“Burke,” Perry said with a sad shake of the head.
“She’s not! But let’s pretend she is. When I did that just now, when I pretended… it was the first time since she fell that I didn’t wish you hadn’t pulled me back from the cliff. It was the first time I felt anything but pain.”
The Velvet Glove looked at the face down body of Malcolm, a pool of blood forming around his shattered head. “That’s not the case for this chap,” he said. “Well, let’s pull these two back into the alley, up toward the lazy-zone, so that they’ll be found. Word will reach the Wolf quickly that there is someone doing something new. He’ll be sending a recruiter to you in no time.”
“How will this headhunter find me?”
“Headhunter! Delightful double-entendre! Oh, you’ll be found. We’ll have to install you in a place here in the area. There are still some buildings that haven’t enjoyed the Whitechapel Renaissance. I happen to own one or two. It won’t be the comfortable lifestyle you jet-setting spies are used to, but it will complete the illusion.”
Burke considered all of this, then nodded his head a single, decisive time. “Take me there now. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it all the way.”
Perry smiled. “All the way is the only way, buddy.”
14
When Perry called Adabelle an hour later, she told him to meet her at the hotel. She was noticeably surprised when he arrived alone.
“Where’s Burke?” she asked.
“In the shit,” he replied. He answered her perplexed expression with a smile, then told her the entire story.
“Christ!” she said when he’d finished.
“Yep. I’m thinking he’s either going to start coping or he’s going to go off the deep end altogether.” Adabelle considered this in silence. “Either way,” Perry continued, “it’s preferable to what he’s been doing.”
“Maybe,” Adabelle said. “Did you happen to tell the Velvet Glove to call his mother?”
“Yes. Mrs. Fischer’s heart is beating regularly once again.”
“Well, that’s good anyway. So – what happens now?”
“Right this minute, I’m going to take a shower. I’ve been drenched in blood numerous times today.”
“I thought I noticed a spot on your lapel. Glad it was blood and not lipstick.”
“That is the sexiest thing you’ve ever said. Care to come with?”
“To the shower? Try to stop me!”
It was late in the evening before the couple came up for air, and as Perry enjoyed the full-body tingle of afterglow, his phone rang. He assumed it would be Burke, but then remembered that he’d taken his friend’s phone with him when he left him in the tenement room. The Velvet Glove had assured him that he would keep Perry informed of Burke’s “progress.”
He looked at the phone and groaned.
“What’s wrong?” Adabelle asked.
Rather than answer her, Perry slid his finger across the screen. “Yes, boss.”
“Mrs. Fischer informs me that Alfred is intact. I assume you and Burke are also on that roster?”
“Roster, boss?”
“You’re intact. Alive. Not yet dead.”
“Oh. Yes. All of those things.”
“Good news from you for once.”
“Yes, you’re welcome, boss.”
“So when can I expect you back in New York?” Moore asked, ignoring the sarcasm.
“Ah, yeah. About that…”
“No.”
“What? I haven’t even asked you anything yet!”
“I need you and Vixen in New York by tomorrow night. But don’t unpack. I have work for her in Istanbul, and I need you to look into a situation in Budapest.”
“Why not just send us to our assignments directly?”
“Maybe I’d like to see you for a little while. Maybe I’d like to crack you one in the mouth. You won’t know until you get here.”
Perry was about to protest, but the disconnect tone sounded in his ear. As was his habit, Moore had hung up without any good-byes. Perry turned to Adabelle. “We have assignments. Separate assignments,” he said, accentuating the word.
“Darling, you know as well as I do he can’t send us together everywhere. There will probably be more separate assignments that joint ones.”
“I know. I just do so much better when you’re around,” Perry said, reaching over to stroke the gorgeous woman’s black hair.
“Of course you do.”
“Well, there’s nothing for it. We need to get to Heathrow asap.”
“You should probably slip into something a little less comfortable. While I love your birthday suit, I doubt the Department for Transport will feel similarly.”
“I don’t know,” Perry teased. “Some of the security staff might be okay with it.”
“Yes, but let’s not talk about those boys right now,” she replied with a laugh.
“Why you!”
The pillow fight that ensued led to another round of love making, but eventually, they could delay their inevitable departure no longer. Perry would have liked to call the Velvet Glove to update him, but the madman hadn’t offered his number, rather stating that he’d be in touch when the need arose.
Several hours and a healthy dose of vodka martinis later, they lifted off the runway for eight hours over the Atlantic.
