Counterfeit Conscience

by Helena Maeve

  He knew full well he couldn’t turn him down.

  Chapter Four

  Through the open office window, the electric hum of the gate filtered in loud and clear. The warble of voices was oddly indistinct by comparison. Will couldn’t resist trying to make out the words.

  He listened for the click-clack of kitten heels up the stone staircase. Then the ensuing pause—Cleo noticing his open office door, scenting the faint whiff of cigarettes in the stale air.

  “Will?” she called out, a note of unease in her voice.

  “In here.”

  She peered through the door with wide eyes. “You’re up early.”

  “Couldn’t sleep.” Will glanced up from the laptop screen. That was nothing unusual in that in and of itself—Sundays were tedious without friends or family to fill up his time. He’d made lunch and dinner, and walked a bit through familiar streets. The monotony of leisure damn near made him sick. Fortunately, there was always work to keep him busy. “I’ll need you to send someone to pick up my suit from the dry cleaners’ in a couple of hours.”

  “Oh. All right.” Cleo scraped the toes of one red pump against the heel of the other. “What’s the occasion?”

  He could tell she was anxious, her voice raising on the final consonant. Cleo had many tells. They made her reassuring. Safe to keep around.

  Above all, she was utterly loyal—a rare quality in this day and age.

  “Not sure yet.”

  It was the most truthful Will dared to be. Vagueness came with the territory. If he was going to visit Ignacio—and he hadn’t decided to step into that bullpen yet—then he would do it armored and armed to the teeth. He also wouldn’t involve anyone else in what was an off-the-books op commanded by a known defector.

  Cleo’s career needn’t be forfeit along with his when this blew up in their faces.

  “I sent you a few reports to look over for typos,” he went on. “Maybe double-check I didn’t get any numbers wrong? You know how Uncle gets when the cash don’t add up.”

  Cleo sighed. “More budget predictions? Terrific…”

  “Someone’s got to do it,” Will replied, affecting the false cheer he’d once reserved for Christmas lunch.

  Deceiving Cleo was a far greater betrayal than telling his mother he was an accounts man or assuring his father he’d voted Labour when he didn’t vote at all, mostly because he knew precisely what went on in the dark halls of Westminster.

  He liked Cleo. He got along well with Cleo.

  The way things were going, he and Cleo would be the only ones left to turn off the lights when the South American desk finally shut its doors.

  “There’s coffee, if you’d like,” he added in a bid to sweeten the pill.

  Cleo shook her head, curls bouncing on her shoulders. “I see insomnia is finally starting to bear fruit. Oh, what was in the package?”

  “What?”

  “The one from Jennings? I left it on my desk…”

  “Oh, that.” Will smiled crookedly. “Cubans.”

  “I thought cigar smoke made you gag?”

  “Still does,” he confirmed. “But I also said I’d quit these things, so…” He stubbed out the cigarette between his fingers in an ashtray already housing three other scrunched up butts. “You never know. Maybe I’ll pick up another vice before we close up shop. How do you feel about cocaine?”

  “Hmm, think that went out of style in the eighties.”

  “Weed?”

  Cleo grimaced. “At your age? Embarrassing.”

  “Cigarettes it is, then!”

  “Such optimism,” Cleo admonished with a wag of the finger. “Or maybe your bean-counting will save us for another year. Let me grab a cup of tea and I’ll lend a hand.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Will said, his insides churning with guilt.

  He wondered if Cleo would feel as giddy once she realized he’d emailed her fourteen different reports—enough to keep her busy well to the end of the week and beyond. He had no choice. This was a dangerous game he’d opted into, and he was playing it alone when everyone else had lieutenants and foot soldiers to do their bidding.

  Will dragged both palms over his feverish face. The Sao Paolo office was teetering on the brink of collapse. Informing his superiors that they’d suffered a breach of security—that he’d met with Karim and Ignacio alone, without prior approval, let alone permission—would see their archives seized at once. Their accesses bolted shut. His clever, dedicated secretary might be dismissed with a slap on the wrist and given the choice to remain in Brazil with her husband, but she might not. Either way, Cleo would never know privacy again.

