A fearful half smile crossed Aiza’s face. He kissed her on the forehead. “Clean yourself up before the children see.” Then he walked away.
As he ascended the stairs, he ignored his children’s attempts at affection. His mind wasn’t in a place for them. He was sad that his oldest friend, Andonios, was gone. But mostly, he was angry. Anger, unlike with his brother, focused Saajid. And he was extremely focused on taking the fight he’d been organizing for more than eleven years straight to the United States of America. They needed to feel what he was feeling. But most of all, they needed to see the error of their leaders’ ways. And whoever killed Andonios would see their ways, their very lives, soon come to an end.
Chapter Thirteen
London, UK
Bentley Martin emerged from the mailbox store and waited on the sidewalk for traffic to clear. King had spent the last couple of minutes digesting Bentley’s story about her look-alike friend. He wondered how many times while he was surveilling Bentley that he had confused her for this other girl. The resemblance was uncanny.
As Bentley crossed the street, he shifted his focus from what had already happened to what he needed to do now, and what he needed to know. The reason he had been watching Bentley was because Sam had heard some chatter in Langley, through Director Hartsfield, that Bentley could be involved with a terrorist group in Athens. At the time, it was only in passing—a conversation Sam wasn’t supposed to hear. Since King had been trying to get at Bentley’s father, Andonios, from every angle, he started taking an interest for his own reasons. He’d wanted to know if she visited her father, and if so, how well did they know each other? Most of all, he wanted to know if Bentley was a weakness for Andonios. King never felt as though she was; otherwise, he would have taken Bentley to get information out of Andonios about who was the true head of the terrorist cell.
Clearly, Bentley was more important than King had thought, what with attempts on her life and all, but he didn’t really know the reason why. Why would another American want her dead, and why would the CIA have chosen to put an entire team in place to watch her?
Bentley opened the door, sat down, and handed him the envelope.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” she asked.
King hit the overhead light and began opening the envelope. “Good question.”
Bentley turned toward him. “Good question? That’s it? So what the hell was your plan when you took me to your flat, Mr. Secret Agent? You didn’t have a next step?”
King pulled a manila folder from the envelope. The last thing he needed right now was another assignment. He was already knee-deep in need-to-figure-shit-out as it was. As far as Bentley’s question of next step, he had one, but when the terrorist in the Tube told him that an American was responsible for calling for the bomb meant to kill her, that sort of threw a wrench in things.
“I was going to take you to a safe house not far from here, but seeing as how you are so popular, I don’t feel like that’s the best place for you.”
Director Hartsfield had set up a safe house when King had moved into his flat a few months ago. A place to go if shit ever hit the fan. The problem now was if an American was after Bentley, King didn’t feel like he could trust the safe house. Maybe no one knew about it, but clearly there was a leak somewhere in the States, so to King, the safe house in London was as good as burnt.
Bentley let out a sigh. “How did you know that car bomb was going to go off? How did you know to try to save me?”
“It’s complicated.”
King knew it wasn’t the answer Bentley wanted to hear, but it was true. While Sam and Director Hartsfield were supposed to be the only two people who knew King was still alive, King knew when he had walked away from his previous life that he was going to need help to keep his loved ones safe, and an ace in the hole when he needed to change the cards he was dealt. Someone who could help him keep Sam safe, too, without her knowing it. Last year when King was running down the people responsible for the pending terrorist attack on the White House, he came across one of the sharpest individuals he’d ever met. Dbie Johnson had all but saved his friends and family with her ability to hack computers and, more importantly, recalibrate the nanobots built by the Maragoses that were set to kill the president of the United States.
Not long after King turned himself into a ghost, he haunted Dbie one night at her home in Cincinnati, Ohio. Because of the way they had worked together, and the way King had also saved her life, she was willing to keep their relationship, and his existence, quiet. It was a risk for King to involve her. He didn’t really know Dbie, but that’s also what made her perfect for the job. He did trust her, but if for some reason she double-crossed him, it wouldn’t be as painful for him to eliminate the problem. It was a callous thought, but the night he visited Dbie, he told her the same thing. She understood what was at stake for King, and even though her life could one day be in danger for knowing he was alive, she didn’t hesitate to offer her services.
Those services had been a big help in gaining an advantage during some of King’s CIA assignments during the past year. And Dbie was the sole reason he knew about the car bomb so he could save Bentley’s life. Over the last week, King had put Dbie on the task of diving deep into the terror group growing rapidly somewhere near Athens, Greece. They had been increasing their presence in London, and Dbie had been able to hack the phone of one of the men she found entering London from Athens. Just this morning Dbie was able to get word to King that she found out there was a hit taking place on Oxford Street, the same street Bentley lived on. King put a plan in motion as quickly as he could.
In hindsight, he should have had Dbie tip off the CIA, but he believed it was only an attempt on Bentley’s life, not a terrorist attack like it had ended up being disguised as. That’s why he dove for Bentley when he saw her going out for a run. It was to shield her from a potential sniper; he had no idea the car was going to blow up. Pulling her away from that had been nothing but luck. Sometimes, like football, life and death is a violent game of inches.
