“If there’s a third I’m gonna come over there and shoot you myself.”
Doug took a deep breath. “Your disavowment? The whole thing might have been staged.”
Trent’s knees went weak. The only other time in his life when he felt such a rush of fear and such a total lack of control was when Mikey had been rushed to casualty with suspected meningitis. The rash won’t fade! The rash won’t fade! Even now after all these years Victoria’s terrified scream still lived in a dark corner of his memory. The hospital had cleared Mikey, but only after hours of agonised waiting.
Now, Trent felt part of his world slide away again. “Staged?”
“Don’t ask. That’s all I know. I wasn’t even gonna tell you, but I figured with what you’ve all been through – you deserve to know.”
“Staged how?” Trent’s brain refused to get past that word.
“The girl you saved? Do you remember the young girl?”
“Of course I fucking remember her!”
“Good. Well, tell me, how many of her family died that day?”
“Four. Her mother and father. Her sister and brother.” It was etched in Trent’s memory like a brand of fire.
“And Emilia lived.”
“Yes!”
“My contact says some information filtered down to him, information that was suppressed by none other than the director of the CIA himself, that Maisie Miller was sighted only a few days ago.”
“It’s not possible. I saw . . . saw the bodies. The blood.”
“I know. Believe me, brother, if it wasn’t for the absolute faith I have in this contact I wouldn’t even be considering taking it any further.”
“Further?”
“I can’t say any more because I don’t know any more. I hope to change that.”
“Who saw her?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could they even know it was her? Does Emilia know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then find out! Damnit!” Trent couldn’t help himself. He was kneeling on the floor without any knowledge of how he had ended up there. His fingers strained around the phone so tightly, they were pure white.
“I will.”
Trent stared into space. “I’m sorry, Doug. This is one hell of a bombshell.”
“Isn’t it? Now you know why I considered a bullet. Your special disavowment deal was signed by the president, for Christ sakes.”
Trent tried to focus. “So what next?”
“You save Monika Sobeiski and her son’s future. You do what you do best. And Trent?”
“What?”
“There’s a little more news. Not good.”
“You’re killing me, Doug.”
“You’ve been assigned a new case agent. Closed case it may be, but with it involving three of our own and under the special circumstances, the FBI likes to keep tabs.”
Trent couldn’t even remember the name of the old case agent. “So what?”
“This one’s a real ballbreaker, Aaron. A superbitch. You name the metaphor – she encompasses it. One guy I know managed to get her into the sack. He still has the bite marks on his chest. For frisky read risky with this woman. Name’s Claire Collins. Always gets what she wants and guess what? She wants you, Aaron.”
“Me?”
“Well, the Edge. She wants you all. Debriefings every week in her office.”
“Can she do that? We’re officially retired.”
“She’s FBI. She can do whatever she wants. Plus, she’s a ball—”
“Got it.”
“You know they know you’re still active. They ain’t stupid, Trent.”
“Understood. As soon as we’re finished with Monika—”
“She has your contact number,” Doug went on. “Who knows? Maybe she’ll throw you a legal job. Stranger things have happened.”
“If what you just told me pans out,” Trent said. “The government will want to bury us. Not work with us.”
Doug went quiet for a moment. “Just watch her, Aaron. Watch your back and your balls. You ain’t exactly got the best of luck with women. And you know what they say ‘bout a spies handler? Don’t trust ‘em whilst they’re breathing.”
“You’re our handler.”
“Well, yeah, but I’m different.” Doug chortled. “So now give me that address. Score yourself some extra juice with the government.”
Trent reeled off the address to where they had tracked Flash in Nevada. This was where Donny Lockley had kept his captives prior to transporting them south to Texas. They had figured it was the best way to take Lockley down without alerting too many of his contacts.
“So,” Doug said when he had finished. “What next?”
“Time to find Monika and bring her home.”
“You feel okay about going up against the Polish mafia?”
Trent laughed mirthlessly. “They’re the ones about to get hit with a big problem. Not us.”
16
“Not sure I can do this,” Radford grumbled as he and Silk left the hotel.
Silk headed straight for the parking garage. “Comes with the territory. Always has. You’re a field op, Dan. You know the game – you take the good with the bad.”
“There’s a difference between field ops and this.”
“You saying you’re a lover not a fighter. That it?”
“I’ll rough it up if I have to. But this is damn different, Adam. It’s disgusting and ghoulish and you know it.”
Radford flashed back on Trent’s face as they left the room. The perpetually unsmiling man had had a twinkle in his eyes, Radford was sure of it. His parting comment, ‘don’t forget your spades’, was delivered with grave humour.
Pun intended.
“A lack of foresight,” Radford grumbled as Silk squealed their way out into the stream of traffic weaving down Las Vegas Boulevard. “That’s what it is.”
“I guess so.” Silk indicated right. “But Trent can’t think of everything.”
“I damn well wish he’d thought of this.”
Trent had been waiting for them when they had returned to the room together, several dollars lighter and several units of alcohol heavier. The look on his face was sterner than ever, the news he delivered even harsher than expected.
