by Mike Cooper
“I’m sorry, Mr. Welch is out today. May I forward a message to him?”
“Oh, it’s not that important—this is Jim Howell down in Compliance.” That was to make sure she didn’t blow me off. “I’m working from home myself today . . . listen, could you just forward me to Ginny Yao’s office?”
Ginny Yao was Morgan’s assistant controller, which I’d learned from an article in CFO Online. The combination of “Compliance” and “Accounting” was, as I’d hoped, intimidating enough that the secretary just said, “Why yes, of course,” instead of wondering why I couldn’t dial the number myself.
Thus, when Ginny Yao’s assistant answered the phone, she saw the call coming from an internal number.
“Hi, this is Bill Unfelder,” I said. “I’m trying to make some travel reservations for next week.” Plausible. Bill Unfelder wasn’t senior enough for his own secretary, and nowadays all firms, even flush, well-paying banks, usually had their employees save a few bucks with DIY travel planning. Thanks, internet. “I lost my Gold Club card—I mean, I didn’t lose it, I’m sure the darn thing’s in this file cabinet somewhere, but I can’t find it right this second. Anyway, can you remind me the company account number?”
Naturally it wasn’t that easy. She followed procedure, told me to ask my department’s administrator, information like that couldn’t be conveyed without authorization, really sorry Mr. Unfelder. I thanked her politely, hung up, and . . . went through the whole rigmarole again with new names and new numbers.
It took fifteen minutes, but eventually I reached someone cheerfully, sufficiently careless of the rules that she just read off the number, told me to be more careful in the future and let me go.
While I was looking up Hertz reservations, my cellphone rang.
“Yes?”
“Got a match for you.” Zeke’s voice.
“That was fast.”
“Not really. It doesn’t exist.”
“What?”
“It’s a ghost plate.”
“Uh-oh.”
Certain government agencies realized long ago that they needed anonymous license plates—otherwise their officers would be visible to anyone with access to state DMV records. Everyone in the world, in other words. When you come across one of these numbers, they’ll either redirect to something totally innocuous, or—less commonly—they simply don’t exist in the system at all.
“Could be a plain old data error,” Zeke said. “That’s what my guy said. Every now and then a perfectly legitimate plate gets screwed up.”
“I think we have to apply Occam’s razor here. Is it a total dead end?”
“There has to be a record somewhere.”
But nowhere a regular person, or even Zeke, could get at. “Okay, thanks.”
“Kind of makes you wonder which side you ended up on, doesn’t it?”
“The wrong one, as usual.”
I hung up and stared at the wall. The government certainly has teams of assassins on the payroll—well, lately they’ve moved off the payroll, to the contractors, but the idea’s the same. They generally operate in war zones, though, not rural America.
Not that I could do anything about it.
I shook my head and found Hertz’s 800 number.
Fortunately Morgan Bancorp didn’t use Alamo, which might have been a little awkward. I gave them Welch’s name and the corporate account, and reserved a car at Pittsburgh International for Gold account pickup.
“It’s kind of last minute, I’m actually calling from the airplane,” I said. “I thought my colleague was driving, but he has to go to a different office. Can you have it ready in an hour?”
“That should be no problem.” The man paused, and I heard clacking in the background as he typed. “Yes, we have a Toyota Corolla available. You can go directly to our area in the central parking garage—check the electronic notice board for your stall number.”
“I don’t need to check in at the desk, do I? I’m kind of in a hurry—they moved the meeting up.”
“Not at all. The paperwork will be on the dash. Just show it to the gate attendant when you exit.”
“Thanks a million. That’s a lifesaver.” I hung up the phone, cleared all history from the browser I’d used and shut down the computer. On the way out the woman was helping someone figure out the fax machine—people still use those things?—so I just waved and left.
Isn’t America great?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was late afternoon when I got back to Pittsburgh.
