Into the Crossfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  There was a low, calm, deep murmur from the intercom—the tone of command very clear—and the big mahogany and brass door to the right of the desk issued a faint click and slid smoothly into the wall.

  The secretary looked at him coolly. “You have until ten fifteen, sir.”

  The subtext was that at 10:15, security would be called in.

  Well, by 10:15 he’d either have a name, or not. It was in Allah’s hands at this point.

  He walked through the door.

  Over the past years, Muhammed had been in countless offices of the rich and powerful. Some preferred the English Lord look. Paneled walls, deep leather armchairs, crystal decanters, as if an office on the fortieth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper had been in existence for three hundred years, bequeathed down through the generations, from earl to earl.

  Some had offices that looked like they’d time-traveled back from the twenty-second century.

  But all of them, all of them exuded a specific aura—look at me. Look at what I’ve accomplished. Look at how powerful I am. Do not mess with me because I will crush you.

  Muhammed had been in this office once before, when Mold had just taken over the big hedge fund. It had looked like Versailles then. Now it was all sleek black marble and Lucite.

  They said that Mold had spent three million dollars redecorating his office.

  And there he was, behind a twelve-foot-long slab of ebony with transparent legs, the desk empty and bare and highly polished, as befitted a Master of the Universe.

  Mold stood but didn’t offer his hand. “Preston,” he said. The deep voice wasn’t particularly warm or welcoming. “What can I do for you?”

  That was a loaded question, if ever there was one. Muhammed was here only because Mold hoped Muhammed could do something for him. If it was only a favor being asked, Muhammed would be marched out by security the instant Mold pressed the red button that was undoubtedly on the underside of the desk.

  All nervousness had gone, sucked away like the stale air into the invisible conditioners.

  Muhammed had seen the future.

  Mold’s office building was one of the top ones of the list. The instant his martyr brothers could fan out, this building was to be one of the first to be irradiated. The brothers would be freshly barbered, dressed in the uniforms of Wall Street—suits by Armani, Boss, Jil Sanders. They would have ID that would bear up to a security guard’s scrutiny. Muhammed would give the order that one martyr stay in the lobby and another martyr brother come up here, to the fifty-fifth floor, and blow himself up right in front of the snotty secretary’s desk. Mold would die instantly. His company, everything he stood for, would be gone in an instant, everything untouchable for decades.

  It calmed Muhammed right down. Mold was giving off the waves of aggression typical of a Wall Street trader turned hedge fund manager. His temper tantrums were famous. He was used to screaming, intimidating underlings to get his way.

  Muhammed looked at Mold calmly, at this dead man walking.

  Only a few days to go.

  He looked around, then chose a chair and sat down just as Mold said, “Have a seat.”

  The chair was by a hot new designer and was made of paper. Muhammed had read that it sold for $10,000, enough to feed hundreds of people in the camps for a year.

  Richard Mold deserved to burn. They all did.

  Muhammed hitched his trousers so as not to ruin the excellent crease, and crossed his legs.

  Silence.

  It irritated Mold. His deeply tanned face turned tight, his eyes narrowed. “So, Preston, what’s this about?” he asked coldly.

  Muhammed waited a beat, then spoke. “I have a piece of information you might find interesting, and in exchange, I want a name and a phone number.”

  Mold’s thick gray eyebrows drew together. “What’s the info and what name?”

  Muhammed plucked at the crease of his trousers, enjoying the feel of the fine linen. He let a minute go by, two. Oh, he’d learned the subtle ways of power of the West. Mold watched him, face growing even tighter.

  Finally, Muhammed gave a small sigh. “A company you invest in, a very well known corporation, has just announced one of its best quarters ever. A double-digit increase in sales. Its stock has risen by almost fifteen percent on the strength of the report. But it’s false. The CEO is hiding almost twenty billion dollars in losses and the FBI will arrest him in four days’ time. If you short that stock, you can make millions. In four days.”

