Overkill

by Ted Bell

  “I know, darling, I know. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  “No. I’m not hurt. One of my pilots is dead though. Russians got him in the fog.”

  Sigrid had to restrain herself from licking the salt from Hawke’s stubbled cheek when she kissed him. Salty, Hawke was—oh my god, delicious, like some soft hot pretzel. She remembered that she always went a little weak around him and felt a vertiginous wave wash over her at the scent of him.

  He followed her into the cold interior recesses of the little house to the kitchen. The ceilings were impossibly low for his six-foot-plus height, and he had to duck going through doorways.

  “Coffee?” she asked, opening a cupboard. “Something stronger?”

  “Perhaps a rum? Or a whiskey? Only if you’ve got it, of course. The sun is, uh . . .”

  “Over the yardarm somewhere?” she said with a shy smile, remembering.

  “Yes. Thank you. I’m a little—”

  “Me too, Alex. Me too. Please sit down. Are you hungry?”

  “Me? No, no. My pilot and I were just having lunch at the café across the street . . .”

  “Here’s your whiskey, Commander,” she said, placing the tumbler on the table.

  He took a sip, grateful for the burning sensation down his throat. Water of the gods. “So. This is your house?”

  “Yes, it is. The one I bought to try and rehabilitate myself and rid us once and for all of that addled monster who threatened you and Alexei and—”

  “Please don’t go there. Not yet. I just want to . . . I just want for us to be together for a little while. I’ve missed you horribly.”

  “Me too.”

  “And the little girl? With the cat?”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, I mean . . .”

  “Is she mine, you mean? My child? Is that what you—Oh, Alex, how could you ever even think that I . . .”

  He’d no idea whether she was about to laugh or cry. She did neither. She smiled and it was the dawn. She reached her hand toward him across the table. He took it in his own, feeling its smallness, its pale white perfection. He had forgotten the spray of freckles across her nose.

  “No, she’s not mine, silly. She’s the daughter of my friends here. A young English couple who moved in across the street. She runs English Tart, the local bakery. Peter and Lily Pell. They came here from Devon after seeing a help-wanted ad in the Herald Tribune. ‘Town on coast of North Africa seeks qualified baker . . .’ Isn’t that sweet?”

  He looked across at her, his blue eyes searching hers, so close he could see her irises swallow her pupils, his mind seeking out where to go next, what to offer, what best to keep inside . . .

  Suddenly they were on their feet, holding on to each other as if on a typhoon-tossed deck, feverish whispers and pleas for a love so long denied.

  “Breathe,” he said softly into her hair.

  Her fingers down the back of his boxers seared his skin. Somehow they were in her tiny bedroom at the rear, the seaward side of the white house. Tall French doors opened out on to the rocks and the grey and still-storm-tossed seas. He’d stood at the end of the bed, stood helpless before her in a kind of trance, the promise of love and warmth so overwhelmingly life-affirming after the cold horror of death mere hours ago.

  He was silent as she sat on the bed’s edge, staring up at him and holding his eyes as she unfastened his old brown leather belt and withdrew it from the loops, unbuttoned his khaki trousers, slid the zipper down, in a hurry, yanking his trousers, pale blue boxers, everything down to his ankles. He was already hard and that sight of him caused a short breath to catch in her throat.

  “Oh, Alex. Oh, dear.”

  “You want the belt?” he said with a smile, doubling the thick leather belt and gently slapping his naked thigh with it. It was part of a constant game evolving between the two lovers. Using sex to tell each other stories about their deepest feelings and hidden needs long gone unmet, seemingly since childhood. Over time, the games had forged a powerful emotional bond between them. The ties that bind.

  Lately, there had been more than a few times when she’d wanted him hard and rough, when he’d obliged her darker, submissive side. If you want a woman, give her what she wants. Whatever the hell that is. Doesn’t matter.

  “Not now, darling. Just you now. This time.”

  She growled, a guttural syllable, and pulled him to her, beside her, and then pushed him backward on her unmade bed.

