Washington, D.C.
The Hart Senate Office Building, between Constitution Avenue and Second Street, provided a million square feet of office space, all nine stories of which were devoted to the United States Senate and its staff. The number of senators was fixed when the republic was founded, at two per state; but the number of staffers was not, and would come to exceed ten thousand. A gratelike marble facade shielded the building’s windows from the mid-Atlantic sun; inside, a large skylit atrium featured Alexander Calder’s mobile Mountains and Clouds, a monumental work of black steel and aluminum. The atrium was surrounded by elevators and circular stairs, and bridged by walkways.
The duplex suite belonging to Senator Bennett Kirk occupied space on the seventh and eight floors. The offices were handsome but short of luxurious—the Oriental carpets were of the standard elephant’s-foot variety, the paneling in the reception area was of stained oak, not walnut—but they had a certain solidity that lent itself to the hush of power. The senator’s own office was grander, and darker, but also vaguely impersonal: Its furnishings somehow announced that they had been passed down to the senator from his predecessors, and would be passed down, in turn, to his successors.
Philip Sutton, the senator’s chief of staff for more than a decade, watched a C-SPAN broadcast of proceedings in the building’s Central Hearing Facility, five floors below him. He sometimes found it easiest to track down his boss by watching television, especially these days. Sutton glanced at his watch; the senator had left the hearing a minute ago, would probably reappear in his suite in a couple of minutes more. He turned off the small television set, caught a glimpse of himself in the dead screen: short, pudgy, balding—not exactly ready for prime time. His nails were bitten close to the quick. Men like him couldn’t get elected dogcatcher. He was a natural lieutenant, not a leader, and it was a fact he accepted with neither bitterness nor regret. If he wanted to know what it was that he lacked, he just had to take a look at Bennett Kirk, and it was all on display. He could see the senator now, in fact, entering the suite with his distinctive loose-limbed lope, broad shoulders, the narrow, almost delicate nose, the head of silver hair that seemed to come with its own key light.
Senator Kirk was smart, earthy, and short-tempered, and he wasn’t devoid of vanity, either. Sutton knew the man’s every flaw and foible, but they detracted not at all from his admiration. What Bennett Kirk had going for him wasn’t just the senatorial looks; he also had something like clarity of purpose, integrity. Pretentious words that would make Senator Kirk cringe, but it was hard to find another way to put it.
“Phil, you look tired,” Senator Kirk said gruffly, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Actually, you look like you’ve been getting your meals out of the vending machines. When you gonna learn that Lunchables are not the fifth food group?”
Sutton studied the older man’s face carefully, but, he hoped, discreetly. He didn’t want the senator to be self-conscious about the state of his health, and so far the illness was scarcely detectable. Sutton had helped him manage the ambitious investigation for many weeks now, but the senator himself was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Too much of the heavy lifting. It would take a toll even on a healthy man.
“Want to hear about your latest opportunities?” Sutton asked. “You’ve never had so many people aching to do you favors.”
“Lead me not into temptation, boy.” The senator eased himself onto a leather wing chair that faced away from the windows. He took a small brown plastic bottle from a trousers pocket, palmed it open, and dry-swallowed an oval yellow pill.
“Let’s see, now. This morning, a call came from Arch Gleeson—you know, former congressman, now a registered lobbyist for the National Aerospace Industries Association. They’ve developed a sudden interest in helping you raise funds for future campaigns.”
“Ah, those defense-industry lobbyists. About as shy as a coon in a Dumpster.”
“Oh, he delicately mentioned the caveat that, if you weren’t interested, they’d make the same offer to any plausible opponent. ‘We just want to be helpful,’ he kept saying. Help me help you—or else. That’s what it came down to.”
“They’re worried about what the committee probe might rumble onto. Or how big a stink we’ll raise once we do. Can’t blame ’em for looking after their interests.”
“Mighty Christian of you,” Sutton shot back with a sardonic grin. “Another firm has offered to hire Amanda as a vice president for corporate communications.” The senator’s wife was a high-school English teacher; it was another transparent attempt at reaching the man leading the Senate probe.
“I can guess what Amanda’s likely to say,” he chuckled. “I guess they’re not aiming at subtlety.”
“A big salary, too. They actually mentioned a range.”
