Her Nightly Embrace Page 21

#ourownpersonalholyfool

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It took five more minutes for my head to stop spinning before I could stand and think again.

  Think.

  I was fucked. I lost. They got her. Game over.

  The gods patiently stood there, waiting for me to do something, anything.

  No.

  There was one play to make.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed.

  It rang. It wasn’t switched off.

  “Hey, Ravi.”

  “Ariel. You all right talking on the phone while driving?”

  “I did this all the time when I was gunning a Humvee through Kabul while insurgents were firing rockets at us. No biggie.”

  “Just don’t let the police stop you.”

  “Please! Hands-free set. We’re cool.”

  “We are so not fucking cool!”

  “Oh yeah. Sorry about all that Mata Hari stuff with you. We had fun, though, didn’t we?”

  “So I was just an assignment for you? Ever since we first met on the plane from New York.”

  “Yeah, but you’re cool. I didn’t hate any of it.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “So I guess I should say, no hard feelings? It wasn’t personal?”

  “This is where you say we’re all professionals?”

  “I wouldn’t be that mean.”

  I could hear Sandra screaming under her hood in the backseat.

  “Guys, could you keep her quiet? She’s so annoying.”

  “Don’t hurt her!”

  “Relax.”

  “I’ve seen what you did to her boyfriend and Jack Higglesworth. You bastards relished too fucking much.”

  “Hey, for Jarrod, it’s a job. He just does it. Me, I figure we should have some fun while we’re at it. Better job satisfaction.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Oh, honey,” she laughed. “We’ve been over this. You like crazy. That’s why you were into that Julia chick, that’s why you flirt with Marcie at the office.”

  “Look, don’t torture her. Don’t hurt her.”

  “Why are you so hung up on saving her? She’s not your personal friend. She’s just a mean bitch who got her boyfriend and some dude in the office killed for a payday. You don’t even like her.”

  “She’s my client, and I’m responsible for her.”

  “Ah, ethics. That’s so quaint. Listen, it’d be easier for all of us if she was out of everybody’s hair. She’s the cause of all this bullshit. She’s that chaotic little butterfly that fluttered its wings in the City and causes a tsunami of mayhem all the way up the Dow Jones.”

  “You can’t just murder her!”

  “Dude, we’re solving a problem. Just like you do.”

  “We don’t kill people!”

  “Really? What about Ken and Clive?”

  Christ, they knew all about us. Like they’d kept dossiers on us, everyone who worked for Roger. How long had this been going on?

  “How can you just, be so casual about all this? After all your talk about spirituality, finding your path?”

  “Ravi, this is my path. I’m not Chaos. I’m part of the force that fights the chaos. And I get paid for it.”

  “What about your karma? What about your soul? Have you thought about the cost to all the killing you’ve done? How that—that eats away at you? How killing someone kills you, too? Have you thought about how it’s going to hollow you out?”

  “Yeah. And you know, I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t feel hollowed out at all. I’m still little ol’ me. Same as how I always was. I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I’m a sociopath. I have the psych evaluation to prove it.”

  “So everything you told me was a lie.”

  “Honey, I never lied to you. I really did work in a bank in Chicago. I really do want to seek my spiritual path in India. I just never told you what I did before. I was in the army, I was in Iraq and Afghanistan. I did my tour and got out, got bored, Jarrod and Collins offered me a job. Travel, medical, and benefits. My dream job.”

  “Don’t hurt Sandra.”

  “Ravi, come on. You’re still charging her credit card. No one will know she’s dead for days, weeks, even months if we do it right. It’s a win-win for everyone.”

  “Not her. Do you even know what was on the files she took?”

  “We have an idea.”

  “She doesn’t have the files. We do. And we’ve read them.”

  There was a pause on the line.

  “Ariel?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m proposing an exchange. The drive for her. We’ve all had a bit of excitement today. That was very bracing. I suggest we all go back to home base, get our heads back, then talk again. But you do not touch Sandra.”

