by Zoe Sharp
While I waited for my eyes to fully adjust to the darkness, I listened intently.
Nothing.
I moved softly across the tiled floor to the doorway. It opened out into a generous hall and open stairwell. I took a few moments to check the other rooms. There was an en suite guest room and loo, but the rest on this floor were empty spaces, still awaiting furniture and designation. I guessed the kitchen and dining room were on the lower story at the back, and the main bedrooms upstairs.
I should make for the kitchen, I knew, where I would be most likely to find something I could use as a weapon—something better than I had brought with me, at any rate.
But as I stood in the hallway, a faint noise came from above. The sound of a stiff drawer being slid jerkily out of its housing. In the time it might take me to go down a level, search for a weapon, retrieve it, and then get up there, whoever was searching might have found what they were looking for and gone.
I couldn’t take the risk.
With a grimace, I reached into the bag and pulled out the drinks can I’d saved earlier. I’d emptied it and torn it in half by twisting the top and bottom in opposite directions until the metal skin had split apart. The result looked relatively harmless, but the base fit comfortably into my hand, and the exposed edges were sharp enough to rip through skin and muscle like tissue paper.
Eyes upward, I moved cautiously to the wide staircase and began to climb.
FORTY-THREE
AS MY HEAD CLEARED THE LEVEL OF THE UPPER LANDING, THERE was enough moonlight coming in from the windows for me to see the ghost layout. An extravagant space with doors off to the bedrooms. The narrow slot of light shining from under one of the bedroom doors was bright in the gloom. It flickered and moved—the beam of a flashlight rather than the overheads.
I froze, straining to hear into the room beyond the closed door. More faint noises, quiet steps, furniture being opened and closed, the riffle of papers. Sounds of a search.
Not Hackett, then.
He would not, after all, have reason to be searching his own house so covertly, even if he’d mislaid something vital. So, who did have reason?
I thought of the Russians I’d seen arriving at the hotel. When they’d waylaid me in Kuwait City, I’d assumed they were working for Sean. Why else would they warn me off from continuing to search for him?
But if that was the case, why hadn’t they carried out their threats to “incapacitate” me when I hired Moe and headed back to Basra? Maybe it had been Clay where their interest lay. Clay and his dodgy connections to Professor Lihaibi and Moe’s Uncle Yusuf. And if Clay was involved in whatever they were up to, it wasn’t unreasonable that his old army mate Hackett might be mixed up in the same thing.
How Sean fit into that scenario, though, I’d no idea.
Perhaps the person currently searching Hackett’s bedroom might be able to fill in the blanks on that for me.
I put down my bag silently, keeping the ripped can in my left hand, and moved to the door. My heart rate was up, and I took a moment to breathe, to steady myself.
Surprise was on my side. If I effected entry with enough speed and aggression, even if the man inside—an assumption on my part, but more likely than a woman—was armed, the chances were he wouldn’t have time to reach for a weapon.
I softened my knees, grasped the door handle, and went in fast.
As the door crashed open, I had a fraction of a second to take in the scene in the rapidly shifting beam of the flashlight. A huge double bed with a small safe next to it, standing open. A slippery spread of papers and documents on the polished floor. And a bulky figure with the flashlight, already starting to rise and twist toward the incoming threat.
The room was big, even by the standard of the rest of the villa. Even so, I was across it and launching for my opponent before he’d had time to reach for anything useful.
I hit him low, bowling him off his feet. He crashed backward, half onto the bed, and half bounced, half fell from there to the floor, landing with a hell of a crack.
He had enough training not to let the shock of the attack immobilize him, more’s the pity. Even down and winded he fought back, lashing out immediately, using the flashlight to aim for strike points on my arms and body.
I blocked as best I could, slashed with my makeshift blade and felt it scrape across flesh, heard the grunt of reaction to the pain. He went for my left hand immediately, jabbing the end of the flashlight at my elbow joint. By luck or judgment, the blow connected solidly.
The lower half of my left arm went dead below an elbow that was suddenly on fire. The can dropped from my nerveless fingers and spun away under the bed. He tried to use the opportunity to get away from me, but I hurled myself at his legs and brought him down again.
He kicked out. I spun on my backside and booted him in the side of the head, wrapping my legs around his arm while he was still reeling, wrenching his wrist into a lock. By forcing his arm out straight across my thigh, I could over-extend his elbow while I planted the sole of my boot hard across his throat. Even then, he didn’t stop thrashing.
“Give it up, man, or I’ll break your fucking arm!”
To my surprise, all the fight went out of him. Even so, I didn’t relax until he flicked the beam of the flashlight first across my face, then up to his own.
“Hello, Charlie,” he said, and although his voice was hoarse from having my foot partly crushing his windpipe, I would have recognized it anywhere.
It was Sean.
FORTY-FOUR
I SWORE UNDER MY BREATH, HESITATED A MOMENT LONGER, THEN released him. He rolled to his feet and only staggered a little on his way to switch on the lamp by the bed. I glanced around automatically, but the thick bedroom curtains were closed.
