Given that Beth McAlister was the object of a computer search, Bianca felt that it was a near certainty that Groton’s death was connected to the Nomad Project. That meant related targets would be anyone else who was involved with it. To her knowledge, that was her, her not-father—and who else?
She had no clue.
So what to do?
Think a problem through before you make a move: it was one of the rules.
First things first: she should probably have Doc search for information on Groton’s shooting. Maybe he could find something where she could not.
Gathering up her things, she headed for his office.
When she stepped out into the reception area, Evie was seated behind her desk with her head buried in her hands.
As soon as she heard Bianca’s approach Evie straightened, squared her shoulders and pasted a smile on her face. The phone started to ring, and she reached for it.
“Hold it right there,” Bianca said before Evie could pick up the phone. As the call went to voice mail, she stopped in front of Evie’s desk and looked down at her with a severe expression. “Let’s have it. What’s up?”
Evie grimaced. Her lips quivered. She pressed them tightly together and closed her eyes. A single tear trickled out to roll down her cheek. Bianca would have been upset at that evidence of Evie’s distress except that, lately, Evie tended to cry over everything from TV commercials to growing grass.
Bianca said, “Evie?”
Evie opened her eyes, swiped the tear away, and said, “I just got a call from my lawyer. Fourth’s filed a petition for joint custody of the b-baby.”
Her voice shook on the last word.
Bianca’s chest constricted at the look on Evie’s face. The ongoing divorce was the hardest thing her friend had ever gone through—and Bianca had a bad feeling that once the baby was born things between Evie and her slimeball ex were going to get worse.
Then it occurred to her that she might not be around to see any of it, and the tightness in her chest turned into an actual physical ache.
A problem for later.
She said, “All right. Deep breath. You’re pregnant. There’s no way he can get any kind of custody while you’re pregnant, unless he thinks he can find a judge to order you to spend every other weekend with him so that he can talk to your belly. You have months to work this out.”
Evie’s hands, which had curled into fists on her desk, relaxed. Her face lost its tragic expression.
“You’re right. Thank God. I have time.”
“Besides, you know Fourth. Do you really think he’s going to want to deal with a crying, puking baby that needs rocking and feeding and gets its diaper changed every couple of hours?”
Evie blinked. Her lips slowly stretched into a smile. “When you put it like that, I don’t think I want to deal with it, either.”
“Yeah, well, you’re stuck. Listen, we’re done for the day. Why don’t you go on home?”
Evie nodded. “I think I will.”
“See you in a bit, then,” Bianca said, and went on into Doc’s office.
She told him what she needed and waited while he ran a search. Standing behind his chair while he did his thing, she entertained herself by looking at the black-and-white prints on the walls. Doc was a major conspiracy theorist. He surrounded himself with a selection of framed images ranging from JFK in the motorcade moments before he was shot to Neil Armstrong taking the first step on the moon to Jimmy Hoffa walking into the restaurant from which he’d supposedly disappeared. In his spare time, Doc liked to work on delving into alternative explanations behind those world-famous events.
The real truth, he was convinced, was still out there.
Doc turned up nothing on Groton’s death.
Bianca’s uneasiness grew. Two things she knew for sure: whoever had run that search on Beth McAlister had not given up. And the sniper who’d taken out Groton had not vanished into thin air.
“I’m heading home,” she told Doc, doing her best to mask her disquiet after he gave her the news. He was still sitting at his desk as she turned to go. Her gaze slid to what had to be the costume Evie had been talking about: a vintage white frock coat and trousers hanging from a handle on Doc’s file cabinet. A black string tie dangled down the front of it. Shades of Colonel Sanders. “I’ll see you at the gala later.”
“Think Evie’d notice if I don’t show?”
“Count on it.”
“You could—” Doc broke off abruptly as something flickered on his computer screen. His head swiveled as he glanced at it, and then his whole body swiveled along with the chair so that he was once again facing his computer. He stared at the screen. His eyes widened. His face went from flushed to dead white in a matter of seconds.
“What?” Bianca asked.
He looked at her. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. His eyes were as round as quarters as they met hers.
“It’s bad.” His voice was a croak.
Alarmed, Bianca stepped closer to look past him at the screen.
All at once she couldn’t breathe. She felt as if someone had just punched her in the gut.
Her face looked back at her. Her face as Jennifer Ashley, with the red wig and prosthetic overbite. That picture filled up half the screen. Beside it, filling up the other half of the screen, was her face as—her.
Bianca went weak at the knees. She had to grab on to the back of Doc’s chair for support.
In the picture her hair was scraped tightly back. Her lips were thinner than she knew her own to be, her cheeks fuller, her eyes darker blue, her hair darker blond. But those were small differences, and the face was clearly recognizable as hers.
For a moment the screen, the desk, Doc himself, seemed to shimmer. Bianca willed away the shock, forced herself to focus.
She’d seen that picture before. In Austria, on a wall at the black site where she’d been held.
