“Her name is Harper McDaniel. I think you know why she’s here.”
Bixel stiffened and shot Helmut a withering glare.
“You’re telling me you know this woman, Adrian?” Albion said. “This intruder.”
“Yes, sir, she came to my attention earlier in the week.”
“And you know what she was searching for?”
Naff said, “Ms. McDaniel wants to know the same thing I’d like to know, the same thing you might want to know as well.”
“And what is that?”
“Maybe Ms. Bixel can tell us, or Helmut.”
“No, Adrian. Whatever it is, I want to hear it from you.”
“All right,” he said. “I believe Ms. McDaniel is searching for details about a series of events in Africa that Bixel and Helmut are trying very hard to conceal.”
Bonnie opened the office door again and said, “Okay, time to go, Daddy. My teachers at school won’t like that my father wakes me up in the middle of the night, drags me to his office, has me sit in the waiting room with nothing but magazines that are all words and no pictures.”
“One second, honey. I promise. A couple of things to finish.”
Bonnie stabbed a finger at the floor in front of her.
“There’s blood on your rug, you know that, Daddy? Somebody was bleeding in your office. Was it you?”
“No, it wasn’t me, sweetie. Now please, go sit down.”
“Was Mommy here? Did she scratch you again?”
“Bonnie, please.”
“Mommy’s getting a divorce,” Bonnie announced. “She can’t take Daddy anymore. She moved out.”
“Bonnie, stop it. Please.”
“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m supposed to be in bed.”
“Helmut,” Bixel said. “Entertain Bonnie for a minute, will you?”
Helmut shot the child a cold look, and Bonnie said, “You’re that scary man. You hurt people and enjoy it. Daddy’s afraid of you. He doesn’t know what your job is, but you’re always around. Isn’t that what you said, Daddy? This is the man, right? The one you call Helmet Head.”
Albion rose from his chair. “All right,” he said with a deep sigh. “Enough of this. The three of you stay and look at the rest of the video if you like. Sort this out, get your story straight. But I don’t want to hear any more about Africa. At this late date I don’t care what happened over there. All I want is for the three of you to fix whatever is wrong, smooth over anything you have to so we can complete the Marburg transaction. If any one of you screws this up and that deal is jeopardized, you’re finished at Albion. Now do what you have to do. Whatever it takes. But I’ll hear no more about any of this. Is that clear?”
“Why the long face?” Spider said. “Aren’t you glad to see me? Old friends in a foreign land?”
Spider steered with his knee while he tugged open his parka so she could see the pistol he was holding in his lap. Aimed her way.
She looked back at Nick lying perfectly still, his eyes on hers, questioning. What now?
“All day I’ve been lusting for a big, greasy cheeseburger. You hungry? I bet you are, the big night you’re having.”
Spider turned off Bahnhofstrasse and crossed the Limmat River on the Quaibrücke bridge, then looped left, heading into Altstadt. The Old Town.
“Where are you taking us?” Keeping her voice quiet, almost a whisper, the way she might have spoken to Ross while Leo was sleeping nearby.
“My hotel,” he said. “It’s not the Widder, but it works for me.”
“How did you find me?”
“Karma,” he said. “Wasn’t even looking, but there you were.”
“Karma.”
“I was watching for somebody else, a guy who did me wrong, and day after day I’m waiting for him to show, who walks by but my favorite lady. So I pay my check, follow till you get back to your hotel.
“I find a café nearby, wait to see what you’re up to, your comings and goings. For a few days it was nothing unusual, then, boom, I’m there this afternoon across the plaza, drinking espresso, I see this tall woman come out of the Widder, looks a little like you only she’s wearing a uniform, and I’m about to go back to my espresso, but no, it wasn’t just any woman in any uniform. It was you. So I grab a taxi, follow along, see what kind of trickery you’re up to, then you and the brother go into the Albion building, leave the van outside. I wait till Nicky boy comes back out and take him down. I need some duct tape to keep him quiet, so I let the guys you abducted loose, and that’s it. The whole story. Like I said, karma.”
