The Whole Truth (32 page)
She turned the corner and headed away from her building. She didn’t look back and didn’t see the man change direction and head her way. She didn’t see the door of her apartment building fly open either as another man hit the street and hustled after her. But she could feel their presence and picked up her pace. Should she start screaming? There were plenty of people around. But what if they had guns? They’d shot poor Lesnik with a million people around. She desperately looked for a cop yet saw none.
She never saw the third man, because he was ahead of her but coming her way. He was the safety valve in case the first team missed, and it looked like he would get his chance. He slid the syringe from the sleeve of his coat, uncapped it, and held it ready as he picked up his pace.
T
HE TAXI TURNED ONTO THE ROAD
and Shaw scanned the street. His gaze caught and held on Katie. Her look of terror was clear. She was running. He caught sight of one of the men behind her. But there would be more than one.
And then it happened. Shaw saw a glint of sunlight reflect off the object in the man’s hand. He jumped from the rolling cab and sprinted forward.
Katie and the man were inches away from each other. He drew back the syringe and then swung it forward, aiming for her belly.
Katie gasped as the fellow in front of her was knocked aside by a far larger man. She felt something slide across her arm. She looked down and saw the needle as it missed going into her by a bare inch. Then she watched as Shaw grabbed the man’s hand, bent it forward, and buried the needle to the hilt in the man’s chest, the plunger pushed all the way down. The man looked in horror at the thing sticking out of him, pushed Shaw away, got to his feet, and ran down the street. His lips were already starting to grow numb as the drug began its lethal journey through him. Caesar had not opted for ricin, the poison fired into Bulgarian Georgi Markov’s leg using a spring-loaded umbrella. What had entered the man’s body was a massive dose of tetrodotoxin, a substance over a thousand times more lethal than cyanide and for which there was no antidote.
He would be dead in twenty minutes.
Shaw grabbed Katie by the arm and they sprinted to Euston Station, jumped on the Tube, rode it to King’s Cross, ran back to daylight, and grabbed a cab. Shaw told the man to simply drive and then looked over at Katie.
She hadn’t said one word to him, not while running and not in the Tube. A terrible thought seemed to grip him. “The syringe, it didn’t . . . ?”
She put a shaky hand on his arm. “No, it didn’t. Thanks to you. How did you know?”
“More luck than anything else.” He sat back against the seat.
“That was the third party back there, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “That was the third party.”
She glanced out the window as the cab struggled along in London traffic. The afternoon was quickly turning to dusk. “Where are we going?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Shaw?”
“I heard you. I just don’t have an answer.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you about Lesnik.”
“So am I,” he said bluntly.
“I shouldn’t have written the story.”
“No, you shouldn’t.”
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?”
“Looks that way. And I told you not to leave where you were staying.”
“They were in the building. I had to run.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I—” Katie stopped. She did not want to tell him that she’d jumped from a window and managed to survive. Unlike Anna. “Through the back. Do you have some sort of plan?”
“I have a
goal
. To stay alive. The plan is still coming.”
“It’s clear now that Lesnik was working for this third party. They killed him and tried to kill me. For all I know they somehow got the
Scribe
to hire me and then dropped Lesnik in my lap. I knew it was too good to be true. Damn it!” Katie slapped the seat.
“Did Lesnik say anything that might give us a lead on who hired him?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I checked out his background. That was legit. He seemed like a sincere guy. His father
was
killed by the Soviets. He probably held a grudge and these people exploited it.”
“But that gets us no closer to the truth.”
“We need to go underground to have any chance of finding out what’s really going on.” She looked at him. “Know anyone who can help with that?”
Shaw already had his phone out. “I might.”
