Alone With an Escort

by Angela Claire

  Whatever. It’d take an army of psychiatrists to try to psychoanalyze Monica Vale.

  “I think the old man will be especially pleased about that,” Donovan continued. “My understanding is he was always trying to kill her until he found out about the boy’s existence. Then they came to some accord and he stopped. If he finds out Monica took out his grandson as well as his son, he’ll go bat-shit. Believe me. If he doesn’t die before then, it’ll probably give him a heart attack.”

  “As long as it’s the Agency, I can sell it to the king. He hates the whole organization. But I don’t care who does it.”

  “Just a little poetic justice.”

  “My words exactly, Neil.”

  Donovan whipped around at the sound of Monica’s voice, here in his study, in his home in Virginia. This could not be good.

  “I’ll have to call you back,” he told Maxwell and hung up. “Monica, this is a surprise.”

  Dressed in her trademark black catsuit, she looked very much the same as she had all the years he had known her. She waved an iPhone at him.

  He tried to be optimistic. “You didn’t have to bring me the recording yourself. I know how hard this job must have been for you.”

  “You, of all people, probably thought you knew how easy it was for me.”

  She threw him the iPhone. He thought he recognized it as Conley’s.

  “Go ahead, press Play.”

  Stalling for time, he did, though he knew what he would see. And sure enough, there it was. The scene of Conley spilling his guts that her son was set up.

  “You don’t have to watch the whole thing, Neil. You get the idea.”

  Donovan put down the phone. “Don’t do anything stupid here, Monica.”

  “When have you ever known me to do anything stupid?”

  “I’ve known it a time or two, Mother.”

  Jonathon Vale, who Donovan had never met though he knew on sight from the security cameras at headquarters, stepped out of the shadows from one corner of the room. “Remember when you wanted me to take ballet because you thought it would improve my flexibility? That was a non-starter,” he told Donovan. “I was nine. What nine-year-old boy would take ballet—you know what I mean?”

  Neither of them were holding a gun on him, but he was well aware either could kill him very quickly, nonetheless, with a gun, a pen, a stapler. This whole study was a minefield for him with these two agents in the room.

  “So, you two have made up.” He kept his voice casual. “How nice. I do believe in strong families. My own son is sleeping upstairs. And if you think you can come into my home and intimidate me with your well-worn bag of tricks, don’t bother! I invented them! And I’ll tell you when—”

  “Save the blustering speech, Neil,” Monica interrupted.

  “There are a dozen agents guarding this house,” he came back with, which happened to be true. More or less. Well, at least six. “Full-time. Always are. No matter how quick you are, you’ll never get away with this. The government will come down on you so hard, you’ll be lucky if they just waterboard you.”

  “Well, you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?” Monica said. “Besides these unsavory side projects like trying to have my son killed, I understand you’ve gotten up to some questionable tactics in that little prison of yours. The one you run for the tough cases who won’t talk when you need them to.”

  “Please! As if you ever get to take the moral high ground with me, Monica. That’s a total joke. Maybe you wouldn’t kill your own son—even raptors protected their young I believe—but don’t forget about his father when you try to get all holy on me!”

  “Same old bull-shitter you always were, Neil.”

  Donovan snapped his head around to the other dark corner of the room where the voice had come from.

  The man who emerged from the shadows this time to stand beside Jonathon Vale, an older version of his son, was a complete surprise to Donovan. But his very presence showed him how he had misjudged the situation. Misjudged everything.

  In fact, called into question everything Donovan had thought he knew. If he wasn’t almost surely about to be assassinated, he’d be having a crisis of identity right now.

  Because the very presence of this man meant Donovan hadn’t accomplished the boldest power grab imaginable so many years ago when he had deposed his boss at the government’s most secret agency and had him killed—he’d been played. Played all along by the couple in front of him.

  And now their fucking whelp was still breathing instead of dying like a good boy because the Agency needed the money.

  “You’re just trying to keep this conversation going, Neil,” the man said, “until your loyal agents outside burst out of their foxholes or wherever they are and come to your rescue.”

  Donovan cocked his head. “I must say, it’s not very nice to see you again. Unless my atheism was unjustified and there is an afterlife.”

  “No. Flesh and blood here.”

  “And here I was just extolling the values of family. How quaint. You and Monica have been very naughty, though, haven’t you?” And they had been. He hadn’t had a hint of their perfidy in all these years since. Never worried this man might come back from the dead. Never doubted he was dead. He was confused by their motivation—where the hell had he been all this time?—but didn’t care to get into it now. But he did need to stall, so he added, “Oh, your father’s dying, by the way, if you haven’t heard.”

  And where the fuck were those agents who should be bursting in right now? As soon as he had put down the phone at Monica’s voice, he had pushed the very convenient panic button on the side of it. He knew he had made budget cuts, but their response time was ridiculously slow.

  “I heard about my father. In fact, I made it a point to have my country’s paper sent to me.”

  “And so, you came out of wherever for a quick death-bed visit with the old patriarch and decided to step in on behalf of your son. Very admirable. Tell me, did you know about your son all along and just walk away from him?”

