Ultimate Weapon (35 page)

Hegel was not alone in his room either, András was irritated to note. He hadn’t wanted to conduct a full scale massacre tonight. At least the other man was sleeping. A stringy, grayish creature with a chicken neck and a mouth that gaped wide and toothless.

Hegel’s eyes were closed. His head was bandaged and one arm was in a cast. András grasped the nurse call button, which dangled on the end of a plastic cord, and looped it up high over the IV rack next to the bed. Well out of the man’s reach. He grabbed a chair and sat down.

Hegel’s eyes popped open at the scrape of the chair, widening with alarm when he saw who sat before him. András was ready with the rubber ball, which he shoved into Hegel’s mouth. He wrapped a gag of rubber around the man’s mouth to hold it in, knotting it behind his head. He fastened Hegel’s good hand to the metal bedstead with a cable tie, pulling it tight enough to cut off the circulation.

Then he laid a heavy hand over the other man’s throat, putting a relentless pressure on his larynx. “We need to talk,” he said. “My original plan was to cut or burn you for a few minutes before we started to demonstrate my commitment, but you must be loaded with pain medications right now. My skills would be wasted on you. But I could puncture your eyeball, for instance, with this.” He held up a long, gleaming needle. “Or saw off one of your ears with this.” He held up a serrated blade, one of the offerings of his multiblade pocketknife.

Hegel’s eyes protruded. He made a gurgling sound in his throat.

“Or we could skip that part of the conversation and speak of Tamara Steele and Val Janos,” András suggested.

Hegel nodded frantically.

“I will take off the gag,” András told him. “If you speak above a whisper, I will put it back in, saw off one ear, and deflate one eye. Do we understand each other?”

Another frantic nod. András reached back, loosened the rubber gag, and plucked out the ball, wiping the spit off on Hegel’s sheets.

Hegel coughed, staring wide-eyed at the other man. His jowled face glistened with pain and fear sweat.

András reached into his briefcase and took out the laptop which he had taken from Hegel’s hotel room after speaking with Ferenc. He opened it, perched it on the man’s chest, and unfastened the tourniquet that held his arm to the bed. “The password, please.”

András observed carefully as the man’s stubby, trembling finger punched a sequence of letters, numbers and symbols into the computer. He committed the password to memory.

“And now, explain to me how you have been monitoring Janos and Steele,” he said.

Hegel cleared his throat. “Janos has an RF trace implanted in his body.” His voice was thick and hoarse. “He doesn’t know.”

András chuckled. “How despicable of you, Hegel. That’s cheating. Tell me about the frequency, and how the tracking software works.”

Hegel swallowed, licked his lips. “But I can’t—”

Pop,
the ball was wedged into his mouth again, and András’s big hand ground the man’s teeth into his lips on top of it. “I do not want to hear those words again,” he said. “First your eyes, and then your ears. Is that turd Luksch worth that kind of loyalty?”

Hegel squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

András lifted his hand, and let the other man push the ball out with his tongue, coughing desperately. András gestured toward the laptop. “Tell me everything,” he said softly.

It took twenty minutes to pry the technical information out of the man: the frequency of the trace, the use of the software, how to access archived data, how to monitor in real time. Relatively simple for András, who had used similar technology many times before.

He stared at the screen, committing to memory the exact spot where the man was lurking this very night. Some obscure point in the mountains, several kilometers from the main coastal highway. Thinking he was safe and hidden. It gave András a pleasurable feeling of power.

Good. It was all good. This was becoming so easy, it might not even be a worthy challenge, he reflected with faint amusement. But he would gladly exchange challenge for speed. It reflected well upon him in any case. And his work here was done.

He took the laptop, stowed it, and stood. He looked down at Hegel, trying to think if there was any reason on earth, any reason at all, not to kill him. The man saw death in his eyes and held up his hand to ward it off. András had seen that classic gesture many times.

“There’s more,” he said hastily.

András fondled the knife in one pocket. “More? What more?”

“Don’t kill me. Help me get away from here, from Georg, and I’ll tell you everything I—”

“Don’t try to bargain with me, fool,” András said. “You will tell me everything you know now, or I will cut off your dick and choke you to death with it. What more do you have?”

