The Payback Assignment (Stark and O'Brien Thriller Series)

by Austin S. Camacho

  “Oh, yes. We were talking about starting a family, weren’t we?” she said, backing away slightly. “I wasn’t sure you were serious, dear. Why don’t you get us a drink and we’ll talk about it now.”

  “Had a drink,” he muttered low in his throat. “In fact, had a few. And we already talked. We’re going to have a son. And we’re going to start on it right now.”

  His strength always surprised her. Gripping her upper arms he pulled her in to a hard, rough kiss. Before she could regain her balance he had spun her around and pushed her toward the king size bed that dominated the room.

  Marlene stumbled on the carpet. Her thighs smacked the edge of the mattress and she felt her nipples scrape across the chenille bedspread. Her fingers curled into the spread as she heard his knees thump to the floor behind her and felt her slip roughly pushed up around her waist. She was staring at their ornate walnut headboard and, above it, the cheap velvet painting of a matador she had always hated. She clamped her eyes shut, trying hard to call up a more romantic image and relax so it would not hurt so much when he entered her.

  -12-

  Morgan awoke at an elbow nudge from Felicity. He had warned her that he generally made it a habit to fall asleep whenever his attention was not needed for anything. He knew she’d wake him at the end of the flight. He leaned forward to look past her. The view out the window told him that their 747 had gone into its holding pattern over Los Angeles International Airport.

  At the airport in Merida, Morgan had been pleasantly surprised at the efficiency of the customs personnel. They were even fairly pleasant once he made it clear that he was more familiar with the applicable statutes than they were. No one at the airport questioned his international security officer credentials or his redundant multinational carry permits. Of course, he still had to endure an ungodly amount of hassle to get his working tools to travel with him. It was worth it, he supposed, for his machete and knives to be stored in the baggage compartment. Customs officials also forced him to pack his pistol in three separate cases, which naturally they provided, for a price. One case carried all his ammunition. Another contained the bolt from his pistol, while he packed the remaining harmless receiver and barrel in a third. All in all, he imagined it was less of a hassle than the hotel maid would go through when she found the bits of his disassembled submachine gun under his pillows.

  After landing, he walked ahead of Felicity through the buzzing beehive of LAX. He hoped he looked like any traveling businessman in his lightweight sky blue suit, white shirt and maroon tie. He still wore combat boots, but he had shined them to a high gloss. He brushed a determined red cap aside, taking their two suitcases and the three small gun cases by himself. Felicity followed, now dressed in the full tan skirt, plush brown blouse and rope sandals he picked up for her. Yes, they were a convincing tourist couple.

  The automatic doors opened before him, and he stepped out into air as hot and humid as the atmosphere he left behind in Mexico. Not the same though, because the air there carried a hint of sweetness from the foliage, whereas Los Angeles air, even this far outside the city, was thick with the petroleum and ash stench of smog. The heat seemed worse too, but only because he was wearing a tie now.

  Between jets taking off and automobile engines running he could barely hear his own thoughts. Felicity pointed to the long line of taxis waited at the curb, and he marched toward the lead cab. The taxi pulled forward to stop in front of them before they reached the street. They slid into the air-conditioned back seat and the slim black man up front jerked the car out into the dense traffic. Felicity leaned forward to give him an address in the Manhattan Beach area.

  For scenery, their trip rivaled the average hospital wall. The view was of one continuous freeway choked with cars, each mile looking suspiciously like the last. Morgan was oblivious to his surroundings, and figured Felicity would be too. After all, she had seen it all a million times before and, like his, her mind was surely occupied with other things.

  Morgan did not recover from his personal reverie until their cab stopped in front of a huge, contemporary structure that had been built as close to the coastline as such a building could stand without sliding into the ocean. Felicity thanked the driver when she paid him, and Morgan noticed that she was a generous tipper. Grabbing the small suitcase and one gun case before Morgan could, she led the way into the lush, luxurious building. The lobby was appointed in stainless steel with gold accents. A uniformed security guard sat behind a marble counter. While Felicity stopped to chat with the guard Morgan read the wall-mounted directory. Most of the building, he learned, was devoted to professional offices. The top three stories held apartments.

