by Dale Mayer
Resolutely she pulled out the ingredients for an omelet. If nothing else, he generally would eat eggs.
Chapter 2
After her father had eaten, Sammy went back up to the office with him, where she sat down at his side, and the two of them worked on the current project. She knew the projects would bother him, if they stuck around too long. The designs were great and had been sent off, came back with changes, were fixed and sent off again, and it was an ongoing process. And the one that he was currently working on was particularly troubling. He had stopped taking new orders because, as he said, he was backed up. And he was.
She just hoped beyond hope that maybe they could get through the whole stack before he left her behind. By the time late afternoon hit, she looked up at the wall clock—four-thirty already. “Wow,” she said, “we did well today.” She looked over, and her father was in the recliner, snoozing gently. She sighed, got up, grabbed a blanket, and threw it over him. She leaned over, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and said, “I’ll go see what we are doing about dinner,” she murmured. He, of course, gave no response.
She walked back to the desk, shut down the task lights, carefully rolled up the blueprints, set them off to the side so they were safe, and then headed downstairs. Once out of the office, her mind immediately went back to the tire, and she wondered just what she was supposed to do about that. She could call the shop to get it fixed, but, in the meantime, she didn’t have a spare; so, if something else happened, she’d be stuck on the road. That, of course, brought her mind around to the tall, dark Eton. “No,” she said to herself, laughing, “he’s a tall blondie.” But that tall, dark, and handsome thing rolled around in her mind because it fit in every other aspect.
Giving her head a shake, she went to the kitchen and pulled out chicken and made a light stir-fry for her father. The doctors, what little they’d told her, said that his nutritional needs were not being met because he wasn’t eating, and to make sure he ate lots of vegetables. By the time dinner was cooked, she set it on the dining room table, two plates with lids on top, and went to get her father. She was halfway up the stairs when she heard him call down, “I’m coming. I’m coming.”
She smiled and said, “Good. It’s all served up and ready.”
“You can call me before you serve, you know,” he said in exasperation.
“Oh, quit your grumping. As usual I always like to have it dished up and ready for you,” she said, with a chuckle. Really, it was her secret strategy to get him to eat more. Left to dish up for himself, he barely took any food at all.
They sat down at the dining room table, staring out over the view. “I love this house,” he said contentedly.
“Me too,” she said, as she reached over and patted his hand.
“It will be yours one day,” he said, then added, “soon,” a word that made her heart break.
“Well, hopefully not for a few more years,” she said lightly, not wanting him to get into that conversation.
“Maybe,” he said, “but you know we’ve been offered a decent price for it.”
Her heart froze, and she stared at him in shock. “Are you thinking about selling?”
He immediately gave a headshake. “No, not at all,” he said. “I want to be here right to the end.”
She let that one slip past her too, because to open up a discussion about that would just bring up what he saw as his impending death. “Besides, it doesn’t matter how good an offer it is,” she said. “This is your home. And it’s not like you need the money.”
“Isn’t that amazing?” he said, with a chuckle. “I hope you make it as big as I did.”
“I hope so too,” she said.
“What will you do … after?”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t even begin to think about that. I won’t. I don’t want to be without you, Dad.”
“I know, sweetie.” He reached over, linked his fingers with hers, and said, “But it’ll happen.”
She nodded. “It will, but it doesn’t have to be today or tomorrow.”
“Understood,” he said, with a smile.
“Come on now. Let’s eat.” She turned the conversation to other topics, chattering as they ate to keep him distracted. Finally she looked at the kitchen and said, “Well, that was tasty. But I need to clean up.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Is there any more of that cake?”
She laughed. “Absolutely.”
“Well, I’ll go sit in the other room,” he said. “Tea and cake—that sounds perfect.”
And, with his mind once again set on that cake and his tea, she watched as he slowly made his way from the dining room. Every step looked painful. She sighed, turned on the teakettle, and proceeded to wash the dishes. As much as her heart didn’t want to face it, she knew that the day was coming, and it was coming very quickly. She didn’t know what she would do when she lost him. It was just too heartbreaking to consider.
*
It didn’t take long to get Eton installed in the small chalet, particularly since Garret had arrived here a good eight hours ahead of Eton and already had the electronics set up.
“Okay, so what did I miss?” Eton asked, shaking off the stiffness from his travels in the car.
“What did you miss? God, getting caught up with the news after I woke up and got my wits about me, now that was an adventure,” Garret said, smiling wryly. “This will be a piece of cake, especially since there isn’t much to tell.”
“That must have been a trip. One minute you’re in a plane, and, the next thing you know, you wake up in the hospital, and they tell you how you’ve crashed at sea, floated around on wreckage with Ryland, got rescued by a hot girl, nearly drowned in a storm, and had been in a coma ever since.”
“Worse yet, while I was unconscious, Ryland somehow got the girl to fall for him. What the hell?”
