The Devil's Footprint (7 page)

"He's
right, Hugo," he said.
 
"This
is
Washington
.
 
Simple direct action is not in fashion around
here."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Four office
suites down the corridor, the watcher who Fitzduane had known would be
somewhere close, was chatting to the attractive young intern he had met in
Bullfeathers.

Jin Endo had
felt his job done when he had spotted the target going through Security at the
main entrance, and had phoned ahead to warn Wakami-
san
where he waited in the committee's reception.
 
He had a note of where the intern worked and
headed up to her office immediately, pausing only to discard hi weapons in a
cleaner's cupboard.

The
Farnsworth
Building
had been sealed off within two
minutes of the killing of Patricio Nicanor and the others, and a further cordon
was placed around the complex of buildings that made up the Hill very shortly
after that.

Everyone
within the inner cordon was identified and questioned.

The process
took over six hours.
 
When it was over,
Jin Endo and his new girlfriend walked free together.
 
Everyone in her office knew that Endo could
not have been involved.
 
The police knew
the exact time of the assault and Endo had demonstrably been visiting his
friend at that time, which also explained his reason for being in the
building.
 
Certainly, he was Japanese,
but so
were
over a hundred other people who had been
caught inside the cordon and whose tour of Congress had proved rather more
exciting than expected.

That night the
young intern, shaken by the gruesome details of the incident, allowed the
handsome young lobbyist to comfort her.
 
True, he was Japanese just like the terrorists, but you did not blame
all Italians for the misdeeds of the Mafia.

Her lover was
young and
fit,
and someone had tutored him well in the
art of pleasing a woman.
 
The intern was
even younger, but sex was something you got plenty of inside the Beltway — if
you were so inclined — so they were well matched.
 
The sex was intense, dangerous, and endlessly
satisfying.
 
There was no denying
it.
 
Power
was
an aphrodisiac, and working in
Washington
was all about being close to
power.
 
The added aphrodisiac was being
so close to death.
 
They had both
witnessed the aftermath of the carnage.

FBI agents,
backtracking through the evidence, made the connection after four days.

It was only
one of many leads, but it rang alarm bells when it was discovered that she had
not turned up for work.
 
True, quite a
few House employees had taken time off to adjust to the shock after the attack,
but most had telephoned in.
 
This particular
intern had not, and that was unlike her.

The young
intern's family was wealthy, and they indulged their only daughter.
 
After her internship she was due to study
international relations at
Georgetown
University
, so she had been comfortably set up in a
lavishly equipped condo in
Georgetown
itself.

The agents had
to break into the condo.
 
They found the
naked body of the intern, her throat cut, wrapped up in blood- and semen-stained
bedsheets in the Deepfreeze.

Of her lover,
there was no sign except for a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that turned out to
be plain glass.

3

Kathleen
Fitzduane, clad in a silk kimono that one of Hugo's Japanese friends had sent
as a wedding present, leaned on the terrace railing of their borrowed apartment
in
Arlington
and gazed out toward
Washington
.

Graced with
rich auburn hair and long shapely legs, she was the kind of natural Irish
beauty who seems almost unaware of her charms.
 
She had an easy laugh and an infectious smile, and there was
a caring
warmth about her.
 
Right now her face was in repose and there was concern in her eyes.

Directly in
front and below her, less than half a mile away, was the Iwo Jima memorial
showing U.S. Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on
Mount
Suribachi
after the bloody conquest of the island.
 
In the middle distance was the Potomac and
the Pentagon, and beyond that
Washington
,
D.C.
itself.
 
Nearby was
Arlington
National
Cemetery
and
Fort
Myer
, the home of the Old Guard.

It was a
particularly good location to inspire an understanding of American history,
and, as such, was not an accident, Kathleen was sure.

Lee Cochrane
had arranged it, and she had some honest reservations about the chief of
staff.
 
He was a little too dedicated for
her taste — if that was an adequate word — and she was concerned about her
husband.

Hugo Fitzduane
had a penchant for causes and a deep affection for
America
.
 
Hugo and Cochrane seemed like a volatile
combination.
 
Indeed, it had already
produced a nightmare of violence, though, to be
fair,
she could scarcely blame Cochrane for that.
 
Or could she?

Kathleen's
priorities were strongly influenced by her biological clock.
 
It did not show yet but she was now three
months pregnant, and the thought of the man she loved not being there at the
birth was disturbing.

Yet in her
heart she knew she was helpless.
 
Hugo's
ancestors had held — indeed enhanced — their positions by force of arms for
many centuries, and the urge to take a stand and test oneself in harm's way
seemed to be programmed into him.

But there was
a heavy price, and she had witnessed it.
 
She had been there when Fitzduane had been brought in close to death
from terrorist bullets.

Later, she had
become involved herself when terrorists had taken her family hostage and tried
to use her information to kill Hugo in the hospital.
 
They had killed her father, and she still
paled at the recollection.
 
She had seen
the true face of terrorism, and Hugo was right.
 
It had to be stopped.
 
