by Seeley James
“It was not like that. Yesterday, I was horrified. You saw me. I was a coward in the pilothouse, hiding in the corner. I was ashamed. I am not like you. I am not brave. Then she called me and told me either you or I will die today. What else could I do?”
Pia darted her. Monique slumped onto the table.
“Sure I understand,” Pia whispered. “What else could you do?”
Pia tapped her fingernail on the table while she stared at her sleeping traitor. After a good think, she got up and darted the two children and a snoring husband. She administered the antidote injectors and checked that their airways were clear. They would awake in the morning, groggy and motherless but otherwise unharmed. She left a note for them then searched the rest of the house, found a packed suitcase, two cellphones, a notebook, and a passport she carried to the kitchen. In a small office downstairs she found evidence of a normal investigative firm: bail bond records, court services, investigations for legal firms. Nothing to contradict Monique’s story. She locked the back door and the window and secured the rest of the house.
Out on the street, a gray mist floated to the ground. She ran to her cabbie and woke him. While he pulled to the curb, Pia carried Monique out of the house on her shoulder.
“Sleeping pills,” she told the cabbie.
An hour and another three hundred euros later, the cabbie helped carry Monique past the sleeping church guard and into her room. They put her in Pia’s bed and the cabbie left.
Tania looked over her shoulder with bloodshot eyes. She sat up, rubbed her face in her hands, then squinted at the woman in Pia’s bed. “Wait, who’s that? You picked up a woman last night? Whoa. Didn’t know you swung that way.”
“It’s Monique Tsogo.” Pia turned around quickly. “Wait, what do you mean? Did you think I picked up a … You think I’m gay?”
“Are you trying to say you’re not? ’Cause you know what they say about female athletes.”
“No, I’m not gay. And they say the same thing about female soldiers.”
“True that.”
They stared at each other in awkward silence for a moment.
“Oh, uh, so, are you gay?” Pia asked.
“Me? Hell no. But, I could learn… y’know, if there’s a promotion involved.”
“No. No. I’m … not that way.”
“OK.” Tania looked out the window and sighed with relief.
Pia rolled her eyes. “Look, none of that matters. We’re taking her to Vienna—”
Something beeped in a duffle bag at the foot of the bed.
Tania grabbed it, pulled out a sat-phone, checked it. She said, “Looks like the Major left us the tracking unit and some other gear. Stuff they’d never get on an airline. Someone’s in trouble, wonder who?”
“Conor Wigan. Why couldn’t they take stuff on an airline?”
Tania pulled two M4s out of the bag and held them up. Pia shrugged.
“Have you ever flown on a commercial airline?”
Pia shook her head. Tania sighed.
Pia looked at the beeping phone. She said, “What does this mean, life alert?”
Tania looked over her shoulder. “Means Conor is dying. The tracker in his sock takes vital signs. When the nervous system erupts or his pulse drops off, it sends a warning. Sometimes we get a false positive, like if he’s exercising. In Conor’s case, I think he’s dying. Not dead yet, but critical condition.”
“Then let’s get going.” Pia headed for the door and dialed her favorite cabbie.
“What about sleeping beauty here?”
“She’ll sleep another two hours. C’mon, let’s try to save Conor.”
“The guy who held you at gunpoint?” Tania said. “Why?”
“He needs help.”
Pia’s favorite cabbie took them to an apartment building across town. They got out, checked the neighborhood, and headed in.
A hazy predawn horizon lit the hem of low clouds moving inland. Dawn would break, but little sunlight would reach them. The fine mist turned to small raindrops.
Pia opened the gate and began checking the apartments. Tania tapped her on the shoulder and pointed across the courtyard. A door stood halfway open.
Tania pulled her Glock. Pia did the same.
They crossed the way, lining up on either side of the door to peer in the narrow opening. A rough outline of furniture was all Pia could make out. They’d go in blind.
