Fox Hunter

by Zoe Sharp

  Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay.

  The warmth of the desert kingdom retreated like a wave from the shore. In its place was frozen air, bitter with the pinch of snow. Just as it had been, back then.

  The hairs prickled at the back of my neck, along my arms, across the front of my shins. I could smell them, feel their hands on me, bruising, tearing. I had to gulp in air, force myself to ground in this reality.

  “Which one?”

  Please, not . . .

  But whoever I might have been praying to wasn’t listening.

  “Hackett.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  I SWORE UNDER MY BREATH, SHORT AND LOW BUT NO LESS HEARTFELT.

  “Still sure you want to stay?” Parker asked.

  “Yes.” I didn’t have to think about it. “More so, if anything.”

  Even with traffic and planes in the background at my end, and the limitations of an international phone line, I heard his sigh. “You don’t have anything to prove, Charlie, I’ve told you that before. Not to me.”

  “Maybe not, but I need to prove to myself that I can face someone I have every reason to dislike and . . .” And not actually kill him. “And behave like a grown-up.”

  I said it with a smile in my voice, but when Parker answered, he didn’t sound as though he found it funny.

  “Think you can make Sean behave like a grown-up, too?”

  “He usually does.”

  If anything, since his brain injury and the coma that followed, Sean had become less instinctively violent. He’d reverted to the soldier he’d once been, for whom there were strict rules of engagement.

  The game we played now had fewer rules. I wondered if that was the reason I found it easier.

  My father had once expressed his concerns over my affinity with death and its delivery. He had predicted that if I followed my course to its logical conclusion, I would most likely spend the rest of my life in prison. Always a glass-half-full kind of guy, my dear papa.

  So far, I had avoided the inevitable fate he’d anticipated. Sometimes, though, you don’t need locks and bars to create confinement. Your own mind can do just as good a job of it.

  “Hackett is in a place called Madaba,” Parker said now. “It’s only about a half hour by car to the west of your location.”

  So close? Some kind of primitive proximity alarm went off inside my head. I had to force my hand to relax its grip around the phone before I lost the feeling in my fingertips.

  “Tell me.”

  “He runs an export company that ships locally sourced goods to Europe, the former Soviet countries, and the States—mosaics, pottery, that kind of stuff. Small scale, good quality, most of it designed and made by small cooperatives. I had Bill run his financials. Company’s doing OK, each year a little better than the last, modest profits, no blips or surprises.”

  “A front, then.”

  “Oh yeah. Whatever he’s doing there, it’s not making it onto the books.”

  I took a breath, let it out slowly. “I better go and check it out then, hadn’t I?”

  “I guess.” It was hard to say which of us sounded more reluctant. “You be careful, Charlie. Not just of Hackett, but Sean, too.”

  “We still don’t know for sure that he had anything to do with Clay’s death.”

  “Maybe not. He had good reason to want him dead, though.”

  “Hmm. I would have said that discovering there were other . . . interested parties, shall we say, makes it less likely Sean was involved.”

  “What other ‘interested parties’?”

  “Hamilton admitted that Clay was under obs by her people, which means they suspected he was playing some role in smuggling antiquities out of Iraq. If that’s the case, and whoever he was working for thought he was compromised, who knows how they might have reacted. Or how far they might have gone trying to get that information out of him.”

  “That . . . actually makes a lot of sense,” Parker said, his voice distracted. “But whoa, back up. Did you say Hamilton?”

  “Yeah, she seemed to be in charge of the snatch squad. You know her?”

  “Describe her.”

  I did so, briefly, watching the other people leaving the airport. Some were met by friends or relatives, but there wasn’t the same level of hugging and crying you see at Western airports. Everyone seemed a little more restrained. Maybe it was just my frame of mind.

  Nobody appeared to be watching me too closely, but I didn’t like hanging around here. It was asking for trouble, under the circumstances.

  “She sound like anyone you know?” I asked.

  “Could be. Call me when you get to Madaba. I’ll update you then. There’s a reasonable hotel called the Mosaic City close to the center. It’s walking distance to the property Hackett’s using as his business address.”

  “I’ll have to show ID when I check in, which will make it very easy for Hamilton’s people to track me down,” I warned. “I may not have long.”

  “Leave that with me. Official channels were no damn use, so now I’ll try the unofficial ones.”

  He gave me the addresses of both Hackett’s office and the hotel. I scrabbled for a pad in my bag and jotted them down, one-handed. “Sounds fine.”

  “By the time you get there, you’ll have a room booked. And before you go breaking and entering or anything like that, don’t forget to call me, OK?”

  “Parker, I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and rang off hoping he wouldn’t notice I’d given him no such assurances.

  Jordan was progressive as far as Middle Eastern nations went, but that didn’t mean a woman driving alone wouldn’t raise eyebrows. I opted for one of the taxicabs lined up outside the airport.

  The driver was a youngish man, clean-shaven with a very white smile, wearing a T-shirt and Levi’s. He seemed happy enough when I told him where I wanted to go.

  “You are going to see the most beautiful and ancient of our mosaics while you are in Madaba?” he asked as we pulled out into traffic. “If so, and you have need of a guide . . . ?”