  Mold’s face betrayed nothing but Muhammed knew the thoughts going through his mind. Over the past week, several corporations had announced big gains after almost two years of recession. Muhammed could be referring to any one of a number of companies. Guess wrong and you lose a bundle. Guess right, ah. Make millions in an instant. Add to your reputation as a miracle man. To someone like Mold, it was irresistible. He and his kind were born for this kind of challenge.

  That tight slash of a mouth opened, cranked the words out. “And what would you want in return for that name?”

  Yes! It was a done deal.

  “Another name,” Muhammed murmured. “All we both want is a name.”

  Mold wasn’t one to utter unnecessary words. He simply stared.

  Muhammed leaned forward slightly, lowered his voice. “Some time ago, I heard that there is a man the financial community…uses. When there are problems you can’t buy your way out of. I want the name and contact details of the man who makes problems and people go away.”

  Silence. Utter silence.

  They were so high no sounds could penetrate and one of the things the woman outside was there for was to prevent noises or distractions. There was no sound at all. Even the air-conditioning was utterly quiet.

  Mold watched his eyes for a long moment, then took out a sheet of thick stock, clicked his Cross pen and wrote. The sound of the pen moving across the thick paper was loud in the morning silence. Mold folded the sheet once, twice, then slid it across his desk.

  Muhammed had taken his own pen and written out the name of a company on the top of a page torn from the Wall Street Journal.

  The name was that of the second-largest corporation in the US. It had just announced record sales after the long slump. As far as Muhammed knew, the figures were correct. Mold would sell short and lose a lot of money.

  It wouldn’t matter, because in four days, Mold, his company, the corporation and all of Wall Street would be gone.

  Muhammed folded the newspaper page neatly in half and slid it across the half acre of Mold’s desk, pocketing the paper Mold had written on without looking at it.

  He rose, briefcase in hand. He didn’t make the mistake of offering his hand. They stared at each other for a moment. Muhammed bowed his head soberly and walked out, feeling Mold’s eyes boring into the back of his head and hearing the slight crinkle of the piece of paper in his pocket with the name of the man who would solve his problem and help him bring down the world.

  Georgia

  The name was Sean McInerney. He worked undercover often and had had numerous aliases, but Sean McInerney was the name he’d been born with.

  It wouldn’t be the name he’d die with.

  After the military, starting his new profession, Sean had thought long and hard about his cover name. He wanted it short and snappy. One word, memorable, like Cher or Madonna, only instead of thinking good-looking chick, you had to think lethal.

  He’d been listening to Outlaw by Whitesnake, and it came to him. Of course.

  He’d had a number of aliases in his time, but “Outlaw” worked real well in his new profession. The name was corny, but his new employers loved it. Made them feel sexy, made them feel tough.

  Life after SpecOps was good. Real good.

  He’d lucked into a little cohort of bankers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, financiers and money managers who spent their time hunched over computer monitors, thinking they were dangerous dudes.

  Outlaw had heard all the macho phrases: Eat what you kill
, Put wood behind the arrow, Drink the Kool-aid.

  Men in finance liked to think of themselves as real tough dudes, but they were tough only because they had a wall of money behind them. When that wall threatened to fall, they crumbled and showed their true natures—that of pale clerks, not alpha males, as they so fondly imagined themselves.

  The only attribute Outlaw recognized of himself in them was utter ruthlessness. Touch their money and they would hire the best to fight for them and give no quarter.

  And so his post-military life began. The dishonorable discharge—thrown out of the Army for selling arms when there were fucking warehouses full of them rusting in the desert—stopped him from applying for a white-collar job, not that he had ever wanted one.

  No, a freak connection between an old Army buddy and his brother in finance had set him up in his new profession.

  The first job couldn’t have been easier. A whistleblower, about ready to send a hot set of documents showing malfeasance to the SEC and blow a fifteen-million-dollar bonus out of the water. The CEO met with Outlaw in a luxury room at the top of a business skyscraper about five blocks from where he worked. The financier might have been a god in the world of finance but he was a fuckhead in real life.

