by Scott Blade
“When?”
“A long time ago. Maybe a month. Less than two.”
“Why so long?”
“I got me ways. But I ain’t a miracle worker. And this guy asked for a miracle weapon. It’s a specialty item. High profile. I told him it was going to be impossible to get it. I tried to get him to settle for a local piece. We got plenty of Vermont poppers out here.”
“He had the funds?”
“Oh, yeah. He had a stack of green. He paid up. Right then at the beginning. No half now, half on delivery.”
“You said this guy Malcolm dealt with him?”
He nodded.
“Sounds like you dealt with him?”
“No. Not me. Malcolm described the situation to me. Gave me the money already. Of course. He’s a good lad. One of my finest.”
“Where this Malcolm now?”
He paused a beat, didn’t want to give him up.
“We’re not going to hurt him.”
Nothing.
“You know we can find out with or without you.”
Cathery nodded and told her where to find him.
“You’d better not warn him when we leave.”
“I won’t. I don’t want him to know you got it from me. Hell, I was gonna go check on him anyway.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t heard from him.”
“How’s that?”
He shrugged, said, “The last time I spoke to him was when he picked up the item. Haven’t seen him since. Been a week.”
She looked at Lu, who stood still, Glock pulled in to his chest.
“What was the gun?”
“It’s a sniper rifle called Valkyrie.”
“Valkyrie?”
“Yeah. It’s an American thing. Really nice. It completely comes apart into several pieces within seconds.”
“It disassembles that fast?”
“Yeah. When it came, I thought originally that I had gotten the wrong item. Because it was packed inside a backpack.”
“A backpack?”
“It was designed to go in a rucksack. The bag had a place for everything. And it changed calibers on the fly.”
“On the fly?”
Lu looked at her and said, “He means fast.”
She nodded.
“The whole thing is quite impressive. A rifleman could be carrying it around and he would look like a normal guy on the street. Could be a college student. Could be full of books.”
The woman from Beijing nodded along.
“Of course, I had to press for extra money when I saw it. ‘Cause, who’d want a weapon like that?”
Assassin was the word that came to her mind.
“Did you get the extra?”
“That’s why I was going to visit Malcolm today. He’s not answering his phone. And he owes me that money.”
The woman from Beijing stood up straight. Looked up and down the street. She had no more questions. No more use for Cathery.
“Kill him,” she said.
“Wait! What?”
Lu stepped forward and put the Glock to his head. Cathery felt it on the bald spot on his scalp.
“Wait!” he said again.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Please! I told you what you wanted to know!”
She turned to return to the car. She paused in front of the lights. She turned back, looked down at him, and asked, “Did you see us here today?”
“No. No. I ain’t never heard of ya.”
She looked at Lu, back down at Cathery.
“You gonna call Malcolm? Try to warn him?”
“No. No. I swear. Besides he ain’t answering. Remember?”
She said something to Lu in Chinese. Then she turned back to the car, closed the umbrella, and got in. She slammed the door and waited.
Lu said, “Close your eyes.”
Cathery held his hands up in the air. They shook. He shut his eyes. He started to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Not on purpose. He was a good ten words into it before he realized it.
He kept his eyes closed. Felt the rain beat down on his face.
He waited to die. But the bullet never came. Death never came. He heard tires on cobblestone. Heard another thunderclap.
He waited a long minute. He opened his eyes and saw they were gone.
He finished the prayer anyway.
CHAPTER 18
FIFTY MILES AWAY, an hour earlier, but twenty-one minutes late pulling up to the gate: Widow, Tiller, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stepped out of a short hallway leading to the gate and the Cork Airport, which Widow had never been to before and never wanted to come back to again, simply because it was already tainted with hauling around two overpaid bodyguards and one CIA agent he still wanted to blacken an eye on.
Tiller had a carry-on bag on wheels that Widow hadn’t noticed before. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern both had messenger bags. All three guys wore black suits. No ties among the three of them.
They must’ve changed during the flight. He was certain Tiller had. Probably in the bathroom on the plane, up in the front in first class.
“Come on,” Tiller ordered all three men, including Widow. He took note of it.
They walked through the airport, past baggage claim, beyond the ticket counters, past signs for car rentals, and shuttle buses, and a string of guys holding signs for pickups.
Tiller led them straight out to the arrivals and pick-ups, like he had been there before. He walked like he was at home in this airport. He walked like he was in his element.
Widow took note of this too. He chalked it up to the fact that Tiller wasn’t known to anybody here. He probably was in his element because he was a literal stranger. Widow could understand that since he had always been undercover, always leading a double life, once upon a time.
It was thrilling.
That had to be what it was.
Tiller had a grin on his face.
Outside in arrivals, they had to cross a catwalk with moving walkways going both to and away from the airport. There were passengers riding them. Standing still. There were half as many walking along the regular concrete parts.
Widow wondered if Tiller had used an app on his phone to get them a ride, like Uber or Lyft. He had seen people do that.