  Under her pale blue silk top, she wore nothing else. Her gooseflesh had taken on a lunar blue, and in the cold wind off the sea, her roseate nipples had dimpled inward. On their knees now, although the sheets were rough and scratched. It didn’t matter. They were reduced to mouths and hands. He swept her legs to his hips, pressed her down, blanketed her with his heat until she stopped shivering, made a sudden, violent arch of her back. Her raw knees were raised to the ceiling and she cried out.

  How he longed for something wordless and potent: what? He wanted to wear her, to live in her bosomy warmth forever, as a man shall cleave unto his wife forever. People in his life had fallen away from him one by one, like dominoes; his every movement now was intended to pin her further, hold her down, so that she could never abandon him again.

  He had a sun blazing in him anew. This splendid everything, this new world now laid out lavishly before him, like some tasting menu, all was beauty, all abundance, all rich with the promise of new and endless love . . .

  He imagined a lifetime of screwing in this small room or on the beach, en-plein-air fucking, until they were like one of those ancient pairs of parch-skinned old birds like the aging couples he’d seen on the beaches of northern Germany, like two storks speed-walking into the morning sun, hand in hand . . . even when they were old and so very grey, he knew he would waltz her into the dunes and have his way with her frail bird bones, her full, healing breasts, her salty-sweet and swelling clit.

  This, then, for all eternity: her soft eyelashes on his cheek, her warm thighs draped across his waist, this thing they used to do, once more . . .

  It was over too quickly. When she shouted, the gulls hovering and whirling outside the windows exploded upward like buckshot blasted into the clouds. The two were pressed so close that when they laughed, his laugh rose from her belly, hers from his throat. He kissed her cheekbones, her clavicles, the pale of her wrist with its skeins of veins, a tracery of blue beneath her almost transparent skin.

  She stretched her long arms over her head and there were little nests of winter hair in the pits. She could hatch baby robins in those things, he thought but didn’t say, and took her hand. He kissed it, bitten fingernail to bitten finger, up the arm, the neck, and then, because the air was bright and the whirling birds beyond the French doors were surely watching, he kissed a long trail down her stomach . . .

  His terrible hunger he’d thought would be sated was not. The end apparent in the beginning.

  “My girl,” he said. “Mine.” Perhaps instead of wearing her, he could swallow her whole.

  “Stop,” she said. She’d lost her smile, so shy and constant that it startled him to see her close up without it. “Nobody belongs to anybody. We’ve done something bigger. Something new.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully and nipped the tip of her nose with his teeth. He had once loved her with all his might and, in so loving, had considered her transparent, a plate of glass. Now he could see through to the goodness at her quick. But glass is fragile; he would have to be careful. “You’re right,” he said, thinking no, thinking instead how deeply they belonged. How surely.

  Between his skin and hers, the smallest of spaces, barely enough for air, for the slick of sweat now chilling. Even still, a third person, her brutal past, had crept in.

  She looked at him in fading light slanting in from the sea. For the first time in a long time, all of a sudden, she saw him again. The dark whip at the center of him. How, ever so gently, he fli
cked the lash and kept her spinning . . .

  Chapter Seventy

  “Come here, Alex,” she was saying later, kneeling on the floor beside the bed, stroking his curly jet-black hair. He woke with a start. Outside, he saw the winter light had begun to leach from the western sky. How long had he slept? My god, Artemis! What must he be thinking? He had to—

  “What? Wha—” he said. “I’ve got to go find Artemis and—”

  “Shh. I want to show you something. Be a good little boy. Follow Mama.”

  He got up, naked, and padded obediently behind her. She led him out into the small hallway at the top of the stairs. They came to a door with a massive bolt and multiple locks securing it. She had a key ring and soon had the multiple locks opened.

  “Now you’ve got my attention,” Hawke told her. “Seriously, Sigrid, what in the world is going on here?”

  “In here,” she said. “I’ll show you.” And pushing open the door, she flicked on the overhead LED light panels.

  “Sigrid,” Hawke said, surveying the tiny room, amazed by what he saw, “I mean, really, what the hell?”

