Her Fugitive Heart Page 15

  “You’re just fucking with me now,” I said.

  Ariel laughed.

  “Ravi honey, I loooove fucking with you, but I don’t need to lie to fuck with you. I just have to tell you the truth and it’ll fuck with you.”

  “Very true!” Kali chuckled, suddenly beside me, in my ear. “My poor darling boy, I wasn’t going to lose you so carelessly.”

  Julia gave me a phone and a Bluetooth earpiece that I put in immediately.

  “To be fair,” Benjamin said on the Bluetooth. “You did have a tracker in your belt buckle. I helped them track you via GPS.”

  We were speeding towards Central London.

  “Where the hell are we going now?” I asked.

  “Where do you think?” Jarrod said. “Get you secured, get back on the hunt.”

  “And where do you think you’re going to look?” I said.

  “We got a couple of leads,” Jarrod said.

  “Rubbish,” I said. “You don’t have shit. You have no idea where to look next, do you? Or did Kali tell you?”

  Jarrod and Ariel stayed silent. Kali must have only told them where to find me. If I wasn’t in the picture, Kali didn’t bother.

  “Benjamin,” I said. “Did Ken and Clive find what they were looking for in the flat?”

  “They found the double,” he said. “And all the parts. Had to pack them back into black bin liners so they wouldn’t leak and stink up the place.”

  “We need to find Vanessa van Hooten,” I said. “She’s going to launch a terror attack on London.”

  I didn’t tell them al-Hassah was dead since I wasn’t sure if they already knew. We were in enough trouble as it was. What I was sure of was that Vanessa had to be keeping al-Hassah’s corpse at home where she could be with him. I didn’t need the gods to tell me that.

  “How do you know that, brother?” Jarrod asked.

  “She’s completely off her rocker and he’s the love of her life. If he hasn’t shown up at the meeting with the CIA, then perhaps she stopped him from going to keep him from getting taken away from her.”

  “You mean she Single White Female’d him?” Ariel asked. “That’s so fucked up it’s kind of hilarious.”

  “It’s the only logical answer,” I said. “And the only proper lead. Somebody pass me a laptop.”

  I logged into the server where Benjamin stored the footage from the cameras he had hidden in Vanessa’s flat.

  “Damn,” Jarrod said.

  “He’s not lookin’ too lively there,” Ariel said.

  There she was unwrapping the black bin liners and taking out the pieces of al-Hassah, including the head, which she cradled to her chest and started primal screaming over.

  “Somehow, this still doesn’t make the list of Top Ten Most Fucked Up Things we’ve ever seen,” Mikkelford said.

  Interzone, being efficient as ever, came in two SUV vans. Mikkelford and Reyes packed Baz, Amir, and Zeb into one while the rest of us got into the other. As we drove out, I noticed that we were in a garage in Hammersmith. I knew we’d never left London.

  TWENTY

  I was now doing something I’d vowed I would never do again: ride in a van with Jarrod and his murderous cohorts from Interzone. I also had to be grudgingly grateful to him and Ariel for saving my life. For the first time in my life, I had nearly been deliberately murdered. It was not a pleasant feeling. I wondered if I would get PTSD.

  “You thought Vanessa might have been a damsel who needed rescuing, didn’t you?” Julia said.

  She didn’t need to hear an answer from me.

  “We always told you your White Knight Complex would get you in trouble,” she said.

  “First rule,” Ariel said. “You don’t try to rescue a bunny-boiler.”

  “That’s a man for you, sister,” Diaz said.

  “Damn right!” Dubois said, chuckling.

  Lord Vishnu and Rudra were there in full SWAT body armor, cosplaying as special ops guys just for a laugh. They were gleefully fist-bumping each other, quoting bad Hollywood action movie dialogue, and laughing their heads off.

  Seriously?

  At that moment, I hated everyone.

  I looked out the window and saw it was morning. Julia looked at me and didn’t say a word. She wanted to hold me and make it better but knew I was in too shitty a mood for that.

