by Zoe Sharp
“So you thought you’d kidnap her instead?”
“That was not a kidnapping,” Hamzeh denied. “It was…an extraction, from a dangerous situation.”
Kincaid raised his eyebrows but kept his voice level. “On what planet does dinner and a cello recital qualify as a dangerous situation?”
“Planet?” Hamzeh frowned. “I do not understand. I speak of events in Italy—on the island.”
“And I speak of events in New Jersey.”
“That was not my doing.”
“Then who was it?”
But Hamzeh shook his head. “Clean your own house, Mr Kincaid. You are in no position to ask me to do it for you.”
“And you, Mr Hamzeh are in no position to refuse. Not when you want something from me.”
Hamzeh gave a growl of frustration. He threw up his free hand—the one not wrapped around the pistol-grip of the M4 he carried—and swung away, back-handing a large and intricately patterned vase off its pedestal. The vase dropped, bounced once and then shattered into fragments.
I saw Helena flinch at the sudden explosion of violence. Gilbert de Bourdillon closed his eyes briefly and swallowed. I wondered how many hundreds of years that particular vase had been in his family.
“Fuck’s sake, Eric, just give the man what he wants, hey?” Orosco broke in. “You do the deal, like you shoulda right from the start, and we can all still walk away from this.”
“Not all of us,” Kincaid said quietly. “Like the man said—too much blood has been spilled.”
“Exactly!” Orosco said, emphasising his point with a stabbing finger. “Why cause any more?”
“Because that would be allowing Mr Hamzeh to break the one rule that’s most important to me. That’s not how I do business.”
“This is more than business.” Hamzeh said through his teeth. “You made promises. I, too, have made promises—to people who have, in their turn, made promises. And so it goes on. Your lack of honour has resulted in my own dishonour. You will deliver.”
“I cannot deliver,” Kincaid repeated. “Because, even if I was inclined to supply you—which I am not—I am no longer in possession of the merchandise.”
Hamzeh froze for a second that stretched into two, then three. His face hardened and he took a step back, bringing the M4 up into both hands.
“Then you are no longer of use to me.”
65
“Wait!”
It took me a second to pinpoint who’d spoken. My mind had been fully engaged with calculations of speed and distance, and angles of attack, and odds. How fast I’d have to move to get between gun and target. The impossibility of finding a blind spot that wouldn’t allow at least one of Hamzeh’s men a clear bead on me. The odds of me being able to stop any one of them from shooting Kincaid dead. Not to mention the odds of me surviving the attempt.
Not good, whichever way you squared it.
Gilbert de Bourdillon had retaken his seat but now he rose again with slow dignity.
“Please, wait,” he said, more quietly this time. “I may have something I can offer you by way of…reparation, shall we say? Something of value.”
Hamzeh eyed him with contempt. “You try to buy me with trinkets like some savage?” He waved a hand towards the shards of pottery from the vase he’d smashed. “I do not have either the contacts or the luxury of time to trade art for armaments!”
“Precisely. Which is why I am offering you the latter rather than the former,” de Bourdillon said.
Hamzeh paused, frowning, although whether that was because he was debating the offer or couldn’t quite work out the meaning of the words, I wasn’t sure.
“I’m sure Darius will be able to confirm for you that he and I are in the same line of business,” de Bourdillon said. “I don’t keep a full inventory here, of course—and nothing of a similar nature. But…I do have a few of the very latest heat-seeking Stinger missiles, man-portable, shoulder-fired, if that might be of interest?”
“Where?” Hamzeh demanded, but brought his weapon up when de Bourdillon took a step forward. “Ah, ah—no. Tell me, and we will check for ourselves.”
“My dear monsieur, this place may be a thousand years old but I can assure you that the security systems for my storage facility here are state of the art. Without me, alive and kicking, you will not get past them.” He flicked his eyes across the Syrians. “Perhaps one of your…associates would care to accompany me and take a look?”
