Enemies Within

by J. S. Chapman

  “Why did you pick on me?” she asked him once.

  “You radiated innocence, even though I know you to be anything but innocent. You also gave off a scent. Of fear. Just remember. Loyalty is a two-way street. I’ll be loyal to you, but only if you’re loyal to me. It’s really for the best. A most beneficial situation to us both. True love has never been sweeter.”

  Today, as they settled into their post-coital embraces of a Tuesday afternoon, he began grilling her the way he always did. For information, rumors, innuendo, and speculation. “I heard a member of your staff flew down to the Caymans. Coyote was spotted down there. Has she reported back?”

  “She’s only supposed to make contact. They used to work together. The idea is for her to stay in touch. Keep tabs on him. A soft connection.”

  “Will it work?”

  “He’s too smart for that.”

  “He’s too smart for his own good,” he said, growling. “Anything else I should know?”

  “Some woman met with foul play down there. A banker. Supposedly drowned. A certain John Fox is a person of interest.”

  “John Fox did you say?” He chuckled under his breath. “Maybe we won’t have to lift a finger. Just set out the bait and let him be the instrument of his own destruction.”

  “He’s too smart for that, too.”

  “Is he? Well, we’ll see about that. And this meeting with MonCom. Think anything will come of it?”

  “They’ll probably use us more than we use them.”

  “We’ll see about that, too. But what do I know? You’re closer to it than me.”

  “Like hell,” she said. “You know everything that’s going on.”

  He didn’t argue. “What I want to know ... and what others want to know ... is whether someone outside the Firm is beating us to the finish line.” He continued to pet her, his fat fingers raking back and forth, his fingernails lightly biting into her flesh. He played games like this before, just to see how far he could go and how much she would take before lashing out. She never did.

  It was such a stupid thing, letting him manipulate her the way he had. Too late now. HID was a small community after all, just a gathering of strangers who wouldn’t ordinarily associate with each other. To get ahead, she had to work with them and flatter them. Brandon had been terribly cheerful that night, terribly charming and terribly agreeable, the epitome of a gentlemen. He knew what he was doing. He was earning her trust. Once he had it, he sprang the trap. There was something sickening about his oily face, his permanent scowl, his snarling lips. She should have known he was a pervert and a cold-hearted bastard. Now that she knew what he was made of, she had to find a way to reverse their positions and cut herself loose. She might have to lie, cheat, steal, and maybe even kill. It was a heavy lift and a calculation that could backfire, but she had to know what he was up to. All of it. He was the link to others more powerful than those inside HID, even more powerful than Wally Reed. They were all musicians on a stage being led by a single conductor. Ripping away the mask of that conductor was going to be her salvation.

  Brandon must have read her mind. “No man drinks his coffee blacker than me. I want your heart, Liz Langdon, but you have only given me your body. I am a greedy man. And you are a stingy woman. I can see that now. Even if the seas rose and we were the only two left on this planet, you would still not surrender completely to me. Give me everything. Including your soul. Would you?”

  She lay still.

  “You can answer the question.”

  She whispered not a word and blinked not an eye.

  “Good men will do what they can, thinking it is enough,” he said, shrugging more to himself than to her. “Whereas evil men will do whatever they please, which is never enough. That is the difference between you and me. It is a fool who starts a fight he cannot hope to win. And I am not a fool. I win every time. And I win ugly.” He sighed. It was a long and defeated sigh, ringing with regrets of the man he could have been versus the man he was. “When I was a young man, I paved my future with good intentions. Now I am older and wiser. And shiftier. Remember that.”

  She lifted her head and looked into his eyes. They were smiling even though his mouth was not.

  “Every morning when I wake up, I vow to do good works but go to bed each night, celebrating the bad ones I have already done.” He bracketed her face between the meaty palms of his hands, quite gently, amazingly so. “I want you to worship at my feet and wash away my sins. Do it, Liz dear. Do it now.”

