The Prince of Risk (16 page)

L
egio. Patria. Nostra
.

Alone in her study, Alex typed the words into the laptop’s search bar. Her phone lay on the desk beside her, its screen illuminated with a picture of the colorful symbol inked on Randall Shepherd’s chest. She knew the tattoo signified membership in a military organization, but which?

She tapped the Enter key, and her response appeared immediately.

“Our Country’s Legion.”

It was the motto of the French Foreign Legion, or Légion Étrangère.

Alex searched for tattoos associated with the Foreign Legion. She found one similar, but not identical, on the second search page. The
1º
stood for “first company.” The
2 REP
for second regiment.

It was a solid start, but Alex wasn’t finished.

She examined the other noteworthy tattoo inked on Shepherd’s arm. It showed the Roman numerals III.III.V and beneath them the words
Vincere aut Mori
. “Conquer or Die.” She performed a search combining the numerals and the Latin phrase. Fewer than a dozen pages appeared. None offered a further clue to Shepherd’s true identity.

Alex reasoned that the roman numerals represented a date. III.III.V translated to March 3, 2005. She was rewarded with 2 million hits. She added “Win or Die” and the number fell to 200,000. No help there.

Alex retreated a few steps. Several of her young lions had served in the marines, and each had body art to remind him of a difficult campaign—Fallujah in Iraq, Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Perhaps the tattoo was to commemorate an operation or a battle won or lost. Diligently she culled through accounts of the Foreign Legion’s recent engagements. There were deployments to the Middle East and Kosovo, as well as less publicized actions in Africa and Asia. Nowhere, however, did she find a mention of a specific battle or operation that had taken place on March 3, 2005. She could not validate her supposition that the roman numerals signified a date.

Alex slid back the chair and padded into the kitchen. The clock read 11:30. She realized that she hadn’t eaten since early that afternoon. Her stomach informed her in no uncertain terms that she was starving. She opened the fridge and found a piece of Gruyère and an apple. Slim pickings. She had a memory of sneaking into the kitchen with Bobby late one night after making love, finding a giant bowl of leftover spaghetti carbonara in the fridge, and sitting together at the table, toes touching, wordlessly scarfing it down. It was too bad they got along only when they didn’t talk to each other. The carbonara sounded delicious right about now.

Bobby was a wonderful cook.

Alex sat lost in her thoughts until the minute hand reached twelve. Rising, she returned to her office and at 12:03 placed a call to Paris, France, where the day was just beginning.

“Allo?” said a sleepy voice.

“Jean. It’s Alex Forza in New York. We have a situation.”

Jean Eyraud, deputy director of the French DGSE—the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, France’s national counterterrorism organization—snapped to attention. “How can I help?”

“I have some fingerprints I need you to run. He’s one of your guys. Former Légion Étrangère.”

“Send them over. I’ll see to it immediately.”

“And Jean…
vite.
”

I
t was not an accident.

Elevator doors do not open by themselves when the elevator itself is six floors below, Astor told himself as he stood in his kitchen, stunned, unsure why he was still alive, part of him not quite believing what had happened.

It was not an accident.

Not when the elevator belongs to someone looking into his father’s murder and the murder involved a vehicle inexplicably careening across the White House lawn. And not when the dead man’s assistant is murdered by a pinpoint knife-thrust to the heart by a person or persons able to float through a home without making a noise.

It was not an accident.

Still, if it were only his febrile mind desperately seeking a means to connect these events in the wake of narrowly escaping his own death, he might be able to posit a modicum of doubt. He might be able to argue that he was mistaken, that strange as it may seem, elevators sometimes do malfunction, and like it or not, this was one of those times.

But that was not the case.

He had proof.

Astor hurried from the kitchen and stumbled upstairs, falling halfway to the top, then raising himself, urging himself onward, carrying himself like the secret drunk he used to be. Inside his bedroom, he made a beeline for the desk, his hands sorting through the annual reports, examining the covers, discarding them one by one until he found what he was looking for.

The Sonichi Corporation of Japan.

He sat down on the floor cross-legged and thumbed the pages. He saw the heading and stopped. It was on page 23. “Industrial Products Division.” It read, “Last year the company extended its market line in its elevator business, branching laterally from the commercial sector to the residential sector with the introduction of two models, the Express 2111 and the Express 2122.”