Hegel swallowed repeatedly. “The child,” he said hoarsely.

András frowned down at him. “What child?”

“She has a child. Steele. She adopted a girl. Three years old.”

András began to grin. Ah, yes. This would make the old man very happy. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know exactly. She appeared on the airport security cameras in Sea-Tac International three days ago. I had three men following Janos in an attempt to locate Steele and the child. He killed the men, took Steele and the girl, and from that point, all I know is that he climbed on a plane in Portland with Steele alone. Somewhere between Sea-Tac and Portland International Airport, they left the child with someone. I do have some archived footage from the night between those events, and I know he spent them at a luxury resort between Tacoma and Seattle,” Hegel babbled on. “A place called the Huxley. I assume they left the kid with someone during that interval, but I didn’t investigate any further because Luksch just wanted Steele. Nothing else.”

András sat down on the chair, chewing the inside of his lip.

“She has, ah, dark curly hair,” Hegel added, a note of desperation in his voice, the sound of a man with no bargaining chips left. “She’s small, very thin for her age. And she’s extremely—”

Thhtp
. The silenced Glock drilled a bullet between Hegel’s eyes. The man flopped back onto his pillow and gazed blankly into the air.

“Thank you,” András said softly.

He gazed at his handiwork for a moment. The slumped body on the bed lacked dramatic impact. He really ought to put a bit more artistry into it. He didn’t have time to get truly creative, but the boss always appreciated that personal touch.

András shrugged off his jacket to save the bloodstains, clicked open his case and took out a small saw and a pair of industrial strength rubber gloves. A few minutes later, he was relatively pleased by the artistic effect of Hegel’s head, nestled in the center of the blood-soaked coverlet, severed hands clasped piously beneath his chin. He snapped a picture on his cell phone, encrypted it, sent it to the boss. The old man needed a pick-me-up. Waiting made him frantic.

András heard an unintelligible sound, turned, found that the man in the other bed was awake and staring at him, eyes bugged out.

Automatically, András aimed the gun at the man’s forehead—and then paused, taking note of the lopsided mouth, the fellow’s garbled attempts at speech. Stroke. András’s grandfather had suffered from a stroke when András was a child. He still remembered the horrified fascination he’d felt at the old man’s distorted face, his helpless frustration. His vain attempts to communicate.

It made him almost nostalgic. Poor old Grandfather.

No need to risk another shot. Each time the silencer was slightly less effective, and this poor old man would never be able to describe him. András tucked the gun into his jacket, leaned over the man’s bed and put his finger to his smiling lips.

“Shhh,” he murmured. “Not one word, eh? Our little secret.”

The man’s eyes and mouth kept stretching wider. A red mote in his eye began to grow and grow. His eyelid filled with blood. It welled over and trickled down his pale cheeks, like a miraculous blood-weeping statue of the Virgin. He was having another catastrophic stroke before András’s eyes.

András could not help but smile at the irony of it. It was one of those days. He was riding great cresting waves of death. Exhilarating.

Ah, yes. Which reminded him. Green Bathrobe. Details, details.

He slid into room 14. Green Bathrobe was asleep, as were his two roomates. András took a pillow from the unoccupied bed and pressed it over the man’s face, counting with slow, deadly patience while his mind churned, compiling a list of professionals in the Seattle area.

Someone who could locate and discreetly extract Tamar’s child. The boss would want her, the way a greedy brat wanted toys and chocolate.

Admittedly, he didn’t have much time left to play.

And András would be the one to deliver this treat. A turn of the knife to show the old man his error in having favored Georg over András as successor after Kurt’s death after years of loyal service.

Some silent moments later, the other inhabitants of the room still slept, and Green Bathrobe’s pulse was absent.

András slid back down the hall like a shadow again, his hand on the butt of his gun. Daring fate. Let someone come out of the nurse’s station and force him to shoot again and again. To leave a pile—no, a towering mountain of bleeding bodies in his wake.

Once he started riding that wave, he never wanted to stop.

H
arry Whelan was having a stressful day. Assistant managing the Huxley on a busy day with two weddings and a banquet made him brusque. When Nancy, one of the check-in clerks, asked him to deal with a cop who had questions about a guest, he was short with her.

