by Lee Goldberg
He kicked the door shut and took a step toward her. She doused him in the face with the pepper spray, blinding him. He growled in rage and pain, whipped out a switchblade, and charged her.
That was when she realized she’d made a serious tactical error diving into the galley kitchen. He was temporarily blinded, but she was boxed in, with no room to maneuver. He didn’t have to see her to stab her to death. All he had to do was corner her and keep plunging the knife into her. She’d be hacked to pieces.
Margo scrambled back, reaching out wildly for something, anything, to use as a weapon and, just as he was about to stab his blade into her chest, her hand closed on the iron handle of the frying pan.
She swung the pan, smacking his skull with a satisfying crack, at the same instant she felt the knife slide into her right breast like it was made of butter.
His head whipped sharply to one side, his face smacking hard into the edge of the counter as he fell. He hit the floor on his back, his wide, dead eyes staring up at her, the bloody knife still in his twitching hand.
And that was when she realized she knew the son of a bitch.
It was Waldo!
His face wasn’t all that was familiar about him. He reminded her of the first person she ever saw die, an incident that also happened in a kitchen and also involved the defensive use of frying pans.
What were the odds of that ever happening twice to someone?
Her chest stung. She looked down at herself with a strange sense of detachment, as if her body wasn’t her own, and saw blood seeping out of a jagged tear in her T-shirt.
Margo calmly set the pan back on the stove and then lifted up her shirt and her sports bra to examine her breast, wiping away the blood with a dishrag so she could get a good look at the wound.
Waldo had stabbed her above her right nipple. The cut wasn’t deep, but it would probably leave a scar, especially since she’d have to stitch it up herself. Hospitals asked questions about stab wounds and reported suspicious injuries to law enforcement.
Somehow seeing her injury made it hurt a lot more. Maybe she shouldn’t have looked. She pressed the dishrag against the wound to stop the bleeding and stared down at Waldo while she considered her situation.
How did he find out about her so fast?
Her cell phone rang. Only two people had the number. Ian and the Agency. She reached into her waist pack but took a moment to catch her breath, not wanting to alarm either possible caller, before answering the phone.
“Good morning,” she said cheerfully.
“It’s me.” It was Kelton, her handler. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No, sir.” She’d never been more awake than she was at that moment.
“I’ve got the information that you asked for and we’ve identified the man in the photo you gave us. His name is Magar Orlov. He’s a GRU hatchet man.”
She looked down at the Russian spy. “He was.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s dead on my kitchen floor.”
“How did that happen?”
“He attacked me when I came into my apartment,” Margo said.
Kelton sighed. She figured he was tired just thinking about the work he’d have to do to clean up after her. “Did you have to kill him?”
“I wasn’t thinking about his survival at the time. I was thinking about mine.”
“That was a mistake,” Kelton said. “We can’t interrogate a dead man.”
She realized Kelton’s sigh wasn’t about the mess she’d made but disappointment that she’d killed their best lead to figure out why the Russians had murdered two women in San Diego and an American couple in Porto. Now she was disappointed in herself, too.
That was when she remembered that Orlov didn’t always act alone. There was at least one person watching his back in San Diego . . . and whoever it was could be going after Ian right now.
“I’ll call you back,” she said and disconnected before Kelton could respond.
She called Ian’s house. It rang a dozen times and nobody answered. She tried his cell phone. Again, no answer. She tried texting him. No response. She called back Kelton, who answered on the first ring.
“What’s going on?” Kelton asked.
“That’s what I need you to tell me,” Margo said. “I’m worried about Ian. Can you get your eye in the sky over his house?”
“Hold on.”
While Margo waited, she put her phone on speaker, crouched beside Orlov’s body, and searched his pockets. All she came up with were the keys to a Toyota and a wallet containing two hundred dollars in twenties, a fake California driver’s license, and credit cards under the name “Edward Aarons.”
Kelton came back on the line. “I can’t get a visual on his house.”
“Why not?”
“Because of all the smoke,” he said. “The hill is on fire.”
It didn’t take long for the plume of smoke to be spotted and reported to the authorities, but the remote location of Ian’s home in the Santa Monica Mountains worked in Beth’s favor. She and her men were able to stay on the scene until the house was fully engulfed in flame, ensuring Ludlow’s demise, and fled only a few minutes before the arrival of the firefighters. Her crew left behind their leaking Weedwackers as evidence to help investigators determine the cause of the blaze, which had quickly spread to neighboring property thanks to the embers from Ian’s house and winds.
She drove the stolen truck and the two gunmen down to a diner on the Pacific Coast Highway, where she had a motorcycle parked. Beth got out, gave the keys to one of the men so he could dispose of the truck, and she rode the motorcycle south along the coastline to Shutters, a beachfront hotel in Santa Monica, and reserved a suite for herself.
