Reflex (48 page)

Davy took the chair. Millie stood slightly behind him, her hand resting on his right shoulder.

Hyacinth rolled to her feet, her teeth bared.

Davy worked the slide on the Glock. A brass gleam flickered against the darkness.

Millie jerked, squeezing Davy's shoulder. "I thought we—"

"We did. Apparently she had a spare magazine." He ejected the clip, then worked the slide once more. Another brass and lead cylinder tumbled through the air, to thud to the ground. Davy took a large plastic bag from his back pocket and put the gun, the clip, and the two cartridges from the ground into it.

Without taking his eyes off of Hyacinth he handed the bagged gun to Millie. He sensed, rather than saw her departure, an absence made manifest, an area of warmth replaced by the chill desert air.

Hyacinth twitched.

Davy peeled the gloves from his hands and dropped them to the ground. Hyacinth inhaled sharply and Davy smiled.

"Right—your prints only, which the FBI will pull off. They'll get a ballistic sample and compare it to the bullets that killed Brian Cox. You might want to consider a plea bargain. No death penalty, perhaps, if you turn in Simons."

She wrinkled her lips. "You know that's impossible! And even if I did, you'll never be able to touch him."

Davy began unbuttoning his shirt.

Hyacinth's brows came together. "You're coming on to me
now?"

He didn't say anything. Instead, he pulled the shirt over to show the dressing and the suction tube.

Hyacinth's eyes opened wide. She hardly flinched when Millie reappeared.

Millie looked from Davy's open shirt to Hyacinth. "Ah, told her, did you?"

"Why aren't you dead?" Hyacinth said.

"I am getting really tired of that question," Davy said, looking up at Millie. "Never underestimate the power of a determined woman."

Hyacinth raised her hand to her left collarbone. "How did you get it out?"

Millie, deadpan, said, "Love will find a way." She looked down at Davy. "Ready?"

"Ready."

The waiting FBI agents handcuffed and frisked a subdued, ashen-faced Hyacinth. Becca began the litany, "You are under arrest for the murder of Brian Cox and the kidnappings of David Rice and Sojourner Johnson. You have the right to remain silent—watch it!" Becca took a quick step back.

Hyacinth doubled over and began vomiting.

Davy flinched away, unable to watch. He waited, his forehead against the cool stone of the Aerie, and took deep measured breaths. Millie finally came and he looked at her, expectantly.

"They started her on atropine and called Sullivan. He'll have his team ready by the time the ambulance arrives." She sat down suddenly, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. "You were right. Kinder to kill her." After a moment, she added, "Becca said, 'I didn't mean it this way when I wanted one of them to spill their guts.' "

"None of them will talk?"

Becca's voice on the phone sounded tired. "None of them who are still alive."

Millie winced.

She was at a pay phone in a D.C. Metro station. She kept her eyes on the platform and the approaches. Cell phones were killing the pay phone business. It was getting harder and harder to find a working pay phone, but the subways were good bets—any place where it was hard to use a cell phone because of transmission interference.

"I thought all the surgeries were successful!"

"Yes. Sullivan had it down to a science by the time he pulled the last implant. But the only one who was willing to plea bargain was the chef."

"And?"

"Somebody poisoned him."

"In custody?"

"Yeah, in maximum security. A guard's missing."

"The one who took him his meal?"

"Yes."

Millie was silent for a moment, watching two suits come down the escalator. They turned away from her, though, and one began reading a magazine he'd been carrying under his arm. "He wouldn't be dead if I didn't take him from that house."

"And Davy might be dead now.
You
didn't poison him."

"Do the others know? Hyacinth, the rest?"

"Well, we didn't tell them, but we couldn't keep the lawyers away. I'm pretty sure they spilled the beans—the prisoners were quieter than usual afterwards."

Several high-school-aged kids came down the escalator and accreted into two separate clusters, boys and girls, each talking only to the members of their own sex but oh-so-aware of the other group.

"And who is paying for the lawyers?"

