The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone Read online

  I had been up in the loft enough times for me to be able to picture its layout clearly in my mind. The freight elevator entrance to the loft was about three-quarters of the way down its length. Just inside the entrance, to the right, a plywood partition separated Veil’s austere living quarters from the vast work area. The entire wall at the opposite end was comprised of a bank of windows; normally, Veil pulled a heavy drape over the windows at night, but when I had approached the entrance I had glimpsed to my left a large, cross-hatched patch of pale moonlight—which only served to make the rest of the loft seem darker. In the far corner, to the left of the windows, there were thick mats, punching and kicking bags suspended from the ceiling, and a large wooden box filled with martial arts weapons. There were three support columns marching down the center of the loft. The entire floor would be covered with stained tarpaulins, paint pots, palettes, mauled tubes of oil paint, brushes soaking in jars of turpentine—all of the paraphernalia for a different kind of battle, one of the mind, that Veil waged constantly in order to produce the kind of eerie, multipaneled mural that covered most of the wall directly opposite me.

  Once inside the loft, I could scramble for cover to one of the support columns, or try to make it around the partition into the living quarters. But either route I chose, there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t run right into the deadly embrace of Henry Kitten. Then again, if he was indeed wearing night-vision goggles, he could simply put a bullet in my head the moment I showed myself. On reflection, it seemed a good idea to stay right where I was.

  “Yo,” I called softly into the darkness. “Anybody home?”

  There was no answer, which didn’t surprise me. Both men would be crouched inside somewhere in the darkness, poised, waiting for the other to make some kind of mistake and show himself, or betray his position. The difference was that Kitten had use of both his arms, and could undoubtedly see.

  “Yo, Kitten,” I continued in a conversational tone as, taking care to keep pressed against the side of the elevator with my gun at the ready, I sidled closer to the entrance. “This is the cavalry speaking. You could have killed me up in Fort Lee, but you didn’t; I figure I owe you one. I won’t kill you unless you force me to. I say it’s better to light one little candle than to die in the darkness. Drop whatever it is you’re carrying, then walk on over and stand in front of the windows with your hands in the air. Then the three of us can chat about what we’re going to do with you. If we wait around here long enough, the lights are eventually going to come back on, anyway. Then you’re finished; if Veil doesn’t nail you, I will.”

  I paused, listening intently, but there was still no answer or sound of movement from inside the cavernous loft. Despite my conviction that sudden death crouched somewhere beyond the entrance, I had to admit the possibility that I’d rolled and bounced into Veil’s building, hauled myself up four floors on a steel cable, to end up sitting in a freight elevator and talking to myself.

  I had no way of knowing how long it would be before Consolidated Edison recognized the problem and restored power to the block, especially if Kitten had blown up an entire circuit. In the meantime, at that very moment Kitten could be on the move in the darkness—heading toward me. He would not want to fire a gun, because the muzzle flash, if not the deafening blast, would give away his position to Veil, who could see pretty well in the dark even without night-vision goggles. But Henry Kitten had a few dozen other ways to kill, and the thought of him skulking in my direction and suddenly popping up beside me in the elevator sent a chill through me and caused the small hairs on the back of my neck to sit up and take notice. Sitting in the darkness and talking to myself was decidedly too passive a strategy to use against the ninja assassin, and so I decided it was time to up the ante in our silent poker game.

  I transferred my gun to my left hand, arched my back, and stretched my right arm around into the entrance. I groped around on the floor until I felt the paint-stiffened edge of a tarpaulin. I wrapped my fingers around the canvas, began pulling the tarp into the elevator. I heard something tip over, and then there was the sharp, eye-watering smell of turpentine. Perfect.

  “We’re going to play a little game of chicken, Kitten,” I said as I continued to haul the tarpaulin into the elevator. Finally my fingers touched what I had been hoping to find—a turpentine-soaked paint rag. “I presume to speak for my friend when I say I believe he’d rather lose his loft than his life. If you’re not silhouetted in front of those windows in ten seconds, I’m going to set this place on fire. With all the wood, canvas, turpentine, and oil paint in there, it’ll go up fast. But you’re the only one who’s not going to get out of here. The first glimpse I get of you, I’m going to put a bullet thr—”

  I ducked away just as something whistled through the air, sliced through the front of my shirt, and planted itself in the wood siding of the elevator with a solid thunk. Shuriken. So much for the pleasant fantasy that I might be talking only to myself. Wherever Kitten was, he now had an angle on me. I crabbed sideways back into the corner of the elevator, groping in my pocket for the book of matches I always carried, since a cold day in Wisconsin years before when Garth’s life and mine had depended on a single match I’d found in a grimy book at the back of the glove department of a car. Lying on my side in an attempt to make myself as small as possible, hoping I wasn’t going to catch the next star-shaped blade in the throat, I put a match to the corner of the paint rag. Instantly, it burst into flames. I sucked in a deep breath, got to my feet, and dove for the opposite side of the elevator, hurling the flaming paint rag into the interior of the loft as I sailed past the opening. I landed on my shoulder and rolled over on my belly, crawled back to the entrance and cautiously peered around the corner.

