Killer Focus (18 page)

Eureka, California

A
t ten o'clock, Dennison checked out of his motel unit. Taylor, who had spent the night in the parking lot staking out his car, waited for a couple of cars to pass, then moved in smoothly behind him. Within a matter of seconds, he turned into a shopping mall complex. Minutes later, he exited with a bunch of yellow roses.

The next stop was a cemetery, and Taylor understood why Dennison had risked surfacing in a place where he could be, and had been, recognized. She had come back to Eureka looking for clues. Dennison was here for purely personal reasons.

His wife had passed away
exactly
two years ago. Within days of Anne Dennison dying, Dennison had turned informant.

When Dennison drove out of the cemetery parking lot, he headed south. Later that afternoon, after two stops, one for gasoline and food, the second so he could use a restroom, Taylor followed Dennison as he turned off Interstate 880. She was both hungry and thirsty, and she needed to visit the restroom herself, but she couldn't risk leaving the vehicle. If Dennison slipped away from her now, the chance that she would ever find him again was remote.

Minutes later his destination became obvious. Oakland International Airport. After parking the rental, Taylor swapped the blond wig for the ball cap, unpacked her luggage and followed him into the airport. By now both Bayard and Burdett would know her general location and they would be monitoring flights. She could be detained if she tried to board a domestic flight, but it was a risk she had to take.

Dennison queued to check his luggage and her heart sped up when she realized he had bought a ticket to El Paso.

The excitement that had gripped her when she had first seen him and which had worn away over long hours of surveillance flooded back. She hadn't been a part of the operation in El Paso because she had been recovering from the hostage crisis, but she had read the reports a number of times. The operation had been critical but, like the two previous ones in Winton and Eureka, it had failed to net Lopez.

Her jaw clenched at the discomfort of having to lug bags with a full bladder, she stepped up to the counter, and asked if there were any seats left on the flight. Dennison had had his ticket with him, which meant he had prebooked. If the flight was full, she would lose him.

The woman checked her computer. There were two seats left, both in economy. Taylor paid for the ticket with cash and checked her luggage. Dennison had cut it close. The flight left in less than twenty minutes.

She followed him at a discreet distance to make sure he didn't buy a second ticket to an alternative destination. Dennison stopped to buy a newspaper and a candy bar, then perused the books. Despite the increasing pressure on her bladder, Taylor waited him out. No matter how badly she needed to make a trip to the bathroom, she couldn't risk leaving Dennison. It was possible that he had purchased the ticket as a ruse and would walk out at the last minute.

When the flight was called, he put the book he'd been studying back on the shelf, left the shop and ambled in the direction of the gate.

Sighing with relief, Taylor walked to the nearest restroom, chose the closest available stall and locked the door. Seconds later, she washed her hands and face, and took the time to check her appearance. With her hair pulled back into a ponytail, and the sunglasses and bill of the cap obscuring half of her face, she would be hard to identify. Add to that the generic, sexless look of the oversize shirt, denims and sneakers she was wearing, and she could have been any one of a hundred travelers she'd seen in the airport.

As she boarded the plane, she skimmed the rows of passengers. Dennison had a seat close to the front. She was near the rear. After stowing her hand luggage, she sidled into her seat, which was wedged between two harassed mothers with babies.

The sudden entry into a world of diapers and baby bottles was disorienting. For days she had been living on the edge. Two people had been murdered, and her life was threatened. She had found Dennison, an unlikely key to the puzzle of both Lopez and the cabal. Now, for the next two hours she was camped in a world she had briefly contemplated being a part of.

Taylor fastened her seat belt. As destinations went, for Dennison El Paso was a huge risk. After the unsuccessful operation and the manhunt that had followed, his face would be known. He risked being picked up by the local cops, and maybe even being detained at the airport. El Paso was the last place Dennison should go, which meant he had a strong reason for going there.

The first opportunity she got when she disembarked, she was going to have to buy a handgun.

 

The second the airplane taxied to a halt in El Paso and the seat belt lights went off, Taylor sidled out to the aisle and began working her way forward. A woman glared, and a man refused to move aside, forcing her to push past, but she didn't have time for politeness. Dennison was close to the exit, tucked in just behind business class. He would be one of the first passengers off. If she was slow disembarking she could lose him.

Minutes later, she joined the stream of passengers gathered around the luggage carousel. Luggage was already circling. She studied the milling crowd, boosted by people waiting for the arriving flight and tour operators picking up clients. She couldn't find Dennison.

He had been wearing a gray suit. He could have taken the jacket off, but she couldn't see anyone in either a gray suit jacket or the light-colored shirt he had been wearing.

A man bent to collect a case. He was wearing a blue ball cap, matching polo shirt, dark glasses, and he had a mustache. She registered the gray jacket draped over one arm.

It was Dennison.

Her pulse accelerated. There was no sign of the shirt, which meant he must have taken it off during the flight and dumped it on the plane. She hadn't seen him carry anything on the flight, which meant he must have been wearing the polo shirt beneath the light-colored shirt. He had probably had the ball cap folded up in his jacket pocket along with the fake mustache.

With his face on the El Paso PD's most-wanted list, she should have expected that he would change his appearance. Six months and a whole different life ago, she wouldn't have missed a detail like that. As a lesson in how dangerous Dennison was, it was salutary. She couldn't afford to forget that he was ex-Bureau turned criminal, and that he had been ruthless enough that Lopez had retained him to run the Colombian branch of the Chavez operation.

Dennison started toward the exit. Taylor checked the conveyor. Her case was filled with things that were important to her, but if she had to, she would leave it. She checked the entrance then glanced back at the conveyor. Her suitcase came into view. Threading her way through passengers, she intercepted the case, at the same time keeping an eye on Dennison, who had bypassed the exit and was walking toward one of the rental-car agencies.

