Excerpt from: THE BLOOD LANCE

The following material is excerpted from the manuscript version of The Blood Lance and may differ slightly from the publication. This is copyrighted material and is presented with the permission of the publisher, Myrmidon Books.

Chapter 3

New York, NY

Thursday, March 6, 2008.

Thomas Malloy stepped off the subway at the 86th Street exit and joined a late afternoon crowd heading south on Fifth Avenue. He wore black loafers, dark, pleated wool slacks, a grey sweater, sunglasses and a black windbreaker. A few out-of-towners gave him a second look. They were trying to decide if he was someone important. They usually decided he wasn't but not always. Malloy caught his reflection in the glass of a building, indulging in a bit of vanity.

His hair was over his collar, going to grey at a leisurely rate. The style was a bit artsy: actor, architect, freelancer writer. He was tall and slender, reasonably handsome by his own estimates. It was not the best face for someone who preferred to be unnoticed as he went about his business, but it was a versatile one. Change the clothes, move the hair round a bit, add or reduce a few mannerisms, change the voice, and he could be different types—French, German, Swiss, English, and of course three or four brands of American. He usually travelled abroad on a Swiss passport with one of four identities, but he had four American names, two German, and even a French passport—just in case.

Through most of his life Malloy had worked as an intelligence officer without official cover. That meant he was vulnerable to arrest and prosecution in most countries, immediate execution in others. It was the kind of life that had taught him to cultivate the friendship of criminals—people with the skills and resources to get past the usual barriers governments imposed. They were sometimes freelance thieves or assassins, sometimes traitors to their countries, sometimes patriots with an agenda. Many just wanted to get rich or do the right thing or they liked him and did him a favour because he was, above all else, a persuasive individual.

With a couple of brutally violent exceptions Malloy's professional life had been a quiet one. The worst had come when he was a fresh-faced operative in training. He still wore the scars of that one—a nest of wounds on his chest. At the height of his career he had penetrated deep into the Swiss banking conglomerates as well as a number of the major European crime syndicates—all through contacts he had developed. In the process he had managed to stay invisible and far beyond the reach of the violent people he tracked. In the late 1990s an old nemesis within the agency named Charlie Winger reached the semi-divine position of Director of Operations and celebrated his promotion by calling Malloy home from Europe and chaining him to an analyst's desk at Langley. The move was supposed to lead to further administrative assignments, but that was just Charlie's spin on it. In fact it was payback for unspecified wrongs at the Farm—when they were both still boys.

Malloy had stuck it out as an analyst long enough to finish his twenty years and secure a pension at half-salary. After that he walked. The September 11 attacks happened a few months afterwards and he ended up pitching in as a contract analyst in the aftermath. But at least he was able to carry it out from his home in New York. During the past year or so Malloy had reactivated a few of his old networks and had started travelling on his various passports again. He was a decade out of the field and sometimes felt that he had lost his edge in an unforgiving game. Worse still, his contacts had all grown old and got nervous. They didn't care for the giddy risks they took in their youth. So he had started with the next generation and did what he could to get back in form.

With his occasional research for the agency, his pension, a family inheritance, and some modestly ambitious investments, Malloy made a decent income and always had. It had just taken him a few years to remember the wisdom of his youth, but as he came toward a head-on collision with fifty, he got it firmly in his grasp again: he could do whatever he wanted. He had only to be ready to pay the price. It wasn't a profound point. He had believed it all his life, but after he lost what he once considered his life's work and had been plunged into the despair of retirement at the tender age of forty-two it had taken a bit of time to get past the idea that Charlie Winger had done him in. The truth was it had been time for him to move on. He needed the freefall and so he had let it happen. Now he needed the work—even if it was work of his own making—and so he was up to his old tricks.

At the Met Malloy took the broad steps stretching across the front of the building without hurrying. Pure habit. When you go to an urgent meeting, never look like that is what you are doing. He checked out the students and tourists lounging on the steps as he went. He was a man enjoying a glimpse of youth on a blustery spring afternoon. The kids sprawled across the stone steps in an attitude of leisure only kids can master. He liked to think he had been different when he was young, but he knew the truth. He had not imagined the wealth he had owned with his empty pockets and guileless smile anymore than they did. Oh, but what he could do with that innocence now!

