Wade didn’t have a clue what the trouble was about. The kid must have done something to annoy his dad, and the guy was the type who didn’t mind lacing into him in public and humiliating him. He probably knocked the boy around at home. The woman, too. In fact, Wade thought he saw a bruise on the woman’s face that she had tried to cover with makeup.
Wade stepped out from behind the counter.
Avery said, “Now, wait—” but Wade ignored him. He went up to the man in the cap and said, “Excuse me, sir.”
The man jerked his head toward Wade and snapped, “Yeah?”
“You’re causin’ a little bit of a disturbance here—”
“You see that?” The man pointed at a basket half-full of merchandise. “I’m buyin’ all that crap, which makes me a customer, which means you treat me with respect and keep your damn nose outta my business.”
Wade smiled. He knew the man looked at him and didn’t see much to impress him, just a slender, sandy-haired guy, medium height, young. Just somebody else he could run roughshod over the same way he bullied everybody else he ran into, including his own family.
“Didn’t mean any disrespect,” Wade drawled softly. “Just wanted you to quit bein’ such an asshole in front of your wife and kid.”
“You just . . . What the hell did you say? I’m gonna get you fired, you little—”
“Go ahead,” Wade said. “Then I won’t have to deal with worthless sons o’ bitches like you anymore.”
The man’s face was almost as red as a sunset by now. The muscles in his shoulders bunched. He might as well have been wearing a sign explaining what he was about to do.
Avery came up behind Wade and said, “Please, sir, there’s no need for a scene—”
The man threw a punch, telegraphing it so blatantly Wade felt like he had a week to get out of the way. Instinct made Wade weave to the side as the fist came at him. The blow went harmlessly past his ear.
Unfortunately, Avery ran right into it. Blood spurted from his nose as the customer’s fist landed on it. Avery grunted in pain and went over backward.
Wade saw his friend lying on the floor bleeding, and that was the last straw. Moving almost too fast for the eye to follow, he hit the big man four times, right, left, right, left, driving him back into a display of fishing poles. As the guy rebounded from that, Wade caught his arm and broke it with a simple, efficient twist. The man started to howl in pain, but Wade kicked his legs out from under him and dropped on top of him, jabbing his knees into the man’s belly and hitting him in the face again and again . . .
In the end, it took Avery, Carl from Paint, and Lucas from Automotive to pull him off. By that time the cops were there, and they fastened his hands in plastic restraints behind his back and marched him out of the store to put him in the backseat of a cruiser.
Wade laughed the whole way. So much for those benefits he’d been hoping to get one of these days. Getting locked up did have one benefit, though.
He wouldn’t have to listen to Lucy bitch anymore.
CHAPTER 20
Somewhere in Africa, three years before the New Sun
Dixon settled in on the hilltop and rested his cheek against the smooth wooden stock of the sniper rifle. The weapon was more than thirty years old, but it still shot straight and true. Dixon knew it, liked it, trusted it. The rifle had done the job for him more times than he could remember.
The job was killing, of course, and few in the world were better at it than Henry Dixon.
When he’d first gotten into this line of work, after a couple of tours of duty, he had let his hair grow out into an impressive Afro, a throwback to the seventies. That hadn’t lasted long because he realized it made him noticeable, and he didn’t want people to notice him. He wanted to ease into a place, do his work, and ease out again with nothing to show he’d ever been there except for a body . . . or two or three.
So he’d shaved off his mustache, cropped his hair close to his head, and he still wore it that way all these years later. It was mostly gray now.
Six hundred yards away, the rebel leader who called himself Dugo stepped out of his tent into the early morning sunlight and stretched. He was a tall, lean man who wore boots and a pair of khaki trousers. His torso was bare.
Through the scope, Dixon watched Dugo yawn, then turn toward the prisoner who was tied to a thick post set in the ground, tied so securely that he couldn’t slide down and sit. From the looks of the dried blood that covered his dark skin, the rebels had tortured him for hours the day before, until they had grown tired of their sport. Obviously the man hadn’t told them what they wanted to know, or they would have gone ahead and killed him and been done with it.
Now it would start all over again. Eventually, no matter how strong he was, the man would break and reveal all the secrets of Colonel Mfunda’s lakefront hideaway. Once they knew that, Dugo and his men could start planning their mission to assassinate Mfunda.
The colonel wasn’t aware of the threat that hung over him, of course. He would have been outraged to think that any of his people wanted him dead, even that malcontent Dugo. Why, he was their beloved leader, wasn’t he? They idolized him, and why shouldn’t they? He had taken his small, mineral-rich country and dragged it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. All it had taken to accomplish that was almost wiping out several of the tribes that had stubbornly and foolishly opposed his benevolent, well-intentioned rule.
Luckily for Mfunda, he had some advisors around him who weren’t as blinded to the truth, and they watched out for him by hiring men like Dixon. The colonel had no idea how many times they had saved his life.
From time to time, Dixon had wondered why Mfunda didn’t just go ahead and declare himself a general. Or president. Or even king. He was the absolute ruler of this country and could call himself whatever he wanted. But he had been a colonel in the army when he’d led the coup and seized power, and Dixon supposed that was good enough for the man. Titles didn’t really mean anything, anyway.
