by David Archer
He got to the car lot a few moments later and shared the photo with Forney and his men. He forwarded it to Forney’s phone, and Forney sent it on to all the rest of the crew and then started calling them to explain. Within a matter of minutes, all of Ralph’s security team were aware of Haggard and why he was not to be allowed near the younger Morgan.
Noah sat in on some of the meeting for a while and got to shake hands with a number of Ralph’s new drug dealer employees. He listened to a lot of talk about the logistics of the drug trade and recognized a lot of the terminology. Part of his preparation for the mission had been a crash course, under hypnosis, in how the illegal drug trade worked. In theory, he could manufacture methamphetamines with the best of them, and understood exactly what they meant when they referred to “pilling it out,” or talked about drying it on a sheet of glass. To stay in cover, he even told a few stories about his own fictitious time in the business.
It was just after four, and Noah was about to head for home, when his phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, so he answered it by saying, “Joe’s Pizza.”
The distorted voice on the line. “That’s funny,” it said. “I arrived earlier than I expected. Are you free at the moment?”
“Yeah,” Noah said. “You want me to come now?”
“Yes. Do you know where the Passion Play is held?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the signs for it.”
“There’s a statue of Jesus north of it a little ways. Christ of the Ozarks, they call it. Meet me there in forty-five minutes. Come alone.”
The line went dead. Noah put the car in gear and pointed it toward the west.
Forty-five minutes was not a lot of time, not with the twists and turns on Highway 62. Likely, the Charger didn’t let the curves slow it down much. Noah got to the intersection of the highway and Passion Play Road in just over twenty minutes, then turned right.
The Christ of the Ozarks statue was built in 1966 and stands sixty-five and a half feet tall. It resembles the famous statue of Christ at Rio de Janeiro, but looks out over the Ozark Mountains around Eureka Springs. Tourists flock to it every summer, and to the Passion Play that runs almost every day when the weather is warm.
This road had its own share of twists and turns. By the time Noah arrived at the parking lot for the statue, forty-three minutes had elapsed since he got off the phone.
There were four other cars in the parking lot, and each of them was occupied by two or more people. He parked his car to one side of the lot, then tucked his pistol under the seat, got out, and sat on the hood.
No one moved for several minutes, so he simply sat there and waited. He kept his face turned toward the statue, as if he were simply admiring it or trying to commune with God.
One of the cars started suddenly and drove slowly toward him. There were two men in the front seat, and he could tell that someone was sitting in the back but couldn’t see who it was. When it stopped, ten feet away and facing him, the back door opened. Noah turned his face toward the car to see who might be getting out, and his eyebrows rose slightly when he saw that it was a very small woman.
She looked like she might be just shy of five feet tall and was probably in her late thirties or very early forties. Her hair was blonde, but it had the kind of sheen that he associated with hair that was not naturally that color. She closed the door and walked directly toward him, a broad smile on her face.
“Hello, Noah,” she said. “You can call me Monique.”
“Monique,” he said. “So it’s you, is it?”
“Am I the one you’ve been speaking to on the phone? Yes, I certainly am. Technology, of course, allows me to hide my gender as well as the actual timbre of my voice, but I am the one who made the offer to give you back a normal life. I am also the one who sold your Sarah to the Chinese and set all of this in motion. I’m quite certain that you have entertained thoughts of what you would like to do to me when we finally came face-to-face, but I would advise you against trying to carry out those thoughts. I can assure you that you would never leave this place alive if you were to do so.”
Noah simply stared at her for a few moments, his thoughts taking shape. “What do you actually want with me?” he asked her. “You know what I am—I’m an assassin. Do you have that many enemies you want eliminated that you need a specialist like myself?”
“Sometimes I think so,” she said. “That’s not all I would want you doing for me, however. In fact, you would probably go months without ever killing anyone. There may be stretches as long as a year when the most strenuous activity you would face would be something like what happened in Odessa. You’d be at home with your wife most of the time, and I would see to it that you could live quite well.”
“And you could honestly make it look like we were dead? You could guarantee that no one would be hunting us?”
“Allison isn’t the only one who has talented people. Could I make it appear that you were dead? Quite easily, and I could even provide them with bodies to bury. With a little preparation, even your doctors wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.” She took a couple of steps closer. “Noah, you could keep Sarah out of the line of fire. You could have children, if you so choose. Would that be so bad?”
Noah took a deep breath and then sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “I had a lot of ideas on what I’d like to do to the person who put Sarah through that. Unfortunately, you don’t have the right anatomy for me to carry out those ideas even if I had the chance. Somehow, I really thought you would be a lot bigger.”
She burst out laughing. “I’m sure you did,” she said, “and I’m sure you expected me to be older and have bigger balls than you.” She glanced down at her chest. “I’ve got those, they just hang a little higher than yours.”
Noah grimaced. “Well, you’re as crude as any man I’ve ever met. So, how would this work? How do we actually make this happen?”