Killing was exhausting work and she deserved a little vacation. But first she had one errand left to do.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Beverly Hills Hotel. Beverly Hills, California. November 14. 8:10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Dwight Edney was enjoying a big breakfast of steak, eggs, caviar, and Dom Pérignon in his suite at the landmark Beverly Hills Hotel, which for decades had been a glamorous watering hole for the Hollywood elite until it was bought by the sultan of Brunei. The kingdom’s policy of stoning gays and adulterous women made many politically correct actors and talent agents uncomfortable power-lunching in the Polo Lounge or cheating on their spouses in the poolside cabanas because they might be singled out for social media shaming for being intolerant.
But Edney didn’t feel any discomfort, at least not until his phone vibrated and he saw a text from his mother, summoning him to a meeting in Baldwin Hills in one hour. It was only eight miles south, a straight shot down La Cienega Boulevard, but in Los Angeles traffic he might just make it if he left right now.
He swore to himself and pushed his plate aside, swallowed his glass of champagne, and called the valet to bring his rented BMW to the front of the hotel.
Edney arrived ten minutes early. He parked his BMW beside one of the thousands of bobbing pump jacks that dotted the vast, parched oil field in Baldwin Hills. He wasn’t expecting to meet his mother here. She’d simply made the arrangements as a go-between for his unidentified local handler. This would be their first meeting. Whoever it was had chosen a good spot. It was remote, despite being in the middle of Los Angeles.
Baldwin Hills was known as the “Black Beverly Hills,” not for the black gold deep below Edney’s feet, but because it was home to so many wealthy African Americans. He knew that Beverly Hills also sat on top of an active oil field, but that was a dirty little secret, the pumps hidden inside fake buildings throughout the city. Even what passed for the real world in Los Angeles was just another Hollywood set.
God, he hated it here.
Edney heard the motorcycle before he saw it and he tracked its progress toward him from the cloud of dust it kicked up over the low hills. He got out of his car and leaned against it.
The motorcycle roared up the dirt road
and came to a stop beside him. The rider straddling the Harley-Davidson was a woman dressed in black, from her helmet down to her boots. She removed her helmet, revealing hair dyed as black as the leather. Whoever she was, she smelled of smoke, not from cigarettes but a campfire in the woods. It was an intriguing oddity.
“There are decades where nothing happens,” Edney said.
“And there are weeks where decades happen,” Beth said, completing the Lenin quote that was their coded introduction.
“Everybody knows who I am,” Edney said. “Who are you?”
“My name isn’t important.” She got off the motorcycle. “Call me whatever you like.”
He studied her for a moment. “Rachel Green.”
“Are you a Friends fan or is this a test to see how American I am?”
“Both,” he said, certain now that she was an American-born sleeper agent, just like him. “Why are we here?”
“The president of the United States is meeting privately today at a high school auditorium in Dunn, Texas, with the families of the militia men killed last night by the Viboras. No press are allowed inside.” Beth reached into her pocket and handed him a thumb drive. “This is a partial recording of what he told one of those families.”
He made a show of admiring the tiny device. “It’s amazing you were able to get this recording, considering that he hasn’t met with the families yet. He’s still visiting the ranch and meeting with law-enforcement officials. I guess you haven’t been keeping up with the news.”
She gave him a cold look. “It’s the president’s voice. You can broadcast it with confidence, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Interesting choice of words, he thought. She said it was the president’s voice, not that it was the president. “Have you heard it?”
“No, but I’m told what he says is incredibly newsworthy.”
“I’m sure it is or the Kitchen wouldn’t be telling me to broadcast it.” Edney pocketed the drive.
“This scoop will make you a media sensation,” she said.
“I already am,” he said. “I’ve got the highest-rated show on the highest-rated news network. Perhaps you didn’t notice.”
Even as he said it, he realized he’d made a mistake. If you have to tell someone you’re powerful and famous, then either you aren’t or you’re embarrassingly insecure. He’d given her the edge in their relationship and he’d never get it back. And he’d probably lost any shot he might have had to sleep with her. He saw her disappointment in him on her face.
“There will be a lot of pressure exerted on you by the White House, law enforcement, and the media to reveal your source for the recording,” Beth said.
“I can take it,” Edney said. “In fact, I welcome it. Their outrage will just keep me, my show, and the story in the spotlight for even longer.”
“You should assume that after this tape airs, you will be under total surveillance at all times,” she said. “You will need to take extreme precautions.”
“I’ll have my office and hotel room regularly swept for bugs,” he said, “and I’ll be sure not to buy any more crack from transvestite hookers on Hollywood Boulevard.”
Beth ignored his joke, reached into another pocket, and handed him a burner phone. “If you need me, call or text the number programmed into this phone or use the dead drop in the park across from your hotel. The drop will be checked twice a day. I will be your contact for the remainder of your time on the West Coast.”
“How long will that be?” he asked.
She shrugged. “We shall see.”
“What is the outcome we are waiting for?”
“You’ll know it when it happens,” she said. “The whole world will.”
“But you already do,” he said. “It would help if I knew the big picture.”
She climbed back onto her Harley. “How would it help?”
“The Kitchen would gain the benefit of my perspective and expertise,” he said. “I could do a better job shaping the story to achieve the desired result.”
