by Dale Mayer
“I’ve had a lot of fun with this place. It’s very much home for me.”
“What about all the men who installed this? How did you get them to stay so quiet about it?”
“Well, I could always say that I threatened them that if they told anyone I’d have to kill them.”
“Nope. Doesn’t fly. You wouldn’t kill anyone unnecessarily.”
“No, I sure wouldn’t,” he said with a gentle smile. “But the men who helped me are men with big secrets of their own. This isn’t a case of help one and turn around and stab them in the back. We watch each other’s backs. It’s always been that way. At least it was always the way of my generation. I’m not too sure what to think about your generation.”
“My generation wasn’t raised in cold wars with spies and intrigues at every corner,” she said. “Most of us are completely ignorant of that world now.”
“And that’s a good thing maybe,” he said. “Enjoy your innocence while you can.” He reached out and tapped the monitor. “I have to admit the crooks these days haven’t grown any smarter. In my day, I never would have been caught like this.”
And she had to wonder about that. Because, in his day, he would have been a young man caught up in the Russian cold war and all that that had meant. “You really were a spy for England, weren’t you?”
He turned that bland gaze her way and grinned. “My dear, why would you ever think that?”
She shook her head. “Oh, I’ve got your number now.” But inside she was delighted. Not only had he lived a wonderful and varied life but he had lived long and well and fully. She motioned to the monitor. “It looks like they’re heading for the front door.”
“This should be fun,” he said. “Because they won’t get it open.”
Even as she watched, they tried to kick it, hit it and then to smash the glass windows on either side. They turned and glared at each other, then raced to the kitchen and its back door. The camera in the kitchen picked them up. Just then they pulled on the door, and it opened. But they didn’t get a chance to leave because Jonas and two other men stepped inside. And, just like that, it was all over.
*
North watched Nikki’s face as he and Anders came into the kitchen. With Jonas and two of his cohorts holding the struggling men, she glared at Carl and smacked him hard across the face.
He roared, “What the hell, you little bitch.”
North decked him with his right fist. Carl’s head slammed to the side, and his knees crumpled. But the agents didn’t let him fall to the floor.
He slowly regained his footing and glared at North. “You’ll regret that.”
“I don’t think so,” North said softly. “But you will not talk to her in anything other than a fully respectful tone. Do you hear me?”
The man just glared at him.
North stepped closer. “I have a left uppercut to follow that right haymaker if I don’t hear the right answer.”
Behind him Anders chuckled. “He used to box. You might want to follow through on that.”
The guy just glared at him and then nodded. “Fine, she’s not worth it anyway.”
North stepped back, and Charles stepped forward from the hallway, smiling at Jonas. “I wasn’t expecting you back quite so soon,” he said smoothly.
“Except that these two asshats decided to come back after your granddaughter.”
“We’re just doing our job,” Carl snarled.
“Sure you were,” she said. “Go and attack a poor defenseless young woman. Aren’t you guys big macho tough males?”
The sneer in her voice made North’s heart lighten. He really did like her fighting spirit.
But the two captured men stayed quiet.
North glanced over at Carl’s buddy. “What about you? You got anything to say?”
Phillip just stared at him steadily.
North glanced at Charles. “Now what?”
“They go back with Jonas.”
“What?” Nikki cried out. “That’s not fair. I want answers now.”
“They might give you answers, and even so they might not give you the correct answers,” Charles said. “My money is on not.”
Jonas walked around behind the two men, quickly cuffing their hands together. He motioned to the two agents with him. “Take them out the front of the house and get them into the vehicle.”
With that, they walked to the front door.
“Didn’t you park around back?” she asked in confusion.
Jonas shook his head. “We want whoever is watching them to see they’ve been picked up by us.”
The two handcuffed men swore low and violently. “You know they’ll shoot us then,” Phillip said.
“Hey, shut your mouth,” Carl snapped. “They don’t shoot anybody.”
“No,” North said in a conversational tone, “they don’t. What they do is shoot out the tires to crash their vehicles and then follow up with a snap of their necks.”
Phillip looked at him in horror.
North nodded slowly. “Willy, the driver who delivered the shipment, and the guy at the second warehouse who received it are both dead.”
“You’re lying,” Carl said in a thick voice. “They can’t do that to us.”
“Why is that? You don’t stink like the rest of us?” Anders asked with a sneer.
Carl fell silent. He obviously didn’t think much of the question or the answers they were giving.
Jonas stepped forward, held up his cell phone to show pictures of Willy, the driver, inside the truck and the man from the warehouse lying inside his car, both with their heads at an odd angle.
Phillip shook his head and swallowed loudly. “Hey, I didn’t have anything to do with their deaths. That was all on him.” Phillip pointed to Carl.
“You’re in this just as deep as I am, so shut the hell up,” Carl snapped.
“If you’re in it at all,” Jonas said, “then you’re in it, and you’re in it deep. There is no half-measure here. Men are dying, but what I want to know is, what’s in those vials?”
Both men fell silent.
