by Lee Rowan
“Thank heaven for small favors.”
“And don’t forget, love—when Sergeant Jones joined the Army, being gay was still a crime. Who’d suspect a tough, stinking, foul-mouthed bugger like that of being a pouf?”
“Mmm.” Kevin let out a deep sigh and relaxed against John’s shoulder. “Poor bastard.”
They stood there for a little while, just holding each other. Finally Kevin straightened. “I’m starving. What’ve we got that won’t take long to cook? I don’t want to open that Pandora’s box on an empty stomach.”
“I can start water for spaghetti and do something with the bagged salad.”
“Sounds good.”
And tonight was supposed to have been a celebration. “Kev—I know we have that bottle of champagne….”
Kevin nodded. “And a wretched mess to sort out, too. Shall we save the bubbly until this is over?”
“Yes. It isn’t this place—I’m still happy to be here, but—”
“I don’t feel much like celebrating either,” Kevin admitted. “All I want to do right now is have something to eat, then set up the alarm system and see if we can get some sleep.”
“Same here.” He felt terrible for Kevin—all the day’s work, and now this deadly threat instead of the peace and quiet they were hoping for. “I wish the bastard could’ve at least waited another week.”
Kevin chuckled. “Well, you know these murdering sociopaths, Johnny—bloody inconsiderate, every one of them.”
John retreated to the kitchen and set water on to boil. He thought about putting on some music as well, but music might mask the sound of someone trying to break in. Not that such a thing was very likely this early in the evening, with all the neighbors still up and about. And just what sort of music would be appropriate to the situation, and what would Kevin like? No. For now, silence would be better than the chance of irritation.
He dumped salad into two bowls, chopped some fresh carrot into the mixed greens, and brought out the half bottle of wine left over from dinner a few nights before. One glass wouldn’t do more than calm them down a bit, and that might be helpful at this point.
“Salad’s up,” he called. Bread? Yes, they’d picked up an Italian loaf on their way to the van rental, early this morning. He sliced a few rounds, wondering at the way time seemed to shift under stress. Had this loaf really been baked just this morning? It felt like days since they’d laughed and held each other in that luxurious shower.
He heard a scraping, scuffling sound in the hall and peeked around the corner just in time to see the end of the treadmill carton sliding through the living room door. Kevin’s curiosity had gotten the better of him. No surprise there. John was wondering himself. What exactly would the SAS consider appropriate equipment for two men being stalked by a professional killer?
He was also wondering just how useful he himself would be, and how much of a liability. It had been a long time since basic training, a long time since he’d fired or even held a gun, even though his marksmanship had been excellent and was probably still above average. He was reasonably fit, too—at least physically. That didn’t mean he could stand up to this uncertainty.
Had he put Kevin’s life in danger by insisting they stay together?
The water had come to a boil; he stirred the pasta in. Everything from the kitchen was still in boxes, but they’d brought the boxes to the appropriate rooms and—yes, there was the jar of sauce. He cheated on the home cooking by putting a saucer over the open jar and sticking the whole thing in the microwave for a minute. He’d learned that so long as he heated in short bursts and stirred betweentimes, the jar wouldn’t explode.
I’m turning into a housewife, he thought suddenly. Which was a stupid notion—he usually made dinner, but Kevin, more of an early bird, usually fixed their breakfast. They were a team. Each of them did what needed doing when a task came to hand. Wasn’t that what it was all about?
“How’s it going?” Kevin called from the other room.
“The salad’s ready if you want it. Another few minutes on the spaghetti.”
“Right.”
John heard a few unidentifiable clicks, and then a sound that set his teeth on edge—the magazine of an automatic weapon chunking into place. Well, what did you expect, water pistols?
“Johnny, do I have time to set up the basement sensors?”
“Can you do it in under ten minutes?”
“I think so.” Kevin came in through the dining room with a handful of tiny blinking devices. “Do you remember where we put my toolbox?”
“I brought that in. It’s with my bike. Hall cupboard, under the stair.”
