Through her shock, she managed to say, “Who are you?”
“A friend of your mother’s. Now, come on.”
I couldn’t see putting her on the back of my motorcycle, so I called a robotaxi and had it take her to Jasmine’s apartment. Then I retrieved my motorcycle and rode over there, arriving ahead of the taxi.
I took Susan upstairs and put her in the bedroom. The Wellington’s security chief’s number was still in my phone so I called him.
“Mr. Fitzgerald? This is Elizabeth Nelson. I have Susan with me at an apartment near the University of Toronto. I think Mark is dead. An overdose in a club called the Drop Inn.”
I gave him the address and sat with Susan until she cried herself to sleep. About an hour later, Fitzgerald showed up with Maya Wellington.
“Where is she?” Maya asked as soon as I opened the door. I pointed toward the bedroom.
“Mr. Wellington is at the hospital,” Fitzgerald said. “They took Mark there.”
“Did they manage to revive him?”
He shook his head. “Nice place,” he said, dubiously scanning the apartment.
I smothered a laugh. “I rented it for an undercover gig. Mr. Wellington recommended my services. That was why I was in the Drop Inn. It’s definitely not my usual cup of tea.”
Maya came back out of the bedroom and said, “She’s sleeping. Are you sure she’s all right?”
“She’s fine, just exhausted. I don’t think she did any of the drug that killed Mark.” Susan hadn’t acted or looked like someone on luvdaze. I took a deep breath. “I went into the bar where I found them for a drink before I went home,” I said. “I don’t know why, it’s not one of my normal hangouts. I heard a commotion, and when I looked, I saw Shannon MacDonald. When I got closer, I saw Susan and Mark. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Wellington.”
She bit her lip and glanced back toward the bedroom. Her eyes were red, and I could tell she was riding on adrenaline. I didn’t have much in that apartment, but a six-pack was in the fridge and a bottle of whiskey was in the cupboard. I went and poured two fingers of the whiskey in a glass and handed it to her.
“No, no thank you,” she said.
“I think you should,” I told her in what I hoped was a kindly tone.
“Drink it,” Fitzgerald said.
She turned her head back and forth between us, then tossed the drink back.
“Damn!” She blinked a few times, then looked around the apartment. “I guess you save your money to spend on good whiskey.”
“I do, but as I was explaining to Mr. Fitzgerald, this isn’t my home. I use it for work.”
She sat down in a chair and said, “Thank you for getting her out of there. And thank you for calling us.” Tears started running down her face.
Susan came to the bedroom door. “Mom?”
Maya turned and Susan rushed into her arms. Fitzgerald and I watched them hug and cry for a while, then I helped him to get the women down to their car.
“We appreciate your help,” he said. “I’ll see that something is sent for your time.”
“No, that isn’t why I did it. Just think kindly of me if you have a chance to steer a little business my way.”
His face softened a bit. “That I will. Thank you, Miss Nelson.”
Chapter 12
After the carnage at Sheridan’s lab, Wil evidently didn’t have to work very hard to convince Mateo Hudiburg of CanPharm to give us the information we needed.
“Everything you asked for,” Wil said, handing me three chips. “I have people running background checks on everyone on the list.”
“Okay,” I said, taking the chips. “Have them send me what they find.” We’d cast a broad net, and although I felt it was important to be thorough, I planned to concentrate on people living and working in Toronto.
“Do you need anything else?” he asked. “We have state of the art facilities and the largest corporate database on the planet.”
“I’ll let you know.” I was very aware of the Chamber’s corporate database. I granted myself administrative privileges to it when I was eighteen. At one time, I considered appointing myself as their chief cyber security officer. That was too much like a real job, though.
Wil left and I went into the spare bedroom on the third floor, the room no one ever saw. The only private installation I’d ever seen to match it was my mother’s. The server array itself took up one wall. The wall opposite had six monitors. As far as the infonet was concerned, the main firewall and router appeared to the world as being physically installed in Belarus. The only port that allowed incoming traffic showed as an address in Zimbabwe. It was a trap. Any hacker attempting to enter it unleashed a system-crashing set of self-replicating, dynamically-evolving viruses.
Mom was one of the best hackers who ever lived. She started teaching me computers when I was three, and I had been inside almost every governmental and corporate network that mattered.
I plugged Wil’s chips into an auxiliary system and scanned them, then copied the information off. No way I was going to let a chip from the Chamber touch my main systems. I read the information into a database, categorized and hashed it, and set up some basic search algorithms based on key words and limits.
While that ran, I started calling up the records of the business people involved with Sheridan’s lab and checking their financial records in their bank and brokerage accounts. Follow the money was an old adage, and in the luvdaze case, it was the most important one. Since the elimination of currencies, bank credit was the only accepted means of exchange, and tracking money had become much easier if you had access.
During my Economic History course at the university, I thought it was funny that governments allowed the banks to crash the world economy repeatedly. Once the corporations took over, that stopped. The corps weren’t about to do business with a bank that disrupted business.
One person popped immediately, the CanPharm accountant who tracked the lab’s budget. Her total income exceeded her salary by a factor of five, and she was spreading it around to different banks. I spent over an hour following her funds’ flows before deciding she was a false positive.
