The Jericho Pact Page 22

  “You didn’t think about…ending it, did you?” she asked carefully.

  “I’m not sure you can be in that situation and not at least think about it,” he replied. “You can’t take a walk down the street and grab a sandwich. You can’t think maybe you need a weekend off to sit on the beach, soak up some sun and let your mind wander. You can’t pick up the phone and call a friend when you want to, or jump online to catch up on the baseball scores from the U.S. They treated me well, but I was still in jail. And suddenly all those things I’d taken for granted were gone, maybe for a little while, and maybe for the rest of my life.”

  “Das verstehe ich,” she said. I understand.

  “And yes, some part of you starts to think…what’s the point? Why sit there, rolling through the same routine day after day, going nowhere, having no future except one more day of the same damn thing as yesterday? I couldn’t tell you or Margarite that, of course. Just like my dad couldn’t tell me that. He said it was all good. He kept right on saying it was all good. Then he found a way to kill himself.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Renate said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And I couldn’t have known what my SAC had planned in Los Angeles. And I couldn’t have known I’d break that guy’s ribs when I tackled him. But at what point does ‘I couldn’t have known’ become a meaningless phrase? How many dead before you decide you should have known…that you should have found some way to know? Nine hundred dead on that train in Nice, and I’ll bet you someone said ‘We couldn’t have known.’ He was my father, Renate. I should have known.”

  “Lawton, you’re free now….”

  He shook his head and continued. “I’m out, Renate. But I’m not free. My dad’s still dead. Carlos Montoya is still dead. Lezeta is still dead. I’m still dead. You’re still dead.”

  The ache within her overwhelmed her. Dead? They were not corpses rotting in a grave. Not yet.

  They exited the train and rode an escalator up to the street. Renate’s hotel was a half block away. Lawton was hurting, and she didn’t know how to reach him. But one thing was painfully clear to her: She needed him back.

  “We’re not dead,” she said as they stepped into her hotel room. “We’re undercover, yes. Forever, yes. But we’re not dead, Lawton.”

  “Aren’t we?” he asked.

  “We’re standing here, talking to each other.”

  He let out a sigh and sat on the bed. “Yeah. We’re standing here talking to each other. And when you need a release, you’re fucking some Italian you met in a bar.”

  She studied him for a moment, trying to organize the thoughts that swirled through her. “Look, I’m sorry that…I didn’t know it would…”

  “And it shouldn’t!” he said. “We both know that. We both know who we are and where we stand in life, what we can and can’t do. I’m not stupid. You’re not stupid. So I sit here and try to forget how Goddamned good it felt to step through that sally port and see your face, how good it felt to hug you and smell your hair, even if it smells like cigarettes, how good it felt to be squeezed next to you on that subway. I have to forget all that, because I’m dead and you’re dead and dead people can’t feel what I felt.”

  “We’re not dead,” she said, stepping closer, sitting beside him. “We’re not, Lawton.”

  He moved away down the bed. “No. I don’t want a mercy fuck, Renate. I’m not some desperate prisoner out of jail and looking for any pussy to feel alive again. And you’re…you’re too damn good to do that anyway.”

  “Yes,” she said, closing the distance between them again. “I am too good to do that. I wouldn’t give you a mercy fuck, as you called it. I wouldn’t give my body to anyone that way.”

  “Unless he’s Italian and in a bar.”

  “Stop it!” she said, slapping his face before she realized she had moved. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” he said, holding a hand to his cheek. “I deserved it.”

  “You did,” she said. “But I’m still sorry, Lawton. That guy in the bar…that was scratching an itch. That’s all it was. And you know what?”

  She gave him no chance to answer. “I wouldn’t do it again. It was going to scratch the itch, but I knew that was all it was going to do. It was not…like this….”

  She leaned in and kissed him desperately. He didn’t return the kiss, but neither did he resist it.

  “Renate, we can’t,” he said, looking into her eyes.