“Thanks.”
Kevin disappeared down the cellar stair to do what he was trained for. John told himself that his own training was not inferior, only different. There’d be no point in trying to reason with a man who was determined to kill them. There were, no doubt, some ethical men in mercenary forces. The pay was better than regular Army, and that would certainly be a factor for many. But gun-for-hire, without the safeguards of military law, was the kind of job that had a special appeal to men who could not, or would not, agree to be bound by the laws that regulated civilized warfare. Many of those men were no doubt perfectly sane. A lot of them were not.
Plates. Which box were the plates in? He rummaged a bit more and found the box of dishes tucked into a cupboard. The crumpled newspaper flew. Civilized warfare. Jumbo shrimp. Amicable divorce. But yes, damn it, there was a difference between an honorable soldier and a war criminal. Self-defense and defense of the helpless were ethical responses to unprovoked attack. You did your best to avoid harming civilians, you fired when fired upon. You did not take unarmed prisoners out and murder them. You didn’t attack your allies for following correct procedure.
The water boiled over, and John jumped to turn down the heat. The colander. Where had they put it?
A quick search turned up nothing, and he didn’t have time to hunt for it. John clapped a plate over the pot and drained away most of the water, though the towel he used as a potholder got saturated with steam. It didn’t matter, he wasn’t filming a cooking show. By the time Kevin emerged from the cellar, their first meal in their new home was ready.
Kevin took one look at the table and said, “You’re fantastic.”
“It’s only spaghetti.”
“It’s food.” Kevin went to the sink and washed the grime off his hands. “It’s hot, it’s here—we don’t have to go out or worry about delivery….” He sat on the folding chair and leaned back with an audible sigh of relaxation. “Johnny, it’s home. Thank you.”
“I couldn’t find the wine glasses,” John said.
“They’re in the fridge with the champagne. I put ’em in there to chill.”
“Oh.” Why hadn’t he seen them? No matter. At least they were clean, and room-temperature red wine wouldn’t damage them.
He set the glasses down; Kevin poured. They each raised a glass; their eyes met. John searched for a suitable toast and could only think of one thing. “To a quiet life.”
“The sooner the better,” Kevin agreed. “Damn, I nearly forgot.” He got up and went to the kitchen phone. Wordlessly, he disconnected the cord from the handset. “Alone at last.”
“You’re joking,” John said.
“No. The receiver doesn’t need to be picked up for someone to listen.” He smiled at John’s obvious disbelief. “Didn’t you know that? We used to tap into phones all the time—it’s a big help if there’s a situation in some place like an office building with lots of different phone lines, when you’re trying to find out where hostages are being held.”
“Christ.” John crunched a forkful of salad. “There really is no getting away from it, is there?”
“Afraid not. Sorry.”
“It’s not you.”
Kevin pushed his spaghetti around moodily. “Yes, it is.”
“Now I say, ‘Isn’t!’” John had to smile. “And you say, ‘Is!’ and we go
back and forth with it a few times, and the next thing you know there’s tomato sauce all over the kitchen.”
Kevin shook his head, but he was smiling too. “When you said that, I could just hear my mother saying, ‘Now, children, I’ll have no quarreling at the table.’”
“Are you saying I sound like your mother?”
“I’m saying I’m probably acting like a five-year-old. And I’d apologize, but that would start it all over, wouldn’t it?”
“As your mother would probably say, eat your dinner.” John followed his own advice. “Kev, if my choices are you with a maniac on your heels or peace and quiet without you—that’s a no-brainer. We’ll get through this. And as you said, there’s a good chance this is all a false alarm.”
Kevin glanced away, then shrugged. “That’s possible.”
“But now you think it’s for real. Why?”
“If the Colonel’s handling it himself, and has brought Jones in, and they’ve given me that arsenal in the other room—then they know something we don’t. He wouldn’t bring in that kind of firepower for a suspicious traffic accident. But let’s not borrow trouble. I need to read the dossier.”
