Death Angel (30 page)

“You really had me guessing. I never suspected that you were the traitor. Never thought you had it in you. In a way I’m impressed. I fool others, I’m not easily fooled. Especially after the others in the cadre started dying off. Your doing—thanks to Lewis and Scourby. They were protecting their investment.

“In the end I thought it would be Nordquist. That’s why
I tried to have his wife and daughter kidnapped, to use as a lever over him if we couldn’t get our hands on him. I faked my own kidnapping to muddy the trail, and maybe squeeze some secrets out of you. Never dreaming you were the arch-traitor. I must say, my respect for you has gone up.”

Annihilax was Carrie Voss Carlson. Real name Jane Miller. The sole daughter of a wealthy family in the American Midwest. Parents of good, solid stock, well-established old money. Her father was an international banker; her background, cosmopolitan.

Early in life Jane Miller discovered she was not like the others, children or adults.

She was completely lacking in empathy. There was a curious blankness at the heart of her being. A lack of emotion regarding the pain and suffering of others. A hangnail to her was more real, more painful, than somebody else being crushed to death in an auto wreck.

Her emotional life was rich, intense, and vividly alive where her own wants and desires were concerned. But as for the feelings of others, playfellows, siblings, relatives, suitors—nothing. Other people were no more real to her than a set of paper dolls. If they got in the way, you just cut them out of the picture.

Her mother and father were sane, normal, loving individuals. Young Jane suffered no physical, sexual, or mental abuse. Her childhood and adolescence couldn’t have been more idyllic—for her. For those around her, should they stand between her and something she wanted—a toy, a trinket, a school prize, a boyfriend, an honor, office, or position—a chain of inevitable fatality soon overtook them.

People kept dying all around her: a schoolgirl who was the ringleader of a clique who snubbed her; a teacher who threatened to report her for cheating on a test; a camp counselor who’d caught Jane and a cabin mate sharing a too-
intimate encounter; a dowager aunt who’d made Jane the beneficiary of a considerable fortune in her will but then had the bad grace to keep on living.

Jane Miller had the benefits of a fine education. Swiss boarding schools, a finishing school in France, university studies and travel in Madrid, Munich, Vienna, Paris.

Pleasure she took where she found it, from beautiful people of either sex. But no pleasure matched the thrill of a successful murder.

Brains, beauty, a gift for languages, and a relentless amorality sent her drifting in the half worlds of drug, vice, and crime. Her talent for killing proved to be not only pleasurable but extremely profitable.

Jane Miller could abide no master. She would answer to no one. To avoid falling under the thumb of any crime boss or spymaster she created an alter ego, an assumed identity.

Her studies had focused on European art history, particularly of the medieval period. In the millenarian and eschatological writings and esoterica of the Middle Ages she’d encountered the dread figure of Annihilax, the Exterminating Angel, who would snuff out the lives of kings and commoners in the End of Days preceding the Last Judgment.

Annihilax became her nom de guerre, her war name. As Annihilax she plied her professional assassin’s trade around the world, earning a place among the top-ranked assassins of the killer elite.

It was in Africa that she met her Waterloo, in one of the fractious mini-states of the Congo region. A mineral-rich province where the status quo was threatened by an upstart rebel leader and his horde of hungry, well-armed troops. A West European industrial cartel that controlled the lucrative mining concessions from the complaisant and infinitely corrupt provincial government hired Annihilax to eliminate the rebel warlord.

Posing as a freelance journalist, Jane Miller established
herself in the provincial capital and began building her clandestine network of mercenaries and assassins. One of her contacts on the scene was Murad Ali, a Pakistani agent. He had lots of money and connections.

Jane Miller became his mistress. Murad Ali liked to talk, especially afterward in bed. She learned that he was a high-ranking officer in Pakistan’s all-powerful Inter-Service Intelligence, the military intelligence organization that not so secretly ruled Pakistan behind the scenes. Possessing the atomic bomb and seeking to augment its own stockpiles, the ISI had assigned Murad Ali to this war-torn Congo province to acquire yellowcake, a product of the region’s uranium mines that could be refined for use in atomic weapons.

