The Fourth Perimeter

by Tim Green

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Kurt Ford raised his son after his wife died. To compound his misery, his son, who joined the secret service, has now supposedly committed suicide. Kurt discovers others have died after meeting the president so he knows whom he has to kill!

Release date: December 12, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

PROLOGUE

It was the taste of metal wiped clean with gun oil. It was the taste of horror, of death. Collin’s teeth bit instinctively into the gun’s barrel, and he closed his eyes against the coming blast. In the brief instant before it came, his mind replayed the events leading up to this crisis. In vivid slow motion he was afforded the opportunity to regret a million moments that he could have rewritten to prevent what was about to happen.

Pernicious fog, heavy with the moisture from the warm river, shrouded the old brick buildings, casting gloom on their normally cheerful wooden signs. The cold spring’s last dying gasp had rushed down the eastern seaboard from Canada and so everything was obscure and ill defined. Collin Ford rolled slowly down King Street under the hazy yellow light of ancient lampposts in his pewter Toyota 4Runner. He might have been any young man in any American city. Most had renovated areas of bygone commerce that hugged some once-vital body of water, and most were teeming with young professionals at night. But Collin wasn’t just any young professional, and the capital of the United States wasn’t just any city. Collin was an agent in the Secret Service.

Unlike with many of his young counterparts, money was of little concern to Collin. He had a substantial trust fund. But that was something he neither relied upon nor talked about. His concern, rather, was one of distinction. Collin had no desire to outdo his father in business, even if he could. As well off as the Fords were, Collin’s father had taught him from an early age that while wealth could be beneficial for certain things, it wasn’t something to strive for. So instead Collin had set his sights on rising in the ranks of the Service and surpassing what even his ambitious father had accomplished before he left the same Service to develop a high-tech business.

Collin found a spot for his truck on a side street and hunched over to pull his jacket closed before slouching up the brick sidewalk to a place called Harpoon Alley. A pleasant amber glow spilled out of the large mullioned windows. Collin spotted his friends inside in the midst of the crowd hunkered down at the bar. He slipped through the door into where it was warm and dry and dodged his way through the throng. He ordered a Coke from the bartender and greeted his friends with a timid smile.

“You’re late,” Lou said, looking pointedly at his Rolex. Lou was tall, handsome, and blond, a former college swimmer. Collin was his opposite in looks as well as demeanor. Lou was the kind of guy who introduced himself to strangers with total ease. Collin, while singularly intelligent, was reserved, average in height and build, and dark-haired, with hazel eyes.

“One of my kids needed a ride home,” he said with a shrug.

“Your kids?” asked Allen, a preppy-looking lawyer with stylish glasses who was better acquainted with Lou than with Collin.

“This guy is like the original saint,” Lou replied, taking a swig of beer. “Instead of using his trust fund to travel Europe in style, he buys uniforms for a kids’ basketball league. Instead of working for his old man in a Manhattan high-rise, he hoofs it all over the country sleeping in Motel Sixes waiting to take a bullet for the president.

“It’s a good thing,” Lou continued, raising his hands in the air. “Don’t get me wrong. But I’m just not prone to a guilty conscience or else I wouldn’t be able to stand hanging around with you.”

“Like handicapped kids or something?” Allen inquired, blinking behind his glasses.

Collin looked at him out of the corner of his eye and took a drink of the Coke that had just arrived in a pint glass. “They’re at-risk kids,” he explained, satisfied that Allen wasn’t trying to poke fun at him. “And we just won the City League Championship for ten- and eleven-year-olds . . .”

Collin was beaming now and he looked at Lou expectantly. Lou knew better than anyone that Collin had gone into this not knowing the first thing about basketball. A couple of months back, when the two of them were on their way to a party, Lou had asked for a breath mint. Collin distractedly told him to check in his briefcase and that’s when Lou discovered the book on basic strategies of the sport that Collin had borrowed from the library.

“Hey,” Lou said now with genuine admiration, “that’s great, Collin.”

“I know it,” Collin said with a self-deprecating grin. “But these kids worked so hard. You should have seen their faces when I handed out the trophies. The trophies were as big as the kids.”

“Now that calls for a real drink, by God!” Lou said, signaling the bartender for another round. He pointed to Collin and told the bartender, “And make his a pint of Foster’s.

“You can certainly have one or two to celebrate,” he said brightly as the glasses arrived. “I mean, that’s really great.”