But by her husband?
 
That was another matter.

It had been a
strange way to meet, and though she had fallen in love almost immediately, she
had not expected it to work.
 
It was too
neat:
 
patient and nurse.
 
Such relationships rarely endured.

But they had
gotten married and they were content, and even the shadow of Fitzduane's former
lover did not intrude more than was inevitable.
 
Etan had lived with Fitzduane and had borne him a son, but then she had
chafed at domesticity and had moved on to greater heights in her media world
and Fitzduane had been left to bring up Boots alone.
 
Until Kathleen came along.
 
Now Boots was for all practical purposes her
son, and soon there would be another arrival.
 
It was happiness beyond her dreams.

Kathleen
smiled at herself.
 
But it was literally
true.
 
It was not perfection because it
was the nature of life that nothing was quite straightforward, but it truly was
— beyond anything she had hoped for in the past.

She smiled to
herself as she remembered Fitzduane asleep with little Boots in his arms.
 
This big tall man with his steel-gray hair
en brosse
and his curiously gentle,
unlined face and his wound-scarred body, and this tiny cheeky boy, hair all
tousled, splayed across his father, totally secure in his arms and in his
love.
 
Of course, Boots — real name Peter
— was not so small now.
 
At five he was
shooting up like a little rocket, but he was still very cuddly and still liked
to be hugged.

Long may it
last, she thought, they grow up so fast.
 
If they have a chance to grow up.
 
The shadow of the terrorist threat was ever
present.

Hugo had first
encountered terrorism by accident, and then curiosity followed by
a disgust
for what the man stood for had led him deeper and
deeper into the hunt for the Hangman.
 
It
had all escalated into something much worse than anyone had foreseen, and the
fact that they had eventually triumphed was of limited consolation.

With the
terrorist's death, he had taken sensible precautions, but, in truth, had
thought such violence was behind him.
 
And then had
come
the Hangman's revenge.

Terror was
just a word until you experienced it, and then you knew that it was worse than
anything you could have imagined, worse than any nightmare.
 
Because it was not
something that you were looking at in fear.
 
It was
reality and it was happening to you
.

Fitzduane had
just survived that second encounter, but then he had known that this was
something he would have to live with — perhaps until he died.
 
He and his family were permanently under
threat.

Any day, some
complete stranger, for reasons that made no sense to most civilized people,
might attempt — and might even succeed — to snuff out his life.

The day was
hot and humid as only a
Washington
summer can be, but Kathleen shivered.

When she had
married Hugo, she knew, she had accepted the nature of the man and of their
situation.
 
She supported Fitzduane's
decision to become actively involved in counterterrorism instead.
 
But because it was the right thing to do,
that did not mean she was happy with it.
 
She wanted a live husband, not a dead hero.

Fortunately,
Hugo's counterterrorism work was not an obsession.
 
He did it because it had to be done, but he
realized full well that such an essentially destructive activity could have a
corrosive negative effect.
 
And that was
not the nature of the man.
 
So he
actively tried to do work as well that was essentially constructive.
 
And that helped greatly.
 
It gave their life a balance and was
interesting in itself.

The threat
remained.
 
Rangers — Ireland's
counterterrorist unit — now trained on the island as part of a security
arrangement that Hugo had made with his old friend and ex-commanding officer,
General Shane Kilmara.
 
And Hugo's
reserve status with the unit was not just a sinecure.
 
He completed weapons practice and training
daily, and was also involved in developing a new strike unit.

Hugo Fitzduane
was a man of parts indeed, but, she feared, however he tried to disguise it,
the warrior side of him was in the ascendant.
 
But this was the man she had wanted and won, and despite her fears she
was at heart content.

She thought of
Boots, now staying with his grandmother, and laughed out loud.
 
She missed the little monster, and she knew
Hugo did too.
 
He loved children.
 
He had asked how big the little baby inside
her was and when she had spaced her hands just so and said it was about the
length of a good cigar, he christened the fetus "Romeo/Julietta."
 
The name covered both the options he had
pointed out.

But men
weren't perfect.
 
He had soon shortened
the name for convenience to Romeo.
 
To
balance matters out, Kathleen used Julietta.

Neither really
minded what sex the new arrival might be just as long as he or she was the
child of Hugo and Kathleen Fitzduane.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The
long-wheelbase limousine that had picked up Fitzduane from the apartment had
tinted windows.

The heft of
the door confirmed his initial impression.
 
It was armored.
 
‘Bulletproof’ was
overly optimistic in a world where armor-piercing RPG launchers were part of
every fanatic's standard equipment.
 
Technology, unfortunately, helped all sides.

Based on what
Cochrane had said when he had called, Fitzduane expected to see a couple of
hard-faced heavies in the front seats.
 
Instead, a quite stunning redhead in her late twenties had ushered him
into the vehicle, and when the driver turned he saw that the slim neck and
smooth blond hair belonged, not to a rather elegant-looking male with a
talented barber, but to a woman as similarly attractive as the redhead.