Downfall (39 page)

B
ENNY, AFTER GETTING ME TO A DOCTOR
who worked for the Round Table and could keep his mouth shut, went to go release Holly Marchbanks from her prison basement. He came back and told me the cellar door had been broken. The bodies of Janice Keene and Wade Rawlings were still there. I told him to leave the bodies where he found them.

I wondered how quickly Holly would run. Fast, it seemed. Within twelve hours she dropped out of sight, her kids vanished, and the San Francisco police began to make very unpleasant noises about the missing Glenn Marchbanks. They were already making noises about the unidentified body with the broken neck left in a park. Soon enough they would know it was Diana, and they’d be looking for Janice.

Shortly after Glenn’s picture appeared in the papers, a witness at The Select reported that the missing man matched the description of one of the assailants in the bar. They found Glenn’s DNA on the plank Diana used against him.

So Glenn and Diana were tied together. You can imagine what people thought—the beautiful, young woman and the powerful, wealthy older man. Audrey Marchbanks began to make a lot of noise about a conspiracy against her husband and then went silent. Maybe her family realized they had much of Glenn’s money, and it was justice of a sort.

Benny got me home to New Orleans. Jimmy told me to stay the hell away from Las Vegas. I might be recognized by the police. They were treating Lazard’s murder as a revenge killing for bad investments, calling it almost a savage gangland-type slaying, and looking for a man who looked like me. I might have to sell the Vegas bar, buy a new bar in a new city, give Gigi a job elsewhere.

Mila held on by a thread. Jimmy moved her to a private hospital and told me it was none of my business where.

“Felix is dead,” I said. “Like you asked.”

“Thank you,” Jimmy said. “But it won’t fix her.”

Leonie and Daniel came home then, and they were good medicine. I lay in bed, recuperating, Daniel curled next to me. Leonie wouldn’t let him sleep there for fear I would roll over on him and I didn’t argue with her. I’d put her through enough, and him.

“A week in LA. It was sort of a vacation,” she said. And Leonie fed me good food and brought me my favorites from the restaurants of the city, but the food had no taste, and only Daniel could make me smile for those first few weeks.

I rested and I got better, and I thought about what had happened and Felix’s unexplained betrayal.

I went to San Francisco as soon as my strength was back.

Benny and I stepped into The Select. Still closed, still shuttered. This bar was done, under this name. I felt bad for the employees. Maybe San Francisco had gone bad for me as well.

All because of this.

The lipstick case.

Diana had hit Glenn Marchbanks in the face with her purse; it was a detail I had forgotten while fighting Rostov. And when Felix and I cleaned up after the fight…I went to the lost and found box.

A silver lipstick case. I hadn’t opened it. I’m a guy. It was lipstick.

I opened it and there was the USB drive. I took it upstairs to the office and powered up Felix’s laptop. For the first few minutes, I looked for answers to Felix’s betrayal in the computer’s data. But everything was gone. Everything was pristine, like the laptop had just come out of the box. He must’ve scrubbed this machine before he and Mila followed me to Vegas.

Then I slid the lipstick drive into the port on my laptop and I watched Janice Keene begin to speak, signing the death warrant for Glenn, Belias, Felix, Diana, and maybe even Mila. I watched the video twice. Twenty minutes. She laid out the whole network, crimes she herself had committed, prominent people she suspected of being involved, how Belias’s exchange of favors worked, a plea for her daughter to accept this world for her own good. It would have been just enough to break them.

And I thought about what had been said at the Nest, Felix saying,
I let you live
, and then,
I was supposed…
, and then the lie I thought he’d told me. The enemy Belias told me we shared.

Then I picked up the phone.

I had some people to see.

“You’re not Belias.” The Second Gentleman, Frederick Henderson, stood on the trail not far from Taos, where he’d met Belias before. It had been an ordeal to get the Secret Service detachment away from him; he finally told them he had to speak in private to an old girlfriend who wanted to embarrass the Henderson family, and they were in fact waiting for him a mile back on the trail.

