Viking Bay (23 page)

37
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By the time Kay got home, Jessica had left for school. Two ships passing in the night—except one ship had left a message for the other, a Post-it note on the refrigerator door: “If you have time, it would be nice if you could pick up a few things from the store.” This guilt-inducing sentence was followed by a list of all the healthy foods her daughter wanted her to purchase.

Kay went into her bedroom, set the alarm for noon, stripped off her jeans, and fell into bed. When the alarm went off a couple of hours later, she felt like her head was stuffed with cotton as a result of sleep deprivation. She took a quick shower, put on clean jeans and a T-shirt, and went to the store and purchased everything on Jessica's list plus a couple of other items her daughter wouldn't approve of, like Oreo cookies and beer nuts.

After she restocked the shelves and the freezer, it was time to leave for K Street. She put a note where her daughter's note had been. “May have to work late. Call you later.” She hesitated, then added, “Love you. Kay.”

—

KAY WALKED INTO
Callahan's office at exactly three p.m. She had many faults, but tardiness was not one of them. Callahan was once more dressed in a suit and looking as if he hadn't slept any more than she had, but he seemed alert and cheerful. Eli wasn't there.

“Are we going to wait for Eli?” she asked.

“Let's give him a few minutes,” Callahan said. “You want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

Callahan poured them coffee, adding cream and about six pounds of sugar to his cup. He was just handing Kay her cup when Eli walked into the office.

“You want some coffee?” Callahan asked, not saying that he was glad that Eli had decided to join them.

“No, I'm fine,” Eli said. He opened his mouth to say something else—and Kay thought that he might have planned a little speech about why he had decided to return—but then he changed his mind and didn't say anything more.

Callahan dropped into the chair behind his cluttered desk and said, “Okay. Here's what we're going to do unless you two have a better idea. First, Anna Mercer. Homeland is going to be encouraged to look very hard for her.”

There it was again, Kay thought: Callahan's special connection to Homeland. “What reason will you give Homeland to encourage them?” she asked.

“Finley,” Callahan said, “was a dangerous hacker who had a record for busting into a Pentagon database. Mercer is ex-CIA. Homeland will be told that Finley and Mercer were connected, and it's imperative we find out what they were doing. The fact that Finley's dead and she's disappeared off the face of the earth shows she's up to something.

“Then we're going to assume she's living in the United Kingdom. That may be a bad assumption, but we have to start somewhere. Homeland, working with Scotland Yard and MI6 and whoever else they work with over there, will be asked to look for single women, approximately forty years of age, who've bought a house in the one- to two-million-dollar range.”

“You gotta be kidding!” Kay said. “That list is going to be tremendously long. I mean, a million-dollar house isn't
that
big a deal. I'll bet there will be thousands of women buying million-dollar homes in the U.K. in the next two or three months. And you're talking England, Wales, Scotland, and I guess Ireland. I mean . . .”

“I realize all that, Hamilton,” Callahan said, “but we have to start somewhere. And if they find a single woman buying an expensive house, they'll be able to do background checks, and if the woman is somebody real, she'll have a history. There will be marriage records, property records of previous homes she's owned, tax records, scholastic records. There's no way Mercer will have been able to build a background that will be deep enough for her to have a completely documented history. So that's the plan: find single gals in their forties buying expensive homes, and then start pulling the string to see if the woman is real.”

“But—” Kay started to say.

“The other thing is, I had someone inventory the furniture in Mercer's house in Arlington, and I'm guessing that when she furnishes her home, she'll buy some of the same brands of furniture she's bought in the past. And also maybe a cat. She's always had a cat.”

Kay groaned. “But what if she's not living in the U.K.? What if she decides to rent for a year or two instead of buying property? What if she gets somebody to buy the property for her so it's not in her name? And a fucking cat? You gotta be shittin' me. Half the single women on the planet own a cat.”

Callahan's response to all her objections was one he'd used before: “Hey, if you got a better idea, I'm all ears.”

When Kay just shook her head, Callahan said, “Okay. Then that's it for now. We'll just have to wait for a while to see what Homeland and the Brits come up with, and in the meantime, we've got other irons in the fire. For one thing, Mercer was working an op in Liberia that she didn't finish before she split and—”

“Wait a minute!” Kay said. “What about Sterling?”

“Don't worry about Sterling. I'll take care of him.”

“You mean, you're going to kill him.”

Somebody had to say the word
kill
and quit pretending they were discussing some other, more benign, solution.

