The Successor (31 page)

The file had to do with an insurance company based in Ohio. Allison glanced at the cover memo on top one more time—she’d already scanned it this afternoon before bugging out quickly when she found out from Debbie that Chris was leaving the office. Apparently, Victoria Graham had tried to persuade Christian to use Everest to buy the Ohio company a couple of years ago. Obviously, he’d refused. And it didn’t actually say so, but as she read between Christian’s lines on the page, it implied that something not quite aboveboard was going on with Graham’s proposal. Christian was much too savvy to ever write anything down in a file that could be used against anyone later, but it looked to Allison as if he were concerned about Ms. Graham’s motives. Allison got at least ten e-mails a day from Christian and she’d gotten used to his writing. She’d gotten used to reading the words—then understanding what he really meant. She could feel his voice in the words on the page and there was suspicion.

She let her head fall slowly to the desk. What in the world was really going on?

SO CLOSE.
A couple of more lonely miles and he’d be home, Alanzo Gomez thought to himself happily. Just down the big hill, a right at the dead end at the bottom, a left, then another right, and he could swing into his driveway, walk inside, and climb into his nice, cozy bed beside his plump, little wife with the secure feeling that tomorrow morning he’d wake up, go to the office, and save Cuba. The roadblock had strengthened his resolve to do it now, not to wait another day. It was too big a risk to wait any longer because perceptions were everything on this island. Being
re
active could mean prison, even death. Being
pro
active could mean being a hero.

He could just picture the Central Bank president’s face when he broke the news tomorrow morning. The man would try to grab the glory—as all high-level bureaucrats in Cuba regularly did—but Gomez had a plan for that. He’d tell his boss just enough to get the saliva dripping, but no more. Not enough for the man to be able to walk into the Party office across the street and grab anything by himself. Just a little taste so the man would
have
to take him along on that walk across the street.

Gomez eased off the accelerator as he approached the top of the hill. It was steep, very steep, and long—at least a quarter of a mile. At the bottom of it was his lovely neighborhood and the house he would live in until he died. Unless the hero thing really took off and the Party urged him to move because a man of his stature needed to live in a bigger, fancier home. He would do whatever they told him to do. Mother Cuba forever, he thought to himself, making a tight fist with one hand.

Gomez put his foot on the brake when he reached the crest of the hill and pressed. The Studebaker slowed slightly, but the reaction didn’t feel normal to him, didn’t feel as if the brake pads grabbed the way they usually did. He pressed the pedal harder. It went straight to the floor with a bang—but didn’t come back.

“Oh, Jesus!”
His eyes shot to the speedometer—forty-five and increasing quickly because the steepest part of the hill was at the top. Within seconds he was at sixty. “My God,” he whined pitifully, zigzagging on the two-lane road in an attempt to stop, careening ahead, tires screeching. The trees on both sides of the road flashed past—suddenly two big blurs now out of the corner of each eye as the speedometer’s needle blew past seventy.
“Help me! Someone help me!”
he screamed, stomping on the brake pedal with his foot, trying to get it to come off the floor. Instinctively, he yanked on the emergency brake—nothing there, either.
“Stop, stop, stop!”
he shouted, pounding on the steering wheel. He should have pulled into the trees as soon as he realized the brakes were gone, he realized now. Taken his chances then on some bad injuries—but not death. But it was much too late for that—the needle was on eighty and the cement wall at the bottom was rushing up to meet him.
“Oh, Geeeooood!”

As the car raced toward the wall, Gomez jerked the steering wheel to the left, trying to turn onto the level street, but the forward momentum flipped the car over. It rolled twice before slamming into the wall at eighty-five.

THE TWO FAR JEEPS
pulled up to the crash, and the officer who had taken Gomez’s identification at the roadblock hopped out. While he had been keeping Gomez occupied, another man had slipped beneath the car from behind and cut the brake line—in such a way that Gomez could drive a few miles, but when he really needed to stop, the brakes would fail.

The officer leaned down and looked into the front seat. Gomez was a bloody mess, obviously dead. There was no need for any follow-up. He stepped back into the jeep and nodded to the driver. A car was coming and they couldn’t be seen here.

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT
and Christian was headed to his study to check e-mails. Beth was asleep on his couch. She’d fallen asleep there, cuddled up next to him while they were watching
Hoosiers
. One minute he was explaining something about the movie, a rule of basketball, the next she was breathing heavily, eyes closed.

Guess it wasn’t going to be
her
favorite movie, he thought, chuckling as he sat down and clicked to his e-mail. Well, you couldn’t expect a twenty-two-year-old woman to care much about high school basketball in the 1950s.

Christian clicked into his received-messages folder, still thinking about Jim Marshall—God, that thing was haunting him. His eyes opened wide as the list of new e-mails popped up. There it was. A message from JRCook. His eyes skimmed across the screen. It was going down tomorrow. Everything was going live. He reached for the phone to call Quentin.

“Chris.”

Christian spun around in the chair and dropped the phone, taken completely by surprise by the voice from behind him. It was Beth, and through the dim light he could see she was crying. Tears soaked her cheeks, and her mascara was smudged all around her eyes. He got up and moved to her, subtly shoving the code card into his pocket. “What’s wrong?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her. She melted into him.

