Consumed by Fire (24 page)

He still wasn’t sure what his best move was. Just because Clement was dead didn’t mean he was—they were—safe. The hierarchy of the far-reaching Corsini family had a long memory, and while Dimitri Corsini had been only a senior adviser and accountant, the rest of the organization had reacted to his execution with rage. His death had sent their complicated accounting system into chaos, and he’d been family. The Corsinis didn’t deal with that sort of thing very well. They wanted Bishop, believed he was the executioner, and he had no interest in telling them otherwise. He could have garroted Corsini just as easily as Claudia had, albeit with lingering Catholic guilt about committing such a sin on holy ground, but he wouldn’t have taken pleasure in it as Claudia had.

He would be in danger until the Corsinis’ ugly trade was smashed, and they were close, so close. The Committee still didn’t know if the corruption stopped with His Eminence or went higher, but once they’d taken care of business, things should ease off a bit.

The problem was Evangeline. Claudia was no longer trustworthy, so his original legal attachment to Evangeline would do little to protect her. At least Claudia was in Japan, trying to push her way in on Taka’s mission, and he could be counted on to keep her busy. By the time he dissolved the marriage, Evangeline would have faded back into the woodwork.

Severing any connection with Evangeline would go a long way toward destroying her value as a hostage to anyone who wanted to get to him. He should have seen that coming sooner, done something about it, but since he never went near her, apart from her bigamous wedding day, he would have thought no one would realize he had that one connection. It was almost impossible to hack into the Committee’s tangled power structure, but, just in case, he’d had several of his friends take turns keeping an eye on Evangeline. That way no one person could be traced if someone was lucky enough to get past all the firewalls and security.

Committee operatives needed to be free from entanglements—otherwise they were too vulnerable. Not that people hadn’t worked around it: Peter Madsen, the head of the original British-based organization, was the first leader who had not only a wife but two children. They were kept safe through a combination of surveillance, discreet guards, and Madsen’s reputation. It would take a madman to attempt to get to Genevieve Madsen or his precocious daughter Izzy—and his five-year-old son was almost more terrifying than Madsen himself.

Most operatives left the business when they made the mistake of caring about someone too much. Some worked on a contingency basis, like Bastien Toussaint, some had disappeared into the ether, like their previous boss, Isobel Lambert and her true love, Serafin the Butcher, aka Thomas Killian, the former CIA agent. And some carried on as always. The Japanese contingent, Reno and Taka, had the backing of the Yakuza as well as the Committee, and they were untouchable, but Finn MacGowan, after three years as a prisoner in the Andes, had settled down into relative domesticity. Falling in love was a definite problem in the Committee—lone wolves like Claudia and Ryder were much more effective.

Not, of course, that falling in love had anything to do with him or his current mess of a situation. He’d been thrown together with Evangeline when he’d expected never to see her again, and the reverberations could be felt all the way to London and beyond. He had to get her back, secure in her backwater college, with the assurance that no one would connect her to him, no one would touch her.

He wasn’t sure how he was going to manage that, but Ryder would help. The two of them had their hands full—not only did they have to track down and terminate the Corsinis’ New Orleans operation, but also they had to set up the framework of the Committee in the United States. Having London serve as the hub was getting more and more complicated, and it only made sense to branch out into the US. If there was a situation going on, a group that was causing trouble, planning some atrocity, it was almost always connected with his country, and Bishop had fought long and hard for a US branch. All they had to do first was to track down the man behind this particular horror scene and kill him.

He leaned back, looking at the bright blue sky. Merlin had finished with his territorial concerns and flopped down beside him, at exactly the right position for Bishop to rub his head. A flash of regret went through him at the thought of Merlin disappearing from his life forever, but then, he’d already been gone for more than eighteen months. Just because he hadn’t gotten rid of his bowl and his dog bed didn’t mean that he thought he was coming back. He
wanted
Merlin with Evangeline. As long as one of them was with her she was safe, and he knew he wasn’t going to be anywhere around.

Fuck
, he thought savagely. He wasn’t going to bitch about the unfairness of life—he’d chosen this, he was still choosing this, and there was always a price you had to pay for the decisions you made.

He pushed himself off the grass, getting to his feet, and Merlin followed, moving to the door of the Winnebago to stand guard. Bishop needed to walk off his edginess. They weren’t going to set off until early afternoon, and in the meantime he needed to keep his distance from Evangeline. Last night, or was it this morning, had been too intense, and he needed to keep focused on the job at hand. He looked at Merlin, who was sitting patiently by the steps up into the RV.

“Come on, boy,” he said.

Merlin didn’t move.

Bishop stared at him in surprise. Merlin was too good a dog to disobey a direct order. “Merlin, come!” he said, making his voice stern.

Merlin whined slightly, but he didn’t move. Bishop shook his head. He wasn’t going to sink that low, he wasn’t. But Merlin wasn’t moving, and there was no need to guard Evangeline right now. Merlin had no intention of leaving her.

He had no choice, though it galled him to do it. “Come on, Merlin. Walkies.”

Merlin did a little dance in place, but apart from that he wasn’t doing anything Bishop suggested. “Traitor,” Bishop muttered beneath his breath, and then headed off into the woods, leaving his wife and her bodyguard behind.

Evangeline didn’t want to wake up. She was curled up in bed, a soft, fluffy duvet wrapped around her, and as long as she stayed there, she didn’t have to deal with him. She didn’t even have to deal with facing her own culpability—she could just hide. It seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do, until she heard Merlin whining at the door, and while she could ignore calls of nature, she couldn’t ignore her dog. Wrapping the duvet around her nude body, she stepped out onto the floor. Directly onto her discarded shorts and underwear.

