“The CliffsNotes version is that I think my research is important, or might be some day—I’m still in the testing phases—but I doubt it’s enough to kidnap me for, which is what I’ve been trying to tell you for days.”
“And I should have been listening because that leads me to believe that maybe they want to kill us both. Or me at least and you’re just a casualty. But that makes no sense. At least not that I can think of now.”
She leaned against the hood of the car, feeling a little bit silly in her rosy dress. “Why not? Aren’t secret agents getting shot at all the time? You don’t seem like this is particularly new to you.”
“No, but usually we’re getting shot at because of who we’re protecting or what we’re transporting or the assignment we’re on.”
“You mean the bad guys and good guys aren’t always trying to shoot each other’s agents?”
“Now that I’m thinking about it, no. There’s sort of a professional understanding, I guess. You might shoot an agent on one side or the other to reach your objective, but shooting the agent usually isn’t the objective itself.”
“Almost as if both sides know they need each other to exist.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty fucked-up.”
“What’s pretty fucked-up is that I’ve seen more people killed in the last few days than I have in my entire life.”
He went back to fiddling with the GPS in the sheriff’s car, punching something in and nodding, as if committing it to memory. “Well, glass half full and all. You could see that as confirming what a peaceful life you have.”
“Had.”
He glanced up at her. “I’ll get you back to it. I swear I will, Veronica.”
“I know. I’m not—I just—I don’t know, Jonathon. All this violence.”
His face got that closed look again and he stood.
“I’m not judging you for it,” she added. “I mean, you were protecting me, and I, I…”
“You have nothing to feel guilty for, Veronica.”
“I killed someone myself. I did.”
“It was self-defense. Or more accurately, defense of me. But you can’t think about that now. We need to keep pressing on.”
She nodded, knowing he was right. “Okay. Back to the subject then. Why would someone want to kill you, specifically you, I mean?”
They walked together over to the abandoned blue car. “Just what I was wondering. No idea. But I know who to ask.”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah. She promised to dig into this for me. I knew there was a mole in the Agency, but I need to bounce off her the idea that the mole might be gunning for me, or you and me, for some other reason than your work. I’ll call her when we get to where we’re going”
“And where is that?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Really? I’ve been so charmed by everything we’ve encountered so far.”
He laughed and turned to hotwire the old blue Pontiac.
* * * *
Neil Donovan whacked the golf ball in the general direction of the green. He played golf more like lacrosse or hockey, with very little finesse. But he enjoyed it. That was the important thing.
He handed the club back to his caddy and stomped off toward his ball, leaving behind the three-star generals who comprised the rest of his foursome. They preferred to travel by golf cart, anyway, at a more leisurely pace, drinking mint juleps and breaking into song every once and a while. This was such a frivolous country, he sometimes thought.
When Donovan located his ball, rather inconveniently in a sand trap, he glanced around then kicked it out. His back to what he could hear was his approaching caddy, he held out one hand. “Give me the five iron,” he ordered.
Seconds later, he had the five iron, but it was held against his windpipe by someone who he very much suspected was not his caddy, which was making it difficult to breathe.
“We paid you a lot of money, Mr. Donovan,” a husky voice said at his ear. “Enough to fund your bloated agency for quite some time, and all we wanted was for you to get a simple job done. Yet here it is days later and we understand it is not done.”
Donovan clawed at the golf club until it was eased enough to allow him to take a deep breath, though the stainless steel was still at his throat. He couldn’t see whoever had sneaked up on him—and he was going to kill his fucking useless caddy, who also happened to be an agent charged with protecting him, for letting this happen—but his assailant was bigger and stronger than he was and he wouldn’t dream of trying to overpower him. That was what other people were for.
“It will be over. Soon. Don’t worry.” Be happy, he almost added, feeling a little giddy, perhaps from lack of oxygen.
“We do worry. You told us it would look like an on-the-job casualty and that is not how it is unfolding, eh?”
The man’s accent was very slight, like his master, who Donovan had only spoken with on the phone.
Luckily, Donovan had received an update on the hit from that moron Conley just this morning. “We’ve come up with something even better. He’s being formally executed, as a mole. As we speak,” he added, hoping the pressure on his windpipe would ease up even more. “The documentation we fabricated on his treason is extensive. Full proof.”
“The only documentation we care for is proof of the kill. We’re running out of time.”
“Yes, I understand his, ah, his royal… that is to say your master’s, ah…that he is not doing very well.”
The golf club hitched even further into the skin of his throat and he gasped.
“Do not speak of that,” the man hissed.
What he had to do for a buck!
“Yes, yes, of course. In any case, your master will have his proof very soon.”
“We had better, or he will feed you to his dogs.”
As if. No wet-behind-the-ears half-shit from whatever-the-crap country out in never-never land would dare touch him. The golf club tightened. Well, they’d touch him, but they wouldn’t kill him. There would be too many repercussions.
