Downfall (38 page)

Janice swung the vase at her and there was a hiss like the air tearing before the sharp, brutal shards. Holly ducked, punched Janice in the stomach. The edge of the vase caught her thin coat and ripped the sleeve. Holly shrugged out of the coat, and when Janice charged her again, she threw the trench coat over the jagged glass. Seizing the vase, she drew Janice close. Janice hooked fingernails toward Holly’s pepper-spray savaged eyes.

Holly screamed as the fingernails scored. She slammed her forearm into Janice’s throat and swung back with the picture frame, catching the edge of it along Janice’s temple. Blood, skin, and hair tore away and Janice fell. But she clutched at Holly’s leg and both women landed on the cold floor.

And then no more screams. Holly’s fingers closed around
Janice’s
throat; Janice’s fingers closed around Holly’s. And then there was just the hard, insistent breathing of two people fighting to the death.

Outside a car started, the music turned up loud as it drove away.

W
ADE RAWLINGS,”
Benny said as we ate a quick breakfast. “Really one of those people that you wonder, how did he get to be a success?”

“Belias is the answer to that.” It had taken a while to find out about the last name on the list. Wade Rawlings was a top political fixer, a paid consultant who guided campaigns. He had a sterling record of success except for one notable fail: He’d managed the re-election campaign of the senior senator from New Mexico, one of the most popular and powerful men in the Congress, but he’d managed to squander a twenty-point lead and the seat had instead been won by Marjorie Henderson. Who was about to become, according to every news channel, the new vice president.

It would not be hard for Wade Rawlings to be fed a lie that given the deaths of Barbara Scott and Lucky Lazard, he was in imminent danger. But Belias wouldn’t want to move him to kill him. He might tell Rawlings to go to some place where Rawlings had easy access but wouldn’t be known to someone hunting him. Benny had finally found, digging through public records, that Rawlings owned a lake house and his family still owned his grandmother’s house, a good distance west of the city.

Those were our possibilities.

“The other possibility is he’s here somewhere in Chicago. Or that Belias has had him leave the city entirely.”

“I’ll take the grandmother’s house,” I said. Because didn’t Belias want this guy dead? That was the lonelier house, easier for murder. “You see if you can find him here in town.”

Benny gave me a truck and I drove west. City and suburbia faded in time and I was out in the countryside. Fifteen minutes later I drove past the address, then turned around and parked a quarter mile away, keeping the truck hidden in a grove of trees.

I hurried through the scattering of snow.

The front door was unlocked.

I crept through the house. There was a man taped to a chair, half his face badly burned, griddled like it had hit a nonstick skillet. It was Wade Rawlings; I recognized him from the pictures Benny had found. He was dead, a bullet through the throat. I touched him; a hint of warmth touched the body, he had been dead for maybe an hour.

I saw a sheen of pepper spray on the furniture and the rug and noticed a trail of blood. I followed the blood to a door in the kitchen. Locked.

I listened. I could hear the soft quiet of someone moving around in the room.

I unbolted the door. Slowly I crept down the cellar stairs, thinking of every movie I’d seen as a kid where the hero or heroine went down the stairs, only to find horror and death.

I found both.

I saw Holly Marchbanks lying on the cellar floor, curled up in a fetal position. But she sat up as I came down the stairs. Dark bruises marred her throat; she had a rising black eye and an ugly gash along her palm.

In the other corner lay Janice Keene. Blood spreading from the back of her head, eyes half-lidded. Dead.

I swung the gun toward Holly.

“Where is he?”

“Who?” Her voice was a broken rasp.

“Belias.”

“I don’t know. Your friend Felix left us here. He killed Rawlings, and when we got here…”

“To kill Rawlings yourself.”

She ignored my comment. “He was bound but not dead and Felix threw us down here.”

“And…you killed Janice?”

Holly glanced at Janice’s body, then looked away. “She tried to kill me.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“I don’t,” I said.

Holly said, “It doesn’t matter now. Are…are you going to kill me?”

I suspected all the fight was out of her. She looked broken. I thought of her children and wondered, Will they see the change in her? That she’s a killer now?

And then I wondered, Will Daniel see the same in me?

“Where did Felix go?” I asked.