“Who were you waiting for when I walked by?”
“Look, here’s my hotel now. You’ll like it, it’s kitschy, a bit of Americana in the heart of Zurich. Good burgers too. We can order room service when we get hungry. And if I know us, we will get hungry.”
He looked over with a sleepy smile. Ran a hand through his thick, red hair, combing it back.
“You think you’re going to rape me?”
He pulled the van into a narrow side street two blocks off Limmatquai and killed the engine. He sat staring out the windshield for several moments chewing his gum.
“Rape? Oh, hell, no, I’m hoping we can get to know each other better. We got started off on a bad foot.” Still looking straight ahead he said, “Come up to my room, we talk, get some room service, have a bite to eat. Just talk, see what we got in common. I bet it’s more than you think.”
Harper’s mouth was dry, lungs tight.
“Look, I know it’s weird, me showing up like this,” he said. “But I’m not nuts. I was just hoping we could give it a try. A real conversation, share our backgrounds, get to know each other better. I mean, yeah, I know you a little already, and I like what I see, but I think you’ve got a negative first impression of me. I’d like a do-over.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. Not to your room, not anywhere.”
“Okay, yeah, I know, maybe I’m rushing things a little. I get it. So here’s a thought. Maybe what we could do, we take a stroll down these cobblestone streets. It’s romantic, medieval architecture, all that, we could stop in a club. You’re young, you like to dance, right? We get sweaty and loose, a couple of drinks, then back to the hotel, see how you feel. Bet you’re in a better mood for talking.”
“Who do you work for? Who paid you to kill my husband and child?”
“Huh?”
He took his hand off the wheel and looked at her. Face half-hidden in shadows, but she could see a twist in his mouth. All his sleazy charm gone.
She said, “Don’t bother denying it. I saw the video you made.”
“What video?”
“The one from the spy cams you hid inside my house. What was that about? What did you need to know? How far the infection had spread? Was that it? Find out if Ross talked to anyone else about what he’d discovered, then you’d have to kill them too. Is that it?”
“I wish I knew what you were referring to. You’re scaring me with this crazy talk.” But his eyes and voice said otherwise. He had the slippery look of a cornered animal.
“Who shot you in the parking lot of the Aqua? Was it Adrian Naff?”
“Whoa. Where you getting this stuff?”
“You and Naff and Jackson Sharp were buddies, comrades in arms. I saw that video too, the three of you held hostage by some jihadi group, you were pleading for ransom.”
“I don’t remember pleading. But, boy oh boy, you’ve been a busy girl.”
“The massacre in Soko, you were part of that, weren’t you?”
He looked at her blankly. “Now you totally lost me. Never heard of any Soko.”
“Listen to me, Spider. You’re done, you’re finished. Your only hope is to let us go and try to make a run for it.”
He chuckled and waved away her bravado like a bad smell.
“Look, you think I killed your husband and little boy,” he said. “But you’re wrong. I hated what happened to them. I liked your family. The way you and your husband acted when yo
u were together, that’s how it’s supposed to be between people. What you had with him, maybe it could happen again with someone else, out in the future somewhere, I mean, like it might take a while, you’d need to get over your grief and loss, but it could happen, right? You think that’s possible?”
“With you? Is that what you mean?”
“You think I’m stupid. But I’m not stupid. I’ve had a successful career. I even went to college.”
“Yeah, you dropped out your first year.”
“Wow.” He smiled at her. “You really been checking up on me.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m flattered. What else you find out?”
Harper didn’t respond.
“Maybe you read about my old man, how he died. That made the papers.”
Harper looked straight ahead out the windshield.
“No? You didn’t find out about my dad? Well, somebody killed the cocksucker. Blew his face off with his own shotgun. Stuffed his corpse in a drainage pipe. I was just a kid at the time, thirteen, fourteen.”
Spider looked at her, eyes in shadow, just a gleam in the dark, nothing she could read.
