Gideon (22 page)

Damn, damn, damn
. He had broken her heart once already. She was prepared to let him disrupt her life. She was willing to fight for him, ready to help him prove his innocence. But she wasn’t going to risk falling in love with him a second time. No, thank you. On that, she’d take a pass.

He was watching her, she was sure he knew what she was thinking. Standing together in the small bathroom, they both became acutely aware of his nakedness. And so she muttered something vague under her breath, turned away, and slipped out the door, leaving him to put on his clothes.

Alone in the bathroom, Carl slowly got into his old Giants shirt and sweats. Then he looked dead-on into the rectangular mirror over the sink. The man gazing back at him looked much older than Carl remembered. Sadder. A little desperate.

Carl didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. It scared him. That’s why he slowly raised his right hand, curled it into a fist, and then jabbed it violently into the glass, causing the image to shatter into a hundred pieces.

The knuckles on his hand turned pink and raw, and a thing tickle of blood ran between the index finger and forefinger. He put the hand under the tap, let a spray of cold water wash over it.

Staring into the mirror, his face distorted by the cracks and the breaks, he stayed in the bathroom until the bleeding had stopped. Then he opened the door and went to join Amanda. Went to figure out what the hell they were going to do to try to say alive.

The Closer took a taxi from a midtown Manhattan hotel out to La Guardia Airport. The driver wore a turban and had suffocatingly bad body odor. He smelled of curry and turmeric, and the combination was faintly nauseating. The traffic was slow, the drivers testy. Many rode their horns incessantly. If vehicles had come equipped with turret-mounted machine guns, the Closer had no doubt their drivers would have used them to annihilate their fellow drivers. The summer heat—combined with their miserable jobs and even more miserable marriages—did that to ordinary citizens.

Having no spouse, as well as employment that offered an infinite amount of variety and challenge, the Closer was able to remain calm and focused.

Leaving from La Guardia, the two P.M. shuttle to D.C.’s National Airport was three-quarters full. The man who was seated next to the Closer was clutching a three-ring plastic binder. The words
Environmental Protection Agency
were stamped on its face. He appeared to be very tense. Possibly he did not like to fly. He did not attempt to speak to the Closer, who had no interest in speaking to him, anyway.

The car, a year-old midnight blue eight-passenger Chevy Suburban with Vermont plates, was waiting in the long-term parking lot. The Suburban was registered to a child day care center in Putney, Vermont. The slogan
Putney Day Care—We’re There
was emblazoned on the driver’s and front passenger doors, underneath a playful cartoon drawing of smiling, happy young faces, balloons, and lollipops. The Suburban came equipped with a fifty-gallon fuel tank for long-distance cruising. The tank was full. The keys were in the Closer’s pocket. In the glove compartment was a pair of high-powered binoculars, along with a German-made SIG-Sauer 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Tucked under the driver’s seat was a .357 Magnum. There was ample ammunition for each. More than ample—the Closer rarely needed to reload a weapon.

Under the fold-down rear seat were two gallon-size Ziploc freezer bags. Each bag contained six eight-inch-long, three-quarter-inch-thick cylindrical sticks of dynamite. In the rear of the car, taped to the casing that held the spare tire, wrapped tightly in extra-thick aluminum foil and folded into a three-inch-by-three-inch square, were six blasting caps.

The Closer was pleased. All instructions had been followed to the letter. Even the musical request.

In the CD player could be found a collection of Dick Dale surf guitar instrumentals from the mid-sixties.

The Closer got in and eased the big, heavy vehicle to the exit kiosk, where he paid the bill, which came to $42.50. Then he steered out of the airport and onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. Observing the speed limit. Admiring the lush green growth of the trees and lawns that grew along the Potomac. Wondering, as always, how Washington could remain such a beautiful and serene place when there were so many ugly and dangerous people in it.

The Closer took the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge over the river and picked up Wisconsin Avenue. Klingle Street was a twenty-minute drive from there. Upon reaching the destination, the Closer parked in a shady spot four doors down the street and shut off the Suburban’s engine.