Picking up my new vehicle—a Lincoln Town Car, I think there was some sort of automatic upgrade on the Morgan account—was as easy as I could have hoped. I’d been prepared to hand over my license, which of course didn’t have Welch’s name on it, and tell some story about how corporate must have screwed up the reservation again, this was always happening to me, did I have to go back to the counter? But the gate attendant just took the printed reservation sheets, checked the plate number, yawned, gave me back my copy and waved me through.
It wasn’t a flawless situation. If I was stopped by the police, they would be far more curious about the mismatch of names. But considering that only a few hours ago I was on foot, this had to be considered an accomplishment.
I was also a little worried about Dave, but he should be safe now. Safe from shoot-to-kill mercenaries anyway. Brendt would surely be pissed that Dave was going all big-game hunter on Elsie, but that wasn’t my problem.
My problem was Clayco.
Let’s walk it through: Someone at headquarters discovers an irregularity in the books. They’re worried about Markson finding out, because Clay Micro is so far over the line that heads will certainly roll if it isn’t cleaned up immediately. Thus Ryan. Of course his hiring is an irregularity in itself. But when the water heater bursts in the middle of the night you don’t go back to sleep, right?—you call a twenty-four-hour plumber.
Anyway Ryan’s lazy, so he subcontracts it to me. I conduct my usual polite but thorough investigation and solve the mystery.
A few hours later Ryan’s gone. Gone gone. Meanwhile, one team follows me from Clay Micro until I lose them, and another goes looking for me in Manhattan. Which, come to think of it, suggests they might not have been coordinated after all. The guys in the Nissan knew exactly where I was Friday evening—two car lengths ahead of them—and so there would have been no reason for Harmony and her crew to be asking around at Volchak’s.
Sitting in traffic at yet another light, I thought about that. Hard.
Two teams, not working together. The gameboard had just gotten more crowded.
A day later the Pittsburgh posse comes for me, guns blazing. They either work for Brinker or he called them into play—they were the same as those who had followed me from Clay Micro, and no one but Brinker could have activated them so quickly.
Ryan’s disappearance, though—that had to be Harmony. Brinker knew who I was, but I never mentioned Ryan to him. And Ryan disappeared from New York, where Harmony had been housebreaking and offering bribes at bars.
Unless there was a third team involved. My head started to hurt.
The people who knew about Ryan were the same ones who hired him—and they wouldn’t turn around and disappear him, would they?
The only explanation I could see involved board-level, factional infighting at Clayco. Or deepwater Hollywood-style conspiracies. Or really, really, really bad luck.
None of these options was cheering.
One fact was clear: very dangerous men—and at least one woman—were trying to kill me. To get them off my back, I had to know why they’d been dispatched in the first place.
And that meant following the only bread crumb on the trail.
Brinker himself.
—
He liked horses.
Not in a big flashy way—the countryside here, rolling hills and forest, wasn’t Kentucky Derby land. But Brinker’s house was one of those mock southern plantations, albeit on a smaller scale: tw
o stories with broad verandas on both floors, running the entire length of the front and sides, held up by wide Doric columns. A long circle drive led from the county road, through an arching gate marked DUNNEWELL FARM. The sweeping lawn and paddock were enclosed by that horse-country white fencing, glowing in the late dusk.
I guess he’d been skimming from Clayco for a while.
When I drove up, it became clear the big house was just another recent McMansion, its period detail revealed as flimsy trim. But the barn, fifty yards down the rear slope, was a hundred years old easy—weathered timbers that had settled into a comfortable skew, wooden shingles and a second-level set of doors opening onto nothing, with that cantilevered beam hook for hauling hay up to the loft by pulley. Two small rings were fenced in close by, one for jumping, one for riding.
It was almost dark. The front of the house was illuminated by small spotlights in the yard. Light glowed in the barn, too.
And there was Brinker himself, walking a saddled horse from the paddock.
