‘Really?’ Jon said. ‘Then how did you find me?’
Oh, he knows, Dasha thought. He’s guessed already that it was Nassri who gave me his name. And if he decides to take out that pervert in revenge, it won’t cause me any sleepless nights.
‘I’ll leave that to you to decide,’ she said, stretching her arms along the back of the sofa. ‘All I really need to say is that my husband needs to be eliminated, and soon.’
Before the divorce goes through, she meant. So that I can inherit everything.
‘If you agree, I’ll call off the dogs. If you don’t, they’ll keep digging,’ she finished. ‘It all depends on how deep you’ve buried your bodies.’
‘You’re very confident, Mrs Khalovsky,’ Jon said, still not moving from his position in the kitchen; here he was perfectly placed to survey the whole area, to keep both the front door and Dasha in full view. His voice didn’t change, either. But something altered, in his posture, in his manner. Dasha couldn’t have described it, but she knew exactly how it felt; as if a cold wind were sweeping her way, enveloping her in an icy chill. His body seemed tauter, as if on the brink of action, every muscle tightening imperceptibly, making him, if anything, even more still.
This is the most dangerous man I’ve ever met, Dasha realised. And I’ve dealt with some real gangsters in my time.
‘My investigators have instructions that if I disappear, or die in any kind of accident, they’re to double their efforts,’ she said, managing to preserve her own equilibrium in the face of the tangible threat now emanating from the man she was threatening.
He’s twenty feet away, and he could break my neck in half a second, she knew. I must judge this even more carefully than I anticipated.
‘And what will they do with this information if you disappear?’ Jon asked softly.
‘They’ll take it to my husband,’ Dasha said firmly. ‘And tell him I was investigating you because I was concerned about your presence in the same building as him. I thought he might be in danger.’
‘You’re threatening me with your husband?’ Jon’s arms hung loosely by his sides, as they had for the entire exchange; only someone as well trained as he would have been able to avoid the temptation to fidget, to shove them in his pockets or fold them across his chest. ‘Somehow, I think you’re the scarier one in the marriage.’
Hah! He’s no fool, either! He’s quite right. Women are always more devious. More treacherous. More unscrupulous.
In this game of verbal chess, he had the advantage of not showing his expression. Dasha couldn’t help the corners of her mouth flicking up in a swift, amused acknowledgement of the truth of his observation.
‘So, Mr Cunningham,’ she said, using his name in a further attempt to rattle him. ‘What’s your answer? Do you kill my husband for me, or do I let my PIs keep going? I only found out about your existence yesterday. What will they find out if I give them a solid week to work on your riddle?’
‘You’ve got me between a rock and a hard place,’ Jon observed. ‘Okay. I’ll take care of Mr Khalovsky for you.’
Dasha nodded: she hadn’t expected him to say anything else.
‘Make it look like an accident,’ she specified. ‘Nothing must come back on me.’
He would have raised his eyebrows if he could.
Lady, you think I’m going to walk in there and shoot him in the head, hitman-style? Are you crazy? Why would I want people looking for a possible murderer in Limehouse Reach? Best thing is a slip and fall in the shower. Happens to hundreds of people every year, and no one ever questions it...
But instead, he asked as calmly as ever:
‘How do I know this will even our account?’
She stood up, pulling down her skirt. ‘I’ve only spent a quarter of an hour with you, Mr Cunningham,’ she said, ‘and I have learnt that I don’t want to be on your wrong side any more than I am now. You do what I want, and I close the book for ever. And the detectives I’ve hired will follow along. They’re not men of action. Not like you. They won’t want to get on your wrong side either.’
Dasha walked towards the door, barely managing to repress a shiver as she passed him. She had met only two other men who had the same ice-cold energy. One was a Chechen contract killer, the other a CIA assassin. And this man made her more nervous than either of them.
Jon retrieved her coat and bag, tossing them to her.
‘Don’t come back here,’ he said shortly as she opened it to leave. ‘Ever.’