“Tell him we don’t give out information about our guests,” he snapped. “It’s Huxley security policy. As you know.”

“I did, but he kept insisting—”

“Does he have a warrant? Tell him to get a warrant.”

“Please, Harry, I did, but he won’t listen to me. Will you come talk to him? He’ll listen to you.”

Harry groaned, but Nancy was so cute with big blue eyes and substantial breasts that strained her green uniform vest to the limit of what was professionally appropriate. He was actually contemplating breaking his no-dating-in-the-workplace rule and asking her out. He hustled down the hall to the front desk, puffing out his chest.

A burly man with a beard waited. He smiled at Harry, who did not smile back. Not when his time was being wasted. “Can I help you?”

The man held out his hand, and Harry shook it. “Raymond Clive, FBI,” he said. “Are you the manager, Mr. Whelan?”

His nametag read AM, which should be clear enough, Harry thought. “Assistant Manager,” he specified.

“May I speak with you in private?” Clive asked.

“I might as well tell you right now that it’s the Huxley’s security policy not to share information about our guests with any—”

“Please, Mr. Whelan. Can we speak privately?” The man leaned over the counter and pitched his voice lower. “It’s a delicate matter.”

Harry sighed. This delicate matter had to be today? With six rooms overbooked, a banquet chef gone missing, and an embarrassing sewer crisis in the back six units of the guest houses? “Come on,” he snapped.

In his office, he sat behind his desk and indicated for Clive to sit on the other side. The man grabbed another chair and dragged it around to Harry’s side of the desk. He scooted closer so that his knee touched Harry’s. Harry shrank back. “It’s a little tight back here,” he said stiffly. “Could you sit in the chair on the other side of the—”

“We have a problem, and time is of the essence, Mr. Whelan. A small child is in jeopardy. She’s been kidnapped,” Clive said. “In situations like these, a man can be excused for bending the rules—even the security rules of the Huxley.”

“Do you have a warrant? If you don’t, I just can’t—”

“I can get one, but I would waste precious time. In missing child cases, every minute counts,” Clive said.

The only good thing about still being assistant manager was that he could pass the buck. His boss would not appreciate being bothered, but they did not pay Harry enough to take on this kind of responsibility. “I’ll talk to my supervisor,” Harry said. He reached for the intercom. “Did you guys issue an Amber Alert? Doesn’t that come first—”

To his alarm, Clive reached out and grabbed Harry’s hand. Tightly. So tightly, in fact, that the bones of his fingers felt like they were grinding against each other. “Wait, Mr. Whelan,” he said. “Just wait.”

Harry yanked, and the man’s big, hairy fingers tightened further. Harry gasped. “Uh, please. That, uh…hurts.”

“Of course.” A tug, and Harry’s chair shot forward. He bumped into Clive’s knees. To his horror, the other man was gripping his crotch. With a brutal, powerful hand. It was a level of pain Harry had never imagined. His balls had to be ruptured.

“Don’t make a sound or I will twist them off.” The man’s teeth flashed in his dark beard. “Keep your hands out where I can see them.”

A knife appeared in his hand, a wicked-looking black thing with a serrated portion near the handle. A razor sharp tip.

“Listen carefully, Mr. Whelan,” Clive said softly. “If your attitude does not change quickly, I will open your pants with this knife and castrate you as you sit, right here. A neat incision in your scrotum, I detach your testicles with surgical precision, flick, flick, and voilà, there they’ll be, on the floor, with a minimum of bloodshed. I hate mess.”

“No,” Harry gasped. “No, no, no.”

“No? All right, then. We do have alternatives, fortunately. Let’s discuss the security policy of the Huxley once again.”

Harry stared at him, wheezing for breath. The pain was making him faint. “You’re not FBI,” he gasped.

“It’s none of your concern what I am. Not a sound, Mr. Whelan. Be brave.” The knife dug into the side of Harry’s testicles. A strangled sound issued from his throat, like the whine of a balloon letting out air. “A three-year-old girl with curly dark hair spent time in this building the day before yesterday,” Clive went on. “Find out who she left with.”

Harry tried to breathe. His lungs would not expand. His ribs were frozen. His hands clutched the desk, as if he were drowning. “I—I—”

“Think, Mr. Whelan,” Clive encouraged him. “Think.”