He shifted the rifle slightly and centered the sights on the back of Dugo’s head. A squeeze of the trigger would put an end to the man’s dreams of rebellion.
But someone else would just come along to take his place, and Dugo was a known quantity, after all. And the colonel’s advisors weren’t Dixon’s only employers. He also worked for men who operated out of fancy drawing rooms in Washington and basements in Virginia. They liked the tension between Mfunda and Dugo and wanted it to continue. If Mfunda got too secure, too complacent, he might decide to kick all the foreign interests out of his country, and nobody wanted that. Better for him to keep on worrying a little, and as long as Dugo was around, he would.
So Dixon shifted the rifle’s sights back to the prisoner, one of Mfunda’s security officers who had been kidnapped by the rebels a couple of days earlier.
The rest of the camp was coming alive now. Women emerged from some of the tents and stirred up cooking fires. Men went into the trees to empty their bladders. It was all very primitive, except for a truck parked to one side that had a satellite dish mounted on it. Even here, people had to have the Internet.
Dixon had gotten into position while it was still dark. He could have carried out his mission as soon as it was light enough for him to draw a bead on his target. But his employers had asked him to wait and kill the man right in front of Dugo. They wanted to send a message to the rebel leader, a message making it perfectly clear that they could reach out and have him killed whenever they wanted to.
It struck Dixon as melodramatic nonsense, but he did what he was paid to do.
He drew in a couple of deep breaths and blew them out. His body was absolutely still. His mind was serene.
He stroked the trigger.
Six hundred yards away, the bullet passed close enough by Dugo’s ear to make him feel the heat of it, then the prisoner’s head exploded.
It was merciful, really. Soon he would have been screaming his lungs out in agony as the torture started
again.
Through the scope, Dixon saw Dugo stagger back from the corpse. He twisted around, his face splattered with blood and brains. His mouth opened grotesquely wide as he shouted at his men. At this distance, Dixon heard the yelling, but only faintly. The words meant nothing to him.
He crawled backward down the far side of the hill until he couldn’t be seen from the camp and then stood up. His jeep was parked on a trail about a quarter-mile away. He trotted toward it, his eyes scanning his surroundings for trouble as he moved. While he was at his best making long, carefully planned and aimed shots, he could handle impromptu fighting, too. He was a good shot with the rifle under any circumstances.
The trees and the undergrowth thickened as he approached the trail. Dixon slid through them without making much noise. Sometimes he thought of himself as a ghost, moving unseen and unheard through life, lacking in substance except for his trigger finger.
Dugo’s men would have to take a roundabout route to reach the spot where Dixon had left his jeep. It would take them half an hour, at least, and by then Dixon would be long gone. By noon he would be on an airplane headed to Paris, where he intended to spend at least a week relaxing.
He stepped out of the brush onto the trail and froze.
A truck was parked on the trail behind the jeep. It was military issue, a deuce-and-a-half, but Dixon instantly knew from the ragtag clothing worn by the eight or nine men around it that they weren’t regular soldiers. They were members of Dugo’s rebel force who had stolen the truck somewhere.
There was no reason for them to be here. Dixon had scouted the trail and knew it was little used. No other vehicle had come along it for days, if not longer.
So what had brought these men here today?
Dixon could think of only one answer.
Bad luck. Sheer bad luck.
And it was worse luck that one of them had a walkie-talkie with him. As they all stood there around the two vehicles in the trail, staring at him as if frozen, a burst of static came from the walkie-talkie, followed by squawking that Dixon recognized as Dugo’s voice. The rebel leader was furious as he ordered his men to start searching for the sniper who had just killed their prisoner.
Dixon didn’t give the man with the walkie-talkie a chance to reply. He whipped the rifle to his shoulder and shot the man through the head. The walkie-talkie flew out of the man’s hand and went high in the air as the heavy bullet cored through his brain and knocked him down.
Dixon worked the rifle’s bolt and shifted his aim with blinding speed. He fired again, this time drilling a man who was trying to raise a machine gun. The slug took the man in the chest and spun him around.
With two men down, the others panicked and scrambled for cover. Dixon dropped another one, hitting the running man between the shoulder blades. Then he leaped toward the jeep in the hope that he could start the engine and get out of here before the rebels gathered their wits.
All he needed was a small lead. He had been the hunter most of his life, but on occasion he had been the hunted, too.
It might have worked, but he hadn’t counted on the fact that one of the rebels had walked on down the trail to see what was up ahead and now was behind him. The man came running back and opened fire with the machine gun he carried. Dixon had no warning before the slugs laced into the back of his legs and spilled him off his feet. He yelled in pain.
But he kept his wits about him and rolled over to spot the gunner running toward him. The man skidded to a stop and tried to open fire again, but Dixon shot him first. Blood sprayed into the air from the rebel’s bullet-torn throat, forming a parabola as the impact flipped him backward.
