“That’s good. The soup.” She’d added a touch of basil. “And your plan. Any luck?”
“More than you’d think. More than we’d like. There were some pretty eccentric houses built along the coast in the early part of the twentieth century. Most of them are gone. Some are still there and in ruins. And there’s a castle or two. We need to narrow it down somehow.”
“Before we can guess at possible lairs, we need to know what role he’s chosen.”
“Venom.”
“He told you that?”
A hesitation. “Yes.”
Was she lying? “Venom is the snake under a rock, the viper who waits to strike the unwary warrior. He kills with guile and poison.” Had Jimmy somehow poisoned her mind against Kennedy?
“I read the online description.” She held her mug clasped between both hands. Sourly she contemplated her soup, then placed her mug and plate on the table. “But who are you?”
“I’m the Celt.”
“Always?”
“Yes.”
She frowned. “Isn’t that a weakness, to always play the same role?”
“In the hands of someone who doesn’t understand the role, it is. The Celt is a barbarian leader who plays the lute and sweetly sings the ballads of war and lost love.” He waited to see if she would grasp the significance.
“I know. I read the online description,” she said again. “But…” She thought. “Ah. The Celt is a dichotomy. He has a warrior’s brutality hidden under a veneer of civilization and melody.”
“Not brutality. Ruthlessness.”
“Call it what you want. I’m the pawn and the Prize. To survive, I need knowledge.”
“I can tell you everything you need about the EoF world.”
“I’m depending on that. From what I can see by observing the game—did you know people still play it?—the world is too vast for me to comprehend without months of study and participation. No. What I need to understand is you. The real you. And him. The real him.” She leaned forward. “Who was Jimmy Brachler before you knew him? How did he get to MIT?”
Kennedy couldn’t keep his disdain hidden. “You mean … was he a poor, underprivileged boy from the wrong side of the tracks?”
“I don’t mean anything,” she said sharply. “I’m not leading the witness. I mean—who was he? Where is he from?”
Oddly, her impatience reassured him. “He was raised by his grandparents on a small Illinois farm south of Chicago. I met Harry and Ruth Brachler once, after the trial. Good, churchgoing Christians. They were grieved and bewildered about the way Jimmy turned out.”
“They’re dead?”
“I don’t know.” As he imagined what could have happened to them, his skin crawled. “He wiped them out of existence.”
“Like he wiped Jimmy Brachler out of existence?” Summer put her hand over her heart. “There’s no record that they ever lived?”
“They’re gone.” He stood, gathered the dishes, and took them to the kitchen.
She followed and leaned against the door frame.
As he loaded the dishwasher, he said, “His mother was an advertising executive, very successful, who wanted a baby. She had no husband and no desire for one. She conceived James … somehow. She died when he was three. His grandparents told me they taught him to work on the farm, but James hated it. They said his mother was the same way. Restless. Ambitious. Always looking to the horizon.”
Summer gathered the pans off the stove and handed them over. “So he was brilliant, driven. He had a tragedy in his background—his mother died of breast cancer and when that happened, the only person who understood him was gone. He was alone.”
Surprised, Kennedy faced her. “How do you know that?”
“I heard him talk about her. He was … sentimental.” Actually, remembering the speech Jimmy gave at that fund-raiser still broke her heart. Whatever he was—killer, drug smuggler, pimp, madman—he had loved his mother, and his loneliness had touched Summer in ways she couldn’t define. Maybe … maybe because her own mother had failed to provide love and support. Maybe because the loss of her father had scarred her more deeply than she had ever realized before.
And she didn’t want to talk about it with Kennedy. She didn’t want him to put that razor-sharp mind to work, to analyze Jimmy’s weakness and how it could be used against him. Jimmy deserved to have the memories of his mother untainted by Kennedy’s manipulations. “Jimmy might not have liked living with his grandparents on a farm, but it means he came from a stable environment.”