Lyndsey Archer had been agonizing for several days. Seeing Burke yet again and not being able to reach out was bad enough. But seeing him and Perry with the man she’d come to kill was pushing her to the point of madness. She had to know what was going on.
Moore’s orders were very clear, however, and if she broke her cover prematurely, there would be serious consequences.
Still, she loved the big idiot. She’d waited too long to tell him and although she assumed she would get to deliver the message eventually, that was not soon enough for her anymore. Obviously, Burke had stayed in the UK because of her. Whether to be near the place she “died” or because he was still holding out hope that she had lived, she couldn’t be sure. But the fact that he had stayed demonstrated the strength of his love, as far as she was concerned.
She grabbed her phone impulsively and pulled up Burke’s contact page. The contact picture she’d chosen of him looked like it would have fit well on the cover of a romance novel. Just the right amount of facial scruff, just the right absence of a shirt…
It was too much. She hit the call button, but at the same instant, she received an incoming call. It was from the Wolf.
Clearly the Universe was informing her she was making a mistake, and she quickly cancelled the call to Burke, even before she’d heard it ring through. Taking the call from the Wolf instead, she said testily, “What?”
“Not a very friendly greeting, Bombshell.”
“You’re not paying me to be friendly. You’re paying me to bring you recruits or leave behind corpses.”
“You’ve done much more of the latter.”
“What can I tell you? Not a lot of these thugs are ready to hitch their wagon to you.”
“Be careful, Bombshell. I don’t tolerate insubordination.”
“Clearly. What can I do for you?”
“Actually, I was calling to tell you that between the few people you’ve sent my way and those I’ve collected from other headhunters, I’m just about ready to move against Zmaj.”
“So you’re calling to tell me I’m laid off?”
The Wolf was not a man known for his sense of humor, so the chuckle that came through the phone was particularly unnerving.
“Not quite so fast. There is one last person I’d like you to ‘interview.’ He’s burst on the scene, as they like to say in the entertainment business. He has several confirmed kills in the past few days, and even more that cannot be positively linked to him with absolute authority, but shared similar characteristics. I’ve finally been able to get a lead on where he’s staying. Gun up, because you’re headed back to Whitechapel.”
He ga
ve her the address and told her to get moving.
With a sigh, she stood and checked her weapon. It was loaded and ready, and she slipped it into her shoulder holster, then put on a light jacket to conceal it. She looked at the address the Wolf had given her. “Ugh,” she said out loud. While most of the Whitechapel district was now quite respectable, there were still several oases of decay, and this address was smack in the middle of one.
As much as she didn’t want to make the visit, knowing that it was likely her last, and that Moore might allow her to contact Burke soon gave her the impetus she needed to head out of her flat and walk to the Underground station nearby.
As she prepared to descend the stairs, she looked at her phone and saw that Burke’s contact screen was still open. She realized it would have been a serious mistake to call him now, and was glad she’d hung up quickly.
“One last dirty job,” she whispered to herself, then stepped quickly below the street.
Perry’s mission in Budapest had been routine – until now. He’d been sent mainly to monitor some communications between a trio of men thought to be working for Zmaj. So for four days and nights, he’d spent most of his waking hours with noise-cancelling headphones on, listing alternately to intercepted cell calls and to the signal from some good old-fashioned bugging devices, all of which had been placed prior to his arrival.
Moore was hoping Perry would be able to identify one or more of the men, which would in turn give them some idea what Zmaj was up to in Hungary. Perry grimaced at the thought of the hideous man. He was like a cancer, infecting more and more of Europe with each passing day, and he knew that Moore wanted him taken down. Brought into custody or killed, he didn’t care.
But today, as Perry had been listening, he realized that the men were planning something big. Hungarian was not his strongest language (although his maternal great-grandfather had been a Magyar), but his comprehension was more than adequate, and today, he was hearing some very disturbing words and phrases, including “automatikus fegyverek” (automatic weapons), “egyházi fesztivál” (church festival), and most chillingly “Öld meg mindet” (kill them all).
He quickly fired up a laptop to see if he could find anything about any upcoming church feasts, expecting there to be dozens. To his luck and surprise, there was only one scheduled, and it was happening today. He memorized the location, and without thinking about it too much, (perchance to talk himself out of the idea), he had headed out to try to prevent a major incident.
The festival was in full swing by the time he arrived, and he realized the degree to which he was at a disadvantage. Thousands of people were enjoying themselves, ignorant to the fact that there were people coming with their only intent being to cause as much carnage as possible. Picking three of Zmaj’s lackies out of a crowd this size was not going to be easy.