“Hamilton, listen to me,” Callahan said. “Sterling is never going to go to jail or pay in any other way for what he did. For one thing, we can't prove he killed Ara Khan. We can't investigate a murder that occurred in Afghanistan. And if we connect Sterling to the stolen fifty million, I can't take him to court. I can't talk about what we were trying to do in Ghazni Province, and I sure as hell can't talk about where the money came from. I'm also going to ask Sterling where he put his share of the money. I know he won't know where Anna is and where she put her money, but maybe I can find out where he stashed his.”

“And you're going to do this personally?” Kay said.

“Yes. I can't ask somebody working for me to kill and torture a U.S. citizen, particularly when the man's death has nothing to do with national security. This isn't about national security, not at this point. It's about payback. It's about revenge.”

Kay shook her head. “Callahan, look at yourself. You couldn't run fifty yards without collapsing. Maybe twenty or thirty years ago you were a real badass, but you're in no condition to take on a guy like Sterling. He's not only in better physical shape than you, he also runs a company that employs people who were trained to kill by the U.S. military.”

Callahan opened his mouth to protest, but before he could, Kay said, “I'll take care of Sterling. You've been training me for this sort of thing, and although I don't know this for a fact, I'm willing to bet that I've killed more people than you have.”

Kay was referring to four drug dealers she'd killed in Miami and two more in Mexico.

“She's right, Thomas,” Dolan said. “And I'll help her.”

“No, you won't,” Kay said. “You need to help Callahan find Anna
Mercer. If I need any kind of equipment or personnel support, I'll let Callahan know, but I'm doing this on my own.”

Callahan, the stubborn bastard, shook his head.

“Callahan,” Kay said, “this is the kind of thing you hired me for, and we both know it. Let me do my job.”

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Anna Mercer's head hurt as if a blacksmith were pounding on it with a ball-peen hammer. It hurt so bad she couldn't even localize the pain and was unable to tell if it was coming from her chin, her cheeks, or her nose. She reached for the button to call the nurse and ask for more medication, but stopped before she pressed it. No, she'd endure the pain, at least a while longer. She was terrified of becoming addicted to pain medication; she'd just heard too many stories of people becoming addicts and their lives falling apart after surgery. But maybe it had been a mistake to have all the surgeries performed at once.

After she arrived in Geneva from New York, she immediately took a cab to the clinic she'd chosen on the outskirts of the city. It was a lovely place: ivy-covered brick walls, a breathtaking view of Lake Léman, large wooded areas with walking trails, and a spa that offered every amenity. It was surrounded by a high stone wall so the patients wouldn't be concerned about outsiders seeing them walking around with bandages on their noses and purple and yellow bruises all over their faces.

She'd selected the clinic when she was developing her disappear-forever plan. It was horrendously expensive and she could have had the surgeries performed in any number of places that were cheaper, but she'd selected it because of its reputation for protecting the privacy of its clients, many of whom were celebrities. When it came to the surgeries, privacy was much more important to her than money.

She met with her primary doctor the day after her arrival and spent
three days deciding what sort of face she wanted to live with for the rest of her life. She'd always thought that her chin was a bit small and her nose too sharp, so those flaws would be remedied. Her cheekbones were good but could be enhanced a bit, and then, of course, it would be necessary to do the work around the eyes and under the chin to minimize the signs of forty-five years of living. The final result—at least in the three-dimensional pictures she was shown—was marvelous. Not only would she be better- and younger-looking, but the most important thing was that she wouldn't look like Anna Mercer.

She wouldn't know, however, if the actual finished product would match the pictures for almost a month; it would take that long for the swelling to go down and for wounds from the surgery to heal. She needed to be completely healed before she left the secluded grounds of the clinic because she was planning to go straight to Luxembourg to have her final identity documents prepared—passport, driver's license, credit cards, et cetera—and she wanted the pictures on the documents to match her new face. The cost to begin a new life—the surgeries, staying at the clinic for a month, preparation of flawless identity documents—was going to be close to eight hundred thousand dollars, and worth every penny to keep Thomas Callahan from finding her.

She didn't really feel bad about what she'd done—maybe she should, but she didn't. Did that make her a sociopath? She didn't think so—but the truth was, the only thing she really felt bad about was Scarlett. She certainly didn't feel bad about the Khans. When Callahan had devised his grand plan to go after the lithium in Afghanistan, the first thought she'd had was not whether Callahan's plan would work. No. The first thought she'd had was: The Khans were going to get rich! Why should a corrupt, opium-growing politician and his daughter benefit and not her? The only thing she had to show after serving her country for a quarter century was her little house in Arlington, and yet instead of Callahan rewarding her, he was going to make a couple of foreigners multimillionaires.

