“Katie, where are you?”
“I’m at Harrods,” she said. “Harrods Department Store.”
Chapter 6
With Katie’s frightened voice burning in my brain, I wasn’t about to let a little thing like an inquisition at the hands of hotel security get between me and Harrods. Philip, however, presented another problem. My old friend might’ve been busy giving the manager a regal dressing-down about guest safety, but his eyes remained pinned to me. When he turned his back to address the house detective, I saw my chance. I slipped out alongside the medics, who wheeled the dazed housekeeper away on a stretcher. Once we hit the hall, they went one way, toward the main elevators.
I went the other.
Avoiding the stairs, I found the service lift, hitched a ride with a waiter returning to the kitchens. I tipped him well to forget about me. He wouldn’t hold out forever, but our transaction would buy me some time when Philip came looking for me.
And I had no doubt Philip would come looking for me.
Outside, an autumn mist had risen from the Thames and was creeping across the city. I used it to my advantage, turning the collar of my jacket against my cheek and hurrying along the busier streets of Knightsbridge. Harrods would close shortly if it hadn’t already, and I didn’t want Katie left to stand on the street by herself.
We’d agreed to meet by the Diana and Dodi sculpture—not the golden design that linked photographs of the late Princess of Wales and the man who’d joined her in an untimely death, but rather the bronze statue of the two, dancing eternally beneath an attendant albatross. The statue was situated in a wide area near the Egyptian escalator and a constant flow of reverential tourists came to gaze upon it. Katie wouldn’t draw attention by lingering there and, if I entered the store from another side, took the elevator to an upper floor, and peered down on the crowd, I’d know if anyone had set their sights on her.
Throngs of shoppers met me at the store’s Brompton Road entrance, all of them leaving just as I arrived. I made my way against the flow of humanity, pushing into the building and upstairs. At the top of the Egyptian escalator, I paused, scanned the patrons in the lobby below, and found Katie waiting for me a few feet from the statue—and within spitting distance of the exit.
Her gray coat was buttoned to her chin and her blond chignon sat askew at the nape of her neck. She’d thrust her right hand deep into her pocket. I imagined she had a death grip on her cell phone in there.
Katie tried to watch everything at once, but couldn’t quite manage it. Still, it was smart of her to try. And I was glad she wasn’t too scared to use her brain.
Behind her, I caught a glimpse of a plain brown hijab, and my heart soared to see Katie wasn’t alone. Dr. Oujdad’s daughter cut a small figure in the shadow of the bronze sculpture, but my relief in seeing her was huge. She listened diligently to someone I couldn’t quite see. I canted my head left and right, hoping to spot her father. Like a mother hen rounding up her chicks, I wanted nothing more than to shepherd all three of them out of here, retrieve the snitch visas from The Elizabethan Rose’s safe, and pack all of us onto the first plane bound for Washington.
But Bijou Oujdad wasn’t chatting with her father.
I shifted from one foot to the other—and came up with a direct line-of-sight to the man talking to her. I couldn’t see his face thanks to the bronze figures and the upturned collar of his navy-blue pea coat. But even though the point of the collar lay against his tanned cheek, I recognized his build. His was a beautiful body. The powerhouse of a prizefighter. And my unbelieving heart whispered his name.
Barrett.
“I’m sorry, madam.”
I nearly jumped out of my skin when the sales assistant spoke to me.
“The store is closing. Please visit us tomorrow.”
I smiled, nodded so she wouldn’t hear my American accent, and hightailed it to the downward escalator. Oujdad’s daughter was alone now. I could see her hands clasped at her waist as if to keep them from shaking.
And Barrett was nowhere to be seen.
“Jamie!” In spite of the swirling crowd, Katie flung her arms around my neck and squeezed me as if she’d never been so glad to see another person in her whole life.
“Where’s the man who was just here?” I demanded.
“Man?” Katie stiffened. “What man?”
I grabbed her wrist, dragged her to the statue’s shadow where Bijou would’ve faded into darkness if she could’ve. She was terrified. Her knuckles were white where her hands came together and her scared eyes were as deep as wishing wells.