But he’d caught a break. While he was surveying the scene, he noticed a small park just outside the barriers set up to delineate the festival area. It caught his eye because they had parked very haphazardly, and closer to the barrier than was apparently permitted. He watched as three men stepped out. They seemed to look out of place amongst the revelers, and as Perry continued to observe, he saw one clearly attempting to hide an automatic rifle under a black leather duster that must have been sweltering to wear on what had been a very warm day.
As he watched, they walked in three different directions, much as he’d expected they would. That was not to say he hadn’t hoped they’d be bad at this and stick together, but as he mourned their degree of operational competence, he was already moving. Two circled away from the festival, to approach from different angles, so he picked the one who had taken the most direct route toward the crowd. Reaching into his pocket, he wrapped his hand around the wooden handle of a narrow awl. The man had come to a stop at the perimeter of the party and was surveying the scene. Perry came at him from an angle outside of his field of vision, and before the man knew what had happened, Perry had seemingly stumbled into him, grabbing as if to steady himself, then quickly inserted the point into the top of the would-be terrorist’s spine, slipping it between two of the cervical vertebrae. The man’s eyes opened wide as he became aware of the fact that his legs could not support him, and that his ability to breathe had suddenly stopped. He was still alive when Perry calmly walked away, but was dead by the time anyone realized that the man lying at the edge of the crowd wasn’t just a sleeping drunk.
He’d been able to find and dispatch the second man quickly as well, as he’d taken up a position that was not far from the first. There were no people nearby as he approached, the man having decided to await the signal to attack while ducked in the dark delivery bay of a nearby business, so he was able to be less subtle, firing a single suppressed shot point-blank at the back of his head.
As he hunted for the third man, he thought he felt his phone vibrate in the left interior pocket of his jacket. “Not now, Addy,” he whispered, knowing this was about the time she called every day, when she could. But the vibration was brief as if she’d called and hung up immediately. He hoped that didn’t mean she was in trouble.
As badly as he wanted to call her back to make sure she was all right, he knew there was still great potential for multiple deaths, but as he moved in the direction the third man had gone, he saw him running back to the poorly parked car. Perry guessed that he’d attempted to give the signal to attack but did not receive confirmation from the other two, and had chosen to abort the mission. After an almost comical series of minute back and forth turns and corrections, the car finally squealed out of the festival area.
Crisis averted, Perry reached for his phone in the right pocket of his jacket, but as he did, he remembered that the vibration had come from the left pocket. That was where he kept Burke’s phone.
Perry had decided to keep it with him, as that was the number the Velvet Glove called when he gave Perry update’s on Burke’s ascension to the top of the London criminal food chain. He pulled it out and looked at it. There was a single notification showing on the screen. It read “Missed Call from Venus.”
“What the fuck?” Perry stared at the message for several minutes, as if doing so would somehow cause its appearance to make sense. It didn’t. “What the fuck?” he said again. Then he touched the notice, which caused Burke’s phone to call back.
Lyndsey double-checked the strip of paper with the address that the Wolf had given her as she stood across the street. It was indeed a rundown block of flats, one that looked somehow familiar to her. After several minutes of pondering, she realized it looked a lot like the building in Dublin where Connor, the would-be Zmaj thug, had “lured” them. The one that had turned out to belong to the Velvet Glove.
Get a grip, Venus, she thought to herself. This is no time to be considering the Butterfly Effect or whatever. A psychopath flaps his wings in Dublin and…
She shook her head to banish the superfluous thinking, then walked across the street. There were as many differences between the two as there were similarities. For example, each first floor flat had its own entrance, whereas the building in Ireland had been a standard apartment block with a single door. She was taking the fact that the Wolf had hinted this would be her final recruiting assignment to heart, and rather than develop some complicated plan to draw the rising star out of his dismal flat, she merely identified the correct door (second from the left), walked up, and knocked.
As she did, her phone began to vibrate. Bad timing, she thought and was about to ignore it when the thought occurred that it might be the Wolf calling to tell her to scrap the mission after all. She pulled it from her pocket and looked at the screen. One word appeared: “Burke.”
Why would he be calling her phone? How desperate must the poor man be, calling a phone that should be sitting at the bottom of ocean? She looked at it and said the name aloud, in a voice filled with sadness.
“Burke.”
At that moment, the door opened, and she found herself looking into the eyes of t
he man whose name was still on her lips. And he was looking at her.
“I knew it,” Burke said. “I knew it.”
Assignment- London Page 10