She wasn't going to agonize over what she'd done. While she was healing, she would find a new home—if she could just get past the pain and concentrate. She had decided she wanted to live within driving distance of London, and she wanted waterfront property; she'd never been able to afford waterfront property in the past. She didn't need a home with five or six bedrooms and a large family room—she had no family and no intention of starting one. What she wanted was a place that had large, open rooms—high ceilings, lots of windows—hardwood floors, a modern kitchen, an enormous master bedroom, roomy bathrooms, a huge walk-in closet, fireplaces in both the bedroom and the great room, and a cute room for an office. She could see the place clearly in her mind's eye—and she could hardly wait to begin decorating it.

She'd write down her criteria, find a reputable real estate agent, and have the agent begin the hunt. In a month, she wanted to step off a plane at Heathrow and drive immediately to the home she planned to purchase. What she was
not
going to do was worry about Callahan finding her. She was not going to second-guess herself, worrying that she may have made some sort of mistake. She'd done everything she could to avoid being found, and she would trust that what she'd done was sufficient. Yes, she'd focus on finding a lovely new place to live.

She opened her laptop and found a U.K. real estate site, but then closed her eyes as another wave of pain washed over her. Maybe she should call the nurse. As she lay with her eyes closed, she wondered if Nathan Sterling was feeling any pain yet. She certainly hoped so; it was really Sterling's fault that Scarlett was dead.

39
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Kay watched from her car as Nathan Sterling stopped his Cadillac Escalade at the main gate of his company's corporate headquarters. He showed the guard his ID, something that Kay was sure was totally unnecessary, as the guard certainly recognized one of the big bosses—but Sterling was probably following procedures that he had mandated for all people entering the facility.

C&S Logistics had three hundred acres in Marion County, West Virginia, the land purchased with money obtained from their investors—investors who, at this point, were probably disappointed with the company's lackluster financial performance. A chain-link fence surrounded the property and trees along the perimeter had been left standing to block the view of folks driving past. Kay could see surveillance cameras mounted on fence posts, and she imagined the cameras were monitored from the guardhouse near the main gate.

Aerial photographs provided by Callahan—she had no idea how Callahan had obtained the photos—showed that behind the fence were training areas, including obstacle courses and firing ranges, a barrack, a mess hall, and a two-story office complex with antennae and satellite dishes sprouting from the roof. There were large metal sheds for vehicles, a helicopter pad, and a number of small concrete buildings that she guessed were arsenals for weapons and contained fuel and explosives. She didn't really care what was in the buildings, however, as she had no intention of attempting to breach Sterling's headquarters.

She'd been in West Virginia for three days watching Sterling, and the only reason she'd followed him from his home to his headquarters
this morning was to confirm that he was sticking to his routine. Each of the three days she'd been watching him, he left his house at six a.m. and didn't return to his home until about seven-thirty or eight p.m., as he stopped each night at one of the local restaurants for dinner.

Considering the nature of his business, Kay was worried that he could leave at any time, take a trip to D.C. to round up more clients or go someplace overseas where his people were working.

After Sterling passed through the company's main gate, Kay started up her car and headed toward Fairmount, West Virginia, where she was meeting a man. The route to Fairmount took her right by Sterling's house. The house was in a new development that had huge brick Colonial-style homes—none less than five thousand square feet—each home sitting on its own three- to five-acre lot. It would take a man half a day on a sit-down lawn mower to cut the grass at some of the places. The other thing about the homes in the development was that each one sat on a small hill, giving the houses the appearance of medieval castles overlooking their fiefdoms. Kay wondered if the hills where the houses were situated were natural or if they'd been created. Whatever the case, Kay had no idea why Sterling, who lived alone, would want to own such a large house.

According to the dossier provided by Callahan, Sterling had divorced his wife of twenty-five years soon after he was forced to retire from the army. Apparently, the wife had been something nice to have hanging on his arm when he thought he still had a shot at being a general, but he shed himself of her four months after he left the service. He was also estranged from his two grown children, a boy and a girl. Phone records showed that until two months earlier he'd frequently called a forty-year-old divorcée who lived in nearby Clarksburg, West Virginia, but was no longer calling her.

