West-End Boys (Naïve Mistakes)

by Rachel Dunning

  Conall called.

  "I'm not sure if it counts as me making it on my own when I can get a job just by telling people your name," I said.

  "Well, hello to you too. Care to explain?"

  "Crawley Inn. So, how many people know who Kayla and I are around here?"

  No answer for a few seconds. "Um, I might've shown your picture around a bit after you got abducted."

  "Oh, I hadn't thought of that..."

  "Well, and I...(crackle noise crackle)."

  "Huh? You're breaking up. Say again?"

  "Reward...people...when you were...(pause) (pause) Leora?"

  Damn it! "I can't hear you."

  "...Skype?"

  "No, I can't Skype now. I need to go to work."

  "...Leo...Skype?"

  The phone died. "They can spy on you from the moon but can't get international phone calls right," I muttered at my phone, as if it could talk back.

  I called him again. It just didn't feel right not ending things off properly with a goodbye or an I Love You. It's like I felt the universe would jinx something if we didn't part correctly.

  I sat on the bed and dialed his number again. All I got were long beeps. Tried it again. Still dead. Looked at my phone. Tried one more time. Mailbox.

  "Damn it." I put the phone in my front pouch (yip, uniform had one of those) and walked to work.

  -2-

  The clientele of Crawley Inn was, on average, a fair amount older than that of Jolly Roger, where I used to work at in Seaford. And they certainly dressed better. There wasn't a pair of denims in the entire place. Mr. Richardson kept me at the bar serving draughts all night. Good safe position. I was more than a little embarrassed when he introduced me to everyone as "Master Williams's Lady," to which I'd add, "Leora."

  It felt a little dumb trying to prove I was 'making it on my own' when I clearly wasn't. And, yet, it also felt unbelievably heartwarming to be somebody's 'lady' and to be it so thoroughly that, in people's minds, the two of you would never again be separated. Like thinking of one would automatically pop up the image of the other.

  And that I did like. I liked it so much that, by the end of the night, I didn't even bother telling them my name unless they asked. Of course, being England, polite and all, everyone did ask. So it worked out OK.

  Conall and I spoke little as the days rolled by. The connection was always terrible and the time difference made it almost impossible to talk when both of us were awake and weren't either in meetings (Conall) or serving beer (me).

  The serving beer, however, had graduated itself the following night to serving wine, then, a few nights later, tagging along with "a more experienced waiter" to go over the specials as people arrived. "A few more weeks and you'll be taking orders!" said Mr. Richardson with a jubilant smile on his ruddy face.

  Now that's climbing up the ladder. And damned if I wasn't proud of it. Heck, I even got a tip or two from some old dude after pouring him "the best darned draught beer I've ever had, young miss!"

  It was coming together for me. So what if Conall had 'helped' get me this job? It was mine now. Mine to keep or lose. And that's when I realized that, although it might be possible to live alone, if you have the choice it's always easier to choose to live your life with someone else. I saw that 'making it on your own' actually meant 'making it with friends.'

  Because isn't the act of making friends something you do on your own first? So, no matter what you do, you did make it on your own. Because you're the one who found the friends who helped you.

  OK, I admit, it was a little shoowah-wow-awesome philosophical. But the point is I was feeling better, and I was grateful for all the help I got from anyone to get me to that point.

  I'd never been happier. Life looked so good, so perfect. I realized I was richer than ever: Four quid in tips and a billion in love-coins.

  The road up to Conall's estate was always pitch-black at night. He lived in a nook where the stars were so bright you wondered who'd been so dumb as to invent harshly lit cities where they were too shy to show themselves. There were only three or four other houses on the long road to his place, each with lawns the size of football fields and, so, too far off the main road to reflect any of their internal light onto the street. Tonight the road glistened with reflected moonlight off its black tar.

  As I made it onto the first speed bump, I felt an unease at not having spoken properly to Conall in over a week. He'd texted me and sent me corny photos of him snoring on a desk and we'd emailed a lot in the first few days. But then all I'd gotten were texts and bad-reception phone calls. We hadn't spoken, hadn't actually conversed and heard or said the words 'I love you' and I was starting to feel the lack of them. How warm and comforting those words were. Warmer than any wood-burning fire in any cozy lounge anywhere.

