“Depends on whether he’s packing, mister,” the guy said with a smile that showed a serious inattention to dental care.
Veronica’s laugh sounded almost natural and he pulled her to stand in front of him, both his arms around her waist.
Getting into the spirit of it, she surprised him by offering, “Oh, Ralph’s packing all right, but his gun’s not near as big as Donny’s here.”
She wiggled her ass back against him, ensuring his gun did indeed get a bit bigger. Since she was playing along so nicely, he hugged her tight and ran his mouth down the side of her neck, sweet and clean. To his astonishment, she turned back into his kisses and caught his lips full on.
Tongue was involved.
Shit, why wasn’t he taking her to another motel right away again?
No, bad agent! He had to stop with the divided attention.
But she pulled away first, with a supposedly apologetic, “I got to use the little girl’s room, baby.”
Before she could walk away, he grasped her arm. “Hang on. I’ll go with you. Phone back there, right?” he asked the attendant, who nodded. “Good, give me some quarters, would you?” He shoved a few dollar bills at him.
Jonathon checked the restroom out before he let Veronica go in and waited for her by the door. When she emerged, it was time to make the call.
Battered as the old phone was, it still worked. It was also out of range of hearing of the attendant who, inspired by Veronica’s performance, was now reading some porn magazine that featured a woman with enormous boobs on the cover.
At the sound of the dial tone on the other end of the receiver, Jonathon punched in a series of four-digit numbers, each one leading to a prompt that asked for the next code, until the final one. He hesitated for a second only, but Veronica’s presence next to him sealed the deal. He punched in the final code and his mother answered the phone right away with her usual lack of preliminaries that he had come to associate with motherhood, as contrary to the normal experience of it as he now realized it was.
“Yes? Who is this?” his mother asked, calm, monotone, not sounding as if she had been asleep, which she probably hadn’t been anyway. She slept, if she slept at all, with one eye open, almost literally.
“Me.”
“Why are you calling?”
“I was tailed the whole way. There was somebody at her house almost as soon as I got there.”
“Her whereabouts weren’t a secret.” Sometimes this woman’s calm could annoy the hell out of him.
“And when we hiked out into the fucking wilderness where I’d left the helicopter and flown to some two-bit town, shooters showed up about an hour later. There had to be a tracker on us. I think it was in the phone.”
“Could it have been on something else? Maybe something of Dr. Barrett’s you brought with you?”
“That wouldn’t make sense. If they’d already been to her house to plant a tracker, say on her computer, which we do have with us, why wouldn’t they have taken her then?”
“You’re right.”
“It had to be on the phone. Or maybe the helicopter. But either way, you know what that means.”
“It could mean a number of things.”
“It could mean only one thing, Mother. There’s a mole.”
“Maybe.”
“And one of the guys who showed up at the hotel we were in knew who I was.”
Silence. That had clinched it.
“Not the others?” his mother asked.
“They were too dead for me to ask. But the one guy still alive, and pointing a gun at my charge’s head by the way, called me by name. He looked a little familiar, too, and almost seemed to know me, but I couldn’t place him.”
“Where is he now?”
“Dead, too.”
“That’s inconvenient.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that. It was kind of him or me.”
“Let me do some digging on this end.”
“That’s what I had in mind. Oh, and there was another thing. This guy meant to videotape my death.”
“That’s odd.” Nice to know she was so broken up by the concept. “No reason for that comes to mind. Let me see what I can find out. Is Dr. Barrett safe?”
Jonathon glanced at Veronica. “Yes. For now. But I don’t like the feel of this. Why all this urgency? All these resources? Six guys in total. I have to tell you it’s caught me completely off-guard.”
“Which doesn’t happen often.”
He felt amused at that. Like any other mother, she managed to get a brag in about her son now and again.
“Yeah, well, I need to know what’s going on. This is way more than I was prepared for and I’m hoping that wasn’t the point.”
“I think you’d better come in. Whatever’s going on, we can protect her better here.”
“No,” he said immediately, surprising himself. “I don’t want to risk it. I’m thinking of taking her to Shangri-La.”
“Absolutely not,” his mother said. “Whatever gave you that idea? It’s bad enough that place exists at all.”
“Well, I don’t have a lot of other ideas at this point. I guess I’ll keep driving for now and see what comes up.”
“Bring her in, Jonathon.”
“I will when you tell me you have the mole. Otherwise, I’m not inclined toward it. I’ll see.”
“Do not take her to—”
“I have to go now. I’ll either call you back, or if I do decide to go to Shangri-La, I’ll send you a message from there and you can contact me the usual way. Let me know how it’s going.”
A pause. “Stay safe.”
“You, too.”
He hung up and Veronica looked at him expectedly.
“Hmmm,” he said, the force of the big blue eyes trained on him giving him a moment’s uncertainty. God, he wanted her to come through this all right. It felt like something different than the duty he felt on other jobs.