“One thing though,” Radford said speculatively. “I do like the sound of our new case agent. She sounds the type of feisty I like.”
The three men had been conscious of time slipping through their fingers. And not just theirs. Monika Sobeiski was running out of time. Her son, Artur, and her friend, Anna, had to be going crazy. The Edge had always been the team that got the job done. This one would be no exception. So they talked it out. The only lead they had was the address of a building site somewhere in Dallas. Half built, half populated by rich folk. Owned indirectly by the Polish mafia, but handled by one of their legitimate companies. The big problem was that they couldn’t wait another week for another consignment to ship in, and didn't even know if there would be another one.
The hours had passed uncaringly. The skies began to lighten over the great city, diluting the effect of the scintillating neon lights. Tourists fell to sleep, shattered but happy, in outsize beds on sublime mattresses. Croupiers and guest hosts, big rollers and thieves, table dancers and pool lifeguards started the journey home to rest and gear themselves up to do it all again in eight or ten hours. And the buffets kept serving. The machines kept rolling. The city never stopped turning.
Radford took five minutes to speak to his wife, trying to explain how he hadn’t had the time to talk earlier, but the way she agreed and continued her own side of the conversation told him she wasn’t listening. He gave up. He went back to the crisis confab.
“There is no answer,” Silk was saying. “Other than direct confrontation.”
“You always say that,” Trent told him. “Every operation, you say that. You have no . . . finesse.”
Silk grunted at the half-joke. “I got plenty when I need
it,” he said. “But when something needs saying, I say it.”
Radford had watched Trent grimace. It seemed their esteemed leader had something else on his mind, something that caused his attention to wander even in these serious times. Not like Trent. He wondered if something was up with Mikey. Or Doug. Probably not the time to mention Natasha. Again Radford wondered what that little secret entailed. It wasn’t like Trent to keep information from them.
“It could be a transfer point,” Trent ventured. “One of the unfinished houses might belong to Roth. One of the ones on the quieter part of the site. He could hold people or bodies there for a while – like a halfway house.”
“In which case there would definitely be people on site,” Silk said, almost licking his lips.
“Or . . .” Trent stressed the word. “It could be a way of disposing of bodies.”
“Foundation mix,” Radford said. “I thought of that too.”
Then Doug called. This time Trent didn’t put him on speaker.
“What’s up?”
Trent listened, then said, “Alright. Talk soon.”
Silk looked like an expectant dog waiting for a T-bone. “News?”
“Doug got his contacts to lay all the groundwork to take down Lockley. Everything based on the address in Vegas we gave him.”
“Where Flash collected his last load?” Silk asked.
“Yes. Doug’s contacts are being stonewalled. Seems Lockley has some juice.”
“They’re stalling?” Silk couldn’t believe it. “On a human trafficking charge? Shit, Lockley has the dirt on a very high someone.”
“My thoughts too. And by the time the warrant’s smoothed out and the good guys swoop in—”
Radford finished, “Lockley’s house will be clean. Seen it a hundred times.”
“But it gives us a play.” Trent almost smiled.
Silk and Radford glanced at each other. “It does?”
“Yeah, but it’s damn dangerous. How about this – we turn Roth and Lockley against each other.”
Silk raised an eyebrow. “My kinda talk. You figure we can’t take the mob down, we can’t take Lockley down. We can’t find Monika because there are too many variables. So how do we make both men focus on just one thing?”
Trent nodded. “We make them focus hard on each other. So we get time to . . .”
“Finesse.” Silk grinned briefly, then his face went blank. “But how do we do that?”
Trent threw Silk the car keys. “Don’t forget your spades.”
*
“Can you even remember where we need to be?” Radford asked as the darkness pressed hard around the car.
“Jesus, Dan, how many people have you buried lately?”
Radford shivered. “One too many, it seems.”
“C’mon, man, you’re cracking me up. Another slick one-liner like that and I’ll drive us off the road through laughing.”
Silk wasn’t laughing.
Radford peered into the night. “I’m serious here. Aren’t you even a little creeped out?”
Silk stopped the car. “I guess you’ve never done this before. Me? I started out as a child-thief, remember? Conscripted into a gang. You did as you were told. You grew hardened to the job. I may regret some of the stuff I did, but I’m sure I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t.”
“And that justifies it?”
“It has to.”
Silk handed Radford a shovel and walked unerringly to the place in the desert where they had buried the pro – Johnny Morgan. “Let’s do this.”
Radford dug hard, elbows and shoulders jolted at every blow by the hard shale they were shifting. His broken finger throbbed. The clatter of digging seemed to carry through the silence, the sound of old Vegas returned. Radford wondered how many ghosts were arrayed around them, screaming their revulsion. He barely noticed when Silk slowed down, and then the edge of his shovel sank into something soft. The steel made an angry grinding sound as it scraped along bone.
“Shit!”
Silk crouched down. “Don’t wet yourself. Get down here.”
Radford dropped his shovel. The dead man’s body was hard to see in the near-dark, but the sound of scuttling insects and other animals was all too loud. As Silk exposed the face, Radford made out dark, jagged caverns that could only be made by teeth.