Among his boasts, Murad Ali confided to Jane that he’d been one of the debriefing officers of Dr. Rahman Sayeed, late of Ironwood National Laboratory in Los Alamos. After being released from custody for time served while awaiting and during his abortive trial for espionage, Sayeed had returned home to Islamabad. He had indeed been guilty of atomic espionage against the United States, and told his eager auditors in the ISI all he had learned during his American sojourn.

Among the intelligence windfall was the intriguing revelation that he had not been the only atomic spy seeking to pry loose Ironwood’s secrets. Sayeed’s delvings into the computer files had detected the presence of a second, unknown master spy who’d been working for years subverting the system and downloading critically restricted data relating to the PALO codes, the digitized fail-safe overrides that could shut down via remote control the launch of any land-based nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.

The identity of this master spy was unknown to Sayeed, although he’d confided the other’s existence to his lawyer Max Scourby. The idea being that if things went badly for
Sayeed in his case, he’d have something to deal with to prompt the prosecution to lighten his sentence in return for the PALO espionage revelations.

As it had worked out, the government’s case had fallen apart under the weight of politics and a bad press, and Sayeed had not had to play the trump card regarding the PALO codes as a get-out-of-jail card. In due course he’d passed the information to his ISI debriefers. It was a tantalizing nugget but they were in no position to capitalize on the lead, and so it had lain fallow all this time.

Finally reaching the ears of Jane Miller during a bout of postcoital pillow talk as she lay curled up beside Murad Ali in his bed. He had no idea that she was Annihilax. He believed her cover story, that she was a freelance Western journalist covering the Congolese provincial turmoil. And a shameless slut, like all American women, which suited him just fine.

For once in her career Jane Miller had bitten off more than she could chew. Annihilax could not deliver on the contract to kill the rebel warlord. The warlord struck against the capital in a boldly unsuspected move, taking it and unleashing an orgy of looting, rape, and murder.

Thousands of refugees fled the city, racing for the safety of the border. Murad Ali had been slain by a rebel machine gunner, dying in the streets while Jane Miller watched. Like any other ordinary fugitive, she had to run for her life.

A river marked the border between the revolt-torn province and the relative safety of its nearest neighbor. It was there, in a hamlet on the wrong side of the river, that Jane Miller crossed paths with Carrie Voss.

Carrie Voss was an American relief worker for an international philanthropic organization helping feed the starving Congolese masses. She was an only child whose parents were both dead and who’d long ago lost contact with her few
aging, distant relatives. She’d been caught up in the rebel onslaught and had to flee for her life. She was roughly the same age and physical type as Jane Miller.

Annihilax saw her opportunity and took it. She cut Carrie Voss’s throat and stole her identity papers. While making the river crossing, she was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round. She woke up in a field hospital where she was being treated for her injuries. Passing for Carrie Voss, she was airlifted to safety and repatriated to the United States under her stolen identity.

A lengthy recuperation followed, including facial surgery to repair her damaged face and therapy for her wounded left leg. The left leg never healed properly and left her with a permanent limp, necessitating the use of a cane.

The world’s intelligence services believed that the assassin code named Annihilax—gender unknown—had died in the Congo. Jane Miller was reborn as Carrie Voss.

She had a purpose.

The thought of the PALO codes obsessed her every waking hour. They were the Holy Grail of atomic secrets; their possessor could alter the balance of world power. A goal worth pursuing.

She relocated to Santa Fe, using that city as a base of operations from which to make her forays into Los Alamos. As Annihilax she’d established a number of secret Swiss and offshore banking accounts that now supplied her with funds for her quest.

Intelligence was the key to all successful field operations. She learned everything she could about Ironwood and its key scientific cadre. Fortune had smiled on her with the advent of Dr. Hugh Carlson. Carlson, a much-married man, was currently between wives. Jane Miller had contrived to make his acquaintance at a fund-raising dinner for the Santa Fe Opera, of which he was a devotee. She was at
tractive, intelligent, and a master of sexpertise. Carlson fell hard and they were soon wed. He already had several grown children, and between them and the alimony payments he forked out to his ex-wives, he had no interest in starting a family, which suited Jane Miller’s purposes just fine.

