The Fourth Perimeter Read online

  “Now you tell me who you are and who sent you!” she commanded. She held her big Glock steady, aimed directly at the center of his face. She gave the gun a subtle jerk and Kurt involuntarily winced as he started to speak.

  “I’m Collin Ford’s father,” he said. He saw that this shocked her, but only for a second. Then her eyes narrowed and she seemed to gather herself, settling into her stance just a fraction, taking careful aim the way any professional would. Kurt felt the heavy truncheon of fear strike his midsection.

  Before he could react, the silence of the night was suddenly blasted by a crack so loud that it sounded like the splitting of a stone. At the same instant, crimson tissue and blood spattered the side of the trailer in a pattern four feet high. A trickle of blood sped down the side of Leena’s face and her mouth opened and closed without making a sound. She dropped where she stood.

  Kurt, too, dropped to the ground and rolled instinctively toward the cover of the Jeep, grabbing his gun as he went. He heard the call of his name as he spun across the gravel and came to rest beneath the front wheel.

  “Kurt!”

  He heard it again. It came from the edge of the woods. The dog’s whine now matched the pitch and intensity of a dying rabbit’s squeal. Kurt remained silent, but peered from beneath the Jeep at the form of a man jogging toward him, crunching down the gravel drive. In his hand was a long rifle mounted with a tremendous scope and a muzzle that was silenced by a baffle the size of an aerosol spray can.

  “David?” Kurt shouted, as his friend’s features materialized in the light. He stood warily, still queasy from the shock of seeing the woman slaughtered at close range. Claiborne jogged all the way to Leena’s crumpled form and bent down over her briefly before rising with a grim face.

  “Let’s go,” he said, taking Kurt by the arm and ushering him around the Jeep and up the drive. Their feet crunched noisily, but Claiborne seemed to care nothing for stealth. He was in a hurry to get away. When he noticed Kurt staring at his weapon, he said, “Nightscope. Don’t worry. I wasn’t going to miss.”

  Kurt looked at his old friend’s face, now lit only by the moon. He felt awash with gratitude. Claiborne had just saved his life.

  “She was going to kill me, wasn’t she?” he heard himself mutter quietly.

  “Yes.”

  A long silence followed between them as they strode up the path. Finally Kurt said, “What made you follow me?”

  Claiborne smiled warmly at him. “I knew you might need a backup. You were good, Kurt, one of the best. But so is she and she’s twenty years younger than you, or she was, anyway.”

  “But now what are you going to do?” Kurt said, his mind beginning to clear. There was a dead woman lying there in the grass behind them, a dead woman that people would find, and not just some anonymous young woman. She was a former Secret Service agent.

  “I’m not going to do anything else but get you back to your hotel and get you out of D.C.,” Claiborne said. “The people behind this whole thing are going to be looking hard to find out what happened and I don’t want you anywhere near it all.”

  “What about you, David?” Kurt asked. They had reached the main road now. The moon had dropped below the trees and it was eerily dark. Claiborne’s dark shadow patted his rifle.

  “This goes in the Potomac. That,” he said, pointing toward the .357 Kurt still clung to, “can go with you, and no one will ever know either of us was here except the other. It’s our secret, Kurt.”

  “My God,” Kurt muttered. But what else was there to do?

  As if he was reading Kurt’s thoughts, Claiborne said, “She was going to kill you, my friend.”

  “I know it,” Kurt replied. “David . . .” He didn’t know how to properly express his gratitude and his regret for not having made Claiborne a part of his team years ago.

  Before he could speak, Claiborne grasped his shoulder. “Get back to where you belong. Go home. And if you do decide to do anything else, you’d better think it through pretty goddamn well, not like this. The next time I guarantee I won’t be there to bail you out.”

  Kurt was silent. His mind was turning, end over end. It wasn’t over. The woman who might have killed his son was dead. But she might not have killed him, and even if she did, there were those behind the scenes who had arranged it. They weren’t going to go unpunished.