Effusive over his victory, Collin gave in and raised his glass. It wasn’t long before he had two pints under his belt and was working on his third. He was demonstrating his zone strategy with balled-up cocktail napkins on the bar when he caught sight of a familiar face across the bar. He stopped speaking in midsentence.

Lou followed his gaze and emitted a low whistle. “Wow,” he said.

“That’s her,” Collin heard himself say. He was suddenly and acutely aware that he was wearing his old jacket rather than the new double-breasted Italian blazer his father had given to him at Christmas and that he’d forgotten to brush his teeth before he came out.

“Who?” Lou asked.

“Her,” Collin said, buttoning and then unbuttoning his jacket. “The girl I told you about. The one I see in my coffee shop. She’s—”

“Incredible,” Lou said. Allen nodded appreciatively and uttered his concurrence.

Her hair was black and straight and her eyes a striking incandescent yellow. They were almost feline and hinted of Asia. But her high cheeks, thick red lips, and long straight nose were more reminiscent of the Mediterranean. Her skin was bronze, and her tall, striking figure was snugly ensconced in a cashmere turtleneck and pleated black slacks.

She had taken the one empty stool on the opposite side of the bar and ordered a drink. She was alone, and while nearly all eyes were on her, she seemed unaware. There was something delicately innocent about her; Lou knew in an instant why she had been the first woman in over a year to distract Collin from the girlfriend who had dumped him for an NHL hockey player.

“Go talk to her,” Lou urged.

“No,” Collin said. “I can’t. Look what I look like.”

“What are you talking about? You look fine,” Lou said.

“I don’t even know her name,” Collin said weakly.

“I thought you said you’ve talked to her,” Lou protested.

“I’ve said hello and things like that,” Collin replied, taking a nervous swig from his glass. “But I haven’t really talked to her, and I don’t know her name.”

“Dude, she’s looking right at you,” Allen said, nudging him in the ribs.

Collin looked up and smiled foolishly. The girl smiled back and gave an embarrassed little wave.

“Go!” Lou hissed, surreptitiously grabbing Collin by the back of his blazer and urging him away from them.

Before he knew it, Collin was standing there in an empty space, his friends jerking their heads at him like idiots and the girl smiling patiently from the other side of the bar. He took a deep breath and worked his way through the crowd.

By the time he got to the other side, it was too late. A big guy with a gold watch wearing a dark Armani suit had wedged himself right up alongside her and was already making his pitch. Collin dipped his head and slipped past as if he were really on his way to the rest-room after all. He was struck by the strong smell of the man’s cologne and further reminded of his own tousled appearance. But as he passed, the girl reached out and tugged him toward her. Collin stumbled and bumped into the guy sitting on the next stool.

“Excuse me,” the girl said abruptly to the interloper, “this is my husband.”

Collin met the other man’s hostile glare with a confused look. Then, without thinking, he bent down and kissed the girl on her cheek.

“Hi,” he said, then straightened up and gave the other guy his best forbidding Secret Service look. The man opened his mouth as if to speak, but his resolve visibly wavered and he quickly melted away. Collin turned to the girl with a grin.

“I never saw that before,” he said.

“It worked,” she told him. “I’m Leena.”

“I’m Collin,” he said, taking her hand. “Collin Ford. I’m the guy from—”

“The coffee shop,” she said with a suppressed smile. “I know. I was wondering if you were ever going to talk to me.”

“You were?” he asked.

Leena nodded and said, “I’m not very good at meeting people. I’m new here. I guess you’ve been here for a while. I saw your friends . . .”

“About three years,” he told her. “Originally from New York.”

“The city?”

“Close by,” he said. “Now I’m with the Secret Service.”

“Not very secretive, are you?” she said archly.

Collin blushed despite himself.

“Your friends are staring at us,” she added with a smile.

He gave them a dirty look, but all that did was incite them. “They’re morons,” he said.

“Want to go someplace that isn’t so . . . crowded?” she suggested.

“Sure.”

Collin led her out into the fog. She had a dark full-length coat over her arm and she stopped outside the door to put it on. Collin helped. The shapeless coat hid her spectacular form and left Collin eager to get to someplace warm where she would take it off again.

“Thank you,” she said in a soft tone that thrilled him. She was almost too sweet.

He started down toward the water but she said, “No, let’s go this way. I know a good place.”

He shrugged and walked along with her in the mist past storefronts, restaurants, and bars.