“Chris, I just got a call from the hospital in Baltimore. My mom died tonight.” She burst into a loud sob. “And I wasn’t there for her.”

17

CHRISTIAN EMERGED
from the entrance to his apartment building on Fifth Avenue with three bodyguards as Quentin pulled up in his silver 760. It was only six o’clock in the morning, so traffic was still light. They’d had no problem spotting Quentin coming from up the block.

As he moved across the sidewalk toward the BMW, Christian searched for signs of anger on Quentin’s face, but, as usual, there was nothing. No hint that Quentin was in any way surprised or pissed off about Beth coming toward the car, too. Christian opened the back door of the spacious car for Beth as Quentin rose up out of the driver’s seat and gestured back toward the entrance. When Beth was in the car and Christian had shut the door, he followed Quentin back across the sidewalk to the bottom of the steps in front of the building.

“What’s going on?” Quentin asked calmly, glancing at the car as he took a bite of a granola bar.

Christian spread his arms, watching one of the bodyguards load bags into the car’s trunk. “Going on? What do you mean?”

“Chris, we don’t have time for—”

“Okay, okay.” For some reason, every once in a while Christian enjoyed trying to get a rise out of Quentin, liked trying to penetrate that cool veneer. He hadn’t been able to often over the past few years, but when he had, it had been fun. And right now, he needed a tension breaker. “Sorry I didn’t call you. She lost her mother last night. She’s a basket case.”

Quentin’s eyes narrowed. “So, what are you saying?”

Down deep, beneath the steel exterior, Quentin was a compassionate man. Christian knew he felt sorry for Beth, but his first reaction had been to stay focused on the matter at hand. He was the consummate professional. “I’m saying I can’t let her be alone right now. She wouldn’t be able to handle it. She doesn’t have anyone else to lean on.”

“You can’t be serious. I’ve planned every detail of this trip right down to the letter. I can’t have another variable like this one suddenly thrown on top of everything else. Not if you expect me to make this go off like we want it to. You coming back alive, I mean.”

“I think you’re overblowing this just a tad,” Christian said, holding his thumb and forefinger up barely apart. “I don’t think this is the trip to worry about. Now, when we’re about to go into Cuba, we’ll both do some worrying.” He noticed Quentin look past him up Fifth Avenue.

“Hopefully, we’re dropping her off in Washington,” Quentin said, taking another bite of the breakfast bar.

Christian shook his head.

“She’s going with us to Florida? Is that the bottom line?”

“Yup.” For the first time in a long time Christian thought he saw a flash of anger cross his best friend’s face.

“No talking you out of it?”

“No.”

“You realize that we really know next to
nothing
about this woman. Only where she’s from and where she went to college.”

“I know about her,” Christian said firmly. “I know she’s a good person. I also know this is a pain in the ass. But I’m not going to let someone else down.”

“Someone
else
?”

Christian looked down at a cigarette butt wedged into a crack of the sidewalk. “Yeah.”

“You mean Jim Marshall?” Quentin put his hand on Christian’s shoulder. “You can’t blame yourself for what he did. My God, you were going to pay for him to go to a rehab clinic out of your own pocket.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t get him there.” Christian gritted his teeth. “I was too busy being tough on him. I’m not going to be tough on her, too.”

Quentin glanced at Beth, who was sitting beside one of the bodyguards in the back of the BMW. “Just for the record, I think this is a very bad idea.”

“I know.” Christian’s expression brightened. “I also know you’ll get me through it.”

Quentin popped the last bite of granola bar into his mouth. “Speaking of which, if you take a quick look up Fifth Avenue while we’re walking to the car, you’ll see a blue sedan at the curb about fifty yards away. That sedan’s been following me ever since I left my garage to come pick you up.”

SHERRY DEMILLE
sat in Christian’s office at Everest, typing password after password into his computer—the two older men from Maryland had sent her a long list of possibilities last night by e-mail and ordered her to try them, ordered her to look for anything that might be relevant on his computer, in his desk, on his credenza. But none of the passwords were working and she was getting more and more frustrated. Not only that the passwords weren’t working, but at what she’d let herself get wrapped up in. For letting Jim Marshall have his way with her at the hotel just so she could get closer to him. Then finding out he’d been fired anyway because the two men no longer had any use for him. She was certain Marshall’s drop from the balcony of his apartment building hadn’t been suicide, which was the only reason she’d broken into Christian’s office this morning when the two men had told her to. She didn’t want to end up like Marshall. Nothing but a stew of flesh and bones on a sidewalk. The men had been beside themselves last night on the phone, almost panic-stricken.

“What are you doing?”

Sherry’s gaze snapped from the screen to the doorway. Allison was standing there, eyes ablaze.

Sherry rose deliberately from Christian’s chair and walked slowly to where Allison was standing, not taking her eyes off Allison’s. Then bolted past her toward the lobby.

QUENTIN PULLED
the silver 760 into a freight warehouse in Newark, New Jersey. As soon as they were inside, the huge door that had been raised to let them in descended again. Quentin steered the BMW to the right and eased to a stop beside an identical 760—except that this one’s windows were tinted.

