Endangered Species: PART 1 (6 page)

Whelan smiled at their reaction. At sixteen
and fifteen, respectively, his sons were in that awkward transition
period from boys to men. He understood. He’d been there himself. He
gently kissed Caitlin on the top of her head, and inhaled deeply.
The clean, sweet smell of her deep black, raven hair flooded him
with emotions, as dozens of memories flashed through his mind in a
second or two. She was his true love, his mate, his partner, his
best friend. He realized how close he had come to losing all of
that and more tonight. He closed his eyes and felt a profound sense
of relief and gratitude wash over him. When he opened them, Caitlin
was looking at him, her cobalt blue eyes framed by the long lashes,
dark hair and ivory colored skin. There was no moisture in her eyes
and no trembling or other evidence of post-traumatic shock. He had
known from the beginning of their relationship that, as gentle and
feminine as she was, Caitlin was tougher than most men he had
known. And he had known many ruthless and savage men. He had killed
several of them.

“
I’ll get the boys back up
stairs,” she said, “then I’ll help you clean up.” She paused for a
moment then said, “There are two bodies in the second floor
hallway. Their throats have been ripped out.”

Whelan nodded. “I know.”

“
We saw that they’ve
dispatched poor Miss Tankersley. I’m sure they deserved what they
got, but they’re making a terrible mess. We’ll have to replace the
flooring if it’s bloodstained.”

“
I’ll take care of it,” he
said.

Caitlin looked around the kitchen, spattered
with blood and gore. “Would you look at this place. I don’t know if
I can ever prepare food in it again.”

“
We’ll not be tellin’ the
health inspector,” he said with a wink.

She rose on the tips of her toes, and
pulling his head down, kissed him softly on the lips. “Thank God
you’re safe, Bren.”

“
Wouldn’t have been if not
for you and the boys.”

“
I always understood why
you insisted on the boys and me learning to use weapons properly,
but tonight really drove that point home.” She paused and searched
his eyes.

“
But I thought I taught you
to aim better,” he said with a grin and nodded toward the surviving
intruder.

Caitlin placed her hands on her hips and
said in mock defensiveness, “I hit exactly where I aimed.”

“
Oh, did you now?’ Whelan
was still grinning good-naturedly. “You seem to have missed the
kill zones and hit him closer to his private areas.”

“
And if I
had
killed him, who would
be left for you to interrogate?” She grew suddenly serious and
said, “Who were these men, and will there be more of
them?”

Whelan glanced at the wounded man who was
bleeding out on their kitchen floor. “I plan to get that
information out of this one. Thank you for not killing him, but it
would be best if you and the boys didn’t watch.”

She understood fully what he meant and
gently shoved Sean and Declan toward the stairs. “Come along, lads.
Tomorrow’s a school day.”

“
But I want to help Da haul
the trash out,” Sean said in reference to the dead home
invaders.

“
Me too,” Declan
said.

Caitlin said nothing, but gave each of the
boys “The Look”. Generations of Irish youngsters have known full
well what The Look means. Sean and Declan sighed. They were sighs
of frustration mixed with resignation. Each boy turned and trudged
up the stairs, purposely stepping on the corpse at the bottom of
the stairwell.

“
It would be good if you
gave Paddy a call,” Whelan said in reference to Caitlin’s brother,
the Sergeant in Charge of the Dingle station of
An
Garda Síochána
. “We’re going to need his help.”

He waited until he heard them reach the top
floor. He turned and walked over to where the last intruder lay.
The man’s upper body was contorting in pain, motionless from the
waist down. He lay moaning in a pool of his own blood and gore. The
bullet’s path through his spinal column had destroyed the nerves
governing actions in his lower body, including his sphincters. He
was surrounded by very unpleasant odors.

Whelan squatted beside him while the man
stared at him, his eyes pleading for help. After several moments,
Whelan said in Russian, “I can help you.” He paused for emphasis
then said, “But you have to help me.”

The wounded man squeezed his eyes shut
tightly in pain and shook his head. Between clinched teeth has
said, “I cannot. He will kill me.”

