Something else was drifting out into the freezing cold. The unmistakable sound of a woman reaching her climax. Sandman smiled inwardly. This was going to make things even easier. For a brief moment, he wondered about what he could hear. Was it at all possible that Reilly was scoring with his hostess behind her boyfriend’s back? Unlikely. It had to be the costumed freaks that were at it. Which meant Reilly was elsewhere in the loft, if he was in at all.
The visit to the nightclub had paid off, big time. He hadn’t needed CCTV footage to see them get into a taxi and have to trace the cab’s number to find out where he’d dropped them off. The floor manager he’d spoken to didn’t know who the guy in the blue cape was, but he knew Gigi Decker, who was a regular at the club and liked to splurge on good champagne. Sandman had left little doubt in the floor manager’s mind that any attempt to forewarn Miss Decker of his enquiries would incur the harshest of consequences.
He slipped inside.
The overhead lights were off. A couple of oversized standing lamps that were replicas of old Hollywood searchlights cast a dim, warm hue over the space. The painted floorboards creaked slightly as he moved carefully through the loft, but he knew it was highly unlikely the pair in the bedroom would hear anything.
He focused his attention and ran it around the loft. The large living room was empty. Unless Reilly was asleep, he didn’t think the FBI agent or anyone else was around. He advanced further and found a small stack of clothes and personal possessions beside a neatly-made futon in one corner. They had to be Reilly’s, so his target was-as he’d surmised-out.
Sandman systematically searched them for a sidearm and found the holdall with the Glocks in them. Which meant that Reilly had probably gone out unarmed. He hid them deep under the mattress and stepped back into the large space.
As he reached the closed bedroom door, there was a shriek of such intensity that he had to hover for a moment until it subsided. They were both laughing now, the woman giggling hysterically like a teenager. There was no way either of them was going to offer any kind of defense.
Sandman pulled out his handgun, suppressor already in place, turned the door handle and entered the bedroom.
Jaegers saw him first, eyes immediately filling with unfiltered terror as he recoiled upright and back against the headboard.
“Shit!”
Decker followed the boyfriend’s alarmed look to Sandman and flinched, pulling the sheet up to cover her. “Kurt!”
Sandman just stood there, knowing there was no benefit in stepping further into the room and offering one of them a target.
“Get dressed. Move.”
They both did, quickly. Jaegers pulled on a pair of dark green leather trousers and a matching hooded jerkin while the girl slipped on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, which got caught on the gold diadem in her hair. She let out an annoyed groan and reached up, disentangled her hair and finished pulling on the tee.
Sandman waved his gun, herding them out of the room.
“Let’s go.”
He took a couple of steps back as Jaegers walked out of the bedroom first, obscuring the inside for the briefest of moments. The girl followed, holding out the diadem.
“Here, you have it. It’s not fucking working anyway.”
Just as Sandman instinctively stuck out his left hand to take the gold band, he knew she’d tricked him. The heavy lamp base she’d concealed behind her back under cover of Jaegers exiting the room was already arcing toward the side of his head. He moved fast, whipping his head away as the lamp slammed into his shoulder with surprising force, but before the pain hit him, he jabbed the butt of his gun into the girl’s head and sent her crashing to the floor.
Jaegers was moving toward him-he’d spun around the second he heard the approach from behind-but Sandman was too quick, swinging his left elbow up and back into the guy’s face. He heard Jaegers’ nose break and the accompanying wail of agony as he turned and aimed a vicious kick just below the guy’s knee-not enough to break more bone, but enough to open up an additional well of excruciating pain.
Jaegers bounced off the wall and crumpled to the floor.
“Enough of this bullshit,” Sandman barked, his gun leveled at the hacker’s head, his intention beyond doubt.
Jaegers removed the blood-covered hands from his nose and held them up, palms out. “OK, OK. Just-please, don’t hurt her again.”
His eyes, wide with fear and worry, bounced from Sandman to his girlfriend and back, then, hesitantly, his palms held open by his face, his lips quivering, his whole face pleading in silence for permission, he crawled over to Decker, slowly.
“Gigi? Gigi!”
She wasn’t moving.
Sandman watched him lean in to listen to her breath, then turn to look at him. “She’s breathing,” he said, then he repeated it before he started to sob.
Sandman looked down on him. “Can I take it you’re going to behave from here on?”
Jaegers just nodded as he wiped the blood and the snot that were streaming out of his nostrils.
51
The October Surprise.
I knew about it already, of course. Not just as a concept, but in terms of its most notorious occurrence-specifically, from the Reagan-Carter election year.
1980.
The expression referred to any major, unexpected news event that could-deliberately-affect the outcome of the presidential election, which takes place in early November. In the days before both the 1968 and 1972 elections, claims that the end of the war in Vietnam was in sight were used to boost popularity, but those were minor instances of it. The expression really referred to the conspiracy that was thought to have taken place in 1980 to secure Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the incumbent, Jimmy Carter.
The facts were that, almost a year to the day before the election, fifty-two Americans had been taken hostage in Iran. This had been a major trauma for the nation and was on every voter’s mind. Heavy negotiations were ongoing to win their release, with the Carter administration correctly hoping for their own “October Surprise”: bringing the hostages home just before the election, which would provide an immense boost to Carter’s re-election prospects. The hostages weren’t released and Reagan won the election. They were eventually released, on the day of his inauguration. Not just on the day, but-literally-five minutes after Reagan took his oath of office.
Suspicions soon arose of a secret arms-for-hostages deal brokered by Reagan’s men-a deal designed to delay the release of the hostages until after the election, to help ensure Carter’s defeat.
The suspicions were dismissed until the Iran-Contra affair exploded five years later, during Reagan’s second term. It transpired that senior administration officials had arranged for Iran to secretly receive American weapons-an illegal act, given that it was subject to an arms embargo. Iran would pay for the weapons in two ways: in cash, which would then be funneled to the Contras in Nicaragua-another illegal act, given that funding the Contras had been banned by Congress-and in influencing the release of seven American hostages who were being held hostage in Lebanon.
The Iran-Contra affair firmly established the links between the Reagan administration and the Iranians and underlined the former’s readiness to play dirty and break the law. This revived suspicions about what had happened during the 1980 campaign. After increased media scrutiny, both the Senate and Congress eventually held inquiries to look into the allegations. Both failed to produce an indictment. However, in the years since, several senior figures who were in positions of power at the time including Abulhassan Benisadr, the former President of Iran, Yitzhak Shamir, the former Israeli Prime Minister, and Barbara Honegger, a former Reagan campaign and White House staffer, have all confirmed the allegation.
My mind raced back to my chat with Faye, my dad’s-I cringe at the word-mistress. What had she said? That she felt the whole country was under his watch, that he took it all to heart.