Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (132 page)

Heroe grimaced. “I wish I knew.”

“Good luck, Chief.”

Nodding, she pushed into the dense greenery until she found the boardwalk. She walked to her right. Finding nothing, she retraced her steps and continued on. Not long after, she discovered a branching to her right, and took it.

This boardwalk was shorter, ending at a small inlet that meandered off to her right. She took a look around and saw nothing but trees and underbrush. A bird sang in a branch above her head and water spiders skimmed across the surface of the shallow finger of water.

She was about to turn around and go back to the boat when something stuck in the periphery of her vision. Squatting down, she looked more closely. Off to her right there appeared to be a footprint in the black mud beside the water. It was a partial, but still. Slipping off her shoes, she stepped cautiously into the opaque water. It came up to her calves, but the mud was so thick she sunk in another couple of inches. Drawing her service revolver, she headed straight up the inlet. She was surprised that the water wasn’t cold. It was, instead, the temperature of blood. This thought sent a shiver down her spine.

Heroe was not prone to superstition, but from the time of puberty she had been visited by premonitions. They did not come often, but when they did they always proved correct. At first, she hadn’t told anyone about her visitations for fear of being ostracized, but a year after they manifested she could bear the burden no longer and, one night, she confessed to Granny. For a long time after she was finished speaking, Granny said nothing. Her eyes had gone opaque as they sometimes did when she sat in her rocking chair in the evenings or on dark afternoons when rain clouds burst open and lightning forked through the sky.

“You have inherited the gift from me,” Granny said after a time. “I inherited it from my grandmother. That’s how the gift works; it skips generations.” Granny’s eyes cleared and she smiled as she touched Heroe’s cheek. “Don’t be frightened, child.”

“I’m not,” Heroe had said, sounding braver than she felt. “But I don’t understand.”

Granny’s smile broadened. “The world we experience with our five senses is only a sliver of what exists. Remember this, child, as you go through life. You and I have glimmers of what really exists beyond the limits. We are the fortunate ones.”

“But the premonitions—”

“Whispers from the other side of things, whispers from souls whose bodies have already turned to dust. Where they are, time doesn’t exist. Time is, after all, constructed by humans to make sense out of chaos. But in the vastness, past, present, and future coexist, as they must. It’s only that we lack the … tools to experience it the way it really is.”

Now, wading through the swampy water, Heroe was visited by a premonition. She “saw” the water as blood and knew that somewhere up ahead death awaited. And then into her mind swam Naomi Wilde’s face. It was covered in mud, distorted by caked blood. So vivid was the image that Heroe was forced to stop in her tracks. She held on to the branch of a tree, much as Naomi had done days before when Annika had led her to the buried body of Arjeta Kraja. For a moment the world seemed to spin wildly around her and she heard the familiar roaring in her ears.
“Someone else’s blood,”
Granny had said when she had described the sensation.

“Who are you?” Heroe whispered. “What are you trying to tell me?”

Slowly, she regained her sense of equilibrium. The world, and, with it, her breathing, returned to normal. She stared at her fist, the knuckles white where she held on to the branch as if for dear life. Letting go, she pushed forward through the muck until she came to a large tree with spreading roots. More footprints here—fresh footprints, in fact. And between two of the largest roots the earth had been recently turned over.

The footprints went off into the foliage. She was looking in that direction when a powerful arm snaked around her throat and she felt a terrible pressure on the delicate bone just below her left eye.

*   *   *

“No,” Jack said. “I forbid it. For you to go after Liridona alone would be the height of madness.”

“I suspected you would say that,” Alli replied. “That’s why I’ve asked Thatë to go with me.”

At once, he saw the trap she had sprung on him, and while he admired her cleverness, he also knew that what she proposed was out of the question.

“I’m sorry, Alli. Your heart is in the right place, but under no circumstances are you going off on this wild-goose chase.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he recognized them as what Edward Carson had told him when he assigned Jack to investigate Senator Berns’s death.

