Deadline

by L. T. Ryan

Ever.

  I often imagined Bear would fall into that line of work. Just the sight of the guy would be enough to shut someone up.

  “Probably the case,” I said. “But worth it still. You and I have a way of convincing people.”

  Bear laughed. I let him do most of the convincing when he was around.

  “Think Brandon can get the file?” he asked.

  “More than likely,” I said. “I’ll check when we hear back.”

  I settled into my seat. Adjusted the side mirror. Stared at the darkness.

  Then it happened.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “What?” Bear said, glancing between me, the road ahead, and the rearview. He didn’t need me to tell him. “Dammit.”

  Headlights had appeared in the distance a few seconds prior.

  Now they were practically up our ass.

  CHAPTER 25

  The vehicle behind us swerved to the passenger side. The headlights reflected off the side mirror. I shielded my face and looked away. A bright yellow spot impeded my vision for several seconds. The car drifted a few feet to the side, then closer to center. The bright light faded, but I still couldn’t see anything.

  “Can you tell how many there are?”

  Bear gazed into the rearview. The car was close enough the headlights didn’t impede his view. “At least two. Can’t make out anything past that.”

  I shifted the mirror toward me and saw two dark shapes. Without streetlights, there was little chance of identifying features. Was it the men we’d encountered twice in England?

  “Tap and hold the brake,” I said.

  “What?” Bear said.

  “Do it and keep your foot on the gas.”

  The hood of the car behind us lit up red. As did the men inside the vehicle.

  “It’s them,” I said.

  “The guys from the marina?”

  The view I had wasn’t perfect. Within a few seconds the vehicle rapidly dropped back from view. But for those few brief seconds I had a good enough look at the driver to confirm it was the same man I’d seen in town. The same guy who stood at the end of the dock with his pistol extended in our direction.

  “It’s them,” I repeated. “Unless they work for Frank, I don’t know how they are tracking us. But they found us.”

  Bear slapped the steering wheel hard enough that the car lurched onto the rough shoulder. “We switched cars, man. How the hell are they on us?”

  “They dropped back fast.” I adjusted the mirror so he could see, then turned in my seat. “Dammit, they’ve stopped.”

  “Friggin’ Frank,” he said. “Son of a bitch told them where we were.”

  “We still don’t know that they’re Agency men. The body was there at the morgue for anyone to find. They could have been watching for someone like us to come along and then followed once we left.”

  The other vehicle turned abruptly and crossed the grassy median. A second later, they were heading the other way. The tail lights disappeared long before they should have.

  “They cut their lights,” I said.

  Bear slowed and swerved into the emergency lane. The car vibrated harshly until we stopped. He looked over at me. “Should we go after them?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “I can catch them.”

  “In this piece of crap?” I rolled down my window and the car sucked in the breeze. The air smelled sweet. Fragrant. Lavender, maybe. “We can’t risk getting pulled over, man. Not after what happened in the morgue. We can’t count on anyone to get us out of jail with an assault charge pending.”

  He released the steering wheel and looked over at me. “We’ve got Sasha in our corner.”

  “You really want to involve her in this?”

  “Not if we can help it.”

  “Right,” I said. “So let’s keep our asses out of lockup.”

  He pulled back onto the deserted highway. His eyes flicked to the rearview and stayed there. I wanted to turn around, but we had no way of catching the other car. If anything, we’d put ourselves in a worse situation if they were parked on the side of the road waiting for us.

  “My guess is they were watching the morgue,” I said. “Whether by Frank’s orders, or someone else’s. So either they followed us from the moment we stepped outside—”

  “—or they got to the car while we were inside and planted a tracking device.” Bear took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “We need a new car.”

  “And now.”

  He pulled off at the next exit and located a car rental not too far from the highway. I took care of the current vehicle, ditching it on a residential street. Bear secured a new rental. He pulled up a few minutes later in a 5-series BMW, grinning. I shrugged.