North studied Carl’s face. “You didn’t think we found that, did you?”
Carl shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah.” Anders held up a picture of the vials he’d taken earlier, holding it for Carl to see. “This stuff.”
“I don’t know anything about it. I handle crates that come in and crates that go out. It’s not my problem what the hell’s in everything. I don’t even do the paperwork to make it all legal. The office handles that. I just work in the warehouse side of the business.”
“So these crates, are they ones your company imports or are they crates London Emporium imports for you?”
The two men fell silent again.
North nodded. “Yeah, you better give some good thought to keeping silent so you can protect your bosses before your bosses cause an auto accident so that they can break your necks too.”
They stayed silent and glared at him.
North shrugged. “I guess if they won’t talk, they can go with you, Jonas. Maybe a little time will help them see clearly.”
Jonas led the way, opened up the double front doors so the agents could go out side by side, and they could keep better control of Carl and Phillip, who seemed to now have issues with each other as well. Sure enough, a government vehicle was parked out in front on the sidewalk.
North stayed where he was, slightly behind the door as the two agents escorted the two smugglers out. They walked Phillip down and put him into the passenger seat on the other side of the car. Then Carl was walked toward the back of the vehicle on the house side.
Just as Carl stood at the edge of the vehicle, there was a weird spit in the air.
“Sniper!” yelled North and Jonas simultaneously.
The first agent dropped lifeless to the ground as a second and then a third spitting noise filled the air. His MI6 partner was dead before he hit the ground. Carl’s
body also slumped to the sidewalk, staring sightlessly up at the gray clouds above. What was new was the bright round hole in the center of his forehead. At the final shot, Phillip—scrambling to get out of the vehicle—went down.
Silence. Four men dead in less than a minute.
As Nikki neared the front door to see what was going on, North caught her and pulled her back against the frame. “The sniper got all four of them out there,” he snapped.
“But I didn’t hear any gunshots,” she said, her frown directed at North.
“Silencer,” he told her. “Stay here.”
Jonas was already on the phone as North joined him, North’s weapon pulled as he studied the immediate surroundings outside. “Didn’t you expect something to happen?” North asked him.
Jonas shot him a look. “My men had on bulletproof vests. Of course I didn’t expect head shots. How many guys would take out government agents along with their own men like that without even having a chance to see how bad things are first?”
“These guys apparently. They took out the other two in their vehicles without so much as talking to them first, so it makes sense they would take these two out right away as well.”
“Nothing makes sense here,” Nikki cried out.
“Well, they have upped their game for sure now by executing government agents right in front of us,” Jonas said.
Nikki asked, “What the hell is in that stuff?”
“Drugs of some kind,” Jonas suggested, “whether recreational or medicinal. Something not allowed in this country.”
“And the name of the drug won’t make a damn bit of difference either,” North said. “Because it’s probably just the raw material to be turned into something else.”
Jonas nodded. “That’s what the lab is testing for. The trick is finding out who is supplying it and who the hell are the rest of the guys doing this because obviously the payout is pretty huge if they’re cleaning up and killing everything and everyone.”
“What about the laptop?” Nikki asked.
“Our techs are still on it,” Jonas said. “Hopefully they’ll track down the supplier of the drugs and, if we’re lucky, the delivery network on this side of the channel too.”
North searched into the distance, trying to locate where the sniper would be. There were houses across the way, and from the look of the bullet hole in Carl’s forehead, this shot had come from directly across the road. If that was the case, they needed to do a full-on search, even though North knew the sniper was long gone now. They should double-check that the owners of the houses were also okay, but they had probably already been taken out as collateral damage.
But he suspected that the current danger was now past, so he wanted to get Nikki out of the way. He nudged her back into the kitchen along with Charles. Motioning at her grandfather, he told her, “You don’t want him to have too much excitement right now.”
Charles sent him a sharp look.
North shrugged and motioned toward Nikki, who was obviously distraught.
Understanding what North was doing, Charles reached out and hooked his arm through his granddaughter’s. “I think we need a cup of tea.”
She half laughed, half cried. “I think all we do lately is drink tea for comfort.”
“If that’s what works, my dear, then that’s what we’ll do.”
North returned to Jonas at the front door. “Search the houses across the street. Confirm none of the owners were killed,” he said in a low voice, so Nikki couldn’t hear this.
Jonas nodded. “We’ll do that. All part and parcel of the lovely shitty world we live in.”
“Your driver? Any chance he made it?”
“No. We’re waiting to see if the sniper will show himself.”
“Hell no. He’s long gone on the other side of town by now.”
Two unmarked government vehicles drove up then, followed by two more and another pair. It was interesting to watch as the British government went to work tracking down whether the sniper was still around. They entered the houses and quickly did a sweep through the entire block. Jonas wandered to the kitchen, to the sitting room, and back to the front door, looking out the windows. Jonas was in his element. All North could do was stand and watch as the process went on before him.
Finally, after hearing Charles call to him, North headed into the kitchen to see Charles and Nikki sitting at a small table with a plate of treats in front of them. North grabbed a chair to sit down between them.
