Fox Hunter

by Zoe Sharp

  “Sean was more than capable of breaking the guy’s neck—quick, clean, and quiet. And less chance of acquiring bloodstains he’d have to hide.”

  “I’m assuming there weren’t any?”

  I hesitated. When he’d switched on the lamp, there had been blood on Sean, but I’d taken it for his own.

  “Not as far as I could tell,” I hedged, and Parker seemed to accept that—for now, at least.

  “I hate to paraphrase good old Oscar Wilde—being found with one body might be considered unfortunate—”

  “—but two is carelessness,” I finished for him. “Yeah, I know. But even so, I still can’t quite see Sean doing something like this. Why would he kill Docksy anyway? As far as I know they’d never met. The guy meant nothing to him.”

  The silence hummed between us for what seemed like a long time. I stared out the hotel window at a few air-conditioning units and distant jets climbing steadily into a cloudless dark blue sky.

  “And are you OK?” Parker asked then. The question surprised me.

  “I’m fine. I got the drop on him and he came off worse for once.”

  “Not exactly what I had in mind, although I’m glad to hear it anyhow. No, I meant . . . seeing Sean again.”

  “Well, I can’t say being shoved into a bathroom with a corpse was my idea of the perfect end to a romantic evening, but . . . yeah, I’m OK. You don’t need to worry that I won’t be able to separate my head from my heart, Parker. I know exactly what Sean’s capable of, and honestly, I don’t think it’s this.”

  “OK, so let’s say, for the sake of argument, Sean is in the clear,” he said, and I wondered if the change of subject was to hide his doubt. “If that’s the case, why would someone want to kill this guy Docksy, and what was he doing at Hackett’s villa?”

  “The two things could be connected. Once he got loose from the office, Docksy might have headed there to warn Hackett someone was looking for him, and was mistaken for Hackett himself. They were a similar type. If you were working from a poor photo or a brief description, in the dark, it would have been an easy mistake to make—particularly the way it was done. Usually, you would garrote somebody from behind, don’t forget.” With a knee between their shoulder blades for good measure.

  “So it’s possible the killer didn’t see his face until afterward,” Parker said slowly. “OK, good point.”

  “But Sean knew Hackett—he trained him. He would have known.”

  “But if it was simply mistaken identity, who else would want Hackett dead?”

  Other than Sean, you mean? Or me, for that matter.

  “How long have you got?” I asked with humor that was halfhearted at best. “What we should be asking is who else would want both Hackett and Clay dead. But considering Hamilton said they had their eye on Clay with regard to smuggling, and Hackett’s in the export trade . . . there has to be something in that, surely?”

  “Hmm, you could be right. I’ll check it out. Ex-military guys do tend to stick together in civilian life.”

  “Speaking of ex-military guys, any more info on our Russian friends? I find it a bit of a coincidence that they arrived in Madaba around the time another body joined the pile.”

  “You think maybe they turned up at your hotel after they’d been to Hackett’s place?”

  “That is also a possibility. I suppose it depends on how long Docksy was dead by the time I got to him. He was still fairly pliable, although his face had started to stiffen, and from memory I think that’s where rigor sets in first. But I don’t know if the fact he was strangled would affect that.”

  “Ah, not my area of expertise, I’m happy to say.”

  “Either way, if the Russians aren’t working on Sean’s behalf, we have to rethink their involvement in all this. I have no idea who else would go to those lengths to warn me off without getting violent about it.”

  “Charlie, they tried to blow up the SUV you were traveling in,” Parker muttered. “What’s your definition of ‘violent’?”

  “Well, they could have finished the job when they hijacked me with Dawson in Kuwait City, but they didn’t. Instead, they passed on their warning and then seemed to back right off.”

  “How soon after that did you hire Moe?”

  I thought back, counting the days. It was incredible to realize how little time I’d actually been on this job. From the inside, it felt like years.

  “The following day. I got back to the hotel, then the next morning Dawson and I followed Bailey to the airport and met an ex–Royal Marine, Osborne, who told us about the fixer. We put the word out right away, and Moe turned up that afternoon.”

  “Hang on, let’s backtrack. You said you followed Bailey to the airport, yeah?”

  “Yeah, but it was some ungodly hour of the morning.”

  “Nevertheless, it coincided with the departure time of a flight to the UK. If the Russians were keeping tabs on you, it might have seemed like it was you who’d decided to cut and run.”

  “OK, yeah, that would fit,” I agreed. “Question is, when they delivered their ‘go home’ order, were they warning me off following Sean, or from following up on Clay?”

  “You got me there. I don’t suppose there was anything useful in the documents you, ah, borrowed from Hackett’s place?”

  “Something in Cyrillic, you mean? No, it’s mainly shipping manifests and invoices, as far as I can tell. Nothing marked Top Secret—For Your Eyes Only, unfortunately.”

  “Shipping manifests . . .” Parker repeated. “Why would he keep them in his safe at home rather than at the office?”

  I shifted from the window, dug the sheaf of papers out of my bag, and spread them across the bed.

