Plague Ship

“He’s a big man, so he should have,” another man agreed. He had an American accent. “But everyone is different.”

Kovac lightly slapped Max’s cheek. Max made a mewling sound, as if he were dimly aware of the contact but was too far under to care.

“It has been twenty-four hours,” the Serbian killer said. “If he doesn’t wake in an hour, I will inject him with a stimulant.”

“And risk cardiac arrest?”

Max had slightly elevated blood pressure. He would make damned sure he’d be awake the next time they entered the room.

“Mr. Severance will be here soon. We need to know what conversations took place between this man and his son. They kept him sedated the entire time they had him. Who knows what he could have told them under the influence of drugs?”

They needed information quickly, Max thought. Contrary to popular belief, proper interrogation takes weeks and oftentimes months. The only remotely effective way to extract information quickly was the application of pain, tremendous amounts of pain. A victim in that circumstance will tell the interrogator anything he wants to hear. It was the interrogator’s job to not reveal his intentions so the prisoner had no choice but to tell the absolute truth.

Max had one hour to figure out what Kovac wanted to hear, because there was no way in hell he would ever tell the bastard the truth.

KEVIN NIXON FELT SICK to his stomach as he stepped past the barricade and onto the movie set.

Being there, he was breaking a vow to his dead sister. He could only hope, given the circumstances, that she would forgive him. This part of Donna Sky’s new movie was being filmed in an old warehouse left to decay after German reunification. The building reminded Kevin a little of the Oregon, only here the rust was real. A half-dozen semitrailers, catering trucks, scaffolding, dolly cranes for cameras, and narrow-gauge railroad tracks for what were called tracking shots were spread across the acres of parking lot. Men and women buzzed around the set, moving at double time, because, in the movie business, time quite literally is money. Nixon judged by what he saw that the film’s producers were spending about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day here.

To him, the organized chaos of a big-budget motion picture was familiar but now, at the same time, utterly alien.

A guard, wearing a uniform but without a weapon, was about to approach when a voice called out from across the lot, “I can’t believe it’s really you.”

Gwen Russell breezed past the security officer and hugged Nixon tightly, burying her face in his thick beard after kissing both cheeks. Always a bundle of energy, she quickly broke the embrace and regarded him.

“You look fantastic,” she said at last.

“I finally admitted that no diet on earth was helping, so I had the stomach bypass surgery two years ago.” In his lifelong battle with his weight, it had been a desperation play that had paid off. Before the operation, Kevin hadn’t seen the underside of two hundred and twenty since college. Now he weighed a respectable one eighty-five, which he carried on a solid frame.

The chefs aboard the Oregon prepared him special meals, in keeping with his postoperative diet, and, while he would never be a fan of exercise, he kept to his daily regimen religiously.

“It worked awesome, buddy boy.”

She spun him around and slipped her arm through his, so he could lead her back to a row of trailers parked along one side of the lot.

Gwen’s hair was hot pink, and she wore brightly colored bicycle pants and a man’s oxford shirt. At least fifteen gold necklaces were hung around her throat, and each of her tiny ears had a half-dozen piercings.

She had been Nixon’s assistant when he had been nominated for an Academy Award and was now a highly sought-after makeup artist in her own right.

“You dropped off everyone’s radar some years ago. No one knew where you were or what you were doing,” she said in a rush of words. “So dish, and tell me everything you’ve got going on.”

“Not much to tell, really.”

She blew a raspberry. “Oh pooh. You vanish for, like, eight years and you say there’s nothing to tell?

You didn’t find God or anything? Wait a minute, you said you wanted to talk to Donna. Did you join that group of hers, the Reactionaries?”

“Responsivists,” Kevin corrected.

“Whatever,” Gwen shot back, using her best Valley Girl accent. “Are you part of that?”

“No, but I need to talk to her about it.”

They reached the makeup trailer. Gwen swung open the door and glided up the retractable stairs. The waxy smell of cosmetics and potpourri was overwhelming. There were six chairs lined up under a long mirror in front of a counter littered with bottles and jars of every size and shape, as well as eyeliner pencils and enough makeup brushes to sweep a football stadium. Gwen pulled two bottled waters from a small fridge, tossed one to Kevin, and dropped into one of the chairs. The intense lights made her hair glow like cotton candy.

“So, come on, it was just after the Oscars—which you should have won, by the way—and, poof, you’re gone. What gives?”

“I had to get away from Hollywood. I couldn’t stand it anymore.” Obviously, Kevin wasn’t going tell her what he’d been doing since turning his back on the movie business, but she had been a good friend and deserved to know the truth.

“You knew me,” he started. “I was a lefty, like everyone else. I voted Democrat across the board, hated everything to do with the Republican Party, donated to environmental groups, and drove a hybrid car. I was as much of the Hollywood establishment as anyone.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve become a conservative,” Gwen said in mock horror. She’d never shown the slightest interest in politics.

“No. It’s not like that,” he said. “I’m just putting what happened into context. Everything changed on 9/11.” Just the mention of the date caused Gwen to blanch, as if she knew where the story was headed.

“My sister was coming to see me from Boston.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Hers was the plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.” She reached across to where he was sitting to grab his hand “Oh, I am so sorry. I had no idea.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone.”

“So that’s why you left. Because of your sister’s death.”

“Not directly,” Kevin said. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. I went back to work three weeks after her memorial service, trying to get my life back to normal, you know? I was doing makeup for this period drama. I won’t tell you who the star was because she’s even bigger today than she was then. She was sitting in the chair, talking to her agent about the attacks. She said something like, ‘You know, I think what happened to those people was terrible, but this country deserves it. I mean, look at the way we treat the rest of the world. It’s no wonder they hate us.’

“That wasn’t an uncommon thought,” Nixon added, “then or now. But then she said the people who died—my sister—were as much at fault for the attacks as the hijackers.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My little sister was twenty-six years old and about to start her medical residency, and this overpaid bimbo says the attacks were my sister’s fault. It was the disconnect, Gwen. People in Hollywood are so disengaged from reality that I just couldn’t take it. This actress made millions parading around on screen in her underwear in an offense to Muslim sensibilities and she lays the blame for hatred on my sister.

“I listened to what people in the industry were saying for another couple of months and knew everyone felt pretty much the same. I could take the ‘it’s America’s fault’ stuff. What I couldn’t stomach is that no one there believed they were also part of that America.” Kevin didn’t add that he had gone straight to the CIA to offer his unique abilities or that he’d been presented a much more challenging and lucrative job with the Corporation, most likely because Langston Overholt had passed his name on to Juan before the CIA even knew he was interested.