Any Minute Now (23 page)

“The secret is to keep the water from boiling,” the girl said. “Boiling water spoils the flavor.”

Charlie turned, studied the girl, who sat like a schoolgirl, back straight, hands one atop the other on the table.

“Thank you,” she said, though she already knew this cardinal rule of tea brewing.

The girl started as she heard el-Habib's cries.

“What's going on in there?”

“Why don't we concentrate on us?” Charlie poured the tea into two glasses and brought them over to the table where the girl sat on the edge of her chair. Her teeth were all but chattering. Sitting at right angles to the girl, Charlie set the tea in front of her.

She waited some moments before saying, “We'll have less difficulty talking if we know each other's name. Mine's Charlie. I'm from Indiana.”

“I saw what happened to Beth. Is the same thing going to happen to me?”

Charlie drank some tea. “Seiran el-Habib shot Beth,” she pointed out.

The woman and the child looked at each other in a moment of distrust/trust that only comes in an extreme situation like this one. The silence was punctuated once more by el-Habib's cries. This time, the girl didn't flinch.

“Alice,” she said at last. “My name is Alice. I'm from Washington, the state.”

“Sip your tea,” Charlie said.

Alice did so, clearly grateful. “I was paid good money to come here.”

“Who?” Charlie said. “Who paid you?”

Alice shrugged. “Some suit.”

Charlie counted to ten to keep her blood pressure at normal. “Did he give you his name? Can you describe him?”

“His name was Dante.”

Dante.
The Inferno
, Charlie thought. Very good.

Alice took another sip of tea. “He was bald, but you know the way men shave their heads, cuz he wasn't old or anything. He smiled all the time. He was nice to me. And he was handsome.”

“Any distinguishing features?”

“His eyes were kind of a milky blue.”

“That's good. Any visible scars or tats?”

Alice shook her head.

Charlie turned her glass around and around between her fingertips. She was no longer interested in the tea. “Help me with something, Alice. How were you and Beth recruited?”

Alice's eyes slid away to a corner of the kitchen where the candlelight could not penetrate. “We were sold.”

I was right, Charlie thought with a lurch in her heart. Slave trade. “Tell me.”

“Beth and I were taken off the streets.”

“Were you related?”

She shook her head. “We said we were cousins, but, you know, we became family on the streets. She took me in, kept me safe, until…”

Her voice died out into the shadows that surrounded them. Charlie wished she felt more for this little girl, but she had a job to do and she knew she could not allow emotion to get in the way of thinking clearly and making the right decisions going forward. “Beth's dead, and you didn't even shed a tear.”

“What's the point?” Alice cried. “Will crying bring her back?”

“No, but mourning might help you feel better.”

Alice laughed harshly, and raised her arms. “Look around us. You see anything that's ever going to make me feel better? My life is shit. It always was shit, it always will be shit.”

Charlie sat back. Words failed her. The chasm between her life and Alice's was simply too vast to bridge. No matter how much she tried she would never be able to imagine what the girl's life might be like.

“Tell me,” she said, because there was no other way to go with this child. There would be no relevant information without a semblance of rapport.

“The shit?” Alice snorted. “It began when my father stroked out. My mother, already one of those tiger moms, seemed bent on driving me insane. I was now the only thing in her life, and she wouldn't let me alone. I ran away, yeah? A couple of real fucked-up things later, I ran into Beth, and for a time things weren't so bad. We foraged when we could, stole when there was nothing for us in the garbage cans and Dumpsters, went to bars, had guys buy us drinks, in exchange for a suck or a fuck. Sometimes we even got a dinner out of it.” She laughed, a naked, awful sound. “Those were the golden days, yeah?”

She gestured. “Then blue eyes showed up, waving money around. He was offering us a better life in a faraway place. Six months, then we'd be free with a shitload of money to take us flying anywhere we wanted to go. Anywhere but the States.”

Charlie's antennae came to full alert. “Wait a minute. He actually said that. ‘Anywhere but the States'?”

