Her Fugitive Heart Read online

  “To be fair,” Ken said, “we interrogated a homegrown wannabe terrorist.”

  “Who earlier tried to kill us,” Clive added.

  “Why do you need to tell me all this?” I said.

  “Ravi, keep your voice down,” Julia said.

  “This is karma catching up with you,” I said. “Live by secretly murdering people, die by being secretly murdered?”

  “Steady on, son,” Ken said. “That’s a bit unkind.”

  “I’ve turned a blind eye to what you two get up to,” I said. “But this goes beyond the fucking pale! First you accidentally murder the most wanted man in the world, then you chop up the body, then you try to hide the body, then you lose the body, and now you torture a wannabe jihadist! I told Roger we weren’t qualified for this! Marcie and her bosses must be fucking desperate to be hiring the likes of us! We are out of our fucking depth here! I have enough to worry about already with my cases and my fucking wedding as it is and now you dump this on me!”

  “I’m startin’ to get some mixed signals here, mate,” Clive said. “Are you losin’ it here or are you really just stressin’ out about your weddin’?”

  “Ravi, mate,” Benjamin said. “You don’t know how bloody scary Marcie really is, yeah? She’s all smiles on the outside, but you know she’s a ball of razor and barbed wire underneath. I know, all right? Olivia has that exact same quality, only she doesn’t hide it like Marcie does.”

  Ken was nodding furiously in agreement.

  “We need your help on this one, son,” Clive said.

  “We’re at the end of our rope here,” Ken said. “We may not look it, but we got stress, too. We need your whatever, whether it’s the gods whispering in your ear or that thing you got where you suddenly just suss everything out when no one else can.”

  “Have you looked more into Vanessa van Hooten?” I asked.

  “You what?”

  “The original job,” I said. “Or have you forgotten already? That was how you came upon al-Hassah in the first place. You were bugging her flat. You have video feeds. This started with her. She’s the one who followed you when you grabbed him, followed you to the forest where you killed him, and followed you to your garage when you stashed the body.”

  “Fuck me, of course!” Ken said.

  “We should have guessed,” Clive said.

  “Yes, you bloody should have,” I said. “It could only be her who took his body.”

  “That was fuckin’ obvious,” Benjamin said. “I suppose we were a bit too stressed out to suss it on our own.”

  “So where’s the delivery guy now? The one you tortured,” I asked.

  “Tied up in the bathroom,” Ken said.

  “Alive?”

  “We didn’t kill him,” Clive said, somewhat defensively.

  “Good.” I dialed Ariel’s number.

  “Hey, hon. Change your mind?”

  “I have something for you,” I said. “Ken and Clive blagged a homegrown wannabe terrorist who’s part of a cell that answers to al-Hassah. You might want to come and take him off our hands.”

  “See, Jarrod? Told you Ravi would come up with something,” Ariel said. “Sorry, hon, Jarrod was skeptical as ever. So you want us to come pick this little shit up?”

  “Please.”

  Ken, Clive, and Benjamin weren’t keen on my bringing Interzone in on this, but this was better than telling Marcie. I decided our best option was to cut in Ariel and Jarrod and let them do the heavy lifting. The delivery guy didn’t know al-Hassah was dead and thought his order had come from the man himself, so Jarrod and his bastards could sit on him and interrogate him to their heart’s content before handing him over to the CIA, who would either vanish him to a black site or hand him over the British authorities.

  As liaison for our firm and Interzone, it was up to me to call their liaison, which was Ariel. She was always a bit too happy to hear from me.

  “We’ll be over in fifteen minutes,” she said.

  We opened the door to Ariel and Jarrod. I knew I’d run into Jarrod since he was the one who commanded Interzone’s troops in the field. He was as proficient a soldier and killer as they came, and that was why I never wanted to be near him. The mood in the room immediately cooled since Ken and Clive regarded Jarrod with a combination of outright hostility and grudging respect. Ariel was her usual cheerful sociopathic self who didn’t give a shit about any of that.

  “Hello, cutie,” she said to the wet, duct-taped delivery guy in the bathtub.

