24
Tex waited near a bench on the riverbank, a stone’s throw from where the red arches of the Blackfriars Bridge crossed the grayish green water of the River Thames. Even the rays of the early morning sun couldn’t penetrate it, and he shivered in the cold. He was still trying to get past the photos that Griffin had sent showing Eve talking to those arms dealers. He wasn’t sure why, because she was pretty, maybe—a sorry excuse—but he wanted her to be innocent. Hard to dispute what he’d seen, especially now that there was a connection to possible terrorist activities.
“Someone coming your way.” The voice was Donovan’s. He stood on the bridge, watching from above. “That him?”
“Not sure,” Tex said, adjusting the volume of the Bluetooth in his ear. The man in question, wearing a heavy black overcoat against the crisp December air, descended the stairs at the end of the bridge down to the pedestrian walkway alongside the riverbank, but instead of approaching Tex, he turned, and walked the other way. More importantly, he wasn’t carrying the green shopping bag with a teddy bear, which their contact had mentioned as a way of identifying him. “Negative.”
“You think whoever was following him got to him? He should have been here an hour ago.”
“Let’s hope not.” He could be three hours late and Tex wasn’t about to leave. Not after hearing the fear in their contact’s voice.
A few minutes later he saw a man walking toward him from under the bridge, not via the stairs as he’d anticipated. He was carrying something in each hand but was too far away to tell for sure. “Donovan. You have a visual?”
“Looks like . . . you ask . . .” The high-low siren from an ambulance passing over the bridge covered his transmission.
“Repeat?”
“Looking over his shoulder. Worried.”
“You have a view of the walkway on the other side of the bridge?”
“Not enough to see if he’s being followed. You sure that’s him? He was supposed to get off on the bus stop here.”
“Maybe he’s being cautious.” And well he should if it involved Trip and this elusive book. “I think he’s the one.” Black overcoat, blue scarf, briefcase, and the telltale green shopping bag. Tex put him in his mid-thirties, his receding brown hair windblown, his face tense with a sheen of sweat on his forehead and upper lip.
The man hurried his pace when he noticed Tex watching. He gave one last look behind him before stopping at the bench, his breaths coming out in short gasps. “You’re the friend of Trip’s? The man I talked to on the phone?”
“Yes. You’re Marty?”
“Marty. Yes. S-Sorry I’m late. I was followed by a couple, and I hid out. Tried to lose them. I—I’m not used to this sort of thing. Do you mind?” His hand shook as he handed Tex his briefcase, then set the paper-handled bag on the bench. A gust of wind blasted across the river, rattling the bag and blowing the nest of tissue that cradled the head of the teddy bear within. Sunlight glinted off its black-bead eyes as it stared out, impervious to the threatening weather. “Before I tell you what this is all about, I need you to promise one thing. That you’ll find my daughter and wife and keep them safe. I don’t want what happened to Byron to happen to them.”
“We’ll do our best,” Tex said, having no idea who Byron was.
“Well, then. Just so you know,” he said, removing his gloves. “It’s well hidden in that Kipling story.”
“Kipling?”
“I couldn’t think of where else to hide—” His eyes widened. He grabbed the scarf at the side of his neck, his mouth opening as though dumbstruck. A dark stain appeared on the blue wool beneath his fingers.
Tex pulled him to the ground behind the bench, the briefcase flying from his grasp.
“What the—” Donovan said. “Where’d it come from?”
Tex saw someone dart into the shadows beneath the bridge. “Under the stairs behind the column.”
“I see him!” Donovan’s transmission came out in a rush as he jumped over the rail and into the greenery, after the suspect. Tex made a quick visual, looking for a second shooter, recalling that their informant said he’d been followed by two people. No one stood out. He turned to the injured man, whose face looked ashen and who was losing blood fast. The dark stain grew wider on the scarf with each pulse, undoubtedly because an artery had been nicked. Tex gathered up the length of blue wool, pressed it against the man’s neck trying to stanch the flow of blood.
His pulse was slowing, growing weaker. He’d be dead before they ever got him to the hospital. Sooner, Tex thought, if he let go. “What about this Kipling story?” he asked, hoping the man wasn’t too far gone to answer.
He made a gargling noise, followed by “. . . take the bear . . . to Emmie. Promise.”
“I will,” he said, figuring Emmie must be his daughter.
A shadow fell over them. Tex looked up, the morning sun obscuring his vision of all but the silhouette of a woman looking down at them, the light behind her creating an aura of bright auburn around her head, then a glimmer of silver at her ears when she kneeled.
“Eve?”
“I can help.”
The man reached out to Tex. “Don’t—”
“Tex!” came Donovan’s voice in his ear.
He glanced over, saw Donovan and a dark-haired man struggling over a gun. Pedestrians fled up the stairs, from under the bridge.
“He needs you,” Eve said, slipping her hand beneath his. “Go.”
