Jack & Jill Read online

  CHAPTER

  31

  ON FRIDAY NIGHT Jack and Jill checked into a high-priced suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, one of the Washington area’s best. No one was scheduled to die at the exclusive hotel. Not that they knew of, anyway. Actually, the killers were taking the weekend off—while everyone else in Washington, the police geniuses especially, stewed in their own juices.

  What a fabulous treat the weekend was. What a delicious notion. The six-hundred-dollar-a-night suite overlooked a corner of Georgetown, and they never left it for a moment. A masseuse came Friday night for a double shiatsu session. Sara had a facial and a manicure on Saturday morning. Room service sent up a personal chef Saturday night, and he prepared their meal in their room. Sam had also provided for four dozen white roses to be delivered when they arrived. It was paradise regained. They felt they deserved it for what they had accomplished so far.

  “This is so unbelievably decadent. It’s a postmodern, grossly socially incorrect fairy tale,” Sara said at a luxurious high point late on Sunday night. “I love every minute of it.”

  “But do you love every inch of it?” Sam asked her. Only he could get away with a touchy line like that—and he did.

  Sara smiled and felt a rush of heat inside her body. She looked at him with warm and inquiring eyes. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  He was deep inside her, thrusting slowly and gently, and she was wondering if he truly loved her. She wished for it with all her being, but she didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it. She was, after all, Sara the gimp, Sara the drudge, Sara the drone.

  How could he have fallen in love with her? And yet sometimes it seemed he had. Is this part of the game for him, too? Sara wondered.

  Her fingers ran all over his chest, played with individual hairs. She touched him everywhere: his beautiful face, his throat, stomach, buttocks, his dangling testicles, which seemed as large as a bull’s. Sara arched up toward him, wanting to be as close as she possibly could, wanting every inch, yes, wanting everything of him that there was. Even his real name, which he wouldn’t tell her.

  “We’ve earned this weekend,” Sam said. “It’s also necessary, Sara. Rest and relaxation are a real part of war, an important part. Jack and Jill is going to get progressively harder from here on. Everything escalates now.”

  Sara couldn’t help smiling as she stared up at Sam’s face. God she loved being with him. Under him, over him, sideways, upside down. She loved his touch—sometimes strong, sometimes so surprisingly gentle. She loved, yes, every inch of him.

  She’d never felt like this before, never thought that she would. She would have bet anything against its happening. In a way, she had bet everything, hadn’t she? For the cause, but also for Sam, for this.

  Sam was such a closet romantic, too. It was so unexpected from The Soldier, from any man she had known before. The suite at the Four Seasons was his idea, just because she had mentioned—mentioned it once—that it was her favorite hotel in Washington.

  “Say,” she said to him now, whispering during their lovemaking, “do you want to know my favorite hotel in the whole wide world?”

  He got the joke—he got all of her humor and twisted ironies. His large blue eyes sparkled. He grinned. He had brilliantly white teeth, and such a shy, disarming smile. She thought he was much better looking than Michael Robinson had been. Sam was a real-life action hero. The Soldier. In a real war for survival, the most important war of our times. They both believed that to be the truth.

  “Please, don’t tell me the answer,” he said with a laugh. “Don’t you dare tell me your favorite hotel in the world. You know I’ll have to take you there somehow if you do. Don’t tell me, Sara!”

  “The Cipriani in Venice,” Sara blurted out, laughing.

  She had never actually been there, but she’d read so much about it. She had read about everything, but experienced so little until recently. Sara the hopeless bookworm, Sara the bibliophile, Sara the cipher. Well, no more. Now she lived as almost no one had before. Sara the gimp lives!

  “Okay, then. When this is all over—and this will end—we’ll go to Venice, for a holiday. I promise you. The Cipriani it is.”

  “And Sunday brunch at the Danieli,” she whispered against his cheek. “Promise?”

  “Of course. Where else but the Danieli for brunch? That’s a given. As soon as this is finished.”

  “It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?” she said, hugging his powerful body a little tighter.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. But not tonight, Jilly. Not tonight, my love. So let’s not ruin this by thinking too much about tomorrow. Don’t make a wonderful weekend into a bad Monday.”