Astor chucked the report aside and ran back downstairs. He punched the elevator call button. Seconds later the door opened. A brightly lit elevator car beckoned. Boldly, he stepped inside. The name was proudly stamped above the call buttons.
Sonichi Express 2122.

There was one last matter.

Leaving the elevator, he placed a call from his cell.

“Yessir, Mr. Astor. How may I help?”

“Hello, Don, just wanted to check if you called me about five minutes ago.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Something about my car. You asked me to come downstairs and take a look.”

“Your car is just fine, sir. Checked it myself when I came on shift.” Don the doorman laughed wryly. “You goofing on me, Mr. A?” Read as, “You back on the sauce again, Mr. A?”

Astor paused. “No, Don. I must have misunderstood. Don’t worry about it. Good night.”

Astor ended the call.

It was not an accident.

It was attempted murder.

Later, after he had reported the malfunction to the building superintendent and the inspector and repairmen had come and gone and pronounced the system in perfect working order, and they had scratched their heads because no one could find anything wrong anywhere, and they had all smiled politely, not quite hiding their opinion that the man on the sixth floor might not be operating with a full deck, Astor retreated to his bedroom. He did not bother with the reports strewn about the floor. Instead he walked to his night table and picked up the slip of pale blue stationery with the words
Cherry Hill
embossed across the top that had fallen from one of the reports.

Cassandra99

He did not know what the word meant, but for now, that didn’t matter. The stationery told him other things. The feminine script confirmed the tremor in Penelope Evans’s voice earlier that day and confirmed that she and his father had been working together on a secret project at the Astor estate in Oyster Bay.

Palantir.

Astor realized that he hadn’t thought of the word since meeting with Mike Grillo earlier that evening.

He looked at his phone and scrolled through to Alex’s number. The sight of her name was enough to scratch any idea he had of contacting her. With Alex it was all or nothing. If he called, he would have to tell her the whole story from A to Z. She would not be interested in hearing about the elevator until he explained why he had had the temerity (she would use a different word) to leave Penelope Evans’s home without calling the police. It would not suffice to blame Sullivan. There would also be the matter of the stolen agenda, and no doubt a dozen other failings on his part.

He could not call Alex.

It was then that Astor took a second, longer, and altogether darker look at his smartphone. It had been acting up since that morning, when he’d had trouble getting a clear line to the office while flying in. He thought about the timing of Penelope Evans’s death. Sullivan had stated that she had been killed less than an hour before they arrived. If he had not stopped to see Brad Zarek at Standard Financial to discuss the terms of the loan, he and Sullivan would have arrived in Greenwich at the same time as the killer. Did that mean that the killer knew about Evans only after he did? That somehow Astor’s interest in her had alerted him? If so, how?

Astor turned the phone over in his hand. Smooth, elegant, much too powerful. A necessary tool. But was it also a weapon?

And then there was the matter of Don the doorman’s call.

Astor accessed his voice mail and searched among the deleted messages. There were over a hundred, and he patiently scrolled through them all until he found what he was looking for. A message from three weeks earlier.

“Yeah, Mr. A. It’s Don. You might want to come down and take a look at your car. Don’t worry. There’s no problem, but it looks like the tires could use some air. That’s it.”

Astor listened again and again. He didn’t quite remember what Don had said earlier, but he was relatively certain the words were close to the same. They had simply been rearranged.

Calmly he walked downstairs and set the phone on the kitchen counter. He found the tool basket in the pantry. He chose a hammer—heavy, rubber-gripped, barely used—and returned to the kitchen. He stood before the counter, took careful aim, and brought it down squarely on the phone. And then he hit it again and again.

Not a weapon, thought Astor. A necessary tool.

For his enemies.

I
t was a dream.

Randall Shepherd said, “I’m going to shoot you and then I’m going to shoot your partner and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Alex stared back at the killer. She saw him pulling the pistol from his waistband and immediately started for her own weapon. She’d always been a fast draw, but this time something was wrong. Her arms refused her commands. She stood immobile, her hands stuck by her sides, her entire body as stiff as a slab of petrified wood. She could only watch and wait as Shepherd raised the pistol and pointed it at her forehead.

“You won’t stop us,” he said.

I will,
said Alex, but now her speech failed her too. She could utter no words as she watched his finger tighten on the trigger.