  We handed him over to her and Jarrod.

  “How did you find him?” Jarrod asked.

  “Ken and Clive are ex-cops, so they used their informants to ask around and turned up this guy,” I said. “Ken, Clive, and Benjamin grabbed him before he could alert his mates, interrogated him, and found out that al-Hassah has been hiding out with Vanessa van Hooten. Turns out they’re lovers.”

  Jarrod’s face dropped in surprise. He was clearly a regular viewer of her father’s TV channel back in the States.

  “How deep do you think the girl’s in on this?” he asked. “She a believer?”

  “She believes in his lovemakin’ skills, that’s for sure,” Benjamin said with a nasty chuckle.

  That didn’t improve Jarrod’s mood.

  “By a complete coincidence,” I said, “her father is a client of ours. And these guys were in charge of watching over her and reporting on anything she might do to embarrass him.”

  “And how grateful do you think her daddy would be if we save him from an incredibly embarrassing scandal where his darling daughter was found having an affair with the world’s most wanted terrorist?” Julia said.

  “Lots of birds with one stone here, guys,” Ariel said. “It’s like the stars aligned to bring all of us together on this.”

  “Funny how that happens, isn’t it?” Lord Shiva said, briefly looking up from tweeting on his phone.

  Kali hovered over Ariel. Bagalamukhi hummed in delight at all the deceit in the room and took a photo of us with her phone.

  “There’s still the reward as well,” Ken said, hopefully.

  “I’ll leave that to our bosses to discuss,” Jarrod said. “And I’m guessing you want us to take this guy off your hands.”

  “So what’s the play?” Ariel said.

  “Looks to me we could be playing Knights in Shining Armor,” I said. “Get al-Hassah for our biggest client, and save Mr. van Hooten’s reputation at the same time.”

  I didn’t tell Ariel and Jarrod about the night before, or that Benjamin already had cameras all over Vanessa van Hooten’s flat, or that we already had footage of al-Hassah in the flat with her, or the elephant in the room: that al-Hassah was dead, his body was missing, and there was a double of him hiding out in the flat. We were going to let Interzone think al-Hassah 2.0 was the real deal.

  “This is going to be tricky,” Jarrod said.

  “That’s why they pay us the big bucks. And bigger bucks if we pull this one off.”

  “We gotta get back into her flat,” Clive said.

  “Not before we check her out,” I said.

  “What for?” Jarrod asked.

  “We need to find out what she’s like,” Julia said. “See how she’ll react if the shit hits the fan. If she’s a believer and member of the sleeper cell or if she’s a hapless girl in love with a substitute bad father figure. Is she going to be a basket case or is she going to play ball? How high-maintenance is she going to get? Is Daddy going to have to pay for extra counseling? All that stuff.”

  “How you gonna do that?” Ken asked.

  “She’s American and upper class,” Julia said. “An exchange student from an Ivy League school. They all hang out at the same bars and restaurants, snort cocaine and get stoned at the same parties in town. She’s in the same student union I am. Our universities are affiliated.”

  “Julia, I don’t want you to do that alone,” I said.

  “Then you can come with me,” Julia said. “Pose as
the teaching assistant in my class.”

  “It just so happens we have her schedule,” Benjamin said. “And we already know the pub she goes to regularly with her classmates. It’s near her school in Central London.”

  “So while Julia and I are meeting her,” I said, “you lot can go into her flat in Earl’s Court.”

  “Okay,” Jarrod said, satisfied. “We have a plan. I got Mikkelford, Reyes, and DuBois here with us if we have to go in hard and fight a terror cell. You leave that part to us if it comes down to that.”

  “Didn’t you say you didn’t want to be involved in all this, Ravi?” Ariel said. “What changed your mind?”

  “I was dropped into this,” I said. “It wasn’t my choice.”

  FOURTEEN

  We returned to the office. Ken, Clive, and Benjamin got back slightly before Julia and I did so that it didn’t look like we all ganged up to plot something and came back at the same time.