  “None of your business,” Monica said, nothing in her voice or expression to give her away, but he had a sense he’d hit a nerve.

  “I’m guessing you’ve been especially bad, haven’t you, Monica? Was your little Jonathon a secret? No shared custody, I’m assuming. You don’t seem very good at sharing.”

  “If it were up to me, Neil, you’d be dead already,” she pointed out.

  “Women!” he remarked with a smile. “So emotional!”

  Nobody laughed.

  “You’re canceling my contract on your son? Is that what this little meeting is for?”

  “I, for one, am canceling it,” Jonathon said.

  Donovan would never underestimate the product of these two individuals’ gene pools. But with his parents here, it seemed like overkill for him to tag along. “So, you came here to tell me to my face? How nice. Very grown-up of you. And you brought your mommy and daddy along, too.”

  “More like they brought me along. I didn’t have any feelings about Conley one way or the other, but I have to say I don’t think you’ll be much of a loss. I wanted to be here when you get what’s coming to you.”

  He hadn’t paid much attention to Jonathon Vale before he’d put out the order to kill him. Monica was always the Vale he kept track of. But he realized the son had a lot of his father in him. Donovan would have realized eventually that his natural sense of power was a threat and done away with him, whether he was paid for it or not. And if those agents ever showed up that was exactly what he would do. But just the thought of this young man’s gifts irked him and the urge to needle him was too much to resist, whether it was wise or not.

  “Where’s Dr. Barrett? That was her name, wasn’t it? Get caught in the cross-fire, did she? My goodness, I hope one of your parents didn’t take her out. I recall in one of Conley’s reports that you’re quite the man with the ladies. I suspect you liked her a little, didn’t you?”

  “Shut the fuck up,”
Jonathon responded, almost as good as his mother in keeping his voice blank, but not quite.

  Nobody seemed in much of a hurry to kill him, either. Donovan suspected that whatever this trio had done, it meant his agents weren’t coming to save him.

  He needed to deal. He switched gears from stalling for time to making his case.

  “Monica, you know how disastrous it would be for you to kill me. The scandal. Think of the repercussions for the Agency. The Agency you’ve given your whole life to.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t very much like what you’ve turned it into. The more I’m finding out about where I really work these days, the more I don’t like it. You have to go, Neil.”

  “And he’s going to take over?” Donovan pointed to his old boss. “After all these years! He never had the stomach for any of this. You know that.”

  “I’m not taking over,” the man said.

  “I am,” she added.

  Monica Vale heading the Agency! That would be a joke. “You’re just a trained killer. You’d never get the job.”

  “I’m taking a page out of your book and giving myself the job, Neil. I suddenly want to burst through the glass ceiling.”

  Donovan hadn’t been out in the field for decades. He was no match for Monica or Jonathon, even if he discounted the third individual, which he was getting the feeling he shouldn’t have done in the first place so long ago.

  He tried to play it casual. “So, I notice I’m not dead yet. What’s the plan here?”

  Jonathon spoke, “You’re going to call your client back and tell him it’s done. I’m dead.”

  “To what end? He wanted proof, as you know.”

  “You don’t get to worry about the ends, anymore, Neil,” Monica said. “Just do it. Call him from your special little red phone—on the speaker please, so I can record it—and tell him your agent is still out on the job and doesn’t want to send the recording of Jonathon’s death through regular channels. He—or she—is coming in to transmit the proof on a secure line, and going to set a bomb to cover up the evidence of the murder, later. But tell him you wanted to let him know right away.”

  “Why should I do all that, if you’re going to kill me, anyway?”

  Just then, several agents came in, guns drawn. Before he could feel even a modicum of relief that the cavalry had arrived, Monica said, “We’re not going to kill you, Neil. This is the Agency under new management. I’ve used the last few days to clear my promotion with the powers that be—something that, as you recall, you neglected to do in advance—and I have their support. All above-board. No shadow director. Just me.”

  “So, you’re not killing me?” He didn’t believe that for a second.

  “No. We’re arresting you.”

  She smiled when she said it and he didn’t know whether to believe her, but what the hell else could he do?

  He made the call, and when he was done, one of the agents slipped handcuffs on him.

  “Since we’re so above-board and everything, I assume you’ll tell my family.”

  “More than you ever told them.” As they led him out, Monica added, “And you’ll be right at home, Neil. They’re taking you to the prison you set up. It really seems to fit the bill. What was that you said about poetic justice?”

  Only as he was being led out did Donovan realize that Jonathon Vale and his father had melted away just before the agents had burst into the room.

  * * * *

  Monica Vale had outlined the entire plan to Veronica and Jonathon in Jonathon’s kitchen with his father standing by and members of the fearsome Agency lurking on the cliffs outside. And of all the things that were contemplated in the plan, the thing that Veronica had the most trouble with was that the plan involved a lot of flying. She still wasn’t sure what U.S. state Shangri-La was in—somewhere in the West—but they would be flying away from it right away.