“So I heard. Wait until you see Cain though. Ryland’s not the only one.”
“What? No way.”
Eton nodded. “Seriously, man, it’s really great to see you still standing. Let’s get to it. So you’ve got a little information but not a whole lot, is that what I’m hearing?”
“We traced Tristan’s particularly interesting cell phone calls to two towns from here,” Garret said. “And, yeah, we could have set up closer, but we’re already pretty conspicuous as it is. Plus these hills here behind us,” he said, “they back onto the other town.”
At that, Eton smiled and said, “So we just go up the hill, and we should have a pretty decent signal to track?”
“Yes,” he said. “We also don’t have any guarantee that the person connected to Tristan is still there.”
“But you got something?”
“Absolutely. Tracked over several days and weeks. That’s how far we’ve managed to go back.”
“Okay, so he is staying there—or at least had been, up until Tristan’s death.”
“Exactly.”
Eton had already brought Garret up to snuff on what had happened in Sicily. And now they were tracking down the rest of the numbers on Tristan’s phone. “Any luck on the driver who pulled away after shooting Tristan?”
“His truck was found a few miles away in a ditch,” Garret said. “It was a rental, rented by Tristan, under Tristan’s real name.”
“But not likely rented by him, I suppose?”
“Could have been, or they could have just set up that rental vehicle like that, knowing it would be a getaway car.”
“And nothing on the ballistics, correct?”
“No, nothing on the ballistics.”
“God, what a mess there,” Eton said.
“Yeah, your face is still showing some of the damage.”
He smiled and said, “Just a sign of my close encounter with Tristan.”
“One side is a little puffy.”
He grinned at that.
“What was that happy look about?”
“Oh, I met a woman on the way here,�
� he said. “She didn’t appear to notice.”
“Right, I checked that out, from the license plate number you sent. Sammy something.” He quickly brought up what he knew. “No arrest record, so I dug deeper. Architecture degree and is currently working for her father. He’s a famous architect. Both have been really close.”
“So he lives here locally?”
“Yes,” Garret replied and pointed. “It’s basically a twenty-minute walk in that direction.”
“Nice,” Eton said, with a light whistle.
“What? Did she interest you?”
“She was pretty fine,” he said, “but, more than that, she was a doer. Instead of waiting for help, she already had the spare tire on.”
“Did she say what happened, how she got the flat?”
“No, and I didn’t ask. The tire was already loaded before I got there.”
“Wow,” he said. “Won’t see too many women doing that.”
“Not in this world of cell phones and roadside service, no,” he said, “but it was all good.”
“Uh-oh.”
There must have been something in Eton’s tone of voice because Garret was grinning at him. “Yeah, not happening,” Eton said. “I don’t need anything taking me away from this job.”
“Oh, Cain doesn’t feel like what he ended up with took him away from his job.”
Eton changed the topic. “Enough. Now back to the cell phone signals. Where does it trace back to? A house or something?”
“The property has multiple buildings on it.”
“Dang,” Eton replied. “So it’s not like it points to one single person and says, ‘This is the guy.’”
“Not only that, it looks like it’s a company.”
“As in?”
“Bands Securities.”
“Bands? I didn’t think that security company was in Switzerland.”
“Yes, I know,” Garret said. “Bottom line is that apparently twelve people work there.”
“So, either this entire location of the company is involved, or some individual is using it as a base.”
“Or a visitor or a delivery person? There could be a bunch of other explanations, including somebody who does contract work,” Garret pointed out.
“Right, so a simple search won’t necessarily give us all the right answers.”
“Well, I’ve just pulled up a list of all the full-time employees,” he said. He printed it out and handed it to Eton. “These are just the ones here.”
“Bands has other branches, right?”
“Yes, closest one is in Berlin,” he said.
“Right, so it could also be somebody who came back and forth from the other office as well.”
“Exactly.” Garret hesitated but looked at him. “We can’t count out the fact that it could also be spouses.”
“No, we sure can’t,” Eton said. “Okay, do we have any other lists? You take one, and I take another?”
“Unless he is a staffer there. All of them are part-time,” he said, “so the staff list for this town is much longer.”
“Let me start with that one,” Eton said, reaching across for his list. “And you take the permanent employees, who I suppose are the managers and such.”
Garret nodded and found his list to check.
At that, they sat down to research the people involved. After about an hour, Eton broke the silence. “First four of mine have raised no flags,” Eton said. “This fifth one though—”
“What?”
“Well, he drives a Mercedes, a sports model at that. I would really like to know what his salary is and whether he can legitimately afford it,” Eton said.
“If he’s young, it doesn’t mean he can afford it, you know. Just that he really wanted it.”
The way Garret said it was so dry that Eton had to laugh. “True enough.” But Eton put an asterisk beside that name and kept on going.