“I think he’s off to find Belias.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I really do not know.” She watched the gun. “Two things. I’ll tell you what I know if you will let me live, Sam.”

“What?”

Her mouth worked. “You offered me safety once…you offered to hide me.”

“Tell me what you know and we’ll see. Do you know who shot Mila?”

She bit at her lip. “Your friend? Felix shot her. I saw it. I was following them…They went into a storage room. He came out a moment later and I hid down the hallway; he didn’t see me. I didn’t see her again.”

“You followed Felix then?”

“I started to but someone found Mila and started screaming and it got crazy. I lost him in the crowd. I think he got on a service elevator.”

That was how he’d arrived at the Lazard penthouse. All right. “You said you knew two things.”

“The video Janice made for Diana. Explaining Belias’s network. It’s in a lipstick case Diana had. There’s a flash drive inside. That was the only copy of the video Janice made, and I don’t know if Diana made a copy but it for sure is in the lipstick case. You can stop Belias if you have it.”

“Do you know where Diana is?”

A momentary flash of surprise crossed her face. “No. No, I don’t.”

“Did you have to kill Janice?”

Holly pointed at her throat. “She tried to kill me.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s dying and she’s crazy and she’s been killing people for Belias for years. Killing people—it ruins your mind.” She looked at me. “Is your friend dead?”

“No. Not yet.”

“I hope she will be okay.”

“Now that you’re in dire straits.”

“If you’re going to shoot me do it,” she said. “Just…I’m tired. I’m so tired.”

I put the gun down but I kept the distance between us. I remembered too well how she fought in the splendor of her own grand house. “Where will Belias be?”

“You offered me safety once before,” she said quietly.

“That offer expired. I don’t trust you, Holly.”

“I’m too much like you,” she said.

“You’re nothing like me.”

“What we wouldn’t do for our kids. Belias knows you broke the law to save yours.”

“Where is he?”

“He would have texted us where to meet him after Janice killed Rawlings. But Felix took our phones.”

I turned and went back up the stairs.

“Sam. Please. Don’t leave me here.” Her voice rose in horror.

“I said I’d let you live. I didn’t say I’d let you out.”

“Don’t…”

“I’m actually curious to see how you deal with a real problem, without Belias to remove all the obstacles. You’re smart, Holly, you should be able to get out of a basement.”

I slammed the door closed, cutting off her words. Let her be scared to death. I’d tell Benny to let her out in a day. If I found and dealt with Belias, I’d let her out myself.

Felix shot Mila. The betrayal was complete.
Yes, Jimmy, I will kill Felix for you.

I searched the house. I found a cell phone, tucked next to the cushion of the chair where he sat.

There was a text message, the last one sent:

Felix had phoned in Wade’s death using one of the women’s phones and faked his own.

Then a reply:

The Nest. I remembered the term from when Belias and Roger captured me and Diana at her friend’s place in the Marina District and offered us a deal. I recalled his words:
You both join Team Belias, so to speak. You’re going to be taken away to a house of mine I call the Nest. Far from here, private. Where we can discuss your futures, your usefulness, and I can start changing your lives for you.

“Holly,” I called through the door, “where’s the Nest?”

She came close to the door, I could hear the scrape of her feet. “Why should I tell you?”

“Because I’ll let you out.”

She weighed my words, then decided to answer me. Hope is a lovely thing. “It’s a bolt-hole of sorts. We’re supposed to go there. If the network melts. He’s arranged for us to be able to get out of the country.”

“Where is it?”

She told me a rural route number and a town northwest of Chicago. Made sense, the center of the country, not far from a big airport where you could fly anywhere in the world.

“Did Felix ask you where it was?”

“No.”

But Wade Rawlings might have told him. He might have tortured the location out of him before he killed him.

Felix and Belias had a head start on me. I wanted them both. But I didn’t know where Belias was coming from, I didn’t know if Felix would simply be laying in wait.

I hoped he’d be alone. I prefer to face one man who wants me dead instead of two.

Holly was still calling my name through the door when I left the house.

B
ELIAS LOVED THE NEST
.

