Michael Walsh Bundle (64 page)

Money and Love.

When all else failed, use Occam's razor: The simplest explanation was most likely to be true.

What else was there, but Money and Love?

Money had first brought them together, and sick Love had kept them together. The sick love Skorzeny had for money and his desire for the solace, however temporary, but satisfying, of women. The love Amanda had for money; how, in the absence of a man and a child in her life, it had made her feel equal to men; and when Skorzeny tapped her—among all others!—for the leadership of his Foundation, what a proof it offered to all her detractors. With money she succeeded and with money she became equal; nay,
primus inter pares
in the world of the City.

And Love? For him, she had none. But that didn't matter to a man like Skorzeny.
Pace
the Beatles, Skorzeny believed, like most men, that money really could buy you love, and if not love, at least the simulacrum of love, which meant sex and a modicum of affection outside the bedroom.

Milton understood it. The oldest bargain there was, the source of the world's oldest profession.
Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World and the source of all our mortal Woe, with the loss of Eden…

She looked back at Atwater's report, which amounted to this simple equation, this simple cipher, that not all the cryptographic machines that the CIA, the NSA, the CSS, and everybody else could muster against. The equivalent of Einstein's E = Mc
²
. Which was this:

Money–Love = Revenge.

She took a deep breath. Were she not a Muslim, she would have taken a deep drink as well, but she only drank when she was in the West, with him, and now that she was back in the East, things were different. Even though no one could see her, there were rituals, formalities, to be observed. No one need know, but she would know and at this point, that was all that mattered.

They had to be here. They had to be here in Hungary, somewhere. There was an intersection, an interstice, and she had to find it. Because, whatever it was, it would lead her to them. Or them to her. But not right now. She had had a long journey. She needed time to think.

Maryam took off her clothes and luxuriated under a long hot shower. That was something else that was forbidden, to enjoy the pleasure of your own body, alone, to reach out and try to connect with the driving mechanism of the universe, the eternal piston engine that He had designed, which Newton had grasped under the apple tree: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down. One door opens, another closes. A man dies, a child is born…

A knock at the door, which she discerned only dimly as she toweled off her head. One of those intrusive hotel “welcome” packages that they reserved for VIPs, or people with money, or both. Eastern Europe still admired money, in a way the West did not. Maybe that was because the West didn't have money anymore.

She wrapped the hotel bathrobe tightly around her. By hotel standards, it was pretty darned nice; assuming that roughly one-third of the guests would steal the robes, the prices charged were fairly reasonable.

The laptop lay open and operative on the coffee table.

There was a woman at the door. Not a room service woman, not an employee of the hotel, no one she was expecting, but someone she very much anticipated seeing.

“Hello,” said Amanda Harrington.

And, right behind her, Emanuel Skorzeny. “
Bonjour, mon cher
,” he said. He had a gun in his hand. He looked over her shoulder, into the room, toward the laptop, and smiled. “May we come in?”

Amanda brushed past her with only a sidelong glance, but Skorzeny seemed genuinely please to be meeting her for the first time. “Really, my dear, you are as lovely as I had heard. Truly splendid.” His mien darkened. “But, as you deprived me of the services of a very faithful and valuable retainer at our last encounter, I feel it necessary to introduce you to his successor.”

He moved to one side. Behind him stood another woman, blond and beautiful.

She had a gun in her hand, and looked like she knew how to use it, so there was no point in arguing. Maryam ushered them into the room and closed the door.

She turned, knowing there was nothing to do. Skorzeny sat down like he owned the place—which, come to think of it, was a distinct possibility. Amanda stood off to one side, almost flinching; her eyes met Maryam's, just as they had back at Clairvaux, only this time their positions were reversed, and Maryam was now the helpless one, while Amanda was the one who might save her if she could, but not right now.

“Put on some music, please,” Skorzeny commanded, and Amanda dutifully obliged. The hotel came equipped with a flat-screen TV that also carried hundreds of audio channels. In just a few seconds, Amanda had found the channel she was looking for and the music came wafting into the room.

“Turn it up,” said Skorzeny, breaking into a broad smile as he heard the familiar strains of the overture: brassy, with urgent strings. He addressed his next remarks to her: “You recognize it, of course. Somehow approrpiate, wouldn't you say?”

The second woman, the one with the gun—she must be Derrida—said nothing as she started to copy the laptop files. Skorzeny noticed and jumped from his seat:

“Good God, woman, what do you think you are doing? Don't touch that. This devil poisons everything he touches.”

Mlle. Derrida stopped and backed away from the machine.

“Our hostess is going to close it down, as per the safety instruction manual. And then we are going to take it, and her, with us.”

Skorzeny turned back to Maryam. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the blonde preparing a needle, with her name on it. The fugu poison again? There was nothing she could do about it.