"That's privileged, apparently, but the firm's done business for Bochstettler and Associates in the past."

"So, barring Davy's testimony, I take it you don't have enough to move against Simons?"

Becca sounded angry. "No. Even the link to the house is iffy. I know he said this was one of his houses but he doesn't own it, not directly. Its owner of record is a real estate holding firm in Boston and it was leased, on paper, to Abney, the butler, who's saying even less than Hyacinth. I say on paper because there's no record of any rental payments. The record you told me about at the Edgartown Golf Club is gone, too. There's no sign of the physicist, Conley, or the other household staff who left before you got there. Even the security company has been stripped of anyone who worked out at Great Pond Lane and the computer hard drives from the security video station are gone."

"And Simons?"

"Still in New York. We've got a wiretap on the townhouse and he's still taking calls but if he's discussing anything of note, it's well coded. We're sniffing his DSL connection, too, but his e-mail is encrypted and we're not sure we want to go to that
other
organization for help."

And the NSA could be listening to this, too.
"I understand your reluctance."

"We'll keep digging. We'll keep watching."

"At least until the ton of bricks lands."

Becca sighed. "Well, Mom always wanted me to be an accountant, anyway."

Two days later, Millie went with Davy as he got a randomly chosen Family Practitioner in Portland, Oregon, to pull the suction tube. "It still aches," he said. "But I feel less...
infected."
He swiveled back and forth, twisting at the waist, then rubbed his wrist. "Less tethered."

The ton of bricks arrived later that same day.

"Suspended, pending investigation into departmental malfeasance. My boss is tarred with the same brush—several thousand dollars in seized RICO cash has gone missing."

Millie closed her eyes tight and leaned against the wall next to the phone booth. "Are you in any danger?"

"I doubt it. A disgraced agent is one thing. A dead agent is something completely different. Besides—it's a balancing act. If they push too hard, we'll go to the press. It's an election year and there are too many photos showing... that man with senior administration members. They want to quiet this down, not blow it up."

"I need to talk to Davy about this. Watch your back, okay?"

"Twenty-four/seven."

"All the windows are shuttered. You can't see anything of the interior. Even before, when I was watching people go in and out, I never saw inside the door. It's got that awning."

They were on the roof across the street and down the block from Simons's Manhattan townhouse. Davy was eating a chicken kabob on a bun, bought from a street vendor at the edge of the park.

Millie glared at him. "Are you listening to me?"

He licked one of his fingers. "Sure. No jump site inside. But we don't want to go
inside
that building." He gnawed at the bamboo skewer, getting the last bit of chicken off the shaft. "It's a death trap." He wiped his fingers on the napkin before reaching over, and took the binoculars from her.
"Nice.
You buy these while I was, uh, gone?" He peered through them.

"Yes."

"Nice flat roof. The parapet is three feet high or so with drains to downspouts. Maybe interior plumbed drains as well." He gave the binoculars back to Millie.

"We'll need about a cubic yard of fast-setting cement."

Millie watched from the distant building as Davy dealt with the video surveillance system, smashing each of the roof cameras with a thirty-three-inch Louisville Slugger baseball bat in maple, bought especial. He took out all four cameras in less than three seconds.

She jumped to join him. He was spinning the bat and grinning like a fool and she said, "Very nice, dear. Don't tear your stitches."

He stuck out his tongue. "Take a peek at the front door."

She stuck her head over the parapet and looked down. There was no activity below. She wondered what they were thinking inside or if they'd even noticed.

"No activity," she reported.

He put down the bat and said, "Back in a second."

When he returned he held two galvanized buckets, each half full of wet cement. He worked his way around the edge of the parapet, filling each through-the-wall rain drain with the thick glop. He made several trips back to the cement yard. By the time he'd blocked all sixteen spouts, the first one was hardening to the touch. There were four more, through-the-roof drains out in the middle of the expanse. He used a bucket over each, letting it squeeze in among the gratings.

He whistled cheerfully as he worked.