  In fact, after Monica had talked to the agents outside and flown away in their helicopter, taking Conley’s body with them, Veronica and Jonathon and his mysterious father—a prince—drove to a hangar where a Gulfstream jet that seemed to be part of some royal fleet was waiting for them. They took the jet on a several-hours-long flight to a suburb in Virginia. Veronica waited in the plane while Jonathon and his father joined up with his mother and confronted this Donovan person, who seemed to be the cause of all their problems. Or not all of them. That was what the next leg of the flight was for, from Virginia to some country she’d never heard of. Just her and Jonathon and Jonathon’s father again. His mother would be heading back to Shangri-La to plant a bomb, along with a John and Jane Doe from a local morgue.

  And this was the family she wanted to be a part of?

  She recalled a conversation back at Jonathon’s house before his mother left.

  “You know, if I had intended to kill you, Jonathon, your best strategy would have been the chicken-cluck sum butterfly.”

  “Yes, Mother, that was just what I had in mind.”

  “I trust that isn’t what it sounds like,” Veronica had noted.

  “No,” his mother had answered. “Well, yes, perhaps, but it’s actually a very complicated maneuver. Most of my trainees never got it, but Jonathon was a natural. Of course, you should have launched into it much earlier,” she had pointed out to him.

  Jonathon had grinned at Veronica. “Yes, my reflexes were off because I was still digesting that my mother appeared to be about to kill me.”

  “Well, let that be a lesson to you,” Monica had said, in all apparent seriousness.

  But as much as this whole thing was crazy, Veronica had to admit that being with Jonathon was what she wanted, when all was said and done, flying or no flying.

  She did wonder how white her face must have gone at Monica’s casual ticking off of all the flights that would be involved in the plan, at least at the beginning. She must have looked deathly pale because Jonathon took her aside right away and said, “You don’t have to do this, Veronica. This is my problem, not yours.”

  She had tried to gather her composure. “Seems to me I’ve been getting shot at quite a bit these last few days.”

  “My mother’s plan will take care of all that. But you don’t have to be a part of it. We can get you a train ticket back to North Dakota and you can take up with your life right where you left it.”

  “You know that’s impossible.” She had searched his face, but it looked as closed as his mother’s.

  “My mother has no right to guilt trip you or scare you into staying with me. If I could turn back time so you could go back to your lab in the middle of fucking nowhere and do your experiments and never see me in the first place, I would, Veronica. I swear I would.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t trade my time with you for anything.”

  He’d swallowed, hard. “I wish I could be with you. I won’t lie. What I feel is…but I…I hook up with women. I told you that,” he’d said harshly. “That’s what I do. You don’t need to ruin your career, your life, by having my mother pull you into this scheme. She’s playing you by telling you it would be safer for you and me if there were no loose ends and you went along. She’s extremely manipulative.”

  “I heard that,” his mother had called out from the kitchen.

  “I like her.” Veronica had smiled.

  Finally, he’d said, “Well, it probably is safer to keep you with me until this is all done. The rest we can talk about later. You sure you’re okay with the, ah, flying stuff?”

  Next thing she’d known, she was in the air again.

  The Gulfstream was so luxurious that with the window shades down. she could almost pretend she was in a hotel lounge. On the ground.

  When Jonathon brought up the wireless to play a movie on the screen of one wall and flicked off the lights, she shifted to pretending she was in a movie theater.

  No one was much interested in the movie but all three of them pretended to watch it with every ounce of their concentration.

  To Veronica’s
surprise, Jonathon and his father did not seem to feel the need to converse. If one of her parents had come back alive, even for an hour, even for a minute, she could not see herself spending it in stony silence.

  But Jonathon said nothing to his father the whole way to Virginia, not even voicing the many questions he must have, and his father, though unfailingly polite to her, offering her drinks, snacks and so on, did not try to talk to his son, not even in the superficial manner of fellow passengers on a plane.

  When they landed at the small airport in Virginia and both men got out into a waiting limousine, Veronica felt almost relieved to have the source of tension removed, though the pilot and co-pilot emerged heavily armed to guard her while they were gone. Even the sight of machine guns had not unnerved her as much as the silence between the father and son. But if she had felt it, how much more must they have?

  By the time they both came back, a few hours later, and the pilots returned to the cockpit, Veronica had decided that enough was enough. If Jonathon wasn’t going to ask all the questions he must have, then she would.

  She endured the takeoff with eyes closed and felt Jonathon’s light touch on her hair, soothing. It would be so wonderful to get where they were going. Will be. Not would. Will be, she assured herself. No conditional about it. Everything was going according to plan, Jonathon had assured her and there was just this last little thing.

  Not so little, she supposed. Important. Necessary.

  As she understood it, Jonathon’s father had insisted on it and had made his cooperation with whatever Monica had done at the Agency conditional on it. Apparently, he had some pull there due to something she didn’t quite understand, but would get Jonathon to explain to her later when this was all over.

  For now, she wanted to hear some explanations for things Jonathon didn’t know. Only his father did.