LandRover Discovery up to the junction. She obviously wasn’t a local, as she was consulting a map and turning her head frequently in each direction.
Quincy thought he’d parked far enough back to be invisible, but the woman suddenly stared at the gap between buildings. Then she glanced in the mirror, before spinning the wheel and moving her vehicle rapidly toward him.
He didn’t like the look on her face one little bit.
Twenty-One
A pungent smell-mustard cut with burning rubber-filled my nostrils and I came round gasping for breath. White light made me immediately jam my eyelids shut again. When I reopened them, slowly, I discovered that the source of the light had been directed away from me. I tried to move, but my arms and legs were tightly secured.
A face moved into my line of vision and I blinked to clear the dampness. My eyes hadn’t deceived me.
‘Matt Wells,’ said Heinz Rothmann, his aquiline nose as prominent as ever. Otherwise, he looked different-his head had been shaved and there was a livid scar on each of his cheeks. ‘Welcome.’ He smiled in the humorless way I remembered. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘Where am I?’ I tried to remember what I’d been doing before I lost consciousness. Whatever he’d used to wake me up had faded and there was now a familiar metallic taste in my mouth. What was it?
‘You are where no one can find you,’ Rothmann said, the smile still playing on his thin lips. ‘In a place where I am the sole master.’ He tapped my forearm and I felt a stabbing pain. ‘You were good enough to advise us of the positioning device beneath your skin. It is currently being taken deep into the Big Thicket. In the meantime, you have been moved to another location.’
I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of what he was saying. The bastard was way ahead of me. My memory finally fired and my brain rebooted. He had lured us to the road between Warren and Fred. The inverted cross on the tree had been a setup. But that meant Nora Jacobsen had been primed to deceive us via her daughter. It wasn’t so strange; Rothmann would have known that the Feds and I would go to them-there wasn’t anyone else. Then I thought of Quincy-what had happened to him? Shit. Now I realized what the steely taste was. It had been in my mouth at the camp in Maine after indoctrination sessions. What else had I revealed while I was out?
‘Matt?’ Rothmann took hold of my chin with the latex-covered fingers of one hand. ‘Come back to me.’
The command was irresistible. I opened my eyes immediately, my whole body stiffening as if I was coming to attention.
‘Yes, my Fuhrer.’
Jesus, did I say that? I really had been conditioned.
Rothmann took his hand away and stepped back. ‘That’s better.’ He looked at his watch, a curiously old- fashioned silver thing. ‘Twenty-three hours have passed since we liberated you and put you back through coffining. What do you remember?’
So I had been subjected to the drugs and the machine that robbed people of their souls. ‘Nothing,’ I said, which was the truth. The fact that I was still able to reason with myself showed that the conditioning process hadn’t been fully completed. Yet.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘It is gratifying that my late sister’s process has remained deep in your subconscious, waiting for enhancement. You have been good enough to describe the measures taken by the FBI’s scientists to counteract the conditioning. It would appear they have been-how shall I put it? — rather deficient.’
I let him believe that. The fact was, I had no idea how long I’d be able to fight the process.
‘Ah, come in,’ Rothmann said, turning to his left. ‘Our friend is awake.’
The familiar face of Gordy Lister came into view. He seemed to have lost weight and there were dark rings round his eyes.
‘Hey, asshole,’ the small man said. ‘Bet you hoped you’d never see us again.’
I was submissive without wanting to be, but whatever look was on my face enraged him. He moved his hand forward rapidly and grabbed my throat.
‘Whaddya know about my brother?’ he demanded, squeezing with surprising strength.
I tried to place his brother, but the pain made that impossible.
‘Let him go!’ Rothmann ordered.
That had an immediate effect. I panted for breath.
‘Sorry,’ Lister said, his eyes avoiding the other man’s.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Sorry, Master,’ the small man said, with a degree of reluctance. So, Rothmann’s megalomania hadn’t decreased since I’d last seen him.
‘Answer him, Matt,’ Rothmann commanded.
I felt the tingling throughout my body again as the conditioning kicked in. I recited the report about Lister’s brother being killed in a hit-and-run incident in Florida.
‘Is that it?’ Lister said, clearly disappointed.
I nodded. ‘There were no witnesses.’
‘No witnesses, my ass. You think people are dumb enough to talk to the Feds about a hit?’
‘It was a hit?’ I tried to disguise my curiosity.
‘Oh, yeah. Some bitch with short blond hair deliberately ran him down. You sure you don’t know anything more about it?’
I glanced at Rothmann. He was following the exchange with interest. That was hardly surprising, since an attack on Lister’s brother might well have been an indirect attack on him. But I didn’t care about that-what did worry me was the reference to the woman with short blond hair. Could she be-?
‘I’ll take that as a no, then,’ Gordy said, frowning at Rothmann. ‘Our boy here’s going to need some more sessions. His brains are scrambled to shit.’
He was right, but not in the way he thought. My thought processes were all over the place. Where was Quincy? Had he completely lost track of me? Had Rothmann managed to cancel out the hatred I felt for him in under twenty-four hours? Was I going to be turned into one of his brainwashed killers? Had Sara been one of the women in Maine? How long would it be until she found me wherever I was now?
‘Oh, by the way,’ Rothmann said, ‘you told me earlier what happened to our former subject Karen Oaten and your son.’ He gave a short, punctilious bow. ‘My sympathies.’
That was enough to bring back everything I had felt about the Nazi fucker. I was going to rip his heart out, no matter how many times I was coffined.
Peter Sebastian had planned to spend the morning in the J. Edgar Hoover building. He got in before the Washington Beltway filled up and was surprised to find Arthur Bimsdale already installed in the office.
‘Morning, sir,’ his assistant said, with great enthusiasm.
Sebastian gave him a weary nod. He had quarreled with his wife the night before and ended up sleeping in the guest room, so Bimsdale’s good cheer was as welcome as a cup of acid. The problem was, the young agent had come up with a potentially useful lead. They had been looking into Heinz Rothmann’s companies since the massacre at the cathedral, but even the financial crime experts had been unable to identify all his backers-he had used a London-based investment bank to create an impenetrable web of foreign and offshore companies around his U.S. operations.
‘How can you be sure about this?’ Sebastian asked, after reading the report.
‘I have a friend in Immigration. Also, I called the Willard. Sir Andrew is there until Friday.’
‘I hope they haven’t passed on that we’re interested in him.’
‘No chance. I said I worked for Senator Austiner-I saw from the latter’s schedule that they’re lunching on Thursday.’
Sebastian shook his head. ‘I don’t want to know the details. All right, Sir Andrew Frogget is chairman of Routh Limited. He’s been personally involved in dealings with Woodbridge Holdings, Rothmann’s holding company. The London Metropolitan Police have already questioned him at length, in the presence of FBI representatives, and
