A grad student. Christ. Talk about tarnishing a memory.
I knew what I needed to do. “No last name?”
“No, sorry.”
We got to the car, and I thanked him for his candor.
He held out his hand. “You’ll bring the kids next time? She’ll never tell you, you know how she can be, but she wishes she could see Kim more, meet Alex.”
I shook his hand. “Sure. In the New Year. We’ll all drive up.”
I climbed into the BMW, started the engine and drove away, leaving Eric wondering why, despite some considerable effort, my expression had so totally contradicted what I’d just said.
I drove a bit, then pulled over and parked ten miles west of the house. I drank the coffee, then called Kurt and Gigi using a smartphone they’d given me. They were working on Rossetti and his editor’s digital trails, as Gigi had suggested. I asked them to find a psychiatrist named Orford who’d been practicing since at least 1981, probably in DC, and I told them to keep working their way out from there till they found him. I also asked them to track down a postgraduate research assistant in jurisprudence at George Washington University at around that time with the first name Faye.
I then started making my way back to New York City, hovering just under the speed limit, with the radio turned up full blast to try and drown the armada of memories that had me under siege.
41
Miami, Florida
An onshore breeze had cleared the night sky of any lingering clouds as the customized Lamborghini Aventador blew north along the A1A, its growl echoing up to the heavens and scaring off any remnants that were stubbornly clinging to the velvet dome high above it.
As the supercar hit the Hillsboro Mile, its driver pressed down on the gas pedal, powering it past a hundred and forty miles per hour. The driver knew the route intimately. He knew this stretch of road was pretty much totally straight. He knew there were no traffic lights for three miles, and no speed traps either. He knew that at three in the morning, there would be no police cruisers or bikes around with uniforms that needed to be bribed, and that he could pass using the oncoming lane, though it was unlikely he would need to. There was nothing but empty road, a clear mind and a pleasantly aching groin from the award-worthy oral experience he’d enjoyed an hour earlier from the nineteen-year-old tattooed muscle-car babe, fringe benefits of owning one of Miami’s top custom car workshops.
Whenever he and his guys finished work on a vehicle, he’d take it out for a drive in the small hours and really open it up, before the owner came in to collect it. The Aventador was a truly glorious piece of machinery. It handled like the muscle-car babe-no complaints, zero hang-ups, nothing fatigued from overuse. It just did exactly what you wanted it to do and performed it with pulse-spiking gusto.
His team had taken the horsepower from the already monstrous seven hundred to seven fifty, reworked the rear apron completely around a new stainless steel exhaust tailpipe that was split into four, added a striking rear spoiler, changed the wheels into a light alloy that was forged and not cast, pimped the entertainment and communication system, then given the whole thing a matt black finish, which he wasn’t crazy about and was the only thing he would have done differently. Still, Siddle hadn’t argued and had kept his reservations to himself. In his customization business as well as in his work as an assassination contractor for the CIA, the client was always right.
Marcus Siddle looked about thirty-five, though he’d been on the planet exactly fifty-nine years and ten months, which he knew because in two months, to the day, it would be his sixtieth birthday. He had a tanned, clean-shaven face and a youthful body honed by thousands of hours in the gym. Contrary to what people thought when he removed his baseball hat to reveal hair cropped short enough to hide his almost total baldness, a state of denial about his age had not led him to try and look young, simply because he had never stopped feeling-and, in many cases, acting-like he was still in his mid-twenties.
Unlike many men his age and with his more-than-healthy bank balance, he abhorred the idea of Botox, surgery, or even a hair transplant. He was totally comfortable in his own skin, so comfortable that the thought of screwing with it made him almost physically sick. He knew several guys-at least three at his golf club alone-who’d spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to make themselves look younger. The psychology of it made no sense to him. If you really loved yourself, why would you change yourself into someone else? And Marcus Siddle loved every single part of himself, without exception or reservation. He never experienced self-loathing about the amount of money he’d made from customizing cars for people richer and stupider than himself, never felt regret that, as the years passed, he hadn’t put his considerable talents to more constructive use, never felt sad that he’d never spent more than three months with a member of the opposite sex before becoming bored, and never felt guilt about the people he’d helped kill because his employers had told him to. It wasn’t that life was too short, but that life was simply too much fun for any of that negative bullshit. And he enjoyed it all, from the fortnight he’d spent with the twin girlfriends of a Russian mobster after he’d sent the fat fuck and his brand new Harley into the Chicago River, to the satisfaction he experienced bringing down a large twin-jet helicopter en route to the Hamptons because he understood the on-board navigation systems better than the guys who built and designed them.
Surprisingly, despite all the deaths he’d caused, there was nothing in Siddle’s past except love and kindness. His dad, an Air Force Colonel, had been supportive and often told him that he’d be proud of his son no matter what he did when he was older. His mom had often voiced how much she loved him. In high school, he’d excelled in math and science and been a social success. At college, he’d studied electrical engineering before joining the Air Force and training as a mechanical engineer.
He’d been shipped to Vietnam in the last months of the war to maintain an assortment of fatigued Phantom, Crusader and Super Sabre fighter-bombers. When he returned to the US, he’d been recruited by the DoD, moving to the CIA a couple of years later after being personally selected by Edward Tomblin, who was only a few months older than him. Then, in the 1990s, he’d gone private, continuing to work for the CIA as a contractor, but also starting his car business after a move to Miami.
He’d fallen in love with the city several years earlier after being dispatched there to sabotage a boat owned by an ex-agent of Cuba’s Direccíon de Inteligencia. The guy and his family had relocated to the US under new identities, but only enjoyed a few weeks in the land of plenty before they’d all died in a massive fireball when the ex-agent’s boat had exploded due to what was later assumed to be a faulty fuel line.
Siddle had quickly built up the shop to the point where he could leave his team to run the place and use an auto show, vehicle auction or consultation as cover for his more lethal pursuits.
He was watching the digital speed counter flicker higher when he felt a slight pull to the right.
His senses were so highly tuned to the smallest reaction coming through from the car that even with that barely noticeable move, his pulse spiked.
Just the new tires bedding down, he thought.
As he passed a line of five-story apartment blocks, the car jerked to the left, halfway across the oncoming lane, then swerved back again just as quickly.
Siddle lifted off, slowing the car right down. Perplexed, he turned the wheel carefully left and right, checking the steering’s response.
Everything was fine.