Текст книги "Blowback"

Автор книги: Emmy Curtis

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

CHAPTER TWO

Molly felt for her pocket. The envelopes were still there, thank God. She opened the door, but David slammed it shut.

“I’ll just be a few minutes. I just have to see Dr. Doubrov. It’s important.”

“Is that the guy you were holding hands with? He was shot, sweetheart.” He frowned at her.

Molly took a moment. Yes. He’d fallen down. He’d been shot? “Who shot him?”

David was silent for a moment, and her gaze rested on his face.

David. Here.

Hell, he looked good. All these months waiting for him, and he was just here.

When she had first really laid eyes on him, she was peeking at him through a window as he took an impossible shot into a trailer and saved them. He’d been drunk, and impossible. And she’d wanted him so much. Wanted to save him, to make him feel better. To stomp on whatever demons were keeping him from participating in reality. To run her fingers through his short dark hair. His eyes had been so sad, and he’d seemed resigned. Like he’d already given up on life. In that second he’d broken her heart as he’d saved her life.

It hadn’t hurt that he was tall, and built in the way only a career combat military guy could be. Broad shouldered, with hard arms that she just wanted to be wrapped in. When his dark eyes had rested on hers, the hard lines on his face faded, and although his lips remained pressed into a hard line, his eyes had smiled at her. She thought. Maybe she hoped.

Right now, all she could think of was that she wanted to touch his face. To kiss him. To understand what had happened to him, and what had changed. And he had changed. He seemed more in control, sober, obviously. He spoke with a lower voice. Seemed less…something. She couldn’t put her finger on the change. Her hand reached out to him, but she snatched it back before she could touch him.

She was on a mission. She was supposed to destroy the envelope she didn’t use, but in the end she hadn’t had time to give him either of the messages, so she figured she should keep them, but everything was getting confused in her mind. Should she destroy them both? Is there someone else she should give the message to? She had to keep working through the problem. If she stopped, she feared she’d break down and might never be able to pull herself together. She didn’t want him to witness that. She clenched her fists.

“Who was he?” David asked.

“He’s the Russian minister of antiquities. Alexandre Doubrov. Why would someone…?”

“I have no idea,” he said, leading her back to the bed. “But you’re not going anywhere. There was no way he’d have been able to survive that shot. I’m sorry.”

She nodded but said nothing. He’d died right in front of her. Poor Alexandre. She had to get hold of Brandon to tell him she’d failed. But she wanted the whole picture before she called him. She yawned. Suddenly sleepy.

“So what have you been doing this past year?” David said, his voice seeming miles away.

Her mind immediately went to the airport at Iraq, as it had a million times before. He’d grabbed her and roughly pulled her into his arms, telling her that he would find her and come for her. Then he’d kissed her forehead hard and departed with his old team of explosive experts on a mission, leaving her to return to the states. Damn him.

“What have you been doing since we met last?” she asked sluggishly.

He sat across the room from her in an armchair. “Giving evidence, getting my shit back together, you know, the usual.” He dragged the chair closer to the bed, still keeping his distance.

Her mind wasn’t really in the room. She was picturing Alexandre’s face as he’d caught sight of her. How his face had lit up, happy to see her there. How he’d kissed her cheeks and then how he’d jumped, a little startled, when he’d felt the contraband being exchanged. And then…he’d been shot. In front of her. Was it because of her? Suddenly she realized she was cold. A few seconds later she was shivering uncontrollably. Her brain ceased to work…at least in any meaningful way. All she wanted to do was get warm.

“Get in.” David gestured to the bed. She didn’t need to be asked twice. The huge fluffy duvet was calling to her, but she couldn’t seem to move. “You’re probably going into shock, Molly.” She felt his hands pushing her down.

“How back together is your shit, then?” she mumbled, fast losing the threads of consciousness.

“Not very,” his voice came from far away.

When she awoke, David was asleep in the armchair. She bit back a groan as she sat up. Her cuts stung like a motherfucker. She’d been cut by the vase, which had been shattered by the guy who’d shot her friend. She took a steadying breath. Okay. She could do this. Her country had asked her to step up, and she’d tried her best. But she wasn’t done. She hadn’t failed…yet.

She grabbed her phone and looked for Brandon’s number so she could text him. A quick glance told her that David was still asleep.

