LITMIR.BIZ

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a manner of speaking,” Blair said. “She’s dead.”

      “Dead?” Bolan leaned forward.

      “Very much so. As I said, she was my favorite guess for the Nightingale when I first started poring over all this stuff. But circumstances have forced me to change my mind.”

      “‘Circumstance’ being that she’s dead,” the Executioner said.

      Blair nodded. “Seems a logical conclusion to draw, doesn’t it? It’s not likely she faked her own death and just fell off the grid. I mean, right? Who does that?”

      Bolan said nothing. In the waning days of his war on the Mafia, he’d done just that, allegedly dying after a bomb destroyed his war wagon. When that ruse fell apart, he’d been forced to stand trial for the blood spilled in his War Everlasting. Ultimately, he’d “died” a second and, as far as the public was concerned, final time. This time it had stuck, but that was partly because of his experiences as a soldier and the help of the White House and Stony Man Farm.

      Presumably, this young woman had none of those resources at hand, he told himself.

      “She died in a house explosion,” Blair said. “It was six months after her sister died. The local fire department blamed it on a gas leak. Neighbors saw her walk in after work. An hour later, an explosion tears through the house, incinerates the damn thing.”

      “They thought it was suicide,” Bolan said.

      “According to her coworkers and family, she collapsed when her sister died, took a month off work to recover from the shock. When she finally did come back, people said she’d changed. She was sullen, depressed and withdrawn.”

      “No surprise,” McCarter said.

      “Agreed. But as time went on, according to the interviews I saw, she got worse rather than better. Since her sister was lost in a terrorist attack, the authorities gave the case a hard look before they closed it, but they found no signs of foul play. She could have died from an accident, which seems plausible. She’d called the gas company to the house at least once about a month before the explosion to report the smell of gas. Or she gave up and killed herself.”

      Bolan nodded. “If she’s dead, why tell us all this?”

      “More to illustrate a point,” Blair said. “Jennifer Davis fits the profile pretty well. So do a couple of other women. They didn’t check out, either, for various reasons. If you’re trying to find the Nightingale, it won’t be easy. That’s really the point I am trying to make here. You’re chasing a ghost.”

      They spent the next hour going through the other information Blair had, including other suspects who’d turned out to be false leads. The Stony Man warriors thanked Blair for his help and left Thames House, along with a flood of civil servants heading out for lunch.

      “Fun to yank his chain, but he seems like a good enough lad,” McCarter said. “Not much help, though. Sorry for dragging you out here.”

      “It’s been a long flight,” Bolan said. “Let’s see if Kurtzman dug up anything in the meantime.”

      * * *

      AFTER HIS VISITORS left, Blair forced himself to sit in his office and, for an excruciating twenty-two minutes, pretended to work. Finally, he grabbed his sack lunch from his bottom desk drawer, grabbed his windbreaker from a hook on the wall and headed out the door.

      A nervous flutter in his stomach nagged at him and, as he made his way through the corridors of Thames House, he felt as though all eyes rested upon him. He bought a foam cup filled with hot tea from a street vendor and walked a few blocks from MI5’s headquarters, where he bought a couple of newspapers from a newsstand.

      Though he tried to look nonchalant about it, he surveyed the streets for any signs he’d been followed. He saw nothing amiss, but knew that meant absolutely zero. He wasn’t a trained field operative. Though he understood surveillance and countersurveillance techniques and principles, he hadn’t applied them in the real world. Said other ways, he was out of his element, over his head or any other clichés one wanted to apply.

      Folding the newspapers in half, he put them under his arm and continued on two more blocks to a small municipal park. With the edge of the folded newspapers, he brushed some leaves and other debris from a wrought-iron bench. He seated himself on the bench, drew his tuna sandwich from the bag and took a bite from it. Nerves continued to roil his stomach and he didn’t want to eat. However, he also wanted to make it look as though he was here in the park for a reason, some reason other than the truth.

      The sandwich became a sticky ball inside his dry mouth and he washed it down with the tea. Three children played nearby. The middle one, a slim girl with long, blond hair, threw a ball to one of the other children, who caught it and tossed it back to her. She let loose with a giggle. A smile tugged at Blair’s lips, followed almost immediately by a mental image of Eleanor, face pale and still, the sound of his ex-wife sobbing, a swirl of people putting their hand on his shoulder, uncomfortably uttering words meant to comfort. The memory of his ex-wife, Daphne, sobbing, makeup smeared, cut him anew. A dull, all-too-familiar ache formed in the middle of his chest.

      He set aside the sandwich. With his thumb and index finger, he reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, withdrew a phone and flipped it open. It wasn’t his phone; it had shown up inside his flat—the bastards had broken into his place while he was at work—and was in a brown envelope on his kitchen table.

      With his thumb, he punched in some numbers. On the third ring, a woman’s voice answered.

      “Yes?” the woman said.

      “I got a visit,” Blair said.

      “Okay.”

      “They asked questions.”

      “About our friend?”

      “Yes.”

      “And you told them what?”

      “What we agreed I’d tell them. Nothing more.”

      “Good.”

      Chapter 4

      Malakov hung up his phone. His ever-present scowl deepened. The Russian, who’d been a bodybuilder and hockey player in his youth, remained thick in the shoulders, neck, arms and legs. He moved with a silence and grace that belied his size.

      His hockey teammates had called him “Juggernaut” because, despite his size, he’d glided quickly, forcefully across the ice, and pounded his opponents. A whitish, ropelike scar ran from his temple to the bottom of his jaw, a leftover from his days as a Russian special forces soldier when he’d forced himself on a Chechen woman. She tried in vain to stop him by hitting him in the side of the head with his own vodka bottle. He still recalled how the bottle had shattered. He’d been too drunk to feel the sting of his flesh tearing open, but the haze of alcohol and time had done nothing to dim the memory of his blood bursting forth in a crimson spray on himself and the woman. A rare smile tugged at the corners of his mouth when he recalled how his blood had heightened her terror and his ardor.

      Every once in a while, after he’d downed a few drinks, when talk amongst his comrades inevitably turned to sexual conquests, he’d shared that story. Occasionally, it yielded laughter, but more often than not he’d found his comrades greeted the tale with stunned silence. He chalked up their reaction to what he considered Russia’s uptight sexual culture, where people repressed their primal urges. Sometimes his countrymen mystified, even disgusted him.

      Hands moving on autopilot scrambled for and located a cigarette. He lit it, took a couple of drags and stared through the windows, which ran nearly from floor to ceiling, of his London penthouse. He saw from his faint reflection he was scowling again and he viewed it like the return of an old friend.

      Something was wrong. John Lockwood had sounded different. Granted, he always was an uptight prick, more balls than brains, but loyal to whomever filled his bank account. Malakov

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