Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  “Those were for Diana in case we needed to calm her down. Roger’s sober, no worries.”

  Holly sank down into the chair. “Great. Sobriety is something I look for in my medical professionals.”

  “What I look for in my people,” Belias said, “is the ability to grab and capture an unarmed, untrained little idiot off the street.”

  She looked up at his face and wondered how far she could stretch her lies. He was a bit older than her, midthirties, sleek with muscle under the suit, with two premature graying streaks through the dark of his hair. Eyes blue as the sea, almost an unnatural blue. She wondered if he wore contacts to disguise his real eye color. It would be like him to wear a lie on his eyes, to keep a constant mask in place. Even his voice—American but with a British accent trying to work its way through the top. She knew nothing about him except that she feared him.

  Be calm. Save Glenn. Fix this mess. Holly said, “We checked her mother’s usual hangouts; we spotted her near a bar her mom frequented in the Haight. She’d gone to the bar last night and used her credit card before she realized we could track her. Glenn followed her into the bar, and I brought the Audi around so he could inject her with the sedative, pretend to be her friend helping her after she’d drunk too much, get her out the back. Then we’d force her into the car.”

  “What a nice, simple plan.” His tone was mocking. He folded his hands in his lap. “How’d he get hurt?”

  “She ran out into the alley; the bartender came after her, Glenn said. One of them hit Glenn. It must have been the bartender.”

  “This bartender was protecting her?”

  “I guess.”

  “And you let her get away.”

  “You know we can’t be caught.”

  Now he knelt before her. He had a sharp, angular face, all lines and cheekbones and chin, and it broke into a smile that made her think of graves. She’d wondered if Belias’s smile would one day be the last sight in her eyes. “Holly. Haven’t I always been fair with you and”—he waved his fingers in the direction of the other room—“Glenn?”

  “Yes.” She was afraid to give any other answer.

  “I give so much. I ask so little.”

  “I know.”

  “But I do ask for the truth.” A pain crossed his face, as if a memory of a lie lingered.

  Holly stared at him, then her lap.

  “It’s very touching that you’re worried about Glenn. You are really the better person, after all he’s done to you. It’s not like he’s shown you loyalty and consideration. You need not lie for him.” Belias took her hand in his. His skin was always so dry, so cold. His fingers so pale. Once she had dreamed of those pale hands with strings attached to his fingers, strings that led back to her shoulders, her wrists, her brain, her heart.

  “Lie?” She hated how he always knew.

  “I listen to the police dispatch. There’s a dead man on that bar’s floor. Who is he?”

  She listened to five loud ticks from the red clock on the wall. “Some bystander.”

  “Glenn killed a bystander. That is unusually…reckless.”

  “Yes. The bystander interfered.”

  “The police dispatch report is saying that there were two men attacking a woman in The Select. Two men.” He raised a pale finger on each hand and pushed them together. “Who was the other man, Holly?”

  You’re a great liar, she told herself. Lie like you never have before. For Glenn. For your kids. “The news reports are wrong. It was chaos. So Glenn said.” Holly pulled her hand from his cool grip.

  He let her; he folded his hands before him in the gentle pose you might see with a saint’s statue. The silver ring he wore was a match for the symbol on her husband’s necklace, and she stared at it like it was a mark of the devil. She was suddenly very frightened, a terror that touched her bones. She stared at those folded hands. Your life has been in this man’s hands for how long? And now it’s come to this. Your ability to sell one little lie. “How are the kids, Holly?”

  She looked up at his face. “What? They’re fine.”

  “Isn’t that why you do what I ask you to do? So your children have a ‘better life’?” He smiled the smile a knife might give if it suddenly came to life. “Who was the other man, Holly?”

  “A bystander, maybe he intervened in the fight.”

  “And Diana?”

  “Ran out into the night. The cops were coming, we had to go.” She kept her gaze steady. “We…we had to protect your investment in us.”

