Killer Focus (22 page)

“It can be arranged.”

“Then we have a deal. Just one last thing. How good is your boy with explosives?”

Lubec, Maine

H
elene Reichmann concealed her car on the deserted stretch of road overlooking the sea. A black van pulled in behind her. Several men dressed in black combat gear and equipped with night vision and automatic weapons flowed out. Within minutes they had dispersed, melting into the windswept trees that edged Ritter's driveway.

Moving slowly, she picked her way down the pitch-dark driveway, pausing frequently to allow her vision to adjust to the intense dark and to listen. Not that either senses would do her any good if Lopez had gotten here before them.

The lights of a lone two-storied beach cottage came into view and she quickened her pace. Ritter's hideaway, built in a north-facing cove that not only carried a similar name but in its own small way mimicked the icy hell that the port of Lubeck in Germany had been, was tiny compared to the mansion he kept in Boston. Ritter liked his privacy, particularly when he came to the beach, and it was that hermit philosophy she was counting on. He employed a local woman to cook and clean, but he didn't have any staff living on the premises.

Security lights flooded the porch as she walked up the steps. Flexing her fingers against the cold, she pressed the buzzer.

Long minutes later, she wondered if she'd gotten it wrong and he wasn't here. Parker had been running for the mountains when Lopez had cut him down; it was possible Ritter was doing the same, although she would put money on the fact that Ritter wouldn't panic. She leaned on the buzzer again.

The door swung open a few inches.

Ritter's gaze was wary. “Helene?”

She flinched. “I told you never to call me that.”

“What do you want?”

“In case you haven't noticed, we have an emergency on our hands.”

He looked past her. “How did you get here? Where's your car?”

Helene took the impact of the solid cedar door as it slammed closed on her shoulder. Wedging one booted foot in the gap, she fumbled in her pocket, produced a gun and pointed it through the gap. She hadn't chambered a round, but the old fool wouldn't know that. “We need to talk.”

The pressure on the door eased. Helene stepped inside and closed the door. “Into the library.”

 

Ritter was an entrepreneur, a mathematical genius with an uncanny talent with stocks and shares. He had taken the small chunk of the cabal's money she had allotted him and built an empire.

He stared at Helene with his light gray eyes, and a shudder worked its way down her spine. He had always been odd, a little too brilliant and insightful, and with that uncanny instinct for the future. In her opinion, despite his prodigy status, at times he verged uncomfortably close to abnormal—and not in a good way. Sometimes she had been convinced he could read her mind. Years ago she had been almost certain he had guessed about the book.

His stare was fixed but slightly unfocused now, as if he was looking at something she couldn't see, a trait that had always infuriated her. When he spoke he used German, his voice halting and guttural, spinning her back to the months spent at the institute in Berlin, the long weeks cooped up on the
Nordika.
“You haven't come to talk. You've come to kill me.”

She lifted the gun. The first bullet caught him in the center of the chest, the second an inch off to the left. He died quickly, with surprisingly little fuss and hardly any mess.

Dispassionately, she stepped back from his crumpled form and the pungent smells that filled the room, and positioned the gun back in her pocket. One more loose end tied up.

Leaving the light on in the study, she systematically walked around the house and switched every other light off. When she was satisfied that the house was secure, she mounted the stairs and sat in the deep shadow of the first landing. The position gave her a clear view of the front door and the study.

Satisfied that the trap was set and that she had taken every precaution, she took out the gun and settled in to wait for Lopez.

Washington, D.C.

T
aylor came to lying on the chilly surface of a hardwood floor. She felt sick and sluggish and so cold convulsive shudders kept jerking through her. She also had a pounding headache. From the throbbing, localized on one side of her head, it was an easy bet that Colenso had dropped her on the floor.

“Take a seat.”

Colenso came into focus, comfortably sprawled on a leather couch, a leather coat and a woolen scarf keeping the chill at bay. Memory flooded back.

When they had left the motel, Colenso had forced her to climb into his car at gunpoint. Le Clerc had rung back within minutes and she had picked up the call. He had asked to speak to Colenso. When Colenso terminated the call, he had stabbed a hypodermic into her thigh.