  The rag was burning brightly a few feet away from a support column, and from its epicenter tongues of flickering, blue-white flame were licking along in all directions on the surface of the tarpaulin, sending up plumes of black, foul-smelling smoke and stabbing fingers of light into the surrounding darkness. I estimated that in less than two minutes the interior of the loft would be a raging holocaust.

  Chicken, indeed.

  Assuming that the flickering light from the flames would be playing havoc with Kitten’s night-vision goggles, I heaved the upper half of my body into the loft and used both hands to sweep my Beretta back and forth in front of me, ready to fire a fusillade of bullets into anything that moved that didn’t have shoulder-length, gray-streaked yellow hair.

  “All right, Frederickson!” It was the familiar, rich baritone of Henry Kitten, somewhere off to my left. I immediately swung my gun in that direction. He coughed, and then there was a thud as something heavy hit the floor. “That was my gun! Now I’m going over by the window!”

  “No! Step out into the firelight where I can see you! I want to see your hands flat on top of your head, fingers laced together!”

  A few moments later the looming figure of Henry Kitten, thick smoke swirling around his waist, appeared at the edge of the spreading circle of light from the flames. A pair of bulky night-vision goggles hung from a strap around his neck, and his hands were dutifully clasped on top of his head. Coughing, squinting against the acrid smoke, he slowly turned toward me.

  “May I suggest you put out the fire, Frederickson?” the big man with the pale eyes said laconically. “It’s getting a little close in here.”

  “I’ve got it, Mongo,” Veil said easily as he suddenly appeared behind and to the right of Kitten, walking quickly through the firelight and smoke.

  Whatever had happened before I’d arrived on the scene, Veil had obviously managed to get to his equipment box; nunchaku were draped around his neck, and he had two throwing knives stuck in the waistband of his jeans. His clothes, his face, and his hair were speckled with paint, which meant he’d done some rolling around on the floor, probably an instant or two after the lights had gone out. He disappeared behind the partition, emerged a few seconds later with a fire extinguisher braced under his
right arm in its paint-stained sling. He pushed a lever on the extinguisher, aimed the nozzle with his free hand, and began pumping foam over the spreading flames. In less than a minute the flames were out, the swirling smoke caught in drafts and mercifully being sucked out of the loft through three open panels in the bank of windows. Throughout, I remained flat on my belly, gun aimed at the center of Kitten’s barrel chest.

  “Now back up to the window,” I said as I got to my feet. “Take slow, easy steps. If I see anything but your feet moving, I’ll put a bullet in your heart.”

  “Like I said up in Fort Lee, you can be a real pain in the ass, Frederickson.” There was just the slightest trace of a smile on Henry Kitten’s face as he slowly backed toward the ceiling-high bank of windows. “How the hell could you know I’d be here tonight?”

  “I didn’t; I just knew you’d show up eventually, despite what happened to your employer. You made that clear to me, remember?”

  “Obviously I talked too much.”

  “I was coming down to talk to Veil about you. We seem to have arrived at about the same time.”

  “You showed up at a most inopportune time.”

  “I couldn’t disagree more,” Veil said dryly from somewhere behind me and off to my left. There was a faint click, and the beam of a powerful flashlight cut through the smoky air and moonlight, spotlighting the assassin’s broad torso and head. Eddies of smoke still whirled around Kitten as he stood in front of the window, feet braced slightly apart. I might have been in hell, talking to the devil himself, and when I had to cough I made certain my right hand remained steady and I didn’t blink. Kitten’s moves, like Veil’s, could be measured in milliseconds.

  Veil propped the flashlight on a stiff fold of tarpaulin, then came over to stand beside me. “Thanks, Mongo,” Veil continued as he studied the man caught in the beam of the flashlight. “I was in a bit of a spot there.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Obviously, this is the guy you kept trying to warn me about.”

  “That’s him,” I replied tersely, backing away slowly while I kept my eyes on Kitten’s face, which seemed remarkably impassive in the bright light. When I bumped up against a wall, I slid down it until I was sitting on the floor. I brought my knees up and rested my forearms on them so as to be able to keep a steady aim on Kitten’s chest while making myself as small a target as possible. Even with my gun trained on him while he stood with his hands clasped on his head, I didn’t intend to lose my concentration for a second.

  Veil moved a few steps to his left, then leaned casually against a support column as he continued to study Henry Kitten. “Why did you come up here?” he asked easily as he hooked his left thumb into a pocket of his jeans. “You certainly don’t look stupid, and Mongo tells me you’re actually quite clever. It must have occurred to you that there were easier ways to try to kill me. Why didn’t you just blow up the place, or pick me off out in the street?”

  Henry Kitten’s response was a shrug of his broad shoulders—a slight movement that almost cost him his life, since I was ready to pull the trigger at the least provocation. I’d seen the ninja assassin in action, and wasn’t taking any chances; in my opinion, Veil still wasn’t treating the other man with sufficient respect and seriousness.