  “Were you holding out on us?” Jarrod said. “How did you get cameras in that girl’s apartment?”

  Before I could say anything, Julia stepped in.

  “The cameras were already there,” she said. “Vanessa’s father had them installed without her knowledge. Benjamin managed to find the feed. Ken and Clive went in there last night and found al-Hassah’s double tied to the bed and covered in air freshener cakes bought from the local chemist’s to cover up the smell of the body parts she had there.”

  Julia was always good at improvising and selling a story, much more than I was. This got Ken and Clive off the hook for how al-Hassah had ended up dead.

  “They didn’t want you breaking into the flat since they felt it was their tip. Ken and Clive are territorial like that. Besides, they never liked you after you ambushed them when you first met.”

  Jarrod grunted.

  “Do they have the body parts and the double secured someplace?” he asked.

  “I’m sure they do,” I said.

  “So now we have this chick running loose in London all set to pull off an act of terror,” Ariel said. “Fun fun fun.”

  “They don’t have access to guns,” Jarrod said. “They’re probably going to use a car and just drive it into a crowd somewhere in Central London, maybe go on a stabbing spree. That’s even if they don’t have a bunch of explosives.”

  “Benjamin, do you have a ping on Vanessa’s phone?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve been trackin’ her since this morning. She’s been on campus all day. Looks like she’s keepin’ up appearances by going to class.”

  “What about her car?” I asked. “Do you have it on GPS?”

  “Hang on,” he said. “Yeah. Looks like she drove it to school this morning. It’s in the college car park. Must’ve been the one she used to follow us the other night.”

  “Okay,” I said and addressed everyone in the van. “I believe Vanessa van Hooten is planning to use her car to pull off an attack on London later today.”

  “How do you know that, brother?” Jarrod asked.

  “I saw it in her eyes last night when she was slapping me about,” I said. “The man she loves is dead, so she wants to take it out on the world. It’s revenge.”

  “What makes you think she’s going to do something today?” Mikkelford asked. “An attack usually takes months for a cell to plan. Lot of recon, mapping.”

  “Because she’s impatient,” I said. “She’s not operating on a rational level here. It’s an off-the-cuff act of nihilism.”

  “She could have explosives in that car that she’s planning to detonate,” Mikkelford said. “Maybe drive it into a crowd of people somewhere, run as many over as she can, then blow herself up and take out a whole city block.”

  “Okay,” Jarrod said. “We need to get to that car and check it out, defuse any explosives if it has any.”

  “Or,” I said, “we could phone the police and report the car and let them send in the actual bomb squad to deal with it.”

  They all looked at me for a second, then laughed. Even Benjamin was laughing, a bit too loudly, on the Bluetooth.

  “Good one, brother,” Jarrod said.

  Even Julia looked at me rather piteously. The gods laughed longer than everyone else. Louise shook her head.

  “I had to put that option out there,” I said, and off their blank stares: “Really? You’re going for it? You’re not getting paid for this. We tell Marcie, she tells her station chief, he calls the local authorities—”

  “Who will fuck this up,” Ariel said. “Your cops are good at acting after something happens. We’ve never been too impressed with the
ir response when shit is actually happening.”

  “She’s right about that one, mate,” Benjamin said.

  “We’re actually doing this?” I said. “We’re going after a bunch of terrorists?”

  “What if Marcie’s station chief decides not to call the Brits for whatever reason?” Ariel said. “Like they don’t want to tell the Brits how they got the information or why it was happening? They might just let it happen and see where the pieces land.”

  “And why do you care?” I asked.

  “A messed-up London is bad for us,” Ariel said. “It’s one of Colonel Collins’s favorite cities. He’d hate to see this place plunged into chaos. It’d make his coming over for high tea really suck. And we have major clients here.”

  “And you can defuse a bomb?” I said.

  “Not our first rodeo,” Dubois said. “I’ll handle any explosives if we find them.”

  “Dubois,” Jarrod spoke on his Bluetooth. “Would you kindly ask the three gentlemen if they were all the members of their sleeper cell so we don’t have any unexpected company when we do this?”

