“I had a visit today,” Tracy told him. “From the FBI.”
Blake Carter stiffened, like a deer sensing danger.
“And the CIA,” Tracy added. “Together.”
“What did they want?”
Tracy told him. Not everything, but the bare bones of what had been said, as well as Greg Walton’s proposal that she fly to Langley.
“What did you say?” Blake asked.
“I said no, of course. I’ve never met this woman, I’m sure of it. And what I know about counterterrorism you could write on the back of a stamp.”
“But these guys thought you could help?” Blake said gently.
“Well, yes,” Tracy admitted. “They did. But they’re wrong. Don’t tell me you want me to go to Langley?”
“Of course I don’t want you to go,” Blake’s voice grew gruff with emotion. “But maybe it’s not about what I want. Or what you want. These 99 people . . . they’re out of control. Someone needs to stand up to them. They’re against everything this country stands for. Everything America was built on.”
“You see, there you go again,” Tracy said archly. “Sam Eagle.”
“All’s I’m saying is, they need to be stopped. Don’t you agree?”
“Of course I do,” snapped Tracy. “And they will be stopped. Just not by me. I’m not a spy, Blake. I have nothing to offer here. Heaven knows how this woman Althea knows about me, or why she mentioned my name. But now she’s got the FBI, the CIA and the White House convinced I have some sort of inside information, some magic power to find her and do their jobs for them. The whole thing’s ridiculous! I feel like Alice down the rabbit hole!”
“OK, Tracy. Calm down.”
“And even if it weren’t ridiculous, even if I could help, which I can’t—I’m not leaving Nick. Not ever.”
“I understand that.”
“Actually I don’t think you do.” There were tears in Tracy’s eyes now. She was angry and visibly upset, although whether it was with Blake Carter or herself she couldn’t have said. “I think you’d better go home, Blake.”
The old cowboy raised an eyebrow. “OK. If that’s what you want.”
Before Tracy could gather her thoughts, he’d picked up his hat and left. Tracy heard the sound of Blake’s truck pulling away, followed by a loud blaring of angry teenage music coming from Nick’s bedroom. Tired and miserable, she cleared away the plates and went to bed.
TWO HOURS LATER, TRACY was still wide awake, staring at the ceiling.
She thought about Blake Carter. Why did he have to be so good, all the time? So damn selfless and upstanding and righteous? Didn’t he realize how annoying it was?
She thought about Nicholas, and how like his father he was. Jeff would have laughed at the fart video. She tried to deny it to herself, but there were times when Tracy missed Jeff so badly it felt like a stone slab pressing on her heart.
Finally, despite her efforts to shut them out, she thought about her two visitors today. The short, charming CIA chief, Greg Walton, with his earnest entreaties; and the bullying, hateful Milton Buck with his not-so-veiled threats.
“I’m sorry.”
“You will be.”
Tracy hadn’t told Blake about that part. She hadn’t wanted to worry him. Blake didn’t know about the jewel heist Tracy had pulled off only a few years back in L.A., stealing the Brookstein emeralds from under the nose of her rival, Rebecca Mortimer. The FBI had made a deal after the Bible Killer case, promising Tracy immunity on that and a string of other crimes. Tracy had scratched their back, and they’d promised to scratch hers. But if Tracy knew one thing about Agent Milton Buck it was that the man had no scruples. He’d think nothing of reneging on their deal and sending her to jail if he thought it would advance his career.
I’m not going back to jail, Tracy told herself. Not ever.
Milton Buck wasn’t the only one with dangerous secrets up his sleeve. Blackmail, Tracy had learned long ago, was a two-player game, and Tracy had prepared her own next move long ago. If Buck tried to come after her over this Group 99 business, she’d be ready.
Eventually, sleep began to come to her. As she sank into its embrace, floating in and out of consciousness, Tracy thought about Althea, this mysterious, murderous, wealthy woman that had the President of the United States and all his many minions clutching at straws.
Who is she?
Where is she?
And how does she know my name?