She immersed herself in charitable work, especially the philanthropic Good Neighbor Initiative. This served several purposes. It allowed her freedom of movement, the ability to come and go at all hours of the day and night, under the pretext of having to attend to various good deeds and related chores.

Two, it was an invaluable intelligence-gathering activity. In the hospital charity wards, the battered women’s shelters, the substance abuse clinics, the halfway houses for probationary convicts, and so on, she received firsthand information about the criminal half worlds of vice and corruption throughout the county.

She learned names and addresses of likely recruits for a new network she was building, a criminal support system to empower her quest for the INL mole and the PALO codes. Just as she had done elsewhere to stage her Annihilax operations, she now constructed a new crime cartel. It was in this manner that she had come across Helen Veitch, the homicidal ex-nurse she had ultimately sent on a mission of murder against Jack Bauer. But that came later.

The most important step in creating her new network was contacting Marta and Torreon Blanco. She targeted Marta first. They had a commonality of interest, both in crime and in uninhibited same-sex partners. They formed their first alliance in bed. Jane Miller had the advantage. Marta Blanco was all passion and fire, grand gestures and romance. Jane Miller was ice-cold, an artist at counterfeiting the lineaments of desire and gratification.

To one of her fine-tuned instincts, the Ironwood kills sig
naled that the lab mole was not alone, that he had partners on the outside, and that his secret-stealing plan was nearing fruition. The death of scientists in the inner cadre eliminated them as possible suspects for the mole.

Her underworld contacts tipped her that the hidden hand behind the violence was Varrin, the gang leader. Who was behind Varrin she did not know but was determined to learn. The Ironwood situation took a deadly turn when Rhodes Morrow put Peter Rhee and Harvey Kling to work on his secret investigation. Part of that was her fault.

She’d been using a burst transmitter to send coded messages to some of her old contacts in Europe, feeling out the ground to see who was still around and could afford to broker a deal for the PALO codes. She didn’t have them yet but it was only a matter of time, especially once she tracked Varrin’s overlord, identifying him as Max Scourby.

That made sense.

Scourby had been Sayeed’s lawyer and was in a position to know plenty. Either he had contacted the Ironwood mole or the mole had come to him. As a top criminal attorney, Scourby had the connections to create and control a goon squad to protect the mole, which he had done by working through Varrin.

But the burst transmissions had put Morrow on the track of Jane Miller. Not yet, not directly; but the fact that he knew the transmissions had come from her Shady Grove neighborhood and that he’d set up a detector in the Parkhurst house meant that he was getting dangerously close.

Through Marta she’d had Torreon Blanco liquidate Rhodes Morrow. Kling and Rhee had pursued the investigation even after their boss’s death, marking them for demolition. Jack Bauer’s advent on the scene had added urgency to the agenda. The past never really dies. He’d been a dangerous antagonist in Brussels years ago; she would not un
derestimate him. Helen Veitch had drawn the assignment to kill Bauer but he’d been too quick and clever for her. Rhee had died—she’d seen to that. Blanco guns had purged Kling and the Parkhursts, but Bauer had survived the Blancos’ best attempts to cross him off the board.

Certain that Nordquist was the mole, Jane Miller had directed the Blancos to kidnap his wife and daughter, hostages to give her the whip hand over him. She knew the intimate details of the Nordquist house and had fingered the inside information about its disposition to Torreon, who’d passed it on to Pardee, and through him to the kidnap team. Bauer had foiled that plan.

At the same time, she’d faked her own kidnapping. It removed her from the scene and the surveillance that ensued, buying her freedom of movement. She had some idea in the back of her mind that she’d be able to parlay the “threat” to her safety into a lever with which to pry some atomic secrets from her husband.

Her master plan had come apart due to one fatal flaw: not Nordquist but her husband, Hugh Carlson, was the mole. She’d never seen that coming in a million years. It could have resulted in total disaster except for her ace in the hole: Lassiter.