Instigator

by Fiona Quinn

  “Yes, exactly, that’s the subject matter. As I was saying, we need to chat when I’m sure Red won’t come through the door.”

  “Roger that. I’ll get with you ASAP. I can call tonight after the clients go to bed. For right now, Nutsbe, you know Christen as D-day?”

  “Honey knows her too,” Nutsbe used Rooster Honig’s call name. “D-day flies for the 160th. He’s been her customer five or six times. She likes to fly MH-6 Little Birds into dangerous places at absurd elevations. I’m talkin’ like eight-ten feet from the terrain at crazy speeds. She’s got a pair of titanium plated steel balls, man. Honey said that he never had an uncomfortable second when he was flying with her. Pure professionalism. Skills of a Zen master. She’s rock solid, but not CIA or a paper artist. She’s a Night Stalker.”

  “Serious?” Gator said. “Damn.” He sat back. “And why are we here protecting a CIA operations officer and a Night Stalker? Is this about Lula?”

  “Lula LaRoe is the childhood friend of Christen Davidson and the legal name for Johnna White,” Nutsbe said.

  Well there was news Nutsbe hadn’t shared before. Lula wasn’t with the Treasury.

  “CIA, huh? Okay again, why are me and Blaze here? These women have the skills they need, none of them are wilting daisies.”

  “Right, well they’re using Christen as a point of entry into this party. But three women may not have access to all the places where a man might talk – locker room, bathroom, men’s lounge. They needed two male operatives with close protection skillsets, and they needed Davidson to buy into the scenario. Those men needed to come from a known private security company. Iniquus could fill that bill.”

  “Okay. And it makes sense to use Christen as an asset. I’d never have guessed she was a special operator,” Gator said. “That’s not how she comes off when she’s around her friends – well Red isn’t her friend. Let’s just say Christen seems comfortable settin’ in the lap of luxury. Socialite. Designer clothes that she wears like a second skin. Well, until you go out jogging with her and Lula, and they turn it into some crazy movie-scene stunt devils.”

  “Yeah, Blaze told us she went hard-core parkour on your ass,” Nutsbe chuckled, “and that you kept up fine until they hit the walls with their ‘gravity has no power here’ act. The file says D-day took that up after she decided gymnastics wasn’t for her. Guess she needed more adrenaline in her life. She took up flying in high school. Honey was in here earlier when we were running the video we downloaded from her contact lens. He said parkour was D-day’s workout routine on base and none of the men would try it.”

  “Not Honey anyways,” Lynx’s smile drew wide. “At six-foot-eight, it’s kind of hard to tuck and roll.”

  “D-day the Amazon princess,” Gator grinned, his eyes warmed with affection.

  Lynx had never seen that before. In the years she’d known Gator, he’d dated lots of women. He’d even had had a long-term relationship with a woman named Amy. But Amy was pushing for marriage and babies, and Gator was emphatically married to his job. When Lynx and Gator had talked about Amy, there was sometimes laughter in his eyes, affection; he cared about her. But this seemed different.

  Lynx thought back to the day that she went out on assignment with their teammate Deep Del Toro as her back up. He’d walked into the art gallery where she was interviewing a witness, and he was gob smacked. Pow. She had watched the very instant Cupid sent out a double arrowed shot at both Lacey and Deep hitting them straight through the hearts. Like the birth of a child or being present at a death, it was an intensely sacred moment. A privilege to witness.

  Gator didn’t look gob smacked – that word seemed to describe a new sensation that threw you for a loop. This seemed more...more…. More what? More long-lived. More assured. Older, maybe. Though obviously they were just meeting. More – primal-beast energy. A smile tickled her lips when she thought that. But yeah, there was something there in that thought. In those words. Something more threatening —“I will rip you limb from limb if you dare to hurt her.” As those words bubbled into her thoughts, any lightness was extinguished from her meandering ideas. A threat lay camouflaged in the horizon.

