Assassin (6 page)

Sutherland nodded his head, wiping rainwater from his eyes. Unlike Congreve, who covered his thinning pate with a hat rain or shine and was now wearing an old wide-brimmed sou’wester, he’d forgotten to grab a lid.

“I think,” Sutherland said, “he would have spent that Friday night up there, having hauled the cable up after him. Little chance of accidental detection then, the morning of the wedding.”

“Yes,” Congreve agreed, “He might just. Minimum he’d have gone up well before daybreak. Long, chilly night up there. He’d have taken food, something hot to drink.”

“I know what you’re thinking. But it was a very professional hit. He would have been extremely fastidious.”

“Still, Ross, gravity is frequently on the side of the law. People drop all manner of things when they’re scrubbing the blood out of the bathtub. Chap up a tree all night, well…”

“Scene-of-crime officers will have gone over this bit pretty thoroughly.”

“Crime scene investigators, Superintendent Sutherland, are not to be confused with Ambrose Congreve.”

“Sorry, sir, I only meant—”

“We’ll do a three-sixty around the base of the tree,” Congreve said, snapping on a pair of latex gloves from Sutherland’s murder bag. “Fifteen-foot radius out. You go that way, I’ll go anticlockwise. Surplus to requirements, eh? Is that what they think? By God, they’ve got another think coming, Sutherland!”

Twenty minutes later, their rain gear covered with mud, twigs, and soggy leaves, the two policemen met on the opposite side of the tree. “Well. Good cursory examination, I daresay. Let’s do it again, shall we? I’ll take your half,” Congreve said. He dropped to his knees and, torch in one hand, began delicately turning over layers of leaves with the other.

Sutherland’s heart skipped a beat when, not five minutes later, he heard Congreve exclaim, “A-ha!”

No matter how many times he’d heard Ambrose Congreve say it, he knew an a-ha meant only one thing. A cold trail had just grown considerably warmer.

“What have you got, Chief?” he asked peering over the older man’s shoulder at a soggy blackish object pinched twixt his thumb and forefinger.

“Not sure. Try and keep your light on it, will you? What’s it look like to you?”

“No idea. A moldy root of some kind?”

Congreve had his spatula blade out and was levering the thing into a clear plastic evidence bag.

“Looks like, yes, which is why your scene-of-crime chaps missed it, prone as they are to snap judgments. Cigar, actually,” he said, holding the transparent bag up to Sutherland’s light. “See the teeth marks?”

Ross peered at the thing from the other side.

“Yes,” he said. “And, here, looks like a bit of foil from the wrapper embedded in the wrapper leaf. Do you see it?”

A
LEX
H
AWKE COULDN’T SLEEP.
H
E COULDN’T STAND BEING
alone in his big empty Georgetown house in Washington and he couldn’t imagine being back in England drowning in all that bloody tea and sympathy. He rolled over and looked at the clock by the bedside. Midnight. Christ. He flipped the lamp on and picked up his book, a battered first edition of
Pigs Have Wings.

Wodehouse had been, since childhood, one of the few authors with even the slightest ability to pick him up and drag him, kicking and screaming, into a passably good humor. He must have read this particular novel ten times over and it never lost its capacity to make him laugh out loud. He read for fifteen minutes, sat straight up in bed, and hurled the hardcover across the room.

Even Wodehouse had failed him.

He managed to hit a particularly hideous Waterford crystal table vase someone had sent as a wedding present (why Pelham had unwrapped the ghastly object and left it there was still a mystery), which smashed against the wall with a most satisfying crashing sound. Like glass cymbals struck with a heavy wooden mallet.

There. That’s a little better, he thought, eyes darting hungrily round the room seeking something even more substantial to splinter into a thousand pieces.

He was about to crawl out of bed and pour himself a stiff brandy prior to putting his fist through a wall when the telephone jangled.

“Hello!” he snarled, not bothering to disguise his mood.

“Can’t sleep?”

“What?”

“I saw your bedroom light go on.”

“Hiya, Conch. How the bloody hell are you?”

“Swell. Cloud Nine. Happier than a pig in—”

“You rang to cheer me up, is that it?”

Consuelo de los Reyes, Conch, was the American Secretary of State. She was rather beautiful and keen-minded, and she lived just across the road. Hawke’s neighbor for some two years now. She’d also been Alex’s lover. But that was longer ago than either of them cared to remember. Check that. Conch cared to remember. And she never let Alex forget it.

“Hey, Mister. Remember me? Your old fishing buddy?”

“Sorry. I’m in a thoroughly despicable humor.”

“Good. Me, too. Let’s have a drink.”

