by Amity Cross
Silence descended on the pub, and I leaned around the end of the bar. I was alone. Rising to my feet, I edged my way across the room until I was satisfied I was in the clear. Then I turned my attention to the guy I’d shot.
I didn’t recognize him. In fact, I didn’t recognize any of the men.
Kneeling beside him, I rifled through his pockets but came up with nothing. Lifting up his hand, I cursed when I saw his fingertips were scarred. The fucker had burnt off his fingerprints. There was no way I was identifying a man who went to great lengths to hide his identity. Not easily, anyway.
Whoever wanted me dead had sent four assassins to finish the job, and four hadn’t been enough. Narrowing my eyes, I considered the notion that had I brought Vaughn like he’d wanted me to, I would’ve had fair warning of the attack, and Gardener would be still in play. He’d been a good informant over the years. We’d met plenty of times, and he’d come through each and every time.
Glancing up, I eyeballed the CCTV camera in the corner. A little red light blinked, signaling that it was operational. A lot of places like this had them installed, but they rarely worked. Publicans used them as deterrents mostly since they were expensive to operate and maintain, but this lot had money. Money that was most likely paid to them by cartels and thugs like the ones who’d smashed up the place.
I rose to my feet and snorted. Everyone paid off everyone. Trust was a fool’s errand in the games we played. To these men, money was the only thing that made a difference as to which side the players played on. I snatched up the money I’d paid Gardener from the floor and slid it into my pocket with the intel. His loss.
Shoving open the door to the back room, I found the computer that held all the pub records and the feed from the cameras. Rifling through the drawers, I found a screwdriver and pushed the monitor to the floor. It landed with a crash as I began unscrewing the cover on the box that housed what I needed below. Casting that aside, I disconnected the hard drive, shoved it into my pocket, and took the back exit.
Sirens wailed in the distance as I weaved through the back alley, distancing myself from the scene. Soon that pub would be crawling with police and Intelligence. They’d find the assassin I’d killed, and they’d find Gardener’s headless corpse, all of which would take them time to identify. I had time to find Ballinger but not much.
The hunter was now the hunted.
Chapter 14
X
I scowled at the headless corpse, thoroughly pissed off.
“Sniper,” Mercy said, standing beside me. “The shot came through the front window.” She pointed to the bullet hole in the glass. A sliver of sunlight shone through the entry point, casting a beam of light onto the putrid green carpet.
“Most likely military issue,” I murmured, glancing back at the corpse as it was zipped into a body bag by a member of the crime scene crew.
The Maid and The Master had been shot to pieces and covered in brain matter. This whole side of the river was under contention after the demise of Royal Blood, but it was also an area where informants used to meet. Before Mercy had put a bullet into Sykes’s head, this used to be Necromancer territory, but that didn’t stop me and others from my side coming to places like this shithole looking for information.
We didn’t have any leads on Lorelei or Lafayette, so we’d lain low with our ears to the ground, listening for any ripples. What we’d gotten was a tidal wave, and it’d brought us right to The Maid and The Master. An alleged shoot out with a group of hitmen for hire and a woman.
We’d gained entry to the scene with fake badges and poked around best we could considering we were operating under MI6’s banner on its own soil. Technically, everything we were doing was illegal. Our aim was to keep our heads down and gather intel. Nothing more.
“What makes you think this has anything to do with Lafayette?” Mercy asked.
“Laurence Gardener,” I said.
“Who’s Laurence Gardener?”
I nodded toward the body bag. “The headless corpse.”
Mercy narrowed her eyes. “How do you know that? He had no head.”
“I met with him several times while I was running hits for Royal Blood,” I said, pulling her aside. “Laurence Gardener had a tattoo on his ring finger. He got it when he married some French woman he’d rescued from some pimp in Calais.”
Mercy cocked her head to the side. “Really?”
“It was in my best interests to know who I was doing business with. Last thing I needed was bad information. Gardener was a good informant.”
“So the tattoo matched?”
“Yes.”
She watched as the body was wheeled out the front door and disappeared into the back of a van. “If he was a Royal Blood informant, then he might’ve been meeting with Lorelei.”
“That’s what I’m thinking and what the rumor suggests, but there’s also the possibility he was taken out by one of the inner circle, and she wasn’t here at all.”
Mercy nudged my arm with her shoulder. Nodding toward the bar, she said, “He might let something slip with a bit of elbow grease.”
Following her gaze, I noticed a broad-shouldered man behind the bar, scowling at the police and suits that clogged up the pub. He was the owner. Fit the profile for a seedy shithole like this.
I nodded in agreement. “We come back tonight. Rough him up a little.”
Mercy wrapped her arm around my waist and smiled up at me. “Sounds like a date.”
“C’mon,” I said, leading her out the back entrance. “Let’s get something to eat, and wait until it’s dark.”
“Kebabs,” she declared. “I want a big, filthy kebab.”
“Is that an euphemism?”
She made a face. “No, it’s literal.”
A few hours later, we sat in the car, the rubbish from our dinner on the backseat, watching the street outside The Maid and The Master.