“See if they’d take me instead,” the senator said waggishly. Ever since the Kirk Commission was established, such veiled threats and bribes had been arriving every day.
Kirk was no kind of saint; Sutton wrinkled his nose at the senator’s support for ethanol programs, a political favor for a major agribusiness supporter, though, like any Senate staffer, he also recognized the political exigencies involved. But the senator had generally kept his nose clean.
And now he had his eyes on the prize. What none of the influence-peddlers realized was that he was beyond deterring or swaying at this point. Aside from his closest aides and his wife, Bennett Kirk had kept the diagnosis to himself.
Nobody needed to know that Bennett Kirk had been diagnosed with an aggressive and treatment-resistant variety of lymphoma. It had already reached stage four at the time of diagnosis. He was not going to be alive to run again. All he cared about now was his legacy; and the kind of legacy Senator Kirk cared about was the kind of legacy a man could not buy.
Sutton only occasionally got inklings of the chronic pain the senator was in, as when a subtle facial twitch or not-wholly-concealed wince made a fleeting appearance. For the most part, however, Bennett Kirk was determined to ignore or overcome any and all symptoms of the disease, until the disease burst the floodgates of stoicism.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Kirk said, his eyes meeting Sutton’s. He rearranged himself on his chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs, trying to get comfortable. But no position was comfortable. The bone metastases made sure of that. “I can tell. You got another one of those message thingies.”
Sutton paused, then nodded. “Another communication from Genesis, yes. Via e-mail.”
“And you take this bogeyman seriously?”
Solemnly, his chief of staff nodded. “We’ve been through this. From the earlier messages we’ve received, it’s clear that Genesis is privy to all sorts of buried secrets. I grant we’re dealing with a pretty vaporous figure, but we’ve got to take Genesis very seriously indeed.”
“So what’s this bit of ectoplasm saying now?”
Sutton handed the senator a printout of the latest e-mail. “Genesis is promising to supply us with information—including names, dates, possible witnesses and perpetrators. Quite a gift.”
“Remember my philosophy: Always look a gift horse in the mouth. But if the horse is invisible, you can’t give it a dental exam, can you?”
“We can’t walk away from this. It’s too good. Too valuable. Stuff we’d never be able to get on our own, no matter how many investigators we threw at it. We’ll be able to unveil and dismantle a conspiracy that’s been under way, it appears, for longer than you’ve been in the Senate.”
“Or we’ll be left holding our breeches in a rainstorm. I mean, this could be the mother of all practical jokes.”
“There’s too much knowledge here. Too many verifiable—and verified—details.”
“In politics, you know, there’s a saying: Consider the source. I don’t like communicating with spirits. This thing unsettles my stomach.” Senator Kirk gave Sutton a level stare. “I need to know who Genesis is. Have we made any progress toward finding out?”
Sutton shrugged uneasily. “We’re in an awkward position. Normally it would be a problem to be kicked over to the investigative and espionage services. Except, of course, those are the agencies you’re investigating.”
Kirk grunted. “I bet some of those bastards would love to get their hands on this Genesis before I did.”
“Word has it,” his chief of staff put in, “that he’ll let people see him…if they’ll let him kill them afterward. Most folks just aren’t that curious.”
“Kee-rist, I hope you’re just yanking my chain.” The senator’s mouth was smiling, but his eyes were not. “And I hope Genesis isn’t.”
Eastern Uruguay
Javier Solanas patted his full belly, drained the last of his mug of beer, gazed around the table, and decided that he was probably as happy as he had ever been, and perhaps as happy as a man should be.
His modest ranch outside Paysandú was nothing special; there were thousands bigger and more prosperous in Uruguay. But he had built it all, had pieced it together from three small plots of land—he, the son of a goatherd! The party wasn’t even for him; it was for his wife of forty years, Elena, whose birthday it was. But that made it all the better. It meant that his pride was not inviting a visit from the evil eye. And nobody, not even the evil eye, could begrudge Elena anyway. Five children—three girls, two boys—Elena had borne him, and all full-grown, all with children of their own. He had three sons-in-law, and he actually liked two of them! Who was so lucky?
The table was filled with plates and platters, half empty. Slabs of fine Uruguayan beef had been grilled in the parilla, slathered with chimichurri sauce. Javier had made his own specialty, morcilla dulce, or blood sausage made with walnuts and raisins. Then there was Elena’s special stuffed sweet peppers. All ravenously consumed. Along with a fair amount of Javier’s beer.