“Probably. The Brachlers seemed like nice people, but it’s hard to see the truth about what goes on behind the scenes in any household. My parents didn’t lose custody of my sister and I until I was old enough to make it happen.”
She mulled that over. “You say Jimmy was from a farm. But he was reminiscing with Dash about when they were kids, stealing cars in Chicago.”
“I know that by the time he was a teenager, he had worn his grandparents down. He spent winters in Chicago going to high school and summers on the farm.” Kennedy shut the dishwasher and hung up the dish towel. “I didn’t know about the stolen cars. I’ll bet his grandparents didn’t, either.”
“So he never got caught.”
“Or he got caught and erased the evidence before he could go to trial—he was always a gifted hacker.”
“He would only be caught once. He would never make the same mistake twice.” With skill and insight, she was building a portrait of Jimmy Brachler.
“You are good at this,” Kennedy admitted. “I had never considered the possibility of defeating him by using his own personality as a weapon.”
She inclined her head. “It’s the technical versus the intuitive. You’re the technician. I’m doing what profilers do in the FBI. The more I know about him, the better chance I have of surviving—and winning.” She walked to the refrigerator, got a couple of bottles of water and handed one to him.
He took it, and her hand.
She let him keep her hand, but she didn’t intertwine their fingers, or give his a squeeze, and after a moment she pulled away to open her bottle and take a long drink.
His first intuition was correct. Something was very, very wrong.
Should he ask? Should he not? Never in his life had he been confronted with this kind of emotional dilemma. All he knew was … he needed not to chase her away.
He headed back into the living room.
She followed. Probably not because she was drawn by the need to be near him, but because she wanted the information he had. But still … she followed.
“How did he get to MIT?” she asked.
“The same way I did. He aimed for MIT. He tested well. His grandparents didn’t have that kind of money, so he got scholarships. Not enough, though. He was paying his own way, too. He had jobs; he worked as the host at a local restaurant and at the university at the library.” Bitterly, Kennedy said, “I thought he needed those jobs to pay his tuition. Actually, he was using them to find his buyers, to keep in touch with his suppliers.”
“You said that you admired him.”
“I thought he was upright and honorable. I didn’t suspect a thing was out of place.” Kennedy seated himself, put on his shoes and tied them firmly, as if Brachler’s neck was in the knot.
She stood beside him and watched without seeing. Her voice was distant and reflective. “He has a different face now. But he has always lived in disguise—on the farm, in Chicago, at MIT. I wonder if even he knows who he is.”
“Venom is evil, using stealth and terror to kill. When you think of the drugs he pushes and the lives he has poisoned … I don’t even know why I’m surprised.”
“But Jimmy views himself in a glamorous light, a man who lived through the worst life could give him, a man who survived and thrived through intelligence, deception, and determination.” She almost sounded as if she admired him. “If he is a snake, he’s a coral snake, decorated with brilliant colors, and each movement is desig
ned to distract from the real, deadly purpose.”
Kennedy was tired of her apparent fascination with that little shit James Brachler. “I can’t argue with your insights. But what I can say is—I don’t care how he views himself. He tried to kill my nephew. He tried to kidnap my sister. He penetrated and attempted to sabotage my corporation. I don’t want him captured. I don’t want him discredited. I don’t want him imprisoned. I want him dead.”
Fiercely, she replied, “Don’t kid yourself. I do, too. I understand the stakes. If he went to prison, it would be nothing more than a short, profitable recruiting expedition. He would be out in no time, and never again would you and I and your family be safe.” She put her hand on Kennedy’s shoulder as if to comfort him. “He’s not going to leave us alone.”
“No.” He glanced out the window. They had three hours until sunset. “We need to start the search now.”
“All right.” She hitched up his sweatpants. “I need to go to my apartment to get ready. So what’s he going to do next?”