As best as I could determine, she was sleeping with a guy in the mergers and acquisitions department of a large bank, and she was trading stocks based on inside information. She was a perfect target for blackmail, since the stock exchanges frowned on that sort of thing. Blackmail is such a nasty business, though. You really have to get off on someone’s fear and suffering to be successful at it. Instead, I bookmarked her brokerage accounts, analyzed her recent trades, and bought five thousand shares of a mining corporation and a thousand shares of a lingerie company.
That diversion completed, I went back to hunting inside CanPharm. One minor executive had a gambling problem, but beginning about a year before, he managed to get his debts under control. Another manager had bought his mistress a pricey condo near the waterfront six months earlier. A procurement manager bought a new house in one of the nicest parts of town, something he couldn’t afford on his salary. The facility manager for the laboratory bought a couple of fancy new cars and started taking some fancy vacations.
Although the total of that money was significant, it was a fraction of the cash flow I estimated from the luvdaze traffic. I switched to checking the people involved in quality control and clinical trials.
Where would you find people to test an aphrodisiac? The next thing I knew, I was staring at a picture of a gynecologist who specialized in female sexual dysfunction. The light went on, and I wondered how dense I could be. Dr. Diane Sheridan should have been a no-brainer. Who sparked her brother’s interest in his particular line of research? Perhaps his sister, who showed a long-term income in the high six figures, had convinced him there was money in women’s orgasms.
Her income had skyrocketed over the past few months, and some of it had funneled into a Swiss account in her brother’s name. Jackpot. I had the brains behind the scheme. I still didn’t have the person who
set it all up.
My smug self-satisfaction gave way to an obvious conclusion—Diane had to be scared spitless. I checked to see if she had booked a plane or train ticket out of town. Sure enough. I called Wil.
“Hey, pretty lady. What’s up?”
“Wil, I know who is behind this, and I think she needs protection. Pick me up and come armed. Right now.”
I hung up. We didn’t have time to discuss things. I could explain in the car.
Opening the concealed vault in the other third-floor bedroom, I pulled out a submachine gun and a handful of ammunition clips. Considering the selection of potential mayhem, I added half a dozen various types of grenades. Given the level of violence at Sheridan’s house and his lab, I wasn’t going into a confrontation under armed.
I started out the door, but stopped. Looking at the firepower I was taking, I could almost feel my father getting ready to slap me up the side of the head.
Returning to my bedroom, I dug out of the back of my closet my bulletproof over-bust corset made of Kevlar and covered with ballistic cloth. It was very pretty, black with red piping and bows, and it definitely enhanced my figure, but it was also incredibly stiff and uncomfortable.
Wil pulled up in front of my house, and I jumped into his car, still tucking in my shirt tail. “Pearson airport,” I said as I fastened my seat belt. “Sheridan has a sister, and I’m betting she’s the brains behind the operation.”
He pulled a squealing U-turn and blasted off down the street. I pulled out my tablet and brought up Diane’s picture to show him. She was fifteen years younger than her brother, and the picture showed her in a business suit, with styled blonde-streaked brown hair. She was pretty, but more than that, she projected an air of professional competence. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her in a corporate boardroom.
I filled him in on what I’d learned.
“Where is she flying?” he asked.
“Vancouver. She owns a vacation home on Vancouver Island.” When the ice melted and the oceans rose, many of the coastal cities disappeared. Vancouver City was surrounded by hills, and the city migrated up. The ultimate result was an archipelago of islands like San Francisco, Seattle, and Montreal.
“When is her flight?”
“We have two hours.”
Wil got on his phone and alerted airport security. I kept running scenarios in my mind. The two places I would target would be the check-in and the security screening lines. The safest place for an assassin to hit would be the check-in area, but I hadn’t researched her habits and didn’t know if she normally checked her luggage. Everyone had to go through security. Nuking the Middle East hadn’t eliminated all the crazies, and every so often, some nut would try to blow himself up on a plane.
I mentioned all that to Wil, who said, “The big problem is, we don’t know who might be targeting her.”
“The people who took out Sheridan and the lab were disciplined,” I said. “That makes me think they weren’t gangbangers.”
“So, any normal looking people could be mass murderers.”
“That’s about right, but mobsters tend to dress nicely. Think tailored suits, not golf casual. Someone dressed like you are probably doesn’t fit the profile.”
Airport security put a hold on Diane’s ticket. She hadn’t shown up yet, but they would notify us if she did show up at check-in or the security checkpoint. We set up on either side of the security line and waited. It was half an hour until her flight boarded, so she didn’t have much time.
“Wil,” I said into my comm link with him, “I’ve spotted two guys from the Donofrio organization. They aren’t flying, just standing around watching people like we are. One on my side of the line, one on your side.” I recognized both of them. The dark glasses they were wearing inside the terminal weren’t very good disguises.
I waited, but didn’t get a response. “Wil?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I’m thinking.”
After a while, he said, “We don’t know that they’re here for the same reason we are.”