Alli’s eyes were blazing. “You have no right to order me—”

“This isn’t a democracy, young lady. In case you have conveniently forgotten, the moment we step off the plane we’re back in enemy territory. An enemy, I might remind you, whose principal business is the enslavement and trafficking of girls and young women.”

She lifted her head. “I’m not frightened of Arian Xhafa.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid of, Alli, because you should be.”

“Well, shit, of course I am, Jack. I’d be an idiot not to be frightened of him. On the other hand, I’m not going to let that fright paralyze me. I mean, who does Edon have except us? Who can save her and Liridona from Xhafa, if not us? Her parents? Her father is the one who sold her and Arjeta to Xhafa’s people to pay off his gambling debts. Do you think he’s going to stop gambling and losing?”

Now it was she who took his hands. “Jack, Edon’s already lost one sister. I can’t stand by and watch her lose another.”

*   *   *

The pressure in Heroe’s head exploded behind her eyes like a mortar blast. She gasped as the shock wave drove through her, but her brain was far from paralyzed. She raised her service revolver until the muzzle pointed directly behind her. She pulled the trigger.

The percussion effectively deafened her in her right ear, but the agonizing pressure beneath her left eye vanished. She was released, and she staggered to her knees.

She was staring down, half-dazed by shock, the point-blank percussion, and the violent surge of adrenaline that had surely saved her life. Her knees had not sunk into the muck. They were resting on something hard. Dropping the service revolver, she dug her fingers in the muddy earth, scraped it away, and saw two faces appearing. One was of a young girl, very beautiful despite the disfigurement of her nose. Heroe had never seen her before. Feverish with dread, she uncovered more of the second girl and saw that it was Naomi Wilde’s face precisely as she had experienced it in her visitation.

She began to cry. But that release of emotion and tension brought her back to herself, and, bracing herself against the tree, she rose to her feet.

Turning, she saw Peter McKinsey sitting against the bole of a tree. The left side of his head was running red. Where the ear had been was a scorch mark, ragged and bloody.

He looked up at her and snapped his teeth together. In utter shock, she watched him lurch to his feet and come after her. She wanted to run, she wanted to defend herself, but her service revolver was at her feet.

And then he was upon her, and her nostrils dilated with the stench of death. His fists beat her down to the muck, until she was lying with Naomi Wilde and the unknown victim. And in that moment, she understood the nature of her visitation. The water turned to blood—her blood, her death. Nothing to be done, then. The future was already written. Today she would die.

McKinsey was on top of her, pounding her, and then he had her service revolver. He pointed it at her, grinning now, victory in sight. And then the world turned inside out, colors coalesced and collided. She no longer felt pain. There was no sound save the rushing of blood in her ears.
Someone else’s blood.

And at that precise instant, she saw the specter of Naomi Wilde rising up behind McKinsey like a twist of smoke, drawing her gaze to the ruined side of his head. No time to weigh a decision, or even for thought.

Lashing out with her left hand, she struck squarely on the gunshot wound. McKinsey howled in pain, rearing up, hands to his head. She struck him a two-handed blow that knocked him sideways. His cheek struck Naomi’s face and he howled again.

Struggling out from under him, she smashed her fist into his right eye. The blow drove the left side of his head into the ground and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. She grabbed her service revolver out of his hand and aimed it at him as she staggered to her feet.

“Get up,” she ordered. “Get up now!”

Instead, he lunged at her. She pulled the trigger.

*   *   *

Immediately following his speech to the NAACP at the Kennedy Center, President Crawford headed for the men’s room. This had already been vetted by a member of his Secret Service detail, and was staked out, ensuring no one could enter while the POTUS was doing whatever it was he needed to do in there.

Everyone, that is, except Henry Holt Carson. The president was not happy when Carson strode into the men’s room.

Crawford gave him a jaundiced look. “A Secret Service agent. Hank, for the love of God!”

“Calm down, sir.”

The president stared at him in the mirror that ran along the wall above the sinks. “I will not fucking calm down. Where in all our planning did we ever contemplate murdering a Secret Service agent?”

