'The biggest I can find—’
'I'm on my way.'
'And, Paddy, if that shrinking violet has had both phones taken off the hook, you tell him I know about his girlfriend from Egypt and I just might leak it if he doesn't call me.'
'What girlfriend from—’
'Button it,' ordered Mrs. O'Reilly. 'Manny let it drop yesterday when he was a mite squiffed and couldn't find his broth of a boy either. Hurry along now. I'll wait for the call here.'
'What about my beef stew?'
'I've got one frozen,' lied the lass born Ann Mary Mulcahy.
Thirty-eight minutes later, after taking two wrong turns in the dark Virginia countryside, Detective First Grade O'Reilly found the road that led to Kendrick's house. It was a road he had travelled over exactly four times but never at night. Each trip had been made to see old Weingrass after he got out of the hospital and to bring him a freshly re-minted bottle of Listerine since his nurses kept the Scotch whisky beyond his reach. Paddy had righteously figured that if Manny, who was about to be eighty and who should have croaked on the operating table, wanted to go out a little pickled, who was to call it a sin? Christ in all his glory turned water into wine, so why shouldn't a miserable sinner named O'Reilly turn a little pint of mouthwash into Scotch? Both were for good Christian causes and he was only following the holy example.
There were no streetlamps on the back country road, and were it not for the wash of his headlights, Paddy would have missed the brick wall and the white wrought-iron gate. Then he understood why: there were no lights on in the house beyond. To all intents and purposes it was closed up, deserted, shut down while its owners were away. Yet its owner was not away and even if he were, there was the Arab couple from a place called Dubai who kept the place open and ready for the owner's return. Any change in that routine or the dismissal of the Agency guards would certainly be conveyed to Annie O'Reilly, the congressman's number one girl in the office. Paddy stopped the car on the side of the road; he snapped open the glove compartment, removed a torch, and got out. Instinctively, he reached under his jacket and felt the handle of his revolver in his shoulder holster. He approached the gate, expecting at any moment floodlights to be tripped on or the screeching sounds of multiple sirens to suddenly fill the quiet night. Those were the ways of Agency controls, methods of total protection.
Nothing.
O'Reilly arced his arm slowly through the bars of white wrought iron… Nothing. He then placed his hand on the centre plate between the two joining gates and pushed. Both opened and still nothing.
He walked inside, pushing the thumb of his left hand against the switch of the torch, his right hand reaching beneath his jacket. What he saw in seconds under the roving beam caused him to spin away, crouching into the wall, his weapon yanked out of the holster.
'Holy Mary, mother of God, forgive me for my sins!' he whispered.
Ten feet away lay the dead body of a young, business-suited guard from the Central Intelligence Agency, sickeningly drenched in blood from the throat above, his head nearly severed from the rest of him. O'Reilly pressed his back against the brick wall, instantly extinguishing the light, trying to calm his all too experienced nerves. He was familiar with violent death, and because he was, he knew that there was more to be found. He rose slowly to his feet and began his search for death, knowing also that the killers had disappeared.
He found three other corpses, each mutilated, each life taken in shock, each positioned at 90 degrees of the compass for protection. Jesus! How? He bent down and examined the body of the fourth man; what he found was extraordinary. Lodged in the guard's neck was a snapped-off needle; it was the remnants of a dart. The patrol had been immobilized by a narcotic and then, without defences, obscenely killed. They never knew what happened. None of them knew.
Patrick O'Reilly walked slowly, cautiously to the front door of the house, once again knowing that caution was irrelevant. The god-awful, terrible deeds had been done; there was nothing left but to total the casualties.
There were six. Each throat was slit, each corpse covered with drying blood, each face in torment. Yet the most obscene of all were the naked bodies of Kendrick's couple from Dubai. The husband was on top of his wife in the coital position, both red-soaked faces pressed against each other. And on the wall, scratched in human blood, were the words:
Death to God's traitors! Death to the fornicators of the