Even though he couldn’t see me, I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I’m willing to bet my life on a coincidence. How old are you?”
“What do you propose we do?”
“I could take them both out. There may be more, but at least that would even our odds.”
Silence again. I chewed on the inside of my cheek and wondered if one sentence had blown my chances with Wil.
“What’s the downside?” his answer finally came.
“Someone might see me. No matter how careful you are, chance can always screw you up. In that case, I’d have to run and you’d be here alone.”
Silence again. While he thought, I edged closer to the nearest of the mob enforcers.
“Do it.”
I fell against a woman, knocking her off balance. She dropped her cat carrier and lurched into the hitman. He stumbled back into me, and I slid a stiletto between his ribs next to his spine. A small push sent him staggering forward, and I moved away from the scene.
The other man was craning his neck, trying to see what was causing the commotion thirty feet away from him. I circled wide around the back of the security line, passing behind both him and Wil, then doubled back. I brushed against my target, pushed the muzzle of my silenced pistol into his side under his arm, and pulled the trigger. I didn’t slow down or break stride as I walked to the back of the line, scanning for Diane as well as for anyone watching me. Everyone’s attention was on the two men falling down.
I kept waiting for a comment from Wil, but he was quiet. I hadn’t thought about it before, but the ability to kill quickly and silently probably wasn’t the sexiest thing a girl could use to attract men.
I noticed three men in the crowd who seemed to be especially concerned about the dead men.
“Wil, I’ve spotted three more of Donofrio’s men. One is bent over the guy near you, the others are freaking out on the other side of the security line.”
“I see them.”
Well, at least he was still speaking to me.
Diane’s plane took off half an hour late, but she wasn’t on it. We had airport security intercept the three mob guys, who were detained for bringing weapons into the terminal. Everyone seemed confused about how two men were murdered in the middle of a crowd, and Wil suggested those armed men might have had something to do with it.
Wil distributed Diane’s picture and asked security at the airport and at the train station to keep a watch out for her.
As we walked out of the terminal, I said, “You might take pictures of the mob guys and try to find out who in Donofrio’s organization they report to. This mess is not Alonzo’s style. He’s a lot more low-key and patient than this.”
He pulled out his phone and gave orders. We got in the car and he pulled away from the curb. I kept waiting, but he still hadn’t said anything to me.
“Wil?” I put a note of pleading in my voice. “Are you talking to me?”
“You know, it’s one thing to be told someone is an assassin, but it’s completely different to see her in action.”
“Tell me you’ve never hired an assassin. Tell me you’ve never ordered a hit.” I doubted there was a corporate security head in the world whose hands were clean. It was the way business was done, and had been done for hundreds of years. At least we didn’t have wars anymore.
“Yeah, I’ve done it,” he said.
We drove in silence back into Toronto. When we got to my place, I got out, then stuck my head back into the car. “At least I saved you from sleeping with me. You should thank me for that.”
I turned and ran up the steps. It was hard keying the locks with tears clouding my eyes. I heard Wil call my name.
Just as I finally got the door open, arms circled me and pulled me against a rock-solid chest. Wil’s voice murmured in my ear.
“Libby, I’m sorry. I’m such a jerk. Please, please forgive me.”
I struggled, trying to get free, but unless I was willing to hurt hi
m, he was too strong. I hated myself as I let a sob escape.
He spun me around without letting go of me, put his hand under my chin, lifted it, and kissed me.
I bit the son of a bitch. Not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to hurt. “You bastard. What kind of game are you playing?”
His eyes blazed as he drew his head back. I braced for him to hit me. Instead, he lifted me off the floor and carried me into the house, kicking the door closed behind us.
My back slammed against the wall, forcing my breath from my lungs. His mouth was on mine again, and his hands were all over me. He was like a force of nature, and I couldn’t stop kissing him. I felt my pants slide down my legs and reached for his belt buckle.
“Condom?” I gasped.
He pulled his head back and stared at me.
“You don’t have a condom?” I asked, feeling the frantic lust drain out of me.
He shook his head and his eyes rolled up, toward the second floor and my bedroom. “Don’t you?”
“No.” I reached down and snagged the waistband of my pants with one hand.
“You’re not very prepared.”
“I could say the same about you,” I snapped. “I wasn’t the one who started it.”
His large hand engulfed my chin and jaw, pulling me up into a kiss. When he let me go, he said, “I’ll be better prepared next time.”
I pulled my pants up and shook free of him. “What about Nellie?”
He grabbed me from behind, his hands on my breasts, and pulled me against him. His breath tickled the side of my neck. “She’s a nice girl. You’re more my type. What the hell kind of bra are you wearing?”
I relaxed against him and said, “Are you saying I’m not a nice girl?”
He nipped my neck and let me go. Backing away, he said, “I’ll be more prepared next time.”
“Who says there will be a next time? What makes you think I like being mauled?”
His grin was my answer. He opened the door and left.
The adrenaline I was riding turned into the shakes, and I slid down the wall to sit on the floor. If I told Nellie about it, she’d kick my ass. Maybe, I thought, I should buy some condoms.
Chameleon Assassin (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 1) Page 12