But then Shepherd turned the gun away and pointed it at Jimmy Malloy. And now Alex could scream, but she still could not move, and so she was condemned to stand still and watch helplessly as Shepherd shot Jimmy in the head. She was screaming, the gunshot loud in her ears, when her phone rang, waking her.

“Forza.”

“Alex, this is Jean Eyraud in Paris. It’s my turn to wake you.”

Alex threw off the sheets and sat up. “Did you get a match?”

“Quite an exceptional person you decided to kill. You should count yourself lucky to be alive. His name is Luc Lambert, thirty-five years of age, nine years in the Légion Étrangère, a sergeant. He fought in Africa and the Middle East. Decorations for valor and bravery. For fun, I ran his name through all our databases. We like to keep track of these guys. Someone like Lambert, with that kind of record, has to have a reason to leave the
légion
before putting in his twenty.”

“Shoot.”

“Ever hear of an outfit called Executive Outcomes, based in London?”

Alex searched for a notepad and a pen, then scribbled the name and underlined it several times. “Can’t say I have.”

“Professional soldiers. Mercenaries. Recruiters for that kind of thing.”

“Nice guys.”

“The nicest, if you get my drift. It seems they put together a team a few years back to overthrow the government of Comoros, a small oil-rich nation off the southeast coast of Africa, in order to get their hands on sizable offshore reserves. The coup was led by a mercenary named Trevor Manning and was backed by a group of international businessmen.”

“When was that exactly?”

“Two thousand five.”

“March?”

“March third,” said Eyraud, surprised. “You know it?”

“Lambert had a tattoo on his arm with that date. I figured it stood for something.”

“The coup was a failure. Everyone knew they were coming before they even set foot in the country. Manning and his team were arrested as they landed to refuel in Zimbabwe. The lot was flown to Comoros and put on trial. Most of them were released after a month or two, but Lambert did a full year. In the trial, it was revealed that he was Trevor Manning’s right-hand man.”

“A year doesn’t sound long for that kind of thing. I’d have thought they’d have been taken out at dawn and shot.”

“It took a lot of strings to get them out. One of the sponsors was the son of a former English PM. We all know about him.” Eyraud gave a cynical chuckle.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to fill me in.”

“He was a front for your boys, of course.”

“What do you mean, ‘our boys’?”

“The CIA. Who do you think?”

“Are you saying that Lambert worked for the CIA?”

“I’m not saying anything. You can connect the dots yourself.”

Alex stood and paced the bedroom. Eyraud’s revelations, true or not, had turned the investigation on its ear. The mere possibility that Luc Lambert, an experienced and battle-tested mercenary who had been involved in an operation backed by the CIA, was assembling a team on U.S. soil elevated the threat level by an order of magnitude.

“By the way, Alex, you didn’t tell me what Lambert was doing in your part of the world.”

“Getting ready to put his skills to use.” Alex explained about the raid at Windermere, the deaths of Malloy and the others, and the trove of weapons discovered beneath the house.

“I don’t like the sound of it,” said Jean Eyraud. “Any idea where or when?”

“We found maps of Manhattan. There was fresh food in the refrigerator for Lambert and a half-dozen accomplices. I’d say sooner rather than later. Days. A week at most. We’re frightened that we may be looking at a Mumbai-style attack.”

“Not good.”

No, thought Alex, definitely not good. If what Eyraud said about the CIA’s being involved in any way with the failed coup was true, they would have managed it through the directorate of operations or, more likely, a shadow organization funded off the books that did not officially exist. Knowledge of the affair would have been compartmentalized at the highest levels of the Agency. Sadly, Alex knew no one with access to such information.

“Jean,” she began uncertainly, “you mentioned something about a recruiter for mercenaries based in London.”

“Executive Outcomes.”

“They still around?”

“I haven’t seen their name recently, but you never know.”

“London, eh?”

“Yes, London.”

“
Merci,
Jean. We will keep you in the loop on this one.”

“Before you go, Alex, may I tell you something? I served alongside many legionnaires when I was in the army. Men like Lambert. Tough. Smart. Maybe a little crazy. Some even work for me today.”

“What are you trying to say, Jean?”

“These men are not terrorists. This guy Lambert, he didn’t want to die. Whatever he was planning to do, he was planning on getting out of it alive.”