Her athletic career had taught her over and again how intimately intertwined were pain and pleasure. So many times she had pushed through torturous drills and excruciating training regimens, driven on by her coaches and her mother, and by doing so her bloodstream was flooded with endorphins that sent her surging beyond the trifling pains and propelled her into the intoxicating high that was her own version of religious rapture.
Now in the distance she saw the lit sign for the Shell station next to the ramp for the highway. It would have a bathroom where she could cleanse her hands. She slowed and debated whether she should pull in to a place so close to the castle or drive farther east.
She was still debating when she saw the white Fiat parked outside the petrol station’s diner. White Fiats were common. It was probably nothing. No doubt the car belonged to some local villager eating an early breakfast or trying to stifle last night’s drunkenness.
But Gerda could not pass it by. When she was a child, her mother had quoted the proverb to her, a stray bit of wisdom that rightly or wrongly had shadowed Gerda’s entire adult life. In essence, it meant Work, work, never let up. And now, as it had done a thousand times before, the adage replayed in her mother’s iron voice:
Wer rastet, der rostet. He who rests gets rusty.
So yes, she would make a quick pass by the Fiat simply to see if it had the rental agency’s red decal on its rear bumper.
It was probably nothing.
SEVENTEEN
Canena, Spain
Harper read the newspaper article twice to be sure she’d missed nothing. When she folded the paper back together and laid it to the side, her hands were trembling. She was certain Ricardo had been alive when she’d left him in the alleyway. Absolutely certain.
She ordered una taza de café, drank the cup of strong coffee, and ordered another. After paying her bill, she used the restroom and was headed back to her car when she saw a dark Audi swerve into the parking lot, idle past the gas pumps, then pull directly behind her Fiat, blocking its exit.
Harper waited at the diner’s front door until the driver stepped out of the Audi. A tallish woman with coppery hair cut short. Square face, strong jaw. Dressed in a black track suit with a dark scarf knotted around her neck. The outfit was cut tight, showing off her rugged physique: broad shoulders, slim hips. A supple swagger to her movement.
Gerda Bixel had come calling.
Harper opened the door of the diner, stepped into the cool air, and glided a few steps to her right, choosing a position with her back to her own car as Gerda turned to face her from a dozen feet away. With the Fiat at Harper’s rear, any accomplice of Gerda’s would have no choice but to attack face-to-face.
Gerda’s ice-blue eyes glittered in the parking lot lights. No trace of humor or pity in those eyes, nothing but a bland resolve. Harper had met the woman’s mother, Larissa Bixel, and knew for certain that she’d been an eager accomplice in Lester Albion’s murderous plots. But even having such a monster for a parent could not completely account for the vacancy in the eyes staring into her own.
“You’ve been following me for weeks,” Harper said. “Why?”
Gerda coughed out a humorless laugh.
“Does it have to do with Albion’s land deals in Italy?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Gerda’s empty stare seemed to confirm her denial. Gerda said, “Where’s your camera? How do you defend yourself without it?”
“Oh. You were watching us fight.”
Gerda’s lips tightened into a sour smile. “That was a fight? What I saw was a fainthearted weakling who blindsides her adversaries.”
“Ricardo and Ángel, were they yours?”
She was silent, but the light in her eyes said yes.
“So you cleaned up afterward to be sure they couldn’t implicate you. You strangled Ricardo, but what about Ángel? Why let him escape? Not worried he’ll identify you? He’s working with the policía now. Did you know?”
Gerda blinked, her expression doing a quick reset. From cold contempt to a flicker of uncertainty, then back to the baleful glare that seemed her default look.
“Why use them? To soften me up before you came for the kill?”
“Keep asking questions, it will get you nowhere.”
“Who pulls your strings, Albion or your mother? Or is it both?”
That tripped her again. Her gaze making a longer detour this time, several seconds before her icy glower returned.
“How about Manfred Knobel? Where does he fit in?”
