Blood Trust (2 page)

Regaining her feet, she looks around, sees the men pushing Liridona around a corner. They are no longer in the plaza. She is on the fringe of the mob, running as fast as she can toward the corner. Running with her heart in her mouth, running toward the sudden roar of gunshots that spurts at her like sleet from around the corner.

“No!” she cries. “No!”

Hurtling around the corner, she is jerked off her feet. She stares into monstrous eyes. One is blue, the other green. They regard her as if each has a separate intelligence, both cold as permafrost.

For a moment, she is paralyzed by those eyes, or, more accurately, the twin intelligence behind them. And she thinks,
Not him, anyone but him.
Then, from somewhere out of her sight, she hears Liridona weeping, and, like glass shattering against stone, the spell breaks. But the instant she tries to struggle free, the barrel of a gun is shoved into her mouth.

“Once again, quiet,” a voice like a constricting iron band says. “Before the end.”

The air shivers.

P
ART
O
NE

BLOOD SPORT

One Month Ago

You can’t have a pact with God and with the devil at the same time.

—The Skating Rink
, R
OBERTO
B
OLAÑO

O
NE

Washington, D.C.

“S
HE
’
S DEAD
.”

These words, spoken by his daughter, jerk Jack McClure out of sleep.

Covered in sweat, he turns in the darkness of his bedroom. “Emma?”

The faintest cool breeze stirs the hair on his head.

“She passed by me a minute ago, Dad. Or is it an hour?”

Hard to tell,
Jack thought,
when you’re dead.

“Emma?”

But the ghostly voice was gone, and he felt the sudden lack of her. Again. A great abyss on whose edge he teetered like a drunk reeling out of a bar. He drew a breath, gave a great shudder, and lunged for his cell phone. Punched in the number of Walter Reed Medical Center and heard the familiar voice of the night nurse.

“Mr. McClure, how odd you should call at this moment. I was just about to dial your number.” She cleared her throat and when she began again her voice had taken on a formal, almost martial tenor. “At two fifty-three this morning, the former First Lady, Lyn Carson, expired.”

“She’s dead.”
The echo of Emma’s voice caused another shiver to run down his spine.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the night nurse said.

“Have you notified Alli?”

“I haven’t yet, but as instructed I’ve called Mrs. Carson’s sister and her brother-in-law.” She meant Henry Holt Carson, Alli’s uncle. “As well as Secretary Paull, of course.”

“Okay.” Jack thumbed the sleep from his eyes as he swung his legs off the bed. “I’ll take care of informing Alli.” He padded toward the bathroom.

“Sir, is there anything—?”

“At the end … did she regain consciousness?”

“No, sir, she never did.”

“Stay with Mrs. Carson.” He squinted as he turned on the light. “I’ll be right over.”

*   *   *

“I
T
’
S THE
end of an era,” Dennis Paull said as he and Jack stood by Lyn Carson’s bedside.

No one knew that better than Jack. Ten months ago, he had been in the vehicle following the president’s limousine in Moscow when the limo had skidded on a patch of ice. Almost everyone in that car, including President Edward Harrison Carson, had died. All except Lyn Carson, who had slipped into a coma. Despite two surgeries, the first on board Air Force One, the second here at Walter Reed, she had failed to regain consciousness. Both procedures had succeeded only in prolonging her twilight life.

“Did you call Alli?”

Jack nodded. “Several times, and they said they’d get the message to her.”

“What about her cell?”

“Fearington has a strict policy about cell-phone use.” Fearington was the FBI Special Ops school in Virginia.

“Even for this?” Paull shook his head. He was now Jack’s boss. He had hired Jack after President Carson’s fatal accident. Jack, who had worked for ATF, had been tapped by Carson as a strategic advisor immediately following his old friend’s inauguration. That all ended as abruptly as it had begun, and Paull, seeing his opportunity, had scooped Jack up. Now Jack tackled the antiterrorism assignments that daunted Paull’s other agents, using his dyslexic mind to unravel puzzles no one else could handle.

“Rules are rules.”

Paull took out his phone. “We’ll see about that.” While he was waiting, he said, “You must’ve moved heaven and earth to get her in there.” Then he held up a finger. “No answer.” He closed the connection.

“Fearington periodically goes into lockdown as a drill.”

Paull nodded and put his phone into his pocket.

“But the truth is Alli did her own heavy lifting,” Jack went on. “She passed the entrance exams with the highest marks they’d seen in more than a decade.”

“Smart little thing.”

Jack snorted. “It takes more than smarts to get into Fearington. After her father was killed, she wouldn’t talk to anyone, even me. She curled up into an emotional ball. But there was so much anger inside her that when I took her to my gym, she slid on a pair of boxing gloves and started pounding the heavy bag.”

Paull laughed. “I’d like to have been a fly on the wall.”

“Yeah, she almost broke her right hand. Then I began to teach her how to box and, damn, if she didn’t pick up all the fundamentals right away. At first, she didn’t have a lot of power, as you can imagine, but then, I don’t know, something clicked inside her. She was like a ghost—it seemed as if she could anticipate my punches. She has this ability. By reading a person’s face she knows whether they’re lying or telling the truth. Now she’s extended this ability to knowing what they’re about to do.”

“So she put the boys down?”

“Did she ever!” Jack said. “But admiration wasn’t what she got from a lot of her classmates.”

Paull nodded. “I can only imagine. Fearington’s a men’s club. Didn’t you warn her?”

