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Almost.
4.
Catamaran Resort Hotel and Spa
3999 Mission Boulevard
Her name was Aayun.
"It means 'eyes,' " she said.
"I know," said Toys.
She was surprised. "You speak Arabic?"
"A bit. Traveler's Arabic. I don't know much."
It was a lie, but it was enough. They were sitting at World Famous. It was the third time they'd talked since meeting in the church. Toys had tried very hard not to be interested, but she was interesting. Smart, filled with energy and life, but also a little sad. It was the sadness that drew him to her. He understood sadness in all of its many shapes and flavors. Their conversations were never personal, which seemed to be by mutual consent. She was as intensely private as he was, except for her desire to talk. So they talked. They talked about art and music, about movies and places they'd been. He was careful not to talk too much about his travels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and other troubled places. She spoke of growing up in a small village near Baghdad, and of moving away with her family in the early days of the war. They did not talk politics. They did talk religion, though, and it became clear that she was not a Catholic. He asked her why she'd been in the church.
Aayun blushed. "I . . . I followed you in."
"Why?"
She shrugged. "I don't know why. I just did."
Toys felt enormously uncom
fortable about that, but he let it go. Aayun was interesting, articulate, amusing, and insightful. He could talk to her about things that had no connection at all to who, and what, he had been or who, and what, he was now. She called him Alexander because she had no idea that the world called him Toys. One day she touched his hand at the table and he didn't pull away. It surprised him. And he liked it.
They met for meals and talked their way through food they barely ate and tea they consumed by the gallon.
He had no intention of taking her to bed. They went to bed anyway.
It was a sultry night, and he had brought her to the small ground-floor apartment on the grounds of the Catamaran Resort Hotel where he lived. She was delighted as he showed her around. The resort was gorgeous, with sculptured gardens in which stands of green bamboo framed ponds of brightly colored koi. Parrots in lovely ornate cages chattered to one another, and ducks waddled in and out of a series of lazy streams that were also home to turtles and bullfrogs. Totem poles hand-carved in Bali seemed to encourage meditation in the gardens. And guests could wander beneath the cool canopy of leaves formed by over a hundred species of palm trees, with a thousand species of flowers and plants filling the air with a subtle olio of fragrances.
Toys's apartment was the least ostentatious of the rooms, with the least enchanting view. That had always been fine with him. It was remote and it was quiet. The fact that he owned the hotel was something no one at the Catamaran knew, nor did he tell Aayun. The staff knew that he was a permanent resident--the only such person at the place--and they mutually assumed that he was a relative of the owners.
But Toys was related to no one. The staff at FreeTech knew he lived there, but Junie Flynn was the only one of them who knew he owned it. And that he owned large chunks of San Diego real estate. Not his own money, really, but close enough.
The money had come to him along with a challenge to do some good with it. However, it was blood money, and Toys felt stained by it.
The British pharmaceutical magnate Sebastian Gault had been Toys's employer as well as his best friend. It had been Gault who had pulled Toys out of the squalor of his younger life, seen the potential beneath the veneer of poverty and bad habits, provided him with the best education, and given him a chance to prove himself. Toys had risen to the challenge, becoming a fixer in his own right. When problems arose, Toys sorted them out. Sometimes that meant arranging a bribe, sometimes it meant cutting a throat. Toys had never been squeamish about it, and soon had a reputation in certain circles as a ruthless, efficient, fiercely loyal enabler of Gault's excesses. Even when that meant supporting Gault's big-ticket play to manipulate the political and religious extremes of El Mujahid and his terrorist network.
The plan was built around a weaponized disease pathogen called Seif al Din that had been designed by the brilliant scientist Amirah--who was also El Mujahid's wife. Seif al Din had been engineered to be virtually 100 percent contagious, and it turned any infected person into a mindless engine of destructive rage. Zombies, or at least the real-world approximation. The plan had not been global destruction. No, Gault wanted to scare the superpowers, notably America, into shifting the bulk of their defense budgets away from mechanized warfare and into research and development for prophylactic drugs that would protect the population from the disease. Gault was well positioned within the pharmaceutical community, and although everyone in the industry would benefit, it was his own profits that were of primary concern.
The problem was that El Mujahid and Amirah were never really under Gault's thumb. They saw the pathogen as a weapon of God, something that would do what decades of terrorist attacks and suicide bombers had failed to do: tear down America.
Toys had bullied Gault into trying to stop it. Together they had destroyed Amirah's lab but nearly died in the process.
Ultimately it was all too much for Toys. He was a murderer, but he did not want to become one of the Four Horsemen of the bloody apocalypse. His Catholic upbringing, so long abandoned, reemerged, and he realized that he was an irredeemable sinner with hell as his only destination.
He had hoped to fade into obscurity and live out his years as a nothing, doing no more harm. But Mr. Church, head of the black-ops group that destroyed the Seif al Din program, found him and made him an astounding offer. He gave Toys access to the vast fortune Church had recovered from numbered accounts connected to various terrorist groups, and Church challenged Toys to use some of that money to do good in the world.
Why Church had selected him, of all people, for that role was beyond Toys. He was evil. He was a mass murderer, an enabler of horrors, a lost soul. He was damned and doomed.
But he took the challenge, even though it meant often interacting with Joe Ledger and feeling the acid burn of the man's contempt. Ledger was Junie Flynn's lover, so there were complications at every turn. Toys found no forgiveness there, and he understood that he deserved none. Not a drop. A sinner with so many black marks against his soul was not allowed the right to despise the devils who tormented him in hell.
And yet . . .
