Redheads (42 page)

“What about the rest of this stuff?”

Westfield reached into the bag and pulled out a man’s wig and a pair of sunglasses. There was also a prepaid cell phone with a wireless earpiece, a pair of compact binoculars, and a Timex watch.

“Don’t tell me we’re going to synchronize watches,” Westfield said.

Before the end of the night, they did.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Julissa stood on the parade ground in front of the castle gates. Behind and above her, the cannons of the Half Moon Battery kept watch over Old Town. She used the high-powered lens of her camera to look down the Royal Mile as she walked, stopping now and then to actually take a picture. Summer crowds of tourists strolled Lawnmarket Street with their shopping bags, or stood in groups around kilted bagpipers. Men were assembling a bandstand just below the castle walls; banners fluttered on every lamppost from the castle to Hollyrood Palace, a mile down the ridge. Behind that, the extinct volcano Arthur’s Seat echoed the castle in ridges of exposed rock and green grass and brambles of heather.

Julissa wore a blonde wig, black jeans, a tight-fitting sweater and leather boots with good soles. Other than the camera, she carried a small black backpack. She expected she might be running today. She looked at the hands of her watch. It was ten seconds to one o’clock.

She counted down the last five seconds. When she reached zero, an artillery piece mounted high in the castle fired with a sharp crack. This was the One O’clock Gun, fired daily through the decades so ships at anchor in the Firth of Forth could set their clocks.

It wasn’t just the ships that set their clocks according to the gun.

She was on the south side of Lawnmarket, at the traffic circle in front of a coal-blackened Scottish kirk. She picked up her camera and looked across the traffic circle and down the High Street, focusing on the door to Ensign Ewart pub. Three and a half minutes later, which was about average, Howard Stark, III came out the door, stepped around a crowd of tourists, and walked down the High Street towards his offices.

Julissa cupped her hand over her mouth and spoke into her wireless mike.

“He’s on his way.”

“Got it,” Chris said. “Will you have time?”

“Just.”

She shoved the camera into her backpack, and ran.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Four minutes after one o’clock, Westfield walked out of the darkness of James Court, a narrow alleyway running between the old buildings pressed nearly wall to wall along this part of the Royal Mile. Chris was at his side. Ten steps from the end of the alley, they saw Stark pass on the sidewalk. They came out of the close and fell in behind him, walking fifty feet away. A couple pushing a child in a stroller was between them for half a block, then stopped at the window of a pub. Chris and Westfield stepped around them and closed the gap just as Stark reached a red-painted door and raised a ring of keys. The glass transom over the door was painted in gold script:
Stark McCallister Fanning & Stalker, Counselors at Law
.

Westfield was wearing a light summer jacket and reached into his pocket to feel the syringe. He held it in his fingers and used his thumbnail to pop the plastic cap off the tip of the needle. He looked at Chris and nodded.

Stark found the key—a piece of wrought iron that may have been hammered on a blacksmith’s anvil in the eighteenth century—and slid it into the keyhole. As he turned it in the lock, Chris stepped around to Stark’s right shoulder and Westfield came to his left. Pressing up to Stark, Westfield used his left hand to jab the needle into Stark’s neck, pushing the plunger with his thumb. Just as quickly, he pocketed the syringe, took the key from the unlocked door and pocketed that. Then he and Chris had their hands under Stark’s armpits and they moved him through the open door. The building had a whiskey shop at the street level and the door through which they’d stepped opened on to a stair landing that would lead up to the law firm’s offices. Past the offices, on the sixth floor, was a vacant space under construction. Stark jerked twice in a weak attempt to get away, then went limp. They had to hold him up to keep him on his feet. The stairs were narrow and barely wide enough to fit the three of them abreast.

Westfield looked at Chris, who put his hand to his ear and spoke to Julissa.

“We’re in the stairs and on our way up.”

Over his own earpiece, Westfield heard Julissa’s response. He could hear the wind blowing across her microphone and her voice was nearly breathless.

“I’ll be there,” she said.

Chapter Fifty

Julissa jogged across Lawnmarket at a crosswalk, then wove through the crowd until she got to the Ensign Ewart. She walked down the steps into the sunken pub, nodded at the bartender, passed the row of men on stools sipping their pints, and headed for the ladies’ room. She stepped inside, closed the door behind her and turned on the light. There was a door to a janitor’s closet crammed between the tilted toilet bowl and the wall. She opened this door, stepped over a mop bucket and into the dank, chemical-smelling space, closed the closet door, and in the darkness fumbled until she found the handle for the sliding door at the back. This opened onto a dimly lit stair landing. She slid the door shut, then bounded up the stairs, using the hand rail as a pivot point at each landing so she could swing around and start up the next flight of steps without losing any forward momentum. She hurtled up the stairs to the fifth floor without meeting anyone.

At the top, she stood on the banister, leaned over the empty space above the descending stairs, and unlatched the dormer window that looked north, towards the Scott Monument and the Firth of Forth. The weighted window slid two feet and jammed, but it was enough. She jumped and got her head and arms through, then found finger holds on the underside of the sill. She pulled herself out and stood on the angled slate roof. She ran east, parallel to the Royal Mile but five floors up, running just past the roof’s ridgeline. She vaulted over a cluster of Tudor-style clay pot chimneys, ran down the mossy slate slope and leapt over the five foot gap where Milnes Court cut between the old buildings. She landed a foot away from the edge of the moss-slick edge, but her boots had good traction and she never even paused. She ran up the steep incline of the new roof, over the crest and down towards the dark crevasse where James’ Court close made its passage between this building and the next. This was an easier jump; the next roof was newer and had a rougher texture to its slate so she could run without fear of sliding over the edge and off a hundred foot drop to paving stones.

