Quicksilver

by Elise Noble

  “Our techs can enhance that.” Nate or Mack, another of their tech gurus, could clean up the image in minutes. “Someone has to know who he is.”

  “I think… Hmm…” Marco leaned forward. “I think I’ve seen him before.”

  “You recognise him?”

  “I don’t know his name, but I’m sure he was in one of our nightclubs last week. El Bajo Tierra in Medellín. I kept an eye on him because he was watching a particular girl, but then she left.”

  “What girl? You think he knew her?”

  “No, more like he wanted to know her. She was with another guy, and they left together.”

  “Did our suspect follow?”

  “No, he picked out another girl and went with her instead.”

  “Then that’s who we need to find. How quickly can we get to Medellín?”

  “An hour by plane from the airport or two and a quarter by helicopter from here. The Eurocopter you liberated last time you were here is parked on the back lawn.”

  Technically, it had been Emmy who stole the helicopter, but Black wasn’t about to quibble over the details. Its former owner was dead, anyhow.

  “Or we could take the helicopter to the airport, then the plane to Medellín and shave off half an hour.”

  Marco nodded his agreement. Good.

  “Warm up the turbine while I get some equipment.”

  Within fifteen minutes, they were in the air. Emmy had wanted to come too, but when Black gave a subtle shake of his head, Ana had reminded her of Eduardo’s potential surgery and also the possibility of a traitor amongst Eduardo’s men and suggested they both stay near Cali.

  Black had to be grateful for that and so, it seemed, was Marco.

  “Does Ana worry you?” he asked.

  “In what way?”

  “In an if-I-get-too-close-she-might-suck-the-life-out-of-me way.”

  Yes. “She’s not that bad once you get to know her.”

  “Right.”

  Marco was at the controls of the helicopter, and the trees shrank quickly as they gained altitude. Black hated small talk, but thankfully Marco seemed content just to fly. Which gave Black some thinking time. Why would someone try to kill Eduardo now? An old vendetta? Because Sebastien and Marco were the men in charge of the money, and the Garcia empire would keep running without their father. Or were they next? Was that why the would-be hitman had been skulking around Marco’s club in Medellín? Black checked his gun, more out of habit than anything else. Today, he’d brought a Colt Rail Gun as his main piece with a Sig Sauer P290RS as his backup. Unlike Emmy and her Walther, he didn’t have a lifelong affinity for one gun; he often tried out new toys and swapped if he found a different model he preferred.

  Would he need his gun tonight? Black would rather talk first, but despite the initial failure of the assassin who got into the Garcia compound, the man wasn’t an amateur, and negotiation didn’t appear to be his strong point. He was a little rough around the edges, perhaps, but Black was careful not to underestimate him.

  Black had also brought an evidence collection kit, because who knew what they might find in Medellín? Since leaving the CIA and starting Blackwood, he’d discovered he liked investigating crimes almost as much as committing them, and modern forensics fascinated him.

  At the airport in Cali, they switched to the Garcia family’s Learjet, which came complete with a leggy brunette to serve drinks and snacks.

  “Champagne, sir?”

  Black gave her a bored once-over. No, she wasn’t a patch on Emmy. “Just water.”

  A car met them at the small domestic airport in the centre of Medellín, and a quarter of an hour later, they pulled up outside El Bajo Tierra. The Underground. Black should have brought a pair of fucking earplugs.

  “How do people have a conversation in here?” he shouted at Marco.

  “Huh?”

  Exactly. Thankfully, the volume dropped a bit towards the back of the bar, and Marco led him past a bouncer and into the security office. The man with his feet up on the desk struggled to stand and brush white powder off the polished surface at the same time.

  “Boss? We weren’t expecting you tonight.”

  “I see that.”

  “I can explain…”

  “Not now. We need the camera footage from three weeks ago.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  Marco passed over the picture of the suspect on his phone. “Him. I saw him in here last time I visited.”