  She worshipped at his feet and washed away his sins, after which he lifted her up and wiped away her tears. “God does not exist. If He existed, he would have saved you from a man like me. He would have seen your worthiness and spared you. But He didn’t, did He? Therefore, He does not exist. We should get back to the office or people will begin to wonder.”

  “Let them wonder.” She pushed him back onto the bed and made love to him. This time he came, and in the coming, she felt relieved, knowing that she had made herself safe, from this moment until she plunged a knife into his breast and bathed herself in his blood.

  The coin had flipped. The odds were in her favor. She was the one in control. And she wasn’t going to cede that power. Ever.

  25

  Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman

  Tuesday, August 12

  WAITING FOR JUDGMENT is a tedious occupation. Hours creep by. Restlessness intercedes. More than eighty-six thousand seconds fill the arc of a day from sunup to sunup. Jack calculated he had sixty-eight thousand seconds remaining to this day. There was something poetic about the numeric symmetry.

  With nothing to do and nowhere to go until Inspector Collingsworth cleared him of murder and gave him leave to get off this wretched island full of ghosts, Jack had little to do but get pleasantly buzzed. And to maintain the buzz at the slim edge separating sobriety and inebriation, shot by measured shot. He chose to maintain his steady supply of alcohol at the pool bar, taking a seat at a small table on the shaded terrace to mark out the remaining seconds, thatched roof above, sea before him, and sun arcing overhead.

  After eating a late lunch, he retired to his room and fell into bed. The bedding smelled of bleach and sea air yet also retained the faint reminiscence of the seductive hotel maid of the wan eyes and doleful expression. Eventually he plunged into a deep sleep.

  The faces of dead people began to haunt him. He was careering down a shrouded path of twisted tree roots and jutting rocks. Branches slapped his cheeks and undergrowth tripped him at every turn. Unseen beasts scurried in the underbrush. Dry leaves rattled in the wind. Wolves howled forlornly. Snakes slithered underfoot. Danger crouched around every corner. Something nipped at his heels and chased him down a narrow path. The woods thickened. A girl screamed out. Her shouts were instantly muffled. Rifle shots fired in quick succession. Jack tripped and tumbled headlong, nothing to stop his fall but the ground coming up to meet his face.

  He awoke with a start, gasping for breath. In the dizzying aftermath of the nightmare, he pictured Milly in her final moments, when she knew Death was coming for her. Did she accept her fate, whisper a last soulful prayer, and go quietly? Or did she fight to the last breath? He knew the answer. She fought to her last breath, wailing on departure.

  He wiped sweat from his neck and cast his eyes around the room. Cobwebs occupied every corner. Terror of the unknown, Jack decided, was unproductive. He didn’t know what would happen in the next second, much less tomorrow morning. He couldn’t waste time thinking about the what-ifs. If he did, he would get torn up inside, unable to lift a fork to his mouth or piss into a urinal. It’s the gentle people who cannot survive, he decided. And Jack had been a fighter since drawing his first breath.

  He remembered a day in June when he was still an impressionable ten-year-old who adored his mother and obeyed his father without question. His parents were arguing. In a fit of temper, dad punched mom, leaving her crumpled on the living room carpet, out cold. If he had been a man, if he had strength en
ough, Jack would have killed his father right then, without guilt and with his bare hands. There had been a time when he could have been different, naïve and carefree and happy-go-lucky. The chance died on that day, when his mother lay sprawled on the floor, bruised and hurting. The boy grew into a man. The man was marked forever. He could not escape his past. He could only reshape his future.