  Sam was right, of course. He was a wise man, too. He started to move again on top of her. He flowed like a fast river current over the top of her. He was such a generous and beautiful lover; he was both teacher and student; he knew how to give and take in bed. Most important, Sam knew how to bring her out of herself. God, she had needed that—forever, it seemed. To get outside of herself. Not to be the gimp anymore. Not ever again. She promised herself that.

  Sara pursed her lips tightly. In pleasure? In pain? She wasn’t even sure anymore. She shut her eyes, then quickly opened them. She wanted to look.

  He held himself over her, as if he were pausing during a push-up. “So you’ve never been to the Cipriani, Monkey Face?” he asked. His cheeks weren’t even flushed. He effortlessly held himself over her. His body was so beautiful, strong and agile, rock-solid. Sara was in good shape also, but Sam was superb.

  He called her “Monkey Face,” from Hitchcock’s Suspicion. It wasn’t really such a great movie, but it had hit the spot for them, hit their spot. Ever since they’d seen it, she’d been the Joan Fontaine character, Lena. He was Johnny, who had been played by Cary Grant. Johnny had called Lena “Monkey Face.”

  At the end of the film, Lena and Johnny had driven off into a sunset on an English coast, presumably to live happily ever after. The Hitchcock movie was an elegant, witty, mysterious game, just as this was.

  Their game. The most exquisite game two people had ever played together.

  Will we drive off into the sunset after all this? Sara Rosen wondered. Oh, I think not. I don’t suppose that we will. What will happen to us, then? Oh, what will happen to us? What will become of Jack and Jill?

  “I’ve only been to the Cipriani in my dreams,” she confessed to Sam. “Only in dreams. But, yes, I’ve been there many, many times.”

  “Is this all a dream, Monkey Face?” Sam asked. His look was serious for a moment. She couldn’t help thinking how precious every moment like this was, and how fleeting. She had secretly yearned for this all of her life, for one truly romantic experience.

  “I think it’s a dream, yes. It’s like a dream anyway. Please don’t wake me, though, Sam.”

  “It’s not a dream,” Sam whispered. “I love you. You are the most lovable woman I’ve ever met. You are, Sara. You’re like staying at the Cipriani every day for me. Please believe that, Monkey Face. Believe in us. I do.”

  He clasped Sara from behind and pulled her closer. She savored the sweetness of his breath, the smell of his cologne, the smell of him.

  He began to move inside her and she felt herself melting into a liquid force. She did love him—she did, she did, she did. Her hands ran all over him, touching, possessing. There had never been anything like this before in her life, nothing even close.

  She slithered up and down on his long, powerful pole, his strength, his exquisite maleness. Sara couldn’t stop herself now, and she didn’t want to. She was choking with her own passion.

  She heard her voice crying out and almost didn’t recognize herself. She was joined with him in a simple rhythm that got faster and faster as the two of them came closer to being one—Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill!

  CHAPTER

  32

  THEIR FAIRY TALE ended with a quiet, almost disheartening thud, and Sara felt herself cr
ashing back to earth, tumbling, being rushed along in a powerful tide. Monday morning meant a return to the dreary work world again, to real life.

  Sara Rosen had held “normal,” boring jobs around Washington for fourteen years, ever since she’d graduated from Hollins College in Virginia. She had a day job now. A perfect job for their purposes. The dreariest and weariest of jobs.

  That morning, she rose early to get ready. She and Sam had separated on Sunday night at the Four Seasons. She missed him, missed his humor, missed his touch, missed everything about him. Every inch.

  She had gotten lost in that thought. Inches. Millimeters. The essence of Sam. His tremendous inner strength. She glanced at the luminescent face of the clock on her bed stand. She groaned out loud. Quarter to five. Dammit, she was already late.

  Her bathroom had a yoga corner with a custom-made leather mat. No time for that, though her body and mind ached for the discipline and the release.