The picture wasn’t of her, exactly. It was a computer-generated image of Nomad 44. Age progressed from an actual photo of her as an infant that had been taken not long after she’d been born.
Before her mother—her gestational mother—had escaped the coming slaughter by running away with her.
In the version of the picture that she’d seen in Austria, the number 44 had been tattooed on the underside of her jaw right where her scar was now.
Bianca found herself touching the scar before she realized what she was doing. It felt puckered and hard beneath her fingertips.
The tattoo, and the scar, were both missing from the photo. Bianca took that to mean that whoever had posted this photo didn’t want the world at large to know about the Nomad Project.
Above the side-by-side pictures was a number written large enough to stretch across the screen: $1,000,000.
Below them was a brief, not entirely accurate physical description, and a warning, in all caps: SUBJECT’S INTACT CORPSE MUST BE PROVIDED BEFORE PAYMENT WILL BE PROCESSED.
Apparently they were taking no chances of paying out for a faked death. She had an instant vision of being felled by a sniper and then having a whole army of minions scurry in like ants to carry off her body.
Oh, God, she even knew why—they couldn’t afford to have an autopsy conducted by any source outside their tight little circle. An autopsy might uncover what she was. Her blood, her cells, her tissue—any of that might bear signs of the thing they’d created.
Hyperventilating wasn’t an option, so she didn’t. Instead she took a deep breath, and read on.
Underneath the description, it said: multiple identities, including Jennifer Ashley and Elizabeth (Beth) McAlister.
Not Bianca St. Ives.
Okay, there was something to be thankful for.
“Where did this come from?” Talking felt weird, like her lips were numb.
Doc said, “I—Reme
mber how I get a notification on anything concerning Elizabeth McAlister? This just now popped up. It’s a—” He broke off, swallowing. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead.
Bianca knew how he felt.
“I know what it is.” Her voice sounded normal. Of course it did. All her life she’d been trained to keep her cool.
Never show weakness: it was one of the rules.
Not even when you find yourself featured on an international hit list. Come one, come all! Step right up, kill this woman and get one million dollars!
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Whoever had posted that had put every bounty hunter, hit man and assassin in the world on her trail: a cast of murderous thousands.
Bianca felt cold all over.
Doc said, “That second picture. It’s you but—different.” He squinted at the screen.
“Not different enough,” she said, then added, “Who put this out?”
Doc hunched over his keyboard, typed something, then looked back up at her as what, to her, was an undecipherable string of computer code scrolled across the screen.
“It’s posted on a bulletin board on the dark web. The money’s guaranteed by Darjeeling Brothers.”
Bianca’s blood congealed. “The Exterminators.”
Doc blinked at her. “What?”
“That’s what they’re called.” She took a breath. Keep it together. “It’s kind of an insider joke. You want someone dead, you call the exterminators.”
“So they’re, like, contract killers?” Doc sounded as appalled as she felt.
Bianca shook her head. “They’re middlemen. For high-end, professional hits, they collect the fee plus their cut in advance from the commissioning party, hold it in an escrow account, post the contract, then pay the killer when the contract is fulfilled. The party who ordered the hit and the party who carried out the hit never meet. They never know each other’s identities. It’s all done through the Exterminators.”
“Marron! What do we do?”
She wasn’t sure what marron meant, but assumed it was Bronx-speak for something like holy shit.
“First off, I try not to die.”
“Boss—” Ignoring her gallows humor, Doc wet his lips. “Can you pay them off?”
Bianca shook her head. Before she could say anything, he continued in a rush, “If you don’t have a million dollars, we can get it. That payday loan company always has a ton of cash on hand. We can hit that. And the jewelry store chain—they—”
Bianca interrupted by holding up a hand. “I can’t pay them off. The only way the contract is withdrawn is if the subject is killed or the commissioning party cancels it.”
Doc stared at her. He was making no effort to hide his growing alarm. “We don’t know who the commissioning party is.”
“There’s the rub.” Only she did know. At least, she had a general idea. Whoever had killed Groton. No, whoever had ordered the killing of Groton. Whoever was in charge of eradicating all remaining traces of the Nomad Project.
Because that age-progressed picture of Nomad 44—of her—had eliminated all other possibilities as far as she was concerned.
The list of suspects had to be extremely small. The problem lay in identifying them.
Hard to cut off the head of the dog if you can’t find the dog.
Doc said, “I’ll figure it out. There has to be a way to figure it out.” He turned and started typing furiously.
Bianca’s mind was beginning to function again. “You get those pictures of me changed?”
Doc’s fingers slowed. “All of them. Every last one.”
“You think it was in time?”
Doc’s fingers stilled altogether. “Think so. Hope so. I would’ve gotten that notification within minutes of that hit list thing being posted. I changed the last of the pictures maybe half an hour before.” He huffed out a breath. “Talk about cutting it close.”