  “Good-bye old friend,” Claiborne said, then suddenly turned and started off down the road in the opposite direction from Kurt’s car. Kurt went too, jogging down the shoulder of the dark road until he could make out the dark form of his Suburban.

  At five-fifteen, he arrived back at the Ritz. Bleary-eyed, he let himself into his room. It was dark, but he closed the door behind him without finding the light. Too exhausted to care, he stumbled through the entryway fumbling for the switch. Then he froze. His surrender to exhaustion was suddenly reversed by a fresh burst of awareness from some unknown reserve. The black space of the hotel room seemed to have shrunk. He couldn’t see, but some sense that was just as convincing caused the hair to rise on the back of his neck. He wasn’t alone.

  CHAPTER 9

  Kurt drew the .357 from its holster and crouched low, flattening himself against the wall. His eyes ached from the strain of trying to pierce the darkness and find the form of what he knew was another human being. Nothing moved. His breathing seemed louder than a city bus opening and closing its doors.

  Trembling, he groped for the light switch somewhere on the wall above him. When he found it, he flipped it on and rolled across the floor, coming up from the roll with his gun ready to fire. A form shot out of his bed in a swirl of sheets and blankets. Kurt hesitated.

  “Jill!” he cried angrily. “What the hell!”

  She blinked at him, confused and still half asleep. “What?” she exclaimed, bleary-eyed. “What happened?”

  “I almost killed you,” Kurt growled with a mixture of horror and relief. “What are you doing here? How did you get in my room?”

  “Why do you have a gun? What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Kurt looked at the .357. “I’m sorry,” he said, and set it on the desk before explaining. “Nothing’s wrong. I just . . . I didn’t expect you.”

  She took her eyes from the gun and gave him a sad and tentative look. Quietly she said, “I thought you needed someone, Kurt . . .

  “Gracie thought it was a good idea too,” she quickly added. “I’ve been worried about you. You didn’t call.”

  Jill held her chin high. Kurt knew she was too proud to cry, but her eyes were moist and he felt certain that that was exactly what she wanted to do. The thought that he could hurt her amid all this wounded him. As if she sensed his self-recrimination, Jill got out of the bed and took a tentative step toward him. Kurt crossed the room and hugged her. He breathed deep, absorbing the familiar scent of her hair. The feel of her body was firm and comforting. He dipped his head to meet her lips.

  Their kiss ignited a passion that went up like kindling in the center of a great bonfire. Soon the flames consumed Kurt’s entire frame, and gently but urgently, he began to undress her and she him. And when they finally lay quiet in the bed with Jill’s head tucked snugly under his arm and her arms circling his waist like a child’s, Kurt felt the blessed tranquillity of emptiness. In that moment, there was nothing inside him to twist and gnaw. His mind felt suspended as if inside an enormous airplane hangar, dark, empty, silent, and expanding rapidly. The emptiness somehow took on a weight. It pushed him down in a slow steady spiral, down into deep sleep.

  Sunlight, hot and bright, burned through the heavy drapes of the tall windows and fell in musty columns across the soft bed. Kurt awoke with a film of sweat on his brow and a scorched dryness in his mouth. Jill put down a book and rose from the high-backed chair in the corner of the room where she’d been sitting with her shapely legs curled up underneath her. She crossed the room to sit beside him. Gently she brought her lips to rest against his before kissing his eyelids and smiling at him in a
n almost maternal way.

  “What time is it?” he croaked, then cleared his throat.

  “Ten-thirty,” she told him.

  Kurt lay still. He reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze, then smiled back weakly. Her presence was like a shady porch on a hot summer day, a comfortable reprieve. But now, with his body refreshed from sleep, the nightmare of what was happening to him came spilling back, flooding his mind with the realization that things were just as sinister as they had been the day before. His son was dead and so now was the woman who had probably killed him. The same horrid monster of grief and insanity clamored from the recesses of his mind, threatening to undo him.