  “Or what?”

  “You’ve been dropping bodies in London. The police are already investigating. We keep this on the down-low, you give us back Sandra for the drive. You even break a fingernail on her, and we will shop you to the police, give them the drive, and you and your client suddenly become very famous. That’s the deal.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  And chuckled.

  “I love this. Oh, Ravi, don’t ever sell yourself short. You are way too interesting to ignore.”

  “Don’t dump this phone. I will talk to you. Only you. Not that murderous nutter Jarrod.”

  I hung up.

  My head was reeling, and not from the flash-bang. My world had just been stuck in a blender and set to “liquefy.” I’d bought Sandra some time. First things first, call Benjamin. Go back inside and check that Ken and Clive were okay. Call Benjamin. Sort out the slashed tires on the car. If any of the neighbors called the police, we would have to sort that out, say it was vandals or something, hopefully Ken and Clive could smooth it over with them. Of course I remembered the license number of Jarrod’s SUV. Maybe we could trace it.

  We had to get back to the office, crack that fucking drive and find out what was on those files.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I had time to piece it all together in the taxi back to the office:

  Interzone had us in their sights long before this case. I was the newbie, so they sent Ariel to feel me out. Reconnaissance. She relished doing it quite literally. When they were hired by Holloway-Browner to get the stolen files back and went through the suspects at the bank, they got wind that Sandra Rodriguez had hired me. This would mean they’d been monitoring Golden Sentinels’ phones and communications. That was when they set Ariel back on me. When I was asleep last night, she must have gone through my pockets and cloned my keycard for the safe house.

  What I didn’t understand was why Interzone, a Private Military Contractor that handled international contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, would bother to keep tabs on Golden Sentinels, a private investigations firm with just a few international branch offices. Had Roger done something to piss them off back in the day? It wouldn’t surprise me.

  “Where’s Roger? Hang on, where’s Cheryl?”

  “Urgent meeting,” Benjamin said. “She made a couple of calls after you phoned earlier and the two of them were off like a shot.”

  “That’s just great.”

  “So you got flash-banged in the face, yeah?”

  “What of it?” I still had a headache and my ears were still ringing.

  “What was it like?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “I always wanted to know the actual physical sensations of getting flash-banged. Call it research.”

  I really was not in the mood, but Benjamin was not going to let this go until he got the data he wanted.

  “Blinding light, big bang. Inner ear fucked. Eyes stop working. Brain feels scrambled. Nausea. Wanted to fall over. Took ages for the senses to work again.”

  “Wish I’d been there,” Benjamin said wistfully.

  “Next time I’m going to get flash-banged, I’ll give you a call.”

  I walked over to Marcie.


  “You okay, dude? Sure you don’t wanna go to the hospital?”

  “What kind of relationship does Roger have with Interzone that they would pay us this much attention?”

  “What makes you think—”

  “Marcie, I’m sick of the evasions and the allusions to spook bullshit. We are up to our necks in it. Ken, Clive, and I could have been killed. What the fuck’s going on? What has Roger gotten us into?”

  The room fell silent.

  “Benjamin,” Marcie said. “You swept the whole office this morning, right?”

  “Every morning, per the boss’s orders.”

  “Okay,” Marcie turned back to me. “Here’s the deal. Laird Collins, the head of Interzone, is the most dangerous motherfucker on the planet—”

  “I know that. I already read the editorials.”

  “—but he’s our dangerous motherfucker.”

  “By ‘our’ you mean the CIA’s.”

  She didn’t answer. We were getting to the point where a nonanswer from Marcie was as good as a yes. And each time she didn’t answer only deepened the pit in my stomach.

  “Technically,” she finally said, “that means they’re on the same side as us.”

  “Bullshit. We don’t murder people.”

  We sat nursing our wounds. Ken and Clive were pissed off that they’d been wrong-footed. They hated to have the rug pulled from under them.

