Stay (11 page)

“You know me,” Amy repeated. “I thought I knew you, too.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Moving supplies around. Sitting behind a desk. That's not what you were doing in the Army, was it?” Amy sipped her drink again. “The guy driving our SUV today and shooting an automatic pistol out the window wasn't a pencil pusher.”

David drank club soda to buy himself a few seconds.

He sat the glass back on the bar and turned to her. She was watching him, not with hostility. Just waiting. Her eyes gleamed with the same alert intelligence that had attracted him in the first place.

A formidable woman. God help me if I ever cross her
.

“There are things I'm not allowed to talk about,” David said. “Not to anyone.”

“I'm your wife.”

“Especially not to my wife.”

She drained the Scotch and set her glass next to his.

“Do you want another one?”

She shook her head. “No.”

They stood looking at their empty glasses a moment.

“Holy crap, Major.” A voice behind them. “It
is
you.”

In his peripheral vision, David had already caught Larry's reflection in the bar mirror. He stood, turned and extended his hand. “Sergeant.”

Larry Meadows ignored the hand and swept David into a bear hug. They patted each other on the back, laughing. When they disengaged, David took a good look at his old friend.

Larry Meadows was a compact bulldog of a man with a bald head and very dark skin. He wore a sharply tailored double-breasted suit with a tasteful emblem of the hotel on the pocket, but whenever David thought about him it was in desert camo and a field rig.

The first time David met Larry Meadows, the master sergeant was saving his ass. He was part of a retrieval team meant to escort David back after one of his deep penetration solo missions. Larry and his squad were hunkered down a hundred yards from the Iran border, just inside Iraq. David was on the other side of the line, pressed flat against some boulders, pinned down by an Iranian patrol spraying AK-47 fire all over the place.

The sergeant's orders had been clear. He could
not
cross into Iran. It was Major David Sparrow's problem to drag his own ass back across the border into Iraq. The U.S. government would claim no knowledge of him if David got himself captured, but if he got himself back across the border under his own steam, Larry and his men would take him the rest of the way.

But David had sized up the situation, and it was obvious that if he ran for it they'd gun him down before he got twenty steps.

Without timely intervention, David was as good as dead.

Later, Larry would say that maps of the area were notoriously inaccurate and who could tell exactly where the border was anyway in that sunbaked hell. So he'd come in fast with his men and had driven the Iranian patrol back enough for David and the rest of them to hoof it out of there. Back in Basrah, David had spent a week's pay treating Larry and his men to drinks.

And Sergeant Larry Meadows could put away the beer.

Eventually Larry rotated back to the world and prospered in hotel management.

“So what brings you to my hotel, Major?” Larry asked with a big smile.

“You saved my bacon once,” David said. “I thought you might enjoy the chance to do it again.”

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

Dante Payne sat at his desk and stared at the phone. It should have rung hours ago, and when it hadn't he'd sent men to find out why.

Now he was waiting again for the phone to ring. He hated waiting. Not that anyone else
liked
to wait, but Dante Payne was hardly anyone else. Such mundane inconveniences were beneath him.

And yet here he was. Waiting.

A woman brought him a glass of red wine. Blond and tall. Short skirt. Her breasts were so large even Dante found them egregious.

“What is your name?” Dante asked.

“Michelle.”

“You're new,” Dante observed. “What kind of wine is this?”

“A cabernet sauvignon.” Michelle told him the label and vintage but her words were forgotten even as they left her mouth.

Women. A wine cellar full of rare and expensive bottles. A luxurious and obscenely expensive mansion. Various pricey automobiles. Wardrobe from the finest tailors in New York, Milan, and Paris. The desk at which he sat was a seventeenth-century antique.

None of it much excited him. There was a time when he thought it would.

Dante dismissed the woman, sipped the wine. It was excellent, and he didn't give a shit.

He stared at the phone.

Dante Payne had everything anyone could ever want and it wasn't enough. The more power and influence he accumulated, the more he wanted. The more he
needed
. It was every bit as much an addiction as cocaine or heroin.

That assistant DA bitch, Amy Sparrow, was a problem, one that—hopefully—would soon go away. Not because she was putting a case against him for racketeering and extortion—although, yes, there was that, too—but for the simple fact that she opposed him.

She opposed
him
.

Dante was an intelligent man and fully realized this childish flaw in his character, but that didn't stop his blood from boiling when he thought about her. That she—that
anyone
—would dare to stand in the way of even his slightest whim was not something that fit into Dante's world view. And if she'd seen what was on the flash drive, then all the more reason she had to die. And then he would recover the flash drive and they'd have nothing and Dante Payne could return unmolested to his endeavors.

The problem, of course, had started when the government man had turned on him. Dante should have realized, should have anticipated the possibility. Any man who could so easily be bought, could just as easily prove to be untrustworthy when the time came to—

The phone rang.

Dante picked it up and put it to his ear but said nothing. Another minor power play that Dante realized was petty, but he couldn't help himself.

The voice on the other end: “Boss?”

“Tell me.”

“We lost some guys. And they didn't get her.”

A pause. A sigh. This was disappointing news but not unforeseen. “The sister?”

“We checked her house. Nobody there.”

Dante considered. “Check the rest of the places on the list and call me back.”

He hung up.

Dante knew instinctively his men would come up empty, but leaving stones unturned was not his way.

The government man had been useful before he'd turned against Dante. His name was Calvin Pope. It had been Pope who had relocated Payne to America when he was no longer useful to the U.S. government in the Middle East. Dante learned that many like him were being relocated, men who traded their services and information for safety and a new chance on American soil. That's when Dante hatched his scheme. These men would be his soldiers, trained and dangerous men who would have similar ambitions to Dante's.