Not minding getting back into the character of ‘Donny’, he put his arm around her and kissed her. She licked her lips, and he could not resist coming back for a taste himself. Only the memory of the dirty old man who was probably watching them made him pull away. He glanced in that direction. Yep. He and Veronica in the flesh were better than Miss Big Boobs on the page.
“Looks like you two ain’t quite done,” the attendant yelled out.
“I ain’t never done with this girl,” he shouted back as they walked to the car, arm in arm.
Chapter Six
#xa0;
In the outskirts of a Virginia suburb, where the five-thousand-square-foot houses were all a regulation ten-acres apart and their manicured lawns eerily comprised of a quarter inch of grass punctuated by a flower bush every twenty yards, a middle-age man was savoring his Monday night football.
Neil Donovan watched the game on his eighty-inch flat-screen T.V. and ignored the insistent buzz of the one telephone that only he was allowed to answer. It was primitive, he knew, but he liked it.
His teenage son roused himself from the hungover stupor he’d been in since he had arisen from bed at noon—the kid skipped school more often than Neil went into work—and sat up in his lounger to ask, “Aren’t you going to get that, Dad?”
“I’m watching this play.”
His son glanced at the phone. Red, of course. “Isn’t that your hotline or whatever? If you don’t answer it, doesn’t the world blow up or something?”
The kid used his snidest tone, but at some level he was undoubtedly afraid it was true. And at some level it was. Donovan savored the moment, the shrill ring beckoning. The throw on the screen went far off the mark.
“Darn it. That quarterback ought to be strung up.”
At some level, that was true, too. Maybe the Agency should branch out. God knew it had been accepting enough freelance work lately, for the right price. Congress was getting so stingy with off-the-book organizations that he had no other choice. It was that or bake sales.
He picked up the phone
, which may have looked like an ordinary landline, but was a sophisticated instrument more complicated than any computer or cell. “Yes?”
“Vale got away.”
He glanced at his son, nodding toward the other room, and the kid got up and left.
“Don’t tell me that,” he warned.
An awkward silence on the other line evidenced his subordinate’s recognition of the severity of his warnings. The pussy.
“I’m sorry, sir. There was a first attempt and, er, when that didn’t go as expected, we sent in our best man.”
“And?”
“He ended up dead. The assassin I mean, and his, ah, team.”
“And?”
“We haven’t heard anything from the cleaner we dropped in. Vale found the tracker, too, apparently, so we have no electronic take on the situation, but we think it’s safe to assume he, er, got away.”
Donovan didn’t even bother with an ‘and’. He let his silence speak for him. After a minute of it, the voice on the phone stumbled on. “We’re bringing in extra men to comb the area and reaching out to all our contacts to make sure we locate him.”
Again, silence.
Donovan let it stretch out. Then, as a final touch, he added, “Don’t call me again until there’s a bullet in that man’s brain. Complete with pictures.”
He hung up.
Oh, shit. The fucking quarterback fumbled the snap. This was turning out to be a most exasperating day.
James Conley, the acting director of the Agency, hung up from talking to Donovan, his boss and the actual head of the Agency. Why could nothing go as planned? It was exhausting. And he had utilized the best, the very best at hand. When those oafs had muddled it up at the woman’s house—no surprise in retrospect that these lower-level agents could not handle Vale—he’d brought in Rutger Linden. The man’s name was synonymous with getting the job done. Very reliable. At the time, James had congratulated himself on having the assassin in reserve when the first attempt had been bungled.
Linden was a pro, trained by one of those neo-Nazi factions running around under the radar in Europe when the Middle East terrorists were grabbing all the headlines. He should have been able to handle even Vale. But instead of finding Vale and the Barrett woman dead, they had been forced to send in a clean-up team to make Linden and his minions disappear.
And thanks to Linden, Vale had warning that he was being hunted as well—specifically. He wouldn’t know why, of course.
Hell, James barely knew why himself. Just that Donovan had said to make it happen, off the record, and there was a one-million-dollar deposit in his Swiss bank account to give him a little incentive. If he wasn’t such a lazy agent—and he knew he was, prided himself on it and figured that was how he had stayed alive long enough to climb the Agency’s corporate ladder instead of getting killed in the field—he would have tried to find out what was so important about killing Jonathon Vale.
But now that Vale was forewarned, it would make everything that much harder. Though maybe if they could spin this development of Vale going off the radar right, it could fit the original scenario.
As long as Vale and the woman still ended up dead.
For that, no contracting out this time. They would just have to use their very best in-house assassin.
Which could be tricky.
* * * *
Monica Vale hung up her cell, the one that, whether her son knew it or not, was reserved only for him. The one that almost never rang. And certainly never had when he was on a job.
She got out of bed and went to the window of the luxurious D.C. apartment where she’d set her bags down last week. She was out of the field, behind a desk most of the time these days, an assignment here and there. But regardless, she never stayed in one place long, a habit she had tried to teach her son. He’d been resisting the advice lately.
Jonathon wanted something more. And that was dangerous. She of all people knew that. He needed to remain a ghost, a spook, an agent.