It was a rhetorical question. Carson was quite certain it required no answer, so he kept his mouth shut.

“And Naomi Wilde, of all people. Damn it, Hank, she was one of our best and brightest. I read the reports of how she handled the crisis in Moscow, how she took charge of your sister-in-law. I’ve spoken with her several times—I
knew
her.”

Time for rebuttal,
Carson thought. “You and I both know it never would have come up, let alone been on the table. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Wilde had gotten too close. If McKinsey hadn’t acted, she would have blown us out of the water—”

“Murder of a federal agent. That’s a capital offense.”

“—and then where would we be?”

Crawford ran his hand distractedly through his hair. He seemed incapable of looking directly at Carson, but continued to engage his image in the mirror.

“This has gotten out of hand, Hank.”

“As far as anyone is concerned, Naomi Wilde is missing. We’ve neutralized her boss, there is no body. Calm down. We’re almost there.”

“The hell we are!” The president stopped, suddenly aware that he had raised his voice. “This has got to stop, right here, right now.”

“You know that’s impossible. We’ve come too far; we’ve crossed the line of no return.”

“I’m telling you, Hank—”

“Cheer up, Arlen, the Middle Bay audit is almost complete. When it is, we’ll have what we want.”

For the moment, the president’s eyes had turned inward, and when he spoke it was as if he was addressing himself. “There’s a line you promise yourself you’ll never cross, because once you do, all is lost.”

For the first time, Carson spoke sharply. “It pains me to have to remind you that we’re both implicated in the Middle Bay merger. If we don’t complete what we started—if we
fail
—well, it will be a pretty bleak future for both of us.”

Crawford’s eyes refocused. Leaning forward, he put his hands on either side of the sink. The skin on his face was pale and slack. Suddenly he looked ten years older. “God in heaven, what this job takes out of you.”

“There are a lot of people who wonder why anyone would want the burden.”

“Well, right now, Hank, I’m beginning to think they’re right.” The president sighed. “Okay, so what do we do now?”

“Clean up the mess McKinsey made.”

“Don’t speak that name to me ever again!”

Carson nodded. “As you wish, of course.”

“When you lie down with fuckers, you’re sure to get fucked,” Crawford said bleakly.

Carson offered a thin smile. “Leave it to me.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You don’t want to know, sir.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Carson crossed behind the POTUS to the line of urinals, unzipped, and began to pee. “I’m going to cauterize the wound.”

Crawford opened his mouth, possibly to ask what that specifically meant, then changed his mind. Instead, he turned on the taps, pumped foaming soap from the dispenser, and commenced to wash his hands.

Carson watched him.
Like Lady Macbeth,
he thought.
But the stink of guilt will never wash off, trust me on that.
Finished, he zipped up and joined the POTUS at the sinks, washing and drying his hands.

“She’s going to be buried with full military honors.”

Carson coughed. “May I remind you, sir. There is no body.”

“And you better make sure there won’t be one.” The POTUS shook his head. “Damnit to hell, Hank, what’s gone right today?”

Patting the POTUS on the back, Carson said, “Buck up, Arlen, you just delivered one helluva speech that’ll put the African-American vote in the bag.”

27

“Is he dead?”

“As a doorpost.”

Heroe closed her eyes. “Shit, shit,
shit
!”

“He got a name?”

“Agent Peter McKinsey, United States Secret Service.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Heroe looked up at him. The pain in her head was distracting her from what she needed to do. “Do I fucking look like I’m kidding?”

“Okay, okay. But forget about him, Chief, and just lie back,” the officer said. “I’ve called for an EMS evac chopper. I don’t want to chance taking you back to the mainland in the boat.”

“Officer, I’m on a grave with two bodies. One of them is McKinsey’s partner. I’m not lying back.”

“My God,” the officer said, “what the hell is this place?”

*   *   *

The moment the 737 hit the tarmac and taxied to a stop, Edon Kraja come up to Jack and said, “I want to get off here with you. I need to find my sister. I’m afraid something terrible has happened to her.”

“I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” Jack said as gently as he could.