They didn’t get to that for another couple of hours, though, because Kevin began setting up the security system immediately after dinner. He even had John boost him up into the attic space above the upper floor so he could put a few motion sensors in up there as well. “No point putting locks on the door if they can tunnel through over our heads.”
The thought of someone creeping in through the attic next door, right over their bed, shook John sufficiently that when Kevin asked him if he was willing to carry a pistol, he was ready to agree. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it, but seeing it was his lover’s life that might be at stake, not to mention his own, there seemed to be little choice.
He didn’t get depressed until Kevin pulled a mat of fine wire mesh from the box of equipment and began screwing its metal framework into place around the edges of their living room window, the big sunny bay window that faced onto the street. “Barrier against a firebomb or grenade,” Kevin said. “This won’t show much once it’s stretched out, no more than a window screen, but it’ll stop almost anything. The double-pane windows are already pretty tough—”
“Right,” John said. “I see. You don’t have to explain.” He went upstairs just to get away from it for a little while and put himself to work setting up their stereo in the library, on one of the smaller bookshelves.
Some time later, slumped on the futon and listening to R. Carlos Nakai playing an American Indian flute, he heard Kevin’s step in the hall. “Johnny?”
“In here.”
Kevin came in and sat beside him. “Anything I can do?”
“Not really.” John slid sideways so his head rested against Kevin’s; his lover put an arm around him. “Better now. I think I’m—” He yawned, suddenly exhausted. “I think some of it’s that I’m just tired.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Kevin said ironically. His hand moved along John’s arm, slow and comforting. “We were up at the crack of dawn, moved my things, moved your things, found out that not only is there an actual bogeyman, he’s probably out there ready to pounce on us… I don’t see why a few little details like that would make you tired.”
“It’s the cooking. Next thing you know I’ll turn into a big old drag queen and slop around the house in a robe and slippers with curlers in my hair.”
“Oooo, look! It’s a penguin on the telly!” Kevin said in Monty Python falsetto. John cracked up, and as he was laughing helplessly, Kevin leaned over and kissed him.
John grabbed on to him. However fucked-up everything else was, this at least still made sense. Oh, yes…. He caught hold of Kevin’s thigh, ran his hand up the inside, and went to work on the button of Kevin’s jeans.
Things would have progressed nicely from there—except that the phone in the kitchen began to ring.
“Shit!” Kevin said fervently.
“Ignore it,” John mumbled against Kevin’s lips. “It’s not hooked up.”
“Can’t. The light’s still on downstairs. They’ll know we haven’t gone to bed.”
“Goddamn it—” But there was no point in arguing with the air; Kevin was already halfway down the stairs. John sat for a minute, wondering whether to just stay where he was. No, that would look like sulking, and Kevin was right. Besides, if the phone wasn’t answered, the nosy, well-intentioned bastards would probably send in a squad to see if they were still alive.
When he got downstairs, Kevin was just hanging up the phone and disconnecting the receiver. “We can rule out an accident,” he said. “There’s more background on our merc—seems the fellow in the States who gave him his walking papers was found dead last week. At the time it didn’t seem related to anything, but it jumped out when our inquiry on his previous employment came through.”
“Found dead? How? Where?”
“Funny you ask. Where was in his own garage, under his car. He lived alone, and a neighbor reported a smell. The coroner’s report said he’d been killed by impact from a large vehicle, but his car showed no signs of impact.”
He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “So the body was planted.”
“Amazing, Holmes. How do you do it?” Kevin neutralized the sarcasm by giving John a quick kiss. “Yes, it was obvious he’d been killed elsewhere. That’s why they put it down as murder, rather than hit-and-run—and the shape and location of the impact damage made the medical examiner suggest they look for one of those damned big Hummers.”
“That matches what we know of him,” John said. “Overcompensation. A man who couldn’t qualify as an officer in the real military might buy as many of the trappings as he could. A military-style car, expensive personal weapons, that sort of thing.”