I eased the Lincoln down the drive. Passing the house, I noticed a white panel van, some sort of contractor’s vehicle, parked behind it. In the dusk I couldn’t see much—a roof rack with a ladder or something, unreadable lettering on the side. But it sat silent and dark, and no one else seemed to be around.
Brinker glanced up as my car crunched over the gravel, then disappeared inside.
Maybe he recognized me, maybe not—the day was fading fast. I shouldered my new luggage, drew the Sig, held it down at my side and walked down.
He stood waiting, legs apart on the ancient, planked floor, one hand on his horse’s neck. A second was behind him, a chestnut warmblood also tacked up. The barn was lit by a single unshaded bulb hanging from a wooden ceiling beam. Another, older man was in front of the stalls, but he wore torn jeans and a cotton shirt buttoned to the neck, holding a pitchfork and the chestnut’s bridle—clearly the groom.
“I’ve got nothing more to say to you.” Brinker crossed his arms. I noticed a white bandage on one of his fingers. When he took his hand away the horse turned to look at him, then at me.
“I think you do.” I kept the pistol out of the groom’s line of sight, not exactly hiding it but not wanting to scare him, either.
Not to mention the horses. Most would tolerate strangers well enough, but seeing a weapon might set them off.
“Send in your report, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. The acquisition’s totally fucked now.”
“Acquisition?”
He shook his head. “You did your job, asshole. Fuck off.”
The groom had leaned his pitchfork out of the way, led the chestnut into a stall, then taken Brinker’s horse and begun securing him to the crossties for brushing. He made a quiet cough to catch Brinker’s eye. “¿Ya me puedo retirar, señor?” he said.
“Sí, por favor acabe despues de que este imbécil se vaya.”
The man finished tying the horse in the grooming stall and faded away out the back. I could see an open trapdoor in the next stall—he’d been mucking it out into a manure pit below the barn. Old-fashioned.
“Your life is rotten from stem to stern,” I said. “Or at least your company is. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen every single employee show up crooked. Truly impressive.”
“We’re making money.”
“Yeah, like a mafia bust-out makes money. You’re blaming the wrong guy—I’m just the accountant. I don’t think you could have held it together for even one more quarter.”
“Whatever.”
I raised the Sig. “Tell me about this acquisition.”
“You can go fuck yourself.” Brinker glanced past me, and a harsh smile appeared on his face. “No, really, fuck you.”
At the same time I heard tires spitting gravel on the drive above the barn. I spun and saw the white van skidding to a halt behind the Town Car. Doors opened but no interior lights came on, and shadowy figures went to ground.
I guess someone had been waiting there after all.
BAANNG!
A bullet smacked the wall near my head. I dropped immediately as several more shots cracked. Brinker went down, clutching his arm.
“What the hell did you do that for?” he screamed.
I’d already hit the floor with him, rolling away from the open doors. “Shut up—it wasn’t me!”
More shots. The two horses reared, anxious, turning in the stalls.
Squinting into the darkness outside I saw muzzle flash from two points near the van. Just to even things up, I twisted onto my back and shot out the light bulb.
The shattered bits fell onto Brinker, who yelled again, but maybe he’d taken another hit.
The shooting stopped. Something was pressing my back—an iron hoof pick, lying on the floor planks. I shifted and picked it up with my free hand.
“Okay!” one of the gunmen shouted. “All is okay now!”
I recognized that accent. And given how free they’d been with the firepower at Dave’s garage, Brinker’s barn probably wouldn’t be standing much longer either.
“What took you so long?” Brinker yelled to them.
“We are here.”
“No shit. You shot me, you fuckhead.”
I aimed where half the rounds had come from and fired once, hoping to keep them down and fend off a rush. A few moments passed.
“If these are your friends,” I said into the lull, “I’d hate to be your enemy.”
“You are my enemy.” Pain in Brinker’s voice, but anger, too. He was tougher than I’d thought. He raised his voice, shouting toward the van. “He’s all yours!”
“You!” The heavy accent again. “Silas Cade!”
