Accelerated (6 page)

With Kay reentering my life, I had the feeling this was only the first part of what would prove to be an ugly drama.

Sometimes I hated being right.

-6-

A week passed. Then one day around ten in the morning, Blake hammered at my bedroom door on the
Alamo
. I’d taken him night fishing for the past several days, although we were docked now.

“Gavin!” he shouted. “Wake up. You have to see this.”

I wanted to fire a warning shot with my Browning and tell him to go away. What was he doing up so early?

“Gavin, can you hear me?”

I rolled out of bed, ran my fingers through my hair and flung open the door. “What in the—”

Blake shoved a folded newspaper in my face. It was the Los Angeles Times, dated yesterday.

“Just tell me,” I said.

He jerked the paper away, muttering, glancing around. Then he flipped on a passageway light. It made me wince and almost slam the door in his face. His fingers tightened so he crinkled the newspaper.

Blake read, “The City of Long Beach registered its twentieth fatality this year when Ms. Kay Durant was struck and killed 11:45 Thursday night while jaywalking across 1400 Center Street, a block from the Togos restaurant where she had been eating. Dan Chester Lee, driver of the laundry truck that struck and killed the Durant woman, claimed that he did not see her until the moment of impact when she apparently darted out from between two parked cars and into the path of the vehicle. Ms. Durant, who lived alone at 600 Washington Street, was employed by Polarity Magnetics, Wayside Park, Long Beach. Police are investigating the accident and no charges have as yet been filed.”

Blake lowered the paper.

I snatched it, reading the story, remembering how Kay had run onto the street near Fisherman’s Wharf. Had she done that again in Long Beach?

“Polarity Magnetics,” Blake said pointedly.

I grunted, rereading the story, wondering what had really happened.

“Did she run out on the street?” he asked. “Or did someone push her?

I shoved the paper against Blake’s chest so he bumped against a bulkhead. I squeezed past him, hurried up the stairs and into the lounge. There, I poured myself a drink. I let the cubes clink in my glass as I swirled and swirled.

Kay was dead. I couldn’t believe it. She had been good for Dave. He used to love stroking her legs. She’d survived the terrible accident in Geneva, survived working for the Shop and now some useless laundry truck had run her over. I shook my head. It hadn’t been a useless laundry truck. I doubted it had been an accident at all. Her insurance hadn’t worked: the cube supposedly in my possession. People had hunted her down and killed her. Had she died because those people knew I’d dumped the cube into the ocean? No. That didn’t make sense. Besides, it didn’t matter now. Kay was dead. She was gone.

I drank the vodka and poured myself more. Kay was dead, and Kay had carried a box here, bringing me a cube to watch. What had been so important about the big cube? I’d never know, and I didn’t care about it. Kay was dead. That’s all that mattered.

I drank more vodka.

Blake entered silently and sat down, with the Times rolled up in his skinny hands.

I touched my lips to the glass for the third time. With a thump, I set it on the drink cabinet.

Blake looked up at me. “I wish I’d met her.”

I stared at him, but I saw Kay in my memory. I saw her lying on the floor four years ago in Switzerland. Even with the exposure making my bones ache, I had found her as she stared at an outline of Dave. As we watched together, bewildered, Dave had phased in, become solid like a normal human being. That’s when Kay had started screaming.

On my boat in San Francisco, I wondered what I was going to do about the cube lying on the bottom of the ocean. I frowned, and I realized that Blake had just asked me a question.

I picked up the glass and slurped my answer. I was going to drink to Kay’s memory. I was going to think about all the pleasant things we’d done together. I was going to have an Irish wake if I could.

I reached for the bottle, but the bottle betrayed me. It was empty.

“I’ll catch you later,” I muttered.

“I’m sorry,” Blake said.

I nodded, grabbed some clothes and headed for a bar.

***

I could say I never saw them coming. Instead, Kay’s death had frazzled me. I moved like an automaton on the sidewalks, hardly looking up. I’d seen friends die in combat before. It left you bitter and terribly glad you were still alive, that death had missed you one more time and taken someone else. You felt guilty for surviving and empty because of the friend you would never see again.

I was six steps from entering a bar. Before I made it five, a powerful hand closed on my left triceps, digging into flesh.