  “I don’t know. Let me have another look through and get back to you—”

  A brisk knocking on the door and a muffled call of “Housekeeping” stopped me midsentence.

  “What?” Parker demanded.

  “Wait one.”

  I moved to the door, keeping out of direct line between that and the window, so the light through the Judas glass wouldn’t alter. As always, my doorstop was firmly wedged underneath, and all the dead bolts activated.

  I took a squint through the peephole. A woman stood alone in the corridor outside. She was dressed in black, looking less like a chambermaid than anyone I have yet to see.

  I sighed, unbolting the door and nudging the doorstop aside with the toe of my boot. I opened the door, and the woman stepped inside without waiting for an invitation.

  Eyes on her face, I said down the phone to Parker, “I’m going to have to call you back. I think the CIA are about to throw me out of yet another country.”

  FORTY-SIX

  FROM THE EXPRESSION ON HER FACE AS SHE CAME IN, IT WAS HARD to tell if Aubrey Hamilton was pleased or displeased to see me. She was very hard to get a fix on. I made a mental note never to take up any offers to play poker against her for money.

  The motivations of the man who muscled along the corridor to join her were easier to fathom, though. Woźniak—the one who’d been instrumental in gunning down Moe—looked like he’d rather saw off his own toes using a blunt nail file than be in my hotel bedroom without a black hood and a set of handcuffs. And I don’t mean that in any kind of a good way.

  He covered his unease by flexing his fingers and scowling while he carried out a brief search.

  “Weapons, recording devices, or contraband?” I asked pleasantly.

  “All of the above,” Hamilton said. She folded herself elegantly into an easy chair—the one farthest from the window—and propped her elbows on the side arms, steepling her fingers.

  I tried, as casually as I could, to gather the papers I’d stolen from Hackett’s safe, in the guise of clearing myself a space to sit down on the bed opposite.

  After a few minutes Woźniak stood still and cleared his throat. When Hamilton glanced at him, he shook his head.

  “Thanks,” she said, dismissive. “I’ll take it from here.”

 
Woźniak moved for the door and hesitated there, his eyes on me.

  “Don’t worry,” Hamilton told him. “If I need help, I’ll scream like a girl.”

  He scowled at her—the scowl of a protective parent forced to leave his daughter alone with someone who was very probably on the sex offenders register. But he went out without further word. The self-closing mechanism pulled the door to softly behind him. It latched, and then it was just the two of us.

  I leaned forward, resting my forearms on my knees, and we sat facing each other. I gauged the distance between us—little more than two meters.

  “You do realize you’d never get the chance to scream, don’t you?”

  “You may be a very proficient and able killer, Charlie, but nothing I’ve read or been told about you leads me to believe you’re psychotic.” She smiled, and it almost reached as far as her eyes. “Well, maybe borderline psychotic . . .”

  That was before I watched a kid I’d grown to really rather like slaughtered without being given a chance by men under your command.

  I almost said the words out loud, but I held both my tongue and my hand, not without effort. It took more effort still to ask, “Would you like coffee? I can ring down for some.”

  Such pretty manners would have made my parents proud.

  Hamilton accepted with an incline of her head. She’d clearly had the training that said to refuse hospitality wasn’t the best way to get someone on-side. While I called to order room service, I could feel her gaze on me.

  When I took my seat on the bed again, she finally spoke.

  “I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but this is one time I should have listened to my mother.”

  I raised an eyebrow and said nothing.

  “She was singing the praises of ‘the young woman from the Armstrong-Meyer agency’ over that whole business with the rescue and recovery outfit she donates so heavily to. I admit I didn’t pay enough attention for your name to click when I heard it again.” Her smile was wry, a little twisted. “Careless of me.”

  It was not a mistake she’d make again, I guessed. I hoped Nancy Hamilton was prepared to be grilled by her daughter over every future move she would make.

  “And if you had been paying more attention?”

  She snorted. “If I’d known you were the one who’d gotten herself swallowed by an earthquake and still came out fighting? I would have sent more men to make damned certain you got on that plane.” She paused, waiting for a reaction I wasn’t prepared to give. “Either that, or I would have hired you.”

  “Am I supposed to be flattered?”

  “Not particularly, but I sure as hell didn’t expect you to be insulted, either.”

  “Really? Considering the last time we met, you had your pet thugs snatch me off the street, killing my driver—little more than a kid—in the process? Then you accuse me of interfering with your operation, threaten me with prison, and deport me under guard. If that’s supposed to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside at the thought of you, then I’m afraid you’re destined for disappointment.”

  She let out a long breath. “Yeah, I guess when you put it like that . . .”

  There was a knock on the door. When I rose to check the Judas glass, I saw Woźniak outside with a tray balanced in one hand, having intercepted my coffee order. I opened up to relieve him of his burden, then pointedly shut the door in his face without offering him a cup. Mean, but not without a twinge of satisfaction.

  The coffee was Jordanian, scented with cardamom, in a small pot with two equally tiny, handleless cups. As I poured us a mouthful each, I said over my shoulder, “I assume I’m about to get another ride to the airport, although you could have sent your boys to do that. So, why are you here, Aubrey?”

