“I have no doubt you won’t say a word.” Jackson sliced across the room, stopping in front of Don. “Open your hand.”
Don complied, lifting his hand palm-up. “Why?”
“Take these.” The intruder dropped two pills in his hand.
When he realized what they were, Don looked up, shaking his head. “No, these will put me in cardiac arrest.”
“Precisely.”
“I did what you asked. You can’t do this. My kids just lost their mother. They need me.” His hand shook. The pills rolled back and forth.
“You have a choice. Take the pills or I’ll bring you the hearts of both your girls in a jar so you can remember them.”
Don started crying. “No, I did what you wanted. I did it. You can’t do this.”
“So is that a yes? You do want souvenirs of your children?” Jackson continued musing. “As long as I’m at your sister’s house, shall I bring her heart as well? I haven’t worked with my surgical blades in a while. Didn’t need them for your wife. You’ll be happy to know she died immediately in the collision. Boring, but efficient.”
Chapter Seventeen
Hunter watched the second hand on his antique brass desk clock, each tick drawing him closer to decision time.
The videoconference in twelve minutes with BAD would go one of two ways. Couldn’t be put off. Not after what he’d found on the memory stick from Linette.
Joe might threaten to put him in leg irons or release a termination contract on him.
Or a third way. Something worse.
No matter what, worse always waited just around the corner.
But first they’d have to find him.
Toeing his leather chair back from the onyx desk, Hunter sat back and stared at the view beyond the ten-foot-tall windows lining one wall of his office. Eliot had worshipped that view. An endless wash of Montana blue sky interrupted only by snow-dusted tips of ponderosa trees and white bark pines covering this remote mountain ridge.
Eliot would hike for days across the one hundred and twenty-eight acres of undisturbed wilderness surrounding the cabin, climbing every vertical surface cut from the volcanic rock and hiking the granite slopes.
Forever in search of a physical challenge.
Then he’d do his damnedest to drink up all the expensive liquor he could find in the bar downstairs, until he finally realized this house could operate two years without a serious supply drop.
Eliot would scoff at the pricey labels.
“Two-hundred-year-old scotch pisses out the same color as cheap whisky,” he’d say the next day, then grin and add, “But I find I like it better on the front end.”
A tap at the door shook Hunter from thoughts he normally kept locked away with an iron determination.
He glanced across the wide room to find his five-foot-eight permanent resident parked in the doorway leading to the foyer.
Borys could have been a ferret if he grew a black pelt and dropped down on all fours. “Compact” and “wiry” described everything about the fifty-two-year-old man who kept the household running in Hunter’s absence. Short black hair stuck out in all directions, none with any plan. Whiskers tried to match his hair. He had a wadded-up face that had been left out in the sun too long until the creases were permanent, but thick lashes and hawk-like hazel eyes saved him from being butt-ugly.
Best-dressed ferret on this mountain.
He wore black suits with starched and pressed white cotton shirts, determined to match some stereotypical role he’d seen in too many movies.
Nothing had ever been said about Borys being a butler or valet or any other position of servitude.
He’d decided that all on his own.
In Poland, he’d played many roles to gain the information he bartered to stay alive. He had a knack for languages and mimickry, which he practiced by drawing from the extensive movie library Hunter had supplied.
When in residence, Hunter wore jeans and T-shirts. He suggested Borys do the same since Eliot had been their only guest and favored jeans over any other clothing.
Borys refused to move from the basement, where he’d hidden for the first three months he’d lived here, to an upstairs bedroom unless Hunter agreed to a trade of labor for somewhere to live.
Once that deal was struck, Borys decided to dress the part.
Hunter gave up.
Seven identical eight-year-old suits hung in the walk-in closet off Borys’s bedroom suite, none of which he’d allow Hunter to replace with more current styles. “Who cares about style if we have no company?” Borys would point out, turning Hunter’s logic back on him.
Borys cleared his throat.
“What?” Hunter sighed at the silver platter his self-appointed butler carried.