Kennedy got his leather gloves and donned his black leather jacket. “I believe he’s fast-forwarded to the end. To finish the game, his castle must be taken and razed to the ground. If a warrior is harried into the castle, he can lose in a frontal attack or because the other warrior sabotages his defenses. He can also lure the opponent into the castle with the appearance of defeat and into the arms of a well-prepared attack. Or he can circle around while the opponent is attacking an empty castle and take the other castle, and win. There are variations of those strategies, but that about covers it.”
“Why doesn’t he attack here?”
“Venom is the snake you step on unaware. He wants us out, seeking him. Then he’ll surprise us, destroy us.”
“That’s hopeful.” She sighed. “Kennedy, how is this going to end?”
“In the game, only one of the warriors can survive.”
“So it does end in death. Obviously. Yours or his. And what happens to the Prize?”
“The Prize goes to the conqueror.”
“And…?”
Yes. Of course she had thought this through. “The Prize can be retained, or sacrificed.” He caught her and pulled her into his arms. “But the Prize can vanquish both warriors, and by any means, no matter what I have to sacrifice, I promise I will save you.”
“I believe you. And I promise I will save you, too.” She searched his eyes as if wanting to impress him with her sincerity. “Now come on. Enough talking. Let me get my backpack, and we can go. Let’s do this thing now.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Summer and Kennedy hotly debated whether to start looking for Jimmy’s lair now or first go into town so Summer could change.
Kennedy believed the search would be lengthy and would require as much time as Brachler could engineer into the problem. He wanted to start now.
Summer knew she couldn’t defeat Jimmy wearing Kennedy’s sweat suit. Since it was her car, her beloved, trusty, worse-for-wear but still speedy 1969 Pontiac GTO, and she was driving, she won the fight.
They turned onto the highway and headed north, toward town. She was just getting into the drive, preparing to take Kennedy into another dimension involving a great car, a winding coastal road and her own daredevil spirit of acceleration when—an explosion blasted their ears and rocked the ground.
Summer slammed on her brakes. She looked at Kennedy in disbelief. “He did not do that.” She whipped a U-turn, drove back to the Hartmans’, and arrived in front of the burning, leveled remains of the house in time to see the detached garage blow up, sending charred debris thirty feet into the air.
She stomped on the gas, driving back to the highway and toward town.
When the speedometer read ninety, Kennedy pressed her shoulder. “Shouldn’t you slow down?”
“Trust me, someone’s seen the smoke and called in the fire. Trucks will be headed this way as fast as I’m headed that way.” As she took the corners, her knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. “How did he do that?”
“The house wasn’t wired to explode. I checked.” Kennedy was sure of himself. “So did Jimmy lob bombs at the house?”
Summer slowed to a more reasonable speed. “Yes! I was staring at the burning house so hard, and there was so much debris flying, I almost missed it. But something slammed through the garage roof right before it exploded.”
“Destroying the opponent’s lair is a brilliant move, but was Brachler sitting with a grenade launcher waiting until we left?” Kennedy answered his own question. “Unlikely. So his lair is close enough for him to keep an eye on us.”
Summer’s eyes narrowed. “That tricky bastard. I’ll bet I know where he is…” They drove past O’Hara’s Pub. She glanced into the parking lot, then turned in. “Let’s find out for sure.”
It was just past three, and the place was packed with construction guys. Her construction guys. Pitchers of beer and tumblers of wine rested on the tables, and most of the men were staring glumly into their drinks.
She walked over to Berk Moore and slapped him on the shoulder.
He peered at her blearily. “Oh, hey, Summer.” He sized up Kennedy, silent and stalwart. “He looks like he’s got money. At least you landed on your feet.”
“Thanks. I guess.” She pulled up a chair and sat down. “Why are you here this time of day? Why aren’t you working on Parnham’s house?”
Berk reared back in his chair. “Didn’t you hear? He fired us. My whole crew.” He waved an arm around at the hopeless-looking guys. “Fired.”
“Who’s working on the house now?” she asked.
