Smoke and Mirrors (21 page)

Holding Brad’s head, I knee-walked the length of the Rover, inching as Alasdair and the doctor pulled him onto a makeshift stretcher. Once out, I slid to the ground and ran my hand along the side of his slackened face. “Damn it, Brad, stay with me.”

He didn’t answer, and my nerves began to fray again. I searched the doctor’s face.

“Let’s get him in,” he said.

We entered the safe house and laid him out across a dining table. I could see Jones in the corner, snarling like a caged animal, his hand held out unwillingly as other agents worked to remove the suitcase. My eyes flicked back to Brad’s closed ones. His color seemed worse, if possible, and my insides felt drained of life.

I’d been too bloody slow to warn him. Too slow to recognize his symptoms.

It’s why you’re not supposed to treat members of your family, idiot.

Family.

I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. Especially like this. I now knew exactly why my words of comfort did nothing to help him. He bore the responsibility, rightly or wrongly, of Sammy’s death. Just as I’d have to live with his.

If living could mean breathing without wanting to. Eating without tasting.

If living could mean having no purpose.

One purpose
, I amended. If Brad died, I’d bloody well make it my life’s goal to find the fucking asshole that was responsible and repay the favor a hundred fold.

Alasdair repeated, “What happened?” and pulled me out of Jones’s earshot.

“
You
tell
me
what happened. How the hell did our sweepers miss a sniper armed with an assault rifle? And how the hell did cyanide get in that salt?”

Composure. Always composure. “We’re working on it. Unfortunately, C’s involved in a closed meeting with the Prime Minister. Something to do with the Russians and the Chechens. He’ll call as soon as he’s able.” Alasdair didn’t sound particularly reassuring, which made things worse.

Brad’s body, hammering again, distracted us, and the doctor turned him and shoved a trashcan beneath his gasping mouth. I fought an urge to step back and be sick myself. It reminded me of the time in primary school when my entire class vomited after Declan MacDonald ate a worm.

At last, Brad lay still. I swiped someone’s sweatshirt from the back of a chair and wiped his mouth. I felt utterly useless, having little experience with poisonings of this sort. I willed the doctor to speak, to give me anything to pin my dying hopes upon.

As if reading my mind, he glanced at his watch and said, “All we can do now is wait. I expected him to be sick, Parker. And like it or not, it’s a good thing. Any remaining poison’s been expelled from his stomach, and what’s made it to his blood stream will be countered by the injection. I’m going to patch up his shoulder and give him a transfusion. You’re welcome to help.”

Poison might not have been my forte, but I had stitched up my fair share of knife and gunshot wounds. So I set about disinfecting and stitching up the nasty hole while the other doctor administered several pints of Brad’s own blood, kept on hand for just such emergencies.

We finished up fifteen minutes later, and I was scrubbing my hands again when I noticed the label on Brad’s blood bag – B Negative. But that wasn’t right. I’d seen Brad’s records when he’d first come to me. It was a thick, detailed file, and I’d not forgotten.

His mother had been B Negative, but Brad was not. So she’d been one of the first women to receive Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics rhoGam injection to prevent her body from making antigens against his.

“This isn’t right.” I held up the bag. “Brad’s B+. I’m certain of it.”

“Maybe it’s mislabeled. Doesn’t matter anyway. It’s his blood.”

I saw his point, but it infuriated me. Once I got back to SIS, I’d have a word with the phlebotomist who’d packed it. I’d also recheck Brad’s file.

I looked down at Brad, so very still, and decided he’d want me to try and catch whoever did this to him. I put a hand on his, and slowly but surely, everything seemed to start tumbling into some semblance of order. Someone wanted Jones to die. Wanted everyone to think the sniper had taken the dirty-bomb. Was it Raul? Did he think by poisoning Jones and shooting Brad and me he could keep both the money and the uranium? Had he double-crossed Jones? Or had Jones been in on it? Was he told that the EMT’s would resuscitate him after he ingested cyanide salts? Resuscitate him and then give him half the money and De Torres’s position in the drug-dealing world?

It had been one hour since the assault at The Villa; Raul would have no idea if their plan had been compromised. And if Jones was in on it, could we get him to the meeting spot in time?

