The kiss went deeper, his tongue testing her lips, then plunging into her mouth, a French kiss from this man who’d murdered sweet Leo, strong, loving Ross.
She lifted her arms high above her head as if to surrender further and found the edges of the desert scene above her, the metal frame, slipping her thumbs behind it, lifting it up and off its hanger, then sucked his tongue deeper, held it there, squirming briefly, and she bit down hard, whipping her head to the left, then right, ripping his tongue, then thrust him away with her hips and brought the Red Rock Canyon down on his skull, the glass shattering, a lost cry from Spider, slamming him again and again until the frame broke apart, then used her fists and feet, snapping the chopping blows, the heel thrusts, knocking him back into the desk, shattering one of its legs.
Spider was down. Face torn, a wedge of glass snagged deep in his cheek, a splinter in his right eye. He blew a blood bubble, and she side kicked his face. Heard the flattening cartilage.
She knelt beside him, checked his throat, felt a thready pulse. He was hanging on. She looked out at the snow swirling down. With Nick freezing, there was no time to measure the moral costs. She gripped his throat in both hands, crushed. Held on a minute. More than a minute.
His mouth sagged, his eyes came open. Staring into hers with surprise that shaded into a weary sadness and, just before he closed his eyes for good, seemed to fill with forgiveness. The patient look of a man loosening his hold on earthly concerns as his body eased into the silky warm bath of forever.
When she found no heartbeat, she pushed herself to her feet and rushed from the room, located the fire-exit stairs, slipped past the lobby floor to the basement, out a side door, momentarily lost, her heart flailing, wiping the blood from her face as she hustled through the thickening snow to the van. Threw open the door, found Nick trembling, sitting up, his hands free, working on the tape at his ankles.
She spoke his name, and he swung around, eyes desolate.
“Oh god. Are you—are you okay?”
“He’s gone. Spider’s finished.”
“Jesus,” he said, shivering. “Thank god it’s over.”
“But it isn’t, Nick.”
She knelt beside him, wrapped him in her arms, holding him tight, warming him with her own crazed heat.
“It’s just beginning.”
THIRTY-ONE
Mid-March, the Widder, Zurich, Switzerland
The final look in Spider’s eyes, what she’d taken as an instant of forgiveness, haunted her. For the next few days she said little, stayed in the bedroom, hardly ate. Looked out the window at the March sky. Clouds and rain, more snow, then a sudden warming, the heavens turning a perfect blue. Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
She wasn’t sure if Spider truly had a final epiphany. Was that even possible for a man whose trade was murder? Or was the look she saw some other thing entirely? Simply the rapid dissolution of his nervous system, the quick biological undoing of all that made him human. She’d not looked into the dying eyes of Jamal Fakhri so had no point of comparison. In any case, it was a useless deliberation, perhaps a trick she was playing on herself to occupy her mind, distract from the twist of guilt that tortured her.
Killing the killer of Leo and Ross had done nothing to assuage her grief. If anything, it made her anguish more complex, added a tinge of shame so potent it inflamed her sorrow all over again.
On Tuesday afternoon, Nick knocked at her door and called out that he needed to speak to her right away.
She’d just showered for the first time since Friday and was starting the slow ordeal of recuperation. She followed him into the study, where Sal was tipped back in the recliner, reading the International Herald Tribune.
“Our boy Nick has been working hard,” Sal said. “This might be something we could use.”
She sat at the desk and watched Nick pace the room. Since the night at the Albion building and the Hotel California, he’d apologized a half dozen times. Guilty that he hadn’t fended off Spider at the van, guilty he hadn’t escaped from his bonds to help her in Spider’s hotel room. Guilty he’d so far contributed almost nothing to their quest.
“There’s not much on the hard drives,” Nick said. “Sal and I looked them over. Nothing incriminating, nothing about Ross or Spider.”
“That’s too bad.”
“But it wasn’t a waste.”
