Shadow Code (A John Kovac Thriller Book 2) (John Kovac Thriller Series)

by David Caris

‘Unboxing and tech reviews – for YouTube. We’re starting a channel.’

  ‘You and dopey here?’

  She nodded, still more defiant than scared.

  ‘So you do know him.’

  She said nothing.

  Malone had fallen asleep again and Kovac decided to let him be for now.

  ‘You know what else I found up in your crawlspace?’ He lifted out another block of plastic-wrapped Euros. ‘Plane tickets, in your name. You’re due to go to Vienna tomorrow. You and Malone, though he’s going to be dead.’ Kovac took out the two tickets. ‘So, six million euro in a mix of denominations, trending smaller rather than larger. And two people looking to get out of Dodge. Here’s my favorite clue, you have a counting machine up there, too.’ He pointed skyward. ‘What does all of that spell to you?’

  He waited a few seconds.

  Griffin gave him a sulky shrug.

  ‘Laundering,’ he said. ‘Tough riddle to solve, but we got there in the end.’

  ‘Screw you,’ Griffin spat. ‘I already told you I don’t know anything about –’

  ‘If I was a cop, Griffin, this is where I’d take a break. I’d go and get a coffee and let you sweat on it for a few minutes – reconsider those blanket denials. Outside, I’d tell anyone interested that I have a few good leads. To any journalists hanging round, I’d say “the investigation’s ongoing”. In other words, if I were a cop, I’d play the long and cagey game. But I’m not a cop. I’m on the clock here.’ Kovac stood and tapped the floor with the putter. ‘I’m at an address you gave me. Which means there’s every chance you want me here.’

  ‘I don’t want you here.’

  ‘Good news is, I don’t have to be here much longer.’

  She frowned but said: ‘Good.’

  ‘For me, yes. For you, not so much. Because I’m the guy with the putter, and you’re the woman tied to a heater.’

  Her voice quavered. ‘Where are you from? Your accent, you sound… are you American?’

  ‘You don’t get to ask questions.’

  She persisted. ‘English? You said you played rugby? Australian?’ I’ll be able to identify you, whoever you are. And I bet police –’

  ‘Says the woman with six million euros in her attic.’ Kovac took up position in front of Griffin, his feet a little apart, as if about to sink a putt. Because of the restraints, her curved lower back was facing him. She twisted her head again, staring back over one shoulder at him. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Which vertebrae?’ Kovac asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The herniated disk, which vertebrae?’

  Chapter 24

  She didn’t understand at first. Then she did. ‘No,’ she said, her voice suddenly taught. She was pleading. ‘Please.’

  ‘Look at it this way, it’ll be one less thing you’re lying about. A legitimate back injury in two hits, three tops. I’d prefer a driver, but I’m confident a putter can get this done. Par three.’

  ‘Don’t. I beg you.’

  ‘If you’re going to hold out on me, Griffin, I at least have to make sure you don’t speak to anyone else. I’ll start with your back, and after you’re done talking, I’ll finish with your mouth.’

  Griffin had her eyes hard to the left in their sockets, fixated on the club. Her eyelids were peeled back wide, unblinking. Her mouth was open as if to plead again, but the horror of her situation seemed to hit home. She closed her mouth and swallowed hard.

  Kovac waited.

  She made an unexpected choice. Her solution wasn’t to talk. Instead, she twisted her whole body, so that she was lying on her back. She was still in the fetal position, still with her hands and feet tied to the heater, so this new position looked uncomfortable. Kovac stepped forward and slipped one foot under her lower hip, bringing her back down onto her side and exposing her spine once again. She tried to twist away a second time, so Kovac put a foot on her knees. ‘Nothing to say?’ he asked. He took a half swing as practice.

  ‘Okay okay,’ she said. ‘But you let us both go. You have to promise to let us both go.’

  Kovac looked to the unconscious Malone. ‘Hear that, Malone? She does care.’

  ‘You have to promise me.’