What wasn’t luck, however, was his escape route from Oxford Street. He’d been planning it for weeks, just in case someone made him while he was surveilling Bentley. The trick with shutting down the train and disconnecting cameras, well, that was King’s secret weapon, Dbie.
So now, he needed to talk to Sam, to fill her in on everything that was going on, and to get her counsel on what to do next. He also needed to talk to Dbie, to get her started on figuring out just who in the hell the American could be that set off that bomb. But he couldn’t do any of that until he knew what he was dealing with on his next real assignment.
“Hey man, are you okay?”
King snapped out of his trance. “What?”
“I’ve been talking to you for two minutes. You were on another planet.”
“If you haven’t noticed, there’s kind of a lot going on.”
King opened the manila folder and moved the briefing sheets so he could get a look at the picture of his next CIA-mandated job. He wanted to get right to it after Sam had told him things were about to get more complicated because of who this was. After one look at his assignment, he realized the word complicated was entirely inadequate.
As he stared down at a picture of Bentley Martin, he realized complicated now sounded like a vacation. This had just turned into an absolute clusterfuck.
Chapter Fourteen
“What is it now?” Bentley broke the silence in the car. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
King pulled his Glock from his concealed holster and put it to Bentley’s chin. She sucked in a lungful of air in shock, and for the first time, fear encompassed her.
“Please, whatever that envelope says I did, I didn’t do it. I swear!”
“Sounds like something a guilty woman might say.” There was no emotion in King’s voice.
“Okay, okay. I promise I’ll tell you everything I know. Just please take the gun off me.”
King hesitated for a moment. She pleaded with her eyes. He put his gun away, then did something he should have done as soon as he got in the car. He patted her down for a weapon. Bentley didn’t protest, she was just happy to no longer have a gun to her head. She was clean of any weapons, but he took her phone. He held down the button until he could power it off.
“Why would you do that?” she shouted.
“For your own good.”
“How would taking my phone help anything?”
Kids and their precious phones.
King changed the subject.
“Why would the United States government want you dead?”
Bentley’s eyes widened. She was no longer worried about her phone. “What? Is that what that is?” Her wide eyes glanced at the folder. “Your orders to kill me?”
King held up the picture of her as his answer.
“O . . . M . . . G . . . I don’t understand!”
“Well, you’d better help me understand. I’ve never had a target get away.”
Bentley searched his eyes. Seeing nothing but truth in them, her bottom lip began to quiver, and her hands were shaking—responses he had never seen from anyone his government deemed worthy of a death sentence. Something wasn’t adding up.
Bentley took a deep breath. “I—I don’t think that’s me in that picture.”
King shuffled back to the profile information. “Nope, says right here . . . Bentley Renea Martin.”
“No, I mean I think they—your people—think it’s me who’s doing terrible things. But I think it’s Karen. I think she’s been doing it for a while now.”
King’s mind flashed back to the girl—woman—in his apartment. He knew exactly what Bentley was getting at, and his stomach dropped. Even though this Karen woman wouldn’t be able to find anything in his place that would reveal his identity, she may have found a way to convey her location to whoever she was working for. If she could find a way out of his locked apartment door. But that lock wasn’t made to keep a professional in. If Karen was a professional, if she wanted to she could always climb out the window. The lock on the door was more of a show to make her think she was trapped.
“Okay, Bentley. Elaborate. Are you saying you didn’t put that chip in her hat in case something happened to her but to make sure she wasn’t lying to you? You were planning to follow her, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Some confidence returned to Bentley’s voice. Having King follow her logic meant he would probably keep her alive. Clearly someone in Director Hartsfield’s world wanted her dead, but King wouldn’t kill a seventeen-year-old girl unless she was about to blow up the White House itself. Bentley may be a lot of things, but his early read was that someone in the CIA had gotten this wrong.
“Start from the beginning, Bentley, but give me the Cliffs Notes version.”
Bentley nodded as she interlocked her fingers, pushed them out away from her, and cracked her knuckles. “I met Karen at a pub one night a little less than a year ago. She bought me a beer because she ran into me and knocked me over. That night we got royally pissed drunk and had pretty much the time of our lives. The next few months, we were together all the time. She is a senior at Cambridge—well, so she says—and I study at Oxford, so days would go by that we didn’t see each other, but we talked and texted all the time.”
“I said the short version,” King interrupted. He was scanning the profile on Bentley in the folder as she spoke.
“Right, well, things started to get . . . well, odd. She would say she was at school, but then we’d video chat and I would hear people around her speaking Greek. Obviously, I recognized it since I am half Greek myself.”
Alarm bells went off when King heard Greek. “We’ll get into that later.”
“Whatever you want, I have nothing to hide.”
Also spoken like a guilty person, but King was beginning to put some pieces together as Bentley was describing Karen and their relationship. He nodded for her to continue, but he really needed her to hurry. The more she spoke, the more a burning in his gut was urging him to get back to his apartment. There was no telling what he might find.
