When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2)

by James W. Hall

  Ross had been on her mind, the blue glacier martinis he loved, so it was jarring to see this man outside her hotel room door, a stranger she was about to admit inside. A man bristling with vitality.

  She unlocked the door, and Naff followed her silently into the room and stood aside as she rolled the room service cart off the balcony and closed the curtains. They’d flown separately, Madrid to Bari, agreed to meet at the hotel Harper selected. Early that morning she’d called his hotel phone and given him her room number.

  “I talked to Sal this morning,” she said.

  “Everyone healing up?”

  “Nick’s better, Daniela too, but she’s still got a way to go.”

  “Good to hear it.”

  “I told Sal he could let the Rossi brothers go home.”

  “You did?”

  “They were making noises like they were ready to leave. And the threat from Gerda’s over now.”

  Adrian frowned and shook his head.

  “What? You think that was a mistake?”

  “Your call. But I’d feel better if they were nearby till this was done.”

  Adrian wandered over to the room service cart, helped himself to coffee, and took a seat at the dining table, then glanced around Harper’s suite and gave her an approving smile. “You OLAF inspectors know how to live. EU expense accounts are a beautiful thing.”

  “The reason the threat from Gerda is over,” Harper said, “is because she’s here in Bari. She was with Manfred Knobel yesterday, visiting him in his apartment over the olive mill.”

  “Interesting.”

  Harper said, “Manfred and Gerda are lovers. Manfred says he’s proposed marriage.”

  His flippant air faded. He sipped his coffee, eyed her over the rim. “Anything else?”

  Harper recounted her conversation with Knobel. His willingness to work with OLAF. His disgust for Lester Albion, his suspicions that there was some other game afoot behind the business deal. All of which Harper believed were sincere claims.

  “I told him to let Albion know that Harper McDaniel would be attending the closing this Friday.”

  “Which accomplishes what?”

  “Lure Albion off his turf. When he sees me, he’ll be so twitchy I’m betting he’ll erupt like he did the last time we met.”

  “High noon, make him draw, then take him down.”

  “He’s a killer, Adrian. He murdered my husband and child and got away with it. He’s a fucking monster.”

  “I’m not questioning any of that. It’s just not much of a plan. What if he doesn’t erupt? What if he keeps his cool? If you’re not defending yourself, can you still take him down?”

  “I can.”

  “Which would make you an out-and-out assassin. That’s a whole different moral universe from what you had in mind. Have you ever done that before? A cold kill.”

  “There’s a lot I’ve never done before.”

  “You’re being smartass now, but this is serious. It’ll change you, put a mark on your . . . I don’t know. It’ll stain your soul.”

  “I can worry about my own soul.”

  He shook his head at her stubbornness.

  “You have something better, Naff, let’s hear it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I think we need more information before we walk into a room with Albion.”

  “I know all I need to know.”

  “You’re underestimating the guy. He’s a twisted fuck, yeah, and he’s juvenile. But he’s crafty and wary, and he won’t go down easy. We need more info. Something that tips the balance in our direction.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Adrian tugged up the sleeves of his sweater, biding his time, nodding to himself as if making some kind of calculation.

  “You ever hear of a guy named Horst Schneider?”

  She hadn’t.

  “Coach for the German Olympic team. Gerda’s ex-trainer.”

  “Is this relevant?”

  “Just hear me out.”

  Harper drew a breath, starting to regret accepting Naff’s help.

  “Albion decided he needs a major-league personal trainer. He chose this guy, Horst Schneider. Last week it falls to me to pick Coach Horst up at the airport in Zurich, drop him at his hotel. They use me as a chauffeur sometimes for the hotshots. Anyway, Horst is a chatty guy. We hit it off. I made a remark about Albion, what a challenge it was going to be to build up a puny body like his. And the coach says no, Mr. Albion is highly motivated, that’s what matters.”

  “Is there a point, Naff?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  “You’re dawdling.”

  “I’m telling a damn story. Like a joke, you don’t just jump to the punch line, it wouldn’t make sense. Wouldn’t make you laugh. You got to hit all the notes along the way.”

  Harper poured herself another cup of coffee, had a sip, and motioned for him to proceed.

  “So Coach Horst is describing how driven Albion is to get muscled up, and I tell him about me teaching Albion how to shoot pistols last year, and how this new phase seems like it’s part of the same pattern, the need to be manly, tough. And the coach looks at me and shakes his head. ‘No, you’re wrong, it’s not about being manly.’ ‘Oh yeah?’ I say. ‘What’s driving him then?’ And he says, ‘It’s all about Gerda Bixel.’”

  Adrian took a sip of his coffee and set it down on the saucer and said, “See, there’s your punch line. Gerda. That’s what’s driving Albion. The guy’s head over heels.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Wasn’t relevant. Just felt like an oddball factoid, an outlier. Now it makes sense.”

  “Yeah,” Harper said. “Manfred Knobel is Albion’s rival.”

  “Another thing I picked up last week, didn’t seem like much at the time. Ready for another story?”

  Harper sighed. “Like I have a choice?”

