Fade (2005) (41 page)

Matt knew that for certain. In fact, not only were you not in danger , he and I agreed that nothing would happen to him in front of either yo u or your daughter. I would never, under any circumstances, break m y word on that."

He finally succeeded with the thread and tied a knot in the end befor e he started carefully sewing his knee back together. "But I'm guessin g you already knew that."

Again, no response.

"Come on, Elise. I have all your CDs. If there's one thing tha t defines you, it's that you're committed to what you believe is th e truth. You don't look away from it."

"I know he wouldn't put us in danger," she admitted finally.

"So then you left him because he's killed people. But you knew tha t before, too."

"Matt's my one blind spot. He's my concession to hypocrisy."

"Everyone should be lucky enough to have that, don't you think?

Something or someone that has the power to make you lie to yourself?"

He bent the needle against the desk, making it slightly better adapte d to the work. Not entirely sanitary, but infection wasn't an overridin g concern at this point.

"Let me tell you a little bit about the world Matt and I live in. It'
s a place where governments punish a man for adultery by making him watc h his sister being gang-raped. A place where a father cuts hi s children's arms off to put in a stew because some witch doctor told hi m it would make him invincible in battle. I've seen people partiall y skinned and covered in battery acid because of a difference in opinio n on political systems that neither person really understood. I've me t people who would kill every man, woman, and child on earth without a second thought because they think God wants them to. It's a worl d where there are no good guys the people the press portrays as innocen t victims really aren't. They're just poorly armed. If they had th e firepower, they'd be out there doing the exact same thing being done t o them."

He paused for a moment to bite off the end of the thread. "What Mat t and I have done might not have been right. And it might have done mor e harm than good. But we were trying to help. It sounds kind of stupi d when I say it out loud, but we were."

The silence following his speech stretched out a long time.

"How's your relationship to the truth, Mr. al Fayed?"

"What?"

"You say Matt didn't stand behind you when you were hurt. Even with m y blind spots, I know that's not who he is."

Fade smiled weakly. "I think maybe I needed someone to blame and h e was the only person with the strength to take it. Matt did what h e could for me."

"You have no right to kill my husband, Mr. al Fayed."

"I was never really going to. I was so angry about .. . well, abou t everything. I wonder now if, in the back of my mind, I didn't want i t to come out the other way. If I didn't want him to kill me. To hav e to live with that for the rest of his life."

"And now?"

"And now I'm tired. Of being angry. Of being scared. Of wonderin g what might have been if everything hadn't gotten so fucked up."

He leaned forward and ran a finger over the stitches in his knee. No t overly artistic, but the effect was pretty convincing. "You're goin g to go back to him, right, Elise?"

For a few seconds he didn't think she was going to answer. Finally , "Like I said, he's my one blind spot."

Chapter
Fifty-five.

The activity in the office had become increasingly feverish over th e past few hours and now encompassed everyone. The birth o f SWVTKILLER
. C
OM had changed everything. The entire staff was now full y aware of what was happening and were reporting directly to Darre n Crenshaw's office. An outside team of investigators was workin g desperately to confirm the facts on al Fayed's Web site while Bil l Fraiser and Lauren McCall had been moved to a group charged wit h finding him.

Hillel Strand was the only person with no role at all. He had no ide a where Matt Egan was or what progress the various task forces had made.

He was still living at the office but, for all intents and purposes , was completely isolated. When he stepped through his door, the peopl e in the hallway went silent, staring at him as he walked stiffly to th e copy room or the bathroom or wherever, and not speaking again until h e was back behind closed doors.

Worse than the silence from his staff was the silence from the rest o f the establishment. His friends and political allies had stoppe d returning his calls and the upper management at Homeland Security wa s acting as though he didn't exist. No reprimands, no debriefings, n o comments to the press. Nothing.

Strand sat and reached for his coffee mug, one of the only things lef t on his desk. His file cabinets, his computer, his disks even hi s notepad and calendar had been gathered up and hauled away. It wouldn'
t do them any good, though. He'd written nothing down that woul d contradict the story he'd created. He told himself over and over tha t he'd played this thing the best it could be played, though it didn'
t seem to be doing anything to ease the pain of the ulcer he could fee l forming.

There was no way Crenshaw could possibly win this fight. The strain o f trying to break through the reasonable doubt Strand had blankete d himself in would crack the very foundations of the organization. H
e would have no choice but to do everything he could to make this thin g go away. Well, one choice. He could try to coerce a confession b y firing Strand and putting him out on the same streets traveled by Sala m al Fayed. The lawyer Strand had hired didn't seem concerned abou t that, though. It would be so obvious a ploy as to make any admission s completely retractable.

The bottom line was that he was going to be all right. It would tak e some time for all this to pass, and his career in the government wa s over, but he was going to be all right. Strand closed his eyes for a moment, letting his mind go blank and his muscles slack. He was goin g to be all right.

A moment later, his door was thrown open and he jumped to his feet a s Darren Crenshaw strode in, followed by two men Strand didn't recognize.

Both were dressed in inexpensive suits and one was overweight enough t o be breathing hard from having to chase Crenshaw at the half-run tha t was his normal pace.

"What can I do for you, sir?" Strand said, as Crenshaw took a positio n by the wall and the men with him planted themselves in the center o f the room.

"Hillel Strand?" one of them said, digging into his pocket.

"Yes."

He produced a badge, holding it out so that Strand could see. I t identified him as a cop. Just a plain cop.

"Sir, you're under arrest for obstruction of justice and the attempte d murder of Karen Manning and Salam al Fayed."

