Down Among the Dead Men (45 page)

Noone gasps and almost drops right then. Instead, he pushes down on the barrel of the shotgun with his left and swings the knife blindly back-handed at Hoy with his right.

It's a wild, panicky shot because Noone knows now that taking on the Marine is a serious mistake. He should have brought the gun, got up close and disarmed the man before trying a stunt like this.

To Noone's astonishment and relief, he gets lucky: the blade plunges directly into Hoy's left eye. The man jerks spasmodically and makes a low guttural animal noise. Noone can feel Hoy's hot
blood running down his wrist. With his left hand, his own movements clumsy and awkward, Noone takes the shotgun by the barrel and directs it towards the ground while Kenny Hoy twitches underneath him. He doesn't want Hoy to pull the trigger in a reflex spasm.

Noone keeps the knife in Hoy's eye socket until there's no movement and then, satisfied the man is dead, pulls it out.

Noone bends double and tries to control his breathing.

The place on his side where Hoy had caught him hurts like a bastard but he's glad; it'll help him to focus more when the next time comes. After a minute or two his breathing becomes regular. His own phone rings and Noone jumps. He takes the cell out and doesn't recognise the number onscreen. He lets it ring out. There's no one he wants to talk to at the moment.

He stands in the absolute silence of the desert and looks at the dead man in the wheelchair. He still marvels at it; alive a minute or two ago and dead now.

There.

Not there.

It's a magic trick and he's the conjuror.

He is trembling with adrenaline. This is the first kill where he hasn't used the taser and he feels flush, proud that he has brought it off and had the control to finish the job. A fucking
Marine
, dude.

The only blood Noone has on him is on his right hand and wrist. He pockets Hoy's phone, places his shotgun on the floor and hauls Noone off the wheelchair and lets him fall onto the sand. Noone angles his head to let the eye wound bleed out.

Leaving the dead man, Noone finds a rag hanging in the carport next to a broom and uses it to clean up as best he can. With his hands relatively dry he kneels to wipe the blood off the knife in the sand. He stands and replaces it in the sheath.

Noone double-checks the call to the tow truck guy hadn't been made. The screen is blank. Noone switches the phone off and slips it back into his own pocket.

He drags Hoy's chair into the space between the mini-van and the shack. It's a lot cooler here and Noone's conscious of how overheated he's become. He opens the door into the house and finds the fridge. He takes out a can of soda and drains it.

The house is small but as neat as a barrack room on inspection day. The floor is polished concrete and the fixtures designed for a man in a wheelchair. There are no dirty dishes, no piled laundry, nothing out of place. Hoy's Marine background shows through everywhere. An organised man.

Noone walks back to his jeep and brings it onto Hoy's property. He parks it behind the mini-van and out of sight of the sand-covered highway.

He wraps Hoy's head in a beach towel to minimise the mess from the blood and lifts him back onto the wheelchair. Noone takes Hoy to a battered metal shed twenty yards behind the house. The shed is larger than the house. The door is padlocked so Noone goes back into the house and finds the keys hung neatly on a hook at waist height near the rear door.

Inside the shed is a professional-looking set of gym equipment: mostly weights and some specialised stuff that Noone guesses Hoy must have had made for him. Although it's broiling inside there is a huge aircon unit set into one of the walls. Standing against the opposing wall is a jumbo freezer cabinet. Noone had been planning to simply leave Hoy in the shed but the freezer will be perfect.

Noone moves items around inside the freezer to make space and then hauls Hoy's body from the chair and places it inside the cabinet under a layer of frozen meat. He closes the lid. The body won't be missed by anyone who's looking carefully but Noone's not overly concerned. If everything goes to plan he'll only need Hoy's place for less than forty-eight hours.

Noone pushes the wheelchair outside, locks the door of the shed and heads into the house. As he's doing so his phone rings again and this time it's his lawyer, Perot. Noone lets it ring out and then listens to the message. Call me.

Putting the phone back in his pocket he places the wheelchair in the centre of the air-conditioned kitchen and wipes it down with another towel. Apart from a puddle of blood on one edge of the seat it's relatively clean. Noone bundles the bloody towel into the trash.

