I have a framed motivational sign on the wall in my office that reads ‘You can’t help anyone else if a demon’s ripped you head off’. It’s a tenet I find worth bearing in mind.
“Sure, I’ll be careful,” I promised. It was an easy promise to make.
I took the short trip to the strip club under a blanket of lowering clouds. It looked like rain was coming, but I was probably going to get away with it. On the way in, at least. I took the precaution of parking as close to the entrance as I could just in case. The CCTV cameras were clearly still working because Butch immediately came out of the doors to meet me, his arms folded across the barrel of his chest in a very definite manner that spoke volumes about his orders to keep me out.
“I want to speak to Traske,” I said firmly as I approached.
“Well he don’t want to speak to you,” the big man informed me as I got closer. “Not unless you’ve got a warrant.”
I took out the gun and shot him once in the centre of his chest. He looked at me with a puzzled expression as the electric charge overloaded the nervous system throughout his body. For a moment I thought he was going to be able to resist because of his size, but he fell heavily back against the door frame and slid down to the ground, his fingers jerking stiffly under the effects of the discharge. “Sorry Butch,” I told him as I stepped over his body (although in truth it took a small hop to get over him) and went inside, “but I don’t have the time to mess about with underlings.”
The upstairs offices were buzzing with activity, but it wasn’t the kind of activity that you would normally expect in a busy office. Instead of phone calls being made and printers spitting out invoices, the shredders were running full time and there was a definite sense of panic in the air. I was fairly sure that I wasn’t the cause of it. I can be impressive if I try, but not usually enough to make an entire building full of people panic and I hadn’t been on the premises for long enough anyway. I had stowed the gun back in its place against the small of my back so at least the sight of a firearm being brandished about didn’t add to the confusion. The office workers ignored me as they hurried about their destructive tasks as quickly as they could manage. I had practically reached the door to Traske’s office when it opened and Cynthia came out. She stopped dead, her face registering surprise through the heavy make-up and then recognition. Then she slammed the door shut in my face.
I was close enough to hear the click of the lock, so I didn’t waste any time trying the handle and just kicked the door open. Well, that was the plan, but the door didn’t budge and I jarred my ankle against the immobile surface. The door was clearly reinforced. Since the workplace smoking ban came in there are never any handy ashtrays around to use to smash doors in with any more, but there was a paper recycling bin that was quite full and therefore quite heavy. I was able to lift it far enough off the floor to swing it around and use its own weight and momentum to do all the work. There was a splintering sound under the impact, but the door stayed where it was and some painful vibrations ran up my arms. I changed my position and swung the bin at the other side of the door. Everyone thinks about putting a decent lock on their door, but few people seriously consider upgrading the hinges as a security measure, leaving them as one of the weak points. There was another splintering crack and the bottom hinge gave way, its counterpart at the top barely managing to stay in place. Now I was able to impressively kick it open, the upper hinge ripping out of the wood and the door pivoting on the lock for a second before toppling onto the floor inside the office quite impressively.
I probably could have opened it just as quickly with a set of lock picks, but it would have had less of an impact on the occupant.
Inside the office, Cynthia Traske stood behind her husband’s desk, holding a large handgun that was decidedly not of the non-lethal variety. From the way she was holding the weapon it was clear that she wasn’t used to doing so. Personally, if I have to face someone with a gun then I prefer for them to know what they are doing with it. There are fewer accidents that way and the situation is more predictable. Also, if they aim to wound they are less likely to take your head off by accident. I darted out of sight behind the wall.
“Done a runner has he?” I asked, making my tone deliberately conversational. I made no effort to go into the room. Not yet. I’d only caught a glance of her, but even from that I could tell that she was scared. Storming in on her in that state of mind would almost certainly have caused her to shoot. The gun was large enough that the wall I was sheltering behind might not prove to be adequate protection from it anyway. They were the typical plasterboard interior walls that could barely stop a determined boot let alone a high-calibre bullet. “Left you to carry the can?”
“He’s coming back,” the ex-dancer denied, but the quaver in her voice suggested that she wasn’t as sure about that as she would have liked me to believe. “He just wasn’t expecting you to come back quite so soon.”
“Really? Interesting that he’s gone and yet he’s left you behind to do all the shredding,” I suggested thoughtfully. “I mean he could have gotten anyone to do that, couldn’t he, and made sure that he got you somewhere safe? After all you are his wife.”
I chanced a quick look around the door. She didn’t answer, but the way that she was chewing her bottom lip made me wonder if she was going to puncture it and let all the botox out. She certainly wasn’t the emotionally controlled type that her boss, and spouse, had been.
“Cynthia, think about what you’re doing here,” I said, using the soothing, calming, non-judgemental tone that hostage negotiators are trained to adopt even when they want to rip some kidnapper’s throat out. “So far the only thing that you’ve done is marry the wrong man. A bit foolish perhaps, but not anything that there’s a law against. The prison system couldn’t cope if there were. OK, you’ve pointed a gun at me and that technically is an offence, but I’m willing to let that one slide if you just put the gun down and talk to me. You can walk away from this with a slap on the wrist for aiding and abetting and even that’s debatable if you didn’t know what it was that you were aiding and abetting him to do.”