“How about here?” she said, pointing around the corner to an out-of-the-way place. They went down a small set of stairs into what was once a cellar. It was darker than Harpoon Alley, darker and dingier, yet Collin felt remarkably at ease. They found a pair of empty stools at the long bar in the back corner.

“Can I take your coat?” Collin asked.

Leena pulled the garment tight to her shoulders and with a feigned shiver said, “No, thanks. Maybe after a drink.”

A lanky bartender who wore two silver hoop earrings as well as a thick dark beard ambled over and asked what they wanted.

“How about a vodka?” Leena said, looking at Collin expectantly. “I’m not much of a drinker, but sometimes I think it’s the best thing in the world to take away a chill.”

Collin hesitated, but only for a moment. “Sure.”

“Two doubles,” she told the bartender, “straight up.”

Collin fished out his wallet and slapped a fifty-dollar bill down on the bar without comment. He never noticed that while the bartender filled his glass with vodka he gave the girl nothing but water.

When the drinks came, Leena held hers in the air and touched Collin’s glass. “To new places, new friends,” she said, and with a mischievous smile added, “and secret agents . . .”

“I said Secret Service,” he told her, smiling also. He liked her sense of humor. And in fact, as they talked, he found he liked everything about her. Leena was remarkably similar to his ex-girlfriend. They both had fathers who were bankers. They both had studied fine arts, rode horses, and loved the symphony. The similarities didn’t even bother him. For nearly a year now, anything that reminded him of Amanda had caused a pang of regret. But Leena was like an improved version of his old girlfriend. She had none of Amanda’s haughty and sometimes frigid nature. Leena was warm and open. Before Collin knew it, he was dead drunk.

He was buzzing comfortably when she finally said in a bashful whisper, “I’d like to go home with you.”

He looked at her, stunned. Tears were welling up in her eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Leena blinked and looked up at him through her long lashes. “I’m just so lonely. I haven’t been with anyone in so long. I’m sorry. I know it’s not right, but I can’t help it. I’ve seen you now for weeks and I think about you all the time. I can’t help wanting to be with you . . .”

Collin almost choked. “No, no, no,” he slurred. “Don’t you worry. I don’t mind. I’d love to have you come home with me. Please, come . . .”

She smiled tentatively and stood up. Her coat fell open, and the sight of her perfect body thrilled him. But when he rose, Collin staggered half a step backward. Leena helped him into his jacket like a mother sending her son off to school. She pulled her own coat close around her shoulders and tied it tightly at the waist. Then she hooked her arm through his and led him through the bar with her head slightly inclined so that the curtain of dark hair hid her face until they walked up the dirty stone steps and out into the cool damp night.

“Where’s your car?” she asked.

“This way,” he slurred and walked unevenly around the block, relying heavily on her much steadier gait. When they arrived at his truck, she asked him if he was all right to drive.

“It’s not far,” he said.

Collin could drive better than he could walk. Without a word, Leena let her hand drift to his thigh. His blood raced, and in less than ten minutes they were in front of an expensive row of town houses right next to the water. He led her up the brick walk. Inside, he flipped on a couple of lights and his sound system before directing her to the couch. He found a couple bottles of Bud Light in the back of his refrigerator, left there by Lou months ago when they had a small Super Bowl party.

He sat down on the couch next to Leena and offered her a beer. She sipped it, then put it down on the coffee table. They continued to talk, and Collin continued to marvel at how similar, but better, this girl was than the one to whom he had sworn everlasting love, the one who had deserted him. And as the minutes passed and he finished not only his own beer but hers, it seemed to him that he was immersed in some blissful dream.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” he asked her, his head starting to nod.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I’d like that.”

Collin led her up the stairs to his bedroom, a spartan place with a large bed on a bronze frame resting in the middle of the hardwood floor and a view that normally let him gaze across the river at the lights of the capital. With maternal tenderness, Leena helped him out of his clothes and pushed him gently back onto the bed.

“I have to get something from my purse,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

Collin frowned as he watched her disappear down the stairs. If he weren’t completely drunk, it would have seemed ludicrous to lie there like that, stripped naked with his clothes in a pile on the floor. On the night table lay his gun. Drunk as he was, his training didn’t allow him to do anything careless with his weapon. It was the first thing he’d removed. He recalled a joke from his past, something about a gun in bed, but the punch line escaped him. He chuckled drunkenly and sighed.

Downstairs, Leena took the beer bottle she’d touched and put it into her purse. She turned off all the lights. Then from the same purse she removed a handkerchief. She draped it over the lock and the handle of the front door and opened the door into the misty night. After waving the handkerchief back and forth several times, she pulled the door shut without latching it. Quietly she climbed the stairs. Collin was still there, lying where he should be. She crossed the room and smiled at him as she picked up his clothes.

