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“By answering another question first.”
“By all means.”
“Who do you fear more? Me or the man who masterminded Borodin’s escape?”
“I fear neither, though in all candor I admit that I admire and respect him more.”
“That is the wrong answer.” Kenin looked down at his keyboard and typed a quick IM. When he spoke, a little of the earlier brevity was back, but now it was more genuine. “The secret to your success has always been two things. Your discretion, which I can do little about, and your physical location, which I can.” Kenin paused as if something occurred to him. “Actually, three things. There is what is referred to as a dead man’s switch. Upon your death, information that you’ve gathered over the years will be disseminated to interested parties. I imagine it will ignite assassination after assassination, and perhaps even trigger a few wars. I guess I should have said switches, since there are four separate people tasked with carrying out your final orders should any harm befall you.”
Had L’Enfant’s scarred visage been able to show emotion, fear would have crept across his face. That he had a dead man as protection against betrayal was known to all. That he had four was not.
The video monitor both men could see split into four quadrants at a command from Pytor Kenin. In each, a man dressed in black tactical gear and wearing a dark mask held a pistol to the head of another person—three men and a woman. Two were dressed in suits, and it looked as though they had been at their offices or commuting to them. Of the other two, the woman wore workout clothes, and behind her were several pieces of fitness gear in a home gym. The third man was next to his bed and wore nothing but a pair of boxers, his gut sagging over the waistband by a good six inches.
All four were lawyers. None of them lived on the same continent or knew one another and yet all had been hired in secret by L’Enfant to divulge upon his death all of the information he’d gathered on his clients and their enemies.
“My only real risk,” Kenin said airily, “is that I’m not certain if these people have people of their own who will carry out your final command. But I think I’m safe.” He then turned deadly serious. “As to your location, my friend, you are currently in the southeast corner of the one hundred eighteenth floor of the Burj Khalifa tower. The ocean vista behind you is a live webcam from Italy’s Amalfi Coast, and while you own the floors immediately above and below yours, I have packed the suite on one sixteen with enough explosives to take down the entire building.
“I will now repeat the question. Who do you fear more, me or him? And let me remind you that I will trigger the charges in, say, twenty seconds.”
L’Enfant took a draw off his oxygen mask. “If this was a level playing field, I would still fear him more than you.”
“The playing field is no longer level,” Kenin said, waving at the monitor to indicate how his men held weapons on L’Enfant’s people.
“I see that.”
“Here’s how this is going to work. You are going to give me his name and the name of his outfit, and then we will never speak again. You will not warn him. Maybe your betrayal will become public and maybe not. It is possible you will be able to salvage something of your career after this. The choice is yours, and you now have five seconds.”
L’Enfant hesitated for as long as he dared and then for the first time in his life he gave up one of his clients. “Juan Cabrillo. He is the chairman of the Corporation. They are based on a ship called the Oregon, although that name is rarely painted on her fantail.”
“See? That wasn’t so hard.”
“Screw you, Kenin.”
Kenin ignored that remark. “Now, my good friend, tell me everything you know about this Cabrillo and his ship.”
One of the things Juan loved about New York City was that enough money could get you anything no matter day or night. Thus he found himself headed north at seven the next morning behind the wheel of a Porsche Cayman S. Because he was at sea year-round, he had little opportunity to drive, so when it became clear the night before that flying and driving times to the Vermont state capital were about the same, he opted to rent the sports car. The dealer in exotic cars could have gotten him a Lamborghini or a GT3 Porsche, but all those fins and spoilers were like a toreador’s red cape to cruising police.
Speed traps weren’t much of a concern since the radar and lidar detector he’d taken from the ship’s stores would give the car’s ceramic-composite brakes more than enough time to slow down.
Before setting out, he’d checked the Cayman’s GPS to map out the most efficient route, and when he saw it involved mostly sticking to highways, he programmed it to find quiet back roads instead. Once through the snarl of congestion that surrounded New York and its environs, he found himself on two-lane blacktop that saw little traffic other than farm tractors and locals running errands.
The six-cylinder engine directly behind his low-slung seat thrummed with eager anticipation as he worked the gears and wheel to throw the nimble sports car around rolling turns, first in Connecticut and then the western Massachusetts Berkshire Mountains. Prudence made him take it easy when passing through little towns that clung to the road in clusters of tired storefronts with only a few cross streets before opening up again to vacant farmland. Black-and-white Holstein cows dotted the fields as if placed there for tourists to photograph.
Though his concentration was fully focused on keeping the Cayman glued to the asphalt, he still could mull over ideas about what exactly the Corporation had stumbled into. It was a secret Pytor Kenin was willing to kill for, he knew that much. Yuri, Karl Petrovski, and the old man Yusuf were dead because of it. From what Cabrillo knew of Admiral Kenin, this had to be tied to some Russian defense project. If Yuri supplemented his meager naval pay by selling off military technology, he was quite certain Kenin was doing it too. The other fact he was reasonably certain of was that this technology was based on something Nikola Tesla had invented more than a century ago.
He put little stock in Mark Murphy’s teleportation theory, despite Max’s limp endorsement, or at least not outright rejection of the idea. Juan felt sure that their research would turn up a more plausible explanation as to how George Westinghouse’s yacht ended up halfway around the globe.
Montpelier sits in a bowl of mountains along the banks of the Winooski River, Vermont’s central artery. Crossing the river on one of the numerous bridges that serviced the city of eight thousand, Cabrillo quickly found himself facing the impressive Greek Revival statehouse building, with its granite façade and gilded domed roof. A little farther along he found himself in a downtown district out of a Norman Rockwell painting. There were no buildings of more than four stories, and each had exacting architectural details. He pitied any modern developer having to face design-review committees.
When he was still two streets shy of his destination, he parked in the lot of a small apartment building and used the hood of the car to shield him while he slipped on a shoulder holster and then shrugged into a black single-breasted blazer tailored to hide the telltale bulge of the FN Five-seveN semiautomatic pistol. Beneath it he wore a white broadcloth oxford with the collar open. He clicked the holster’s lower loop around his belt to secure it in place and carefully closed the Porsche’s hood.
A minute later, he rolled up to a Queen Anne–style house that was all brightly painted gingerbread, narrow dormered roofs, and peaked turrets. Had it actually been made of gingerbread, he wouldn’t have been surprised. The hundred-year-old house had an attached garage that was an obvious add-on, but whoever had done the work had strived to match the original building’s delicate architecture. In a word, the place was “charming.” And it looked to be the perfect hole-up for a retired MIT professor.
Cabrillo slid from his seat and walked across the stone path to the front porch and the door. There was an electronic bell, but it felt right to use the ornate brass knocker instead.
“One moment,” a muffled voice called from within.
If Juan could pin down exactly how long a moment lasted, that’s how long it took for the door to swing open.