  Kurt closed his eyes.

  “What?” Jill whispered. “What’s happening?”

  The question bumped up against him, threatening his equilibrium. “I love you,” he said abruptly, opening his eyes and looking into hers with a nearly maniacal intensity.

  “I know,” she said in a somewhat unsettled tone. “I love you too. That’s why I came.”

  Kurt sat up and stared at the hypnotic pattern on the bedcover for a while before saying, “How much? How much do you love me?”

  “As much as anything in my life,” she whispered urgently. “Ever.”

  “What about your career?” he said.

  Jill emitted a scornful laugh. “My work? I love my work, but Kurt, I said I’d marry you. That’s everything to me now, everything . . .”

  Kurt considered her, how she had magically taken away all his pain, even if it was just for the night.

  “And you’re everything to me, love,” he said, kissing her gently.

  They were both quiet for a moment before he said, “I think I may need to start my whole life over, our life . . .”

  Jill wore a puzzled expression. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Kurt pressed his lips together, choosing his words carefully. “I’ve worked a long time now, long and hard. Now this . . . I just want to get away, Jill. I want to disappear, to leave this world behind. I thought maybe we could be married and just go someplace, maybe an island in Greece or the South Pacific, just the two of us and start a life away from everything . . .”

  “Oh my God, Kurt,” she said quietly. “I would love that.”

  “What about your work?” he asked. “Really.”

  Jill thought for a moment, then said slowly, “I enjoy my work, yes. I like to think it’s important.”

  “It is.”

  “But I hope the center of my life isn’t about programmable chips and more effective encryption systems,” she said. “Kurt, I love you. My life with you is what matters more than any of that by far.”

  “What about friends?” Kurt asked.

  Jill frowned. “The people that I work with . . . and my friends, well, I care about them, but again, you are what matters most. And I’m sure Talia could come visit us wherever we are,” she added. “You know she and Henry travel all over the world half the time anyway.”

  Talia was Jill’s best friend and the one person Kurt expected might be a hindrance to her leaving New York.

  “But,” Kurt said hesitantly, “what if she can’t?”

  “Oh,” Jill said, waving off the idea. “She can always come. Even if it’s only once in a great while.”

  “But, really,” Kurt insisted. “Just suppose she couldn’t for some reason. Would you still go with me?”

  Jill smiled strangely at him and said, “Why are you saying this?”

  In his mind, Kurt knew that they would be hunted and their disappearance under those circumstances might not then sound as romantic as he was making it out to be. Of course, he couldn’t tell her what he was planning. He would have to tell her something, though. Then he’d just have to hope that when the time came and she knew what he’d really done, she would understand why and forgive him. If she didn’t, well, then, she didn’t love him as much as he hoped.

  “Is this why you have a gun?” she asked quietly, breaking his trance. “What’s happening?”

  “Collin didn’t kill himself,” Kurt said softly. His face cringed as if in pain. “He was killed. Some people had him killed . . . because of something he saw . . .

  “No, don’t worry,” he said, watching her eyes dart from the desk where the gun still lay and then back to him. “I’m not in any danger, and neither are you. I just . . . didn’t know. They’re bad people and I didn’t know if I was going to come face-to-face with them or not.”

  “You’re not going to do anything crazy, are you, Kurt?” she asked. Kurt said nothing.

  She shifted uncomfortably and after a while, she asked, “What are you thinking about?”

  Quietly, but forcefully, he said, “If I have the chance to bring them to justice, I won’t lie to you, I’ll do it. I’ll expose them—and truthfully, it’s part of the reason I want us to go away. It’s possible they might try to find me when it’s over. But I can take care of everything. You have to trust me, Jill. It’s the right thing.”

  “You’re going to expose them?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s dangerous?”

  “I won’t lie to you,” he said with a grim smile. “It could be dangerous, but nothing I can’t handle.”