  “Not impressed?” he said.

  “Not really,” I said. “You can drive.”

  “This thing fits me, it can fit anyone.”

  “You fit into the last car.”

  “Barely. And my knees were bumping the dash. You know how hard it was to maneuver in that thing?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Christ, you sound like Mandy.”

  A few minutes later we were back on the highway, which grew more crowded with every on-ramp we passed. Town grew closer. I stared down each new driver that pulled up alongside us, half-expecting to see the men from the marina staring back at me. There were old men, young ladies, and everything in-between.

  Except them.

  “Guess we’ll know if it was the car soon enough,” Bear said.

  “Suppose so,” I said. “Let’s just hope we live through it if it was something else.”

  He ran his hand over his head and placed it near the base of his neck. Held it there for a few minutes. His face twisted, like he was in pain. I’d seen that look plenty of times. Usually after he’d taken a pipe to the gut, or a bullet to the shoulder. Never from sitting in the car.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  He nodded, said nothing. Guess the earlier fight had taken more of a toll on him than he thought. He was out of practice and out of shape and it was showing.

  “You’re not gonna turn into a liability on me, are you?”

  He laughed. “I’m already a liability, partner. So you better watch both our backs.”

  The phone set on the dash vibrated and skirted toward the center.

  “Brandon?” Bear asked.

  I nodded, answered. “What’s up?”

  “First, I got you a line to use,” Brandon said. “It’ll show every call you make coming from a residence on the top floor of a sixty-story building in Hong Kong.”

  “You said Tokyo before.”

  “You serious?” he said. “I’ll cut that damn line off—”

  “Kidding.” I said. “It’s perfect.” He read off the number. I wrote it down. Bear committed it to memory. “Before you keep going, I got one more request.”

  “I’m billing you by the minute. You know that, right, Jack?”

  “Yeah, whatever.” I glanced over at a passing Jaguar. British Racing Green. One of my favorite colors. An old lady glanced over. Looked like she smiled, then pulled ahead of us.

  “So what do you need?” Brandon asked.

  “Police report from the hit. And I suppose any other info you can dig up on what happened today. I need witness names. The officers’ names. Anything and everything.”

  “You got it.” He tapped on his computer, starting his search or perhaps making a note to check after the call. “You ready for these results?”

  “Lay it on us, my man.”

  He cleared his throat, then proceeded to tell us something I couldn’t believe.

  CHAPTER 26

  “OK,” Brandon said before clearing his throat. He grunted several times. “Damn cheese puffs, always messing me up. Anyway, onto your corpse. Man, this is some crazy mess here. It’s most definitely not your lady. Not sister A. Not sister B. Not some weird mashup of them.”

  That confirmed what we’d noticed. The thoug
ht that the tattoos had been fakes had crossed my mind. After all there was only the single picture taken more than a decade ago with their bodies exposed.

  Brandon continued. “Aside from the facial structure, which I’m about to get to, I was able to access some classified docs. Full shots of both women. The tattoos were there from about age eighteen. Now, I don’t know if the dudes at Langley, or wherever, are gonna notice this or not, but I’d say you’re twelve-to-twenty-four hours ahead of them.”

  “Any clue if they’re sending someone to check out the body?” I said. “Frank’s gonna sell them on what we sent. It’s possible someone will dig deeper. Want more answers.”

  Brandon laughed at the suggestion. “You know the only fools that are gonna see those pics are high up enough that they don’t do any day-to-day type stuff. No one is gonna compare any more than the face. And on the surface, it passes.”

  “So how come you’re saying it’s not her?” Bear said.

  “Bear, Bear,” Brandon said with a heavy sigh. “I don’t stop at the surface.”

  “Well, then enlighten me, my scrawny friend,” Bear said.

