by TG Wolff
Monte grabbed the ends of his T-shirt and stripped it. The white, medicinal girdle squeezed his doughy breasts up a cup size. His gaze on me, he yanked the binding, the Velcro crying out. “Oh, man, this is really going to happen, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Monte, this is really going to happen.”
“I knew it. As soon as I saw you walk in, a cougar on the prowl.” He let the girdle drop and then went for the button on his fly. “Steve and Wilson are not going to believe this.” He pulled out one leg, then the other. “Can I take a picture?”
I backed him up until the rumpled bed took his legs out from under him. “Not a chance. But don’t worry, I’ll leave you with sex dreams to last you the rest of your lonely, horny life.”
“Fuckin’ awesome.” He lifted his head. “Wait…what?”
I straddled him, grinding against the tent post in his navy-blue briefs. His head fell back, groaning with pleasure. I gave him the belly-dancer routine—hip swivels, pelvic rocking, slow, fast, light speed.
Reaching behind, I unzipped my dress. It was one of my favorites and wanted to protect it from slobber. Monte popped up and buried his face in my cleavage. I wrapped my arms around his head, ran my fingers through his hair. He did have nice hair, thick and soft.
While Monte worked on freeing my breast, I looked toward the window. There were no telltales, but I knew somewhere a high-powered lens focused on me. Monte was into me, but he hadn’t done anything acrobatic enough to call his bluff.
I needed him on top.
“Hey big boy…” I threaded my hand between our bodies, stroked his rigid cock. Once…
“Shit.”
“Will you give me what I want?”…Twice…
“Yeah. Anything. Everything.”
“Get on top.”…Three times…
“No!” Monte’s arms clamped around me, his cock jerking beneath the blue cotton blend. “No. No, no, no.”
Another equipment malfunction. This just wasn’t my day.
He fell back on his bed, the crook of his arm over his eyes. “Damnit,” he sobbed, then hit the mattress with his fist.
“I take it as a compliment.” No, I don’t. “I’ll get us some drinks, we’ll play for a while and you’ll be back in the game. With twice the staying power.” Which gave me a full minute to work out Act Three.
“Yeah?”
“Abso-yeah.” I leaned in and bit his lip. “I’ll be right back.” I dismounted and exited the room. What were the odds the kid would prematurely lift off? Pacing the kitchen in my spectacular bra, panties, and boots, I needed another plan. Monte had been playing the game long enough—he wasn’t going to blow the gig easily. The brace kept him in check in public and in private, well, if he’d been sloppy, Black would have gotten the job done by now. How could I flush the guy out?
An idea blossomed. A wickedly hot idea.
The setup took a matter of minutes, which included fixing Monte the promised drink. Can you call opening a can of Red Bull “fixing”?
Hips swaying, I reentered the bedroom where he was propped up on pillows like some pampered prince. I handed him the drink, walked to the window in my bra and panties, and opened it. The screen had two long tears in it, as though a cat been dragged down the length. Eight feet below was the ground.
“You are really beautiful.” Truth rang in Monte’s voice. “Women like you, they don’t look at men like me.”
I turned to face him, resting my bum on the sill. “Men like you?”
“You know…geniuses. I have an IQ of one-fifty-three.”
My gut reaction was lie, but I had an ear for falsities. This had the same ring of truth as his compliment on my looks. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Monte, but if you have an IQ of one-fifty-three, what the fuck are you doing here?”
He pulled the blanket over his body, picked at the little pills of fuzz. “You have no idea what it’s like. From the time I was in kindergarten, my parents pushed and shoved. Extra lessons. Extra studies. ‘You’re going to make something of yourself, Montgomery. A doctor. A researcher. Find the cure for cancer.’” He snorted. “No pressure. Just find the fucking cure for cancer.”
“You showed them,” I said. “You quit.”
“Quit? I like to think I found other uses for my talents. Can I tell you something?” He patted the bed next to him. When I complied, he leaned toward me and whispered. “I know who you are.”
