“I guess you’re right about that,” he said, with a wry smile.
“What’s the endgame, Nickerson? What’s your angle? Money? Is that it?”
Nickerson laughed. “Money? My family already has money. Money buys you yachts and fancy cars. It buys you a house on Nantucket and the French Riviera. Hoarding money is the ambition of small people. Me, what I want is power.” He smiled. For a man who wore a mask nearly every minute of every day, it was liberating to speak freely. “What I want is power,” he repeated. “Real power. The power to do anything I want. The capo di tutti capi. Politicians, those Wall Street assholes, the President himself—they are all going to line up to kiss my hand.”
Natasha laughed.
“What?”
“Your delusions of grandeur,” she said, smirking. “Very amusing.”
“Trust me. You are small-time. You know nothing of real power. How to get it or how to wield it.”
“Perhaps.” She slinked closer to him. “And yet I could kill you right now. It wouldn’t even be difficult. And for all the power you say you have, there’s nothing at all you could do about it.”
He instinctively backed away from her, regarding her with the impotent fury of defeated pride. She stood there, her gorgeous face inches from him, her faint perfume smelling like death. She snapped her teeth at him, as if she was going to bite him. He flinched. She grinned.
“By the way,” she said, turning and stepping away from him, tracing her finger on his desk, “our mutual friend has already alerted me to my next assignment. I must say, you are a bold man, for a senator.”
He looked at her with wounded pride, but he knew how to take things in stride. “So you accept it?”
“Yes, I will do it.”
“And the Cobra situation?”
“He will be dead by morning.” As she turned to leave, she looked back at him over her shoulder. “You will be hearing from me, Senator.”
CHAPTER 22
Morgan parked the Sebring around the bend from Plante’s suburban home. It was in an out-of-the-way neighborhood, sparsely populated and cut with twisted streets that wound around in a lightly forested area. The thick old trees, which during the day would provide pleasant shade, now seemed to fill his line of sight with ominous dark corners. He got out of the car and started making his way to the house. He kept to the shadows as much as possible, all the way up Plante’s inclined front lawn and the house’s front steps, lit only by the flickering lamppost on the street below.
Plante’s home was a two-story, two-car-garage brick house. Morgan was hoping that Plante would be waiting for him, but no one came to the door as he approached. He knocked lightly—the doorbell would too easily announce his presence to anyone who might be nearby. Getting no answer, he tried the handle and found that the door was unlocked. He pushed it ajar, and it creaked slowly open, the streetlight behind him casting his shadow far into the entrance corridor.
The house was mostly dark, but there was one visible source of light, spilling from a room all the way down the hall. The stillness gave Morgan a bad feeling. As he crept toward it, he wished he had the comforting weight of a gun in his hand. That feeling hit him harder when he reached the door, looked inside, and saw Eric Plante.
Plante was slumped over on his desk, his face turned away so that the back of his head was turned towards Morgan—or what was left of it, anyway. Most of it had splattered on the wall behind him. Blood, sticky and deep crimson, had pooled around him and was trickling down to the floor, where it formed a dark stain on the carpet. Without thinking, Morgan stepped into the room to examine the body. From the blood spatters on the wall, he unconsciously worked out the trajectory of the bullet, following it backward with his eyes to a broken pane on double French doors to the outside.
Sniper.
Instinctively, he dodged out of the way, just as he heard another pane crack and a bullet whiz past his ear, hitting the opposite wall. He stood flat against the far wall—with the floor-to-ceiling window in between him and the only way out of the room. Exiting would now move him into the shooter’s line of sight. Any sniper with decent reflexes would be able to hit him before he made it halfway to the door. If it was T holding the gun, which was all too likely, he would not even get that far. He was trapped.
Morgan told himself that panicking would not help. He let himself breathe and assessed his situation. Outside, by the light of the room, he could only see a few feet of the backyard lawn. The rest was engulfed by the darkness, and he had no hope of catching a glimpse of the sniper. The French doors had curtains, which were currently open, but they were too wispy to provide any decent cover. Plus, any move to shut them would get him killed. Behind him was a built-in bookcase with below-waist-level cabinets that held, along with books, a couple of Plante’s nicer pipes and tobacco. He knocked on the interior wood backing, hoping for a hollow sound, but it was solid, with no way to break through to the other side. There was no way out of that room that wouldn’t get him a bullet in the head.