Mission not accomplished. Mission Impossible.

Crap, she couldn’t say that. She didn’t really know what to say. Maybe that was too much. Maybe someone was monitoring her phone. Was she paranoid? Getting too far into this? She deleted it and tried again.

Cocktail party was a bust.

There. No one could read more into that, surely. Besides which, a shooting at a G20 cocktail party was bound to be covered by all the news channels. She hit SEND and watched for a reply. Nothing. She pulled the envelopes from her pocket and felt them under the duvet. Was the message to blame for the shooting? Maybe it was a warning that he was going to be killed and she’d arrived too damn late to save him? Stupid effing airline.

“How do you feel?” David said, his voice making her jump.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, gingerly leaning back onto the pillows. “My back hurts, my friend…well my acquaintance, is dead, and I guess it could easily have been me, right? I mean if you hadn’t jumped on me?”

He stretched his arms above his head and she heard a series of clicks as his joints cracked. She winced at his grimace. And something in her softened. She wanted to touch him, to ease his pain, his past. A wave of warmth flooded through her as she watched him awaken properly. No, she couldn’t think that way again. He’d already broken one promise to her, she wasn’t going to get sucked into him again. But…she was alone in a hotel room with him.

“Don’t look at me like that, sweetheart,” he said.

“Like what?”

He gave her a “you know what I mean” look.

Before she could say anything, a weird vibration came from the other side of the room. A tinny voice. “Um, I think your trash can is talking. That’s…not right…right?” She held her head. This was all so surreal that there had to be a good chance that she was dreaming, or maybe locked in an asylum somewhere having a very specific delusion. David being in Greece, Alexandre being shot, the stupid message she hadn’t passed. No one could blame her for taking a second to see if things were actually real. She rubbed her eyes and shook her head.

David pinched her as he went by. “Yup. It’s all real.”

She opened her eyes, solely with the purpose of eye-rolling him, and saw him fish something out of the wastebasket and stick it in his ear. It took her a second. Oh, right. Must be an earpiece. Which kind of explained the fractured conversation she vaguely remembered from last night. Last night…

David shoved the earpiece in his ear. “What’s up?”

“Do you want to go on a field trip?” Mal asked.

How was he not hung over and still sleeping? That guy had the constitution of an ox. An ox on PCP.

“I’m kind of tied up right now,” David said, stretching again and shutting the bathroom door behind him.

“Nice work, mate. Wait. Literally tied up? You need help, or privacy?”

There was just no talking to him.

“What field trip?”

“To the sniper’s lair.”

A jolt flashed through him. “Yeah. That’s the sort of field trip I’m interested in.”

“You know the proper answer to that question should have been ‘No, we’ll let the authorities handle it’?”

“I’m not proper,” David said. Mal was right, but this felt personal now. He wanted to get answers for Molly. If nothing else, he could give her that.

“I thought you might not be. Meet me in the lobby in ten.”

“Roger that.” David took the earpiece out and eyed the shower. He was still in his suit pants and shirt from the night before. He needed to change. Nothing said “guy we need to question” like a disheveled guy in a tux following a night of death and destruction.

Eight minutes later, he emerged from the bathroom in jeans and a T-shirt, thinking about what he needed to take with him on the field trip. And then he remembered. Molly. Sweet, crazy, and injured Molly. What had she been trying to pass the Russian before he’d been shot? He had a concern that she was into something bad. He’d definitely witnessed the attempted pass. He didn’t imagine that. He didn’t think. But then he hadn’t believed Molly was actually there, even when he’d seen her. Maybe he was still teetering on the edge of insanity.

“Where are you going?” Molly asked from the bed.

She was lying back down again, on her side, looking sleepy. He grabbed a bottle of military-grade ibuprofen from his bag and shook out a horse pill. “Here. Take this before you sleep. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, okay?”

She nodded, and as she took the pill and glass of water, he fought every instinct to crawl in beside her, and wrap his arms around her as she slept. He’d killed someone to save her life in Iraq, and that had to mean something. She was his to protect now. What the hell was she into? Or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time? He wanted to know what was in her head. Why her eyes had lost that glow of openness he’d remembered. He wanted her so badly. Had been wanting her for months. He shook his head and reined in his impulse.