Tania nodded to Pia and burst through the door, moving to the right. Pia rushed in behind her to the left. They swept the room: cramped kitchen, dining area filled with boxes, living room with a worn-out couch and two cane chairs. They moved into the hallway, a bathroom on one side and a closed door on the other. They listened. Nothing.
Pia swung into the bathroom. Empty. She turned and stood on one side of the bedroom door. Tania turned the knob, took a breath, and ripped open the door. They jumped in, Tania on the far corner, Pia toward the bed.
Conor Wigan was propped upright with his back against the wall. His head sagged over his shirtless chest, his arms at his sides, the sheets beneath him red with blood. Pia checked the closet then holstered her gun. Tania flipped on a light. Conor lifted his head, recognized Pia, and smiled a gruesome smile. Losing his energy, his head sagged again.
“You’re… bloody cooked, girl.” He was barely audible. His chin touched his chest.
“Who did this to you, Conor?” Pia asked.
“Those Swiss…bastards. They…”
Pia looked him over from a few feet away, trying to figure out where the bullet holes were. Tania gestured that he’d been shot in the back.
“Sent Mustafa…” he said. “Bloody… traitor. He…”
“Save your breath, Conor. An ambulance is coming—you’ll be all right.”
Tania shook her head at Pia. She said, “No. Keep him talking.”
“Bloody hell … Mustafa thought he would take the…”
“Take what, Conor?” Pia said. “Stay with me now. Don’t go to sleep.”
Conor listed sideways, leaving a smear of blood on the wall. As Pia moved to help him Tania reached out and pulled her back.
“Touch nothing. We were never here.” Tania hissed.
Pia nodded. She choked and wiped her eyes.
“What is Mustafa taking, Conor?”
“God it hurts,” Conor said. He groaned loudly, spasmed, then relaxed. Black bile oozed out his mouth.
They stood in silence for a full minute staring at Conor’s corpse.
“Let’s go,” Tania said.
“We can’t leave him like this.”
“All we’re doing is messing up a crime scene. We take the trackers out of his shoe and pocket, wipe down anything we touched. Then we’re gone.”
“Guess you’re right. Seems cold.”
“Yes. It is.”
They cleaned up and left. From the cab Pia called the police to report gunfire in the apartment building. After that, the ride back to the convent was silent, each woman lost in her own thoughts.
The sun rose and streaked the clouds’ underbelly in bright orange before quickly disappearing above them.
They climbed out and gave the cabbie another hundred euros. He folded the money, pledged his silence and pulled away.
Pia tugged Tania’s sleeve. “You implied you could trade sex for a promotion—”
Tania laughed loud. “Hey, I wasn’t setting you up for a lawsuit. I swear, I was just having a little fun, checking out your ways. I would have said no. Probably.”
Pia shook her head, pulled open the convent door.
“Sexual harassment is not something we joke about.”
Tania said, “Yeah yeah yeah, whatever.” They walked inside. “You are gay though, right?”
Chapter 31
* * *
50,000 feet over North Africa
27-May, 10AM
Pia could hear every word and she was not pleased. But she kept focused on reading the report on her pad.
“I cou
ld get used to flying around in this thing,” Tania said. “Just look out that window, Monique—that’s Tripoli down there. Tripoli! As in Libya. And we’re going to fly right over Rome in another hour.” She pointed. “See the map on the wall? That’s where we are, and the line shows where we’re going. Isn’t that cool?
“Now, here’s the thing.” Tania leaned forward. “If you say NO one more fucking time, I’m going to throw you out the window and you’re going to face-plant in Tripoli. You got that, bitch?”
“Tania!” Pia shouted down the aisle. “She just woke up. Let her sort out a few things out first. Don’t make threats.”
“No threats here, Ms. Sabel. I only make promises.” Tania turned to Monique, held her index finger up between them. “Ms. Sabel looks the other way for one minute, just one minute, and it’s whoosh, out the hatch.”
Pia turned to the window as Tania came up the aisle. Tania plopped in the chair facing her.
