by Zoe Sharp
Madeleine pointed a remote at the big flat-screen TV mounted on the wall at one end of the room. While we waited for it to sync with the laptop, she handed out the folders.
I opened mine with a certain caution, unsure what I might find. Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t the photo of a woman’s scarred face, staring straight and fearless into the lens of the camera.
“But . . . this is Najida,” I said. “The woman who—”
“—Clay raped in Basra,” Madeleine finished for me. “Yes. Ever since Luisa Dawson first told me about her, the case has bothered me. I wanted to do something about it. Not just for her, but for all women who find themselves in that situation—betrayed and abandoned.”
“So where does Hamilton come in?”
“We discussed the situation quite a bit while we were in Borovets and you were . . . otherwise engaged. It turns out that under her rather steely exterior she has something of a heart of gold.”
“Too malleable,” I said. “Titanium, maybe?”
Madeleine smiled but ignored my comment. “And we agreed that the first course of action was to catch the men responsible, and not only for them to be punished, but for them to be seen to be punished.”
“If you want to punish Clay any further, you’ll need a shovel to dig him up first.”
Parker took a sip of his coffee to hide what I suspected might be a grin. Madeleine favored me with a stern look.
“Clay was not acting alone, and there has been a further attack with an identical MO since he was killed. So, his partner, whoever that was, has acquired a new accomplice and is carrying on without him.”
“Still no official investigation, I assume?”
She shook her head.
I would have asked more, but the laptop chimed with an incoming feed, and moments later Aubrey Hamilton’s face appeared on the flat-screen, considerably larger than life. There were banks of monitors behind her.
“Well, the gang’s all here,” she said by way of greeting, and toasted my boss with the can of Diet Coke she was holding. “You must be Parker Armstrong. Good to put a face to the voice at last.”
Parker nodded. “Likewise, ma’am.”
“We received intel that a suspicious vehicle had been seen cruising one of the local markets, so we threw chum in the water and waited for the sharks to start circling, ready to take the bait,” Hamilton said, straight to business. “And trust me, you have no idea how much chum we had to throw.” Somebody in the room behind her spoke and she gave them a curt nod over her shoulder. “OK people, we’ve gotten the feed from this morning all set up and ready to roll. Let’s go.”
The picture changed to a jerky shot of a street scene from what looked like a camera hidden in the front of a bag. It swung gently as the person holding it walked, turning occasionally to face street stalls, or outward across the street to the other side of the market. To one side I could see dark folds of cloth from the burqa the figure wore, swaying as they walked.
There was a microphone recording as well, picking up traffic noises, car horns, and the noisy exhaust note of scooters, the babble of voices and calls from the market stallholders.
The figure stopped at one stall and spoke to the stallholder in Arabic. I heard enough of the voice to recognize that it was a woman. When she turned sideways, the bag camera caught a portion of the street behind her. Moving slowly at the curb was a dusty beige van, but I couldn’t see any detail of the driver.
Unconsciously, I felt my pulse quicken.
The woman finished her conversation with the stallholder and moved on, apparently oblivious. She stepped down off the curb and turned right into a side street. The sunlight was dimmer there, although I calculated it was midafternoon in Iraq, three hours ahead of the UK. It took the lens a moment to adjust, then I saw parked cars, empty boxes from the stalls, and storefronts with shutters pulled down over the windows.
As an ambush site, it was ideal.
The bag swung suddenly, revealing the beige van was now alongside the woman. She turned, said something I couldn’t catch, the first signs of alarm in her voice. The van’s side door slid open. A man lurched out and grabbed the woman and the bag. The picture went haywire as she was thrown inside, shrieking and pleading in Arabic.
I heard a man’s voice say, “Drive!” and the sound of a gunned engine came clearly over the audio track.
The bag was still clutched under the woman’s arm. By accident or design, it pointed the camera up at her attacker, who forced her into a corner of the van and pulled a combat knife from a sheath on his belt. His face was hidden by a wound keffiyeh, so that all I could see were his eyes. They were all I needed to see to glean his intention.
Suddenly, the man stumbled and almost lost his balance as the driver braked hard and swore.
I heard voices shouting in American-accented English for him to get out of the van, to throw down any weapons, for him not to be stupid.
And then the man with the knife started to swear, too.
He looked down at his erstwhile “victim” with eyes that were fearful now, quickly turning vicious. He lunged with the knife, but a second later his hands dropped sharply and the blade clattered to the metal floor of the van. A long groan escaped from behind the headscarf and he fell backward from, I guessed, a well-aimed knee to the groin.
The side door shot back and Woźniak’s face loomed into the shot, a machine pistol in his grasp.
“You OK, Dawson?”
“Oh, yeah,” the woman in the burqa said.
The bag camera jostled around again, then settled on her would-be attacker, now lying facedown on the van floor with what looked like Woźniak’s knee in his back as his hands were zip-tied behind him. Dawson reached out and yanked the keffiyeh away from his face.
“Well, hello, Dave,” she said to Bailey. “Want to hear the good news, mate? Not only are you going to prison for a very long time, but you’re going to prison in Iraq . . .”
I said my good-byes to Madeleine, and Parker walked me out to the bike.
“Did you know what she was planning—Hamilton, I mean?” I asked.
“I had an idea. She’s got a surprisingly strong sense of justice, for a spook.”
“Yeah, it’s a dying art,” I said, sticking my key into the Fireblade’s ignition. “So is truth, it seems.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets, raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
I sighed. “You knew what Sean was doing right from the start, didn’t you? He wanted to know what really happened back in the army, so he decided to track down and talk to the men involved. But before he did anything, he discussed it with you.”
“Did Sean tell you that?”
I swung my leg over the bike and reached for my helmet. “He didn’t have to. You were his partner, his friend. He didn’t trust me anymore. Of course he’d talk it through with you.”
“Maybe he mentioned it,” Parker allowed. “But when Clay was killed, I was truly worried that he’d gone off the rails.”
“Honestly? Or did you realize what it might look like from the outside, and think it might be a good opportunity to cut your losses? To get someone else—me—to do your wet work for you.”
“Charlie, I—”
“Save it. I don’t think there’s a whole hell of a lot you can say right now that will make this sound any better.”
I waited, even so, for a more adamant denial. It didn’t come.
I murmured, “I thought not,” and pulled on my helmet, flicking the front section up away from my face and buckling the strap.
“You said it yourself, Charlie. Since he came back . . . well, he didn’t really ever come back, did he?”
“There are easier ways to get rid of employees, Parker. Sooner or later, almost anyone can be persuaded to hand in their resignation.” I hit the starter, and the Fireblade’s engine growled to life. As I toed the bike into gear and began to let the clutch out, I raised my voice so I’d be heard over the top of it, adding, “And speaking
of resignations—take this as mine.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Aubrey Hamilton
Britni Patterson
Claiborne Hancock
Courtney Girton
David Farrer
Derek Harrison
Dina Willner
Don Marple
Emma Yates
Heather Venables
Jane Hudson
Jane Parsons
Jill Harrison
John Lawton
Judy Myers
Jules Farrer
Libby Fischer Hellmann
Pippa White
Thomas Talinski
Toni Goodyear
FOX HUNTER
Pegasus Books Ltd.
148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 by Zoë Sharp
First Pegasus Books cloth edition August 2017
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-68177-438-1
ISBN: 978-1-68177-489-3 (e-book)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company