“Don’t go anywhere. I’ll wake you when I get back.” He hesitated and leaned down, swiftly pressing his lips to her forehead. He let himself out of the room and braced the door as it closed so the bang wouldn’t startle her, hanging the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the handle.

In the lobby, Mal was drinking coffee from an impossibly small cup and reading a newspaper. He didn’t acknowledge David’s presence.

David pulled out his phone and pretended to scroll through emails as he surveyed the foyer. There were two policemen behind the reception desk looking at a computer and one talking to the concierge. David stowed his phone and strode out of the hotel, snagging some tourist brochures from the concierge desk, figuring brazenness would save the day. It worked. Both the hotel employee and the policeman smiled at him as he left. You could get away with anything ninety-nine percent of the time if you smiled and appeared relaxed.

He hooked a left outside the hotel and loitered by a newspaper bodega. To his alarm, the English newspapers all led with the assassination of a Russian official at the G20 meeting. The Greeks were outraged that this had happened on their turf, and all the other coverage was speculating on why a minister of antiquities was the target.

“Not exactly low profile,” Malone said from behind him.

David just nodded and walked toward the next block. As soon as they were out of earshot of the bodega guy, Mal pointed to the left, and they took the road that led to the back of the hotel.

“So, who’s the bird?” he asked.

Of course that would be the first thing he mentioned. “Just someone I met last year.”

“Pre, or post fucked-up breakdown?” he asked boldly.

David shot him a look, trying to figure out the line of questioning. He wasn’t one hundred percent sure about Molly and what she was doing last night, but that was his problem and he wasn’t going to lay her open for Mal to investigate. He paused, not willing to suggest that she had anything to do with the situation, nor wanting to lie.

“Look. It’s no secret you were totally fucked up last year. I don’t mean anything by that…we’ve all been fucked over at some time in the last ten years. That’s war for you. All hot girls, dancing, and booze. Bound to get to a bloke eventually. But the thing is: you froze. You had one fraction of a second of indecision, and then you left your principal. Because of her. So I’m going to ask you again. Is she part of the bad stuff that you went through last year, or part of the recovery?”

David got it. Mal was asking if he needed to get involved to stop David crashing again. He’d have asked the same thing. “She’s neither actually. She was an innocent bystander in Iraq last year. We had some kind of connect—”

“All right, mate. I don’t need you to get mushy on me. I just need to know that she’s not going to be a problem for us.”

He decided to come clean-ish. “She’s an archaeologist. A speaker at the conference. I knew she was coming, but I didn’t plan on making contact with her again. She knew the vic and went to greet him, which is when he was shot. That’s pretty much all I know right now. I’m mostly sure she’s not going to be a problem.”

“Mostly. That’s terrific. Mostly. There’s a lot of potential crap in that word, you know.” Mal increased his stride as they crossed another road.

“I swear, man. Not a problem.” He sounded more confident of his answer this time, but maybe he still hadn’t been convincing enough.

Mal gave him a fast look of barely hidden disbelief. David couldn’t blame him. Unfortunately he couldn’t be sure of anything, especially that she was any less of a problem than the police presence at the building. He didn’t want anyone diving into his background, and he suspected his boss didn’t either. He guessed they’d have to get into the sniper’s lair some other way.

But Mal’s brain was clearly back on the mission at hand. He didn’t hesitate. He directed David through a short alleyway that took them into a courtyard of the adjacent building.

Ignoring three doorways, Mal opened the fourth and took the steps behind it two at a time. Holy shit. Mal had been up long enough to scope out the area. David felt ashamed that he’d stayed in the room so long. But Molly. He’d stayed up way too long watching her sleep.

“Okay,” Mal kept his voice low. “This is the floor that the police have cordoned off, next door. It’s directly opposite the hotel restaurant.” He paused.

David looked out of the open stairwell and thought about the night before. He used his hands to visualize the trajectory of the sniper’s bullet. “No. I’d say the bullet hit the Russian at a forty-five degree angle, blowing out his lower back. Which means…” he looked up and across at the restaurant. “I’d say the nest is maybe two floors higher.”

Malone looked relieved. “Thank God. They said you were solid, but you know, after last night…” He held his hand flat and shifted it to and fro.

“You dick. I’d heard it was you I had to keep my eye on.”

