Critical Space (12 page)

"Understand. Wendy and Peter are standby. "

Natalie turned to make eye contact with me, and I gave her a thumbs-up. She nodded, and I heard her over the net again.
"Tink gives all clear."

The door on the plane opened, and the stairs unfolded. I waited until Natalie had moved into position at the bottom, then opened the front and rear passenger doors on the Benz.

"Coming out, coming out,"
Moore radioed.

Natalie mounted the steps, stopping just outside the door as Fiona Chester emerged. She was in her late twenties, small, with short and curly brown hair, wearing a long black wool skirt that must have been very uncomfortable for July. She carried a computer bag over one shoulder, with a smaller duffel bag in her left hand. Chester hesitated just long enough to be sure of the angle on the stairs, then began her descent with Natalie at her side. When they hit the tarmac, Natalie escorted her over to the Benz. Chester climbed into the backseat, sliding over to the window, and Natalie turned and went back to the plane, this time stopping at the bottom of the stairs.

Antonia Ainsley-Hunter appeared in the doorway. She was in blue jeans and a green shirt, pulling on a tan windbreaker. She kept her head down and didn't pause, and Moore emerged right behind her, close behind. As Her Ladyship reached the bottom step, Natalie started forward.

I kept watching the perimeter, noting that the two who had helped with the luggage were now watching from the mouth of the hangar. Other than them, however, there was no motion, nothing.

When Natalie reached the car she peeled off, stepping around me and making for the Lexus. I moved back, away from the door, still scanning, as Lady Ainsley-Hunter climbed in, Moore after her. He closed the door after him and I took a last look, then slid into the front passenger seat. I had barely shut my own before Corry pulled out, and Dale put us into gear, and then we were accelerating off the runway. We were already doing forty by the time we reached the intersection at the end of the access road.

"Looking good," Dale told me. "We're clear."

"Pick your route," I said.

"Bravo."

I used the handset for the car radio, relayed the choice to Corry in the Lexus. He radioed back a confirmation, and when I acknowledged, I felt as much as saw Moore relaxing in the seat behind me.

"Everything's good?" Lady Ainsley-Hunter asked me.

"Everything's fine," I said.

"All right, then," she said, and leaned forward from the backseat, reaching around and giving me a rather awkward hug. "Nice to see you, Tinkerbell."

"Nice to see you, too, Wendy."

"Anything new?" Moore asked. All I could see of him was a bit of his shoulder and the side of his head as he kept watch out the rear window.

"Minor things. I'll brief you after Wendy's been buttoned up at the Edmonton," I said.

He turned in the seat long enough to meet my eyes in the mirror, curious, but he knew better than to ask and, after a second, went back to watching the traffic from his window. Lady Ainsley-Hunter asked Chester a question about the evening's schedule, and Chester opened her computer bag, producing a sheaf of papers. They continued to talk quietly as we followed 287, the Lexus always in our lead. Natalie's voice came over the radio, giving us regular updates on changes in the traffic and potential delays.

It took another ninety minutes before we reached the city, coming in across the George Washington Bridge, then down the West Side Highway, and then an additional half an hour to make it the three miles through the crosstown traffic to the Edmonton. We followed the Lexus around the hotel, past the roundabout at the entrance to the service side, opposite Central Park. Natalie was out of the car before it had come to a complete stop, and I waited until she had secured the door to the building before climbing out myself. Moore, Natalie, and I debussed Lady Ainsley-Hunter quickly, bringing her through the kitchen as planned, as Dale, Corry, and Chester went around the front to check in and deal with the bags. A couple of waiters and chefs gave us stares as we came through, but most ignored us, having seen this sort of thing before; the Edmonton was used regularly by visiting dignitaries, and the hotel staff was experienced with the procedures and peculiarities of security work.

"I feel very important," Lady Ainsley-Hunter confided as we were riding up to the eighteenth floor in the service elevator. "And extremely embarrassed."

"There's a Holiday Inn off Times Square we can put you in, if you'd prefer," I told her.