Dixon knew he was bleeding out from the multiple wounds in his legs. He had only moments to live, and that reduced everything to the starkest, most primitive terms. He wanted to take as many of the bastards with him as he could, so he rolled onto his belly again and started firing as the rebels charged him.
Through the red haze that was slowly dropping over his vision, he saw one man fall, then another, and then the red began turning to black and he knew he was slipping away . . .
Then the oddest thing happened. A great wind began to beat at him, and a deafening noise descended on him. Just before he lost consciousness, he realized that the two things were connected and figured out where they came from.
The beating of a helicopter’s rotors.
When Dixon came to, he had to lick his lips a couple of times before he could rasp, “Am I . . . dead?”
“Not yet, old buddy-roo,” a familiar voice said.
“Somebody got the bright idea of keeping an eye on you to make sure you got out all right after you finished the job. When we saw that firefight break out, we swooped down to get you. You did finish the job, didn’t you?”
“Y-yes. Am I going to . . . going to die?” he asked as he felt the helicopter bank in the air.
“I’m just a civil servant, not a doctor. But we’re gonna get some help for you just as quick as we can, so you hang on, okay?” The man paused, then asked, “You still with me, Dixon? You stay with me, you hear?”
“I’m . . . here,” Dixon said as the man’s face swam into view above him. It was a bland, white man’s face, the face of someone who ought to be selling insurance instead of treading the murky back roads of international espionage. “Do you think they can . . . save my legs?”
“Sure they can. You’re gonna be good as new, buddy.”
“For a spy . . . you always were . . . a terrible liar, Clark.”
CHAPTER 21
London, two years before the New Sun
Megan Sinclair leaned closer to the young man and whispered in his ear, “Your suite? Half an hour?”
His eyes were big with anticipation. He swallowed and said, “Oh, my, yes, please.”
“You’re sure you can get away from your minders by then?” Megan asked.
“They’ll do whatever I tell them to. They work for me, you know.”
Actually, they don’t, Megan thought. They work for this young man’s father. So it was possible the bodyguards might pretend to go along with his orders while still keeping an eye on him without his being aware of it.
She’d just have to keep an eye out herself.
She gave him a sultry smile and did the quick little up-and-down trick with her eyebrows that she knew excited men, then moved away from him to mingle with the crowd in the big hotel ballroom. She sipped from the flute of champagne in her hand, and when she’d finished it she snagged another from a passing waiter in a red jacket.
It hadn’t been easy to get an invitation to this exclusive, black-tie charity event, but a few weeks of effort had managed it. Megan had a lot of contacts and had worked them for all they were worth. Even at that, she probably wouldn’t have been able to swing it if any important members of the royal family had been attending. There was nobility in the room, but more of the garden-variety type.
She wasn’t interested in noblemen. The young man she had targeted with her attention was the son of an industrialist and financier who had risen from nothing, the offspring of Moroccan immigrants, to become one of the richest men in England. He had established a trust fund worth five million dollars for his son, who had a reputation for being what earlier generations would have called a playboy and a wastrel.
Megan liked that word, wastrel. She supposed that was because she was an old-fashioned romantic at heart.
And what could be more romantic than stealing from the filthy rich?
From the corner of her eye, she watched as Peter Mahmoud spoke to his bodyguards and then left the room. The two burly men followed him. Megan knew they would accompany him up to his suite, but once he was safely inside maybe they would seize the opportunity for a little downtime.
She would believe that when she actually saw it, though.
When she judged that she had killed enough time, she started to leave the party herself. She was well aware of the heads that turned and the eyes that watched her go.
The long waves of her hair were like dark honey, and the classic little black dress she wore showed off the sleek lines of her body to their full advantage. More than one man had told her that her eyes were deep green pools in which they would happily drown. She looked like a successful attorney, or a business executive on her way straight to the top of the corporate ladder.
A few of the male guests spoke to her on her way out of the ballroom and tried to convince her to stay, but Megan turned them aside with a smile and a gently humorous comment or two. She’d had plenty of experience at deflecting passes, since she had spent several years surrounded almost entirely by men.
The ballroom was on the third floor of the hotel. She timed it so that she was able to get in an elevator by herself and start down. But she stopped it at the second floor, got out, walked quickly past some meeting rooms, and slipped through a door that opened onto the fire stairs.
The stairwell was deserted, as she had expected it to be. She went up nine flights to the tenth floor, which was also the top floor. It was divided into two suites, one being used by Peter Mahmoud, the other empty tonight since it cost a small fortune to book it.
Peter had a large fortune.
Megan eased the stairwell door open a crack and peered through it. The door opened onto a short corridor. The elevator was at one end of it, two doors at the other end. The door to Peter’s suite was to the left.
No one was waiting outside it. Maybe the bodyguards really had left.
Megan couldn’t see behind her to the elevator, though, and she couldn’t open the door far enough to look in that direction without being seen. So she eased it closed again, walked back down to the ninth floor, and went out into the corridor there. She was in superb condition, so all the going up and down stairs hadn’t winded her.
She summoned the elevator, then rode it up one flight to the tenth floor. When the door slid open, she stepped out with an air of unconcern, as if she had just come from the party in the ballroom down on three.
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