I’d killed the two guards and regretted their silence now. If Jones was supposed to die, we’d never know where they were planning to rendezvous with the uranium.

But we could trace Raul’s whereabouts, and therefore we might still be able to find their third partner – the nameless ‘Russian’ who had probably masterminded the whole thing.

Brad and I had both been considering his role separately, toying with the idea that neither Raul nor Jones had the respective opportunity or intelligence to pull off such a multi-faceted deal.

Brad, cigar smoke curling up from his slightly parted lips, had said,
‘He’s probably a genius at putting together those all white 10, 000 piece jigsaw puzzles. You know the fuckers I’m talking about. The ones that give you nothing to look at when they’re done…”

I had known exactly what he meant. There was a peculiar sameness about people who put together picture-less puzzles; one that summed up our elusive suspect. He got a joy out of planning which went way beyond the end product.

Renewed with hope, if not for Brad, than for the capture of his enemy, I motioned to Alasdair. “The tracer’s locked on Raul. If Jones can confirm his whereabouts, then we’ll know they were planning to meet again. Can we force him to tell us what he knows?”

Alasdair nodded and approached Jones. “You’re going to do us a little favor, Stephen.” Withdrawing a box from his pocket, our DIF lifted the lid and unclipped an innocuous bracelet.

Worry etched Jones’s pudgy face. “What’s that?”

Alasdair got down on one knee, mocking a proposal. “With this bracelet,” he paused and snapped it on Jones, “I thee wed. And since I wear the trousers in this marriage, you’re going to do just what I ask.”

“What the bloody hell is it?”

Alasdair pulled out his mobile. “You’re going to pretend the plan went awry, that the shooting started before you could poison yourself. Then you’re going to tell him De Torres was killed and you grabbed Alexandra because De Torres had cuffed the uranium to her. Because if you don’t –” Alasdair tilted the mobile toward Jones. “I’ll send enough electricity through that bracelet to stop your bloody heart.”

“But I’m not supposed to meet with Raul. I didn’t know about the cyanide. Honestly…”

Alasdair touched the mobile’s screen, causing Jones to jump. It took seven progressively stronger shocks to do the trick, but eventually, Jones confessed that he was to have been poisoned. He wasn’t certain how. It would only be a little bit. Even knowing that, he’d picked at his food. He assumed, like with snakebites, they’d give him something that was easily counteracted. But he wanted to make certain he hadn’t ingested too much.

The ambulance drivers were to have resuscitated him. Then he would be dead to the world and could reap more money from the second sale of the uranium. He and Raul would enter their respective codes and split the bonus funds.

Lord knew how he thought he’d be brought back to life, prove he was dead without a body, and sell an item that had half of the world’s foremost intelligence agencies looking for it. But then again, Jones wasn’t known for his intellectual capabilities. He did however confirm Raul’s whereabouts.

Which left me in the passenger seat of the stolen Range Rover, cuffed to the same bar Stephen had been. The handcuffs were easily removable, but better than that, they contained both tracking and recording capabilities. Focusing on my alias’s reaction to being kidnapped once again, I pushed thoughts of Brad’s still-unconscious figure out of my head. There would be time for that, but it wasn’t now.

We got to the tiny village of Secondo by dark, jostling along in silence as the Rover made its way up a steep trail to an as-yet-unseen hideout. Passing through thick brambles, we emerged at last in a small clearing which held a dilapidated cottage and a second jeep. Raul and his pilot appeared, assault rifles at the ready.

Raul fired a round off into the air above the Rover.

Hands up, foot kicking open the door, Jones stumbled out, his words jumbled in terror. “Don’t shoot! It’s me, Stephen. I needed to steal a ride. Things went bad, but I’ve got Alexandra and the bomb. See for yourself; she’s cuffed to the dash.”

Raul looked confused. “We aren’t to meet until you sell the suitcase. What the fuck is going on?”

I kicked open my door. “You double-crossing piece of shit!”

Raul, lulled by my tears and idle threats about how I was going to do to him what had been done to Giovanni, lowered his gun and indicated his pilot do the same. He walked forward until he was close enough to lean against the roof. He reeked of marijuana and his girlfriend’s Patchouli-based perfume.

