by Heskett, Jim
“Of course they do.” He rubbed his temples. “I’m thinking the sooner we take care of our thing, the sooner this will go away. We need to bring balance back to the Club, and we can’t do that with Jules watching our every move.”
“I agree, David.”
He smiled and felt guilty for questioning her about her sudden need for a personal day. She was the perfect assistant. “It’s good to have you on my team, Naomi.”
“Absolutely, sir. I’m with you.”
He dipped his head to meet her eyes and lowered his voice even further. “Where are we with the Jules plan?”
“It’s all taken care of, and you don’t need to know the particulars, if you don’t want to.”
“No, I want to see it happen. Can we have a remote viewing session?”
She nodded. “Most definitely. I can cobble together some drones and maybe body cams. At your house, I assume?”
“Yes.”
“Very good, sir. The team has been briefed, and everything is ready to go. The day after tomorrow, Jules Dunard will die.”
Chapter Five
ISABEL
FBI Agent Isabel Yang nibbled on a falafel from the takeout box while she watched the parking lot at Ember’s condo. The sun was setting behind the mountains, turning an already chilly day into a frigid evening. She’d been here for two hours and had told herself she didn’t want to run the heater constantly. So, it was ten minutes of car on and heater running, ten minutes off. Sometimes, the ten minutes off turned to six or eight, depending on how bad she shivered.
Isabel checked her phone one last time to see if there had been any calls or messages from her boss, Marcus Lonsdale. She hadn’t expected any, since he hadn’t returned her calls in several days. His secretary said Marcus was out of the office for an extended assignment, and wouldn’t say anything more on the matter.
Isabel wanted to know what was going on here. She didn’t know what she would say to Marcus if she actually got him on the phone. She knew what she wanted to say, but not if she would have the courage to make her lips form the literal words.
Were you having me followed in DC and why?
She told her phone to call Jacob, and sighed at her windshield as it rang. Jacob was an old friend, retired FBI, someone who had taken Isabel under his wing when she had been wet behind the ears and he was already marking X’s on his calendar toward retirement.
It rang several times, and the frown on her face deepened after the third ring. He was normally quick to pick up after one or two rings.
Finally he answered. “Yes?” His voice was muted and thick, nasal and slow.
“Jacob… are you okay?”
“No, kid. I’m sorry, but I’ve come down with a case of the gross gut. The flu, I mean. I came back to New Hampshire and the trip took it out of me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. I don’t suppose you had a chance to look over those financial records?”
“Sorry. I gave it a go, but my head’s all full of mush. I don’t expect we’ll find anything, anyway.”
Isabel had begged, borrowed, and nearly stolen, but she’d finally been able to get her hands on Marcus Lonsdale’s records. Years of them, hoping to follow the money to see direct evidence linking him to some type of corruption. But as Jacob had said, Marcus was too smart for that. And now, she felt guilty for putting it on Jacob when he wasn’t feeling up to it.
“I think you’re right. Rest up, okay?”
Jacob coughed. “I’ll try. I don’t recover as fast as I used to, you know. Spring chicken and all that.”
“Yeah, I hear you. You stay safe and healthy, and I’ll be in touch.”
The call ended and Isabel stared at her phone. If Jacob was out of commission, then she was all alone in her investigation. That was how she had felt from the beginning, actually, but this was confirmation. And losing an ally along the way felt more devastating than never having had one in the first place.
Isabel quite often felt like a fraud and an imposter, but she was usually able to tell herself that feelings weren’t facts, as her boss liked to say. But the imposter feeling became harder to refute as the days sped by and she moved no closer to understanding everything happening here.
She took another bite of falafel as a car turned into the lot in front of Ember’s building. Ember’s car. Isabel dropped the falafel back into the bag and wiped her hands on a napkin.
She opened the car door and stepped out, knee aching. It always did in cold weather, which was one reason she had dreaded coming out to Denver in the first place. Of course, becoming Allison Campbell’s—Or, Ember Clarke’s—handler had been part of her job.
Isabel hadn’t seen the job taking all of these turns, however.
She punched the crosswalk button and waited a few seconds for the light to change. When it did, she rushed across the street as Ember climbed the steps toward the second floor landing. Heart pounding, skin tingling from the cold.
Isabel thought about calling out after her, but she didn’t want to spook Ember and make her draw a gun, in case she was packing. Hard to say what would set her off.
But it didn’t matter. Ember paused at the top of the stairs at the second floor landing and turned around as Isabel hustled across the parking lot.
“No need to run,” Ember said. “Don’t want you to slip and fall.”
Isabel slowed her pace, heart strained from exerting herself in this altitude. She paused at the bottom of the stairs, panting, hand on the railing. “I don’t know how you get by out here with so little air. Every breath is like the last mile of a marathon.”
“You get used to it.” Ember’s head tilted and she lowered her voice. Her eyes darted left and right before continuing. “You going to try to shoot me this evening, Agent Yang?”
“No. I come in peace. Can we please talk inside your apartment?”
Ember shrugged and took her keys from her purse. “Sure.”
