Enemy Agents (30 page)

PART FIVE:

I EXPECT YOU TO DIE

35

William Thorpe was pulled from the trunk of a car after a two-hour drive. The stops and starts near the end made it clear that he was in a city, and given where they’d started, it was obvious that city was New York. The mercenaries who pulled him out of the car—his arms were bound with a loop of metal ribbon that had cut him on both wrists—were not the same goons who had loaded him into the car. They hadn’t made the trip. From what he had heard through the car, those guys were all going “to the project.”

The new goons were dressed in suits, but underneath they were carved from stone. They were clearly former military, the sort of guys Globection liked to hire as contractors. They were in a parking garage. It was just Thorpe, the two suited men, and the car’s driver, Fatale.

“You’re doin’ so good, Willy.” She said with a smirk, pulling at the elastic that held her hair and letting her tresses fall over her shoulders. She was dressed down today, in a pair of black yoga pants and a long sweater. Even without makeup her looks were enchanting, dangerous. She was letting the hair down for someone else’s sake. That and the parking garage were all Thorpe needed to be sure.

“You’re giving me to Mercier.”

“I always give gifts to boys on naughty lists,” she said with a sarcastic smirk before turning her attention to the pair of gigantic thugs. “Heel, boys,” she mocked, snapping her fingers and pointing toward an elevator ten metres away.

One mercenary grabbed Thorpe’s arm and marched him behind Fatale. The second man opened the back door of the car and pulled out Thorpe’s briefcase from the back seat.

They rode the elevator without speaking, although the superior smirk on Fatale’s face had triggered the urge to insult her. Just a little pithy comment to remind her who she was dealing with, but somehow, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

There was a churning in his gut, tightness in his chest, a buzz behind his eyes.

He was about to be in a room with Mercier.

Oh, how Thorpe had waited. His adrenaline was rising as fast as the elevator.

The doors parted as Thorpe was ushered into a large sitting room. Mercier had the entire top floor of the building, and his actual office was only in one corner of it. The rest was opulent meeting and sitting space, something to wow clients and politicians. You could see all of Central Park almost as soon as you got off the elevator. The chairs were leather, the wood on the counters a warm brown. The wall with the elevator was surely concrete, but it had been covered in old wood that looked like something you’d see in a century-old gentlemen’s club. “Hugo Zoeli” was nouveau riche, but he did it well.

There was even a well-stocked bar along the right wall. Thorpe looked at the half-full bottles and felt his hands quiver.

The mercenary pushed Thorpe toward a cushy leather armchair and shoved him into it, his wrists still bound. The other laid Thorpe’s briefcase on the coffee table, then placed Thorpe’s cell phone on top. The two thugs moved to positions standing behind Thorpe’s chair, no doubt to hold him down if he tried to attack Mercier. Fatale stretched languidly across a loveseat, each of her movements deliberate and slow. She watched Thorpe, an eyebrow cocked, and smiled. “Don’t worry, Willy. You did good for us. Mrs. Willy even got to have her breakfast shake this morning.”

Thorpe finally found the will to speak, but it wasn’t a pithy pun or a swaggering taunt like he usually offered up. He was too angry, too broken, for that sort of thing now. Instead, he looked her in the eyes and told her, “When I kill you, it’ll hurt.”

“William Thorpe: the very definition of class,” said a slightly accented voice from behind him. Martin Mercier had done well to adopt an American accent, but an experienced ear could still hear the continental French underneath the phoney New York Italian.

“Martin Mercier.”

Mercier came around the chair, dressed in a tailored suit, hair slicked back, holding a cell phone. “The name’s Zoeli. Please, don’t get up.” He lifted fatale’s legs off the arm of the loveseat, tucked himself under them, and sat back down, letting her drop her legs back over his lap. “So, Thorpe, we meet again. What’s it been?”

“Twenty-three years.”