  The velvety decor mildly affected him, but other things impressed him much more. The building and its uniformed employees were quiet. A woman wearing a jumpsuit and apron was polishing a table at the side of the lobby, although the place already looked clean. A repairman stepped out of the elevator, maybe the reason Morgan saw no sign of maintenance needed anywhere. The place emanated efficiency.

  Morgan and Felicity stepped past the maintenance man just before the doors slid closed. Even the elevator moved silently. At the end of the rocket ride, the elevator whispered open at the top floor, the twentieth. Two apartment doors faced each other there, separated by a central tropical garden that was illuminated from a wide skylight above. He could not remember ever seeing the bird of paradise plants indoors before. Their blues and reds and yellows and oranges glowed as brightly as they ever did in their natural setting, their petals yawning like the birds’ beaks that gave them their names.

  Felicity strode to the door marked “number two” in fancy scrollwork. Next to the doorknob, an electronic cipher lock presented three rows of four numbers each. Felicity pushed eight buttons in a certain pattern, much like dialing a telephone number on a touchtone telephone. After the subtle click sounded, she turned the knob and opened the door.

  Morgan followed her into a cavernous space. Felicity touched a light switch revealing a huge, sparsely furnished, sunken living room. He judged the room to be twenty-one feet wide by twenty-eight feet deep. The marble tiled mezzanine under his feet continued around three sides of the room. He stepped down three steps into deep plush carpet that matched the walls. The color wasn’t really pink, but not quite red either. He thought he may have seen it on a paint pallet in a hardware store with a name like dusty rose or something of the sort. He couldn’t imagine anything more feminine. The furniture was plush, a velour texture that added to the feeling of softness the room exuded. Directly to his right stood a round oak table with three nicely padded chairs. In front of him, a hand rubbed oak cube filled in as a coffee table. Beyond it stood a very long and inviting sofa. Some searching of his memory produced a name for the color of the furniture. Mauve. Maybe. Ordinarily he would just call it tan, but in this case the specific shade seemed to matter. Behind the sofa, up on the mezzanine level, an array of stereo equipment looked out from behind glass doors. While he stood rooted, three steps past the door, Felicity crossed the room and stepped up to the bar beside the stereo cabinet. She reached into one of the upper cabinets, rattling glasses.

  The kitchen area was to the right of the sofa, and an overstuffed easy chair stood off to its left, almost in the corner. He continued to pan left to take in the wall on that side, and as he did his eyes widened in wonder. To his surprise, there was no wall to his left.

  On closer inspection, that wall was a series of glass panels, running from floor to ceiling, each three feet wide. Sheer curtains hung at each end. Morgan was staring out at a twenty-one foot vista of the Pacific Ocean. Rarely nonplused, Morgan had to admit that the view totally overawed him. For the first time in years, he was reminded of just what money can buy.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” Felicity asked. “I get all the light. And I practically own the sunset.” Felicity’s voice had taken on a slightly Californian, almost valley girl accent that mixed oddly with the Irish tones he had detected before. She was
pouring something over ice while he continued his turn around the room. Landscapes and still life paintings in a variety of sizes hung on the wall behind him in a random pattern. The huge centerpiece, an oil painting of windmills, unexpectedly changed to a field of pansies. On closer inspection, what looked at first like a huge painting was in fact a forty-two inch plasma television screen. Someone had programmed it to display a rotating collection of art, probably from a disc in the DVD player below it.

  “By the way, Morgan, do we have a business deal?” Felicity asked, bouncing down the steps back into the living room. She extended her hand, with a drink for him.

  “I’m still deciding.”

  “Oh come on,” Felicity prompted, seizing a cellular telephone lying on the floor of the deck behind the couch. She walked around in front of the glass wall, sipping slowly. Watching her there, dwarfed before the Goliath moving mural, he thought this woman must be in love with the sunset.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Red,” he said, sipping from his own glass, and reacting to the sweetness of its contents. Bailey’s Irish Crème over ice was not one of his regular choices. “Maybe I can help you recover your fee if it requires any rough stuff. How about fifteen percent of what we collect, plus my expenses?”