T
HIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN
one of the happiest days of Nicolas Creel’s career. After years of work, and one enormous and recently manufactured international crisis, both the governments of Russia and China were about to sign contracts with Ares Corp. and its subsidiaries to the tune of half a trillion dollars with plenty more to come down the road. It was a testament to the centralization of defense contractors in the modern age that countries on either side of a dispute would buy their weaponry to destroy each other from essentially the same outfit. Yet Ares did not pick favorites. It was an equal-opportunity provider of weapons of mass destruction and always would be.
The final catalyst for the successful deal had occurred when President Gorshkov had sent a strongly worded demand for a public apology to Beijing. And the man also wanted money, in the billions, for the damage done to Russia’s international reputation. Beijing, not surprisingly, had not agreed with that position. They sent an equally forcefully worded reply to Moscow stating that the Chinese weren’t involved in the Red Menace machine, and thus owed the Russians nothing. Predictably, international relations between the two behemoths went downhill from there at a remarkably brisk clip.
Other countries had stepped in to try and broker a peaceful resolution to this mess. The United States naturally took the lead role, but since the Chinese government was basically financing America’s consumption by buying its debt, Washington had little recourse when Beijing told it to back off. The Russians accused the Americans of being in China’s pocket for this same reason. Consequently, the U.S. ambassador to Russia was told to stand down or pack his bags when he implored the Russians to do nothing drastic.
France next tried to step in, but Gorshkov would not even return the French president’s phone call. The Germans remained silent. Berlin obviously didn’t want to get dragged back behind either a new Iron Curtain or a Titanium Coffin. Britain was in an extremely delicate situation. If Russia
had
been behind the massacre and China
had
been operating the Red Menace campaign from London, the poor Brits didn’t exactly know what their role or response should be. And when initial diplomatic channels had been opened with China over the matter, the communists had been as stern in their denials of culpability as they had been with Russia, and ended by telling Downing Street to keep clear of the dispute.
The entire world was now arming for a third world war. The new amount of business would be the biggest in the history of the world, the vice chairman of Ares Corporation e-mailed to Creel, his glee evident in every word of his message. “What a stroke of luck, this Red Menace thing,” he’d added.
Creel read the message once and then deleted it.
What a stroke of luck indeed
. He made a mental note to find a new vice chairman to replace that idiot.
The cold war was back and better than ever. With a series of deft moves and remarkable planning he’d reshaped the planet’s power structure to where it should be. The pissants in the Middle East had immediately tried to suck the world back in, doing a version of “Hey, what about me, I’m still bad news,” by cratering another mosque in Baghdad, bombing a market in Anbar, and killing all of eighty civilians and two U.S. grunts. The world’s collective response had been swift and unmistakable: “Don’t bother us, we’ve got
real
problems.
Millions
could die!”
Ironically, Creel had made the world far more civilized by getting back to a “real” war mode. That was his plan, after all.
Not a shot fired
.
And the money poured
.
And the savages without a conscience put in their place
.
It is the hat trick. Thank you very much
.
It had never been about the money, really. It had been about the world. Nicolas Creel had just saved it.
Yet still, there was something wrong.
He was currently standing on picturesque Italian soil, the beauty of the Mediterranean coast spread out before him. The mother superior was next to him, resplendent in her lovely white robes. She was beaming, as she looked over preliminary plans for the building of a new orphanage to replace the one that had been constructed right after World War II when there had been a large number of orphans.
Speaking in Italian the mother superior said, “It is beautiful. And you are a beautiful man to have done it, Nicolas.”
“Please, Mother Superior. It was the least I could do. And I can assure you I will benefit spiritually to the same degree that the children will by having a new home.” He said all this in fluent Italian.
Creel was proficient in many languages; he’d learned them solely to gain an edge in business. Some of his biggest deals had come about simply because he could say “Please” and “Thank you” in his customers’ own tongues.
Yes, this should have been a time of great triumph for Creel as he strolled around the site where the new orphanage would be. But it wasn’t. And for one reason only.