So I blasted my heel into his balls. He doubled over, swearing between desperate attempts to breathe. I let the rage of Brad’s poisoning flood me. “You fucking bastard! He paid you your shares after finding you a buyer who guaranteed your freedom. And what do you do? You have him shot!” My next sentence was cut off by the pilot’s fingers digging into my throat. He’d reached in through Jones’s open door and was trying his best to choke the life from me.

Twisting again, I kicked at him, hitting his face and knocking his glasses away. I guess he was far sighted, because he never saw my foot move, and my next kick sent him flying into the door jam where he knocked himself silly and sagged slowly out of my reach.

Heart slamming, I turned back to face Raul. Strangely enough, he appeared amused by my antics. “A wildcat in anger is a wildcat in bed.” Still bent at the middle, he reached out to touch my face. “And I’ve got a great little hideaway where no one will hear you scream. Now get out of the car after Jones unhooks you, and if you try anything, I’ll shoot your kneecaps. I like women on their backs.”

Muttering under my breath, I allowed Jones to unlock the cuffs and relock them behind me before I followed him into the one-roomed building. Paint peeled from its abandoned walls, mouse droppings littered the corners, and save for a table, an ashtray, and the laptop I’d seen Raul use at The Villa, it was empty.

“Do you think SIS can get back their payment?”

Jones was damn right to be worried.

Raul seemed to grasp the notion that they could very well lose it if he didn’t get it laundered quickly. Dropping a cigarette, he opened a screen on his Blackberry and texted someone. Then he gave the laptop his attention.

We stood around the computer while Raul typed in a series of codes that brought up his bank account. I watched as he dumped his newly acquired funds into a series of randomly numbered accounts – likely Caribbean banks notorious for laundering drug, human, and arms trafficking monies.

He then did the same to Jones’s money, asking him for his access codes, and finished up with numbers I recognized as those belonging to De Torres. Accounts that also held all of Alberto’s seized wealth. I watched with suitable awe as he cracked each and every code with unbelievable ease
. I
had been privy to the majority of codes, and even I would have been hard pressed to navigate the system so easily.

It was as if he already knew them.

“Jesus,” I breathed aloud. “You’ve got someone in SIS, haven’t you? That’s how you got a sniper past the security sweep, how you poisoned the salt.”

Pausing from his nearly completed transferal of the huge sums of money, Raul eyed me with fresh suspicion. “What do you mean ‘poisoned the salt’?”

“You didn’t know the salt on our table was laced with cyanide?”

He shook his head and hit the last key. “What makes you so certain it was?”

“De Torres died from cyanide poisoning.” Now Jones looked confused, which didn’t bode well at all.

“What the hell do you mean you didn’t know about the cyanide?”

“Stephen was supposed to be poisoned with his dessert, my dear Alexandra.”

Which explained the mashed tiramisu. But if these two didn’t know about it, who had?

Someone who knew Jones liked extra salt on his glass.

Everything led back to a mole at SIS. And if there was a mole within our organization, then it meant, despite the protection of Jones’s bracelet and my backup team, I was on my own.

Someone intended for Raul to move all the funds into one secured location before…

The front door swung open, and we all glanced up expecting to see the pilot. Instead, our eyes met a tall, athletically-built stranger wearing a ski mask and carrying a mean looking Sig Sauer semi-automatic .357 complete with a New York Trigger.

Raul swung his rifle upward, but died when a bullet slammed into his head. Leaving his own weapon to crash against the floor, Jones shouted, “Don’t shoot!”

The gun’s second bullet, a 9mm in a 10mm case, answered Jones with its own version of ‘No!’

Wondering who the fuck our newcomer was, I said, “Not a fan of theirs either?”

The ski mask twitched where a mischievous mouth smiled despite the fact his gun was still leveled at me.

I worked my cuffs until my hands came free. “They just transferred all of their money. Stole my boyfriend’s share as well. I remember some of the numbers if that’s what you’re after.”

He crossed the room with unusual grace, indicating with his free hand that he wanted me to move away from the laptop. I did so slowly, stepping back and kicking the end of the briefcase that had dropped unobserved to the floor. I used the sound to cover any noise my handcuffs made as they too fell to the dirt floor behind me.

If the noise unnerved him, he didn’t show it. Instead, he continued to hold the gun on me, reentering numbers I had just seen, until all the monies vanished into other accounts. I was utterly perplexed.