  “Fine,” Felicity replied, “but don’t call me Red.” While she dialed the telephone, he dropped the suitcases and bounded easily up to the marble level behind her to stare out at the boundless view. He felt as if he had landed on top of some private mountain. The sky was infinite in all directions, with only one small bank of cotton ball clouds over on the left. There was no hint of the city behind them. In the distance a gull slid across the wind lazily, banking and playing the currents like a seasoned hang glider. Below, foam swirled around a body surfer as he was caught in what looked like a giant washing machine.

  In the background, he could hear the beginnings of Felicity’s conversation. Her voice was rising and falling as rhythmically as the hypnotic ocean swell before him. It became white noise, as if he could hear the waves below. None of her words caught his attention until a demand broke through.

  “If I don’t have the cash within seventy-two hours I’ll come and get it. And don’t be thinking I won’t.”

  Morgan spun and leaped to her side in one long bound.

  “Red! What are you doing?”

  “I have friends, you know,” Felicity snapped into the telephone, ignoring Morgan. “You won’t get away with this.”

  “Don’t tell them we’re coming,” Morgan said in a harsh whisper. “You’re throwing away the advantage of surprise, you idiot.”

  “I won’t take it, Stone,” Felicity shouted, waving him to be quiet. “It’s my money or it’s your arse.”

  When she slammed the telephone down, Felicity looked up as if she was expecting an argument, but Morgan reacted with neither rage nor resignation. His initial response to her conversation was a dumbfounded silence. Slowly he moved to sit on the edge of her plush sofa, which turned out to be real velvet, not just velour as he had assumed.

  “Did you just say Stone?” he asked after a moment. Felicity nodded her head.

  “Tall dude? White hair? Kind of pale eyes?”

  “You know him?” she asked.

  “We’ve done business in the past,” he said, settling into the deep, totally comfortable couch.

  “Well that’s a bit of luck,” Felicity said, perching on her oak cube. “What do you know about the man?”

  “He’s an old pro. Sort of a general contractor.” Felicity’s puzzled look prompted him to continue. “Say for example, somebody has the dollars and wants a dirty job done. He contacts Stone. Now, Stone doesn’t actually do stuff, but he knows how to find the people who do. He’s connected. You need mercenaries, a hit man, a bodyguard, a courier...”

  “A thief,” Felicity added.

  “Yeah, or maybe some Mafia muscle. He can get them. All for a fee or a percentage, of course, and no risk to himself. As a matter of fact, he was the contact man for this last raid I executed. This raid I didn’t get paid for in Central America. You and me, we got some things to discuss.” He tossed back what remained of his drink. “By the way, you got any real liquor in here?”

  With a thoughtful expression, Felicity picked up the remote control unit resting in a space apparently cut into the oak block for just that purpose. She thumbed a button, and suddenly Brahms filled the room, seemingly from everywhere.

  Morgan was no lover of classical music, but he considered himself a connoisseur of fine stereo equipment, and the quality of the sound reproduction impressed him. Glancing around, he spotted four of the tiny but powerful Bose jewel cube speakers. There would be an Acoustimass module hidden someplace for the base. .

  Felicity had wandered back to the bar and when she returned she held a glass of amber liquid at his eye level.

  “Chivas Regal okay?” she asked.

  “More like it.” He gratefully tipped the glass to his lips. Felicity stretched out catlike on the couch, her skirt rising high on her shapely thighs. This was not the hyperactive feline he’d met on the trail. She was completely relaxed there on her own home ground, too relaxed for his tastes. Now that he had signed on for a job, he felt he needed to take command. The tactical situation, mostly unknown, was growing worse.

  “Tell me what you know about the opposition,” he said, sitting up straight. “Who’d Stone hire you for? Where’s your real client? What kind of backing and resources does he have?” From his jacket pocket he produced a small note pad and the sharp stub of a pencil he always carried. Felicity examined the ceiling for several seconds and took a long pull on her drink before she spoke.

