No Survivors by Tom Cain Read Free Book Online Page B

helplessly at the open page, an angry frown on his face. He clearly hadn’t a clue what she’d just said.
    “Not here,” he said. “Come back another time.”
    “Impossible! I make appointment. Please to look again, Yekaterina Kratochvilova.”
    A couple of uniformed maids walked by, turning their heads to see what the fuss was about. Alix caught their eye.
    “Maybe you help,” she called to them. “I come see housekeeper, have appointment. She can see me now, yes?”
    The maids looked to the porter for guidance.
    “It’s not my decision,” he insisted. “There’s nothing in the book.”
    Alix gave the two women another pleading stare. She’d timed her performance carefully. By three in the afternoon, any guests that were leaving a hotel would have checked out and their rooms prepared for the next occupants, but few of the coming night’s guests would have arrived. It was the quietest time of the working day, when even the busiest housekeeper might be able to see an unexpected job applicant.
    One of the maids took pity.
    “I’ll go and get her,” she said.
    “Thank you, thank you,” Alix gushed, while the porter looked on indifferently.
    The maids disappeared.
    Alix took a couple of steps backward, out of the light.
    The porter returned to his tabloid.
    A middle-aged woman appeared at the far end of the passage, tight-lipped and stern-eyed, her steel-colored hair pulled back in a bun, reading glasses hanging from a gold chain around her neck. She was talking to the chambermaid, clearly irritated by the intrusion.
    It took Alix no more than a couple of seconds to fix an image of the housekeeper in her mind’s eye. Then she slipped away from the entrance, unseen by anyone as she left. By the time the housekeeper got to the hut, she was long gone.

13
    K urt Vermulen looked around the banquet hall where the Commission for National Values was holding its private meeting. The room was located on the fifth floor of a modern hotel close by a shopping mall on the outskirts of Washington. The interior designer had gone for a gentlemen’s club effect, with dark paneling, lights in ornate sconces, and vintage oil paintings in gilt frames. Vermulen hoped the men he’d come to address weren’t equally phony.
    The meal had been cleared away, and the speeches were about to begin. Vermulen, however, would have to wait his turn. For now a stocky, pugnacious man, in a sober black suit, his shock of silver hair glinting in the glow of the chandeliers, was making his way to the podium, which had been placed on a low stage just behind the top table.
    His name was Reverend Ezekiel Ray. Across a swath of states in the South and Midwest he could draw crowds to hear him preach that would put platinum-shifting rock acts to shame, but today there were no more than eighty men present. No women had been invited, and the only brown faces in the room belonged to the waiters.
    This select congregation belonged to the innermost core of a secretive organization, invisible to the public eye. Its membership constituted some of the heaviest hitters in American conservatism: politicians, preachers, lobbyists, strategists, lawyers, academics, and business leaders. Their congregations ran into millions, their fortunes to tens of billions. They could bankroll candidates, or boycott TV stations. Though they were, for the time being, denied control of the White House, they still wielded enormous, if well-disguised influence on their nation’s politics.
    The “national values” with which the commission was concerned were defined in a very particular way. They felt that it was immoral, even blasphemous, to keep God out of government. Their God, however, was a very specific, Baptist Christian deity, and they regarded the followers of Islam with a fear and hatred equaled only by the loathing that Islamists felt toward America’s satanic, crusader culture.
    These were not Kurt Vermulen’s values. He believed in God, but his faith was a