The Kill Room (6 page)

A
HUMAN FORM, LIKE AN UNFLAPPABLE
, patient ghost, appeared in Shreve Metzger’s doorway.

“Spencer.”

His administrations director—his right-hand man around headquarters—had been enjoying the cool blue skies and quiet lake shore line in Maine when an encrypted text from Metzger had summoned him. Boston had immediately cut short his vacation. If he’d been pissed off, and he probably had been, he’d given no indication of it.

That would be improper.

That would be unseemly.

Spencer Boston’s was a faded elegance, a prior generation’s. He had a grandfatherly face, creases bracketing his taut lips, and thick, wavy white hair—he was ten years older than Metzger. He radiated an utterly calm and reasonable demeanor. Like the Wizard, Boston wasn’t troubled by the Smoke. He now stepped into the office, shut the door instinctively against prying ears and sat opposite his boss. He said nothing but his eyes dipped to the mobile in his boss’s hand. Rarely used, never to leave the building, the device happened to be dark red in color, though that had nothing to do with its top-secret nature. That was the shade that the company had had available for immediate delivery. Metzger thought of it as his “magic phone.”

The NIOS director realized his muscles were cramping from the pressure on the unit.

Metzger put the phone away and gave a faint nod to the man he’d worked with for several years, ever since Metzger had replaced the prior head of NIOS, who’d disappeared into the vortex of politics. An unsuccessful vanishing.

“Thanks for coming in,” the director said quickly and stiffly, as if he felt he should make some reference to the ruined vacation. The Smoke affected him in many different ways. One of which was to muddle his mind so that, even when he wasn’t angry, he’d forget how to behave like a normal person. When an affliction rules your life, you’re always on guard.

Daddy, are you…are you okay?

I’m smiling, aren’t I?

I guess. It just looks, you know, funny.

The admin director shifted. The chair creaked. Spencer Boston was not a small man. He sipped iced tea from a tall plastic cup, lifted his bushy brows.

Metzger said, “We’ve got a whistleblower.”

“What? Impossible.”

“Confirmed.” Metzger explained what had happened.

“No,” the older man whispered. “What are you doing about it?”

He deflected that incendiary question and added, “I need you to find him. I don’t care what you have to do.”

Careful, he reminded himself. That’s the Smoke talking.

“Who knows?” Boston asked.

“Well,
he
does.” A reverent glance at the magic phone.

No need to be more specific than that.

The Wizard.

Boston grimaced, troubled too. Formerly with another government intelligence agency, he’d been a very successful runner of assets throughout Central America—his region of choice—in such fulcrum countries as Panama. And his specialty? The fine art of regime change. That was Boston’s milieu, not politics, but he knew that without support from Washington, you and your assets could be hung out to dry at the worst possible moment. Several times he’d been held captive by revolutionaries or insurgents or cartel bosses, he’d been interrogated, he’d probably been tortured, though he never talked about that.

And he’d survived. Different threats in DC; same skills at self-preservation.

Boston’s hand brushed his enviable hair, gray though it was, and waited.

Metzger said, “He—” Wizard emphasis again. “—knows about the investigation but he didn’t say a word about any leaks. I don’t think he knows. We have to find the traitor before word trickles down to the Beltway.”

Sipping the pale tea, Boston squinted more furrows into his face. Damn, the man could give Donald Sutherland a run for his money in the distinguished older power-broker role. Metzger, though considerably younger, had a much more sparse scalp than Boston and was bony and gaunt. He felt he looked weaselly.

“What do you think, Spencer? How could an STO have gotten leaked?”

A look out the window. Boston had no view of the Hudson from his chair, just more late-morning reflected light. “My gut is it was somebody in Florida. The next choice would be Washington.”

“Texas and California?”

Boston said, “I doubt it. They get copies of the STO but unless one of their specialists is activated, they don’t even open them…And, as much as I hate to say it, we can’t dismiss the office here completely.” The twist of his impressive head indicated NIOS headquarters.