I didn’t do anything to alleviate her fears. “What did he say to you?”
“ ‘Say’?”
“Yes, that man who spoke to you. What did he say?”
Bijou Oujdad shook her head as if she didn’t speak English, let alone understand my question. But I doubted that was the case. She’d seemed to understand every twist and turn of the conversation Katie and Dr. Oujdad had had when they’d met on the doorstep of that bookshop.
Still, I rephrased my question. In French. But the wide-eyed Bijou mutely shook her head in reply.
Frustrated, I surveyed our fellow patrons one more time. It was useless, though. I knew Barrett had left the building.
“Jamie,” Katie demanded, “what’s this about?”
“I’ll tell you on the way to the airport. Where’s Doctor Oujdad?”
Katie didn’t reply. Instead, she linked arms with Oujdad’s daughter and patted the woman’s hand. A single curl slipped from the hem of Bijou’s hijab—and unshed tears welled in her eyes.
“Doctor Oujdad,” Katie told me, “is missing.”
—
If The Elizabethan Rose was my favorite grand hotel, Rabbit’s Revenge was my favorite retreat. Once a coaching inn on London’s Hampstead Heath, the cozy pub out front gave way in back to a modern boutique hotel. The place was small enough to afford some security, but large enough for anonymity. Best of all, it was all the way across town and far from the pandemonium I’d left Philip to handle.
He’d called my cell three times since I’d bailed on him. I hadn’t answered once. I only hoped he hadn’t leveraged his Foreign Office connection to talk the manager into opening his safe—and forking over the snitch visas I needed to get the Oujdads out of Britain. I’d have to find a way to spring those from the safe myself. First, though, my fellow runaways and I needed a place to lie low and to regroup—and Rabbit’s Revenge had been offering the perfect place for highwaymen, wayward aristocrats, compromised starlets, and recovering rock stars to do both since King James had sat on the throne of England in 1603.
With the fake name of Vivian Sternwood on the books and a credit card any federal government would have a hard time tracing to my discreet Swiss bank account in play, Katie, Bijou Oujdad, and I retired to a suite on the fifth floor. Once the door was firmly bolted, a late dinner had been ordered, and my two roommates had been dispatched to the showers, I pulled the coverlet from my four-poster bed, wrapped it around my shoulders, and slipped onto the narrow balcony just beyond the sitting room. There, overlooking the lights of London blinking across the heath in the fog, I phoned my father.
It was Roger, however, who answered.
“The Senator’s in conference,” he informed me.
But I didn’t buy it. It was past midnight in DC. “He’s in conference with a scotch and soda. Hand him the phone.”
“Maybe he is, and maybe he isn’t. I can’t say more than that, Jamie.”
Well, if that were the case, Roger would have to listen to me, because I sure as hell had plenty to say to him.
All in all, he took the news of my encounter with a dead Albanian hit man pretty well. My announcement that Katie’s smuggled passports could be in the hands of the British Foreign Office didn’t faze him, either. But when I told him Dr. Oujdad was lost somewhere in London, Roger’s blood pressure shot into the stratosphere.
“Jamie, you’ve got to find her. You’ve
got to bring her to the States. Without her, it’ll take years and countless lives to get the information she’s carrying—”
“Roger, you’re not listening to me.” I propped my aching arm on the balcony’s railing. Swelling inside the cast and the chilly night air made my fingertips tingle. The pain pill I’d taken at the hospital had worn off hours ago. So had my patience. “I’ve got Doctor Oujdad’s daughter here with me. It’s the old man that’s missing.”
Silence buzzed over the airwaves between Roger and me. I imagined our connection bouncing from cell phone tower to cell phone tower, and off some satellite framed against the stars in geosynchronous orbit. But the hum that stretched between us had nothing to do with digital technology or white noise.
This was the sound of being totally and completely on my own. I was a stranger in a strange land. My government’s unwitting operative, left to freeze in the cold.
