Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [76]
“It is no longer your concern.”
The line cut off, replaced by a dial tone.
“Well, damn.” She hung up the phone, and leaned back in her own chair, twirling one of the carrot halves between her fingers. Someone was playing games. Big, ugly, complicated games that were going to get people killed.
She smiled now, and bit into the carrot with a satisfying crunch. Just so long as it wasn’t her.
The security camera showed a van pulling into the driveway. Dark blue, with a discreet white logo on the doors. A transmitter placed inside the car signaled to the security box at the front gate, and they passed through the checkpoint without a hitch, the doors opening smoothly for them. As they moved down the graveled driveway, the headlights caught flashes of large bodies loping on all fours alongside the truck before deciding it wasn’t a threat and falling away.
The van pulled up in front of the house, and two men dressed in dark blue coveralls got out, one of them going around back to open the sliding door and retrieve a small toolbox. The other man waited for his companion to rejoin him, then pulled a cap out of his pocket, fitted it to his head, and together they went up the stairs.
They rang the doorbell, then waited patiently until the door opened.
“I thought I told you people to use the side door,” Prevost groused as he opened the door. “Well, come in, come in. I wasn’t expecting you for another hour or two.”
“We were already on the road when the call came in,” one of the men said, exchanging a glance with his companion that clearly indicated his opinion of the man in front of them.
Prevost, already leading the way through the house to the command center, didn’t notice. “Well, as you can see, on the surface everything is working, but someone managed to break through nonetheless. And I refuse to sleep here until it’s all been checked out, and fixed!”
“I don’t think that will be a problem, sir,” one of the nameless men said, as he took a soft cotton scarf from his pocket, and looped it around Prevost’s neck, yanking the unsuspecting man backward with one jerk of his arms.
The other man took a large curved knife from his toolbox, and stepped in front of the struggling Prevost, calmly slicing open his throat, a wide gash from one corner of his jawline to the other, with one slash of the blade. Prevost’s body arched forward, so the blood spurted on the ceiling in an artistic spray, only a few drops landing on his assailant’s face and coverall. Then Prevost slumped forward, collapsing to his knees as his assailant let go of the scarf. “You’ve become the problem. Sir.”
The knife-wielder wrapped the blade in a cloth also taken from the toolbox, and replaced them both carefully, locking the lid. Only then did he pause to wipe the blood from his face with his sleeve, the crimson fading into the deeper blue of the fabric.
“Get started down here,” the first man said, rolling up his cloth and replacing it in his pocket. “I’ll go check out what’s upstairs, see if there’s anything they want back, now that we’ve found him.”
“Right. Give a yell if you find anything—I’ll only be a few minutes down here.” He picked up the box and went back out to the truck, leaving Prevost behind on the parquet floor, gaping like a fish as he died.
Ten minutes later the house was in flames, and an unmarked blue van was making its way through the streets of the nearest town.
thirteen
Sergei was waiting for her at her apartment when she finally got home, two hours after dawn the next morning. The stolen car was abandoned in the driveway of an unsuspecting suburban household an hour’s drive west of the estate. She had walked through the predawn gloom several miles to the local Greyhound station, catching the next bus south to D.C., where she had paid cash for a seat on the first Amtrak express train back into Manhattan. By the time she arrived, the sweats she had put on in the car looked far worse for wear, and she could have easily passed for one of the discharged mental patients who wandered the