  “A Wednesday, right?” The manager scrolled through files until he found the right ones and turned his screen towards Marco. “Which camera do you want to see first?”

  “The tables to the left of the bar.”

  Sure enough, it played out like Marco described. The guy had a good eye for faces. The whole family did, in fact, which was the only reason Black was here now and not rotting in the ground.

  “Do you know any of these people?” Marco asked his man.

  “Never saw the dark-haired guy or the girl sitting down before. But the blond man talking to her is Roscoe.”

  “Roscoe—is that a first name or a last name?”

  “Not sure. People only ever call him Roscoe.”

  “Find out. And the other girl?”

  “She’s in here most weeks, usually hooks up with somebody. Laura? Lola? Something like that.”

  “I talked to the first girl briefly,” Marco said. “She’s Catalina. So we have three names, and now we need to find them. I don’t care who you call or how you do it, but I want full names and addresses within an hour.”

  CHAPTER 14 - BLACK

  TWO OUT OF four. They got two out of four.

  Laura was easy. They found her in a bar along the street, dancing with an Eastern European guy who probably felt like a king in Colombia because back home, pretty girls wouldn’t give him a second glance. Black just stared at him until he backed away.

  “What do you want?” Laura asked, focusing first on his chest then craning her neck back to look him in the eye. She soon averted her gaze.

  “We want to talk to you.”

  “What would you like to drink?” Marco asked.

  Now she smiled. “Rum and Coke.”

  “Easy on the rum,” Black muttered to Marco. The woman was already tipsy despite it only being eight o’clock in the evening. Black guided Laura over to a table, and the guy occupying one of the seats soon got up and left.

  Marco followed with her drink, and as he slid it in her direction, her eyes lit up in recognition.

  “I know you! From El Bajo Tierra, right?”

  “Right. One of our patrons stole something from the back office there a few weeks ago, and we think you talked to him.” Marco passed over a printout of the suspect. The manager at the club had run off a whole sheaf of them. “Do you remember his name?”

  Laura’s eyes widened in shock. She had expressive eyes, and they would have been a nice feature if she hadn’t caked them in make-up.

  “Uh, uh…”

  “You did talk to him, didn’t you?”

  She’d done more than talk to him. Black could tell from the way she paled under the sickly neon lights.

  “Yes, we talked.”

  “His name?”

  “Lorenzo. What did he steal? He seemed nice. Kind of intense, you know? But…but…” Now she blushed. “Really hot.”

  “Where did you and Lorenzo go after you left the club, Laura?” Black asked. “Your apartment? A hotel?”

  She shook her head, and a chunk of mascara flaked off and landed on the table. “His apartment.”

  Black glanced at Marco. Now they were getting somewhere.

  “Can you remember where his apartment was?”

  “I don’t want him to get hurt. He was kind, you know? Made me breakfast in the morning.”

  “Nobody’s going to get hurt,” Marco said. “I just want my money back. And he shouldn’t go around stealing. Did he take anything from your purse? Any cash?”

  “No.
At least, I don’t think so.” Her voice dropped. “Maybe. I didn’t check.”

  “Can you show us where he lives?”

  A quick nod. “Promise you won’t hurt him?”

  “We promise.”

  Lorenzo’s apartment was in the Los Pinos neighbourhood, a small walk-up on the third floor of a shabby block. Laura pointed it out, then Marco gave her a few thousand pesos and sent her home in a cab.

  “What do you think?” he asked Black.

  “No lights on. Too early for him to be asleep, so I’d say he’s out.”

  “Are we going in?”

  “Damn right we’re going in.”

  Up on the third floor, Marco was about to kick the door down when Black grabbed him.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Going in.”

  “For fuck’s sake.” Black put on a pair of thin leather gloves, produced his set of lock picks, and opened the door in under a minute. “This is how we go in.”

  Inside, the air was still. Stale. Black turned on the lights and took a good look.

  “Stay by the door,” he told Marco. “And don’t touch anything.”