“Cops went through the motions, but the old man was such a mean-ass drunk, always in trouble with the law, beating the shit out of my mother, picking fights in bars, drunk and disorderly half his life, so as far as the cops were concerned, him getting murdered, it was good riddance.”
Harper cut a quick look at Nick. Lying still, listening to Spider.
“You want to know a secret? I never told anybody this before. It was me who did it, killed the son of a bitch, my start in life, how I went off in the wrong direction.”
“Oh, that’s how it is,” she said. “Your shitty childhood gives you a license to murder anybody you feel like? That what you’re saying?”
He smiled at her. “See what we’re doing now? This kind of back-and-forth is what I was talking about. Sharing our pasts, opening up, revealing who we are. That’s a good thing, a healthy thing. But it would be a lot easier if we went inside, more comfortable, sit in chairs, have a glass of wine. How about it? I don’t want to bully you, but we should go in.”
She took another glance at Nick. He gave her a gloomy look, then closed his eyes and turned his head away.
Harper settled back in the seat and watched the snowflakes swirling in the dark. A frigid hand gripping her heart.
“So what do you say, Harper? Give it a try, go up to my room, talk some more? How bad could that be?”
THIRTY
Mid-March, Altstadt, Old Town, Zurich, Switzerland
The lobby for the Hotel California was on the second floor, up a narrow flight of stairs. Harper in front, Spider following close. Framed posters on the wall featured American bands from the sixties. Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, The Doors. Garish yellows and reds, harsh overhead lights.
The young man behind the reception desk wore a brown-and-red uniform. He looked up as they entered the small lobby, checked out Harper, gave Spider a knowing nod, and got back to the newspaper spread out before him on the counter.
They waited in silence for one of the elevators to arrive. On the walls were posters of the American West. A large desert scene covered each elevator door, boulders and saguaros, wide expanses of sand, the paintings labeled Red Rock Canyon and Death Valley.
“I know you’re jumpy,” Spider said. “But there’s no need. It’s going to be just fine. You’ll see.”
She was silent, coiled, watching for the opening that was bound to come.
“I’m not like this normally, so forward with women,” he said, keeping his voice low, intimate. “It’s your fault, really. The way you are. That animal energy you project.”
Yes, animal energy. She felt it rising inside her like black steam.
The elevator arrived and she stepped aboard. Spider followed, leaned across her to press number five. She looked down at the brief flash of his exposed neck.
When the doors closed, Harper stepped away and planted her back against the opposite wall.
At the second floor, the doors drew open, and a squat woman in her sixties in a maid’s uniform rolled her cart into the car, separating them. Harper on the right side, Spider left. He gave her a warning look: don’t try any shit.
As the doors closed, the woman punched the button for three. She stared at Spider then and at Harper. Gave Harper a commiserating shrug. In a side tray of the cart there were cleaning supplies and sheets of hotel stationery and envelopes. In a second tray, a collection of ballpoint pens emblazoned with the hotel’s logo.
Her move hidden by the cart, Harper pocketed a single pen. Spider smiled at her as the doors opened at three. The maid bid them bonne soirée, and rolled her cart into the corridor.
“Five-eleven,” Spider said when they’d stepped onto the fifth-floor hallway. “Left around the corner, third door on your right.”
Across the hall from 511, a BBC newscast was filtering through the door, another devastating terrorist attack in Germany. Harper stepped aside and Spider used the key, swung open the door, and gestured for her to enter. His room smelled of a citrusy cologne. His bed tightly made with crisp hospital corners, suitcase open on a luggage stand, contents folded, portioned off in neat sections.
“I’m a neat freak,” he said. “Too many years in the military. I don’t like messes. But you’re neat too, right? Organize your drawers, your closet. Something we have in common.”
Harper went to the window and drew aside the curtains and looked out at the snowy street below. She could see the rear doors of the Kintana van a half block away. Nick would be shivering, frightened, battling against the wraps of tape, the numbing cold.
“Red or white?” Spider held up two bottles. “I seem to remember you’re a red girl.”
