Redheads (41 page)

Now, floating in the deathlike darkness, she remembered clawing and biting at his face. But it hadn’t done any good. If anything, he’d enjoyed it. He’d choked her until she’d gone limp, and he’d choked her well past that until she’d been a second or two from death. After that, she didn’t remember much. Just a few images. It was like walking in and out of a snuff film and seeing only the worst parts. In this scene, the girl is staring at her hands and ankles as the man binds them with duct tape, the sight slowly receding as her pummeled eyes swell shut. The next shot is a long ride in the foot well of an unseen vehicle, the girl’s head banging against the dash. She cries out; a man laughs. Hours into the drive, she struggles to the surface for just a moment, forcing one eye open against its bloody bruise. The man looks down at her as he drives.

“You’re perfect,” he says. “You’ll do just fine.”

It’s hard for the girl to talk. Her throat has been crushed somehow; even whispering is a struggle.

“My editor. Knows. Where I went.”

“No,” he says. “She doesn’t. I checked your email, your phone. You told her you were going to Cambridge. To meet a source on the hacking probe. So you’re on your own here.”

He reaches down to cup her breast and she blacks out as she screams.

Then they were in a dark and cold city and he’d put a hood over her head before taking her out of the van. He used a saw-bladed knife to cut her ankles free, digging into the skin while he was at it. She could see her feet, the mossy cobble stones across which he was dragging her. A door opened. The same door boomed shut. Now the darkness was total and he was guiding her down steps. They descended forever, his hand crushing her arm above her elbow, the point of the knife between her shoulder blades.

“You think I’m taking you down here to do things to you,” he’d said. “Rape you, kill you. Stuff like that. But you’re wrong. I’m just bringing you. Whatever happens next is between you and him.”

He cut her clothes off, and cut her wrists loose, and whipped the hood from her head. She stood frozen in the utter darkness, listening for anything.

When his fist fell on her neck the second time, it had worked exactly as he intended: she fell to the stone floor like a dead thing.

She floated in the darkness for hours, for days. She didn’t know. At one point she came to earth again, skin upon stones, and she found her way to her hands and knees. She crawled across the cavern floor, tentatively, then faster. Ten feet, a hundred feet. A quarter mile. Her hands found a round stone the size of a melon and she held it and turned it in her fingers, her thumbs finding deep openings. It was too light to be a stone. She found the teeth, the hinged jaw, and knew what she held. She threw the skull away and listened to it bounce hollowly along the floor, rolling and banging down a slope for minutes as it went deeper into the ground. She lay on her side and went back into a protective ball, shutting her eyes against the darkness.

Everything dropped away. She was drifting, unbound.

But there was something above her. A pair of unblinking yellow eyes watched her from on high, like a spider in its web. They began to circle. As they moved, she could hear the click and scrape of claws on stone.

She began to scream again.

Chapter Forty-Seven

The chartered Learjet 45 landed on the main runway at Edinburgh International Airport at nine p.m. on the twenty-second day of July, 2010. Edinburgh lay so far north the sun wouldn’t set for another hour. In the gloaming shadows of the rainclouds, the fields around the airport were a cool, deep green. On their approach, the North Sea had been gray and choppy. The jet taxied to its hangar and then Chris unbuckled his seat belt, got his bags, and stretched in the aisle. His back and neck were still sore from the car accident.

“Can I carry those?” Julissa asked.

“I’ve got them. You want to wake up Westfield?”

Westfield woke at the sound of his name. He had no bags except for the first-aid kit he’d taken from the
Tantallon
’s lifeboat, and he wore old clothes given to him by a Portuguese fisherman. They walked down the plane’s metal stairway. The charter company had arranged for a customs and immigration inspector to meet them in the hangar. To Chris’s intense relief, the inspector simply stamped their passports and welcomed them to the United Kingdom without going through their luggage. On the other side of the hangar bay, a smoke-blue Rolls Royce waited at an idle, its chauffer standing by the passenger door.

Less than two minutes after they stepped from the plane, they were in the car and on their way into the city.

“Nice way to travel,” Westfield said.

He was sitting on the wide leather seat facing Chris and Julissa. To his right was a wet bar with its crystal decanters of whiskey and Calvados brandy. There was a soundproof glass partition between the driver and the passenger compartment.

“Edinburgh’s probably the most dangerous place in the world for the three of us to show our faces,” Chris said. “So I thought the fewer people we run into getting to our hotel, the better.”

“Good idea.”

“Also,” Julissa said, “you saw how we just blew through customs. You only get that if you come in by charter. And we’ve got some stuff in our suitcases.”

“Julissa stayed in L.A. to work out your passport. I rented a car and went across the border to Arizona,” Chris explained. “Went to a gun show in Phoenix.
 
Cash on the table, no ID.”

Westfield nodded. He looked at each of them and then let his eyes rest on the other empty jump seat.

“Mike’s not here,” he said.

“They got him,” Chris said. “And his family.”

“It was bad?”

“Yeah,” Julissa said. She was whispering. “I saw it. I mean, I didn’t see it happen, but I saw it after, and it was bad.”

“Do we know which guys?”

“No,” Chris said. “It could’ve been the guy I shot on my doorstep. Or the guys we killed in Golden Gate Park. Or the man you dumped in the Atlantic.”

“I hope it was one of those,” Westfield said. “He helped us get here, though, didn’t he?”

Julissa put her hand on Westfield’s knee and squeezed gently. Chris put his hand on top of Julissa’s.

“A lot of vengeance coming down,” Aaron said. “A lot of payback.”

Chris nodded.