Harper had simply thrown it out, not expecting anything, but she watched in wonder as Gerda’s facial muscles flickered like a jittery silent film, moving so quickly through a string of intense reactions that Harper couldn’t identify any of them.
Trying without success to mask the emotion in her voice, Gerda said, “How do you know Manfred?”
“He’s an Olympian like you. You were probably friends, maybe you still are. Maybe more than that.”
“Du Mutterfänger.”
Harper’s command of German idiom wasn’t fluent, but she was pretty sure she’d just been called a motherfucker.
“Tell you what, Gerda. Why don’t we call a truce, sit down, have a glass of wine, and you can tell me all about Manfred and Albion and your mother. How they fit together. I can tell you what I know, and you can fill in my blanks. What do you say? Woman to woman, leave the men out of it.”
“You think you can mock me, manipulate me, make me deviate from my path, which only demonstrates you know nothing about me.”
“Sure, sure. Staying on the path, that’s important. Orders, rules.”
Gerda was silent, her glare hardening.
“Makes sense,” Harper said. “Top athlete like you, everyone’s been telling you what to do since you were a little kid, coaches correcting your form, judges assigning a number, somebody with a stopwatch pushing you. All those years in training, staying inside the lines, maybe you never learned how to be free.”
“Oh, and you, McDaniel, you’re so free? I watch you for weeks and I’ve seen no freedom. Every day the same thing, like the robot.”
Harper couldn’t help herself. She smiled.
“Point taken. Maybe we have something in common.”
“We have nothing in common. Nothing.”
Gerda’s hands tightened, and she was tilting forward ever so slightly onto her toes. A telltale giveaway of an inexperienced fighter. No doubt she was strong, and Harper knew she was low-down dirty, willing to commit any act necessary, such as strangling a half-conscious man in an alley.
Out on the road fronting the diner, the whoop and wail of a siren passed by. Gerda glanced over, and Harper flicked her gaze to the right to catch an ambulance flying past, its red strobe lights slashing across the asphalt between the two of them.
As Harper expected, Gerda chose the distraction as her opening. She plunged forward, covered the ten feet between them in a blinding half second, and sprang into the air.
Harper shifted left to slip what she judged was a right-footed flying kick. Ready to employ an evasive block she’d used many times before. But this was no flying kick. Gerda sprang four feet in the air, as graceful and effortless as a puma bounding over a fence rail. Like nothing Harper ever faced on the practice mats or the streets.
She sailed past Harper’s shoulder, landed on the hood of the Fiat, and as Harper was spinning to face her, Gerda dropped to Harper’s side, a length of cloth lashed around Harper’s throat as Gerda rode Harper to the pavement in a painful heap.
Slamming hard against her hip and shoulder with Gerda’s full weight atop her, Harper was stunned. In only those few seconds, with the material locking against her airway and tightening, she knew she was already close to choking out. Thirty grueling days on Marco’s practice mats neutralized by a high jumper’s blitzkrieg.
Groggy and pinned, with one of her legs bent backward and trapped beneath her, Harper heard one of Marco’s regular chants: Break the cho
ke. Break the choke. Above all else, get air. Get air.
She wedged her fingers between her throat and the fabric binding her flesh, wriggled them beneath it, then levered an elbow against the pavement, pulling the scarf away slightly, and managed a single breath. Then another.
Heaving for air, Harper wriggled her trapped leg free, rolled flat on her back, knees bent, and arched her torso up, bucked Gerda backward, the stranglehold loosening as Gerda writhed, fighting for leverage. Gerda’s hands fumbled as she tried to reset the cinch, her fingers reeking of gasoline.
Thrusting to the left, Harper did a sharp sit-out, a grappler’s exit move, then swung her right elbow, hammering it into Gerda’s gut. The woman’s belly was so ridged with muscle it felt like paving stone. Harper drove the elbow into her stomach again, then once more, concentrating all her weight behind each blow. At last Gerda’s clenched muscles softened, and Harper hammered again and again until Gerda gasped and her hands relaxed, and Harper twisted free of the cord around her neck and scrambled to her feet.