“That would fit this bastard,” Kevin said. “Arrogance enough for a general, but no self-control. In a way I’m surprised he hasn’t come at us head-on by now. You don’t suppose my so-called resignation makes me less of a target?”
“I shouldn’t try to show off—forensic psych isn’t really my thing. But an educated guess—since you were the one who stood up to him in the first place, he may see you as the cause of it all. You’re bound to be on the list. I’m just grateful you weren’t the first target.”
“I hope the bloke who made him redundant was the one who hired him in the first place.”
“Yes.” John gave up his last hope of seeing their lives return to normal anytime soon. “Right, then. Your sergeant said there was information in that dossier?”
“Yes. You should at least know what he looks like.” Kevin retrieved the papers and spread them out on the kitchen table. “Here’s our boy. Charming, isn’t he?”
Not by a long shot. A set of arrest-record photos was clipped to something John automatically classified as costume drama. “Rocky Diaz,” the headline declared. “A hard man is good to find.” The picture was part of a half-page ad in some mercenary magazine, and from the comic-book grimace to the overloaded equipment belt, he looked like a humanoid construct out of a war-game video, not the kind of man John would have been willing to serve with. He wasn’t even wearing his pseudo-Special Forces beret properly. And his eyes had the soul-dead stare of the Serbian murderers John had watched shooting down innocent civilians who happened to have had the wrong ancestors.
“‘Rocky,’ for God’s sake,” John said. “He looks like a joke. A macho asshole who’s likely to get someone killed.”
“Got it in one,” Kevin said. “Rotten joke, though. It’s a nom de farce, of course. His real name is Carl Blackwell. Diaz is his mother’s maiden name, but the family’s mixed-bag American.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t call himself Stallone.”
“I’m surprised anyone hired him. He’s got an assault-and-battery record going back to juvenile offenses, dishonorable discharge for striking a superior officer, and four divorces, all for violent behavior. No childr
en, though. That’s unusual—this sort of character generally leaves a string of abandoned kids by different mothers.”
“Hm. Sterile, you suppose?”
“That’d be a break for the gene pool, wouldn’t it?” Kevin flipped to the next page. “Drunk and disorderly, driver’s license suspended for reckless driving convictions… there’s a lot more. By rights he should be in prison—there’s no hint he can function in normal society. Though I suppose if you want somebody who hasn’t got a single human inhibition against brutality or murder, he’s your boy.”
“Who would be crazy enough to hire someone that volatile?”
“Corporations. Multinationals, for jobs in overseas locations where the police forces are corrupt and it’s survival of the fittest.” Kevin’s voice was heavy with loathing. “The men in silk suits never have any contact with the actual mercenaries. They leave that to ‘human resources’ recruiters. Middle management, like the first man who was killed.”
“Murder for hire,” John said.
“Just about. And they call them ‘security contractors.’” Kevin shook his head. “It’s time the UN outlawed private armies in war zones. Blackwell is worse than some, but he’s not all that unusual. And even if he lost his job, you can bet he kept the weapons.”
“How would he bring them through Customs?”
“We don’t know that he did—but he might have a cache here as well, left over from when he was in England doing bodyguard work for another branch of that company. At any rate, he’s been using a car as his weapon, and anyone with a valid driver’s license can rent one of those.”
“Your people would’ve checked that, I assume?”
“Absolutely. It would be part of the basic sweep. He came in through Customs a week ago claiming to be bound for a hiking trip in Cornwall, gave them the name of a B&B where he had a reservation—”
“And never arrived.”
“Of course not. And we’re back to plausible situations—that happens sometimes, people change their plans, they forget how wet and cold it gets this time of year, and decide to go see a few shows in London instead. It’s impossible to monitor everyone—even if the tourism industry didn’t go postal at the record-keeping, the cost would be astronomical. But there’s no record of him anywhere else—no credit card trail, hotel bills, car rental, bus tour—nothing. And no indication he’s gone home.”