There was a stifled sob from inside and a muffled, “I didn’t. I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I positively oozed understanding. “I mean maybe you suspected that he was into a few dodgy practices, considering where you both work. You’re a bright woman and you must surely have suspected he was up to something, but nothing major, nothing serious. Am I right?”
“It was them that put him wrong,” she complained. There was a small thunk and I risked another quick look around the door frame. The pistol was now lying in the centre of the desk and she had turned away from it. I moved quickly in and picked it up. The safety catch was still in the ‘on’ position.
“Who is ‘them’?” I asked, ejecting the magazine from the gun and checking that the chamber was empty before pocketing the weapon.
“I don’t know, I was never introduced to them,” she slumped down into the chair behind the desk, all resistance gone, all sense of denial washed away. I had expected her to be made of sterner stuff considering that she had faced the lascivious gaze of dozens of strangers every night, but I suppose that love can make weaklings of the best of us. “There were meetings. Not here. When I asked about them he told me that it was best for me not to know.”
“He never mentioned any names?” This was a delicate time. She was offering information freely and without duress, but if I were to press her too hard she might just break down completely and then all I would be left with would be a blubbering mess of ex-stripper.
“No,” she shook her head tiredly, emotionally washed out. “He was very careful about that. I don’t think that he ever spoke without considering his words from three different directions first. He probably did it when he asked me to marry him. I’m pretty sure that the only name he ever used wasn’t real. You know, one of them pseudopods.”
I knew what she meant, even if she didn’t. “
What was it, the false name?”
“Osiris.”
Osiris!
I clamped down on my initial urge to speculate. It was the kind of name that positively demanded speculation, but that wasn’t my purpose here, at this time. Getting the facts was more important. Making sense of them came later.
“And what was your husband…”
“Gerry,” she helpfully filled in the blank.
“Yes. What did Gerry do for these people?” She started to sniff and I handed her a tissue from a box that she had knocked off the desktop onto the floor. “What did he do for them Cynthia?”
“He got things brought into the country,” she said, stuffing the tissue under her running nose. Her mascara was going the same way and it was a good thing that she wasn’t planning on performing any time soon. “You know, without going through customs.”
“Smuggling,” I translated.
“Only small stuff,” she objected with a sudden flash of loyalty, but it didn’t last long and she slumped back into her dejection. “Nothing big. Nothing important. Not until that woman.” She almost spat out the last word as though it came with its own unique bad taste.
“Woman?” I prompted when she seemed unwilling to continue on her own.
“Red hair, odd eyes, smelled funny,” she described, no longer censoring anything that she told me. Whatever I was getting it was the unvarnished truth. The truth as she saw it anyway. “Not bad as such, just odd.”
“That her?” I took a photo of Arnie and the Siren screen captured from the CCTV footage out of my pocket and slid it across the desk. She looked down at it with mascara-smeared eyes, but made no move to pick it up.
“Yeah, that’s her. I think that she might have been some sort of singer once. She had a lovely voice,” her own voice was taking on a distant singsong quality, though nobody would have described it as ‘lovely’. I was losing her to shock and emotional distress. If I wanted any more information from her any time soon I needed to get it now. Once the paramedics arrived (and I was pretty certain someone in the offices must have called the emergency services the moment I started kicking at doors) and got hold of her there’d be sedatives and sleep and I’d have to wait until the next morning at the earliest.
“Have you any idea where these meetings Gerry went to took place?”
“Yes,” she nodded, her eyes glazing over a bit. “He didn’t think I did, but I did. I’m a bit cleverer than he thought I was. Than you think I am.”
“I think you’re very smart,” I lied, “and you’re about to prove it to me. Where were the meetings?”
The office window shattered noisily. I like to think that I can move pretty fast when the spirit takes me, but I didn’t react quickly enough to prevent Cynthia from spinning around in the chair fast enough to knock it over, sending her sprawling headlong across the floor. I was down on the floor with her pretty quickly, though there was no further gunfire. I hadn’t heard the shot; it probably came from too far away for that and was probably silenced to boot, but I was pretty damned sure that’s what it had been. The bullet shattering the window had been the first indication of the shot and by then it was far too late to do anything about it. I dragged Cynthia into the lee of the desk with me, by no means certain that the next bullet wouldn’t go straight through the flimsy wood and into either one of us, but there were no further shots, only the sound of glass tinkling as the last few shards dropped from the window frame onto others that were already lying on the carpet.
One of the office workers appeared in the doorway that no longer held a door, this latest event finally giving him enough courage, or outrage, to spur him into action. “What the hell is going on in here?”
“Did you call the police?” I demanded from my uncertain refuge. When he didn’t answer I allowed myself to get mad. Anger is usually counterproductive, but it does usually get a better response from ordinary folk, “Did someone call the bloody police!?”