Hamzeh exchanged a quick, speaking glance with his men, which somehow told me they were more than mere subordinates. He nodded, as if they’d discussed things out loud. “I will go.”
When Moustache gestured to the rest of us, Hamzeh regarded us with narrowed eyes. When he spoke, it was in English, so there would be no confusion on our part, jerking his chin to indicate Eric Kincaid. “If they give trouble, kill this one first.”
Into the silence that followed de Bourdillon’s departure with Khalid Hamzeh, it was Kincaid who spoke first.
“Was he telling the truth—about the kidnapping of your daughter?” he asked Orosco, his voice far too calm. The phrasing was deliberate, I suspected. ‘Your daughter’ rather than ‘my wife.’ A reminder of the relationship between Orosco and Helena, hammering it home.
Orosco wilfully misunderstood.
“Like the man said, it was an extraction. Things were—”
“Don’t!”
The word snapped out across the space between them. Orosco flinched in spite of himself, as though physically struck by it, then scowled at his own response. Both Moustache and Clean-Shaven tensed, their hands tightening around their weapons.
“Just…don’t. Don’t lie to me,” Kincaid said tiredly. “And, more important, don’t lie to Helena. You owe her that much, if nothing else.”
Orosco floundered for a moment in the face of his daughter’s stony gaze.
“What? No! You got some balls accusing me of something like that, Kincaid.” He tried on the different emotions of outrage and denial like costumes in a quick-change farce. “I mean, you think I’d lie to you, sweetheart? Aw, c’mon, hey? You’re my little girl. You think everything I’ve done hasn’t been with your best interests at heart?”
“You did, didn’t you? You had me kidnapped from my own anniversary dinner, damn you.” Helena’s face paled. “You bastard!”
She scrambled to her feet, but Moustache moved to intercept her with a sharp rebuke that needed no translation. Clean-Shaven, I noted, stayed back near the open doorway, covering the approach and keeping his eyes roving across the rest of us, just in case. Whoever trained these guys had done a first-class job.
They were right to be distrustful of the show, even if it was more than an act put on to distract them.
Just for a moment, Orosco considered keeping up the pretence of ignorance but clearly decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Not with so little likelihood of convincing anyone, least of all Helena. She stared him down with nostrils flared, her clenched hands trembling.
“Look here, kid, you were never in any real danger—”
“Well, that cuts no ice with me. You may have known it was all an act, but I damned well didn’t! I’d just been ambushed on the road, remember? I’d just watched Ellis die. He had a wife and another kid on the way. I’d just seen Illya almost give his life for mine. I’ve had nightmares ever since. And now you tell me that because the danger to me was never real, it’s all OK?”
“Sweetheart, that’s just crazy talk. You’re being a little over-emotional here, hey? That’s all right. It’s natural in this kinda situation. But later, when you’ve calmed down, you’ll accept I’ve always done everything in my power to keep you out of harm’s way.”
“No, you’ve done everything in your power to keep me under your control.”
“Now, sweetheart, you know that’s not—”
He never got to finish his denial, and not because he had a sudden revelation about how patronising he was being.
A shot cracked
out. In the doorway, Clean-Shaven spun with a cry and went down, letting go of the assault rifle to clutch at his leg. The weapon hit the door frame and clattered to one side.
The sound of the shot was loud enough to startle but at the same time way quieter than it should have been.
Outside.
The shot had come from outside. I was on my feet before Moustache had fully reacted to his comrade falling. Moustache wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t twisted towards him, presenting his back to me. I knew I wasn’t going to get a better chance than this.
I leapt.
66
Even as I launched, a part of me recognised the risk I was taking.
And the price of failure.
So, don’t get it wrong, then…
I bounced one foot off the low seat of the nearest sofa, using it as a springboard, adding gravity to momentum. At the last moment, Moustache caught my attack in his peripheral vision and started to spin, eyes widening.
He was too slow.
