Текст книги "Adrenaline"
Автор книги: Jeff Abbott
Соавторы: Jeff Abbott
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 28 страниц)
10
I LIKE BARS. I don’t drink a lot but I like the air of a good bar—the ripe wisdom of animated conversation, the cutting smell of fine liquor, the sound of laughter among friends. Ollie’s was a good, simple bar. Quiet most nights, a wide, oaken bar surface, stools topped with leather that bore the imprints of loyal and regular customers, not a lot of kitsch on the walls—just mirrors from the beer companies and framed photos of Ollie’s father, the original owner, with many of his longtime customers. The regulars were a bit of a mix, older folks who’d been in the neighborhood a long while, younger folks with a bohemian bent who might be borrowing money from parents to pursue art or internships. Now and then the Manhattan-commuting professionals would slum at Ollie’s, and they tipped well and drank imports and more lavish cocktails. But the people, most of them, were nice. No one asked me questions. I just served the drinks, made idle talk when required, and no one knew my hell.
The Company got me an apartment three streets over from Ollie’s, on the edge of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. It wasn’t cheap, but I wasn’t paying the rent, and the building I was in was seeing several units remodeled, so I didn’t have many neighbors. Howell, no doubt, liked my isolation. I assumed that Ollie’s and my place were being bugged, perhaps even with cameras hidden inside. Probably installed by August. I found the bugs, four of them, and the next morning I walked straight to the van, and as they stared at me in surprise, I laid the bugs on the van roof in a nice straight line. Then I walked away. The next day they had a new car to follow me in and I didn’t find any replacement bugs. Didn’t mean they weren’t there, though.
It was like life in a cage. But it wasn’t the stone prison cell. I wondered how long Howell’s men would keep an eye on me, and, if I didn’t draw out Lucy’s kidnappers, if they’d shutter me back behind bars.
I thought about how to escape. I would do myself no favors by rushing. I was still in a cage, but a cage where I could move. I did not want to be back in the Polish prison.
And when I wasn’t serving drinks, I thought about Lucy and The Bundle.
One day in late March, I arrived a bit hurt. A bicycle courier had sideswiped me while crossing a street and I’d fallen, scraping my forearm. My shadows did nothing to help me. I rolled up my sleeve to keep the shirt clean and went into the front; it was early afternoon on a Saturday and only one customer sat along the bar.
She was a few years older than me, maybe thirty. Pretty but with eyes of hard quartz, a slash of a mouth. Her cheekbones would have made a photographer contemplate a next great shot. She wore black slacks and a dark sweater. Her hair was blondish, the color of fresh straw, and cut to just above her shoulders. She picked up her neat whisky, drank it carefully. She moved with precision. She was not looking at me but I thought she was entirely aware of me. My first thought was: She’s major trouble.
“Do you have a first-aid kit?” I asked Ollie.
“Yes, in my office.” Ollie sounded irritated. I’d interrupted a discussion between him and the woman. He jabbed a thumb at me. “This one. Runs like a maniac, bouncing off stairs and buildings and such. He’ll fall and break his neck and then I’ll be out a halfway decent bartender.” Ollie felt self-esteem to be overrated.
The woman surveyed me. “L’art du déplacement?” Her voice was low and cool, like a summer breeze coming out of a tree’s shadow, and she had an odd accent I couldn’t quite decipher. She was beautiful to look at—although I had no real eye for any woman but Lucy—but I did not like her.
But she’d used the original French name for parkour running. I nodded. “Are you a traceur?” I asked. A term for parkour runners, drawn from the French term for a special kind of bullet that leaves a trail.
“Oh, no. I used to live in Paris. I used to watch the kids trying parkour, running along the edges of buildings, throwing themselves from rooftop to rooftop, amazed that they didn’t break their legs.” She smiled the slash-smile again. “I wished I had their nerve, their fleetness.”
“I say if you want to run an obstacle course, get on a track.” Ollie poured more whisky in the woman’s glass, although she hadn’t asked.
“But life’s an obstacle course,” the woman said. “The runners run in the world we live in, not an artificial one.” She turned back to me. “I always thought they looked like animals.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“In their grace. Wolves on the street. Hunters. The runners looked to me like a pack, closing on prey.” The woman sipped her whisky. “I have a fondness for wolves.”
It was exactly the sort of bizarre comment you hear in a bar that would make no sense anywhere else but seems reasonable in dim light with the sting of booze on your lips. Ollie stared at the woman, auditioned an unsure smile, and decided to end the discussion of wolves with introductions. “Hey, Sam, this is Mila.”
Mila offered a hand. I shook it. “Are you a regular, Mila? I’m still learning who’s who in Ollie’s kingdom.”