Oh, believe me, Dasha thought as she left, you don’t need to worry about that. I will do my absolute best never, ever to be alone with you again.
Jon
He was livid. Absolutely livid. His fists clenched, his jaw trying to set hard, fighting the pain from the recent surgery, he paced back and forth across the living room, up and down the wide expanse. The stunning views of the towers of Canary Wharf, dazzling sunshine glinting off the glass windows, glittering on the water of the Thames in the boat basin below, might as well have been blank white walls. He had managed to keep himself calm and controlled during Dasha’s visit, but she had sensed how much danger she was potentially in, and she had been right.
If I hadn’t made a vow that I would never kill another human being, I swear to God, I’d have snapped her neck like a twig, cut her up in the bath, dropped her in weighted bin liners down the rubbish chute in the middle of the night and then slipped down to dispose of her in the river, he thought savagely. Blackmailers are the scum of the earth.
But I made that vow when I became Jon Jordan, and if I don’t keep it, my new life literally has no meaning. The whole point of it is that I’ve stopped the killing. For ever.
In his seven-year freelance career, Jon had made a great deal of money, and he had saved almost all of it. Enough to live on for the rest of his life. His tastes weren’t extravagant, and he’d done his sums carefully. A year ago, he’d bought a ranch in Montana. Beautiful country, wide-open – so Jon could see any old enemies coming – but close enough to the Rocky Mountains to make an Appalachian hill-boy feel at home. He was planning to raise horses, maybe pigs too. He liked pigs. They were smart. He’d fly-fish, hike the Rockies, and white-water kayak. Maybe hunt a little, but not that much. He’d concentrate on ranching. Enough living things had died at his hands; now he’d see how good he was at raising them instead. There’d be more than enough to do, and he was far enough away from town so he didn’t have to see a single living soul for months if he didn’t want to.
Jon had long ago given up any hope of trusting anyone enough to ever share his life with them. His early years had turned him into a pathologically private, self-contained loner. If the Unit had deliberately set out to create a perfect candidate for their assassin training programme, they couldn’t have done better. Jon’s mother’s refusal to protect her children from their violent, brutal father had been the tipping point; when Jon had begun to suspect that she was actually grateful that her husband was beating their sons instead of her, that was when he really shut down, stopped trusting anyone. Relied solely upon himself.
Even by the standards of the hardscrabble life in the Appalachian hills, Mac Mackenzie had been a brutal husband and father. The only reason Ma didn’t have the usual passel of kids is that Mac kicked her in the womb when she was pregnant for the third time and broke everything in there for good. She should’ve left then. Aunt Eileen offered to take her in and make sure Mac didn’t come by to haul Ma back. Even Mac had to knuckle down to Aunt Eileen if she laid down the law.
But Ma wouldn’t go. And that meant we couldn’t either. That was how things worked up in hill country. You stayed with your pa and ma, no matter what kind of job they were doing.
That was when I stopped trying to protect Ma. She was a lost cause. And that’s when I started calling him Mac, not Pa.
He’d taken plenty of blows for it, but then he was getting bounced off the walls anyway on a regular basis. When he was thirteen, and Mac was belting him till he bled, Mac had
yelled that his older son was just like him, that Mac was beating Jon because he was the spitting image of his father, and that taking the belt to Jon was like hitting himself. Liar, Jon had thought furiously. Liar. And hypocrite. If you wanted to hit yourself, go right ahead. Punch yourself in the jaw. Ask me to take a two-by-four to you if you need a bit more weight behind it.
Jon shook his head, jerking himself out of the memories of his childhood. Why the hell did that all come back? I haven’t thought about them in years. It’s being on my own like this, with nothing to do. Too much time on your hands isn’t ever healthy.
Well, I’ve sure as hell got something to do now. Figure out how to get out of this mess I’m in.
Dasha Khalovsky didn’t realise it, but what she was holding over Jon’s head was the worst threat she could have conceivably come up with. The Unit – the highly secret CIA black-ops division for which Jon had been an operative for a decade – was the only entity that Jon truly feared.