Things were quiet in the wake of the incident inside. Really fucking quiet. The pub was ‘closed for repairs’ and was dark, the street devoid of movement. Everyone had chosen to steer clear of the scene, and I couldn’t blame them.
It was only a matter of time before the publican came back. Now that the crime scene had been dismantled, he’d sweep the place for anything he’d left behind.
“Is this what you imagined working for Section Seven would be like?” Mercy asked. She sat in the passenger seat, her boots resting on the dash with her gaze focused on the pub.
I narrowed my eyes but didn’t reply straight away. I didn’t remember my life as an MI6 agent. I had images that had been shocked out of me by Jackson, the…whatever he was. Tech guy, scientist? Those images didn’t mean much to me in context with my life now. Mei had given me a copy of my personnel file to go with it, but that was just letters on a page.
“I knew we’d have to answer to someone,” Mercy went on, “but it’s been a little cut and dried, don’t you think? I expected a little more support.”
“That’s what happens when you disobey a direct order,” I said dryly.
“You disobeyed a direct order,” she shot back. “I’d hardly dipped my toe in outside of the fucking classroom. I didn’t get a chance to be a smartass.”
I snorted, returning my gaze to the pub down the street. “There was always going to be some teething issues.”
“I’ll say.”
“Once we do this, we’re free of any outside obligation,” I said. “No more personal shit.”
She slapped me on the arm and pointed toward the pub. “Old dude, eleven o’clock. And yes, you’re right. Just this one last thing to do before the slate is clean.”
We watched as the publican walked down the footpath, fishing in his pocket.
“Ties make this job difficult,” I said as the guy unlocked the door. “The less you’ve got to worry about, the better.”
“The less you have,” she murmured. We both knew about having no ties left in the world. Both our families were dead. Hers at the hands of Syke
s and mine…well, they’d been my test of loyalty. Completely fucked up.
The publican disappeared inside, and a moment later, a light came on.
“We’ll go around back,” I said, checking my gun.
“Game time,” Mercy declared, sliding from the car.
We walked in silence down the dark alley behind the pub so we didn’t alert the publican that we were approaching. He’d likely assume he was in the clear after such a public display of violence. Nobody would be touching this place for a long time, so he was probably well looked after by whoever had ordered the hit on Gardener and his associate.
Leaning my back against the wall, I drew my gun and covered Mercy as she picked the lock to the rear entrance. There was a dull click as the mechanism turned over, and she nudged me with her elbow.
“Me first,” she whispered, pulling her gun out, obviously itching for some action.
Knowing it was useless to argue with her considering our current position, I nodded. Placing my hand on the knob, she held position, her gun aimed out in front of her.
When she nodded, I opened the door, and it swung inward, light flowing out onto the street from the illuminated office beyond, and she stepped inside without hesitation.
The publican turned with a cry at our abrupt entrance and pulled a pistol, raising it clumsily. Mercy sidestepped around him and brought down the butt of her gun into his elbow ditch. His aim was thrown toward the ceiling, and before he could get a shot off, she’d grabbed his wrist and disarmed him.
“Fucking annoying,” she declared as I darted forward.
I pressed the barrel of my gun against the publican’s head, ready to shoot the stupid thing off if he tried anything.
“Who the fuck are you?” he spat, his eyes crossing as they fixed onto the gun that was jammed against his temple.
“None of your fucking business,” I said.
His hand shot up to knock away my gun, and with an annoyed groan, I swung back the other way, my left fist connecting with his pudgy eye socket. He stumbled, and I shoved my hand into his stringy hair and shoved him face first against the desktop.
He connected with a bang, a strangled cry of pain bursting forth. “Fuck!”
“This can go one of two ways,” I said, leaning over him and jamming my gun against the base of his skull. “You can either play nice and answer our questions or be a dumb fuck and get your head blown off. Which would you like?”
“The one where I shoot you,” he snarled.
Mercy moved to the side, glanced at me, then out of nowhere, kicked the guy in the balls.
“Ah!” the publican cried. “Bitch!”
“Tell us a bedtime story gramps,” she said. “Once upon a time, in my pub last night…”
“A woman came in,” he said, his voice sounding an octave higher. “Never seen her before.”
“What did she look like?” she asked, leaning down to eyeball the guy.
“Pretty. Curly brown hair.”
She glanced up at me, not giving anything away to the asshole with his face smashed against the table. She believed it was Lorelei, but I still wasn’t convinced.
“There’s a camera up there,” I hissed. “And another in the pub. Where’s the footage?”
“Fuck off,” the man spat, jerking against my grasp.
“You’re not helping your current predicament by using nasty words,” I drawled. “I don’t care if you wind up dead at the end of this, just so you know.”
Mercy smiled sweetly at him. “He’s a man of his word, pops. He likes to leave a mess.”
“Pops?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, you know the sound when a head detaches from some poor old codger’s shoulders. Pop.” She popped the p at the end of her sentence and smiled wickedly.
“No!” the publican exclaimed. “Please don’t kill me.”
“Where’s the footage?” I snapped.
“Gone. Someone busted up me computer real good. Took the hard drive.” He pointed to the mess of computer equipment pushed against the side wall.
“No backup server?” Mercy asked.
