The Kill Shot

by Nichole Christoff

  “Well, that would be all right, wouldn’t it? I mean, you’re not going to force her to go to America if she doesn’t want to. What if she wants to go back to her home country, instead?”

  I placed a steadying hand on Katie’s shoulder. With her golden tresses tucked behind her ears and her face scrubbed of makeup, she seemed so young this morning, regardless of the maturity she’d shown in convincing me to stay in London last night. But young or not, she had to understand what Ikaat was up against. She had to face it. And she had to realize that danger for Ikaat meant danger for her and me, too.

  I answered, “As far as I’m concerned, Ikaat Oujdad can live anywhere she wants. But that human gorilla with the gun didn’t agree. There’ll be more guys like him, wherever he came from.”

  Katie blinked her baby blues, then eyed the cast on my arm.

  “Ikaat’s best bet is to get to Washington,” I continued. “It’s up to you and me to help her get there.”

  Katie’s eyebrows pinched together, but she nodded as if she agreed with me.

  I turned to leave.

  Katie plucked at my sleeve. “Jamie, wait. Where will you be? How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t know.”

  “Well, how will we reach you if we need you?”

  “You’ve still got your cell phone, don’t you?”

  Her hand delved into her robe pocket. She extracted it, clutched it to her chest like a woman who still hadn’t heard from her dear sister. “Yes.”

  “Call me,” I said, “if you need me.”

  And with that, I set out to find Ikaat’s father.

  According to his daughter, Armand Oujdad had no family in London and no friends at all. He carried no credit cards and only £300 in his trouser pocket. In this cosmopolitan city, I knew £300 was chump change. He’d likely slept rough if he’d slept at all. He couldn’t live on London’s streets indefinitely, though.

  And he wouldn’t live long if Helmet Head found him before I did.

  The start of my second hour of surveillance found my tan trench coat dark with the wet. My toes stung with the chill rising from the pavement. As the fog thinned, a street cleaner—one of those loud, truck-like things with brushes bristling from its belly—rumbled past me on the cobblestones, generating a roar of white noise. And my BlackBerry, on my hip, began to vibrate. Philip’s number lit the caller ID.

  I debated whether to ignore the call.

  But against my better judgment, I answered it.

  “Good morning.” Philip’s tone suggested his morning had been anything but. “How’s the old arm?”

  “Uncomfortable, but I’ll live.”

  “Excellent. Then perhaps you’ll join me for breakfast.”

  “I can’t. I’m only in Britain for a couple of days and I’m on a bit of a tight schedule—”

  “I gathered as much when you vanished last night.”

  “I’m sorry about that.” And I was.

  “Well, make it up to me.”

  “I really can’t, Philip. I’ve got a full agenda today.”

  “Yes. I assumed so when I saw some rather intriguing video this morning.”

  My phone grew cold in my hand. I frowned at the nearest lamppost, now clearly visible in the evaporating fog, and followed its vertical line to the horizontal sweep of the eaves of the building beside me. There, in a glass bubble that put me in mind of a gypsy’s crystal ball, I found the dark eye of a closed-circuit television camera.

  The eye glowered at me.

  I wasn’t surprised to see it. In recent years, CC-TV cameras had popped up everywhere in Great Britain, and while the idea of such constant, public surveillance had gained some popularity in the U.S. in the wake of the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, the notion that Big Brother might be watching didn’t always sit well with the Brits. Some had begun to call the UK the ultimate nanny state. Others openly compared the public safety program to the machinations of George Orwell’s government in 1984. But love it or hate it, the CC-TV system had accomplished one thing. It sometimes gave law enforcement the ability to catch criminals in the act of committing their crimes and—better yet—to prove their guilt in court.

  Consequently, after the shooting last night, I had no doubt Philip had footage of me with the Oujdads.

  And of Barrett blowing Teodor Dalmatovis away.

  Case in point, Philip said, “I believe you’ll want to see this fascinating video, Jamie. I’ll send my car for you.”

