The Blonde (15 page)

Angela walked up to him and unbuckled his belt. She smelled like she’d been in an Italian kitchen all night. There was perfume there, too, something warm and flowery and lush, but beneath that was the scent of garlic and tomatoes and even cigarette smoke.

She was careful not to touch his skin, only leather and buckle and fabric. And then his pants dropped to the floor.

Think, Jack, think.
…

“What if you moved that closer to me? That saddle thing?”

“The Sybian?”

Lightbulb. All of a sudden, the driver’s reference to a “Sybian club” made sense. Clue phone, for Mr. Jack. Line one.

Angela regarded him carefully now. Suspicion was in full bloom. “This isn’t your first time here, is it? Because I specifically requested that—”

“No, no … I’m just slow this late at night.”

She looked at the Sybian, then back at Jack, who was still pinned to the wall with metal clamps and brackets.

“You seem like a nice guy. But I’ve had trouble before. In fact, I was the stone-cold bitch who insisted that they move that thing back a good ten feet, away from the wall. I’m all for the mutual masturbation, up until the point where you catch a hot load in the face.”

What was Jack supposed to say next? That he was nearsighted? The words
mutual masturbation
echoed in his skull. The situation was finally starting to make sense. This wasn’t a whorehouse or a strip joint. This was some kind of swingers club where nobody touched. Angela here wasn’t an employee.
She was a member
Right off work, most likely, from her waitressing gig. Some Italian restaurant. Serving manicotti and ravioli and meatballs and aching to finish her shift so she could sit in a room and hop on an electrically powered dildo-equipped saddle while some strange guy with his pants around his ankles yanked one off. Maybe she’d repeat the process a few times. Was this how the club got around a tilted male/female ratio? Men were good for one pop, maybe two. But women could be repeat customers.

“So I’m going to go over there, okay?” She took a tentative step backward.

“What if I didn’t”—Jack searched for the phrase—“do anything? Just watched, I mean.”

That suggestion, apparently, was as bad as not knowing how to identify the garden-variety Sybian.

“And I’m supposed to what, just watch you staring at me while I come?”

“Then unlock me. I’ll be good.”

“Until you decide to rape me. Uh-uh. No thanks.” She patted his wrist. “Look, I’ve had a long night, and if it’s okay with you, I want to hop on the machine and screw my brains out. If you don’t want to jack off, whatever, at least humor me and pull your dick out. Or if you’ve changed your mind, I’ll go get someone to escort you out of here. You tell me.”

With a flick of her thumbs, her panties slid from her hips, then made their way down her legs. They stopped at her knees.

“So?”

“Thing is,” Jack said. “I’m nearsighted.”

Security Office, the Sheraton

K
owalski found Just for Men hair dye in Room 508, along with a black leather jacket. Can you say
aging, overachieving fuckhead}
Probably out for a jog around Rittenhouse Square this early in the morning. Trying to outrun death. Good luck. Part of Kowalski wanted to stick ar.ound, say hi when he returned. Hey, guess what? All that running didn’t mean dick!
Snap
.

The man’s absence was all the better for Kowalski, of course. But still. The guy should be at home sleeping if he was worried about dying his hair blond. Less stress in your life.

A pair of black jeans from another room, along with a pair of reading glasses from still another—Kowalski nabbed ‘em right from the nightstand in that case, with their sleeping owner two feet away—he was finally ready to say hello to Charles Lee Vincent.

Who didn’t recognize him at all.

“So this is a DHS matter, huh?”

Kowalski smiled nervously, adjusted his glasses with his good hand. Kept his right tucked in the jacket pocket. His wrist was throbbing, and he didn’t want it to give him away.

“If this is the guy we’re looking for, then yes. He assaulted you?”

“He got lucky. If it hadn’t been so late …”

“Of course. But don’t feel bad. This man I’m after is well trained. Got deep with Mossad, did some mercenary work in Afghanistan.”

“Still, I say he got lucky.”

“You feeling okay, Mr. Vincent?”