  “Marcie, what can you tell me about Vanessa van Hooten?” I asked. She was the one who’d introduced Lucas van Hooten to Roger, after all. Small world. Small and insidious world.

  “Where do I start?” Marcie said. “Total wild child heiress. Couldn’t keep out of the gossip pages in New York for years when she was a teenager . . . you know, getting drunk with the A-list, cavorting in clubs and strip joints, all the good stuff. Back in New York, she made Paris Hilton look like Doris Day!”

  “Did you know her when she came over for school?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’d meet her at all kinds of functions where American ex-pats in London gathered. She’s always pumping me for contacts, and shopping tips, and the best deals, not to mention the best people to buy weed and blow from. And she gives nothing in return. Total user. I’m used to that. That was most of my clients back in PR.”

  “I heard a rumor that she got all radical and joined the Socialist Workers Party,” I said.

  “Not a rumor, dude,” Marcie said. “It’s all true.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I notice the Company guys at the US Embassy put a flag on her just in case, but they think it’s just a phase she’s going through. And I bet it’s over some guy she’s balling. Gotta be. Probably some douchebag extreme leftist with a posh accent. American girls go for that. She doesn’t have a political bone in her body. She never talked politics at any of the parties I saw her at. And thank God for that. She can be pretty unbearable already. Imagine her talking politics.”

  So Vanessa van Hooten was as adept at compartmentalizing as a man was. A girl who could separate her Marx from her Manolo Blahniks. Why not? This was the twenty-first century, after all.

  “Chicks like her are into Power, and Dudes with Power. Total Alpha Male fixation,” Marcie said.

  “Well, look who her father is,” I said.

  “And who her boyfriend is,” Kali said, chuckling.

  “Do ya reckon Daddy would pay us extra if we uncover somethin’ really scandalous and help keep it quiet?” Benjamin asked.

  Ken and Clive glared at him, like they were ready to strangle him if he said any more.

  “That’s up to Roger to negotiate with Mr. van Hooten,” Cheryl said from her desk.

  Olivia didn’t even look up from her computer. She showed no interest at all in any of this. She was busy looking over the bank accounts of an offshore company she had been hired to do a forensic analysis for.

  From what I’d observed, Marcie might be adept at networking and knowing everyone worth knowing in London, justifying her past legend working in public relations, but as a private investigator, she was rather lazy. She tended to leave the heavy legwork to the rest of us after bringing cases to the firm. They were often lucrative cases involving high-profile clients with large wallets, but I suspected that she took her work as an intelligence officer much more seriously than her day-to-day cover as a private eye here at Golden Sentinels. In the case of finding al-Hassah, she was really here as Roger’s handler and to monitor any progress we might make. Benjamin was bursting to blab what had happened in the last eighteen hours, but even he had enough self-preservation to keep his mouth shut. Marcie would be pissed off if she knew we were keeping something as big as al-Hassah from her, but we were definitely better off with her not knowing till we could tell her what we wanted her to know, which should be a version that didn’t land us in the shit with her or her bosses.

  Julia’s smartphone rang.

  “Mum?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Honestly, Mum, I’m not going to wear white. It’s the twenty-first century. I told you. I’ve already picked out my gown. It’s from Louise’s closet. That’s right, I kept her clothes. She had a lot of designer dresses and gowns. There’s one I set my eye on. No, it’s not garish. And why should Ravi wear a bloody tuxedo? It’s so cliché. Listen to his mother. She has some good ideas. Because we could use some color rather than white and gray and black. Ravi’s relatives are coming in from India and they’ll be wearing their formal attire. Mum, if you want to argue, I’m going to call the wedding off. If you kick up a fuss, Ravi and I are just going to elope.”

  “Nice one, sis,” Louise said from the office sofa, but only I saw and heard her.

  “Sorted,” Julia said when she hung up.

  “Marcie,” I said. “Benjamin just asked me to back him up on the van Hooten case.”

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “I think Vanessa might have made Benjamin, Ken, and Clive when they were doing surveillance on her flat.”

  “Did she confront them?”