  “If you hadn’t interrupted me, I’d be halfway done explaining it to your thick ass.” He coughed a couple times, perhaps because he’d started to laugh. Maybe he inhaled a few more cheese puffs or licked the dust off his fingers. A few seconds later, he continued. “OK, so the pics passed the eye test. Dead blonde girl looks like the living blonde girl, when you account for the pale-gray skin, matted hair, lack of make-up. Oh, and the goddamn bullet hole in her skull.”

  “Right,” I said. “We get it.”

  “But when I feed them through my software, it’s off. I mean, it’s close, but not quite right. Follow me?”

  “Sure.” Following Brandon’s chain of thought required an advanced degree.

  “So I took the picture from the hotel. Matched it against the corpse. And guess what?” He paused, but wasn’t waiting on us to respond. “Partial match.”

  “What are we thinking here?” I said. “A relative? Both of them are relatives?”

  “That crossed my mind, briefly.” There were touchtones as he tapped on his screen. My phone buzzed a few seconds later. “Take a look at that.”

  I downloaded the attachment and opened it. It was a side-by-side shot of the brunette woman from the hotel and the most recent photo of Katrine Ahlberg. There were blue dots spanning each face connected by thin lines. A grid of some sort.

  Another message came through.

  “Now look at that,” Brandon said.

  It was a mashup with the photos lined up on top of each other, dots and lines still intact.

  “Christ.” The grids matched up perfectly on each face. “This mean what I think it does?”

  “Yeah,” Brandon said.

  “The dark-haired woman from the hotel is Katrine?”

  “I mean, that’s what the pictures say. There’s some minor differences, but they can be accounted for with surgery. But the basic outline, so to say, is the same. So unless you can get a better shot of her, maybe in a bikini, I can’t say I’m one hundred percent sure. But I trust my software enough to say that I’m ninety-nine-point-nine-nine on it.”

  “She knew,” Bear said. I glanced over at the big man. He was nodding to himself. “Someone tipped her off. But how the hell did she get another person to take a bullet for her?”

  “Money?” I said. “Maybe the woman who took the bullet didn’t know?”

  “More than likely,” Brandon said.

  “Other thing is,” I said, “as far as I know, this just came about on Frank’s side. Unless Ahlberg and her body double were perfect matches, the work the other woman had done isn’t something that takes place overnight.”

  “Question is,” Brandon said, “who the hell is she?”

  “That’s what I need you for,” I said. “Can you start scanning and matching against the databases?”

  “Already working on that.” He paused, took a wheezy breath, followed by a puff on his inhaler. After he exhaled, he continued. “But so far it’s not returning anything.”

  “Exhaust every damn source you’ve got.” That was as far as we could get on the corpse’s identity, so I switched topics. “What about the police report?”

  The key to everything might lie with that report. All we needed was the name of one witness who managed to get a look at the killer, the killer’s vehicle, the type of gun they used. With that, we had a chance at figuring out who was behind the hit. Who we were working against. Who was and wasn’t on our side.

  “I should have it within the hour,” Brandon said. “I’ll shoot you a secure link when I do.”

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll check in with you after we get some sleep. Maybe sooner.”

  Bear and I sat in silence for five minutes after ending the call. I’m sure our minds chewed on the same questions. Did they arrive at the same possible conclusions?

  Katrine had spent a decade pretending to be someone she wasn’t. We’d tried to take her life, but false intel led to a massive screw-up and we assassinated her sister, Birgit. What better way to continue on than let the world assume Katrine was dead, and assume the identity of Birgit? Sure, she lost a lot of money by doing so, but it wasn’t like her family was poor. As Birgit, she laid low for several years, perhaps operating behind the scenes in the same activities she delved in while living as Katrine. Only when she became more active, perhaps with the thought of more outwardly resuming some of the roles of her previous life, the community noticed her.

  Her network had to be strong. There had to be someone from her past who knew she was still alive living under her sister’s name. That person had to be well-placed in order to have advance warning of the hit. Access to our intelligence, or someone else’s? Determining the “someone else” would go a long way here.