How had she gotten involved with Group 99? And was she the one responsible for turning them from an organization of peaceful, subversive, idealists into brutal terrorists, as bloodthirsty and ruthless as all the rest?
Blake Carter’s words came back to her: It’s not about what I want, Tracy. Or what you want. These people need to be stopped.
Exhausted, Tracy Whitney finally slept.
CHAPTER 6
SALLY FAIERS WAITED PATIENTLY for the four keys in front of her to merge into one so that she could unlock her front door. It would help if the door would stop swaying too. But after four large vodka and tonics, one couldn’t have everything.
Sally’s flat was on Beaufort Street in Chelsea, one of hundreds in a typical, redbrick Victorian mansion block. By journalist standards it was a nice place. Expensive part of London. Decent transport links. Not covered in mold. An award-winning columnist at The Times, Sally Faiers was at the top of her game but she would never earn a fortune. No one went into investigative journalism for the money. But Sally owned her own place, paid her own mortgage and even, when the situation demanded, bought her own vodka.
At last, the key went in, so suddenly that Sally lurched forward, bumping her head painfully against the door.
“Arse,” she grumbled under her breath.
The four flights of stairs were a killer. She really must go to a gym sometime this century. Staggering, breathless, into her flat, she locked the door behind her and kicked off her heels.
What a night! Sally had filed her latest story, an exposé of one of the top Catholic clerics in England colluding in a pedophile ring, at six o’clock and had gone straight to the nearest pub to celebrate. She was in between boyfriends at the moment, but had made do with snogging John Wheeler from the sports desk in the cab on her way home. She contemplated asking him in for a nightcap—word on the desk was John had the biggest dick in Wapping—but then she remembered what had happened the last time she had a one-night stand with someone at work. Will, the sexy intern on news. Poor Will had mooned over Sally for weeks afterwards, continually “dropping by” her desk for coffee when she was trying to write. In the end she’d had to have a word with the editor and get him transferred to obituaries. She still felt bad about it.
Padding into the bathroom, Sally peeled off her dress and tights and turned on the shower, glancing at her reflection in the mirror before she stepped inside. At thirty-two Sally Faiers still had a good figure, despite her gym phobia, borderline alcoholism and generally dissolute lifestyle. Her waist was small, her boobs big and remarkably perky, and her long legs just the right amount of toned. She had a small, snub nose that she hated but that men inexplicably found sexy, pale gray eyes like morning mist, and a very wide mouth, that had been known to produce an astonishing number of swear words, curses and profanities, especially when its owner was under a deadline. She wore her blond hair in a blunt bob, and almost always dirty due to a chronic lack of both time and being arsed.
The moment she opened the shower door, her phone rang.
Sally groaned. Two in the fucking morning! It wasn’t unusual for her to receive calls at odd hours. But once a story was filed, there was usually a lull until her research began again. On this last story, some of the calls had been harrowing. Broken men, sobbing down the line to her as they recalled childhood abuse. Detachment was the one part of the journalist’s job that Sally had never been able to master. That, and an ability to ignore a ringing phone.
Wrapping a towel around herself—Why? Nobody’s here?—she s
taggered back into the hallway and picked up.
“Sally Faiers.”
“Hello, gorgeous.”
Sally’s heart dropped to the pit of her stomach. It was a bad line, but she’d know that voice anywhere, the deep, masculine, American voice that was part drawl, part growl.
“Hunter.” Just saying his name was painful. “You’re alive, then.”
“No need to sound so happy about it.”
“I’m not happy about it. You’re a fucking arsehole.”
“Now, that’s not kind. You know the only way I got through the last year was by imagining you naked, with those perfect legs of yours wrapped around my waist. Remember Stockholm?”
“No,” said Sally. “The only way I got through the last year was by imagining you chained to a wall in some godforsaken Group 99 hideout with a pair of electrodes glued to your bollocks.”
Hunter laughed. “I missed you.”
“They let you go, then?”
“Actually I escaped.”