He’d gotten the idea from his favorite Hitchcock movie,
North by Northwest
. He knew he was supposed to root for the hapless adman hero, Cary Grant, but the supposed bad guy, James Mason, was just so much more interesting. Suave, smart. And he had a private chalet and a private little airstrip right by Mount Rushmore. Belias loved that. He wanted such a rural yet well-designed escape.

So he’d found and had a network member acquire for him via a front company an abandoned airstrip north of Chicago, not far from Lake Michigan. He’d had a comfortable house built there. He called it the Nest because he told every member that if the network melted, if it fell apart, they could run to the Nest and he’d prepared escape routes for them and their families.

Of course it was a lie. If the network fell apart, he would abandon them and he would tell the authorities where to find them all, waiting there at the Nest. He was their master, not their keeper, and if he had to go, then he was gone. They were on their own.

His plane from New Mexico landed. The pilot got out, said he’d refuel, do a postflight checklist and then asked when they’d want to head out. “Probably a couple of hours,” Belias said.

A car was parked close to the house, and he recognized it as the one he’d left for Janice and Holly in Chicago. They’d arrived. He clicked on his smartphone.

A message from the anonymous benefactor who’d sent him Sam’s CIA file appeared on the screen:
DO YOU HAVE SAM YET?

NO
, he wrote.
BUT SOON. I’M GOING TO SET A TRAP FOR HIM.

And he would. Rawlings was dead now, and Sam, if he had sense, might be able to sniff out a trail that led here. Let him if he dared show his face. Here he would die.

The plane could take Holly home to San Francisco, back to her children. Janice could come home and reason with Diana. And he could focus on finding Sam and his friend Felix, and silencing them.

He went inside the house. The lights were off except in the kitchen and he walked into the room, drawn by the slight smell of coffee. He knew that Holly loved her coffee, she must’ve made a pot…He flicked on the lights, blinking.

“Hello,” the man in the kitchen said. “My name is Felix Neare and we are going to have a talk.” And then he shot Belias.

I
DROVE TO THE ADDRESS
of the Nest. It was the middle of nowhere, and I had phoned Benny to say where I was heading but he was a good hour behind me. I wasn’t sure how much use Benny would be in a fight. He looked very quiet and soft. Of course, sometimes those are the deadliest people.

He had brought bad news: Mila’s condition had worsened.

I wanted Felix Neare’s throat in my grip.

I parked on a country road about a mile away. The woods were sparse here, but I moved quickly and quietly through them. The sky spit early snow at me, a brief brisk flurry that thinned. I wished for a blizzard for cover. The snowfall here had been sparse.

And then I saw the plane. I heard it first, a low approaching buzz, and I ducked close to a tree. The snow hadn’t been much here or I think the plane could not have landed, the strip would have had to be cleared. I stayed very still and wondered if I’d been spotted.

The plane landed, drove to a smooth stop. I saw Belias get out, speak to the pilot, then walk toward the house. I snuck up carefully on the pilot. Maybe he was just a paid flight jockey, maybe he was a network member. He was inspecting the engine of the plane, going through a postflight checklist to kill time, and he didn’t hear me until I was ten feet behind him. He startled, surprised, but I hit him hard in the throat and slammed his head against the fuselage. Three times. In the movies they make it look easy. It is not that easy or that quiet to render someone unconscious. I eased him down to the cold ground. He was armed, a gun under his coat. So not a flight jockey, probably a network member who had a pilot’s license, doing his master a favor. It would be hard for him to fly with a concussion.

I moved toward the house.

And then I heard a gunshot and a scream.

I ran up to the house. Curtains and screens insulated the interior from view but I could hear the roaring coming through the other side. They were killing each other, I guessed, but right now I needed them both alive.

I threw a porch chair through the window. The curtains fell back enough for me to see Belias on the floor, a bloodied shoulder wound, and Felix standing above him, the gun pointed at Belias, starting to turn toward me.

I jumped through the window and fired. The bullet caught Felix in his gun hand, a bright red awful blossom between two fingers. He screamed. Belias scrambled across the floor. He must have weapons he had stashed here. But Felix was the greater danger. I was blind with hatred and rage. I lost my cool. If this had been a CIA operation, I would not have allowed myself. But this was me, who’d only tried to help a poor young woman who begged,
Help me,
in the dark of my bar, scared out of her wits, and tried to make my world safe for my son, and now it was a whole chain of deaths and maybe Mila dead and my so-called friend Felix had shot her and betrayed me.

