“Why not?” Cheney said.
Suddenly Bevlin walked away from them and over to the big front window. He looked down. “I thought so,” he said over his shoulder. “My fuzzy old doll’s here and I’ve got to convince her that her husband wants her to listen to what his son has to say about this trust scam. Please find out who killed August, Agent Stone, and keep Julia safe.”
Cheney and Julia passed the fuzzy old doll on the stairs going back down to the street. She paused, a little bird of a woman dressed in frilly pale blue. She looked them both up and down, and slowly nodded. “I can see that Mr. Wagner has helped you. You’re wonderfully attuned to each other. How lovely to be young and want to bundle all the time. Now it’s going to be my turn. Mr. Wagner will be so pleased for me—I’m going to marry my sweet young man.” And up the stairs she went, her step light, her pink scalp showing through her fluffy white hair.
“Oh dear,” Julia said. “This isn’t going to make Bevlin’s day.”
“Or Ralph’s. I feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. Bundling? Didn’t that go out in the eighteenth century?”
“No, it never does.”
CHAPTER 31
Xavier Makepeace stood at the window of his hotel room in downtown Palo Alto and sneered down at the people scurrying about like pointless lemmings, none of them going anywhere, none of them worth anything. He imagined picking up his Kalashnikov and mowing a wide swath down the middle of that unending noisy herd, thirty rounds so fast it made your teeth sting. It would put all those useless cretins right out of their misery.
His Kalashnikov, his favorite assault rifle, was cheap and simple, and it never let him down. He always spoke its full name, liked the way it flowed on his tongue when he whispered it aloud, not the ridiculously shortened AK-47. Too bad he’d had to leave it tucked it away in his home in Montego Bay. But still, he enjoyed thinking about how it would feel to spray bullets from his open window—he could almost hear the screams, suck in the smell of terror, and the odor of gunshots and death. It always revved him like nothing else.
Nothing revved him at all right now. He turned away from the window.
He thought back to the years before he’d gotten his Kalashnikov, the years of his youth when he’d gathered young Jamaican men around him with bribes of the very best, the most potent ganja, their spiritual aid and, it seemed to him, their only escape. He’d believed he could lead them to do almost anything at all, and what he wanted was to rob the pasty-faced Brits, break their wills, send them scurrying back to that cold, benighted island of theirs. He thought he’d convinced some of the young men to put their future in his hands, to rebel against all the Brits’ stupid laws and tedious education, their bloody imperialist history and foppish speech, the greedy thieves. His father included. His father, who’d been sent to what he thought a dismal little island as a civil servant to improve the locals’ lot. Yeah, like he had cared whether that was going to happen.
Xavier had realized before his father had that the young men hadn’t wanted to be improved. They wanted to spend their days sprawled in the shade, wallowing in the numbing bliss of their ganja. They stayed polite to his father and had backed away from Xavier, like he was crazy and they might catch it.
Xavier thought of his father’s endless rules and regulations, that supercilious way he looked down his nose at those he considered his inferiors, and that included anyone who hadn’t attended Sandhurst.
And yet his father had lowered himself to bed a local, and Xavier was the result. The old man eventually sent him to England for an education he said would rival the prime minister’s. Xavier had hated the relentless cold, the bone-numbing damp, and the rain, always the rain, snaking down his neck, making him so miserable he’d wished he’d die.
And how he’d hated the Brits. At school they rigorously caned their rebellious young to make them strong, and he was no exception. He’d heard them say more times than he could stomach that it was for his own good. He thought he might bomb Sandhurst out of existence one of these days. It was something profoundly pleasant to look forward to.
Xavier realized he’d clenched his hands so tightly they were cramping. How could that old bastard still twist him up?
Bad memories, he thought, that’s all. His old man was well and truly gone, ever since Xavier had squeezed three neat shots into his chest on a sodden black night in Belfast, years and years ago. His father was there to negotiate with those hate-filled blighter Irish, and ended up sprawled on the street between his two dead bodyguards. Xavier had watched the life fade out of his pale icy eyes, filled first with disbelief, and then final awareness. He leaned down and told his father that a lowly Siberian peasant had invented the Kalashnikov and what did he think of being shot with that? His father hadn’t answered, he’d died instead.
Xavier had stood over that sodden bloody mess of tweeds, a still-furled umbrella lying next to him. He hadn’t told those dark-eyed men in Belfast that he’d have been happy to kill his old man for free. His father had fetched ten thousand pounds, and he’d enjoyed that money, along with his inheritance. At least, he’d thought, the Irish were trying to rid themselves of the bloody English, and he’d done his part. For a price.
Incredible weapon, the Kalashnikov. He’d once thought the Ml6 was the god of all assault rifles until he’d been with a group of Palestinians on a raid in the desert and the damned thing had jammed, victim of a blizzard of blowing sand. Why, he’d asked their leader, did they use weapons that didn’t work in this hell on earth? But the Arab had only shrugged, said there would always be hardships for those who tried to carry out Allah’s wishes. Xavier found their hard-wired hatred of the Israelis insane—as if the Israelis hadn’t lived side by side with them over thousands of years as they’d fought and lost to a host of invaders. He knew deep hatred like that knotted you up, made you an easy target rather than a fluid shadow, unseen by your enemy because you moved too fast and sure. Hatred made you stupid. The Palestinians had looked at him when he’d said that, then away, quickly, and he’d known in that moment that without their hatred, they’d have nothing at all, their lives would be pointless, like that paltry stream of humanity parading below his hotel window. It was then he’d eschewed all contact with groups of any kind. He was by himself now, depended only on himself and answered only to himself. He was the perfect assassin, swift and silent and deadly, terminating his targets without flaw, without fuss.
Until now.
He felt rage rising in his throat, a sour peppery taste, and wanted to choke on it.
A stupid little woman, an amateur who should have died in San Francisco Bay, a lovely deep knife thrust through her heart, had shot him, maimed him. Of course he couldn’t have factored in an FBI agent that first time, couldn’t have predicted he’d be there at that precise moment. What a bit of luck for that walking-dead bitch. Well,