“Everybody out,” he ordered, climbing from the car, careful not to bang his door into the maroon-colored minivan to the left.

Christian, Beth, and the bodyguard who had ridden in the back with Beth climbed out.

Within fifteen minutes, Quentin’s 760 had been outfitted with window tinting and new license tags. Now there was no way to see into the car, and no way to identify it from the silver 760 they’d pulled up next to.

ALLISON GLANCED WARILY
at the cages and aquariums lining the walls as she moved hurriedly into Victoria Graham’s office. At least the alligator wasn’t here anymore.

“What is it, dear?” Graham asked. “Why did you need to see me so badly?”

Allison moved to the desk and dropped the photos she’d taken last night onto Graham’s desk. “You told me to tell you as soon as I thought there was something weird going on.”

Graham picked up one of the pictures. “Christian in a restaurant with a pretty girl.” She looked up. “What’s so strange about that?”

“The girl’s half his age.”

Graham put the photograph down. “Men go through these things when they’re in their forties. It’s sad, but they do. Even a man like Christian.”

“She just showed up,” Allison said, sitting in the chair in front of the desk. “Don’t you think that’s odd?”

The older woman raised both eyebrows and smiled grimly. “I do think it’s odd, but not because of the timing.”

“But—”

“He’ll get over it, dear,” Graham interrupted. “I promise.”

Allison knew what Graham was thinking. That this was all just about petty jealousy. But it wasn’t. She was really worried about Christian. “An hour ago I caught a woman named Sherry Demille trying to get into Christian’s computer at Everest.” Graham’s eyes raced to hers. This time her reaction wasn’t so measured. “Sherry’s an associate with the firm. She’d gotten into his office.” Using that key on top of the molding obviously. A mistake to trust anyone, she thought to herself. As Christian always preached.

Graham leaned forward. “What did she say?”

“I didn’t have a chance to ask her anything. She ran. I chased her through the emergency exit in the lobby and down the stairs, but she got away. I even phoned the security desk in the main lobby and told them to stop her, but they never saw her come into the lobby. Maybe she went out through the freight entrance.”

“Do you think she got into his computer?”

Allison shook her head. Suddenly Victoria Graham wasn’t so calm. “No. I checked after I called security and the computer was still requiring a password for access.” She saw Graham’s shoulders sag slightly.

“Good.”

“What’s going on, Ms. Graham? Do you think what Sherry did is related to what we’re doing?”

Graham shook her head. “I don’t know, I just don’t know.”

Allison rose from the chair and placed a folder down in front of her. It was the folder she’d found in the Dead Deal room related to that Ohio insurance company Christian had decided not to pursue. “Does it have anything to do with this?” she asked, pointing at the file.

ANTONIO BARRADO
had just dropped down from the camp’s dock into the Boston Whaler when he heard one of his men yelling wildly for help from behind the shack to the far right. A desperate scream with a tone so eerie it sent a shiver up his spine. He scrambled back up onto the rickety planks and raced toward the shouting, aware that the other men in camp were sprinting from the left, where they’d been clearing brush and laying down the load of wood he’d brought last night. Which was where he had been headed when the yelling had started. To get another load.

Barrado reached the scene first and could barely believe what he saw. He’d heard about this—about people letting their pets go free in the Everglades—but never thought
this
could be possible. He whipped the .44 magnum from his holster just as the other men made it to where he was standing, leaned down, pressed the barrel to the massive snake’s head so the bullet wouldn’t hit his man, and fired. Blowing the head completely apart, severing the rest of the snake, which was tightly coiled around the man’s body, from the jaw—the hundreds of backward-tilting, razor-sharp teeth so deeply impaled in the man’s thigh that the jaw stayed right where it was.

Instead of going limp, the dead snake’s coils constricted even more tightly, then started to writhe wildly. It took several minutes to completely separate the snake from the man. When they finally had him free, they measured the python. Twenty-two feet—even without the head.

Barrado gazed at the tape measure, barely able to believe what he’d seen. Thank God this part of it was almost over.

THE MAROON MINIVAN
moved quickly out onto the tarmac of the small, central New Jersey airport toward the waiting Gulfstream. The vehicle moved directly to the bottom of the lowered stairs, where it stopped abruptly. Christian, Quentin, Beth, and the three bodyguards hopped out and hurried up the stairs into the jet. Now they were headed to Naples, Florida—a two-hour drive directly across the state from Miami.

VICTORIA GRAHAM
gazed at the photographs Allison had taken. Allison was just doing what she’d been told to do. To be aware of things that seemed strange, not normal. It was a good thing, too. Not because of the photographs but because Allison had told her about Sherry Demille. They were already trying to find Sherry, but that was going to be difficult, she knew. Sherry was probably already dead. At the least, running for her life.

Graham leaned back in her desk chair and shut her eyes. Christian ought to be on his way to Miami by now. And if it wasn’t Miami, she’d know where it was soon enough. That was the whole reason that Melissa Hart—aka Beth Garrison—was with him.