Felix could see it in my eyes. I would kill him with my bare hands.

He knew it was life or death. He’d swallowed the agony with adrenaline and switched the gun to his nonfiring hand, and if you’re not used to it, the gun is practically useless. He tried to fire at me again and I kicked the gun. The weapon went flying across the kitchen and he tackled me. We staggered through the shattered window, separating as we hit the ground.

I levered the gun up to shoot, fired twice, but Felix yanked my aim away from him. He screamed like a kid who’d been cheated on the playground, hammered blows to my groin, my throat. He knew what he was doing. Mila and Jimmy had trained him. If I underestimated him, I was dead.

He tried to pin my arm and so I did a flip jump to untwist his grip. I got free but I landed on my back and he kicked me savagely in the ribs. Something broke and pain bolted up my body. He did it again and I tried to writhe away. The patio had ornamental bricks in the bare, snow-lapped flower beds.

Felix grabbed a brick and lifted it up high, his bloodied hand seizing my throat. He was ignoring the agony. He was going to bash my head into a jelly.

Belias shot him in the other hand. He keeled over, howling, both hands punctured, the hot fresh agony countering the rush from the first shot and his need, apparently, to kill me and Belias both.

“No, no,” Felix bleated. “Sam, help me.”

“No,” I said.

“I hate a betrayal,” Belias said, leveling his gun at both of us with his good arm. Blood puckered his shoulder, dotted his blanched-looking fingers. “Felix. Where is Diana’s video?”

I kept my mouth shut.

“We never found it. And she’s dead, so she can’t tell you.” His words were a broken bray in his pain, but he spit them with defiance.

“She’s
what
?”

“Dead. Holly killed her in the bar. When you were recruiting Sam to switch sides.” Spittle flew from his lips.

Belias kept the gun on me; there was really no need to keep it on Felix, with his ruined hands.

“Sam? True?”

“I didn’t know Diana was dead. I didn’t have contact with him after…Vegas.” I stared at Felix. “You shot Mila.”

“I didn’t shoot her…I wouldn’t…No.”

“You shot her and you left me to die,” I said.

Felix shook his head. “I let you live. I was supposed…”

“Supposed to what?” I asked; then I thought I knew.

Belias stared down at him. “Who are you?”

“The nobody who’s bringing you down,” Felix said, courage in his voice. “Truly and finally down.”

“Truly and finally?” Belias shot him. The shot was loud and clear in the quiet. It caught Felix between the eyes and he snapped back to the ground.

I looked up at Belias. His shoulder was bloodied but he seemed in control of himself. I had busted ribs and so we might still be evenly matched.

But he had a gun and mine was on the ground, a few feet distant. About the depth of a grave.

“Kevin,” I said.

“Only you get to call me that now,” he said. “Sam, what a shame this is. I told you I wanted a partner. I wanted you, Sam. We could have been brilliant together.”

“It wouldn’t have worked,” I said.

“Did you see that he set up video equipment in there? I guess Janice’s digital confession gave him the idea. He told me I was going to name all my network on tape. What an odd revenge. You’d think he’d just kill me.”

“I have Diana’s video. The one Janice made for her. Holly told me where it is.”

“Holly?” I could hear a shift in his voice toward panic. “Where is she? Did you hurt her?”

“She’s alive. Stashed away. You want her back?”

His tongue worked inside his cheek. “Maybe you and I can work out another deal.”

Like we could trust each other. “Doubtful. I have two things you want, and you have nothing I want.”

“Wrong. Remember, it wasn’t the CIA who got me your file. It was someone who wanted me to recruit you and then hand you over to them.” He raised a palm toward me in surrender. “You have a very dangerous enemy. Wouldn’t you like to know who it is? We could draw them out together.”

The story took shape in my brain. Small bits that had made no sense before. But instead I said, “I have no reason to trust or believe you.”

