by Dakota Banks
“Ah! I paid that woman a great price! Now she has my money and the map.”
“You stole the original from her, and it is back where it belongs. Consider instead that you paid a large price for the copy you have.”
“You always could run rings around me. You are so much smarter than I.”
“Catherine the Great always said that she praised loudly and blamed softly. Where is your soft blame?” Maliha said.
“You have already had it from me. You gave back the map that wasn’t yours to give. Ah.” He shrugged. “It’s only money.” He laid his hand atop hers, familiarly. “This mysterious process of yours. It is not something I could…become involved in?”
She hesitated. “Why would you wish it?”
He sat back in his chair. He was wearing a straw hat and sunglasses, and she thought he looked debonair.
There is nothing wrong with his age. He’s healthy, and stubborn. He’ll probably live another fifty years.
“I have lived a certain kind of life. A life dedicated to my country. You know, you are the same. I’ve done many things that don’t give an old man peace of mind. It’s not that I regret doing them. It’s that I want to have another chance, another life in which I don’t know and do these things. When I grow this old again and go to bed at night, I would sleep easily, except when I get up to take a piss. There are good things I could do.”
She was quiet a long time, trying out and discarding different answers. “There is no process, Abiyram. My story is long and hard to explain. But I promise this to you. When I am done and can come back and take some time off here, I will tell you that story. You may end up joining me in something that I am trying to accomplish. And then you will live that life you are talking about, the one where you get to do good things. But it will not make you physically younger.” She smiled. “I have a friend who would dispute that you are old.”
“I’m intrigued. Let’s put it all aside and get to what I have found. The Brit—I knew I’d seen him before and it didn’t take long to track him down. William David Hall, former British Secret Service. Pushed out very quietly as a suspected mole, nearly executed, but calmer or stupider heads prevailed. Turns out he wasn’t a mole after all, but by then the damage was done to his career and he couldn’t go back to his undercover job. Didn’t want a desk job, he liked the thrill. He doesn’t seem to have held any grudge against England because the switch turned him on to a much higher lifestyle. He made a large amount of money in financial advising, and he kept his identity a secret from his customers. Some said he used inside knowledge, others that he was just a financial wizard. In any case, he must have loved the secret trappings of it.”
“Where is he now?”
“He has a house in London and an office in Hong Kong, but he hasn’t been at either of them for two to four weeks. He’s in Latvia, in a ruined castle. I suspect he has some kind of personal fortification there.”
“A safe room, in other words.” She got the location of the castle from him.
“Anything on Vincent Landry or the Leader?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Thank you. This helps immensely.”
Abiyram waved his hand in dismissal. “This is the work of my life. This information is traded on the international market like eggs.”
He omitted the fact that he was retired, making Maliha wonder if he really was. “Only if the trader is you, my friend.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Maliha was on her way to kill William David Hall.
She hadn’t had occasion to visit Latvia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. If not for all of the other things crowding the top of her agenda, she would have stayed a few weeks or months collecting background material for a Dick Stallion book.
That was another thing sliding toward a deadline—her book Too Big To Be True. If she could manage to do one normal thing, she should phone her editor, Jefferson Leewood, and warn him that things would be close. Just the thought of dealing with Jeff, who lived his day from one crisis in his own mind to the next, was too much today. She could ask her agent to move the Dick Stallion series to a new publisher after the current contract ran out. The books were wildly popular. But Jeff had taken a chance on her when she was a nobody, so out of loyalty she’d stay with him. Besides, he sent her a fruit basket every year.
During her flight, she had some quiet time, and her thoughts revolved around Jake and Lucius.
She was holding the door open for Jake, at least a small crack’s width, until she had her talk with him and learned more about him on her own.
I owe him that. Or do I? He’s been so deceptive with me. She thought back to how she’d met Jake and how their relationship had gotten started. But I can’t say that I was honest with him either.
Lucius was out there somewhere dealing with his new situation. He hadn’t been in touch with her after the message carved in the tree, and she had no way to get in touch with him. She’d looked for L. A. Cinna, but he’d vanished. She could only assume he was back on his island, recuperating and planning what to do next.
The heart he’d drawn might as well be engraved on the inside of her eyelids. She saw it constantly and it was never out of her thoughts.
Well, almost never. Alarm bells were going off about the proximity of the full-scale launch of the hitchhikers, and she was ready for what was coming: the increasingly difficult tracking down and killing of the remaining council members and the challenge of finding their leader.
Her phone rang, and she was surprised to hear Yanmeng.
“Is Amaro—”
“Yes, he’s wiping the call. Hello to you, too.”
“Sorry. I was concerned about tracing or leaving a phone-company record.”
“I’m concerned too, Maliha. All—”
“You’re in a secure place. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“I mean about you—”
“I told you I can take care of myself.”
“Would you shut up and listen for a minute?” It was the first time Yanmeng had ever raised his voice to her. She hadn’t realized she’d been drowning out his words and genuine concerns.
“Sorry. Speak your mind.” She had a feeling Yanmeng was not alone in making this call. She pictured Hound and Amaro sitting nearby.