“Anyway, more and more things like that started to happen. I was already wondering why she was being more weird, but I just figured it might be to get to my money or something. But after I found out my father was killed, that’s when I decided this morning that I would try to see what she was really up to.”
“So many questions,” King said. “First, why did you have a tracking device on hand to put in Karen’s hat?”
Bentley half smiled. “Oh, it’s standard-issue crazy from my mother. Ever since she and my father split, she’d been down a lot of rabbit holes thinking people were watching us. She used to make me carry that same chip to school every day. In case someone took me. She was always worried about someone trying to kidnap me for ransom.”
“Got it. I actually understand, and she probably wasn’t crazy. More importantly, how did you know Andonios—your father—was dead?”
’Cause I only just killed him last night, he thought.
“Because I overheard ‘Karen,’” Bentley said, making air quotes with her fingers, “on the phone telling someone that he was dead. That they found him in some house by Bewl Water.”
This time King’s stomach turned. While it was good that Bentley maybe hadn’t been in contact with her father after all, it also meant he had led a wolf, this Karen woman, right into his pasture for sure. The questions he had about Bentley helping her father with the shady accounting for Everworld Solutions like the CIA profile is saying, they would have to wait.
King pulled the phone he’d taken from Karen back at the apartment. Just as he suspected, it had been wiped clean. Probably a software installed on it that erased it automatically every hour or so. But technology was a funny thing. Though King would never be able to retrieve any information himself, his little secret weapon, Dbie Johnson, would be able to if it was at all possible.
“Okay, Bentley, we still have a lot to talk about, but I don’t have time right now.”
“You have to go make sure Karen doesn’t figure out who you are, don’t you?”
“Something like that.”
“Who do you think she is?”
“I don’t know,” King said. “But I have a feeling she’s been pretending to be you for a lot longer than you think.”
Bentley nodded and moved her stare out the front windshield. “How did all this happen?” She was quiet for a moment. King put the folder back together and returned it to the envelope. She turned to him and waited until he found her eyes. “Are you going to kill me?”
King knew that he wasn’t. He could tell that whatever information had led Director Hartsfield to choosing Bentley as his next target, obviously she was completely misled. This wasn’t the first time this kind of mix-up had happened either. The last time nearly got him and his entire team killed. King would be going into this with eyes wide open this time. However, he wasn’t going to tell Bentley she was for sure off the hook yet. A little bit of fear for her life would compel her to dig even deeper for information that might help King reach the source of all this trouble.
“I won’t kill you, as long as you’re useful.”
“Anything. Name it, I’ll do it.”
“Let’s start with something simple.” He took Karen’s phone out, went to the notes section, and typed in Dbie’s address. He handed Bentley Karen’s phone. “Take this phone and overnight it to that address. Don’t use your credit card.”
“I don’t have any cash.”
King went back to his pocket and produced a key. “Mailbox 221. I keep a go bag there just for situations like this one. Inside—”
“Go bag?” she asked.
“Sorry—it’s like a shit-hits-the-fan bag, if you will. Inside there are a lot of things, but in the first small pouch, there’s a roll of cash. Use that. Keep the bag, get back to the car, and drive around until I call you.”
; “Okay, but I’ll need my phone.”
“Not happening.”
“Okay, but if I mail Karen’s phone, I won’t have one.”
“There will be a burner phone in the go bag. When you get it, just power it on.”
Then he pulled the new burner phone from the envelope Sam had left him and powered it on. The number for it was taped to the top. He took the paper off and gave it to Bentley. “If you get into any trouble, just call me on this number.”
“Why can’t you just give me my phone back if you are going to give me a different one?”
“You know why, Bentley. If your mom was so crazy about tracking, you know good and well someone could be watching you by tracking your phone.”
“All right, Mr. Secret Agent. Then you should know they can still track my phone even if it is powered off. That’s Spy 101.”
“That it is, smart-ass. The difference is, I want whoever is tracking your phone to follow me while I have it. It will save me the trouble of having to find them. Any other lessons you want to teach me?”
Bentley was quiet. King could tell she was used to being the smartest person in the room. Which made him a little nervous: maybe it was her who was helping her father hide his terrorist-funding money after all. That didn’t mean she was guilty of anything. She wouldn’t have known what it was for. But it did put her in a lot of danger if someone wanted to make sure all parties involved with that money and its intent went away. That would explain why someone was trying to kill her, but it didn’t make sense as to why the CIA would want her dead. That’s what really made him nervous.
Bentley rallied her thoughts. “Okay, you keep my phone, makes sense. But if you’re giving me another phone, how do you know I won’t call someone else?”
He knew she wouldn’t because she clearly didn’t know who she could trust. But instead of piling on to her already rough night, King kept it light.
“Because no one your age knows actual phone numbers. You just press the contact on your phone and it calls them. You probably don’t even know your own mom’s number, do you?”
Alexander King Thriller Series: Books 1-3 Page 7