“But I just saved your brains from being gushed all over my patio.” He smiled at me. “I mean, that counts for something. Why would you want to bring me down? My people and I, we didn’t hurt your friend Mila. Felix did. You know I can give you what you want, Sam. You want power, you want money, you want to make everyone who ever hurt you pay? You know I can do it. Knowing that—it has to count for something.”

“Yes, I know you can.” I made my voice reassuring. Like it was a vote of confidence. Because he had. He had made his scheme work. He could do the same for me.

“Well?”

I threw the dirt from the flower bed in his face. Simplest trick in the book. He was leaning toward me and the dirt impacted his eyeball. He gasped and I scrambled to my feet, pain stitching my side, grabbed at him, catching the I Ching ring he wore, and yanked him off-balance as he fired the bullet between my feet. I grabbed and slammed the brick Felix was going to brain me with into his knees as he staggered back.

“I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with you.” I yanked the gun.

He jumped back through the shattered window, stumbling into the kitchen proper, and I saw him grab a knife from the rack.

But I had the gun now and I steadied my aim.

He opened a door, it blocked my view. I thought,
He can’t hide in a pantry
. But I heard a ripping noise and then he ducked out, holding a length of cable.

I could smell the sudden, rich odor of natural gas, the deadly hiss of a heater emptying into the air.

I hate smart people.

He turned and he ran.

I cut through the house, knocking over the sad little camera and tripod.

I could smell the gas flooding into the house.

I charged around the corner and Belias slashed at me. My forearm opened through the jacket and the shirt.

I couldn’t risk the shot.

But Belias was used to people who gave up. He was used to those who wanted life easy.

He was not used to me.

Belias swung the knife back at me as the blood spurted from my arm, and I blocked it and powered his arm against the wall. He didn’t drop the knife. The smell of gas was growing, fast, and panic flashed in his eyes. He hadn’t thought about the broken window near the leak, that would buy us a bit more time, but he wanted out. He was still stuck in his trap for me.

But then he got lucky. The devil is always lucky.

Or I got bad. He slashed the knife across where Felix had hurt my ribs and the pain was blinding. I felt fresh blood spurt along my side.

“Where’s the video?” he yelled.

“Where you will never get it. You kill me, I don’t check in, it’ll be on YouTube in a matter of hours.”

How do you scare the devil? You drag his evil into sunlight. I didn’t even know what was on the video but the thought of it was enough to scare him. “Sam, call your people, tell them I trade you for the video.”

“They won’t.” I was bleeding. Badly. I fell to one knee.

He kicked me in the shoulder, and I sprawled on the floor, clutching the gun, scared to fire as the gas filled the house.

Even with me hurt he was done with risk, it was time to run. He hurried out the front door.

I thought he must be searching for my car. But no. Through the window I could see him running toward the plane.

He knelt by the unconscious pilot, kicked him out of the way.

Mila. I thought of Mila.

I managed to get to my feet, every breath an agony, bleeding badly. I stumbled out of the house, the gas smell rich as awful and unwelcome perfume, running toward the runway. Then onto the runway.

Belias started the plane, began to taxi down the little strip. Toward me, the only way to go.

I stopped, steadied, and fired. You have to play hurt. You have to take the obstacles as they come. Belias and his people never got that.

I emptied the gun into the plane and the range was barely there and I’d missed.

It was a small plane. A small target. He rose into the ashen sky and then circled back toward me and I thought,
Get to your truck
, and I tried to run but I staggered and I fell, looking toward the clear slate-gray sky.

Smoke.

The first little black finger of it curled out from the plane, and I heard a noise that didn’t sound right and he was swinging back, trying to bring the plane back and land and probably run right over me as I bled out on the ground. But then it dipped and rolled, and I thought, through the clear air and the broken window of the plane, I heard him scream.

I didn’t see it but he must have smashed into the gas-filled house because then the world exploded, hot and bright even behind my shut eyes, and I crawled toward the woods as the dry winter grass began to burn, began to burn faster than I could crawl and I heard Mila saying,
Samuil,
you stupid, get up, get up for me and Daniel
, and I staggered across the ice-cold creek and fell down by my car, trying to remember Benny’s phone number.

I think I called Mila’s number instead because the last thing I heard other than the rising hiss of the fire on the other side of the creek was Jimmy’s perfect voice, demanding to know what I wanted.