When then got to the other side, they ended up in a parking structure, but Tiller stopped on a pass-through stretch of blacktop.
There were cars parked, waiting to pick up people.
Tiller looked left. Looked right. He didn’t see what he was looking for. He put his hand up and stepped over to Widow.
He said, “We’ll wait. We got a ride coming.”
He looked at an expensive, stainless steel watch on his wrist, just poking out of his jacket sleeve.
“Five minutes.”
They waited.
Eleven minutes passed, not five. A black, polished, and freshly waxed Range Rover, drove up an entrance ramp, pulled around several parked cars and cars going the slow speed limit, and jerked to a stop in front of Widow.
The first thing he saw was police light bars, hidden and embedded under the grille guard at the front and under the front plate, and smaller versions around the inside front wheel wells.
Undercover police vehicles. No question.
The driver’s side window was tinted and black and virtually impossible to see into. It rolled down. At the same time, the front passenger door opened and a big guy stepped out. He stared at Widow from over the top of the vehicle.
The driver was a woman. She spoke in an Irish accent, not too thick.
“Tiller?”
“Yep.”
“You’re with us. Get in.”
She buzzed her window back up.
The big guy walked around and offered his hand for everyone to shake. He was maybe an inch shorter than Widow was, but beat him out by twenty or thirty pounds. All solid. All muscle.
The guy had small scars on his face. They were combat wounds. That was obvious. This guy had been in a
brawl or two or ten. The scars looked like broken bottle gashes. Nothing hideous enough to scare the common man away in fear, but enough to tell a mugger to think twice before trying him as a target.
His hair was buzzed down to a jarhead fashion. He could pass for a Marine, but he wasn’t. He looked more Irish than a shamrock and tough enough to be as hard as an actual rock.
He introduced himself as Gregor. No indication of it being a last name or a first name. There was no “Mc” on the front of it, like Widow would have expected.
Gregor popped the cargo space in the back and helped Tiller stuff his bag back there. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern kept their messenger bags on them. Which made Widow think they might have weapons in there. He shook off that thought. No way did they get firearms past security in the airports in the first place.
Probably not.
Widow approached the backdoor, ready to pick his spot in the Range Rover, but Tiller grabbed him by the arm.
“A quick word,” he said. He released Widow’s good arm and stepped away from the vehicle and onto the sidewalk, a good fifteen feet out of earshot of the others.
Widow said nothing about the arm grab.
Tiller spoke in nearly a whisper.
“Remember, we’re not here to help them. They’re here to help us.”
“You don’t want me offering intel to them?”
“Of course not.”
“What if they’re keeping things from us?”
“You think they are?”
Widow nodded, said, “I would. They want to catch this guy. Four guys sent here from the American government, they’re going to know we know more than they do.”
“Be helpful without being helpful.”
Widow said nothing to that.
Tiller turned and went back to the Range Rover.
Widow got in the back, behind the driver, Tiller next to him. His guys had to pile in behind them in a third, uncomfortable row. They were crammed back inches from the rear door. Widow was grateful to have gotten in before they had the chance to order him to get in the back.
He couldn’t see the driver in detail. What he could see was that she was tiny. She had her seat pulled up, probably on the last bit of track. She was virtually on top of the steering wheel.
Widow saw her eyes in the rearview mirror. They were solid blue and bright like afternoon sky.
Her hair was thick, pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail. She wore a brown leather jacket. Widow couldn’t see her pants or shoes. He saw a pair of sunglasses folded and left on the dash in front of her. She stared at him in the rearview mirror.
“Mr. Tiller?”
“That’s me,” Tiller said.
“I’m Nora-Jane Cassidy from Gardaí Special Investigations. This is Rourke.”
The guy named Rourke craned his head and looked back. First at Widow, then Tiller. He nodded a hello to both.
Tiller introduced only himself and as a state department attaché, which was a typical label for a CIA agent in a foreign land. Like a signal that said “Don’t ask” to official members of local government.
Rourke picked up on it right away. Maybe he had had a run-in with an American attaché before. He turned right around and lost interest, or he was feigning the loss of interest because, like Widow, CIA agents left a bad taste in his mouth.
Cassidy, on the other hand, hadn’t had any experience with the CIA, nor did she pick up on the alias.
Widow saw her eyes light up. A question furrowed her brow.
Cassidy had said she was Gardaí, which was the National Police for Ireland. It stood for An Garda Síochána, which meant Guardians of the Peace. Rough translation. Widow wasn’t sure if that was the exact Gaelic meaning. For all he knew it meant “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
It was the Irish version of the Scotland Yard, only better, any Irishman would argue. They would prefer a comparison to the FBI, only rolled in with Homeland Security. But they’d still argue that the American FBI and Homeland Security would never compare to the greatness of the Gardaí.
The Irish have always had a “we take care of our own” attitude. And when it came to the other countries in the United Kingdom, they held a “deal with it yourself” attitude. They did not like outsiders meddling in homeland affairs. In America, the only thing comparable to Widow’s mind was that he was from the South. And the South was like that, in a way.