  “A little while after I spoke with the coach, I was in Larissa Bixel’s office. She’s got a wall of photos, Gerda as a little tyke bouncing around the mat, waving her ribbons. There’s one of Gerda wearing her silver medal, glaring up at the Russian girl who beat her out and won the gold.”

  “And the punch line?”

  “You always in such a hurry? Like about everything?”

  Harper caught a whiff of something vaguely sexual in the question but let it go. She pushed her cup and saucer aside, brushed some crumbs off the white tablecloth.

  “Okay, so there I am looking at the photos. Gerda, this little girl who had some of the best coaches in the world, she’s got muscles everywhere muscles can be found and places they shouldn’t be. And Bixel’s bragging about what a deserving girl Gerda is. I say something like that’s the way every parent feels, proud of their kid, and she comes back with what seemed like a non sequitur, you know, out of the blue she says Gerda’s going to marry a rich man, somebody who can provide the very best things in life.”

  Harper was staring into Adrian’s eyes. “That’s it? The punch line? Gerda’s going to marry a rich guy?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “I must have missed a step.”

  “Manfred Knobel versus Lester Albion. Who’s the rich guy?”

  Harper reached across the table and plucked the toilet paper off Naff’s chin and dropped it on the tablecloth.

  “Knobel’s got money,” she said.

  “Does he?”

  “Nothing like Albion, but he’s not poor.”

  “And when this olive-grove deal gets done?”

  “Sure, he’ll have more debts, but he’ll be a major landowner, and from now on he’ll be supplying his own olives to his own mill. The machinery in that mill is worth at least a million euros. Anyway, Bixel might hope her little girl will marry a rich man, but if Gerda’s in love with a pauper, that’s the end of the story.”

  “Hm.” Naff shrugged his doubt.

  “But this could work,” Harper said.

  “What?”

  She tol
d him about setting up the adjoining room with the video cam. Putting the room in her own name.

  “To entice Gerda.”

  “Yeah, deal with her one-on-one, take her off the board.”

  “Listen to yourself,” Naff said. “You’re an executioner now.”

  Harper brushed that aside and said, “But since now we know Albion’s sweet on her, she’s more valuable alive.”

  “Okay, let’s say Gerda somehow finds that room, goes in, walks around. Then what?”

  “Capture her, tie her up. Maybe use her as bait for Albion.”

  Naff considered it. He finished his coffee, poured another cup. Looked off toward the balcony. He glanced back at Harper, grimaced, then turned back at the balcony.

  “So now you got Gerda and Albion in a hotel room together, both of them tied up. I don’t see what happens next.”

  “Eliminate them,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “They’re murderers, both of them.”

  “What happened to justice, rule of law, a noble intent? Or even plain old self-defense?”

  “At this point, anything I do to them is self-defense.”

  “You’re playing with words.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes. Harper trying to script the perfect ending. Albion dead, the outcome she’d been imagining for months. But Naff was right, and Lavonne had said the same thing. Killing Albion in self-defense was acceptable. Even if she manipulated him into the showdown, she could live with that. But simply murdering him on sight if he was unarmed and didn’t threaten her? She wasn’t sure. All her drills with Marco and her work with Lavonne’s people at the training camp in Carolina, all of that had been defensive.

  She could kill. She had done it more than once. But only for her own survival.

  “Your daughter—Julie Marie, is that her name?”

  Adrian opened his mouth to reply, then shut it and nodded.

  “You have a picture?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m curious. We’re getting to know each other, right?”

  Though the truth was, before she got any more reliant on Naff, Harper wanted to be sure Lavonne hadn’t been bullshitting her, using some fictitious sick daughter to set Harper up with this guy. It wouldn’t be beyond Lavonne.

  Adrian considered her request for a moment, then dug out his wallet, flipped it open, and thumbed a color photograph from one of the slots. He laid it on the table between them.

  A blonde kid about seven with braided pigtails, thick glasses, her head tilted almost to her left shoulder. She was sitting in a bulky motorized wheelchair with a controller lever at her right hand. A stuffed animal lay in her lap.

  “Benny the Beagle,” Adrian said. “She carries it everywhere.”

  “Cerebral palsy?”

  “Wish it were that. It’s ALS, Lou Gehrig’s. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord start dissolving. It’s what Stephen Hawking had, the black-hole guy.”

  “I thought it only struck older people.”

  “Children are extremely rare.”

  “No cure?”

  “Some medications help with cramping, a couple slow the progression—riluzole, for instance—but yeah, there’s no fix.”

  “Got to be hard,” Harper said.

  “Julie doesn’t complain. Can’t say the same for her mother.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Wartime fling. Never married.”

  “What’s her name, this woman you never married?”

  “Shelly.”

  “You have a lot of flings, do you?”

  He fixed his eyes on hers and shook his head.

  “Your daughter’s beautiful.” Harper slid the photo back to him. “Do you see her often?”

  “Her mother won’t allow it. I’ve seen her exactly twice in the last five years. Shelly cashes my checks, but that’s all.”

  “Maybe Shelly blames you for Julie Marie.”

