Ms. Nasgate looked very puzzled by the question. I shrugged.
“No,” I said, “but they deserved to be.”
He chewed on that. “Then I suppose everything ended well.”
Well as can be.
I left them there to talk over whatever they needed to talk over. I’d done all I could. Somewhere, Mom would know that.
Thirty
Willard and I stood in an unleased floor of an office building, across the street from a similarly empty and even more rundown warehouse on Seattle’s north end. Rundown, but hardly quiet.
“You see them?” Willard said. “In the repair van.”
I did. I had an even better view than Willard, once I’d adjusted the focus on my binoculars. Two men sitting in the front seat, and at least one more in the enclosed rear of the high-ceilinged van. The vehicle tilted slightly as the unseen third moved around.
Ondine had provided Bilal Nath with plenty of resources. All men in casual clothes, all moving with purpose, and every one of them armed. I’d counted four so far, carrying duffels long enough to allow for carbines or shotguns. They hadn’t arrived all at once. The team had been taking positions around the warehouse since eight this morning, less than one hour after I’d texted him the address along with the time to meet: High noon.
They had set pairs of operatives at the corners of each intersection and already entered the warehouse. More than likely they were also on the roof of the building Willard and I were watching from.
I’d chosen our meeting place after searching through commercial listings. I didn’t care much about the neglected warehouse itself. But I loved that the office building across the busy street had space available, giving us an excellent vantage point. And that its occupied floors were dedicated mostly to single-business suites, psychologists and massage therapists and chiropractic clinics, which buzzed with appointments after the holiday break. Lots of comings and goings. Lots of people for Bilal’s team to try and keep track of.
It was a reasonable assumption that the repair van was planned for me. The kidnap team. Once they had me trapped, the team would bring the van around and they would efficiently force me out the side door of the warehouse and into the vehicle. What would happen after that wasn’t worth thinking about.
Willard scanned the streets. “I’m up to eighteen so far. Think Ondine gave Bilal a bulk rate?”
I took my eyes away from the lenses. “A joke. From you. Amazing.”
“Laughing in the face of death.”
“Look at it this way: the more of them that are here, the better.”
Eleven o’clock now. One hour to go. I called Elana.
“They haven’t left the hotel,” she said immediately. “But their Mercedes is in the roundabout, with two tight-asses in suits and crappy haircuts hanging at the entrance. How’s the meeting spot?”
“Might as well have a giant bull’s-eye painted on it.”
We held the line open until something changed. It took less than ten minutes.
“He’s here,” Elana said, her voice an octave higher than usual. “Bilal. He and the two rejects and that bodyguard with the angry face are getting into their car.”
“That’s Saleem. No Aura?”
“No Aura.”
“We’re on our way.”
Willard and I took the elevator to the ground-floor parking level. Hollis was in the passenger seat of Willard’s Continental, from which he had been watching the eastern side of the warehouse.
“Are you sure it’s too late to call in your Army compatriots?” he said as he climbed out and stretched. “I’m sure one of those lads carried a no-bullshit machine gun through that door.”
“Keep your distance,” I said, taking his seat. “And text me—”
“Once your man arrives. I’m on it. Good luck, boyo. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Willard and I pulled out on the rear side of the office building and gave the warehouse a wide berth on our way to the interstate. I kept watch on the oncoming lanes as Willard sped south, on the off chance we’d spot Bilal’s Mercedes as it passed. We didn’t, but it didn’t shake my confidence that Nath was headed where I wanted him.
Elana met us at the gate of the Neapolitan.
“I forgot to tell you: I haven’t seen that walking cement truck who works for Bilal.”
“Juwad. He’s probably guarding Aura.” I turned to Willard. “Think you can keep him from twisting my head off?”
Willard smiled. Humor didn’t look at all natural for his Cro-Magnon features. As if a rock suddenly rippled like water.
“You’re up,” I said to Elana.
She smoothed her white blouse. Combined with the conservative skirt and efficient black pumps, and her hair drawn into a neat bun, she looked the very model of a hospitality professional. From the waistband of the skirt she removed a Neapolitan Hotel name pin that read nancie.
“Where’d you get that?” Willard asked.
“From Nancie, of course.” She tapped the pin with her nails. “I’ll put it on in the elevator.”
“See you inside,” I said.
Elana pivoted and walked away, a distinct spring in her step. Willard and I gave her a minute’s head start before walking into the lobby and directly across to the hotel bar. It was lunchtime, and the handful of business travelers and affluent vacationers were doing their best to start the weekend a little early.
The Neapolitan’s bar had a back room available for rental to parties of up to twenty people. It was closed for a private function. Ours. Hollis had reserved the space yesterday.
I left the door to the room ajar and chose a booth out of the direct line of sight. Willard stood outside at the bar as if waiting to order.
Elana would be knocking on the door of Bilal’s suite by now. Helpful Nancie, conveying the message to Aura or, more likely, Juwad that Mr. Nath had mentioned on the way out that he would prefer they wait at the back of the hotel bar, and would Mrs. Nath please bring her computer and tablet in case they were required, and was there anything else she could do to make their stay more pleasant?