His mom had been a small-town sheriff in Mississippi. He remembered that her department liked to handling things in-house. No need to call in the state cops or the FBI, not unless it was clearly a matter of regulation.
Texas was also like that.
The big difference was that the Irish had been like that for thousands of years.
During WWII, they remained neutral, even though their neighbors were getting bombed.
Cassidy’s cop interest in Tiller was showing, but she remained professional. Sort of.
She said, “You must be important, Mr. Tiller. Our bosses told us to cooperate fully with you. He said you might help us with our investigation?”
“Maybe. I need to know what I’m dealing with first.”
“As far as we know we got one dead Brit named James Lenny. We sent you the crime scene photos.”
“We need to see everything. Hopefully, we’ll catch this guy.”
“Where are we going first?” she asked.
Tiller looked at Widow.
Widow leaned forward and said, “I’d like to see the two videos.”
Cassidy finally turned around in her seat. The seatbelt wrenched with her and she stared at Widow. He saw her for the first time. She had pale skin, smooth-looking. Her lips stood out against her skin’s backdrop. They were pink and not too full. Her cheeks were high as if powerful bones were carefully placed underneath. She was a good-looking woman, right up there out of all the women that Widow had ever seen in his life, but at the tip-top of all cops he had ever seen. She looked like she had missed her calling to be a movie star instead of an inspector for the Gardaí.
He realized in that moment that she was Gregor’s superior because he had a struggling look on his face like he wanted to argue with her only he couldn’t.
Cassidy said, “What video?”
Tiller looked at Widow with the same question on his face.
“The videos, actually. As in more than one. Two, I figure.”
“What video? Mister?”
“Widow. Jack Widow, ma’am. Nice to meet you.”
He offered his right hand up and over the console for her to shake.
She stared at it, hesitated for a long second and then shook it.
“And who are you, Mr. Widow?”
“Me? I’m nobody. Just the poor guy that the CIA dug up to solve this thing.”
Tiller looked at him with anger on his face that almost felt as good to Widow as when he had punched him.
“The CIA, huh?”
Tiller stayed quiet.
Widow shrugged and said, “What difference does it make? We’re offering to help in exchange for your help.”
Cassidy shrugged and said, “I’ve been ordered to escort you around.”
“You mean you’ve been ordered to take us for a ride?”
Gregor said, “That’s what we’re doing.”
“I mean take us for a loop. You know? Give us a brush off? Take us around and show us nothing.”
Cassidy smiled. Gregor said nothing. And Tiller looked away.
“What videos are you wanting to see?”
Widow said, “In the photographs you sent us, there are dents in the dirt. Lenny was trying to recapture his glory days. Trying to hit his old shooting record.”
She stared at him.
Those blue eyes, he thought. He couldn’t imagine a lot of men telling her no. Just with those eyes alone, she’d get far ahead in her organization because every time she interrogated a suspect she’d get her way. Man or woman. No one could resist.
“You think he videotaped it?”
“I know he did. He used cameras up on tripods and they’re missing from your photographs.”
Cassidy smiled again.
She asked, “Who are you again? You’re not CIA.”
“I’m not. Just these guys. I was a special investigator of sorts.”
“FBI?”
“Military, ma’am.”
“DIA?”
“Something like that?’
“If you’re not DIA then some kind of special unit in the army police?”
He thought for a moment. No reason not to tell her the truth.
“NCIS.”
“NSIS?”
“N-C-I-S.”
“And what’s that?”
“Navy version of the FBI.”
Gregor said, “Like on TV?”
Cassidy looked at him.
He shrugged.
She turned back to Widow and asked, “You want to see the videos? Fine. There’s not much extra there.”
“I want to take a look anyway.”
“You got it.”
And that was all that was said.
Cassidy took her foot off the brake and they left the Cork Airport Business Park, went through security exit checkpoints and swooped off Avenue 2000 and onto the N27, a national primary road in Ireland. They stayed on it for a straight shot that curved every so often until they arrived on Eglinton Street and to the Gardaí’s Special Investigations Unit office in Cork.
Cassidy went through the police security gate and signed in. The guard insisted on taking a peek into Tiller’s bag and the messenger bags of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They looked and approved everything.
Cassidy waited for the guard to punch a button near his window to allow a garage door to open. He waved them through and they drove down a steep ramp into a garage. She parked the Rover in a slot near the front of the motor pool, like reserved parking, and they all climbed out.
Cassidy was short, only Widow had been mistaken about how short because he saw her boots were lifted a bit by two-inch heels. She walked in them like she was born with the extra lift, natural.
The boots were tucked underneath a pair of blue jeans. They were faded, no holes. Figuring out how old she was; was a mystery. She looked twenty-five, tops, but her rank in a male-dominated field told a different story. Widow watched as she passed police and fellow inspectors. Everyone showed her nothing less than the respect of a four-star general, everything but the saluting.