What he didn’t understand, though, was why this man’s master didn’t just kill Vale himself—not that it was so easy to do that, as he was discovering. But why didn’t he try? Why involve Vale’s own employer? Although given the amount they had offered Donovan for the deal, they presumably knew his cooperation would not be much of a problem.
Donovan knew who wanted Vale killed and he was one of the few people in the world who even knew why, or thought he did. But the need for this round-about death through the Agency? That narrative was a little confusing.
And the fact that Conley on his own initiative had involved Monica Vale? Well, that was just priceless. Full circle. Even as he was having the amusing thought, he realized his club had clattered to the grass. He didn’t turn around just yet, waiting for the strongman to get away. He looked behind him only when he was sure he had.
Farther down on the hill in the distance, he saw his golf bag lying on its side by a clump of trees and trudged back toward it. A short investigation proved the caddy was in the bushes. Dead. He sighed.
Now, he would have to carry his own bag.
* * * *
In a small mineral-rich country that did not show up on most maps and, maybe because of that, escaped the brutal machinations of most other small, mineral-rich countries, an old man lay dying. Dying in the luxurious trappings of wealth—ivory silk sheets, the finest feather bed, a dozen doctors and a hundred servants hovering about to carry out his wishes—but dying still. He knew it. Had known it ever since the last operation by the finest surgeon in the Western world had failed to stop the malignant growth that was overtaking his worn-out body. He didn’t mind. At eighty-two years old, he had lived more years than his own father had. And far, far longer than his own son.
At the thought of his son, he let the prospect of dying fill his head with fanciful notions of an afterlife. Perhaps he and his son would meet again at the pearly gates, or be
greeted by a flock of virgins or whatever was supposed to happen in heaven or paradise or wherever. He couldn’t remember the specifics since he had long ago rejected an afterlife, and most other precepts of organized religion, as he steered his country toward peace and prosperity. No religious zealots welcome in his kingdom. Freedom of religion, certainly, but none of the fanaticism that had been rampant in past centuries in his country. He had hoped, once, to have transformed his kingdom even further in his reign, into something more resembling the democracies that he had so admired and to which his son had, for all purposes, pledged his own allegiance. But it had never happened. He was the same all-powerful ruler that his own father had been, though he liked to think—no, he knew—that he was more benevolent. He had improved the lives of his people, educated them. But it was not enough. Like every other all-powerful ruler that had ever lived, he was going to die, and with his death he would leave an uncertain future for his country.
If his son had lived, the old man would have known the direction his country would go in after his death. Toward further progress, enlightenment even. Justice.
His son could have accomplished that in his own reign. He had been such a man. Strong, smart, powerful, but he had offered those gifts to a country that didn’t deserve them.
The old man regretted with every fiber of his still-barely-functioning body the day that he had succumbed to his American wife’s wish to have their son educated in the United States. At the time, he had been so in love with his young dark-haired bride that he had not thought through the implications properly. She’d spoken of how a Western education would benefit their son’s reign, when he succeeded to the throne. Had played up how an endless source of riches—which is what the old man had, and did not dispute it even then—would enable him to see his son as often as if the boy were at a local school and came home only for weekends. She’d encouraged him to buy a Gulfstream jet to ease the transition, when he had never before cared to own one. Back then, he’d been unaccustomed to travel, happy to stay in his own secluded kingdom, his own private Shangri-La, as he thought of it.
He had always been wary of the rest of the world that seemed to grow more insane even as he molded his country into a safer, more just place. But he had allowed his son to be educated overseas. He’d bought a jet to keep in a hangar near the boy’s school, wherever that happened to be, always ready to take him home to see his father, though the boy’s mother did not accompany him very often, even from the beginning.
And the visits home had become more sporadic—especially after the old man was no longer so in love with his wife and the feeling appeared to be mutual—until if he’d wanted to see his own son, he’d had to summon the jet himself and go to the United States. Always incognito, no fuss or ceremony.
When his son had decided to stay in America after college, to take the path he had decided to take, the old man had recognized what his estranged wife had done all those years before. She had taken their boy back to her own country and thereby deprived him of the one he was born into. Deprived him of his birthright.
To disastrous effect.
He still blamed his wife for it, though she had long since died, a decade before their son had.
When the old man thought back to the destiny his son had chosen, he practically cried. To work at such a place, to become a part of all this, this Western insanity. What foolishness! He couldn’t blame his son’s career path on the boy’s mother. No, that was the direct result of some recruitment at university, an elite colleague who’d recognized the boy’s abundant gifts and had turned them to the advantage of his adopted country.
The old man blamed himself at that point. When he’d realized the dangerous role that the boy had taken on, he should have dragged him back to his country, kidnapped him if he’d had to, the whole royal guard at his disposal to do so. If he had been his own father, he would have.
But even back then, he’d recognized that, as young as his son still was, it would not have been so easy to sway him from his choice. With force or otherwise. For one thing, the boy had a lot of force at his own disposal, though the old man didn’t understand that until later.