She stopped at the skylight she had marked with a blue chalk X two nights before and knelt down, breathing hard. No more than a minute had passed from the time she last spoke to Chris and Aaron. Now she keyed her mike and spoke to them again, her voice breathless as she gasped for air.

“I’m at the skylight.”

“We’re almost to the landing,” Chris said.

“I’ll be there.”

Julissa took off her backpack, reached inside it, and took out a diamond-bitted glass cutter and a plastic suction grip bar. She spat on the suction cups, stuck them to the middle of the skylight, then used the wheel of the diamond cutter to etch along the lead soldered edge of one of the skylight panes. When she had gone all the way around, she braced her knees on the roof and pulled hard on the suction handle. The sound of the pane breaking loose reminded her of stepping on a frozen puddle. She lifted the pane free and set it gently on the uphill side of the skylight so it would not slide away. Then she pulled the release trigger on her suction grip, put it back into the backpack, and pulled on a pair of heavy-duty leather gloves. She looked at her watch. It was 1:06 p.m. Exactly two minutes had passed from the time Chris and Aaron had stepped out of James Court in pursuit of Stark.

She shouldered her pack, grabbed on to the frame of the skylight, and lowered herself until she was dangling by her arms. She could feel the sharp remnants of the glass against the leather palms of her gloves. The floor was six feet beneath her. She let go and dropped, landing on her feet and falling to a crouch so she hit the wooden floor with almost no sound at all.

They’d discovered the top floor of this building was being remodeled. Stacks of clean sheetrock took up one corner. The walls were bare studs with exposed electrical conduits. There was a table saw and a water-cooled tile saw. Julissa stood, turned around quickly to be sure the work crew was truly gone, then walked to the door. There were three sets of deadbolt locks, all of which could be opened from the inside without a key. She flicked them back one by one, then pulled the door open.

Westfield and Chris were coming up the last flight of stairs, supporting Stark in between them.

“You okay?” Chris said.

“I’m fine. Anyone see you?”

“Nobody on the stairs,” said Westfield. “I can’t say whether anyone saw us on the sidewalk.”

They brought Stark into the room and lowered him onto the unvarnished wooden floor. Julissa closed the door behind them and locked it.

“Here,” Julissa said. She handed out the black ski masks from her backpack. They each put one on. Westfield and Chris then slipped on their gloves.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Westfield said. He knelt next to Stark, took a digital recorder from his pocket, and pressed
Record
.

Chapter Fifty-One

In two days of searching the regular Internet and the FBI resources Julissa could access, they had been able to learn next to nothing about the contents of Westfield’s syringes. The side of each glass syringe bore nothing but a Cyrillic stamp:
Cерия-64
. Each tube was marked with metric graduation lines, and each contained exactly fifteen milliliters of a perfectly clear liquid. After spending half an hour figuring out how to type in Cyrillic, Chris translated the word as “batch”. Nothing on the Internet gave any hint as to what Batch-64 might be.

The FBI had a little more. There was an advisory to the field offices warning counterintelligence agents to look out for something named Batch-64 or Lot-64. An unnamed source privy to the contents of Russian diplomatic pouches advised that Batch-64 was being delivered to embassies and consulates. The source claimed it was a hypnotic drug. Chris had been hoping for an instruction manual, but all they found was this.

Now he was watching the attorney twitch and writhe on the floor. Stark had never been entirely unconscious. His eyes were open but unfocused. If he could see, he probably wasn’t seeing anything in the room.

“Where are we, buddy?” Westfield asked.

“Ensign Ewart,” Stark said. It was almost a question.

“That’s right.”

“I usually have a pint of ale at lunch.”

“I know.”

“Just a pint. I think I went and had a bit more.”

“You did, but that’s okay,” Westfield said. He looked up at Chris and nodded.

“You’re the agent for Lothian Lines,” Chris said, just jumping into it.

“Our first shipping line, that’s right.”

“Who’s we?”

“My father was the agent before me. His father before him. And so on.”

“Who owns it?”

“We don’t have a name for it.”

“But you work for it?” Julissa asked.

“Yes.”

“All the Starks have?” she said.

“All the Starks, always.”

“Where does it live?”

“Edinburgh.”

“Where?”

The man’s hands groped the air, gripping nothing, then holding on to nothing tightly and carefully as he brought his hands to his lips.

“You spill any?” Westfield asked.

“A little.”

“You want me to get you another one?”

“That’d be good.”

“The thing that owns Lothian Lines, where does it live?” Julissa asked.

“It’s not just a thing. He’s not just a thing.”

“What is he, then?” Julissa said.

The man shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s old. Not old like a man. Old like a rock, or…” He trailed off, maybe searching for the word.

“Or what?” Julissa asked.

“Like a fossil. Like something you’d dig up.”

“Are there others?” Chris asked. “Others like him?”

“He was looking for them. He’d go to the old cities and look for them. Maybe he thought he’d be able to smell them, or just feel them with his thoughts if they were nearby.”

“Did he find any?” Chris asked.

“I don’t know. I take care of his finances.”

“Okay,” Westfield said. “But where do we find him? We want to talk to him.”

“You don’t talk to him. He talks to you. Or through you. He can reach out and touch you.” The man touched his left temple. “Here.”

They all looked at him in silence. He went on.

“But you don’t want him to do that, touch you that way,” he said. “Especially you.”

He was looking at Julissa when he said this. His eyes focused briefly and then filmed over.

“You know where to find him, though,” Westfield said.

The man was silent, working with his hands in the air. Chris thought that if they were in a bar, he’d be tearing his soaked cardboard coaster to shreds. Maybe that’s what Stark thought he was doing.