  I pulled my phone out and texted him.

  Leora: I'll stay up tonight. I don't care if it's four A.M. But I need to hear your voice.

  The text I got in return, from Conall's phone, was so far from what I'd expected that my legs buckled when I read it and I hit the cold ground with my knees.

  Conall: Leora, Trey here. Go home and STAY THERE. Conall with me. Safe, but hurt. I'm on my way.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  -1-

  Trey was at Conall's place an hour later. With Alexandra. Hand in hand. Even though my mind was swirling I still found the strength to tell Alex I was happy for her.

  Brad and Kayla had been in the main house with me ever since I'd gotten the message. I was still in my waitress outfit. We all sat in the lounge. Brad had made a fire because I was freezing. That happens to me when I freak out. I get cold.

  "Conall's at a safe-house. He's been back home for a week. A few broken ribs, but he'll live," said Trey.

  The train that had just driven through the room and splattered me against its windshield was not slowing down.

  "Leora?"

  I took a moment to gather my wits and peel myself off said bullet-train. "Uh, OK? I'm listening..."

  "I— You understand that what I say to you now can never be repeated, right? If it gets out that I've helped Conall with some of these operations, I will lose my job. Now I'm not one to care about job security, but that same job has played no small part in keeping the people in this room safe. You understand me?"

  I nodded.

  "All of you?"

  Everyone in the room indicated the same.

  "There are a few things you need to know first. Conall is worth a lot more than he lets on. If the man chose not to work, he wouldn't need to. He wanted to make it on his own. So the money he spends, this house, all these things you see here, that's all him, his own making."

  Wanted to make it on his own? Oh, the irony...

  "But actual worth, actual value"—he whistled, slowly—"the boy numbers up in the billions. It's family money. He's the sole heir. His brother is such a crack-head that his father wrote him out the will years ago.

  "On paper, half of it is already his. Something to do with tax benefits if he takes on the inheritance now rather than later or something. Finance, not my field, Conall's. He'll get the rest when his parents pass away.

  "Those thugs that took you, Leora, that's what they wanted. That's why they took you. But there's another reason they took you. I'll get to that in a second.

  "Conall had let it all go, all the investigations, all the PIs, all of it. Except for one lead. One that he couldn't drop. When I tell you why, you'll understand.

  "Leo, you know about his sister?"

  I nodded. Little Vivienne, the Princess Diana of the Williams family. Shot and killed in Hyde Park. A heavy cloud settled on me as I thought back to him telling me about it, how she'd died in his arms, hit by a stray bullet from some thug that hadn't even aimed for her.

  "The killer in that hit was shot down by cops afterwards and died instantly. Resisting arrest. Or so they say. Truth is, and this is what Conall discovered recently, is that the guy was murdered. By the same cops who'd been cha
sing him. And someone paid big money to keep it covered up. The same person who was involved in your kidnapping—we only know this last fact now."

  My jaw dropped. My skin prickled. I began to tremble.

  Brad took off his coat and put it on me.

  "Wait, what sister?" asked Kayla.

  Alex put her head down, knowing the story as I did, wiped her eyes. She explained it briefly to Kay.

  Trey continued. "Drugs, not money, is the source of all evil when it comes to crime, Leo. The poor soul who killed Conall's sister was nothing more than a coke-head, a dupe informant who helped Scotland Yard with a number of small-time drug-busts in and around Brixton and Hackney—two of the poorer boroughs of London. One of which I'm from, actually.

  "Anyway, it seems this guy had a scuffle with two dirty cops who'd promised him some dough to keep his mouth shut but then didn't pay up. They were the ones chasing him. It seems the purse in his hand was where the money was in, as if the cops had planned on framing him right from the start. The dupe took one of their guns and, well, you know the rest. The idiot was so high he fired by mistake and Vivienne was in the way of the bullet, died in Conall's arms.