Waiting for his turn to purchase a ticket Malloy studied a flier about an upcoming exhibit his wife Gwen wanted to attend. Gwen knew very little about Malloy's professional life, having met him soon after his retirement. She was aware that he had worked overseas for a number of years. He had led her to believe he did contract work these days for the State Department as a forensic accountant. Admitting to being an accountant, he had learned from long experience in the game, usually ended all queries about his professional life. The forensic aspect excited Gwen's interest a bit, but that was fine. He didn't mind his wife thinking of him as a detective of sorts. The rest was probably a bit more than she was ready to believe anyway. She asked him once about his wounds. 'A visit to a bank in Lebanon,' he told her, which was true, 'a case of mistaken identity,' which was not. It had been Malloy's first assignment. In the course of an afternoon he had lost all of his assets, the people he had recruited in other words, and learned as no lesson before or since never to tell the truth about anything to anyone.

Gwen was a painter, lately a very successful one. In her world what she said was true and the people she associated with she either liked or avoided. She knew her husband kept weapons and was trained in their use, but she wouldn't touch them and preferred actually never to see them. That was fine. With Gwen, Malloy could be … well, not exactly himself, he was only himself when he was working, but at least content. Call it what it was: with Gwen he was happy.

Gwen was a good soul with a streak of disobedience toward authority that he shared. He liked to think he had worked through his transition on his own, but he knew he had only made it back to his own two feet because Gwen loved him. The shame of it was she never really knew how much she had done to make him a man again. But that was his only regret.

*

Having bought his ticket Malloy meandered through the Greek and Roman sections, stopping occasionally as if to consider the stone visages but in fact memorizing the living faces within the hall. When he moved on he wanted to be sure no one was following him without his knowledge. Good guys, probably, but nothing irritated him more than letting anyone know what he was doing.

He saw a pretty long-haired girl in a short skirt studying a mosaic featuring long-haired naiads, and took a moment to reflect how little had changed in two thousand years, at least with regard to hair styles, young girls, and the eternal erotic in the fantasies of the male of the species. In the next hall the girl showed up again and studiously avoided eye contact again. He could imagine it was coincidence if he believed in such a thing, but he knew better and lost her after a fast turn.

She was waiting with just a hint of a blush at having been shaken so easily when he came to the centre of the museum's labyrinth, the Metropolitan's impressive medieval collection. The hall was mostly empty except for the long-haired girl and a tall blonde in her thirties, who studied a Byzantine triptych with far too much earnestness. Jane was employing children! But then, as he recalled only too well, she had hooked him at a tender age as well, bullet-riddled and desperate for a second chance.

Jane was good. She ran operatives the way the best operatives ran their assets—pay, coddle, cajole, pay some more, and have a heart, as long as it served a purpose. In two or three more years the young girl would go to the ends of earth for Jane and probably wouldn't get spotted doing it. The one in her thirties was already there and might well have followed him without his knowing. If Jane had wanted Malloy dead, this one would have accomplished that too and without a flicker of conscience. It was something to keep in mind.

A guard sat contentedly at the far end of the room, probably not one of Jane's people. When two boys ran through the hall, their shouts awakening his attention, he wandered dutifully after them. The kids might have been Jane's doing. The girl with the long hair now walked toward a smaller room, and Malloy followed her as if to a tryst.

Jane Harrison was contemplating a Byzantine fibula crossbow, a weapon that could be held in one hand like a pistol and was good for killing at a range of no more than about two or three metres. Naturally, it was not only deadly, but quite ornate. Malloy had never warmed to Byzantine art. It was too formularized for his tastes, but he thought their weaponry showed real imagination—the true art of that gold-laced god-driven culture.

Jane was in the spirit of things. She didn't want to be seen, so she had come frumpy: large square glasses with a good smudge or two, no makeup, and even a bit of an old lady totter. Her hair was slightly frazzled, giving her the look of a slightly off balance schizophrenic with an expression that said, 'Talk to me, I dare you!'