“Thought you and the missus might like some coffee.” Today Borys sounded like a cowpoke from a John Wayne movie.
“She’s not the missus and this isn’t a social event.” By the time Hunter had put Abbie in a room last night she wouldn’t speak to him. He probably shouldn’t have been quite so honest when she pressed him about when she’d see her mother again, but he figured an honest answer would save days of arguing.
Telling her not to expect to get back for another week had ended all conversation. She’d withdrawn into herself. He’d have kidded her about losing the bet if she hadn’t looked so forlorn. He checked the wall security monitor for the orange light that indicated the front door remained secure.
“Treat a lady nice, you might see her again.” Borys’s wide lips twisted with a frown.
“She’s not staying long and I don’t expect to see her again once she leaves.” Hunter hadn’t figured out exactly what he was going to do with Abbie, but she couldn’t go back to reporting for a television station and she couldn’t stay here.
Especially not after that kiss had backfired last night.
He’d remembered Abigail Blanton all over again when her lips touched his.
He hadn’t met the real Abbie six years ago.
That one had strutted her stuff, looking and acting like every other woman he’d known to date.
The Abbie he’d met at Wentworth’s party hadn’t teased or flirted, and she’d filled out nicely. Unavoidable as it had been, he couldn’t wipe away the vision of all that creamy skin in nothing but underwear when he’d removed his coat from her on the airplane.
He got hard just thinking about holding her again.
And that’s why he had to figure out what to do with her.
Walking past the butter-yellow leather chair and sofa arrangement near the window, Borys muttered under his breath, then set the tray on the low table, a four-foot-wide slice of red oak polished to a shine. He poured coffee, grumbling, “No decent woman’s gonna put up with an a**hole.”
Hunter ground his back teeth. Did everyone have the same mediocre vocabulary of insults?
You get what you pay for.
Hunter would pay Borys if he’d accept more than room and board.
No chance.
This had been the only place to hide the former snitch from Poland seven years ago when the CIA went after Borys, who had been the European connection between a Los Angeles crime family and a Russian mob they supplied with black-market weapons. If Borys hadn’t tipped off Hunter that he and his female partner had been made, the Russians would have tortured Hunter, slowly removing body parts for days while interrogating him. His female counterpart would have faced worse.
Hunter couldn’t let the CIA hand Borys over to the Russians when they conveniently forgot how Borys had helped their agents.
But right now he needed Borys to get the hell out of the room so he could contact BAD.
“I take it black,” Hunter told the ornery cuss still fussing over a coffee mug.
“I know what you drink, dammit.” Borys brought a thick white ceramic coffee mug with RUBY’S DINER printed in blue ink on the side. The one Hunter had used for over ten years after Eliot lost one of their famous “high-stakes” bets on a Texas firing range.
The loser had to produce a worn diner mug with blue ink that couldn’t be bought and couldn’t come from a state bordering Texas. Eliot rode his classic Triumph Bonneville motorcycle sixteen hundred miles over three days, searching for the mug.
Compared to what they both did for a living, the only high stakes worth betting on were creative ones.
Hunter smiled at the memory until a fist squeezed his heart.
“You want breakfast?” Borys asked.
“Do I ever eat breakfast?”
“Hell if I know what you do when you’re gone.” Borys walked away, mumbling, “Guess you don’t bring women here either, but that’s better’n seeing you with a man.”
Hunter shook his head and waited until Borys reached the door. “I don’t want to be disturbed. Would you close—”
The door slammed shut.
He glanced at the front-door security light once more, then dismissed his concern over Abbie trying to leave. She’d been rattled in the woods last night. She wouldn’t face the wilderness alone.
Turning back to the computer, Hunter scooted up to the table and tapped keys to boot up the videoconferencing software. He reached over to a control box that resembled a low-profile stereo receiver and pressed buttons to close blinds inside the double-paned glass windows to darken the room. The only thing anyone at BAD would see when they came online was Hunter with a blank wall behind him.