Now it was Sally’s turn to laugh. “Bullshit! You have about as many survival skills as a hedgehog trying to shuffle across the M40.”
“I’ve improved.” Hunter sounded wounded. “I did have a little help from my fellow countrymen. At the beginning.”
Through her drunken haze, Sally read through the lines. “You mean, you were there? In the Bratislava camp?”
“I was there,” Hunter confirmed.
“And they left you behind?” she asked, incredulous.
“Not exactly,” Hunter admitted. “I made a run for it.”
Sally slid down the wall and sat on the floor. “What? Why?”
“It’s a long story.”
A torrent of emotions rushed through her. The strongest was relief that Hunter was alive. He’d broken her heart into a million tiny pieces when he left her for that slut Fiona at the New York Times. But even Sally didn’t want to see pieces of his skull flying through the air like poor Bob Daley’s.
Hot on the heels of relief was excitement. The whole world was out there looking for Hunter Drexel and speculating about his fate. And she, Sally Faiers, was on the phone with him, listening to him tell her that he’d run from his American rescuers—that President Havers’s statement had been an out-and-out lie! Talk about a scoop!
Reaching up, she grabbed a pencil and pad from the hall table.
“Where are you?”
“Sorry,” said Hunter, sounding nothing of the sort. “Can’t tell you that.”
“Give me a clue at least.”
“And you can’t tell anyone about this phone call either.”
Sally laughed. “Fuck off. This is front-page news. The minute you hang up I’m calling the news desk.”
“Sally, I mean it, you can’t say anything.” Hunter’s voice was deadly serious all of a sudden. “If they find me they’ll kill me.”
“If who finds you?” Sally asked.
“Never mind that now,” Hunter cut her off. “I need you to do me a favor.”
It was astonishing how quickly relief could turn to anger. “In what alternate universe would I do you a favor?” Sally asked.
“I need you to do some digging for me,” Hunter said, ignoring her. “You remember the Greek prince who was found strung up at Sandhurst?”
“Sure. Achileas. The suicide. Hunter, you aren’t seriously telling me you’re working on a story right now? Because . . .”
“I don’t think it was suicide,” Hunter interrupted her. “There’s a senior officer at Sandhurst, Major General Frank Dorrien. I need you to find out anything you can about him.”
Sally paused. “You think this Dorrien guy murdered Prince Achileas of Greece? Are you on drugs?”
“Just look into it,” Hunter said. “Please.”
“Tell me where you are and I’ll think about it,” said Sally.
“Thanks. You’re an angel.”
“Hey, I didn’t say yes! Hunter?”
“You’re breaking up.” He started making ridiculous, crackling noises down the phone.
“I am not breaking up. Hunter! Don’t you dare hang up on me. I swear to God, if you hang up now I’m gonna call the CIA right this minute and tell them about this call. Every word. And then I’ll run the story in tomorrow’s Times.”
“No you won’t,” said Hunter.
He hung up.
Sally Faiers sat naked in her hallway for a long time with the phone in her hand.
“Fuck you, Hunter Drexel,” she said aloud.
You ripped my heart out. You utterly betrayed me. And now you expect me to sit on the biggest story of my career, and quietly go out and do your dirty work for you on some wild-goose-chase, bullshit story at Sandhurst?
“I’m not doing it,” Sally shouted down the empty hall of her flat. “Not this time.”
But she already knew that she would.
HUNTER HUNG UP THE pay phone and stepped out into the howling wind.
How he wished he were in London with Sally! Preferably in bed. He found himself getting hard at the thought of her. Those legs. Those phenomenal tits . . . What had possessed him to leave her in the first place?
She’s right, he thought. I am an asshole.
He looked around him miserably. Up and down the litterstrewn street, poorly dressed people dived into ugly concrete apartment buildings or offices or cafés, anything to get out of the cold. The few poor souls forced to wait at bus stops huddled together miserably, like sheep en route to the abattoir, stomping their feet and smoking and clapping their gloved hands together repeatedly against the bitter weather.