  Kovac had often found himself in this situation, and it never made the least bit of sense to him. Confronted with bodily harm, potential victims invariably asked for assurances. As if there was no way for him to go back on his word… ‘On my mother’s grave,’ he said.

  ‘What’s her name?’ Griffin asked.

  This caught him off guard. Kovac routinely swore on his mother’s grave and no one had ever asked for her name. ‘Her name?’

  ‘Yes. What’s her name?’

  Kovac thought about his mother. Not in the abstract. He pictured her as she had been just before her death. He had lost his mother at age eight, three years before joining a gang. Ancient history, and none of Griffin’s business.

  He raised the club, but hesitated. His mind had leaped back in time without his permission again. For an instant, he wasn’t standing over Griffin, but over his own, eleven-year-old body. He was suddenly one of the boys who had delivered the initiation punches and kicks all those years ago, to a boy who would do anything to have a family again.

  Even join a gang.

  He lowered the golf club.

  ‘Is she alive?’ Griffin asked, doubling down on her success.

  ‘My mother? Sure,’ Kovac lied.

  ‘The two of you close?’ Hope returned to Griffin’s voice now.

  Were they close? Kovac’s mother had abandoned him long before she died. She had gone from a size ten to a size four after her cancer diagnosis. It was in her mouth, her tongue, her throat, too. Her life had become endless medical appointments, as she fought for time she didn’t have and accrued debts Kovac’s father would never repay. Somewhere in that journey, surgeons took most of the tongue. She lost the ability to speak, and was silent save for occasional guttural howls of frustration, rage or fear – Kovac didn’t know which. He had hidden at such times. What else was there to do? His mother couldn’t sign. Nor could he. They were reduced to improvised gestures, to pen on paper. He had vivid memories of begging her to write. But whatever she was thinking, feeling, it only ever found expression in those howls. It was that or silence, and he had never been sure which he hated most.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Griffin asked. She swallowed hard again, then gave a small sniff. ‘Please, let me go.’

  Kovac crouched. ‘You want to know where I’m from? Bushwick. That’s where.’

  She tried to shunt herself back from him.

  ‘You haven’t heard of it, have you? Brooklyn. My mother loved it there. She was part Puerto Rican, and Bushwick was Latino back then. Black too, but heavily Latino. A rough area to grow up.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘My mother died when I was eight. I joined a gang. I killed a kid. That’s how I got my start. You know what they say, Griffin. If you want to get good at something, start young and practice. Every day is best. We are our habits. So I made it my career. Are we getting to know each other yet?’

  ‘I’ll never tell anyone about this. I swear.’

  Kovac stood, noticing she wasn’t offering to speak. She was offering to keep quiet. ‘On your mother’s grave?’ he asked. ‘Because if she’s still alive, I’ll find her, too. I’ll track her down and kill her, then kill everyone you ever loved because I’m OCD like that. I don’t stop until everything lines up just the way I think it should.’ He bent down and picked up the card with the German-looking address, waggling it at her before pocketing it. ‘I know you’re up to your neck in this, Griffin, so quit wasting my time.’

  Griffin started crying, started sobbing in fact. Kovac had expected this long before now – a mental collapse of sorts – and he was ready for it. He put the putter into Griffin’s open mouth, pressing on it with one toe to drive it in and choke her. She began to gag, but kept sobbing. When she finally tried to
scream it came out as a choking howl.

  Kovac winced. The sound that came out of Griffin was uncannily similar to his mother, and it sent him reeling back mentally and physically. He didn’t come to a stop until the back of his legs hit the washing machine built into the kitchenette at the other side of the room. He reached back for the benchtop and rested his palms on it, stabilizing himself. He hadn’t realized just what a mess he was, not until now, not until he tried to work again. Murdering Bennett had robbed him of his ability to switch off, to shut out distractions and get the job done.

  He took out his phone and pulled up Megan’s number. He stared at it a moment, then pressed the button to call.

  She answered almost immediately. ‘Kovac?’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This was a mistake. I can’t help you.’

  ‘I won’t be able to protect you from the police Kovac, nor the media.’

  ‘Do your worst.’

  He waited. He could hear her breathing, could practically hear her thinking.

