The Widow File

by S. G. Redling

  “‘See the news?’” the message said. They read aloud the next line together. “‘Four, four, one, eight, six.’”

  “Is that from Tom?” Dani asked. “What are those numbers?”

  Choo-Choo stared at the phone. “That’s a Stringer code.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Did you… I thought…” Dani couldn’t put words in order. She didn’t know what she was asking or what she wanted to hear. Rasmund had exploded. Fay had been killed along with the Faces team. Mrs. O’Donnell had been kidnapped. Dani didn’t hold local law enforcement in low regard. She knew they were more than capable of understanding a crime scene much more subtle than Rasmund. Anyone would recognize the presence of bodies in the ashes.

  “What should I say?” Choo-Choo looked as sideswiped as she felt.

  “How about ‘Help!’ That seems kind of fitting.” When he still didn’t move, she squeezed his arm. “The Stringers, they’re hit men, right? I mean basically that’s what they are. Isn’t that what you said? We know the people that attacked Rasmund had hit men. Don’t you think it would be nice to have a hit man of our own? Someone on our side? Maybe he knows something.”

  If it was possible for Choo-Choo’s fair skin to become any paler, it happened at that moment. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about. Maybe he does know something.”

  “What?”

  “What if we’re looking at this all wrong, Dani? What if Rasmund didn’t get hit but we did?” He stared into her eyes, waiting for her to catch on.

  “But we did get hit. Rasmund got hit.”

  “No, we got hit. You and me and Fay and the Faces. Who worked on the Swan job? You and Fay, me, Hickman and Evelyn, Phelps and Eddie. Everyone got hit but us because we escaped. Mrs. O’Donnell walked out.”

  “Tied up with a hood on her head.”

  “Because that’s so hard to fake?” He scowled at her. “That might have been for your benefit, did you ever think of that? The people who hit us knew someone was missing. They saw you come in and then they couldn’t find you. Maybe they knew you were watching. Maybe they were trying to draw you out. Dani, they got into Rasmund. They got the codes for the locks, the cameras, the phones, everything. That is not an easy place to get into. And to get into it without setting off any alarms? You know who gets in and out of Rasmund without being seen? Stringers.”

  She shook her head. “No, whoever it was must have come in with the Swan liaison. They collected all the materials. This has got to be part of the Swan job.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “The job was called!”

  “Says who?” Choo-Choo asked. “Says Mrs. O’Donnell. She’s the one who called the job. There was absolutely no chatter about that beforehand. There was nothing in the audio I heard to suggest that the job was off track. And what was in the materials? Did you see anything? I had shit on audio. There was zero evidence of anything wrong at Swan.”

  “But why would she… ? Who is… ? Tom said that the people who hired him think I have something. All I have are the Swan materials that Hickman gave me. What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know.” He slumped back against the couch. “Whoever is working this, they have the power to affect the police investigation. That’s harder than you might think. It’s one thing to alter a police report. It’s another thing to convince a battalion of state troopers and firefighters to not see dead bodies in the wreckage of a blown-up building.”

  “Could they have gotten the bodies out?”

  He shook his head, uncertain. “Maybe? My sense of time was pretty warped when we ran but it doesn’t seem like there was a lot of time between us hitting that road and the building blowing up. Am I being paranoid?”

  Dani laid her head back, her shoulder pressing into his. “I think we’d be crazy not to be.”

  Booker cut through another busy intersection before he even realized he had left the hotel. His face burned hot, an unusual sensation for him. He knew his face got red when he exerted himself—he was still a functioning organism, but it had been years, decades even, since he had been aware of the occurrence. He didn’t hear the traffic around him. He heard nothing but a pounding in his ears and the steady huff of his breath.

  No sign of foul play.

  Booker had put nothing in motion to hide the bodies. The plan had been to create confusion. The discovery of corpses was supposed to kick off a gruesome discovery of murder and mayhem. The bullet holes in the skulls of the Rasmund employees would take a few hours but that evidence was supposed to open a trail of suspicion and misdirection. The unexplained presence of the dead team of mercenaries would only add to the cloud of fear and foreboding.