The wheelchair is a robust-looking machine, with rugged tyres, the seat very similar in appearance to a regular car seat. Underneath is a boxed area that houses the motor and the electronics. There is
also a space for storing items but Noone isn't interested in that. He finds a box cutter in Hoy's pristine garage cum workshop and uses it to carefully slice open the back edge of the seat along the seam. He makes a cut of about eight inches in length. This done, Noone drops to his knees and prises open the leather. Inside the seat is a foam pad. Noone manoeuvres this out through the gap he's opened up and places it on the kitchen floor.

He retrieves the Micro Tavor from the Jeep and places it on top of the pad. If he breaks it down into the two component parts as Gena had demonstrated and lays it diagonally across the foam, it just fits. Using the box cutter, Noone hollows out a space in the yellow foam and places the gun inside. After a few adjustments he gets it to sit in naturally. He replaces the foam padding and gun inside the seat of the wheelchair and stands back to see how it looks.

From the front and sides there's nothing to see. At the back, only the gap where he'd made the cut gives anything away. It takes another ten minutes but Noone finds a sewing kit in one of the kitchen cupboards. Taking his time he carefully sews the gap closed, keeping the thread as close to the raised seam as possible. By the time he's finished it's almost impossible to detect there has been any tampering with the chair.

Noone sits on the wheelchair and switches it on. He can feel the gun beneath his buttocks. He spends twenty minutes driving the chair around Hoy's house. Satisfied that he has control of the chair he parks it in an angle of the hallway, out of view of any of the windows. In Hoy's bedroom there's a battery charger for the chair. Noone brings it into the hallway and hooks it up to the wheelchair.

He's going to have to leave the Micro here overnight but that can't be helped. In any case it keeps it out of trouble.

There's something else he needs from Hoy: the invitation.

Noone had been hoping it'd be propped up on the kitchen counter or some such dopey shit, but it's not there. It takes him five minutes but he eventually finds it in a side drawer of the cabinet next to Hoy's bed. A crisp white envelope and a sheet of card inside. Noone checks the details and replaces it in the drawer. He'll pick it up on Thursday. No sense in keeping any of Hoy's stuff in Santa Monica.

His last task is to move Hoy's mini-van inside the garage. He's hoping that if anyone does call by they'll assume Hoy is out. It's a risk, but it can't be helped.

Noone tidies up any sign he's been inside the house and, satisfied there's nothing that would be discovered by a casual inspection, finds the bathroom. In the bathroom he cleans himself up properly. He takes off his clothes and inspects them carefully, looking for blood or anything suspicious. There's a smear on the side of his shirt so he balls it up and finds a replacement in Hoy's bedroom. He puts his own shirt in the laundry basket. He steps into the shower and washes himself. He dries himself and dresses in his own clothes and Hoy's shirt.

Leaving the bathroom as tidy as he found it, Noone leaves the house, locking the door behind him. He puts Hoy's keys in his pocket. On his way out he throws sand over the bloodstains in the yard.

In the Jeep he's thirty minutes west of Palm Springs when his phone rings once more and this time Noone answers.

It's his lawyer, Perot.

The cops are at his place.

Thirty-Five

Noone, tired and edgy, gets back around seven.

He pulls into the drive and parks on the concrete pan next to a Santa Monica PD cruiser.

'Ben,' says Perot, shaking his hand. Noone reciprocates. Perot glances at his dusty jeans and boots. 'Been hiking?'

'Something like that.' He turns his head in the direction of the police car. 'What's this all about?'

'Cops got a call from one of your neighbours,' says Perot. 'They saw someone acting suspicious, heading up over the back through the park. She thought they were coming from your property so she told the cops to come here. They did and found signs of a forced entry. Nothing taken from what they can see.'

'Why are you here?'

'The Santa Monica PD called you but got no answer. They had my name on file as your lawyer and that was the only contact number they had for you. I called you and thought you might need some support.' Perot smiles. 'All part of the service.'

Noone doesn't reply. He's still feeling wary this close to D-day.

'You been inside?'

Perot, following behind, shakes his head. 'Uh-huh, no.'

At the junction with the steel walkway, Noone heads left and down a set of stairs to where a cop is looking closely at the broken lock.