  The rapping of a tentative knuckle on the door brought him fully awake. He heard himself say, “What?!” No one answered. He sank back, thinking the rat-a-tat-tats were remnants of his dreams. Since he had closed the patio blinds, everything lay in shadows except for tiny fingers of sunlight slipping through the slats and raking the walls. Outside, waves slapped onshore. Children played in the surf, giggling. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar. Everything was as it should be, everyone living full lives while Jack stood on the outside. He sniffed in bottomless breaths to calm his racing heart and exhaled each in a gust. He checked the clock on the bed stand. It was nearly three. Three in the afternoon? Or three in the evening? Afternoon, he decided, and shook his muddled head. He moved. In his hand, he gripped a makeshift cudgel, the base of one of the lamps strewn about the room, its shade and bulb removed and the electrical cord wound tightly around his fist, leaving impressions in his flesh. He had asked himself what possible use he could make of the improvised truncheon. Enough, he decided, to crush a man’s skull.

  The discreet rapping on the door returned along with the erratic thumping of his heart. It could have been the lovely Cecile, come to make love to him once again. Or Sheriff Benedicto, eager to take him back to Maryland, in chains if necessary. Or the Frenchman, come to play another game of feral cat and alley rat, torturing him with women dangling from his fingertips like charms from a bracelet.

  The knocking returned, more insistent now, along with a lilting voice, muffled through the door. “Jack? It’s me. Aneila. I know you’re in there. Open up.”

  He bounded across the room and squared his eye against the peephole. The distorted image in the glass had the look of Aneila, the mahogany hair of Aneila, the sunny eyes of Aneila, and the proud chin of Aneila. He cracked open the door, grabbed her delicate wrist into his cruel clutch, and flung her halfway across the room, locking the door in her wake.

  She landed on the mattress as he meant her to. She was disoriented and blinking up at the ceiling, panting rapidly, struggling to make sense out of what had just happened. Her friend turning on her. Her friend looking and acting like a madman.

  He was angry at her for coming to a place she didn’t belong, a place as unsafe for her as it was for him. Reconnoitering the room as if it were enemy territory, his eyes alert and his ears pricked up like a wolf’s, he climbed into his jeans. “How the fuck did you find me?”

  She elbowed herself up, peering across at him, her face dazed and her expression fearful. She beheld a man different than that fare-thee-well Jack Coyote fellow. She saw only this imposter. John Fox. A man resurrected from the dead. An intimidating man. A stranger. The blinds clacking gently against incoming breezes startled her enough to wrench around, suddenly skittish. She watched them settle benignly back into place. When she brought her eyesight back around, Jack was positioned with his back to the locked door, legs separated, hands suspended on either side of his body, fists clenched for a fight.

  “And why the fuck are you here?” He said the words harshly, accusingly. He wanted to disarm her. Trip her up. He already knew why she was here. And who sent her.

  She scooted to the other side of the bed, putting space between them. “I ... I only knew you were here in the Caymans. I didn’t know which hotel. Or what name you were using. I tried every hotel. Showed them your picture. The desk clerk recognized you.”

  He lurched toward the bed, loomed above her cowering figure, tightened his fists. Given his mood, he wouldn’t mind strangling her pretty little neck. Instead he took a step back. Unclenched his hands. He must have looked like one of those cartoon superheroes, eyes afire, muscles bulging, mouth scowling. In the softest tone he could muster, he said, “And who the fuck sent you?”

  She tossed her head. Defiant. Truculent. “Who do you think?” Raging with anger, she got up to confront him, sidling around the bed, meeting him face to face, pushing her eyes up to meet his downward glare.

  “I could kill you with my bare hands,” he said in a dark voice that didn’t sound like him.

  “Do it. And prove to me and everyone else you’re exactly the man they think you are.”

  “You fucking don’t get, do you? Another woman is dead because of me. Here. In paradise. Excuse me for not wanting anything to happen to you.”

  She wasn’t surprised by his news. “How did she die?”

  He wondered why she wasn’t surprised. Then he understood. While death had a way of following him around, she probably heard the whispers all over the island. “Drowned.”

  “The hell she drowned. She was killed. Like Milly.”

  He answered her assertion with a sardonic grin.

  She shivered before saying, “Who was she?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does to me. It’ll be in the news sooner or later. Probably sooner.”

  “A banker.”

  She nodded slowly, aligning facts in her mind. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? The fifty million.”

