I'd come so close to losing her without knowing what it was I'd almost lost.
Do something then.
I was doing everything I could.
Protect her — kill the bastard who wants her dead.
A slight movement in the corner of my eye made me tense and lift my head.
“I thought I dismissed you.”
Angelica didn't react to my harsh tone. “Are you all right, Mr. Boutilier?”
The concern sounded real, but Angelica was as skilled an actor as I was. She had no reason to care and probing for information could become a habit in this line of work. Even the most inconsequential blather could sometimes prove useful.
I turned back to the file for distraction.
Get a grip. You fucking get a grip right now.
There was a highlighted chunk of text in the middle of the top page, which was still warm from the printer, and I focused on it gratefully —
Until I realized what I was looking at.
Prostitution.
Human trafficking.
This was new. Fuck.
“Michael?”
In a staggering lapse of control, I'd spoken aloud.
I raked my fingers through my hair. The office was stifling and it was hot under the buzzing fluorescent lights. “I wasn't expecting this.”
“Are you surprised?”
Surprised meant I had been taken off guard. Surprised meant Callaghan had succeeded in getting the drop on me.
I picked up a pen and made a few notes. Stalling for time, and both of us knew it.
“Am I surprised that he got in on the skin trade like so many other corrupt businessmen?” I mused, trying not to fixate on how slippery the pen felt in my fingers. “No, that doesn't surprise me. Not in hindsight,” I added pointedly.
Everyone's a fucking psychic in hindsight.
What surprised me was his choice of venue. Callaghan was a fastidious prick who generally washed his hands of sex. As far as I could tell, he'd had no lovers, male or female.
He was a rapist, but rape wasn't about sex; it was about power, and fear, and causing pain. Any shrink fresh out of Headfuck University could have told you that. But then, that summed up human trafficking to a T. It was about exploiting human fear and weakness to those in power who knew better but didn't care.
Tale as old as fucking time, that. Bringing in young girls from the Balkans and Mainland Southeast Asia to a land where they couldn't speak the language on the pretense of job opportunities. These women came to the U.S. thinking that they were going to be employed as a maid or a cook: an honest living with an honest wage that they could send back to their families. Instead they were subjected to abuse that bordered on torture, and promised more if they didn't behave themselves. The traffickers employed the use of middlemen to keep the money out of the hands of the girls, although they did encourage the girls to send for their sisters, and their mothers, and their female friends. More girls meant more bodies, and more leeway to keep them in line.
I had been contracted by men in the human trafficking industry before. Whores who knew too much. Activists whose influence posed a threat to their precarious business dealings. Rival traffickers. Indiscreet johns. On the flip side, I had also been contracted by members of these latter groups to kill the traffickers themselves. If they had the money, I never asked where it came from. Human trafficking was a brutal trade, but no more so than mine had been. And since there was a ready market for sex, as well as death, both enterprises persisted.
Who was I to judge?
But dealing in trafficking firsthand — actually buying and selling human beings, forcing them into slavery — was distasteful. There had been a time I had believed myself capable of anything, from rape to the killing of small children, but I thought that even I might have drawn the line at this venture. If not for the moral and ethical niceties, then because of the high risks involved. There were a lot of people who wanted these men dead, and with good reason.
This is not a productive line of thought.
I cleared my throat, turning my attention back to the folder. “How did you find out about this?”
Angelica slid her hand under mine and yanked out one of the pages. The contact sent irritation arcing through me. “What are you doing?”
Ignoring me, she flipped the paper over so that it covered the manila envelope, and my hand. Her movements were so brisk it was a wonder she didn't give me a fucking paper cut.
“The fuck — ”
“Finish reading.”
“Why can't you just fucking tell me?”
“Trust me.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, drawing in a deep breath instead of snapping at her for being cute.
All my irritation vanished as I began to read.
“Maudit,” I breathed.
The story had been an easy lead, if you knew what you were looking for. One of the 'shipments' had been intercepted by the local authorities. The man who had been charged with the trafficking was the textbook example of a patsy if I'd ever seen one. Overweight, sweating, well into his fifties, white. Just the kind of sick pervert society wet themselves trying to condemn. All he needed was a pair of oversize glasses from the 80s and a flasher's khaki trench coat.
I tapped his picture. “Who's this clown?”
There was no way he'd done it. No fucking way.
Angelica inclined her head. “He was a member of the IMA.”
Was? “Is he dead?”
“They don't care much for rapists and sex traffickers in prison.”
No, they didn't. And this Kevin McCarthy — that was his name — would not be the first casualty of penal justice. Rapists, child molesters, sex traffickers — these men were abhorred by criminals as much as the general public, and were often forced to serve their sentences out in solitary because of the vast risks and many threats they faced from other inmates.
Killing him would be easy now. All it would take would be a simple bribe, a word whispered to a guard, and an unlocked cell.
Easy.
McCarthy would die in prison, or he would rot while serving out his lifelong sentence. Either way, by using this man as sacrificial lamb, Callaghan had silenced McCarthy as effectively as if he had placed a gun to his head and pulled the trigger himself.