“Let me fold these for you,” she said.

“No, no, don’t worry about that,” he slurred. “You’re too sweet. Forget my clothes.”

Behind her, Leena could hear the stealthy footsteps of two men ascending the stairs.

“I’m going to turn out the light before I undress,” she said calmly. “Then I’ll be there.”

What happened next came fast. The light went out and two dark figures entered the room. Quickly they pinned Collin to the bed. Leena hastened across the room. From its holster on the nightstand, she extracted the big standard-issue Secret Service Glock 9mm, jammed the gun into Collin’s screaming mouth, and pulled the trigger. The men stepped back from the bed and she calmly handed one of them the weapon before hurrying out of the bedroom and down the stairs, leaving them alone with the choking, gurgling sounds of death. In the front room, she pulled back the curtain and scanned the walk up and down as far as the fog would let her see. There was no one and nothing to be seen or heard. She left the house without any apparent urgency, walked around the corner, got into a black Jeep, and drove away into the murky night.

CHAPTER 1

It was late Saturday in upstate New York, a perfect early summer evening on Skaneateles Lake and not the place one would expect to receive tragic news. On the water, an occasional boat droned past through the light chop that had been kicked up by a pleasant breeze. The sun had dropped behind the towering hills and already overhead the brilliant three-quarter moon danced with tattered clouds. Jupiter winked nearby, and the soft hum of crickets played background to the rustling leaves of a tall willow. On the broad covered patio of the Glen Haven Inn, groups of people sat around circular tables covered with white linen tablecloths and adorned with fresh-cut flowers. Peals of soft laughter drifted across the veranda as if the patrons too were blooming in the first true warmth of the season.

None, though, seemed happier than the couple that sat by themselves at a table by the railing on the edge of the night. The man was in his late forties. His posture was effortlessly upright and his shoulders subtly muscular. Though he had been dark-haired as a youth, his asymmetrical face was now weathered and crowned by a full head of hair frosted by time and care. Either side of his irregular visage by itself was uninspiring, but together they were somehow pleasing. His dark brown eyes were a constant contradiction, brooding fathomless pools one moment, smiling and luminescent the next.

He had the look of a man who had seen much, yet had somehow retained at least some of the joy of youth. He appeared both rugged and gentle, with the outward demeanor of a man whose livelihood relied more on his hands than his mind. The labels inside his clothes could betray his wealth if he hadn’t removed them all for comfort’s sake. So could his gold watch, but only on the rare occasions that he remembered to put it on.

The woman looked younger by ten years or more. Her wavy light brown hair was highlighted with long golden strands and it fell past her shoulders in wild bunches that might have given her an unkempt appearance if not for the meticulous demeanor of her clothes and the perfect features of her face. Her eyes were the color of blue glass and bright, unspoiled despite the disappointments life had shown her. Her smile too was as animated as it had been when she was a young girl, and she was always ready to laugh, even at herself.

She was laughing now while the man recounted for her the verbal abuse he had taken earlier in the day from his sister. Gracie was much older than he, and the two of them had a unique relationship. It was she who for years had helped to manage the domestic affairs of a man who seemed to care very little for money although he had vastly more than most. It was Gracie who ruled the mansion in Greenwich, if not the lake house in Skaneateles and the massive penthouse apartment on Central Park West in the city. The younger woman was quite familiar with the sister’s austere demeanor as well as her unabashed and biting criticism of the many things that didn’t please her.

“. . . So I said to her,” the man continued between gleeful gasps, “‘Gracie, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you have a thing for that man!’”

The woman, Jill, let out a shriek of mirth. “You didn’t!”

The man laughed even harder, barely able to catch his breath. “And then she said . . . she said,” he howled, bursting into tears of delight. “She said . . . ‘Don’t forget, Kurtis Andrew, that I used to change your diapers!’”

Jill shrieked again, wiping tears from the corners of her own eyes.

“Holy shit!” Kurt bellowed, still crying. “Can you believe she said that? Oh God, she sounded like my mother . . .”

Together they emptied their laughter into the night, unconcerned with the stares they drew from everyone around them and the embarrassed smile on the lips of their waiter, who pulled up short of the table with their coffee and dessert. When they had quieted, and the waiter had moved on, Kurt reached into the pocket of his blazer and felt the velvet box he’d hidden there. He gazed lovingly across the table, moving the flowers to the other side of the candle so he could see his companion’s face without obstruction.