“Damn it, Sean, I . . .” I almost said, “. . . could have killed you.” Instead changed it to “You’re a hard man to find.”
“I didn’t ask to be found.”
He turned, studied me. He wore cargo pants and a black T-shirt that was now torn across the stomach and glistened wetly. I swallowed back the words of regret, of concern, and brought my chin up.
“Well, tough. I was sent to find you. And now that I have, we’re on the next flight out of here.”
He ignored that, asked instead, “You were sent to find me by who?”
“Parker—who d’you think?”
He looked away, lips thinned in a face less forgiving than stone. I realized, too late, that he might have been hoping I’d come for him on my own account.
Ah well, too late for that now.
He was unshaven and looked dog tired, his skin taut across his bones and his dark hair longer than I was used to seeing it, hanging raggedly over his forehead. His eyes, entirely black in the shadowed lighting, were hollowed and haunted.
The face of a man on the edge, certainly, but pushed over it? I knew Sean’s face as well as I knew my own, but that I couldn’t tell.
“What happened between you and Michael Clay?”
I spoke gently. He looked at me and something flashed in his eyes, almost too fast to follow, then was gone again.
“I killed him. But first I tortured and mutilated him,” he threw at me. “Is that what you hoped I might say?”
I heard my own indrawn breath, but I didn’t move, didn’t otherwise react, while adrenaline roared into my system, flooding me with the urge to flee. I held it back and kept my gaze on his face, on his eyes.
He blinked first, glanced down and dabbed at the blood oozing slowly through his slashed T-shirt.
“Of course it isn’t,” I said. “If I’d wanted that, don’t you think I’d have gone after them myself by now?”
“It depends—on if you knew the right one to go after.”
I sighed. “They all of them played a part in it, Sean.”
“So how can you stand there and tell me they should be allowed to escape the consequences of their actions, yet at the same time knowing you went after the man who shot me? I did
n’t get a say in that decision.”
“I went intending to catch him, not kill him,” I said with as much sincerity as I could manage. “And at the time, you weren’t in any position to make a decision.”
“Then you should have waited until I was.”
How could I tell him that, at that point in his coma, the best doctors Parker could hire thought it was more and more likely Sean wasn’t ever going to come out of it? His brain activity was slowing down, his responses weakening. It felt as if he was dying, inch by inch, right in front of my eyes.
And taking me with him.
“I—”
“Besides, who says this is all about you? You weren’t the only one affected by what they did, back then.”
I said nothing, searching his face for any inkling of emotion. My heart was pounding in my chest, a double drumbeat in my ears that made my vision pulse in time with it.
I hadn’t considered for a moment that Sean might be doing this with his own agenda. True, when our relationship had become known, he’d been slammed for it hard by the army brass. I learned later that they’d put an end to any career aspirations he might have had. Not only that, but they’d done their best to send him on missions that practically ranked as suicide, one after another.
And that part of his life—that part of me—was all he remembered when he finally woke from his coma.
Half of me genuinely rejoiced at the recovery he’d made. It had been a long road back, but he’d fought his way to strength and fitness. Another smaller, meaner part of me wondered if having him back but no longer mine was worse than not getting him back at all.
“How?” I demanded.
“How what?”
“How did you torture Clay?”
“You really want to hear all the gory details, Charlie? Never had you down as a closet sadist.”
“Well I’m here, aren’t I? I must be more of a bloody masochist instead.”
“Like it rough, do you?” he mocked. “Oh, yes, now that I do remember . . .”
I bit back the flaming retort that rose like bile. Because I remembered it, too, from the last time we were together, just before he’d disappeared from New York and surfaced again in Kuwait City. I’d seduced him, for want of a better word, without tenderness or delicacy, relying on his abstinence and lust to get me past his doubts. That and an intimate knowledge of his weaknesses, of the things he found hardest to resist.
“Just answer the damn question, will you?” I said quietly.
“You want a blow-by-blow account? Ask away.”
“How did you immobilize him—did you drug him?”
“Something like Rohypnol, you mean? Where would I have got hold of that at short notice?”
I nodded, but at the same time some of the tension went quietly out of my neck and shoulders. Clay had been drugged, I knew that for certain—if not to restrain him beforehand, then certainly to keep him conscious during—and if Sean didn’t know that . . .
“You met him at the hotel, the day before, and you argued. What about?”
“About digging up the past, of course. Not surprisingly, he wanted to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why?” The bitten-off word hung stark between us. It’s history. Another life. Why do you care?
He raised an eyebrow in my direction.
“You know why. What they did to you was appalling, but they took me down, too. They have a debt owing—to both of us.”
I shook my head. “This is no way to repay any kind of debt. Not for me, it isn’t.”
“Spoken like a coward, Charlie.” He was taunting me again. “Justice is always worthwhile, even if it involves making a noise and a mess to get to the truth of it.”
I shied away from exploring the kind of mess that had been made of Michael Clay, instead asked doggedly, “If he wouldn’t talk about it at the hotel, why arrange to meet him in Basra?”
“I sent him a message, asked if he was up to his old tricks again, and how his current employers might take the news.”