“Observe and report,” the veddy, veddy British voice on the phone had said. The instructions were very clear. “I need information.”

Hanging up the phone, the Closer had smiled. They lived in different worlds. One in which information was a valuable commodity, a form of money and power and strength. And one in which the only information of any value was that which led you to your prey. Or kept you alive.

After thirty minutes of listening to Dick Dale, and unmarked gray Fort Taurus sedan pulled up in front of the destination and stopped. A tall, blond, official-looking man got out and strode briskly up the bluestone path to the brick carriage house that was around back.

The man was inside for forty-five minutes. When he left, the Closer watched him turn and look back at the woman’s house. The expression on his face showed confusion, indecision. Something was bothering him. As if he’d left something behind. Then he turned, walked back to the Taurus, and drove away. The Closer waited. And sure enough, within minutes, the Taurus returned. Parked in a different location on the other side of the street. The blond man turned the ignition off but sat in the car, waiting, watching the house from which he had emerged.

The Closer looked at the clock on the dashboard of the Suburban, then picked up the cell phone and dialed. It was time to follow those very clear instructions. The Englishman answered on the third ring and listened to the Closer’s report but made no comment until all the information had been dispensed.

“Something new has come up. I have another job for you.”

“What about
this
job?” the Closer asked.

“A minor change of plans there as well,” the English voice said through the slight distortion of the cell phone. “Or should I say, of ratings.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning it would be to my financial benefit to make this more newsworthy.”

“How?”

“However you choose,” he replied. “Knowing the details would only spoil my fun. I work hard for my money. I deserve to have some fun.”

“We all deserve to have some fun.” The Closer’s palms were beginning to itch at the prospect of it. “But only a few of us are lucky enough to ever get the chance.”

* * *

Lindsay Augmon hung up the phone on his most dangerous employee. He was not thinking of the Closer’s vivid imagination or special abilities. Nor was he thinking about the consequences of those skills.

He was thinking about money.

Lord Lindsay Edward Augmon had made his first million dollars when he was twenty-two years old.

His father, Sir James Lindsay Augmon, was an Oxford don, distinguished, stuffy, quite righteous, and respected by all who met him. He revered the queen, supported Labour, and felt there was no higher calling than teaching poetry to young people thirsting for knowledge and beauty. Every seven years or so, Faber would publish James’s own thin volume of poems, which ritualistically received glowing reviews, and every four or five years they would publish a volume of his criticism, most of which made it clear that no other modern poet had a clue.

Young Lindsay attended Oxford as well, as duly expected, but lasted just one month into his second year, when he was expelled for impregnating the sixteen-year-old daughter of the head of his college. Lindsay did not mind leaving England’s greatest university behind him. He did not care much for his father—for his obsession with discipline, his stiff-upper-lip British reserve, or his phony liberalism, which in Young Lindsay’s mind had more to do with making the right social connections than anything else and allowed his father to love the masses from afar and treat his own son, who was quite close up, like a pile of rubbish. He also detested his father’s retreat from reality into academia and had no intention of following in the elder man’s hallowed footsteps. Lindsay had every intention of becoming a newspaperman. And a man of the streets. He loved the roughness of lower-class England: the smells, the language, the excitement. It was where he felt he belonged.