  Finally, Roger and Cheryl strolled back in from their errand.

  “Gather around, children,” Roger said. “And hear the tale I have to tell.”

  Oh, this ought to be good.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  WHAT FUCKERY IS THIS?”

  We all stopped to look at Roger. His Majesty demanded an audience for his latest performance.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I said, ‘What fuckery is this?’ to the high-and-mighty Laird-fucking-Collins. How dare he come into my town and pull this malarkey on my people.”

  “Is this true?” I asked Cheryl.

  “More or less,” she said with a shrug.

  “That’s where we were,” continued Roger. “I wasn’t neglecting you, my children. I look after my people. I tracked down—”

  “Actually, I tracked him down,” Cheryl said.

  “Yes.” Roger flinched. “Cheryl found the hotel where His Murderousness was staying while in town for the arms fair. She even got his itinerary and knew when he had a gap in his meetings with warlords and despots so we could ambush him.”

  “So where did you pull said ambush?” Mark asked lazily, knowing he was feeding the rhythm of Roger’s showmanship. He just had to put on a show, even to us, his employees.

  “Would it surprise you that the bastard was staying at the Chesterfield Mayfair? Nothing but the best for his poxy, born-again arse. We knew he booked up the whole tearoom for afternoon tea, one of his few weaknesses. With other bigwigs, it’s sex or dominatrices and whips and dog cages. With him, it’s his love for a civilized English tea with crumpets and champagne. That I might make him choke on his champers gave me great pleasure.”

  I glanced at Cheryl, who rolled her eyes.

  “He always has two armed bodyguards with him,” she said.

  “Didn’t matter. It was just Cheryl and I, alone and unarmed, demanding he call off his fucking dogs.”

  “Bit late for that, isn’t it?” I said. “Two people are already dead and they have our client.”

  “Well, I impressed upon him that we are in England, the First World, not some village in Mosul where they could just bump people off willy-nilly.”

  “Not to mention that we’re supposed to be on the same side,” Cheryl said.

  “What ‘same side’ is that supposed to be?” I asked.

  “Why, Western Democracy, of course,” Roger said. “Western values. Market capitalism.”

  “The CIA,” Cheryl said.

  “And we now have a conflict of interest,” Roger said. “Interzone have been tasked with recovering the stolen files and hush up anyone threatening to blow the whistle, and we have been hired by one of those people who are in their sights.”

  “So what are the chances,” I asked, “that any of us here might end up one day mysteriously and ‘accidentally’ dead? Car accident. Mugging. Drug overdose. Slashed wrists in the tub. Stepping off a rooftop. Faked autoerotic asphyxiation like poor Darren Cowley.”

  “Blimey, you have been keeping score,” muttered Ken.

  “Never say never,” Roger said without batting an eyelash. I guess he’d thought about all this, too. “But what’s keeping that from happening is that technically, we’re on the same side as Interzone.”

  “We don’t kill people,” I said. “Not in our brief, anyway.”

  “We’re at the service of our clients,” Cheryl said. “And at the end of the day, the biggest client we have is the same one they have.”

  “The CIA,” I said.

  “We call ’em the Company,” Mark said.

  “Why should the CIA care?” I asked.

  “Daddy doesn’t like to see the kids fight,” Olivia said. “Makes everyone look bad.”

  “I might as well see this to the end,” I said. “I’m fucked anyway.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Roger smiled. “Now back to work!”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Cheryl, what’s all this between Roger and Collins, anyway?” I asked.

  “Roger and I know Laird Collins from back in the day,” Cheryl said. “The CIA recruited him out of the military, and he was born again then, too.”

  “So he actually believes he’s doing God’s work?” I asked. “All that stuff he says in interviews about bringing about the Apocalypse and the Rapture?”