  Belias smiled and she knew her lies hadn’t worked. He touched the tip of her jaw with his finger. “You make me sound mercenary when all I care about is your well-being.” He got up, poured her a glass of ice water. She drank it silently while he watched. “Let’s see how Glenn is doing.”

  Roger, with his typical efficiency, had cleaned Glenn’s wound, shaved the hair away, and butterfly bandaged the wound. “How is he?” Holly asked. He looked bad. So pale. But his breathing was steadier.

  “Blood loss, concussion. He could have a hairline skull fracture,” Roger said. His accent was rural, English, thick. “When did he last have a tetanus booster?”

  Holly wanted to say, It’s not my business anymore to keep up with his medical records, but she found herself trying to recall what Glenn’s file at home said…Did she still have one for him? Wouldn’t he have taken it when he moved out?

  But Glenn answered for her, as though cogency were returning to him. Roger went to a fridge and checked supplies and gave Glenn an injection. Lord only knows what’s in that fridge, Holly thought. Truth serum?

  “We have to find Diana,” Belias said.

  “She’ll go to the police now,” Holly said.

  “No, she won’t. She won’t send her own mother to prison. I’ve profiled this young woman. Her mom is everything to her.” Belias glanced at Glenn. “You’re off the job, Glenn. She knows your face. And this dead bystander’s face.”

  She wanted to say, Be smart, Glenn. But he was hurt, disoriented, and in pain.

  Roger said, “The police dispatch say another man at this bar was stabbed. I thought you were strictly a gun man. You never did that well when I trained you with the knife, Glenn.”

  “I thought the knife would be better,” Glenn said. “I needed a way to scare her, to get her into the car. But she had a gun. She fired it at us through the purse.”

  “I’ve underestimated her,” Belias said, more to Roger than anyone else.

  “Bring her mother back to deal with her. Her mother calls her and tells her to meet us, she’ll come straight out of hiding,” Holly said.

  “Would you do that to your own child, Holly?”

  Holly looked at the floor. “If I needed to make my child understand…” But she knew it was a lie. Please don’t let my kids ever know about Belias. Don’t let them know what I’ve done.

  “Her mother is busy on a very important job for me. For us. Busy, busy bee.” Belias wiggled pale fingers in front of his face.

  “Well, Glenn could have been killed,” Holly snapped. “She’s not that busy.”

  “And you two are screwing up so bad we have collateral damage on the bar floor. Do you think the police will ignore a customer killed inside a Haight-Ashbury bar, where tourists frequent? Well. They. Won’t.” Belias crossed his arms.

  Glenn said, “I didn’t kill him. The bartender did.”

  Holly’s heart sank.

  “Again the bartender. Explain?” Roger asked.

  “You said we had to get this woman. Bring her to you.” Glenn licked his lips. He spoke with what Holly thought of as his negotiating voice—firm, calm, reasonable. Same voice he’d used when he told her just because he was leaving her and the kids, she didn’t need to make a scene. “I didn’t want to put Holly at risk. We’ve never done a kidnapping before. This is in fact the riskiest job you’ve ever asked us to do.”

  Holly stepped behind Belias and Roger, and over their shoulders, she shook her head at Glenn.


  Glenn ignored her. “So I hired a guy to help us. Big man, used to be Russian Special Forces.”

  “And you and he went into the bar together to grab Diana,” Roger said.

  “She made a scene. The bartender confronted him and the Russian went for his knife.”

  Roger inspected his fingernails. “Why did I bother training you and Holly? Seriously. It’s good we never needed candy stolen from a baby.”

  “She had a gun, so I was right. You said she was the biggest threat we ever faced. I wasn’t going to take chances, even if you were.” Defiance armored Glenn’s tone.

  “And this…bartender killed your hired thug.” Roger always wanting to understand the tactics of the situation.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t make a very good investment this time, Glenn,” Belias said. “I thought you had a perfect record.”

  “I wanted to protect Holly, and I wanted to be one hundred percent sure we got your so very important target.”

  “Glenn,” Holly said, “calm down, please.”