  The financier had given a false name and made sure that he employed euphemisms, but it was clear he wanted the whistleblower taken out. Outlaw had showed him the Barrett 95 in its carrying case and watched as the banker’s eyes widened.

  It was bullshit, all of it.

  Outlaw knew perfectly well who the banker was. Lewis Munro, CEO of the tenth largest corporation in the US. Outlaw had his name, home address and address of the hideaway apartment on Lexington where Munro’s mistress lived. Outlaw knew how much cocaine Munro consumed in a week and how much he paid for it. He knew what private schools the kids were in, how much Mrs. Munro dropped weekly at Hermés and even the amount of taxes Munro had evaded.

  Even the Barrett was bullshit. A .50 cal bullet was guaranteed to rain down police attention like nothing else. For the Barrett he used an armor-piercing bullet, the Raufoss Mk.211, containing an incendiary, and very accurate in sniper rifles. He’d lifted three thousand boxes of the stuff from the base warehouse.

  It was a military bullet, totally wasted on a civilian target unless you had to snipe at two grand out. Like a big, red fucking sign hung around the dead guy’s neck that this was a hit. Sometimes that was necessary. Most of the time, it wasn’t.

  When it went down, it was a perfect street mugging. The whistleblower walking back home alone from a dinner date with friends, the mugger taking all his money, credit cards and even his wedding ring and wristwatch. The police speculated that the whistleblower had resisted and got a knife in the ribs for his pains.

  The homicide detective stood over the crumpled body in the alley and shook his head over the mugger’s luck in hitting the heart with one thrust.

  It wasn’t luck. Outlaw had practiced that move thousands of times in training and hundreds of times on live bodies on mission.

  Had the whistleblower been taken out by a sniper’s bullet, the police would have looked closely at his affairs and would have found material incriminating Munro, who would have had some explaining to do, which would have made pointless the hundred thousand dollars Munro had transferred to Outlaw’s bank in Aruba.

  As it was, the police couldn’t track the knife on which there were no prints and after a fruitless two weeks, the whistleblower’s file was already a cold case.

  That hit had made him. He became the go-to guy for anyone in the financial sector who had a problem that couldn’t be solved by throwing money at it, including divorcing wives where there was no prenup.

  Outlaw had had more than twenty jobs in the past five years, all executed perfectly. A study of the terrain and the subject, a quick in and out, using methods that varied widely, and no one was the wiser. He had even put together a team of former soldiers, good men who, after giving their all to Uncle Sam, were now up for earning real money.

  Outlaw had learned from the finance guys, too. Corner a market and charge big. He was up to five hundred grand a pop now, plus expenses.

  Outlaw had given Munro a cell phone number on a card, knowing Munro would spread it around. Munro lived in a world of men used to winning, no matter what. And if they didn’t have the necessary set of skills to do specific jobs, they simply hired men who did.

  The call came as he was looking out over the hundred acres he’d bought in Georgia, less than an hour from the hub that was Hartsfield International. The land was extensive enough to have firing ranges, a shoot house and endurance courses for his men, while offering complete privacy. The perimeter was surrounded by sensors sensitive enough to detect a jackrabbit, with webcams every five feet.

  In essence, Outlaw had his own country.

  He’d built an enormous house that offered every comfort he could possibly want. Standing at the huge reinforced plate-glass window sipping a Jack Daniel’s, he answered his cell. It was his business cell phone, never used for anything but clients with jobs.

  Well good, he thought. Time to make me some more money.

  “Are you the man known as Outlaw?” The voice was soft, not deep, standard American.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t ask who was calling. It didn’t make any difference. The guy would lie anyway. If necessary for the job, Outlaw could find out. Otherwise, he didn’t give a shit as long as the money landed in the bank. “What do you need?”

  “Ah, a man who comes directly to the point. I like that.”