I snorted. “Highly doubtful.”
“Just wot was on the computer,” the publican sniveled.
“Then tell us who paid you off.”
“All they said was they wanted the place clear,” he cried.
“Who?” I snarled, pressing the gun harder into his flesh.
“Didn’t give me their names. Didn’t care what they were. They give me the cash, enough to make busting up the place worth my while. I don’t ask questions.”
“How many?”
“Two men, sounded like they had more. I swear, that’s all I know.”
Shit. Hired thugs, which meant it could’ve been anyone who bankrolled them. It could be someone from Royal Blood wanting to take out their competition or someone from Lafayette’s camp who’d gotten wind of an outsider trying to get in. Either way, there was no trail to follow unless we could identify the men and track their movements, which was near on impossible without security footage.
I rolled my eyes as Mercy rose to her feet.
“Well, that was a bust,” she said. “What are we going to do with him?”
I smiled as the publican began to thrash, thinking he was about to get a bullet in the head. What a wicked woman she’d become. It wasn’t worth the mess.
Removing the gun from the base of his skull, I raised it high and brought it down on the side of the slimy fucker’s head. The butt connected with his skull, and he went limp. Letting him go, I allowed him to slide to the floor.
Mercy raised her eyebrow but didn’t say anything. She just went over to inspect the broken computer.
“He was right about the hard drive,” she said as I rifled through the desk drawers. “It’s been ripped out.”
“There’s nothing here,” I said, moving to the filing cabinet and quickly running over the contents.
“Fuck. Then let’s get out of here.”
We left the publican on the floor where he fell and locked up behind us. There was no use in doing anything else. The guy was scum, but from the way he caved after a little kick in the balls, there was no threat of him coming back to bite us in the ass. He was a just a man who needed some money for his floundering business after his regulars, Necromancers and then Royal Blood, had imploded. Killing him would only cause an unnecessary mess and yet another scolding from Mei.
Back in the car, I gunned the engine.
“She’s after someone,” Mercy said as we drove away from the pub.
I nodded. “That much is clear.”
“So you do think it’s Lorelei?”
“The presence of Gardener would suggest that it’s a possibility.”
“She’s after Lafayette,” she declared. “Has to be.”
“I wouldn’t place all our cards with him. She’s unpredictable right now.”
I knew how Lorelei chose to operate and how she would go about hunting down the human trafficker. I was exactly like her. We were the same, albeit in different states of mind, but we had come from the same place. The Watchman’s factory of brainwashed assassins.
“I still think—”
I raised my hand, cutting Mercy off. After everything we’d been through, she still wanted to place her bets with a fickle emotion. Their story was not ours, and it wouldn’t play the same way.
“She will reveal herself sooner or later,” I said. “And when she does, we will be there to grab her. We can’t assume she’s still with Vaughn.”
“Yeah,” Mercy said, furrowing her brow as we stopped at a red light. “What about Vaughn and Hawkes? If Lorelei’s working alone, then where are they?”
I’d worked closely with Vaughn’s right-hand man when I’d infiltrated The Watchman’s compound in Bristol. I wouldn’t say I was best friends with him, but we had an unspoken understanding because of the lengths we’d gone to get back what was taken from us. “I’ll open a channel with Hawkes and see where he�
�s at. No promises it’ll work. If Vaughn’s gone underground, then he has, too.”
“Anything’s worth a try right now,” Mercy replied, watching as a lone lorry rumbled past our position.
She was right. Anything was fair game when there was no other trail to follow.
Our best chance of getting Lafayette was if we were working with Vaughn and Lorelei, not by constantly shadowing their every move. Not to mention, our best chance at saving those two was finding them before MI6 did. Section Seven wouldn’t be able to pull them out of that even if Moltke himself walked into the director’s office and pleaded…and that man did not plead. Anyway, Section Seven wanted them incarcerated just as much as Her Majesty’s Service did.
Their only hope laid with me and Mercy.
God help us all.
Chapter 15
Vaughn
Don’t wait around.
The thought of never seeing Lorelei again struck me deep. I’d just seen her resurrected from the dead, and to lose her so soon after getting her back sent my overworked brain into overload. It did more than pull on my cold heart. It pissed me off. It made me want to smash the house to pieces. It made me want to hang some poor bastard by the ankles and bleed them dry.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, I pulled the biggest knife from the block and turned it over in my palm, the silence that had descended upon the house doing nothing to placate my nerves. My gaze raked over the sharp edge, thoroughly enraged that Lorelei thought she didn’t need me. I wasn’t some child that could be dismissed with a flick of the wrist. I was The motherfucking Hangman.
I had to admit Lorelei was right about a lot of things. She couldn’t be claimed, she couldn’t be loved, and she couldn’t be placated with sex. Not yet, anyway.
When she came back, because I knew she would be hard to kill even if she was losing her mind, I would give her an ultimatum. Together as equals or not at all.
The sound of tires crunching on gravel pulled my attention outside. Sliding the knife back into the block, I pushed off the bench and glanced through the curtains. The gray car that Lorelei had stolen from some poor sod in Luton rolled into view and came to a stop outside the front door.