  “Absolutely sincere,” she said. “That means everyone he kills, everyone he sells out, is all perfectly justified in the name of the Greater Good. He truly believes he’ll be welcomed by God into the Kingdom of Heaven when his Time comes, that his accounts will be balanced.”

  “But he had a soft spot for you didn’t he, Cheryl love?” boomed Roger from his office. “Still does, I reckon.”

  Cheryl stared daggers at Roger from her desk.

  “Collins’s nickname for her was Cheryl the Wild.”

  She knew from my look that I would ask, so she preempted me.

  “All because I stole a car so that the three of us could escape a riot in Brixton.”

  “Riot—? How long ago was that?”

  “This firm was barely a thought then,” Roger said. “We were practically still kids. I was just getting an inkling there was money to be made from private eye work. Cheryl sort of fell in with me.”

  “Roger was hired to find some posh girl who’d run off with her Jamaican musician–drug dealer boyfriend. I knew who he was. We ran into Collins because he’d been sent after him for some black bag work he did back in Jamaica. He was on a reconnaissance mission and was green as us then.”

  “And it was more than you nickin’ that motor, Cheryl. There was the Molotov cocktail you chucked, that drug den you blew up with the gas explosion, and that toerag you kicked several shades of shit out of. That’s right, Ravi. Our Cheryl wasn’t always the prim office manager you see before you. She was a full-on punk with a Mohawk and rough leather jacket and all, one of the few half-English, half-black punks we had in London.”

  Cheryl continued to glare at Roger as he wistfully recounted their salad days.

  “That was when Collins took a shine to her. He wanted to ‘save’ her. I think he really wanted to save her marvelous bum as encased in those leather trousers. But she was mine. And she wasn’t havin’ none of that.”

  “Collins left the CIA around 2000 and set up Steerbridge. After September 11, the War on Terror was a boom time for him. He has contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, all from the CIA, various governments and corporations.”

  “That’s why you don’t ever want to end up on his radar, Ravi lad,” Roger said, bitterness rising in his voice. “That bas
tard’s fucked me over on more jobs than I can count in the last ten years. One day I’m going to fucking destroy him. And I’m going to enjoy every second of rubbing that into his sanctimonious mug, and show him what useless bollocks his beliefs are. The Torah trumps his born-again fantasy bullshit.”

  “Damn you, Ravi,” Cheryl muttered. “For dredging all that up today.”

  She turned away, the topic closed, and went back to typing up their meeting with Collins. I was about to protest that I wasn’t the one who brought it up when it all came flooding into my head: the sad, failed love story of Roger and Cheryl. For a long time, she loved him. He might have loved her, too, but his lust for power and prestige proved stronger. All that was over now, with his trophy wife and their relationship now strictly business but filled with the disappointments of their shared history. How much and how often he must have let her down over decades. All they had now was this firm.

  Looking back, I should be grateful now that Marcie took me by the arm and led me back to my desk.

  “You still need to crack Sandra’s drive,” she said.

  Olivia was still sulking at her desk.

  “Any luck cracking the password?” I asked.

  “What do you bloody think?”

  “You didn’t even try, did you?”

  “Why bother? It’s finding the right haystack before we can even look for the bloody needle.”

  “Can’t you feed it through a program to run the combinations?”

  “You’re talking about trillions upon trillions of numbers, letters, and special character combinations, never mind words. If it’s a string of two or three randomly combined words, that’s even more infinite. I’m better off doing sod-all than to try to guess or run it through any program.”

  “Look, Darren Cowley wasn’t a genius. He had a punter’s grasp of security. At best he might have been slightly above average when it came to encrypting that drive with a password.”

  “Then this is on you, Ravi. You’re the one who talked to him. Didn’t he leave you some sort of clue?”

  “I barely heard ten sentences to Darren before they killed him.”

  “Did Sandra say anything? Something about the two of them or their relationship that might have stood out? He would have chosen something simple and personal for him as a password. Perhaps something unique that brings her to his mind? One word? Two words? Perhaps three, tops?”