She waited.
“There’s one thing we can use. Albion’s e-mail logs show he’s done a lot of recent communication with his legal team about an upcoming deal, a takeover of Marburg chocolates.”
“Okay,” she said. It didn’t sound like much.
“Most of that is about the structure of the deal, negotiations, the point-by-point strategy they’re using to convince the Marburg board of the benefits of the deal. But there’s some personal information too: Lester Albion’s motivation comes across in several of the e-mails.”
“What motivation?”
Sal said, “Guy’s obsessed with Marburg chocolates. It’s a lifelong fantasy. A very big deal to Albion. More personal than business. He’s like some little kid, never grew up.”
“And how does that help us?”
“I’m not through,” Nick said. “The transaction is supposed to close Friday, in three days. So that’s all the time we have.”
“Time for what?”
“Just wait,” he said. “Let me put it all out there, then we can figure out how to use it.”
Nick launched into a description of the Marburg acquisition deal, revealing a side of him she’d never seen. The businessman fluent in financial jargon, the mechanics of corporate economics. In his detailed explanation, he lost her several times, and she had to stop him and make him simplify, but eventually she thought she had the gist of it.
Albion’s acquisition of Marburg was a tricky deal for several financial reasons but mainly because the Marburg family were practicing Quakers, and their religious conservatism guided all their business decisions. Any hint of impropriety was anathema to them, and even if it meant making decisions that were unprofitable to their corporate interests, they were nevertheless guided by their strict ethical codes. Ethics trumping profit, a quaint idea.
“That’s where the Ivory Coast comes in,” Nick said.
Harper leaned forward in her chair. A prickle on her shoulders.
“There were twenty e-mails, maybe more, back and forth between Lester Albion and Edwin Marburg. Edwin is the patriarch. Chairman of the board, clearly the head honcho, even though his two sons are the CEO and CFO. It’s Edwin who’ll make the go/no-go merger decision.
“Of those twenty e-mails, most are about an incident in the Ivory Coast four years ago. It started after accusations from an international relief agency came out about the use of child slaves on Albion-controlled cacao plantations. They sent a couple of video people out into the jungle and got film of the slave kids. The press investigated, the claims turned out to be true. Kids as young as five using machetes to open cacao pods, deaths, lost fingers, hands, all of these kids working sixteen hours a day, frequent beatings, no school, no holidays. Cruel shit.
“Lester Albion claimed he had no knowledge of the practice and that once made aware, he worked overtime to correct the problem. Ordered reeducation of all his plantation bosses, sensitivity training, and he built schools to service the kids, increased oversight, invited a UN humanitarian investigative team to make sure the problem was corrected permanently. He had one of his people, a woman named Larissa Bixel, send Marburg executives dozens of documents, press releases, certification notices, a huge pile of supporting material to convince him the problem with child slaves was permanently cleared up.”
“And who exactly is Bixel?” Harper said.
“Larissa Bixel is the VP of global affairs, second in the corporate ladder behind Albion. Working-class background, father was a baker, so she’s up by the bootstraps.”
Harper nodded. “Bixel was one of the people Jackson Sharp mentioned to Ross. He was try
ing to get Ross to investigate the woman.”
“Investigators from AVISCO, a child protection NGO, were the ones who first exposed Albion for using child slaves,” Nick said. “I think it was those same two AVISCO investigators doing a follow-up who were killed on the video Jackson Sharp showed Ross. Late last year, a husband-and-wife team, Bert and Kathy Fordham, working for AVISCO, were reported missing while out on a research trip to the Ivory Coast, never heard from again.”
“So that whole story Sharp sold Ross was bogus. Rachel Sharp being Jackson’s wife, all that.”
Nick nodded. “There’s another detail I learned from a World Bank associate of mine. A couple of weeks back, I put the word out to a few friends I thought might have had some knowledge of Lester Albion. Asked them very discreetly. And I heard back from almost all of them. Mostly it was about how Albion was an obsessive guy. A micromanager. Watching every penny and nickel, everything comes across his desk. Everything.”