“Yeah.” Bianca thought for a minute. “Okay, they don’t have the name Bianca St. Ives. You’ve changed all the pictures of Bianca St. Ives that were searchable online so that if someone runs facial recognition software on that picture—” she gestured at the age-progressed photo on the computer screen then remembered the possible forensic sketch that Mickey could come up with if pressed “—or anything else that shows me, nothing, in theory, should turn up. At least, I won’t turn up.”
Doc was breathing more heavily than usual. “That’s right.”
“So we’ve got a little while to figure this out.” What Bianca didn’t see any reason to tell him was that no hit that had ever been posted on the Exterminators’ website had stayed there for longer than thirty days. Why not? Because no target had ever survived longer than thirty days.
Enlisting every professional and semiprofessional with a weapon in the world had proved to be a brutally efficient way to create a successful killing machine.
Could anybody say, dead super soldier walking?
Good thing panic wasn’t something she did.
Doc said, “You think it’s that prince? Al-collie something from Bahrain?”
Bianca knew it wasn’t the prince. She didn’t know how to explain to Doc how she knew that without telling him the rest, and coming up with complicated lies was temporarily beyond her. Right at the moment she seemed to be suffering from brain freeze. Her head kind of felt like she’d been gobbling down ice cream way too fast, only without the ice cream.
All the pain with none of the fun: was that the story of her life or what?
“I don’t know.” A thought forced its way through the throbbing in her head: once upon a time, her not-father had been involved with the Nomad Project—as an assassin tasked with killing her and her mother, but this wasn’t the moment to quibble about details. He should know who was left alive who’d also been involved with it. He might know, or be able to guess or help her figure out, who had ordered this hit. Once she knew who to approach about fixing the problem, that’s what she would do. If a polite request didn’t do the trick—and she had a sad feeling that it might not—well, then, she was prepared to do what she had to do.
Snappin’ necks beats killers cashin’ checks. Oh, God, the stress was getting to her: she was channeling—well, mischanneling—Will Ferrell now.
The problem was, she had no way to contact her not-father. He was in the wind, hunkered down for his life just like she was. She had no phone number for him, no email address, no physical address. No idea where in the world he was—and he could be anywhere in the world. Mason Thayer was a pro at every nefarious thing he did, including hiding.
And if she probed around in some of the usual places to try to contact him, what she might succeed in doing was bringing the hounds down on both their heads.
Hmm.
Think, think, think. And try not to think that now you’re channeling Winnie-the-Pooh.
Doc said, “Could we fake your death? I mean, Jennifer Ashley–Beth McAlister’s death? From, like, before this was posted. We could say you died in a car accident. We could create an obituary with a picture and everything. We could—”
He broke off as Bianca shook her head. “They wouldn’t fall for it. It’s too pat. All it would do is intensify the hunt because they’d know for sure I was out here and aware of what was going on.”
She took slight comfort in recalling that she had already faked her own death, pretty well if she did say so herself, and it was possible that whoever had put this hunt into motion wasn’t sure if she was actually still alive. If she kept her head down and stayed quiet, maybe after a while the hunters would conclude that she really was dead and give up.
Yeah, and maybe tomorrow she’d sprout wings and be able to fly like a bird, too.
The chances of eluding a contract of this magnitude were slim to none.
“We can’t just do nothing.” Doc sounded anguished.
�
��You’re right.” An idea had occurred to her, which gave her one more thing to be thankful for: her brain was working again. “Can you set up a fake eBay seller account? One that could never be traced back to either of us, or Guardian Consulting, or Savannah, or anywhere close?”
Doc gave her a questioning look. “Sure, but...why?”
“Because I can use it to contact someone who can help fix this. I think.”
“Who?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you. Just do it, please. How long will it take?”
“Not long. Half an hour? I need to boot up a virtual machine and then connect everything through the TOR network and bounce it off a couple of—”
She held up a hand to stop him. “You know I don’t understand a word you’re saying, right? You do you. I need to run home and get something. I’ll be back.”
Doc nodded and waved dismissal. He was already busy on his keyboard.
Bianca hitched her purse up higher on her shoulder, grabbed her briefcase from where it had somehow found its way to the floor and headed out.
She was so busy thinking through the ramifications of what she intended to do that she almost forgot about the Kill Bianca version of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad that was out there combing the world for her—until she stepped out of the elevator at the lobby level and found herself knee-deep in people. Then her training kicked in.
Thanks to the combination of the Food and Wine Festival tents set up in the square across the street and the public restrooms in the lobby of their building, the ground floor was busy enough during what were still business hours to make an attack there unlikely. Heading for her car, Bianca scanned faces, read body language, kept on the move. The parking lot, too, was busy, and although the sun was setting in a fierce orange burst of protest against the dying of the light, there was still enough of it left to make it difficult for anyone to hide. She looked up, down, all around, checking for cars with tinted windows, for pickups with covered beds, or campers, or paneled vans—the better to ambush you from, my dear.
The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller Page 11