If they ever find out that I’m still alive, there’ll be hell to pay. As carefully, as meticulously as he had covered his tracks when he faked his own death, Jon couldn’t take the smallest, most infinitesimal risk that his old CIA handlers could find out that he was still alive. You didn’t leave the Unit. You couldn’t. You died in harness; or, if you were clever and lucky, you got promoted up the ladder to be a handler yourself. Telling them who to kill, setting up targets for assassination. Whole families sometimes, if you couldn’t get your quarry any other way.
Well, no thank you. Not any more.
Jon wasn’t confident that he could outrun the reach of the CIA’s death squads if they were sent after him. No one could do that for ever.
That Russian woman’s got me in a chokehold. Kill or be killed. I swore I wouldn’t kill, and I’m damn well not going to be killed... so where the hell does that leave me?
The doorbell rang. For a split-second, Jon thought it was Dasha, and he spun towards the door, a cold rage rising inside him. Don’t let her in, he knew immediately. You can’t trust yourself right now.
And then he glanced over at the clock projected on the wall, and realised what time it was.
Aniela. Perfectly on time.
He couldn’t help his lips twisting in an ironic smile as he walked towards the door. His slip of the tongue yesterday, telling Aniela he was a kind of escapologist, now paled into insignificance compared with the situation Dasha Khalovsky had dumped in his lap today: now I have a death threat hanging over my head, I’m not exactly going to let my guard down to Aniela any more...
But as he pulled open the door and saw her standing there, calm and composed in her simple white uniform, fair hair scraped back from her wide forehead, her pale eyes regarding him as seriously as before, he felt the same tilting sense of disorientation that he had experienced before.
What is it about this woman? he couldn’t help asking himself. Why does she get me feeling like this?
‘Come in,’ he said brusquely, turning away, determined to look at her as little as possible.
It’s because she’s a nurse, he told himself. That whole cheesy fantasy that she’ll take care of you, minister to your needs, look after you when you’re weak and vulnerable.
Yeah, that’s all it is. I need to deal with this crap, get a handle on it once and for all, and bury it deep. The last thing I need with this crisis on my hands is any sort of external distraction. I’ll let her change my bandages and get the hell out in five minutes flat.
Jon strode to the usual chair on which he sat while his wound was checked, turning it at an angle to the door so he couldn’t see her enter the apartment.
Ah, crap! he thought. He was deliberately wrenching his thoughts away from Aniela, detaching himself from her physical closeness by working through the consequences of the visit he’d just had: this means I can’t use Jon Jordan after I leave London! It’s been compromised. Dasha Khalovsky knows what name I had surgery under. Dammit!
It would be easy enough for him to get a new passport under whatever name he chose: his contacts were well-established all over the world. But he’d spent a lot of time coming up with the name Jordan, had been really satisfied with its symbolism: the crossing of the river, like a baptism that would wash him clean, let him purge away his sins, make a fresh start. And he had felt confident that the security and discretion of the Canary Clinic – plus the debt Nassri owed him – would keep the name hidden for ever.
Just goes to show – you can’t trust anyone. He glanced sideways at Aniela, setting his lips tightly. Remember that, he told himself. You can’t trust anyone at all.
Aniela
‘Y ou’re agitated,’ Aniela said immediately as she closed the door behind her.
She watched him as he stalked to the chair and sat down. It might not have been visible to someone else, but his energy levels were through the roof. His body was vibrating like a tuning fork, sending off a distress signal that she could hear as clearly as if it had given out an audible sound.
‘Something has happened,’ she stated, frowning. ‘Something bad. Is anything wrong with your head? Are you in pain?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he said, glancing briefly towards her and then away again. His face was so bashed around she couldn’t have told from his expression what he was thinking, but she didn’t need to see it; the set of his shoulders, the tense lines of his body were telling her everything she needed to know. ‘I’m fine.’
‘No, you’re not,’ she said firmly. ‘I need to take your blood pressure. I will get the monitor.’