“Brilliant idea. Your place or mine?”

“Yours. You have a much better wine cellar. Give me five to throw something on.”

The doorbell chimed half an hour later and Hawke answered it, a bottle of Lafitte ’53 in hand. The old adage, ‘Life is too short to drink cheap wine,’ had never seemed more appropriate. Fully aware since childhood that we’re all hanging by a thread every second of our lives, the savagery on the steps of St. John’s had put paid to Hawke’s most fragile notion of security.

Hawke pulled the heavy door open.

Conch’s eyes glistened, and she wrapped her arms around him, her right hand patting him softly on the shoulder. They stood there in the doorway, silent, just holding on.

Finally, Alex pulled away and looked down at her upturned face, speaking softly.

“Should we skip the wine and go directly to the tequila?” He tried a smile and almost managed it.

“I make a mean Margarita, buster.”

“The meanest goddamn Margarita between Key West and Key Largo.”

The two had met down in the Keys. Hawke had been determined to learn how to catch bonefish, and Conch, a Cuban who’d grown up in the Florida archipelago, was the acknowledged master. She was just out of Harvard with a brand new doctorate in political science the summer they’d met. A free spirit, taking a year off to decide what to do with her life, and meanwhile earning a pretty good living as a bone guide out of Cheeca Lodge on Islamorada.

The Cheeca’s bar overlooking the ocean was a favorite watering hole for local captains and bone guides, and Conch had met the tall Englishman with the curly black hair there the afternoon he’d arrived. Unlike most of the tourists, who sported gaily colored tropical fishing shirts, Alex Hawke was wearing a simple navy blue linen shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows over his finely muscled forearms.

“Bartender over there tells me you’re headed down to Key West for dinner tonight,” the deeply tanned, deeply beautiful woman had said to him that first afternoon. She was wearing khaki shorts and a coral cotton shirt that did little to hide her lush figure.

“As a matter of fact, yes I am,” Hawke replied smiling, already hooked, but not in the boat yet.

“Bad idea,” she said, shaking her head.

“Really? Why on earth should that be?”

“Crime rate has skyrocketed down there,” she deadpanned. “Chief of police is a good pal of mine. Just between you and me, he tells me the number of drive-by spankings has tripled in the last six months.”

Hawke, who had some idea of the sexual demographics of Key West, had laughed out loud.

Within an hour, Conch had a new bonefishing client. Twelve hours later they were out on the flats, the sun was shining, the beer was cold, and they were already making a lot of memories. Alex proved an adept pupil, though he didn’t have the patience required for the wily Mr. Bone. He’d taken a great delight in hooking sharks on the light tackle, fighting them all the way to the flats boat. ‘Bit more sporting like this, don’t you think?’ he’d said with his boyish grin, his spinning rod bent double by a large shark.

A week of Budweiser, Buffett, and the most beautiful sunsets Hawke had ever seen would spin them whirling permanently into each other’s orbits. Lovers, friends, lovers, friends. They’d last stopped the wheel on friends and that’s the way it had been ever since.

“Answering his own door,” Conch said, trailing Hawke into the kitchen. She saw a spoon standing upright in a half-eaten tin of macaroni and cheese. “Staff has the night off? Where’s dear old Pelham?”

“Dear old Pelham is upstairs in his bed. Not feeling well, I’m afraid. I took some tomato soup and toast up to the old boy and he wouldn’t touch it.”

“I have to say I’m overwhelmed by the image of your taking a tray up to him.”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s sweet. A girl thing, maybe. Where are the limes? And you better tell me you’ve got key limes, Sugar.”

“In that big fridge over there. I’ll fetch the tequila from the drinks table. Back in a tick.”

Conch pulled open the stainless steel door and stood staring into the refrigerator, not seeing anything.

God. She was glad to see Alex’s stiff upper lip was still intact; and the startlingly blue eyes above his jutting cheekbones were clear. But strangely hollow. Filled with pain and yet so terribly empty. She could see the hurt in them, and it was all she could do to keep the silly smile plastered on her face, keep her hands to herself, keep her mouth shut. She wanted to run to him, hold him, tell him it was going to be all right, tell him a thousand things, the truth about how she still felt, how much it hurt to see him in so much pain.

Since she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, ever, do any of those things, she took the white porcelain bowl full of limes out of the refrigerator, put the bowl on the counter, found a knife, and began slicing the tiny green limes and squeezing the tart juice into the mixer.

Hers was a dark, secret love. She had learned, somehow, to live with it.

They sat on the floor in the library before the fire Alex had built and they were halfway through the small pitcher of Margaritas before either of them could say anything.