  Karim was right. The thought of being put out to pasture was daunting. Will would be repatriated, perhaps even dragged through the mud on account of disobeying procedure. The only thing worse was the discovery that the higher-ups back in London already thought Sao Paolo so untrustworthy they had bugged his office.

  Pouring oil on their fire would trigger an audit. A fishing expedition to dig up secrets that just weren’t there.

  I’m forty-eight years old. I’m not finished, damn it. I still have work to do.

  Suffocated by the walls pressing in around him, Will reached for his packet of Marlboro Golds and tapped one out against the desk. His fingers were steady around the lighter. He was committed. He had no choice.

  * * * *

  A car was waiting outside his apartment building when Will returned home that evening. It was still there after he’d showered and shaved, and changed into his freshly dry-cleaned charcoal-gray suit.

  The black Bentley was hard to ignore in a neighborhood of SUVs and speedy two-door coupes, yet traffic moved around it leisurely. The locals had better things to worry about on a Monday night.

  Sizing himself up in the mirror one last time, Will struggled to see himself as Ignacio might. The suit was nice enough. His lace-ups shone in the hallway light, wingtips buffed and waxed. He should have made time to get his hair cut, but after their chat on Saturday, he didn’t want to give Ignacio the impression that he was putting too much effort into making a good impression.

  It’s not that kind of rendezvous, Will told himself as he flicked off the light and pulled the door shut behind him.

  Outside, leaden cloud hung heavy over the city, packing the heat close to the ground. His dress shirt was instantly stuck to his back. The smell of ozone hung heavy in the air. It would storm tonight. By morning the streets would be clean and shiny with runoff—and Will would hopefully have this final case file closed.

  Without prompting, the driver jumped out to open the back-seat door for him.

  “There is champagne and scotch,” he told Will. “Mr. Macias sends his regards.”

  “I’m sure he does.” Showing off for me, Ignacio?

  Bottles clinked when the door swung shut in his wake. The central column came with an electric lighter, too, but Will had left his cigarettes at the office. He didn’t want to get back into the habit of needing them every half hour. It was harder to resist the pull of the Glenlivet French Oak, tempting as it was in its bulbous bottle, the seal still unbroken.

  Ignacio had spared no expense.

  The Bentley purred to life as the driver slid behind the wheel and keyed the engine.

  A gentle pitter-patter of rain on the windshield was soon lost to the hum of tires on slick tarmac. Beyond Will’s tinted window, Sao Paolo gleamed like a watercolor postcard.

  The tangle of streets faded quickly. The Bentley raced away from the business district, onto the Rodovia dos Imigrantes and off into the thick woodland that separated city from unbridled ocean.

  Will lost track of the time. He had only a vague idea of their direction—east, southeast perhaps, but away from the continent in any event—and no precise knowledge of their destination. He toyed with the thought of asking his driver, but he doubted he would receive a straight answer.

  Silence won out in the end.

  They reached the coast just as lightning
began to slash at the sky with jagged, blinding claws. Thunder served only to heighten the pounding in his skull, like a particularly loud reminder of the chances he was taking.

  As best he could tell, they were somewhere just past Peruibe when the Bentley rolled off the tarmac and onto a paved road. A sign marking the path as private property briefly caught Will’s eye. His heart rattled against his ribs. They were close now. The winding path forced his driver to slow down, but even at a trot it was still barely five minutes through the rosewood forest before they reached the wall of the property.

  A metal gate some twenty feet wide slid open to admit them. Will refused to turn in his seat, but in the rear view mirror he caught a glimpse of the massive gate sliding shut in their wake, effectively trapping him on Ignacio’s turf. Within, the courtyard was cobbled with stone around a vast, ring-shaped fountain. The house itself was not as imposing as Will had expected, nor nearly as modern as the architecture Ignacio had once claimed to prefer.