  “Way ahead of you, Sarge,” Reyes said. “Answer’s negative. They think our guys killed about three of ’em yesterday and they were the other half apart from Ms. van Hooten.”

  Jarrod looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “We didn’t kill anyone yesterday,” he said. “Would that be your two alpha gorillas’ handiwork?”

  “That was how they ended up with the one you picked up in their flat,” I said.

  “For civilians, you folks have been awfully busy since this job started,” Jarrod said, a mix of mild irritation and respect in his tone.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Jarrod drove the van to the campus and dropped off Ariel and Mikkelford. Mikkelford, with his ginger beard, jeans, and backpack, and Ariel, with her tattoos and jeans, easily passed for grad students milling around the entrance of the school building, chatting and checking their phones.

  We then dropped Dubois off in the car park. Benjamin fed him the license number and color of Vanessa’s Golf GTI, which was a surprisingly modest car given she could have bought a Mercedes or a BMW. Everyone communicated via Bluetooth headset. The gods didn’t need Bluetooth. They could hear us all just fine.

  Dubois found the car and pretended to get down to tie his shoelaces so he could inspect the undercarriage.

  “Not seeing any wires or explosives on the underside,” he reported. “I’m guessing it’s inside the car. She might be driving this thing into town, like over to the Embankment, plenty of targets nearby. She could go to the West End, Picadilly, Westminster, and blow herself up where it’ll make the biggest statement.”

  “Class should be over in about fifteen minutes,” Benjamin said.

  “Sarge, I could open the trunk or the driver’s seat,” Dubois said. “Don’t know if she might have booby-trapped the door. What’s your call?”

  We were a few hundred feet away from the car, but if it went off, we’d still be caught in the explosion if the GTI was packed with Semtex in the boot.

  “When Vanessa comes out,” I said, “we have to distract her in case she tries to remotely detonate the car.”

  “Stand by,” Jarrod said.

  “Copy that.”

  “You can’t let Vanessa see you,” Julia said to me. “She thinks you’re still in that garage or dead.”

  “I could snipe her from the roof across the street when she comes out,” Ariel said. “Got a clear view of the front entrance. Put a bullet through her brainstem before she can reach a detonator. Mikkelford could be my spotter.”

  “Too many witnesses and bystanders,” Jarrod said. “Too many variables for what kind of chaos that could unleash.”

  “Guess we have to do up close and personal, then,” Ariel said. “My favorite.”

  “Can somebody give me a phone?” I said.

  “What are you going to do?” Julia asked.

  “I’m going to be the distraction,” I said. “Benjamin, give me her number.”

  When the students came out of the building, it took four minutes before Vanessa van Hooten walked out.

  “Let her walk past you,” Jarrod told Ariel and Mikkelford.

  I dialed.

  “Vanessa, we didn’t finish talking when you left the garage last night.”

  “What the fuck?” she answered.

  “We have the head. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Let’s make a deal.”

  “The only deal you’re getting is death, fucker,” Vanessa said.

  “Okay, then we’ll just toss it in the Thames, shall we?”

  “NO!”

  “All right, here’s my offer. Let’s meet in Trafalgar Square, by the fountain, and I’ll bring the head in a bag.”

  “Fuck you. You don’t even know the kind of hell I’m about to send you to.”

  “Let her walk clear of the building and the bystanders,” Jarrod said to Ariel and Mikkelford, who were now following Vanessa.

  “If you want the head, you don’t want to set anything off. I’m offering you a chance to walk away.”

  “It’s too late for that. All my life I’ve seen what bullshit everything is. My father and his TV news and papers, the whole fame thing. Nothing meant anything till I met Hassan, and you took him from me.”

  Vanessa could have ransomed me for the body parts the night before, but she thought I was MI5 and wanted to kill me for revenge and to send a message. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her to make that play.

  “So, what, you’re just going to throw an epic tantrum?” I said. “Grow the hell up.”

