“Well well,” Callahan said, “I thought you knew everyone worth knowing in D.C. I understand Wolf is quite the swinging dick over there.”
“Influential?”
“Important enough that some very bad people are looking for him. I got the strong sense that he might be connected to this nasty business you alluded to.”
“And you know this how? Vatican Intelligence?”
The priest ignored the question. “This is his last known address.” Callahan handed Carver a slip of paper with a Rockland, Maryland, address on it. Eden. The one in Ellis’ case notes. “He moved without leaving a forwarding address. Perhaps you can get one of your people on it?”
The American slipped the paper into his pocket and smiled. He had been around long enough to know how double agents played their employers. One side would ask for information. They would then go to the other side, framing the request itself as a golden nugget. When the subsequent investigation then yielded fruit, they would take it back to the original source.
But Carver didn’t like being played.
“I’ll do that,” he said. And then he told his second lie of the evening: “I’ll let you know what we find out.”
Vera Borst Residence
Vera Borst was suspended in mid-air by a rope that was attached to a pulley and a hand winch. Her hands were tied behind her back, her torso arched forward. Her blouse was torn open, revealing sagging white breasts and a bulging stomach, which was already bloodied by several open incisions. Carver had been right. It was just like he had predicted. Rope torture.
Borst’s mouth was fixed in an “O” shape. Her eyes were closed. Her chin bobbed wearily against her chest. Her vocalizing was less constant now, breaking up into great spastic bursts of guttural release.
A man in dark coveralls stood at her feet. He seemed to be attaching some sort of weight to her ankles, which Ellis imagined might be enough to actually break Borst’s wrists and sever them from her body. Ellis judged the distance between her and the tormentor to be about 30 feet. As much as he might deserve to die, she wanted to take him alive. He had to be questioned.
He didn’t look like the most overpowering physical specimen. Perhaps five foot ten, with a trim, but not especially muscular, build. Ellis was no dojo master, but she had studied a variety of hand-to-hand combat techniques in the Army.
The man had his back to the staircase. He seemed to be preoccupied with affixing the weights to Borst’s ankles. There was no telling whether he was alone. Ellis did not have a full view of the basement, nor was it well lit. However small, there was a chance that another perpetrator could be behind the row of canoes, kayaks and oars to the right of where Borst hung, or lurking in a dark corner of the space, perhaps behind the crates of Christmas ornaments or behind the air hockey table at the far end.
Nevertheless, there was no time for deliberation. Borst’s life was quickly slipping away.
Ellis crossed herself before leaping down the stairwell. Although she had perfected her flying kick several years earlier en route to earning a brown belt in karate, she had been skeptical about its effectiveness in an actual combat situation. That had changed while watching a cage match on TV the previous year, when a 230-pound bruiser was dropped senseless by a much smaller man using such a move. It was time to find out for herself.
Borst’s cries masked Ellis’ footfall, but the perp sensed the reverberations an instant before she took to the air. He turned his shoulders and neck just as the edge of Ellis’ right foot plowed into his neck. The blow knocked him into Borst’s suspended torso, snapping his neck back violently. The under-secretary-general swung grotesquely back and forth like a bloody pinata.
The perp collapsed at her feet, legs and arms twitching violently. Ellis was shocked by the effectiveness of the maneuver, fearing that she had killed him after all. “You better not die,” she growled.
Another. Another. The words seemed to pop into her head, as if whispered from angels. Another. She looked up. The words were Borst’s. A warning.
A canoe paddle struck Ellis’ back, felling her head-first into a column of crates filled with tree ornaments. The Beretta flew from her hand. Two dozen silver balls popped loose, breaking into hundreds of tiny shards against the concrete flooring. Ellis tumbled over them, instinctively rolling on her right shoulder so to as avoid eating glass. She rose slowly, just enough to see that the first perp was still where she had left him, twitching beneath Borst, who continued to swing like freshly butchered hog.
The second perp stood several feet away. He wore a black plastic smock that was hooded at the top. A prickly black beard protruded from his face.
He threw down the oar, reached into his pocket and removed a small Taser. Oh hell. The Beard was going to Tase her.
Ellis had once been told that the best defense against a Taser was a firearm. That advice was now of little help, as her Beretta was nowhere in sight. She rolled right across the bed of broken Christmas ornaments, heading for the foosball table. She heard a burst of compressed nitrogen. Two electrical probes crackled toward her at 135 feet per second. They struck her left side, right in the ribs, piercing her shirt and skin. Ellis’ momentum sent her rolling, the wires wrapping around her midsection as her body was flooded by 50,000 volts. Her hands clenched involuntarily. Every muscle in her body seemed to seize and cramp. Her sinuses seemed to actually screech.
As her mind traversed the edge of consciousness, she tried to roll over. Her extremities were unresponsive. She could do nothing but observe as the Beard appeared over her, like some reaper from a dark fairy tale. He tightened the cooling probe wires around her, turned her on her stomach, and began tying her wrists together with some sort of elaborate knot. And now the Beard was talking in some foreign language. The same phrases over and again. Benedictus Dominus Deus meus qui docet manus meas ad proelium digitos meos ad bellum. Deus, refugium meum salvator meus scutum meum et in ipso speravi. Benedictus Dominus Deus meus qui docet manus meas ad proelium digitos meos ad bellum…
Ellis tried to block out the pain and think. Why was the Beard praying? Was he asking God for forgiveness, or was he giving thanks for the latest prey that had fallen into his trap?
She managed to raise her head and get her bearings. She must have been dragged from the place where she had fallen. She was underneath Borst now, right next to the Beard’s fallen companion. The Beard would probably finish Borst off and drag her upstairs, like he had done to her boyfriend. Then it’s my turn, she thought. The strappado.
Carver and Speers would eventually find their way here, she realized. They would find her in a heap on the floor, her body scarred by the telltale signs of the rope torture. And slipped inside her shirt would be an octagon. Just like the one they found on the others. And they would look at the number of wounds on her body and based on that, they would try to deduce how much information she had given up. It was the last thing she could control, she realized. Her life was over, but she could decide to stay strong, to keep her mouth shut until the end.
She spotted the twitching man’s Taser gun, perhaps four feet away now. If only she could get to it.
Mary. Mary. Mary. The voice again. Ghostly, as if blown in from the Puget Sound. Mary. She looked up to see if angels might be hovering overhead. It was the opposite. The motion of Vera Borst’s body had slowed, but the rope still carried her back and forth over the twitching man. She had stopped wailing. Her eyes were open now. She couldn’t seem to move her head, but her eyes were tracking, and they looked deep into Ellis’. Her lips moved, more of a whispering wind than a human voice. They want Mary.