  Tall wooden doors opened as soon as the Bentley slid to a stop, but it was not Ignacio who hurried down the front steps with an umbrella to help Will out of the car.

  Turquoise Shirt’s smile was dim this time. His eye-catching outfit had been traded in for a loose white sweater that showed off his collarbones. His sandals splashed Will’s trouser cuffs as they charted the distance from Bentley to door.

  “He’s waiting for you in the sunroom.”

  “Is he?” Will hummed. “Not a lot of sun today…”

  He wasn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t to see the young man thrust the umbrella into a servant’s hands and kick off his sandals. Before Will could follow his example, the boy was already pulling away with a sure gait.

  It took Will a moment to understand that he was expected to follow. The flirtatious back and forth at the Blue Dragon was clearly a one-off.

  The house opened around him in a series of snapshots. First the entryway with its mosaic tile and grand staircase—very colonial, very turn of the century—then a glimpse of the sitting room, festooned with exposed brick walls and the massive but doubtlessly useless addition of a fireplace. A dining room girdled with dark walnut paneling and decorated with a long glass table. The mix of old and new was everywhere. Will noticed artwork in thick black frames—mostly landscapes featuring ocean and rocks bordering a small stretch of beach—and statuettes that seemed to belong to every culture but the local.

  Thunder roared high above their heads as his guide tugged open a pair of sliding doors at the rear of the house. Will understood at once why they called this the sunroom. On a cloudless day, the view of the waves crashing on the cliffs below must have been unparalleled. At the moment, the wall of windows looked out onto a water-logged garden. Palm trees shook in the downpour while the overflowing pool churned like a boiling cauldron.

  Ignacio caught Will’s eye in the floor-to-ceiling pane and quirked his brow. “You came.”

  Without shadows to conceal him, it was easy to see how little he’d changed. He was a little heavier around the waist, perhaps, and silver dusted the hair above his temples. But he smiled the way Will remembered him smiling. He still waited until he’d peeled off his martini down to the dregs before fishing out the olive and elegantly pulling it off the stick with his front teeth.

  Once, when they’d been still too young to grasp the value of mysteries no one else knew about, Ignacio had confessed that his incisors were porcelain fakes. He’d been a brawler all his life. Teeth were the least of what he’d lost in fistfights.

  Will erected barricades around the memory and separated himself from the vicious pull of nostalgia. He’s just a thug. Don’t let it fool you.

  “You know I’m a man of my word.”

  Also in the glass, he noticed Ignacio’s young friend roll his eyes. “If you don’t need me…”

  “Yes, yes,” Ignacio said, a mite impatient. “You can go to bed, Ruben. Good night.” He didn’t have to tell his paramour to close the door behind him when he left. He waited until they were alone before he turned to face the room—and Will. “Would you like a drink?”

  Will thrust his hands into his pockets, determined to conceal their slight tremble. “First the Blue Dragon, then the scotch in the car… What is it with you and trying to get me drunk?”

  “James Bond drinks like a fish.”

  “Last time I checked, my codename wasn’t double-oh seven.”

  Ignacio jabbed the air with a finger. “Sobriety doesn’t suit you.”

  Just for that, Will vowed not to let his lips touch liquor as long as he was in Ignacio’s presence. He hadn’t come here to play dinner guest, anyway.

  He wasn’t entirely sure why he had.

  The decision had been gradual, the result of careful planning rather than impulse. He needed to remember as much when his addled mind began searching for traces of the man he’d once known in the creature standing tall and blasé before him now.

  “You never spoke to Jennings,” he volleyed, making short work of small talk.

  Ignacio drew his eyebrows together. “From threats to calling me a liar… I must say I liked you better as a grunt.”

  The sting of his rebuke glanced off Will’s flesh like a bullet ricocheting off reinforced steel.

  “Never said you were lying.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The man who came to you a week ago, who asked that you cease and desist in your efforts to put a bullet in Manuel Sosa and Arthur Foley…” Will shook his head. “He wasn’t Jennings.”

