Bodyguard of Lies

by Bob Mayer

  "Damn," Neeley whispered as she heard the sound and glanced over.

  "What?" Hannah asked. "Did I do something wrong?"

  "You didn't do anything wrong." Neeley lifted a hand off the wheel and pointed. "That dot. It represents a tracking bug. We've got one in the car. That's how this guy is following us."

  "How can we have one in the car?" Hannah demanded. "We switched cars."

  "It's not in the car," Neeley said. "Well, it is, but not on the car."

  "What do you mean?" Hannah asked.

  "Your thigh," Neeley said. "It's in your thigh. That's why that guy stuck you with the knife. He was putting a bug in you." She should have focused on the fact that the knife had looked strange, but it had been one detail in the middle of a lot of things happening.

  Hannah stared at the spot on her thigh with her first sign of emotion in quite a while. "Get it out."

  Neeley switched out of the fast lane and headed for the nearest downtown exit. "Hold your horses, Hannah, I'm driving."

  Hannah spoke in short clipped words. "I don't care. Get it out! Get it out now!"

  "Well, at least we know how he's tracking us. We need to set up a trap and get rid of this guy."

  ***************

  Racine knew they had spotted him. He didn’t want them to become complacent. He always found it best to keep the quarry off-balance.

  He stopped at the booth the tall one had been in. He called the operator for the company that serviced the phone. Using his FBI badge number, another perk from the Cellar, he had her give him the last number called from that phone.

  After he hung up, Racine looked at the number for a few seconds. The area code was Montana. The shadow world covered the entire planet but the population that dwelled inside the borders of that world was a small one. Racine closed his eyes and his mind flashed through names and faces until it clicked.

  “Damn,” Racine muttered as he got back in the car. The bitches were going to fly. He couldn’t allow that. Then Nero would get involved further and it would be out of his hands. He would have to stop them before they got on that plane.

  Racine stood still for several seconds, thinking, coming up with his plans. Plan A was to stop them himself. But he knew he needed a plan B, just in case.

  ***************

  Neeley was slowly navigating through the crowded business district and looking for a place to park. They left the car and headed for a mostly empty restaurant, Neeley carrying a small black kit and John's briefcase. In the bathroom, Hannah looked down at the hole in her thigh as Neeley dabbed away the blood. "They can really make one that small?"

  "They can make transmitters extremely small," Neeley said. "The problem is the battery. That's what takes up most of the space." Neeley looked about. “But I don’t think he was worrying about it having to last very long. Just long enough to catch us.”

  Neeley felt with her fingers in the cut and Hannah took a sharp breath, but didn't make any other noise. "I can't feel anything in there."

  Neeley reached into the kit. She pulled a small scalpel and tweezers out. "I'm going to have to dig. It'll hurt."

  Hannah nodded and looked at the wall over Neeley's shoulder. "How did you end up like this?"

  Neeley turned the faucet on hot, letting the water run until it started steaming the glass over the sink. Then she put the blade under the water and held it there.

  Neeley turned to look at Hannah. It was a question she had only answered for Gant. She thought about it for a few moments, and then spoke. "My earliest memories are of my mother locked up in her room whenever my dad was gone. He was some kind of low-level Department of Defense spook and he was gone a lot. That's the way it was; dinner would stop, she would stop, our lives would come to a standstill while she waited for him to come home. He was gone for months at a time.

  "I swore I'd never be like that, so dependent on another human being, but I followed in her footsteps like I'd been in training my whole life. His name was Jean-Philippe.

  "He was a boy I knew in Strasbourg. My mother was French—my father met her when he was stationed in Germany-- and every summer I went to my grandparents. You had John, I had my Jean-Philippe. I'd spend those weeks exploring the city with him and bettering my French. Every year he was taller and more beautiful and every year it was harder for me to leave.”