“You haven't answered my question, my dear,” said Skorzeny as Mlle. Derrida approached her. She was powerless to resist. Better to let it happen now, to learn as much as possible while she was in captivity, to try and figure out a way to escape later, to—

The needle pinched a little, and almost immediately, she felt herself shutting down.

“The music?” Skorzeny looked at her, mouthed words at her, but she couldn't make any sense of them in any language. She was so tired. Just before she went completely paralyzed, she might have heard him say:

“It's the overture to
La Forza del Destino
. What an amazing coincidence.”

But then her world turned dark and she didn't care anymore.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Principessa Stanley awoke with a start. She didn't remember much, but what she did remember wasn't good. Where was she? Where had she been last night?

Let's take them in reverse order, she decided. She had already noticed she couldn't move her arms or her legs, but right now her arms were her primary concern, if only to wipe the dirt and the goo off her face, however it got there. But she couldn't move her arms, and therefore her legs were the last of her worries at the moment.

The main worry was the plastic bag over her head and the rag in her mouth. Luckily, she could breathe, which was a
duh
because if she couldn't have breathed, she would have been dead long ago. So whoever did this to her at least had enough of a heart to keep her alive, although for what, she'd rather not think…

Principessa Stanley was a good reporter. In fact, she was a better reporter than most of her rivals, including those on the newspapers. She had earned her job fairly, with a high degree from a good School of Communication, which was what all the former journalism schools were calling themselves these days. It was not her fault that she was pretty and had a killer body; those assets were only the deciding factors, the extras, whenever she had been up for a gig in the past. At her level now, every woman was either good-looking or unemployed. Such was the triumph of feminism.

So why was she here, buried up to her neck in a dirt grave behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Who had done this to her?

She tried not to panic. That was what she always heard. Panic would get you nowhere. Worse, panic would get you killed even faster. Take deep breaths…

She panicked. She struggled and writhed and tried to pretzel her way out of the shallow grave, but it was useless. She was planted in the backyard of the Met, like some kind of human vegetable like Farmer Brown's victims in that ridiculous horror movie from the eighties,
Motel Hell
. Her assailant probably had seen the damn thing, which is what had given him the idea. Fucking hicks from flyover country were all the same: right-wing nuts who ought to be hunted down and exterminated. When Angela Hassett beat that horrid Jeb Tyler in the fall, things were going to change, but good. She could hardly wait, not that she would ever admit that on the air or anything. After all she was a neutral journalist.

She caught herself and stopped moving. Clearly, she wasn't going to get out all at once. She was going to have to work her way out of this, wriggle out of it, like a worm or something, a quarter-inch at a time. Slow and steady wins the race.

She tried pushing down at whatever solid ground might be below her, but couldn't get much of a purchase. The soil was soft and loamy, freshly dug; all she was managing to do was sink a little deeper, which obviously wasn't the way to go. Once again she stopped, and this time she realized she was already out of breath. What a ripoff that gym membership had been. All that cardio exercise was supposed to help you in situations like this, wasn't it?

Think.

Then she felt something move between her legs. If she could have jumped, she would have. Instead, she thought her heart was going to stop, right then and there.

What the hell was in the pit with her?

Her mind raced. She was starting to lose it.

A snake? Did they even have snakes in Central Park? There must be snakes in Central Park. There were coyotes in Central Park now, and she had to admit that she always felt a small thrill whenever another wild animal was sighted within the five boroughs. It was long past time that humans should move aside and start sharing the limited space on the planet with animals who, afterall, were just people without lawyers of their own species.

It moved again.

It didn't feel like a snake. It didn't feel like it was slithering, whatever slithering felt like. Snakes didn't travel underground, did they? She remembered that time when she was a girl when she saw a sunning snake slither back into its lair, in a hole in the ground. So it could be a snake, after all.

But what if it was a gopher, or a groundhog, or a woodchuck, something with teeth? Would that be worse than a snake? Something that would start by nibbling on her extremities, get a tasty bite or two, and then set about making a meal out of her, so that when they finally found her, when the city wasn't in lockdown anymore, they'd reach for her head and that would be all that was left of her, the rest having gone to nourish a colony of woodchucks the size of Staten Island.

There it went again. That same feeling. Whatever its source, it didn't seem to be moving, just sitting there between her knees and her crotch, buzzing, tickling her, vibrating…in other context, she might even have enjoyed the experience. But not now.

She tried to push herself up again, which was a dumb idea, because she moved farther south, and she also felt whatever it was slide a little as it vibrated once more.

It was a cell phone
. Her cell phone, which she had been looking at when that bastard assaulted her. If she could somehow slide her hand down and grab it…well, that was the first half of the plan. The second half would be to somehow get her arm out from underneath the dirt and bring the phone to her face, where she would somehow manage to get the damn thing to work, even if she had to press the talk button with her nose.

She reached. It was like fighting her way through molasses, but amazingly she could make a little progress. That was the upside of the loamy soil; her hand could actually move a little. Inch by inch. Keep it simple. Baby steps. Get to the goal eventually, even if it took forever.