She had finished her composition with shoes that were scuffed and breaking down at the heel, because pros always looked at the shoes. Jane believed frumpy old women in frumpy overcoats were invisible to the human eye—the prototype of stealth bombers—as she had put it years ago. She claimed actually to have run some experiments to prove it. Put fifteen people in a room and ask trained agents to recall each individual in detail. The frumpy old lady not only didn't get a colour of hair or exact height or weight, she actually vanished sixty-two percent of the time—or so Jane said. Jane had Malloy's failing. She lied so earnestly and constantly you never knew what was true. The fact that a statement wasn't important had no relevance. Lying was an art one employed for all occasions because a time might come when it would keep you alive or get you killed. It paid to be good at telling a lie and even better at reading one.

In this case, if it wasn't the truth, it ought to have been. Except she wasn't invisible to Malloy. To him Jane was simply amazing. Malloy had admired very few people in his life: his father, his mother, Gwen and Jane Harrison. He trusted a few more than that, but oddly enough, both his father and Jane failed to make the cut on his 'trust' list.

Looking at her costume it was hard to imagine Jane was currently the deputy director of operations at Langley, nearly impossible to believe she had started her career with a field assignment inside the Italian terror cells, spouting Marxist tripe and making love by the numbers.

'A thousand Madonnas,' Malloy muttered, 'and I find you admiring the only weapon in the room.'

'There aren't a thousand Madonnas here, T. K.'

Malloy looked around at the stiff Madonnas holding their miniature men wearing halos and giving the old hippy peace sign. 'Feels like it,' he said.

'Not a fan of Byzantine art?'

'They made nice weapons.'

Finally she smiled. 'Didn't they?'

Jane turned and walked toward an especially primitive painting of the Crucifixion. Malloy followed via a Madonna and child. As he passed by her for the sake of a slightly more interesting Crucifixion, Jane said, 'What have you gotten me into, T. K.?'

Malloy inspected the second Crucifixion. The spear of Longinus had just pierced the flesh of Christ. The blood spurted out like a fountain. A man in silk robes stood at the foot of the cross catching the blood in a gold chalice. It was bad science—Christ, being dead when struck by the spear, wasn't going to bleed like that—and bad art certainly, but what struck him was the notion of the blood itself. The medieval mind had believed in its power beyond all else. It was the blood staining the spear, the Chalice, the thorns, and the Cross, that made those relics the most prized possessions of the faith. It was not the same as the 'blood' of the Eucharist either. Not for those folks. For even the hint of a stain of the Saviour's blood they had been known to trade away whole kingdoms.

'You're talking about Jack Farrell?' he said with a touch of well-rehearsed surprise.

Jane stood slightly behind him now, just off to his side as if she too wanted to examine the arc of blood from the hanging corpse to the cup. 'This was supposed to be a quiet operation, T. K.'

'What can I say? I didn't think he would run.'

'It wasn't the running that got the media's attention. It was stealing half-a-billion dollars before he took off.'

'Taking his secretary along didn't help.'

'The secretary was a nice touch—from the media's standpoint.' Jane sounded tired, frustrated and justifiably pissed off. Jack Farrell might have caused the problem, but she was blaming Malloy.

She walked toward another painting whilst Malloy continued to stand before Longinus and his spear. The Holy Lance, if one thought about it, was a curiously ambivalent symbol. Normally an instrument of violent death its use on a living man being crucified would have been an act of mercy. Understandably, it was the most popular relic of Medieval Europe—a weapon everyone knew and understood. By modern times, the popularity had grown into the notion that whoever possessed the True Lance held in his hand the destiny of the world. Hitler had apparently been fascinated by this notion and had brought what he thought was the True Lance out of Austria once he had subjugated that country in 1938. He had kept the relic in the cathedral of Nuremberg to the end of the war, according to some, the supreme treasure of the Third Reich.

'You told me you could make Farrell an asset.'

Malloy resisted confessing he was wrong. Confessions, even genuine ones, only antagonised Jane. She had disliked the idea of recruiting Jack Farrell from the beginning. As far as she could see, Farrell was too big, too public. Besides if he was really connected to European crime families she ought to put someone else on it. Malloy was more valuable to her working black ops. The truth was Malloy had wanted Jack Farrell for his own reasons and so had claimed, without offering proof, that he was the only person capable of turning the man.

Jane had got to be an old woman by trusting no one—especially her best operatives. 'There's something you are not telling me,' she had answered. As usual there was a great deal he was not telling her, but what Malloy had said to her was this: 'If we go after Jack Farrell, I think we could end up inside the largest crime families in Europe.' That got Jane's attention. Was Farrell really so dirty? Malloy had lied to her with utter conviction: he was sure of it.