  Belias didn’t appear to be bothered by his tone. “You broke a rule, Glenn. We do not involve outsiders. Did you mention my name?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Can anyone connect me to this dead, useless Russian?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Only you and Holly.”

  “Only me,” Glenn said. “He didn’t know Holly. He had no contact with her until tonight. I never told him her name.”

  “What did you tell the useless Russian was your reason for finding Diana?”

  “He didn’t ask for a reason. He didn’t care as long as he got his cash.” Glenn’s words came out in staccato bursts.

  “What was his name?” Roger asked.

  “Grigori Rostov,” Glenn said. “It wasn’t a bad decision; he should have been able to grab Diana with efficiency and deal with any random threat like a do-gooder bartender.”

  “A Rostov.” Roger glanced at Belias. “There’s a Russian crime family in New York by that name. Notably disciplined and vicious.”

  Holly watched Belias. She’d thought Glenn’s plan stupid, even patronizing to her, but he’d already hired the Russian when she met him at the rendezvous point in Golden Gate Park, and they’d set out, trying to track Diana from where she’d gone before she realized they were tracking her movements and abandoned her car. The Russian was an impulsive decision by Glenn, and she thought, with a blaze of anger, that he made too many of those. Like when he divorced her. We’re over. I’m sorry, Holly. We had good years. Let’s concentrate on that and the children.

  “I hate Russians, but this is just spilt milk,” Belias said in a light tone. “I think we can wipe it up with a rag. Holly, why don’t you go home? Nothing more to be done tonight.”

  “I don’t understand why you don’t tell Diana’s mom to call her…”

  He put his hands on Holly’s arms. “Because Mama doesn’t need to know Diana’s running. Mama’s working on something that will take us to the next level, to borrow a cliché from Glenn’s world.”

  “Whatever her mother’s doing won’t be so important if we get exposed,” Holly said.

  “If our merry band cannot capture a ditzy, spoiled twenty-three-year-old, we deserve to lose,” Roger said.

  Belias looked at her with a gaze that was supposed to be sympathetic but instead just made her cringe. She hoped her flesh wouldn’t goose pimple under his cool grip.

  “We build each other up, Holly. Brick by brick. But we’ll have to come up with another strategy. So go home. Tuck in the kiddies, watch some TV,” Belias said.

  She patted Glenn on the shoulder. “C’mon, you. I’ll take you home.”

  “No,” Belias said. “I think it best he not go home to the new wife, not with an unexplained injury. Not to mention he should be under medical observation, isn’t that right, Roger?”

  Roger nodded.

  “Audrey will worry about me…” Glenn began.

  “Send her a text,” Belias said. “You can talk to your wife without really talking to her. Should have been invented right after the wheel.”

  “She’ll freak out if I don’t come home.”

  “Tell her you have an emergency meeting. May run all night.” He put a hand on Glenn’s shoulder. “You’re injured, Glenn. You go home and collapse, you get taken to the hospital, you have to answer questions. Let Roger take care of you.”

  A cold itch worked its way at the base of Holly’s spine. “He can come home with me. The kids would love to see him.”

  “And explain a head injury?”

  Holly said, “He fell down some stairs.”

  Belias said, “If the police are looking for an injured man, better he lay low. Someone might have seen him get into your car. This bartender, perhaps.”

  “But…” Holly started.

  “It’s a good idea, Holly,” Glenn interrupted her. His voice was soft. “I’ll be fine.”

  Shielding me again, she thought. “Please don’t be upset with him.”

  “He’s just trying to protect you, Holly. I would do the same.” Belias flicked her a smile. He made her think of a grinning crow.

  Holly said, “I don’t need protection.”

  “You never have,” Belias said. He never underestimated her the way Glenn did, and for a second she felt terrible, thinking better of him than she did of Glenn. But Belias had never hurt her the way Glenn had.

  “Give the kids a kiss for me,” Glenn said.

  She ruffled his hair, the way she always had, careful now not to touch the bandage. Old habit. She had to stop caring. But how did you turn love off? She thought when he left her she’d grow to hate him and instead she missed him. She glanced at Roger. “Take good care of him.”