  It was a server room. Every square inch packed with server racks, vertical towers of them ablaze with blinking green and yellow lights and a rat’s nest of interwoven red and blue wiring on each rack. All running, humming away, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  One entire wall was taken up completely by an array of Belkin computer display screens ablaze with worlds of imperceptible bright green numbers scrolling by. Atop an old console table in the middle of the room, a battered wooden stool and a large Apple iMac computer and a printer and a shredder.

  Sigrid sat on the stool and plugged in a hacking tool disguised as a USB thumb drive. The black iMac screen was suddenly filled with green text flying by. There was a rolling stool nearby, and she pulled it beside her. “Sit here, darling, and pay close attention.”

  “Seriously, what’s this all about?” Hawke said.

  “That day, the day I was moving out of the Gardener’s Cottage for good, Ambrose came down to see me and say good-bye. He begged me not to go. He said you needed me now, needed me more than ever. And . . . Alexei did, too. But my mind was made up, darling. I knew I had to disappear. Even then I knew it might shatter that Ming vase of your precious heart into a million pieces . . .”

  “But, why? We’d had that awful fight in St. Moritz, I know, but—”

  “Shh. Just listen. I told Ambrose and Diana that I had to leave. That I was going to devote myself to finding a way back into your heart. That however long it might take, I would search for a pathway home to you . . . and you know what he said? Ambrose?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He said, ‘I may have a way back for you, Sigrid. But, it won’t be easy. And, it will probably be dangerous . . .’”

  “‘Anything,’ I told him. ‘I’ll try anything.’

  “He said, ‘The search for Alexei is not going well, Sigrid. Sometimes I fear the worst has happened. But I can never let Alex know that. I have to be there to shield him from the useless fears that threaten him every second. But you, you can go down roads he and I cannot ever travel, roads even Scotland Yard has trouble following . . .’

  “‘You mean . . . follow what exactly, Chief Inspector?’

  “‘Follow the money, Sigrid, follow the money. That was your genius at Credit Suisse before you two met! Use it! Nobody has deeper access into the hyper-secretive world of Swiss banking than you do. Who was that friend of yours in Zurich? The head of the Swiss Bankers Association’s cybersecurity division? Jon Levin, was it? He helped us get to the bottom of Her Majesty’s troubles with Russian cybertheft, remember?’

  “‘No, it was Helmut Koller.’

  “‘Exactly. Go there! Go to Zurich. Meet with Herr Koller, privately and in the strictest confidence. Explain about the kidnapping. And Putin’s possible role in it. Tell him we think Putin is alive and on the run. Desperate for a place to hide. Tell him you want him to help you get on Putin’s financial trail. Follow his footprints. See where it all leads.’

  “‘Because where Putin is, so too will we find Alexei.’

  “‘Yes. Precisely, my dear,’ Ambrose said. ‘And if you can find Alexei, oh, my dear girl, you can certainly find your way back into that poor man’s heart, can you not?’

  “‘I-I hope so, god help me.’ That’s what I told dear old Ambrose. Et voilà, here I am, darling. With Helmut’s help, I set up this entire room. Everything in this room is linked though Credit Suisse to the Swiss Bankers Association Ops Center in Zurich. I get to see things no one else in the world gets to see . . . including CIA, MI6, and Scotland Yard . . .”

  Hawke, amazed at what she had wrought, scooted his stool closer to her, looking over her shoulder at the big screen. “This is all simply unbelievable! Have you gotten anywhere? Are you making progress, darling?” he asked, the hope in his voice almost heartbreaking.

  “I think so, Alex. I do. I’m beginning to see things coming together that hold promise, I’ll say that much . . . Here, look at this one! One week ago today, Putin transferred a huge sum from—”

  “Darling, what you’re doing is amazing. Can you just pause for a few minutes?”

  Hawke was looking at his watch. “My pilot, Artemis Cooper, is waiting for me across the street, over at the café. I’d very much like him to see all this stuff . . . if you’ve no objection, I mean. He’s on the team . . .”

