Killer Instinct

by Patterson, James

  “Wait,” she said. “Why are you hiding?”

  I’d peeled off to the side, directly out of line with the security camera. Again, I knew what I was doing.

  “Just look up so he can see you,” I said, pointing.

  “Who?”

  I didn’t have to answer. By then, the snapping sound of multiple locks had Elizabeth spinning back around. He’d opened the door.

  “Jesus Christ, Needham, what the hell are you doing here?” asked Evan Pritchard. “If this is about your fiasco up in Pelham this afternoon, I don’t want to hear it, not tonight. How’d you even know where I live?”

  “Trick or treat,” I said, stepping forward.

  “Oh, shit,” said Pritchard. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Reinhart.”

  Elizabeth’s head whipped back and forth between me and her new boss. “You guys know each other?”

  “We’ve crossed paths once or twice,” I said.

  It was an obvious understatement. Elizabeth rolled her eyes at me. “Is there anyone you don’t have history with?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “What can I say? I tend to make an impression on people.”

  “Actually, I should’ve known,” said Elizabeth. “You both knew about Halo.”

  Pritchard glared so hard at me I thought his eyes might pop out. “What the fuck did you tell her, Reinhart?”

  “It’s more like what you told her,” I said. “Apparently, you flinched or something when she showed you that hotel surveillance footage. You really ought to work on that.”

  Never mind that Elizabeth caught me doing the same thing when I saw the footage. I conveniently left that part out. But Elizabeth already knew about my past. Now she was learning about Pritchard’s.

  He shook his head. “If I’d known it was you, Reinhart, I would’ve—”

  “I know, I know. You would’ve never opened the door,” I said. “Now that you have, are you going to invite us in or what?”

  “That depends. What do you want?” he asked.

  “Peace on earth and a brand-new Ferrari. What do you think I want? I need your help.”

  “You’re still as charming as ever, Reinhart,” he said.

  “Yeah, and you still owe me,” I shot back.

  Pritchard mumbled something about my being the male offspring of a female dog. He then turned and walked back into his townhouse, leaving the door open for us. It wasn’t the warmest invite, but the result was the same. We were heading inside. Though not before I quickly whispered in Elizabeth’s ear.

  “Brace yourself,” I said.

  “For what?” she whispered back.

  I didn’t have to answer. With only one foot inside Pritchard’s door she saw what I was talking about.

  CHAPTER 50

  IMAGINE IF Mike Tyson, Norman Schwarzkopf, and T. E. Lawrence from Lawrence of Arabia had all been interior designers. Now imagine Pritchard having hired all three at the same time.

  We walked in. Every inch of his floor was covered with sand. Actual sand. Like from an actual desert.

  As for interior walls, there weren’t any. There was no second or third floor either. The townhouse had been hollowed out and fitted with an angled glass ceiling for a roof. You could see the night sky.

  To the left of us were a standing punching bag and a full-size boxing ring. Behind the ring was a large military tent from Operation Desert Storm. It was the exact same tent Pritchard slept in as a land component commander.

  That of course leads to the question How do I know that?

  Meanwhile, Elizabeth was looking at me with her own question. What the hell did we just walk into?

  The short answer was Pritchard’s happy place.

  After the liberation of Kuwait, Pritchard returned to the States as a warrior without a war. He cashed in as a bodyguard for a Saudi prince attending Columbia Law School. Thus, he was able to afford a Manhattan townhouse. He then joined the CIA with a fast-tracked application courtesy of a four-star general. It was a brief stint, followed by what’s been a long tenure with the FBI and the JTTF.

  But at no time was Pritchard more “alive,” as he put it, than when he was on a battlefield. So instead of returning to a Middle Eastern desert, the terminal bachelor decided to install one in his Upper East Side townhouse.

  Had it been anyone else, the word crazy would’ve come to mind. For Pritchard, it somehow made sense.