  The apartment was furnished, but with the kind of soulless shit that came out of a catalogue. Like someone had visited IKEA and ordered everything from the first set of mock rooms they saw. The bed was neatly made, and a thin layer of dust covered everything in the lounge. Black flipped open the bathroom bin. Empty. Same in the kitchen. The fridge contained two bottles of beer, a bottle of white wine, and a can of cola. The only food in the kitchen cupboards was a solitary bag of pretzels.

  This wasn’t a home. It was a bolthole. A fuckpad. How did Black know that? Because he’d once owned one himself.

  A more thorough check revealed nothing more personal than a bottle of shampoo, but Black did have one hope left.

  “Marco, would you get the big black case from the car?”

  Fingerprints. Lorenzo had to have left a print somewhere, and a quick dusting of magnetic powder with a fibreglass brush revealed a veritable treasure trove. If the guy was in a database anywhere, Mack would find him. Half an hour later, Black carefully wiped down all the surfaces and packed up his toys.

  “Ready to go?” he asked. “Did any more information come through?”

  He’d heard Marco talking softly on the phone a moment ago.

  “Roscoe Ward isn’t home. He runs an export company, but according to my guys, it’s literally an empty warehouse near the airport, so that has to be a front. One employee, and when they visited him at home, he said Roscoe took off on vacation a couple of days ago. Mentioned something about a windfall.”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Keep a man on his house.”

  “Already done.”

  “Nothing on Catalina?”

  “Nobody’s seen her before or since.”

  Black’s phone buzzed with a message at the same time as Marco’s.

  Emmy: Eduardo needs to have the surgery. If you find the fucker, save him for me.

  Shit.

  Judging by Marco’s face, he’d received a similar communication.

  “Do you want to go back to Cali?” Black asked.

  The younger man closed his eyes for a moment and took a long inhale. “I should. Yes. A day, and then we will continue the hunt.”

  “I’ll come with you.” Emmy needed moral support. “Meanwhile, my team in the US can process these prints and start work on the blood sample.”

  Mack could also go through flight records and look for Roscoe. A vacation? No. The timing was too convenient.

  “I hate having to abandon the search. It feels as if we’re giving up.”

  “Not giving up. Just putting things on hold for a few hours because your family needs you. Family’s important.”

  At least, Black assumed it was. He didn’t have any family left, not blood relatives. His parents, who he now knew weren’t his real parents at all, had died in a car accident right before his sixteenth birthday, and his twin brother had been the victim of an assassination plot meant for him before they ever got the chance to meet. Last year, he’d made an attempt to find his birth parents, but every trace of his history had been wiped out.

  But he had Emmy and the family he’d created for himself in Virginia—Nate, Nick, Dan, Mack, and all the others—and that was enough for him.

  At the airport, he opened up his laptop and set about sending the information to Richmond before the pilot even closed the door. Photos, names, fingerprints. The blood samples would have to go by courier, but thanks to Nate, Black had a tiny high-resolution scanner for the prints.

  The brunette was back.

  “Sir, can I get you a drink or any…” She trailed off, and Black turned to look at her.

  “Is there a problem?”

  She’d gone white.

  “Not really.” She pointed at the picture of Lorenzo. “Uh, why are you looking at that man?”

  “You know him?”

  “Not exactly.” A giggle. “Sort of.”

  For fuck’s sake. Had Casanova claimed another victim?

  “You had a little fun with him?”

  “Shh!” She glanced past Black to Marco. “We’re not supposed to get distracted on duty.”

  Black waved Marco away. For a moment, junior looked as if he might argue, but then he took the hint and backed off.

  “On duty? You slept with him on duty?”

  “I don’t want to lose my job.”

  “I promise you won’t lose your job. What happened?”

  “Sometimes we have to wait around for hours. Whole days, even.”

  “And you get bored?”