Part of him had been proud, proud that the boy wanted to paint on a bigger canvas, as he’d explained. Had wanted to make a difference in a world that was so fraught with conflict that it could swallow up the rest of the planet, their own small nation included, if the right people were not in charge in countries like America and around the world.
The old man, absolute ruler in his own realm, in the country the boy had been born into, richer in his own right than anyone in America, had never felt so provincial.
“I’m not accusing you of being a hick,” his son had said.
A hick? Did he even know his own son anymore? This boy who spoke his native tongue with no accent of course, but who also had no accent in speaking American English. Had lost it somewhere along the way.
The old man had finally just turned away.
Had broken off relations with his son, as if they’d each been ambassadors of their respective countries and no longer had embassies in the other’s land.
The old man had come back to his kingdom and cultivated his nephew Maxwell as his heir in the boy’s place, although he’d never been blind to the faults that had seemed to be in Maxwell’s genes, no matter how he’d tried to teach him. The son of his own half-brother, Maxwell was, like his late father, greedy, selfish…and worst of all, stupid.
But when the old man had reached out to his son years later, to try to mend the divide, to get him to see his obligation to his own country, it had been too late. A stranger in a lavish office had greeted him. His son, but not his son. A stranger who’d been guarded, secretive. A grown man who he’d felt as if he had perhaps never known. Only when the old man had gotten up to leave, intending to try again—next week, next month, whenever—only then had he seen his boy in the man’s wary face.
The embrace they’d shared on his departure had had to last the old man over thirty years. His son had been dead soon after.
Killed by the corrupt system he had tried to help.
Or more precisely, killed by a woman.
Yes, though he had never pried into his son’s life while they were estranged—never wanting to know all the danger he was courting—he’d made sure to find out how he’d died, as difficult as that had been at the time.
At first, he could not believe it. It had seemed impossible that so slight a girl could take down his powerful son. But beneath her deceptive petite form was a devil. A red-headed devil who worked for that damned agency. In the beginning, he had tried to extract revenge. A life for a life, that was what he’d wanted, even though he had banished such a legal right in his own country. He’d ignored his own hypocrisy, thirsty for satisfaction for his son’s murder. He would not have been a father if he had not. But the startling discovery he had made in the process had caused him to back off.
No, he would not deprive that woman of her life.
Not to mention, doing so seemed near impossible, anyway.
But he had wanted no part of the child at the time.
A child who had grown up to look very much like his father. And who went to work for that cursed agency, just like his mother. Just like his father.
Only when the old man had been dying had he thought of the boy again. A boy no longer. His grandson.
Only then had he thought that maybe he didn’t have to leave his country to the weak, evil man he was beginning to believe his nephew was. He could rescue his grandson from his mother and the agency she had doomed him to—and make the boy heir to his throne.
But in trying to bring his grandson to him, he may have unleashed something worse.
He was beginning to get very worried, for himself, for his country…and for his grandson.
“What are you thinking of, Uncle?”
The wheedling tone of his heir brought him away from his ruminations on the past and into the very cloudy present. Maxwell stood by h
is bedside in the lavish traditional robes he favored—so much easier to hide the girth that his gluttony had resulted in—diamonds and gold twinkling from every finger and from chains around his neck. Cologne wafted from his bloated body in such intensity that the old man thought he might vomit. But it was important to make Maxwell believe that nothing had changed between them. He had to make him believe that.
At least until he could locate his grandson.
“Nothing, nothing at all, Maxwell.”
He had to find this Jonathon Vale. The kingdom would not accept a ruler outside the royal line.
His grandson was his only hope.
And he didn’t have much time.
His nephew went to fluff his pillows. The old man tensed and the royal guard at his side stiffened.
Maxwell laughed. “Is something the matter?”
“I’m tired. Leave me.”
“Yes, of course, Uncle. You must conserve your strength.” Maxwell nodded to the royal guard, telegraphing him a message with his eyes that said he’d have him beheaded as soon as the old man died. But the guard was one of the old king’s most stalwart protectors. He met Maxwell’s eyes with a ferocity that said right back you’re not king yet. And until you are, you will not lay a finger on the old one.
But he needn’t have worried. The old man knew Maxwell would never kill him. He thought his inheritance was coming soon enough and wanted there to be no question about his legitimate succession. The people remembered too well Maxwell’s father’s short, bloody, attempt at a coup, which they had rejected almost unanimously. The people accepted Maxwell now because he was the only heir and the old man had groomed him to succeed to the sacred role. Without that imprimatur, Maxwell would have a much harder time. And his nephew was a coward. Like everything else in life, Maxwell wanted his accession to the throne to be easy.
Well, not if the old man could help it.
When his nephew left the room, he asked the guard, “What progress have you made?”
“There’s been a complication.” When the guard explained, the old man felt even more fatigued.
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