  Since Lynx had met Gator, sometimes when she looked at him she picked up the whole gladiator vibe. Sometimes it was Viking energy. Hammer to the North! A mighty anvil held aloft. A thunderous roar. Yeah, that was definitely the energy she felt swirling around Gator when Christen was in the picture. Christen was his, and he would protect her to the death. Lynx looked at smiling Gator. Focused Gator. Cute, funny, soft-hearted Gator. The visual and the energy didn’t match up very well. “Something evil this way comes,” not a knowing, just a whisper through her brain. Why the witches from Macbeth suddenly popped into her mind, Lynx was afraid to guess. But yes, this energy—that she was trying, and failing, to define—felt prophetic. She and Gator had been swimming in it since the hotel room in Tanzania before they took on this mission.

  And then came a real knowing. A full body slam of a knowing. This is the house that Jack built.

  She knew those thoughts had flooded her system in less time than it took for her to snap her fingers, because Nutsbe was correcting Gator’s last quip, “Not an Amazon princess. A decorated war hero.”

  “Yeah, sorry.” Gator lay his hand on his chest. “That didn’t come out the way I meant. I have mad respect for her skills. Not just the parkour but a Night Stalker? Whooeee!” He paused, a little smile twitching the corners of his mouth, his eyes looking introspective, then he focused back on the screen. “Oh, hey, you said Honey was feeding you information. The team’s home?”

  “Safe and sound.” Lynx forced a smile. “Randy is out of ICU and is in stable condition. They’re running neurological tests on him later today, but coming out of anesthesia, he had sensation in all his toes. That’s a good sign.”

  “Whew! Thank you for sayin’. I’d like to be kept up on all that.” Gator adjusted the screen and glanced toward the door. “Okay, I’ve got a small window here, let’s talk about the mission. You’ve joined the effort, Lynx?”

  “I’ve been added to your team because of the information you handed us about helium. That was an angle that no one had considered.”

  There was a tap at the door. Gator turned his head and gave a nod. Lynx could hear the door snick shut, and then Red showed up on the computer screen as she squished in next to Gator.

  “I was just about to share some information about helium,” Lynx said.

  Red reached behind her and grabbed a pillow from the top of the bed she and Gator were sitting on. She hugged it to her, rolling forward until her forearms rested on her thighs mirroring Gator. She looked like a girl at a slumber party ready to listen to a ghost story.

  “Gator had mentioned to us that Meg Finley had made a connection between William Davidson being in Tanzania and helium,” Lynx began.

  “Our intelligence said Davidson was in Dar es Salaam to negotiate a contract for natural gas and off shore drilling now that negotiations between the Tanzanian government and Hesston Oil were interrupted over the kidnapping of Derek Bowman.”

  Gator swiveled toward Red. “Meg says that the helium and natural gas are mixed together and processed to separate them. A contract for natural gas would be a contract for helium.”

  Red tilted her head “And Meg’s job is…”

  “Animal migration, ma’am. But that don’t mean she don’t know what she’s talking about. She’s researched this because this would impact the animals she’s studying.”

  “Our research has shown the same information,” Lynx said. Nutsbe scooted to the side so Lynx’s face could be center screen. “The US is the biggest producer - a four-point-seven-billion-dollar industry. Asia’s booming manufacturing is driving up the competition for a finite resource. As US reserves are dwindling, the emerging markets are importing more and more of the helium from Qatar.”

  “Who else is involved?” Red asked.

  “Russia, and to a much lesser extent Algiers, Canada,
and China. But those last three are miniscule in the global market. For the big hitter, we’re looking at US, Russia, and Qatar,” Lynx said.

  “Meg told Blaze and me that there was a problem with distribution, and she was afraid it would force prices up so that Tanzania would find the market too hot to pass up. You got anything on that?” Gator asked.

  “Yes,” Lynx said, “Hang on. Nutsbe, can you hand me that page?”

  Nutsbe gathered a piece of paper filled with colored thought bubbles of information and held it up. When she nodded, he passed it over to her.

  Lynx looked over her notes. “This started with Saudi Arabia et al jumping on Qatar for their involvement with funding terror. The Qatari ports have been closed, there’s nothing coming or going out of there. Businesses are relying on their helium reserves to continue with manufacturing items that require that element — MRI machines and what have you. The US can’t make up for the amount of product that’s being withheld from worldwide industry.” She put her paper down. “If this keeps up there will be a fight for the limited supply. And prices will go up. The longer this continues, the higher the prices can go until the market gives way with businesses unable to produce because of lost profit margins. The disruption in the helium market squeezes a bunch of important industries and can set off a wave of global repercussions.”