  Who the hell was playing him?

  Booker knew nobody had gotten out of that building alive except O’Donnell and Dani. Duncan and his crew had died screaming and cursing him. The real question was why would anyone tamper with this plan? Or more to the point, how did it affect him? Booker didn’t give a rat’s ass if the master plan kicked off the emergence of a new Third Reich so long as he got away free and untouched. What bothered him, on the ever growing list of things that bothered him about this job as a whole, was that nobody had given even an inkling of this wrinkle. The client, his assistant, the site of the big hit, nothing in Marcher’s background—nowhere had Booker found even a hint, a trace, or a suggestion that a bigger game was afoot. And Booker had an excellent eye for treachery.

  Was someone setting him up? A less experienced professional might feel some relief that the Rasmund hit came up on public record as being a fatality-free accident. Less experienced professionals didn’t last long without questioning windfalls and happy surprises. The level of incineration needed to vaporize the number of bodies in Rasmund to a point beyond detection would have left a crater in the Virginia countryside that would still be smoking.

  Somebody was covering Booker’s tracks. Why?

  Of all the many lessons Booker had learned through his forty-plus years on the planet, one of the most important was that nobody did good deeds for nothing. Nobody would cover the tracks of the job Booker got paid so handsomely to do unless he could use it for a payday of his own. Was someone going to try to shake down the client? If so, Booker planned on being on the next flight out of town. Were they going to try to shake him down? He felt the warm hilt of the silver knife he had tucked in the small of his back as it touched his skin. That wouldn’t end well for one of them.

  Who could pull off a maneuver like this? The questions pounded on Booker as he pounded down the sidewalk, walking without looking, toward the Metro. The bodies were still on-site, of that he had no doubt. Booker had watched the building explode. Nothing had gotten out of the blast area; he himself had barely cleared the perimeter when the rescue workers came on-site.

  They had been legitimate rescue teams, right? The tingling thrill he’d felt when he thought Dani had outsmarted him morphed into a hot wave of nausea that roiled like broken glass under his skin. “No,” he told himself, speaking aloud despite the strange looks he got from the few people on the sidewalk at this hour. No. Those were local fire and rescue. They had to be. That meant someone in charge of releasing information to the media had chosen or been forced to cover up the deaths. Who had that kind of clout? Who had that sort of reach into local law enforcement? Booker felt his mouth go dry. Higher levels of law enforcement.

  Had he been hired to hit the government?

  “I still say we contact them.” Dani grabbed her purse from under the pile of bags and started pulling out burner phones. “We have got zero information about what’s going on. It’s not like we’re giving your presence away. You sent them the emergency message. Will they know it’s from you? Do they know you’re alive?”

  “I don’t know if they know it’s me. I’ve got to assume they do. Hell, I don’t know.” Choo-Choo bounced the phone on the tips of his fingers. “If we send the message, if we start a dialogue with them, we’re going to have to bluff.”

&nbs
p; “If they’re contacting us—or you—they must want to know something. This is hardly the time for a social chat. Why are they contacting you? To warn you? To fish for information? Let’s see what they know.”

  “What do you recommend?”

  Dani took the phone. “You said you all only use tone codes. Well this is a verbal message so clearly the rules have changed.” She read her message as she typed it into the phone. “‘Saw it. Surprised?’” She looked up at him. “Let’s make it sound like we know what’s going on. Like we’re on the inside of the loop.”

  The phone beeped in less than a minute. “‘Not as surprised as you’ll be.’”

  Choo-Choo let out a sigh. “That doesn’t sound very friendly.” Another beep sounded and he read aloud, “‘Let’s talk.’ God Dani, what if they want to finish the job?”

  “Well they’re going to have to get in line, aren’t they? I think Tom already called dibs on that particular activity.”