And how about the face of his pretty dark-eyed Elena when he presented her with the pair of plane tickets! She had always dreamed of visiting Paris, and now they would. They would leave tomorrow.
“You shouldn’t have!” Elena had cried out, her beaming countenance saying, Thank God you did.
This was what it was to be a man: to be surrounded by children of all ages, children and grandchildren, to be in a position to feed them all so well that they could not swallow another bite! No, not bad for a goatherd’s son!
“A toast!” Javier called out.
“You’ve already proposed seven toasts,” his daughter Evita said.
“Papi!” her older sister Marie said. She was nursing her infant while keeping an eye on her toddler. “We’ve run out of baby food. Pedro loves the strained carrots.”
“We’ve run out of beer,” said Evita’s husband, Juan.
“No more Pepsi!” called Evita.
“I’ll go to the store,” Juan offered.
“In whose car?” Javier demanded.
“Yours?” The response was a sheepish interrogative.
Javier gestured toward the three empty bottles of lager by Juan’s dinner plate. “I go,” Javier said.
“Don’t go,” said his wife.
“I’m back in five minutes. You won’t notice.” He raised himself to his feet and walked over to the back door. When he and Elena were married, he had a flat belly, flat like the pampas; now he couldn’t see his own feet without making an effort. Elena told him, “More of you to love,” but Javier wondered whether he should take more exercise. A paterfamilias had an obligation to his family. He had to set a good example.
When he reached the green-painted garage—a converted chicken-coop, not that anybody could tell—he closed the narrow side door behind him and turned on the lights. Then he jabbed at the button that would raise the rolling door.
Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. He would have to lift up the rolling door himself. He took a step and felt odd. He took another deep breath, and another. But no matter how much he breathed, he could not catch his breath.
The lights flickered and went out. Javier thought it odd. He was aware of himself blacking out, losing muscle control, slumping gently to the concrete floor. He was aware of himself lying there, flesh, food, blood, bones. Aware that a fly had settled on his forehead, that others were coming to feed on him. Aware that soon he would not be aware at all. It had to have been a heart attack, yes? Or a stroke? But it wasn’t the way he thought such things would be. Not that he had given the eventuality of death a great deal of thought.
His mind drifted, eddied. So this is what it’s like, he thought. I wish I could go back and tell the others. It’s not so bad, really. The main thing is not to be afraid of the dark.
Then consciousness began to evaporate like morning dew, and the flies gathered in a thick cloud.
From just behind the berm line of a wheatfield across the road, two men peered with binoculars.
“Do you think he felt much pain?” one of them asked.
“Nitrogen asphyxiation is about the kindest way you can take a life,” the other, who was more experienced, said. He called himself Mr. Smith, at least when he was on assignment. “You don’t feel breathless, because there’s no carbon dioxide buildup in the blood. You run out of oxygen, but you don’t know what’s happening to you. It’s like someone has turned out the lights.”
“I think you always know when you’re dying,” said the other, a tall man with sandy hair, who went by the name Mr. Jones.
“Marco Brodz didn’t.”
“No,” his companion agreed. “A large-caliber bullet to the head. He never had time. I think that’s the kindest way.”
“They’re both kind. Even fast-acting poisons are kind compared to what nature has in store for us. Cancer, with its jaws munching away at your gut. That’s how my mom went, and it was rotten. Even the horrible crushing sensation of a heart attack—my dad told me about how it felt, the first time he had a coronary. Natural death is a bitch. Really, it’s much better this way. Our way.”
“How did you know that Javier would go to the garage, not anybody else?”
“What, and let another person drive his brand-new sedan? A man like that? You obviously don’t know these parts very well.” He pressed the button of an augmented radio-frequency transmitter; two hundred yards away, a garage door rolled up.
Replacing the air in the garage with a pure nitrogen from the tank of liquid gas had taken nearly half an hour. Now the atmosphere would equilibrate in less than a minute.
Mr. Jones looked through the binoculars, adjusting the focus until he saw the stricken man on the concrete, an area of urine darkening his crotch, a fog of flies darkening his face. “There’s never any real dignity in death,” he observed. “But he does look peaceful, don’t you think?”