“I represent Belias,” the young man said. He was tall, lean, dirty blond hair, blue eyes. He was well dressed in wool slacks, good shoes, and an expensive-looking navy jacket, a dark scarf.
Like the desperate up-and-comers crowding Washington
, Freddy Henderson thought. But he moved stiffly, as though recovering from injury.

“Well, what is it?”

“It’s done. Belias is done. Actually, he’s dead.”

The Second Gentleman stared at him.

“So, if you had any thoughts that he’d help you get rid of the president so your wife could step up, abandon those. She’ll be resigning. A tragically short tenure.”

Henderson began to sputter. “She will do no such thing. Are you insane?”

“According to some. I have his phone records, which showed a GPS record that he met you here, on your own property. The fact I know where to meet you, like he did, ought to give you serious pause.”

Henderson wiped a trembling hand across his mouth.

The young man continued, “She resigns. Or she gets named. We have all of Belias’s network. All of them. Every name. Two I’ve confronted committed suicide within hours.” The young man’s words hung in the cold air. “She resigns or she gets named along with the rest.”

“But…it’s not fair.”

“That’s what you were so afraid of. Life not being fair. You have a week.”

“What if I can’t convince her?”

“Then I guess you’ll see what happens.”

The well-dressed young man turned and walked slowly off into the forest.

I
HATE HOSPITALS.

Jimmy and the Round Table had flown Mila to a private clinic in Seattle. Jimmy called me and told me that Mila had asked for me, so he relented on letting me see her. I gave my name at the front desk and waited and waited and then I waited some more. I looked out the window at Mount Rainier, shrouded in gray. I read four magazines and I tried not to jump out of my skin. Then a tall woman in a suit, very lovely and cold, came into the waiting room—it was more like a library at a spa; there were no other families waiting alongside me—and asked me to follow her.

We went down a sleek hallway and then to another, where computers beeped and hummed with high-definition screens colorfully laying out the etches of life, heartbeats and brain activity and what have you.

I thought of my ex, Lucy, in her CIA hospital, mired in wires, and I thought,
Does everyone I care about have to suffer?
Daniel, kept from me for those first few months of his life. I always worried it would mar him in some way, keep him from loving me.

And now Mila. I’d followed the nurse to a room and she stepped aside and I saw Mila lying there. Tubes and wires, like Lucy in her forever bed. I felt sick. Her eyes were half-lidded in sleep. There had been multiple surgeries. A complication. A slow recovery.

The well-dressed woman stepped away as I stepped inside. I could only stare at Mila. She was alive. She was breathing. But the bullet had nearly ended her. And there would be a long road ahead of her and would she ever be the same?

She turned her head slightly toward me and I saw her smile. The ghost of a smile. “Sam,” she croaked.

“Yes. I’m here. I’m sorry. And sorry it took me so long to come here.” Never mind that I’d been forbidden until today.

“Is…Is…”

“Belias is dead. It’s done.” Jimmy had no doubt told her all this but I wanted her to hear it from me. “His network is dismantled. And you’re going to be okay.”

“My heart’s made of Moldovan steel,” Mila said. “I will be all right. It will just take a while.” She lifted a hand, weakly gestured at the tubing as if annoyed with it. Her voice was thick with painkillers.

“How is Daniel?”

“He is fine. He’ll be ready for you to play with him your next visit.”

“I hope this clinic has good gift shop. I will bring him best toy.” She closed her eyes. “Sam. What about the woman who shot me…”

“Woman? Not Felix?”

“No. Holly Marchbanks shot me.” She opened her eyes.

Holly had told me one lie too many now.

“You need not worry,” I said. “Just concentrate on getting better.”

“Better…I think I will go back to sleep now,
Samuil
.” The Slavic form of my name. She only used it when she was upset or worried.

“Sleep, then,” I said, and as she closed her eyes, I became aware of the gun pressed into the back of my neck.

“Sam Capra. At long last.” The voice was quiet, steely, English, upper-class.

“You’ll make a mess if you shoot me in here,” I said. “Jimmy.”

“You don’t get to call me that. We’re not friends. And as far as a mess goes, the nurses are competent. I’ll tell them to tidy up while you bleed out your last.”

