Paradise Burning

by Blair Bancroft

  Paradise Burning

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Paradise Burning

  by Blair Bancroft

  Published by Kone Enterprises

  at Smashwords

  Copyright 2011 by Grace Ann Kone

  For other books by Blair Bancroft,

  please see http://www.blairbancroft.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

  ~ * ~

  1

  Chapter One

  “Kira?”

  “Almost in.” Kira Malfi’s honey-warm voice pinged off a satellite, crossing thousands of miles as clearly as a call to Boston.

  To Mandy Armitage, Kira was a reddish blob of body heat on her computer screen, but in her head she held a clear picture of AKA’s whipcord-fit agent, poised over a keyboard in a dilapidated warehouse on the outskirts of Lomé, Togo, her chocolate-brown skin blending smoothly into the darkness around her.

  Almost in. A few more minutes and they’d have what AKA had been after for months. The culmination of Eleanor’s latest pet project.

  At the thought of Eleanor Kingsley, the autocratic K in AKA, Mandy winced. Eleanor’s intentions were good, but on the problem of trafficking her views tended toward obsession. Risks . . . too many risks.

  But not on tonight’s assignment. AKA had had the location under surveillance for a week. At night the warehouse on the outskirts of town was a dark, deserted shell. No problem.

  Yet . . .

  Mandy repressed a sudden urge to blurt out, Hurry, hurry, hurry. Stupid. How many times had she done this, talking an agent in and out of a building, a city, a country . . .? She was queen of AKA’s controllers because she could stay cool and steady while her mind skidded around, or vaulted over, every obstacle that stood in the way. Kira’s mission was just one more job, one more line on AKA’s hush-hush list of accomplishments.

  A second voice, urgent, barked in Mandy’s ear. Not what she wanted to hear.

  “Kira,” Mandy relayed, “observer reports headlights approaching . . . Land Rover pulling up . . . Get out now!”

  “I’m in.” Kira’s voice was steady. Unruffled. “Just another moment . . .”

  “Two men at front, two moving toward the back. Back door now, Kira. Abort, abort, abort!”

  “Got it.” Kira Malfi still sounded as if she was taking a stroll in the park.

  Too late. “They’re in,” Mandy said, voice cool, stomach clenched. “Windows? Packing crate?”

  “No windows, no crates,” Kira intoned. “Rafters twenty feet up. So where’s Scotty and his damn beam when I need him?” Mandy heard a faint sigh. “Hell, baby, maybe they just want to chat—”

  A burst from an automatic rifle punctuated Kira’s words.

  “Kira? Kira?”

  Mandy stared at the five red heat signatures on her screen. Four showed signs of movement. One did not. Oh, God. In AKA’s twenty years in business they had lost only two agents. Armitage, Kingsley & Associates weren’t a mini CIA, just a private firm of problem solvers. On an international scale, maybe, but AKA agents were not supposed to die. Particularly not on Mandy’s watch.

  Never on Mandy’s watch.

  Never before.

  The rose garden, bleak and frosty in an overcast Massachusetts January, perfectly matched Mandy Armitage’s mood. For a short while she’d allowed herself to hope. Until AKA’s observer reported Kira Malfi’s lifeless body being tossed into the back of the Land Rover.

  Kira. One more female lost to the ruthlessness of men who made their living selling women and children into slavery. Bastards.

  Mandy sat slumped on a wooden bench beneath a rose arbor. Bare gray branches twined around her, above her, the thorns undisguised by a few brown remnants of summer leaves. Pulling the glove off her right hand, Mandy touched her index finger to a thorn. Pressed down. Watched as blood welled up, the only spot of color in the winter landscape.

  Within twenty minutes of what Eleanor Kingsley had chosen to call “the incident,” a replacement had been assigned to Mandy’s computer. She’d been debriefed not only by Eleanor but by Jeffrey Armitage, the A of AKA. Professionals to the core, they’d done their jobs, but Mandy noticed Eleanor kept her hands tightly clasped on her desk, very likely to keep them from shaking. Jeff poured brandy for all three of them.

  Sometimes, just sometimes, her parents seemed almost human.

  And now, at last, she’d escaped into the frozen gardens behind the old stable block that had been converted into AKA’s version of mission control. The extensive estate, sixty miles west of Boston, was centered around a sprawling Tudor-style manor house with guest cottages for employees. The soothing ambiance of the rolling New England countryside spread its varied beauty over eight months of the year and was as stark and unrelentingly gray as the most conservative Puritan could wish during the other four.

  And yet . . . sometimes when it snowed, every branch, every rooftop, every fence post was capped with white, turning the landscape into a minimalist design in charcoal and white, with sun glinting off the sea of snow, accented by dark green spikes of spruce and cedar. Oh yes, Massachusetts could be beautiful in winter, but not now.

  Today was ugly, ugly, ugly. Even the ice on the pond beyond the garden was ugly. Who wanted to skate, laugh, have fun?

  Mandy flicked the blood off her finger onto a lingering patch of snow. Rose Red, Snow White. Innocents venturing into a hateful world where women and children were sold as casually as peanuts at the ballpark.

