“That still leaves two, Hayden and Cameron.”
“Wild cards,” she said. “You’re not going to get that Tallinn file in time, are you?”
“Unlikely,” I admitted. “But now I have a recording of Conrad and Fritz talking about it and whether it leaked. They also talk about ‘getting rid of’ a scientist in Estonia. But tell me something: What if I do get the file? What will you do with it?”
“You’ve asked me that before.”
“Humor me.”
“I trigger an inquest and criminal investigation, and families of victims will get compensated. And, yes, justice is done.”
“Okay.”
“I just know,” she said, “that if we don’t dig up a copy of the Tallinn study, my father will be unstoppable.”
“We still have two days. Anything can happen.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” She paused, looked at me. “Why do I get the feeling there’s stuff you’re not telling me?”
“I’m not?”
“Like what you’re up to. What you’re doing. What’s going on.”
“That’s not part of the deal,” I said.
“But I hired you.”
“And fired me and hired me again. But you asked me to get you a particular file. Not to tell you how I was going to do it.”
“Do you not trust me?”
“Of course I do. I’m protecting you. There are things I don’t want you to know because it’s better for you if you don’t. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Our drinks arrived. She took a sip of her margarita and then said, “I’m not—how do I say this?—I’m not great about trusting other people, as you’ve probably surmised. I’m starting to feel close to you, and warning sirens are going off in my head, Danger, danger. Because I don’t want to get burned. Again. So if you’re going to betray me, let me know now.”
“Betray you?”
“Everyone has an agenda.”
“And what do you imagine mine is?”
After a moment, she shook her head. She didn’t know, and she didn’t answer.
The sun was bright on the beach, and the interior of the shack, a hundred feet away, was shadowed. I was able to see a hulking figure enter the shack and talk to the bartender.
“I need to know I can trust you,” she said. “It’s so hard for me.” She hesitated. “You’re not like anyone else I’ve known.”
“Let me ask you something. Sort of difficult. Paul talked about something that happened between you and your father, when you were in your teens.”
“I can’t—I can’t—I need to be strong. I need to do what I need to do. I can’t go there.” Tears were flooding her eyes.
I had to ask her. “Did your father—”
She closed her eyes and replied in something close to a monotone. “Maybe he was drunk. Maybe he was, I don’t know, drunk with success. He’d just turned down a huge offer from Pfizer, and . . . He felt like he could have anything and anybody.”
“And he did something.”
She nodded mutely, tears in her eyes. “I still can’t talk about it,” she said very quietly.
I took her hand. “A guy I knew in the Forces once told me we all get wounded,” I said, “and we all take our scars with us. And if we don’t accept our scars, we haven’t really healed.”
We sat in silence for a minute or so, waiting for our food, neither of us hungry. They were taking their time. I asked the waiter for a second Red Stripe, and then I happened to notice the Audi I’d seen earlier, parked on the side of the road not far from where I’d parked the Suburban. “Stay here,” I said.
“Where are you—?”
“I’ll be right back.”
I went into the shack, which was a large kitchen next to a bar and a few small tables—most people sat on the beach—and when my eyes got adjusted to the dark interior, I didn’t see the South African there anymore. A young male bartender at the blender, and two sweaty-looking workers in a small, hot kitchen.
When I exited the shack onto the road, I saw the red-faced, chubby retired mercenary standing near his Audi, smoking a cigarette. The guy from the shoe store. He was wearing a white ball cap and sunglasses and talking to another guy. Younger, slimmer, tougher-looking.
I went up to them. “Thought I’d make it easy for you,” I said. “You want to follow me, here I am.”
“Jy was deur jou ma se gat gebore want haar poes was te besig!” the chubby mercenary said.
I had no idea what he was saying, but I could tell it was some sort of obscenity. “I thought I made myself clear,” I said, and suddenly I kneed him in the balls. I heard the air leave his lungs—oof—and he crumpled, toppled, onto the sand, clutching himself. “Cuiter!” he gasped. “Fok!”
“They should have given you more information on who you’re following,” I said.
I first saw something glinting in the sun and then saw that the second guy had pulled out a nasty-looking knife with a serious blade. I was, of course, unarmed. Weren’t they always saying Anguilla was extremely safe?
Disarming a guy bearing a knife is always a problem, no matter what you see on YouTube videos. Quickly, I looked around for some kind of weapon of opportunity but saw nothing. Asphalt, sand, the concrete walls of the beach shack, a couple of parked cars. Maybe a rock I could use as a bludgeon. But I didn’t see anything else.
I stuck my left arm out toward the guy to goad him into taking a slash at me. Because when he did, he’d move in close enough for me to do something to him. If I was really lucky, I’d be able to snatch his hand away right as he lunged and not get cut.
But sometimes you have to make a sacrifice. That’s called sutemi, a Japanese word in the martial arts meaning to sacrifice something in order to gain a tactical advantage. Or so I remember from training.
He whipped out his right hand, the knife slashing at me. I managed to grab his hand, but not before he sliced the back of mine.