The elevator stopped and Natalie stepped out to check the hall, reporting back that Corry had already gotten the room opened up. Together, the four of us made our way to eighteen twenty-two, a suite of four rooms that included a central sitting area complete with a fireplace. Moore got Lady Ainsley-Hunter seated on the sofa there, and Corry headed back down to the lobby to supervise the transfer of the luggage. Natalie and I gave each room another look-over, decided that if there was anyone or anything lurking with intent to do harm, it was hidden beyond our ability to spot it, and rejoined Moore and Her Ladyship just before the rest of the group arrived, now in the company of a bellman and his heavily laden cart.

Chester tipped him, and when he left, Moore shut the door and then turned the dead bolt and threw the locking bar. We spent another ten minutes moving the bags, and then Lady Ainsley-Hunter announced that she wanted to take a nap, and that she thought Fiona ought to do the same. They each retired to their respective rooms.

Moore and I exchanged looks, and he gave me a little nod of the head, so I got on the phone and ordered up sandwiches and sodas from room service, watching while the rest of us got settled. Moore had his equipment bag out and was loading spare clips for his Browning. When I hung up, he reached into his bag again and removed a folder, dropping it on the coffee table in front of him. He waited until I had taken my seat, along with Natalie, Corry, and Dale, and then unfastened the string holding the folder closed. Inside was a stack of photocopies, what looked like copies of reports and photographs.

Moore fished a single photograph from the stack, and held it out to me.

"Meet Oxford," he said.

It was the same picture that Gracey and Bowles had shown me the previous afternoon, the one of the mock military unit. The man who had been picked out with red ink before was this time highlighted in fluorescent yellow.

"Son of a bitch," I said.

"Real name unknown," Moore said. "Been identified as one of The Ten for coming on fourteen years, now."

I handed the picture to Natalie, who looked at it carefully for several seconds before letting it continue around the circle.

Moore went on, now laying out a sequence of new shots, mostly color copies, and all of crime scenes. "The I.D. picture is at least four years old, though Interpol only began distributing it last September. Taken in Croatia. He's called Oxford because the first hit put to him was the murder of a Cambridge don in '87, an old wheeze named Kepper. That's him."

He tapped a black-and-white copy of a picture with his index finger. The shot showed a man in his late fifties or perhaps older, in his bedroom and on his side. The noose was around his neck, tied at the other end to the headboard. A television and VCR were visible near the edge of the photo.

"Staged as autoerotic asphyxiation," Moore continued. "The video player had a tape in it of some very dodgy behavior between human beings and other members of the animal kingdom. Extraordinarily humiliating, since Professor Kepper taught, amongst other classes, Christian Ethics."

"You said a Cambridge don?" Natalie asked.

Moore managed a grin. "The gag -- if you'll pardon the pun -- is that one of the detectives who figured it for murder made the comment that the assailant must have been 'an Oxford man.' "

None of us laughed.

Moore slid the other photographs around. They depicted acts of exceptional violence, rarely with a single victim, and universally related to sex in one fashion or another. Bodies were bound in rope or chain, cut and stabbed, as if the pictures were all production stills from a series of snuff films.

"You can see his M.O.," Moore said. "He's considered a specialist, the fellow you hire when murder just won't do the trick, and you need to assassinate character as well. He consistently plays a sexual angle, either because that's his pathology and it gets his horn up, or because sex is almost always sensational and scandalous. Maybe both. In most cases he capitalizes on already existing relationships -- affairs and the like -- but he's willing to fabricate from whole cloth if need be. Most of the time the stagings don't hold up, but by the time the facts are known, the media's already finished Oxford's work for him. The victim's reputation is destroyed."

There was a silence while we all studied the photographs, then Moore began gathering them up again, casting a glance at Lady Ainsley-Hunter's closed door. We'd been keeping our voices low, conspiratorial, and Moore's glance made me feel suddenly guilty, even though I knew better. We were keeping things from our principal, but all of us knew that was for the best. Better that she remain ignorant for now than terrified for no reason.

"Why do your people think he's here?" Dale asked Moore.