I knew all of this the second Roger said, “Jamie, the old man’s a doctor, but he’s not a physicist. It’s the daughter. She’s Doctor Ikaat Oujdad. For her sake—and for your country—you’ve got to bring her to Washington.”
—
After a short goodbye and a long string of curse words, I returned to the sitting room. Roger had given me new orders. Since he spoke for my father—and since my father was my client—I intended to follow them.
But I wasn’t happy about it.
I wasn’t happy about a lot of things. Right then, though, the thing I was most unhappy about was that no one had bothered to point out that the young woman Katie and I had met at that bookstore wasn’t really Miss Bijou Oujdad. No, she was Dr. Ikaat Oujdad, the all-important physicist.
Important to my country.
Important to my father.
Therefore, she was important to me.
My only consolation was Katie had seemed as uninformed as I’d been. While she’d expected to meet a father/daughter duo, she’d clearly thought the old man was the physicist, just as I had. And just as I had, she’d walked into tonight’s Covent Garden ambush blind. Try as I might, I couldn’t blame Roger for leaving me open to that. I could only blame my father.
A sneaking suspicion began to form at the base of my brain that maybe I could blame my father for Barrett’s involvement in this mess, too. How else would a U.S. Army officer—and a military policeman, no less—show up in the middle of a clandestine meeting on the other side of the Atlantic? But when I asked myself why a United States senator would bother to involve an MP in such an operation, I couldn’t come up with a good answer.
The only thing I could figure was maybe my father brought Barrett into this as fire insurance.
Because maybe he believed I couldn’t get the job done.
In any case, back in the suite’s living room, I secured the French doors behind me. Katie and Ikaat emerged from their room, wrapped in fluffy bathrobes. Both wore their hair loose to their shoulders and the soft scent of lavender shampoo lingered in their damp locks. Without the pearls and chignon, or the brown hijab, they looked like sorority sisters from an old June Allyson movie.
I, on the other hand, felt like the monster from a 1950s disaster flick.
And in light of my conversation with Roger, I was ready to show my teeth and roar.
I waited until room service delivered French onion soup and roast beef sandwiches as thick as my fist. Katie nibbled nervously on hers. Ikaat, I noticed, had to force herself to swallow even the smallest sips of broth.
Maybe she was worried about her own father. Maybe she regretted her decision to defect to the United States. But her feelings were none of my concern. I had an assignment to complete. I had to bring this young woman to Washington because I’d told my father I would.
“Eat up,” I told her. “Then get dressed. We’re catching the next flight out of Heathrow.”
Katie patted her rosebud mouth with a linen napkin, then spoke to me in a stage whisper from behind its folds. “We can’t leave Britain. We can’t go home without Doctor Oujdad.”
“We won’t. We’ve got Doctor Oujdad right here with us. Don’t we, Ikaat?”
If I’d expected Ikaat to curl into a small ball in the corner of the couch and confess her true identity, I expected wrong. Like a queen, she squared her shoulders, turned to face me. And like an archangel’s halo, the helixes of her lustrous curls framed her heart-shaped face without the cover of her hijab.
In her heart, she was as strong as an archangel, too. She said, “The bargain I made was for my father as well. I will not leave London without him.”
This was the first time I’d heard her speak more than a word or two. Her voice was soft, like a breeze sweeping over sand, but her English was hard, with each consonant standing on its own. That’s when I knew I’d have to be hard too.
“I don’t understand.” Katie blinked at our traveling companion. “Your father called you Bijou—”
“No,” I interrupted. “Armand called her his bijou. His little gem. It’s a nickname, Katie, not a proper name.”
Ikaat didn’t deny this.
“You have to come to the States,” I told her, “with or without your father. Because you can’t go home. Your countrymen would have a helluva welcoming committee waiting for you. And you can’t stay here. You have a price on your head. The man who shot at you outside that bookstore won’t be the last one who’ll come to collect it.”