The pang she’d always felt when she thought of her handsome son was there, but even sharper now. She never ignored her instincts. It was why she was still alive.
And her instincts told her something was very, very wrong.
Her regular agency-issued cell rang and she saw it was Jonathon’s immediate supervisor. Curious timing.
“What is it, O’Reilly?” she answered.
“We haven’t heard from Jonathon. We think something may be wrong at this point. Has he contacted you?”
She didn’t miss a beat. “No. You know better than that. I’m the last person he’d contact for help.”
Monica didn’t believe in the efficacy of lie detector tests for the simple reason that there wasn’t one she couldn’t pass with flying colors even if she said the moon was made of cheese. Lying was easy for most human beings. Her skill lay in how she did it. With as much conviction as when she was telling the truth. Which was to say, with no conviction, no tone, no emotion at all.
Perhaps that was what had made her a crappy mother, among other things.
“I’m thinking maybe we should send somebody in,” O’Reilly continued. “To try to find him.”
“Whatever you think,” she said. “Was there anything else?”
A pause. “No. I guess not.”
She hung up. She had some work to do. Off the radar screen.
* * * *
Once they were alone by the gas pumps, Veronica asked, “What’s Shangri-La? I heard you mention that on the phone.”
He smiled. “I guess I’m going to call it plan B.”
They got back on the highway.
“Was your mother really a secret agent?” she asked over the lulling sound of the car.
“Was. Is,” he answered. “That’s who I called at the gas station.”
“Oh. I heard you call the person ‘Mother’ but I thought it was a code name or handler name or something.”
“Afraid not. Just good old Mom.”
“That’s funny.”
He shrugged, keeping his eyes on the road.
“So, what was that like? Growing up with a secret agent for a mom?”
“When I was younger, I didn’t know, of course.”
“What did you think she was?”
His response was automatic. “The worst mother in the world.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m just kidding. It’s only that she traveled a lot and left me with nannies half the time. Or I thought they were nannies. In fact, they were more like bodyguards. I don’t think they knew what she really was, either. They just thought she was paranoid. She was supposed to be some kind of business consultant. We always had enough money. A nice house.”
“Until it got nuked.”
He laughed. “Well, it wasn’t really nuked… Actually, it sort of was, but they were more like tactical weapons. Anyway, that was when we lived in the Middle East. We moved around a lot. I realize now that most of that was for my sake. She obsessed about keeping me safe. Always had a private instructor teaching me, ah, things most little boys don’t study.”
“Like what?”
“Martial arts. That sort of thing.”
“Lots of kids take karate.”
“Not many of them have a black belt by the time they’re seven and use real bullets for marksman practice. I was only a little older than that when I started to figure out something wasn’t quite right. Then I was kidnapped—”
She gasped, apparently startled. He had almost forgotten how odd his childhood had been. Maybe because he hadn’t talked to anyone about it before.
“They were just trying to get to my mother,” he assured her. “It worked out fine. She got me out of it and after she did, she told me the truth. Then she began to train me herself.”
“Wow. That’s so weird.”
“Depends on what you’re used to, I suppose. Oh, shit,” he said as they passed a sign indicating the next exit wasn’t for seventy miles.
“What?”
“I should have gotten you something to eat at the gas station. You’re probably starving.”
“No offense, but I couldn’t eat right now, anyway. My stomach’s in knots.”
He changed lanes to pass the occasional car that popped up on the road. “Trust me, Veronica. I swear I’ll get you out of this.”
“How do you know they won’t follow us?”
“I don’t. In fact, I know they will. As soon as they can get a read on where we are. But I’m hoping they don’t have any indication of that yet.”
“Hoping.”
“Yeah. So for now, we’re just going to drive a bit.” He didn’t add that they would stay on the road only until he decided whether to take her to Shangri-La. Maybe in the meantime, they could find someplace so out of the way that he would feel comfortable stopping there, at least to sleep.
“We’re not more exposed just driving? Shouldn’t we find a city and disappear into a motel there?”
“Most cities these days have face recognition software, usually at the traffic lights. It’d be hard to avoid and a way for someone to track us. I’d rather take my chances on country roads.”
“Like the old song,” she murmured.
“What old song?”
“I get the feeling there were areas of your education that your mother may have neglected.”
That was for damn sure. Like the way he felt so vulnerable about a charge he seemed to be starting to have feelings for. Not that ‘starting to have feelings’ was a phrase he ever meant to use with respect to himself.
He hated to bring up the elephant in the room, or car rather, especially since she was slouching a little in her seat and seemed almost relaxed. But they needed to clear the air and get back on a proper footing, since they would be together on the road for a while. “Listen, in terms of where we left it back at the hotel—”
“The bodies? Will they be traced to you? Or, oh my God, to me?”
“No, not to either of us,” he assured her. “For one thing, I don’t exist. If the local cops ever show up and run my fingerprints through any data base, they’ll come up empty. And as to yours, the Agency will take care of that. Don’t worry. But I wasn’t talking about the bodies. I was talking about the sex.”
Alone With an Escort Page 8