  “Yes, we can,” she said. “Because we’re not dead.”

  She kissed him again. This time he returned it, their lips caressing, exploring, parting for tongues to join in the dance. Her fingers wandered over his stubbly cheeks, the surprisingly soft skin at the curve of his neck, the gentle but firm curve of his shoulder.

  “We’re not dead,” she whispered, a mantra of need, as he drew far enough away to cup one of her breasts in his hand.

  “Not tonight, at least,” he said.

  He had just released the first three buttons of her blouse when the door burst open.

  24

  Berlin, Germany

  L awton and Renate were already rolling to the floor as the echoes of the splintering door frame had settled.

  The metallic clicking of the bolt recycling, the thuds of rounds impacting on the mattress, were louder than the reports from the silenced handgun.

  Lawton knew that neither he nor Renate had a weapon. Even if they had, there would be no way to reach it. While he had been lost in self-pity and lust and she’d been trying to pull him out of that pit, they had overlooked the basic rules of countersurveillance. They’d been followed. He hoped he would have the chance to kick himself for the mistake, but this was not that time. They had only moments before the gunman found them on the floor, sandwiched between the bed and the wall.

  He gathered his legs beneath him, realizing even in that instant that he was stepping on Renate’s knee. A distant part of his mind registered that a torn ligament was the least of their worries. Shutting his ears to her shriek, he pushed off, launching himself at the attacker who, even now, was turning toward them.

  He saw the muzzle flash this time, and tried to block out the burning sting in his side as his momentum carried him into the man and against the dresser. The man let out a grunt as the breath rushed out of him, and for an instant Lawton thought back to the sounds he’d heard on the street outside the Centrum Judiciaum, but only for an instant.

  It was an instant too long.

  The impact of metal on his skull sent his vision into star-sparkled shimmers. His muscles wanted to give way to the pain, but he knew that could not happen. Curling his fingers into atavistic claws, he raked the man’s face twice in rapid succession, grateful that he hadn’t thought to cut his fingernails while he’d been in jail. He felt flesh give way on the first strike, and the second skidded over blood-slicked flesh.

  That bought him the split second he needed to get his legs back under him, and he exploited the opportunity to the fullest, planting his right foot behind him, giving him a firm base to drive his forehead forward in a strike that would have made a soccer player proud. His next blow would not have, however, for he drove his left knee savagely into the man’s groin.

  He heard the clatter as the gun dropped to the floor. They were on even terms now. No, more than that, because the other man’s face was torn open, his nose broken, and Lawton could hear the high, keening sound from the man’s throat as he tried to get his hands between his legs in that most automatic of self-protective responses.

  They were not even. Lawton held the advantage, and he was determined to press it to the fullest. Shifting his weight onto his left foot, he drove his right heel down onto the man’s instep, then snapped his knee up just as the man completed the autonomic reaction of doubling over. The knee caught him squarely under the chin, and Lawton saw his enemy’s head snap up and back.

  For the first time, Lawton saw the face of his attacker. The man’s features were already slackenin
g as he slid down the front of the dresser, eyes rolling back and up as he slipped into unconsciousness. The man had perhaps once been handsome, although the ragged tears from Lawton’s fingernails and the mass of bloody mucous beneath his nose made it difficult to tell. European, definitely, although Lawton couldn’t immediately pinpoint his origins beyond that. Close-cropped dark hair. A faded tattoo barely visible at the collar of his black sweater. The gleaming white furrow of a scar above his left ear, probably a bullet that had had the man’s name on it, ever so slightly misspelled.

  Lawton laughed at the thought, and the sound of his own laughter shocked him, even as the shooting pain made the room spin. The man’s face was replaced by the ceiling, and then by Renate’s as she stood over him.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said, wincing as she bent to pick up the man’s gun.

  “They misspelled his name,” Lawton said, watching her swirl above him.