“Can we dispense with the foreplay?”
“You’re making this harder than it needs to be. Why don’t you sit down, get comfortable? Maybe take a look at the room service menu.” He picked up a leather folder from the desk and held it out to her.
Work with what you have, her sensei said. Use what’s at hand.
She stepped forward and took the binder from him and opened it.
He didn’t back away, letting her into his space. His guard down.
Hand the menu back, and while he’s close, plant the pen in his throat and rip. Same as she’d handled Jamal Fakhri. Steeling herself. The icy hand in her chest tightening. A flutter of stage fright.
Spider watched her, holding his ground a few feet away.
The desk was behind him. Harper’s calves and the back of her knees brushing the double bed. Not the best fighting space. So many obstacles, so many variables. A floor lamp on one side of the bed, a bedside table on the other. Phone, table lamp. A mirror on the wall beside the closet. More glass-framed posters of California scenes. Big Sur, Mendocino, the Sierra Nevada, another Red Rock Canyon in a heavy frame. Objects that could be clubs, things to be smashed, glass shattered, variables.
“Oh, and by the way,” he said, drawing open his jacket, showing his holstered pistol. “Why don’t you give me the pen you palmed.”
Harper drew a hard breath.
“Put it down,” he said. “Over here.”
He patted the desktop and took two steps to the side.
She drew out the ballpoint, laid it on the desk. Set the menu beside it.
“You really hate me that much? You’d stab me with that?”
A door slammed in the hallway, voices walked past, giddy female laughter.
Spider picked up the pen, snapped it in two. Dropped the pieces in a metal waste can.
“You’re delusional if you think I’m going to have some kind of relationship with the man who destroyed my family.”
“You keep saying that, but I didn’t do it.”
“I saw you, Spider. I watched the video.”
“I don’t know what you saw, but it’s not true. I never killed them. I wouldn’t do that. I regret it happened. Deepl
y regret it. Now just let that go and let’s have a drink? Settle us both down.”
When she didn’t answer, he studied her for a long moment. “Have a drink . . . then maybe, if you like, I could brush your hair, how Ross used to do it. I’ve got a very nice brush right here. Would you like that? I know I would.”
The jolt in her chest sent a wild, skittering light through the room. The floor rocked. Spider’s grotesque violation, his invasion of her marriage, befouling the most intimate moments between Harper and Ross.
“I bought it yesterday. It’s a very nice brush.”
He turned to reach for it, and she was on him.
Right elbow cracking against his skull sent him sprawling into the desk chair. She kept coming, chopped him in the throat, two more blows to the side of his head, then she grabbed the chardonnay. Spider rolled into her, shoulder into her gut, knocked her back against the bed.
He drew his pistol, brought it to her face, and Harper swept the wine bottle up, cracked his wrist, sent the pistol flying.
Then swung the bottle downward at his skull, but he’d moved too close, and it only clipped the side of his head, slowed him for a second, but he recovered, knocked the bottle away, sent it crashing against the side table, and he rose and closed in, face inches from hers, both fists pummeling her midsection, body blows again and again, a street fighter, nothing fancy. Still, he doubled her over.
She gasped, spun away, and as he closed again, she kneed him, missed his crotch, struck his thigh. No room to work. He kept coming, making a mournful, apocalyptic moan, as if he were abandoning all hope, throwing himself off some excruciating cliff.
She let him drive her backward into the bedside wall, flatten her there, his breath heavy, and she stayed pinned, let him crush his body into hers, grinding his hips into her loins, falling into a rhythm, and good Christ, the guy was dry humping her, grinding and grinding, the fantasy in his head taking charge, savagery and sex intertwined for him, and as he slowed his rhythm, she felt him harden against her, and she went with it, sexual judo, fed his make-believe, became the slut unable to resist, and tilted her face forward, fit her lips to his wild mouth, his hot breath filling her, but he resisted, mouth hard, lips shut, disbelieving, then seconds later his vanity undid him, and he softened, thought she was yielding.
When They Come for You Page 18