Aura might call her husband to check. Or maybe she would assume radio silence while Bilal was supposedly dealing with me. We had to roll the dice on that. She would have Juwad and the midday crowd in the nearby lobby for reassurance. Safe as houses, as Hollis would have said.
I set the cryo bottle at the edge of the booth’s table, where it could be seen from the doorway, and watched the bar in the stripe of mirror that ran along the top of the artfully tiled wall.
We didn’t have to wait long. Aura appeared in the entrance to the back room, her aqua-tipped blond hair framed by the broad expanse of Juwad’s chest behind her. Both scanned the room. Her eyes lit on the cryo bottle. She rushed forward as if to stop the container from falling.
I placed my hand on it before Aura could reach the table.
“Let’s talk,” I said.
Juwad came up fast behind her, barreling toward me. Before he reached the table, Willard was there, draping a gigantic arm over the powerlifter’s wide shoulders and taking hold of Juwad’s bicep with the other hand. Juwad’s neck muscles grew taut as he strained to pull away. Willard’s fingers tightened. They stood, neither of them moving, two titans locked in an uncertain contest. Juwad’s face contorted. Willard smiled grimly.
“You’re safe,” I said to Aura, “and if everybody stays calm, you and I can make a deal for these.” I drummed my fingers on the bottle, looking pointedly at her guardian.
“Juwad,” she said. “Please.”
Willard stepped back. Juwad almost slumped into the booth, but he righted himself. His brow was shiny with sweat.
“Bilal is waiting for you by now,” Aura said, her eyes on the cryo tube.
“Let him wait. These are yours, not his.”
“What is it you want?”
“The same thing you do. A future for me and my family. Can we agree on that?”
She sat down opposite me in th
e booth, almost tossing her tablet and laptop aside, eyes flickering between me and the container. “You want our word you won’t be touched.”
“I want mutually assured destruction.” I hefted the bottle. It was amazing, in a minor key, that only an inch of material separated my fingers from cold that would shatter them like peanut brittle. “I want enough hard evidence to send you and Bilal to jail forever, enough to make sure your future children are taken from you if it comes to light. If I have that, then I’ll sleep soundly.”
She blanched. “That’s impossible.”
“That’s my price.”
Aura touched her teeth together. The bottle pulled her gaze back as if her eyes were physically stitched to the slender tube. “Bilal has—clients. I could give you their names, and the materials he has on them.”
“Not even close.” I set my phone on the table, leaning against the cryo tube, angled so its lens would capture Aura’s every expression and gesture. “Three eggs, three stories. You, Bilal, and Ondine, too.”
“Ondine? Why?”
“That’s my business.”
“Bilal—”
“He’ll understand. But even if he doesn’t, you’ll have your children.”
That was enough for Aura to look at me. “If you’re lying to me, or if my eggs are already gone, I won’t be able to stop him. I won’t want to.”
“I accept that, Aura. So let’s figure out how to get past this.”
After a moment, she leaned back. “I can—I can tell you about me.”
I nodded. Baby steps.
“Timothy, my ex-husband. We were together when I was first diagnosed with cancer. He suggested harvesting my eggs. Our marriage was already—” She frowned. “It doesn’t matter. The whys.”
“Go ahead.”
“Timothy oversaw my procedure. The head of the clinic, Jackson, was a friend of his. A friend of ours, I thought. We didn’t have any money of our own—Timothy owed nearly a million dollars just for his school loans, all those crazy degrees, and everything was tied up in trying to get Ceres launched—so it was all done as a favor. I was so desperate, I was dumb. I never signed papers or even told my insurance company, just to keep it all under the table.”
Aura closed her eyes, maybe berating herself out of habit.
“It wasn’t long after that when I told Timothy I wanted out of the marriage. We fought, and when I saw that he was determined to draw our separation out for as long as possible, I demanded my eggs.”
“He refused?”
“They told me that there had been an accident, that my eggs had been destroyed. I was sure at first that Timothy had arranged with Jackson to make the whole matter go away. They could have both lost their licenses if I went public.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I had no proof. I have a criminal record, and time spent in psychiatric facilities when I was a teenager. Who would believe me compared to them? I’d already decided to fight back another way.” Aura touched the sleeve that held her laptop. “It wasn’t hard to hack into Jackson’s home and work computers. I made some false trails, just to make it look right.”
Her breath caught. I kept my mouth shut, allowing her space to say the next part.
“Pornography,” she said. “Of children. There are horrible, horrible things available, just—out there. For the sick freaks who want it.”
“You framed Jackson.”
“I left one trail where it would be found. It was enough. The court sentenced him to six years.” Aura’s eyes flicked to the camera lens, to the cryo tube holding her eggs, to me. “Jackson didn’t know about my skills, and I don’t think he ever suspected me. But Timothy did, of course. He knew that I’d gone after Jackson first just to make him sweat it out. That he would be next.”
I raised my eyebrows. Aura was, in her way, as merciless as her extortionist husband. “And that’s when he told you he still had your eggs.”