  “All right, Reinhart,” he said, folding his thick arms as he turned around to face us. “What do you want?”

  “I need your file on the mayor,” I said.

  He laughed. “What file?”

  “The one you compiled after Elizabeth was assigned to your unit.” I glanced at my watch. “When you’re done pretending it doesn’t exist, let me know.”

  So much for his fake laugh. It was as if Pritchard had suddenly remembered my PhD from Yale wasn’t in the field of classical banjo or underwater basket weaving. I was inside his head. I knew how he operated. There’s a fine line between paranoid and protecting your ass, and Evan Pritchard walked it every day like a Flying Wallenda.

  “Okay, let’s pretend for a second—hypothetically, of course—that this imaginary file on the mayor somehow exists,” he said. “What specifically would you want to know?”

  “Deacon has a guy feeding him intel,” I said. “I imagine it’s not happening at City Hall, and wherever it is happening it’s probably one-on-one. He’s Middle Eastern. That’s all we know.”

  Apparently, that’s all we needed to know. “Give me a minute,” said Pritchard.

  He walked off, disappearing into his commander tent.

  Elizabeth turned to me. “How long ago was he in the CIA?”

  “The less you know about that, the better,” I said.

  “Why does he owe you? At least tell me that.”

  “Okay, but you’ll need to wait until after.”

  “After what?”

  “Eighteen more years,” I said. “That’s when it gets declassified.”

  That earned me an epic slow burn that would’ve probably lasted for days were it not for Pritchard returning. He had a black-and-white photo in his hand, courtesy of a super-long lens.

  “Is this him?” he asked, holding it up.

  “Yes!” said Elizabeth. “Who is he?”

  “He’s former Mossad,” said Pritchard. “Goes by the name Eli these days.”

  “Where can we find him?” I asked.

  “Good question,” said Pritchard.

  Huh? “You were able to find out his name and that he was former Mossad, but—”

  “But exactly,” said Pritchard. “No known address or phone number. The agent I had tailing the mayor saw him only one time. He was entering Deacon’s limo early in the morning. When he got out, it was as if he’d turned into a ghost. After two blocks my agent lost him.”

  “So we know who he is. We just don’t know where he is,” said Elizabeth. “We can work with that.”

  Pritchard shook his head. “You’re not working with anything, Needham.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “You know exactly what that means,” he said.

  CHAPTER 51

  ONE SECOND, they were talking. The next, they were screaming at each other.

  It was only fitting that we were next to a boxing ring, as I practically had to separate the two and send them to neutral corners. Pritchard was laying into Elizabeth for “going rogue” and not bringing any backup to the house in Pelham, as well as avoiding him and his repeated calls after she “nearly blew up the damn neighborhood.”

  Elizabeth was countering with how she couldn’t know if the tip from this guy, Eli, at Starbucks was for real. The mayor couldn’t even fully vouch for it, after all. “And it was his goddamn source!”

  The bottom line was that Pritchard wanted to suspend Elizabeth until further notice. He couldn’t trust her. Sure, she’d saved his life, but he was convinced she’d also gotten the kid, Gorgin, killed. Gorgin could’ve be
en the key to eliminating the cell responsible for the bombings. Now they had nothing to go on, said Pritchard. Everything and everyone was reduced to ash in the blast. Forget dental records. “And that AK-47 you grabbed? It came back clean from the lab. We don’t even have one fucking fingerprint!”

  “Yeah, but we do have this,” said Elizabeth, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out a folded piece of white paper, handing it to Pritchard. “This was on the guy with the AK-47.”

  I craned my neck to look. It was an ATM receipt from Chase Bank.

  “Do we know the branch?” asked Pritchard.

  Elizabeth knew that and then some. “Penn Station, main concourse,” she said. “I’ve spoken with their security office already. We should have footage matching the time stamp by tomorrow morning.”