Monique smiled then, a genuine and radiant smile. As small as she was, she was actually a rather attractive woman. “It will require some planning,” she said. “I’ll have to make arrangements for your apparent deaths, and if you still insist on bringing the other boy along, that may take a little longer. I’m guessing it would take a couple of months to get set up, and then I would simply need to know about your next mission. All three of you would apparently die in a terrible attack, something that would leave your bodies burned beyond recognition and require medical and dental records to sort you out. After that, though, you would be free. Oh, we might resort to a bit of cosmetic surgery just to be safe, but it won’t be much.” She reached out and laid a hand on his knee. “Are you interested, Noah?”
Noah looked at the other men in the cars. “Who are these people?”
“They work for me the same way you would work for me,” she said. “They don’t actually know who I am, which is why they are simply sitting in the cars and watching this conversation rather than getting the opportunity to hear it. As far as they are concerned, I am the representative of their employer, and they are charged with my safety. They don’t know that I’m the one who could actually give the order to kill their families, or they might decide to eliminate me themselves. We couldn’t have that, now, could we?”
“I’m sure that wouldn’t be anything pleasant for you,” Noah said. “The thing about me, though, is I don’t play second fiddle to anybody.” He turned his eyes back to focus on her own. “If I work for you, I work only for you. Nobody else tells me what to do, and I only answer to you. Who I am, where I came from—all of that stays entirely between us.”
She tipped her head slightly to one side, acknowledging his statement. “I can agree to that. The only caveat I would add would be that any disobedience, any refusal to follow my orders, would unleash a terrible retribution. I’m sure you don’t need me to spell it out.”
Noah nodded. “I don’t do what you want, Sarah suffers. I think you already know I do whatever it takes to keep her safe, so I doubt you really expect that circum
stance to arise.”
“Oh, I can see that we understand each other quite well. Do we have a deal, Noah?”
Noah stared into her eyes for several more seconds, then slowly nodded. “We do,” he said. “Make your preparations. Give me some way to let you know when that next mission begins, and I’ll have everything ready on my end. I’m not going to let Sarah or Neil know what’s going on, because I can’t take a chance that one of them might slip. When it happens, we’ll make it happen all at once. I’ll explain it to them then, when it’s already a done deal. Sarah will be okay with it, I know. As for Neil—I think he’ll be okay with it, but if he’s not, I’ll deal with him.”
Monique looked into his eyes and nodded once. “I’ll be in touch.” She turned and walked back to the car, got into the back seat, and said something to the driver. The car started again and drove away, down the road Noah had just followed to get there.
The other cars stayed where they were for at least five minutes, and then all of them started up and drove away at once. Noah waited until they were out of sight and then got back into the Charger, started the engine, and put it into gear. He drove slowly down the road, and all of the other vehicles were gone before he got back to the highway.
He turned left and headed toward Berryville, driving sedately and thinking over the conversation he’d just had. He was almost halfway back by the time he realized that his thinking was becoming cloudy, and it was at that point that his vision began to blur slightly. He shook his head to try to clear it, but it didn’t help. He saw a gravel parking lot ahead on his right and slowed the car quickly so that he could turn in. He got it stopped and parked, then opened his door to climb out, but his legs seemed to be weak. He couldn’t manage to get up out of the driver’s seat, so he simply sat back and took out his phone.
His eyes would not focus, as he tried to find the icon that would ring through to Sarah. He shook his head again, desperately trying to think, but it only made him dizzy. The phone slipped from his hand as he fell back against the seat.
The last thing he managed to see was another car pulling in just in front of his own, but then everything went dark. His thoughts continued for a few seconds more, as he realized that she had somehow poisoned him when she touched his knee.
Noah Wolf, who had never experienced any kind of regret, suddenly wished he had called Sarah before attending the meeting. He would have liked to have been able to say goodbye.
* * * * *
He wasn’t dead. Noah knew that he was alive because the dead can’t hurt that badly. Something seemed to be running around inside his head, smashing on his brain with a large hammer. In all of his life, he had never felt a headache like this one.
He opened his eyes, but it was dark wherever he was at. The darkness was complete, and he could tell no difference with his eyes open, so he closed them again. It didn’t help with the pain, but it allowed him to concentrate just a bit more of his attention on his other senses.
He was lying on something hard, he could tell that. He tried moving his hands and found that they were not restrained, but he was too weak to attempt getting up. The surface under his hand felt like wood, and he suspected that he was lying on the floor.
He breathed in quickly through his nose. There was an odor, something familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. He stopped trying to recognize it and simply thought about what it might remind him of. By letting his thoughts run free for a moment, he glimpsed a quick mental image of a flower garden. He suspected there were either flowers growing nearby, or else he was in a funeral home.
He turned away from that line of thought and listened, straining his ears for any sound. There was something, some kind of rhythmic noise, and it dawned on him that he was hearing the sound of an electric motor. It sounded like a big one, but he couldn’t be sure.