“OK,” Tania said, “so don’t invite me to sit down.”
Pia shrugged and looked out the window.
“You know,” Tania said, “you’ve got everything. Smarts and skills. Not to mention jets and cars and servants and mansions. And here you are, looking like—”
“Only thing money does is make other people jealous.”
“OK, let’s trade. Everything I have for everything you have.”
Pia leaned across the polished table between them.
Tania pulled back and said, “Hey, I was just kid—”
“Did your mother teach you how to cook?”
“Yeah, as little as she—”
“Mine was teaching me how to chop celery when the killers came in. He wore a red shirt, grabbed her by the throat and held her off the ground while he strangled her. The other guy went into the home office and shot my father in the head.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“I’ll give you everything I have if you can give me five more minutes with my mom.”
Pia leaned back, turned to the window.
Tania sat still for a long time before wiping her nose. She said, “What the hell triggered that?”
Pia turned back to face her. She said, “Conor, I guess.”
“Survivors are always on a rollercoaster. Silly one minute, depressed the next. We were joking when we went back to the convent. That was the high. Guess what this is. Yeah. So talk to me. What else is it?”
“Alphonse.” Pia tapped a fingernail on her pad. “Our people in DC sent me his background check. High school in DC, college in Paris, a promising career in the Army. Then a court martial, but the charges were dropped. He joined the gendarmes in Lyon.”
“Hey, don’t worry about the court martial. They toss those out like party favors. Been there, done that. But Lyon—didn’t the gendarmes try to arrest you in Lyon?”
“It can’t be him.”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“The Major thinks it’s him. And then the report came in. I was so sure before.”
“Call him, talk to him. Use your female senses.”
Tania went to the back of the jet. “Hey, Monique, you know how to play poker?”
Pia dialed Alphonse.
“Clément Marot was to meet in Vienna with the man named Elgin Thomas,” he said. The appointment was made the same day he called Sabel Security.”
“We keep hearing that name. Major Jackson thought it was made up, then she found a reservation to Brussels.”
“We find nothing about him in Geneva. The secretary knew nothing of the name, yet they were to meet tonight at ten.”
“I’m … leaving Cameroon,” Pia said.
“To Vienna, as we discussed? Capitaine Villeneuve has cleared my travel. I will be there late this evening. Where will we meet?”
What should she say?
“You are the quiet one, oui? What troubles you?”
No way out of it.
She bit her lip and took a deep breath. She said, “Alphonse, every time I tell you where I’m going, someone tries to kill me.”
Pia counted ten seconds before he responded.
“I see.”
She waited.
“I understand,” he said. “We do not need to meet in Vienna. I do not want the, ehm, suspicions.”
“I’m sorry, Alphonse. It’s just that I have to be sure.”
“No, no. I understand. I will be in Vienna anyway. I have the reasons to trace Marot’s planned meeting. And then there is the opera.”
“The opera?”
“Oui. Mme. Marot is not just the fan, she is also the big supporter of the state opera. She made many financial commitments to funding them, yet many payments are not made. Capitaine Villeneuve thinks there could be the motive there.”
“Her husband stopped her philanthropy so she killed him and four others?”
“Sometimes we just do what our capitaine says.”
“I’m sure my employees think I have dumb ideas too.” Pia glanced down the aisle at Tania. “Say, Alphonse, when you were in the army, where were you stationed?”
“London, Oslo, Berlin, and so on. I was the NATO liaison.”
Pia felt her stomach squeeze tighter. “What do you know about Elgin Thomas? Do you have any background on him?”
She could barely speak much less hear his answer. Her voice had betrayed her and she knew it.
“Only that he was on the calendar of Clément Marot,” Alphonse said. “Are you all right? You sound tired.”
“Fine. Did the other banks have too much money like Banque Marot?”
“Capitaine Villeneuve sent in the juricomptable—ehm, the forensic accountants. No report is expected before the next week. Oh, and she is ready for the help of Sabel Security, but she has the minor concern.”