“Anything happening out there?” she asked.
“Yep,” North answered. “They’re doing the same thing they always do when there’s a sniper. Safety first. Check all the residents, look for the sniper. But, Charles, you and I both know he’s long gone.”
“He obviously knew Carl and Phillip were in here and waited to see what the results of their actions would be,” Charles said.
“Exactly,” North agreed. “Some things are just standard. They couldn’t afford to let either of these men talk, which meant they knew something. Or were at least connected to something or to someone who knew something, and they didn’t want that connection to become clear.”
“Is this likely to last for hours?” Nikki asked, staring toward the front door. “As much as I want the sniper caught and punished who killed those two agents and to know more about what Carl and Phillip knew, I’m really tired. I’m working off of only four hours’ sleep. And this isn’t how I had planned to spend my day.”
“No, but you got to see a lot more than you would have on any normal day,” Charles said with a sigh. “At least now you know I’m perfectly safe here.”
“You can’t be perfectly safe,” she reminded him. “After all, you did get attacked and were knocked unconscious.”
He appeared to concede that point. “So ninety-nine percent of the time I’m very safe here,” he said. “I just have to be sure who it is I’m expecting to come into the house.”
She reached for a scone, split it in half and put butter on both sides. North watched with interest. She caught his glance and slipped the thing onto his plate and selected another one for herself.
He picked it up and took a bite. “Charles, you are a fantastic cook.”
“Thank you. It’s one hobby I really do enjoy taking time for,” he said with a tiny smile at the corners of his mouth.
“So what do we do now?” Nikki glanced around. “And where’s Anders?”
“Keeping an eye on the back of the house,” North said.
“The back?”
“Yes. As Jonas and all his men are busy in the front, we wanted to confirm that somebody would keep an eye out in the back.”
Her shoulders slumped as she nodded. “I guess that makes sense. It’d be really nice to get this over with though.”
“Absolutely.” He pulled out his phone, placed it on the table and said, “I’ll take a look at the research material you’ve found for us. Maybe we’ll dredge something out of that section.”
“Or not,” she said. “Jonas should have picked up whatever paperwork and stolen goods or illegal goods were in that one warehouse. I’m not sure there’s much more we can find out on our own.”
Charles and North both chuckled.
She groaned. “Okay, so you guys do this all the time, but I don’t. It seems like we’ve done all we can. But you’re saying we haven’t. So what else can we do?”
“Now we dig into Carl’s and Phillip’s lives,” North said. “They connect to someone who doesn’t want them to live, so I need to know who that someone is.”
She tilted her head, looked at him and gave a clipped nod. “That makes sense.”
“Thank you,” he said humbly. “I do try.”
She rolled her eyes at him, and he just laughed.
His phone buzzed. He looked at it and said, “It’s Anders. I’ll take his place outside.” He got up, nodded to the two of them and slipped out the back door.
He headed to the corner, walking normally, naturally, in case he w
as being watched, then, just before he reached the back alley, he slid up to the corner and waited. A whistle came, telling him it was all clear. He stepped around the corner and casually strolled along the alleyway to the small backyards of the other properties, and there was Anders waiting for him.
“Nothing here. It’s all quiet,” Anders said in a low tone. “I’m not sure what’s going on in front, but …”
“Nothing unusual,” North said. “Jonas has teams all over the place.”
“All these back gardens have this pathway behind the lots, not even a real alleyway beyond them,” he said, “but it’s definitely a place to exit if somebody got caught in this area. And that’s only if they didn’t jump into the actual backyards.”
“Exactly. There’s treats inside if you want something.”
Anders shrugged. “I can stay out here. I just wanted to touch base and to get an update.”
“I’m not sure there’s any point in staying here. We have a lot of research to do. With two more smugglers dead now, we need to tear apart their lives and find out who the hell the sniper was, and, if it wasn’t their boss, then who’s the man who ordered the sniper into action. If anyone ordered this. It’s quite possible their boss was cleaning up all by himself.”
“And, as usual, instead of getting clearer on all this, we’re getting deeper into it,” Anders said.
The two of them walked back into Charles’s yard and up toward the house.
“But I also think the head smuggler’s mistakes are getting bigger,” North said. “It’s not too often we get the lowlifes taken out by the big bosses. So Carl and Phillip knew something or someone. And now we have to find out what or who that is.”
Chapter 10
Nikki watched as both men came in the rear kitchen door. She smiled and said, “If it’s not too late, I want to take some of my work and go to the main office. It’ll be empty, but I go in on a weekend if I have to.”
“How often do you do that?” North asked.
She twisted her lips slightly as she thought about it. “Once a month normally. It depends on the accumulation of paperwork. I always take in a hard copy, and I want to check in with the office to see if anything has changed. So much is happening with the owner being ill that I’m always afraid I’ll go in one day to find it all locked up—like my key won’t work. That nobody would have told me how the company has gone under or been sold or just that the doors were closed and how I’m not getting paid anymore.”