  “I’m afraid I underestimated you, Kendry, not to mention the prescience of your friend over there. I thought this was the easy way.”

  “Are all the lights in the neighborhood out?” Veil asked as he glanced over in my direction.

  “Just this block.”

  Veil grunted. “A time-delayed charge, in just the right spot. Interesting. In addition to his other talents, Mr. Kitten here appears to be a master electrician.”

  “Yeah. How’d he get in?”

  “Up the fire stairs. He managed to pick the locks on both doors downstairs without my being aware of it, but I’d already seen the needle on the security system monitor fall, indicating that the entire system, including the battery-powered emergency backup, was out. I was just getting ready to check out my batteries when the lights went out. It seemed a bit too much of a coincidence for my alarm system to go out at the same time as the power failed, and I hit the floor about a second before Jumbo here came crashing through the upstairs door. I managed to get over to the equipment box and take out some weapons without getting shot, and I just stayed there. He couldn’t move over these stiff tarpaulins without my hearing him, and he obviously didn’t want to test my skills with a throwing knife. It was a standoff until you showed up.”

  Henry Kitten, who had been following our conversation with mild interest, now smiled, his lips parting to reveal even, white teeth. “I saw in the morning papers that the man who hired me is dead. Somehow, I strongly doubt that he shot himself in a hunting accident; Orville Madison never took vacations, and people were the only prey he was ever interested in hunting. Somehow, you managed to find out who he was and get to him, didn’t you, Frederickson? The profile I gave you in the park led you to him. That was a nice piece of work. You did a hell of a lot better job of flushing out Madison than I did with Kendry here.”

  “Which just goes to show that you have to pay attention to quality in choosing your clients,” I said.

  “I’ll remember that in the future.”

  “You don’t have a future,” I replied curtly. I was in no mood for—and had no intention of being lulled into—light chitchat with Henry Kitten.

  “So, Mongo,” Veil said easily, “what are we going to do with our visitor?”

  It seemed an excellent question, one for which I didn’t have a ready answer. Perfunctorily gunning down in cold blood a man who had spared my life—albeit for his own good reasons—didn’t really appeal to me, and turning him over to the police would pose any number of serious dilemmas, any one of which could tear apart a carefully constructed and necessary tissue of lies. An enormous amount of political power had very recently been brought to bear to conceal the fact that the dead secretary of state had been a murderous psychopath responsible for the brutal murders of a lot of innocent people, and that it had been my brother who’d killed him. The way things had worked out seemed best for all. But with the world’s most wanted assassin sitting in jail awaiting trial, the whole thing could start to unravel virtually overnight. Captured, with what I presumed were death sentences hanging over him in two dozen different countries, Henry Kitten would have no reason whatsoever to keep quiet about his own long association with Orville Madison, and the events of the past few months. People would start asking questions, and reporters would begin comparing notes. Neither Garth, Veil, Mr. Lippitt, President Kevin Shannon, nor I needed the attention Henry Kitten’s tales would bring us.

  “Do I detect a note of indecision?” Henry Kitten asked in a mild tone. “Why not just turn me over to the police? They can book me for breaking and entering.”

  I said, “They’ll book you for a whole hell of a lot more than that, Kitten.”

  “Will they? Somehow, I get the impression that you’re keeping things from me. Exactly what did you and your brother discuss with President Shannon, Frederickson?”

  “You know about that?” Kitten only had it half right; I was the only one who’d actually talked to Shannon. But Kitten’s intelligence was still impressive.

  “I guessed. I tracked the two of you to Washington, and I saw you heading into the park toward the Viet Nam War Memorial. Considering the large numbers of police and Secret Service agents hanging about, I figured it had to be the president you were going to see. At that point, I decided that it was a waste of time to keep tracking the two of you in an attempt to find Kendry, because Madison was finished—how finished he was I didn’t fully appreciate until I saw the papers this morning. Anyway, with Madison destroyed, I naturally assumed that it wouldn’t be long before Mr. Kendry would come out of hiding and be … available to me.”

  “You should have gone home yourself, Kitten.”

  “That’s not my real name, you know.”
r />   “You say.”

  “I’m impressed that you came up with a name at all, but that’s not the right one.”

  “Who cares? They can bury you under ‘John Doe.’”

  “Oh?”

  “What is your real name?”

  “Did the president personally issue the order for Madison to be killed, Frederickson? Is that why you can’t quite decide what to do with me?”

  “Veil?” I said. “What do you think?”

  “Kitten,” Veil said to the huge figure standing before the window, “I know you spared Mongo’s life. Would you consider getting out of here and forgetting about killing me?”

  “You’d accept my word?”

  “I would. I believe you act on your own strong code of honor, which is the real reason you chose to attack me the way you did. Even if you’re forced to take a sizable cut in future earnings, it’s still better to lose some of your reputation and fees than all of your life. Remember that I don’t owe you anything, and I might just break your neck now and be done with it if I think you’re going to be a headache in the future.”