  Pritchard nodded. It was definitely a step up from his yelling at her but well short of anything approaching a compliment. Nice work, for instance. After all, it’s not like the guy with the AK-47 handed her the receipt before trying to kill her. I figured the least I could do for Elizabeth was to point this out.

  I turned to her. “So with the house about to explode at any second you still stayed behind to search this guy’s pockets?”

  “Shut up, Reinhart,” said Pritchard.

  Mission accomplished. I shrugged. “Just saying.”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” he said.

  “Actually,” I replied, “it could change everything.”

  “I’m not talking about the investigation,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

  I did. So did Elizabeth. Pritchard was talking about her suspension, and she was about to take the reins back from me to argue it. We all understood what she wanted—the chance to track down the mayor’s informant, Eli, and find out how he’s connected to Gorgin and what else he knows. It made sense.

  Still, Elizabeth had barely gotten her first word out when I interrupted her. She wasn’t going to win this battle with Pritchard. He was stubborn. He was pissed. Plus, he had home-field advantage. Who the hell turns his Manhattan townhouse into Operation Desert Storm?

  A guy who lives to fight. That’s who.

  Elizabeth could’ve either fallen on her sword or waved the white flag. At least, that was the conventional way to look at it.

  Screw conventional.

  CHAPTER 52

  “WHAT THE hell was that?” asked Elizabeth.

  She was hopping mad. Literally. The second we reached the sidewalk outside Pritchard’s townhouse she was right up in my face, rocking up and down on the small heels of her flats so fast she actually got airborne a few times.

  “That was a compromise,” I said. “Pritchard doesn’t have to look at you for a few days, but you’re not actually suspended.”

  “I was standing right there. I know what you said.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

  “This isn’t going to be a gender thing, is it? I know you can fight your own battles.”

  “Then why didn’t you let me? And where do you get off promising Pritchard that I won’t go hunting for this Eli guy? That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I promised you wouldn’t.”

  Elizabeth raised her hands up like she was squeezing a basketball really hard. Or my neck. She officially wanted to strangle me now. “For Christ’s sake, how many of those whiskeys did you have back at the restaurant?” she asked.

  Not nearly enough.

  “The reason you won’t be tracking down Eli is because that’s what I’m going to be doing,” I said.

  “So why can’t I help you? We’ll do it together.”

  “Sure, like old times,” I said. “Except you’re going to be too busy doing something else. I need to borrow you for a couple of days.”

  “Borrow me?”

  “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “This is going to be a gender thing.”

  Elizabeth folded her arms and stared at me, waiting for my witty retort. There wasn’t one. I was too preoccupied with going over the checklist inside my head, the things I could and couldn’t tell her. I was having a hard time. This from a guy who memorized pi out to fifty digits when he was eleven. Just to see if I could.

  Yeah, I know. I was a weird kid.

  Elizabeth had been assigned to investigate the death of Professor Darvish. She was then officially taken off the case, only to unofficially continue the investigation on her own with me in tow. We had narrowed down to five the possibilities for who that mystery woman was with Darvish, and then I went off to get Julian’s help. I had assumed the woman was CIA, which meant Elizabeth couldn’t know her identity. I had assumed wrong, though. My meeting with Foxx in Chinatown had convinced me as much.

  Now it gets tricky.

  I could tell Elizabeth about Sadira Yavari. I just couldn’t tell her about Darvish. He was CIA. An informant, at least. An asset. No matter how much I trusted Elizabeth, there were some secrets I simply couldn’t tell her.

  Of course, that’s what got you into trouble with Tracy, isn’t it? You ruined everything, you genius. What are you going to do?

  “Earth to Dylan,” said Elizabeth. “Are you there?”

  I snapped out of it. “I’m sorry. What was I saying?”

  “That you needed to borrow me.”

  Again, no witty retort. In fact, no anything. I simply stared at her until she was done doing what she always does in her head: figure things out.

  Three, two, one …

  “You know which woman was with Darvish!” she said.