“Word for word.” Alice drained her tea, set the glass down. “What did we care? The last place either of us wanted to be was back in the States. So we said yes. And found ourselves here with”—she pointed to the doorway—“that piece of shit.” She shook her head. “At first, Beth rebelled, said no to the things he wanted her to do. Then came the beatings, the starving out, the lack of light and tactile sensation. He nearly drove her crazy. He broke her. She was no problem after that.”

“And you?”

Alice held her head defiantly. “I was paid money. I was promised more. I did everything he said.”

Now that she had been softened up, Charlie finally got down to the nitty-gritty. “How long have you been here, Alice?”

“It'll be six months three days from now.”

Charlie's heart started to thump against her ribs. “And what is supposed to happen in three days?”

“Blue eyes said he would come.”

“And you believed him?”

“I have no reason not to. The prick in there gets bored with his girls after five or six months. Like a stud bull, he requires fresh bodies or his thingy doesn't rise to the occasion.”

Charlie threw her head back and laughed. It was something she never thought she would do in a slaughterhouse.

 

21

There were three life lessons Joe Kinkaid's father taught him when he was growing into manhood: never back-talk your boss, never be led astray by a woman, and never get in over your head. The problem facing Kinkaid now was that he was very much afraid he was in over his head.

This thought was uppermost in his mind as he strode down the corridor in the subbasement of the building built and occupied by the FBI. He was on his way to his second interview with Martin Price, field name Bluto.

Going toe to toe with NSA was a sure way to have his career cut short, as his father's had been. Nevertheless, the incidents of today had led him in that direction. But maybe, no, it was his involvement with Preach that had led him down this path, which might be good or bad because he hated Luther St. Vincent with a passion.

As he stood in front of the cell where Bluto was currently cooling his outraged heels, Kinkaid had reason to think of his father again. Regal Kinkaid was a big man. When Kinkaid was growing up, he seemed as huge as Paul Bunyan, and just as heroic. That all came crashing down when Regal Kinkaid was hauled off to prison the week after the energy company he ran went bankrupt. The company's ambitious expansion into new forms of energy was revealed to be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, using investors' money to construct a house of cards without value. There weren't any new forms of energy the company was pursuing, only Regal Kinkaid's golden tongue. And how was he brought down? Through the NSA's domestic spying program. And who was the head of that spying program? Luther St. Vincent. And because of that success and others, St. Vincent was given his own fiefdom, Directorate N, where he directed God alone knew what evil mischief.

People lost their lifesavings; several committed suicide. Regal Kinkaid was convicted, began serving what was supposed to be a twenty-five-year sentence. But somehow he and his lawyers cut a deal with the feds, and he was out in three years.

“I got in over my head, son,” he said to Kinkaid the day he was released. Then he winked. “But I had a life preserver. You got to have a good one if you're unfortunate enough to get in over your head.”

So there were, in fact, four life lessons, Kinkaid thought, as he unlocked the cell door. Which is why he had sought out his own life preserver: Preach.

*   *   *

Orteño made his methodical, almost mechanical, circuit of the villa and compound looking for life, and finding none. As he progressed, he policed his brass—that is, he picked up his spent shell casings, as any good professional would do. Leaving no trace of their presence was essential. He had learned to police his brass at an early age. It was so ingrained in him that he hardly thought about it—it had become automatic, which was just as well because his mind was elsewhere.

Ever since he had woken up in the hospital after his concussion, he had felt different. The report sent to Cutler from Bethesda, though entirely routine, had almost derailed his getting back in the saddle. Cutler was wary of concussions in his people—far more than he was of bullet wounds or broken wrists or ankles. “Concussions can fuck with your sensory input,” Cutler was fond of saying, “not to mention your judgment.” Flix had Whitman to thank for his continuing on with Red Rover. His
compadre
had gone to bat for him with Cutler, vouching for his health, saying he was indispensable, and that if Cutler wanted the brief to be completed successfully Flix had to be part of the team.