Uh-oh. Did Yanmeng draw the short straw?
“We’re concerned about the way you’ve gone off on a killing mission. Multiple kills. You’re treating this like you’re Ageless again.”
“This again? How would you know how I’m acting? Are you watching me without permission?”
When Yanmeng remote viewed Maliha, she could tell him to go away with a hand signal. He was supposed to honor that and she always assumed he did.
“No. But if I did, what would I see that’s made you so defensive?”
“I’m not defensive. We all agreed that the Tellman council needs to be wiped out. Now you’re quibbling about how I do it?”
“You’ve got us locked away—”
“For your safety.”
“Granted, for our safety. But you’re slipping away from us on this. You want to operate in some kind of hidden mode.”
You wouldn’t understand, and you’ve just proved it.
“I have to find out who these people are and track them down. You don’t think a little stealth is required?” Maliha was getting exasperated. She didn’t understand Yanmeng’s concern and resented the questioning of her methods.
“We just don’t want to lose you.”
“I always kill alone. I don’t see you there helping. The burden’s always on me. Now why don’t you lose my phone number and let me work?” She hung up the phone.
And regretted it immediately. What’s gotten into me? I can’t believe I treated Yanmeng that way, even if I don’t understand why he’s so concerned.
She dialed the shelter, and this time Hound picked up.
“You can really be an asshole sometimes,” he said.
“Yeah. Is Ya
nmeng still around?”
“He said he had a headache and went to lie down.”
“What’s going on there? Are you all getting paranoid or something?”
“Hell, no. We’re all fine. What’s with you and this secret shit?”
“I’m looking for the targets in old ways, that’s all. Sources I can’t reveal.”
“Listen to you. Targets. Sources. You turned into a spook?”
“If that makes it easier for you to understand, yes.”
“Spooks give up their humanity, you know. What’s left of you if the human part’s taken away? That’s what we’re worried about.”
Arriving at the Riga airport, she rented a Škoda from the Europcar counter and left the city immediately. She’d brought with her everything she needed in her checked luggage. She was heading east, on the main road that crossed Latvia and went straight to Moscow. She’d have to go on country roads later, but for a while it was smooth going. Her destination was Volkenberga, the castle on Cloud Mountain.
She got to the ruined castle, a minor tourist site, after dark, and that was perfect for her purposes. It took nerve for a man to create a personal panic room in a tourist attraction. She wondered how many of them he had sprinkled around the world. She had about a hundred of them, but none were in tourist destinations.
Maliha packed carefully, both weapons and the padded cases she needed to get into the panic room. Then she climbed to the top of Cloud Mountain. The wooden steps the tourists used in the summer were covered with snow. She walked next to them, using snowshoes and pulling her supplies behind her over the snow. The pine forest she was in was dense enough to block out the stars. The weather in Latvia in November was bitterly cold during the long nights and her breath came in great plumes that tracked her progress through the woods. She checked with her aura vision to see if Rasputin was with her. All that showed were the smaller, pulsing auras of animal life nearby. She paused to marvel at an elk passing by, shimmering against the dark trunks of the trees. It scented her, startled, and was gone. Moments of beauty like this made her appreciate the unique life she led.
As an assassin, I travel the world and see things few people do. That underwater base aglow with lights, where I’d killed Cort Maur. A place of beauty, like Cloud Mountain. Death and beauty.
She searched the ruins, knowing that the crumbled stone walls were probably not the site of Hall’s room. She wanted to make sure she wasn’t leaving him a clear escape route. She looked for ventilation shafts, but suspected they would be too small to notice, especially in the dark. There would be a number of them, probably forming a network under the snow.
An assassin, that’s what I am, demon’s slave or not. Then I killed for chaos and evil, now I kill to save lives, but I still kill, kill, kill. Am I really different?
Satisfied that she’d done her best aboveground, she found the entrance to the catacombs. With a flashlight covered with her hand, she made her way down a dank passageway and found the steel door within minutes. Set to one side was the fake rock panel that normally covered it. She immediately used her dimmed flashlight to search for cameras in the wall and ceiling. They would be concealed, with just a small lens among the rough rock surface.
Not finding any, she turned her attention back to the door. The rest of the room’s construction depended on when this room had been built. In the past safe rooms were made of concrete all around, but she couldn’t figure out how Hall could have hauled concrete into a public site during the summer. It would be impossible to do it during the winter. If the room had been built recently, the steel door would be the same, but the ceiling, sides, and floor of the room would be protected with layered Kevlar fabric set into the rock. Now that could be smuggled in during the winter, with no one around.
With the flashlight on low and tucked into her coat pocket, she pulled a small ax from its sheath on her back and began chipping away at the rock next to the steel frame. The noise no doubt warned Hall, if she wasn’t already in view on a camera she’d missed. She chipped past the frame and discovered a Kevlar wall.
She heard a click, like some gear turning in her direction, and she leaped away from the spot she was occupying. A bullet, fired from the ceiling, entered that spot.
She flicked off the flashlight and moved back down the passageway, she hoped out of range. Without light and having to move quickly, she stumbled several times and caught herself before falling.