  With that, he disconnected. Because he didn’t need to wait around while I rattled off coordinates for my current location. Thanks to the camera mounted high above me, Philip’s driver knew exactly where to find me.

  Eleven minutes later, I learned that Central London’s infamous morning traffic couldn’t hinder Philip’s shiny, black car one whit. It slid through the congested streets of the old city as if on rails. From the loneliness of the cavernous backseat, I practically pressed my nose to the tinted window—just to be sure we weren’t actually driving on the sidewalk.

  We weren’t.

  Still, landmarks like Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the monument to Boadicea, the ancients’ warrior queen, blurred by. Once, on a whim when we paused at a stoplight, I tugged on the hefty, chrome door handle at my elbow. It didn’t yield. Neither did the button controlling the car’s locks. I frowned my disapproval at the driver, but that didn’t do any good. He couldn’t see me through the raised privacy partition. Besides, by disabling my ability to unlock the doors, he was undoubtedly acting under orders from Philip. And Philip clearly wasn’t about to let me slip away from him a second time.

  After a thirty-minute drive, Philip’s car deposited me on a swath of cracked asphalt in the middle of nowhere. An airliner could’ve landed in front of me on the vast expanse and still have room to taxi. Against the horizon, I made out a cluster of distant buildings, including 30 St. Mary Axe.

  The egg-shaped high-rise of spiraling girders and glass that Brits refer to as “the Gherkin” rises from the heart of the nation’s financial district. I judged it to be easily several miles from where I stood. More than a little distance separated it from me, however. A bend in the river, turgid and gray, as well as decades of economic loss meant we were worlds apart. Because while the Gherkin was deep in town, I was deep in London’s East End.

  Over my head, the seagulls of the Thames estuary shrieked in confirmation of my location. Or maybe they were just shrieking at Philip’s car. It drove off in a huff of white exhaust, leaving me and the wheeling birds to ourselves.

  I suspected, however, we wouldn’t be alone for long.

  To my right, a string of grimy Victorian brick warehouses stood between me and the North Sea, and while these buildings were a far cry from the hallowed halls of Westminster and Philip’s haunt in the Foreign Minister’s Office, I had no doubt he was loitering in one of them, smirking as I scowled in his general direction. Sure enough, the second I was within spitting distance of the nearest warehouse’s iron-clad sliding door, it swept aside as smoothly as if it had been oiled yesterday. Philip himself appeared in the widening gap.

  He didn’t look overjoyed to see me.

  “You haven’t been frank with me, Jamie.” Philip’s hair seemed redder than ever in the rainy gloom. And it stood out from his crown like licks of burning flame. His voice, however, was cold enough to turn the mist to ice. Especially when he added, “Do step inside.”

  I did as he instructed. Under my feet, two-hundred-year-old floorboards as wide as virgin oak trees didn’t so much as sigh. The place smelled of dust and bird droppings, though.

  Philip moved past me and I caught a whiff of his aftershave. Bay Rum mixed with something warm. Something spicy. Something sexy. I couldn’t put my finger on the scent, but irritation had me thinking his family had probably discovered the mysterious ingredient during some early seventeenth-century sea voyage to the far side of the world—and made a second fortune cultivating the stuff on an exotic plant
ation.

  High over my head, a flock of pigeons took exception to our presence. They flew from one rafter to another in a flutter of feathers. Not that anyone else was around to notice. Where wholesalers once poked and prodded bales of American cotton and crates of India tea, an RV long enough to satisfy any rock star’s ego stood in the middle of the warehouse floor. But no one was within sight of it.

  Philip blazed a beeline for the recreational vehicle, so I followed him. When he wrenched open the door and gestured for me to enter, I obediently climbed inside. A bank of video consoles ran the length of the vehicle’s dim interior. Men and women in dreary suits and dull ties studied the consoles. As I entered, they didn’t so much as glance at me. When Philip entered, however, every last one of them jumped to their feet and snapped to attention.

  Philip bypassed them all. Drawing me in his wake, he pushed his way into a cramped compartment in the end of the RV. A paneled door snapped shut behind us, leaving us in a humming darkness punctuated by the neon glow of televisions mounted from the floor to the ceiling and wall to wall.

