Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (29 page)

As Andre begins to double over, Jack’s windpipe is freed. He sucks in a great lungful of air, brings the book up, jams its edge into Andre’s neck. To maintain the maximum force, he’s obliged to keep both his hands on the spine of the book and so lacks the means to force Andre to drop the switchblade. This weapon now swings back and forth like a pendulum with a razor’s edge, grazing first Jack’s ear, then his shoulder. With each wild pass, Jack feels searing pain, and hot blood begins running down him. The next arc could find his carotid artery.

Gritting his teeth, he jams the book harder into Andre’s throat, hears a crackle like a sheet of paper being crumpled prior to being thrown away. Then Andre’s mouth opens wide, emits a sound like a grandfather clock about to break down.

Jack, staring into Andre’s bloodshot eyes, begins to cry. Part of him knows what’s happening, what the outcome will be, but that part must stand aside while the organism is in danger. Andre, in a last, desperate attempt to kill, brings the edge of the switchblade up to the level of Jack’s ear. He points it inward, aiming for the canal opening. Jack, terrified, shifts his weight. The corner of the book penetrates into the hole made by the fracture of Andre’s cricoid cartilage. All air is cut off.

Andre’s knife hand moves. The point of the switchblade is almost at the canal opening. Jack leans in with all his weight; more of the book pushes inside Andre. Andre’s knife hand begins to tremble; the momentum falters. Tears are streaming down Jack’s cheeks. They fall onto Andre, into his wound. Andre’s eyes stare at him. They are unreadable.

There is now a contest of wills. Andre can no longer breathe, but he holds the knife. All he has to do is summon the strength to jam it point-first into Jack’s ear. There is a moment of stasis, when the power, the wills of both boys are held in balance. Nothing moves. The small sounds of the library, the occasional whisper, the soft pad of footfalls, the tiny, very particular sound of a book being slipped out from between its neighbors, all seem exaggerated, like the sounds of insects deep in the forest. All the trappings of civilization have become irrelevant, useless. All that remains are the tiny symphony of sounds and the beating of your own heart.

Nature abhors stasis; like fame, it’s fleeting, though its seconds may seem like minutes. Jack feels the point of the knife enter his ear canal, and he twists the corner of the book. Andre’s eyes roll up; his lips are drawn back in a rictus. He has nothing left, only a helpless rage that ushers him rudely from life to death.

Jack, panting like a sick dog, lies against Andre’s crumpled form. He feels as if a light has gone out in the depths of his soul, as if he has lost a part of himself. He is in shock, stunned at what has occurred. There are no words, no thoughts in his head adequate to what he’s feeling. Soon enough, he begins to shake with a profound chill. The strong copper taste of blood is on his tongue, but whether it’s his blood or Andre’s or both is impossible to say.

In a dim dead-end of the library where no one comes, he lies in a daze, in a kind of trancelike state, remembering an Indian parable from
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
he came across weeks ago. It happened that a tigress, large with an unborn cub, attacked a herd of goats. As it sprang forward to grip in its teeth a terrified goat, the goatherd shot it.
The tigress fell, and in that moment before she expired, she gave birth to her cub. The cub grew up with the goats, eating grass and, mimicking its adopted brothers and sisters, bleating. Until the day a male tiger found the herd. It quite naturally attacked the youngster, who did not fight back, but only bleated. The male tiger gripped the adolescent by the scruff of his neck, dragged him to the river.

“Look at our reflections,” the male tiger said. “You and I are as brothers. Why do you bleat like a goat? Why do you live with them instead of feasting on them?”

“I like grass,” the adolescent replied.

“Because grass is all you know.”

Whereupon the male tiger leapt upon a goat, tore out its throat. The adolescent was close enough to the feast to taste the goat’s blood. Then he put his head down and bit into the flesh, which he discovered he liked much more than the taste of grass.

The male tiger lifted his head, watching the adolescent gorge himself on goat meat. With his great muzzle covered in blood, he said, “Now you and I are the same. Now you know your true Self. Follow me into the forest.”

Jack, weeping still, gets to his feet. He dries his eyes and, finding his shirtfront bloodied, grabs his jacket off the back of a chair, puts it on. He finds that if he buttons the jacket up to his neck, the blood is hidden.