The impression Kay had of Sterling when she met him in Afghanistan and they argued over whether she'd be permitted to have a gun was that he was an arrogant prick with a low opinion of women. She
wouldn't be surprised if this contributed to his breaking up with the lady from Clarksburg. Maybe she was reading too much into a single encounter—but she didn't think so.

She had no intention of misjudging Sterling, however. He may have been almost sixty, about Callahan's age, but unlike Callahan, he was in excellent shape. He trained with his mercenaries, jogged and lifted weights almost every day, and he looked as if he weighed the same as he did when he graduated from West Point. His scholastic records also showed that he wasn't a dummy—he graduated in the top ten percent of his class—and, like most high-ranking military officers, he'd gone on to receive postgraduate training. Lastly, he was an excellent shot with both a rifle and a pistol, and he always went about armed.

She would not underestimate Nathan Sterling.

—

KAY DROVE
into the parking lot of a supermarket called Shop 'n Save in Fairmount. She was driving a long-body, white panel van, the type painters and plumbers tend to use. On the roof of the van was an extension ladder, but it was just for show. Kay had no intention of using the ladder. She checked her watch. It was seven-thirty. She was right on time.

At seven forty-five, a vintage 1984 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, maroon in color with a massive chrome grille, parked next to Kay's van. A serious-looking little guy in his sixties with a face like a prune—sour and wrinkled—stepped from the Cadillac. He was wearing a black trilby hat and black-framed glasses, the type with lenses that change color depending on the light. In his right hand was a small gym bag.

He opened the passenger-side door of Kay's van; his legs were so short it took some effort for him to get up into the passenger seat. Probably because of his size and the hat, Kay thought he looked like a onetime jockey, although she was pretty sure his primary occupation had never been riding the ponies.

“You Betty?” he asked Kay.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I'm Archie.”

Yeah, right, Kay thought. We're both a couple of comic book characters.

“You got the two grand?” Archie asked.

She pulled a roll from the front pocket of her jeans and handed it to him.

“Okay. Let's go,” Archie said, for some reason thinking he was in charge.

Kay drove back to Sterling's place and stopped in front of a black, wrought-iron gate that barred the entrance to a long driveway that ran from the main road to Sterling's home. On a post near the gate was a box that contained a doorbell button, a mesh screen like you see on intercom systems, and a keypad. If visitors came, they could push the doorbell button and tell Sterling they were there, and Sterling would open the gate from inside his house. A second option was he could give trusted visitors the code to the keypad to open the gate. The way Sterling opened the gate, however, was with a remote control he kept in his car, and Kay was betting—or hoping—that the same remote opened the door to his three-car garage.

Archie told Kay to turn the van around so the rear of the van was pointed at the gate, then he and Kay crawled between the front seats and into the back of the van. Archie then opened the van's double doors and from his gym bag he took out a device that looked like a TV remote, except it was about twice the width of TV remotes that Kay had used. He jacked a cable into one end of the remote and then jacked the other end of the cable into a black box about the size of a smartphone. He pointed the remote at Sterling's gate and Kay saw red lights start to run across the screen on the smartphone-size box. Thirty seconds later, maybe less, Sterling's gate started to open. Kay knew from watching Sterling that the gate would automatically close in ninety seconds.

Archie closed the van's back doors, disconnected the cable from the remote, and handed it to Kay. He dumped the cable and the other device into his gym bag. Mission accomplished.

They drove back to the Shop 'n Save parking lot in silence and Archie stepped out of the van. Before he closed the door, Kay said something that probably didn't need to be said, as Callahan had vouched for the little guy, but she said it anyway: “You know what will happen if you talk to anybody about this.”

Archie sneered at her, slammed the door shut, and strutted back to his Cadillac.

Kay couldn't help but smile.

—

KAY DROVE BACK
to Sterling's house, pointed the remote at the gate, the gate opened, and she drove through it. She figured the best thing to do at this point was to be both quick and direct—there was no point in sneaking around.

Sterling had two neighbors, one to the north, one to the south, but because all the homes sat on such large lots, the neighbors' houses were at least half a mile away. If a neighbor happened to look out, he or she would see Kay driving through the gate in the type of vehicle a contractor might use. Hopefully, the neighbor would then think that Sterling had given the contractor the access code to open the gate. Most likely, however, nobody would even see her open the gate and go up the driveway.