  “I’m meeting up with friends when I get there.”

  “Ah, well if your friends need a guide, also, please call me.”

  “We won’t have much time for sightseeing.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror, eyebrows climbing. “Then why are you going to Madaba?”

  It was a question I couldn’t answer truthfully, so I didn’t answer it at all.

  How could I tell him I was going there to confront a man who’d taken everything away from me in the most brutal way possible?

  Hackett had been the worst of the four. I’d been wary of him from the start, but somehow amid all the testosterone and macho posturing of a Special Forces training unit, the risk he’d posed to me personally had become gradually obscured. Until it was far too late to do anything about it.

  I glanced at the taxi driver. Would what they did to me mean as much to someone from a part of the world where women were not seen as equals but as property—first of their fathers, then of their husbands? I thought again of Najida, the girl Dawson had introduced me to at the clinic in Kuwait City. She’d been through a similar experience of pain, fear, and violation. She, too, had turned to people she should have been able to trust with her story. Instead of believing and defending her, she had been betrayed and left for dead.

  I wondered how my life would have turned out if I’d come through my own experience and been vindicated instead of vilified. It had dropped me into a deep, dark hole it had taken years to climb out of.

  And now I was heading toward a meeting with one of the men who’d put me down there.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  LESS THAN AN HOUR AFTER MY ARRIVAL IN MADABA, I WAS LURKING across the street from Hackett’s office in a store crammed with tourist souvenirs, including a burqa-clad Barbie doll. It also sold leather bags and belts, cheap cigarettes by the carton, magazines, postcards of the famous mosaics, cans of watered-down exotic juices, and rather crude r
epresentations of the better-known parts of the ancient Rose City at Petra. I was reminded of the statue Moe’s Uncle Yusuf had foisted onto me, although I doubted any of these were priceless underneath.

  I hadn’t been back to see Yusuf and his family, I thought with a flush of guilt. Did he know the fate of his nephew? Did he blame us for it? He had every right to . . .

  I glanced through the overstuffed front window of the store and saw a nondescript minivan pull up outside the office. A man got out, but the vehicle was tall enough to largely shield him from my view. He unlocked the door to the building and went inside. I caught no more than an impression—slim, wavy darkish-blond hair brushing the collar of a blue shirt.

  It could have been Hackett, but then again . . .

  I hadn’t seen the man for years. Hadn’t wanted to see him, either. It was bad enough when another of the four, Vic Morton, turned up on the close-protection circuit. I always knew it was a possibility I’d cross paths with one or another of them sooner or later. The career choices for ex-soldiers of their caliber tended to be somewhat limited. If they didn’t become mercenaries, they usually became bodyguards.

  But Hackett was different. He’d been a public schoolboy who’d joined the army under hazy circumstances. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d caught him torturing small animals and given him no other option.

  The military machine is noted for taking ordinary men and making killers out of them. In Hackett’s case, they had to try to tone him down. With his background, he might have been considered officer material, but even the army realized that giving him the power of life and death over a group of others would have been a big mistake.

  I turned away from the store window, paid for the oddments I’d selected, and waited while the owner bagged them and made change. The door to the office over the road stayed closed.

  It was a short walk back to the hotel in high sun, the heat reflecting harshly from the stone streets. I took a circuitous route, stopping for coffee at a tiny shop-front café on the way. I took my time over drinking it, keeping an eye on the street while pretending to skim through the magazine I’d bought, even though it was in Arabic and all I could do was look at the pictures. Still, I hadn’t bought it for the content.

  Back at the hotel, I called Parker again.

  “You hit traffic?” was his first question, dryly delivered.

  I tipped out my shopping bag onto the bedspread. One ring-pull can of papaya juice drink, two leather belts, the glossy magazine, and a traditional red-and-white keffiyeh scarf. Not ideal, but it would have to do.

  “No, I was doing a little shopping and getting the lay of the land.”

  “Did you find Hackett?”

  “I found his office, no problem, and spotted a guy going into the place—not a local. Could have been him.”

  “Could have been a customer.”

  “Only if they hand out keys. I didn’t get a good enough look at him for a positive ID, but the chances are, if it wasn’t Hackett, this guy works with or for him and can tell me where he is.”

  “Don’t you want to wait—keep an eye on the place until you’ve gotten that positive ID?”

  “And what if Sean turns up in the meantime? For all I know, he could have been waiting inside already.”

  “He didn’t fly out of Iraq—not on his own passport, anyway. If he traveled by land, the roads in the eastern part of Jordan are not an easy route. You may be ahead of him.”

  “I know, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “The question is, when you find Hackett, what are you going to say to him?”

  I’d spent most of the journey from the airport to Madaba trying to work that one out. If it had been anybody else, the logical thing would have been to warn him that danger was possibly on its way and then wait for Sean to turn up so I could . . . what? Reason with him? Restrain him?

  Kill him . . . ?

  “I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it,” I said.

  “Well, the good news is you won’t have Hamilton on your back while you’re doing it.”

  “Wow, I’m impressed. How did you manage that?”

  “Played dirty—I talked to her mother.”