A crowd had gathered outside the diner.
Mostly men. But they were not watching the two women locked in combat on the pavement. They were craning to the west, peering above the roofs of the cars, up toward the mountain’s summit, staring at the Castillo de Aranjuez, where flames were flaring from windows and lashing the castle walls.
More sirens screamed past as Gerda struggled to her feet.
Harper turned on her and snapped a right-handed blow to her nose, a straight jab to her throat, then executed a spinning back kick, using the momentum to slam her heel deep into the meat of Gerda’s solar plexus. Gerda gagged, staggered against the white Fiat, and her eyelids fluttered as she slumped to the pavement.
Harper sprinted to the driver’s door of the Audi that blocked the Fiat, saw the keys lying in the seat. Slid inside, started the engine, and screamed in reverse, tires burning, then cut the wheel and roared back up the hillside toward the flames.
PART THREE
EIGHTEEN
Zurich, Switzerland
Lucia Campos, compliance director and chief ethics watchdog for Albion International, was hiding out in the Hotel Sonne in Bremgarten, twenty-seven miles west of Zurich, waiting for Adrian Naff to return from his trip. She didn’t know when that might be, nor did she know the purpose of his trip. She’d tried Adrian’s cell repeatedly but had gotten no answer, not even his voice mail.
The day after Adrian left, Lucia had made her decision and gone to Adrian’s office.
Adrian’s secretary, Derek Müller, glanced up at her, blinked, and asked what in the world was wrong.
“Where is he? I need to speak to him. It’s urgent.”
“I don’t know. He didn’t make his flight to Greece. He walked out of here with his suitcase and hasn’t checked in since. What’s this about?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“You’re in some kind of trouble?”
Before Lucia could frame a response, Derek took an educated guess.
“It’s about Mr. Albion, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t talk about it.”
“All right then.”
“Does Adrian call, check in with you?”
“Usually, yes. He hasn’t yet, but he will soon, I’m sure.”
“Listen, Derek, do me a great favor. When he calls, tell him to contact me immediately.”
He nodded. “He has your cell?”
“I’m not using my cell.”
Derek squinted in confusion.
“So how should he contact you—I mean, when he calls?”
She saw no choice but to confide in him. Her cell could be tracked. She was well aware of the capabilities of the tech department at Albion.
“I’ll be staying in a hotel for a while.”
“A hotel? Are you leaving Albion? Did you give notice?”
“There’s no need for that. I’m finished here.”
“What’s happened? You can tell me.”
“Can I?”
“You know you can.”
Lucia wasn’t certain. All she knew for sure was that Derek was aware of her affair with Adrian, and he’d apparently been tight-lipped with that knowledge. There’d been no gossip about their romance, no knowing looks from her fellow workers as she passed in the hallways. No snide remarks whispered behind her back. None that she knew of.
Still, it was a leap of faith to trust Derek with her whereabouts. But if she hoped to speak with Adrian at the earliest moment possible, what choice did she have? If Adrian trusted the young man enough to keep him as his personal secretary, then wasn’t that reason enough for Lucia to trust him?
She scribbled the name of the hotel she’d chosen on a slip of paper and handed it to him.
“Read it and give it back to me. Don’t speak the name aloud.”
Derek stiffened and looked around the office with suspicion.
“Bugged?” he whispered.
She nodded in the affirmative. The whole building was. She’d seen the work orders and the receipts. Hallways, offices, even the restrooms. E-mails, internet activity, everything logged.
Derek examined the slip of paper, nodded, and handed it back.
“Tell Adrian and no one else. No one.”
“You’re terrified, Lucia.”
“I am,” she said, and left.
That was two days ago. She abandoned her apartment, taking only a single bag and a briefcase with the relevant documents. She believed she understood Albion’s goals now. The twisted scheme he had put into motion that seemed to have only one purpose, to spring a financial trap on another individual, though what his motives were, she had not been able to ascertain.