Ikaat placed her soupspoon in the saucer cradling her bowl. Silver met porcelain with a single, sharp click. “I cannot go to America without my father. I will not. When teaching girls became outlawed and my school closed forever, my father secretly taught me math and English. When only boys could buy exit visas to attend foreign universities, my father practiced medicine during the day but scrubbed toilets at night to earn enough money for the bribe. When the secret police spied on me, threatened me, ordered me to stay in my home or in my lab, my father risked his life to meet an undercover American on my behalf.”
And my heart lurched. Because in that moment, I was certain Barrett was Ikaat’s American. He had to be. His sunburnt cheekbones, delicious tan, and hush-hush summer assignment suggested as much. And his mysterious appearances in Covent Garden and at Harrods confirmed it.
Fear shivered through me. But not for myself. For Barrett. No foreign government would take kindly to the things he’d done. The Brits certainly wouldn’t thank him for killing a man on their own soil, even if that man were an Albanian hit man. They would want him arrested and tried. And because he’d helped their leading nuclear physicist escape to the West, Ikaat’s government would want Barrett’s blood.
But Barrett wasn’t Ikaat’s first concern. Her hand closed around mine. “I cannot go without my father. I will not go without him. How free will I be without him by my side? Surely, you understand.”
I did and I didn’t. Ikaat’s father had faced the very real threat of arrest and torture to educate his daughter—and to free her. I couldn’t even get my father to talk to me on the telephone.
“Ikaat,” I said softly, “I have to escort you and Katie to Washington. It’s what I promised my father I’d do.”
“Well,” Katie said, “you can make another promise, can’t you?”
From her chair on the far side of the coffee table, she’d watched the conversation like a match at Wimbledon. Now, she spoke like more than a spectator. She spoke like more than a State Department courier, too.
She spoke like a diplomat.
“Jamie, you can promise to look for Ikaat’s father tomorrow. Whether you find him or not, Ikaat can promise to leave London the day after. Right, Ikaat?”
Ikaat nodded eagerly, readily accepting the deal.
But this wasn’t the best suggestion I’d ever heard.
Being a security specialist, I knew we should’ve been on our way to the airport at that moment. Indecision had me scowling at one woman, then the other. Katie’s pretty face was set in firm resolve. Ikaat’s chin wobbled as she awaited my decision.
It
wasn’t the emotions of either that decided me, however. It was the realization that the last time I’d seen Ikaat’s father, Barrett wasn’t far behind. So if I looked for Ikaat’s father—and if I found him—I just might find Barrett as well.
Chapter 7
Dawn came achingly early—and found me huddled with my sore arm and stiff knee in the mouth of a dank alley in Covent Garden. Last night’s fog had congealed into fat droplets that resembled rain. Instead of falling to the ground, though, they came at me sideways to catch me full in the face. Still, despite the weather, I had a good view of the front of the bookstore where I’d last seen Ikaat’s father. If he came looking for his daughter—and for their snitch visas—chances were he’d look here first.
The night before, Ikaat, Katie, and I stayed up until the wee hours. Us
Americans had pelted Ikaat with questions about the old man. I believed Ikaat had done her best to answer them. As incentive, I hadn’t hesitated to remind Ikaat that Helmet Head wanted to find her father. And that it was in everyone’s best interests that I find him first.
Before leaving the hotel, I hunted up Ikaat in the bedroom she’d shared with Katie. And I instructed her to remain inside Rabbit’s Revenge—no matter what. She was still in the robe she’d donned the night before and I was glad to see it. It meant she wasn’t planning on slipping out of the hotel the instant my back was turned. But her lovely olive skin was sallow and she’d nibbled her bottom lip raw. Worry, apparently, had kept her up all night. And I couldn’t be sure what it would make her do during the day.
With that in mind, I jerked a nod at Katie, silently suggesting she leave Ikaat behind and accompany me to the suite’s door. She did so. And once we were beyond earshot of our traveling companion, I said, “Don’t let Ikaat out of your sight.”
“She’s in danger,” Katie said.
“She could run,” I corrected. “She could’ve lied about not knowing where to find her father. She could’ve gotten cold feet about defecting. She could’ve gotten homesick overnight. In any case, she’s got too many reasons to take off like a shot.”
The Kill Shot Page 5