“I told you I didn’t know she was hurt. I didn’t even know she was in Las Vegas.”

“Then you didn’t try.”

I didn’t have an answer. The gun left the back of my head and I felt breath return to my lungs. The man stepped around to face me. He was a bit taller than me, black haired and blue eyed, casually handsome, dressed impeccably in a cashmere sweater and dark slacks. He must have been spending nights in the fold-out at the foot of her bed; blankets lay stacked next to it. “So what do I call you, Jimmy?”

“Mr. Court will do.”

Mister
…My throat closed. “Court is one of Mila’s aliases.” DeSoto had said to me,
Give my regards to Mrs. Court.

“Not an alias. It’s her married name.”

And this was…“Now that you’ve seen my wife, spoken to her, assured yourself that she will recover despite your abandonment, you may go.”

I didn’t move. Mrs. Court. She really was…

I found my voice. “She told me about you. Not that you were married. But that you recruited her into the Round Table. You found her, you trained her…”

“And I trained her not to leave anyone behind.” Jimmy Court’s mouth curled in disdain. “It’s only because the Table wants you alive that you’re alive. I could kill you and tell her that you vanished. She’d think talking to you now was a dream, morphine-
induced
mental blather. But she would believe me.”

“Then do it if you must.”

“The Round Table wants you alive. They want you running the bars. Didn’t you ever wonder why she needed someone like you, Sam, to run the bars? She didn’t want to travel the world all the time. She wanted to be with me.”

“So…who do I report to?”

“Me for now. And my first order to you is to go. Just go. But not to New York and not to London. Not where
she
likes to go, not where I’ll take her to heal. Go home to your child in New Orleans if you like. But just go.”

I could take my marching orders. Turn around and leave. But I didn’t.

“I know what you did.”

Jimmy cocked his head, a slight smile.

“You. Felix. You knew about Belias’s network before Diana Keene ever ran into The Select and asked me for help.”

“I hardly see how.”

“Dalton Monroe. Janice didn’t use Felix to get close enough to poison him. Felix used Janice. Brought her to the event, but
he
poisoned Monroe. Not her. And he put Monroe’s name in the
DOWNFALL
file.”

“Belias easily could have targeted Dalton. Janice had a file on him at her home…”

“That Felix planted when he and I were there. That was the clincher for me that we had to go after Belias, with me leading the charge. And he planted that article from that first file we found in her house into the one I took from her office; he would have had time when we were heading over to find Diana. But Dalton was the only name in that file that wasn’t dead or ruined, it didn’t make sense. What the faked poisoning, and then Felix improvising and sneaking that article into the
DOWNFALL
file was supposed to do was to make it look like a Round Table member was under attack. So we could respond to a threat quietly without you telling the rest of the Round Table. You and Felix had been working this, but Mila didn’t know about it. There’s only one reason for that.”

Jimmy glanced at Mila, as if to confirm she was asleep. “I didn’t know you’d suffered an injury to common sense. Why would I do such a thing?”

“Maybe Vasili Borodin was a member of the Round Table—I’m pretty sure a Russian billionaire would have been an attractive target—and you’d been looking for Belias and Roger for the past several years. The Round Table worries about and deals with the threats that no one else quite sees yet. And the Table’s backed by very wealthy people. If any organization was in place to notice the patterns of success and downfall created by Belias, it’s us.”

Jimmy’s expression gave away nothing. “Theoretically, I suppose that could happen.”

“And when you found Belias and Roger, found one of their people in Janice Keene, well, look what they’d done. Duplicated the advantages Belias had given Borodin many times over. A new network with great wealth and influence—and you wanted to take them over. But here’s the kicker, no one else in the Round Table would know. You never told Mila.”

“These are baseless charges, Sam, and I think reflective of my problem with you being a person who leaps before he looks.”

I wanted to reach across her bed and snap his neck. “You weren’t going to share Belias’s network with the Round Table. Mila or they would have had you shut it down. You were going to run it. Just like Belias. What did you promise Felix if he helped you?”

He said nothing.