  “And you know this because?”

  “Jennings wrote to me from London a week ago. We correspond often, seeing as he is the closest thing I have to a direct superior.” It brought him no pleasure to admit it, because the trick that had fooled Ignacio had also persuaded Cleo and might even have worked on Will, if he hadn’t known Karim personally. No one but him could have had the guts to attempt such a bald-faced ploy.

  Will could count the number of people he trusted on the fingers of one hand—and Karim had been one of them until just a year ago.

  Ignacio’s name had been rubbed from that lineup far sooner.

  “We’re being set up,” Will concluded. “Both of us.”

  “By whom?”

  “A new power… I don’t know what they call themselves yet, if they even care to have a name. Everyone we’ve ever wronged?”

  “Must be a long list,” Ignacio mused. He covered the distance between them with leisurely strides, a lion comfortably strutting through his territory.

  “Very. You seem awfully calm about this. You realize we’re being targeted—that someone knows about your collaboration with MI6? Someone who obviously isn’t MI6?” Or at least, not anymore. “If you’re worried enough about Sosa exposing your secrets that you’d try to have him assassinated in our custody, what about this third party?” Will’s voice cracked.

  He didn’t mean for that to happen.

  Ignacio was close now, close enough to prompt a retreat. Will resisted as long as he could, but ultimately he had no choice. He shifted his weight to his back leg. One step, two. Ignacio followed. Will’s shoulders struck the closed sunroom doors, wood rattling behind him.

  “Big bad spy…and you are afraid of me?”

  “Big bad mobster,” Will countered.

  Up close like this, he couldn’t avoid noticing the scar in Ignacio’s brow—an old cut that had healed, but not without leaving a mark—or the dent in his earlobe, where someone or something had sliced his skin clean off. These were new war wounds. All those nights he’d been supposed to gather intelligence, Will had spent cataloging the old scars as they’d lain in bed together.

  Now someone else had the privilege—Ignacio’s wife or Ruben—and Will was staring down a powerful stranger.

  Ignacio’s gaze swept over his features. “How can I trust that you’re not lying to me now? How can I believe that you’re not here to manipulate me into doing what you want? That’s how your people operate. Disi
nformation and veiled threats…”

  “I’ve never known you to be bloodthirsty for the hell of it.”

  “There was a lot we did not know about each other.” Ignacio reached up a hand and gently brushed an errant strand behind Will’s ear. Ruben had done the same thing at the Blue Dragon, but his touch hadn’t elicited the same shiver, the same zing of desire stabbing deep into Will’s gut.

  He wanted Ignacio to trace the shell of his ear and grip him by the collar. He wanted to kiss him, like they’d kissed before, until he tasted blood in his mouth and couldn’t tell it if was his or Ignacio’s.

  But Ignacio only pulled his hand down to palm the side of his neck, sliding his thumb over Will’s Adam’s apple. “Why are you here?”

  “You invited me,” Will rasped.

  The grip around his neck grew tighter, a silent warning.

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  Ignacio chuckled. “You could have asked your people for their surveillance tapes. I know they’re watching me, even if you don’t.” He shoved Will against the door so hard that his skull rang with the impact. It wasn’t enough for bruises, though they’d never shied from those in the past. “The truth now,” Ignacio growled, leaning in. “Why did you come tonight?”

  They’re retiring me. They’re taking everything I’ve worked for and dividing it up, reassigning the remains piecemeal. They’re fighting a war I want no part in.

  However true, none of those answers were what Ignacio wanted to hear. So Will did the next best thing.

  The tension in Ignacio’s body didn’t lessen at all as he pulled him in. His shoulders were stiff in Will’s hands. He squeezed at his throat so hard that Will briefly thought he might choke for breath.

  Then their lips met in a harsh kiss and Ignacio sagged against him, exhaling through his nose. Will still had height on him, but it was Ignacio who carried the advantage in body mass these days. When he made to pull back, there was no stopping him.

  Their eyes met, an unspoken now what? hovering uncertainly between them.