Mal smiled. “You should. If you want to learn something. Come on. Stop wasting time.” He strode up the remaining steps to the roof. Once there, it was easy to step across a small wall on to the roof of the next-door building.

David spotted a door and nodded toward it. He reached it first, and pulled on the handle. Locked. “Of course.” He breathed, taking out his knife.

Mal watched the surrounding roofs as David levered the door open by forcing the blade through the doorjamb. It was relatively easy. Nothing up here seemed to have been well maintained, and the wood splintered as if it hadn’t seen a lick of moisture in decades.

Three floors down they found the likely lair. Both men stood in the doorway listening to the sounds of the police a couple of floors down. Mal raised his eyebrows at the laughing below, and David just shook his head.

The room was empty. The floor was covered in linoleum that had seen better days. A couple of boxes lay near the window, and several others by the wall. Mal stared toward them. They appeared empty, but who knew?

The sun peeking through the window glinted on something. “Stop!” David hissed. Mal stopped dead in his tracks and looked to find the reason for David’s order.

“Tripwire about ten inches from your left foot.” David approached and followed the wire to the wall. “Huh.”

“Huh what?” Mal said through gritted teeth.

“Wait.” The tripwire disappeared on both sides of the room under what appeared to be empty boxes. Then extended in a V shape to the boxes in front of the window. “Back up toward the door. Try not to deviate from where you were before.” He heard Mal sigh, but was grateful that he complied. As he lifted the cardboard boxes he saw devices with enough explosives to wipe out the room, but not much else. Probably not the people inside the room either. Weird. Just enough to destroy the evidence, he guessed, but not enough to kill anyone. Someone with some explosive skills had great restraint. Usually people who made their living designing bombs did so for maximum mayhem. This bomb maker was clearly very specific about the level of destruction he desired. Or he was under specific orders.

David couldn’t detach the wire without triggering the explosive charge, so he shrugged and cut the plastic wire in two places to relieve the tension on the trigger. He walked around slowly, ensuring there were no secondary devices. “All clear.”

“Tell me before you cut a wire next time, mate. You nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought in these situations we’re supposed to have a hilarious conversation about which to cut: the blue or the red wire. Don’t just snip something without discussing it first, okay?”

It was hard to tell how serious Mal was about anything. “It wasn’t wire.” He picked it up and sniffed it. “It’s minty dental floss.” He frowned and sniffed again. “Wow. That’s…really improvised. The whole thing feels unplanned. Like someone wasn’t expecting to have to rig something but managed to anyway. That’s…hardcore.” He met Mal’s eyes.

Mal nodded. “And hardcore means fanatic or professional. Neither one fills the heart with moonlight and roses.”

Suddenly, voices came from a few floors down. Raised and excitable. Mal and David rushed to the window and looked down. As soon as they did, a muffled boom launched a wave of dust and glass through a lower window. Then before they could do much more than wince, the window below theirs blew out too. They looked at each other for a second. Mal braced himself as if he was expecting their room to blow too.

David raised an eyebrow. “You saw me defuse it right?”

“Sure I did. But I don’t know how good you are at that shit. You could be crap.”

“Well let’s see how good you are. Get us out of here with as much evidence as you can.” He looked back toward the door. “I’d say we have less than a minute to clear the building.

Mal didn’t hesitate. He stacked one empty box inside another, set it in the middle of the floor and started throwing things in it. David grabbed as much dental floss as he could, the device, and the explosives. He lobbed all but the explosives into the box. Those he tucked in his jacket pocket.

A second later the room upstairs blew too. “Okay, we’ve got to go now.”

David lofted the box full of evidence and broke for the stairwell. Below, he could see men in antiexplosive suits slowly advancing on them. They must be the police’s bomb squad. A good half of him wanted to stop and shoot the shit with them. He missed the craziness of the Air Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys. Instead he took the stairs two by two. Mal was now ahead of him, as he hadn’t stopped to look at the bomb squad.

David stopped on the next floor up, where bomb debris had blown into the stairwell. He picked up some larger pieces and stuffed them in a pocket and kept running. Once on the roof, they retraced their steps back to the building adjacent.

As soon as they were inside the building, they stopped to take a breath. “Jesus. Every floor?” Mal said.