  She took a quick shower and washed her hair with Salon Selectives shampoo. She put on a navy Brooks Brothers suit, low pumps, a leather-strapped Raymond Weil watch. She needed to look sharp, look alert, look freshly scrubbed this morning.

  Somehow, she always came out like that anyway. Sara the freshly starched.

  She hurried outside, where a grimy yellow cab was already waiting at the curb, wagging a tail of smoke. The wind whooped and howled up and down K Street.

  At five-twenty, the yellow cab pulled up in front of her workplace. The Liberty Cab driver smiled and said, “A famous address, my lady. So, are you somebody famous?”

  She paid the driver and collected change from a five-dollar bill. “Actually, I might be someday,” she said. “You never know.”

  “Yeah, maybe I’m somebody, too,” the driver said with a crooked smile. “You never know.”

  Sara Rosen climbed out of the cab and felt the early December wind in her face. The pristine building before her looked strangely beautiful and imposing in the early-morning light. It appeared to be shining, actually, glowing from the inside out.

  She showed her ID card, and security let her pass inside. She and the guard even shared a quick laugh about her being a workaholic. And why not? Sara Rosen had worked inside the White House for nine years.

  PART III

  THE PHOTOJOURNALIST

  CHAPTER

  33

  THE PHOTOJOURNALIST was the last piece in the complex puzzle. He was the final player. He was working in San Francisco on December 8. Actually, the photojournalist was playing the game in San Francisco. Or rather, he was playing around the outer edges of the game.

  Kevin Hawkins sat in a scooped-out, gray plastic chair at Gate 31. He contentedly played chess with himself on a PowerBook. He was winning; he was losing. He enjoyed it either way.

  Hawkins loved games, loved chess, and he was close to being one of the better players in the world. It had been that way ever since he’d been a bright, lonely underachieving boy in Hudson, New York. At quarter to eleven he got up from his seat to go play another kind of game. This was his favorite game in the world. He was in San Francisco to kill someone.

  As he walked through the busy airport, Kevin Hawkins snapped off photograph after photograph—all in his mind.

  The prizewinning photojournalist was outfitted in his usual studied-casual manner: tight black cord jeans with a black T-shirt, tribal bracelets from several trips to Zambia, a diamond stud earring. A Leica camera was looped around his neck on a leather strap decorated with engravings.

  The photojournalist slipped into a crowded bathroom in Corridor C. He observed a ragged line of men slouched at the urinals. They are like pigs at a trough, he thought. Like water buffalo, or oxen, taught to stand on their hind legs.

  His eye composed the shot and snapped it off. A beauty of order and sly wit. The Boys at the Bowl.

  The urinal scene reminded him of a clever pickpocket he had once seen operate in Bangkok. The thief, a keen student of human nature, would snatch wallets while gents were in midstream at a urinal and were reluctant, or unable, to go after him.

  The photojournalist couldn’t forget the comical image whenever he entered an airport men’s room. He rarely forgot any image, actually. His mind was a well-run archive, a rival to Kodak’s vast storehouses of pictures in Rochester.

  He peered at his own image, a rather haggard and pasty-white face, in one of the cloudy bathroom mirrors. Unimpressive in every way, he couldn’t help but think. His eyes were war-weary, an almost washed-out blue. Gazing at his eyes depressed him—so much so that he sighed involuntarily.

  He saw no other mind pictures to take in the mirror. Never, ever, a picture of himself.

  He started to cough and couldn’t stop. He finally brought up a thick packet of despicable, yellowish paste. His inner core, he thought. His animus was slowly leaking out.

  Kevin Hawkins was only forty-three, but he felt like a hundred. He had lived too hard, especially the last fourteen years. His life and times had been so very intense, often flamboyant and occasionally absurd. He had been burned, he often imagined, from every conceivable angle. He had played the game of life and death too hard, too well, too often.

  He started to cough again and popped a Halls into his mouth. Kevin Hawkins checked the time on his Seiko Kinetic wristwatch. He quickly finger-combed his lank, grayish blond hair and then left the public bathroom.