  “No, but here’s the thing,” I said to Marcie. “Benjamin found out that Vanessa van Hooten’s current boyfriend is a very dodgy geezer, the type her father would hate, and could bring down a huge scandal. I feel I should warn her.”

  “Why not tell Roger so he can tell her dad?” Marcie asked, raising an eyebrow. “He’s the one who hired us to keep tabs on his little girl.”

  “I don’t think this can wait,” I asked. “The guy’s crashing in her flat and scrounging off her. It might be one of those situations where we send Ken and Clive in to put the frighteners on him.”

  “Point taken,” Marcie said. “I’d break it to her, but that might blow my cover. She doesn’t know I’m the one her dad hired to watch over her.”

  “Guess it’s down to me,” I said.

  “Good idea,” Marcie said, and texted Vanessa van Hooten to arrange for us to meet her after class that evening.

  Julia and I exchanged a look. That had been surprisingly easy.

  FIFTEEN

  The objective was to lure Vanessa van Hooten out of her flat so that Ken and Clive could sneak into it to look for the body parts. We hadn’t told Interzone that al-Hassah was dead and in pieces. Ariel and Jarrod were sitting on the delivery guy and waiting for us to call and tell them when to make their move. We didn’t want them bursting into Vanessa’s flat to seize al-Hassah’s double and finding the body parts, and if she was there, there would be a particularly huge mess. We couldn’t let them interrogate Vanessa, because she would probably tell them that Ken and Clive had killed al-Hassah, which would piss Interzone off since it would mean that nobody was going to claim the twenty-million bounty.

  I had to think about what I was going to do for the next few hours. What to say to Vanessa? How to warn her about her boyfriend?

  “She’s in class all day,” Marcie said. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll meet her at the tapas bar she likes going to and have a drink with her, do the usual social thing. Then you can come into the bar and I can spot you and wave you over to say hello. Then you can take it from there. How’s that?”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Then you can find an excuse to have to leave so she doesn’t know you engineered the meeting, and if it goes south, it won’t be your fault. I’ll take responsibility.”

  “Is this why Benjamin, Ken, and Clive have been acting weird today?” Marcie said.

  “I think they’re embarrassed that they were s
ussed by the subject they were tailing,” I said.

  “I have to meet Mum this evening,” Julia said. “She’s driving me barmy with all this wedding stuff. I have to calm her down.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ll deal with this and see you at home.”

  Marcie and I headed for the tapas bar in Earl’s Court ahead of Vanessa. Marcie went inside first to wait for her while I went into the off-license across the road to watch the bar.

  And in she waltzed.

  Vanessa van Hooten was what you’d expect her to be from her reputation: incredibly well turned out in all the right designer labels, with blond hair and an all-American arrogance that some people might find attractive, especially if it’s in a woman with a nice rack.

  “Hey, you,” she said as she and Marcie air-kissed.

  “Hey yourself,” Marcie said.

  I walked into the bar, and as if on cue, Marcie pretended to be surprised as she saw me and waved me over. Introductions were made and wine was ordered.

  “So what brings you to London?” I asked.

  “Studying abroad and getting out from living under my dad’s shadow,” Vanessa said. “He’s so controlling, and acts like I’m still a little girl. You know how people say, ‘born with a silver spoon in your mouth’? I was born with a silver antenna in my mouth.”

  “You mean your father is the van Hooten?” I asked, feigning surprise.

  “Guilty as charged,” she said. “Mom is really Daddy’s third trophy wife, and he already had a son by his first wife. Howard was always being groomed to take over the family business.”

  “Vanessa is a wild child as only the offspring of the insanely rich can be,” Marcie said.

  “Oh, shut up,” Vanessa laughed.

  “Come on,” Marcie said. “Caught skinny-dipping in Central Park at the age of sixteen, then ending up with a stint in rehab?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Vanessa said. “Daddy had to donate a whole new sports stadium to my school to keep them from expelling me when they caught me snorting and selling cocaine to my classmates.”

  “You did pretty well as a model when you were eighteen,” Marcie said.