A decade of undercover work had schooled my reactions. I let a slow, feline smile grace my lips. “Who am I, Monte?”
“I don’t know who, but I know you’re with him. The guy in the bar.”
I rolled my eyes. “Everybody knew I was with him. That was then. Now, I’m with you.”
He shook his head. “I know you work for him.”
My turn to snort. “I do not work for him.” Easiest truth I ever told.
“He’s been trying for weeks to prove my injury isn’t real. Dropping shit and asking me to pick it up. Following me.” His gaze measured by cup size. “He’s upped his game. I like it.”
“If you believe the bullshit you’re spewing, why tell me? If I was gaming you, I’d be smart to walk away after a revelation like that.”
“I told you, I’m a genius. You’re not walking away from me without proof, one way or the other. I bet you’re the best at what you do.” He propped up a pillow, leaning against it, arms crossed behind his head. “I hurt my back, on the job, just like it said in the report. I understand if you need to, uh, verify my story.”
“You want to hear my version of the story?” I stood back up, picked my dress from the bed, then started putting it on. “Once there was a twenty-year-old genius who didn’t know jack shit about the world. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone around him. He pulls off small-time scams but doesn’t net enough cash to buy a real glass of scotch and lives the high life in a hand-me-down Granny home from family too soft to put him out on the street. One day, this genius pulls a con on a guy with smarts who knows a pile of horse shit when he smells one. So, the guy with smarts hires a guy with skills and the guy with skills blackmails a woman on a mission. Now the woman on a mission doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the genius, he’s just a speed bump in her day.” I crossed to the window, pushed in the tabs, and released the screen, letting it fall to the ground. Monte sat on the bed, his jaw unhinged and gaping. “There’s a fire on the other side of the door. This window, with a wide-angle lens focused on it, is the only way out.” I picked up my keys and phone.
He stared at me, a player deciding to raise or fold. His yawing mouth closed into a deep frown. “That’s a pretty speech, but it doesn’t do a damn thing for my broken back.”
His gaze went to the door, his bravado as limp as his dick.
“One way to know for certain.” I waved my hand toward the door, inviting him to call my bluff.
He climbed out of bed with the grace and speed of a ninety-year-old. He walked stiff-legged to the bedroom door, performing for the camera. He opened the door and looked into the hallway.
Hell looked back.
A monster with a raging hunger, the fire ravaged the wall and licked at the hardwood floor. It growled and crackled as it devoured lead-based paint and the detritus of past generations.
He slammed the door, propping it closed with his back. “My house is on fire.” His gaze flashed to his phone. He was easy to read. His plan was to call the fire department and stay put.
I beat him to the phone and threw it out the window.
His voice went fourteen-year-old girl. “Are you insane? You’re going to kill us both.”
“Not both.” I went to the window, straddled the sill. Landing in the three-inch heels was going to be a bitch. I’d rather have jumped barefoot, but the ground below was a collection of forgotten stone and dying plant. Sunlight reflected off abundant materials not organic in nature. My boots were staying on. “I’m leaving now. You have a choice: stay, die, and you don’t colle
ct the disability. Leave, come clean on the scam, and use your big brain to build a real life.” With those words of wisdom, I swung my other leg out the window and hang dropped to the ground. I managed to do it without spraining an ankle or breaking a heel.
Monte appeared in the window pulling on a T-shirt. “Don’t leave me.” Fear tightened his voice.
“I’m right here.” Calm. Cool. “Do you have shoes on? Your wallet?”
“Shit.” He disappeared into the darker interior then reappeared. He sat on the sill. One leg. Two legs…almost, his heel caught on the sill. “It’s too far.”
“Bullshit. If I could do it in Donna Karans, you can do it in your sneakers. Get your leg out the window.”
His leg freed, he clung to the side of the house, holding the window frame like it was floating lumber from the Titanic. “I don’t think I like you very much.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“The fire is eating the door.” His legs bicycled uselessly against the clapboard.
“Fire will do that. You’re three feet off the ground. Let go.”
