‘Fredriks?’ Lowell asked next. ‘Fielding?’ His voice snapped back to Jacobs. ‘Damn you, what’s happened to them?’
‘They’re dead, Harvey. Their fate was sealed the moment you brought them here. You had a chance, though. If you’d accepted the vision, you could have joined us. You could have been one of us.’
‘Hey,’ Lowell said in a placatory tone, ‘let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Stephen. We can negotiate, right? I mean, that was then, and this is now, right? It’s not too late. I can still join you. You know I can be useful. You know that, right?’
‘No, Harvey, I don’t. But why don’t I ask my friend?’ he said reasonably. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, and Adams could envision him directing his question to the mysterious box.
‘Well,’ Jacobs said moments later, ‘that seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?’
‘No!’ Lowell yelled, and Adams heard him pushing his chair backwards, moving quickly, fearfully. ‘No!’
And then Adams heard the loud, concussive blasts of three 9mm rounds fired from a semi-automatic handgun, and the heavy thud as Lowell’s dead body hit the floor above him.
10
Jacobs stared down at the dead body of Lowell, lying bleeding on his study floor. It had been unfortunate but necessary.
‘Why did you contact us?’ The voice entered Jacobs’ mind almost painfully. ‘You could have dealt with this yourself. It was unnecessary to give him details.’
‘On the contrary. We felt we could use him on our team before. He was a good man, we just felt he wouldn’t go along with it. But then he came here, demanding to be a part of it. It was worth finding out.’ Especially as I still need to find one more person anyway, Jacobs didn’t say.
‘Just so long as it does not interfere with our schedule.’
‘It will not,’ Jacobs promised. He had already decided what to do with the bodies of Lowell and his men. ‘We will meet in person within the week, I promise you.’
‘What the hell’s going on over there?’ Lynn asked, startled by the muted gunfire coming from the other side of the woods.
Thomas got straight on the secure radio to Benjamin on the main road. ‘Ben, what can you see?’
‘Not sure yet,’ Benjamin’s voice came back, crystal clear. ‘But I’m pretty sure that was nine-millimetre fire, and the Secret Service carry forty cal.’
‘You think Jacobs’ men have opened fire on the agents?’ Lynn asked incredulously.
‘It’s possible,’ Thomas replied. ‘I don’t know what the hell is going on but I’d be ready to believe anything right now.’
Adams gently lowered himself from the top shelf, silently touching down on the floor.
He had outstayed his welcome and was going to have to leave. If he read the situation correctly, Lowell’s Secret Service agents were all dead. It would be standard procedure for Jacobs’ security team to now comb the building to make sure it was secure.
But what had he learnt? Adams began to think, but a rattle at the outside laundry door made him go instantly alert.
Damn! He chastized himself; there would be plenty of time for reflection if and when he managed to escape from this place. For now, he had to concentrate his resources on survival.
Reacting on instinct, he hauled himself back up to the topmost shelves again, lying flat just below the high ceiling. It was cramped and dark in the store cupboard, but if anyone looked directly up, they wouldn’t fail to see him.
Adams concentrated on his breathing, consciously slowing it, putting himself into a state of reduced metabolism, less likely to make any unnecessary movement that would alert anyone who came into the cupboard. At the same time, he removed the blackened knife from the sheath on his belt, holding the wicked blade flat against his forearm.
Outside, he could hear two men looking around, checking around the laundry room. He heard the laundry chute he had slid down earlier being opened, the men obviously looking up into it. He heard it swinging shut, and then the next thing he knew, the cupboard door was flung wide open and a burly, short-haired security operative armed with a short-barrelled submachine gun entered the small space.
Adams watched from above in a state of heightened anticipation as the man looked through the lower shelves, knowing that if the operative looked upwards, he would have no choice but to dive straight on to him and kill him with the knife.
But the man just moved two tubs of bleach to one side in a half-hearted gesture and then muttered to himself, turned on his heel, and left, closing the cupboard door behind him.
Adams waited a few moments more until the men had left the larger laundry room, and then exhaled slowly.
He was about to slide back down to the ground when voices from above caught his attention.
‘What are we going to do with the bodies?’ Adams heard, recognizing the voice as that of Eldridge, the security guard who had searched Lowell earlier.
‘Round them up, put them in their own cars, and drive them out to Pahosa Point,’ Jacobs said in reply. ‘I’ve just spoken to GT, he’s going to meet you up there with an oil tanker. Rig up a crash, make sure all vehicles are involved and incinerated by the tanker exploding. It’ll look like they died on their way here.’
‘Sir,’ Adams heard Eldridge say in protest, ‘those bodies are full of bullet holes. One body alone has over thirty rounds in it. It won’t look like an accident for long.’
‘We don’t need it to look like one for long,’ Jacobs replied. ‘Just for a few days, and we can use our resources to slow down any investigation. After that, it won’t make any difference at all.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Adams heard Eldridge reply, but he didn’t even consider why it wouldn’t matter in a few days’ time that an entire cohort of Secret Service agents had just been massacred; instead he latched on to something else Jacobs had just said.
The cars. They were going to move the cars.
And in an instant, Adams realized he had a way out.
‘OK, drag them inside,’ Eldridge ordered the guards, pointing towards the government SUVs. The men nodded grimly and started to load the bodies into the large 4x4s.
The bodies of the Secret Service agents had already been recovered and arranged in front of the entranceway, a thick trail of blood and entrails leading from the house.
The agents had gone around the house, rounding up the guards by relying on their presidential authority. They had forced the guards to drop their weapons but had failed to cuff them or check them for back-up pieces, which they all carried.
When Eldridge had sent the message to retaliate, the men had simply drawn their weapons and shot the agents dead. So confident were the Secret Service men in their inviolable authority, they had been caught completely off guard, and only one agent had managed to get off a shot of his own.
Killing over thirty members of the elite presidential bodyguard would have unnerved most men, but Eldridge remained unmoved, as did the security guards; after all, they knew that the world’s ultimate power was not possessed by any government.
Being one of the hundred ‘chosen’, Eldridge himself knew even more. He knew exactly why the deaths of all these men mattered not one bit.
They would all have been dead in the near future anyway.
Adams manoeuvred himself through the house as quickly as he could, aware that even though Jacobs’ men were otherwise occupied, he could still be discovered at any time. He saw bodies being dragged through the house, blood still pumping across the tiled floors from the bullet holes that riddled them, but managed to remain undetected. And then he was at the window of the dark kitchen, staring out at the well-lit courtyard outside. The eight SUVs were parked up in a semicircular arc around the turning circle directly outside the front entrance, the bodies lined up in front of them.