Lethal

The Bookkeeper was impatiently waiting for his call, and this time the news had to be good.

The car bomb had failed to dispense with either Coburn or Honor. The Bookkeeper had received that bad news with even more fury than Doral had anticipated, and he’d anticipated something along the lines of Hitler getting news of the Third Reich’s defeat.

“You goddamn idiot! You told me he was there.”

“He was. I saw him myself.”

“Then how could he have got away?”

“I don’t-”

“And why didn’t you check to make sure he was dead before you left?”

“The car was in flames. There was no way to-”

“I’m sick of your excuses, Doral.”

It had continued that way for several minutes. But Doral preferred the ranting to the cool, distant tone of The Bookkeeper’s final words. “If you can’t do any better than this, I don’t need you, do I?”

In that moment Doral realized that unless he delivered Coburn and Honor, he was a dead man.

Or.

It occurred to him that he did indeed have another option. He could kill The Bookkeeper.

That treasonous thought had wormed its way into his mind and coiled around his imagination. He fantasized about it and found the prospect enormously appealing. Why not?

The main why not? was because the end of The Bookkeeper would spell the end of his livelihood. But who was to say that he couldn’t take over the whole operation, now that the groundwork had been so meticulously laid?

In the interest of time, Doral decided to shelve that enticing thought for future consideration and, in the meantime, to find Honor and Coburn. He wanted that asshole dead whether The Bookkeeper had ordered it or not.

With that goal in mind, he had called Amber, the airheaded receptionist at Tori’s fitness center. He reintroduced himself as the guy she’d met at the sandwich shop the day before and had asked her out for a drink.

She’d played hard to get. It was after eleven o’clock, she’d said peevishly. Why had he waited so late to call? She had to open the center at six a.m.

Doral had said the first thing that popped into his mind. “I just hate to see a good kid like you get blindsided.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tori is interviewing other girls for your position.”

The plausible lie had worked like a magic wand. He was invited to come to her place for a nightcap, and all it took was two vodka tonics for her to start enumerating all the advantages that Tori Shirah had over her, including a house on Lake Pontchartrain that she’d cheated an exhusband out of.

He left Amber with a promise for dinner at Commander’s Palace soon and immediately reported his findings to The Bookkeeper. Laying it on real thick, he had volunteered to personally drive to Tori’s house on the lake and check it out.

His efforts had paid off. Big-time. He hadn’t located Coburn or Honor, but he’d discovered Emily sleeping in one of the guest bedrooms, and that was almost as good. The sooner he reported something positive to The Bookkeeper, the better the working climate, and the healthier for everybody.

Cursing his own sound judgment, which was preventing him from sampling what he’d lusted after since adolescence, he zipped up, then bent down and whispered, “Your pussy will never know what it missed.”

He backed away and aimed the pistol down at Tori’s head.

Hamilton’s jet set down at Lafayette Aero at 03:40 Central time, gaining him an hour. The FBO was virtually shut down at that hour of the morning, so the only personnel there were the ground crew.

Hamilton was the first off the aircraft. He pleasantly greeted the man with the chocks and told him that they were an advance team sent by the State Department to set up security for the upcoming visit of a government dignitary.

“Really, who? The president?”

“I’m not allowed to say,” Hamilton replied, smiling genially. “We don’t know how long our errand will take. Our pilots will stay with the plane.”

“Yes, sir.”

Meanwhile the six men who had disembarked with Hamilton unloaded their gear and stowed it in the two black Suburbans with the darkly tinted windows that Hamilton had requested to be waiting for them on the tarmac.

If the young man wondered why an envoy from the State Department required automatic weapons and S.W.A.T. gear, he wisely contained his curiosity.

Within minutes of the jet’s landing, the team was speeding away in the Suburbans. Hamilton gave his driver the VanAllens’ home address, and he programmed it into the built-in GPS. Hamilton wanted to stop there first and pay his respects to Tom’s widow. He owed it to Tom. He owed it to her. After all, it was he who had sent Tom to that meeting on the abandoned railroad tracks.

It was incredibly presumptive to call at this hour of the night, but hopefully she would be up, surrounded by friends, neighbors, and kinfolk, who had rushed to her in response to the news of Tom’s death.