“My God, I love you so much,” he said with quiet urgency. Reaching out across the table with his other hand, he grasped her fingers tightly.

“Oh, I love you too,” she said fervently. “Kurt, I love you so much.”

The mirthful tears in his eyes turned sentimental. He thought of how long it had been since he had allowed himself to really love a woman, more than twenty years. The last had been his wife, and since then, although after a while there were other women who had occupied his mind, none of them had ever truly been allowed to find a place in his heart.

Even so, he chided himself for being so apprehensive. His intention had been to present the ring when the champagne arrived, but for some reason he’d come unnerved. Maybe it was because that was too formal a time. Their relationship was more casual, born out of friendship, although lust on his part had been present from the moment she walked into the boardroom with her flushed cheeks and her wild hair falling all around the padded shoulders of her trim business suit. That first jolting impression was what prompted him, but it was the person beneath that he fell so deeply in love with. She was brilliant and kind, and she seemed to adore him too.

Somehow, it seemed more appropriate to him now that he give her the ring, a seven-carat canary yellow diamond, over coffee and apple strudel. He was certain, or almost certain, that she would accept. Maybe therein lay the problem. He was either certain or he wasn’t, and if he was almost certain, then he wasn’t certain, not really. They had never talked about getting married, not in any concrete sense. Oh, there had been romantic whispers deep in the night about the enduring nature of their love. And it had seemed for a while now that what free time either of them had, they spent together. But they’d never really gotten down to the business of it.

She had been married once before. A mistake. Her husband, Kurt knew, had been possessive, selfish, and generally unkind. They had argued frequently and he was irrationally jealous. Then they learned that he was unable to give her children, something she had always wanted. The tempestuous nature of their relationship only worsened. He became abusive—not physically, but verbally and emotionally. Nevertheless, Jill fought hard to keep her marriage alive. She had confided to Kurt early on that she considered divorce an admission of abject failure.

Even so, Kurt had been able to become a part of Jill’s life, a confidant and a friend. And, although they were truly just friends, Jill’s husband finally had a palpable target for his burning jealousy. Jill was working for Kurt’s company, then and now, as a scientist. It wasn’t long after they started to become close that Jill quit without a word, right in the middle of the development of the project that had first thrown them together.

Kurt was no scientist himself, but he was the source of almost every successful idea the company had developed. Whenever a new product or a line of business was being pioneered, he would be heavily involved until things were up and running smoothly. That’s how he had built Safe Tech into a billion-dollar business and that’s how he intended to keep it that way.

But when Jill inexplicably left, Kurt forgot all about business for the first time since his son had gone away to college. He moped about for a week or so feeling sorry for himself, going through the motions of being the important CEO of a major corporation. Then he literally just went and got her. She was coming out of her house in Long Island, sharply dressed in a dark brown business suit, her wild hair tightly constrained with clips and a comb. She looked sad and beautiful and was so preoccupied that she was in the middle of the driveway with her hand on the car door before she realized he’d pulled up to the curb and was walking toward her.

“Kurt?” she’d exclaimed in a voice laced with fright. “Why are you here?”

“I had to see you,” he told her. “You just left. Why didn’t you say anything to me?”

“Can we go somewhere?” she asked, looking nervously around.

They went to a nearby diner and had coffee until it was time for lunch. She told him everything that day, and he had been her true confidant ever since. She’d been his as well. But even though he was able to save her, so to speak, the marriage ended quite messily. Her husband dug in and made everything as painful as possible. And although she returned to Safe Tech, she insisted on keeping their relationship purely platonic until her divorce was final. While that time had seemed agonizingly slow, Kurt thought now that their relationship was even more special for having been built on the solid rock of friendship and genuine respect.

That was more than three years ago. Of course she would marry him, Kurt told himself. She was still young enough that they could have children. He would do that for her. He had always sworn to himself that he would never have another wife and certainly not another child. But . . . well, he really believed that it was what Annie would have wanted him to do. He never told anyone, not even Jill, but instead of talking to himself, he talked to Annie, as he had done since the day she died. And so he knew that she wanted him to do this, to marry this wonderful woman—to make himself happy, and to make her happy as well.

The tears were now close to spilling from the corners of his eyes. Oh God, Annie, he said to himself. You know I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think you really wanted me to.

“Jill,” he said out loud, closing his fingers around. . .