  “We need to figure out what individuals would benefit from this spike,” Red said. “If this has anything to do with this group Davidson’s gathered, it would be an interesting twist, for sure. And one not readily obvious. Let’s keep that hypothesis in play. There is no Tanzanian on the guest list. There is a Qatari, a Sheik from Saudi Arabia. William and Karl Davidson are American. No Russians but we do have someone from Slovakia with ties to Russia. His name is Gregor Zoric, nicknamed Medved’. We’ve had our eye on him for a while. Medved’ has connections with Russian oligarch families. He likes to play in my neck of the woods.”

  “With Hezbollah and Hamas?” Lynx asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Red said sternly. “Why would you suggest that?”

  “I worked the Sophia Abadi case – Sophia Abadi-Ackerman, she’s newly married. But you would know that since you’re still her handler.” Lynx didn’t know why she wanted to wrestle some power away from Red. Lynx was kicking herself for the weird dynamic she just introduced.

  “Zoric,” Gator said. “We’ve had a brush with the Zoric family in DC. They’re a crime family with ties to terrorism.”

  “Exactly.” Red nodded. “Gregor’s the head of one branch of that family. As I was saying, he likes to hang out with Russian oligarchs and live large. From our reports, I can say he hasn’t got much of a soul.”

  “Psychopathic kind of soulless?” Gator turned a sharp gaze on Red. “This makes a big difference in terms of preparing for and providing security.”

  “That’s what our psychiatrists have indicated, yes.”

  “And he’s Slovakian?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” Red tilted her head asking for more information.

  “Kind of interesting. When Blaze and me were saving William Davidson in what we thought was a pretend fight—”

  “Ha!” Nustbe snorted. “I still can’t believe you were fake fighting in a real fight that turned out to be the wrong fight.”

  Gator sent him a grin. “I reckon those guys think we’re pathetic fighters. I mean my punches were coming in like I was a hundred-year-old grandpa on his sleep meds. I honestly didn’t know what to think when it was going down.”

  “Classic, man.” Nutsbe grinned. “That fight’s now an Iniquus legend.”

  Red gave Gator a playful bump of her elbow. “Langley legend, too.”

  Gator dipped his head bashfully. “I bring it up ‘cause the guy I was putting to sleep was talking in a foreign language. At the time, I thought it was icing on the cake for the operative to be speaking in Russian, but when I talked to Blaze about it, he said he didn’t recognize any of the words. Blaze did say he thought it was in the Slovic language family. It sounded similar. Mind you, Blaze’s Russian is conversational not fluent.”

  “Russia wanting to stop Davidson from a helium deal with Tanzania wouldn’t make any sense. His oil company holds Russian contracts. They rub each other’s backs to get the Russian oil on to the markets with the current NATO sanctions in place. And like I said, the Zoric family isn’t part of the oligarchy, but they have firm ties. I think trying to pin Zoric to the attempted kidnapping attempt on Davidson isn’t reasonable.”

  “Noted. I’ll research that angle further,” Lynx said. “But as I was telling Gator all of the members of this business party have a helium connection save one. You have two Japanese businessmen from a shipping company which transports helium. There are three Chinese, and one man from India. Those four are all involved in industries that require helium for production. Then there is Gregor Zoric who is connected to Russian energy, Nadir al-Attiyah the Qatari man who is connected to the royal family and heavily involved in their helium production and distribution, and William and Karl Davidson. The only businessman I can’t link in is the Saudi sheik. I have no idea why he’s there. But again, he’s well tied into the Saudi royal family tree. Those are the eleven businessmen at the meeting.”

  “Lots of players. Lots of power. Lots of money on the table.” Red checked her watch. “Gator you and I need to go get spiffed up. It’s almost time for dinner, and you have a damsel who needs your protection.”

  Gator stood. “Lynx, I’ll get back in touch with you after our clients have gone to bed.”

