Reginald Cook - Veil

They walked out of the conference room and down the hall. Robert noticed drops of blood on the hallway floor.

In unison, they quietly stepped to opposite sides of the door and readied their weapons. Robert released the safety on his Berretta.

Thorne racked her shotgun.

He carefully tried the doorknob to his office. Open. He signaled Thorne with three fingers.

On three, they burst inside, guns pointing in every direction.

Charlie’s chair lay turned over on its side next to a small pool of blood.

They relaxed their weapons, bewildered.

Charlie and the evidence were gone.

Andre Perchenkov thought himself the perfect hunter. Growing up in St.

Petersburg, Russia, the hunting trips he and his brother, Vladimir, took with their alcoholic father were the high point of a debilitating, abusive childhood.

Those trips made up the few pleasant moments he could remember growing up. Killing his father during one of those outings, another.

Hidden in the thick branches of a leafless tree, twenty yards from an elegant Georgetown townhouse, Andre, ski masked and dressed in black, watched Superior Court Judge Jonathan Weiss pack for what looked like a long tropical vacation.

Harsh piercing wind cut through the tree like prickly needles. Andre sat unmoved. Months in Siberian wastelands hardened him to the bitter cold long ago. There to take a life, his sixth judge since this ritual began, nothing else mattered.

He glared into the master bedroom with cold indifference, as though the magistrate were a deer, or a rabbit. The judge disappeared from sight, walking into a large luxurious bathroom. Andre absorbed every detail. The olive colored his and hers towels, the brilliant gold fixtures on the sink and shower, the ice white Italian marble floor, and the Irish Spring soap. He watched the judge open a fresh bar, missing the trashcan with the wrapper.

Judge Weiss closed the bathroom door out of habit, Andre supposed.

Nobody else was home. He watched the last of the servants leave earlier.

Mrs. Weiss left hours ago, and he planned to have the judge decomposing by the time she returned.

He climbed down from the tree. The area, well lit but splotched with plenty of shadows, provided enough cover for him to disappear to the rear unnoticed.

An icy gust whipped up a funnel of snow powder. A rush surged when he reached the rear door, but he suppressed it.

Excited and anxious to kill, his vitals fell steady, his heart rate even.

He unscrewed the overhead floodlight. “Never get too excited right before a kill,” his father once exhorted. “Your prey can smell your excitement.” Andre reflected that his father never smelled him coming.

He picked the double locked door with no trouble and found the alarm just as simple. Entering the house increased his sense of excitement and expectation, but he remained calm. Tiptoeing through the kitchen, he smelled the fading aroma of garlic and roast duck, and heard the judge moving around upstairs humming Beethoven’s Fifth.

He found his way around in the dark with ease, having entered the place for dry runs twice, once while the staff attended to their duties.

At the top of the stairs, Andre stopped, removed the ski mask, and listened. It was stone quiet except for the judge’s self-symphony, which moved from Beethoven to Mozart. Perfect.

He inched down the thickly carpeted hallway toward the bedroom door. Luciano Pavarotti replaced the judge’s humming. The tenor’s aria of Donizetti’s La Fille Du Regiment, poured through the wall speakers and filled the townhouse.

From a sheath strapped to his ankle, he slid out a ten-inch buck knife, stopping at the bedroom door. Pavarotti hit an effortless High C and Andre closed his eyes. One of nine he hit that evening, he recalled. New York Metropolitan Opera, 72. I had good seats that night. He slid the knife back into place. I’ll use my hands tonight.

Andre cracked the bedroom door open and watched the judge sort clothes. The judge caught a glimpse of him in the dresser mirror, swung around, stumbled, and tripped over a suitcase on the floor. Andre smelled his fear. His heart raced. He pounced, punching the judge hard about the face, crushing his nose into a clump of mush and blood.

“Urrrhhh,” the judge cried, obviously not used to pain.

A shame. If you’d grown up in Russia, your nerve would be stronger and you might have a chance to survive.

The judge’s face transformed from fear and terror to desperate anger.

Good. A fight for a change. I was beginning to think Americans lacked the will to live. The judge punched and kicked wildly, knocking Andre on his back, jumped to his feet and ran for the door like he was twenty.

Andre, calm, but deliberate, followed his sixth victim down the staircase. The judge ran into the den and slammed the door. Andre heard the lock slide into place, and turned the cherry lined panels into firewood with his shoulder.

Judge Weiss unlocked a gun cabinet hidden in a panel behind his desk. Andre leaped over the oak, landed on the judge, knocking him to the floor.

“Why are you doing this?” the judge asked, collapsing, deflated.

“Because Lenin would want it this way,” Andre told him, speaking in his native tongue.

A woman’s scream seared the air. The judge’s wife stood rigid in the doorway, a pile of packages and shopping bags at her feet.

“Run Emily!” the judge screamed, fighting, trying to push the Russian off.

Andre, ready to finish, snapped the judge’s neck with one quick twist.

Mrs. Weiss screamed louder and ran upstairs.

He didn’t mind killing women, but considered letting the judge’s wife go. Unfortunately, her sudden interruption broke his concentration, ruining the thrill, leaving him unfulfilled. No matter .

To Andre’s delight, Judge Weiss married a woman half his age. He remembered her smooth velvety skin, round breasts and hard nipples from his last dry run only a few days before.

Yes. I’ll kill her after all. Besides, I haven’t had sex in awhile.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, please!” Edward chimed. “Let’s save the sparring for another time.”

He paused, allowing each of the four men sitting before him a moment to gather themselves. Each was given the opportunity to debate what he considered meaningless issues for almost an hour. Occasionally, he commented on their opinions out of feigned politeness. Now, he wanted their undivided attention.

“I’ve asked you here at this late hour because I have a very special request. As you know, my son Charleston has been Governor of New York for the past three years. What you may not know is that the White House is his next stop. I intend to pave the way for his ascension to the Presidency, and I hope we’ll have your full, unwavering support.” Edward Rothschild III leaned back into a courtly, burgundy leather chair that held great men from Churchill to Eisenhower. He puffed his Cuban. A rich cloud from Havana’s finest temporarily masked his stern countenance, fierce green eyes and silvery gray hair. The others sat comfortably on sofas and chairs strategically positioned around a highly polished antique coffee table, a precious heirloom from the eighteenth century donated to the Cosmos Club by Edward’s long deceased grandmother.

The club’s main pavilion was closed, with most of the staff gone for the night. A skeleton crew stayed on during the late hours to tend to the small number of members and guests who stayed in the club’s residence overnight. Tonight Edward handpicked the servants. Over the years, he’d learned whom he could trust.

The occasions for these men to meet were rare. When they did, things changed. Stock markets rose or crashed, governments struggled or achieved peace, wars started and ended, leaders lived or died. Their very existence as a group fueled the obsession of conspiracy theorists from New York to Moscow, and Edward was their leader-as much as a group of men like these could have one.