He did. He landed off balance, fell backwards, and did half a somersault. Downside up, his legs pedaled like a bug stuck on his back. Falling to his side, he pushed up until he sat on his butt.
Black better have his money shot because this shit was over.
I reached down and helped Monte to his feet.
He looked up through the window to the room now basked in red. “What happens next?”
“Withdraw the claim and nobody has to see the pictures. You have two hours.” Sirens called in the distance. “It was nice doing business with you, Montgomery Rand.”
I left him standing in his driveway, a stupefied look on his face, as I backed into the street and raced away. My phone chimed. I put Black on Bluetooth. “Tell me you got it.”
“I am a professional.”
I snorted. Enough said. “I gave him two hours to end it on his own.”
“Long as I get paid.” The sirens echoed in stereo, coming from behind me and through Black’s call. “Meet me in fifteen minutes.” He named a park a few miles away.
“You jerk me around and you’ll be the next body found in the creek.” I disconnected but not before I heard him chuckle his lack of concern.
The patch of green he selected was narrow but did the job to separate where people lived from where they worked. A winding drive through seventy-year-old trees ended in a long parking lot. There were runners and dog walkers and mothers with kids. The place wasn’t crowded, but it was still public. I parked away from the trail-using population and kept the motor running.
Black pulled in next to me and then climbed into my passenger seat. He handed over a thick file. “Everything I found plus what you’ll need. I used photos from two years ago. Didn’t know you ditched the blond.”
I let my fingers walk through the pages. Police reports, interviews, still photos, conference registration list. “Did you—what are you staring at?” It wasn’t a creepy leer, but I still didn’t like the intense facial scan.
“The hair still. You don’t look like you.” The staring didn’t stop. “When did you sleep last?”
“I’m dead. I don’t sleep.” I pulled out a passport for Celina Matta. She had the blond hair I sported until my untimely death. Next was a plane ticket. “I’m going to Rome.”
“Tomorrow. You have reservations at a small hotel run by friends. Be nice, I want to keep them. Gavriil’s notebook isn’t listed among any of the reports. Do you have it?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t in his things I brought back from Rome. He didn’t leave it at home, and it wasn’t in the boxes from his office.”
“You didn’t pack his office. Someone at the university did it. Could they have kept it?”
Confession time: I might not have been clinically sane for a few weeks after my husband died. I didn’t think I was crazy at the time. Looking back, I realize I can’t quite remember the details. It’s like I wasn’t there in person but maybe Skyped in. Those weeks were the only time in my life I let people do things for me, big things, like packing my husband’s office. “Could someone have kept it? Sure. I didn’t realize it was missing until I got that email.”
“Is it possible he was killed for it?”
“He wrote in it constantly. New ideas. Tweaks. Anything he didn’t want to lose. And you know Gavriil, he had a lot to lose.”
The careless façade Black wore faded as if my words struck a chord. “Yeah. Yeah, he did. It could have been valuable, in the right hands.”
The right hands. Fucking Buford Winston. The name shown before my eyes in red, neon letters, the no-good, cheap, dirty bastard.
Winston lived in Oklahoma and had his tentacles in a dozen states. “Why am I going to Rome?”
“Read the file. There’s a lot of questions. Where is Gabe’s notebook? Who was this Russian woman? Why was Gabe outside the hotel? We need to start at the beginning.”
Gabe. God, I hated the nickname Black had given him. It just didn’t fit. My husband loved it, saying it made him feel American. Who would have thought the professor and the purveyor, for lack of a better term, would become poker buddies? A chance meeting. An insincere invitation. An unlikely friendship between two men who lived by their wits.
“There are other ways to do this,” Black said. He reached for my hand, then thought the better of it. “You don’t have to put yourself back out there. I know how much Gabe meant to you, but you mean a lot to a lot of us.”
An idea bubbled. “This is the third time I’m asking you, and this time I expect an answer: why did you pick my funeral for the meet?”