“Yes, yes they did,” he reacted in surprise. His gaze had fallen onto the woman that I was cradling to me, the woman that he worked with and who was no longer moving very much.
“Then get the hell out of the way unless you want a few holes in you as well!”
He gave a little cry of fright and scrambled away at a much faster rate than he had come.
“Cynthia?” I turned her face upwards and smoothed back her hair. I didn’t need to do anything more. The neat hole in the centre of her forehead was enough to tell me everything that I needed to know. It was a precise wound, a professional kill, and the sniper had been thoughtful enough to use a self-cauterising round that minimised the mess on the carpet.
I laid her gently down onto the floor and stood up. I didn’t need to worry any more about being the target of a second bullet. If I’d been the target then I’d already be lying on floor with a hole in my head like the one Cynthia now possessed. Whoever had taken the shot could have taken me out with the same ease and if they’d wanted us both dead then I would have been the logical first choice of victim. Of course killing me would have brought down the full weight of the Agency on whoever was responsible and from a very great height. Every agent would have been pulled from every non-essential assignment and every resource diverted into finding out who was responsible. It was not a very comfortable situation for anyone to find themselves in to be on the run from us, but it usually turned out to be a very short uncomfortable situation. We looked after our own and anyone who hurt us didn’t live long enough to hurt us a second time, so it was much better for them to cut off the information at the source and hope that I hadn’t learned enough.
The truth was that I hadn’t learned very much at all.
I could hear sirens, the kind that come attached to police cars this time. Picking up the phone on the desk, I dialled a number and there was an electronic squeal from the other end, killing the electronic listening device that had been installed either in the handset or on the line. Then a pleasant voice enquired how they could help.
“Splashdown,” I said simply and the voice at the other end turned brisk and businesslike.
“Yes sir. What is the address? And your ID code.”
I gave the club’s address and identified myself. The voice thanked me and rang off. It was a fair bet that Director Grayson wouldn’t be thanking me when he learned that I’d declared ‘splashdown’ on his previously deniable investigation. The communications centre back at Headquarters would be springing into action. A clean up and investigation crew would be despatched and on the road within the minute. The local police authorities would be informed that the club was now the site of an Agency operation and they were merely to secure the perimeter even before the first vehicle squealed across the car park. The media would be handled and muzzled before the camera crews could even get mobilised.
My phone rang and I didn’t need to check the display to know who was calling.
“I thought that we agreed this would be a low key investigation,” Grayson said pointedly. The holographic interface wasn’t activated, so I was left with only his voice, which was fine by me. He didn’t want anyone to see that he was involved in this mess.
“I didn’t shoot anyone,” I pointed out. “I am just following long-established Agency protocol. You’ll have to take it up with the sniper.”
“Sniper?” he didn’t even bother disbelieving me. “You’ve pissed someone off then.”
“Yeah,” I was forced to agree. People don’t usually unpack long-range sniper rifles unless they have what they consider to be a very good reason. There was no point trying to pretend any longer that this situation was anything less than very, very big and very, very serious. Smuggling Sirens and carrying out professional hits was the kind of stuff that only went on in the big leagues. The very big leagues. Certainly bigger leagues than kidnapping small time chemists, “and I was being so nice and polite to everyone as well.”
“What do you need?” And there he went again, trying to help me do my job. It’s hard to di
slike someone when they act all professional and efficient.
“I’ve declared Splashdown, so it’s all pretty much taken care of,” I reported back, even though he already knew that. Splashdown was a set of well-rehearsed procedures for dealing with deaths in any Agency operation that had been laid down before my time and was now as fixed as a set of super-glued fingers. Everything would be handled and locked down tight by personnel who were very highly trained in their jobs to minimise the impact on the Agency’s reputation, but the post-operation debrief was always a gold-plated nightmare. With my recent luck this one would be handled by Mrs Freidriksen.
“I’ll need an update,” he told me.
“Once we’re clear here,” I assured him. This was starting to feel annoyingly like a good working relationship. I would have to do something about that.
A uniformed police officer arrived at the top of the stairs, his yellow hi-vis jacket making him a perfect target for the sniper. Fortunately, the shooter would probably be long gone by now. The copper clearly didn’t feel threatened as he walked along the corridor, telling the few office workers that were too terrified to have already fled from the building to make their way down onto the ground floor. When he reached the broken doorway to what had been Traske’s office, he took in the whole scene with a single, detailed look. I was pleased. They’d sent me somebody experienced. That was going to make matters so much easier.
“You Ward?” he asked, rather redundantly since he had clearly already made up his mind that I was.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“You got the ID to back that up?”
I was a bit surprised at the request, but then again he was just being thorough. Another sign of professionalism. “Yeah I do.”
“I’m going to need to see it.”
I tossed him my ID and he took a minute to study it. When he was satisfied, he tossed it back to me. “All right. The perimeter’s secured. I take it your team will be here shortly and the press is being dealt with?”
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 11