The pain was intense, but the adrenaline was pumping and I was hyper-focused. I saw the serrating on the blade. The talon in the knife’s logo. The hair on the back of his knuckles. I pivoted to my left and slammed the edge of my right hand down onto his arm in a knife-hand strike. I could hear the bone snap, and his knife clattered to the ground as he roared in pain. I was pretty sure I’d broken his ulna. That’s the thinner long bone in the forearm. I know people who have broken half-inch boards with a knife-hand blow. I wasn’t that good, but I was clearly good enough to inflict pain on the guy. And a broken arm.
Both men were writhing on the ground now, howling. I glanced at my right hand, saw that the cut was deep and bleeding copiously. Sukie raced up to me, gasped when she saw the wound. “Get in the car!” I shouted.
I swooped down and grabbed the guy’s knife, but then I realized that I wasn’t done here. The first guy, the chunky mercenary, had gotten to his feet and was now pointing a gun at me.
75
Sukie screamed, and one of the waiters shouted, “No, man!”
And I thought about my options. There weren’t many. Normal situational logic didn’t apply here. Whoever they were, they surely weren’t tasked with killing me. They were local guys, local cutaways, and they’d been humiliated, and now they wanted to take me out.
These guys were blunt instruments; they didn’t do microvascular surgery. Their idea of subtle was Thor’s hammer. I know people like this, and they can be deadly, in their blunderbuss way. When you get them mad, they’re going after you, and they don’t give a shit. That’s the danger.
The second guy, with the broken arm, was sitting on the ground, dazed with pain. But that wouldn’t last long. He would recover too.
“Drop the knife,” the chubby guy said. He might have still been weak from the blow to the balls, but the gun he pointed at me—a semiautomatic pistol, large and black, a SIG Sauer—looked
pretty steady.
“What?” I said, just to piss him off.
“You heard me. Drop the knife.”
I had no choice. I dropped the knife.
“Now kick it away.”
“What?”
“Now!”
I kicked it away. “Sukie,” I shouted, “get in the car now!”
The mercenary came closer to me. “Now turn around.”
“What?” I said, and he finally lost patience. He shoved my right shoulder with his left hand to spin me around.
I’d been waiting for a moment like that.
I spun to my right, but I kept going until I was next to him, my left shoulder up against his right. He tried to adjust and re-point the gun at me, but he was too late.
I wrapped my left arm over his right arm at the biceps and tucked it under my left, hugging it tight to my body so he couldn’t really use it. Then I grabbed the barrel of the pistol and wrenched it around and pointed it back at his face. His wrist was hyperextended, so to stop the pain he let go of the weapon. He had to.
I backed up a step, the gun pointed at center mass. “On your knees, my friend, or I’ll kneecap you right here.”
He knelt. He didn’t have a choice.
When I noticed the second guy starting to get to his feet as well, I wagged the barrel at him and said, “On your knees too.”
The second guy got to his knees.
“Who are you working for?” I said.
Neither man replied.
“I’ll ask you again,” I said. “Who are you working for?”
The thinner man replied first. “Black Parallel.” He pronounced it “Bleck.” He was South African too.
“And who are they working for? Who’s the client?”
The thicker man said, “Hell do I know? We’re just doin’ our fokken job.”
I had a good idea who these people were all of a sudden. Probably Afrikaners, refugees from justice from the apartheid era. They probably didn’t feel safe in South Africa anymore. Maybe they did some bad things back in the day when they were in the South African police. And some things people don’t forget. When your son has had his arms ripped out by the police, it’s hard to forgive. Chickens come home to roost.
“All right,” I said, knowing there was nothing more useful I could get from them. “Get out of here now, unless you want to deal with the police. Go.” I sure didn’t want to face the Anguillan police and the hours of bureaucracy that would entail.
I backed up until I was at the Suburban. I got behind the wheel. “Come on,” I said, “we’ll get lunch back at the hotel.”
But I wasn’t hungry, and I had a feeling she wasn’t either.
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I was fairly sure we were safe as long as we remained within the resort, which had its own security. They wouldn’t come after me as long as I was there. And I had no doubt that Sukie was not a target. But she was, of course, shaken up.
I wondered at first why Black Parallel had hired these subpar operatives to go after me. They must have been alerted to my presence in Anguilla and scrambled to find local talent.
I got some bandages from the front desk and spoke briefly in the elevator, which seemed safer than talking in the room.
“I need to get back to Boston,” I said. “Now.”
I called a local taxi company directly instead of asking the concierge—I didn’t want the hotel to know I was leaving. I didn’t know how plugged-in Black Parallel was, but I assumed someone at the hotel, or several people, had been paid to keep track of my whereabouts.
My cell phone rang. It was Natalya Aksyonova, Conrad Kimball’s fiancée. In New York I’d given her my number.
I took the call on the balcony. I had a favor to ask her.