“That’s your mistake, Dwight. You think that your opinion, outside of what you are told to say on television, matters to anyone in Russia.” She put on her helmet. “It doesn’t. To the Kitchen, you are a delivery device, a talking head who can influence an easily manipulated percentage of the American TV audience into accepting what you tell them as fact. That’s all Russia wants from you.”
“And what about you?”
“I am also a delivery device.” Beth started up her Harley and the engine answered with its trademark guttural roar, like a rudely awakened beast that was pissed off and ready to eat.
Edney raised his voice to be heard over the motor. “What do you deliver?”
“Death,” she said and sped off.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Ian Ludlow’s Bunker. Malibu, California. November 14. 1:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
The underground bunker’s air vent, a radio antenna, and a camera were hidden in a fireproof imitation oak in a stand of trees on the hillside above Ian’s house. The trees were barely scorched by the flames and the camera provided Ian and Mei with the perfect angle to watch the firefighters battle the fifty-acre blaze on the bunker’s mounted flat screen.
Thanks to several surgically precise water drops from helicopters and hard work by scores of firefighters, the flames were quickly extinguished before they could become a raging firestorm or take any other homes. Even so, the battle made for some exciting television and play-by-play from KNX 1070 on the radio.
Ian and Mei sat on the couch, sharing a bowl of popcorn, while on TV a group of firefighters were using spades to put out hot spots on the charred hillsides and two coroners in white jumpsuits carried a body bag out from the smoking ashes of his home.
“Who died?” Mei asked.
“I did,” Ian said.
“You’re sitting right here,” she said.
“You know that, and I know that, but maybe it’s better if nobody else does for a while,” Ian said. “Especially whoever wants me dead.”
“That explains why we haven’t left the bunker yet, but it doesn’t answer my question. Who is in the body bag?”
“The skeleton in my office.”
“Won’t the medical examiner discover that it’s not you?”
“Eventually,” he said, “but it buys us some time.”
“Time for what?”
“To figure out who killed the Americans in Porto and just tried to kill me,” he said. “I was lucky they came for me here, where I had a place to hide, and that we had some warning.”
She set the bowl of popcorn aside and snuggled closer to him.
Watching arson investigators and Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies poke around the ashes of Ian’s home for clues soon became boring to watch for both of them. Ian turned off the radio and picked a James Bond movie from his end-of-the-world DVD collection to play until the firefighters and investigators were gone and it was safe to emerge from the bunker.
Ian and Mei watched Tomorrow Never Dies, which starred Pierce Brosnan as Bond and Michelle Yeoh as a Chinese spy. Together, the two secret agents foiled a plot by an insane global media magnate who sinks a British destroyer and shoots down a Chinese fighter jet to provoke a war that would somehow give him exclusive broadcasting rights to all of Asia. Ian didn’t understand how that would work, or how anybody at the studio could think that “broadcasting rights” was exciting stakes for a spy thriller, but by the end of the movie, he’d figured out an entirely different plot, the one he’d nearly died for.
He knew the reason for the killings in San Diego, Porto, and Texas. And the irony was, he’d not only guessed what it was before he’d stepped on the plane to Portugal, but he’d seen at least three variations on the scheme a hundred times before.
The only thing he didn’t know for sure was who was behind the plot. But he thought he might know someone who could tell him. The trick would be getting him to talk.
“
I could play a part like that,” Mei said, intruding on his thoughts.
“Like what?” He was bewildered, as if he’d just been awakened from a nap. But that wasn’t unusual for him. Coming up with a story was often like being in a waking dream.
“Her.” She pointed to Michelle Yeoh, who was kissing Pierce Brosnan on a piece of floating wreckage on the South China Sea. “A Chinese secret agent. You could write the script as a starring role for me.”
“I’m having a hard time lately just writing my Straker novels.”
“But this would be easy.” She switched off the TV with the remote.
“Writing is never easy.”
“All you’d have to do is take our true story and fictionalize it,” she said, climbing onto his lap, straddling him. Out of habit, he looked over her shoulder to see if Match Game was on. “It could be about a Chinese spy who discovers that rogue elements in her government are plotting to assassinate the president of the United States. She has to stop it.”
“That would make her a traitor,” Ian said.
“That’s what the bad guys want people to think.” She put her hands on his shoulders and began to rub herself against his groin. “But the truth is, she’s doing it to save her country from making a terrible mistake.”
“You’re saying that she’s actually a patriot.” He put his hands on her hips.
“Yes!” she exclaimed, but it sounded to him more like she was confirming her arousal as she moved against him rather than mutual, creative understanding. “She teams up with an idealistic, visiting American novelist to sneak out of China and foil the plot.”
Her robe fell open, making him very aware of her nakedness and his erection intruding between them. He was hard, but yet strangely unexcited. Ian uncinched his robe. “Don’t you think that’s a little too close to the truth?”
“It’s a way to use our real-life stories, and the publicity we’ve already gained, and turn them into assets.” She mounted his hard-on, gasping as he entered her, yet he felt detached. “Don’t you see the beauty of it? Not only would this be a terrific movie, it could change the narrative about me.”