Jane had people on the ground in most of the major European cities. She knew the key families and the politicians who protected them. She had a reasonable idea of the nature of their activities and a good estimate of the kind of money involved. What could Jack Farrell give her beyond that?

'With Jack Farrell,' Malloy told her, 'I'll have the bank account numbers of the bosses.' This had led to a series of questions. How had he settled on Jack Farrell? Interesting fellow. Jane had laughed at him. That was no answer. What did he like about Farrell? His old friends—the ones he avoided these days. Anyone she knew? Malloy dropped a few names. The more pertinent question was how much Jack Farrell really knew. Did Malloy have any idea what his role was inside the various syndicates? What did he do? What did he know? What piece of information was going to take them inside? How did he intend to turn the guy? What did Malloy know that someone else could not learn and use? Why did he have to be Malloy's asset? And her greatest concern: what if laundering funds was the extent of his involvement? 'We go to a lot of trouble and get nothing but intelligence we already have—and I've called in markers … for what?'

'Jack Farrell knows things we don't,' Malloy told her.

Was she supposed to take that as an article of faith? Why not? Well, for one thing, he had no criminal record, no known contacts with any of the crime families….

Not exactly true, Malloy had told her. He had business dealings with various companies connected in one way or another to Giancarlo Bartoli. Jane had answered this with the obvious. Most international companies had dealings with Bartoli, like it or not. Besides Bartoli was grey. He was also international. If you dealt with Italy—if you dealt with Europe—you brushed up against him. Malloy had countered with the observation that Bartoli was considered mostly legitimate because of a lack of good intelligence. With Jack Farrell as Malloy's asset Giancarlo, his son Luca, and their whole syndicate would come tumbling down.

Jane had offered to see what she could do, but Malloy told her that wasn't good enough. A cursory look, even a long steady examination, wasn't going to work. In the end Farrell was going to be too clean to prosecute. What Jane needed to do was get the SEC to pursue every violation his company had made no matter how insignificant. Once the U. S. Attorney had indicted him, Malloy said he would have a talk with Farrell. 'If he cooperates, we can give him a pass. If he plays tough, he gets to see if country club prisons are all they're cracked up to be.'

'If he's clean and I persuade the SEC to go after him, someone this prominent, I'm going to feel some pressure.'

'Trust me,' Malloy had answered. 'Jack Farrell is dirty and he will talk.'

'If you're wrong about this, T. K. … trust me, I'll take your legs out from under you.'

As Malloy had predicted, the Securities and Exchange Commission investigators had found very few irregularities in Farrell's company practices, but there were enough dubious circumstances to persuade an especially naive grand jury to hand down a seven count sealed indictment, including two counts of perjury and three of obstruction—all arising from his claims of innocence. Immediately before his arrest was to take place Farrell had got wind of the proceedings and made a run for it. That hadn't excited anyone particularly. Farrell was well known in a small world. He had dated a number of B-list celebrities for a time, getting some tabloid attention, but he was hardly a household name. All that changed when the press got word that Farrell had run off with one of his administrative assistants and his corporation's most liquid assets—an amount close to half-a-billion dollars. That was a story.

Within two days the FBI tracked Farrell to Montreal, but he was already gone, on a flight possibly to Ireland or possibly not. By the time the administrative assistant surfaced in a Barcelona hotel Jack Farrell was still an American story—more oddity than anything else—but after Barcelona the media converged on the story en masse. The scandal sheets began to love him even as a hardcore group of professional financial writers were beginning to question the SEC's decision to go after Farrell in the first place. The indictment stank, to put it mildly. No one had whispered the infamous letters C-I-A but people at the SEC were starting to run for cover, and it was only a matter of time.

The evening before—midnight in Hamburg—the Hamburg police had received an anonymous phone call about Farrell's location. The police converged immediately on a five star hotel in the heart of the city. They missed Farrell by a matter of minutes. The media storm in the aftermath of the raid had started on the East Coast in time for the prime time news programmes. The morning talk shows had already turned Jack Farrell into an instant American folk hero, dubbing him the Runaway Billionaire.

'They're going to get this guy,' Jane muttered, 'and he's going to come back and stand trial. When that happens the media is going to drag the agency into the middle of this, and when they do that, the Director is not going to have any trouble finding where to put the blame—and neither will I.'

