Nine

“But still-you’re famous now!”

“No, I’m not. And I have no desire to be. I doubt I’ll ever desire something so crass,” he said.

“Yes, well-bon voyage then,” Frederick murmured.

“Thank you.” In a more tender voice, he added, “You know I don’t begrudge you your enjoyment of this, don’t you?”

“Oh, no, I know you don’t. But you’re right-it’s-it’s so bourgeois, isn’t it? I’m going to turn it off right now.”

Everett smiled to himself and said, “No, please. Watch it. No harm in that, really. I may watch it for a moment or two myself.”

They said their good-byes and hung up. He decided he couldn’t fault Frederick, who was an excellent gatherer of information, for being aware of news reports.

He turned on the nearest set and stood motionless as the screen flashed the helicopter camera shots from above the house in Lakewood.

“Repeating our top story this hour, a fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list was found dead in this Lakewood home earlier this evening. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI report that Bernardo Adrianos, a suspected drug trafficker who reputedly murdered a family of four…”

He hit the mute button on the remote control. “Suspected. Reputedly. Bullshit.”

He pressed the record button and videotaped the segment, smiling to himself as a petite redheaded reporter approached a tall, lean, dark-haired detective. Alex Brandon. The television cameras showed that his eyes were light blue, but Corey knew they failed to capture the startling color. Until he had observed other members of the detective’s family, Corey had thought the color of Alex Brandon’s eyes might have been achieved with tinted contact lenses.

He wondered why Detective Ciara Morton wasn’t with Brandon. Corey watched his movements with interest. A shame, really, that he was in law enforcement. The man had an air of self-possession, a presence that was wasted in this line of work.

Brandon stayed calm as the reporter shouted a question and thrust a microphone at him, but it didn’t require lipreading skills to see the answer was a firm “no comment.” Corey watched until Brandon was out of the frame, then switched among the cha

Finally, all of the stations had moved on to other stories or were merely showing the same footage they had shown earlier. He turned the television off. He glanced at his Omega watch, placed the videotape in a hidden safe, and walked across the darkened lawn to the mansion.

Upstairs, he showered and changed into a set of clothes he had bought in Berlin last year. He changed his shoes as well, and put on a pair of dark-rimmed glasses with lenses that did nothing to change his excellent vision. He opened a drawer that contained Tag Heuer, Rolex, Raymond Weil, and other fine timepieces, including a few vintage Hamilton railroad pocket watches. He took off the Omega and replaced it with an inexpensive watch with a plastic band, which he had purchased at a shop near a German university.

He practiced a few key German phrases, not because he doubted his ability to speak the language fluently, but because it helped him to get into the role he would be playing, that of a young German student traveling before starting college. It was the identity he had created with the phony passport that was now tucked into a backpack. The backpack contained nothing that would alarm airport security perso

He was ahead of schedule, so he went down the hallway to his favorite room in the house and unlocked the specially constructed door. Even before he was through the second door of this room-within-a-room, he felt anticipation as he heard familiar sounds from the other side of the door.

Clicking and whirring. Snapping and chiming. Buzzing and ticking. Mechanical sounds.

A motion detector turned on the lights as he entered his kingdom of mechanical devices. Many were playthings collected by his father and grandfather. The most valuable of these was an eighteenth-century automaton. The lifelike mechanical boy’s intricate design included a mechanism in his chest that made him appear to breathe, and gears that moved his hand, arm, and eyes as he wrote his school lessons. Everett ignored him, as he ignored clockwork tin figures, jack-in-the-boxes, an antique electric train. He barely glanced at the mechanical banks-a girl skipping rope, a lion chasing a monkey up a tree, a dentist pulling a tooth. He walked past the clocks with elaborate mechanisms that marked the hours with waltzing couples, marching soldiers, and hounds chasing foxes. These objects had been built by others, long ago.

He moved to a workbench at the far end of the room. Here were projects that revealed his own ability to create mechanical things. Until recently, the most prized among these had been a large clock that worked by feeding steel balls through a series of chutes and levers and balances. There were others, devices that completed sophisticated movements at the flip of a switch.

Everett considered his mood, then pressed a series of buttons. From a pair of overhead speakers, he heard the energetic Turkish March from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He pressed a lever, then watched the workings of the initial model of an invention of his. The full-scale version of the invention was now in place at another location, awaiting its single, glorious use.

It was not an especially complex mechanism, but he enjoyed watching it work all the same. In appearance, it seemed to be a clock attached to a closed tube containing shiny steel balls. Like a clock, it marked time. But as predetermined increments passed, it released the heavy balls one at a time. Each then rolled along a wooden pathway, toward nine wooden cha

Of course, electrical timers could do more than light bulbs.

He switched off the current on the timer, turned off the music, and smiled.

He finished locking the room and made his way toward the curving marble staircase that led to the mansion’s entry hall. As he passed a small Louis XVI marquetry table, the phone on it rang. Again he checked the caller ID display. He recognized the cell phone number. He picked up the receiver and said, “I sincerely hope you aren’t going to tell me anything that will displease me.”

There was a pause before the voice on the other end said, “Kit has a young boy living with him.”

“A child, Cameron? Living with that lunatic? Be serious.”

“It’s true. Not his own. Ten years old or so, I think. I didn’t get close enough to see.”

“You didn’t harm the child?”

There was another silence. “I did only what you asked me to do. Molly’s dead. He’s already found her.”

“And he caught a glimpse of you?”

“I made sure he did.”

Everett smiled in satisfaction. “Perfect, then. As always, you are perfect. The rest will unfold as it should, boy or no boy. I’ll see you at Ke

“I’m almost there now.”

“Excellent. In a few hours, then. And remember, we’re strangers.”

“Yes.”

He carefully replaced the receiver and made his way to the curving marble staircase which led to the mansion’s entry hall.

He checked his airline tickets. All in order, of course.

He heard the Maserati coming up the drive.

He looked at his cheap watch. Morgan was right on time.

Project Nine was in motion again.