She grabbed the handle of her case and started after him.

Washington, D.C.

H
elene Reichmann waited for the maid to pour coffee. Afternoon sunlight glittered off the rings on her fingers as she added artificial sweetener to her cup. Her hands were well manicured, but despite all of her efforts they betrayed her age. She was seventy-one, although with cosmetic surgery and a rigorous exercise regime, most people thought she was in her midfifties.

After she had sipped her way through the first cup of coffee, she poured a second cup, picked up the television remote and selected a news channel.

A terrorist action in the Middle East led the news, followed by a breaking story about a local murder. Her interest sharpened as images flashed across the screen. Hot coffee scalded her fingers.

Normally it was the international news that most interested her, particularly the complicated weave of politics, greed and madness that drove various terrorist factions. Ever since she was very young she had been fascinated by the reasoning behind violence, the murky layers of anger and ideology. Invariably, there was one motivating factor: greed.

It was a motivation she understood very well. From the icy port of Lubeck and the ramshackle collection of tin huts Marco Chavez had called a refuge to the well-ordered opulence of her husband's mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, the lesson had been hammered home. Money was power. It changed lives, altered destinies and gave one the ability to create the future.

She set the cup down, barely registering the dark droplets that had spattered the expensive fabric of her cream suit.

Paul Seaton was dead.

The back of her neck crawled as the story segued into a brief biography of Seaton. Robert Onslow, another cabal member, had died several days ago of a heart attack. His death had been a surprise. He had been fit and healthy and hadn't had any previous record of heart problems, but he
had
been seventy-five. She hadn't gone to the funeral; nor, to her knowledge, had Paul or the other two surviving members of the upper echelon of the cabal, Stephen Ritter and Alex Parker. To do so would be to court media attention and discovery, and it went against the agreed code.

As always, she had made sure the code was adhered to by sending one of her people along to surveil the event and provide a list of the participants. Sometimes the finality of death stirred up old allegiances and loyalties and, with the increasing age of the ruling members of the cabal, she was ever vigilant.

There was no ambiguity attached to Seaton's death: it was murder. A .38 caliber bullet in the chest, another in the head. According to the report, the killing of the reclusive media magnate was brutal and senseless. No evidence of theft had been found, although Seaton's desk had been rifled through, so it was possible something of value had been stolen before the killer had exited the house.

With a jerky movement, she switched the television off and walked out into the hall. Mail and newspapers she hadn't yet had time to peruse were neatly stacked on a mahogany side table. She picked up the
Post.
Her gaze was caught by an advertisement on the front page, and any idea that two deaths within a week could be a coincidence dissolved.

She stared at the advertisement for a photographic service specializing in restoring old and damaged films—a cipher that belonged to another place and another time. Although the World War II cipher once used by German Intelligence had been used since. During a seven-year window when the cabal had first established itself in the States, before they had cut their umbilical cord to Chavez, they had used it to coordinate the trafficking of drugs and weapons with the cartel.

Discarding the
Post,
she picked up the
Times.
The advertisement was also featured on the front page. She studied the seemingly random arrangement of numbers and letters within the body of the advertisement. The first was different from the second. Lopez, in his arrogance, was communicating with her, but until she could find the key—

The sound of a voice jerked her head up.

She stared blankly at her personal assistant. Her driver was parked out front, waiting. She had appointments, meetings to attend, a four-o'clock briefing on the upcoming OPEC summit followed by a press conference. “Thank you.”

Her voice sounded distant and hollow, but it was reassuringly precise. The facade she so effortlessly maintained was still in place.

She skimmed the advertisements again as she strode to her suite and changed. She hadn't made a mistake. Lopez had murdered Seaton and placed the ads on the front page of two major daily papers, where she couldn't miss them. The lead time for inserting advertisements was usually several days before publication, which meant the murder had been planned and precisely timed to coincide with the advertisements.

For the first time since the book had been stolen in Cancun, raw panic squeezed at her chest. The security leak that Taylor Jones had represented was irrelevant. Lopez
had
the book. He wanted her to know how much power he had over the cabal.

She had always suspected that Marco Chavez had set her up in Cancun. She had searched for years, and hidden the fact that the book had been stolen. Admitting the loss would have created an unprecedented situation, one that Ritter, her second in command, wouldn't have hesitated to exploit. He would have demanded her execution.

Over the years, when no blackmail attempt had been made, the fear that the book had been stolen by Chavez had subsided. Gradually, she had come to believe that the book had been discarded along with the rest of the contents of her bag and had probably ended up at the bottom of a landfill.

Now the murders and the coded advertisement confirmed that her first instincts had been correct. Marco
had
outmaneuvered her. He had had the book all along.

Now Lopez was exacting his revenge by killing the cabal members, one by one.

Two of the five upper echelon had died the past week, both killed by Lopez, leaving herself, Ritter and Alex Parker. She could tell the remaining two cabal members, which would buy them time to get to safety, but if she did that she would have to admit that she had lost the book and hidden that fact from them. That she had thrown the entire upper echelon of the cabal to the wolves in order to preserve herself.

In a way, she decided, Lopez was solving her problems for her.

From the moment she had lost the book, the cabal, an organization that in recent times had become increasingly unstable, had become a threat to her. The threat could no longer be condoned.

The cabal was finished, but she would survive.

Lopez thought he held all the cards, but she held the most important one.

She knew who he was going to kill next.

She joined her assistant on the front steps. Outside, the day was sunny and warm, but the air had a crisp bite. In contrast to the lush, overblown display of spring, the roses, grouped in a formal arrangement around the front portico, were skeletal and barbed.

Her driver opened the rear door of the waiting limousine. “Where to this afternoon, Madame Ambassador?”

“The White House.”