After a few more minutes Garret sat back. “Not much here.”
“I’ve finished mine,” Eton said, “and the only one who flashed at all is the one I mentioned earlier.”
“Well, guess you better hack into the company and seek out his paycheck.”
“Can get that off his credit reports faster maybe,” Eton noted.
He started working his way through the information databases they could access easily. When that didn’t give him anything, he went to the guy’s bank account. Something supposedly not easy to accomplish, but, for them, it was fairly simple. Terrifying to think of all the people not aware of this, as Eton and others moved around in their finances behind their backs. The general population felt secure in their annual subscriptions for security software, said to prevent identify theft or to prevent hackers from access to their information. Little did they know that Eton and men like him all around the world weren’t deterred at all.
In moments, he had located the man’s bank account and found not a hell of a lot of money. In fact, a large part of his paycheck went to cover the monthly loan payment on that sports car. “Idiot,” Eton muttered under his breath.
“Knew it. Was I right, or was I right?” Garret said, laughing.
“You were right,” he said. “Jesus, the things these guys think are important. That kills me.”
“He’s probably young and trolling for chicks with it,” he said.
“God, whatever. How about your list? Anything?”
“Only one of interest to me,” he said. “The boss has been married three times, so the alimony payments are killing him. His house is mortgaged to the hilt, and his car is leased, probably because the last one was about to get repossessed, so he surrendered it.”
“So his financial pressures make him susceptible to bribes, payouts, and blackmail.”
“All of the above and more,” Garret said, nodding. “You know what? It seems they’ve always been one step ahead of us. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had another party in place here as well.”
“Yeah, they’ve always got another hand to play. At some point soon,” he said, “we have to get closer.” Eton stood to stretch.
“No doubt, and it could be anyone really.”
“No kidding. After what we found in Sicily, it’s shocking to think what people would do for a little bit of money.”
“Right, those people were something, weren’t they?”
He just shook his head. “I feel bad for Petra,” Eton said.
“I do too. She just lost her father and her sister, and now her aunt and uncle are being charged with multiple offenses, many of them against her. That’s pretty sick,” Garret said. “At least she’s financially stable though, so that’s one good thing.”
“Yeah, but that’s what made her a target in the first place. No doubt she’d rather have her father.” Eton paced the room. “Money. It’s so easy to look at anybody and think they are involved somehow. If they have money, or if they don’t, we assume they are guilty of something.”
“It’s the job. It makes us jaded.”
Eton chuckled. “Petra kept pointing that out. Cain’s got his hands full with that one.” Returning his attention to the list, Eton frowned. “We need to broaden this, maybe start with the spouses and other family members,” Eton said.
“Yeah, I was hoping we wouldn’t have to, but we might as well. At least if we don’t find anything interesting, we will have cleared it.” They quickly started with the names of anybody attached to an employee who was over eighteen. When Eton came to the punk with the sports car, he realized the kid had no steady girlfriend, but his parents were wealthy. “This punkhead with the car is just trying to keep up appearances,” Eton said. “His parents have money.”
“He probably crashed every car his parents ever gave him, so they cut him off and told him to go get his own.”
Eton laughed at that. “Unfortunately that’s all too possible, and having to drive what he could afford was too much for his ego.” Heading to the motor vehicles and insurances databases for Switzerland, Eton quickly confirmed
that Garret was correct. “You are almost magical,” he said jokingly. “You nailed it.”
“Nah, just basic young-man mentality.”
“Well, I need to get past the young-man mentality and get into something much darker.”
“Don’t write him off though,” Garret said, looking at him. “If you think about it, he has a lot of reasons to do something for money.”
“True, and showing up every day to earn a regular paycheck probably isn’t his style.”
On a hunch, Eton buckled down and hacked into the security company and checked the personnel records. “Not only are his wages only average but he’d been written up several times for insubordination and insolence. I’ll have to run some of this through a translator to be sure, but it looks to me like he’s even had his pay docked several times.”
“Which all makes him pretty high up in my mind,” Garret said. “Want me to check out the parents?” Eton nodded and read off their names. Garret set to work and soon had a start. “Well, the parents used to work for the military.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes, in the Swiss military.”
“Well, I suppose the Swiss guards could have their bad apples, like everybody else,” Eton said. “Though it doesn’t mean that they are of the same ilk as these lowlife bastards who are after us.”
“No, doesn’t look like it. Several commendations are in both files for good behavior. Several awards as well.”
“Complete opposite of their son then. Everything I find makes it appear that he’s an only child and that they’ve doted on him since birth. Looks like they’d finally had enough with that last crash.”
“Why is it that parents can’t handle their kids?” Garret said. “Somebody’s got to do it.”
At that, Eton let out a bark of laughter and started digging into the rest of them on his list. He shoved his laptop away two hours later and said, “I didn’t find anything much, did you?”