Granted. A co-worker in this office might have sold them out, as painful as it was to think about.

Boston continued, “I’ll check with IT security about the servers, copiers and scanners. Polygraph the senior people with download permissions. I’d do a major Facebook autobot search. Well, not just Facebook but blogs and as many other social media sites as I can think of. See if anybody with access to the STO’s been posting anything critical of the government and our mission here.”

Mission. Killing bad guys.

This made sense. Metzger was impressed. “Good. A lot of work.” His eyes strayed to the vista. He saw a window washer on a scaffolding three or four hundred feet up. He thought, as he often did, of the jumpers on 9/11.

The Smoke expanded in his lungs.

Breathe…

Send the Smoke away. But he couldn’t. Because
they
, the jumpers on that terrible day, hadn’t been able to breathe. Their lungs had been filled with oily smoke rising from the crest of the flames that were going to consume them in seconds, flames roiling into their twelve-by-twelve-foot offices, leaving only one place to go, through windows to the eternal concrete.

His hands began to shake again.

Metzger noted that Boston was regarding him with a close gaze. The NIOS head casually adjusted the photograph of him, Seth and Katie and a snorting horse, taken through a fine set of optics that happened, in that instance, to record a dear memory, but wasn’t dissimilar to a scope that could very efficiently direct a bullet through a man’s heart.

“They have proof of completion, the police?”

“No, I don’t think so. Status is closed, that’s all.”

Kill orders were just that—instructions to eliminate a task. There was never any documentation that an assassination was actually completed. The standard procedure when asked was to deny, deny, deny.

Boston began to ask, “Are we doing anything…?”

“I’ve made calls. Don Bruns knows about the case, of course. A few others. We’re…handling things.”

An ambiguous verb and object. Worthy of the Wizard.

Handling things…

Spencer Boston, of the impressive white mane and more impressive track record as a spy, sipped more tea. The straw eased farther through the plastic lid and gave a faint vibration like a bow on a viola string. “Don’t worry, Shreve. I’ll find him. Or her.”

“Thanks, Spencer. Anytime. Day or night. Call me, what you find out.”

The man rose, buttoned his ill-tailored suit.

When he was gone Metzger heard his magic red phone trill with a text from his surveillance and datamining crowd in the basement.

The Smoke diminished considerably at reading this.

At last. A place to start.

J
ACOB SWANN APPROACHED HIS CAR
in the lot of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia airport.

He set his suitcase into the trunk of his Nissan sedan carefully—his knives were inside. No carry-on with them, of course. He dropped heavily into the front seat and stretched, breathing deeply.

Swann was tired. He had left his Brooklyn apartment for the Bahamas nearly twenty-four hours ago and had had only three or so hours’ sleep in that time—most while in transit.

His session with Annette had gone more quickly than he’d expected. But, after he’d disposed of the body, finding an abandoned trash fire to burn the evidence of his visit last week had taken some time. Then he’d had to take care of some other housekeeping, including a visit to Annette’s apartment and a risky but ultimately successful trip back to the site of Moreno’s shooting itself: the South Cove Inn.

He’d then had to get off the island the same way he had last week: from a dock near Millars Sound, where he knew some of the men who clustered daily to work the ships or smoke Camels or ganja and drink Sands, Kalik or, more likely, Triple B malt. They would also handle various odd jobs. Efficiently and discreetly. They’d hurried him via small boat to one of the innumerable islands near Freeport, then there’d been the helicopter ride to a field south of Miami.

That was the thing about the Caribbean. There was Customs and there was custom. And the lower-case version allowed for people like Jacob Swann, with a bankroll of money—his employer had plenty, of course—to get where he needed to be, unnoticed.