“
You’re bleeding out. Not
much time left before you’ll die anyway. Tell me what I want to
know and you’ll at least have a chance to live a bit
longer.”

“
No.” The response was
almost a grunt.

Whelan stood and walked
over to a section of kitchen counter. He pulled a knife from a
wooden block that rested on it. It was a 9
½-inch fillet knife. The blade was long, thin, and very
sharp.

Returning, he again
squatted by the dying man. “I don’t suppose you’re familiar with
George R. R. Martin’s magnum opus
A Song
of Ice and Fire
?”

The man shook his head back and forth a few
times.

“
There’s a line in it,
something like ‘
A naked man has few
secrets; a flayed man has none.’” He held the fillet knife in front
of the man’s eye. “What I’m going to do is peel your skin off.
Slowly. The bad news is that it won’t kill you; it will cause far
worse pain that anything you can imagine.”

He let the man stare at the blade for
several seconds. Despite his pain, the man’s eyes grew wider in
horrid fascination.

“
Try to imagine what it’s
going to feel like as I loosen it with this knife and then tear
strips off with my bare hands.” He paused. “And there’s more bad
news. You have a lot of skin. We’re going to be here for a long
time.”

The man vomited. It was clear that he’d had
some kind of fish for dinner. And potatoes.

Whelan placed the edge of the blade lightly
against the flesh of the man’s forearm. Even with the slight
pressure, the sharpness of the blade split his skin. Blood began to
ooze from the new wound. He looked at the man’s eyes; he had begun
to sob.

“
Please, I will tell you. I
don’t want to die.”

Whelan left the blade where it was. “Give me
names. Who sent you?”

The man hesitated and Whelan applied a bit
more pressure to the blade. The cut deepened and lengthened.

The man screamed. “It is one whose name
cannot be spoken.”

“
Listen,” Whelan said with
a quiet growl. “This isn’t some damn fantasy or sci fi movie. Give
me the name.” The knife dug deeper. Whelan used the tip to begin
peeling back enough of the man’s epidermis to be able to rip a
piece of it off his arm.

“
Yes, yes, I will tell
you,” the man screamed between sobs. He hesitated for a moment,
caught between Scylla and Charybdis. He knew that if he didn’t
provide the intel Whelan sought, he would die tonight. His
departure would be unimaginably painful and drawn out. If he did
reveal who had sent him and his associates to kill Whelan and his
family, it would betray a man he feared as much as he did Whelan.
Maybe more. He thought momentarily about lying to Whelan, giving
him false information. But he sensed the Irishman would know, and
the torture would begin in earnest. Ultimately, he opted in favor
of a slim chance to live a little longer.

“
His name is
Maksym.”

Chapter 6—Tidewater
Virginia

The trip from his Federal-style home in the
Georgetown suburb of Washington to The Lodge was about an hour and
thirty minutes by car. There were two routes. One was mostly on
Interstate 95. The other was more scenic. Cliff Levell had
instructed his driver and personal attendant Rhee Kang-Dae to take
the scenic route. It was almost exactly the same distance as the
other route. Mostly utilizing Highway 301, it took a few minutes
longer. As part of the pre-Interstate highway system, it wound
through the business districts of a multitude of towns and small
cities in Maryland. Eventually it crossed the Harry Nice Memorial
Bridge into the rolling green hills of Tidewater Virginia.

It had been a pleasant trip, although the
scenery had been wasted on Levell. He used the time to review the
latest intel bulletins and briefings assembled by the organization
he led. He was on his way to meet with other principal members of
that organization, The Society of Adam Smith. These meetings
usually were held at The Lodge near Fairview Beach, Virginia.
Located in dense woods and accessed by an unmarked gravel road, it
was less than a mile from the wide Potomac River. The location had
been chosen carefully.

Fairview Beach was isolated and small. Only
a few hundred people lived within the town limits. The countryside
around the town was heavily wooded in many areas and sparsely
settled. A few narrow, paved two-lane roads connected the town to
Highway 218, also known as Caledon Road.