  Which is why, when faced with that awful decision five years ago, she’d chosen AKA. Chosen loyalty to the family business instead of love. The agents in the field needed her. All too often one of them was Jeffrey Armitage. Father. Mentor. Friend.

  And once upon a time Peter had been one of them too.

  Mandy considered herself a pragmatist. She did her job, avoided introspection. But today, doubts crept in. She loved her work, loved the excitement, the sense of accomplishment that came with a job well done. The conviction that what she did mattered. Her Boston Brahmin grandmother might sniff and call AKA nothing more than glorified private investigators, but the success rate of AKA’s day-to-day operations was phenomenal—bringing in enough money to support an international business and indulge Eleanor’s private war against trafficking as well. Which, Mandy thought sourly, was a bit like trying to stop a tidal surge. Both demand and supply were endless,
extending to every part of the globe. Quite simply, trying to stop human trafficking was like attempting to dam Niagra Falls or empty the Atlantic with a teaspoon.

  Yet Kira Malfi had died trying.

  Mandy looked out over the garden, the pond, the distant bulk of a stone-on-stone fence, and saw an endless line of women and children, of every race, creed, and costume, winding their way toward the horizon. Crisscrossing the globe, north to south, east to west. Going, going, gone. Work slaves. Household slaves. Sex slaves. Some pampered; most worked to death in a few years time.

  Logically, Mandy knew Kira had volunteered for the Togo assignment, had been willing to risk all for a list of slave routes through West Central Africa. In reality, AKA was trying to plug one tiny hole in a dike with more holes than Swiss cheese.

  The cold penetrated Mandy’s heavy duster coat; her breath frosted in the late afternoon air. As she drew her glove back on, she stared down at the blood red spot on the patch of snow.

  So what now?

  Oh, she’d be at her computer tomorrow and all the tomorrows thereafter. She’d attend meetings, research, plot, and plan. But for the first time—yes, she had to admit it—for the first time she began to understand why Peter walked away.

  “Amanda, please sit.” Eleanor Kingsley, CEO of Armitage, Kingsley & Associates, inclined a regal nod toward a chair that was almost lost before the polished expanse of her oversized mahogany desk. Eleanor. Perfectly groomed as always, her blond hair in a French twist from which no tendril dare escape. Eyebrows precisely plucked, cheeks expertly rouged, lipstick a soft reddish brown to complement the elegance of her designer-tailored beige linen suit. The highly intelligent, penetrating gray eyes Eleanor focused on her daughter might, Mandy thought, be marginally warmer than usual, but she was certain of only one thing. She was glad she’d given up all attempts to emulate her mother somewhere around the age of eleven.

  In the three weeks since Kira’s death in Togo, Mandy had buried herself in work, controlling investigations ranging from a missing child to insurance fraud, bodyguard duty for couriers to Buenos Aires and Hong Kong and for an internationally renowned visiting lecturer at Harvard. She’d supervised security system analyses for major businesses in Needham, Providence, and Greenwich. But it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. She loved the ever-changing challenge of her job, yet it had all turned to dust.

  Oh, she’d recover, she knew she would. Just as people everywhere swallowed their grief at the death of a friend or loved one, picked up their lives, and endured. But guilt, no matter how unjustified, lingered, refusing to bow to logic. She had helped plan Kira’s mission, had personally directed Kira every step of the way.

  Had not been able to save her . . .

  “Amanda.” Eleanor spoke sharply, obviously not for the first time.

  Mandy lifted her head, drew in a breath, looked her mother in the eye. Eleanor was up to something, no doubt about it. Very likely she and Jeff had had a private conference and decided to manipulate their daughter’s life. Again. Never mind she was twenty-nine years old and the linchpin of AKA operations. Short of handing in her resignation, she was stuck with whatever decisions her co-bosses chose to make.

  Eleanor tapped a beautifully manicured nail on the polished surface of her desk, betraying a rare twinge of nerves. “Amanda, your father and I think a change of pace will do you good.”

  Oh-oh. When Eleanor referred to Jeff as “your father,” she was pulling out all the stops.

  “You work very hard, Mandy. Too hard. We’ve asked too much of you.” Eleanor’s words were so smooth Mandy figured she must have practiced them. Either that or she was reading off some invisible prompter screen. “You haven’t been more than a mile from your keyboard since your last visit to your Grandmother Kingsley in Cambridge, and that was six weeks ago. Except for AKA business, you haven’t been out of New England in, well, more than a year.”

  “I did a week on Cape Cod, a week in the mountains—”

  “No breaks at all for the last eight months,” Eleanor continued inexorably. “You’re a genius at your keyboard, Mandy. But yours is a stressful position, and even the best and brightest wear thin—”

  “I hate vacations. Twenty-four hours and I’m climbing the walls!”

  “We understand that,” Eleanor replied with uncharacteristic patience. “Fortunately, you’re also a good teacher. You’ve done an excellent job training your backups. Therefore”—Eleanor paused, closed her eyes a moment before forging on—“therefore your father and I have arranged a temporary assignment for you in a new location. The change will enlarge your horizons, give you a fresh outlook–-”

  “Nothing’s going to bring Kira back!”