Romania was a beautiful country. But Oradea, the city where Hunter had spent the last three days, was a dump, full of abandoned, communist architecture and depressed, unemployed people. The hospitals were stuffed full of abandoned children, and filthy Roma families roamed the streets like animals, some of them actually sleeping on top of mounds of rubbish, left to rot or freeze or drink themselves to death.
If Romania’s a supermodel, Hunter thought, Oradea is the pimple on her ass. There was none of the beauty of Transylvania here, none of the sophistication of Bucharest. No sign anywhere of the much talked about economic revival. Wherever Romania’s EU millions had been spent, it wasn’t here. Oradea felt like a forgotten city. But that made it perfect for Hunter Drexel. Right now Hunter needed to be forgotten. No one would look for him here.
Not that there was no money to be found in Oradea. In the Old Town, along the banks of the Crişul Repede river, a few magnificent mansions, relics of the pre-communist days, had been reclaimed by wealthy private owners. Stuffed with fine art and priceless antiques, their formal gardens lined with lavender bushes and neatly clipped hedges, these homes glittered like stars in an otherwise pitch-black sky, sparkling incongruously like newly cut diamonds dropped in a pile of manure. Their owners were mostly native Romanians, gangsters, corrupt local government officials, and a smattering of legitimate businessmen, some returning to their hometown now after years of exile abroad.
It was in one of these houses that Hunter was staying. Its owner, a property magnate by the name of Vasile Rinescu, was a keen poker player and a friend of sorts.
“If you’re here to play, you’re welcome,” Vasile told Hunter, when the latter had arrived, shivering and desperate, on his doorstep. “I don’t know about blood, but poker is definitely thicker than water.”
“Thank God for that,” said Hunter.
“I’m hosting a game this Saturday as it happens. Some very interesting players. High stakes.”
“Good,” Hunter said. “I need the money. I’m . . . in a bit of a tight spot right now.”
Vasile laughed. “We may be a backwater, but we do watch the news here, my friend,” he told Hunter. “The whole world knows about your ‘tight spot.’ ”
A look of panic crossed Hunter’s face.
“Don’t worry.” Vasile clapped him on the back. “My friends are discreet. No one’s going to turn you over to the CIA, or Group 99.
Unless of course you lose, and you can’t pay. In that case they’ll turn you over to the highest bidder.”
“Right.”
“Once they’ve finished torturing you.”
“Gotcha.” Hunter grinned. “I guess I’d better not lose then.”
“I would try very hard not to,” said Vasile. He wasn’t smiling.
Hunter didn’t lose. After three days at Vasile’s, enjoying the first home-cooked meals and hot baths he’d had since he was kidnapped in Moscow, he’d managed to win enough money to fund at least another month on the run.
Keeping one step ahead of the Americans, Hunter realized now, would be the easy part. It was Group 99 that worried him, in particular Apollo. The sadistic guard was bound to view Hunter’s escape as a personal humiliation, one that he would stop at nothing to avenge. If Hunter so much as glanced at a computer, Apollo would find him. That meant no emails, no credit card, no cell phone, no rented car, no flights, no electronically traceable presence of any kind. From now on, until his story was finished and in print all around the world, Hunter must live entirely under the radar.
Luckily, poker provided the perfect opportunity to create this new, cash only, invisible version of himself. Poker players were natural secret keepers, with an inbuilt sense of loyalty towards one another. Through poker, Hunter had “friends” like Vasile Rinescu scattered all across Europe. He could flit from safe house to safe house, earning enough to live, and work on his story between games. Of course, without a computer or a phone, research would be tough. He couldn’t do this without Sally Faiers’s help. But he knew Sally would help him.
She may not trust me as a man. But she trusts me as a journalist.
She knows this is big.
Once he’d published his story—once the truth, the whole truth about Group 99, was finally out there—he would turn himself in to the Americans. He’d have some explaining to do, of course. But then so would a lot of people.
Wrapping his scarf tightly around the lower half of his face, Hunter headed across the bridge to the mansion.
Sidney Sheldon's Reckless Page 6