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He needed something to make his day. He called a contact of his at CI.
“How are the plans proceeding with security at Indigo Ridge?”
“The place is in a fucking uproar.” The disgust in his voice was evident. “This isn’t our thing and no one knows how best to go about it.” He took a breath. “We sure could use your help, Mr. Secretary.”
“You want help, talk to Director Danziger,” Hendricks said with a poisoned glee. “That’s why he gets to sit in the big chair.”
His contact chuckled. “You’re killing us, Mr. Secretary.”
“Not me.”
“By the way, there’s a minor buzz around here concerning your new co-director of Treadstone, Peter Marks.”
Hendricks caught his breath. “What about him?”
“Word is he’s missing.”
Hendricks said nothing.
“Peter still has a lot of friends here, Mr. Secretary. If there’s anything we can do.”
“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind,” Hendricks said before he disco
He thought about how right Maggie had been in suggesting this course of action with Danziger. Phoning his Indigo Ridge security group, he told them they were back on standby. He could allow Danziger’s fucking up to go only so far. Indigo Ridge needed to be secured.
But his pleasure at the prospect of riding to the rescue was short-lived, what with an attempt on Peter’s life, Peter missing, and the FBI material on the triple homicide at the Lincoln Square Hotel staring him in the face. Then his phone rang.
“No luck with any of the hospitals,” his assistant said, “and we went all the way out to Virginia and Maryland. Same with EMS.”
Hendricks closed his eyes. A headache was starting way back behind his left eye. “Have you any good news?”
“Well, that depends. One of the private ambulance companies reported a stolen vehicle not long ago.”
“Has it been found?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, dammit, find the fucking thing!”
He slammed down the phone so hard the DVD jumped off the desk. He looked at it, then picked it up, watching the rainbow rise and fall on its metallic surface. Opening the tray on his computer tower, he settled the DVD and slid the tray home. He heard the mechanism spi
Christopher, by the time you see this I will be long gone. Please don’t try to contact me.”
She paused, as if knowing Hendricks had reached for his cell phone, which he had. He felt his fingers tremble with the slender weight of it, as if he were touching the nape of her neck.
“My name isn’t Margaret Penrod and my profession isn’t landscape architecture. Almost nothing I told you is true, though the truth began to leak out despite myself.”
Her eyes glittered, and even though Hendricks felt a fiery demon clawing at the lining of his gut, he was powerless to look away from her image, which shimmered like sunlight on water on the flat screen of his computer.
“You must hate me now, which I suppose is inevitable. But before you judge me, you must understand something.”
Her expression changed, and Hendricks sensed that she was reaching out for something—a remote control, as it turned out. The frame drew back from her face to reveal her naked body. It was covered in blood.
Hendricks hunched forward on the edge of his chair. “Maggie, what the fuck?” Then he realized that the woman he was looking at, the woman to whom he’d made love, had possibly given his heart to, wasn’t Maggie. “Who are you?” he whispered.
The lens moved back farther until Hendricks could see that she was standing in a hotel room. At that instant, he was overcome with what might have been a hot flash. He felt his gorge rising. And rising more, as the video camera moved lower and pa
And there they were. Hendricks let out a low groan. The three members of the death squad, all dead. At his lover’s hand? His mind seemed to implode. How was that possible? As if to answer his question, Maggie continued:
“These men were sent to kill me because I protected you. And now I have to leave Room Nine Sixteen, leave DC, leave America. I’m on my final journey.” The camera returned to her, zeroing in on her face. “I was supposed to bring you here, Christopher. Room Nine Sixteen was to be our secret love nest where our every move, every word we exchanged would be recorded and then disseminated to the media. To ruin you. I couldn’t let that happen. And now instead of a love nest, Room Nine Sixteen has become a charnel house. Perhaps that’s a fitting end for the two of us, I don’t know anymore.” Her face was obscured for a few seconds as she brushed wisps of hair from her eyes. “The only thing I do know is that you’re too precious to me to hurt. If I don’t go now you will be in terrible danger.”
Her smile was rueful, almost sad. “I won’t say that I love you because it will only sound hollow and false to your ears. It sounds fatuous, stupid, even. How could I love you when we have known each other a matter of days? How could I love you when all I’ve done is lie to you? How is it that the earth is the third planet from the sun? No one knows; no one can know. Some things just are, sunk in their mystery.”
Hendricks, scrutinizing her face through the squeezing of his heart, saw that she didn’t blink, her eyes didn’t cut away, two basic tells of the liar. She wasn’t lying, or she was very, very good, better than any liar he had ever met. He looked into those eyes and was lost.
“Apart from my father, I have never loved anyone before you, and my love for him is very different than it is for you. Something happened when we met, a mysterious current went through me and changed me. There is no better way to explain it. That’s all I know.”
She leaned forward suddenly, her face blurring as she planted her lips on the lens. “My name is Skara. Good-bye, Christopher. If you can’t forgive me, then remember me. Remember me when you are protecting Indigo Ridge.”
A smear of colors, a vertiginous blur of motion as she pushed the lens aside. Then Hendricks was faced with blackness, the fizzing of the electronic void, and the painful galloping of his heart.
Dawn had broken and so had Cherkesov. Boris had done as much damage as he needed to do. Cherkesov, it turned out, was deathly afraid of going blind. A swipe of the knife blade just under his right eye had been enough for the resistance to bleed out of him. He handed over what he had been bringing from the Mosque in Munich to Damascus.
“It’s a key,” he told Boris, through thickened, bloodstained lips.
“What does it open?”
“Only Semid Abdul-Qahhar knows.”
Boris frowned. “Didn’t Semid Abdul-Qahhar give you the key to bring here?”
“Semid Abdul-Qahhar is here, not in Munich. I was to deliver the key to him in person.”
“How?” Boris said. “Where?”
“He maintains a residence.” Cherkesov’s lips quivered in the parody of a smile. “You’ll like this, Boris Illyich. His residence is in the Old City, in the former Jewish Quarter, in the last remaining synagogue still standing. It had been abandoned for years, ever since the Syrian Jews fled to America.”
“So Semid Abdul-Qahhar took it over, figuring his enemies would never think to look for him there.”
Cherkesov nodded, and groaned. “I need to lie down. I need to sleep.”
“Not yet.” Boris grabbed him by his sodden shirtfront as he was leaning back. “Tell me the time of the rendezvous and the protocol.”
A thin line of pink spittle exited the corner of Cherkesov’s mouth. “He’s expecting me. You’ll never have a chance.”
“Leave that to me,” Boris said.
Cherkesov began to laugh until he coughed up blood. Then he looked up at Boris. “Look at me. Look what you’ve done.”