'Mr Noone?' says the cop. Noone nods.

'I'm Patrolman O'Brien. My colleague, Patrolman Vento, is inside. Looks OK but we'd like you to check around and see if anything's gone.'

Noone goes in. The place looks exactly as he'd left it. There's nothing incriminating on the property of any kind other than
a small stash of recreational dope. He walks through each of the rooms and emerges back into the downstairs kitchen area shaking his head.

'Can't see anything missing.'

O'Brien points up at one of the security cameras. 'How about checking your camera feed?'

Noone shakes his head. 'It's not hooked up,' he says. 'Dumb, huh?'

'It happens a lot,' says Vento. 'I suggest you get that fixed as soon as possible, Mr Noone.'

Ten minutes later, after filling out a short incident report form, the cops leave, followed by Perot.

Noone heads straight for his office. He opens his computer and establishes a link with the security camera feed, which is working perfectly. He resets the digital counter to when he left this morning and fast forwards until he finds an image of two men at the door. He watches them smash the lock and then follows their progress around the house. It's clear they've found nothing.

Noone doesn't think it's anyone from Daedalus. It's too clumsy for them. But there's something familiar about one of the burglars and Noone thinks he knows who it is.

Keane.

Right on cue.

Noone smiles and checks his watch. The president will be touching down around now. Noone knows every step of the itinerary. After landing, the president will be taken to a private home in Century City. The place has been loaned by one of the city's biggest agents. It's not the venue for tomorrow night's party, which will be in the Hollywood Hills.

There's one final touch that Noone wants to make to ensure he gets a clear run at the target. When he'd thought of it he could have hugged himself, so perfect was it in its simplicity.

He picks up the phone and dials the number he never thought he'd need to call.

Thirty-Six

Angie's not picking up.

Frank tries all the way back into West Hollywood but gets nowhere.

He leaves a message for her to call. He tells her he's a friend of Ben's from Liverpool.

At the apartment he and Koop don't say much. The cloud of failure is hovering. Koop turns the TV on and switches it to CNN on mute.

'I'm going to get cleaned up,' he says. He flicks a thumb at the TV. 'See if anything happens ahead of schedule.'

While Koop's in the shower, Frank makes another call. On the TV a straw-haired reporter is standing outside a police cordon at LAX. He looks excited.

'Em,' Frank says when Harris picks up. He keeps his voice down but he doesn't really know why.

Em Harris's voice is sleep-clogged. 'Frank,' she says and then pauses. 'Do you know what time it is?'

'Sorry.'

Frank hears a few muffled words. Em has her hand over the phone and is speaking to someone.

'Em?'

'I'm here,' she says after a moment. 'I'm in the living room. You woke us up.'

'How is Linda?'

'She's fine. Look, Frank, you haven't phoned for a chat, have you? I only got to sleep a couple of hours ago. If you imagine you're getting a warm welcome at three in the fucking morning you've got another think coming.'

'I need you to listen to a story,' says Frank. 'It might take a while. But it's business, Em, so pay attention.'

'OK, fire away.'

Frank outlines the events leading up to this moment in time. He leaves out the break-in at Noone's. If the apartment is being bugged it's the only thing he doesn't want them to hear. Pretty much everything else they already know and he wants them to know he's passing it on to Harris, to someone.

When he's finished Em lets out a long low breath. Frank can hear it across the miles, can see the air leaving her lips. On the screen a procession of limousines and police motorcycles sweeps past the cameras in a blaze of red and blue flashing lights. Despite the way the case has gone Frank feels a ludicrous elation at being so close to the centre of power. Is this what it feels like to be American? Is that why they are as they are? The Romans must have felt like this, and the English a hundred years ago.

'You have to take it to Homeland Security, the FBI, someone, Frank. You have no choice. If something happens and you don't make every effort to warn them there'll be . . . well, there'll be trouble.'

'I know,' says Frank. 'The next call I make is to Hagenbaum. But I suspect that what will happen is that I'll be warned off again, this time more seriously. There may even be violence. Daedalus seem to be somewhat maverick when it comes to due process. I need you to know what I think and to have it down tomorrow morning in an MIT report. And if this place is bugged then that saves me the trouble of going through the whole stupid dance again.'