"Couple days ago a listening post intercepted a call that should've gone through Rome, ended up being routed through London instead. I don't have the details of the conversation, but whatever they heard was enough for them to tell me Oxford was headed to the States."

"So nothing's to say if he's actually after her or not," Corry said.

"No, but she's a viable target," Moore answered. " She's pissed off people who make their living off trading flesh, in particular the flesh of children. Those are people with money, and they might well want her not only silenced but discredited."

We were all silent for a few seconds, thinking. Moore replaced the closed folder in his bag, and as he did so room service arrived. Dale signed for the food and Natalie brought the cart in, and everyone but me descended on the meal, cracking open cans of soda and taking halves of sandwiches.

When everyone had taken their seats once more, I said, "The CIA showed me a picture of Oxford yesterday, but they didn't identify him as such. Why would they do that?"

"Intelligence gathering?" Corry ventured. "They wanted to know if you'd seen him before."

"But they had to have access to the same sources Robert has," Natalie insisted. "Which means they had reason to believe Oxford is on the move, and potentially moving against Lady Ainsley-Hunter."

Dale shook his head. "They know something that they aren't sharing. Something about Oxford or Drama. A connection between the two, maybe."

"Like?"

"Like maybe they're working together," Corry said.

"Okay," Dale said. "But I have to ask, is that likely? We know for a fact that Drama works alone, and that's not unusual for someone in her line of work."

Moore said, "If Oxford's hunting Her Ladyship, he's hunting alone. There's been nary a whisper about Drama."

"It doesn't hold, anyway," I said. "Drama doesn't have a partner."

"Doesn't have to be a partner," Corry countered. "Just someone she's working with on this one job."

"That's a lot of money to spend to take Her Ladyship," Natalie pointed out. "Just guessing, but if it costs a million dollars to hire one of The Ten, it's got to be at least twice that for two."

"Some people might think it was a bargain," Corry said.

Natalie frowned and turned in her seat, tossing her empty soda can into the trash by the desk. "I agree with Atticus on this. Drama and Oxford are not working together. Doesn't fit the M.O."

"But it would explain why both are coming to New York, if in fact both are," Dale said.

"We don't know if either of them are coming to New York," Moore said. "All we know is that Oxford is on the move in the U.S., but not where. And if we believe what Atticus was told, we have the same problem. It's the same problem as ever with this lot, children -- we know just enough to be justly dribbling down our legs, and not enough to do anything more."

"We also know that The Ten work constantly to preserve their anonymity," Natalie said. "If two work together, all of that gets blown to hell. The difficulty doesn't double, it explodes exponentially. Alone, Drama and Oxford can keep their own counsel, modify their plans as they see fit. If they partner up, they've got to worry about all sorts of new problems -- including communication. And the more they communicate the greater the chance of being discovered or compromised. It'd be too risky. Even if we assume both of them are on the move, that both of them are coming to New York, that both are after the same mark, we still can't assume they're in it together."

Corry grunted, ceding the argument.

"There's one more strike against Oxford, now that I think of it," Dale said. "If he's after Lady Antonia, he'll have to get her alone to stage the hit. He needs to assassinate character along with life, right? So he's got to make her look really bad, and we know that he'll try to make that bad be some sort of sex thing. He'd need to get her alone to make that work."

"And he'd need prep," Corry added. "A lot of prep. We're talking not only props, but another person, potentially."

"Not necessarily," Natalie said. "He could use one of us."

We all looked at her.

"He could," she said. "Bodyguard in Tryst with British Peer would make great copy. Any of us would do."

"Wouldn't work," I said. "Oxford would want it to look like Lady Ainsley-Hunter was the perpetrator, not the victim. The nature of the relationship between us and her is such that no one would buy her taking advantage of us. If Oxford sets it up to look like any of us jumped her, it'd make Her Ladyship into a martyr."

Dale coughed. "Make us look pretty bad, though."

"Oh, that's a lovely thought," Natalie said. "Oxford's not after
her,
he's after us? Why?"

"Maybe Drama hired him," I said. It was a joke. No one laughed.