“Janice had cancer, Felix knew how to get close to her. You even moved him to San Francisco—he had only been there a few months. He was your way to charm past a weak point in Belias’s network.”

“Sadly, reason is on my side. Felix betrayed us all. He attacked Mila.”

“He was supposed to kill me in Vegas, along with everyone else, but he balked. He even told me to call my old bosses and beg for help. He was trying to get me out of the way without killing me or me ending up in jail. But it would have been
your
order to kill me.”

“One of the many reasons I find you unappealing, Sam, is that you think the worst of people. Felix loved Janice; he was trying to free her from that network.”

“Maybe Felix didn’t realize you had no intention of turning over Belias’s network or dismantling it.” I crossed my arms. “The Round Table saves people from lifetimes in prison and gives them meaningful work. Like me. And sometimes the gratitude can be overwhelming. In Felix’s case, blinding. You took advantage of his loyalty, his belief he was doing right. Every manager has been wronged, it wouldn’t be hard to aim someone like Felix at a group of people who routinely wrong others in unfair ways.”

We stood on either side of Mila’s bed, her sleeping.

“I wish you would apply this imagination of yours to running the bars at a higher profit,” he said.

“I know you did it. You tried to keep Mila away from San Francisco. And I bet if I ask her, she’ll say Felix tried to keep her from going to Vegas with him. Felix never would have hurt Mila, except the only way to keep her out of that penthouse was to knock her out of the fight. A fight you didn’t want her in. If Mila’s in this hospital bed, it’s your fault, not mine.”

“If any of this fable of yours was true, then I could have threatened your child to corral you. I didn’t.”

“Because Mila would have never forgiven you if harm came to Daniel. You took responsibility for keeping my son hidden and safe. If you failed, you’d risk losing Mila. Or maybe even you draw the line at murdering an infant.”

Jimmy’s handsome face didn’t lose its composure. “If you care to accuse me in front of my wife, Sam, I hope you have hard evidence.”

“Felix sure did track down Belias’s start as Borodin’s private hacker years ago very quickly. I thought Felix was brilliant. But his speed of discovery was because he and you already knew that history. Long before Diana Keene asked me for help in the bar, you’d already done that research. But you’re a careful guy, Jimmy, and Felix’s computer at The Select has been wiped clean, the data destroyed and overwritten. Now, why would anyone bother to do that, given everything that’s happened?”

“Felix would have done it before leaving for Vegas, obviously. Your imagination, when it takes flight, it’s supersonic.”

“Mila even recognized the I Ching symbol for the network, because she’d seen it with you in London. Coincidence? Or maybe you’d realized that symbol was a visual password for them and took her along when you wanted to find out what it meant.”

I had him, but I couldn’t prove it. And he knew it. I shrugged.

“Here’s the funny thing. If Diana had come in when Felix was downstairs and I was up, this might have ended all differently. But it didn’t. Twist of fate.”

“Life is full of such twists.” Jimmy glanced down at the sleeping Mila, and for the first time I saw tenderness in his gaze.

“But I’d like to know why I was your cannon fodder. Felix was the one who played on my fears of getting involved, claiming I had to do this to protect my son. But I wasn’t supposed to survive for long, even if I won, was I? You needed someone to do the dangerous work and then be lost in the line of duty. But after Mila was shot, Felix kept on his mission you’d sent him on. You tried to send me home, but when you saw I wasn’t giving up you switched gears and told me to kill Felix for you. If he’d killed me, you’d have Belias’s people under your thumb. If I killed him—well, then you figured your secret was safe, because a dead Felix couldn’t rat on you.”

Ten ticks of the quiet clock above Mila’s bed. His gaze was steel. “My wife enjoys your company a bit too much,” he said simply. “I don’t like you.”

Jealousy. The same poison that had been the black seed to grow Belias’s network. In this case, unfounded. “You’ll have to explain to her why you kicked me out of the Round Table.”

“I’m doing no such thing. You still own the bars. You still have a job. That’s what Mila and the Round Table want.” He smiled. “It’s a very dangerous job.”

“And now so is yours,” I said, and his smile shifted ever so slightly.

I looked at Mila a final time, and then I left, out into the gray day.