  There, in the grainy black-and-white glory of digital video, Barrett stood on a familiar London street, the collar of his navy pea coat obscuring the familiar hollow of his cheek. His arm was extended and parallel to the sidewalk. His hand was an unbroken line from his wrist to the sight on the muzzle of a handgun. Before him, the electronic image of the Gorilla, Teodor Dalmatovis, didn’t look half so big or half so scary as it had in person. A bald spot on the back of Dalmatovis’s head reflected the glow of a streetlight, making him look like a harmless middle-aged man.

  Philip brushed a thumb over a remote control he pulled from a pocket. The image of Barrett jerked to life. A white flash flared when he fired his weapon.

  Blam!

  I jumped as if I were the one who’d been shot, but onscreen, Dalmatovis folded like yesterday’s newspaper.

  Blam!

  A shock wave of stereo sound blasted the little room, pumped through my body, and I watched Dalmatovis die one more time.

  Blam!

  Philip had looped the video or one of his lackeys had done it for him.

  Blam!

  And everywhere I turned, I saw Barrett killing the man with the bald spot again and again.

  Blam!

  “Enough!” I shouted.

  Philip froze the frame. Onscreen, Barrett’s face was emotionless. Troubled by the sight and wanting not to show it, I tried to cross my arms against my chest. The cast on my wrist wouldn’t cooperate. Pain spiked from my thumb to my elbow brutally enough to make me wince. But the discomfort was nothing compared to the ache of knowing Barrett was in serious trouble. And that Philip hadn’t brought me here to help Barrett out of it.

  “You’ve been traveling with bad company, Jamie.”

  “Not me,” I replied, proud that my voice didn’t tremble. “I’ve been traveling with Katie deMarco, as you well know.”

  Philip ignored my insinuation that he’d been nosing through my business and stepped to a narrow workstation bristling with buttons. At the brush of his finger, Barrett’s expressionless mug swelled to fill each screen. “Have you seen this man before?”

  I had. In the hour before I’d boarded my plane for London, I’d seen soft lamplight deepen the chocolate pools of his eyes and his sunburnt cheeks flush with passion. At the time, I’d thought I wanted to see a lot more of him. Now, fear for him made me get defensive. But then I remembered the best defense could be a solid offense.

  I hiked my chin, stared Philip in the eye. “Yesterday, you mentioned Katie by name. You knew we were staying at The Elizabethan Rose. How long have you been keeping tabs on me? And more important, why?”

  Philip shook his head as if I were a schoolgirl who hadn’t done her homework. “I didn’t bring you here to ask questions, Jamie. I brought you here to answer them.”

  “Then how about we answer questions for each other?”

  “No, how about you look at this?”

  Philip rewound the video.

  Barrett shot Dalmatovis over and over.

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  I flinched with every blast.

  “That man,” Philip said, “is a killer.”

  “So is this one,” I said, stabbing the pixels of Dalmatovis’s bald spot with my index finger, “by your own admission. If he’d had his way, he might’ve killed me.”

  “No. Dalmatovis only hired on to kill the two defectors. I don’t know the other man’s agenda.”

  “Well, neither do I,” I admitted, glad to tell my old friend the truth about something.

  Philip didn’t comment. He parked his finely tailored ass on the edge of the electronics console, grabbed the tail of my trench coat’s cinched belt, and drew me between his knees. From the frozen monitors, royal-blue light spilled across the ridge of Philip’s right cheekbone before splashing the side of his aristocratic nose. No doubt about it, my friend was a good-looking man. And he always had been. I’d willingly overlooked that fact when we were undergraduates. Frustrated and more than a little afraid, I found him hard to overlook now—especially at such close range.

  “Jamie, if you’ve gotten yourself into difficulty, I want to know about it.”

  “I’m a security specialist. I get into difficulties all the time because I get paid to bring people out of them.”

  “Yes, but when you brought Ms. deMarco to London at the behest of your government, murder wasn’t the difficulty you were expecting, was it?”