A few dirt lanes led back into the woods
from the sparse collector roads. At the end of one of them, sitting
in the middle of an eighty-acre tract and isolated by dense woods
from its few neighbors in the area, was a fifteen thousand square
foot, two-story building with the appearance of a hunting lodge.
It’s exterior was made of large logs with a brick chimney at either
end of the lodge. It was clearly posted as private property and
signs in five different languages cautioned would-be trespassers
not to enter. An ultra sophisticated electronic and video system
provided twenty-four hour surveillance of the entire tract. Nothing
moved in the eighty acres that wasn’t instantly detected. A staff
of very professional, highly trained security people would respond
immediately.

While the exterior of the lodge was designed
and built to convey a rustic, masculine simplicity, the interior
was something else entirely. Immediately behind the exterior
façade, all walls, ceilings, and floors were lined with materials
that resisted all efforts to penetrate with infrared, ultrasound,
and all other surveillance devices. The technology and
communications facilities were designed, installed and maintained
by the best minds in the CIA, NSA, and private sector working on
their own time. They were upgraded continually in order to remain
superior to anything available to the planet’s top security
agencies.

The interior was comfortably decorated and
furnished in homage to the style of a luxurious western ranch. The
lodge had eleven separate bedrooms and bathrooms, a large dinning
hall, ultra modern kitchen, library, gymnasium, and boardroom. A
large separate facility housed staff, sheltered motor vehicles, and
provided a few spare bedrooms and bathrooms for occasions when the
main lodge was fully occupied. A tunnel connected the two
facilities.

The library had stone
floors overlain with throw rugs that reflected Southwestern style
and colors. The light switch on the wall beside the entrance to the
library served two purposes. It did turn on the
lights recessed in the lower part of the tray ceiling,
providing accent for the fireplace and bookcases
. But, if flipped ten or more times in rapid succession, the
switch activated an electrical motor. The motor caused a three-foot
by three-foot stone plate in the floor to recess and pull back
under the adjoining flooring, revealing a set of steps leading down
into a chamber beneath the library. There was a long, well
polished, mahogany table and several comfortable chairs in the
room. Bottles of fine wine were stacked in specially crafted
shelving that kept each bottle in a prone position so its contents
could work on the cork. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the
chamber also were lined with lead and other more sophisticated
materials that defied all attempts to probe the activities
occurring there.

The lodge was owned by a company that, in
turn, was owned by another company that was owned by yet another
entity, and so on through a mind-boggling chain of twists and
convolutions that were impossible to decipher. The funds to
acquire, develop and maintain the property, if the chain of
ownership could be unraveled, were provided by three billionaire
industrialist brothers. Alfred, Hermann, and Tomas Mueller were
among the founding members of the Society. Its membership also
included certain top military brass, politicos, and senior members
of the security agencies that helped design the facility and kept
it on the cutting edge technologically.

Rhee turned down the gravel road and stopped
in front of The Lodge, tires crunching on gravel and pine needles.
The valets and most other employees had worked there for years.
They knew that no one touched Levell’s black Cadillac Escalade
other than Rhee. The staff helped the Korean transfer Levell from
the rear of the SUV to his wheelchair. Once he had transported
Levell into the main structure, Rhee returned to the vehicle and
drove it around to the parking facilities in the second
building.

“
Are the others here yet,
Timothy?” Levell said to one of the staff members.

“
Yes sir, Mr. Levell. I’ll
let them know you’ve arrived.” The man turned and headed toward the
main living area of the building at a fast trot. He knew it was
useless to offer to help Levell. The old man was extraordinarily
tough and independent. He seemed unfazed by his disability. At
times, Timothy and the other employees at The Lodge almost forgot
about the spinal injury that had robbed Levell of the use of his
legs. But he and the others had heard the stories about him, that,
despite his age and the injury, Levell was physically and mentally
very powerful. And his political power was even greater. No one who
had any involvement with the Society, as a member or employee, had
any doubt who its leader was.