World Without End (22 page)

Lee shut the door behind him, moved into the living room and stopped dead in his tracks.

"Jesus," he said.

"I didn't know you were going to kill him."

Bouchard leaned over John Riley's body, picked up the jamming unit from the floor and turned it off.

"Does the word mittens mean anything to you?"

"No. Why?"

"According to John Riley, another person was screaming this word inside the lab."

"Randy Scott."

Bouchard nodded.

"He was the only person in the lab. As for Stephen calling Mr. Riley, it looks like it was an accident."

"This word mittens. You think it's decryption code?"

"Possible. Only Randy Scott would know, and he's dead."

"If Misha had stuck to the script, we wouldn't be in this mess," Lee said.

"He's the one who decided to fuck with the tapes at Delburn."

Bouchard didn't say anything. He didn't want to get into it with Owen.

"Any word on Stephen's condition?"

"The word came down when you were in here. Conway's awake." Lee took off his cap and rubbed back his hair.

"The security on that suit is locked tighter than a flea's ass. I can't hack my way past it. I tried. I might have a fighting chance if you gave me access to the NSA computers " "Out of the question,"

Bouchard said. He could keep them off the radar screen, but some things were simply out of the question.

"Then I hope the word mittens is the decryption code, because Dixon sure doesn't know it." Lee chewed his gum, his eyes reflective.

"Our Russian partners are getting worked up. Misha, he's a fucking loon."

"Put him out of your mind."

"Easy for you to say. You weren't there when he did his… thing with Dixon."

"Can't stomach this?" Bouchard said.

"This isn't a normal gig and you know it. Look, I explained to Misha that we didn't encrypt the software they downloaded into the suit. That Randy did it at the last second and changed the code without our knowledge. The dude stood there and looked at me as if I was something stuck to his shoes. Those eyes… It was like I was throwing rocks down into a well that had no bottom. The guy's not a good listener.

And he's not big on patience either."

"You have the drugs?"

"Right here," Lee said, tapping his jacket pocket with his gloved hand.

Raymond had investigated John Riley's background and knew of the man's battle with cocaine and alcohol, the stint at the celebrity dry-out clinic in Arizona. When John Riley's body was discovered, the autopsy would reveal the cause of death as a simple drug overdose. Case closed.

"Stage the scene," Raymond said.

"After that, I want a standard surveillance rig, just in case. Might as well cover all the bases. The girlfriend, Kaufmann, she's staying at the Renaissance Hotel in Amsterdam."

Lee's eyes brightened.

"You're shitting me. That's where Cole is staying. He's heading up the Fletcher gig."

Malcolm Fletcher was the name of a renegade FBI profiler responsible for the death of one of Jonathan Cole's men, Victor Dragos. Cole was leading the hunt.

"I'll call Mr. Cole and tell him to pay Ms. Kaufrnann a visit and see what she knows," Bouchard said.

"You have the woman's apartment bugged?"

"Her place and this place. She called him just a few minutes before you got here, then Riley hung up on her. I heard the whole thing.

We've got it on tape. Now we've got to talk about the Russians."

"We'll talk about it later."

"No, we've got to talk about it now. We've got to find a way to get out from under them. These guys are fucking animals. They're not like the Italians. La Cosa Nostra, those guys are dangerous motherfuckers, but they operate by a strict code and have a certain sense of honor, but Misha and his gang… Misha's talking about how he and his buddies took turns beating the shit out of this fifteen-year-old prostitute.

She lost one of her eyes and is in a wheelchair for the rest of her life and Misha's standing there in front of me laughing it up."

"Maybe it's time we introduce Cole to Misha."

"He won't do it." Lee considered a private thought, and then added,

"Cole is unstable. You do realize this."

"I realize he's a major liability. You tired of playing his house boy?"

"You know I am."

"Then we'll work something out."

"Like what?"

"It's time to take Cole out of the picture."

"Sure, why not. It's not like our plate's full."