It had started with her discovery of the dark pool Albion had set up through the company’s finance office. After that it had taken Lucia Campos several weeks to uncover and decipher the various requisitions and transfers of funds to support the purchases of large tracts of land, and finally the travel documents for a man named Dickens.
Mr. Dickens was employed in an Albion laboratory in El Paso, Texas, but had been dispatched on a mission to Italy for work on the ever-expanding olive grove owned by Lester Albion.
Searching for other references to Dickens, Lucia combed hundreds of computer files before she discovered a trail of curious shipments made from yet another Albion agricultural lab, this one in Minnesota. Crate after crate shipped throughout the spring and summer of this year, all of them traveling from Minnesota to Bari, Italy. The same location where Mr. Dickens had been sent, which was also the heart of Mr. Albion’s expanding olive-grove empire.
The manifests listed the contents of the shipping cases as “fertilizer.” Lucia, using an alias, made phone calls to the lab in Minnesota and managed to convince a secretary that she was doing a follow-up report for Lester Albion himself. She needed to confirm the contents of those shipping crates. Lucia had been affable and indirect until finally the woman in Minnesota relented.
“Spittlebugs,” she said. “A ton of the little bastards. You didn’t know that already?”
“Yes, yes, spittlebugs,” Lucia had said. “That’s what the records indicate, so I thank you for confirming.”
“Those things are pests, you know. They’re not locusts, they don’t gobble up crops or anything, but they’re great at carrying pathogens like the ones those were exposed to. Only reason we breed them in our lab is to find better ways to neutralize the little devils. What in the hell were they using all those infected bugs for?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”
“Yeah, yeah. Top secret, I know. Same thing the other one said. Bixel, whatever her name is. You know Bixel? Boy oh boy, now there’s a pushy one.”
“Yes, that’s her,” Lucia said. “Thank you for your kind assistance.”
Lucia spent her days inside her hotel suite. Again and again, she called Adrian Naff’s cell phone but got no answer. Finally, when she managed to get through to his voic
e mail, she became so flustered she babbled for several minutes about Albion and Dickens and the spittlebugs shipped to the docks at Bari, Italy, before she lost the connection without ever telling him where he could reach her. She redialed immediately and got nothing.
She spent her waking hours reading novels that failed to distract her. She tried the television but found nothing of interest. She napped, she ordered room service. She paced.
Before arriving at the hotel, she had cleaned out her savings account and had a certified check made out to her in the amount of 37,000 euros. Some she’d saved, but most of it she’d inherited from her father upon his death two months earlier. Ordinarily, she would’ve telephoned her father, a strong and resourceful man, and he would have invited her to stay with him at his condo in Milan. The condo he had bequeathed to Lucia, his only child. If Adrian didn’t return to Zurich soon, she decided she would travel to Milan and settle into the flat. There was little chance Albion or Bixel knew of her father’s gift to her.
She had been living in the hotel room for exactly three days when the room’s phone rang. She crossed the floor quickly, picked up the receiver, and held it to her ear, saying nothing.
“Lucia? Lucia, it’s me. It’s Derek.”
“Did you hear from Adrian?”
“I need to see you, tell you what I’ve found out.”
“You can tell me now.”
“I need to do it in person. I’m downstairs in the lobby.”
A steel band tightened around her chest.
Breathless, she asked him what he wanted.
“They won’t tell me what room you’re in.”
“Tell me on the phone, Derek.”
Derek was silent.
“Whatever it is, you can tell me now, Derek, and then leave.”
“I don’t believe this. You don’t trust me.”
She rocked her head back and stared up at the pale-pink ceiling.
“I wasn’t followed,” he said. “I was very careful. I parked my car ten blocks away and walked. No one’s tailing me. I’m sure of it.”
Lucia told him her room number and set the phone down.
When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2) Page 13