  “Tell me you’re not being plucky. I hate plucky.”

  “The alternative is wailing hysterics. Your choice.” She trailed her thumb across the phone. “He wants to talk. Let’s talk. ‘Where, when, and why?’” She showed her message to Choo-Choo before she sent it. He nodded and she pushed the button. The phone remained silent for several long moments.

  Choo-Choo spoke around the thumbnail he gnawed. “Did we stump them? Which question do you suppose they’re stuck on?” The phone beeped. “I guess they figured it out.” “‘Dupont Circle Metro, westbound. Fifteen minutes,’” Dani read. “Screw that. We’re not just marching to our death. What should I tell him?”

  He took the phone and started typing. “‘Need more info. How do I know you’re secure?’”

  The phone beeped in seconds and he held the message up for her to see. “‘Because I’m alive.’” Another beep and he read aloud, “‘Trying to keep you that way too.’”

  “That would be nice to believe. Do we believe him, Choo-Choo?”

  He replied to the text. “‘How many of us are alive?’” Then to Dani, “Let’s see what he knows, if he knows about you or Mrs. O’Donnell.”

  “‘Complicated.’”

  “No shit,” he muttered at the message and kept typing. “‘Not good enough. How many?’”

  “‘Four. One taken, one in the wind. Only found you.’” Another message came in right behind it. “‘Please, Choo2—need help. Dani is target. Must find.’”

  He and Dani leaned against each other, their breathing the only sound in the room. Dani kept her voice at a whisper. “We don’t have any choice. We’re stuck here. We have nothing else to go on. If he doesn’t know I’m with you, I could maybe trail him or something. Get the jump on him.”

  “With what? Your purse? I don’t suppose you have a gun in there.”

  “What else can we do? Maybe this guy really is trying to help us. We know Tom’s not. You meet him in public, stay with the crowd. I’ll hang back. We’ll keep our extra phones on so we can talk. If it looks like he’s pulling a weapon or something, I’ll cause a scene. You can run.”

  “That is a terrible plan.”

  She gave him a weak smile. “So was the roof and we pulled that off.”

  He didn’t look convinced but sent his confirmation to the Stringer. “You know there’s a huge gap in your logic, don’t you? If this really is a Stringer, a Rasmund Stringer, they’re going to know you by sight too. The odds are excellent that this guy has a whole file on you. He’s looking for you.”

  “Let’s worry about one hit man at a time, shall we?” She started packing up the Swan materials. “I feel like all I do is pack and unpack this stuff.”

  “Why are you even bothering? You’re not taking it all with you, are you?”

  “Yes, I am. I’m taking it everywhere.” She rolled the champagne cork around in her palm, her pinkie catching the wire where someone had once bent it into a perfect heart. After all the pouch’s adventures, the shape was little more than a mangled loop. “This may be the only thing that’s keeping us alive. If there really is something in the material that they want, it’s probably in here. If things go really wrong, maybe we can bargain with it.”

  He grabbed her wrist as she dropped the cork onto the Tootsie Pop wrapper. “What if it has nothing to do with the pouch? What if they’re just erasing anyone and everyone who was exposed to the information? What if there isn’t a single thing in that bag that’s worth them not pulling the trigger?”

  She pulled her wrist free of his grip. “You were the one that said they’re trying to draw me out because of what I’ve got. Tom says they want something that I’ve got. The only thing I’ve got is this pouch. If it doesn’t have what they want, then we’ll make them think it does.”

  Booker dialed the emergency number. He didn’t care that it was nearly midnight. He didn’t care that it was freezing outside. The client answered on the second ring. Booker didn’t let him finish his hello.

  “What the hell is going on here? What was that place?”

  The client sputtered, mumbling something about the time, but Booker cut him off.