  “Her . . . ? How the hell did you know where to get hold of her mother? Isn’t that classified, or something?”

  “All I had to do was look in the client files,” Parker said. “Aubrey Hamilton is the eldest daughter of Nancy Hamilton.”

  Nancy Hamilton was the one who’d hired me for my last assignment; she was a major financial supporter of a disaster recovery team, and she’d asked me to look into the death of the team’s security adviser. In pursuit of that truth, I’d gone into the middle of an earthquake zone with them, uncertain which of them I could trust. Turned out their biggest worry was how far they could trust me.

  “Well, it’s a good thing she came away from it a satisfied customer, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, isn’t it just?” Parker murmured.

  I hadn’t told him just how far I’d gone in covering for the surviving team members, but he’d guessed anyway. And he was a good enough boss never to ask me outright. I’d always been more interested in justice than the legal definition of right and wrong, anyway.

  “I can’t believe that, however strong her maternal influence, Mrs. Hamilton would carry enough weight to get your three-letter-agency pals to back off, though.”

  “Maybe not, but when we spoke, she told me she had already given her daughter a glowing report of your abilities and suggested she might make use of you. That and the fact that you’ve had previous contact with certain other agencies, shall we say, and I don’t think they’ll be wasting their time chasing after you.”

  “Hmm, well, it would be nice to have one less enemy to worry about. Did Dawson make her flight OK in the end, by the way?”

  “I hope those two thoughts aren’t connected,” he said, a smile in his voice. “Yeah, I liaised with Madeleine, and she’s arranged for someone to collect Dawson from Heathrow when she lands. Sounds like she did a pretty good job for you.”

  “She did. I’d work with her again.”

  “That’s lucky, because I’m thinking of offering her a contract, effective immediately, but she can start as soon as the shoulder’s mended.”

  “She’ll be over the moon. Thanks, Parker.”

  “Don’t thank me. Arabic speakers are always in high demand.”

  “Yeah, let’s just hope I don’t need her here.”

  “Well, at least you know Hackett speaks English.”

  “True, but with a bastard like that, I’d rather it was two against one.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  THE MAN WHO ANSWERED THE DOOR IN RESPONSE TO MY KNOCK was the same fair-haired guy in the dark blue shirt I’d seen earlier. He was not James Hackett, although in a lot of ways he had the same cocksure manner. Was it something that could be absorbed by proximity alone?

  I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, politely enough, but without undue enthusiasm. I judged that the quick visual scan of me he carried out probably estimated fairly accurately my worth, and therefore the amount of business I was likely to bring his way.

  Not enough to warrant the full-wattage smile, I saw.

  “I’m looking for Jamie, actually,” I said with enough of a drawl for him to recalculate quickly. “Jamie Hackett. Is he here?”

  “Um, no, not at the moment. He’s away—business, you know. I’m not expecting him back until later. Perhaps I can help?”

  “Really? Oh damn. I was sure I emailed him the date I was getting in. He promised me dinner and a good time,” I added with a wink. “Perhaps you can help me, after all.”

  The man flushed. He was maybe in his late twenties, and had the kind of pale English complexion that burns or blushes with equal, painful ease.

  “I say, I’ll just pop in and leave him the number of where I’m staying, shall I? Then he can call me the moment he ge
ts back.”

  And with that I blithely pushed past him into a tiled hallway with grim overhead fluorescents and chipped tiles on the staircase at one side. I dropped my sunglasses into the shopping bag I’d slung over my arm. “Are you down here, or upstairs?”

  His head jerked toward the upper floor almost automatically, and I trotted up the steps without waiting to see if he was following.

  He soon caught me up. “Um, I’m really not sure if—”

  “Nonsense, he’ll be delighted! Through here? Oh, how charming. I do like what you’ve done with the place.”

  That earned me a quizzical look, and I can’t say I blamed him for it. I was only talking so he didn’t have a chance to tell me where I could and couldn’t go.

  The office was a large room divided in two by an opaque glass screen. The front half had been turned into a reception area, with a pair of sofas and a smoked glass coffee table, all of which went out of fashion sometime in the 1980s. On the walls were stock photographs of Jordanian landmarks in cheap frames—the Treasury at Petra, the Roman ruins of Jerash, biblical Mount Nebo, a resort on the Dead Sea. It looked like a job lot from a travel agency gone bust.

  I didn’t pause there long to admire the décor but kept moving past the frosted glass divider, rummaging in my shopping bag.

  “Oh bugger, I can’t seem to find a pen. Do you have one . . . ?” I pulled out the magazine and scarf in my search. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t know your name?”

  “Ah, it’s um, Docksy.”

  “Really? You’re Docksy? How very cute.”

  It was a game to see if I could keep the blush in his cheeks. For all his initial swagger, he seemed to be far too easy to embarrass. A Hackett-wannabe rather than the real thing.

  Behind the glass screen divider were two dark veneer desks shoved together at right angles. They were a mismatched pair, one slightly higher and wider. A laptop sat open on one—sleek and slim against its outdated surroundings. The other desk had a space clear of clutter just large enough for a similar laptop, but it was missing. Hackett’s, I presumed.