  I nodded. Yes, I did. “Her name is Sadira Yavari,” I said. “And she’s about to be your new best friend.”

  CHAPTER 53

  DIVIDE AND conquer. Or as the Romans first said it, Divide et impera.

  I beat Elizabeth out the door the next morning by a couple of hours. Mayor Edso Deacon sleeps even less than Trump. His Honor’s always up before the sun.

  Of course, the ancillary benefit of that was that I didn’t have to sit around and wallow in the absence of Tracy and Annabelle. It was so stupid of me to look into Annabelle’s room before going to bed. Her empty crib was all I could see, even when I closed my eyes.

  Okay, Deacon, what’s on your agenda this morning? Surely you want a face-to-face with your guy Eli after his tip nearly got Elizabeth killed. Lucky for me you don’t trust phone calls. Who knows who could be listening in?

  If the meeting was going to happen, it wasn’t going to be at City Hall or anywhere else requiring an official log of the mayor’s whereabouts. Deacon would never be so sloppy. Not a chance.

  No, I was looking for a meeting that no one was supposed to see.

  First decision? Whether I stake out the mayor’s residence at Gracie Mansion or the Excelsior Hotel on the Upper West Side, where Deacon hunkered down during his reelection campaign. The Excelsior was also where he met up with his mistress, the woman Elizabeth unwittingly provided cover for when she was first brought in as a member of his security detail. The guy had no shame. Of course, that’s job requirement number one of any successful politician.

  “Start with the hotel,” Elizabeth told me. Then she told me what to look for. “He never uses the front entrance. Always the back. If you see his limo, he’s there.”

  I saw the limo.

  It was parked by an unmarked door next to the loading dock used for deliveries. The engine was off. The driver looked to be sleeping. That made things a little easier.

  Perched on my bike in an alley near the back of the hotel, I watched through the visor of my helmet and waited for that unmarked door to open. A half hour became an hour. The sun was officially up. Could you actually be sleeping in, Deacon? Of all days?

  I didn’t care. I was prepared to sit there on my bike for as long as it took. That was the plan. It was all
about finding Eli. One way or another the mayor was going to lead me to him.

  One way. Or another.

  The more I kept staring at that unmarked door, the less I could hear of the city. The traffic, a plane overhead—every noise was fading into the background. That’s when something strange happened. My phone rang.

  It shouldn’t have. That was the strange part. The ringer was off. But it still rang.

  I glanced at the caller ID before quickly removing my helmet. It was Elizabeth.

  “Hi, there,” I said. “How’d you sleep?”

  I knew right away from the laugh that it wasn’t Elizabeth. “I slept like a log,” he said with an Israeli accent.

  “Who is this?” I asked, although I already knew. He must have air-swiped the IMEI from Elizabeth’s phone at Starbucks. He was now piggybacking on her line. This guy was Mossad, all right.

  “I’m the guy you’re looking for,” he said. “Now say ‘Cheese.’”

  And like that, I was Al Pacino and his fellow detectives in Heat. I’d been made. Eli had gotten me to take my helmet off. He was probably now clicking away nearby with a long-range lens.

  On second thought, I should’ve been so lucky.

  CHAPTER 54

  FUNNY THING about the mind. You get a certain idea stuck in it and then all other thoughts funnel through like lemmings. That is, until it turns out you had the wrong idea.

  I looked everywhere in front of me, trying to spot Eli. Was he on a rooftop? A terrace? In a window nearby? If he wanted to identify me, he had to be able to see my face. That was the idea.

  I had my helmet in one hand, my cell in the other. Eli was no longer on the line. Say “Cheese” was the last thing he’d said.

  I’d taken the bait.

  He wasn’t taking my picture. He was just making sure I kept looking in front of me.

  “Nice bike,” came his voice behind me.

  I turned to look. It was pure reflex and exactly what he was banking on. He was tall, wore dark sunglasses, and never broke stride in his black blazer and turtleneck as his left hand went up. Pzzzz!