  He merged smoothly with the thick corridor traffic rolling past on the killing floor. It was almost time, and he was feeling a nice out-of-body buzz. He hummed an old, absolutely ridiculous song called “Rock the Casbah.” He was pulling a dark Delsey suitcase hinged on one of those cheap roller contraptions that were so popular. The “walking” suitcase made him look like a tourist, like a nobody of the first order.

  The red-on-black digital clock over the airport passageway read 11:40. A Northwest Airlines jet from Tokyo had landed just a few minutes earlier. It had come into Gate 41, right on schedule. Some people just know how to fly. Wasn’t that Northwest’s tag line?

  The gods were smiling down on him; Kevin Hawkins felt a grim, humorless smile of his own. The gods loved the game, too. Life and death. It was their game, actually.

  He heard the first strains of a noisy commotion coming from the connecting Corridor B. The photojournalist kept walking ahead, until he was past the point where the two wide corridors connected.

  That was when he saw the phalanx of bodyguards and well-wishers. He clicked off a shot in his mind. He got a peek at Mr. Tanaka of the Nipray Corporation. He clicked another shot.

  His adrenaline was flowing like lava from Kilauea in Hawaii, where he’d once shot for Newsweek. Adrenaline. Nothing like it. He was addicted to the stuff.

  Any second now.

  Any second.

  Any nanosecond—which, he knew, is to a second as a second is to about thirty years.

  There was no X-marks-the-spot on the terminal floor, but Kevin Hawkins knew this was the place. He had it all visualized, every critical angle was vivid as hell in his mind’s eye. All the intersect points were clear to him.

  Any second. Life and death.

  There might as well have been a big black X painted on the airport floor.

  Kevin Hawkins felt like a god.

  Here we go. Cameras loaded and at the ready. Lock and load! Someone’s going to die here.

  CHAPTER

  34

  WHEN THE SEMIOFFICIAL ENTOURAGE was approximately twelve feet from the busy corridor-crossing, a small bomb detonated. The explosion sent a cloud of gray-black smoke into Corridor A. Screams pierced the air like whining sirens.

  The bomb had been inside a dark blue suitcase left next to the news and magazine kiosk. Kevin Hawkins had placed the innocent-looking suitcase directly in front of a sign that advised travelers to WATCH YOUR LUGGAGE AT ALL TIMES.

  The deafening, booming noise and sudden chaos startled the bodyguards surrounding Mr. Tanaka. It made them erratic, and therefore predictable. Security teams, even the best
of them, could be fooled if you forced them to improvise. Travelers and airport personnel were screaming, seeking cover where there was none to be had. Men, women, and children pressed themselves to the floor, faces hard against cold marble.

  People haven’t seen real panic until they’ve witnessed it in a large airport, where everyone is already close to the edge of primal fears.

  Two of the bodyguards covered the corporate chairman, doing a half-decent job, Hawkins saw.

  He clicked another mind photo. Stored it in his photo file for future reference.

  This was good stuff, valuable as hell. How an excellent security team reacted under stress during an actual attack.

  Then the efficient, if uninspired, bodyguards began to hurriedly move their “protected person” out of danger, out of harm’s way. They obviously couldn’t go forward into the smoky, bombed-out corridor. The security team chose to go back—their only choice, the one Kevin Hawkins knew they would make under duress.

  They pulled along Mr. Tanaka as if he were a large, ungainly puppet or doll, which he pretty much was. They almost physically carried the important businessman, holding him under his arms so that both his feet left the floor at times.

  Mind photo of that: expensive black tasseled loafers skipping across the marble floor.

  The trained bodyguards had one goal: get the “protected person” out of there. The photojournalist let them proceed about thirty feet before he pushed the detonator in the shoulder bag housing his camera gear. It was that easy. The best plans were one-button simple. Like a camera. Like a camera suitable for a child.

  A second suitcase he had left alongside the corridor near the men’s room exploded with double the thunder and lightning of the first, causing more than twice the damage. It was as if an invisible missile had been guided directly into the center of the airport.

  The destruction was instantaneous, and it was brutal. Bodies, and even body parts, flew in every imaginable direction. Tanaka didn’t survive. Neither did any of the four diligent and highly underpaid bodyguards.