  “Well, since I’ve got myself a rep as a straight shooter, let me tell you straight out I’m not moving until my fee is in my bank.”

  “I was told about your…style, Mr. Outlaw. If you check your bank account, you will find your fee. Plus. I will send you the information on the person of interest in ten minutes, once you’ve ascertained this.”

  Outlaw didn’t need ten minutes. Inside a minute, he’d logged onto his bank account and yes, there it was, 500K with an extra 100K thrown in for goodwill.

  Outlaw knew his employers lived, breathed and died for money. Extra money meant this was extra important.

  After ten minutes, a beep from his cell phone. He had a text message.

  Nicole Pearce. Translation agency, Wordsmith. Morrison Building, San Diego, California.

  Nicole Pearce received data in e-mail sent from Marseilles on June 28. Retrieve hard disk, possible flash drive, search for backups, eliminate computer, eliminate Nicole Pearce. Strict timeline. Job must be completed by July 2.

  Okay.

  Get a hard disk from a woman, snuff woman. He’d done harder things in his life. He checked the website of this business, Wordsmith. After half an hour, he had a handle on what it did and he’d gotten a good look at Nicole Pearce.

  Christ. She was a fucking looker. One of his men, Dalton, was perpetually horny. If Dalton had been on this op, he’d toss Dalton this Pearce babe to play with for a while. Make him grateful.

  He checked Vital Statistics and saw that she lived with one Nicholas Pearce, her father, not her husband.

  Outlaw purged his search history from his computer, stood up and stretched. He finished his bourbon looking out the window at his little fiefdom.

  He loved this life. He loved the heft and feel of it, the money and the power. He loved having hard skills and making soft men pay through the nose for them.

  Outlaw stood at the window, watching the planes from Hartfield climb into the sky, one after another, like clockwork. In his own way, he was as precise a technician as any pilot or surgeon.

  He’d go down to his state-of-the-art gym and give himself a good workout, get limber, then would have a light lunch with water. No more booze. He was now officially on Op Time, dedicated solely to the mission, and would be until the job was done.

  He had a private plane at his disposal. He’d book it for 3 P.M., give him time to research the person, the hit.

  His eyes lingered on the lovely face
on his computer screen.

  Christ, a real beauty. Who was about to be sacrificed to the money men.

  Sorry, honey, he thought. I don’t know how you did it, but you just stepped on the wrong toes.

  Chapter 7

  San Diego

  June 29

  Sam put the phone down for the bazillionth time, teeth grinding. Nicole wasn’t answering. She hadn’t picked up the phone the first time he called, she wasn’t picking up the phone the thirtieth or fortieth time.

  He knew that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome each time.

  Was he insane?

  God only knew. He sure wasn’t entirely sane. He’d been pinging off the walls of his own brain ever since he’d woken up in a post-coital glow unlike any he’d ever had before, only to find that Nicole had sneaked out while he was sleeping.

  Without a word, without even a goddamned note.

  He must have been in a coma, because no way the noise of even the quietest person on earth dressing wouldn’t have woken him up. In the field, he’d heard in his sleep a dislodged rock tumble down a hillside half a klick away, and when the tangoes got to the campsite, they were met by only the embers of a fire and an ambush.

  Not to mention the fact that his security system sent off a message to his cell phone each time the front door opened. He’d slept right through that, too.

  Everything about the morning was off, askew, after the most fabulous night of sex he’d ever had. At first, he’d stumbled blearily from room to room, foolishly expecting to find her…somewhere. Out on the balcony. In the bathroom. Maybe in the kitchen sipping a cup of coffee.

  It had taken him two circuits of his house before it hit him upside the head that her clothes were gone. Together with Nicole.

  He’d rubbed his chest when he realized that. It hurt, as if he’d taken a sharp blow.

  That was when he’d placed his first phone call, to her house, kicking himself in the ass because he’d been too involved in his dick to think of asking for her cell phone number. Well, a quick search of a semi-legal database took care of that.