by Helena Maeve
It was no longer the case. When Will peered up at him, he saw a graying man with dark brow, brooding over his most recent mistake.
“I haven’t forgotten that you’re a control freak,” he replied, intent on keeping his voice even and businesslike. “But if you expect us to join forces, you must not be paying attention. I’m in no position to lead a crusade against the enemies you have earned us.”
“A little harsh, don’t you think?”
Will gulped down the rest of the water. If it was laced with GHB, at least he would be thoroughly knocked out. “You’re a good shag, Ignacio. You always were.” He handed back the glass. “That’s where this ends.”
They couldn’t go back ten years, pretend nothing had happened. They weren’t the same people anymore.
His legs unsteady, Will pushed up from the armchair. “Consider my offer. People who get caught up in our affairs don’t often live to tell the tale.”
“I thought we were done with threats,” Ignacio sighed.
Will met his gaze wearily. “That’s not a threat, love. That’s my advice.” Because I remember how it was between us. Because despising you took ten years to achieve and one night to unravel. He buttoned up his shirt but let the tails hang loose over the belt. “The car’s still waiting out front?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Will turned the lock and walked out without a glance over his shoulder. His heart seemed heavier with every step. He forced himself to keep pressing forward.
The phantom scars Ignacio had left in his wake had never smarted worse.
Chapter Six
Public school hallways washed away in a shrill ringing. Will’s uniform, ill-fitting and uncomfortably tight on a grown-up body, dissipated into the solid lines of the Venetian blinds. His terrifying dream about retaking the A-levels vanished under the harsh glare of morning.
Will scraped both palms over his face and kicked off the sheets. His phone buzzed again.
“What?” he barked in English as he picked up.
A total of three people had his home number, but telemarketers sometimes called to ask if he was content with his insurance or cable subscription. A foreign language dissuaded them from trying too hard.
“Café do Sol,” a voice said, on the other end of the line. “Twenty minutes.”
Will sat up groggily, sheets pooling around his waist. “Who is this…? Hello?”
The line went dead.
He stared at the cordless receiver for a long beat before dropping it to the mattress. His alarm clock—a digital, green monstrosity gifted to him by Cleo and prone to rousing him fifteen minutes later than the appointed hour—read seven-oh-two.
Will smothered a yawn. He’d gotten in at a little after two o’clock last night. His clothes were still scattered around the bed, where he’d stripped them off with his very last ounce of energy before collapsing into a dead sleep. Five hours wasn’t enough time to recharge his batteries or erase yesterday’s mortification.
He swung his legs over the edge of the mattress and pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. Last night’s hoop-jumping flashed through memory, a silent movie reel without the over-the-top piano tunes. He had set himself up for the fall. Ignacio helpfully provided the necessary impetus to propel him over the edge.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Will eyed the clock again. Twenty minutes was just enough time to grab a shower and hurry to the coffee shop. He wasn’t going to rush through his morning ablutions.
His mysterious caller could bloody well wait.
* * * *
The Art Deco clock over the register chimed eight as Will stepped at last through the sliding doors. When he’d first relocated to Sao Paolo, Café do Sol had been a family-owned business, with rickety wooden tables and owners who remembered his name. It had the misfortune of being counted as prime real estate, a corner location with a spectacular view of the Mosteiro São Bento.
It was only a matter of time before investors took over and modernized the little hole in the wall. Now the doors opened and closed automatically and easy jazz trickled from artfully concealed speakers in the ceiling. Everything was sleek and modern, down to the square cup in which Will’s espresso was poured after he made his way to the counter.
He cast a glance around the restaurant, pretending to look for a seat. He’d already spotted the figure at the back, safely concealed from the tall windows and secluded from any other patrons. Today, Karim wore a checkered white shirt under a tweed jacket that nevertheless fit him to a T. A rain-dappled trench coat rested on the back of a chair at his table, dripping runoff onto the mosaic floor.
He was poring over one of his beloved crossword puzzles, seemingly unperturbed by the language barrier inherent in the local paper.
No point delaying the inevitable.
Sighing, Will made his way to his table.
“You’re late,” Karim volleyed in lieu of good morning.
“Had a feeling you’d wait.” After all, Karim had gone to all the trouble of finding Will’s number and breaking into his office in the first place. It made Will feel all sorts of warm and fuzzy to know he cared.
Karim stirred the tea bag in his cup. “I wonder…why do you think Jennings felt the need to bug your office?”
“It’s eight a.m. and I don’t bloody give a damn,” Will groaned. “Can you at least let me wake up first?”
“Rough night, was it?”
Over the rim of his cup, Will did his best to glower. “You set me up,” he noted, after a scalding, rousing caffeine injection.
“How so?”
“You went to Ignacio yourself.” Before you came to me.
Karim’s expression betrayed no guilt, no shame. “It would have been remiss of me not to go straight to the source, wouldn’t it? Besides, I couldn’t be sure you’d agree.”
The betrayal stung for reasons that Will couldn’t immediately unpack. He returned his cup to his saucer. “I’m curious. If he told you to fuck off—persuasive as you are—why did you think he’d be more receptive to my efforts?”
