To the Death

Jimmy took his right hand off the wheel and tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger. “Mostly because I alone do not give a rat’s ass about the murder. I’m looking for something else, and I just found it.”

“I don’t know why you have to be so dismissive about the life of Matt Barker.”

“Because he was just a big stupid accident who blundered into the path of a major Islamic terrorist operation. Of course she killed him, but it’s about as important as having a cup of coffee. And I’m the only person right now who is aware of that.”

“Well, the media don’t seem to agree with you. They are possessed by this murder.”

“If his bloody pecker hadn’t been sticking out, none of ’em would have given a damn. It just gave a salacious flavor to a routine country killing. And that’ll do it every time. They wouldn’t recognize the real truth behind the story if it bit ’em right in the ass.”

Jane chuckled. “Christ, Arnold Morgan has had an effect on you,” she said.

“I take that as a compliment,” he replied. “But just ask yourself. This murder has all the hallmarks of an international terrorist operation. And how many times has any newspaper, radio, or television outfit mentioned that obvious truth? I’ll tell you. None. And how often have they mentioned Matt Barker’s pecker? About eight zillion times.”

Again Jane laughed. “I guess his brains ended up in his pecker,” she said. “A darned expensive move — cost him his life.”

“Right. And a very dangerous one for Carla. Just a bit of bad luck. This randy bastard from the garage waits outside the hotel and tries to give her the Big What-Ho. Attacked her in some kind of sexual frenzy. For Carla, there was no alternative but to kill him. Quickly. And efficiently, like all special operators.

“And that meant she had to get the hell out. And now she’s gone, probably abroad, certainly under a different passport. She’ll never be found.”

“How do you know that?”

“For a start, no one knows her name, no one has the remotest idea what country she’s in, and she left, apparently, no trace. No one even knows where she lived.”

“Okay. But the truth may come out in the next few days.”

“I wouldn’t put your life savings on it. Miss Carla was a complete professional. Assume, just for a moment, I’m on the right track, and then look at what she did. Her objective is to find out from Kathy’s mum when Arnold is going on vacation.

“She enters the country almost certainly on an American passport, otherwise the forgery would have been picked up at the immigration desks at the airport. She makes her way to Mrs. Gallagher’s little town and immediately gets a job at the local hotel. She befriends no one, except for one person — Mrs. Gallagher, surprise surprise.

“No one ever sees her arrive at the hotel, and no one ever sees her leave at night. No one has ever seen her car, not even Mrs. Gallagher. You know why?”

“No, ’course I don’t.”

“Because she never had a car.”

“So how did she get to work and home at night?”

“She had a chauffeur, who dropped her off at different places close to the hotel, quiet streets only. And at night he waited for her at an agreed place. She just slipped across the parking lot and ran to where her car was waiting. Until the night when Matt Barker decided to ambush her.”

“Was the chauffeur her boyfriend?”

“Christ, no. More likely a fellow member of Hezbollah or Hamas, or maybe even from a Middle East embassy. Someone right here in the USA gave her that dagger to protect herself if necessary. She’d never have tried to bring it through airport security herself.”

“Well, it all sounds plausible, and I do remember that hotel manager saying she must have removed her documents from the file. And she plainly gave a false address, that Bowling Wharf or whatever it was.”

“Listen, Jane. Sooner or later, someone’s going to report a missing tenant in an apartment block. Remember Emily’s words, apartment, doorman, balcony. And the police are going to trace Carla Martin’s passport, and it will be a dead end, and no one will ever have heard of her.

“And we’ll still be the only people who care about her real purpose. Because Emily told Carla all about the admiral’s trip to London, his hotel, date and time of departure from Washington. And someone is going to be waiting for him. And that someone is going to try to kill him. Arnold’s life is in the gravest possible danger.”

“Is anyone going to believe all this?”

“I doubt it. Certainly not Arnold.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’d like to stop him from going. Which will be a lot like trying to stop a freight train with your bare hands.”

1000 Friday 6 July Police Station, Brockhurst

Detective Joe Segel had more “information” on his plate than he knew what to do with. There had, so far, been more than sixty-five “sightings”—people who claimed to have seen a youngish lady fitting Carla’s description driving toward Brockhurst during daylight hours.

The vehicle identifications were more diverse than the geographic locations, ranging from small compact automobiles to huge SUVs. A few callers claimed to know where she lived, and Joe Segel had been moving police cruisers all over the area to check out the possibility of “apartment, doorman, balcony,” as reliably mentioned by Emily Gallagher.

Three had emerged as possibilities, but police checks had revealed no one answering Carla’s description in residence, no one having gone missing, and no female who was out after 10:30 P.M. on Monday night. All three of these expensive apartment blocks employed assiduous doormen who logged in every resident on a computer, every night. None of the buildings was named Chesapeake Heights.

Joe considered all of that added up to a huge disappointment. But the biggest stone wall he ran into was the identification of Carla Martin. Computerized records revealed only three white females of that name born in the USA in May 1982. Joe Segel trusted Jim Caborn on that one.

Further checks revealed that two of them had never applied for passports. The other Carla Martin had been born on May 27, 1982, in Baltimore, Maryland. She was unmarried and now lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where she worked at a high school, teaching physical education. There were approximately 278 students, about 19 teachers, and 67 parents perfectly willing to swear that Miss Martin had been running three soccer games last Monday until seven o’clock in the evening, nine o’clock in Brockhurst. No, she did not have a part-time job moonlighting in a hotel bar 2,350 miles away in Virginia.

The local Phoenix police did interview Miss Martin, but only half-heartedly, since she was plainly innocent of any crime. They thus failed to discover that her first cousin on her mother’s side, Kathy Streeter, was married to Mr. Dori Hussein, a cultural attache at the Jordanian embassy, in northwest Washington, D.C.

Like his colleague, Ahmed, Mr. Hussein was a field officer for Hezbollah. And a good one. Documents were his specialty, having graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Well, how the hell did the Brockhurst Carla get ahold of the Phoenix Carla’s passport? That was essentially what Joe Segel wanted to know. Although he realized it was a blind alley, because the passport Carla showed to Jim Caborn was blatantly a forgery, and could have been scanned and copied in a dozen different ways. The forgers might even, in a blind coincidence, have invented all the names, dates, and places.

And had Carla used it to enter the United States, IF she was foreign? Who the hell knew? And anyway, that was none of Joe’s business. All he wanted to know, for chrissakes, was who had killed Matt Barker. And the only certainty with which the day had presented him was that a lady who taught sports at an Arizona high school was not guilty.

A blanket check of all ports of entry on the East Coast of the United States had revealed nothing. There was no record of any Carla Martin. And the fact that Joe Segel did not even have a proper name for his prime suspect was really bothering him.

But at ten minutes before noon on that Friday morning, he got one. Fred Mitchell, the ex-Green Beret who manned the door by night at Chesapeake Heights, called in to reveal that he almost certainly knew the barmaid the police were seeking. Better yet, he knew her address and apartment. “Sir,” said Fred, “she lived right here in this