He hadn't told her which drug he'd used. By the time he informed her that she was once more high on ketamine, she had been in no state to care.

He grinned, obviously having the time of his life, and waved his gun at an armchair situated off to one side. “I insist.”

She pushed up into a sitting position. She was still cuffed, which made moving difficult. While she waited for her head to stop swimming, she took stock of her surroundings. The room was large, and strategically lit with lamps and wall lighting placed to highlight works of art and paintings. She didn't know a lot about antiques, but the few pieces she could see looked very old and expensive.

Outside she could hear the unmistakable sound of surf. A large bank of windows that presumably looked out over the sea but were presently blacked out by the night dominated the room. An empty fireplace occupied one wall, the pale, gray stone perfectly fitted and as cold in appearance as the temperature.

Using the arm of the chair to steady her, she hauled herself upright and sat down.

A gust of wind buffeted the house. The windows shuddered, shifting the garish reflection of Colenso and herself. “How long have I been out?”

Colenso checked his watch. “Approximately three hours.”

She stared at a painting on the wall. Art was something she did know a bit about, courtesy of a narcotics bust where the currency had been stolen art. “The Degas looks authentic.”

“It's real. So are the Picassos.”

She examined the paintings positioned on the stark stretch of wall behind her. Not one Picasso; three.

“The smaller of the set was damaged in transit.”

She stared at Colenso. “From Germany?”

He smiled. “Colombia. Although my father was on the
Nordika.
”

Pushing to his feet, he walked across to an elegant side table and poured himself a drink from a crystal decanter. “Technically, my telling you that I'm a cabal member earns me the death penalty, but that was before Lopez started his little rampage. Now the rules have changed.”

At a guess, Colenso was making them up as he went along. “He hasn't got all of the upper echelon yet.”

His gaze sharpened. “How do you know that?”

“Le Clerc.” She was bluffing, but anything that made Colenso feel less secure had to work in her favor.

He shrugged. “Lopez can't kill us all, only a selected few, and most of them are past their used-by date.”

The pronouncement was chilling, highlighting the real personality that Colenso had successfully masked for years.

Taylor worked her fingers, stimulating the blood flow as she skimmed the sitting room. Most of the surfaces were bare. She couldn't see Colenso's wallet or the keys he'd used to lock the cuffs, which meant he was either carrying them in his pocket or had them stashed in the briefcase she'd seen on the backseat of his car. “Lopez has finished the cabal. No criminal network can survive that kind of exposure. Reichmann will close you down.”

He set his empty glass down. A muscle worked along his jaw. The silence drew out, punctuated by the increasing whine of the wind and the spatter of rain on the windows. “Who told you about Reichmann?”

Taylor spotted the briefcase, slotted beneath the elegant side table that held the decanter. Unless Colenso left the room, there was no way she could get to it to search for the keys. “That she really runs the show, and that she's not included in the book that she lost? Who do you think?”

His stare was intense. “What le Clerc knows about the cabal wouldn't cover the back of a postage stamp.”

“But it's enough to take it down. Nazis operating on U.S. soil? The media will go crazy. The witch hunt will make McCarthyism look like an Easter egg trail.”

“It won't happen.”

“You can't stop it”

“Yes, I can.” He picked up the briefcase, laid it on the table, flipped it open and pulled out a plastic Ziploc bag with a syringe in it. “And you're going to help me.”

She stared at the syringe. “The damage control's a bit late. Lopez has already killed three cabal members.”

He smiled. “Did you think we didn't know what Lopez was up to? As far as Reichmann's concerned, Lopez couldn't be doing a better job if he were on the payroll.”

Her stomach sank. That answered one question. Colenso didn't work for the cabal as a whole; he worked directly for Reichmann. His interest was in protecting her. As long as she survived, Colenso was still in business. “Reichmann might be safe for now, but Lopez won't stop.”

His stare was direct and cold. “He won't reach her. Reichmann is connected.”

