had said about Cam Hooker’s death while they waited for their food.
“What are you thinking?” Hawke asked Brick after a few minutes of contemplative silence from his friend.
“Question,” Brick said.
“Go.”
“Let’s be realistic here. Could someone commit a fairly sophisticated murder here in Maine on Sunday and then pull off another one four days later in Paris? Even more elaborate?” I mean, seriously. Who the hell is good enough to pull that off?”
“Cam was a pretty tough act to follow, all right.”
Hawke waited a beat and said, “Maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Can you connect any of these dots, Brick? Between these two most recent guys and the other ones? Because I’m telling you right now that if we can’t… well… mere coincidence starts to look pretty good again.”
Brick took a bite of his steak and said, “Don’t go there yet. Stay open to it. But I hear you. I’m on the connect-the-dots issue as soon as I get back to my office tomorrow. I’ll call your Bermuda number if and when I get any positive hits. Correlations, I mean.”
CHAPTER 11
The rain had stopped.
After dinner at Nebo, Hawke and Brick walked back to the Hooker place, taking the main road along the harbor. It was a full moon, hanging bright and white and big in the sky. Each man knew what the other was thinking. There was no need of talking about it.
Finally, as they turned into the long Hooker drive, Brick stopped and looked at his friend.
“What’s your gut telling you, Alex?” Brick said. “Right this minute. Don’t edit. Spit it out.”
“Okay. That the timing of all this no coincidence. That what you’ve got is a totally bad-ass rogue agent running around the planet systematically killing your own top guys.”
“Yeah. That’s where I come out, too.”
“Let me find him for you, Brick.”
“Are you kidding? It’s my problem, not yours. My agency. My people getting killed. God knows, MI6 has got enough of its own problems these days. That intel meltdown in Syria, for starters.”
“This guy, whoever he is, killed my friend Hook, Brick. That makes him my problem, too.”
“You’re serious. You want to take this on?”
“I do.”
“You even have time to do this?”
“I’ve got another two weeks before C wants me to mysteriously appear in a Damascus souk, looking to purchase some bargain-basement Sarin gas.”
Brick looked at him and they started climbing the hill.
“Two weeks isn’t a long time to find a seasoned operative who’s gone to ground without a trace. Now roaming the globe on a murder spree but not leaving any tracks. But, listen, Alex. Hell, I won’t stop you from looking. Nobody is better at this than you. Just tell me what you need.”
“Don’t worry, I will. This is obviously not an MI6 operation. You’re right. And C and the brass at MI6 will pitch a fit if they find out I’ve gone freelance. So, I need somebody attached to this op at Langley. Files on every possible disaffected agent who had ties to multiple victims, for starters. Active and inactive. Send everything to Bermuda. I’ll get Ambrose Congreve on this with me. He’s there at his home on Bermuda now, as luck would have it.”
“Your very own ‘Weapon of Mass Deduction.’. If he can’t solve this, no one can.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Brick said, never breaking his stride but taking a deep breath and staring up at the blazing moon and cold stars. “I’m really going to miss Hook, that old bastard, won’t you, Alex?”
“I sure as hell will. But I’ll feel a whole lot better when I catch the son of a bitch who bloody killed him, I can tell you that bloody much. It won’t be pretty.”
“Easy,” he said, “Easy there, old compadre.”
“Who the hell, I ask you, who the hell would ever want to murder a fine old Yankee gentleman like Hook?”
“Go find out, Alex. Whoever he is, he needs killing soon. I have a lot of justifiably nervous campers out there right now.”
“Yeah. Murder’s bad for institutional morale.”
“Ambrose will have every shred of evidence I can pull together arrive at his Bermuda address by courier within forty-eight hours.”
“Sooner the better. A couple of weeks isn’t a long time.”
CHAPTER 12
It didn’t take Ambrose that long.
“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” Pelham said.
“Not at all, Pelham.”
“Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve here to see you, sir,” Pelham said, wafting farther out into the sunshine-spattered terrace. “A matter of some urgency, apparently.”
It was a brilliant blue Bermuda day, but embankments of purple cloud were stacking up out over the Atlantic. Storm front moving due east. Hawke put down the book he was reading, a wonderful novel called The Sea, by John Banville. It made him want to read every word the man had ever written.
“Thank you, Pelham. Won’t you show him out?”
“Indeed, I shall, m’lord.”
“Offer him a bit of refreshment, will you, please?”
“But of course, your lordship.”
Pelham withdrew soundlessly back into the shadows of the house.
Hawke smiled as he watched the old fellow retreat.
These stilted conversational formalities had not been necessary for years. But it was something Hawke and his octogenarian friend Pelham Grenville found so amusing they continued the charade. Both men found an odd reassurance in these hoary, Victorian exchanges. It was a code they shared; and the fact that an outside observer would find them old-fashioned and ridiculous made their secret all the more enjoyable.
Moments later Ambrose Congreve walked out onto the terrace at Teakettle Cottage with a big smile on his face. He was wearing a three-piece white linen suit with a navy blue bow tie knotted at his neck and a white straw hat on his head, something Tennessee Williams might have conjured up. He was even dabbing at his forehead with a white linen handkerchief as Big Daddy might have done.
Congreve had been busy. He had spent the last two days in his home office at Shadowlands, sifting through mobile intercepts, old dossiers, photographs, all the reams of highly classified material Brick Kelly had forwarded out from Langley. And, judging by appearances this morning, the famous criminalist had come up with the goods.
“Oh, hullo, Ambrose,” Hawke said, raising his sunglasses onto his forehead. “Why are you in such a fiendishly good mood this morning?”