  “And that’s why you asked about Talia?” she said. “Because we might have to hide?”

  “Yes,” he said solemnly, “we might. There’s a very real chance you might not be able to see her or anyone—ever.”

  Jill was silent. After a time she reached out and brought his hand to her mouth, kissing his fingers lightly. “I don’t want that, Kurt,” she said softly, “I really don’t. But if you’re asking me will I still go away with you, even with all that, the answer is still yes. Yes, I will.”

  His mind began to spin now, but in an ordered, balanced way, like a gyroscope. There were a million things he had to do; a million things he had to consider. Each one had to be thought out and executed to perfection. The simplest error, like the brush of a sleeve against a house of cards, could ruin everything.

  First, he had to avenge his son. At the same time, he had to plan an effective escape, not just for himself, but for Jill. He had to do it in secret. If things went wrong, he didn’t want her to be culpable. If his plan worked, he wanted to be able to whisk her away and disappear without a trace. He’d have to find a place for them to go. He’d have to create new identities. He’d have to move his money out of the country so they could live out their lives in hidden comfort. It was a daunting task, but Kurt knew if he could build a billion-dollar company from nothing, he could do this too.

  “Thank you, my love,” he whispered, repeatedly kissing her face and hugging her tight. When he finally felt her relax, he gave her one last gentle squeeze and got up to take a shower.

  “Call the pilots, will you?” he said with a disarming smile. “Tell them we’ll be heading back in two hours.”

  “Are we going home?” she asked excitedly.

  “Yeah,” he said as he disappeared into the bathroom. “We’ll go to the lake. I need some time to think about how I’m going to do all this.”

  Kurt came out of the shower refreshed and steadier than when he’d gone in. But the undercurrent of sadness that hung about him was palpable. Only the arrival of Jill had bolstered his spirits enough to give him even the outward appearance of calm. The image of the dead girl from the night before had been relegated to the same dark corner as the photos of Collin. But the troubling emotions from everything that had happened lurked just beneath the surface. He needed to get out of Washington, back to a place where he could consider the situation from afar. Then he would act.

  Jill had everything packed and had arranged for the plane to be ready by twelve-thirty. They had a late breakfast in the hotel restaurant and then stopped briefly at the Starbucks across the street for cappuccino before heading out to the airport. Their conversation was limited to fluffy banter, each of them apparently keeping it afloat for the sake of the other.

  At
thirty thousand feet, however, their talk ebbed. In the pocket on the side of Kurt’s leather recliner were stuffed several newspapers from that morning. On page three of the Washington Post was a story about the president’s campaign schedule for the coming months. Kurt eyed Jill warily before digging into the article. She was oblivious. She had already taken his cue and was reading her book.

  A third of the way down the page, Kurt nearly gasped aloud. His eyes were locked on the words “Skaneateles Lake.” The article said the president was coming to Skaneateles, his town, the town where he kept his summer home, in less than six weeks. An appearance at the nearby New York State Fair would give the president the opportunity to glad-hand the swing voters of upstate New York that could carry the state in what people were predicting would be a close race. Kurt’s mind went back into high gear. It was serendipity, the events of the earth and the stars lining up to serve the implacable forces of justice. Kurt had the intoxicating thrill of a man about to commit an act of almost religious significance, a man about to eradicate a scourge from humanity.

  Killing the president was something that required fearlessness and luck. Getting away with it would require even more of both. Inside knowledge—that he had—but also serendipity. Now he had that too. It was as if it had been written down long ago. It was meant to be.

  The president and his wife were to be the guests of a federal judge whose turn-of-the-century mansion was almost directly across the lake from Kurt’s. Six weeks gave him plenty of time to reconnoiter the house and the grounds before the advance team for the Secret Service even began their work. Kurt could get in and around the house and devise his plan without arousing the slightest suspicion. It was an opportunity so perfect that his heart raced in his chest and a merciless grin broke out on his lips.