So easy.
“What did the poor joker do to piss the bastard off?”
“He was an older member.” Angelica recited the facts from rote memory. “He had seniority over even you. He was recently stationed in Scotland.”
The reeducation facility. “Without pay?”
“It seems he had not kept his displeasure with recent changes in management quiet.”
“So we have the motive.”
“A considerable one,” she agreed.
And Callaghan knew. That was what killed me. He knew that I would see through this ruse of his as clearly as glass. Knew it? Hell, he was counting on it. Subterfuge like this was how the bastard went around flipping the bird. He was telling Christina and I that we were both next.
Christina had had every right to be worried. Those roses in the cemetery had been a threat.
She popped into my head, unbidden, her face conjured up as easily as if she were standing right across from me now.
The mere thought of what Callaghan was doing to these women would elicit outraged tears on their behalf. She took things personally, that girl. She was a one-woman crusade. If she knew for a fact that the IMA was using her dead mother to fuck with her —
I schooled my expression. Casually, I asked, “Has anyone else seen what you just showed me?”
Angelica smiled, revealing her small, white teeth.
“I left that distinct pleasure to you.”
Of course she had.
Fils de putain.
I wasn't looking forward to this.
Christina
Six months. They could slip by in a breath. They could span an entire lifetime.
Time can be as fluid as wa
ter, and never in the way you'd like; it slows down to a standstill when you wish you could get things over with, and rushes by in a blur when you wish things would last.
Six months had passed since my mother's death. No. That wasn't the right word. Death was a passive, natural act. My mother had been excised from this world by a cold-blooded killer when Adrian had hired a man to pose as one of my mother's boyfriends and then kill her when her guard was let down.
My mother had been murdered.
A dialogue box popped up in the program I had scripted. Start conversion? I clicked 'yes.'
The box was replaced by a rotating hourglass. That hourglass could go to hell, as far as I was concerned. It was only marginally less annoying than that talking paperclip that lived in Word.
“Come on,” I urged it. “Please.”
After what felt like eternity, the hourglass went away, and my cipher program loaded, scanning the encrypted characters for probabilistic matches. This makes words like “the” and “and” valuable keys.
I was hacking into the computer of a member of the IMA. I'd already forgotten his name. Michael had told it to me before he went off to meet with Angelica. The name didn't matter. He was low-ranked and not particularly careful. That mattered.
Poor man. He was going to feel Adrian's wrath very soon. Maybe I should have felt more pity, but I kept thinking back to those roses on my mother's grave. Oh well. He knew what he was getting into when he signed up to work for a psychopath.
I stared at the scrolling cryptograms — as lazy as this man appeared to be, he was that careful. Numbers, special characters: they blurred together in wavering lines, forming a map of my exhaustion.
I hadn't slept in days. That flight from Oregon had been the last straw. My body was starting to show the effects. Not even coffee worked. The chipped mug that sat beside me on the desk was ice-cold. I'd knocked it over several times, the dark spills spattering the carpet below my desk testament to my clumsiness. Under the harsh glare of the fluorescent bulbs, the stains looked an awful lot like dried blood.
Hopefully this wouldn't take too long.
I closed my eyes. The inside of my eyelids rasped against my dry corneas. I rubbed them to assuage the itch, as white bursts of light danced behind my closed lids, but that only made things worse.
Mamá and I had never been close. When my father first landed on the IMA's radar screen, my mother, my own mother, had chosen to throw me to the wolves so that she and my father could escape.
When my captor — Michael — had threatened my well-being, she took a gamble no mother should ever make. She assumed that he would not have the stomach, or the motivation, to hurt me.
On that, as with so much else in life, she had been sorely mistaken.
This wellspring of grief that had spurted up in the wake of her passing was unexpected. My loss hurt so much; I felt it every day, growing like thorns in my heart. And if sorrow was the thorns, the flower was a brilliant, irradiated hatred that burned orange and red like fire, caustic enough to sear upon contact.
I hated the man who had had my mother killed.
He was the man who had ordered my mother killed.
He was the man who had tried to buy me as though I were a slave.
He was the man who had once beaten me so badly that I had nearly died.
He was the man who had made damn sure that Michael and I would live under the shadows of our own death warrants for as long as he was still alive.
Adrian Callaghan.
The one man on this earth I wanted to kill.
Oh yes, I hated him so much I vibrated with the force of it, as if hatred was something as tangible as the electrical field of an ion cloud, strong enough to subsume me in a burst of plasmic fire.
When I closed my eyes, I could see his mocking smile. He was in my nightmares, this man — this monster. I often awoke from my dreams with his laughter ringing in my ears like a death knell, with the phantom taste of my own blood in my mouth.
The Lord teaches forgiveness, but some things are unforgivable.
Until I met Adrian Callaghan, I hadn't truly believed that people could be evil. I thought everyone had a little of both in their hearts, and that it was up to God to measure the scales.
I had been wrong.