The moment he felt her hand put pressure on the artery, he ran toward Donovan. He was almost at his side when the shooter saw him approaching and suddenly let go of the gun. Donovan faltered back, catching himself just short of the river wall, then chased after the man up the stairs. Tex stopped in his tracks. Turned toward Eve. And that was when he realized what the informant had said about being followed . . . Not by two people. By a couple.
A man and a woman.
He raced back, his feet flying over the brick pavers. She stood, Marty’s briefcase in her hand as she looked right at Tex, her dark red hair blowing about. He felt like he was moving in slow motion. She hopped over the low retainer wall, then up the embankment, through the shrubs toward the street. Even before he had a chance to think about following, she jumped into a waiting car and took off.
“I lost him.” Donovan’s voice sounded tinny, and Tex glanced up, saw Donovan standing on the top of the bridge. Figuring he had a few seconds before the police arrived, Tex kneeled beside the victim, who stared unseeing into the sky. He checked his pulse. There was none. The man never had a chance, even if Eve had stayed, but Tex hadn’t wanted to leave him alone. Not like that.
Sirens sounded in the distance. He’d rather avoid interacting with the local law enforcement, too much that couldn’t be explained, and started toward the bridge, figuring they had about a minute to get out of there, maybe less.
But the wind rustled the tissue of the teddy bear that sat on that bench, its black eyes watching Tex, and he thought of the promise he’d made to a dying man for someone named Emmie.
The sirens grew louder.
“Time to move, Tex.”
“Meet you back at the safe house.” He opened the man’s coat, saw an ID card for A.D.E. hanging from a lanyard on his belt and pulled it free. He stood, grabbed the bag as the first patrol car, its light flashing, sped across the bridge, skidding to a stop near the stairway. Tex strode off in the opposite direction, trying to lose himself in the handful of pedestrians walking near the river.
He had no idea what was going on, but one thing was clear. That hit was too well-orchestrated to be anything but professional.
25
Eve hugged the briefcase against her chest as she glanced in the side mirror and saw the multitude of emergency lights converging on the bridge all growing smaller as Lou sped off. “We weren’t the only ones there,” she said when she caught her breath.
“I gathered that.”
“Marty must have called them after he slipped us outside
of the Tube. They were waiting for him under the bridge.”
“Who was it?”
“The reporters from the Recorder.”
He looked over at her, saw the blood on her hand, then nearly slammed on the brakes. “Jesus—”
“It’s not mine.”
He took a deep breath, turned back to the road. “I thought you said they wouldn’t be a problem.”
“I’ll take care of them.”
“You’d better. They’re becoming a liability.” He stopped at a red light, then nodded toward the briefcase. “You gonna open that?”
She held it fast for a moment, then finally lowered it. When she opened it, her heart skipped a beat then thudded against her rib cage as panic gripped her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, and her brain seemed to trip over her memories as she tried to recall if there was any way she’d made a mistake.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s not here.”
Lou checked his mirrors, turned down a street, and parked. “What do you mean, it’s not there?”
“Exactly that.” She held the briefcase wide, allowing him to see in.
“Did you drop it?”
“No.”
“Then he had to have had it in his hands.”
“No. When we got to the bridge, he handed the briefcase directly to the reporter. I saw him. Why would he do that if it wasn’t in here?” She leaned back against the headrest, feeling faint, nauseous even. “I can’t believe this . . .”
“We’ll find it,” Lou promised. “It probably fell out in the bushes when you were running up to the street.”
“A book? I would have noticed that. What are you doing?” she said when he pulled out. “I can’t go back. The place is probably swarming with cops, someone’s bound to have noticed me, and I’m covered in blood.”
“You drop me off. I’ll look, then meet you later.”
She reluctantly agreed, even though in her gut she knew nothing had fallen out of that briefcase. About two blocks away he got out and she took the car and watched him walk off.
Somewhere between the Tube and the bridge Marty had done something with that book. It didn’t even matter at this point. All that did matter was that she didn’t have it, and in that one moment she felt completely alone.
It had been a long time since she’d cried, and if she had the time, she might consider it, but right now she had about ten minutes to think of a way to spin this.
She’d failed.
More importantly, she truly feared what the outcome would be.
“Are you people insane?” Eve said, storming into the room. “You can’t kill every A.D.E. employee under the sun. Byron? Now Marty? People are going to start suspecting something is up.”
Barclay, the head of A.D.E., narrowed his gaze at her, a flash of anger at the interruption. “And you have a better way to deal with those who want to defy me?”
“I was this close to getting the book you want, and you kill the only person who may have an inkling where it is.”
“It wasn’t in the briefcase, was it?”
“You knew it wasn’t there, and you let me go anyway?”
“Trip informed us.”
She stopped cold in her tracks. Lou had tried following Trip but lost him. “Where is he?”
“We picked him up last night outside the A.D.E. office. Apparently he thought it would be a good night to reconnect with an old friend.”
“That’s why you killed Byron and his family? Because of Trip?”
“We had to make sure he was telling the truth. Byron, of course, said Marty had it, and here we have Trip saying Marty absolutely does not have it.”
Eve tried to reconcile what she saw beneath the bridge, Marty meeting with the reporter, handing him the briefcase. Why, if not to hand over the book? “Trip said Marty did not have the book?”