“She’s a wandering regular. Stops in when she’s in town, which is only like three times a year. And then I can’t get rid of her for a week.” Ollie grinned. “She keeps wanting to buy the bar from me but you know I will never sell.”
“I can work on him for you,” I said with a polite bartender smile. “I’m sure he wants to retire to Florida.”
“Oh, God, no,” Ollie said. “New York till I die.”
“He won’t sell, but he listens to my proposals because he sells me a bottle’s worth of Glenfiddich during that week.” Mila kept her hands folded on the bar in front of her, primly.
“Nice to be able to travel,” I said.
“The world is a smaller place these days. Much smaller.” Mila shrugged—a small, elegant gesture. “Be careful on your parkour runs, Sam. Ollie will not spare the whip if you’re on crutches.”
“Sam I don’t need to whip. The others, Jesus, Mila, you can’t believe it. How hard is it to pour neatly and quickly and accurately into a glass? To pour? Gravity does the work. This is not surgery. I tell you, that day-shift guy, he sloshes my profit margin onto the floor and I mop it up…”
I raised my arm. “I better bandage this.”
I found the first-aid kit in Ollie’s cramped office. There was a desk, with scatterings of papers, an ancient, grinding PC Ollie had never quite mastered (I’d had to help him do searches on the web and also recover a lost spreadsheet), and a safe. The safe would not be difficult to crack; it had a keypad and, considering Ollie’s general loathing of technology, I suspected the pass code would be a simple one to guess.
Arm tightly bandaged, and dressed to work, I went back out to the bar. Mila was gone, bills tucked under her glass. She was an excellent tipper.
“She completes me,” Ollie said. “Damn. I like her but there’s no hope.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Everywhere.”
If Howell wanted to have me followed by someone other than his normal teams, or wanted to insert someone into my life, he might pick a person like Mila. Or if the Money Czar was coming after me, he might send someone like her.
But. But she had a history with Ollie. Unless Ollie was lying about that, and was in Howell’s pay. Hello, madness. You see how your mind starts to twist: you suspect everyone. I went back to wiping down the bar, trying to blank my mind.
“Hey, I got this for you.” Ollie pushed a thick book at me. I looked at the cover. A bartender’s guide. I opened it to the end to see how many pages it was: 508. Very comprehensive.
“Preparation is key so you don’t mix drinks wrong and waste liquor,” Ollie said. “Take it home.”
“I will never make most of these drinks.”
“You strike me as a guy who likes to be prepared.” Ollie was right.
The week inched past. Dave with his Budweiser, Meg with her pinot grigio, the Alton brothers with their pints of Guinness every Friday night; they’d watch the pour you did as though you were splitting a diamond. I worked, I ran, and Howell’s two shadows followed me everywhere I went. At night I lay in bed and I flicked through the five-hundred-page bartender’s guide. It relaxed my mind to consider the thousands of cocktails crafted by humanity; each a perfect little mix of what was at hand to produce a desired result. That was the pattern of thinking I needed to solve my own problem. What elements, mixed together in what order, to create a sublime result.
How to get a gun, how to get documentation to get overseas, how to escape Howell’s constant watch.
11
DURING THE NEXT WEEK, Ollie fired a bartender he didn’t like, hired a new one so he’d have a fresh face to bitch about. August only showed up twice, watched part of a basketball game, didn’t have much to say to me. I felt he was trying to summon the courage to broach a topic but didn’t know how to start.
Then there was the lovely Mila. She came in for four more nights, discussed world politics with Ollie and asked me about my parkour runs and nothing else. But I felt her watching me as I worked, as though taking my measure. Ollie’s mother in New Jersey got sick and he had me manage the bar for two days; one night I lifted prints off the safe’s keypad, found prints on only four keys. Same four numbers as the bar’s street address. I tested the code; the safe opened. Inside was a cash bag, a Glock with three rounds of ammo, and Ollie’s passport, used once three years ago to visit Ireland. I left everything where it was, cleaned off the keypad, and felt relief I could get to a gun when I needed one. Because I thought the time had come to move. Howell’s followers had been a bit lazy, not coming up on me when the bicyclist hit me. They were slacking or Howell was loosening the leash on me. They’d convinced themselves that I was willing to sit still. That was the key to escape.
Now I knew where I could steal a gun. But I had no passport. And I needed to get back to Europe. Lucy’s trail started there.
But I didn’t know where I could obtain fake documentation in New York. Passports now have digital watermarks and subtle chips, and they can’t be forged as easily as they used to be. You need someone who can acquire the special paper used in the passports—usually by bribing someone who might send documents in a diplomatic pouch or works in government printing. It didn’t have to be an American passport; in fact, it would be easier for me to have one from Belgium or the UK or Canada. Belgian papers particularly are known for being easy to forge.