“Nobody. He’s not going to finish it.” Berk muttered, “Right from the beginning, goddamn job was snakebit. We covered the whole outside to protect it from the weather. What for? I mean, really—what for? So it could rot.”
Kennedy asked, “Did he have you finish any of the interior rooms?”
“Yep. I got extra men in to do it on his schedule. Worked day and night. Then … you’re fired.” Obviously, Berk still couldn’t believe it. “Just like that.”
Summer recognized a force at work that could only be Jimmy Brachler. “Which rooms?”
“What does it matter?” Berk drank the last of his beer and stared into the glass as if surprised to see the bottom.
“Which rooms did you finish?” Kennedy’s voice held a touch of the whip.
Berk snapped to attention. “That goddamn black hole of a wine cellar.”
Kennedy nodded at Summer. “The Dungeon.” He obviously had his suspicions, too.
“Right. It was like a dungeon,” Berk agreed. “The tower room.”
“The Watchtower,” Summer said. “And on the ground floor, the office that faces the cliffs.”
“Command Center,” Kennedy said. “Anything else?”
“Inside the building, we completely covered a couple of the corridors and the stairway in plywood. When you’re inside there, it’s like a maze. A maze.” Berk stroked his stubbled face. “Who the hell would want a maze in their house?”
“Someone who is playing a game,” Summer said.
“He’s a goddamn idiot, then,” Berk said.
“Can’t argue with that.” Summer turned to Kennedy.
But Kennedy was no longer behind her. Instead, he was leaning over the bar, talking to the bartender. He handed over a wad of bills, then joined her.
As they headed for the door, the bartender shouted, “That fine gentleman ordered pizzas and drinks for every one of you sorry out-of-work sons a bitches. So give him a hand!”
Summer and Kennedy walked out on a resounding cheer.
Summer didn’t know if she loved Kennedy. But she sure did like him. “That was good of you,” she said.
“It’s the least I can do. It’s my fault they’re unemployed.”
“A few hours ago, just to be a bitch, I might have agreed with you.” She grinned at him savagely. “But it’s Jimmy’s fault, and Jimmy has pissed me off.”
?
??Took him long enough.”
“I’m a real even-tempered gal.”
He laughed. “I’ve noticed that about you. Anyway, beer and pizza is cheap. I’m going to have to buy Harold a new car.”
“Harold?”
“At the resort. Harold loaned me his Prius to get home from the party. It was parked in the Hartmans’ garage.”
* * *
Kennedy paced Summer’s tiny living room and listened as, in the bedroom, Summer and Kateri argued.
“I can’t handle a forty-five automatic repeating pistol,” Summer said. “It’s too unwieldy for me to carry when I climb.”
“I can come,” Kateri said. “I can carry it!”
Kennedy had just been formally introduced to Kateri. He remembered seeing her at the party, but he could not reconcile that Cruella de Vil with this woman, tall and well built, with snapping brown eyes and straight glossy hair, half black, half bleached white.
“On some level, what I’m about to say to you might sound stupid…” Summer took an audible breath. “But we’re not allowed to bring reinforcement into the game.”
“On some level?” Kateri asked.
Sarcasm. He recognized it.
“I know.” Summer sounded both resigned and exasperated. “I know.”
“That little popgun of yours is not going to stop anything,” Kateri said.
“If I aim well—and I will—it’ll put a hole right through Jimmy’s stone-cold heart.”
“Unless he’s wearing a Kevlar vest.”
“I’ll shoot him in the nuts.”
“Even if you miss and hit his leg, that’s a good strategy. I wonder if I could lift explosives from the Coast Guard and pass them off to you.” Kateri sounded thoughtful.
“I think between losing the cutter and being investigated for causing earthquakes, you’re in enough trouble with the government.”
Kennedy stopped pacing. In trouble with the government? Who was this Kateri?
Summer said, “Anyway, don’t worry about a weapon. I’ve got this…”
Kennedy could imagine Summer gesturing. But at what?
“And,” Summer said, “I’ve got an idea.”