“D-d-day before yesterday, there was an afternoon wedding,” he forced out. “Big party, lots of overnight guests.”

“Well, then. The guest list would be an excellent place to start. Turn to the computer screen, put your hand on the mouse. Show me who checked in that afternoon. Show me a list of all the rooms that had notations regarding infants or small children.”

Harry pulled them up. The man leaned forward to peer at the screen, jabbing the knife deeper in the process. He tried not to shriek.

“Shut up, Mr. Whelan,” Clive said absently. “Hmm. Four single women with children, six couples. Did you see any of them?”

“N-n-no,” Harry gasped. “I wasn’t out on the front desk. I don’t work the desk. I work back here.”

“Oh. How unfortunate for you.” The knife dug deeper. “Perhaps one of your colleagues? If I took this knife away for a moment, you could consult with one of them. Could you behave, if I did that, Mr. Whelan? Would you be a good boy? Can I count on you?”

Harry nodded, violently.

“Because if you give me any trouble, you will regret it. And so will your colleague. Is this clear?”

“Yes,” Harry gasped. “Yes, please. I’ll call one of them. Please.”

Clive removed the crushing pressure of his fingers. Tears of relief streamed down Harry’s face, clogging his nose. He wiped them on his sleeve, and tried to remember who had been on the desk that day. Nancy, for sure. He stabbed her button. “Nancy? Could you come back here for a minute?” His voice was watery and high.

“Sure, Harry. Just a sec, got to finish up this guest.”

She was there in two interminable minutes, eyes big and puzzled. Harry made a huge effort to control his face, his voice, his bowels. Clive’s knife hovered in front of his crotch, beneath the desk, menacing him. “Nancy, do you remember that wedding party two days ago?”

“Sure,” she said. “Becca Cattrell and Nick Ward. Harry? Are you OK? You look kind of strange.” She looked curiously at the bearded man.

The knife dug into Harry’s balls again. Harry sucked air, and forced a weak smile onto his face. “I’m fine. Little headache. Do you remember a three-year-old girl in that wedding reception? Dark curly hair?”

Nancy’s big eyes rolled. “Oh, my God, yes. That kid screamed the place down the morning after, in the dining room. I’ve never heard anything like it in my life, and I’ve heard some doozies when I worked day care. Talk about living birth control.”

“Do you remember her parents’ names?”

Nancy frowned thoughtfully. “She was with her mom, I remember that. A glamorpuss type, like a top model. I didn’t check her in. Charlie did, but she’s out sick today. The glamorpuss left with the gorgeous foreign guy. That was why the kid flipped out, because her mom had to go somewhere without her.”

“What guy? What was his name?” Harry begged.

Nancy shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think he had his own room booked. One of us would’ve remembered. The guy was, like, movie star good-looking. It was unreal, the two of them together.”

Harry could not think straight enough to form a response to that, trying as he was not to vomit from the white-hot pressure of the knife tip.

Clive asked, “And who did the child leave with?”

Her face cleared. “That’s easy. It was with one of those McCloud guys. I remember the name because there were three of them, and all the girls at the desk were checking them out. Drop dead gorgeous, all three of them. Brothers, I guess. Like, be still my heart.”

“Which one?” Harry burst out. “Just tell me which one it was!”

Nancy blinked at his tone, startled. “One of the ones with a baby,” she offered timidly. “Two of them had babies. Cute as can be. I don’t remember which one, though. Look, do you want some Advil or Tylenol? Or at least some coffee? You do not look good at all.”

“No. I’m fine,” Harry said.

Clive drew the knife away, and it was all Harry could do not to collapse into sobs. “Is that enough?” He turned imploring eyes on Clive.

The man smiled genially and nodded. “That’s fine.”

“Thanks for your help, Nancy,” Harry said. “You can go.”

Nancy left, throwing a worried glance back over her shoulder. “You let me know if you change your mind about that Advil,” she said.

The door clicked closed. Harry began to sob silently.

“Don’t fall apart yet, Mr. Whelan,” Clive chided him. “I need printouts of the credit cards you billed for those two rooms, please.”

