He grunted as he tried to pry the ax out. It was stuck.
She would not get another chance. She pivoted out from under the handle, turned and pulled the watch’s face free. The garrote’s wire glinted in the fading, dusky light. She looped the wire over his throat and threw herself onto his back. Then she pulled.
Yaakov Zviman tried to pry fingers under the wire but she tightened it too fast. He tried to throw her free; she wrapped her strong, lithe legs around him, ankles crossed above his ruined crotch. She thought of his wicked, smiling face, looking back over his pimpled shoulder while he raped her sister. She thought of Ivan, teaching her in the dusty, broken light of the winery how to fight, how to kill. She thought of Nelly, lying in surprised blood, the last of her life pulsing out of her.
And she pulled tighter.
He made noises no human should make. He threw himself against the van, trying to scrape her off.
‘ Tu mori,’ she gasped, ‘ tu mori.’
He fell, face down into the gravel. She felt the wire slice her own flesh on her fingers, the side of her hand. She drove her knees into his back.
The handle on the fake face of the watch broke. She felt it give. The garrote would not work.
She didn’t look to see if he was even still breathing through the compressed wreckage of his throat. With a shuddering moan she kicked against the van, levered the ax out of its torn side with a rush of strength, and she avenged her sister with a final downward blow.
90
Where it all began
I took the gun and inched toward the mezzanine’s railing.
‘Sam?’
A voice calling to me. I didn’t know it. So I didn’t answer.
‘Sam, I’ve brought your friend Mila.’
I stopped. I thought he was in the foyer, walking along the hardwoods in the entrance.
‘Now if you don’t come out, she’s going to get hurt.’
If that was true, Mila was going to get hurt anyway with Zviman around. His threat wasn’t going to flush me out.
‘You’re not being a gentleman,’ he said with disapproval in his tone.
I got still. I listened. And then, muffled, I heard Daniel begin to cry.
‘That’s the future crying,’ he said. He started coming up the stairs. I heard the creak of the wood against his heels. Outside I heard – noises of struggle, a fight. Zviman might be functional. And he was out there, with Mila as a prisoner.
Oh hell.
Now he walked into sight. We kept guns raised at each other. The man who had sat in the corner of the bar, nursing his pints. Ray Brewster.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said.
‘That must be why your limo driver and your psychotic sister act tried to kill me, Mr Brewster.’
‘Ray Brewster was just an alias. My name is Ricardo Braun.’
Braun. August’s boss. The un-retired head of Special Projects.
Braun shrugged. ‘Kill Jack Ming, that was fine. I didn’t need him exposing the truth. You, Sam, you were different. You were the bridge.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ At this distance we couldn’t miss each other. He kept heading toward the top of the stairs, I kept moving toward where stairs met mezzanine.
‘You’re the bridge between Special Projects and our biggest mistakes. You being that bridge, well, I could let you and your child live.’
‘Mistakes… ’ I fell silent. ‘Nine Suns. Nine Suns was started by Special Projects.’
‘Yes, years ago. May I explain?’
‘Why? So I’ll pretend to listen and you’ll get a chance to shoot me?’
‘No. Because you have a role to play, Sam, if you dare.’
I was silent.
He cleared his throat. ‘The CIA had a long history of dealing with questionable sources. People who were criminals. Often they were heads of state. You develop a high tolerance for holding your nose. But we thought – I thought, it was my idea – what if criminals, carefully selected, could be put to use by the CIA. They know about dark corners of the world. They could help us insert people into situations where we never could have access. They could give us information and people we could never find on our own.’
‘And why?’
‘We would protect them and their interests. Really, no different than propping up a brutal but pro-Western government in the old days. So we researched them, people in positions of power in criminal rings from around the world, and we brought nine of them here. Here, to this house. The language schools are an old Special Projects front.’ He laughed. ‘You know how the CIA is, once they buy property they never want to sell it. They’re always afraid some secret has been left behind, hidden in the woodwork.’
‘They came willingly?’
‘Not exactly. Kidnapped them. But treated them with dignity once they were here, in the lovely Catskills. I explained to them the… opportunity. They embraced it. What we couldn’t have foreseen was – they bonded. As a group. I didn’t anticipate they would think if they didn’t cooperate, they would lose a competitive advantage. They understood each other. They respected each other and since all nine were scattered about the world, they weren’t, well, natural enemies. These were men and women on the edge of the powerful rings, ambitious and looking for a way to the top.’
‘Like Zviman out there.’
‘Yes. I recruited his father, he stepped in after his dad died. They went from being whoremasters – who are a very useful source of information – to smugglers to a supreme extor tionist and spymaster.’ He flexed a smile, almost of pride. ‘I chose well with my recruits. The Suns, they took what I taught them about tradecraft and stealing secrets and they, well, formed a gang beyond a gang. A meta-gang. To grow their own power and profit. With an eye, I think, on becoming the most powerful criminal syndicate in the world. They stopped doing exactly what the CIA asked for. It was harder for me to shield them. I retired. They broke away; but kept their own alliance.’
‘Nine Suns.’
‘There were leftovers, of course. People I recruited who were criminals but not parts of rings. Individuals working alone for Special Projects.’
‘Such as the limo driver. The sisters. The people that Leonie hid for you.’
‘Yes. Odd, that the psychos were more loyal than the sane criminals for me. But the psychos prefer the attention and support.’
‘Your group inside the CIA gave birth to the most powerful and ambitious criminal ring in history,’ I said. ‘One that just tried to commit a mass assassination against our government.’
‘You don’t want to see those words in a news report,’ Braun said. ‘It would have been devastating. CIA in bed with renegade Russian Mafiosi and Japanese Yakuza and Israeli racketeers.’ He flexed a smile; he held up the red notebook. ‘There’s a picture of me, in here, with two of the Suns. Two of the ringleaders. I can’t have that. I can’t have what they’ve done tied to the CIA. I can’t be disloyal to the Company that way.’ He pointed down to the foyer. ‘Right here’s where they got their name. There was a tapestry, hanging in the library here, a Chinese tapestry that showed the legend of the Nine Suns. I think an agent had been given it as a gift from someone we’d smuggled out of mainland China. One of the criminals noticed there were nine suns, and nine of them. They picked the name, almost as a joke, while they sipped cocktails and I explained how the CIA could protect them if they helped us. I got them to use the Latin form because I thought it would sound like a religious order. I was worried someone in the Company would hear of them and see the tapestry. The Company uses this facility, still, now and then.’
‘So. You came back to Special Projects after Nine Suns tried their assassination plot to clean up the mess.’
‘I can’t destroy them. But I can keep the Company’s role in creating them from being exposed. That’s all I can do. Oh, I’ll kill Zviman, and any other Nine Suns bastard I find because it tells the others to remain silent. I don’t mind waging a private war, that’s what Special Projects is going to have to do now. That’s why I wanted you.’