“What old tricks?” I demanded. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask what he had found out about the rapes and Najida, the woman in the Kuwait City clinic.
He shrugged. “Nothing for definite, but back when he was a squaddie, Clay always had something a little shady going on the side, so it was a one-size-fits-all kind of threat.”
I heard the evasion in his voice but didn’t call him on it.
“Where did you pick up your Russian pals?”
“What Russian pals?” His surprise seemed real.
“The ex-Spetsnaz boys you got to warn me off—twice. Once in Basra and again in Kuwait City.”
He shook his head. “Nothing to do with me. If the Russians have stepped in, they’re playing their own game.”
I stilled, recalling the way the Russian guy had delivered his threat. After the initial ambush failed—something he’d described as an unauthorized mistake—he’d gone to some lengths to persuade me I should quit, without resorting to actual physical violence. And if it wasn’t Sean who “knew me and had my best interests at heart,” who was behind it?
“So the fact they turned up here in Madaba, the same time as I did—at the same hotel—is just a coincidence, is it?”
“Coincidences do happen occasionally.” He frowned. “They’re here?”
“They were checking in via the lobby at the time as I was checking out, in a manner of speaking, via the balcony.”
He went to the window, his movements steadier now, and peered around the edge of the thick curtains down into the street below.
“You’re sure they didn’t tail you?”
Why was it everyone assumed I wouldn’t notice that? “I’m not an amateur, Sean.”
He let go of the curtain, touched the rips in his T-shirt again, and grimaced slightly. “No, you’re not, are you.”
“You ought to let me take a look at that,” I said, adding pointedly, “before we head for the airport.”
He hesitated a beat, then came back across the room. “Yeah, sure.”
I jerked my head toward a second door over to my left. “Bathroom?”
He nodded.
I took a couple of steps and opened the door. The smell hit me almost at once. I was already turning back when Sean hit me just below my shoulder blades, hard enough to knock me off my feet and send me sprawling headlong onto a hard tile floor.
The door slammed shut behind me, leaving the room in utter darkness. I groped for the door, felt my way up to the handle, and rattled it hard. He must have jammed something under it on the outside, because it wasn’t going anywhere.
I slammed my hand against the door panel in sheer frustration. “Sean, for fuck’s sake!”
“Sorry, Charlie, but I’m not done here.” His voice, even muffled by the hardwood door, did not sound in the least bit regretful.
“You don’t know what you’re risking if you go on.” I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice but did not succeed.
“Oh, I think I do. No more than I’ve already risked by coming this far. You might even thank me for it one day.”
“You’re a bloody fool,” I yelled. “And I know you didn’t kill Clay.”
There was a pause. “Well, that’s something, at least. Try not to let anyone convince you to think the worst of me, no matter what happens next.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
But only silence greeted me. Cursing under my breath, I fumbled outward from the door frame, looking for a light switch and hoping it wasn’t on the outside.
My fingers closed on it with relief. Half a dozen sunken spotlights blazed on in the ceiling, and I was forced to screw my eyes shut against the glare.
When I opened them again I found I was in an opulent tiled bathroom, but I didn’t have time to take in the details.
I was too busy staring at the dead man in the bathtub.
FORTY-FIVE
“SO IF IT WASN’T HACKETT?” PARKER SAID. “THEN WHO . . . ?”
“A guy called Docksy. I doubt that’s the name on his passport, but it was how he introduced himself when I met him yesterday morning,” I said. “He told me he worked with Hackett.”
I was in yet another hotel room, across from the Queen Alia International Airport. I’d grabbed a taxi and driven straight over here without returning to my hotel in Madaba. It was now midmorning the following day, although so far I hadn’t booked a flight out. I’d wanted to report back to Parker first, see where he wanted to take this. And, if I was honest, I’d also wanted to put as much distance as possible between me and the corpse.
“And . . . Sean?”
I heard the tension in his voice and knew he didn’t want to come right out and ask what he was desperate to know. I deliberately sidestepped—not from cruelty but from cowardice.
“By the time I kicked my way out, he was long gone. I grabbed all the documents from the safe, just in case, wiped down anything I’d touched, and got out of there.”
I’d even fished under the bed to retrieve my improvised drink-can weapon. It still had Sean’s blood on it. Not something I was eager to leave behind for the Jordanian cops.
Parker sighed. I could almost see the frustrated wipe of hand across face that accompanied the sound.
“Did he do it, Charlie—yes or no?”
“How can I be expected to answer that? I’m not a forensic pathologist.”
“And I’m not asking for a physical autopsy—more a psychological one.”
My turn to let my breath out, slowly.
“From the way it was done . . . I don’t know. It wasn’t Sean’s style, somehow.”
“Interesting choice of word to describe killing a man.”
“What I meant was garrotes can be messy—especially if it’s a thin wire, which is what the killer used, from what it looked like.” I had a brief mental image of Docksy’s bloated and discolored face, stark against the white tub, with the bloodied groove from the ligature sliced into his flesh. He’d fought, from the looks of it, clawing at the weapon with fingers that were torn and bloodied, too. I shook it off.