After the scoring with the blade, after the blood, he was convinced that Annette had not told anyone about him, about the questions he’d casually asked her a week ago regarding the South Cove Inn, suite 1200, Moreno’s bodyguard and Moreno himself. All those facts could be bundled together, resulting in some very compromising conclusions.

He’d only used the Kai Shun a few times, slice, slice…It probably hadn’t been necessary, she was so frightened. But Jacob Swann was a very meticulous man. You could ruin a delicate sauce simply by too quickly adding hot liquid to the sizzling flour-and-butter roux. And once you’d done that there was no correction. A matter of a few degrees and few seconds. Besides, you should never miss an opportunity to hone your skills. So to speak.

He now pulled to the airport parking lot’s exit kiosk, paid cash then drove a mile on the Grand Central before pulling over and swapping license plates. He then continued on to his house in Brooklyn.

Annette…

Bad luck for the poor prostitute that they’d run into each other when he’d been planning the job at the South Cove. He’d been conducting surveillance when he’d spotted Moreno’s guard, Simon Flores, talking and flirting with the woman. Clearly they’d just come out of a room together and he understood from their body language and banter what they’d been doing.

Ah, a working girl. Perfect.

He waited an hour or two and then circled the grounds casually until he found her in the bar, where she was buying herself watered-down drinks and dangling like bait on a hook for another customer.

Swann, armed with a thousand dollars in untraceable cash, had been happy to swim toward her.

After the good sex and over the better stew he’d learned a great deal of solid information for the assignment. But he’d never anticipated that there’d be an investigation, so he hadn’t cleaned up as completely as he probably should have. Hence, his trip back to the island.

Successful. And satisfying.

He now returned to his town house in the Heights, off Henry Street, and parked in the garage in the alley. He dropped his bag in the front hall, then shed his clothes and took a shower.

The living room and two bedrooms were modestly furnished, inexpensive antiques mostly, a few Ikea pieces. It looked like the digs of any bachelor in New York City, except for two aspects: the massive green gun safe, in a closet, which held his rifles and pistols, and the kitchen. Which a professional chef might have envied.

It was to this room that he walked after toweling off and pulling on a terry-cloth robe and slippers. Viking, Miele, KitchenAid, Sub-Zero, separate freezer, wine cooler, radiant bulb cookers—his own making. Stainless steel and oak. Pots and implements sat in glass-doored cabinets along one entire wall. (Those ceiling racks are showy, but why have to wash something before you cook in it?)

Swann now made French press coffee. He debated what to make for breakfast, sipping the strong brew, which he drank black.

For the meal he decided on hash. Swann loved challenges in the kitchen and had made recipes that could have been formulated by greats like Heston Blumenthal or Gordon Ramsey. But he knew too that food need not be fancy. When he was in the service he would come back from a mission and in his quarters outside Baghdad whip up meals for his fellow soldiers, using military rations, combined with foods he’d bought at an Arabic market. No one joshed with him about his prissy, sanctimonious approach to cooking. For one thing, the meals were always excellent. For another, they knew Swann had very possibly spent the morning peeling some knuckle skin from a screaming insurgent to find out where a missing shipment of weapons might be.

You made fun of people like that at your peril.

He now lifted a one-pound piece of rib-eye steak from the refrigerator and unwrapped the thick white waxed paper. He himself had been responsible for this perfectly sized and edged piece. Every month or so, Swann would buy a half side of beef, which was kept in a cold-storage meat facility for people like him—amateur butchers. He would reserve a whole glorious day to slice the meat from the bones, shape it into sirloin, short ribs, rump, chuck, flank, brisket.

Some people who bought in bulk enjoyed brains, intestines, stomach and other organ meats. But those cuts didn’t appeal to him and he discarded them. There was nothing morally or emotionally troubling about those portions of an animal; for Swann flesh was flesh. It was merely a question of flavor. Who didn’t love sweetbreads, crisply sautéed? But most offal tended to be bitter and was more trouble than it was worth. Kidneys, for instance, stank up your kitchen for days and brains were overly rich and tasteless (and jam-packed with cholesterol). No, Swann’s time at the two-hundred-pound butcher block, robed in a full apron, wielding saw and knife, was spent excising the classic cuts, working to achieve perfectly shaped specimens while leaving as little on the bone as he possibly could. This was an art, a sport.