“I should have realized it sooner. If you’re not with Timothy, you’re against him. He would never destroy something that gave him so much control over me, even if it might save his career. And now he could use my eggs to keep me from ripping his life apart.”
“You were trapped,” I said. “Both of you.”
“Until I met Bilal. I took some work with him, hacking into companies here in the States. When he came to Miami for treatment, we met in person. Our relationship was already serious. With his illness he didn’t have time to spare, and I wanted him to be able to stay in the country. So we got married. I confessed to Bilal what I’d done. Ceres had completed construction of their new building by then. It made sense to us that he would hide my eggs there. Bilal’s team and I searched through the company, looking for any coded items in their records without a paper trail back to R&D or vendors. Timothy wasn’t as clever as he imagined.”
I wondered again if that had been part of Aura’s attraction to Bilal. Power, wealth. A chance for revenge against her abusive ex. And to be completely cold about it, only a temporary commitment, with Nath already showing signs of ALS.
“So now you know,” Aura said. “If the police found out, I would take Jackson’s place in prison.”
“I have to have actual evidence.” I pointed at my phone and its camera. “Something to back up your story.”
I had expected Aura to kick at the final step, but she removed her laptop from its sleeve.
“There are the original logs and the ones I doctored to put on Jackson’s computer,” she said, “plus the hacked account from where I stole the—the pictures. Tell me where to send them, and they’re yours.”
Give her this: the woman was decisive as hell. We spoke for another thirty minutes while Willard kept watch on the entrance and Juwad grew increasingly agitated. The battery on my phone ran dangerously low as it videoed Aura’s entire confession.
I learned about Bilal Nath fixing a provincial election in Pakistan, and two other instances where he’d bribed territorial leaders to get charges dropped against his informants. Aura also told me that Ondine Long had jumped a little too quickly to act on whispers of a company going public, with email messages that would be highly embarrassing at best and lead to charges of insider trading if the DA chose to make an example of her.
Aura was one of Bilal’s best operatives, as well as his wife. She sent the evidence of their transgressions to the shared drop site I gave her. I’d already arranged that anything placed on that location would be automatically copied to a second private site in the cloud. Trust, but only so far.
“Ondine,” I said to Aura. “I own the goods on her now. Forget you know her name.”
“That’s everything,” she said. “Everything I have.”
“Not quite,” I said. I touched the white tablet that she’d used to hack my phone at Dr. Claybeck’s. “I want this handy gadget.”
Aura looked perplexed. “It’s not perfect. And it requires recoding every time a phone model pushes an upgrade to its OS. Without updates, it will be obsolete within a month or two.”
“I’ll take it, anyway.”
I turned off my camera and handed her the cryo tube. “It’s safe to open it.”
She did, as if the tube held the antidote to a poison already consuming her. I gave her a glove, and she used it like a rag to extract the slim steel rod with the vial of her eggs attached to its end. Wisps of escaping vapor curled almost protectively around the tiny crystal straw.
“Store them somewhere more permanent within two days,” I said.
Aura nodded, but I was uncertain if she was paying full attention. I signaled Willard, who moved to the doorway separating the bar from the back room. Juwad remained on his stool as I stood up.
“Goodbye,” I said to Aura.
“If Bilal sees you again,” she said, delicately turning the seal to close the tube, “I don’t know how he’ll react.”
“Then convince him to leave town,” I said. “For your kids’ sake, if not yours.”
She nodded, as if she�
�d already thought of that. “Yes. I want to be gone. Tonight.”
Willard and I walked through the bar to a utility hall that led to the alley behind the hotel. His Continental waited there, its engine idling, with Elana at the wheel.
“All good?” she said as we climbed in.
“Not all bad,” I said. Elana hit the gas, and we were out of the alley before I took another breath.
Thirty-One
I didn’t take Aura’s word, of course. Willard and I took opposite corners of the block to watch the hotel entrance, Willard from the comfortable driver’s seat of his car, and me from an apartment-block entryway that did little to block an adamant wind that smelled of impending ice sheer and car exhaust fumes.
Within half an hour, Bilal Nath’s lunar blue Mercedes returned to the hotel roundabout. The vehicle bounced an extra inch as it nudged the curb, its suspension tested by all that hired muscle inside. Bilal’s men quickly disembarked before Nath himself appeared from the rear seat. With his thin frame and cowl of dark hair, he looked like a chess-set bishop surrounded by bricks.
My phone buzzed. I didn’t have to look to know who was calling.
“Ondine,” I said.
“I imagine you already know that Nath has left the meeting place,” she said. Her voice so calm, like the drop in air pressure just before a tornado hits.
“Yeah,” I said. The rear guard of Bilal’s host vanished into the lobby, leaving the SUV to the scurrying valet.
“Explain yourself.”
“I’ll cut to the finish. Aura Nath and I have reached an agreement. She and Bilal will be leaving town.”
“With what guarantee of your safety?”
“That’s my business. I’ve got everything I require. So will you, if we can cooperate.”
“Meaning?”
“Insider trading must seem like small potatoes to a guy like Bilal. I wouldn’t have thought you needed the dough.”
Ondine’s silence stretched long enough to read a page of hexes.
“What is your intention?” she said.
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