  I grabbed the tail end of my trench coat’s belt and jerked it from Philip’s hand. As far as I was concerned, Barrett hadn’t committed murder. He’d defended unarmed civilians from a known assassin.

  Not that Philip was likely to see it that way.

  Out loud, I challenged, “What makes you think I’m here ‘at the behest of my government’?”

  “Darling, which British ministry do you suppose your government contacted before they launched this action on these shores? And which government representative do you suppose supplied British passports so Ms. deMarco could spirit her contacts away?”

  I blinked at Philip in disbelief. “You sent the passports to our State Department?”

  “Indeed. Although Ms. deMarco hasn’t managed to spirit anyone away so far, has she?”

  No, she hadn’t. Because Ikaat wouldn’t leave Britain without her father. And her father was nowhere to be found.

  “To meet your obligation in this matter, you must find the elder Oujdad,” Philip reminded me. “I must find Dalmatovis’s killer. We must work together because I believe when we find one, we shall find the other.”

  “No.” I turned on my heel, made tracks for the front of the caravan.

  I didn’t like the sound of Philip’s proposal. Oh, I liked the idea of finding Ikaat’s father, all right. I liked the idea of finding Barrett even more. But old friend or not, Philip was still a highly placed official in a foreign government. He had his own priorities and so did his employers. And after what Barrett had done, neither Philip’s priorities nor the British government’s would bode well for him. He’d be better off if Philip wasn’t peering over my shoulder when I found him with Armand Oujdad—and so would I.

  But before I could reach the door of the small editing suite, Philip hooked my elbow. He spun me to face him. And in the close confines of the tiny room, we suddenly found ourselves toe-to-toe and breast-to-chest. For one long, loud thud of my heart, we stared into one another’s eyes. Then Philip’s gaze dropped to my lips.

  Whatever might’ve happened next didn’t. Because Philip deliberately let go of my arm. Still, I couldn’t let go of the feeling my old friend had been about to kiss me.

  “Surely, Jamie, you know I cannot allow you to investigate on your own.”

  “What are you going to do? Lock me in this RV?”

  “No,” he admitted. “But I will have you driven to Heathrow and forcibly restrained on the first aircraft bound for New York. Should you try to enter the United Kingd
om again, you’ll find your name blacklisted and your passport denied.”

  Anger stoked the heat in my cheeks and I felt the immature urge to kick Philip in the shin.

  But then he said, “Come now, Jamie. It’s been so long since we’ve been together. I’ve missed you terribly. Say you’ll stay in London. Say you’ll work with me on this.”

  Years ago, as an undergraduate at Princeton, I’d resisted the come-on from the English exchange student whom every woman on campus wanted to call her own. And although that student had grown into an exceedingly attractive man and a good friend, I wasn’t going to be silly enough to assume he was doing anything more than saying he’d missed me to get his way now. But I’d be lying if I said at that moment, sore, tired, and more than a little scared, the thought of taking him seriously for a while didn’t cross my mind.

  “The Oujdads,” I told Philip, “have got to be my first priority—”

  “Of course.”

  “—and I’m not interested in helping you track down the shooter—”

  “Understood.”

  “—but if you can offer any help in finding the old man, I’ll take it.”

  “Naturally.”

  With matters as settled as they were going to be, I grasped the door handle in my good hand. Before I twisted the knob and left the little editing suite, however, I found I had one more thing to say. I cleared my throat. Because I hadn’t been entirely honest with Philip. And dishonesty wasn’t like me. But I could be honest about one thing.

  “Philip?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve missed you, too.”

  A slow smile spread across Philip’s handsome face. It got tangled up in his hazel eyes and set off a spark there. But those eyes slid away from mine.

  My friend mumbled, “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  And I knew when he said it that Philip Spencer-Dean, for reasons that had nothing to do with nuclear secrets, was pleased indeed—even if he didn’t want to admit it.

  Chapter 8

  With our newly formed pact in place between us, Philip and I left his RV hidden in that East End warehouse and ended up where this misadventure had begun.