The second man, Mr. Smith, took the binoculars and peered carefully. “Does he look peaceful? It’s hard to tell. He certainly looks dead.”
Raleigh, North Carolina
The images kept cycling through his head as Belknap returned to the hotel. Ruth’s sightless, staring eyes, the rivulet of blood glistening from the corner of her slack mouth. One moment she was talking, breathing, reasoning; the next moment she had simply ceased to exist, leaving behind only insentient tissue. No, she had left behind more than that. There were her two young boys, now orphaned, and there were the memories that others had of the woman’s unique and precious existence. An existence that blinked out when someone had squeezed off a carefully aimed bullet.
A sniper’s bullet, obviously from a considerable distance, given its soundless arrival, and therefore demonstrating considerable marksmanship. Belknap himself might have been next, had he not dived into the brush as soon as he realized what had happened. Why was the sniper dispatched? Who had done so? How had they been shadowed? Belknap tried to be analytical, but he felt the rage grow within him, wrapping tendrils around his stony heart. How many of his friends had he seen die? And then there was his beloved Yvette: a memory he had tried to bury as deep as he could, like nuclear waste canistered and interred in a desert salt mine. Part of him—a dream of the man he might have been—had been struck down along with his bride. Where there is beauty, one finds death.
He appeared punctually at the lobby of the Raleigh Marriott at precisely four, and there was Andrea Bancroft, equally punctual, drinking from a white china cup at one of the chair-and-low-table clusters to the right side of the lobby. He hoped that she had followed his instructions and stayed at the hotel. After what had happened at Rock Creek, he had to worry about her own safety as well as his own.
By reflex, he let his gaze wash over the rest of the lobby, a second-long glance that slid like a windshield washer over slick glass. His neck prickled. Something was wrong. To try to warn Andrea was to endanger her; it would plant a target on her within sight of his enemies. She wasn’t their objective, or she wouldn’t be there.
He had to act before he could analyze, act in a manner that was swift, erratic, and difficult to anticipate. Don’t turn back: They’ll have thought of that. Go in! Todd did not break stride as he made his way through the lobby.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Andrea leap up. She assumed he didn’t see her, was coming after him.
Exactly the wrong thing to do.
He whipped his head around, tried frantically to signal her with his eyes, by looking at and yet past her: Do not acknowledge me, as I am not acknowledging you. Pretend we are strangers.
He kept race-walking across the lobby, and—rather than stopping at the front desk or waiting by the elevator bank—immediately pushed through the unmarked swing door behind the concierge desk. Now he was in a luggage-storage area. The fleur-de-lis carpet immediately gave way to hard Congoleum flooring, chandelier lights gave way to fluorescent tubes; racks of suitcase lined either side of the long alcove.
Even as he ran, an inward eye reviewed his threat assessment. What had he seen in the lobby, exactly? A man—an ordinary-looking man, maybe forty, in an ordinary gray suit—reading a newspaper in one of the hotel wing chairs. Diagonally across an unmarked centerline, a man and a woman, both in their late twenties or early thirties, sitting together at a small table. A white porcelain tea server, two white cups. Nothing that would be noticed by a nonprofessional. What alerted Belknap was that neither the man nor the woman at the table near the door looked up when he walked in. A typical couple would have responded to the arrival of a stranger with a flicker of the eye at least. But this couple did not need to; they had already registered his arrival through the glass adjoining the extra-wide revolving door. Instead, the woman glanced, fleetingly, at the older man, who was holding the newspaper just a little lower than he would if he had actually been reading it. Then there was the matter of footwear. The older man was sitting with his legs crossed at the ankles, such that the soles of his shoes were visible, and visibly discordant with his expensive leather shows: textured black rubber, not leather. The woman was dressed fancily—a pale blouse, a dark skirt—and yet her shoes, too, had thick rubber soles. Her makeup was careful, her hair pinned up above her neck, her attire elegant: The rubber-soled shoes she wore were an incongruous element. Belknap had picked up on these things at a glance, instinctively; spelling them out, naming them, took longer. He knew these people: not personally, but professionally, generically. He knew how they were trained; he knew who had trained them. People like him.
They were enemies, but worse still, they were colleagues. Members of a Consular Operations retrieval team. They had to be. Highly trained professionals, carrying out orders. They were not used to failure; they had no reason to be. Belknap had been on just such a detail more than once in his own career. Never had the operation ended in anything less than swift success. How did they know where he was going to show up? he wondered—yet there was no time for such questions.