So I had to find a way to find a contact who could get me a passport that could pass muster. I knew the street value of a false passport was around eight thousand dollars. I would have to either save or steal the money, and I’d have to lose my tails to find a seller. I bought a cellular phone, prepaid, close to the local Brooklyn Flea Market, using the crowds to lose Howell’s shadows for a few minutes to make the buy. I made some discreet ventures, calling my non-CIA contacts in Prague and Paris and London, looking for someone who could help me get back to Europe.
No one I called knew I was part of the Company. I used an old identity from the Prague sting, a former Canadian soldier named Samson—close enough to Sam so I wouldn’t ever tongue-stumble using it—who operated as a smuggler and hired gun.
I got stonewalled for three days until a friend in London mentioned a broker in New Jersey named Kitter who could set me up with Belgian papers. I called Kitter to arrange a meet in Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan the next day.
I dodged my shadows by going into Ollie’s—the tails did not sit in the bar, they watched from outside—and then heading out the back of the building, down a side alley through a deli. If a shadow there saw me, and I had to assume they would, it made sense to dodge into a department store and exit out the back, hurrying into a hotel across the street. I watched for familiar faces—it’s easy to dump out of a suit into casual wear, you can’t rely on clothes as identifiers, you can only rely on the face. I felt clean and I grabbed a taxi to Manhattan an hour early. Got off at Grand Central, felt I was still walking clean. I kept scanning the patterns of people’s movements for any followers as I walked through building lobbies and hotel lobbies, in and out, cutting through, doubling back, not spotting Howell or any of his regulars following me.
The man fitting Kitter’s description sat on the edge of a bench, iPod earphones in place, wires trailing inside his jacket. He was reading the Wall Street Journal. Thin blue jeans, flannel shirt. I sat on the other edge of the bench.
He pulled out his earphones but he didn’t look at me.
“Our mutual friend sent me,” I said. “I need documentation.” A tickle surged at the back of my throat; I felt the need to rush. Stupid. But I’d been waiting days, weeks, months, for a chance to track Lucy. I was like a dog, straining at the leash, ready to run. How could I wait anymore? I dreamed of my family every night.
“You have the photos and the money.”
“Four thousand and the photos.” Half up front, half when I got the finished passport.
He took the envelope from me and told me to wait. “Meet me at the Starbucks on the north side of Grand Central in three hours.”
Kitter stood and walked off. I sat for a moment, thinking, Good. Then I stood and started to walk and my stomach wrenched. Forty feet away stood Howell, hands tucked inside his overcoat. I turned around; Kitter and my money were gone.
I sat back down. I stayed on the bench and Howell walked up to me. He didn’t sit.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “My wife, my child, I’d be doing whatever I could to get to them.”
“Can I have my money back?”
“No. Let it be a lesson learned.”
“You’re the one who needs a lesson,” I said. “I could draw out Lucy’s kidnappers if I could get back to London. I know I could.”
“We can’t trust you. Look how you’ve disobeyed instructions.”
“But you said you don’t blame me.”
“You have not been fired, Sam, and your job classification has been reassigned so that you cannot resign without the permission of the Director. You do not have that permission. You’re ours. Do what you’re told and be glad you’re not locked in a cell for the rest of your life. We have been generous to you. Go back to that charming neighborhood bar, smile at people, be glad you’re not sucking cold soup out of a wooden bowl and being beaten every night.”
I shook my head. “I dream about my son,” I said. “Did you have that in your file, Howell? I dream about my wife and my child because I know she’s innocent and I know she and my kid are out there and… you are in my way.” I heard the iron growl in my tone, for the first time in a long time.
He was unimpressed. “You’re in your own way. Go home, Sam. Play nice. I won’t be so forgiving next time. There was a debate in the office about whether to shoot you on sight for attempting to acquire forged documents. Your actions could be those of a desperate man or a guilty man. I argued for desperate and thank God for you I won. But desperation fades. Do this twice, then you’re guilty.”
“You don’t have the balls to arrest me because you need me out here as bait,” I said. “I call your bluff. Stick me back in the cell. I’m not sitting still, Howell.”
“Go home, and we’ll pretend it didn’t happen.”
“That really is your favorite phrase, isn’t it? It didn’t happen. But sticking my head in the sand doesn’t work for me.”
Howell turned and walked away from me, lighting a cigarette as he walked, blowing out an annoyed plume of smoke.
He was wrong. Desperation doesn’t fade. It just gets stronger. I watched him walk away and then I got up and walked in the opposite direction.