  Eventually, she said: ‘Just meet with me. Tell me what you’ve found so far, and if you still want out after that, fine. I’ll do whatever I can to make it happen. We owe you that.’

  He was staring across the room at Griffin, who was still crying. He realized there was an easier way. He strode back across the room, putting the phone on speaker as he went. He switched off the screen, crouched and set it down on the floor a few feet in front of Griffin’s mouth. ‘I might have been bluffing,’ he said, ‘but the individual on the other end of this line will kill you. So you’ve got two choices. You can say nothing and stare at this phone until someone shows up at the door with plyers and a pistol. Or you can talk and go on talking until you’ve said everything you know, and hope it’s enough.’

  Griffin studied his eyes, blinking out tears, then nodded her understanding.

  Kovac stood and started back towards the ply door he had kicked in.

  He took a last look at Griffin.

  Her eyes were red and full of tears, and she blinked them out furiously, so as to focus on Malone.

  Malone was still out cold.

  She would speak or she wouldn’t. Kovac didn’t care anymore.

  He opened the door, which didn’t take much effort given the state it was in, and started down the staircase.

  Chapter 25

  Kovac made his way down the stairs and out into the street. He adjusted his shirt, checking there was no print from his pistol, then crossed to the Superleggera. He opened it, only to realize he was done with it. He locked it again and started walking. One block, two, three… on and on.

  He dropped the Superleggera’s fob into a drain, then kept on towards noise, towards lights and advertisements and whatever else looked like it might still be open at this hour. The sky was spitting rain again, and he was hungry. He needed somewhere to take cover – somewhere to sit, eat and think.

  There was a time in Kovac’s past where Brixton would have put him on edge – roughly the same era Kovac was getting around with a push-button Nokia. Not anymore. The more he walked tonight, the more he saw how much the area had gentrified. Locals mixed with Europeans and tourists alike, and everything was roughly double the price Kovac considered reasonable.

  It was late, but the area still had plenty of partygoers. They were at that strange point in an evening where talking into phone cameras and spontaneously dancing in the street seemed perfectly natural. Conversations went from whispers to explosions of shouting, then to raucous laughter and back to whispering. All in the space of ten seconds. Most of the restaurants Kovac passed were closed. He got the feeling that a majority of the people left in Brixton’s streets at this hour – all young, all intoxicated – were from other parts of London. A few clubs were still open, all with burly men on the doors. But the upstairs windows on most buildings were dark, presumably filled with sleeping families.

  He stepped around a girl in a short red skirt and jean jacket, ignoring the men she was with when they asked him for a cigarette. He crossed the street and, short for food choices, settled on KFC. He ordered a value something-or-other and chose a table towards the rear of the store. He sat with his back to a corner, monitoring everyone who came and went.

  He realized he was shaken up, his hands trembling ever so slightly. But maybe that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He had just about hit a woman in the spine with a golf club. How the hell had he ended up at that point so quickly…?

  He waited until his food was ready, then stood and collected it, before returning to his little corner. He unpacked his chicken, settling a little as he started into it.

  He was out, he resolved. He was out, because he was going to keep his promise to himself and move on from a life of killing… At the end of the day, it was that simple. In or out. He had been fooling himself, making deals with Megan, with Curzon, like an alcoholic drinking low-alcohol beer. He wasn’t in control. He hadn’t been bluffing with the putter and he knew it.

  He went on chewing, hardly tasting it. He looked around at the other customers, and it occurred to him that he had never been above society so much as outside it. Rule of law was the price of entry?

  Or maybe it was too late for Kovac. Even now, he was scanning for threats. He saw people’s height, their weight, the way they carried themselves, and the nearest object that could be converted to a weapon. And all of it on autopilot… Would he ever switch that off?

  No.

  But he could choose not to use it.