"I'm serious," Raymond said.

"I'll bring him here and wipe him out."

"Right now, I'm more concerned about the Russians."

"I'm working on it," Bouchard said, and felt the anger he had been nursing for the past four years rise to the surface. He looked at the clock mounted on the wall above the mantel. It was late. He realized he hadn't eaten.

"I'm going out for a while," he said.

"I'm going to turn my phone off. I don't want to be disturbed."

"You've got a transmitter in your phone. If there's a problem, I know how to find you," Lee said and got to work.

A celebration: Dinner at the excellent Aujourd-hui at Boston's Four Seasons Hotel. The maitre d' sat Raymond at a private corner table that overlooked the restaurant's long, wide room of matronly diners and offered a second floor window view of the spectacular Public Garden. He ordered quickly, taking the wine steward's suggestion for a bottle of red that would complement the main course of beef. When the wine came, Raymond declined the obligatory first taste, telling the steward abruptly that it was fine, knowing his tone was rude. Raymond didn't care. He wanted to be left alone.

Wine in hand, he settled back into the soft comfort of his high-back chair, his eyes wandering the room, taking in the people. A lot of the patrons were twenty something men all of them multimillionaires from hot Internet startups, what he called New Money. But the other selection, the Old Money crowd, the crowd Raymond had grown up with, dominated the room. Distinguished older cocksuckers dressed in their stale Brooks Brothers suits, dining with their wives, who had sliver hair and saggy tits and faces stretched tight from plastic surgery.

Some of the women were noticeably younger, their beauty a sharp contrast in the sea of weathered, lined faces.

Cunts, all of them.

Raymond loved the way the word sounded inside his head. Cunts. Tits.

The rhythmic language of cretins and the uneducated. Growing up, he had never been allowed to use such words in his daily speech; he still didn't. But his interior life was vastly different than the one he projected to others. He often bridled when he heard such words spoken out loud.

Well, that wasn't exactly true.

He said cunt several times when thinking about Toni, now his ex-wife.

That was coming up on three years now. Toni-the-Cunt was the reason why he was in this mess with the Russians. The memory was there, always there mental herpes that refused to go away.

Toni had come from serious family money. She never had to hold a full-time job not unless you considered attending society and political functions and ass-kissing an occupation. Her only dream, the same swan song of all women, was to have kids. She had been married once, and when they tried to have kids, they found out she had fertility problems. The guy up and left. The problem was Toni liked to eat and her figure reflected it.

When she turned thirty-six, her biological clock already on its downward spiral, the unmarried hag had secretly started exploring artificial insemination and adoption. Her father, a man who had been raised in a world of privilege in New Orleans and had gone on to become one of those blue-blood lawyers who had invested wisely in real estate and the stock market, had discovered his daughter's plans. Artificial insemination? Have you lost your goddamn mind, woman? Children need a father in their lives. You can't find a man on your own, then that's the Lord's way of telling you it ain't meant to be.

Toni threatened to go ahead and do it anyway. Pops threw his trump card: If she went ahead and had a baby without being married, the allowance would be cut off, and she would not see one penny of the family fortune. The only thing Toni loved more than her dream of having a family was her daddy's money and the lifestyle it provided her.

She was just pushing thirty-nine when they met at a society function, and Raymond was already into his mid-forties, established and doing well, but not well enough to live the sort of lifestyle he felt a man of his intellectual stature deserved. He had been born into it, had sampled the life to the age where he was old enough to appreciate it, and it could still have been his if his pathetic excuse for a father had learned to manage his business.

Or maybe it would have turned out differently if you hadn't married Janet. Another one from the Cunt Express. Married when they were both twenty-three, they had relatively nothing in common except not wanting children and demanding the finer things in life. Time marched on, and when Raymond's CIA salary didn't provide the life Janet wanted, the rift between them grew. After eight years of marriage with a missing husband who worked nights and weekends and had secret affairs, she left, taking with her the house and car and a good chunk of his salary.