  “Of course. I’ll wait until you’re back, Alex.”

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Hawke returned a few minutes later with Cooper. After the briefest of introductions, Sigrid placed another stool in front of the iMac.

  “Show us what you’ve got, darling,” Hawke said, placing his right hand on her shoulder and squeezing it gently.

  “Well, gentlemen,” she said, tapping away at the keyboard, “have a look at this, for starters. We’re looking at Putin’s accounts now. Here’s an exceptionally large transaction, wouldn’t you agree? Took place about a month ago. I’m still trying to find out where the money came from, where it went, and how it got there. But the point is, Putin entered into a transaction wherein this sum, on a single day, left the country for an undisclosed bank in the South of France . . .”

  Artemis let out a long, slow whistle. Hawke, on his feet, said, “Five hundred million dollars? What the hell?”

  “Right. And mind you, this is not big corporate money we’re talking about. Some mega-corporation swallowing up another mega-corporation. No, no, gentlemen. This is a private transaction between two fabulously wealthy individuals with unimaginable firewalls, encryption, and cybersecurity prevention tools the likes of which neither Helmut nor I have ever seen before. At any rate, with his help, I was able to dig this deep. Are you with me?”

  Hawke said, “Yes. Keep going, Sigrid. What’s this one over here? Thirty million the very next day? The man is on a buying binge . . .”

  “Good eye! That’s what I was about to point out to you. This transaction is similar in nature, but varies in one very important way . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “The money comes from the same Swiss black hole as the larger transaction the day before. But, it doesn’t disappear down the same rabbit hole as the prior one. Oh, no, not by a long shot it doesn’t.”

  “Where does it go, Sigrid? Do you have any idea?”

  “I do now. It goes right into the pocket of this man right here . . . you may well recognize him, Alex. He was in your life, and mine, for a brief time.”

  She tapped a key and brought up a grainy photograph that filled the screen.

  “Good lord,” Hawke said, instantly recognizing the face of the man in the photo.

  Handsome, the man was standing inside some walled gardens on the shores of Lake Zurich. It was a brilliant sunlit summer day, all vibrant green grass lawns and blue water and bountiful floral displays . . . He was smiling into the camera, bouncing a beautiful little boy on his right shoulder . . . H
e was . . .

  “Baron Wolfgang von Stuka,” Hawke whispered under his breath. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Yes, Alex. It’s him, all right,” Sigrid said.

  “Who?” Artemis said.

  “Von Stuka was the powerful Swiss army divisionnaire whom I had long suspected of being involved with the Russians in the looting of Her Majesty the Queen’s Swiss coffers. Not to mention my own more modest accounts. My money, flowing to the Russian coffers . . . but I could never prove it.”

  “With these new tools, we may well be able to do so now, Alex,” Sigrid said. Von Stuka was a sore spot between them and she knew it.

  Here was a man who’d once stirred jealous passions in Hawke’s heart. When first they’d met in Zurich that summer, Sigrid had told Hawke that Von Stuka had once pursued her romantically. Despite her protestations that she was never interested, she had accepted the gift of a massive ruby ring. She was relieved to see that Hawke at that moment was all business.

  “Tell me about that second transaction, Sigrid,” Hawke said. “Curious, I must say.”

  “Real estate deal, plain and simple. Baron von Stuka is selling Seegarten, his gorgeous island estate on Lake Zurich, to an unknown buyer for thirty million dollars. A week later, the baron had removed himself from the island to the family castle up atop Great St. Bernard Pass. Helmut and I are still trying to find out just what—”

  But Hawke wasn’t listening.

  He was still staring at the photograph of Von Stuka, looking closely at the magnificent mountain in the background of the photograph. A mighty peak that stood on the farther shore, soaring into the skies above Lake Zurich. Der Nadel. The infamously cruel mountain peak where, like so many climbers before him, Hawke’s own grandfather had lost his life. His bones were still up there. Some day, Alex vowed, he’d bring them down and back to England to be buried properly at Hawkesmoor.