Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

Wading deeper into the growing madness, she fights her way after them. The car fire has spread, and one of the hawthorn trees becomes a column of flame, its widening plume of smoke a dark banner rippling ominously over all their heads. Alli coughs, her lungs burning. A young woman hits her in the face, a boy drives his elbow into her side in his panic to get away from the militia. The armed men wield metal truncheons, which rise and fall in concert like a thresher in a field of wheat. She gasps and continues on, reeling and in pain, but she will not allow Liridona out of her sight. But the fog, a metallic brown from gunpowder, garbage, and the grit of the streets, thrusts itself against her like a living thing. She is buffeted by the currents of running people. Screams find her as insistent as the tolling of bells from the cathedral, which seems to watch indifferently with its elongated El Greco face.

Alli loses sight of Liridona altogether, and her heart beats even faster in her chest as she plows her way through the mob, nearer now to the mass of truncheons lifting and falling, to the sprays of blood and bone, to the tilted bodies, to the cries of pain and terror.

Then she spots one of the men, his tall frame sinister as a bat, rising for a moment above the heads of the students. Her way lies directly in the path of the militia. There’s no time to circle around, so she plunges ahead until she is close to the line of truncheons, advancing en masse like a phalanx of Roman soldiers. On hands and knees, she makes herself inconspicuous, crawling through the melee, squirming through the legs of the militia until she eels her way through to the other side.

Regaining her feet, she looks around, sees the men pushing Liridona around a corner. They are no longer in the plaza. She is on the fringe of the mob, running as fast as she can toward the corner. Running with her heart in her mouth, running toward the sudden roar of gunshots that spurts at her like sleet from around the corner.

“No!” she cries. “No!”

Hurtling around the corner, she is jerked off her feet. She stares into monstrous eyes. One is blue, the other green. They regard her as if each has a separate intelligence, both cold as permafrost.

For a moment, she is paralyzed by those eyes, or, more accurately, the twin intelligence behind them. And she thinks, Not him, anyone but him. Then, from somewhere out of her sight, she hears Liridona weeping, and, like glass shattering against stone, the spell breaks. But the instant she tries to struggle free, the barrel of a gun is shoved into her mouth.

“Once again, quiet,” a voice like a constricting iron band says. “Before the end.”

The air shivers.

PART ONE

BLOOD SPORT

One Month Ago

You can’t have a pact with God and with the devil at the same time.

—The Skating Rink

, R

OBERTO

B

OLAÑO

ONE

Washington, D.C.

“SHE’S DEAD.”

These words, spoken by his daughter, jerk Jack McClure out of sleep.

Covered in sweat, he turns in the darkness of his bedroom. “Emma?”

The faintest cool breeze stirs the hair on his head.

“She passed by me a minute ago, Dad. Or is it an hour?”

Hard to tell, Jack thought, when you’re dead.

“Emma?”

But the ghostly voice was gone, and he felt the sudden lack of her. Again. A great abyss on whose edge he teetered like a drunk reeling out of a bar. He drew a breath, gave a great shudder, and lunged for his cell phone. Punched in the number of Walter Reed Medical Center and heard the familiar voice of the night nurse.

“Mr. McClure, how odd you should call at this moment. I was just about to dial your number.” She cleared her throat and when she began again her voice had taken on a formal, almost martial tenor. “At two fifty-three this morning, the former First Lady, Lyn Carson, expired.”

“She’s dead.” The echo of Emma’s voice caused another shiver to run down his spine.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the night nurse said.

“Have you notified Alli?”

“I haven’t yet, but as instructed I’ve called Mrs. Carson’s sister and her brother-in-law.” She meant Henry Holt Carson, Alli’s uncle. “As well as Secretary Paull, of course.”

“Okay.” Jack thumbed the sleep from his eyes as he swung his legs off the bed. “I’ll take care of informing Alli.” He padded toward the bathroom.

“Sir, is there anything—?”

“At the end … did she regain consciousness?”

“No, sir, she never did.”

“Stay with Mrs. Carson.” He squinted as he turned on the light. “I’ll be right over.”

“IT’S THE end of an era,” Dennis Paull said as he and Jack stood by Lyn Carson’s bedside.

No one knew that better than Jack. Ten months ago, he had been in the vehicle following the president’s limousine in Moscow when the limo had skidded on a patch of ice. Almost everyone in that car, including President Edward Harrison Carson, had died. All except Lyn Carson, who had slipped into a coma. Despite two surgeries, the first on board Air Force One, the second here at Walter Reed, she had failed to regain consciousness. Both procedures had succeeded only in prolonging her twilight life.

“Did you call Alli?”

Jack nodded. “Several times, and they said they’d get the message to her.”

“What about her cell?”

“Fearington has a strict policy about cell-phone use.” Fearington was the FBI Special Ops school in Virginia.

“Even for this?” Paull shook his head. He was now Jack’s boss. He had hired Jack after President Carson’s fatal accident. Jack, who had worked for ATF, had been tapped by Carson as a strategic advisor immediately following his old friend’s inauguration. That all ended as abruptly as it had begun, and Paull, seeing his opportunity, had scooped Jack up. Now Jack tackled the antiterrorism assignments that daunted Paull’s other agents, using his dyslexic mind to unravel puzzles no one else could handle.

“Rules are rules.”

Paull took out his phone. “We’ll see about that.” While he was waiting, he said, “You must’ve moved heaven and earth to get her in there.” Then he held up a finger. “No answer.” He closed the connection.

“Fearington periodically goes into lockdown as a drill.”

Paull nodded and put his phone into his pocket.

“But the truth is Alli did her own heavy lifting,” Jack went on. “She passed the entrance exams with the highest marks they’d seen in more than a decade.”

“Smart little thing.”

Jack snorted. “It takes more than smarts to get into Fearington. After her father was killed, she wouldn’t talk to anyone, even me. She curled up into an emotional ball. But there was so much anger inside her that when I took her to my gym, she slid on a pair of boxing gloves and started pounding the heavy bag.”

Paull laughed. “I’d like to have been a fly on the wall.”

“Yeah, she almost broke her right hand. Then I began to teach her how to box and, damn, if she didn’t pick up all the fundamentals right away. At first, she didn’t have a lot of power, as you can imagine, but then, I don’t know, something clicked inside her. She was like a ghost—it seemed as if she could anticipate my punches. She has this ability. By reading a person’s face she knows whether they’re lying or telling the truth. Now she’s extended this ability to knowing what they’re about to do.”

“So she put the boys down?”

“Did she ever!” Jack said. “But admiration wasn’t what she got from a lot of her classmates.”

Paull nodded. “I can only imagine. Fearington’s a men’s club. Didn’t you warn her?”