“And the intriguing detail?” Harper said.
“It involves Ben Westfield, our actor friend,” he said. “Albion’s infatuated with Westfield. Well, more than infatuated. He collects Westfield memorabilia. Pricey stuff. Has his people going to auctions, buying vintage posters, old movie scripts, wardrobe items, props from the sets of his movies, souvenirs from other private collectors. Westfield’s cowboy hat from Lost Trail, he paid eighteen thousand euros for that. And he’s managed to put together a collection of every pistol Westfield ever used in a movie since High Peak at Sunset.”
“There was a poster of Westfield in his office,” she said. “An ad Ben did for Albion, it must’ve been forty years ago.”
“I told Nick this Albion guy’s like some little kid.” Sal picked something off his sweater and flicked it across the room. “Those Westfield movies suck, by the way, most of them. Those three Mafia flicks, you see them? Well, don’t bother. I seen Three Stooges episodes more realistic.”
“I don’t understand where this goes,” Harper said. “What’s the relevance?”
“I’m not finished,” Nick said.
Harper raised both hands. Sorry, sorry, go on.
“Here’s the point,” Nick said. “Edwin Marburg and Albion are both members of the Westfield fan club. Marburg’s not as far gone as Albion, but he’s a fan. He prefers Westfield’s recent war movies, while Albion is more into the early stuff, the spaghetti westerns, the Chicago cop movies. And the five Westfield directed. Ocean of Blood, all those.”
“Those cop movies are a joke,” Sal said. “Ten minutes in, I walked out of that first one, Johnny Danger, or whatever the hell it was. There was no cop ever born as pure as that guy. What a load of shit.”
“And your idea?” Harper said.
Nick picked up a chair, carried it across the room, and sat across from her. He was flushed with eagerness. Eyes lit.
“You call Ben Westfield, get him to fly to Zurich right away, we’ll set up a meeting with Albion and Marburg. They’d be thrilled at the chance, flattered as hell. The story is Ben’s decided to make a movie about the chocolate industry, he’s doing research, needs their input. Gets us in the door.”
“And do what?”
He sighed and shook his head.
“I don’t know. That’s as far as I’ve gotten, just the structure of it. The creative part, that’s your department, Harper.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You came up with that Kintana plan.”
“That almost got us killed.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“You will,” Sal said. “I can hear the wheels cranking from over here.”
“Westfield’s a busy man. He’s probably making a movie.”
“He’ll come if you ask him, Harper.”
“Why do you say that?”
Nick hesitated for a moment, then said, “Because you’re Deena’s daughter.”
“So?”
“He had a thing for Deena. Well, a thing with Deena.”
“What?”
“A thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
Nick took a long moment, eyes lowered.
“Okay.” He swallowed a breath, bringing his eyes to hers. “I discovered it when we were kids. Deena and you and me, we were all in Istanbul. I think I was eight, you were nine. I remember we were staying at the Four Seasons at the Bosporus. One morning, I was up early wandering the halls, I saw Westfield come out of Deena’s room, must’ve been six or seven o’clock. I said hello, and he ducked his face and kept walking. Apparently their affair went on for years.”
“You’re sure of that?”
Nick nodded. “I knocked on Deena’s door that morning and asked her about it. She dragged me into her room and slapped me. Only time she ever hit me. She apologized, hugged me. And while she was holding me, I asked her again if Ben Westfield was her boyfriend, and she said yes, it was true, she had a lover. And I could never tell anyone, not you, not Dad, no one. And I promised her I wouldn’t. It was our secret. For years.”
“Deena and Ben Westfield. I can’t picture it.”
“Your mother was a tiger,” Sal said. “She was a force of nature. She probably ran that show, even a macho man like Westfield.”