Kicking them out of the way, she opened the door, steeling herself to face Bishop. But he wasn’t there; it was only Merlin waiting to get in. She backed up and let him past her, then looked out into the thick forest of pines. There was no sign of Bishop. With extreme luck he’d left her there, safe in a camper with all the comforts of home. Was he expecting her to drive for help? Or sit there quietly, waiting for his return?

If so, he was in for a surprise. Bishop wasn’t the only one who could hotwire a car around here. She shoved the bed platform up and out of the way, refusing to think about the state of the sheets, and moved to the driver’s seat. One look told her she was shit out of luck—this wasn’t really a 1970s Winnebago, no matter what it looked like. The dashboard was a computerized nightmare, and while she was relatively good at technology, she was iffy when it came to upscale vehicles, never having been able to afford one herself. Besides, she could hardly drive off stark naked and wrapped in a duvet.

“Where’s your asshole friend, baby?” she asked Merlin, who cocked his head. “No, you don’t think he’s an asshole, do you? It takes a woman to appreciate his full asshattery.” She headed into the back of the camper to investigate. She hated using toilets in RVs—nothing could keep them from eventually permeating the living space. She hadn’t taken into account the space-age facilities someone, or something, had supplied Bishop, and she took a look at the tiny closet-like room with awed appreciation.

A quick shower went a long way toward restoring her battered self-respect, clean clothes helped as well; but most useful of all was Bishop’s absence. If he’d left her, and she only hoped he had, then eventually someone would come back to get them out of there. Maybe it wouldn’t take that long for her to walk for help, and she’d try that eventually. First, she needed food.

The kitchen was another marvel, and it didn’t take her long to cook up a frittata with fresh zucchini and mushrooms. She accidentally made too much, and she would have fed it to Merlin, but despite that asshole’s assertion, human food wasn’t good for him. She even found the high-end kibble she fed him, leaving the rest of the frittata on the counter while she continued her exploring.

She couldn’t believe her luck when she found a laptop tucked behind canned food, and she pulled it out with a cry of triumph. She slid onto the bench of the dinette and opened it. Password protected, of course, providing nothing but a blank screen. The damned thing would probably explode in her hands if she did the wrong thing; but she had no intention of giving up without trying, so she started with the passwords, including the obvious “user” and “guest.” The computer belonged to someone called Edmunds, which she assumed was either Bishop’s real name or another alias, so she went on with the slightly less obvious “B1sh0p” and “Us3r.”

No good, so she moved on to forms of Merlin interspersed with numbers, Winnebago, anything she could think of. In frustration she typed in “asshole” and “a55h0l3” but obviously it didn’t work.

“I can do this,” she told Merlin, who was lying peacefully at her feet. “I’m good at stuff like this.” The problem was, everything she knew about James Bishop was a lie, so she sat back, racking her brain for anything that could possibly be true. She tried “Claudia” and its permutations, and at last, in total frustration and fury, she typed in “Evangeline.”

“Stupid idiot,” she muttered to herself. If she was going to be an idiot, she might as well go all the way. She threw in numbers for every vowel, cursing herself, then finally tried “EvANGELin3.”

The screen opened. She stared at it in complete astonishment, then glanced down at Merlin. “He did this on purpose, didn’t he?” she said severely. “He made the computer easy to find and did this to keep me busy. Asshole,” she muttered.

That word was getting tiresome—she had to think of something new to call him, but right then she wasn’t feeling terribly creative. She turned back to the screen and let out a frustrated curse. The laptop was demanding another password, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be “Evangeline” again.

She could play with that later. The screen also offered a shining golden opportunity. You could sign on as a guest, which she immediately did, only to be confronted by a generic Windows interface. She spent an hour searching through every possible path to documents, hidden files, and Cloud files, but it was as if the computer were absolutely clean. She knew it wasn’t—getting past Bishop’s next password would open a world of answers, but that wasn’t going to happen. She could only make do with what she had, and she gave in to the curiosity that she’d always refused to indulge. Google was her friend, and she went back to the tiny village of Cabrisi, the hotel, Claudia and James, and at the last minute threw in the tiny church of St. Anselmo to see what she came up with.

She was so engrossed in her discoveries that she didn’t even hear Bishop return. The side door slammed, and suddenly he was looming over her, shoving the laptop closed and yanking it out of her reach. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded in a dangerous voice.

So much for morning-after love talk, she thought, eyeing him warily. “You didn’t think I’d just curl up in a little ball and hide, did you?”

“That’s what you wanted to do last night.”

She knew her face whitened. He was prepared to fight dirty, was he? What else could she expect? He didn’t know she could fight dirty too.

“It’s a new day,” she said brightly. “How do you happen to have Internet access here?”

“Trade secret.” He shoved the laptop back where it came from, then slid into the dinette opposite her.

“What trade, may I ask?”

“You may not ask. At least I know you couldn’t get anywhere on the laptop. It’s password encrypted.”

She looked at him directly. It was hard, staring into his sea-blue eyes that were so flat and expressionless. “I got through the first one,” she said.

She expected him to be defensive, angry, but instead his mouth quirked up in a tiny smile. “Bet you liked that.”

Asshole
, she thought. “Of course that’s as far as I got. You must have two or three more levels.”

“Seven,” he said flatly. “So exactly what did you discover? I know you couldn’t have gotten anything off the computer itself, and the Internet wouldn’t be much more helpful.”

Ah, triumph
, she thought, warming. “Oh, not much,” she said. “There was no trace of a man named James Bishop who resembled you in any way.”