  “What?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

  Lawton pointed to the scar over the man’s ear, trying to collect thoughts into words, losing the battle as every breath seemed to drive a spike through his mind. Her face changed then, and she looked down at his side.

  “You’re shot.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “They misspelled my name, too.”

  “Whatever,” Renate said impatiently. “We’ve got to go, and we’ve got to go now, so you have to suck it up, Lawton. On your feet.”

  In a strange moment of clarity, he noted the hardness that had returned to Renate’s face, so unlike the softness of the woman he had seen just before the door burst open. Then his brain spiraled away from coherency.

  He tried to rise as she pulled his hands with surprising strength, but his legs wanted nothing more to do with anything his brain might be thinking. Leave us alone and focus on the bullet in your side, they screamed, then sulked into limp uselessness.

  He tried to laugh as the thought flitted through, but that only reminded him of the burning pain. And didn’t it just figure that his shock-weakened brain would tell jokes when he couldn’t laugh at them? Life sure was a bitch.

  He heard the slap before he felt it. He certainly never saw it, for his eyes shot open an instant too late. Renate’s eyes had gone cold, hard, predatory. He knew that look. And she was directing it at him.

  She’ll cut her losses.

  The whisper of thought tore away the fog in his mind like a hot desert wind, leaving him squarely and painfully in the here and now.

  “Get up, Lawton,” she snapped. “We have maybe thirty seconds to make it to the service elevator. Twenty-five…”

  He nodded, taking her hands and pushing himself to his feet, ignoring the wet fire in his left side, letting her shepherd him out of the room and down the corridor. Already cautious heads were poking out of doorways.

  “Herzattacke!” she barked. Heart attack!

  He wondered if they believed her, or if they could see the blood on his shirt. Regardless, they ducked back into their rooms, good, obedient Germans staying out of the way. She leaned him against the wall of the elevator, stabbing the button for the basement parking level.

  “I’m sorry,” Lawton said with a groan.

  “Later,” she snapped, trying to keep her weight off her right leg. “Let’s get out of here first.”

  “I’m all yours,” he said, pressing on the oozing wound, fighting back the fog that threatened to return.

  When she looked at him, a smile crept almost to the edges of her eyes. “Later for that, too.”

  Rome, Italy

  Assif Mondi lay on his side beneath his desk, trying to draw a breath through the fear. He was not a field man. He’d received cursory weapons training, of course, first when he’d joined the Delhi Metropolitan Police and again when he’d been selected for the elite federal unit, the Central Bureau of Investigations. But his specialty had been such that neither he nor his instructors had worried all that much about his combat proficiency. His future lay in an anonymous, pale-green-walled office, in front of a computer screen, prying into the Internet communications of radicals who sought to overthrow the Indian government.

  And there he would have remained but for the presence of Lashkar-e-Toiba sympathizers in the CIB. When he had broken into their communications network and informed his superiors of their involvement in the attack on the Indian Parliament, he had been swiftly targeted for death. He had known the assignment to the Kashmir region on the Pakistani border was intended to put him in a place where he could be eliminated. A voice on a telephone had saved his life in the minutes before the bomb exploded in his hotel room. He had “died” in that hotel room and then had been invited to move his talents to Rome.

  But there would be no voice on a telephone to save his life tonight.

  His ears still rang from the first blast, the one that had torn the warehouse door from its hinges. Now he heard the crackle of gunfire. God only knew how many of his colleagues were already dead or dying out in the front offices. He was alone in the computer center, unarmed. He might be the only one left. And he was terrified.

  They would be thorough. Anyone capable of attacking Office 119 would send trained operators who would search every room, squeezing the trigger again and again until everyone was dead.

  Everyone.

  He could not simply hide beneath the desk. He had to move, had to find a weapon. The fire extinguisher on the far wall. It wasn’t ideal. He wasn’t even certain how to use it. But it was better than cowering under his desk and waiting to die.