“Well, you’ve still got it, kid,” he said to her, staring into the flames. “Just might be the meanest Margarita ever created by man or woman.”

“Alex?”

“Yes?”

“What are you going to do? I mean—”

“Me? Oh, gosh. I have no immediate plans. Beyond finding the bloody bastard who murdered my wife, I mean. Finding him and ripping his bloody heart out. Beyond that, I—”

“Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry. So—”

“Let’s not do this, Conch. I can’t talk about me. Let’s talk about you. What’s going on in the world? I haven’t been there much lately. I haven’t a clue.”

“You really want to know?”

“I do. Really.”

“Okay. You asked. As a matter of fact, the world crisis du jour happens to be resting squarely on my frail shoulders.”

“Tell me.”

“Somebody seems to have decided it’s a good idea to pick off a couple of our ambassadors, Alex. Two of them have been assassinated in the last two weeks.”

“Christ. I was in Louisiana when I got the news about Stanfield’s murder in Venice. Sorry I didn’t call you. Quite the lady-killer, old Simon Stanfield was. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of them returned the favor. There’s been another?”

“Tonight. About six hours ago. Butch McGuire. Our ambassador to Saudi Arabia. You’ve met him. He was having dinner with his wife Beth at their favorite restaurant in Riyadh. According to Beth, he suddenly went very rigid for a moment, looked at her with wide eyes, and then simply keeled over halfway through the meal. No apparent cause of death. He was only forty-five years old, Alex. Excellent health. I’ve ordered an autopsy.”

“An aneurysm. Stroke?”

“Maybe. Two ambassadors in two weeks. I’ve put the worldwide Diplomatic Security Service on full alert. Could be a coincidence. Or, it could be just the beginning of something worse. Langley and the Bureau are picking up a lot of increasingly interesting cellular traffic. Can’t go into any details, but something big is brewing, Alex. Jack Patterson himself is running this show for me.”

Alex Hawke looked over at her. “Tex?” he said.

Jack Patterson, the legendary chief of the Texas Rangers, now with State, was one of the finest men Hawke had ever known. Coming from a long line of Texas lawmen, Patterson was a direct descendant of the early Texas Ranger, John “Jack” Patterson. A Comanche Indian who’d switched sides and rode with Patterson in 1840 had given the young Ranger captain the name Brave Too Much.

Bravery was a quality that still ran in the family. Like most everyone in Washington, Alex called the Ranger captain’s descendant, the man now in charge of the DSS, ‘Tex.’

“I did a little duet with Tex once. There was that embassy that did not get blown up in Morocco, remember?”

“Right. He still gives you all the credit, Alex.”

“Yeah, well, he’s still a liar. Splendid guy. Superb criminal intelligence officer,” Alex said.

There was light in his eyes. The first light she’d seen there since she’d seen him standing at the altar two weeks earlier watching his bride-to-be walk down the aisle.

“Tex could use your help again, Alex. He told me so himself. Hell, we all could. The president himself is asking for you. They both also told me not to tell you that. They know you’re hurt. What Tex said was, ‘I can’t call Alex, Conch, that boy, why, he’s on the bench.’ He also knows you have some huge personal scores to settle.”

“Yeah. Spot on, in that regard.”

“Alex, I know you must be suffering terribly.”

“I’ll deal with it.”

“I have—a place. Where you could go for a while. In the Keys.”

“Go?”

“Be alone. It’s not much. Just a glorified fishing shack down on Islamorada. But it’s on the water. You could fish. Watch the sunsets. Pull yourself together.”

“Very kind. Pull myself together.”

“Sorry.”

“Not at all. It’s me, Conch, not you.”

“Alex, we’re in grievous trouble. Without compromising my government, I can tell you we’re seeing some kind of Armageddon scenario coming together.”

Alex and his old friend stared at each other for a few moments. In his eyes, she saw his heart and mind tugging at each other. Saw them going in opposite and equally powerful directions. One way lay vengeance. The other, his highly developed sense of duty.

“Give me a week,” he finally said, poking at the fire. “You tell Tex that for me. I’m sick to death moping around feeling sorry for myself. One week. Tell him I’ll be off the bloody bench so fast he’ll never know I was there.”

Conch smiled and reached out to stroke his cheek.

Alex jabbed the logs with the poker again and a shower of sparks rose up the chimney.

He’d avenge Vicky’s death somehow. Somebody would pay. Pay dearly, and, soon. Like the much-vaunted Royal Navy battleships his ancestors had sailed through two world wars, Hawke’s mission in life was to give, not to receive.

For now, duty had won.