Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  I thought back to everything I heard Darren say. We only had the two conversations, not enough to get any real insights beyond his resentment at Sandra and fear for his life. Nothing the last time I spoke to him on the phone. That left the first time I met him, outside Sandra’s door. Again he was all gak-fueled rage and panic. Didn’t really say anything memorable except . . .

  except . . .

  “Try ‘manicpixiebitch,’ ” I said.

  Olivia’s fingers finished typing that before I even finished the sentence.

  Presto.

  “Huh, no special characters, not even numbers. Typical,” Olivia said.

  And the contents of the drive opened themselves up to us. Her fingers typed faster than we could follow as she opened up file after file of emails, account details, transactions, charts, proposals, prospectuses. Figures danced down the screen, currencies shifted from pounds to euros to dollars and back again.

  “Interesting,” Olivia said. “We’re looking at a self-sustaining investment portfolio, driven by bots to generate a self-driven and growing income pool.”

  “So what is it, exactly?” I asked. “Some kind of slush fund? Whose accounts are these?”

  “It belongs to one client.” Marcie said. “All these companies listed as the account holders? If you run a trace on them, you’re going to find they’re all dummy corporations with letterheads, a couple of offices and PO boxes but hardly any staff.”

  “So who is it?”

  “Do I have to spell it out, Ravi?” sighed Marcie. “There’s only one client that could possibly have the funds and resources to set all this up in this much secrecy.”

  That sinking feeling, back again.

  “The CIA.”

  “You win the prize.”

  “Did you know about this slush fund?” I asked Marcie.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I see the elegance of this,” Olivia said. “Take some black funds, set up a large, rotating investment portfolio that accrued interest to create a fund to pay for various outsourced, off-books operations, and take the burden off the American taxpayer. Conscientious, in their own way.”

  “That fund,” Roger said, suddenly appearing behind us every time a result was met. “Would be the coffers that would pay us, if the Company should hire us to do some freelance intelligence gathering, and pay Interzone for a security operation, an extraordinary rendition, or eliminating certain problems.”

  “The Company can’t be seen anywhere near this fund, since it’s not supposed to exist,” Marcie said. “So of course they outsource it to a favored contractor to get the leaked documents back.”

  “Yeah, I can see people getting killed to keep this secret,” I said. “And professional courtesy is what’s keeping them from knocking us off? That’s what Jarrod meant earlier?”

  Roger laughed.

  “Don’t you get it yet, old son? We’re expected to cooperate. And you’ve given me—er, us—a nice bit of leverage over them. We know the details of these accounts, more than they do.”

  “And that’s how we’ll get Sandra back in one piece,” I said.

  “What? Oh yeah,” Roger said absently. “That, too.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  I still had Mullins to take care of. I phoned him and said we had the password for the drive. We arranged to meet down the pub.

  “You brought your PR tottie with the tits,” Mullins leered. “All this for little old me?”

  “I’m just here to vet anything that might adversely affect our client,” Marcie said.

  “And Benjamin here is our IT,” I said. “He’s got the password and will talk you through the steps.”

  Benjamin opened his laptop on the table and booted it up.

  “First round’s on me,” I said. “Vodka tonic, right?”

  “Good memory,” Mullins said. “You’re not totally useless after all.”

  I walked over to the bar and ordered Mullins’s drink, the vial I got from Mark hidden in my hand. As the barkeep handed over the vodka tonic, I tipped the liquid into it and slipped the vial back into my pocket.

  I brought the drink over to Mullins, and he practically grabbed it out of my hand.

  “Cheers! You lot not having anything?”

  “Too early for us, dude.”

  “Chin-chin!’ Mullins said, and downed it with one gulp.

  He took Sandra’s thumb drive out of his pocket and brandished it like a wand. He was the cat that ate the canary, a bottom-feeder who thought he had the winning lottery ticket.

  He plugged the drive into Benjamin’s laptop and waited for it to show up on the screen.

  “Come on, then. What’s the password?”

  “fuckface123,” Benjamin said.

  Mullins dutifully typed it in with two fingers.

  The drive didn’t open up its files.

  “Or what?” Mullins muttered.

  “Type it again,” Benjamin said. “fuckface123.”

  Again, no change.

  “Come on,” Benjamin said. “fuckface123.”

  Mullins typed it again, stopped, and finally realized what Benjamin had been calling him.

  “Are you taking the piss?” He glared.

  “You must be typing it wrong,” Benjamin said. “fuckface123.”

  Mullins’s face went red with rage.

  Benjamin and Marcie burst out laughing.

  “Right! That’s it!”

  Mullins pulled the drive out of the laptop and got up to leave.

  “Come on, mate,” I said. “Sit down.”

  “I don’t know what game you think you’re running here, but you just proved to me this is a big fucking deal. And you are going to regret fucking with me.”

  He started to storm off. Benjamin and I got up after him.