They came into the soot-stained, stone heart of the old city just as the sun disappeared. They were driving on Princes Street, along the sunken gardens built at the foot of the Edinburgh Castle. The castle dominated the city from its volcanic crag, its crenellated battlements and ramparts now catching the last of the light, the Union Jack rippling in the stiff breeze from its pole atop the highest keep. They passed the gothic spire of the Scott Monument, then turned into the porte cochère of the Balmoral Hotel just as the last of the burgundy glow faded from the bottom of the rain clouds.

This was the city of the monster. Chris felt it in his heart, like a roomful of cold air. They were so close.

Julissa used the key Chris gave her to let herself into his room half an hour after they got to the hotel. As she stepped inside, she used her left hand to pull off the silk scarf she’d had over her hair.

“I went downstairs and bought us a bottle of whiskey. There’s a shop just down the street,” she said. When she saw he was looking at the scarf, she added, “I thought it’d be a good idea to cover my hair. But I don’t know. There are a lot of redheads in Scotland.”

She held up the bottle of eighteen-year-old Laphroaig, which was still inside its protective cardboard cylinder. During their four days in Los Angeles she had found a way to securely move funds from her bank accounts in Texas to an untraceable Swiss account by initiating a transfer through a series of proxy servers. Chris could tell she was relieved to have her own money. She had performed the same service for Westfield and had given him his new bank card when he stepped onto the plane in Flores.

She found two crystal tumblers in the bar by the window and raised her eyebrow at Chris. He held up his hand with the tips of his thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart. Julissa poured the whiskey and handed one glass to Chris. They sat in armchairs by the fireplace and waited for Westfield.

When they were all together, Chris spread a map of Edinburgh on the dining table. He used a red pen to circle the law firm, Stark McCallister Fanning & Stalker. It was a four-man firm near the end of High Street in Old Town, a few blocks from the castle and close to the old courts. High Street followed the spine of an ancient volcanic ridge for a mile, ending at the gates of the castle. Because the sides of the ridge were so steep, instead of cross streets, it was cut by dozens of winds and closes—narrow stone staircases that wound between, and underneath, the eight-hundred-year-old buildings that crowded up either side of the ridge. There was a close on each side of the building that held the law offices, and the map showed one of the closes led to a hidden courtyard behind the building.

“Looks like we could get in from all four sides,” Westfield said.

“Maybe five.”

Julissa rotated her laptop so they could see the screen. She had zoomed in on the building using satellite photos from Google. “The closes are so narrow I think we could jump from roof to roof and get in through the skylight windows on the top floor.”

“That would keep us out of view of the street,” Chris said.

“But first we need to figure out if he even uses the office. He might work from home,” Julissa said.

“You got a picture of him?” Westfield asked.

“Yeah.” Julissa took a manila folder and passed out the pictures she’d printed in the business center of their hotel in Los Angeles. The first photograph was at least twenty years old. Chris came across it in the online directory of the Scottish Bar Association, and it showed Howard Stark, III on the day he became a member of the bar. It was a grainy black-and-white photograph, enlarged too much for its size, and showed a young man in a pinstripe suit with a mane of blond hair combed straight back from his forehead. He had a square chin and wore heavy black glasses.

Westfield looked at the first photograph in the folder and then turned back to Chris and Julissa.

“I was kind of hoping it’d be Stark. The thing I saw on the ship. But this is just a man.”

“Who ages like a man, if you look at the next picture,” Julissa said.

The other photograph was only two years old. Julissa found it by searching Google, which had turned up a page from a magazine published by the University of Edinburgh. It showed Stark, his faced lined and sagging beneath his eyes, his blond mane retreated and grayer. The nose that supported his gold-rimmed bifocals had blossomed from an additional twenty years of whiskey. The caption under the photograph stated
Howard Stark, III, Esq., (Law ’75), delivering the Annual Tetlow Lecture on Admiralty Law.

“The important thing is to get the syringe into him without him noticing,” Westfield said. “I wouldn’t know they interrogated me if the guy hadn’t told me what was up before he did it. The only thing I remember is him telling me, and then the needle. Then nothing.”

“How long were you out?”

“I don’t know. By the time I finally got to shave at Father Silva’s house, I had maybe seven days of beard growth. That’s starting from Galveston, the last time I shaved. Then I drove across West Texas and the thing got me early in the morning on the second night, in Carlsbad. I spent a little over twenty-four hours in the lifeboat. So that leaves up to five days I absolutely can’t account for, other than snatches in the body bag.”

“Jesus, Aaron.”

“But I think if one of us just comes up behind him and gives it to him in the neck, he won’t remember a thing. And then we can ask him anything we want and dump him in his own bed, and he’ll never be able to raise an alarm that we’re here and asking questions.”

“So at the very least we’ll need to know his routine and know where he lives. If he’s got a wife or a girlfriend or a maid, we’ll need to get her out of the way,” Chris said.

“It sounds like a couple days’ preparation, at least,” Julissa said.

“It’ll take a lot of ground work. We can use Google maps and satellite pictures all we want, but we’ll have to get out there and go into buildings and figure out the space. So we gotta make sure we don’t get caught while we’re trying to lay a trap,” Westfield said.

“We thought of that too,” Chris said.

Julissa brought a suitcase to the table. She pulled out the shopping bags from Los Angeles, then opened the concealed compartment at the base of the suitcase, where Chris had put the disassembled guns. Chris handed Westfield a shopping bag and a plastic bag full of gun parts.

“Can you put that together?”

“What’s it supposed to look like when it’s done?” Westfield asked.

“A Micro-Uzi.”

“Jesus Christ, where’d you buy that?”

“We got it off the guys Chris shot,” Julissa said. “The other two are just regular Glocks. They all load nine millimeter and we have four hundred rounds in the other bags.”