She couldn't help smiling.

"Well," he said, tossing the buckets to one side. "It's not too late to stop. We do this and they'll chase us the rest of our lives."

Millie stopped smiling. "And this changes things how? As if they're not going to keep chasing us if we don't? Let them understand the consequences."

Davy nodded briefly. "Yeah, but now
we've
crossed the line as well. You want the front or the back?"

She said, "I'll go across the street and watch the front." She jerked her thumb directly across the street to a building one story higher.

Davy nodded. "Got your horn?"

She held up the compressed air can with the boating horn attached.

"Be off with ya, then." He picked up the bat and wandered back toward the rear of the building.

Millie jumped across the street to the fire escape she could see and climbed to the roof. She watched Davy lean over the rear parapet and glance below, at the rear garden. He turned back to her and waved. She waved back.

He'd described it, of course, when he told her what he'd done back on the Vineyard, but she was unprepared for the sheer volume of water. The roof was approximately sixty feet by sixty and it was knee deep in under half a minute.

About one hundred and sixty-two tons of water.

She was wondering if it would hold the full three hundred and twenty-four tons that water all the way to the parapet would entail when the question answered itself. The roof caved in near the front of the building, and the water flowed down into the gap.

Almost immediately water smashed through the glass and geysered between the bars of the windows on the fourth floor.

Up on the roof Davy kept the water coming. He was holding onto the rear façade and the roof under him was apparently still solid.

Now water was coming out of the windows on the third floor. The front door banged open below and Millie focused the binoculars. They mostly seemed to be servants—at least they wore livery, wet, in some cases, to the waist.

Three more men
washed
out the door and down the steps, as the water began to flow in earnest on the first floor, turning the stoop into a cascade of rapids. An end table, a lamp, a coat rack, an attaché case, and a padded bench followed in the flood. One of the two garage doors started to creep up, then stopped, with a gap of three feet. Several bottles and gallon jugs washed out onto the driveway, then a mechanics creeper, and a bundle of rags.

The electricity is out.
That's why the garage door had stopped rising. It's also why Davy had used—was
still
using seawater.

A man crawled out under the garage door, then reached back to drag,
well, float
another man out on his back. A man wearing a cast and sling.

Bingo.
She squeezed the horn button and winced at the noise, a thousand balloons being rubbed together, then threw it aside. Before her ears stopped ringing, Davy was at the front edge of Simons's building perched on the parapet like a gargoyle. He looked down at the street and vanished.

She jerked her head back down to the sidewalk but Simons was already gone.

She went to the Aerie first, and picked up the handheld metal detector she'd purchased that morning. It was a black and yellow "wand" unit like those used at airports.

Davy, as arranged, had jumped Simons to an empty stretch of desert some fifty miles east of the Aerie, northwest of the town of Terlingua. He was worried about tracking devices. They were smaller and smaller, with satellite transceivers using the global positioning system to fix location. And knowing Davy and Millie were alive and active, Simons might have taken precautions.

Simons was face down in the sand and Davy was kneeling on him, one knee in his back, while Davy patted him down with one hand. Tossed to one side were a cell phone, a wallet, a set of keys, and two clips for an automatic pistol. The gun that went with the ammo was in Davy's hand, the muzzle pressed quite hard against the back of Simons's head.

The expression on Davy's face frightened her. She was half afraid he'd kill Simons.

And half afraid he
won't.

She switched on the wand and swept it over Simons's legs. The shoes beeped and she pulled them off before throwing them into the growing pile. His back was negative but his watch set it off. She stripped it off.

Simons's right forearm was in a fiberglass wrist cast stretching from the base of his fingers to just short of his elbow. When she passed the wand over it, the speaker shrilled.

"There's something in his cast," she said. "Strong signal."

Davy ground the gun muzzle into Simons's head. "What did they put in your cast?"

Simons said slowly, "They put two pins in my wrist."

Millie shook her head. "They can't put a hard cast on after surgery until the swelling goes down. He's lying."