Within days of his arrival in London, in 1953, Lindsay Augmon had a job on Fleet Street. His reporting instincts were so unerring and his demeanor so fearless that within six months he was asked to move south to the coastal town of Falmouth to run a local resort paper, the
Sandpiper
. The paper was seasonal, the ad rates high but good for three months only, four months tops. However Lindsay quickly changed the tenor of its news coverage. Instead of covering local yacht races and having full-page weather reports, the
Sandpiper
became political. Not surprisingly to anyone who knew the young Augmon, the paper’s target were the Labour Party and the queen herself. Both were attacked viciously and relentlessly, and Lindsay’s specialty became the lurid tabloid headline. After another Labour victory in the national elections, Augmon’s paper blared, “Entire Country Having Labour Pains,” and, after a sex scandal with Parliament involving a minister named William Conklin, it ran “Willie’s Willie—Will He?” The one that caused the most consternation and caused the greatest one-day sale of papers in the
Sandpiper’s
history was “Queen Eats a Rat.” This particular headline was to become the symbol of Augmon and all his papers, as well as the modus operandi. The queen had not, in fact, eaten a rat. The story was about a London restaurant that was discovered to be serving rat meat in their stew and passing it off as chicken. When the owner of the Soho eatery was asked for a quote, he insisted that rodent made a perfectly fine meal His quote was, “If the queen herself came in to eat, I’d serve her the little buggers.” The fact that the queen
hadn’t
come in to eat didn’t stop Augmon. His headline was close enough to the truth for him—and apparently for his readers as well. Within a year, the paper’s circulation had quadrupled and advertising rates were soaring year-round.

One year after going to work for the
Sandpiper
, he put together a syndicate to buy the paper. It turned out he had a flair for ownership. For
sole
ownership. One by one, his partners disappeared—quitting in frustration in the face of his ruthless business tactics or driven out by Augmon’s economic pressuring. By the late 1950s Augmon owned seven newspapers in England and had expanded to Australia, where he owned four more papers. Each was small, tabloid in nature, and becoming more and more fanatically right-wing—all in the name of giving the working people what they wanted. In the early sixties he moved into TV, magazines, and books. By the late sixties he realized that England was a dead end, never again to be a world power, so he took his voracious appetite and his penchant for making up stories to America. During the seventies he took dual citizenship, becoming an American citizen so he could circumvent the law restricting foreign ownership, and began buying up American television stations as well as any magazine or newspaper that came up for grabs. He followed the same formula for each of his possessions: streamline the operation by any means necessary, hire hungry young people who had as few scruples as possible and who were eager to climb the corporate ladder, go for the blue-collar audience, and never worry about the truth if a lie will sell better. Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s England made the perfect foil for his schemes and vision.

By the time he celebrated his fiftieth birthday, he had been married three times. His second wife bore him a son, Walker. The relationship between father and son was not a good one. When Walker was sixteen years old, he was killed in a freakish accident. he was vacationing in the middle East and was hiking in Jordan, in the spectacular ruins of Petra. While he was walking through the narrow ravine leading out of the ruins, there was a flash flood. Most of the tourists were able to cling to a high space. Walker, along with three others, was drowned. His body was flown back to New York, where his mother and father lived, but Lindsay Augmon did not attend the funeral. On that day he was buying a film studio and the funeral did not fit into his very busy schedule.

He was knighted in 1984 when he bailed out Britain’s largest airline and kept it from going out of business. Throughout that decade, his formula never varied. The only thing that changed was his bottom line, which became more and more profitable as he moved into the business of satellite television, wireless communications, and blockbuster films. In 1988, the same year he became a naturalized American citizen,
Forbes
magazine listed him as the seventh richest man in the world, with a net worth of $6.8 billion.

In 1990 Lord Augmon had perhaps his most important revelation: It wasn’t only Britain that would never again be a world power.
No
country would ever truly dominate again. Modern tools of communication had stripped governments of their real means of power—the control of information. If one wanted to be a ruler, one had to rule not with weapons, not with law, but with technology.

It was that simple. One night Lindsay Augmon went to bed with a new realization about the way of the future. The next morning he woke up determined to become the most powerful man in the world.

“You’ve got to think,” she said.

“If I think any harder,” he told her, “I’m going to suffer a full cranial meltdown.”

Amanda nodded, backing off. “All right, then let’s take a break.” She went to the refrigerator and took out a Bud Light. “I bought you some beer,” she said.

“That’s not beer, Amanda. That’s more like monkey piss.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Amanda snapped. “Next time I’m stocking a hideout for you I’ll make sure to provide a full selection of handcrafted micro-beers.”