  Her eyes flicked to mine at the mention of her first name. She was frowning as she took the cup I held out to her, but that could have been down to the quantity of her beverage rather than my question.

  “I don’t like making mistakes,” she said after a moment’s silence. “And I think trying to shut you down when we last met may have been just that—a mistake.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve since found out that you’re very good at what you do. The fact you used us to get you as far as you wanted to go, then gave us the slip, kinda proves it. I was impressed.” She smiled into her coffee. “Mad as hell, yes, but impressed all the same.”

  I took a sip of my coffee and reminded myself she was a spook, and therefore manipulating people was what she was good at.

  “Why do I have a feeling there’s ‘an offer I can’t refuse’ coming?”

  “Because you’ve seen too many old movies?” she suggested. The smile ghosted away as she added, “I’m about to seriously overstep my authority, but I want to level with you.”

  “In return for . . . ?”

  “Information is a two-way street, Charlie. That’s how it works.”

  The offer surprised me, even with strings attached. And if my experience with other clandestine government agencies was anything to go by, they would be bloody big strings.

  “What makes you think I can tell you anything you don’t know already? After all, I’m on my own . . . now,” I said with just a little bite. “You’ve got the might of the US government at your beck and call.”

  “That’s just it. We’ve had a recent . . . change of direction at the top, if I can put it like that. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be allowed to do our job out here.”

  “And—don’t tell me—you hate leaving things unfinished, too.”

  She nodded and drained the last of her coffee—they really were tiny cups. “You got that right.”

  “What was Uncle Sam doing taking an interest in looted antiquities in the first place?”

  “Penance?” She pulled a wry face. “Truth is, we fucked up over here. All that planning—all the logistical analysis and projections and all the bullshit that went on for a year or more before we invaded in ’03, and nobody worked out the first thing people would do, soon as the heavy hand of Saddam was lifted, was go rob their own back yard.”

  “Surely, after what happened in Kuwait . . . ?”

  “Even after the invasion,” Hamilton went on, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs, “we had, like, two guys—reservists—who knew about archaeological remains. So did we utilize their expertise? Like hell we did. One was drafted into planning for a refugee crisis that never materialized, and the other made so much noise about what was going on, he ended up getting himself reassigned guarding a goddamn zoo. Meanwhile, every site of significance in Iraq was being robbed six ways from Sunday. Can you believe it?”

  “All too easily, I’m afraid.”

  “Damn right. Thing is, the Hague passed some kind of resolution back in the ’50s for the ‘protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict.’ It’s in the rules that we’re supposed to put a stop to theft, pillage, or vandalism.”

  Professor Lihaibi had blamed the Americans for the looting that went on after the second Gulf War. At the time I’d thought him biased. An error on my part.

  “Excuse me for being a tad cynical, but it seems a little late in the day for the US government to be growing a conscience, and having met Lihaibi, I don’t believe he has one, either, so what more is going on here?”

  She paused, favored me with another of those sharp, assessing glances. “Smart cookie, aren’t you, Charlie?”

  No, if I were that clever, Moe wouldn’t be dead and Sean wouldn’t have got away from me last night . . .

  I said nothing.

  “Isis is what is going on,” Hamilton said then. “They make this big song and dance about destroying ancient sites that don’t scan with their view of things, but most of that’s just a cover. They’re clever and adaptable, and since we disrupted production at many of the oilfields they seized, and stopped them trading livestock or crops from captured territory, they’ve gotten a huge percentage of their funding from those looted antiquities.�
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  “If what you—and Lihaibi—say is true, I’m surprised there’s anything left for them to loot by this time.”

  “Ah, well, at the start, the Isis high command took a twenty percent cut on stuff others were digging up. Call it tax, call it commission—the result’s the same. I guess if the IRS was allowed to chop off your hands if they caught you trying to weasel out of paying, we’d have a hell of a lot less tax evasion going on back home.”

  “I thought they already could.”

  She snorted again.

  “By the end of 2014, Isis decided, ‘Hey, why let somebody else take eighty percent when our need is greater than theirs?’ and they brought in their own archaeologists and teams with bulldozers. Now they’ve taken over the business almost entirely. They even scour the online markets to find out what’s in demand so they can work out what’s worth digging up.”

  “Where did Michael Clay come in?”

  “Somehow they’re shifting large amounts of contraband artifacts out of Iraq and Syria, and so far we have not been able to identify the route taken, or who’s responsible for shipping, but we suspect they’re using outsiders rather than people from their own network.”

  “When you say outsiders, you mean Western contractors—people like Clay?”

  “It makes sense when you stop to think. They’re moving in and out of the country all the time, often with large supplies of construction materials. Because of the political situation, and the speed everything is moving, the checks and balances don’t always work the way they should.”

  I thought for a moment, nose over my cup to inhale the lingering scent of warm cardamom. “What would make someone like Clay—someone who’s spent most of his professional life shooting Isis members on sight—suddenly want to work for them?”

  In reply, Hamilton lifted her hand and slid her thumb back and forth across the tips of her fingers.

  “Money,” she said. “And, oh boy, lots of it.”