  “Who’s covering this up? Are you playing me? Stop talking and let me make two things abundantly clear to you. One, the money is non-refundable and already out of the country and is nowhere near enough to make me take the fall for you. And two, if I even think you are setting me up, there is no place on this planet I can’t reach you. It may take a day, it may take a year, but know like you’ve never known anything in your entire miserable life, that when you die, it will be at my hand. Are you getting this?”

  “Would you stop?” The client’s voice sounded gravelly and tired. “Nobody is setting anybody up. I have assurances from people in a position to know. Nobody is setting anybody up. We’re looking into the matter right now.” Another voice spoke in the background and the client answered in muffled tones before coming back on the line. “We need time.”

  “You don’t have time,” Booker said. “Someone tampered with the site, someone with the authority to put a gag order on the scene. Why would someone do that? Why is Rasmund so important that the law is going to protect that scene?”

  “No names!”

  Booker rolled his eyes, stepping into an alley to pace. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re worried about your phones being tapped? Now? We just orchestrated a hit that left behind two dozen corpses. There should be outrage and bedlam, demands for justice.”

  “We’re trying to orchestrate an alternative plan right now. We’re powwowing.”

  “Powwowing, Jesus Christ, would you listen to yourself? Would you get your head out of your own corporate ass and look at this situation? What is Rasmund? All my research showed it to be an elite investigation firm. You hired them. Do you know something different? If you do and you didn’t tell me, I swear to God I’ll start by cutting out your granddaughter’s eyes.”

  “I don’t know any more than I told you. I swear.”

  Booker pressed his forehead to the filthy brick wall. He closed his eyes, wrestling his frustration under control. “All right, let’s assume this is a complete surprise to you too.”

  “It is. I swear.”

  “Could they have connections high up in the government, maybe the FBI or Homeland Security, someone who could clamp down on a crime scene like this? Someone who could, I don’t know, convince the rescue workers to keep the facts of the scene under wraps for national security reasons?”

  The client breathed hard. “That could be a possibility. I’ll have my team look into it.”

  Booker dropped his head backward, looking up to the sky in disbelief. “You didn’t think to maybe look into that before you started this job?”

  “You listen to me, you condescending son of a bitch. You are a very small part of this operation. You were hired to do a job. What you need to know is—”

  “Shut up.” Booker heard the man choke on his words, shocked at being spoken to like that. “Just shut your mouth and let me think. Where
are you on finding out what leaked? Do you even have a clue what Dani is supposedly carrying? Does it even matter now? Don’t answer that. Don’t speak again. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to find out everything you can about Rasmund—who’s hired them before this, what kind of connections they’ve got. And I mean find out real information. Don’t go by their press release. You shake that tree until you get someone on the top who actually knows something. You’ve got the old woman. You wanted her alive, now use her. Put a gun in her mouth and don’t take it out until she starts talking. Are you getting this?”

  There was a long silence, then a sigh. “Yes. Yes, I can talk to her.”

  Booker shook his head at the evident relief in the man’s tone. Once again he was having to hold a client’s hand when everything fell apart, having to baby talk them through the mess they created by ordering the trigger pulled too soon. It happened so often Booker should charge extra for consultation fees. He really had to get out of this business. “While you’re working on that, figure out exactly what is missing from Marcher’s files and what you are going to do if it’s not returned to you.”

  “It has to be returned.”

  “You’re not in a position to insist on that. Do you understand me? If it turns out that you are linked to a terrorist attack on a government facility, whatever secret ingredient is missing from your little cake batter is going to pale in comparison to the hurricane of shit that will rain down on you. You. Not me. You.”

  The man growled through the phone. “Don’t think for a second I can’t or won’t take you down with me. I know who you are and how to find you.”

  “Do you?” Booker lowered his voice. “Because it seems to me that you can’t find your dick with both hands. Don’t threaten me. I’m the only thing keeping your plan alive right now. You lose me—and you can lose me very easily—all it will take is one call to the NSA to have you dragged out in chains. Now shut your mouth and do what I tell you. Find out all you can.”