There was another swing door with a small glass window toward the end of the space; Belknap pushed through it and into an industrial-looking kitchen. A row of small brown men with straight black hair were cleaning or doing prep work, but nobody heard him over the faucet noises, the clattering of aluminum pots on the range grates. Cans of vegetables the size of small oil drums were stacked on wheeled steel carts. There was a rear entrance—but it would be watched. Instead, he found a small elevator, no doubt used for room service.
From behind him, he heard the clattering of unmuffled footsteps: Andrea had gone chasing after him.
Exactly the wrong thing to do. She was no professional, had understood nothing of what he had tried to signal.
Another sound: the snick-click of a pistol being readied. A small, wiry man stepped out of a recessed area next to the service elevator, an M9 pistol trained at Belknap.
Dammit! She was not the only one to miscalculate. The team was well deployed; an operative was stationed by the service elevator as well.
Andrea was tugging on Belknap’s arm. “What the hell is going on?”
The small, wiry man—iron eyes in a broad, weathered face—stepped closer to them, moving his pistol from one to the other. “So who’s your friend?” he barked.
Andrea gasped. “Oh, Jesus. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.”
Three in the lobby. Not five or seven. Three. That meant that they were staffing the operation with S.A.P. operatives only—veterans of special-access programs, with the very highest level of security clearance. Three in the lobby meant that the man with the dull black pistol in his hand was on his own. He would call in the others momentarily—but had not done so yet. He wants to get credit for the capture, Belknap thought. He’ll want it to be absolutely clear that he’d already taken charge of the target when the others arrive.
“I said, who’s your friend?” the gunman snarled.
Belknap snorted. “My friend? For three hundred dollars an hour, the bitch better be my friend. She’ll be your friend, too.”
Belknap saw something on Andrea’s face. A glint of comprehension.
“Screw you,” she yelled at Belknap, suddenly vehement. “And give me my goddamn money!” She punched Belknap hard in the shoulder. “You think you can get away with not paying, you asshole?” Then she turned to the gunman. “What the hell are you looking at? You gonna help me or not? Help me get his wallet. I’ll split it with you.”
“You’re out of your tree,” the gunman said, startled and unsettled. Belknap saw him reaching for his communicator.
“Didn’t Burke send you?” Andrea asked him. “Get on the goddamn stick.”
“You move again, bitch, you’ll get a breast implant of bullets,” the gunman snarled at her. “Both of you—you better freeze. I ain’t saying it again.”
One gunman. One gun. Belknap stepped in front of Andrea, keeping his body between her and the gun. If his orders were to shoot, he would have done so already. Therefore shooting was to be resorted to only in the event of likely mission failure. He took a long step toward the gunman, plunging both his hands inside his own trouser pockets. “You want my wallet? That what this is about?”
He saw the uncertainty in the other man’s eyes. An operative’s most important weapon was his hands; no professional would encumber his hands the way Belknap had by sticking them in his pockets. Had Belknap approached him with his hands raised to shoulder level, the wiry operative would instantly have recognized the gambit; he would have been trained to employ it himself. Even with hands raised high in the air, Belknap would be identified as a threat. An opponent becomes more dangerous when he’s within an arm’s length of you.
“You tell Burke that if he wants a john to pay up, he better make sure his honeys are putting out.” Belknap’s voice was confiding, as if he were trying to appeal to the other, man to man.
“Don’t take another goddamn step!” The man’s command was taut, yet his uncertainty was visibly growing. Was this, in fact, the correct target?
Belknap ignored him. “Put yourself in my situation,” Belknap went on, and came closer still. He was close enough to smell cigarettes and sweat on the man. “Because I’m going to tell you a secret about your boss I don’t want this bitch to hear.”
With a sudden movement, Belknap scissored his torso and smashed his forehead into the other man’s face, then wrested the pistol from his grasp before he crumpled to the ground.
“Andrea, listen to me,” he told her urgently. “There were three operatives in the lobby, and they would have made you. Chances are at least one of them will be here in maybe fifteen seconds. The others won’t recognize you. You need to do precisely what I tell you.”
He knelt down, rummaged through the fallen man’s pockets until he found a pack of Camels, half-empty, and a disposable lighter.