I took the bus back to Brooklyn. I didn’t bother to try to shake any shadows. It made the trip much faster. I went to work, listening to Ollie tell me the same stories he’d told me yesterday, drawing lunchtime half-pints of Harp and Budweiser, jetting sodas into glasses, listening to regulars prattle on about their problems with difficult clients or troublesome bosses or wives who just didn’t understand, and when Ollie bitched about not getting full shipments of Glenfiddich—he was a crate short—I thought of an escape from this second prison.
12
AUGUST WAS SITTING ON THE STOOP at my apartment building when I got home.
“I’m in trouble,” I said. “Are you?” I sounded like a fifth grader caught skipping school.
He looked out onto the street like he was back home surveying the windswept plains. “From what I heard, it didn’t happen.”
“Howell is, if nothing else, consistent.”
“I think you’re lucky you’re not dead. You owe Howell big-time.”
“I am never going to be in that man’s debt.”
“Plus, I didn’t know what you were up to,” he said with a shrug. “Can I have a beer?”
“You could have gotten a beer at the bar.”
“I’m tired of hearing Ollie’s opinions,” August said.
“Sure.” We walked up to my apartment. It was bare, furnished only with the secondhand stuff the Company had bought before I moved in. I opened the fridge and handed him a cold Heineken.
“You can’t run, Sam,” he said, popping the little keg-shaped can.
“You should have told me that this morning,” I said.
“Your stunt set off a wildfire here. Some people wanted you put back into jail. Others took it as a clear sign that you were dirty. Howell fought for you. I thought you should know. You have one other friend than me, and that’s Howell.”
“What is Novem Soles? Howell asked me about it. It connects to Lucy somehow and the London bombing.”
“Never heard of it. And you shouldn’t be asking questions. Not today, when you’re lucky to be out of a noose.”
“Maybe this is the group that has her. I want you to see what you can find about it. Please.”
“You know I can’t share any classified stuff with you.”
“Then why are you here, August? A free beer?”
His cheeks reddened. “I am here to give you a warning,” he said. “You’re a horrible embarrassment, Sam. The cover-up that was involved in London to keep from the press that it was a CIA front that was bombed was enormous. Nearly two dozen people dead; we’re lucky it wasn’t worse. The British are furious and they’d just as soon kill you if you set foot back on their soil. And for the few that think you might be telling the truth, no one’s taking a bullet for you. I’m telling you, watch your back. Higher-ups who normally get their way have argued for you to be terminated. A hungry soul’s bound to pick up on the sentiment and will figure they might get a promotion if you conveniently disappear or die, Howell using you as bait and Howell’s defense of you be damned.”
“Has the order been issued?”
“It won’t be an order. Nothing written. Just a wish made and a wish granted. Like King Henry talking about Thomas Becket: ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ ” He finished his beer. “Watch your back, turbulent.”
“I’ll be fine.”
He pulled two phones out of his pocket, handed one to me. “Here. Only you have this number. If someone comes after you—call me. I’ll help you.”
My only friend. I didn’t want him to see the heavy swallow in my throat. “Thank you, August.”
I watched him leave, and then I went to bed. I think best in bed. I cleared my mind by paging through the thick bar book Ollie had loaned me. Every success in life was like a cocktail: a careful blending of elements in exact proportions, done in correct order.
I put the bar book down and I lay watching the ceiling, hatching a plan.
13
I AWOKE TO THE BAREST SOUND. I didn’t move. It was a footstep and then the slightest click of a door closing.
I was bait, and someone was hooked.
I could lay still. I could get up and see who it was. I could wait for one of Howell’s rookies to crash in the door and save my ass. But Howell, for all his warm words to me, didn’t need me alive after the bait was taken. If this was someone from the scarred man, he could dispatch me and the watchers could catch him later. I wasn’t sure the shadows were even listening to me since I’d tossed them their bugs.
Or maybe it was someone like August had said, ridding the Company of their great embarrassment.
I listened for the next footfall. Didn’t hear it. I got up from the bed with enormous care, scooted the pillow where I should be, moved on cat feet to the corner of the room behind the door.
I heard nothing else. Maybe I had dreamed the footfall. I stood in the darkness and a crazy thought wormed its way into my head: It’s Lucy, come home, finally she’s gotten away and she’s found me. It was lunacy to think it, but I did.
The air conditioner kicked on. The soft, somnolent hum masked the intruder’s movements. I had no weapons. Nothing. I waited.
I expected the intruder to kick in the door and lay a round of fire into the bed.
Didn’t happen.
