Seeing Red (Gareth Red Thrillers Book 1)

by Nick Thacker

  “The first two people to die — a man and a woman — were both on the list, and they both made the largest deposits. Brun Rukleveh made the third-largest.”

  “How much?”

  “I do not know that information. My job is to find the people on the list, and find out not only why they are dying, but why they made the deposits in the first place.”

  Gareth looked out the windshield, thinking about this. Something didn’t sit right with him, and he thought he knew what it was.

  “Why did you say ‘why’ they are dying?”

  “Excuse me?” Roderick asked.

  “You said, ‘not only why they are dying, but why they made the deposits…’”

  “Correct.”

  “Why not, ‘my job is to make sure no one else dies?”

  Roderick didn’t respond.

  “You don’t really care that they’re dying, do you?”

  “Mr. Red, of course I care. I am absolutely hoping to get to these men and women before —”

  “Before their brains are splattered all over my parka?”

  “Before they are murdered, yes. But the main priority, the one that you share with me as well, is to understand why.”

  “So as long as we deliver to your boss at the bank why these clients are getting offed, you get paid. No matter how many more people die?”

  Roderick’s nostrils flared quickly and then he righted himself, his face melting back into its stoic silence.

  “I, personally, want no more deaths. Except one.”

  “The woman who’s killing them.”

  Roderick looked at Gareth. “Correct.”

  16

  GARETH WAS TRYING TO CONTROL the anger still stewing inside him, but he couldn’t get over the simple fact that had they gotten to Brun Rukleveh a little bit sooner, they might have been able to save him.

  They might have been able to end all of this once and for all.

  Roderick apparently could tell that Gareth was still pissed. He glanced over to Gareth, who was still gripping the wheel with one tight-fisted hand.

  “What is it you are concerned about now, Mr. Red?”

  Gareth shook his head.

  “Go ahead. I thought we are being honest with each other.”

  Gareth gave him a raised eyebrow as he drove on.

  Roderick sighed. “Fine. I admit I have not been entirely forthcoming with —”

  “‘Entirely forthcoming?’ Are you kidding?” Gareth asked, his voice rising in his throat. “He — he’s dead. Because of us. Because we didn’t get there in time. And now what? We just… drive to the next place?”

  Roderick didn’t speak.

  “You didn’t think it was important to tell me that you knew he was in serious danger? You didn’t think it was important to let me in on that little secret? Christ, Roderick, we could have saved him. We could have —”

  “What, Gareth? We could have jumped in front of the bullet? We got here as soon as we could. You know that. We came to try to get any information that might be helpful, yet we were still too late. Brun Rukleveh is dead, and while it does not make me feel better about the situation, it does mean the situation has changed. We know more now than we knew before.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d better start telling me about ‘this situation’ before I call it quits. I’m not standing anywhere near any of these other guys while they get shot up by some mysterious sniper.”

  “Yes, I agree.”

  “Good. Start at the beginning. What do you know about all of this that I don’t?”

  Roderick sighed again, this time longer and deeper. Gareth got the impression that it wasn’t out of a desire to keep Gareth in the dark but more out of not knowing exactly where to start. Gareth decided to give him some help.

  “How about the bank? What bank do you work for?” Gareth asked.

  “PremierONE.”

  “Never heard of it,” Gareth said.

  “And you would not have,” Roderick replied. “It is a private equity institution, focused on the premier estate management of —”

  “Hey, pal, I’m not as pretentious as your target market. Give it to me in the plain-English version.”

  Roderick considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, I apologize. We work with very wealthy clients.”

  “Got that.”

  “…who each have a net worth of at least half a billion dollars, in a United States dollar valuation.”

  “Billion? With a ‘B?’”

  “Correct.”

  Gareth whistled.

  “There are many more billionaires in the world than what Forbes reports. Many people wish to keep their net worth a secret, for obvious reasons.”

  Gareth smirked. “Like not wanting to get shot in the head.”

  “Well, yes. But our clients choose to work with us because we provide the simple banking logistics of many popular institutions, the exclusivity and privacy they require, and the security benefits of the world’s most powerful currency and exchange organizations.”

  Gareth frowned, trying to understand. “So you’re like an offshore bank — outside of the US’ control and tax downsides, but with higher security, like a Swiss bank.”

  Roderick nodded. “The Swiss have been known for banking for many years, but it is becoming somewhat of a misnomer. They have been denying many Americans the ability to establish accounts of late, for differing reasons.”

  “So you guys step in and offer what they don’t.”

  “Precisely. Nearly the same control — ATM withdrawals, worldwide account access, and fast transactions — as well as the security and tax-haven benefits that Swiss and Cayman banks have garnered a reputation for.”

  “I see.”

  “So our clients at PremierONE tend to be not only extremely wealthy, but they also interested in accessing their money from anywhere in the world, without any particular government’s oversight.”

  “Seems like a good deal,” Gareth said.