“I’m fine. But I’m standing here thinking, you look so goddamned familiar. You sure we haven’t met up somewhere else?”

“Pretty sure,” Kowalski said. “Unless you used to be on the force here, because I was out in San Diego. Possible we met at a convention or something.” That sounded vague enough to be true, and wide open enough to send Mr. Vincent here searching his memory bank in the wrong part of the building.

“Yeah, maybe that was it.”

Kowalski asked about Jack Eisley, the guy in the room with the blonde. Vincent didn’t know much: He had his driver’s license and credit-card info on file, so Kowalski was welcome to that. Then Vincent explained how he’d escorted the guy down here, because Eisley claimed to have panic attacks if he was left alone, which seemed like grade-A bullshit to him, but whatever. Not good business to upset a Sheraton customer, so he’d humored him. Brought the guy down to the lobby, had a colleague baby-sit him. Next thing, though, the guy bolted. Probably worried that his wife would find out about the blonde in his room. Like that would do any good. Sooner or later, the cops were going to want him.

“And like I said, we’ve got his stuff on file right here.”

“What do you have in the way of cameras out front? ”

Vincent’s eyes lighted up. “I’m ahead of you.”

After switching over to the backup recorder, Vincent pulled the current digital tape and popped it in the playback machine, then used a large plastic knob to rewind back to 3:00
A.M.,
right around when the cops arrived, he explained. The more he moved the knob to the right, the faster the tape rewound. A few minutes went by, Vincent eased up on the knob, and then yeah, sure enough, Jack Eisley had left the building.

“Looks like he was headed south on Eighteenth Street,” Vincent said. “Could be anywhere by now.”

Kowalski kept watching the screen. Not much was happening.

“Waiting to see if he’ll double back? Don’t know what good it will do you. I saw that scumbag you’re looking for a lot more than Eisley. We rode up in the elevator together. I’d be able to spot him in a second.”

“You would, huh?” Kowalski said. “Wait—there.”

A yellow blur on the screen. A cab, racing up Eighteenth Street. Kowalski twitched the knob slightly to the left and rewound the tape a few seconds. The cab sailed past again, and Kowalski returned the knob to dead center. The cab was frozen in the middle of the street.

“You can’t see who’s in there,” Vincent said. You can barely see the driver’s hands.”

“But I can see the medallion on the hood. What button can I use to bring up the focus on this?”

“You’re not going to be able to read those numbers.”

Kowalski ignored him, punched more buttons. “You know how the blonde is doing?”

“I heard she was being taken to Pennsylvania Hospital, but it doesn’t look good. Fucker probably pulled the same thing on her. Squeezed the air right out of her lungs, deprived her of oxygen too long. You should have seen it up there on five. Unless you already have.”

“I have,” Kowalski said, still working on the focus.

“Then you saw the blood on the carpet. How hard do you have
to choke somebody before they start spurting blood? I mean, fuck. That’s hard. You say this guy was with Mossad?”

“They know no mercy. Hey, you got a pen and paper? I got those numbers.”

“Holy shit. You did? This something they teach you at Homeland Security?”

Not really. Prior to 9/11 and the creation of DHS (and CI-6), prior to active CIA status, prior to the military, prior to University of Houston, Kowalski was an AV geek for a short while. Manned the control booth for a handful of basketball games, screwing around with the studio gear for a couple of weeks, but that was it. Brother Harry begged him to come back, but he needed to move on. With high school activities, Kowalski was like a locust. He wanted to try it all, master none. No baggage, even in high school. If he were to head back to his high school reunion—and oh, how watching that John Cu-sack movie made him long to do just that—he wouldn’t be surprised to find that everybody sorta remembered him but nobody knew him.

“We learn a little of everything, brother,” Kowalski said, locking eyes with Vincent. “Look, I’m going to run this down. If I catch this bird, I’ll bring him back for the Philly boys.”

As he said this, he pressed the button that would erase the five minutes of digital tape on which the cab appeared.