“Oh that’s right. Your honeymoon.” Mercier’s phone beeped. He looked at it briefly, then set it on the side table. “Sorry, business is booming.” Mercier shifted uncomfortably, as if something was poking at him. He reached behind himself and when his hand came back he was holding a Glock pistol, which he absentmindedly placed next to the phone. “Damn things always get in the way,” he said with a toothless smile.

“Twenty-three years,” Thorpe almost growled as he repeated it.

Mercier still smiled. “I want to clear something up. I know you think I tried to kill you and accidentally shot your wife.”

“Don’t try to deny it!”

“OK. OK.” He held up a hand and tried to look contrite, but his face was still viciously playful. “I did fire that bullet. But here’s the thing. You think I was hired to kill you, and I took my shot, and it missed. And your wife’s brain-dead because of me. That’s what you think happened.”

Mercier turned to Fatale, “My dear, I’m sorry you have to hear this part.” Back to Thorpe: “I shot the bitch on purpose. You think your wife was an angel, but she was a snake. A Judas. I paid that bitch—”

“Julia!” Thorpe screamed, jolting forward so hard he almost jumped out of the chair, but the hulking guards shoved him back into his seat. Mercier looked pleased.

“—I pai
d
Juli
a
some very good money to make sure I disappeared from MI-6’s database. But she let me down. So she had to go.”

“She wasn’t a spy,” said Thorpe. She had been a secretary in a corporation Thorpe had investigated. Julia had been just another well-placed woman whom Thorpe used to get close to a powerful and dangerous man. But then she had been so much more than that. She could touch his heart in ways no other woman could, and his heart still beat a little faster whenever he saw her, even after all these years in the hospital. She hadn’t been a spy. That was his life, not hers. She had been another victim of William Thorpe’s lifestyle, another woman who suffered for Queen and Country and Agent Triple-Eight.

“She was a better agent than you, Thorpe. You’re a drunken, womanizing sexist and you always were. But Julia was the real thing. She could get close to any man and make him feel like he was the most important person in the world. Make him feel real, genuine love for her. She did that for you, didn’t she?”

Thorpe’s face twisted as he fought to think of anything to say. Julia wasn’t a spy. His life with her wasn’t a lie. She was his wife.

“She played you and you bought it, but you never even knew that while you were working her for MI-6, she was conning you for MI-7.” Mercier rubbed his hand along Fatale’s leg. “I know because she did it to me first.”

Thorpe couldn’t look at Mercier anymore. He had to let his eyes sink to the floor while Mercier kept talking. “I thought I had tamed her, just like you did. I thought she would betray England for me, erase my photos and my fingerprints, get my name out of all the files. But she backed out, she left some of my information intact. She took my money, broke my heart, and betrayed me.”

Thorpe lifted his head again. “We found your prints on those documents, even after the Digamma plot should have erased them from our records,” he said, knowing that he shouldn’t say it. He knew that once he started matching the real facts with Mercier’s fiction, he’d never get it out of his head, but the story fit. He had been a sucker, thinking that Julia was an innocent victim, when she had been a higher-level agent the whole time.

“It was unfortunate that you fell so hard for her. If only you had known what a duplicitous bitch she really was, you wouldn’t have spent all those years visiting the hospital.”

“So what do you want with me?” Thorpe asked, his voice quiet and resigned.

“I want you to move on. Show that lying bitch that she can’t ruin your life anymore. Take her place in my organization. Destroy my files at MI-7, and you can live out your days sleeping around in Jamaica like God intended.”

Thorpe shook his head, tears welling in his eyes. “You want me to betray the Service.”

“I want you to be free of it. Free of her. Be your own man for once.”

The tears squeezed out when Thorpe closed his eyes. He let out a shuddering breath and looked Mercier in the eyes. “So she betrayed you. She betrayed you and then she married me,” responded Thorpe. “She was loyal to her country, and to me. What she did was lie to a murderer and a fool to keep her country safe. And thanks to Julia’s choice, you can’t go on pretending to be Hugo Zoeli any longer. You want me to be a traitor, because Julia was a patriot.” Thorpe’s eyes cleared as he stared into Mercier, and the tears stopped flowing. “I’ll never betray England. Arresting you will mean finishing her work.”