  “Totally.” Now her eyes cut towards the cockpit. “Pablo never wants to talk. He just drinks coffee and reads.”

  “So you talk to other people, and Lorenzo was one of them?”

  Her brow crinkled. “Lorenzo?”

  Black tapped the picture. “Him.”

  “Oh, he’s not called Lorenzo. His name’s Alonso.”

  Great. So it was a sure bet the suspect was called neither Lorenzo nor Alonso. “Okay, Alonso. Where did you meet him?”

  “At a drink stall in the terminal.”

  “And?”

  “We’d talk sometimes.”

  “Sometimes? You saw him more than once?”

  “Every few weeks. And then one day… I don’t know what came over me. Alonso’s got this way of talking to you, like at that moment, you’re the only thing that matters. So we snuck out to a hangar, and in the bathroom…you know.” Her eyes went dreamy. “He was amazing.”

  “How did you get into the hangar? Didn’t anyone try to stop you?”

  “The door was unlocked, and we walked straight in. The only person we saw was the old man Alonso flies with, and he just laughed on his way out.”

  “Wait. What old man?”

  “Ernesto, I think his name is. He works at one of the flight schools.”

  “Which one?”

  “I’m not sure of the name, but I could probably find the hangar.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Black grabbed his case again and beckoned to Marco.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Flight’s delayed.”

  At the EJC Escuela de Aviación, Black again worked his magic with the lock picks and once inside, pointed the brunette to a spot beside the door.

  “Wait there.”

  “Can somebody tell me what’s going on?” Marco asked.

  “Yeah. Our suspect can’t keep it in his pants,” Black told him under his breath. “Miss Champagne and Snacks over there reckons she saw him in here.”

  “And when you say saw him…”

  “I mean fucked him.”

  “Mierda. I hope she used protection.”

  “Don’t tell me you…”

  Marco shrugged. “She sucks like a vacuum cleaner.”

  A four-seat Cessna 172 took u
p most of the space, but at the back, there was a small office and, sure enough, the bathroom. Black pushed the door open out of curiosity. Hmm. Miss C&S must be flexible as a garden hose too.

  For a business, the office yielded remarkably little in the way of paperwork. A maintenance log for the plane. A few invoices for fuel, coffee filters, and ink cartridges for a printer that didn’t seem to exist. A handwritten planner on the desk had all the entries from two weeks ago onwards crossed out. What had happened to cause the cancellations? Preparation for Eduardo’s execution? Nothing new had been written in, and as with the soulless apartment, dust had begun settling. Black took pictures of everything, then set about hunting for fingerprints. A quick examination showed two recurring sets—on the desk, the coffee machine, and the plane. Ernesto and his mysterious amigo?

  On the way back to the jet, they stopped off at the office where Marco spoke to an acquaintance behind the desk. Ernesto was last seen two days ago. He’d filed a flight plan for Barranquilla and taken off with one passenger. Their suspect.

  He returned alone.

  Back in Cali, Black and Marco headed straight to the hospital. Emmy paced the hallway outside the operating theatre while Ana sat cross-legged in a chair, watching her. Sebastien was chewing on a fingernail, but he stopped when Black arrived.

  “Hey.” He caught Emmy’s hand and pulled her close. “What’s happening?”

  “He’s been in there for two hours. Nobody’s telling us a thing.”

  “Right now, that’s probably good news.”

  She sagged in his arms. “I know. But I still want to strangle someone with my bare hands. Did you find anything?”

  “A lot, considering the time we’ve spent so far. We have a suspect and a possible acquaintance.”

  “Who’s the suspect?”

  “No name so far, but we’ve got prints. I’ve sent them to Mack. The acquaintance is Ernesto Castillo. He runs a flight school out of Olaya Herrera Airport, but he doesn’t seem to give many lessons.”

  Seb, who’d leaned closer to listen, shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

  “It could be innocent. Our suspect might just be a pupil, but from the booking calendar, those seem to be so rare they’re practically an endangered species.”