The apartments owned by the Clinic were equipped with basic medical hardware for the nurses’ use; Aniela wheeled the trolley with the blood pressure monitor on it from the hallway cupboard and set it up with quick, efficient movements. Jon was wearing another of his short-sleeved crisp white T-shirts, and as she rolled up the sleeve to his shoulder to make room for the blood pressure cuff, she smelt fabric conditioner wafting from it, light and fresh-scented.
He changes and washes his clothes every day, she realised, glancing to the open door of the bathroom, where a rack of white T-shirts, sweatpants and – she blushed – what looked like white boxer briefs were ranged neatly on a drying rack in front of the towel rail. He’s meticulous. She thought for a second of Lubo, stinky, slobby Lubo, lounging around the apartment, drinking and smoking and eating stinky takeaway food, not washing his clothes for days on end: the comparison between him and Jon was so harsh that she cringed in embarrassment.
Jon’s arm was taut and rippled with lean muscle, his freckles distractingly delicate over the bicep that was swollen up like an anatomy drawing, and the tricep that was as hard as iron as she pulled the plastic cuff taut around it and Velcro’d it into place. The image of Lubo’s saggy, lardy frame flashed into her mind again, no matter how much she tried to hold it off, and she wrinkled her forehead in a grimace of disgust. She darted quickly behind Jon, ostensibly to pull the monitor into place so that he could see it too, but really so that he wouldn’t catch her expression.
‘What the hell makes you think I’m agitated?’ he asked as she came into view again. He sounded cross now. ‘I said I’m fine.’
‘Nurse’s instinct,’ she said, starting to inflate the cuff with the rubber pump. ‘Just relax as much as possible, please.’
‘I don’t get it,’ he said, sounding even crosser. ‘I don’t get why the hell you—’
‘Shh! Relax!’
Briefly, much to her own surprise, she reached out and fleetingly laid one finger to his lips. His mouth was the one part of his face that wasn’t bruised like a rotting apple. That was totally unprofessional, she thought instantly, horrified, dragging her hand back. He could report me for that. There’s something about this man that makes me act like a stupid schoolgirl... Oh Jesus, I’m still pumping up the cuff! I’d have cut off his circulation by now if he didn’t have such good muscle tone!
Freezing her grip on the pump, she took a deep breath and read t
he figures off the monitor.
‘A hundred and fifteen over seventy,’ she announced with great relief. ‘You are perfect.’ She gulped. ‘I mean—’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, and now there was a thread of amusement in his voice. ‘You’re very kind.’
‘Your blood pressure is perfect!’ Aniela said, her voice rising in a way she never normally allowed. She ripped off the cuff with a frantic pull and dropped it on the monitor, clattering the pump down on top of it. ‘This is what we see in athletes – a blood pressure reading this low. It is excellent.’
She took another deep breath.
‘I should check your heart rate too,’ she said, walking round the trolley, tilting her left wrist to look at her watch as her right hand took his, her fingers sliding round his wrist, finding his pulse with practised ease.
Aniela had been a nurse for almost a decade now; she had taken heart-rate readings so many times that she had often said she could have done it in her sleep. His vein was pulsing beneath the pads of her fingers, a strong, regular beat; it should have been the easiest thing in the world to count them against six seconds and multiply by ten. Automatic, her training kicking in without even exercising her conscious brain; and in fact, her conscious brain was being eclipsed by her body, which was insisting on being heard. Her own heartbeat was pounding, fast and furious, as if her heart were swelling up enough to knock against her ribcage; that’s why I’m having such a hard time taking his pulse – I can’t hear it over my own... his hand in mine, the intimacy of this touch, it’s overwhelming...
‘Nearly eighty!’ she said, finally managing to take a reading. She dropped his hand as fast as if it were on fire. ‘That’s a little high – well, higher than I would have expected for such a low blood pressure reading – athletes are usually below sixty-five. Not that I’m saying you’re an athlete – well, you’re very fit—’ She took hold of herself, drawing in a deep breath. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’
Bad Angels Page 12