He kicked his way past the furniture that had been thrown around the room, and seconds later the music stopped, just as Greaseball tried wiping the vomit from his mouth before realizing his hands were bloodstained.
Hubba-Hubba appeared in the doorway and for a moment looked appalled by what I had nearly finished.
“What?”
“Glasses,” he said.
“What?”
“One of the boys needs his glasses.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Fuck him, just get rid of them. We’re running out of time.”
“He can’t. He needs them, they’re difficult to get. Really expensive to buy here.”
He rooted around on the floor next to the bed, then pulled back the blood-soaked covers as I finished what I’d come to do.
I grabbed the top sheet, pulled it from under Greaseball, and wrapped Zeralda’s head in it.
Hubba-Hubba stood over the headless body. “Can you turn him over?”
“What?”
“Turn him over. They could be under him. You have the gloves.”
I did as I was told. The precious glasses were under his legs, one lens cracked and bloodstained.
Hubba-Hubba picked them up between his thumb and forefinger as if he were holding a scorpion. “They can go now. I’ll put them in the car.”
Lotfi hadn’t returned, but I knew what he was up to.
I wiped the knife blade on the bed and put it back into the bergen, then pulled out a black garbage bag and threw in the shrouded head.
And that was it. I’d never cut off a man’s head before, and I hadn’t been looking forward to it one bit. But after seeing Zeralda with the boys, I’d had all the incentive I needed. In fact, I felt pretty good as I turned to Greaseball.
The roar of burning fuel now filled the night. Flames licked higher and higher, brushing against the sky. The police could only be minutes away.
Greaseball raised himself up from the bed. “You can’t kill me, I am too important. No one but Zeralda is to be killed — you know that, don’t you? You can’t kill me, that is not your decision to make, you are just the tools.”
I looked him straight in the eye, but said nothing, feeling angry and deflated as he spat out some vomit. Then he almost smiled. “How do you think your people knew that he would be here tonight? You cannot kill me, I’m too important. You need me. Now, stop being stupid and crawl back into your kennel until required.”
Windows were being smashed about the house now, to feed the fire we were going to start in here. Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba would be stacking furniture for good measure. This was the bit they’d really loved during the training.
Lotfi pulled the last of the squeeze bottles from his bergen. They’d been half-filled with boiled dishwashing liquid, then topped off with gasoline and given a good shake. He gave the bed a squirt, then saved the rest for Zeralda. One match and this place would be an inferno.
Greaseball made a run for it into the house and Hubba-Hubba started after him.
“Leave him. Not enough time.”
The phone rang and we all jumped.
It could have been anyone — maybe the police, maybe one of Zeralda’s family, or one of his pedophile pals. Whatever, Hubba-Hubba turned and gave the phone a good squirt as well.
“Come on,” I shouted, “time to move. Let’s light up, let’s go, let’s go!”
I shouldered my bergen, and heard the rush of fuel being ignited in the room next door. Lotfi ran past me and out into the courtyard. I followed as Hubba-Hubba transformed the bedroom into a furnace.
There was no great plan for the next part — just run down to the boat and get out to sea for a pickup and some hot sticky black tea and a noseful of diesel fumes.
As I ran through the perimeter door I saw the flaming fuel from the bung flowing out of the breach and down the incline, exactly like it said in the script. The sky was bright orange. After all that practicing, all that rehearsal, it looked just beautiful. I stood there for what seemed like ages, looking at the flames as the heat gently seared my skin. I was almost sorry that we wouldn’t be around to see the best part. As the flames flowed under the fuel trucks, they, too, would soon be joining in the fun, with luck just as the police arrived.
Lotfi gave me a shove, and our shadows followed us until we got over the lip. Once we hit the sand it was simply a case of turning right and following the shoreline to the Zodiac.
As I scrambled down the hill I felt nothing but exhilaration. At long last I’d earned my U.S. passport — and the right to a whole new life.
Chapter 5
I sat on the T, the smart aluminum commuter train that had brought me from Logan Airport into Boston and, after a quick change, north toward Wonderland.
Wonderland always sounded to me like some kind of glitzy shopping mall; in fact, it was only the drop-off point for people from the northern suburbs heading into Boston. Today, though, no destination could have been better named. Carrie had been lecturing at MIT this morning, so was picking me up here instead of at the airport, then taking me to her mother’s place in Marblehead, a small town about twenty miles north along the coast. Her mother had lent us the guest annex, while she carried on with her bed-and-breakfast business in the main house. Carrie and I lived there alone now that Luz had started high school in Cambridge. To me it was home, and it was a long time since I’d felt that way about anywhere.
The other passengers looked at me as if I’d just escaped from the local nuthouse. After two days of traveling back from Egypt, my skin was greasy, my eyes stung, and my socks, armpits, and breath stank. As some kind of damage limitation before I saw Carrie, I was brushing my teeth and swallowing the foaming paste as I looked out of the window. It wasn’t going to transform me into Brad Pitt on Oscar night, but it was the best I could do.
I picked up the nylon duffel bag near my feet and put it on the empty seat beside me. I needed to check just one more time that the bag was sterile of anything that could link me to the job before she picked me up. My hand passed over the smooth, rounded shape of the Pyramids snowstorm shaker I’d bought her at the Cairo airport, and the hard edge of the small photo album she’d lent me for my weeks away. “If you don’t look at it and think nice things about me every day, Nick Stone,” she’d said, “don’t even think about coming back.”
I opened it and felt a grin spreading across my face, as it did every time I saw her. She was standing outside Abbot Hall in Washington Square, Marblehead, on the start of what she’d called my U.S. Heritage Induction Tour. Abbot Hall was the home of The Spirit of ’76, the famous portrait of a fife and drum at the head of an infantry column during the Revolutionary War. She wanted me to see it because she said it embodied the spirit of America — and if I were going to become a U.S. citizen one day, it was my solemn duty to damned well admire and be moved by it. I said I thought it looked more like a cartoon than a masterpiece, and she pushed me outside.
Her short brown hair was being buffeted by the wind blasting off the Atlantic as I pressed the shutter. She looked like GI Jane in green fatigue cargos and a baggy gray sweater. She certainly didn’t look in her late thirties, even though a certain sadness in her smile, and a few small creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes, told anybody who was paying attention that the last couple of years had not been easy on her. “Nothing Photoshop can’t handle,” she said, “once I’ve scanned them into the PC.”
It was rare to see her expression so relaxed, even when she was sleeping. Normally it was much more animated, most often frowning, questioning, or registering disgust at Corporate America’s latest outrage. She had good reason to look weighed down. It had been hard for her and Luz since the two of them had come back from Panama, one without a husband, the other without the man who’d become her father. Since Aaron’s death there hadn’t been a day when he didn’t come into her conversation. I still tended to cut away from stuff like this, but the way she saw it, he’d been her husband for fifteen years and dead for only a little over one.
In the whole of my life as a Special Forces soldier, and later, as a “K” working on deniable operations for the