Adrian Callaghan was evil in every sense of the word.
The computer bleeped, and I glanced at the screen. Conversion in progress.
“Come on,” I muttered. How many lines of code would I have to scroll through tonight? I'd only just gotten back. I wanted to sleep.
And I wanted to talk to Michael. He had been quiet, even for him. I couldn't help but feel that he was hiding something unpleasant from me, and that upset me, because if he felt as though he had to shield me from what was really going on that meant that he didn't really see me as an equal. Not quite.
I glanced at the computer's clock. Michael had been in that meeting of his with Angelica for the better part of an hour. What were they doing in there?
My brain plied me with ideas, but I doubted that they were anything remotely close to the truth.
“Coño.”
An abrupt cough punctuated the silence to cover the curse, followed by keys clacking in a syncopated burst of noise. Cliff Cordova was studying the screen of his own computer as it loaded the lines of encrypted code that I had managed to crack so far.
His eyes were as red-rimmed as mine felt, his face a mask of concentration as he took notes that might or might not help our cause. I wasn't sure yet.
Something else must have gone wrong. He muttered, “¡Qué cagado!” and shot a quick look at me, as though making sure I hadn't heard.
I pretended innocence.
Cliff had worked for Adrian once. His partner had been The Sniper. In fact, the two of them had captured me in Seattle and brought me to one of the bases the IMA had in Washington. He'd reformed since then, but only after he found out that Adrian planned to set him up for the same kind of fall that he'd given Michael. Self-preservation is everything.
Cliff was a big man, with a bronze complexion, dark hair, and muscles that looked like the weapons they were. I knew next to nothing about him, although I was starting to suspect, based on the curses he used, that he was probably from Cuba.
It said something that Adrian could bring even this great monolith of a man to fear.
Oops. I'd stared too long. Cliff was aware of being watched. When his eyes started to slide towards mine, questioning and suspicious, I looked away.
I could feel his eyes on me as I stared diligently at my screen, but he didn't say anything. I was grateful for that; I didn't want to talk. It was strange being on the same side as the man who had once hauled me in to Adrian. I still wasn't sure I could trust him — any of them — even though I knew I had to. Hell, Michael seemed to, and he was the slowest to trust of all.
Or maybe he's just putting on a really good front.
His whole life had been spent putting up fronts. I wondered if he even knew what his true self was like. He so rarely allowed himself to be himself.
It broke my heart.
There was a discordant bleep and when I looked over, Cliff had the blue screen of death.
Cliff pounded the table. “¡Me cago en tu madre!”
Even though he had been talking to the computer, and not me, my throat choked with emotion. “Could you stop?” I snapped, and he looked at me, just as angry, until he realized what he had really been saying, who he had been saying it around.
I saw the exact moment he put two and two together. The exact moment he realized that he'd uttered “I shit on your mother” to the woman who had just visited her mother's grave.
His entire face slackened, and he said, “I am so, so sorry. I didn't mean — ”
“I know,” I cut him off. I didn't want to hear it.
In the silence that followed, I could hear Suraya talking with her younger sister, Jatinder, in Hindi. I scowled. They had been conversing for the last hour.
&nbs
p; I wasn't sure I could trust Suraya, either. Yes, she had driven the getaway car that had helped us escape from Adrian when everything went wrong, and she had helped save Michael from what had seemed like certain death, but in the context of AMI she didn't really do much to advance our cause. Mostly she spent her time standing around and looking sullen or sequestered away with her sister. Gossiping.
What she had done for Michael couldn't carry her forever. I was grateful to her for saving his life — I couldn't bear to lose him, too — but I also would have liked to see more concentrated effort on her part.
Loyalty was all we had, and if we couldn't count on that, we had nothing, nothing at all.
The quiet screech of hinges made me pause. I craned my neck, looking over my shoulder, and saw Michael standing in the doorway.
His face was tight with restraint. That was never a good sign. I watched him carefully, but this time his expression betrayed nothing of his inner mind.
Cliff noticed me tense and his hands stilled.
“Can I have your attention? Suraya,” Michael barked. “Where are you?”
In the other room, the faint strains of Hindi stopped. The door opened, and Suraya stepped out of the conference room, her slim brown arms folded over the front of her dress.
“What's going on?” she demanded irritably.
I opened my mouth to ask her who the hell she thought she was talking to him like that. But Michael caught my eye and shook his head.
Fine. I pressed my lips together, and waited.
Michael cleared his throat, shifting something under his arm. A file folder. Packed full of paper.
“We have a problem.”
Chapter Three
Predicament
Christina
We have a problem.
I swallowed hard.
When Michael said there was a problem, that usually meant someone was trying to kill us.
My irritation with Cliff fizzled out like a wet sparkler as Michael handed me the manila envelope he had been carrying under his arm.
I ran my fingers along the matte surface. Apprehension eddied through my thoughts until I felt almost carbonated by the sheer, bubbling force of my anxiety. I knew I wouldn't like whatever lay inside this folder. Not at all.
Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4) Page 3