He turned, facing me square. “I know you think you lost everything when Gabe died—”
“Don’t tell me you know, Ian. You don’t know shit—”
“I know you. And I know Gabe. He wouldn’t want this for you, Diamond. He loved you. All those people there today love you, too. This whole idea of killing yourself is…it’s bullshit, Diamond.”
“You think I wanted to kill myself?” Emotion was a flamethrower to my throat. “All I wanted was the fucking police to look at the video, to look at Gavriil being pushed in front of that fucking car and investigate. I didn’t even expect them to find the bastards, you know? I know the game. I know the odds. But they wouldn’t even try, Ian. They nailed his coffin shut every bit as much as the asshole who pushed him and the murderer who hit him. I tried to play it straight. I tried to go by the rules, but no, Gavriil wasn’t important enough, not to them. He was everything to me.” My voice broke. I swallowed, squelching the flames, pulling the hurt inside, locking it away. “Annalisa Rubchinskaya played by the rules and look where it got her. A dead end. So, fuck the rules. And nobody fucks the rules like Diamond.” Her power washed through me, burying the grieving widow. I dug my nails into her confidence, her determination, her complete resolve to see Gavriil’s killers bleed the way his wife did. I closed the file. “I’m going back to the beginning to follow every line, every thread until I find the place where the son of a bitch messed up.”
I hadn’t expected this from Ian Black, a guy who would sell bricks to a drowning man. In my line of work, friends weren’t luxuries, they were liabilities. In the confines of that car, he felt like a friend. He didn’t speak but scrutinized me the way he might a grenade with a pulled pin.
I leaned into him, a feral hunger curling my lips. “Don’t look so worried. I’m going to do what I do best.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.” He cupped the back of my neck, pressing forehead to forehead. “I want to see the bastard bleed, just as much as you do. Understand me. This isn’t business, it’s personal. You need anything, you call me. You end up dead at the end of this and I’ll fucking kill you myself.”
I grabbed his neck, mirroring his pose and grinning into his dirt-brown eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a plan.”
First Stop, Hell
; Rome made sense as the place to start. Sure, I wanted to go for Buford Winston’s throat, but too many mistakes had already been made on this investigation. If the Italian police had only—nope. Not going there. Like they say, if ifs and buts were candies and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas.
With the information from Alexei, the certainty big agriculture was the root of Gavriil’s death rose to eighty percent. I’m woman enough to admit twenty percent was fact-based and the balance gut-checked. Big ag was called big ag for a reason—it wasn’t limited by inconveniences like oceans or borders.
Gavriil worked here in the States, but his research took him to the four corners of our spherical world. When he traveled, he rarely resided in the spaces made famous by Michelin. When your field of choice was feeding starving populations, you went to spaces made famous by violence, drought, social unrest, ethnic strife, and natural disasters. My husband went in willingly, his idealism buffed until it glowed like the North Star; his ammunition was his laptop and his treasured quinoa.
It’ll take a little time to drive back to my place. Indulge me in some backstory…
In my pre-marriage days, I was the poster child for a happy, successful, professional woman. I had the life beyond what I dreamed of, jetting around the world in the high-stakes game of chemical weapons—buying, selling, arming, disarming, arresting, entrapping, yadda yadda. The CIA recruited me before I finished grad school. I had all the credentials: fluent in four languages, master’s degree in chemical engineering with a specialization in explosives, and what turned out to be my biggest assets—tits and ass.
I loved my job. Let me make this clear. This is not a sob story of someone who never quite made it to the top, who had her hair messed up when she smashed against a glass ceiling. This is a story of an agent who got to get up every morning, wheeled and dealed in international justice, and went to bed each night knowing—absolutely knowing—the world was better off than when the sun rose.
I. Loved. My. Job.
Were there downsides? Depends on your point of view. I wasn’t there for those sentimental family dinners where you (me) were reminded how you were incapable of doing anything correctly. (Bonus.) I wasn’t there for the accident my mother caused by paying more attention to her lipstick than the concrete median, then needed to be driven around for the next six weeks. (Double bonus.)