“Precisely.”
“Then why kill Marty?”
“As I explained, Byron assured us right before he died that Marty did, indeed, have the book. And was the man not trying to pass the briefcase along to this . . . person moments before he was shot?”
Eve stared at the men sitting around the table. “So just kill everyone?”
“Are you growing soft, Eve?”
“No. I’m concerned you’re not thinking things through. Someone’s bound to start wondering at the short life-expectancy of A.D.E. employees and their families.”
“Random acts. They happen.”
“Not to people working in the same company.”
“Your concern is touching, but you’ll find that once we recover the book, poor distraught Trip, who was fired not once but twice from the same company, will end up taking his own life out of guilt for killing his brother-in-law.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You’re insane. The police will never believe that.”
“They already do. A few well-placed witnesses were very helpful to the police investigation, and the shooter certainly matches his description.”
“And what if Trip doesn’t produce the book?”
“He has two days or we kill his sister and niece once we find them. So you see, Miss Sanders, he’s going to die anyway. The question is who he intends to take with him?”
Eve wasn’t sure what she could possibly say to that. What might cement her position or make it worse. She opted for the positive. “It seems you’ve thought of everything.”
“Oh. We have. I only hope no one got too good a look at the woman who stole his briefcase.”
His smile left a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. He’d serve her up to the police in a heartbeat just as easily as kill her and toss her out with the trash. She knew, however, that any sign of weakness would be a grave misstep, and so she smiled right back at him. “We can only hope.”
26
Tex’s phone rang about five minutes after he got back to the safe house. The number on his caller ID showed the phone they’d followed to the hotel on their arrival to London. Eve. “Hello?”
“You may believe you know what you saw. It’s not what you think.”
“Then what is it?” Tex asked.
“I can’t talk right now, I’m being watched. But if you’ll meet with me after Micah’s program tonight, I can explain everything.”
“I’ve already had one person shove a gun in my side in your presence, and a man killed right in front of me. Not sure if I’m liking those odds.”
“I didn’t do it. Please . . . just meet with me.”
“Tell you what. I’ll think about it.”
He hung up on her, picturing that moment in his mind’s eye when she’d looked at him, Marty’s briefcase in her bloody hand right before she fled . . .
Donovan walked in then, and Tex told him about the call.
“And what? We hallucinated the whole thing?”
“I’m still trying to figure her out.”
“I take it the book was in the briefcase she took?” Donovan asked. He was rolling up his sleeve to examine his elbow.
“I can’t believe I let her get it. When it hit me what I’d done . . .”
“The guy had a gun. On me. You did the right thing.”
Tex grinned. “Some might say that was debatable.”
“So what’s with the teddy bear?”
“I sort of promised the guy I’d take it to his daughter, Emmie.”
“You know where he lives?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Found his ID. We can arrange to have one of the locals drop it off. Maybe after the notification’s made.” Because he sure as hell didn’t want to have to tell some little girl her father was dead. Or the wife, either.
Donovan craned his neck trying to see his elbow. “What do ya think? Bandage or not?”
“Butch up. It’s barely a scrape.”
“It’s bleeding.”
“A mosquito would starve on that. Air it out.”
Donovan rolled his sleeve down. “The guy tell you anything else befor
e he was shot?”
“Not a lot. He said he was being followed, but before he told me what that was about, he said I had to protect his wife and daughter, then something about something happening to someone named Byron. Oh, and something about it was well-hidden in a Kipling story. I’m guessing this is the book everyone’s after.”
“Kipling?”
“Special annotated version or something.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Tex said, taking a seat at the table and picking up the newspaper he hadn’t had a chance to read yet. “And then he was shot. Hence the promise to get the teddy bear to his daughter.”
Donovan eyed the bag.
“Trust me,” Tex said. “Nothing’s in there. I already looked. It’s just a kid’s toy.”
“Which makes you wonder what the hell’s hidden in this book.”
“Got me,” he said, unfolding the paper and shaking it out on the table, eyeing the front page.
“Sandwich?”
“Shit.”
“I was thinking more like roast beef.”
“No. This. Look.”
He pointed to the headline that read MURDER-SUICIDE IN QUEEN’S PARK HOME. “We were wondering what prompted this guy to call us? Here you go.”
Donovan leaned over the table, read the article. “Byron? That’s the name Marty mentioned?”
“That’s it. Entire family. Murder-suicide. I’m guessing Marty thought otherwise.”
They both turned, eyed the teddy bear.
“Shit, is right,” Donovan said. “If Eve just called wanting to meet, I’m guessing the book isn’t in the briefcase, and they’re still looking for it. We’ve got to find his kid and his wife before they do.”
Trip lay on the floor in a dark room, his hands tied behind his back, his feet bound together. He wasn’t sure what time of day it was. He’d drifted to sleep during the night off and on, startling awake whenever someone entered the room. The door opened and bright light spilled in, blinding him, and he didn’t see the boot coming at him until it struck his gut.
The Black List Page 12