Somehow Harry managed to perform that task. Clive tucked the sheets into his pocket, and spun the knife, a twinkling show of dexterity, like a baton twirler. “Thank you, Mr. Whelan. You’ve been very helpful. And in case you’re tempted to discuss what just happened with anyone…your supervisor, for instance, or the police, or the McClouds—”

“I won’t,” Harry assured him, his voice breaking. “I promise.”

“Or your mother,” Clive continued. “Or even that pretty colleague, the one who’s so worried about you. My associates and I informed ourselves before I came here. Your address, for instance. Where you live with your mother in that Victorian home in Tacoma. Pretty, but those old houses are firetraps. It would be tragic to come home from work and find that your mother had been burned to death in a house fire, hmm? Batteries run down in the smoke alarms. Tsk tsk. Terrible shame.”

“I promise, I—”

“And then there is Nancy, that lovely girl who wants to play nurse. Isn’t that sweet of her. She lives in that apartment complex on the other side of the park, all alone with her cat, in unit 8D. Violent things can happen at night to young women all alone. Just terrible. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for something like that, would you?”

Harry shook his head, and realized to his dismay that he could not stop shaking it. It just kept on twisting, back and forth.
No. No. No.

Clive smiled and grabbed the top of Harry’s head, forcing it to stop turning. “Excellent, then. We understand each other.” He held out his hand, as if they had just conducted a normal business meeting.

Harry was horrified to realize that his slavish obedience to the other man actually extended to automatically holding out his trembling hand to shake. Clive shook it and gave it one last, agonizingly painful squeeze. Harry cringed and squealed like a whipped dog.

“Have a great day, Mr. Whelan. Thanks again for all your help.”

The door closed. Harry collapsed on his desk. His throat felt like it would implode. His groin throbbed. He felt raped, torn. Bleeding inside. He hadn’t known how easy it would be to be mortally hurt.

Then it flashed in his mind, like a pop-up banner on the computer. An appalling thought.

What a man like that might do to a three-year-old girl.

He shoved the thought away as if it electrocuted him. Too much. He couldn’t deal with that too. That little girl was not his responsibility. This was not his fault. He had not caused this.

There was a timid knock on the door. He scrambled for a fast food napkin to wipe his eyes and nose. “What is it?” he snapped.

Nancy peeked in the door. “Harry? I just, um, saw that guy go out. I thought I’d check on you. I was wondering…what the eff?”

For one crazy instant, he was tempted to tell her everything. What a sweet relief it would be, to let someone else carry some of the weight of the horribleness of the ten minutes that had just passed. Then he thought about her all alone at night with her cat in unit 8D.

No. Don’t.

He blew his nose again. “That was a tricky situation,” he said, hating the phlegm-clogged, officious tone in his own voice. “Sometimes in this business, you just have to make a judgment call.”

“Ah,” she said. “Um. OK. Harry, are you sure you’re—”

“Yes! I’m fine! It’s just this sinus thing I get sometimes. Allergies. It’s no big deal. Don’t worry about me.”

“OK.” Her face reddened. The door started to close.

“Nancy?” His voice had a wobbly, pleading tone. He took a deep breath to steady it as she opened the door and peeked back in. “Uh…don’t mention this to anyone else, OK?” he begged. “I mean, no one.”

She looked almost scared. “Whatever,” she said softly.

The door closed. There was a strange finality to the sound. As if the door was closing on the person he had fantasized about becoming.

He’d been cut down, trimmed into something that would always be smaller now. Someone who would never get rid of that pot belly and train to run in the local 10K. Never ask Nancy Ware out to the Blues In The Park concert series. Never get his own place and move out of his mother’s house. Someone who would never make general manager.

He grabbed the wastebasket, vomited into it until bitter snot hung from his face over the plastic sack. He mopped it off, touched his balls, wondered if they were irreparably damaged.

Wondered if it would be a relief to run his car off the road into the river tonight when he got off work. Just to make this awful feeling stop.

“Push with your legs,” Sveti encouraged her. “Up and down. That way you can go higher all by yourself.”

Rachel tried valiantly, but she didn’t really have much luck coordinating the frantic movement of her skinny little legs with the rhythm of the swing. Still, she put all her effort into it, flopping like a freshly caught fish in the bucket-style kiddie swing, giggling madly.