Flix, never one for expressing his emotions, hadn't known what to say or how to thank Whitman, so he'd simply nodded and kept his own council. Again, that was just as well, as he didn't know how to convey to anyone else how the world had changed for him. BC, before the concussion, it had been dull and gray. Now it was bright, clear, almost radiant.

Rip currents of color registered not only in his brain but throughout his entire body; he
felt
the colors as well as saw them: the deathly pallor of the faces of the dead, the smell of death, like a freshly opened casket. With the sight of each of the guards lying in unnatural positions memories flashed through him of how easy they were to spot, how easy it was to target them, pull the trigger, keep going, pulling the trigger again. It was as if his mind, his body had melded with the AR-15, or, conversely, as if it had come alive in his hands, as if it was telling him what to do and when. He had not missed with even one shot, and each one was a killing shot, even though that seemed improbable to him. And yet, he was seeing the proof with his AC—after concussion—vision. There simply was no denying it.

Something deep inside him contracted with each of these memories, as if quailing at the implications. He went in search of the dogs in order to shift his thoughts in a different direction, but he saw no sign of them anywhere. Seven dead, not including one of the girls being held by el-Habib. He had killed seven Americans. He should have felt sadness, remorse, self-revulsion even, but he felt none of these emotions. In fact, he felt nothing at all. It was as if he had scored 100 on his target at the USA firing range. What the hell, man?

Taking one last look around the compound to make sure nothing was moving, no one was coming down the dirt track over the hill, he turned and went back into the villa. Somewhere deep inside him, that thing that had contracted whispered that he should tell Whitman of the inner changes. But then a battering pain quashed the thought, and by the time he rejoined Whitman he had forgotten all about the growing dichotomy inside him.

*   *   *

“I'm not telling you anything,” Bluto said, sitting on his hands in one corner of the steel bench. “I'm not an enemy combatant; we're not in-country. I've got rights. This is America, buddy.”

“I'm not your buddy,” Kinkaid said.

“You can't do this,” Bluto said. “You touch a hair on my head and you're toast, fucker.”

That was when Kinkaid took out the noise-suppressed handgun Bluto had been wielding when he'd been taken into custody. With one hand he compressed Bluto's nostrils, then, when he opened his mouth to breathe he jammed the end of the noise suppressor between his teeth.

“You came after one of my people with this.” By “my people” Kincaid meant one of Preach's people, but he was happy to let Bluto believe he meant FBI. “You were all set to put a bullet in her temple, so don't you fucking tell me you're not an enemy combatant, that we're not in-country. Don't you dare claim this is America. You have no rights here. You've broken the law. NSA is forbidden to issue briefs on American soil. That's strictly for the FBI.”

“I didn't fire that,” Bluto mumbled around the metal. “You've got nothing on me.”

“Nothing, you say?” Bending over, Kinkaid shoved most of the barrel into Bluto's mouth, making him gag. “Here, in my world, where you are, intent is nine-tenths of the law. When you got out of your car, drew this gun, and approached my people, you made your intent perfectly clear.”

Kinkaid shrugged. “So now you know the situation you find yourself in.” Inch by inch, he withdrew the gun from Bluto's mouth. He unscrewed the noise suppressor, put away the two pieces of weaponry. “But, now I come to think of it, I wonder…”

Grabbing a chair, he spun it around, straddled it, folding his arms across the back. He sat, staring into Bluto's face. “You may not know this, but my father was once in jail.” He spoke in a normal conversational tone, as if they were two friends exchanging war stories over drinks. “He was an embezzler—a mighty one, too. He had some powerful mojo going for him, even when he was in prison. Somehow—don't ask me how—he got his sentence reduced to barely more than a tenth of what it had been. Can you beat that?”

He lifted a hand, waved it back and forth before allowing it to settle back on top of the other. “Anyway, when he was released, you'd think he would have been a changed man. Not a bit of it. He was the same unrepentant sonuvabitch I'd known all my life. I mean, he was always good to me, but in business, Jesus, he didn't care who he cut off at the knees.”