She marched down the walkway as Isabel hurried up the stairs after her. Ember didn’t wait for her to enter the apartment, but she did leave the door open. Isabel entered and shut the door behind her.
Ember paid her no mind as she strolled across the carpet to her kitchen. With a groan as she bent over, Ember snagged a beer from her fridge and drained half of it in one gulp. Her eyes trailed over the dirty dishes in her sink for a few seconds.
Eventually, she returned to the couch and sat, eyes down, not looking at Isabel. She wore dark bags under her eyes, slumped shoulders, a frown etched onto her face.
“You okay?” Isabel said. “You look like you haven’t slept.”
Ember shook her head. “Someone close to me died. Just yesterday, actually.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, me too.” Ember now looked up, her eyes wet. “You sound like my mom, telling me I look tired.”
“I get that a lot from people. Saying that I sound like their mom.”
Ember snickered. “I could see that. But it’s good that you’re here, actually.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I spent a chunk of last week chained up in a Golden basement, put there by a woman who was very angry at me for a mistake I made.“
“Jeez.”
Ember nodded and drained the other half of her beer. “Yeah. It was not my best week, but I survived it. And I did have a lot of time to think. One of the things I was thinking about… was you.”
Isabel crossed the living room and sat on the carpet opposite Ember. She had to resist the urge to nestle next to her on the couch and rub Ember’s back. They weren’t exactly friends, after all. “Okay.”
“You were doing your job, Agent Yang, and I made life very difficult for you. I know you inherited me from my last handler after his heart attack, and we never got close. I never gave you a chance. I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry for that.”
Isabel didn’t know what to say, so she held her tongue for a few seconds. She cleared her throat. As far as she could tell, Ember sou
nded genuine. “I appreciate you saying so.”
Ember wiped tears from the corners of her eyes and set the bottle on the coffee table. “Why are you here?”
“Last time we talked, you told me to look in Washington for answers. What did you mean?”
“I don’t really know. There are no answers here, and you know Marcus is dirty. You have to know that.”
“I’m not sure what I know,” Isabel said. “I do know that he’s connected like a spider web across all of DC, and people who have crossed him have had their careers junked.”
Ember gave a rueful chuckle. “You could say that.”
“I know that every attempt I’ve made to find evidence of wrongdoing in his past leads me to a dead end.”
Isabel didn’t know if it was wise to bring up Ember and Marcus’ affair or not, so she erred on the side of caution. “Two weeks ago, he told me to kill you. Since I couldn’t do it, he’s hired someone else.”
“Who?”
“A woman named Serena Rojas.”
Ember looked up at the ceiling, as if searching her memory banks. “I don’t think I’ve heard the name.”
“You went to Lyons. She followed you there, and I followed her. I got the drop on her and she went away in handcuffs, but that won’t last for long.”
Ember’s mouth creaked open and her eyebrows climbed up onto her forehead. “Oh, that’s why the blue-and-reds were flashing when I was at the Oracle. I wondered about that. Thank you, by the way, for not letting her kill me.”
“This Serena woman is the real deal. About your height and build, long black hair, brown eyes, darker complected. Were it not for the skin tone difference, you could be siblings. She works for a small team in the government that’s so secret, it doesn’t have a name. I can’t even get info about it.”
“You’ve seen her in action?”
“She’s something else. There’s this intensity and focus that follows her like a cloud.”
“How very cloak and dagger of Marcus to hire someone like that, from a clandestine team. It’s exactly his style.”
Isabel looked around the spartan apartment. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to stay here. She definitely knows where you live.”
“I’m way ahead of you. Staying with a friend this week, maybe beyond. I’m actually on my way down to Denver, I just stopped by here to grab a couple things.”
Isabel stood. “I’ll leave you be, then. You should know I’m going to attempt contact with Serena this week. I’m going to appeal to her professional courtesy and ask her to back off.”
“You think that’s a smart idea? If she’s as deadly as you say, I mean.”
“I’m not sure. But it feels like the right thing to do. After all, I’m your handler, so keeping you out of trouble is part of my job, isn’t it?”
Ember stood and crossed the room. She extended a hand. “I appreciate it, Agent Yang.”
Isabel stared at the hand for a moment, then she reached out and shook.
Chapter Six
EMBER
She parked at a gun range across the street from Pink Door, which was literally pink. Not the whole thing, but the door was like a piece of glittery candy against the dreary backdrop of the rest of it. The building was a few stories tall, with what looked like apartments above the main strip joint on the ground floor. Bam had said the bomb was at Niles’ favorite place, so was it the booby bar or the apartments above? Maybe even more important was, where would Bam find an out-of-the-way place to stash the bomb?
A neon sign over the club’s door blasted her eyeballs and cast a wide aura of tawdriness. Ember made sure her pistols were stashed under the steering column and also that she had her Halo knife packed securely inside her boot. She had no idea if she would be searched upon entry. Women usually weren’t, even at places like this. But if it came to that, this investigation might be over too soon. No point in bringing the guns and ruining it right away.