Andrea was breathing hard now. She had momentarily staved off her terror, lost it in the mad intensity of her performance. Soon, he knew, it would return.
“Keep it together, okay?” He handed her the cigarettes and lighter.
She nodded mutely.
Belknap looked into her eyes as he spoke, as if to verify that she was absorbing his words. “You leave the back way, like you’re a manager taking a cigarette break. Five paces away from the door, stop. Turn and face the hotel. Open your purse. Take out a cigarette. Light it. That cigarette is like oxygen to you. Then you start to wander off the lot and toward the street, like you need to buy more cigarettes. You keep going. There’s a hotel a block south with a taxi line. Get a taxi there, get yourself to downtown Durham, stay in public places like shopping areas.”
“Please,” she whispered. “Come with me.”
He shook his head. “I can’t go out that way. They’re waiting for me.”
“Then what’s going to happen to you? That man, he was going to—”
Belknap heard footfalls from the corridor where the luggage was stored. “You’re craving a cigarette,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “The smoke is like oxygen to you. Now go!”
Her shoulders stiffened slightly, and he saw that she grasped the situation. She put the cigarette pack into her purse, and, without another word, let herself out the rear entrance. If she were given a role, he knew, she could play it. He had given her one. She would be safe.
He had no such confidence about himself.
Now he jabbed the button to the service elevator. He could hear the sound of luggage being tossed around. One person, plainly, had been detached from the lobby unit to search the internal spaces of the floor. A sound move: The agents watching the other exits must have reported in that the target had made no appearance so far.
He jabbed the elevator call button again. It would take just seconds before the operative satisfied himself that Belknap was not hiding with the luggage, and pushed toward the rear of the hotel.
The elevator cabin opened and Belknap stepped in. He pressed the button, almost randomly, for the fourth floor. The doors closed jerkily and the cabin started to move.
He closed his eyes, calmed his pulse, reviewed his options. He had to consider the strong possibility that he had been glimpsed stepping onto the elevator—in which case others may well be in pursuit, taking other elevators to the fourth floor, or simply bounding up the stairs. He raced down the hallways, looking for a maid’s towel-laden cart, an open door. His head start, if he had one, could be measurable in seconds.
An open door. He found one: a room being turned down, the bolster pillows removed from the headboard, the spread and blanket folded back. The maid, moving stiffly in her pale blue uniform, greeted him with a Spanish accented “Good afternoon, sir,” as he entered, taking him to be the guest. “Just finishing up,” she added.
Suddenly she shrieked, and Belknap knew that his luck had run out. When he whirled around he saw that two armed men had raced into the room. One of them spun the maid around and shoved her out of the room before standing post at the door.
Belknap forced himself to breathe normally as he sized up the two operatives. Neither was from the lobby; indeed, neither was anybody he had ever seen before. One of them looked vaguely Filipino, though with the long limbs and well-developed musculature of a corn-fed American. Child of an army base marriage, Belknap figured. The other was denser, and dark-skinned, with a shaven skull that gleamed like ebony. Both held short-barreled automatic weapons, polymer grip, long curved magazines beneath the stock. Thirty rounds of 9mm ammunition each. At full fire, the weapon could probably discharge all thirty rounds in a few seconds.
“Lie flat on the floor.” The black man spoke first. His voice was light and eerily calm. “Clasp your hands behind your head. One ankle over the other. You know the drill.” He could have been a driving instructor telling a student to release the clutch. “Do it now.”
Rinehart was always dismissive when Belknap spoke of good luck. Has it ever occurred to you that your “good luck” consists of getting you out of fixes that your bad luck got you into?
“I’ll repeat the instructions—once,” the man said. Again, he sounded utterly calm.
I’d feel calm, too, if I was aiming a powerhouse machine gun at a man with a pistol stuck in his pocket.
“No need,” Belknap said. “Speaking as a colleague, I gotta say you guys have done a bang-up job so far. If I were writing up a post-action report, though, I might raise a question about the ammunition. Hotel walls are famously thin. I assume you’re using standard NATO cartridges. That means one round could punch through half a dozen walls. You got those things set at triple burst? Or single shot?”
The two men traded glances. “Full fire,” the black man said.