  He ran a hand through his hair and glanced at the patio door, envisioning the body of a beautiful woman found floating in the surf like a beached whale. “They had to shut her up.”

  “You’re following the money.”

  “They sent you. Liz and Camilla and Angie. Didn’t they?”

  She lowered herself onto the bed, palms braced flat on the mattress, head bent down, incapable of looking him straight in the eye.

  The evidence had been in plain sight, only he was too cocky, too boastful of his skills, too taken up with his little game of smoke and mirrors that he hadn’t seen it before. They were onto him from the beginning. After setting him up, they worked the system to put him away for good, coming at him from every angle, hounding him every step of the way. Sending out henchmen and assassins and beguiling women, each meant to trip him up, slow him down, and corner him.

  “Angie wanted me to convince you to give yourself up. Says she doesn’t want you to get hurt. And you will get hurt if you don’t turn yourself in.”

  “Turn myself into you?”

  She hesitated before shaking her head. “I don’t think I could. It ... it would be a betrayal of our friendship.”

  He was exhausted. Past exhaustion. “You don’t flinch from anything, do you?”

  “Never.” Her face was defiant, her eyes narrowed, her shoulders quaking with emotion. But she wasn’t afraid of him. She should have been. She should have been afraid of everyone. He wanted to shake her, slap her around, and send her packing with a souvenir, like a punch in the jaw or a kiss upon her pursed lips, whatever it took to knock some sense into her. “You do know you’re in over your head. You do know they’ll stop at nothing. They mean business.”

  He stomped towards her, grabbed her by the upper arm, and yanked her towards the door. “You did your duty. Now go home and tell them to fuck off.”

  She wrested herself out of his grip. “Don’t you understand? They know you’re here. They’ve been tracking your movements. They didn’t order me to, but I could tell they want me to pump you for information. To pretend I’m on your side. It wouldn’t have been hard since I already am. I don’t like this any more than you do. I don’t trust them. I don’t know who to trust. I don’t even know if I can trust you.”

  Something about her earnestness. Her damned pride. Her fearlessness. They got to him. He went up to her. Knuckled up her chin. Gave her a chaste kiss on her mouth. And then another kiss, not as chaste as the first. Something in her eyes made him stop. He once thought her eyes dark and unfathomable, but they were a subtle shade of cocoa and clear as dawn. She blinked. And blinked again to keep tears from spilling out. She s
earched his face. Whatever she saw caused the tears to finally flow down her cheeks. Soundlessly. Mournfully. She reached up and bracketed his head between the cool palms of her hands, locking her eyes onto him before tugging him against her, there to quell his fears as a mother quells the fears of a child who just skinned his knee.

  They tumbled onto the bed together. Jack tasted the saltiness of her tears. To be in the arms of this lady was like sailing into the calm waters of a harbor. He loosened her hair from pins and ornaments, and let the strands fall around her face. Nothing could come of a fling, just the opposite since only heartbreak would follow. They both knew it. They parted, still lying on the bed, not touching, on their backs and blinking up at the ceiling.

  “They had a powwow with MonCom. Camilla and Angie and Liz. You’ve heard of them, right?”

  “Monetary Compliance Network?” he said. “About what?”

  “Give me your laptop.” She reached into her back pocket and palmed a jump drive. “Hurry up. My flight leaves in an hour.”

  Suspicious, and not quite trusting her, Jack wondered what was going on. Reluctantly he dragged the laptop from his backpack and handed it over. She regarded him shyly. The moment when both could have clung to each other and left their fears behind had passed. She put her hair back up, winding around the shiny tresses and securing clips, a mirror unnecessary to make everything come out like a fashion plate.

  She looked over at him, catching the look on his face, almost embarrassed by his nearness. “Password?”

  He had to laugh, he wasn’t sure at what, and gave her his login credentials.

  “They sent me down here on a hunch. My eye, it was a hunch. Someone tipped them off. Maybe your dead banker. Maybe someone else.”