  “It is,” Roderick replied. “Albeit an expensive one. Many of our clients pay upwards of $10,000 US for access privileges.”

  “A year?”

  “A month.”

  “Damn.” Gareth turned slightly left, to follow the long road back to Yakutsk. So far, he hadn’t seen a single vehicle traveling in either direction on the highway, and he had the sudden realization that they would likely freeze to death waiting for help if something happened to their trusty old truck. He let his foot off the gas and allowed the vehicle to slow down another ten miles per hour.

  “Okay,” Gareth said. “What else? You work with rich guys and gals, handling their money and making it available wherever they are in the world, whenever they want it. But why are they emptying it all into a bank account?”

  Roderick shook his head. “I honestly have no idea. None of us do.”

  “Who’s ‘us?’ You mentioned your boss, the woman I spoke with. Who else is involved?”

  “For reasons of discretion and in the interest of the safety of our clientele, only my boss, myself, and one other person — the Chief Financial Officer of PremierONE — knows about the deaths and their relation to the bank.”

  Gareth whistled again. “Wow. So that makes four of us, total. Not even the US government knows?”

  “They will find out, but it will be weeks — possibly months. Their investigation team will eventually understand that the deaths are all clients of ours, and they will know that the clients had liquidated a large percentage of their assets into an account.”

  “But you’d probably like to get this all wrapped up before the Feds start digging around, huh?” Gareth asked.

  “We would like to prevent any more deaths,” Roderick said. “But yes, the more entanglements with governmental regulatory agencies we can dodge, the better.”

  “So you’re in a bit of a conundrum: can’t call them for help, but you also didn’t have the manpower to handle it on your own.”

  “Precisely, Mr. Red.”


  Gareth nodded. “Got it. And so you and I were chosen to embark on a wild goose chase around the globe to find this chick and take her out?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Do you know who the next target is? You knew the first three, based on the order of the amount of their deposit.”

  “We do, yes.”

  “So that’s where we’re heading.”

  “Yes,” Roderick said. “Unless I hear otherwise. We have two days to get there, and this drive is going to take most of that time.”

  “So I’m hoping this next place is close, then,” Gareth said.

  “Vladivostok.”

  “Another Russian place. Great.”

  “It will not be as cold as this place,” Roderick said, as if that was any consolation.

  “Roderick,” Gareth replied, “my freezer isn’t as cold as this place. Literally anywhere else on Earth is warmer than here.”

  Roderick stared straight ahead, watching the trees pass by the speeding truck, still no other vehicles on the road.

  The desolation felt complete to Gareth. They were alone, and they were in the middle of a foreign country, and in a place within that country that no one else from that country even wanted to visit.

  No wildlife, no humans, no buildings or signs of civilization.

  It was ironic, really. The claustrophobic feeling he had just from being alone in the middle of all this openness. It was expansive, and yet constricting. Never ending, and yet tightly wrapped around him.

  He was isolated, a feeling he knew all too well.

  17

  HE HAD TRIED.

  HE REALLY had.

  It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, trying. He’d done a lot of hard things in his life, and he had even joined the Army, another hard thing that would bring a lot of really hard things to him.

  But trying was harder.

  There wasn’t much he could try, so he tried the only thing he thought he knew about: he tried to talk to her.

  He stared down at the phone on his thigh, sitting there like it had been sitting there for the past half-hour. He hadn’t moved in three hours except to take the phone out of his pocket ten minutes ago.

  The apartment smelled of lavender, probably due to the giant bowl of lavender-scented potpourri in the corner, near the television.

  Also of cinnamon, which was weird. He couldn’t figure out why he smelled cinnamon, but it was definitely cinnamon.

  Maybe the potpourri is cinnamon-scented and it’s weird that it smells like lavender.

  He couldn't tell, couldn’t remember. He didn’t care to think more about it. It was weird that it smelled of both lavender and cinnamon at the same time, and he didn’t really care why.

  The phone didn’t ring, and he wondered if it knew. If it shared that with him, and it didn’t want to interfere with whatever it was going on inside of him.

  But no. The phone wasn’t a dog. It couldn’t empathize with its owner, understanding its master on a level that sometimes even humans struggled to comprehend. The phone wasn’t alive, wasn’t a thing that could share anything with him unless he picked it up and told it to.

  It wasn’t alive.

  Alive.

  He started to cry.

  A damn phone makes me cry now, he thought.

  But it wasn’t the phone. It was never the phone.

  It wasn’t even the person he wanted on the other side of the phone. She couldn’t make him cry anymore. She couldn't do anything to him anymore. She had no power over him.

  Power.

  That’s what it was about, he figured. Power. Power over something else. Not over him, of course, but of something… else.

  Did she want power?

  Was that all it was?

  Had she wanted control?

  He didn’t understand.