“Oh, see, that’s not good.” A chink in the armor: The man had responded to him. They had the well-founded confidence of their overwhelming firepower. Belknap’s only hope was to find a way to use that confidence to his own advantage. “You didn’t work out the backstopping issues.”
“On the ground now, or I will fire.” The black man spoke the words with the air of someone who had killed enough men to regard it as little more than an inconvenience. At the same time, pride kept him from adjusting his weapon’s firing rate; he wasn’t going to lose face in front of a colleague.
An S.A.P. retrieval team. Belknap knew that his best chance of surviving was to surrender. But S.A.P. retrievals did not end in court hearings or newspaper items. Once “retrieved,” he would probably face incarceration for an indefinite number of years at a clandestine facility in West Virginia or a black-site location in rural Poland. He did not value his own survival highly enough for surrender to be an appealing option.
“First, it’s highly irresponsible for you to use full fire in an environment dense with nontarget civilians,” Belknap said, adopting the tone of a training instructor. “When I started in this business, you two were still sucking on pacifiers, so listen to the voice of goddamn experience. Full fire against hotel drywall? The post-action report practically writes itself. Classic tyro’s mistake: Job like this, you need a fine camelhair brush, not a goddamn paint roller.” As he spoke, he walked over to the window. “So let me help you out here. What we’ve got here is a window.”
The man who looked part-Filipino snickered. “Oh, you noticed? No other hotel guests out in the air, now are they?”
“Who the hell trained you?” Belknap demanded. “Please don’t tell me it was me. No, I think I’d recognize your ugly mugs. Now, then, before you find yourself trying to explain to Will Garrison why two guys with machine guns were forced to terminate a retrieval and blast away at an unarmed man”—he slipped the lie in with a name they’d recognize—“which we can all agree is a suboptimal mission outcome, let me ask you a question. How far will a nine-millimeter bullet travel through the air?”
“We ain’t your goddamn students,” the larger gunman sneered.
“High-velocity plinker like you got there, could be more than two miles. Over ten thousand feet. Even if you reset to triple burst, you need to expect that the third bullet is essentially traveling through thin air, following the opening punched out by the first two. Now, let’s take a closer look at where the natural trajectory is going to lead.” He turned his back to them and slid open the floor-to-ceiling window, which let onto a narrow balcony.
“Hey, Denny,” the corn-fed Asian said to his partner, “I know what I’m gonna write in the post-action report. Target was terminated because he was so goddamn annoying.”
Belknap ignored him. “As you may have noticed, we’re in a fairly built-up and densely populated region.” He gestured toward a glass-and-steel office building across the nearby highway, but his own attention was focused on the large outdoor pool that the balcony overlooked. A tall privacy hedge of rhododendrons screened the pool from a busy street nearby.
With an easy grin, the black man lowered himself into a crouch, keeping the gun aimed at center-body mass, but at an upward angle. “Easy enough to change the trajectory, now isn’t it? That’s some bullshit you’re talking.”
“You should have taken a closer look,” Belknap said, undeterred. “Should have done what I’m doing.” He stepped onto the balcony, gauged the horizontal distance between it and the pool.
“Sucker thinks he can run out the clock,” the second gunman said with a nasty laugh.
“I’m just trying to teach you kids a thing or two,” Belknap went on. “Because if you’re firing from that rice-paddy crouch of yours, Denny, you’d ideally want your target in a more elevated position.” As if to demonstrate, Belknap turned his back to the operatives again and stepped onto the four-foot steel trellis, its exact measurement doubtless in compliance with some child-safety law. What about the safety of fleeing adults? Balancing himself precariously, he sprang forward with all the coiled strength of his legs, forward and into thin air.
He heard a spurt of gunfire, like a chainsaw exploding into life: full fire depleting their magazines at eight hundred rounds per minute, or a little over two seconds for a thirty-round clip. If you can hear it, it didn’t hit you. They had failed to anticipate his move, and their surprise must have delayed their reaction by a critical instant.
