Страница 3 из 74
Fi
Ross went through his usual litany of triviality that evening, finishing it off with three fingers of Joh
Yet earlier there had been something on his fingers. It had felt slick, like Vaseline. You could rub and rub and never get it to feel dry. He had washed his hands when he got home, and that seemed to do the trick. The fingers didn’t feel slick anymore. He didn’t know if it was due to the soap and water or to whatever it was having evaporated.
Then the truth hit him like a.50 caliber round. Or absorbed. As in absorbed into my body.
Where had his fingers become wet? He strained his mind to think. Not this morning. Not at the store, or the deli. After that? Perhaps. Getting in the car. The car handle! If he could have managed it, Ross would’ve sat up in a Eureka! moment. But he couldn’t manage it. He could now barely breathe. All that emitted from his mouth was a sort of shortened wheeze. The door handle of his car had been slicked with something that was now killing him. He eyed the phone on the nightstand. Two feet away and it might as well have been in China for all the good it would do him now.
In the darkness the figure appeared beside his bed. The man wore no disguise; Ross could make out his features even in the weak light. He was young and normal-looking. Ross had seen thousands of faces just like that and had paid little attention to any of them. His job had not involved normal; it had encompassed extraordinary. He couldn’t imagine how someone like this man had managed to kill him.
As Ross’ breathing became more labored, the fellow pulled something from his pocket and held it up to him. It was a photo, but Ross couldn’t make out who was in the picture. Realizing this, Harry Fi
“Now you know,” Fi
He put the photo away and stood silently looking down at Ross as the paralysis continued to wend its way through. He kept his gaze on the other man until the chest gave one last erratic heave and the pupils turned glassy.
Two minutes later Harry Fi
Around midnight, Harry Fi
Now he focused on the next name: Carter Gray, the former chief of America’s intelligence empire.
CHAPTER 4
ANNABELLE CONROY stretched out her long legs and watched the landscape drift by outside the window of the Amtrak Acela train car. She almost never took the train anywhere; her ride was typically at 39,000 feet where she popped peanuts, sipped watered-down seven-dollar cocktails, and dreamt up the next con. Today she was on the train because her companion, Milton Farb, would not set foot on anything that had the capacity and intent to leave the ground.
“Flying is the safest way to travel, Milton,” she’d informed him.
“Not if you’re on a plane that’s in a death spiral. Then your chances of dying are roughly one hundred percent. And I don’t like those odds.”
It was hard to argue with geniuses, A
Thirty minutes later, as Amtrak’s only bullet train service wound its way down the East Coast and pulled into a station, A
Yet she was smart enough to realize that Jerry Bagger had every motivation to leave Atlantic City and come looking for her wherever she might be. When you ripped a guy like that off for $40 million, assuming that Bagger would do his best to tear thousands of pieces of your flesh off one at a time was hardly irrational thinking.
She glanced over at Milton, who looked about eighteen with his boyish face and longish hair. In reality the man was pushing fifty. He was on his computer, doing something that neither A
Bored, A
It shouldn’t have been a difficult decision and yet it was. She had grown close, or as close as someone like her could get, to an oddball collection of men who called themselves the Camel Club. She smiled to herself as she thought about the foursome, one of whom was named Caleb Shaw and worked at the Library of Congress. He reminded her remarkably of the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz. Then her smile faded. Oliver Stone, the head of this little band of miscreants, was something altogether more. He must’ve had one hell of a past, A
Her gaze flicked up at a young man passing by who did not attempt to hide his admiration for her tall, curvy figure, long blonde hair, and thirty-six-year-old face that, if it didn’t actually hit the “wow” level, came awfully close. This was so despite a small, fishhook-shaped scar under her eye; a present from her father, Paddy Conroy, the best short con artist of his generation, and the world’s worst father, at least in his only child’s estimation.