The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [135]
“As frustrated as that makes me, because I want to know the truth, as you do, I understand why they did it. With power comes responsibility, and anything that can’t be understood must be suppressed until people are ready. Most people aren’t ready for the truth about what it was that hovered over gate C-seventeen at O’Hare.”
The emissary indicated with a thoughtful nod that he understood the point of the story.
“Are you ready for this part?” Rhodes asked over the noise of the engines, which were louder at the back of the plane.
“Yes.”
The plane banked and turned. Gazing through the haze, Rhodes could see across the lake to the spectacular Chicago skyline. But even in the daylight, the area to the north of downtown seemed dark and dead. “We’ll land just long enough for you to deplane. A car will be waiting, of course, but the driver will have only minimal instructions and he won’t budge from that itinerary, no matter what you say. Other than him, you’ll be on your own.”
“Understood.”
“Everything else has been seen to—money, alibi, an irrefutable paper trail that shows you were nowhere near this place. Don’t do anything to fuck that up.”
“I won’t.”
“Give it all to me. License, debit cards, gym membership. Everything with your name on it.”
The emissary did and Rhodes handed him cash in a thick roll. Then Rhodes reached into his bag and carefully pulled out the gun.
“Wear tape over your fingertips,” Rhodes said. “Jennings’s fingerprints are all over it. We’ve sprayed to preserve them, but your prints would add a contradicting detail, and gloves would be conspicuous in this heat. We want this to be cut-and-dried.”
“How did you get him to touch it?”
Rhodes almost smiled at the story. “I told him it was used to kidnap Patty Hearst.”
The emissary laughed.
“Do you have a good knife?”
The emissary nodded.
“This will be gruesome. Difficult.”
“I practiced a little. On Amoyo. The lawyers, too.”
The flaps of the plane adjusted with a whir and the sudden drop in altitude felt like someone plucking a string connecting Rhodes’s heart to his testes. “Police thought it looked personal. Fit with their theory that Jennings did it. Impressed the Sheik.”
“Unintended consequences and all that. But good. I want to do this well.”
Rhodes smiled and stood, then walked reluctantly toward the front of the plane, toward the Sheik and the acusmatici, leaving Peter Trembley a few minutes with his own thoughts before they landed.
He hadn’t mentioned that Peter would be leaving the plane in an old steamer trunk.
50
OUTSIDE JAMESON’S dining room was a twisting piece of black metal that rose straight toward the fifteen-foot hallway ceiling and then curled forward like a man with old bones. In the walk between her room and here, down two stories of Woodward spiral and through the narrow hallways of the first floor, Nada could count more than two dozen paintings and sculptures, many of them as disturbing as this one. She had been inside many mansions, including her own childhood home, and stared at many a rich person’s wall, and she knew wealthy people mostly liked subjects in art that celebrated their wealth—lush landscapes and portraits, fox hunts and horses, still lifes and jeweled eggs.
Jameson surrounded himself with art that seemed intent on undermining, even devouring the good life he had made. This was not the studied art of the aristocracy. Not the art of the status quo. Not the art of leisure. Jameson had embraced the art of revolution—of instinct, of reaction, of death.
Most days, she had eaten breakfast in the kitchen with Molly and Hugh, but this morning Myra had come to her door and insisted she eat in the big dining room. “I want to be sure you get out of this room,” Myra told her. Pulling up to the table in a dress she didn’t remember packing, the news of Bea’s death—and David’s, too—still had her feeling like her head and her arms were