“Someone really wanted to cover their tracks. But I have to say, to me that sounds like more than one person. Setting four bombs on tripwire takes time. It’s not something you can do fast. I mean unless they set them all earlier…but then they ran the risk of them blowing before the hit.” David frowned as they walked much slower down the second flight of stairs.

“Bombs are pretty commonplace here,” Mal said slowly.

“Huh?”

“I mean people aren’t as freaked out by them here. Athens has a healthy population of antiestablishment anarchists of all stripes. Hell, just this year they’ve firebombed a few American businesses. Never heard of them using a sniper though.”

“So it could be someone sent to assassinate the Russian minister and using bombs to make the authorities think they’re local anarchists?” David said. “Sounds clumsy to me. No way would they think those bombs were from anarchists. Well, depending, I guess, on what’s left of them now. From what I could see, a hefty amount of evidence shot out of the window.”

“The bad news is that they will go to see why our floor didn’t blow out too. Footprints, fibers, fingerprints. Shit. I touched the window frame when the second floor blew,” Mal said.

David knew that everything he’d touched was in the box he held. “Dammit. Well you probably have about three days before they process the prints.”

“I’m not in the system. But it still doesn’t fill me with the joys of spring to know that anyone has my fingerprints.” He fell silent, and David allowed him a few minutes to digest. If Mal was SAS, his prints would definitely be classified. But with the world’s eyes on Athens and the G20 meeting, there may be pressured cooperation between the countries. Which meant Mal’s days in Athens was numbered. He was sure Mal was thinking about that.

“The worst thing isn’t that my identity will be blown, it’s that the authorities will think the British had something to do with the assassination of a Russian minister. And frankly, boy-o, you should be worried about that too. Send your girl away. Whoever she is, she’ll be in their crosshairs, being the person with him when he got killed. Your country doesn’t want that heat either. No offense, mate, but country first. Give her a kiss and send her to the airport. Fast.”

So Mal, for all his attitude, was as patriotic to his country as David was to his. He was right on all counts, as well. David knew what he had to do. Should do.

Do I have the strength to send her away again? Yes, yes he did. He had to.

When they got to Mal’s room, David laid some clean white towels on the bed and started placing the recovered items on it. As he went, he placed the bomb components together as they’d been connected in situ. The more he rebuilt, the more he concocted a vision of how this went down. Someone had left at least the explosive charge, and maybe all the equipment, for the shooter. The shooter could have set the explosives, made his shot, and then left, knowing that as soon as someone located the origin point of the shot, the evidence would be blown up. Meaning the shooter could make a fast getaway, not having to worry about clean up. Or, someone assembled the explosives after. But that would have been too risky. Actually the only scenario that made sense was that the explosives were rigged before the sniper took position. Oh. Ohhhh.

“Okay,” David said. “Imagine you’ve been given the assassination job. Your front man has set up a bunch of explosives to cover any evidence you were there after you’ve done the job.”

Mal sat in the armchair and nodded, leaning forward, elbows on knees. It was the most serious David had ever seen him.

“You’re directed to the second floor to take the shot. What happens?”

Mal didn’t hesitate. “I make a mental note to kill the guy who told me I could get a bead on the target from the second floor. There isn’t a good enough line of vision to get a shot.”

David nodded. “So the explosives are rigged on the first, second and third floors. But you need the fourth floor to make your shot.”

Mal nodded. “I take the explosives from one of the other floors, and put them on the fourth floor.”

“But?”

Mal was already nodding. “But to move the explosives, I have to cut the wire. So I take the bombs onto the fourth floor, and then I have to use something else as the tripwire. Something handy…something like dental floss.”

David looked back at the towel and picked up the sheath to a pen. It was a metal tube with “BP” engraved on it. Someone’s initials, not a logo. “This came from the floor above. It’s charred, so it was definitely near the bomb. Maybe even the contact blocker.”

“Keep it in case,” Mal said. “I don’t much like anything going on here. Can you get rid of the explosives?”

“Sure.” That wasn’t even slightly difficult. He could throw it in any trash can in the city and it would be totally inert. Although he was more inclined to take them to the US embassy. “I’m going to check in on Molly.”

“Great. Ask her why someone would want to shoot her friend, will ya? Could save time.” Mal wrapped up the towel with all the evidence, and dumped it on the floor. He lay on the bed, and put both hands behind his head and closed his eyes.

David didn’t dignify it with a reply.