On the verge of leaving, he turns to regard Andre. What has happened has affirmed a notion embedded in his subconscious for a number of years: It isn’t simply his dyslexia that’s made him an Outsider. He won’t bleat and run like a goat. He won’t ever rub shoulders with the passersby on the street; he doesn’t want to. Like the tiger, he stands apart. The jungle is his home, not the cultivated field.

32

Once every two weeks or so, Secretary Dennis Paull scheduled a senior staff meeting at dawn, much to the grumbling of those closest to him. There was no obvious reason for doing this except to keep them on their toes, which is what pissed off his senior staff because it cut into their social lives. God forbid they should attend one of Paull’s senior staff meetings with a yawn or, worse, hungover. The secretary would hang them out to dry in front of their colleagues.

The meetings were held at Fort McNair, which was a building that didn’t look like a fort and was in the heart of downtown Washington. No one understood why the meetings were held at an army base and not at Homeland Security HQ, but no one had the intestinal fortitude to query Secretary Paull. Consequently, people thought he was simply eccentric and this behavior, along with numerous other peccadilloes, simply became part of the Beltway lore concerning him.

This was precisely what Dennis Paull had in mind. He never did or said anything without a specific reason, though that reason, like the moves of a chess player, was not always readily apparent. The reason Paull scheduled the meetings at the crack of dawn was because virtually
no one was around. The reason he held them at Fort McNair was that it was a place within which even the president couldn’t track him.

This particular morning, at precisely 0617, Secretary Paull called a ten-minute break, pushed his chair back, and strode from the conference room. He walked down a number of halls, went down a flight of stairs, up another just to reassure himself that he was absolutely alone. Then he ducked into the men’s room at the rear of the third floor. No one stood by the row of sinks; no one was using the urinals. He went down the row of stalls, opening each door to ensure no one was in temporary residence.

Then he banged open the door to the last stall in the row and said, “Good morning, sir.”

Edward Carson, the president-elect, who had been reading the
Washington Post,
stood up, folded the paper under one arm, and said, “No need to call me sir yet, Dennis.”

“Never too early to get started, sir.”

The two men emerged from the stall. “Imagine what the Drudge Report would say about this,” Carson grunted. “We’re all alone?”

“Like Adam before Eve.”

Carson frowned. “What news of Alli? Lyn is beside herself.”

Paull knew it wasn’t presidential for Carson to add that he was also beside himself. Presidents never lost their cool, no matter how dire the straits. “I believe we’re closer to finding her today than we were yesterday.”

“Knock off the media-speak,” Carson said testily. “This is my daughter we’re talking about.”

“Yessir.” Paull rubbed his chin. “The ball is in your man’s court. I’ve given McClure every ounce of freedom I possibly can without showing my hand to the POTUS.”

Carson’s frown deepened. “But is that going to be enough, Dennis?”

“I’d be lying if I said I knew for sure, sir. But you and McClure go
back quite a ways, from what you tell me, and you’ve said he’s the best man for the job.”

“And I stand by that,” the president-elect said stiffly.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Paull went on, “my agent agrees with you.”

“The only thing that’s going to make me feel better is the safe return of my daughter.”

There was a sudden noise outside, and both men went completely still. Paull held up a finger, crossed to the door, pulled it open quickly. One of the cleaning personnel was turning a corner. When he was out of sight, Paull ducked back into the men’s room, shook his head in the negative.

“I had to deliver Yukin into the POTUS’s hands,” Paull said. “I had the evidence against Mikilin, and I gave it to the POTUS before he left for Moscow. I attended a celebration of sorts following the POTUS’s return. He’s got the Russian president in his back pocket now, so does he demand exports from RussOil, as I suggested? Does he forge a pact to create a joint strategic uranium reserve, as I also suggested? No, of course not. Instead, he’s spent the ammunition I gave him obtaining Yukin’s promise to back the POTUS when he makes his final national-policy address to the nation. In it, he’s going to charge that the government has direct evidence that Beijing is funding E-Two, and that the First American Secular Revivalists are, in fact, a front for E-Two. And where d’you think that bogus evidence will come from? Moscow, of course. And no one will be able to say it’s false.” Paull crossed to the door once again, put his ear to it. Satisfied, he returned to where Carson waited for him. “The POTUS is going to declare war on the missionary secularists of any and every stripe.”