Mercier shrugged. “We both killed people for a living, but let’s face it, Thorpe, I did it better. I made better friends. Friends,” he waved, gesturing to the opulent setting, “in high places. You only made enemies and got women killed. Once you and that Canadian kid are dead, Martin Mercier returns to the ether and Hugo Zoeli carries on. I have other friends who will make sure of that.”

Thorpe still stared hard into his enemy, his determination growing with each poisonous word Mercier spoke. “I don’t need friends,” said Thorpe. “I’ll kill you myself.” Mercier’s fake smile finally slipped, and he picked up the gun without ever looking away from Thorpe’s staring eyes.

Fatale interrupted the stare-down, flipping her long legs off Hugo’s lap, momentarily blocking his eyes to break up the staring contest between the men, before spinning out of the loveseat and standing up. She put her hands on her hips and talked down at Mercier. “OK, you got your British boy-toy. Now give me what you promised.”

Zoeli rolled his shoulders, his face relaxing out of the tense, coiled posture it had taken in his talk with Thorpe. “The money’s already been transferred to your account. Now show me what’s in the case.” Fatale sighed, and marched over to where the bodyguard had set Thorpe’s metal case on the counter. She moved the cellphone to the countertop and tossed the case onto the sofa next to Mercier, where she had just been sitting.

“That case is all he had with him in the car when he thought he was going to arrest you. Just some booze for the old boozehound. He had no evidence.”

Mercier flipped open the case to find the bottles, glasses, and martini shakers. He shook his head and made a disappointed
tut-tut
sound before examining around the edges of the case for hidden compartments. Eventually he was satisfied, so he caught Fatale’s eye and then nodded toward the elevator doors. “Just call the right-hand elevator down from the roof.”

Fatale trotted over to the wall and called the second elevator, and it descended just slowly enough for everyone to watch as she awkwardly fidgeted, not sure of what to do with her hands. When the doors opened, she rushed toward someone, wrapping her arms around him.

“I knew I’d see you again,” she said.

“Just had to lay low for a while,” said the man.

She slipped her arms off him and down his body, so that they ended up holding hands like high-schoolers when they walked back toward Mercier.

Mercier smiled for them. The smile was just as fake as the rest of Hugo Zoeli’s life, and Thorpe only hated him more for it. “Now,” Mercier said to Fatale, “you have been paid in full. I’ll be in touch if I ever need to hire you again, but for now the job’s done. The project will be ready soon, Scarret has the password, and Harry Milton’s dead. You’re free and clear.”

Fatale nodded and headed back toward the elevator, pulling her boyfriend’s hand as she went, but the man lingered. “I’m not done with Mr. Hershey yet,” said Mercier. Fatale stopped and turned.

“What do you mean?”

“He still owes me for saving his life. You’re done, but he has one more job to do. Head on down to the lobby, he’ll meet you there.”

Fatale looked disappointed and disheartened, her entire posture sagging, but she obeyed the order and dutifully walked into an elevator and closed the doors. Mercier waited for the elevator to move down before waving for the man to speak.

“So what now?” asked the boyfriend. Thorpe had never met him, but from the name it was clear that this was Pete Hershey, another traitor from Quarrel’s office.

“Now you finish what you started in Ottawa. And when it’s done I want you at the Teacup. It’ll be up and running soon.”

“Understood,” said Hershey, who seemed to have no emotion about any of this. Hershey walked over to the second elevator and followed Fatale down to the lobby, never once looking back or saying anything to Thorpe.

“Finish what he started?” asked Thorpe.

“Sure,” said Mercier, standing up and walking over to the seat where the guards held Thorpe. “Quarrel still hasn’t been taken care of, and Fatale knows too much about me. I didn’t get to be Hugo Zoeli by leaving loose ends.”