The judge, of course, was a woman. Cunts always stuck together so naturally, Janet got everything, and he got stuck with the massive credit-card debt and worked to pay for her fucking tennis lessons and facials.

And now here came the plump and needy and ridiculously rich Toni looking for the same love she sought from her overbearing father. When it came to spotting a good opportunity, Raymond was like a shark sensing blood in the water. Toni, he knew, could be molded and managed. Raymond had molded operatives for a living; he knew how to play the part, how to press down on a nerve and when to ease up. She liked the fact that he was a founding partner for an e-business consulting company called Bradfield (she would never know he was CIA); she responded to his good looks and charm. Her eyes lit up like a pinball machine when he started in on how much he loved kids.

The vasectomy was a simple procedure performed right in the doctor's office. Snip-snip, and a few weeks later no sperm.

Toni didn't know about it. Sure, there was that period of four weeks when he couldn't have sex because of a pulled groin, but after Raymond got the doctor's go-ahead, he jumped back into the part, doing it to her every night, even coming home early from work to service her (and that's exactly what it was, with those wide hips and lumpy white skin, he had to close his eyes every time and think of that woman he was seeing, that pretty thing with the long blond hair and an ass and tits that made your hands ache with want). Then he did the doctor thing, even going inside the bathroom to produce sperm for testing. Raymond had the sample in his coat pocket, given to him by one of his men. The test results were fine. He didn't have a problem. He was fertile.

They kept trying.

Toni turned forty… They explored fertility options. Toni's age made it next to impossible to get pregnant, but to be sure, Raymond paid off the doctor to make sure it never happened. Raymond collected skeletons for a living. Turning a man into a puppet was easy when you had the right nerve to press.

Toni turned forty-one… forty-two… Good-bye baby, hello good life.

At least that was the way it was supposed to work.

Toni was supposed to grieve and get on with her life. And Raymond didn't have to worry about Toni wanting to adopt. Her father, Harrison Winthrop, was not going to be the grandfather to another man's child.

Toni would grieve, do the therapy thing, pig out, pop pills, and be overly dramatic in the way she always was, help me, someone help me, the sky is falling. Meanwhile, Raymond would play the part of the sympathetic husband, listening to her constant griping, comforting her when she cried. All he had to do was look around the house he lived in, its sprawling grounds, the lifestyle that once was promised to him now a reality, and he knew he could put up with anything.

But the world has a funny away of biting you back.

Raymond came home one night, late, opened the front door and stepped into the dark foyer. He was about to go upstairs when he saw a flame jump from a lighter in the darkness of the living room, an orange and yellow halo of light spreading across the face of Harrison Winthrop.

"Sit down, boy. You and me need to have a chat," Winthrop said.

Raymond turned on a light. Winthrop wore a black suit and sat on the couch with his legs crossed, his left arm propped up on the armrest, a Churchill-size cigar clasped in the tiny fingers of his small hands.

His white hair was immaculately combed, his powder blue eyes serene behind the wisps of smoke drifting up across his face.

A cold pain shot up through Raymond's stomach and ran all the way up into his head. For a moment he couldn't breathe; it was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. He opened his mouth to speak.

"Now the affairs, I can see that," Winthrop said. His voice was neutral, as if this discussion was simply a business meeting.

"Nothing wrong with a man wanting to get his pencil sharpened every now and then as long as it's done in good taste. Toni ain't never been a pretty girl, and the Lord didn't give her that many marbles either, but he did give her a heart of gold and what you did to my baby girl was downright cruel." Winthrop took a puff on his cigar.

"I know all about the vasectomy," he said in a long trail of smoke.

"Son, don't try to lie to me. I saw your medical file. You got the vasectomy not two months after your marriage, right in Dr. Brocade's office. And don't bother asking me how I found out, because I'm not going to tell you. What I will tell you is that you're out of the picture."