“I want to help you, Dennis, but until Alli is returned to me safe and sound, my hands are tied. As long as there’s a suspicion that either
E-Two or the FASR is behind her abduction, I can’t make a stand against the president.”

“I understand your overriding concern here, sir, but we’ve had a complication.”

Carson’s blue eyes bored into the secretary’s. “What kind of a complication?”

“The men I sent to keep McClure safe were compromised.”

He’d caught the president-elect’s full attention.

“Compromised in what way?”

“The POTUS’s people gave them orders to terminate.”

A deathly silence overtook them. “Jack’s safe?”

“Yessir, he is.”

“I don’t want another incident like that,” Carson said. “Am I being clear?”

Paull stiffened. He knew a rebuke when he heard one, and this one was well deserved. “Absolutely, sir.” Somewhere along the line, his careful security net had been breached. He had to find out where with all possible haste.

Carson stepped away, regarded his pale, lined face in the mirror, then turned around. “Dennis, if the POTUS got on to your men, then he knows. Jack’s not the only one in terrible danger. We are, too.”

“Yessir.” Paull nodded. “That’s the goddamned truth of it.”

33

It had been a long time since Jack woke up with a splitting headache. He clambered out of bed with the unusual care of a mountain climber with vertigo. Crawling into the shower, he turned on the cold water full-blast so that no one would hear him screaming.

Ten minutes later, when Nina called, he had crawled out of the muck of the sea and had grown a spinal cord. He figured by the time she showed up, he had a chance of being halfway human.

Still, he insisted on driving them over to the All Around Town bakery. The day was cool but sunny, which made a welcome change of pace. But according to AccuWeather, there was another front coming in that wasn’t afraid of dumping three inches of rain or something worse on them.

He was in no mood to talk, but soon enough he noticed Nina repeatedly glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.

Finally, she ventured an opinion on his physical state. “You look like crap.”

“That’s what a week without sleep will do to you.” He eyed her speculatively. She was dressed in a gray flannel suit over a cream-colored cashmere sweater. “On the other hand, you look as fresh as a plate of sushi.”

“And just as cool.” Nina laughed. “I’ll bet good money you were thinking that.”

“Actually,” Jack said, “I was thinking about what we’ll do if Joachim Tolkan hasn’t shown up from his sad trip to Miami Beach. Or, even worse, if the story he fed Oscar was a lie.”

“Since when did you become a glass-half-empty guy?”

“Since last night,” Jack said, more to himself than to her.

“What happened?”

“My ex happened,” Jack said bitterly.

“I’m sorry, Jack.” Nina put a hand briefly over his. “I once tried to get back with an old boyfriend. All that did was make me realize why we broke up in the first place.”

Wanting to get off the subject of exes, Jack said, “I grew up around here. A lot of memories, good and bad. Mysteries, too.”

“What kind of mysteries?”

“A double murder up at McMillan Reservoir, for one.”

“It went unsolved?”

Jack nodded. “Not only that, I remember there was no info at all on who was killed.”

“That
is
odd,” Nina acknowledged.

Jack turned a corner. “Then there was Ian Brady.”

“Who was he?”

“No one knew who he was or where he came from. But he had a huge amount of juice—too much, I’d say, for a local drug dealer. He was supplying heroin, God alone knows what else. Other suppliers were caught or killed, but not Brady. No one could lay a finger on him.”

There was a sporty cabernet-colored Mercedes coupe parked in front of the All Around Town bakery, and Jack took this as a good sign. The bell rang as they walked in, and there was Oscar behind the counter.

“Boss just got here,” he said as soon as he saw them enter. “Wait right there.” He disappeared into the back. A moment later, he returned with a man whose only genetic connection with his father was
his olive-gray complexion. He was tall and slim, dapper as his dad, though.

His expression was quizzical, curious, free from his father’s dark guile. “Oscar said you wanted to see me.”