  Mullins barely took two steps before Mark’s drug kicked in. His eyes rolled back in his head and his legs went wobbly. Benjamin and I caught him by the arms before he went down in a heap. As we guided him back to his seat, I reached into his jacket and took the thumb drive.

  We left him unconscious at the table and walked out, nice and smooth. To all eyes in that pub, this was not the first time Mullins had passed out drunk at his table.

  “Not the first time we drugged a journalist,” Benjamin said with a shrug. “Won’t be the last.”

  Another first for me, though, and a totally shitty one.

  THIRTY

  Olivia confirmed the drive was identical to the first one we had gotten from Sandra. That included the password that unlocked it.

  “Good,” Roger said as he took the second drive and put it in his safe. “Nobody knows there’s a second drive, so let’s keep it that way.”

  “Why are you keeping it?” I asked.

  “Always useful to have some extra leverage on tap,” Roger chirped.

  “Now that we know what’s on the drive,” Cheryl said, “there’s no way we can give it to the Post.”

  “So sod ’em,” Ken said. “They tried to blackmail us. Now they’ve got nothing.”

  “Nah, we should give them something,” Mark said. “Just not exactly what they were expecting. We might need them on our side in the future. Best not to burn any bridges if we can help it.”

  “So we still want to keep the bed warm with the Post?” I asked, disgust in my voice.

  “Ever heard of the term ‘useful idiot’?” Marcie said. “That’s somebody of influence who helps out with your agenda without even knowing it.”

  “You’re saying we turn journos like Mullin, Vankin, and whoever we have in our address book to into our useful idiots?” I asked.

  “Sure. They’re assholes. Might as well make ’em our assholes. Spokespeople, celebrities who drink the Kool-Aid champagne. Anyone who’s going to publish. It’s all PR in the end. In principle any journalist can be a useful idiot.”

  “Always handy to have some on our speed dial. The more the merrier,” Roger said.

  Marcie was still grooming me. I realized that now
. She’d been quietly teaching me these tools since I got this job. And I hadn’t resisted, because the lessons had been useful.

  “It’s an old-school spook term,” she said, knowing I couldn’t stop being curious. “The Soviets were using it all the way back to the 1940s. Since the Cold War was in swing, it’s been a definitive term ever since. I like it a lot better than ‘fellow traveler.’ It has a better layer of insult to it.”

  “So what are we going to give the Post?” I asked.

  “Leave that to us,” Benjamin said. “Olivia and I have a brilliant idea.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  David spent nearly an hour on the phone with the lawyers from Holloway-Browner, who were making threatening noises, but since they couldn’t in fact prove we had their stolen documents, they couldn’t do more than that. He fulfilled his brief of shielding Sandra from them, and managed to coax from them the name of the man who set them after her, namely Stuart Powys, her former boss.

  “Did you ever think it would come to this?” I asked.

  “Christ, no!” David said, shitting bricks. “If I knew we’d end up dealing with black-ops killers, I would never have gotten you this job!”

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t blame you.” I said.

  “Ah, cheers, mate. You have to believe me, I thought it’d be a cushy enough job that kept you from going off your nut with boredom.”

  “Why would you be concerned about me getting bored?”

  “Are you joking? You become a moody sod when you get bored. And we had the maddest times back in uni. When you dropped the religious studies, you became a right lump, with the breakdown and the visions of gods and all that. It broke my heart, mate.”

  “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

  “Of course not. You were too busy being depressed and weird, talking about gods. So when you lost the teaching job, I was afraid you’d go into that rut again and never come back.”

  “So you thought I should become a private detective?”

  “To be honest, I wasn’t sure Roger would hire you, but he saw something in you like I thought he would, and here we are. I thought it’d be good to have us watching each other’s backs at this firm. In case you haven’t noticed, our colleagues are stark raving mad.”

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “You’re my mad friend.”

  “Yeah, fair enough.”

  When David got nervous, he would talk a lot and spill his guts. It was one thing to feel pressure from his family of high-flying Nigerian immigrants who expected him to go far; it was quite another to come within kissing distance of trained paramilitary killers, which was the type of social interaction David was ill-bred and ill-prepared for. All he ever really wanted was to be a lawyer who helped structure business plans and helped stave off lawsuits. Like the rest of us, Roger had seduced him into working for Golden Sentinels with his plans for global expansion and domination. David treated the company like it was a start-up and Roger had been very pleased with his work. Roger wanted to tap David’s family connections in international banking and business, and the work kept David’s parents off his back. Eventually, David planned to run for political office after he’d shored away all his contacts and important friends in his work as a lawyer.

  As far as David was concerned, meeting up with Interzone was beyond his brief. Apart from fearing for his own skin, he was feeling genuinely bad for me.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “They’re not going to kill us. Yet.”

  And with that, I headed off to my meeting.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I arranged to meet Ariel in Green Park, the most public place I could think of so nothing violent could happen without loads of witnesses. A goose was all set to attack an American tourist who was trying to feed it some bread.

  “Hi, babe,” she said.