  “Maybe she does.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Harper knew the terrible inadequacy of those words. A hundred times since the loss of Ross and Leo, she’d heard them directed to her. The polite helplessness of friends and family attempting to soothe what could never be soothed.

  “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “Photos of your family. Have any?”

  “Not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “A fire burned down our house. Photos, everything lost.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. So you don’t even have a snapshot? I showed you mine.”

  Harper blew out a breath. She weighed it for a few seconds, then got up from the table, went into the bedroom, and came back with the black-and-white she’d taken that final night.

  “Since we’re sharing.” She laid it down in front of him.

  Adrian Naff picked it up and studied the photo.

  Harper stared down at her hands. She’d never shown that picture to anyone, not even Sal or Nick. That image had become sacred to her, the last trace of those she loved, their bodiless essence. No matter how often she looked at it, the photo still hollowed out her gut, turned her breath cold. To share it with a virtual stranger was a violation, a defilement, especially this man who worked for Ross and Leo’s killer, who spoke with Albion on a daily basis, did his bidding. Still, she’d shown him her family, not sure why.

  She heard Naff speaking but she didn’t catch the words.

  She looked up. He was holding out the photograph, returning it, his eyes were glassy and desolate, as if he’d just felt the cold whisper of his daughter’s breath across his neck.

  Naff’s grief had to be far different from her own. He endured it in torturous increments, hour by hour, month by month. Maybe that was even more agonizing than her own sorrow. Her loss had been sudden, cataclysmic, a devastating jolt that ended her old life in an instant and left her with a pain that would shadow the rest of her days. But Naff was being poisoned, drip by drip, his every hour tainted by the certain knowledge of his daughter’s slow, pitiless descent.

  She took the photo, turned it facedown on the table.

  “All right, then,” Harper said and swallowed the knot in her throat. “If we’re going to wipe out this son of a bitch, we need to know exactly what’s going on and come up with a better plan.”

  You were right.

  The text came while Gerda was having coffee and a fruit cup at a restaurant along the waterfront.

  She picked up her phone and typed: Right about what?

  McDaniel used her credit card to check into the Grande Albergo delle Nazioni Hotel. Room 407.

  Good. I will take care of it.

  Be most careful. This is unlike the woman. Could be trap.

  Gerda had a last sip of the coffee and set down her cup and thumb-typed a reply. It was a maxim Coach Schneider taught her long ago.

  Take no risk, reap no reward.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Villa Romanazzi Carducci Hotel, Bari, Italy

  Back in his room at the Villa Romanazzi, Adrian reassembled his cell phone for the first time in more than a week, inserting the SIM card and the battery. He’d been using hotel landlines to stay in touch with Harper. Safer than bringing that GPS beacon back to life.

  But now he wanted to speak to Lucia Campos, hear the details of her discovery. During his time in Spain, he’d had terrible reception, but here in coastal Italy, with the battery back in place, five bars appeared on the screen. Thirty missed calls popped up, most from the same number, one he didn’t recognize, though it seemed vaguely familiar. All the calls coming from a 41 country code, Switzerland.

  Also, there were two voice mails.

  Adrian settled into one of the chic, low-slung chairs with a view of the leafy hotel grounds—palms and cypress and a few olive trees, grassy gardens, rocky paths. He tapped the voice mail icon, and a child began to speak. She didn’t introduce herself, so it took Adrian a few seconds to put a name to the
voice. Bonnie Albion.

  Very precisely she described in detail an experiment involving a couple of white mice. Over a short period of time, the older of the two mice had grown more active while the younger mouse grew weaker until finally it could no longer rise from its bed of straw and died soon after.

  Adrian had no idea what she was talking about, and the voice mail ended abruptly as Bonnie asked if Adrian could help her with this matter.

  He tapped the icon for the second voice mail and listened to a few seconds of static, then Lucia’s voice came through, panicky loud, her words hurried, her sentences fragmentary, the transmission garbled, but her urgency palpable. He listened a second time, then a third.

  She mentioned an American man named Dickens who worked in an Albion lab in El Paso, Texas, then said something about an insect called a spittlebug shipped to the Port of Bari, where Dickens had picked up crates of them for months and took them to Albion’s olive groves. Check the groves. This was the secret heart of Albion’s scam. Spittlebugs.

  He called Lucia’s cell and got a message that her number was no longer in service. He redialed just to be sure, and the same message repeated.

  Adrian rose, searched his hotel room, located a tourist map of the city, and found the port and nearby local attractions.

  He called Harper, made it quick, told her to meet him at Cattedrale di San Sabino, a couple of blocks from the port’s warehouse district.

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. Give me thirty minutes. I need to make another call.”

  He dialed Albion International’s main number and asked for Lucia Campos, director of compliance.

  “Ms. Campos is no longer with us, sir. I can transfer you to the compliance main desk.”

  Adrian clicked off, dialed his own office. Derek Müller picked up.

  “Albion International, Chief of Security Derek Müller speaking.”

  “I’m gone a week and you get promoted? Sitting in the big chair.”

  “Mr. Naff?”

  “Listen, Derek, I need to speak to Lucia. Where is she?”