When she reached the top of the driveway, she pointed the remote at Sterling's garage and smiled when the garage door opened. She had a backup plan if the remote hadn't worked on the garage door, but now she wouldn't need to use it. Next, she just sat in her car and waited to see if an alarm would sound. None did, which is what she'd expected.

The same security company provided security for all the houses in Sterling's development. In the basic security plan, which it appeared Sterling had based on the size of his monthly bill, all the exterior doors
were alarmed, including the door that permitted entry to the house from the attached garage. The roll-up garage door, however, was not alarmed. In addition to alarms on the doors, the windows on the first floor of the house were alarmed, and inside the house there were weight-sensitive detectors located beneath the floor in strategic places. The concept was that if an intruder was able to get into the house by crawling through a window on one of the upper floors, and if the intruder weighed more than a house cat, he would set off one of the floor alarms.

If the alarm system was set, or “armed,” the owner had sixty seconds to disarm the system after he entered the house by punching a six-digit code into a keypad. If the system wasn't disarmed in sixty seconds, then a Klaxon would go off, making a god-awful racket, and a signal would be sent to the security company. The Klaxon would sound for ten minutes; with luck, the noise alone would scare off any intruders and alert the neighbors. At the same time, the security company would call the house to see if the owner had accidentally set off the alarm; if no one answered the landline in the house, the security company would call the owner on his cell phone and simultaneously call the cops. It usually took the cops about fifteen or twenty minutes to show up, and when they did, they'd walk around outside the house looking for signs that someone had broken in.

Kay wasn't concerned, however, about the Klaxon going off or the cops coming, because she had no intention of entering the house and attempting to disarm the security system. What Kay was worried about were cameras. If the homeowner wanted to pay the price, the basic security package could be upgraded to include cameras installed both inside and outside the house. If an alarm sounded, the security company would look at the cameras to see if there was an intruder in the house, and the cameras would have a record of everything they'd videoed in the last twenty-four hours. The security cameras could also be monitored by the homeowner via the homeowner's smartphone or laptop.

But based on the size of Sterling's security bill, Kay was pretty sure he only had the basic package and didn't have cameras installed. She hoped. She put on a baseball cap and sunglasses and then, like an old-time bandit, tied a bandanna around her head to obscure the lower part of her face. She stepped from the van and walked along the front of the house checking for cameras. She didn't see any, and she would have, because cameras installed by a security company were usually very obvious; the company
wanted
potential intruders to see the cameras.

Kay had one final task before she left. She walked into the garage, and the first thing she did was check for cameras, and again she didn't see any. The center bay of the garage was where Sterling parked his Escalade, and it was empty. In the bay closest to the house was a BMW Z3 sports car, the top down, a set of golf clubs in the abbreviated backseat. The third bay of the garage contained a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a snowblower, storage lockers, a workbench, and a rolling cabinet containing a bunch of tools.

What Kay didn't see was a great place to hide.

Kay left the garage, got back into the van, and used the remote to close the garage door. Her reconnaissance of Sterling's place was complete; she was now ready to kill the man. She started the van and drove back toward the main gate, which opened automatically as she approached it, and turned in the direction of the motel where she was staying. She could have taken care of Sterling that night but decided not to, for one simple reason: the meteorologists were predicting rain tomorrow and rain would be good; she just hoped the weather bozos were right for once.

—

BACK AT HER MOTEL,
she called Callahan and gave him an update. When she finished, he said, “Are you sure you're going to be able to do this, Hamilton?” Kay hung up without answering.

It was too early for dinner and she was feeling restless, so she changed
and went for a three-mile run. As she was running, it began to rain. Good. She took a shower, dried her hair, and changed back into jeans, a simple white pullover sweater, and her running shoes—practically formal attire for dining in rural West Virginia. She opted for a chain restaurant that was within walking distance of her motel. Before leaving her room, she put on a baseball cap and a lightweight jacket because the rain had picked up, which again was good as far as she was concerned.

She ordered a pre-dinner martini; she wasn't exactly celebrating—it was too early to celebrate—but she was feeling pretty good about the way things were going. She was nervous, of course, because something could always go wrong, but she wasn't afraid. She had confidence in her skills.

What she
was
worried about was the question Callahan had asked her: Would she be able to kill Nathan Sterling when the time came? When she'd killed the drug dealer Marco Alvarez and three of Marco's men in Miami, it had been an act of self-defense: They were shooting at her, but she shot them first. They started the fight; she just finished it. She'd never been in a situation, however, where she'd
executed
someone.