Like most Americans, Pope was pathetically susceptible to money and was soon in Dante's pocket. Dante would send the man a monthly cash payment, and Pope would relocate select candidates according to Dante's direction. Certain men Dante had known in his former life found their visas and clearances being expedited in record time and on transports to the States. In almost no time at all, Dante had a trained street force ready and willing to do his bidding.

It had all been so absurdly simple, and right under the nose of the American government.

And then a few months ago, a problem arose. The media uncovered the government program to relocate dangerous foreigners to live among law-abiding citizens. Congressmen scrambled quickly to protest and toss together oversight committees. Investigations followed. No politician of either party was eager to be seen as supporting any policy that put registered voters in harm's way, and there was fierce competition among those on the Hill to see who could protest mostly loudly.

Outrage was the fashion of the day, and midterm elections approached rapidly. Cable news pundits drew blood nightly.

That was when Dante decided Pope should be eliminated. His bosses would eventually be called in to testify before Congress, and as blame worked its way through the system in search of an appropriate sacrificial goat, there was too much risk that Pope's corruption would be uncovered and he would be made to tell what he knew. Pope himself would likely jump at the chance to testify in exchange for immunity.

Much simpler and safer for Dante to simply put a bullet in the back of the man's head and dump his body somewhere in Jersey.

It irritated Dante that he'd miscalculated.

Calvin Pope had been weak and corruptible but
not
stupid.

As an insurance policy, Pope had put the entire record of all his transactions with Dante, including the names and addresses of all foreign nationals improperly relocated, onto a password-protected flash drive.

That Pope thought himself beyond Dante's reach infuriated the crime lord. The audacity!

The absolute, unmitigated audacity!

Dante struck fast, hoping to take Pope and also lay hands on the flash drive, but he hadn't moved fast enough. Pope had eluded him and sent the flash drive to the DA who had ambitions to put a case together against him.

The problem had become a mess, and the mess had become a disaster.

Pope would have to be found and killed. The flash drive recovered and destroyed. The Sparrow woman eliminated also on the chance she'd seen the information on the drive. The
burn everything to the ground
strategy was far from subtle, but in this case it was called for. This was a case in which nothing less than bold, decisive action would do. Find the Sparrow woman. Find Pope. Make sure no trace of them was left upon the Earth.

But to accomplish these things, Dante would need a better class of bloodhound.

He checked his list of likely candidates, all men he'd instructed Pope to relocate from overseas. Capable, hard men with very specific skills. He narrowed the list of a dozen men to six and then again to four.

He opened his laptop and composed an e-mail, using code language, but his intent clear. His e-mail address was also a code name, and his tech people assured him that what he was doing was untraceable. He cut and pasted the message into three other e-mails. All four men would get the same message. He attached a picture of Pope and also one of Amy Sparrow.

By some instinct or perhaps on a whim, he attached the picture of the husband. If it turned out to be important, he could find out the man's name later, but he'd been at the courthouse for the shooting, and one of Dante's men had snapped the photograph with a camera phone.

Dante didn't know which of the men would be available or if they would even reply, but they were all hunters. Money was no object. They knew Dante would pay top dollar, and they would only take the job if reasonably confident they could complete it.

Dante hit Send and felt better. It was good to do something besides sit and wait.

*   *   *

He lived in the fashionable section of Buckhead in Atlanta. He'd done well since coming to America, had spent an appropriate amount of time in Manhattan in service to his sponsor before striking out on his own.

Atlanta suited him. Not too big or too small. Not too cold. An airport to take him wherever business demanded.

He enjoyed, without reservation, the life of the infidel. Allah would most definitely not approve of the tumbler of twenty-year-old Scotch or the fifty-dollar cigar, but he'd never been religious, not really, and America had to be the most godless place on the face of the Earth. His Armani suits and his Mercedes coupe were more a religion to him than anything that had ever happened in a mosque.

He sat at his computer, pulled his tie loose, and sipped Scotch as he scanned his in-box. The message from Dante, even coded, caught his eye immediately. He opened it and read carefully.

If Dante had one fault it was that his temper often resulted in rash decisions. He'd made a bad situation worse and would pay handsomely for a remedy.

Providing remedies had paid for many Armani suits.

He was available for the job certainly, but he would need to mull this offer before responding to Dante. He was just coming off a job and was due for some downtime. It was a perk of his success that he could pick and choose his assignments. He clicked open the first picture.

The woman was one of those well-put-together professionals, attractive without trying, just short of glamorous. She was the sort that demanded to be taken seriously by her male counterparts, a tedious type all too common in America.

He clicked open the other picture. It was a shot snapped quickly, a photo of a man in profile, turning away, but the image was good enough to make out—

He blinked. Looked at the photograph again.

He enlarged it and sent it to the wireless printer, producing a glossy five-by-seven print. He studied it carefully, took in the face.

He filled the tumbler with three more fingers of expensive Scotch. He emptied the tumbler in two gulps and filled it again.

He grabbed the phone and dialed. Someone picked up on the other end, and when he heard no voice he knew who it was.

“It's me,” he said.

A pause.

“I didn't expect to hear from you so quickly,” Dante said. “I appreciate your swift attention. Do you feel you can handle this matter for me?”

“Yes. But I'll need more money. I don't think you understand who you're dealing with.”

Another pause. “Explain.”

“I know the man in the photograph,” said Yousef Haddad. “And I can kill him for you.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“The penthouse suite takes up almost a third of the floor.” Larry Meadows ushered them in, gesturing at the plush surroundings. “Sitting room here, game room through there with a bar and a foosball table and pinball machines. Three bedrooms and a full kitchen. Two bathrooms. It's the owner's place, but he's in Monaco, so you're all clear.”