"What? What the hell are you talk "

"Sir, if you could step out from behind the desk, please."

Strand looked over at Crenshaw. "What the hell is going on?"

"We found the e-mails you sent to Roy Buckner, Hillel. He didn'
t delete them."

"What are you talking about? I never sent e-mails to Buckner!"

Crenshaw just shook his head disappointedly as one of the cops can e around and grabbed Strand by the arm. He pulled back and a momen t later found himself pinned to his desk with his hands held firml y behind him. Then there was the cold metal against his wrists and th e unmistakable ratcheting of handcuffs. When he was jerked back uprigh t again, Crenshaw had already turned to leave.

"I know things that could be very damaging," Strand shouted after him , beginning to panic. "You can't just turn me over to the goddam n police." ; Crenshaw stopped in the doorway but didn't look back. "What do yo u know, Hillel? What do you know that isn't already plastered all ove r the fucking Internet?"

Chapter
Fifty-Six.

In light of the growing mob outside and Fade's own recent antics , security at the hospital was understandably tight. Metal detector s that had sprung up at the entrance precluded bringing any meaningfu l weapons and everyone seemed to be hyper aware of what was going o n around them. Fade kept his head down, trying to get used to moving o n the crutches he'd bought, and avoiding eye contact with the cops an d security guards wandering the halls. He was wearing a Lakers basebal l hat that, combined with a pair of lightly tinted sunglasses, gave hi m the generic look of a thirty-something with a self-destructive penchan t for pickup games. The key to the rather lame disguise, though, was hi s knee. Black and blue, swollen and stitched, it was clearly visibl e beneath his cutoff pants and drew the eye of nearly all the nonmedica l personnel that passed by.

He stopped with his back to a security camera and traced a finger alon g a color-coded map of the hospital, locating the orthopedics ward an d starting off down the hall again.

"Sorry," he mumbled as he hopped into a crowded elevator on one leg , whacking no fewer than three people with his backpack as he did so. Hi s normal MO would have been to rappel down the side of the building, o r have a helicopter drop him in, or at the very least, slink up the bac k stairs. In his current condition, though, riding the elevator wa s about as athletic as he wanted to get. It was a frontal assault o r nothing.

Not surprisingly, when the elevator doors slid open and Fade nearl y fell out into the orthopedics ward, there was a cop watching.

"Who are you here to see?"

"Dr. Pritchard." He'd gotten the name off the hospital's Web site.

"Do you have an appointment?" the cop asked, tearing his gaze awa y from Fade's bulbous knee and looking down at the clipboard in hi s hand.

"I don't know. I just talked to him about a half an hour ago and tol d him what my knee looked like and he said to meet him here. He thinks I m ight have an infection."

"Looks nasty."

"You have no idea."

"Okay. Go ahead."

Fade started down the hall, but then paused and craned his neck around.

"Hey. Is this where you guys are keeping that Collector freak? There'
s like a thousand people outside .. ."

The cop just frowned and sat down in the folding chair facing th e elevator.

The layout turned out to be almost ideal for his purposes. There wa s really only one way to go and the hall had enough twists and turns t o put the various security people out of sight of one another. H
e finally came around the last corner and headed toward a set o f solid-looking double doors with a beefy, short-necked cop sitting nex t to them. He stood as Fade crutched forward, focusing predictably o n his damaged knee.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm supposed to be meeting Dr. Pritchard. But honestly, I'm not sur e I'm in the right place."

"I can guarantee you're not. You need to go back to the desk yo u passed and talk to the nurse."

Fade had briefly toyed with the idea of having Isidro convert his ne w crutches into twelve-gauge shotguns. The incredibly high cool factor , though, hadn't quite outweighed the obvious impracticalities. S
o instead, he'd spent some time experimenting with his right leg , determining exactly what it would and would not do. He figured he ha d about 40 percent power and 30 percent maneuverability, but only fo r short bursts. It was just enough to give his utterly inelegant plan a remote chance of succeeding.

As he turned around, Fade pretended to lose his balance, dropping on e of his crutches in a maneuver he'd rehearsed in the full-length mirro r at his hotel. When the cop bent to pick it up, Fade swung the othe r one into the back of his head. He went down hard, letting out a grun t that seemed impossibly loud in the empty hallway. Fade tensed an d looked back down the corridor but no one materialized. His good karm a for this type of thing continued to hold.

Leaning over with a little difficulty, he took the cop's gun an d stuffed it into his waistband, grabbed his crutch, and then pushe d through the doors.

The hall he entered wasn't as long as he expected, extending abou t forty feet before it dead-ended into a window that looked out over th e Virginia suburbs. This time there were two cops, both of whom jerke d from their positions guarding the last door on the right and starte d immediately toward him.

"Hi," Fade said, actually having to raise his voice a bit to be hear d over the drone of the protestors outside. "I'm here to meet Dr.

Pritchard. He's supposed to examine my knee."

They both stopped and Fade continued forward until he was within a normal conversational distance. "Do you know which room I'm suppose d to wait in?"

They both seemed a bit confused and one of them called to their no w unconscious companion. "Hey, Andy? What's up with this?"

Fade reached behind him and pulled the gun from his waistband before i t became obvious that their colleague wasn't answering. One cop wisel y raised his hands but the other stared malevolently, swinging his arm t o within inches of his holster.

"You don't want to be fucking around here, boy," he said. "You'r e gonna get yourself hurt."

"We'll see," Fade said, pushing off his hat and glasses. "You guy s have probably heard of me. My name's Salam al Fayed."