  Or maybe Katrine Ahlberg was extremely paranoid and had arranged for a body-double long ago, anticipating the day another attempt on her life would take place.

  “I think we should call Sasha,” Bear said, breaking the silent lull. I tuned out the hum of the tires on the asphalt in the background. He was running down the same trails as me. We each had a single contact we could trust. For me, Brandon was the man. Bear had Sasha. I felt I could trust her. He knew he could.

  “I don’t want to get her involved,” I said. “Too dangerous, especially when she’s got Mandy in her custody. You know Frank is watching.”

  “Sasha can take care of herself just as well as you and me.”

  “She’s a desk jockey, Bear.”

  “She wasn’t always. And you know they don’t work like that. She spends plenty of time in the field. Hell, wasn’t that long ago you trusted her with Mia, right?”

  He had a point. Around the time I had my last showdown with Frank, Sasha came to help watch Mia while I tied up a few loose ends.

  “Let’s hold off,” I said. “I’m not entirely opposed to bringing her in, but let’s see what Brandon comes up with on the police report and the ID of the mystery woman. If there’s lingering questions, we go to Sasha.”

  He nodded tersely, said nothing.

  “Remember,” I said. “We don’t know who’s watching who here. It is possible that someone in MI5 or MI6 is working with Frank, or whoever, and watching her. Monitoring her. Keeping tabs on every call she makes and receives.”

  Bear exhaled loudly, fogging the glass for a few seconds. The street lights turned into large bursts of orange as we passed them. “You’re right. Let’s find a place to crash.”

  We exited the highway a mile later and found a small motel. I checked in while Bear parked the car around back. Best to keep it out of sight.

  A cool breeze that smelled of jasmine swept across the barren parking lot. Crumpled paper raced through the puddles of dim white light. A couple windows were lit up through drawn curtains, but most of the motel was dark. Didn’t seem like the place had a lot of business at the moment.

  Bear met me n
ear the stairwell. I led the way up to the second level, down an outdoor walkway, and found our room. The odor of stale cigarettes slapped me in the face. At one point in recent history, I wouldn’t have minded. But it had been a while since my last one. Best decision I made in recent years. I could run further and faster than in my late twenties. I figured most rooms here would smell the same, so no point in requesting new accommodations.

  I flipped on the light, illuminating the small, dated room. It had green shag carpets and wallpaper from the seventies. There were two twin sized beds. Bear picked his and flopped onto it. The frame groaned and bowed in the middle. His feet hung off the end. His head rubbed against the wall.

  “I dunno,” he said. “Floor might be better.”

  I glanced down at the thick carpet and imagined a colony of bedbugs weaving their way through the long threads. “Nah, I think I’m taking my chances with the bed.”

  I could have slept anywhere at that point. An old, sagging bed might not be the best thing for my back, but chances were I wouldn’t notice until I got up.

  I fell back onto the bed with the same results as Bear. A few seconds later my eyes were closed. But sleep wasn’t forthcoming. My phone buzzed against the nightstand. Had to be Brandon.

  “Want to find out?” I said.

  Bear grumbled something indecipherable.

  “Take that as a yes.” I swiped through to the message and downloaded the attachment. “It’s the report.”

  “What’s it say?”

  I scrolled through, unable to read most of it since it was in Dutch. Brandon had made comments on the important parts, though. In the end I had the names of two cops and one witness. Brandon had made a note alongside the witness’ name.

  NOTE: The name was REDACTED on the current file. I had to dig a little deeper for the original. I’ll have the address for you by morning your time. Good luck.

  “Coos Joosten,” I said.

  “That the cop?” Bear said.

  “The witness,” I said.

  He rolled onto his side, propped his head on his hand. “Address?”

  “Forthcoming.”

  He collapsed onto his back. “Looks like we got a lead.”

  “Sure does.”