Ember contemplated possible scenarios as she crossed the slushy snow in the street to approach the bar. A muted whump whump of bass reverberated through the walls of the building and out into the street. Across the street, next to the gun range, a homeless shelter’s light blinked on and off, then finally died. A few people stood around on the sidewalk out front, their faces grim and stoic. Dressed in rags, not nearly warm enough for this weather.
Inside the club, she paid the admission price in an anteroom and received no pat down, except a virtual mugging from the lecherous eyes of the man who took her cash to let her in. She crossed into the black-light-tinged glow of the main room. Dancers on poles, scantily clad servers hustling drinks, lonely men thrusting dollar bills at g-strings. Teeth glowing white from the light. It wasn’t the saddest place she had ever seen, but there definitely felt like a lack of joy from every angle.
She checked her watch. First, she was distracted by the step count, only at seven thousand for the day. Terrible. Then she checked the time. 9:30, which meant she still had more than two hours to find this bomb. If it was real, and also if this was the right place. Fagan’s second-hand information about Niles liking this particular establishment wasn’t an airtight lead.
Ember hadn’t been to one of these places since college, for a friend’s bachelor party. Not her kind of scene, with the dancers throwing themselves at her, getting way more handsy than they would with the men. Maybe that night, Ember had downed a few too many shots and had kissed an alluring stripper to garner some male attention from the boys at the surrounding tables, but she hadn’t felt good about it the next day. It was not the sort of activity she had ever repeated after that.
One woman in particular tonight, an Asian girl who looked barely old enough to be out of high school, strutted over to her. Hips swerving left and right with each step.
“Hey, blue eyes,” the young woman cooed. “Buy me a drink?”
“I don’t think so.”
The woman pouted. “Aww, are you not interested in having a good time?”
“Not really, no. I’m looking for a friend.”
“I could be your friend.”
“I doubt it. He might be in the back room. How do I get access there? Is there someone I need to pay, or do I have to have a code word of some kind? I’d appreciate it if you could help me skip through all that, because I’m in a serious time crunch.”
The young woman’s lips twitched for a second. “I’m not sure I… you mean the champagne room, sexy?”
“Never mind. You going to college?”
The girl nodded. “Front Range.”
“Get that degree and never come back here again.” Ember patted her on the shoulder and left her there to continue scanning the room. The Asian woman frowned, then sashayed off to court someone else.
Ember’s eyes landed on a man sitting alone at a table, more into his phone than the music or naked bodies swirling around him. Based on his clothes and his manicured fingernails, Ember made a snap assumption about him, and she approached the table. He didn’t bother to look up as she hovered next to him.
“Hey,” she said as she slid into a seat at his table. Because of the music, she felt like she was shouting.
“No thank you,” he said. Definitely gay. Not because he wasn’t interested in her, but because he had a bitchy sneer, talked like a valley girl, and he looked like he was above this place. Why hang out here, then? There was definitely something beyond just boobs and drinks being served in this establishment.
Ember leaned forward. “I’m not trying to offer you a lap dance. I’m wondering if you’ve ever seen a guy come around here. Tall, almond eyes, bad skin. Like you, he doesn’t seem like he would fit in here. His name is Niles.”
The guy at the table raised an eyebrow and sighed. “Sorry, honey, I can’t help you. If you don’t mind, I’m not buying whatever it is you’re selling.”
Ember now noted a couple security guards had taken an interest in her. She dimmed her eyes toward a booth built into the back corner of the room, lights ha
nging low to obscure the faces of the men seated around it. Two bouncers stood near the booth, further obscuring the occupants. They had eyes pointed in her direction. She knew their type immediately. Always watching out for the boss, as it was their job. They’d recognize anyone who came and went from this place, without a doubt.
One large man sat in the middle of the booth, with a banana-shaped scar under one eye. Ember guessed that would be the owner, given how he appeared to be telling a story, and the sycophants on his left and right gazed at him with rapt anticipation. The big guy then paused his story as his head tilted a little to the left, ducking down under one of those low-hanging lights.
“Aren’t you leaving yet?” the sneery gay man asked her. Ember ignored him.
She averted her eyes when she realized the boss man at the booth had been eyeing her. Out of her peripheral, the big guy mouthed something to one of his bodyguards. With the distance and the intensity of the music, she couldn’t make it out, but she knew it wasn’t good news.
“Shit,” she said as she stood from the table and backed away from the attitudinal man with the phone.
She hustled over toward the bar to order a drink. A wide mirror behind it let her keep an eye on the surroundings. She noted one of the bodyguards leaving the back booth, buttoning his suit coat, and walking in her direction.
A little too late to order that drink now. Ember had assumed there was a good chance she would attract someone’s attention in here, but hadn’t expected it to happen so fast. She turned and took a step back toward the exit when the bouncer guy cut her off. He was a white giant, at least 6’6”, with a shaved head and a black stubbly widows peak slicing down onto his forehead. He looked like he’d been scowling his entire life and the expression had stuck, the epitome of the warning mothers across America had been dishing out for generations.