“Well, I
reminded
her.” Jack sighed. “Not that it did any good. She was determined. No one and nothing was going to get in her way.”

*   *   *

A
LLI
C
ARSON
was pulled from sleep, roughly and without warning.

“Get up, Ms. Carson. Please be good enough to rouse yourself.”

Alli turned over, opened her eyes, and was almost blinded by the fierce glare from the overhead light. Who had turned it on, who was barking orders at her? Her mind, still fuzzed with the dream of Emma’s face glowing in the light of—what?—a streetlamp, a full moon, an unearthly luminescence?

“What is this? I don’t under—”

“Please do as I say, Ms. Carson, quickly, quickly!”

“Commander Fellows?”

“Yes,” Brice Fellows said. “Come, come, there’s no time to lose!”

She sat up. The oversized T-shirt she slept in was black, covered in white silk-screened skulls. Though twenty-three, she looked more like sixteen or seventeen. Graves’ disease had interfered with her growing, so that she was slight, almost pixieish, just over five feet in height, her tomboy figure more suited to an adolescent than an adult.

“Can you please tell me—?”

“Hurry, Ms. Carson. The police are outside.”

Fellows glanced around the dorm room, pointed to a chair on which she had casually tossed the clothes she had been wearing during dinner. Beyond was an empty bed with the covers pushed back.

“Where—where is Vera?” Alli asked.

“You don’t know what happened to her?”

“No, I don’t.” Beneath her anger at this treatment, she felt a wave of fear rising inside her. “She fell asleep before I did. She was there when I turned off the light.”

A catch in the commander’s voice. “Well, that, at least, is a relief.

“Now, please, Ms. Carson, get dressed.”

“Where is Vera?”

“She’s in the infirmary.”

A clutch in the pit of Alli’s stomach. “Is she okay?”

“At the moment I can’t say.”

“Commander, you’re scaring me.”

“Please, Ms. Carson, just do as I ask.”

Crossing to the chair, she drew on a pair of black jeans and a thick turtleneck sweater of the same color. She always dressed in black. Sitting on Vera’s bed, she placed her palms against the bottom sheet as if to make certain that Vera wasn’t there. Then, drawing her shoes over, she stepped into them.

“Here, you’ll need this.”

He passed her her leather jacket. She swung it around and zipped up.

“Come with me.”

She stood up, silently, with a fiercely beating heart.

Beyond her door, the hallway was only dimly lit, so as not to awaken the other recruits on the floor, she assumed. She saw two police detectives, a three-man forensics team, and a pair of Secret Service agents, one of whom, Naomi Wilde, had been the head of her mother’s detail. Cops
and
the Secret Service? What in the world had happened?

All at once, her heart skipped a beat. “Naomi, is Vera all right?”

“Keep your voice down.”

She turned to see three forensics techs snapping on latex gloves before they stepped into her room. Turning on the lights, they began to methodically go through it.

“What are they looking for?” Then Alli turned back to Naomi. “Please,” she begged. “Just tell me if Vera is okay.” But Naomi’s face was as blank as a field of snow.

“Ms. Bard is in the infirmary,” Naomi said.

“I already know that,” Alli said. Something in her voice had spoken of a forced detachment, which caused Alli’s stomach to clench in anxiety. If Naomi wasn’t in control of the situation …

“She’s been drugged. She was disoriented, sick to her stomach. She went out into the hallway without, apparently, knowing where she was, and collapsed. A security guard found her.”

“What?” A chill ran through Alli. “My God, how … who would do such a thing? I want to see her—!”

“Ms. Carson—”

“Hey, Vera’s the only one here who gives a damn about me.”

A member of the forensics team emerged from Alli’s room holding a plastic evidence bag with something in it. Approaching one of the Metro detectives, he handed over the bag and whispered in the detective’s ear, before disappearing back inside the room.

The Metro detective cocked his head. “Interesting you should say that now.”

Alli turned on him, her cheeks aflame. “What the hell does that mean?”

He held up the bag. “This bottle contains traces of Rohypnol. Roofies in common street parlance, the date-rape drug. It was found under your bed.”

“What?”

“You deny it’s yours?”

“Of course I deny it.”

“So it’s your claim that you didn’t drug your roommate?”

“What the what? Why on earth would I?”

“Please keep your voices down,” Commander Fellows interrupted.

“Ms. Carson,” the detective said in a steely voice, “I must insist you come with us now.”

She looked around. “Just let me find my cell phone.”

“The academy is in lockdown. You know the rules.” The commander gestured to the doorway. “This way, Ms. Carson.”

She knew better than to argue further with Fellows. He ran Fearington like an Army boot camp, and talking back would only get her into deeper trouble. Fearington was one of only a couple of elite academies that fed the government secret services. Like its brethren in other regions of the country, Fearington was a closely guarded secret. Its cadets were the cream of the crop, exhaustively vetted and tested before being chosen to fill its ranks. The courses were rigorous, both physically and intellectually. It had taken all of Jack’s skills to get Alli accepted into the examination phase; following Jack’s intensive tutelage, she had done the rest. But from the very first day, she had been acutely aware of the fact that she didn’t fit the traditional Fearington mold.

As she was marched down the hallway and out onto the grounds, she wondered dazedly why she was in trouble. Her legs were shaking and the core of her felt cold. Nevertheless, she had no choice but to take her first step into the nightmare.