“I’ll have the Major work it out with her. I have to go.”
They clicked off.
Pia didn’t like the feeling of that call. She thought about what she’d learned from their conversation. Everything fit Elgin Thomas, yet nothing was definitive. He just didn’t feel like a killer to her, but then she had no real experience interrogating killers. Besides, Alphonse backed off when she confronted him. Was that genuine? Or did he have other means of finding her?
Oh, god—the phone.
Pia called the Sabel Security communications team and ordered them to turn off the GPS system on the phone she gave Alphonse, a safety precaution she kicked herself for not taking earlier.
She trusted Alphonse—just not completely. But should she trust him at all? Damn! Pia pounded her fist on the table.
Tania and Monique craned around their seats to look at her. She shrugged.
Tania caught Monique’s gaze. She said, “Boyfriend trouble. You know how it is.”
Monique nodded and looked back at her cards.
Pia called the Major next and filled her in: her conversation with Alphonse and Villeneuve’s willingness to work with them, her abduction of Monique, Conor’s death, and Monique’s planned meeting with le Directeur, as well as the gender confusion.
“For all we know, Elgin Thomas is le Directeur,” the Major said.
“A bank executive isn’t going to run a pirate organization from that far away.”
“So maybe Conor ran the pirates, and the phantom banker came down from Geneva on paydays.”
“The banker would have to have investments in Cameroon that justified business trips,” Pia said.
“Possible. I’ll check it out on this end.”
“What about the female voice who told Monique she was le Directeur?”
“Girlfriend, voice changer, hired help—who knows?”
“We know Monique has a meeting,” Pia said. “I’ll make sure she’s there. We’ll see who shows up.” She paused. “Did you get more agents out of Berlin?”
The Major cleared her throat. “Well. Uh. We have a problem in our Berlin office. Of the six employees we had, four resigned when your father appointed you. We have one agent who was in a car accident an
d has a broken leg, and we have the business manager. He was a male nurse before coming to Sabel. No field experience. Never fired a gun.”
“Guess Tania and I will figure it out.”
“I sent the nurse—I mean business manager. Extra eyes and ears if nothing else. He arrives on a late flight this evening.”
Pia said, “And I have more experience with firearms than he?”
Chapter 32
* * *
Vienna, Austria
27-May, 1PM
The limo dropped them in front of the Wiener Staatsoper, the Vienna State Opera. Tania and Monique seemed mesmerized by the magnificent stone building.
“Holy… This is the real thing, right?” Tania said. “Those towering arches with little angels up there, they represent stuff—themes from operas. Heroism, tragedy, fantasy, comedy, love.”
“Come on,” Pia said. “We don’t want to be conspicuous out here. We get checked in, then we do the recon, then we catch le Directeur or whoever shows up to pay off Monique.”
“Won’t Elgin Thomas be here too?” Tania said. “He was supposed to get cash to pay off Mustafa, al-Jabal or whoever. His boys killed Ezra. He’s the one I want.”
“Either way, one will lead us to the other.”
They made their way around the opera house to the Hotel Sacher. While Pia checked in, Monique and Tania stared at the marble cherub in the lobby center. Above it hung a chandelier of crystal and brass. Their eyes swept the ground floor, taking in the white marble walls with red marble trim, the life-sized bas-relief sculptures of ancient Greek goddesses, the glass vases four feet tall. Beyond the lobby was a wood-paneled parlor filled with exquisite antique furniture and more chandeliers.
Pia booked the best penthouse suite and two extra rooms. Snapping her fingers before the eyes of her awestruck companions, she broke their trance and led them to the elevators.
The bellman led them to the top floor and stopped in front of double doors engraved Zauberflöte.
“Hey, that’s named after a Mozart opera. The Magic Flute, right?” Tania said.
Tania and Monique waltzed in first and wandered through the suite. It had a yellow and white living room with antique furniture. The bellman opened glass doors to a balcony that wrapped around two sides of the top floor.