guards holding short-barreled Micro Uzi assault rifles.
The tall, muscular man standing rigidly in front of the others, his chiseled face impassive, was DeVane’s chief lieutenant, Siegfried Kuhl.
“Eduardo,” DeVane said, his voice carrying softly across the room. “How do you do?”
Eduardo tried to think of something to say, but thought was impossible, swept from his head in the whipping gale of terror generated from the group of men before him and the pressure of Ramon’s gun against the base of his skull.
DeVane steepled his hands on his lap. His legs were crossed, his right thigh hanging loosely over his left knee.
“You look frightened,” he said. “Are you?”
Eduardo still could not wring any sound from his throat. He felt a choking, breathless nausea.
“Tell me if you are afraid,” DeVane said.
Eduardo opened his mouth in another unsuccessful attempt at speech, then closed it and simply nodded. The tiny projection of the Sig’s front sight ruffled his neck hairs as his head moved up and down.
DeVane sighed.
“You know, my boy, I am as loath to be here as yourself,” he said in his smooth, quiet voice. “I preside over a great many enterprises, and generally a small complication such as you have caused would be the sort of thing I let others handle. I cannot be everywhere at once. A leader must have confidence in those who work for him.” His hand left his lap and fluttered toward Vicente. “Solid, honorable men like your uncle.”
Eduardo glanced over at Vicente. A rail-thin man in his mid-sixties with a sweep of white hair over a high forehead, Vicente looked back at him for only a second, his wrinkled face grim. Then he dropped his eyes.
Eduardo’s legs weakened underneath him. It was the expression on the old man’s face. The way he had avoided his gaze.
“This isn’t to say your situation hasn’t been of interest to me, or that I feel it is inconsequential,” DeVane went on. “The problem isn’t your arrest. That happens. In any competition there are errors and setbacks. Times when the best of plays are outdone by your opponent. Do you understand me so far?”
Eduardo nodded.
“Good,” DeVane said. “And since you’ve admitted to your own fear, I’ll tell you what scares me.” He leaned slightly forward in his chair. “I fear the stupid and the weak, because history illustrates that their actions can bring down the most powerful. When someone like you is gullible enough to be duped by a common street-walker, letting her convince you to deal with men you do not know, men you do not bother checking out, there is no telling what information might slip to the other side. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you have to offer, because one thing leads to another, and that to another, and so forth.
“For example, by contacting Vicente to bail you out of trouble, you put him in a position of having to ask a favor of me. Out of respect for your uncle, I then felt obliged to offer bribe money to a petty government bureaucrat, some of which filtered down to the magistrate in charge of your case, with smaller amounts trickling in dribs and drabs to a federal prosecutor, and then, I suppose, to a police clerk in an evidence control room who conveniently made the proof of your transaction disappear. These are markers, my boy. And they may lead an astute and determined opponent from you to Vicente, from Vicente up to me, from me down to a lackey officer, and then finally back to you — a connective loop that could theoretically cause me trouble without end.”
He paused a moment. “Are you still following, Eduardo?”
Eduardo nodded agitatedly again.
DeVane’s eyes bored into him with such awful, palpable force he thought his knees would finally give out.
“Open your mouth and answer me,” he said. His expression was brittle. “Find that much strength.”
Sick, dizzy, Eduardo again struggled to speak. He knew that he was standing at the brink of Hell, and if his silence were perceived as defiance, he was finished.
“Yes,” he said in a faint, cracked voice. “I–I understand.”
DeVane sat back in his chair and put his fingers together in a steeple again, resuming the relaxed, self- assured posture in which Eduardo had first seen him.
“Good,” he said. “Then you should finally understand something else. I am here, now, as a gesture of respect for Vicente, for whom I know your punishment will be difficult. Were it not for him, it would have been unworthy of my attendance. I would have ordered it done from the comfort of my home, and devoted no more thought to it than I do to blinking my eyes.”
With that, he looked at Kuhl, who had turned partially in his direction. There was an unspoken interaction between them — a brief meeting of their gazes, barely perceptible nods.
Then Kuhl reached back around his right hip and pulled something from his wide leather belt. Squinting in the semidarkness, Eduardo could see that it was some sort of wooden club or nightstick.
He looked beseechingly at DeVane, but he was staring at his own hands as if contemplating some unrelated matter. Beside him, Vicente sat with his head still lowered.
Kuhl stepped toward him, his hand gripping the stick.
“Please,” Eduardo said. He cowered backward, came up against Ramon’s solid body and the unyielding gun- metal pressed to his neck.
Kuhl was on him an instant later. Even as Eduardo raised his hands in defense, Kuhl struck a sharp, precise blow to his right arm with the end of the stick. His wrist bone broke free of the long bones of his forearm with a clean and audible snap. Kuhl swiftly brought the stick to the right and down again between Eduardo’s neck and collarbone, then swung it across his middle. Eduardo simultaneously crumpled to his knees and vomited on himself.
Kuhl hit him three more times with the stick, smashing his nose with one blow, then striking him twice in the head. Eduardo collapsed further, curling his knees up into his chest. Blood gushed from his pulverized nose onto the rough concrete floor.
His eyes rolled blearily upward. He could see Kuhl standing above him, holding the stick in a vertical position, pulling at its upper end. And then the stick’s handle detached and the long length of a knife blade slid from inside its bottom segment.
Kuhl stood there without expression, the knife in his right hand and the remaining portion of the stick in his left, looking as if he were about to plunge the blade into Eduardo’s body. But instead he turned and passed it to someone who had come up beside him.
Eduardo shifted his head as far as he could, saw the man standing next to Kuhl, through a haze of pain, and released a low, tormented groan.
Vicente stared down at his nephew a moment, his eyes solemn, the lines around his mouth deepening. Then he knelt over him with the knife and sliced its edge across his throat to deliver the
Eduardo jerked, made a gurgling noise, and expired.
Rising, the old man gave the weapon back to Kuhl, turned toward DeVane, and bowed his head a little.
“I am sorry for your loss, dear friend,” DeVane said gently.
Vicente nodded again but remained where he stood.
DeVane rose from his chair as Kuhl approached him, the knife dripping in his hand.
“Have Vicente driven out of here so the others can scrape that garbage off the floor,” he said. “The Albanians have come through for us, and you and I have matters of vital importance to discuss.”
ELEVEN
“Any word on Thibodeau?” Gordian asked.
“He’s still in ICU, but his condition’s been upgraded from critical to serious,” Nimec said. “The doctors are encouraged. They say he’s alert. Also told me he’s already getting on their nerves.”
“How so?”