But the dog-tags were there, glittering dully.
“You get them,” Silk said. “I’ll grab the gun and the spare mags.”
Silk scraped away more sand and shale from the man’s midriff. Radford hooked the dog-tags and pulled. They wouldn’t budge. Damn, he was going to have to . . .
Radford leaned forward, face only a foot away from the corpse’s, trying to ignore all his senses. One thing was certain – he and Amanda wouldn’t be sitting down to watch any zombie films for a year or two. With revulsion streaming through his every nerve, he shoved a hand under Morgan’s head and lifted. The skull came up surprisingly easy, the hair falling over Radford’s wrist like a hairy black spider. Radford tugged the dog-tag chain again, felt and heard it rasp across the nape of the neck.
Now it tangled in the man’s hair.
He wiggled it, eyes squinting, mouth firmly closed. Something walked on to the back of his hand and stayed there. Radford persisted, heart pounding, but weathered the fear. He knew he had been in worse situations, but the creepy episode unnerved him. At last the tags came free and Radford scurried backwards, falling in the dirt above the grave.
Silk looked up at him. “Got the gun and the mags. You ready for this next bit?”
Radford was already at the car unwrapping the tarpaulin.
17
They drove to Chicago, just three men, grim and quiet, with a single agenda. Trent reflected on the last few years, in particular remembering an illuminating argument with Victoria on the eve of their break up. 'You have no light in your life!' she'd screamed at him. He had looked at her, thinking of the job, the things they made you do, the things he could never talk about, and the people they saved – the same people who trod the malls and the theme parks and the city streets every day.
And he had sent a glance upstairs, right around two corners all the way into Mikey’s bedroom, a look loaded with so much love it wrenched at his heart. Here, standing in front of him was a woman who could say that out loud?
“You have a child, Vic,” he had told her. “But it’s you. You who have no light in your life. I can’t even imagine how that must feel.”
The look she gave him told him he’d just made a huge mistake. He would pay for analysing her so well. He would pay and Mikey would pay, all for Victoria’s revenge.
Over the years she had lightened . . . slightly. She still took pleasure in making him hurt.
They stopped at a service station, loaded up on coffee and food and carefully swapped out the license plates. Trent ran through the next phase of the operation, stressing its danger, but his words were mostly rhetoric. The team knew what they were about to go up against. They would take every precaution, but sometimes . . . shit happened.
Two of the truest and most fateful words in the English language, Trent thought. They encompassed a host of wrongs, masses of bad luck and even Fate itself. Right there. Two words.
My slogan.
The drive to Chicago offered the perfect chance for Trent to discuss Doug’s latest bombshell with them. But he didn’t do it. He had no intentions of keeping the speculation from them a moment longer than was necessary, but focus was everything going up against the mob that existed in any state, so he made the leader’s decision.
His thoughts flickered back over the entire incident that led to their disavowing. Blanka Davic, the head of the Serbian mob, had been chasing down a traitor, hard on his tail as they hit a crowded freeway. What followed was recklessness in the extreme as Davic continued the chase with no let up, weaving in and out between cars, bumping vehicles aside and ordering his entire convoy of three cars to bring the traitor down at all cost. Almost ine
vitably the pursuit led to a pile up, innocent people in their dozens getting hurt as twenty-three cars smashed together in varying ways and angles. With the noise of sirens bouncing down the freeway and the panicked screams of the trapped echoing around a bridge underpass, Blanka Davic had risen from his car like an avenging demon, gun in hand, and stalked over to where the traitor was crawling for freedom, leaving a smear of blood on the tarmac in his wake. Davic had taken great pleasure in shooting the traitor, first in the legs and then the head, laughing all the while. This act had been witnessed by a family of five – the Millers – whose own car was trapped against the middle K-rail. When Davic realised, he started toward them, calling his goons, but then his luck ran out. The emergency services arrived in droves – ambulances, cop cars, fire engines – effectively saving the Millers’ lives. Davic drove away, lucky to be at the front of the pile up, lucky again that the camera positioned beneath the freeway underpass was out, lucky that his lawyer was young, shit-hot and had a weakness for prostitutes, but at the same time about to get his comeuppance in the form of the Millers.
Here was their shot to take down one of the biggest criminals in America. The law enforcement community came together to form a great force – a net of protection cast around the Millers made up of elite teams from every aspect of surveillance, defence and assault. The Razor’s Edge, then the top CIA spy team, were tasked with the internal scrutiny. Not the perimeter, not the outside of the house itself, but only the inside. From the start, Trent had questioned the intelligence of employing so many different teams. It made the job harder, the targets less secure, in his opinion. But he had been overruled.
From on high. Very, very high, he now reflected. The orders had come from so far up no one knew exactly who'd issued them. The chain was clouded, ambiguous. But the teams had settled in well. Trent had even started to believe he might have spoken out of turn.
Then . . . disaster.
Red splashed along the traces of his memory, thankfully obscuring the events for now. It had been the worse night of his life, including the split with Victoria. Nothing compared to seeing the family you were sworn to protect being murdered before your eyes.
The Razor's Edge Page 10