  Someone knocked on the locked door. “Cleaning,” Neeley yelled. The person went away and Neeley resumed her story as she heated the blade. "Finally, after high school, I moved there to go to college and Jean-Philippe and I became lovers. By then he was involved in a lot of weird businesses I barely understood. I really didn't even pay attention. I just loved the image of it. Me and my handsome French lover with his friends in a smoky café. Jean-Philippe was making money, a lot of money, and hanging with other people with a lot of money. For a nineteen year old it was pretty wild.”

  Neeley checked the blade, and put it back under the water.

  "It was an exciting, wonderful time. My own studies were suffering, but that was all right because Jean-Philippe seemed to want me close all the time. As he was drawn further into his business, people appeared in our lives that should have frightened me.

  "Today I know those people are the machine: they are the probes and tentacles that slither around from the main body and search for souls to feed it.” She looked at the other woman. “They are not a particular cause, Hannah. They have no fixed values in their heart but just want to make money and don’t care what they have to do in order to achieve that goal.”

  Neeley pulled the scalpel out of the water and came closer to Hannah. "Are you ready?"

  Hannah nodded.

  Neeley continued talking as she carefully pushed the blade into the cut. "I was so far in with Jean-Philippe, so dependent on him, that I didn’t see the reality. Then some really dangerous people found us and nothing would ever be the same. They sensed our immaturity and used us. At the time it seemed like fate. Today I know you make your own fate. When you're empty and weak, other people give you your fate."

  Hannah glanced at Neeley and seemed about to say something, but didn't.

  "Jean-Philippe and I left France and spent the next two years working for those people in various places, particularly Berlin. I learned to worship values that weren't my own and in the end I lost the only thing I ever loved."

  Hannah finally spoke. "You lost Jean-Philippe."

  "No." Neeley looked up from the blood. "I lost myself.

  "When the final betrayal came, I was little more than a robot, an emotionless thing following him. One day Jean-Philippe forgot his love for me because he was told to by someone who probably paid him a lot of money, which I know now was more important to him than any person. That was the end for me. I wasn't human any more, just another tentacle of the machine."

  Hannah leaned back against the bathroom wall, not looking at what Neeley's hands were doing. "And who was this Gant guy?"

  Neeley smiled something that was a cross between pure pleasure and immeasurable grief. "He was the man who saved me." She reached with her free hand and pushed a finger into the wound she had widened. "There's something in here."

  She pulled out fingers dripping blood and grabbed the tweezers. She pushed them into the cut flesh, ignoring Hannah's hiss of pain and clamped down. She pulled out a small piece of metal, half the size of the nail on her pinkie. "That's it."

  Neeley placed it down on the counter top and took a small spray bottle of antiseptic out of the aid kit. "This will sting."

  "Like what you just finished doing felt good," Hannah said.

  Neeley squirted the wound, soaking it. Then she used gauze and tape to bind it. "You need to walk on it."

  "Excuse me?" Hannah said.

  "You need to keep the muscle from tightening up on you."

  "I thought we were flying west, not walking," Hannah said as she carefully hopped down from the counter.

  "We are, but you need to be ready."

  "You sound like
a girl scout troop leader," Hannah complained, but she was gingerly walking about, testing the thigh. "It's not too bad."

  "That's the second time today you've impressed me," Neeley said.

  Hannah paused. "Don't try to boost my ego with false flattery. You would probably be running a half-marathon with this injury. If you want me to believe you, then talk to me honestly, not like a child."

  Neeley slowly nodded. "All right. That's the second time today you've impressed me." She looked at her watch. "We have to get rid of this guy who had you stuck with this."

  Neeley dropped the bug in her pocket. Then she reached down and put John's briefcase on the counter. Hannah walked over and silently watched as Neeley flipped open the latches. She swung the lid up and both women stared at the contents.

  A stack of papers and plans were inside. Neeley picked them and thumbed through. “Plans for two pipelines in Afghanistan like John said. Contracts.”

  Hannah took some of the papers and they spent several minutes reading.