Belknap was hurtling downward—yet, in freefall, he felt as if he were motionless, and that the ground was hurtling toward him, growing bigger and bigger and closer and closer. He had perhaps three seconds to right himself, to stretch his body into a blade, knife though the surface tension. At these heights, one did not dive headfirst. He could not waste time peering downward: If he had miscalculated and was going to hit cement, then nothing he did mattered. He had to assume that he was going to fall where he had aimed himself, at the deep end of the pool. To a body falling from a height of twenty yards, water was not a soft and yielding substance: It was stiff and resistant, and the more surface area exposed to it—the broader the area of impact—the harder the water would hit him. In training, he had learned the basic equation: shape factor multiplied by water density multiplied by the square of velocity. It was like someone taking a two-by-four to your bare feet, he recalled a professional cliff diver reporting. He would be traveling at almost forty miles per hour when he reached the water. The problem isn’t the falling, the cliff diver had said. It’s the stopping.
Belknap could not affect his velocity; he could not change the fact that water was more than eight hundred times denser than air. All he could do was reduce his shape factor—to place his feet together, angled en pointe, raise his arms above his head, straight, palm to palm. He glimpsed cars on the adjacent roadway and, though they had to have been traveling at least forty miles an hour, they looked to him as if they were inching along, scarcely moving at all. At the last moment before hitting the water, Belknap inhaled deeply, filled his lungs, and prepared for what could not be prepared for.
The jolt ran through his body, an impact that rippled through his very skeleton, his spinal cord, his every joint and sinew.
He’d thought it would never come, and yet, paradoxically, it had come sooner than he had expected. He had done all he could, and yet felt utterly unready. After the concussing shock of impact, he grew conscious of other sensations, like a sense of coolness all over his body, and the way the water, having struck the first blow, now cushioned him, as if to make amends, gentling his course to the bottom. Coolness became warmth, uncomfortable warmth, and then the sensation of temperature was swamped by a mounting breathlessness. A warning chimed in his head: Don’t inhale. He could feel solid ground beneath him—the bottom of the pool. He sank down further, bending his knees all the way, and then he shot upward, toward the surface, fourteen feet above him. Only when he could wave a hand freely in front of his face, proving that he was no longer underwater, did he allow himself to take a breath of air. No time! He clambered over the side of the pool and rolled himself onto the stone coping.
He did not bother to look up at the window from which he had jumped. The gunmen there were equipped for close-quarters combat. Neither was a marksman, nor equipped with a distance-accurate rifle, and there were too many civilians in the pool area for a burst of automatic fire to be a permissible action.
With great effort he struggled to his feet. His entire lower body felt like a giant bruise. His muscles jellied, and no sooner was he upright than he sprawled to the ground. No! He would not give in. Adrenaline surged through his viscera, tightening every muscle fiber as if someone were twisting the pegs of a violin. He lurched into a run—he was not sure he could walk, but he could run—and found a small opening in the rhododendron hedge. His sodden clothing added at least ten pounds to the weight he had to carry, and—as he realized only when he nearly stepped into the path of a whizzing and, to him, noiseless car—he was deafened: Pool water had evidently filled both ear canals. His legs were now pincushions; he could not feel the asphalt underneath his feet: In place of physical sensation, tactile awareness, there was only a needling pain, and then pulses of searing heat.
Yet he had not been captured. Not yet. He had not been “retrieved.” His adversaries had failed—so far.
Belknap darted across the busy road, testing the limits of a two- or three-second interval between vehicles—if he stumbled, took just a second longer than he hoped, he would have met the bumper of an oncoming van—and then through another intersection.
A block later, he reached a row of small houses with separate garages; most looked dark, shuttered, waiting for their owners to get home from work. Belknap scooted into a garage through an unlocked side door and stretched out behind a pile of tires. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he made out a silhouetted statuary of gas-powered gardening gizmos—a leaf-blower, a weed-whacker, a tiller with its tines plugged by ancient sod. Evidence of a fitful enthusiasm. The toys were no doubt purchased after a great deal of care and comparison shopping, used a couple of times, and left to gather dust. He inhaled the familiar smells of decaying tire rubber, motor oil, and tried to make himself comfortable. He would stay here until his clothes dried.
There were too many places he could have gone to make it rational for the retrieval team to stay in place, especially after the burst of gunfire and the unwanted attention it would attract. The team would disperse until the next sighting. Belknap simply had to stay still for the next six hours, with no companion but the pain, which assaulted him like a violent, whole-body toothache. Still, nothing was broken, nothing torn. Time would heal the bruising, and, as Belknap reviewed what had happened, he knew that the physical agony would be overtaken by the one thing that had always proved its equal: rage.