  He crawled out, slowly at first, then rose and ran as he realized there was nothing to be gained by stealth. He was alone in the room so far, and speed was what mattered.

  The door burst open just seconds after Assif grabbed the extinguisher and read the operating instructions. He pulled the pin and raised the nozzle to blast the man in the doorway with a freezing spray of carbon dioxide when he recognized the man standing before him.

  “It’s me,” Jefe said. “Are you okay?”

  “What…?”

  Assif stepped forward, looking past his blood-stained boss. Behind Jefe stood four slight Arab men, their hands at their sides, pistols pointed to the floor.

  “They’re okay,” Jefe said. “We have good neighbors. Grab the laptops and let’s go.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Jefe waited while Assif collected the computers he could carry and disabled the others, then led him out into the main office. He explained the bodies on the floor with a coldness that left Assif even more shaken than the attack itself. “It was a three-man team. Shock and speed. Blew the door and came in shooting. They hit her with the first volley. If they hadn’t tripped the infrareds in the alley, they might have gotten all of us.”

  “Her?” Assif asked.

  “They got Margarite.”

  Jefe’s eyes were expressionless, yet Assif knew he must be feeling as shaken as he himself was. “Is she…?”

  “Never had a chance,” Jefe said, still walking toward the door with the four Arab men. He turned and touched a finger to his breastbone. “Three-shot burst. We’ll deal with that later. For now, we have to leave.”

  “But where will we…?” Assif asked, hurrying to catch up as Jefe crossed the street outside the warehouse.

  They walked two blocks before ducking into the small restaurant where Assif and the other Office 119 agents had often come for takeout. Grim nods greeted them. Everyone here knew what had happened.

  “Upstairs,” Jefe said, nodding to a stairway. “It’s not a lot of space, four rooms, but it will have to do for now. Like I said, good neighbors.”

  The facilities upstairs were rudimentary at best, but they did have electrical outlets. Plenty of them. Assif assigned himself the task of setting up the laptops. One of the Arab men walked in with coils of T6 cable.

  “You will need to network, yes?” the man asked.

  “I…yes,” Assif said. “Who are you?”

  “We heard th
e first blast,” the man said. “We came at once. I am sorry we were not in time to save your friend.”

  “Why did you come at all?” Assif asked.

  “Because of Strasbourg,” the man said.

  “You’re with Saif Alsharaawi.”

  The man nodded. “A small cell. We have kept an eye on you since Strasbourg. We decided you were…doing good work. When this was made a relocation zone, we made sure you would not be disturbed.” He sighed. “In that, we failed.”

  As he spoke, a series of powerful whooshes split the air outside, followed by a low rumble. Jefe had triggered the incendiary charges in the warehouse. What had been a state-of-the-art headquarters was now burning fiercely, its glow visible through the window.

  “This is useless,” Assif said, shaking his head as he plugged in cables. “The data was on the mainframe. No way can we run on five laptops.”

  “You would want to connect to that port,” the man said, pointing at the wall. He smiled an apology. “As I said, we kept an eye on you. We have been linked to your computers for months now. The pantry in our cellar stays quite cool.”

  “Sixteen degrees?” Assif asked, referring to the standard room temperature for a mainframe computer. Sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit, sixteen Celsius.

  “Precisely.”

  “Good to know we were being watched,” Assif said as he began booting up the computers. “It didn’t help Margarite, though.”

  The man nodded sadly. “We were watching for agitators from our own community. We had circulated word that your office was not to be touched, but of course there were some who might get angry and look for any white face. We kept such people under a close eye. But they did not do this.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “No,” the man said.

  “We’re going to find out,” Assif said. In focusing his mind on hooking up the computers, shock had finally given way to anger. “And we’re going to find out fast.”

  25

  Béziers, France

  M iriam had spent the day reading Father Steve’s notes from his research at the library. She broke off to listen to Soult’s speech in the early evening, and what she heard combined with Steve’s research to give her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.