I put on a sweater, a coat, the Kevlar vest, and a wool hat to keep out the rain.
“Are you sure he’ll be alone?” Pat asked.
“He has to come alone. This is all about blackmail. They can’t involve anyone else. You’ll see,” I reassured him.
“Be careful,” Pat said.
“I will.”
I left the apartment, walked downstairs. I crossed the street to the main graveyard entrance. Went in. My plan was to skirt the tree-lined stone cemetery wall on the river side. It rose to a dense woody embankment overlooking the graves and from there I could see everything, yet because of the trees I couldn’t be seen. Charles wouldn’t know that. He wouldn’t know Fort Morgan. He’d show up, go to the shelter in the center of the graveyard, wait for me, but I’d already be there watching him.
I inched along the wall. The hail had become freezing rain. Pitch black. I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me. I stopped in the trees fifty feet behind the shelter.
Midnight. A few minutes after.
A figure in a white coat. Too small to be Charles. Who? Amber? He sent you to do the dirty work? He sent you to clean up his mess?
I watched her. I waited. She came closer.
Amber. Is that really you? I kept behind the trees. Had to be her. I smiled. I moved nearer, still hidden by the undergrowth. I slithered down the embankment until I was only twenty feet away, cloaked by the trees and the night.
“Amber,” I said.
She didn’t hear. She leaned on a hooped pillar, provided for people to tie up their horses.
I said it louder: “Amber.”
She spun around, looking at the graves, and then she peered into the thickets of dense wood, staring right at me, not seeing me. The hood on her coat up, but definitely Amber. No one else had that poise. That deep embodiment of sex. One of the main weapons in her arsenal. And as I stood there looking at her, thinking of that, gazing at her, it came to me and I knew what the mistake had been. What a naive boy I was. From Ireland. From the sticks.
“Amber.”
“Alex?” she said. It was her.
“Amber, I know now what I did wrong,” I said.
“Come out, come down here and talk to me like a civilized person,” she said with self-assurance.
“It was that remark, that joke. Wasn’t it?”
No reply.
“That Kama Sutra twenty-one joke. Goddamnit. You froze up after that. And you told Charles. And he came to kill me.”
“Come out of there and talk to me face-to-face,” she said. Cool, icy. I liked that.
“Kama Sutra twenty-one. Victoria said that to me once. Victoria Patawasti. She said that as a joke to make me laugh. To relax me. A joke against herself. You know, because she’s Indian. But she said it to you, too, didn’t she? You slept with her, didn’t you? You fucked her to get her to tell you her password. Or if not to tell you, to give you information to work it out? I’m right, tell me I’m right, Amber.”
“Come over here and I’ll talk to you, I can barely hear you,” she said, quiet and calm. Of course she wasn’t going to confirm or deny anything in case I had a tape recorder. I knew that.
“‘Carrickfergus,’ you kept saying. Was that it? Does that ring a bell? Was that her password? Maybe, maybe not. Who cares. It doesn’t matter. You got it somehow. Seduced her, got her to trust you. You were Charles’s whore. And it was more than just the password, he wanted to know if she could be bought.”
“You must be drunk or something, Alexander, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I want to help you, I think you might be mentally unbalanced, you’re talking nonsense, come down here, come out of there, I can help you,” she said.
I barely contained my anger.
“No, you stand there and fucking listen to me,” I said.
“But I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m really sorry, Alexander, you’re out of your mind,” she said softly, patronizingly, like a social worker or a nuthouse nurse.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Alan Houghton, the first obstacle. Victoria Patawasti, the second. And you seduced her and she wasn’t sure, but you’re so goddamn beautiful. You fucked her. Probably with that strap-on dildo you used to have.”
“That’s disgusting, you must be drunk or on drugs or something. Please, Alex, believe me, I have no idea what you’re saying,” she said.
“Liar. You fucked her. Charles told you to do it. Maybe it was her first time with a woman, she was nervous, so she made that joke. That same fucking joke. Her on top, you below. ‘That’s position twenty-one of the Kama Sutra,’ she said. And stupid me. You remembered it when I said it.”
“Oh, my God. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re quite delusional,” she said, calm and lovely and irritating.
“When I did that Kama Sutra joke, you knew I’d slept with her too, that I knew Victoria Patawasti, that I’d slept with her and that I’d come to avenge her, to seek you out.”
She didn’t speak, she didn’t budge, she stared at me, silent, unmoving. Infuriating.
“Tell me I’m wrong, you bitch, you bloody bitch,” I screamed at her.
But she said nothing. Shook her head sadly. Smiled. It was the final straw.
I climbed out of the thicket. I walked down the embankment toward her. I took out the.45, chambered a round. She dropped something, a signal. Hit the deck, put her hands over her head, a glint of her white teeth grinning in the dark and rain.
The shooting started and I was hit immediately in the chest and shoulder.
I tumbled to the bottom of the embankment. Gasping. Blood over my hands. Bullets flew out of the dark, thumping into a tree a half meter to my left. Others flew by from a different angle, big and churning like machine-gun rounds. The rain poured down. It hurt to the touch. My hat gone. Amber gone. Dazed. I looked for a way out but the air was as thick as coal.
I stood again. Easy target. Petrified. I dived for cover. I got behind a gravestone. Caught my breath. A scream of objects came whistling by out of the trees. An arc of fire. A shotgun. Jesus. So that’s shooter number three: a guy above me blocking off the exit.
They had planned it out. Trumped me, checkmated me. They had anticipated that I would come early, that I would be in the trees above the shelter and along the wall. They had seen all this and had placed two assassins in the shelter next to Amber and one in the trees behind me so I could not escape. The men below had me from different angles and the man up at the wall could shoot down on me from a flanking and elevated position.
I had lost all the advantages that I had come here with: surprise, tactical superiority, the high ground.
Automatic weapons. M16s. Coils of tracer in the black sky. A hungry pack of bullets seeking me out. The cemetery far from streetlights, and Fort Morgan cloaked in low clouds. Thunder. Rain. No stars. No cars. No help.
They found me. An object smashed into me and I went down again. My eyes saw white. I bit through my tongue. I rolled to the side. I’d taken another hit. Above my left knee this time. I reached down and my hand came back with blood. Shotgun pellet. I couldn’t tell if my patella was smashed. A lot of blood. I yelled and burst into tears. Scrambled away. Pathetic. I had failed. For Victoria, for me. For everyone. I, who was so goddamn smart. Jesus. My eyes closed. She was cleverer than me. I could see that now. I had been bested. Arrogance. Hubris. I blinked. Crawled behind a big tomb bedecked by angels. The men were moving too. Getting a better position. I had to move. I slithered toward the embankment, under monuments, gravestones and Celtic crosses. A sign told me that I was in section K, block 1, wherever that was.
My head was light. I couldn’t breathe. A tunnel collapsed my vision into a single fatal exit and the downpour took on a dreadful cadence. Funereal and mocking.