* * *
• • •
I had a dilemma over what to do with the pistol I’d confiscated. The SIG Sauer P226 was an excellent weapon, extremely accurate. Nine millimeter. It was loaded, which meant sixteen rounds, if it was full—one in the chamber and fifteen in the magazine.
I decided I’d throw it into the ocean on the way to the airport. So I had it with me, stuck in the waistband of my pants and concealed by my untucked shirt, when my cab arrived: a dented, rusty-looking Hyundai.
Sukie hugged me tight. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. But she looked awfully worried. I kissed her and told her I’d see her again in two days.
The driver, an affable islander, had on some kind of talk radio, a call-in show. A young woman was complaining about her boyfriend. The road was deserted. I watched the countryside go by. The island had been badly damaged by Hurricane Irma a few years before, and here and there you could still see wreckage on either side of the road, broken buildings and bent palm trees.
I was about to ask the driver to pull over so I could toss the gun into the ocean, when suddenly he shouted and slammed on the brakes, which squealed loudly. “Shit!” he screamed. The cab swerved to the left and then to the right and then fishtailed before slamming to a stop.
“Look on the road,” the driver croaked, pointing. “Bastards!”
Someone had placed a spike strip across the narrow road, a portable tire-deflation device that folded out, baring rows of spikes. Despite the driver’s quick reaction, the tires had been punctured and were hissing.
Then a bullet blew a hole in the cab’s windshield.
And then a second shot.
The cabdriver opened his door and leaped onto the road, screaming in terror. He ran back in the direction from which we’d come. I was sitting in the back seat on the passenger’s side, and I immediately ducked down, lowering my head. I was being fired at from the right side of the road. Keeping my head down, I opened the driver’s-side door and climbed out, using the door as a shield. I needed to get down behind the wheel well of the front left tire, because I remembered from my training that the best protection would come from the engine block. Bullets could go through the windows or even the trunk of the car, but nothing would penetrate the engine block. I had to stay near the hood.
Now I yanked the SIG Sauer out of my waistband and raised my head just enough to see a couple of shooters across the street. I recognized the bulky mercenary from before, the one whose weapon I’d confiscated.
He was probably even angrier and now determined to kill me. It was like when I was a kid and accidentally kicked an underground yellow-jacket nest and they emerged in a terrifying cloud coming at me.
Or maybe the Afrikaners’ orders had changed. Maybe they were instructed to take me out.
Now he was back, with someone else. He fired a shot, which went high and wide, hitting an abandoned building across the street behind me.
At the same time another round hit the right side of the car, spiderwebbing the right-hand window. There were at least two of them, I knew, maybe three. I couldn’t be sure. Because they were using handguns, they had to be relatively close. Handguns are only accurate up to around fifty yards; beyond that the aim degrades significantly.
Two or three of them against me, with one handgun and sixteen rounds, if the magazine was full. I had to make each of my shots count.
Trained police hit their targets less than half the time. A fifty percent hit rate is considered good. So sixteen rounds wasn’t much when you’re outnumbered that badly.
I squeezed off three shots, aiming directly at where I’d seen the assailants seconds before. I heard a scream, and I was fairly certain I had taken one down.
Then I saw one of the men cross the street toward me, toward my side of the taxi. He was coming up on my flank, and when I tried to stick my head up and take aim, a volley of shots came at me, preventing me from moving.
I desperately needed to change my position. I was about to be exposed, as soon as the guy came around the hood of the car. I spun around, sa
w the abandoned building, realized it was probably my best cover. I fired straight ahead, a few shots, and then squeezed off another two to my left, covering myself as I raced to the deserted building. A wood-and-drywall building like that would serve as poor cover from the gunfire, I knew, but it was decent concealment at least.
I needed all I could get. At least half of the magazine was empty now. But I was glad I hadn’t yet tossed it.
Gunfire echoed in the street as they—the two remaining shooters, I guessed—fired at me.
The building was some sort of abandoned restaurant. I raced through the front area, which looked like it had once been the dining room, and then farther in until I found a tiled space that once must have been the kitchen. Most of the major appliances were gone. The front dining room offered only one wall of protection, and that was made of plasterboard. The kitchen offered me three walls of protection. The more walls between me and the shooters, the more walls the bullets had to go through, the more the velocity of the bullets would degrade. The safer I’d be.
But one of them raced into the building just moments after me. I saw him in my peripheral vision as I stood in the abandoned kitchen and fired off a shot. He kept coming at me, firing wildly. I fired off three more rounds in quick succession, right at his chest, and finally he stumbled and fell. I saw in an instant that he was a young, fit guy, wearing a Kevlar vest. So they were professionals. The rounds had hit him in the chest, and he was knocked out, though probably not dead.
I briefly considered stopping to steal his vest, but there really wasn’t time. So I backed up into the kitchen and looked for the exit to the jungle-like vegetation behind the building. Just one shooter remained now, and he was somewhere inside. I weighed my options. I could run out of the building, into the jungle, and be pursued by the remaining attacker, or I could stay in the kitchen and fight.
But I didn’t know where the other one was.
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