  "Now, it's inevitable that you find corruption in the police force whenever you start getting data about worldwide drug cartels. Inevitable. Conall knew that. And you know his game. He was only interested in having leverage, never really sure what to do with everything he found, just collecting, collecting."

  His drug, I thought. I knew that Trey also knew it.

  "Conall had learned long ago that vigilantism works only in the movies. When I found out he was privately investigating all these drug cartels—a few months after Alex here disappeared—I told him a little about what I do. I told him what I'm going to tell you now, and nothing more: I work for the government, and I also don't. But I can help catch bad guys. If any of it goes wrong, I get all the heat, you don't. That's all I ever said to him. That's all I'm saying to you.

  "I like catching bad guys. Conall likes catching bad guys. It works well. He gets the info. I can do something with it. Occasionally, he's personally involved, but only in extreme circumstances. Or when I can't convince the stubborn bastard otherwise. Such as when Leora here got taken.

  "We went after a few drug lords in the beginning. I remember one of them, Italian Mafioso prick. Got him off the scene. Conall and I partied it up in the West End thinking, naively, we'd just made a wonderful change in all of the world. Two hours later I got a call from one of my contacts. There was already another guy in that Mafioso's place. All our work had been for nothing. I won't go over details, but I'll tell you there'd been quite some personal danger in that operation as well. All for nothing. And that's the way of it. Take one out, another one enters.

  "I told Conall to knock it off, to forget it because there was no point in investigating every drug cartel in the world. He never did. He was..." Trey put his hand on Alex's, looked meaningfully at her. "He was obsessed with it after they took you, Alex.

  "Well, call it luck, call it what you will. But, hey, here you are. And I'm grateful for it. As I'm sure are the people in this room."

  They kissed briefly. Alex got emotional and held the back of Trey's neck. I recognized that grasp, the one for dear life, holding onto the person you care for with all you are. Your anchor in a swirling world.

  "So, we went in there, guns a-blazing, got Alex out and— Never mind the rest.

  "Now, you try and convince Conall after that, that what he'd been doing had been a waste of time and money. Add to it the incident with this...what was his name? That Hispanic that Kayla—"

  "Raphael," said Kayla.

  "Yes, him. Add to it the success he had in protecting you, Leora, and you, and you"—he pointed to Kayla and Brad. "His friends. He'd had leverage against this Raphael prick because of his investigations. So, he wasn't going to let it go. To tell you the truth, I was starting to believe he shouldn't, either. I'd never really supported this hobby of his. Too dangerous. But after these two successes, well, who was I to tell him otherwise?

  "Then, I'll tell you this, we only found you, Leora, when you got taken, because he had enough cross-referenced dirt on this Hungarian gang that took you, for us to be on them within hours.

  "So I'd given up trying to get him off this obsession with investigating these pricks. He always cited these successes he'd had. He'd tell me that just having the data made the people he loved safer.

  "But then, out of the blue, he did stop. After that trip you folks took up to Switzerland. He stopped it all. And I didn't know why. He told me it was 'getting too dangerous' and that he had everyone he loves safe now, so why bother.

  "There was just one thing he needed to take care of first, he told me. And then he told me what he'd found. And I understood why he said it was getting too dangerous, and why he couldn't let go of this one last lead.

  "Before he left on this last trip he briefed me on part of what he was doing there, in case something happened.

  "You see, he has all this stuff in an encrypted database on his computer and he's looked at it for years. Names, people, times, types of drugs, convictions. Heck, I think the NSA would be jealous of the stuff he's amassed.

  "Now, you know Conall. The guy's a geek. He's a hacker. He writes algorithms and software and tools just for the fun of it.

  "And all the data he'd find he'd input into this database he created which cross-referenced the shit out of everything else in it. Some of it ran permanently, day after day, just calculating, hypothetical connections to people and things while he slept.

  "And he'd made a breakthrough. A coke-head who'd been an informant for the cops. And he recognized the photo of the man. Like staring at a laughing grave."

  Trey paused, as if waiting for us to piece it together.