  “Everyone’s good?” Red asked. She stood and threw the pillow up toward the top of the bed. “Now, we get to meet the gentlemen in the world of helium.” She elbowed Gator. “Sounds like a gas!”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Christen

  Thursday, Reception, Ruffles Hotel, Singapore

  Her brother Karl lifted his drink toward Christen in a kind of a solute. “How do you like living in Kentucky?” He sounded like he wasn’t sure how to make small talk with her. They had almost nothing in common. They never did, even when her mom was still married to their dad.

  “It’s fine. There are some beautiful national forests, wonderful waterways to explore.” Christen hoped someone would come over and join them to expand the conversation. It was odd for Karl to come speak to her alone like this. She couldn’t remember that ever happening before. Normally she was “my half-sister, Christen,” and then the conversation would move on to yachting or what have you, something that had nothing to do with her scope of the world and therefore, there was nothing she could add. And typically, nothing she wanted to take away either. But her mission was to gather what intelligence she could, and so she actually needed to be the proverbial fly on the wall and listen to the men interact.

  She glanced around the room. Blaze stood by the door, Gator stood cattycorner. Johnna was talking to London, and she couldn’t find Lula.

  “Horse country, too,” Karl said. “I just bought Mimi a stallion from near there, outside of Nashville.”

  Mimi was Karl’s fiancée. Mimi looked like a horse; but that was Christen thinking like a brat.

  “You live just north of there don’t you? Near Fort Campbell? A lot of special forces operators out your direction,” Karl said. “I bet you enjoy that.” He lifted the corner of his mouth in a smirk.

  Christen blinked. Surely, Karl wasn’t on the Christen-folds-origami bandwagon. Surely, he remembered she served in the US military and was special forces herself. “A few.” Okay her tone was a little too sarcastic. She cleared her throat and tried again. “The ones I know are nice.”

  “Nice? I bet you don’t say that to their faces. It’s like calling them Nancy-boys. It would hurt their poor feelings.” He tipped down some scotch and pointed at her with the glass in his hand. “I imagine they’re all peacocks walking about town with their chests puffed out. I bet the muscle that gets the most exercise is their ego.” He shook his head. “Ridiculous. I mean, g
iven the technology we have today, how hard can their job be? How can they possibly be losing the war to a bunch of uneducated goat herders?” He reached over to grab a canape from the doily-covered silver tray a waiter was circulating. Karl ate it in one bite and spoke with his mouth full. “And yet all these years later…”

  Christen closed her eyes, and reached for her training to contain her emotions. She remembered the heard of goats in Syria, the Deltas as they lay in the dust getting ready to fight for their lives while she abandoned them in her helicopter. When she popped her eyelids open, Gator was in her line of sight and caught her gaze. She imagined he was sending her mental waves of support. Seeing Gator and knowing he’d served as a Marine Raider and was now protecting her scumbag of a brother, who had the gall to speak derisively of the sacrifices the military made, Every. Single. Day. pissed Christen off even more. “Can I tell you a secret?” Christen asked leaning in with a conspiratorial whisper.

  Karl gave her a wicked smile and a nod.

  “They shit themselves when they’re on their missions,” she said under her breath.

  Karl flung his head back and laughed heartily; he came up sputtering. “Scared, huh?”

  “Probably. But that’s not why they shit themselves. They shit themselves because they’re eating whatever the fuck they can find to eat in some of the filthiest places imaginable with flies landing and defecating on their food, leaving microbes that turn into illnesses that twist their bowls into knots.”

  Karl pulled back. His grin dropped off and was replaced with a look of disgust. He swiped at his mouth.

  Christen reached up and grabbed Karl’s lapel and pulled him back in close. “But that doesn’t stop them. Even though their bowels are cramping, and they’re feverish, and just want a clean bathroom and some time, they don’t get that. Once their mission is in go-mode, they stop for nothing. Not even to pull down their pants and get some relief. If they need to shit, they shit. And if their bowels won’t hold while they’re running from house to house, then they shit as they run. And they change when they get back. Hopefully safe and sound. But not always. They don’t always make it out alive or whole. They put their god-damned lives on the god-damned line so people like you can stand around at cocktail parties and talk with your crappy privileged-class superiority about how little it takes in terms of bravery and skill to go to war and protect our nation.” She pushed higher on her toes, so she could hiss right into his ear. “You should be ashamed you pathetic never-served asswipe.”