  “Wish I could tell you. I worked blind for Stone. That phone number I just called? It’s in Denver, but from the time lapse and the clicks on the line, I think it’s transferred through to another city. I really have no idea who I was actually doing the job for, or what kind of organization he might have at his base, or even where his base is for that matter. Had no reason to want to know at the time. I guess we’ll have to find out somehow.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck,” Morgan said, getting to his feet. “I figure either this guy couldn’t afford to pay you, or he’s so rich he don’t have to bother paying you. If he’s small time, he’ll just drop out of sight, fade into the woodwork. On the other hand, if he’s big time, he could have a dozen thugs on our necks in a couple of days.”

  “So what do you suggest we do?”

  “We?” Morgan said with a smile. “I think you mean you. You better get busy trying to trace that number. I’m a mercenary, not a private eye. I’ll hang around here for three days. You’ve got seventy-two hours to get a line on this mystery man. After that I’m splitting. I’ve got my own snake to find. Even though that job came through Stone too, I can probably find the client easier than the flunky. I’ll get after him if your job falls through, and my trail starts south of the border.”

  -13-

  The beautiful blonde bent forward to help Adrian Seagrave out of his hot tub. Ashleigh was completely naked, and bending that way put her most prominent features very close to Seagrave’s face. She had no trouble concealing the distaste she felt when she was with him. After all, she was a professional. She had been with plenty of short, pear shaped men before, as pockmarked as this one, with the same dull lifeless eyes and brown straggly hair.

  She had a more difficult time disguising her fear. She had never been intimate with a known killer before. It took a lot of money to attract her to so deadly a meal ticket, but for what this man paid for her company, she would have slept with Al Capone. Besides, he had probably never killed anyone with his own hands. The rich and powerful seldom do.

  Smiling broadly, she rubbed Seagrave’s body dry with a thick terry cloth towel. That done, she helped him into a black oriental silk robe and silk slippers. Cool air chilled her as they left the room dedicated to the hot tub and walked across the wide contemporary study. Against the far wall stood what looked like
a gilt edged cage. At the push of a button the cage doors opened like the petals of a golden blossom and folded into the wall.

  “See you soon,” Seagrave said, pinching her hard on the rump before stepping into the cage. Ashleigh watched the silent doors slide closed and the cage descend in slow motion. After she heard the elevator car stop at its destination she turned to return to the bedroom.

  Ashleigh gathered up her clothes, marveling anew at the rooms Seagrave lived in. Clearly a professional decorator had furnished the place. It wasn’t personalized much, at least, not in any way that showed a woman’s touch. The few things that clearly were not a decorator’s work, like that awful velvet painting hanging over the crumpled bed, were definitely the man’s work.

  Halfway through getting dressed, Ashleigh stopped to make the bed. It wasn’t an impulse of neatness, but rather an act of respect. When she thought about what she did to make money, she had to admit that her own life sucked. Still, all things considered, she pitied the wife.

  One floor below Seagrave’s apartment, the elevator opened. When Seagrave stepped out, he faced a long conference table. Beyond it, the oak paneled room widened out. The room was laid out in a “T” shape, with the long table aligned with its base. From Seagrave’s left, sunlight filtered in through two huge picture windows behind the head of the table. Rich maroon velvet drapes muted the sun.

  Seagrave turned to his right, and walked past the foot of the table into the reception area, which represented the top cross bar of the “T.” A wet bar filled the side of the room to his left, and a desk and office setting took up the space on his right. Seagrave focused on the two remarkable men sitting at the bar. Right then, the thinner man held his gaze.

  He was tall, perhaps six feet four or five inches, but as thin as a cattail reed. His hair was stark white, yet no wrinkles showed on his face. What really captured Seagrave’s attention were his eyes. They were pale, almost entirely colorless, as if someone had streaked a thin blue wash across his irises. Those cold orbs betrayed no emotion as he filled his companion’s glass.