  And then I did. "The man who killed his sister."

  Trey fired an imaginary gun at me with his fingers. "You got it.

  "Of course, he couldn't let this go. Wouldn't let it go.

  "Long story short, he dug deeper, hit a dead-end. Called me. I looked into a few things he didn't have access to. And, yes, discovered that the man who'd killed his sister had been running from two dirty cops. Names unknown. And that's what he's been working on the last few weeks, the one person he couldn't protect. He's been trying to find his sister's killers. And the guy or guys who paid to have those dirty cops protected."

  We waited.

  "What does that have to do with the states?" I asked.

  "You heard of something called Legat?"

  I shook my head.

  "I know it," said Brad. "FBI in foreign countries."

  Trey nodded. "It's short for Legal Attaché. And, yes, it's the FBI office in a foreign country. They have a bunch of them around the world in major cities. Pisses me off, actually. But maybe that's because I work for another team." He smiled. "The PI that turned up dead in Germany had made contact with someone in the FBI there, in the German-based Legat, who was going to give him the names of those two cops." He smiled again, thinking something else. "You know, I'd hate to work in the US intelligence community these days. It seems every agency has some guy in there who's ready to divulge the US's dirty secrets at the drop of a penny, and for no personal payment at all. Snowden, Dodson... Anyway, that's another story. But it makes it easier for people like us. So, on a smaller scale—not worldwide like the recent NSA and ATF scandals—Conall and I found a few snitches in the FBI that were giving us the data we needed."

  "Wait," I said, "how would the FBI know about two Scotland Yard cops?" And then that hit me as well. "Oh... Oh, no."

  Trey nodded. "That's right. Those two bobbies hadn't been Scotland Yard at all. They were Legat. London Office.

  "You see, Leora, British cops don't carry guns! You see all these cop shows on TV and you think it's the same in Britain. It's not. Our bobbies are unarmed. More recently there are task forces and special divisions that, on a provisional and case-by-case basis, get given firearms in the U
K. That was the excuse the Williams family got given when they asked about those buggers being armed."

  "But Conall didn't buy it?" I asked.

  "Actually, he did buy it. As did his family. At the time. There was no reason to doubt it. He didn't know then what he knows now. It was only recently, after he found this dupe's name and started digging, that he had reason to doubt the official story."

  "So," I said, "the guys who'd scuffled with the snitch were FBI?"

  Trey nodded. "Traitors, but US feds nonetheless."

  "But Conall told me he was in the states on business, and that he's consulting on a hacking—" I stopped abruptly.

  "Right on point one. And very right on two. The best way to hack a system is to be given direct access to it."

  "You're kidding."

  Trey shook his head. "Conall will stop at nothing, Leora—nothing—to bring justice to those who hurt the ones he loves—or, in Vivienne's case, loved."

  "Damn, I fucking love this guy," said Brad.

  "Dumbass!" cried Kayla, slapping him once on his big arm. "Bad timing, babe?" she said, the comment sounding like a question.

  Brad put his arms up. "Oops, sorry."

  But Brad was right. It's also what I loved—and hated!—the most about Conall. He was relentless, unstoppable, even to the point of personal danger, when it came to protecting those he loved. Those he felt were under his care.

  He was going to get himself killed because of it!

  "And this PI...in the states...?" I asked.

  "There is no PI in the states, Leora. It was an internal guy. He was working with Conall, gave him access to their computers under the guise of training their staff."

  "So, it had nothing to do with Raphael after all," I said.

  Trey wiped his mouth, appeared suddenly like a boy with his thumb in the pie.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "Well...there's more. You'd think there was only one thing we had to worry about. Actually, there are two, maybe even three.

  "The second issue is this punk, this Raphael dude. Well...turns out—and, please, don't attack the messenger here—he had a few friends in the force as well. Turns out, also, that he caught wind of Conall's multi-billion dollar savings account and wants in on it. Turns out, finally, that he exchanged information about the guys higher up than him for clemency in any possible crimes he might have committed, in return for, well, a dirty deal."