This comforted him.

My little butcher man…

Now he set his rib eye on a cutting board—always wood, to save his knives’ edges—and ran his fingers over the meat, sensing the tautness of the flesh, examining the grain, the marbling of the fat.

Before slicing, however, he washed and re-edged the Kai Shun on his Dan’s Black Hard Arkansas whetstone, which cost nearly as much as the knife itself and was the best sharpening device on the planet. When he’d been sitting atop Annette, he’d moved from tongue to finger, and the blade had an unfortunate encounter with bone. It now needed to be honed back to perfection.

Finally, the knife was ready and he turned back to the steak, slowly slicing the piece into quarter-inch cubes.

He could have made them bigger and he could have worked faster.

But why rush something you enjoy?

When he was done he dusted the cubes in a mixture of sage and flour (his contribution to the classic recipe) and sautéed them in a cast-iron skillet, scooping them aside while still internally pink. He then diced two red potatoes and half a Vidalia onion. These vegetables he cooked in oil in the skillet and returned the meat. He mixed in a bit of veal stock and chopped Italian parsley and set the pan under the broiler to crisp the top.

A minute or two later, the dish was finished. He added salt and pepper to the hash and sat down to eat the meal, along with a rosemary scone, at a very expensive teak table in the bay window of his kitchen. He’d baked the scone several days ago. Better with age, he reflected, as the herbs had bonded well with the hand-milled flour.

Swann ate slowly, as he always did. He had nothing but pity bordering on contempt for people who ate fast, who inhaled their food.

He had just finished when he received an email. It seemed that Shreve Metzger’s great national security intelligence machine was grinding away as efficiently as ever.

Swann called the Tech Services people and requested some datamining. Then he pulled on thick yellow rubber gloves. To clean the skillet, he scrubbed it with salt and treated the surface with hot oil; cast-iron should
never
meet soap and water, of course. He then began to wash the dishes and utensils in very, very hot water. He enjoyed the process and found that he did much of his best thinking standing here, looking out at a dogged ginkgo in a small garden in front of the building. The nuts from that plant were curious. They’re used in Asian cuisine—the centerpiece of the delicious custard chawanmushi in Japan. They can also be toxic, when consumed in large quantities. But dining can be dangerous, of course; when we sit down to a meal who doesn’t occasionally wonder if we’ve been dealt the salmonella or
E. coli
card? Jacob Swann had eaten fugu—the infamous puffer fish with toxic organs—in Japan. He faulted the dish not for its potential for lethality (training of chefs makes poisoning virtually impossible) but for a flavor too mild for his liking.

Scrubbing, scrubbing, removing every trace of food from metal and glass and porcelain.

And thinking hard.

To eliminate witnesses would cast suspicion on NIOS and its affiliates, of course, since the kill order was now public. That was unfortunate and under other circumstances he would have tried to arrange accidents or construct some fictional players to take the blame for the murders that were about to happen: the cartels Metzger had claimed were really responsible for Moreno’s death, or perps the police and prosecutor had put in jail, out for revenge.

But that wouldn’t work here. Jacob Swann would simply have to do what he did best; while Shreve Metzger would deny that kill orders even existed, Swann would make absolutely certain that no evidence of or witnesses to his clean-up operation could possibly tie NIOS or anyone connected with it to the killing.

He could do that. Jacob Swann was a very meticulous man.

Besides, he had no choice but to eliminate these threats. There was no way he’d let anybody jeopardize his organization; its work was too important.

Swann dried the dishes, silver and coffee cup, using thick linen, with the diligence of a surgeon completing the stitches after a successful procedure.