Blood Vendetta

Blair smoothed down one of the rumpled newspaper clippings with his palm, pushed it forward so the Stony Man warriors could read it.

“I know I could have printed it out from the internet,” he said, “but I’m still partial to the newsprint-and-ink version.”

Bolan nodded, but focused his attention on the clipping.

Terror Bombing Kills Seven

Seven passengers were killed—including a pregnant woman on holiday—and three others were injured when a bomb planted by an Islamic militant group tore through a train car’s interior.

The dead also included four London residents, a French tourist and another American, a man believed to be the husband of the pregnant woman killed in Sunday’s explosion, authorities said.

In a statement sent to news organizations, a group of Islamic militants with ties to al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the bombing. The act was meant as a protest against the presence of British troops in Iraq, according to the statement.

Bolan scanned through the rest of the article, but found few other details useful to his search. It mostly contained eyewitness statements and comments from police and politicians vowing to hunt down those responsible.

Blair spread out a second article on the desk. Between the headline and the story, Bolan saw the photos of seven individuals lined up.

With his index finger, Blair tapped the picture of a young woman. The photo portrayed her from the shoulders up. Her hair was blond and her mouth was turned up in a warm smile.

“That’s the American. Name’s Jessica Harrison. Beautiful young woman. According to a New York Times profile that ran at the time, she was six months pregnant. Her husband, Jeremy, was fresh from foreign-service officer school and was stationed at the London embassy. He’d been in the country four months before he was killed. She arrived that day. They were on their way from Heathrow to the U.S. embassy compound. Diplomatic cables and other information from your government pretty much confirmed the information in the Times piece.”

It struck Bolan that the analyst was drawing details completely from memory.

“You’ve spent a lot of time on this,” the soldier said.

Blair gave him a lopsided grin. “Shows, doesn’t it? Normal people have hobbies or, better yet, girlfriends. Anyway, I thought for sure this woman was the key. See, she had a twin sister, Jennifer Davis—Davis was the dead woman’s maiden name. Her sister worked for a couple of major U.S. banks. Really understood the nuts and bolts of financial transactions. And did I mention she oversaw information security at another point in her career?”

“Happy coincidence,” McCarter muttered.

“Smart woman, obviously. Quite lovely, too, though more serious than her sister, judging by the photos I’ve seen.”

“So she went underground?” Bolan asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Blair said. “She’s dead.”

“Dead?” Bolan leaned forward.

“Very much so. As I said, she was my favorite guess for the Nightingale when I first started poring over all this stuff. But circumstances have forced me to change my mind.”

“‘Circumstance’ being that she’s dead,” the Executioner said.

Blair nodded. “Seems a logical conclusion to draw, doesn’t it? It’s not likely she faked her own death and just fell off the grid. I mean, right? Who does that?”

Bolan said nothing. In the waning days of his war on the Mafia, he’d done just that, allegedly dying after a bomb destroyed his war wagon. When that ruse fell apart, he’d been forced to stand trial for the blood spilled in his War Everlasting. Ultimately, he’d “died” a second and, as far as the public was concerned, final time. This time it had stuck, but that was partly because of his experiences as a soldier and the help of the White House and Stony Man Farm.

Presumably, this young woman had none of those resources at hand, he told himself.

“She died in a house explosion,” Blair said. “It was six months after her sister died. The local fire department blamed it on a gas leak. Neighbors saw her walk in after work. An hour later, an explosion tears through the house, incinerates the damn thing.”

“They thought it was suicide,” Bolan said.

“According to her coworkers and family, she collapsed when her sister died, took a month off work to recover from the shock. When she finally did come back, people said she’d changed. She was sullen, depressed and withdrawn.”

“No surprise,” McCarter said.

“Agreed. But as time went on, according to the interviews I saw, she got worse rather than better. Since her sister was lost in a terrorist attack, the authorities gave the case a hard look before they closed it, but they found no signs of foul play. She could have died from an accident, which seems plausible. She’d called the gas company to the house at least once about a month before the explosion to report the smell of gas. Or she gave up and killed herself.”

Bolan nodded. “If she’s dead, why tell us all this?”

“More to illustrate a point,” Blair said. “Jennifer Davis fits the profile pretty well. So do a couple of other women. They didn’t check out, either, for various reasons. If you’re trying to find the Nightingale, it won’t be easy. That’s really the point I am trying to make here. You’re chasing a ghost.”

They spent the next hour going through the other information Blair had, including other suspects who’d turned out to be false leads. The Stony Man warriors thanked Blair for his help and left Thames House, along with a flood of civil servants heading out for lunch.

“Fun to yank his chain, but he seems like a good enough lad,” McCarter said. “Not much help, though. Sorry for dragging you out here.”

“It’s been a long flight,” Bolan said. “Let’s see if Kurtzman dug up anything in the meantime.”

* * *

AFTER HIS VISITORS left, Blair forced himself to sit in his office and, for an excruciating twenty-two minutes, pretended to work. Finally, he grabbed his sack lunch from his bottom desk drawer, grabbed his windbreaker from a hook on the wall and headed out the door.

A nervous flutter in his stomach nagged at him and, as he made his way through the corridors of Thames House, he felt as though all eyes rested upon him. He bought a foam cup filled with hot tea from a street vendor and walked a few blocks from MI5’s headquarters, where he bought a couple of newspapers from a newsstand.

Though he tried to look nonchalant about it, he surveyed the streets for any signs he’d been followed. He saw nothing amiss, but knew that meant absolutely zero. He wasn’t a trained field operative. Though he understood surveillance and countersurveillance techniques and principles, he hadn’t applied them in the real world. Said other ways, he was out of his element, over his head or any other clichés one wanted to apply.

Folding the newspapers in half, he put them under his arm and continued on two more blocks to a small municipal park. With the edge of the folded newspapers, he brushed some leaves and other debris from a wrought-iron bench. He seated himself on the bench, drew his tuna sandwich from the bag and took a bite from it. Nerves continued to roil his stomach and he didn’t want to eat. However, he also wanted to make it look as though he was here in the park for a reason, some reason other than the truth.

The sandwich became a sticky ball inside his dry mouth and he washed it down with the tea. Three children played nearby. The middle one, a slim girl with long, blond hair, threw a ball to one of the other children, who caught it and tossed it back to her. She let loose with a giggle. A smile tugged at Blair’s lips, followed almost immediately by a mental image of Eleanor, face pale and still, the sound of his ex-wife sobbing, a swirl of people putting their hand on his shoulder, uncomfortably uttering words meant to comfort. The memory of his ex-wife, Daphne, sobbing, makeup smeared, cut him anew. A dull, all-too-familiar ache formed in the middle of his chest.

He set aside the sandwich. With his thumb and index finger, he reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, withdrew a phone and flipped it open. It wasn’t his phone; it had shown up inside his flat—the bastards had broken into his place while he was at work—and was in a brown envelope on his kitchen table.

With his thumb, he punched in some numbers. On the third ring, a woman’s voice answered.

“Yes?” the woman said.

“I got a visit,” Blair said.

“Okay.”

“They asked questions.”

“About our friend?”

“Yes.”

“And you told them what?”

“What we agreed I’d tell them. Nothing more.”