“Look,” Nick said. “The Marburg takeover deal is on track to close Friday. Albion’s desperate for it to happen. It’s his childhood fantasy. So if we’re going to try to leverage Marburg’s moral righteousness to pressure Albion, then after Friday, we lose that leverage.”
“Pressure him to do what?” Harper said.
Even as she spoke the words, an idea came to her, forming quickly with the sharp-edged clarity of a photographic image.
Sal said, “I think Nick wants to get everyone together in a room, throw a bomb on the table, make the bad guys turn on each other as they’re fighting for the exits.”
“I think I have something,” she said.
“Great,” Nick said. “So share.”
“Not yet. I need more time. I need to refine it a little.”
“Well, if we’re going to do this,” Sal said, “you’ve got to call Westfield, get him moving.”
“Just tell him you need his help,” Nick said. “You’re Deena’s little girl. He’ll come.”
She nodded, the image hardening into place. It was a decent plan. It might even work.
Nick said, “We need to move. We only have two days to get ready.”
THIRTY-TWO
Mid-March, Zurich, Switzerland
An hour later she made the call. Westfield’s cell number was stored in her phone from last year’s photo shoot—the thirty-year reunion of The Last Bloom group. She got him as he was leaving the makeup trailer, heading for the set. He wasn’t surprised to be hearing from her. Actually, he seemed pleased, chatting away as he walked across the lot.
Told her he was starring in an action thriller about a heroin kingpin who’d escaped from a Mexican supermax prison. His character was leading the commando assault on the bad guy’s mountain hideout. Tarzan with shoulder-fired missiles is how he described it. He thought the movie was even sillier than usual.
He told her he’d heard about Ross and Leo. Said he’d called Nick to check on Harper the day after it happened. His condolences must’ve gotten lost in the agonizing shuffle.
Hearing Westfield’s voice, his deep bass, Harper was disarmed by his unadorned authenticity and dropped the lie she was going to tell him.
“I’ve been tracking Ross and Leo’s killer.”
He was silent for several moments. She asked if he was still there.
“You got Deena’s moxie, all right. Tracking a killer.”
“I found the triggerman and took him out,” she said. “But I need to know who pulled his strings.”
“You did what?” he said. “You sure you should be telling me this?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, okay. How can I help?”
“I’d like to put you in a room with the suspects, see what hap
pens.”
“Is there a script?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Sounds like serious business.”
“I wouldn’t call you if it wasn’t.”
“And you think I can help?”
“A couple of the principals are your fanboys.”
“Run into those idiots everywhere.”
Harper was silent while Westfield continued to talk.
“Sure, I’ll take a few days off. They can shoot around me. My plane’s in a hangar half an hour away. I could be in Zurich by breakfast. That good enough?”
Without warning, the tears came. His warmth, his reassuring strength had given her a sense of security she hadn’t felt since losing Ross. His screen persona was no act. Solid to the marrow. Deena’s equal.
Her next call was to the number she’d promised never to use again.
“I need your help,” she said to the familiar voice.
“Change your mind, coming back in?”
“No,” she said.
“Then I don’t know what I can do.”
“The Rome job. I want to collect on some long overdue payback.”
Silence.
“You’re thinking about it.”
“Need some details.”
“This line secure?”
“As secure as a line can be.”
She described what she knew. Didn’t dress it up. A matter-of-fact accounting of Royale Plantation, the killings in the Ivory Coast, and those in Miami. Even described killing Spider. She saved Soko for last, a village massacre, fifty, sixty killed, women, children.
“You’ve been on a rampage.”
“Isn’t that how you trained me?”
“Pains me to inform you, but massacres in Africa are a dime a dozen. I’m sorry to say, these days when another one happens, our needle doesn’t even twitch. No constituency for that sort of thing.”
“What if the massacre was the work of one of the world’s largest corporations?”
The line went quiet for a few breaths, then: “Name of that village?”
She spelled Soko.
When They Come for You Page 19