“Does it need articulating?”
Will’s face flamed. “So this is about the past? You arsehole… You encouraged me, remember? You were right there, like a sodding pimp.”
You used me to get what you needed out of Ignacio and now you’re doing it again. It wasn’t a real spook reunion until blame was lobbed back and forth.
Karim had the good grace to duck his eyes and study his teacup. “As I recall, you were one of our best agents. And you were reprimanded worse than Cole or I. You always drew the short straw. Has that changed?”
The boxes at the office told a story. His dwindling budget was an answer in itself.
“Do you see reinforcements jumping out of the woodwork to arrest you?”
“No.”
“If I had my way, you’d be in handcuffs by now and we’d be having this conversation through six-inch glass.” Careful what you wish for.
Karim took a sip of tea, clearly buying himself time to think. His unflinching cool matched Will’s bitterness. “You haven’t told Jennings…or anyone else, for that matter.”
“I told Ignacio.”
“Yes,” Karim breathed, “isn’t that interesting?”
The knowing look in his eyes had Will seriously contemplating pulling out his revolver and firing a few warning shots. Possibly into Karim’s smug face.
He resisted the impulse. “Ignacio refused your terms.”
“That’s unfortunate. Is it a definite no?”
“I’ve never known him to be fickle.”
“I mean,” Karim clarified, “can he be persuaded? Is there anything you could say or do—or give him…?”
Will threw his head back and let out a rich guffaw. It wasn’t a matter of amusement so much as despair. This was the man he’d once looked up to, one of the few he’d called ‘friend.’ Karim had lived and breathed espionage before he defected. He’d toed the line between what was acceptab
le and what was self-indulgent like a true professional.
And he was implying that Will should spread his legs for England.
“You always had balls,” Will snorted.
“I wouldn’t be asking if—”
“If lives weren’t at stake,” Will finished for him, unimpressed. “Heard that one before.” Too many times to count or be the truth. At the end of the day, Will was just a cog in a great machine that had churned out disinformation and advanced other people’s interests since the war. “Find some other way. I’m done being your errand boy.”
He was tired. He had been beaten down by the people he’d called allies one too many times. He would be out of a job in a month whether or not he pulled his weight in Sao Paolo.
Will pressed a hand to the table and made to rise, his espresso unfinished.
“There is another way,” Karim pointed out, without raising his voice. He was the kind of man who could bring a rowdy gaggle of children to heel with a single word. He should have been a teacher. There was only so much damage he could do in the shaping of young minds.
“Well? Are you going to make me ask?” Will bit out, caught in the uncertain no man’s land between bolting from the café and sitting back down.
“We can take the fight to Ignacio.”
His stomach sank into his knees. “What?”
“It might even be enough to salvage your position here,” Karim went on. “Without Ignacio to do Section’s bidding, you and yours will once again be on the front lines, representing Britain’s interests, providing Uncle with the relevant intelligence… The South American desk would be saved.” He tapped his pencil against the table. “Come to think of it, that might be the better solution.”
But you’d have to kill Ignacio first.
The many tentacles of the Macias leviathan would be too busy fighting one another to be of any use to Section top brass. Will’s office would be a vital expense once again. Cleo could keep living with her husband in Brazil. They might even be able to recruit a second assistant to pick up the slack.
Will rested his hands on the table and bent his elbows. “You son of a bitch… Was that your game all along? Put me back in that madman’s clutches, then make me choose?”
“I gave you a mission,” Karim replied, with unflappable calm. “Failure was as likely as success. Naturally, I planned ahead. For either outcome.” Undaunted, he shook out the tea bag from his cup and set it aside. Each movement was precise and tempered, each silent beat another dent in Will’s armor. “As for your liaison with Ignacio,” he said at last, “I gave you the opportunity to relive an affair that would otherwise exist only in your memories. Most of us don’t even get that much.”
“You can dress it up and call it kindness if you want, but I know you played me.”
Karim offered no apology. Will hadn’t expected him to.
“This isn’t over.” He pushed away, adrenaline flooding his bloodstream.
The coffee shop doors opened for him with a smooth glide, depriving Will of a satisfying, resounding slam.
* * * *
Pounding Sao Paolo’s rain-spattered, crumbling sidewalks did little to clear Will’s head, but he couldn’t stomach the metro. He walked to the office, where he locked himself into silent communion, his laptop open on the desk and a letter of resignation fleshed out with every angry keystroke.
He didn’t go out for lunch. He brushed off Cleo’s gentle nudging and ignored the greasy paper-wrapped tempura she slid onto his desk when she got back from her break. By the time six o’clock rolled around, it still hadn’t been touched, so Cleo swept it into the trash and disposed of the mess with a quiet sigh. She knew better than to press her boss when he was in one of his moods.
She knew not to ask what was wrong, either, because need-to-knows were a dime a dozen their line of work.
It wasn’t unusual to go a whole day without exchanging more than a few words on Cleo’s part and a few grunts of acknowledgment on Will’s, but that didn’t make it pleasant. The hours dragged in an interminable succession of mundane tasks. Nothing had changed. Seeing Ignacio again, conspiring with Karim, all of that might have been a figment of Will’s imagination.