Heading back into the passage, wary, her flashlight set on high, she scanned the walls and ceilings as she should have done instead of trying a stealth entry. She found four cameras on the low ceiling, including the one right outside the door, and destroyed them with the point of her knife. She found the weapon embedded in the ceiling and put it out of commission.
Now. Where was I?
She enlarged the exposed Kevlar area with her ax and then brought out one of the two special items she’d brought with her. It was a metal halide lamp, a super-high-intensity UV source. She set the lamp up at close range, put on special dark sunglasses, and walked back down the passageway until she rounded a corner before pressing a remote ignition.
Kevlar had a weakness. UV light degraded it, which is why it was rarely used in outdoors without a sun shield—such as the sun-blocking layer that covered it in applications like body armor. Degradation took time, but Maliha had put a focused industrial source three inches away from it, and she didn’t need total degradation, just enough to yield to her ax.
In an hour, she turned off the light and went back. With a few swings of her ax, putting all of her strength into it, she dug through the first layer of Kevlar. Shine, repeat. In three hours she had a hole big enough to insert a flexible camera and get a view of the panic room.
Hall was in there, all right. He was staring back at the camera from across the room. It was small—only eight feet across—but packed with weapons and survival gear. The first thing she did was check his aura and was relieved to see that she hadn’t put in all the effort to break into Hall’s safe house to find that he was a sweet cherub of a man.
From all the supplies she could see, she wasn’t going to starve him out anytime soon, and time was on his side with the hitchhiker project. He started to move, coming toward the camera with something in his arms she couldn’t make out right away.
Oh. It’s a… Her camera went dead. Bolt cutter.
In place of the camera, Hall shoved the point of a sharp rod through rapidly, hoping to catch her eye with it. She jerked away, caught the rod, and yanked it away from him. This guy is pissing me off.
Before he could get the idea to block up the hole she’d worked so hard to create, she slipped a blowpipe into the hole and shot a tranquilizer dart into his ass as he retreated.
From then on, with Hall not causing trouble, things moved smoothly. She blew the steel door off from the inside using C–4 inserted through the hole. Hall didn’t die in the blast, but there wasn’t a lot of killing left to do by the time she got to him. She snapped his neck. Unlike Lucius, Hall wouldn’t be recovering from it.
She hadn’t expected the mission to be so…exhilarating.
Being the Black Ghost is so much simpler than being Maliha Crayne, woman with a conscience.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Maliha phoned Hound. They agreed to disagree on her method of work, at least for this conversation.
“Amaro found some info on the French guy, but he said the last group conversation didn’t go so well, so he was hoping you’d check in. Then Randy dragged him off to bed.”
“Really?”
“I mean, made him go to sleep. Alone.”
“Oh. Is Glass okay there?”
“She’s fine. She’s stuck with me making her do her rehab exercises. She says none of the other physical therapists ever cursed at her before.”
Maliha couldn’t help smiling. “So you think she’s had it too easy?”
“Damn straight.”
“Before we get to Landry, let me say we can sc
ratch William Hall off the list.”
“Good.”
“I’m getting nervous about not turning up anything on the Leader. I would bet he—or she—is the one with a finger on the button, or whatever it takes to launch the hitchhikers. Wiping out the rest of the council might be just what he had planned anyway, and I’m just an unpaid hitman. Tell me about Landry.”
“Okay, Amaro’s got notes here. Reading his words now. ‘Very wealthy man, just like Hall. Interesting that you have picked up on this man. He is the grandson of a Nazi collaborator, one who was responsible for exporting Jews from France to the concentration camps during World War II. Not that Landry should pay for his grandfather’s crimes, but he is a person of dubious repute on his own.’ You know Amaro wrote that. I wouldn’t say dubious repute in a million years. I’d say he was a…”
“Go on.”
“There’s more. ‘Landry lives on a large estate, heavily guarded I’m told, in Normandy, near Les Pieux. The exact source of his wealth is unknown, but he is thought to be a major player in putting together illicit arms deals, a facilitator.’”
“I’m on it.”
Driving through the Normandy countryside lifted her spirits. She turned off all of her concerns for a short time and enjoyed the sunshine. The weather was chilly, in the low forties, but cows roamed in pastures looking for the last green tidbits of summer and the bare branches of apple trees cast tangled shadows on the hillsides. She’d spent twenty years living here in a cottage overlooking the ocean between the two world wars. Rabishu hadn’t given her an assignment during that time. She’d lived simply in spite of the vast wealth she had to draw upon, grew herbs in her garden, watched the waters of the English Channel, and gently turned away suitors.
Not all of them. There was Jules. Sitting outdoors with him, the sunset, wine, Camembert, fresh bread…I should do that again for a time. Go live with Abiyram. Sit on his balcony and drink wine and watch the world go by.
She approached Landry’s estate. From the road, there was only a gate and a guard shack visible. The main home must be set back over the small hill she could see that had a driveway wrapping around it. She kept going, waving at the guard who, in a moment of unprofessional zeal, whistled at her.