  Eleanor sighed. “No, it won’t, but you’ll be helping fight the scourge that killed her.”

  “Nothing’s going to do that either,” Mandy shot back, her temper building. “It’s a lost cause!”

  Eleanor bowed her head, seemingly intent on the nail polish that matched her lipstick. “I have to admit that the dribs and drabs we’ve been able to accomplish haven’t made much of a dent. I hoped getting the list of routes . . . no matter, I agree with Jeff it’s time to take another tack.” Eleanor paused. If Mandy hadn’t known it was impossible, she’d almost think her mother looked uneasy in her well-upholstered executive chair.

  “There’s an author in Florida writing a book on trafficking,” Eleanor continued. “He’s done some remarkable research on his own, but feels he’s reached the point where he needs a research assistant.” Mandy’s mother took a deep breath, plunged on, blatantly pseudo-bright. “A two- or three-month job. Just think, Mandy, a season in paradise. People pay thousands of dollars a month to be in Florida in the winter. You’ll actually get paid to be there.”

  Florida. When Mandy was nine, she’d begged to go to Disneyworld. Eleanor had looked at her as if she’d asked to go to a monster truck rally.

  Mandy had never been to Florida.

  “He put in a request about five weeks ago,” Eleanor was saying. “I didn’t mention it because we were planning Kira’s mission and I knew you’d never leave her on her own. Also . . . well, there were complications.” Mandy’s mother trailed to halt, as if her prompter had suddenly gone blank.

  What on earth did some author in Florida want with Amanda Armitage? In the land of sunshine, sand, beach, boats, golf, and senior citizens, an analytical specialist—let’s face it, a computer nerd—would be as out of place as an evening gown at a backyard barbecue. Maybe Pensacola? MacDill? Some DEA facility farther south? Stubbornly, Mandy kept her mouth shut. And waited.

  “He’s a New York Times best-selling author, and he’s just built a new house along some jungle river not far from the Gulf Coast. But this is his first try at non-fiction, and he wants to get it right. And, of course, the subject matter is close to our hearts—”

  Best-selling author. New house. Trafficking. Research assistant requested from AKA.

  Mandy leaned back in her chair, staring at her mother through eyes that had turned to laser beams. “You didn’t . . . you couldn’t . . . What did you tell him?” she demanded, her voice rising from a whisper to an outraged bark.

  “Mandy, we realize this is not something we can order you to do, but Jeff and I, we think it’s for the best. That it’s worth a try.”

  Hoo-rah. Seeing Eleanor squirm was almost worth the shock.

  “So you and Dad are just going to re-arrange my life. Planning on changing the corporate name, are you? Matchmakers, Inc., perhaps?”

  “There’s no need for sarcasm, Amanda. We’re merely trying to do what’s right. If you weren’t considering the possibility, you’d already be slamming the door in my face.”

  Damn! And wasn’t that the truth?

  “He asked for you,” Eleanor said, more gently. “Not just any of our researchers, only you. I delayed, told him we were in the midst of a project. Yesterday I called to see if the offer was still on the table. It is. More than that—he was eager.” E
leanor’s voice softened to something almost resembling mother mode. “Is it so awful, Mandy, the idea of working for Peter, seeing if there’s still something there?”

  Mandy glared. “I’m an only child and you want grandchildren.”

  “We want you to be happy.” The sight of Eleanor gritting her teeth to hang on to her customary cool was an added bonus. Almost enough to compensate for Mandy’s horror.

  “Sure.” Mandy flung her hand into the air like a magician showing off his latest illusion. “Go to Florida, Mandy. Research for Peter. What’s a five-year separation? A mere bagatelle. Go on. Run, run, run. The great Peter Pennington snaps his fingers and there goes Mandy, panting, groveling at the great man’s feet.”

  “Amanda!”

  “Is there any other interpretation?” Mandy demanded. “Well, is there?”

  The silence sizzled with animosity, pain. Unspoken thoughts. “I beg your pardon,” Eleanor murmured. “I’d hoped . . . we’d hoped . . . Peter hoped . . . It seemed like a good idea. Obviously, we were wrong.”

  A new house. Along a jungle river. Sun . . . warmth. A long, long way from February in Massachusetts. A long, long way from AKA and the often grim duties that went with it.

  After putting on her most long-suffering look, Mandy muttered, “I’ll give it a try.”

  He was a damn fool, Peter Pennington growled to himself. Just the thought of Mandy’s arrival scared the hell out of him. Yet, figuratively speaking, he’d gotten down on his knees and begged. To Eleanor, the icicle, who might have had a maternal impulse somewhere back in the Stone Age, but he doubted it.

  He’d wanted to go direct to Jeff, man to man, but Mandy was the heart and soul of Jeff’s operations. It was Mandy’s loyalty to her father and his far-flung band of agents that had split them up. So Peter had devised a plan, a thinly disguised maneuver to get Mandy to Florida.