  “I don’t get it,” Neeley finally said. “Yeah, these papers implicate Senator Collins and Cintgo in a deal with the Taliban to build these pipeline but these are dated 1993.”

  Hannah ran a hand across her chin in thought. “According to John, Collins tried to tie up all loose ends on this deal back then in ’93. He failed and because Gant had the video and John these papers, they were able to hold things in a status quo. But something’s missing.”

  “What do you mean?” Neeley asked.

  “Didn’t you say Gant told you there were three pieces?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the third?” Hannah didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s the critical thing. The video—if it shows Collins in the same screen with Bin Laden will certainly be damaging, but at the time it wasn’t. And these papers appear to be legitimate business documents. We’re missing the critical piece.”

  “In his note Gant said I needed the who, what and why,” Neeley said. “We know who—Senator Collins and Bin Laden; we know what—the Afghanistan pipelines; but we don’t know why. We still haven’t seen the video, so maybe that will give it to us. But I agree with you—I think the third piece, whatever it is, is critical.”

  Neeley took the papers and slid them back into the case and shut the lid. "We have to think fast before this guy chasing us is on top of us. Let's go." She didn’t mention her surprise at Hannah’s observations.

  They were back on the sidewalk. Neeley fed more quarters into the parking meter and looked for Hannah. Hannah was staring at a store across the street and the beginning of a very slight smile was curling her pale lips. "I say we take the upper hand and use our advantages for a change."

  Neeley looked at the store and grimaced. "No way."

  Hannah pulled her arm. "Please, just this once let's do it my way. Bring the bug with you so our Prince Charming can find us."

  Neeley did as she was told and followed Hannah across the street. "OK, but we're not buying anything."

  CHAPTER 15

  Racine was fuming. What had begun an hour and a half ago as a mild irritation had worked into a full-blown rage. He had traced the women to this street in downtown Kansas City. It hadn't taken long for him to discover their stolen car. He had watched it for a while until he saw one of them walk out of the damn store and feed the meter. They didn't realize he was still onto them. Probably thought they'd lost him leaving the parking lot. Still he had to be careful in such a public place and so he sat and waited.

  He planned to nab them as soon as they hit the street. He had a serviceable shield in his wallet and handcuffs. He knew he'd have little trouble ‘arresting’ the two women on the busy sidewalk. People hated to get involved nowadays.

  He was getting cramped even though he had pushed the front seat back as far as it would go. Racine listened to the radio for a while, twiddled his thumbs, studied a map he found on the back seat and read the airbag instructions a few hundred times. He couldn't stand waiting.

  Racine had washed out of sniper school when he was in the service because he couldn't wait. The instructor had told him if it was just about putting a round in someone's skull, everyone would be doing it. But they had exercises at Fort Bragg where you were supposed to sit still for two days just so you could put a single fifty caliber round into a microwave relay tower to disable it. They called it Strategic Target Interdiction. Racine had called it a waste of time. Walk up to the damn tower, kill the guards, strap some C-4 on the sucker and blast it, was his recommendation.

  Racine had no idea how those stupid sons-of-a-bitches sat with those bushes on their head for days at a time. Gant could do that shit, but there had been lots of other things Gant had avoided that Racine could do with ease.

  Watching the store, Racine felt a new surge of anger. Women were just plain different. They had things in their head they couldn't control-- like the urge to buy stuff when they should be running for their lives. The women had been in that store going on two hours. What was left to buy? He glanced at the sign above the door. Give him ten minutes and a hammer and he'd know Victoria's damn secret.

  He thought about the brunette, Gant’s shadow. She didn't look bad if you forgot she was dead meat. Hannah Masterson wasn’t too shabby either and it was a shame that Nero wanted her intact. Racine grew even more uncomfortable as he thought about the two women.

  That was it. Racine decided to take out the store. Enough was enough. Who the hell did they think they were? He wasn't some schmuck waiting around while they modeled every Goddamn thing in the store.