  And Roger, who could teach you how to kill with a knife or a gun or the ballpoint pen on the desk, smiled at her. “He’ll be fine.”

  “Holly?” Belias said as she reached the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t lie to me again. It’s hard for me to make proper, reasoned decisions if I don’t have complete information.”

  “Of course.” She looked at Glenn again, and he gave her a weak smile and a nod, and she went downstairs.

  She got back into the car. The blood dotted the leather, but it wasn’t on the carpet pad. His jacket had soaked up most of the flow. She stopped on the way home and bought cleanser, and she wiped up the blood.

  We could have died tonight, she thought. Is this all worth what Belias gives us?

  Instinct told her to avoid the stretch of Haight where The Select was, but she could not help herself. Only one lane was open, an officer letting the traffic take turns. She eased the car past the police lights, the silent red-and-blues throwing shadow and light like cards across a table. She saw a cop talking to homeless people outside the bar, a small fleet of cop cars in the front. Had anyone seen her, noticed her in the Audi before all hell broke loose? But no cop stopped her car as she inched by; no one had reported the vehicle’s license plate. She wondered what she would have done if they had. The nightmare would be over but at a terrible price. She shivered, and then she drove the Audi back to the rendezvous point, a parking lot off Stanyan. Several other cars sat in the lot, and she wondered if one was the Russian’s. Did you take a bus or your own car when you were hired to kidnap someone, when you didn’t have to worry about the transportation? She felt ill. She’d seen the terror in the young woman’s face, in a momentary gleam of a car’s headlights, as she ran away from the bar. She shoved it to the back of her mind, out of the light.

  She wiped the prints off the car. Glenn had another key; he would pick it up tomorrow, assuming he could drive, or Belias would take care of it. She walked out of the lot. A homeless man ten feet away entreated her for loose change, and she tossed him a five-dollar bill she had tucked into her jeans pocket. She didn’t know why she did it; she never gave to bums. He looked too young to be a bum. She could never figure out the young homeless in the
Haight; what were they looking for, sitting around, doing nothing, playing drums? It scared her to think that her kids could ever make that choice; that was why you had to do everything right for them, everything you could to give them every advantage. So they didn’t make a grand mistake.

  She walked the four blocks to her own car and she drove home, wondering who had made the bigger mistake tonight: Glenn in hiring the Russian or her leaving Glenn with Belias.

  7

  Thursday, November 4, evening

  YOU’RE MINT TO ME. So valuable,” Belias said. “I know I shouldn’t have sent you on a kidnap job, but…I trust you and Holly so. You were my first. My best.”

  Glenn’s voice was sluggish with painkillers. “I’m sorry we failed.”

  “Because of this bartender.”

  “You think she knew the bartender?” Roger asked.

  “He was certainly the right guy at the right place for her,” Glenn said. “You’re sure she won’t go to the police?”

  “Diana Keene doesn’t want her mother in jail,” Belias said. “I’ve erased several rather panicked voice mails she’s left for Janice where she’s said she won’t go to the cops until she talks to her mom.”

  “You seem very sure,” Glenn said.

  “It’s what I do,” Belias said. “Understand the way people program themselves to behave in certain ways. Describe this bartender.”

  “About six feet, very lean build. Midtwenties unless he’s got a boyish face. Dark blond hair, wearing a fitted suit. At one point Rostov spoke to him in Russian and he spoke back.”

  Belias’s gaze narrowed. “Did they know each other?”

  “I don’t think so. But the bartender clearly knew how to fight. The Russian was bigger than him, by four inches and fifty pounds, but the bartender took him down. I was fighting with Diana then, trying to get her purse…”

  Belias laughed at him. “You couldn’t even snatch her purse, Glenn? You’re so handy at wresting money from people on a good day.”

  Glenn stared at him, and Belias saw a flash of anger in the dulled gaze, cutting through the painkillers. “You and Roger go find her, then. It’s not my fault we’re in trouble. If there’s a problem, it’s yours to fix.”