'Tell me what you want me to do.'

'I want you to make Jack Farrell go away.'

Malloy let his head tip back as he took a deep, thoughtful breath. 'Away?' he said, finally.

'Dead, gone, or locked up for good in a German prison. Take your pick. Just don't let him come back to New York—or any place that is willing to extradite.'

'I can do that, I guess.'

'Farrell left two different passports in his hotel room. He was using one. The second was presumably his backup. He won't try leaving the country without a new ID, and my source in Hamburg tells me he's looking at a minimum of three days, probably closer to a week before he can get something that can pass. We don't know if he's still in Hamburg, of course. He could have moved to Berlin, but hunkering down right now is the smartest move he can make, and so far he's been making smart moves. Hamburg gives him a lot of cover. He takes a week, gets a new ID, and crosses the border someplace easy.'

'I'll get a flight to Hamburg tomorrow and see what I can do.'

'Your plane leaves tonight. We have to move on this thing, T. K. If the Germans get to him before you do, they'll send him back to us out of pure malice. If that happens you and I are going to suffer the consequences.' Malloy looked at his watch. A flight out that evening was pushing things a bit. 'And one more thing,' Jane told him. 'It's not out yet, but it will be for the evening news. Jack Farrell's new travelling companion is Helena Chernoff.'

Malloy blinked. He knew the name but hadn't thought to link it to someone like Jack Farrell. 'Number seven on Interpol's Most Wanted list?'

'Big fan, are you?' Jane asked.

'Some people check out the best sellers, I watch the FBI and Interpol Most Wanted lists.'

'What do you want to bet she moves up a couple of notches in the ratings next week?'

'What's an assassin doing with Jack Farrell?'

'Sleeping with him, according to the Germans.' When Malloy had nothing to say to this, Jane let one shoulder kick up in resignation. She was too old to question human nature's capacity to surprise. 'She works for money, T. K., and Jack Farrell has a lot of it. Also, she knows Hamburg.'

'So Farrell can sit it out for as long as it takes?'

'Interpol has been looking for Chernoff for close to two decades without any luck. I think she knows what she's doing.'

'Well, now she's got the FBI interested.'

'They've been interested for quite a long time, but that's another story. Here's the thing, T. K. We've got two FBI agents on the ground in Hamburg. They were in Barcelona interrogating Farrell's girlfriend and flew to Hamburg as soon as they heard about the near-miss. I'm guessing they're feeling a little over their heads at the moment, especially as neither of them speaks German. I went through a friend at State and arranged to give them some help.'

Jane passed behind him as he studied the naked breast of a Madonna placed a bit too close to the shoulder—medieval erotica.

'The best possible situation would be if the Germans keep Farrell. We raise a fuss, kick and scream, and Farrell doesn't see an American courtroom for ten-to-fifteen years. By then I'm retired and you've been shot to death by a jealous husband. Trouble is once the Germans understand how flimsy this indictment is, they're going to cooperate just to watch the show.'

The pretty girl walked into the room, and Jane said, 'We're out of time. Get with Dale Perry in Hamburg.'

'I know Dale.'

'I know you do. I introduced the two of you, remember?' Malloy tipped his head. In fact Jane had sent Dale to Zürich for six months when Malloy was operating there, but in the trade he supposed that amounted to an introduction. 'If Chernoff and Farrell are still in the city, Dale has the best chance of finding them. Just keep him out of the spotlight. I can't afford to expose him—even for something this big. You'll go in on your State Department ID, by the way. With the financials the Germans have turned up that shouldn't raise any eyebrows.'

'Anything in the financials worth looking at?'

'Nada.'

The girl handed him a business card as she passed him. Checking it, Malloy saw only a number.

'Remnants of your old slush fund in Zürich I just reactivated,' Jane told him. 'For incidentals.'

'What's my limit?'

'Whatever it takes.' And then she was gone.

Malloy walked back to the main hall, where the woman in her thirties approached him carrying a site map of the Met. 'Excuse me,' she said, and extended her map, 'Do you know where I can find the Impressionists?'

Malloy palmed the airline ticket she handed him as he touched her map and then shook his head. 'Sorry,' he told her, 'I'm lost myself.'

Copyright Craig Smith 2008