  “Listen, motherfucker, I’m sick and tired of assholes like you always trying to make a move on me thinking you can glom off my name or my money—”

  Ariel quietly walked up behind Vanessa and stuck her with a stun gun. It happened so quickly that the passersby missed it. Anyone looking over would have seen Ariel and Mikkelford supporting Vanessa as she went slack, then grabbing her under the arms and walking her into the van. They put her in the back, shut the door, and bound her wrists and ankles with zip-ties as Jarrod drove into the car park, towards Dubois.

  This was the second time in as many months I’d witnessed Ariel sneaking up on someone. That seemed to be her specialty, that and her skills with a sniper rifle, which I hoped never to witness.

  Ariel took Vanessa’s purse and searched it.

  “Found a detonator,” she said.

  She passed the car keys to Dubois. He smashed the window on the driver’s side and checked inside to make sure there were no wires before he opened the door and popped the boot.

  “Looks like C-4,” he said. “Wired to a detonator, but no timer. Basic job, totally analogue. Give me two minutes.”

  “Take your time,” Jarrod said.

  Dubois cut the wires connecting the C-4 and removed the detonator rods. Then he got in the car and we drove off to Interzone’s safe house, where he secured the explosives.

  TWENTY-TWO

  We returned to Golden Sentinels and told Roger, Cheryl, and Marcie what had happened, leaving out the part about Ken and Clive grabbing and killing al-Hassah two nights before.

  “I always had faith in my boys and girls,” Roger said, beaming.

  “And you managed to grab one of the doubles as well?” Marcie said.

  “We recorded him on video and everything,” Ken said proudly.

  He opened his phone and played it.

  On the screen, al-Hassah 2.0 sat on a chair facing the camera.

  “My name is Mohammed al-Hassah. It is true, I am the sixth cousin of Hassan al-Hassah. Our fathers were brothers. I was given plastic surgery so that I would look more like him, in order that I can serve as a double for him. I do not know how many doubles he kept. I may have followed him for years, but I never had the heart for the acts of violence and bloodshed he advocated. I had made contact with the Americans a year ago and told them I wanted to defect, in return for all the knowledge I could giv
e them on the network my cousin had established. They were not very interested in what I could tell them. I was eventually contacted by Vanessa, who told me that they needed me to continue to live as a sleeper in Paris until they needed me. She said when the time came, my being a double to Hassan could be very important. I just did not want to get killed. I thought they might order me to act as a double agent, to deliver false information or inform them of any imminent danger, but they never did. I was left alone for more than a year. They told me to ‘sit tight.’ It was very difficult for me, as I looked just like Hassan after the plastic surgery. Occasionally, I would be required to stand in for him in a videotape, reading out a statement pledging to continue our struggle against the ‘infidels’ of the decadent West. For the rest of the time, I would remain in hiding in the mosques and safe houses around the city, barely seeing any sunlight at all.

  “I had been in hiding with another sleeper cell in Paris when Vanessa van Hooten phoned me a few days ago, and told me to come to London immediately, that she needed me to pose as my cousin in London. She told me that this was part of a grand plan the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to play on the British MI5. My blood became like ice, because I could tell she was mad. I believed if I went along with her plans, I would likely end up dead. I finally made contact with the French Secret Service and offered to defect to them. Unlike the Americans, they were overjoyed at my offer, since I knew almost everything Hassan knew, including his training at the hands of the Americans, and the French very much wanted all the inside information on the CIA. However, before I could arrange to give myself to them, Vanessa had some men take me to a private airfield and fly to England. I was taken straight to Vanessa’s flat and told to wait there, until your friend broke down the door and took me out of that place. I will be forever grateful to you for that.”

  “See? Aren’t you glad you didn’t kill him?” I said to Ken and Clive.

  “We’re a pair of fuckin’ heroes,” Clive said. “Still bothers me, him lookin’ like that piece of shit, though.”

  “I told you they’d pull it off,” Roger said to Marcie. “Even Ravi.”