John Miller - Inside Out

Winter slid the passport back inside the dead man's vest and hurried to the elevator. He pressed the call button. Fifteen had said he was going upstairs, but the car was rising slowly from below. The door opened and Winter got into the empty car. Before he could press a button, the door closed and started up.

When the elevator stopped, Winter stepped out into a circular foyer with granite floors, a curved faux marble wall, and an ornately carved stone arch with twin maple doors whose tops followed the curve. The domed ceiling had been painted black so that hundreds of tiny white bulbs transformed it into a quasi planetarium.

The elevator closed and started down again. Winter entered into a palatial apartment, his footsteps muted by a thick oriental rug on a polished oak floor. Paintings-classic pastorals and portraits-filled the walls. The ornate furniture looked too valuable to sit on.

“Anybody home? Fifteen?”

Winter opened the door on the far side of the room and stepped into the main hallway. The first room he came to was an office. The few papers, letters, and receipts that were scattered on the desk's surface appeared to be written in Cyrillic.

He opened the door to a bedroom that, in stark contrast to the rest of the apartment, was Japanese modern. Two life-size forms, dressed in samurai battle regalia, stood at either side of the bed. They looked like fierce insect-men, patiently awaiting the opportunity to lay waste to some invading army.

When Winter pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen, he was suddenly face-to-face with a man seated at the table, who was staring straight at him-or more likely into the fires of hell. “Ah, just great,” Winter groaned.

Based on George Williams's description, the white-blond crew cut and the wrist encircled by a barbed-wire tattoo indicated that the corpse at the table was the old man's helicopter pilot, Ralph. Someone had garroted him using a length of wire, some of which was still deeply embedded in the open slit in his throat.

A dinner plate between his forearms held in its center a single human eye with its malformed keyhole pupil positioned so it stared up at Winter.

Lying on a folded napkin beside the plate like a utensil was Winter's Walther PP. He lifted it and sniffed the barrel to discover it had been fired recently. Reflexively, he put the pistol into his jacket pocket. A fresh coating of blood mixed with what was surely brain tissue, bits of white hair, and bone decorated the wall behind one of the kitchen chairs like an abstract painting.

If Winter was found in the building, the FBI could easily draw the conclusion that he was involved with them through their scapegoat, Greg Nations. Anything he said would be meaningless, and Fifteen's threat against his family meant he couldn't defend himself with the truth without endangering them. The realization that he had been set up built a fire in the pit of Winter's stomach. It made sense-the Russian passport, the weapons, all pointed to a facility used by mercenaries. Even though the corpses in the bathroom obviously weren't the men listed in their passports, he knew the bodies would match them before he was hauled off to jail. But the corpses' Kevlar vests made no sense.

Winter peered out into the service hall, looking for the missing body that had left the wall splashed with gore. The reinforced door to a rear stairwell was dead-bolted, its key removed.

Back in the kitchen, Winter noticed blood smeared on the handle of the refrigerator, more on the floor in front of it. Winter opened the door and found Herman Hoffman's dead body again basing his assumption on George's knowledge. The old man had been crammed like a Peruvian mummy inside the commercial-size refrigerator, a small bullet hole in his forehead-undoubtedly fired from the Walther now in Winter's pocket. A printed note read, Curiosity killed the cat.

There would be no FBI arresting him. There were several pale blocks of Semtex in the old man's lap, and a red indicator light blinked on a detonator. He understood that opening the refrigerator door had armed the device.

In Winter's experience, real-life bombs set by professionals didn't have illuminated panels of numbers counting down to the explosion like in movies. There was enough explosive packed into the Sub-Zero, and on the floor below, to erase the building, to destroy all of the evidence except for things like torsos, passports placed inside body armor, guns, and badges like his own.

Fifteen intended to solve everybody's problems at once.

Richmond, Virginia

At 7:50 P.M., Hawk's van sat with its rear bumper twenty feet from the hotel's front doors. He checked his Glock and the four magazines in two holders on his belt. His partner had been parked across the street from the hotel since seven-thirty, his shape visible through the windshield of his high-performance Taurus SHO, which had a steel plate in the trunk angled to deflect bullets away from the cabin.

When the cab pulled up in front of the Grand, right behind the van, Hawk tightened his vest and watched through the rearview. After the tattooed boy sprang from the cab and sprinted inside, Hawk opened the van's door. As he stepped into the street, his long coat was whipped by a sudden gust of wind. He pulled a dark ball cap from the pocket of his coat and put it on.

He put the closed badge case in his left hand so the first thing Sean Devlin would see would be the familiar glint of a gold star set in a circle.

He nodded to his partner, who then stepped from the SHO and leaned against the front fender holding a semiautomatic twelve-gauge shotgun underneath his trench coat. Through the glass doors he saw the marble-faced counter across the lobby and the old man standing behind it. After crossing the lobby, Sean Devlin would come into view from his right. He would grab her and bring her outside, where he and his partner would whisk her away.

At five minutes before eight, Sean placed the pistol in her backpack. She had made the choice between taking the train and keeping the gun, or dropping the pistol into a garbage can before she got near the metal detectors at the airport. She had decided that getting as far away, as fast as she could, was better than having the security of the gun. She put on her coat, grabbed her backpack and duffel, and looked around the room one last time to make sure she wasn't leaving anything behind. In a few hours she would be in Seattle. She credited Sam Manelli's image on television for her heightened anxiety level, and she couldn't rationalize her fear by telling herself that he couldn't possibly have a line on her.

The phone rang and she jumped, almost dropping the backpack.

“Ms. McSorley, your driver has arrived,” Max announced.

“Thank you. I'll be right down.”

She left the room, made her way to the elevator door, and pressed the call button. Four floors below, the gate closed and there was a rumble as the motor engaged. When the cage opened she stepped into the elevator and took a deep breath to calm her racing heart.

“We're due for rain,” the operator remarked as they descended. “We can sure use it.”

“Rain would be nice,” Sean agreed. She wondered how rain could affect the life of a man who lived in the hotel and spent his days going up and down in place like a piston.

At the lobby level, he opened the gate for her and, even though it was night, he said, “Have a nice day.”

Wire Dog, waiting outside the elevator like an impatient date, took Sean's duffel from her.

The two women Sean had seen earlier were still sitting together on the leather couch in the center of the lobby.

As she and Wire Dog passed by, Sean exchanged smiles with the women. The women stood, and the younger one's dark ponytail fell halfway down her back. She was well tanned and looked as if she made an effort to stay in shape. She had changed clothes since Sean had seen her that afternoon. Now she wore khakis, running shoes, and a jacket. The leather purse under her right shoulder was almost as large as Sean's backpack. The older woman, wearing a loose-fitting dress, had wet dark hair combed straight back.