I hit him with the side of my open hand as I came down, slashing into his exposed temple between eyebrow and ear.
The idea of the one-punch knock-out blow may seem like an urban myth but it isn’t. There are certain strike points on the body that will do it, every time. It’s as much about technique as brute strength. I’d spent a lot of time over the years learning where to hit people and how hard. Now, it was automatic.
A split second after I landed the blow, Moustache’s body recognised his brain was no longer in charge. He continued to turn towards me, but by that time his arms were heavy and his knees had gone soft. I caught a brief flash of his expression, saw the shock and surprise in his dilated eyes.
He tried to bring the assault rifle to bear but couldn’t control his aim. I stepped inside his guard and punched into the bicep of his right arm—knuckles into muscle—tripping out his brachial nerve. The muzzle of the weapon drooped as his arm went numb. He tried to tighten his hand around the grip. I chopped across his forearm, attacking the radial nerve leading down to his thumb. It sprang open like a busted lock and the gun tumbled from his nerveless fingers.
As soon as he was disarmed, I was on him. I grabbed his face, jerking his head away and down. His torso followed. I went down with him, swinging him into position so his right arm was braced into hyper-extension across my bent knee. As we landed, I shoved hard on his wrist.
And felt his elbow snap without a twinge of regret.
If you’re going to take someone out of a fight, do it hard, do it fast, and make sure they stay out.
He let out a yell and began to struggle, still groggy from the initial blow but lent strength by pain and fear and a strong enough survival instinct to push and keep pushing.
I shifted my grip from his face to his neck, wrapping my arms around it and wedging them in tight. All I had to do then was squeeze, keeping my head tucked in so his flailing limbs failed to connect. He continued to thrash for maybe ten seconds, growing weaker all the time until finally he went limp.
Still I didn’t release the hold. Ten seconds became twenty. I could have tried to claim I was making sure the threat was neutralised, but that would have been a lie. I’d seen Williams’ body and wanted this man dead.
A hand on my shoulder jolted me out of it.
“Charlie, please—that’s enough.” Helena’s voice. “He’s gone. Let him go.”
I released the choke hold and thrust Moustache away from me. He rolled bonelessly onto the carpet. I tried not to wince at the way his broken arm flopped. Over by the doorway, Clean-Shaven was sitting propped against the wall, bloodied hands clasped to his wounded leg. He stared at me with both disgust and horror. I looked away.
As I came to my feet, I noted without any pleasure that Darius Orosco had managed to pick up the gun that Moustache dropped in the fight. He was holding it loosely but I didn’t like the way his right fist was curled around the grip, finger close to the trigger.
Kincaid gave me a brief nod and headed for the doorway where Clean-Shaven’s weapon had landed.
“Kincaid, hold up a minute,” Orosco said.
My heart sank, as much at his tone of voice as the words themselves. Kincaid must have heard it, too. He paused, raised an eyebrow in the direction of his father-in-law.
I took a sliding step away from Kincaid. Orosco caught the movement and his mouth twisted into a sneer, as though I was trying to put distance between myself and a possible target.
I was—but not for the reason he assumed.
In a confined space like a room, with two distinct targets, a long gun is a disadvantage. And the further apart those two targets are, the less chance the shooter has of swinging around to hit both of them. Kincaid glanced at me and I saw he understood at once what I was doing, and why.
“Well now, Darius,” he said. “Looks like you got a choice to make. But make it the right one because, if you don’t, I think I can pretty much guarantee you won’t live to regret it.”
Orosco hesitated. His brain told him he was top dog and had been for his entire adult life. That Kincaid was no more than a hired hand who’d been in the right place at the right time, caught Helena’s eye and got lucky. But at the same time, he knew Kincaid had been hired for good reasons and promoted for ones that were even better.
And as for me, well, he’d just seen with his own eyes exactly what I was capable of. His gaze flicked over me, laced with a lingering denial that bordered on panic.
How could he shoot either one of us without the other killing him?