The revolver and passport concealed in the false bottom of his desk drawer told a different story.
The fleeting memory of Ignacio’s fingers carding gently through his hair gripped him at least appropriate moments, whether he was engrossed in the latest intra-agency report on the Cuban situation or slumped in a plastic seat on the metro, tossed this way and that by centrifugal forces.
A good night’s sleep would help dull the vivid echo, maybe even help him work up the nerve to dispose of the gun. He prayed he still had a bottle of wine left somewhere around the apartment, just to make sure he didn’t wake again until morning.
That plan, Will discovered long after he finally tore himself from unsent emails on his Blackberry and the perpetually unfinished paperbacks in his briefcase, would have to wait.
His Twitter handle was a perfectly incongruous collection of letters and digits, no more affiliated with him than with his organization. It had no followers and followed no one. And yet the ping of a direct message was no accident. Will tapped a few keys and waited for the page to load. He didn’t know the sender but he memorized the string of Arabic and Roman numerals before deleting the DM.
He was two stops from his apartment when he dug out his copy of Needful Things, battered by transport and yellowed with time, and began the familiar task of flipping back and forth through the pages.
Book ciphers were comically simple to put in place and the first to be set aside when more sophisticated methods of communication took over. But without a direct line to his agents and only so many house calls he could dare before his visits attracted attention, they were still incredibly useful.
In the span of three minutes, Will had a time and place, and the choice of title informed him as to the identity of the sender. He let the metro take him to the end of the line. A short bus ride later, he stepped into the dusky greenery of Ibirapuera Park, the sky a mottled bruise above him. Light pollution blotted out the stars, but the moon shone a faithful fingernail of pasty yellow beneath which Flor cut a sickly picture.
“You got my message.”
Will nodded, striving to catch his breath without appearing as though he was utterly out of shape. He had a feeling he’d failed when Flor patted the wooden bench beside her.
The park teemed with life during the day. Street vendors and tourists clogged the paved, cyclist-congested alleys. Children ran every which way. At night, the park shed its frenzy for a more contemplative mien. Lago das Garças shimmered with the gentle patter of rain, Sao Paolo trembling in its mirrored surface. The weather granted privacy.
Will wrinkled his nose at the damp seeping into his trousers.
“Did some digging into your wanted man,” Flor said without prompting.
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
She hitched her eyebrows. “So report me.”
The challenge hung in the air between them with all the makings of a citation for insubordination. But to add that note to her file, Will would have had to come clean about Ignacio in the first place. His hands were tied.
“You can’t, can you? I knew this was extracurricular.”
A tepid droplet of rainwater landed on his cheek. He flicked it off.
“Shit. This doesn’t look good, Will. Why are you digging up the past when you know you’ve got a tail?”
He stiffened in his seat. “What?”
“The jogger,” Flor murmured. “Looks local, but she’s not.”
“How can you tell?”
“No Brazilian woman would wear Converse on an evening run. Or traipse through the park on her own, for heaven’s sake… But that’s neither here nor there. Uncle knows I’m on the payroll.”
“Yes, of course…”
“Then why the long face?” Flor sighed. “Will, if you don’t tell me what’s going
on, I can’t help you.”
Six years ago, when Will had first received his marching orders, Flor had been among his first recruits. She was sharper than most and perfectly integrated into the seedy underbelly of the city. She’d been his eyes and ears ever since.
It hadn’t occurred to Will that one day she might want to serve as his moral compass.
“What did you find out about Ignacio Macias?” he asked, deflecting her concern into something more useful. ‘Actionable intel’, Karim had called it.
“He’s a little Napoleon of the South American black market. Money-laundering, drug dealing… He’s got some world-class hitmen on his payroll. One of which is—”
“In Section custody. Yes,” Will said, “I know.”
“Then you also know Sosa turned himself in deliberately. Could be a mole.”
“Could be.”
Flor clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Powerful men have a lot of enemies. Is Section going to war with Ignacio Macias?”
“Not that I know of,” Will answered thinly.
“Are you?”
If Flor had been Karim or any other legacy hire, Will would have rewarded the impertinence with a scoff. Then again, if she’d been home-grown, she wouldn’t have been half as effective in the favelas of Sao Paolo.
“Sooner or later you’ll hear this from Cleo or my successor, so I might as well tell you. Ignacio Macias and I were involved some years ago,” Will informed her, mindful to chase all inflection from his voice. “It’s a thing of the past, of course, but I recently discovered he has been contracted by London to provide us with sensitive information.”
“How’s that working out for him when we’ve got one of his men in custody?”
It was Will’s turn to affect a knowing expression. “Precisely.”
Flor looked out over the lake. “And your tail?”
“Could be one of his.” Will shrugged. He thought it more likely that Karim had saddled him with a watcher he’d been too self-involved to notice. A desk job softened the sharper edges of an agent’s life-saving suspicions. Will was no exception to the rule. He brushed aside the thought. Karim had said it himself—if he wanted Will dead, it wouldn’t take much to dispatch him.