Radcliff had been a senator. If one member of the cabal had managed to step into the political process, it was a given that others had, too. Fischer was investigating on the basis that national security was threatened from within the country's security agencies. “What are you talking? Political? Or the Intelligence community?”

“Come on, Jones, you can do better than that.”

Higher than the intelligence community itself meant he was talking the White House.
“So, what now?”

He smiled. “We drive to the motel.”

Colenso's cell phone buzzed. He answered, speaking in monosyllables, then hung up.

“Who was that?”

“Not lover boy.”

Her stomach sank. He had seen through the ruse with le Clerc. He knew he was dealing with Fischer.

The phone rang twice more. Colenso's conversations were brief and concise; he was putting his men in position.

Colenso walked over to an occasional table, pulled on latex gloves and took her gun from his briefcase. He checked the clip, extracted his own gun from his shoulder holster and replaced it with hers, and suddenly the full scope of Colenso's plan was crystal clear. He wasn't happy just to reclaim the book. He was going to ambush Fischer, and anyone else who made the meeting at the motel. Using her gun, he would then stage the scene to make it look as if she was one of the killers. Once she was dead, he would plant the syringe on her, linking her to Shaw and Tate's deaths. His choice of ketamine—a drug that had sent her into months of therapy and had, arguably, lost her her job—made sudden sense.

The tabloids would love it. When interviewed, Colenso would make sure to emphasize her past association with Lopez, her problems with ketamine, and leak the false surveillance report that had “exposed” her as the FBI mole. In one stroke he would have cemented her role as Lopez's insider in the FBI and covered his own trail, and Reichmann's.

If the plan ran smoothly and Reichmann managed to influence her “connections,” support for the investigation into the cabal could be scaled down or even withdrawn. Reichmann would remain anonymous and protected and Lopez and Taylor would go down in history as the villains.

The only hitch in Colenso's plan was the existence of the ledger, which was incendiary enough to guarantee a continued flow of support for the investigation. But if Colenso destroyed the original and Lopez's copy never came to light, that avenue to expose the cabal network would be gone. “What about Lopez? He's not going to stop.”

Colenso shrugged. “Now that we know he's working to a list, every time he kills he presents us with an opportunity to take him down.”

Us.
The calmness of his statement reminded her that Colenso was working with a team. His men would already be in place at the motel he'd chosen.

She had never thought of Colenso as particularly clever, but he was. He was keeping her alive for now, but only because he couldn't afford to kill her until shortly before he did the other killings. If he shot her now, rigor would set in, negating the “evidence” of his staged murder scene. He needed all of the murders to happen within a window of an hour and, preferably, just a few minutes.

He picked up the briefcase and jerked his head toward the door. “Time to leave.”

 

Minutes later, Colenso turned off the narrow country lane and onto a highway. Taylor stared at the landscape, now dotted with houses. A luminous sign indicated they were entering the city limits of Portland. Traffic thickened. They had to be close to the motel, so she didn't have much time. Colenso braked. Across the intersection a highway patrol car was stopped, waiting for the lights.

Suddenly, she knew what she had to do. Fischer would know it was a setup, but if he had to play by Colenso's rules he wouldn't stand a chance. If she could attract some attention, maybe even get them stopped by the highway patrol, she would have a chance at escaping. At the very least, she could delay Colenso's schedule and give Fischer the opening he needed.

The lights turned green.

“I feel sick.” She leaned forward and used the movement to fumble at the seat belt clasp. The belt went slack.

The patrol car flashed past. Sucking in a breath, she flung herself sideways, grasped the wheel and wrenched. The car spun sideways across the road. Horns blared, tires screamed. The gnarled branches of a tree appeared, suspended, in the headlights. A split second later the car hit the tree with a sickening jolt and she was flung sideways.

The engine screamed as Colenso put the car in Reverse. The tires spun, then finally gained traction, and the car shot back. Scrabbling for the door, she tried to get out. The door, which was locked, wouldn't open.

She heard the snick as Colenso unbuckled his seat belt. Instinctively, Taylor swung, using the cuffs. Blood arced from Colenso's mouth. She had a moment to register the recoil of his fist, then hot light exploded inside her skull and everything went black.