Eliot had set up this computer system that routed to a different location every time Hunter had to make direct contact, which he rarely did from his safe house in Montana. No one, not even BAD, knew about this location. Until now, he’d never had a reason to keep his distance from BAD. Today’s feed went to a location in Canada. The minute he ended communication, he would dial a number by phone that would trigger a minimal explosive, destroying the computer hidden in the basement of a telemarketing center and ending the satellite link to the site.
His forty-eight-inch monitor flashed with the image of a retro-looking video countdown like the old television sets used to have in the sixties. The number 1 appeared, indicating the link was secure.
Joe’s bold face and broad shoulders filled the screen, his gray-blue eyes as hard as his tone. “Start explaining.”
Hunter hadn’t expected pleasantries from BAD’s director, but he had thought Joe would ask for his current location first. “I followed the Blanton woman to her apartment and tagged her with an audio transmitter. An intruder grabbed her before I could get inside.”
He couldn’t very well tell the head of BAD he had Abbie with him at a location he wouldn’t share the coordinates on. If he did, Joe would end the conversation and order them both to headquarters. He had the information Joe wanted and with a little luck he’d pull even more out of Abbie, then worry about what to do with her.
“Where is she?” The quieter Joe spoke the more an agent should worry.
“Don’t know. Her apartment was hit with tear gas. When I left, I picked up a tail I couldn’t shake. Protecting the memory stick I retrieved at the Wentworth estate came first so I took a jet out of Midway. I’m at a safe house. Didn’t want to risk coming into headquarters in case I didn’t lose the tail.” Hunter paused for more feedback from Joe to test the strength of his lies.
“What safe house?”
“Belongs to a friend.”
Joe didn’t ask what friend. In their line of work everyone had “friends,” and no one gave up a name with trust at stake.
To deflect attention from that subject, Hunter asked, “What happened to Gwen Wentworth?”
“In ICU at the Kore Women’s Center, stable but not promising. She’s pregnant.”
Another surprise, only because Hunter remembered her losing a baby during childbirth two years ago, then her husband dying not long afterward… a sailing accident. “What about the three men suspected of being Fratelli? What happened to them?”
“Gone.” Joe’s voice dropped with disgust. “Seven matching Land Rovers exited the estate at the same time and split up in different directions in a matter of minutes. We didn’t have enough resources on-site to cover them all and the three we followed each entered a parking lot, then exited with an additional matching vehicle on its tail before they took separate routes.”
That meant all seven had contingency plans. It would have taken an army of agents in separate vehicles to track them.
“I need that memory stick now,” Joe interjected.
“I can bring it in.” Risky. Joe might use that to lure Hunter back to headquarters only to put him in lockdown if Joe silently suspected anything. “But in the interest of saving time I reviewed everything on the USB key and downloaded the data into one of our secure electronic vaults. Our informant explained the Fratelli hierarchy as twelve Fras who operate as a ruling unit on each continent but said little about their identities.”
“Give Gotthard the vault code in a minute,” Joe said. “He received an electronic missive two hours ago from our informant about the Fratelli in North America gearing up for an operation on U.S. soil in conjunction with a product developed by a UK Fra who’s supposed to be noted on the memory stick.”
“He is,” Hunter said. “Here’s the short version of what I downloaded. Vestavia is at odds with Fra Bardaric from the UK. Last night at the Wentworth event, I got a look at the man I think was Vestavia, but he was too far away to render a decent sketch. There may be a connection between the JC killer and this Bardaric.”
Hunter continued, careful not to show any change in his voice rhythm when revealing what he’d learned about that murdering JC bastard from Linette’s memory stick. “Peter Wentworth told Vestavia about ten male babies born thirty-two years ago in North America. All ten were taken as a group and raised in China to be disciplined killers completely loyal to the Fratelli. Five proved to be incapable and were terminated. Three died on missions. Of the two that remained, one was training the next generation, but he committed suicide. The tenth one entered MI6, spent four years in the organization, then disappeared five years ago. He’s known only as the Jackson Chameleon, because of the titanium baby spoons he leaves when he completes a mission and the spoon image he stamps on confirmation kill photos.”