The tension stretched between us, humming like railway tracks just before a high-speed train comes whistling through.
A shadow in the doorway snapped us out of it. Helena let out a gasp of surprise as a figure came through, casually scooping up Clean-Shaven’s weapon as he passed. He paused just inside, the barrel of the sniper rifle resting on his shoulder and the newly acquired M4 in his other hand.
“Hey,” Schade said. “What did I miss?”
67
Kincaid glanced from Schade to Clean-Shaven, still sitting with his back against the wall and hunched over the bleeding wound in his leg.
“Oh, I’d say you didn’t miss a thing,” Kincaid said. “Unless you were aiming for his head.”
“Dude, this is me you’re talking to. I thought I better not kill him right off, just in case—”
“Schade!” Orosco barked. “Cut the crap and get your ass over here.”
I was close enough to see Schade’s eyes blank behind the lenses of his glasses. Just for a second I thought he wasn’t going to comply. Then he looked at Kincaid with a flicker of something like regret, and moved across to Orosco’s side. Was it my imagination, or did Kincaid’s shoulders droop a fraction as he did so?
“Where the fuck d’you disappear to last night, hey?”
“Making sure I got back up here before you did, boss,” Schade said, nothing in his voice. Orosco scowled for a moment longer, then clearly decided not to make an issue of it. He clapped Schade on the shoulder.
“OK, OK. Glad you made it.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t come bearing good news. The shipment is gone already.”
“I know that. But where?”
“They sold it to the Kurds.”
Orosco swore with heartfelt vehemence and turned on Kincaid. “You are really trying to screw the pooch, hey? Not good enough just to balls up the deal I had going with the Syrians, then you had to sell to the fuckin’ Kurds?”
“Their need is greater,” Kincaid said without contrition.
“Yeah, and their credit is fuckin’ non-existent!”
Kincaid shook his head and said with satisfaction. “Paid in full.”
Orosco’s mouth gaped. “You gave ’em a deal, didn’t you? Please tell me you did not give those fuckers a deal… You did. I knew it. I fuckin’ knew it.”
“It was all over before we even got to the coast,” Schade said. “I doubt we’d catch up with ’em now, but I can try if you want?�
�
Orosco shook his head, even as Helena scowled at Schade. “Do you even know the meaning of the word ‘loyalty’? We trusted you.”
“The trouble with trusting people is that most of ’em let you down, sooner or later,” he said evenly. “This is a business where loyalties are sometimes traded along with the merchandise.”
“So, who do you trust?” I asked him with a hint of bite.
“Me,” he said, as though the answer was simple. “That way, I’m never disappointed and I’m never surprised.”
“And you never have anyone you can rely on when your back’s against the wall.”
“Hasn’t happened yet.” He cocked his head. “Tell me, Fox, who do you trust?”
I said nothing.
He nodded. “Yeah, thought so.”
“Put down your guns!” came Hamzeh’s voice from the inner doorway. “And if you hold your friend’s life to be of any value, I would suggest you make no sudden moves.”
I kept my body still but turned my head just far enough to see the Syrian had Gilbert de Bourdillon braced in front of him with a pistol to the back of the old man’s skull. I saw Hamzeh’s eyes rake over his fallen men.
“Al’abalah!” he spat at Orosco. As far as I could recall, it meant idiot or fool. I was surprised Hamzeh didn’t call him something worse.
Orosco may or may not have understood but he flushed anyway. “Hey, chill the fuck out, Khalid,” Orosco said. “I’m just takin’ back control of the situation here.”
“This is under control?” Hamzeh demanded. “Put down your weapons. I will not tell you again.”
“OK, OK.” Orosco huffed out a breath and loosened his grip on the M4 before dumping it onto the nearest sofa.
Schade stared at him blankly for a moment and I realised that, had Orosco not moved first, he would have stood fast, regardless how much that put de Bourdillon at risk.
“You heard the man, Schade. Put ’em down.”