Wait a minute—she didn't have forever. She tried to recall what she read about people living without food and water. You could go without food for weeks—just look at those Irish hunger-strikers—but water, she was pretty sure, was a nonnegotiable commodity. Maybe a day or two, then madness set in, followed by death. What if the crisis wasn't over by then? The way the cops fought these days, it might take them a week to round up the dudes for the fair trials. She couldn't wait to cover the proceedings.

Her thoughts continued to run along these lines until she realized that she was already slipping into madness. Goddamnit, didn't that bastard know who she was? He couldn't treat her like this! The minute she got out of here, she was going to hunt his ass down, find him, and rat him out to the cops. She'd testify at the trial and hope to hell he'd get the death penalty. Normally, she was against the death penalty, but in this case she'd make an exception.

The buzzing again. Her hand moved closer. It brushed up against something. By God, she was closer to it all along than she had thought! Now we were getting somewhere.

Keep buzzing, you bastard,
she thought.
Come to mama.

She had it!

It was a cell phone!

But not her cell phone. She could tell by the feel. It was just a cheap piece of crap. WTF?

It was his
. That dirty son of a bitch. She had him now. As soon as she got out of here, she could trace this sucker, ransack his phonebook. The little bastard would be sorry he was ever born after she turned the wrath of the Sinclair empire on his sorry ass. She started laughing. Revenge was going to be eaten hot and she was going to enjoy every bite.

Her arm was moving!

The dirt was falling away from her shoulder. All of that moving and shaking had loosened it just enough so that now, in her justifiable rage and anger and lust for vengeance, she could extract it.

Here it came—

Her shoulder popped out of the earth. She shrugged as hard as she could, just like she did in the gym with some light dumbbells in each hand, toning the traps, and raised her elbow. Pushing, pushing. Come on, do it. Remember the old bodybuilder's motto:
what can be conceived can be believed and achieved.

She did it! It was coming up through the ground, her hand along with it. Which meant she could snatch the stupid baggie off her head and in just a few minutes—

“Just what I was looking for.”

Somewhere in the back of her mind, the voice sounded familiar. One of the things that made her a good reporter was her ear. She had an ear for music and an ear for voices, and she rarely had to think twice before being able to attach a name not just to a face, which was easy, but to a voice, which was much harder.

This voice she knew.

No time to think about it now. The cell phone disappeared from her grip. Shit. There went her last hope. The bastard had come back for it, and now he was going to kill her.

“I was wondering how long it would take me to find you. Brave girl. Now, where is he?”

He had not taken the baggie off her head, and he was behind her. But he wasn't fondling her or anything like that, so she had to assume he was one of the good guys. Still, he didn't sound like a cop—

Hang on. Didn't sound—sound—Say, she
knew
that voice…

“What was his name?” The voice was sterner now. Somewhere a clock was ticking. No time for games. She'd find out who it was later.

“He didn't say.”

“Sure about that?”

Something about this guy's voice said not to fuck with him. Think—there. “No, wait, he did say.”

“Thought so. You weren't lying to me, were you?”

“No, why would I—”

“I can tell when you lie. I can tell when anybody lies. So be straight with me, collect yourself, and everybody will be happy.”

“Yeah.”

“That's yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.” No point in arguing.

“What did he say his name was? Some Arabic name?”

“No, American.”

“Go.”

“Raymond. Raymond something.”

“D.B. Do better.”

“Gimme a sec. Something German-sounding…wait…it's coming.”

“So's the Rapture. Hurry.”

Her mind raced again. It was doing a lot of that lately. It was on the tip of her tongue…news business…anchors…She had it!

“Cronkite, like Walter, I think. How could I forget something like that?”

“I believe you,” her rescuer said. So he wasn't going to kill her; he wasn't another sick fuck psycho. He was a kind of guardian angel.

“So? You're going to get me out of here now, right?”

No answer. She could free herself after a while, but it sure would be easier with a little help.

“Right?”

“Listen, you cocksucker,” the man was saying intro the phone. “I'm coming for you. O my Brother, this will be the last dawn you will ever see.” Except that she couldn't understand a word: to her, it all sounded like a variation of
haLA-haLA-haLA-haLA.
She really had to start studying languages, especially those funny foreign ones they spoke in the Middle East. “Because I am sending you to hell.” That part at least was in English.

She stayed silent and listened in case he spoke again…but could hear nothing. Either he was still here, or he was gone.

“Hello?”

No response.

“Mister?”

Ditto.

Fifteen minutes later, covered with dirt, Principessa Stanley tore the baggie off her head and took a deep breath. The back end of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had never looked so good to her. In vain, though, she looked around for the man who had saved her, the man whose voice she dimly recognized, and would now devote the rest of her life to discovering his identity. What a story that would be.

She looked in a 360-degree circle, then ran out onto Fifth Avenue.

But he, whoever he was, was gone.