  For a life-and-death meeting, Ariel was her usual chipper self. She looked like an American tourist in London who saw everything as fun and interesting. She even smiled when she saw me, and she didn’t seem to be faking her cheerfulness. Context was everything. I now saw her as someone utterly without boundaries.

  “Are you seeing any gods right now?”

  “Did you know about that all along?”

  “We saw your medical records, so yeah, we know about your breakdown back in college,” said Ariel. “When you gave up the religious studies.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “What if you’re not crazy? What if you’re a shaman?”

  “Funny. My father brought up that idea a few months ago,” I said. “But I don’t buy it. Shamans don’t really fit in cities, especially not in the twenty-first century.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, babe. You get to see things I would kill to see. People usually have to take drugs to see what you see.”

  “Or take drugs so they don’t.”

  “Like I said, you are too interesting to ignore,” she said. “Even when our guys were grabbing Samir Langhani months ago, they noticed you trying to chase them down at the hotel.”

  “That was your lot that snatched Samir Langhani?”

  “Don’t be so shocked,” Ariel said. “The Company stopped sending their own guys on extraordinary renditions a while ago. They outsource to guys like us so they can have deniability.”

  “So you’ve been in our faces all this time, and I didn’t even know.”

  “We’re just that good.” Ariel shrugged.

  There were no gods around. No, Kali was there. The tattoo on Ariel’s arm. Signs and portents. Death and rebirth.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said. “You get the thumb drive, and we get Sandra Rodriguez back, breathing.”

  “That could be a deal breaker,” she said. “The Holloway-Browner side’s been too much of a leaky boat, and our job is to plug the holes.”

  “Right now, your boss and my boss are negotiating with each other to play nice. I suggested a compromise that your boss might be open to.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Call your safe house and get let me talk to Sandra.”

  Ariel called Jarrod and asked him to put Sandra on. She handed the phone to me.

  “Sandra,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “S-so far,” she stammered. “They haven’t laid a finger on me, but I think they’re waiting for the order. What’s going on?”

  “We’re going to get you out of there, but you need to listen to me. I’m getting you a new job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “What you do best,” I said. “Investment banking, managing a hedge fund.”

  “Why are you bringing that up now?”

  “Because you’re going to work for Interzone.”

  “What?!”

  “As an employee, you’re bound by confidentiality. The contracts are getting drawn up now.”

  “What if I don’t want to work for these fuckers?”

  “Then you’re going to meet up with Jack and Darren and talk about how you all ended up.”

  “How is this supposed to work?”

  “It plugs the hole you opened up when you nicked those files. If you’re Interzone’s investment manager, you’re entitled to know about and have access to those files. And think about it. Interzone has over a hundred million dollars distributed worldwide that they need someone to look after. You said you were the best at that, and thanks to Powys, you’re not going to get hired by any other bank out there.”

  “I suppose I could make this work.”

  “I know you can. So it’s a yes?”

  “Shit. Yes. Yes!”

  “David will sort out your contract and smooth over any rough spots with Holloway-Browner. The main thing is you agree not to leak the files you took.”

  “All right.”

  “When they took you, you were as good as dead. Think of this as being reborn.”

  I handed the phone back to Ariel and took out my own to set up the exchange.

  Half an hour later, Marcie showed up
with the thumb drive and Jarrod brought Sandra. Ken and Clive eyed Jarrod’s men murderously while Mark took Sandra to the car, and Ariel plugged the drive into a computer. I gave her the password, and she opened the files to verify they were the real thing.

  “Very smooth,” Jarrod said.

  “If you’d just given us a call in the first place,” Marcie said. “We could have saved a lot of time.”

  “And lives,” I said.

  “He’s not letting that go,” Ariel said.

  “There’s one last loose end,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Stuart Powys was your point man at Holloway-Browner and has been acting like he’s the boss of this whole operation,” Marcie said. “He’s not. The Company is.”

  “We let him think so to save time,” Jarrod said. “Alpha wannabe.”

  “He was getting paid a bonus from the Company to supervise the establishment of that account,” I said. “He was supposed to share that bonus with the team that put that account together. That included Jack Higglesworth, Darren Cowley, Sandra Rodriguez, and the three other investment bankers whose names I’m sure you have as well. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Jarrod grunted as he put the pieces together.

  “He used you to commit murder so he could keep some extra cash. Nothing to do with keeping the world safe. He’s put you lot in the frame for two murder charges.”

  “This is fun,” Ariel said, grinning.

  “As I see it, someone needs to be the face of this whole mess so the CIA can keep themselves out of it,” I said. “You lot have become a potentially embarrassing loose end if the police find out what you’ve been up to the last few days, and the CIA will deny anything to do with you, so I’m offering a solution to your problem, as well. Sandra Rodriguez only stole the files because Powys was a sexist prick who had her sacked, so this whole mess was his fault to start with. She never thought anyone would die. So why not lay the blame on the one arsehole who escalated the situation in order to game the system?”