  He checked the gun in his jacket pocket, unfolded himself from the confines of the car and strode to the front of the store exuding purpose and barely suppressed rage.

  His entrance was loud enough that the one saleslady immediately stepped forward. She recognized Racine's state and without a word pointed to the back. Racine nodded. Smart girl. Recognized a man pushed to the edge. He looked around and figured it happened a lot in this snatch temple. As he walked in the direction the clerk had pointed, he could hear them talking behind the closed door of the dressing room but he couldn’t make out the words.

  Racine kicked his foot against the flimsy lock and walked into the small room-- and found himself staring at the blond. She was fully dressed and seated in a chair, one leg resting on a stool.

  What really caught his attention next though was the mirror behind her and the reflection of the brunette and most especially the gun she held and the red dot on his right temple. He froze, recognizing the Glock 20 and knowing what the bullet would do punching through his skull.

  Neeley was in her jeans and jacket and she gestured with the gun for him to move to the center of the room, out of arms reach, like a pro would. Hannah slowly got to her feet, favoring her wounded leg slightly. She took a wide berth around him and shut the door, locking it.

  Racine almost tried to take Neeley, but he remembered her shooting at the house and the fact that Gant had trained her. The asshole had his faults but Racine had no doubt he’d taught her to drop someone in this situation in a heartbeat. And if she’d wanted to kill him, she’d have done so. She wanted to talk so this wasn’t a dead end scene. So like a woman. Racine moved to the center of the room, hands away from his sides so she wouldn’t make a mistake.

  Neeley nodded. "Well, it's nice to finally meet you face to face. Do you have a name?”

  Racine said nothing. She was going to pay. Pay hard. No quick death for either of them he decided right then and there.

  “Why don't you take off your clothes," Neeley said, no hint of a question in it.

  Racine started to protest but the combination of the muzzle of the Glock and the look in her eye pushed him toward acquiescence. He warily watched the two women as he stripped down to his shorts.

  "The knives." Neeley gestured with the gun. Racine dropped the assorted weapons onto his pile of clothes. Hannah picked up the handcuffs. Racine sat in the chair Hannah had vacated. Hannah secured his hands behind the
back with the cuffs, ratcheting them down tight on his wrists.

  Neeley waited until Hannah was done before she spoke again. “Do you have a name?”

  Racine remained quiet.

  Hannah went through his wallet, pulling out a card. “This says he’s FBI. Special Agent Harold Racine.”

  Neeley glanced at the massive Desert Eagle pistol deposited with the clothes. “No FBI agent would be carrying that thing. And the gun that shot up the house was big caliber like that, which isn’t exactly what the FBI would do either. You work for the Cellar don’t you, Harold?”

  “Racine. No one uses my first name.”

  Neeley nodded. “OK, Harold. Here’s the thing. I want to make a deal."

  Racine tried to maintain some control. "You're not playing nice for someone who wants to deal."

  Hannah seemed about to say something but a glance from Neeley stopped her.

  "Here's the deal," Neeley said. "I take Gant’s place and Hannah takes John Masterson’s. We keep things as they are with new people in the old places."

  Racine shook his head. "You know the rules. Or you should know the rules from Gant. You can't beat the Cellar."

  "I'm not trying to beat the Cellar, just you," Neeley said. “And I’ve already done that.”

  "You're stupid," Racine said. "I don't make the rules, I follow them. And the rules say you die and I take Mrs. Masterson back with me. There's no negotiating that."

  "We're dealing with the wrong man,” Hannah said. “We want to talk to your boss. Mister Nero."

  "Yeah, right." Racine's voice oozed sarcasm. "Mister Nero doesn't deal with people like you."

  "I think he will," Neeley said. "We have what John and Gant had. Nero knows that."

  "What do you have?"

  Neeley held up the briefcase. “John Masterson’s piece of the puzzle.”

  Racine shook his head. "Whatever is in there isn't in my instructions so I don't care."

  "Perhaps Mister Nero does," Neeley said.