Philadelphia International Airport

W
ithin three minutes of his plane landing at Gate A22, the Operator was walking through the ridiculously oversized international-arrivals hall, with its images depicting Philadelphia as America’s birthplace. Cute.

His seatmate on the plane hadn’t been so lucky. He was a pale
Scot with some kind of strange rash on his hands. His eyebrows were so faint, you could hardly distinguish them from the pasty flesh of his forehead. It wasn’t that he talked so much as that he scratched … and scratched and scratched, for most of the flight down from Toronto. Must have caught some kind of deal over from Edinburgh. The Operator didn’t do connecting flights. If there wasn’t an available flight between the two points he wanted to travel, then he simply chartered a plane. Which he probably should have done in this case. Sitting next to Mr. Itchy for the one-and-a-half-hour flight… maddening. Then there was that problem of changing his destination from D.C. to Philly at virtually the last minute. So yeah, he was in a bad mood. And maybe he had acted a little harshly when he decided to take it out on the Scot by pulling a stewardess aside and showing her his Department of Defense badge and telling her about the Scot sitting next to him, who, he said, was talking about all of the Pakis he was going to blow up on his trip to America with nail bombs and … and that was all it took. It would be a long while before the itchy Scot and his rucksack would see the beautiful patriotic artwork inside the international-arrivals hall. If ever.

Escalator to hallway and directly to a cab outside. No bag to claim; whatever the Operator couldn’t carry with him at any given moment, he bought.

Interestingly enough, the cab had a Paki driver. “My friend the Scot would have loved you,” the Operator said.

“Sir?”

“Don’t mind me. I often get lost in my own fictions. Pennsylvania Hospital, please.”

He wondered about her. What two weeks of running would have done to her face, her body. He’d been used to seeing her every day in the lab. Would she look the same to him? He remembered a certain college girlfriend who’d dumped him; he’d been able to
score revenge sex six months later, but it wasn’t the same. She looked different. Even tasted different. It was quite unsatisfying.

So would it be the same with her? With “Kelly White,” as she’d been calling herself?

See there. Even the name was different. That alone would have taken its toll on her features.

His contact within CI-6 had said she’d been “incapacitated.” The Operator hoped that she wasn’t too far gone to be brought back. They had unfinished business, the two of them. Maybe they could go to a secret prison in Thailand. Where it would be just the two of them, once again. Even for a few hours.

Pennsylvania Hospital

S
he was awake but not awake, In this world but not of it. She could feel the sensations of movement, of hands, of needle sticks. Shed been this way since collapsing onto the carpet of the hotel hallway, and since then she had not been alone. If she had, the Mary Kates would have finished their job. She would be dead
.

I should have thought of this days ago, she thought, and imagined herself laughing. And that was all she could do, because she was still paralyzed
.

Which was going to make it difficult to get out of this one
.

Oh, she was cracking herself up here tonight. This morning, tonight. Whenever. Wherever
.

She stared at the insides of her eyelids and saw fields of stars and pulsars rushing past her She wished she could open her eyes at least. See where she was. It was a hospital; she could tell that much. She could hear the beeping and gushing of oxygen tanks and faraway voices on an intercom. She could smell the harsh disinfectant. But it would have been nice to know which hospital
.

She had been born on Holies Street, the National Maternity Hospital
in Dublin. Was there any kind of symmetry with this hospital? Maybe this was Americas National Maternity Hospital. National to National. Dublin to Philadelphia. The last of the great emigrations
.

Because soon enough, she would be left alone in a room in this hospital, and she would die
.

What gave her comfort in these final minutes
—
and she was sure that it was just a matter of minutes
—
was how much she’d accomplished in these past two weeks
.

How gravely she’d wounded the Operator
.

He’d never be able to recover from this
.

And she would never have to look at his face, that mask of balding banality, those piercing black eyes like a manhole cover on a sewer of insecurity and depravity
.

She never wanted to see that face again
.

She preferred the dark
.

Sybian Lounge