  He finished eating, wiping at his mouth with a paper napkin. Then he rose, dumped his trash and walked out of the store, comfortable with his choice. He didn’t know if it was possible to find his way back to a normal life, but Curzon wasn’t the right path. He knew that much. They didn’t have his interests at heart. They didn’t even have his back. He had learned that in Japan, in the hardest way possible, and worst of all it hadn’t even been him who paid the price. It had been a woman who was doing some good in the world, a woman Kovac had executed in cold blood.

  Unforgivable, he reminded himself.

  He kept walking, picking up speed, happy with his choice until, five blocks on, he realized his mind was back on Malone.

  He had been thinking about the way Malone jumped off the roof. Who did that? And what about Griffin? She was the same. Kovac had given her an ultimatum and, far from talking, she had chosen to roll onto her back and take the blows to her side. Two people risking permanent, debilitating injury to avoid talking to him…

  Kovac could only see one logical explanation for that. He stopped dead in his tracks, as the words came to him. They feared someone more than they feared him.

  He half-turned, contemplating backtracking, already doubting everything he had decided, and that was when he saw the car veer from the road.

  Chapter 26

  It was an Uber, but Kovac didn’t know that until it was halfway up onto the pavement, a few feet shy of his knees.

  Megan got out of the back seat. ‘Okay, what’s with messing me around? We had an agreement, Kovac.’

  ‘You’re tracking me now?’

  ‘No. But I can track my stolen car. It took five phone calls and more than an hour on hold to call centers – but hey, persistence pays off.’ She waved an arm across Brixton, her expression giving him a sarcastic “yay”.

  ‘That doesn’t get you here.’

  ‘True. Driving in circles looking for a six-foot-two asshole gets me here.’

  ‘In an Uber?’

  ‘In an Uber, yes.’ She reached in and paid the driver, and he reversed out a little before encountering traffic and waiting. He sat with his indicator on, his wipers squeaking every few seconds as they ran across the wet windshield.

  Kovac turned and started walking again. ‘I’m out.’

  ‘Were you going to call an ambulance?’ Megan yelled after him.

  ‘I wasn’t hurt that bad.’

  ‘Not you. The two people you tied
to a heater and left to die.’

  He glanced back at her, still walking. ‘They did that to themselves.’

  ‘Riiiiight. And the guy you beat up? He slipped?’

  ‘He jumped off a roof. Go home, Megan.’

  But as soon as Kovac said this, he was struck by a question. How did Megan know about the heater? He stopped again, frowning. ‘You went into the apartment? How did you know which one it was?’

  ‘I remembered the number, just not the street. My car gave me that.’

  The rain suddenly picked up, drumming on the Uber’s roof. It was still waiting for a break in what, for the driver, must have been a frustrating string of cars. Kovac ran a hand through his wet hair. He was going to get drenched and knew his pistol would show. He flapped his shirt out and managed to get back to the Uber as it found a gap and tried to drive forward. If the driver had looked irritated before, he was pissed now.

  Kovac banged on the roof, and Megan immediately joined him, doing the same. She opened a door and Kovac got in. She followed him and they both ended up staring at each other across the back seat, ignoring the driver, who didn’t want to be ignored.

  He spun on them, letting them have it. He was a guy in his sixties, who looked like he was an accountant by day and an accountant with an Uber by night. ‘If you won’t get out, you’ll need to put an address in.’ He pointed to Kovac’s pocket, clearly believing there was a phone there, and finally saw the outline of the Glock.

  ‘Just drive,’ Kovac said. ‘I’ll pay you in cash when we arrive.’

  ‘Arrive where?’

  ‘At the place where I get out and pay you in cash.’

  He shrugged, less sure of himself now, and checked his mirrors again before pulling out onto the street and accelerating.

  ‘You went into the apartment?’ Kovac asked Megan. ‘Reckless.’

  ‘I’m not stupid, Kovac. Bishop left me with a few phone numbers.’

  ‘What, for men like me?’

  ‘Similar to you, yes.’

  ‘And yet you drive around Brixton looking for me on your own?’

  ‘I brought one bodyguard – the same one I sent up into the apartment. He’s phoned an ambulance for the pair you left up there, by the way. He’s headed to the hospital with them. He said the man has one of the worst concussions he’s ever seen.’