No doubt about it. I glimpsed him in the moonlight, standing long enough to move a few yards. He was positioned some way to the left of his gunmen, setting up a defilade.
It was the seven-foot giant.
I hunched lower behind the stall’s corner beams. “What do you want?”
“We need talk to you.” His voice was lower. No need to holler.
“I’ve got nothing to say.”
I heard a grunt from Brinker. Yes, yes, very funny, having the tables turned like this. After a moment I stuck my arm out and fired three more times. Gunfire erupted in return. I hunched as bullets splintered wood and slammed into the floor all around me. Dust and wood chips filled the air.
The shooting stopped. For a few moments I heard nothing but the ringing in my ears.
“Nikogo ne ranilo?”
“Net, my v poryadke.”
“Nikto ne vidit etogo mudaka?”
Shit, that was Russian.
I didn’t understand any of it, but the sound was unmistakable. I’d once spent a few months at a Defense Language Institute immersion class in Monterey—Arabic, if you must know—and the other half of our floor was doing the post-Soviet thing. I heard enough to get familiar with basic phrases.
I peered behind me at the muck door in the stall’s floor. Scoot over, drop through and be gone . . . it was tempting, except for the part where I fell headfirst into a ton of horseshit.
“You are difficult,” the Russian called back, in English.
I wished he was visible. The disembodied voice was disconcerting. Not to mention the rustling I thought I could hear from the other side of the yard. His shooters were probably repositioning themselves.
I couldn’t see any way out. They had superior firepower, higher terrain, greater numbers and—I had to admit—a better strategy. The leather bag was still over my shoulder, but even the MP5 wouldn’t make enough difference. I holstered the pistol and pulled out one of my cellphones.
“See this?” I held it up slightly. Of course we were in the dark but I assumed at least some of them had IR goggles on. “I’m dialing . . . nine. One. One.”
The Russian made a sort of roaring noise. After a moment I recognized it as laughter.
“Yes, sure,” he said. “You have service?”
What? I glanced quickly at th
e display, not wanting to lose what little night vision I’d developed, and—oh, shit, he was right. No bars.
“We turned on jammer,” he said.
A long pause.
“All right,” I said. “I’m open to negotiations.”
“First, Brinker—out.”
“I’m not going anywhere!”
I looked back out the door, opened my mouth and—wait. Was that a light on the road?
“He’s wounded,” I yelled, squinting hard up the hill.
“That is tough shit.” The Russian seemed to have moved, about five meters left. “He leaves now, or he dies with you.”
And these were his allies? No wonder Brinker didn’t want to move.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” I moved backward, toward the hatch. “I’m ready to come out myself. Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot!”
“Yes, good. Throw the gun first.”
“Okay.” I hefted the hoof pick, then tossed it as far as I could through the door, aiming for a spot I thought was midpoint between the Russian and his crew. It clanked on the gravel.
“Now stand and mo—”
An engine roared from the road, and suddenly a truck was skidding down the drive, gravel spraying, headlights jouncing all over the place.
WHUMP!
It slammed into my Lincoln, knocking the sedan over—in the headlight glare, I had a flashing glimpse of the underside as it rolled onto its back.
Dammit, I hadn’t even had that car half a day.
Rifle fire came from the Russian’s soldiers, loud, some of it on auto, bullets tearing into both vehicles. The truck slewed sideways, came to a halt, and several dark figures leaped out, going to ground.
The horse nearest me kicked against the stalls again with a terrified whinny. The other joined in, breaking the crossties and almost trampling Brinker, who groaned and pushed himself across the floor.
Someone threw a flare, which tumbled onto the drive farther down. The magnesium fire was white bright even to my eyes—if anyone’s night-vision scope had been pointed that way when it ignited, they were now blind.
Gunfire increased. The newcomers seemed more disciplined but rounds flew everywhere, raking the barn, into the fields, raising dust and spattering gravel in all directions across the drive.