  He picked up the phone from its pedestal on his thigh and threw it across the room as hard as he could. His couch was about ten feet from the opposite wall and the huge, beautiful flat-screen television they’d picked out together, and the phone crossed the chasm like there was no space between them and smashed into the front of the television.

  The television fared worse than the phone. A tiny scratch on the screen of the TV, but the phone fell face-up onto the carpet, a long, diagonal crack stretching from the top-left to the bottom-right corner.

  He didn’t get up to grab the phone for another half hour.

  His life now existed in half-hour increments.

  Half an hour for laundry, then half an hour on the couch. Half an hour to make a simple dinner for one, half an hour to eat it.

  Half an hour to look at the book she’d left on the nightstand next to his bed in his apartment, half an hour to decide what to do with it.

  Half an hour to decide to wait and not do anything at all, then go sit on the couch. Half an hour to stare at the television.

  He wondered if he’d care that there was a noticeable mark on the flat-screen TV. Would it lose resale value? Would he even want to sell it?

  Half an hour, he figured, to figure it out.

  Nothing else existed. Boot camp started up soon, but until then it was half an hour. One-half of sixty minutes at a time, then another. Over and over and over again until he woke up the next morning.

  Gareth hadn’t slept in so long, or at least he hadn’t remembered sleeping. He had just walked, silently, from one room to another and then on to the next, depending on which half hour increment of his day he was in.

  It had been seven days. An entire week.

  Still, he hadn’t talked to her.

  The phone’s screen lit up. It didn’t make noise, but there was a text message on it. He could see that from the couch, but he didn’t get up.

  He had another twenty minutes before the next half-hour started. He would do it then.

  The twenty minutes passed like no more than five and he got up and checked the phone’s screen.

  He read it, staring at the words and wishing for a moment he couldn’t read.

  How was it that someone could learn to read, and then not be able to turn that skill off? They had no way of not reading. It was a cruel trick, really, to be forced to understand a set of words and letters and syntax and punctuation no matter where or when you were shown it, knowing what it said and what it meant.

  Immediately.

  There was no time between when he read the words on the tiny screen and when he understood them.

  For that reason, he started to cry. He didn’t care about the words, but he suddenly cared about the fact that he understood the words.

  He cried because he didn’t know why he understood the words, and that it was unfair to not understand the words.

  He couldn’t go back, travel backwards to a time when he didn’t understand the words, and that made him cry even more. The tears were warm, but not soothing in any way.

  She can’t go back either.

  She can’t change this.

  He thought of them both. One, who had taken his life and completely transformed it into one of meaning, one of importance, and another, one who had taken a life and completely transformed it into nonexistence.

  He could never forgive her for that.

  A girl.

  He cried harder, the sopping wet tears splashing all around his knees and the carpet around them, the broken television and the broken phone both staring stupidly down at him, probably wondering what it felt like to feel.

  He couldn’t even think about her, so he thought about her.

  He tried.

  He picked the phone up. Turned it on, unlocked it.

  He scrolled through the contacts list, found her number.

  Hovered his thumb over it.

  Clicked it.

  The phone immediately sprang to life, obeying its master and dialing and connecting and providing him with the audible and haptic feedback of the connection.

  He put the phone to his ear, still kneeling on the carpet of his two-bedroom apartme
nt in the city, the brand-new appliances and furniture all reminders of the woman’s voice he was about to hear.

  He continued to cry, his shoulders bending over in desperation, his head down, his arm lifted and his right hand holding the phone.

  The television sat silent right behind him, tarnished and unwavering.

  He watched the light trickling through the blinds she’d chosen, through the curtains she’d closed twenty days and four hours ago, right before they’d left it for the last time together.

  The phone, also broken, continued to ring.

  He waited.

  He wept.

  The phone went to her voicemail.

  He had nothing to say. He never did. He hadn’t wanted to say anything. He owed her nothing, wanted nothing from her.

  But something told him it was the right thing to do — the only thing to do now, really.

  So he’d called her.

  He’d wept, and waited.

  Still on his knees.

  The apartment smelling of lavender and cinnamon. An odd combination, he now realized. It was weird that it smelled like both of those things because he had never really noticed it before, but now it seemed weird to him that it smelled like both at the same time.

  Or maybe it was weird because it was just a weird smell.

  He shook his head, trying to shake the feeling that he was putting off something dreadfully important, while simultaneously fighting with himself over the fact that putting off that very thing was the only thing worth putting off.

  He realized the voicemail recorder had started. He frowned, thinking.

  What am I supposed to say?

  Or, rather, what do I want her to hear?

  He had nothing more to say to her, and she knew that. There was no reason for him to be calling her right now, except because it was the only thing he could think of doing in this particular half-hour block of time.

  The next half hour might find him in his bed, crying.

  Or cooking, since something deep inside his head was telling him he was hungry.

  Or it might even find him walking up and down the street, wondering if the ‘she’ he was calling now would have been similar to the ‘she’ he would never know, the ‘she’ that she removed from his future would have made the same decision.