A wooden surface, the smell of flowers, and an electric motor. He tried desperately to put those things together into something coherent, but nothing would come. He decided it was time to force his body to cooperate, so he began to struggle up to a sitting position.
A wave of nausea struck him, and he fell back. His head hit the floor, and he was gone again.
A loud creaking invaded his consciousness and forced him to wake. The pain was much less, now, and bearable. He opened his eyes and saw that light was coming through a doorway some distance away, and someone was walking toward him. From the shape and stature, he knew that it was Monique.
“What…” His voice cracked, and he worked his tongue a bit to generate some moisture in his mouth. “What the hell is going on?” It still sounded rough, but he got the words out.
“There’s a reason,” Monique said, “why those few people who know who I am have never betrayed me. Would you like to know that reason? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway, so you might as well just listen.” She knelt down beside him and put a hand on his left arm. “There’s an amazing bit of technology that’s out there today, something most people would never have heard of. You know how they can inject a microchip into you, something that can carry a lot of information about who you are, your finances, your medical records, all that stuff? Well, that’s not the only thing that’s been developed for injection. Do you feel the soreness in your armpit? If not, don’t worry, it’ll come. We just injected you with a little insurance. The needle was kind of large, almost two millimeters in diameter, but it allowed us to implant something into your muscle. It’s lodged right beside the artery that comes through your shoulder, the one that feeds all the blood to your arm. It’s a very tiny but very powerful explosive device, and it contains a microchip that can receive a radio signal from any of a number of satellites overhead. If it receives that signal, which is heavily encrypted, then it will detonate. The force of the explosion will tear most of your arm off and will rip that artery to shreds. You would bleed to death within barely over a minute, and nothing anyone could do would save you.”
“I thought we made a deal,” Noah managed to croak out.
“Oh, we did,” Monique said. “Let’s just say that I like to have a bit of insurance. There are only two things that could set off that device and kill you. One would be if I enter a certain code into the computer that holds the encrypted signal. Should I do so, it would explode within three seconds. The other is the one I’m particularly proud of, though. You see, there is another little device implanted inside of me. It measures my heart rate and keeps track of every beat. Should my heart suddenly come to a stop, it would wait about fifteen minutes to see if it was merely some sort of glitch, but if it hadn’t detected my heart beating again during that time, then it would instruct that same computer to send that signal out. That way, it becomes just as important to you that I survive as it is to me.”
Noah looked at the dim image of her face and licked his lips. “Pretty smart,” he said. “You drugged me?”
She waved her fingers in front of his face. “Some patches on my fingers. I put them on just before I got out of the car, because that stuff is extremely potent. It contains a natural solvent, so it passed right through the fibers of your jeans and into your skin. Once it got there, it was absorbed into the capillaries and carried into your bloodstream. We knew how long it would take to act and simply followed you. I was confident you’d pull over once you felt it start to take effect, and I was right. Then all we had to do was help our poor, inebriated friend out of his car and into our own. I had this little place prepared in a hurry after I knew we were going to meet. If you agreed to my offer, then I knew that I’d have to bring you here to put my insurance policy in place. If you had not agreed, then we would’ve simply killed you where you sat.”
She stood up straight again. “We didn’t leave your car,” she said. “It’s sitting right outside the building. You might have to use your GPS to find your way home, but you’ll be fine. The effects will wear off the rest of the way within the next twenty minutes or so, and you’ll be able to get up and walk out of here. As for our arrangement, I’ll g
et everything sorted out, and then I’ll be in touch. As I said, it might take a couple of months. Until then, just keep doing your job so that no one suspects anything.”
Monique turned and began walking toward the doorway, but then she stopped and came back to him. “Can you believe I almost forgot? There’s one other little thing you need to know about that device in your armpit. It measures the amount of pressure that your tissues put against it. If that pressure drops significantly lower than it was in the beginning, it will also cause the device to detonate. That pressure can only drop if someone is trying to take it out of you, though, so it probably isn’t a good idea to go looking for a surgeon. Believe it or not, that little sucker has enough power that it could probably kill the doctor as well. You wouldn’t want to do that, now, would you?”
She turned again, and this time she walked out the door and closed it behind her. Noah heard a car start and drive away, and then he began forcing himself to get up. He made it, but he was so dizzy that he had to stumble into a wall to stay on his feet.
Although it was dark inside the building again, he was certain that the doorway was off to his right. He felt along the wall until he came to the corner, then followed that and found the door. It had a simple doorknob, and the door opened when he turned it.
The Charger was sitting there, just as she had said. He staggered over to it and leaned on the front fender for a moment, then managed to get the door open and climb inside. Once he was there, though, he simply leaned back in the seat and waited for the worst of the nausea and dizziness to pass.
And then he started the car and went home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It was just past seven thirty by the time Noah got home, but Sarah hadn’t been excessively worried because she had known he was supposed to meet the mole that evening. When he pulled in, she stepped out onto the porch with a big smile and waited for him to climb the stairs.