Caesar had arrived from London and ridden a launch out to the
Shiloh
. Katie James had slipped through their fingers. One of Caesar’s men had been stuck with the damn needle instead. And Shaw, the man with the eyes like Creel’s, had been right in the middle of it. He and James were now out there together. Doing what, only they knew.
According to Creel’s sources Shaw had run out of The Phoenix Group building like he was on fire twenty minutes before he arrived at James’s flat. And worst of all, Creel didn’t know why.
For the first time in a long time, the fourteenth richest man in the world felt a twinge of real fear. Nicolas Creel was not a man who bet the farm or thought himself infallible. He was brilliant enough to know that he didn’t actually know everything. He was a man who could adapt a plan on the fly, apply new intelligence to maximum effect, and realized that a plan set in stone was always doomed to failure.
And as he thought about this, the mother superior hugged him, her angelic tears staining his blazer. “God will bless you for this,” she whispered in his ear.
And above all, Creel was a man who hedged his bets any way he could.
“Mother Superior, can I ask a favor please?”
“Ask and it shall be done, my son,” she said.
“Will you pray for me?”
S
HAW AND KATIE HAD HIDDEN OUT
in a small row house outside London near Richmond that Shaw had previously arranged as a safe house. The next night they had received a visitor, an Italian with a Dutch accent. He was the same man who ran Shaw’s favorite restaurant in Amsterdam. He said a polite hello to Katie and then nodded at Shaw, who was scrutinizing him closely.
“How did you get here?” Shaw asked.
“Train,” replied the fellow. “A bit more congenial security-wise.”
Shaw nodded in understanding while Katie watched curiously.
“You have it?”
The man took out a small package from his pocket and handed it to Shaw.
Shaw tried to give the fellow a roll of euros but he pushed it away.
“At least for your expenses,” Shaw said.
“Come see me in Amsterdam, after this is all over. Spend your money there with good food and bad wine.”
The men shook hands and then the Dutch-speaking Italian was gone.
Shaw put the package in his coat pocket and looked at Katie, who was staring at him expectantly.
“Care to share?” she asked.
“No.”
Shaw next called Frank and filled him in. At the end of his lengthy explanation, Frank’s comment was brief but to the point.
“Ho-lee shit!”
“I was expecting something a little more helpful.”
“What do you want me to do? You’re got no real proof and you still don’t know who the third party is.”
“Then get me to Dublin and I’ll take it from there.”
“Why Dublin?’
“I’ve got people to see.”
“Like who? Leona Bartaroma at Malahide Castle? I know you went to see her.”
“FYI, I’ve got Katie James with me.”
“Lucky, lucky you.”
“So can you get me to Dublin?”
“Look, I had a hard enough time convincing the folks upstairs that your freelancing with MI5 was a good use of your time. If they find out you’ve split, all bets are off.”
“Just get me to Dublin.”
“I can, but you’ve got to swear you won’t see Leona about
that
.”
“I do.”
The next day Shaw and Katie were driven from London to Wales in an old bus. After that they ducked into the damp hold of a ratty tugboat that was now crossing the Irish pond in pitching seas. Katie spent an hour throwing up into a bucket as they bounced to Ireland. Shaw kept handing her soaked towels to wipe her face.
Katie finally sat up, nothing left to heave out of her gut.
“Your sea legs are impressive,” she said. “I’m more of a landlubber.”
“The high-speed ferry wasn’t an option since everyone in the world is looking for you.”
“Everybody wants to be famous until they are and finds out it sucks.”
“We’ll be there shortly.”
“Good to know,” Katie said, one hand over her still-writhing stomach. “So we get there, and then what?”
“And then we meet someone who can help us go deep underground. Disguises, new IDs.”
“And then what?”
“And then we figure out the next step.”
Later, Shaw walked over and looked out a porthole. The tug had slowed, the rocking had ceased. They were past the breakwater and into the harbor.
“Let’s go.”
Katie rose gingerly, testing her legs. She slid her bag over her shoulder. “Shaw, we’re going to die, aren’t we?”