Slowly—as slowly as a door opens in a nightmare that floods you with dread—the door opened. The hinges moved in silence. I waited.
No convenient glow of moonlight lit the stage for killer or victim; the dark in my bedroom was nearly total.
Then a tiny flash of light sparked, seeking the bed. A snap of silenced bullet hitting the mattress.
I slammed the door into the intruder. Hard. I heard him fall back onto the floor and in the thin gleam of light from the den window he swiveled the gun toward me. I powered my foot into his wrist and the bullet skimmed along the expensive hardwood. I kicked the gun loose, then away.
The intruder stayed as silent as his gun. No yell, no cry out. He was taller than me, and I felt hard muscle power into my chest as he drove me back into the bedroom. We landed on the bed and he, with crisp efficiency, yanked a length of sheet around my throat. I hardly heard his breathing increase in heaviness from the exertion.
He started strangling me and I seized the pillow and pressed it hard into his face. Silent standoff as the oxygen deprivation kicked in for both of us. The darkness deepened. I let go of the pillow and he tightened the sheet around me with a renewed vigor. I pile-drove fists hard and sharp into rib cage. Harder. Sixth blow I felt bone crack, and the intruder gasped and eased on the strangulation. I was sick and dizzy, struggling to breathe, but I launched myself free of the sheets and aimed a shattering kick into his face.
The intruder fell off the bed and I grabbed at the lamp. I missed, and my hand closed on the bartender’s book Ollie had given me. I slammed its five-hundred-page hardcover spine hard against the intruder’s throat and pressed downward as he struggled on the floor. He tried to kick me loose, but now I had breath and I had fury; there is a primal flutter about killing someone who comes into your house intending you harm. Awful atavistic shudders; I could feel waves of energy pouring from the ganglia at the base of my spine, that ancient seat of instinct. I gritted my teeth.
Harder. His struggles grew more frantic. I put all my weight onto the bartender’s book. I pressed my knees against him. I wanted him unconscious so he could wake up bound and answer my questions. But then I felt his windpipe break and the crack sent a sick tremble up my arms.
The kicking stopped and I yanked the book off him. The intruder said his first words, just a gurgle of breath. Maybe he called for his mama; maybe he called me a bad name; maybe he cursed whatever boss sent him to his death.
I expected Howell’s rookies to crash in if they’d eavesdropped on murder but no, no one was coming. They hadn’t put in replacement listening devices. I went and stood in the corner on my bedroom and looked at the splayed body and considered the problem. After a few moments my head was clear.
I had a dead body in my apartment. I dragged him into the bathroom, shut the door, and turned on the light. I eased him into the bathtub; easier to clean. Dead bodies release stuff.
I had never killed a man before. Ever. The body count on my jobs had been, well, zero. I fooled people into telling me things and then I left them. I did not kill them. I never had need.
I am a killer now, I thought, and another calming voice rose in my head: Stop it. You did what you had to do. Keep doing what you have to do.
Killing slices your life into a before and after. I was firm in the after, because the alternative was to be the body lying in the cool porcelain tub.
I leaned against the wall and let my gaze focus on the intruder’s face. He was around my age, midtwenties. Olive-skinned, with dark, short hair. Big ears, a wide mouth, a Roman nose that I’d broken with my kick. He wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, a black denim jacket. Dark, heavy boots. I searched him. A heavy knife in the boot he’d never had a chance to go for, of Swiss manufacture. An extra clip for his gun in the jacket pocket. A cell phone, small, light, not packed with features, just a plain, cheap model that was practically disposable. No passport, no ID, so presumably he’d left those stashed someplace. On his upper arm there was a small, delicately crafted tattoo. A stylized blue nine, in a curving beauty. The top curve of the nine was an orange sun, with short spiky rays.
Nine and sun. Nine suns. Novem Soles. My head felt a little swimmy.
I checked his wallet. A wad of dollars, another wad of euros. Wedged in the folded corner of one of the euro bills I found a rail ticket, used, from Paris to Amsterdam.
The ticket was three days old. He’d come to Amsterdam from Paris and then here, one could presume.
A man, sent from Europe, to kill me.
I had a problem. Someone had taken the bait. Howell would want to know. But given August’s warning, maybe this guy wasn’t from the scarred man. He could be Company, stationed in Europe, dispatched by one of my detractors who still thought me a traitor.
I opened his phone. The only referenced activity was a text, sent from the phone six hours earlier. The text read: Arrived at JFK. I recognized the country code for the Netherlands. I pressed the number to send another text. What the hell.
Let’s play, I thought.
Capra done, I typed. But problem. Followed by surveillance. Clear now but they may have seen face.
Within one minute the phone vibrated in my hand.