“Herr Kiel, the Chief would like a word with you.”

The accent and manner of speaking froze my limbs. A Shop commando was here! Before I whirled around and drove a fist into his gut, logic took over. If the Shop had wanted me dead just now, my first inkling of their presence would have been a rifle shot. In that split-second, I realized several things. Something had changed with the Shop if they were approaching me like this. It seemed that Kay had told the truth about that. I also recognized the voice. The Chief was sending me a not-so-hidden signal by using this monster as his errand-boy.

I turned my head fractionally. The hand on my skin wore gloved leather. Nice. I wore my A’s hat, sunglasses and a blue Hawaiian shirt.

I swiveled around, but I did it too fast and too far, ripping my shirt under my left armpit. I usually wore baggy or easily stretched clothing these days, but even so, with my increased density I was always ripping too many.

I faced a tall man wearing mirrored sunglasses. Jagiello had spiked blond hair and Slavic features. He wore a navy-colored suit and tie, with matching blue leather gloves. He was a lethal killer, and he was Lithuanian. Behind Jagiello were two others like him, but they wore black suits.

“The Chief insists,” Jagiello said.

I wanted to beat him, but if I tried, the other two would pull out guns and begin firing. All my instincts told me to flee. Yet it was strange standing here in the open, speaking with Jagiello. For one thing, this wasn’t Europe. Kay had said something about American agents working against the Shop. Did that mean Jagiello and his men were on a leash? The idea was appealing.

“Where’s the Chief?” I asked.

“If you will follow me,” Jagiello said, “I’ll show you.”

“Not a chance. Tell me first and I’ll think about it.”

A hint of a frown touched his lips. Jagiello was like a tormenting demon, used to having bound prisoners in his power. This must be a new experience for him, and I’m sure he found it annoying.

“The Chief is nearby in a café drinking coffee, waiting to speak with you.”

“Out in the open?” I asked.

“Would you agree to meet anywhere else?”

“Is this about Kay?”

He nodded stiffly and his gun-hand twitched.

I hesitated, not sure what to do. I had been running from the Shop for a long time. The Chief—I had no desire to speak with him. In the end, however, one thing persuaded me to go: Kay had opened my prison door four years ago. Now she was dead, likely murdered. It seemed more than possible the Chief could tell me something new about Kay and about her death.

“Sure, let’s speak with the Chief,” I said. “But those two and you have to walk ahead of me, not behind.”

The fact I could lay conditions nettled Jagiello. His watched me silently for several seconds. Then he turned, snapped his fingers at the other two and motioned them ahead.

Dutifully, each killer withdrew a hand from inside his jacket. One of them studied me as he walked past. The other—the one with grease in his hair—pretended I didn’t exist.

Jagiello set a brisk pace, and I could tell he was still as athletic and purposeful as I remembered. He’d fired reinforced darts into me on two different occasions. Once, he had clubbed me from behind with a shock baton until I’d crumpled in a beaten mass. Jagiello’s expressions had never changed, although during my beating, he had clenched his teeth and beads of sweat had appeared on his forehead. I had once told the Chief that the Lithuanians had made the most famously brutal SS camp-guards during Hitler’s reign.

“You mean the Latvians,” the Chief had said in his strange whisper. “But I accept the compliment in the spirit it was given.”

Jagiello and his men led me to a little tourist café. The Chief sat on a gilt-iron chair in a shadowed patio under a plastic palm tree. A decorative iron fence surrounded the area. The Chief sipped coffee, read his Blackberry and sent texts.

“Buy yourself a cup,” Jagiello said, pressing a five into my hand as he stared down into my sunglasses.

“We’re not in Milan,” I whispered.

“Not today, no,” he said.

I gripped his fingers, squeezing as I crumpled the bill. He grunted painfully. The others drew guns with long silencers screwed onto the barrels. They held the guns close to their bodies and in such a way that I saw them, but no one else nearby did. I shoved Jagiello from me so he staggered. The wadded bill fell to the sidewalk.

“No,” Jagiello told the others. “Put them away.”

They did, making it seem like a magician’s trick. It left me in no doubt that these two belonged on the A-Team. If the Chief needed to act, these two would prove dangerous.

Jagiello regarded me as he cradled his injured hand against his chest. “The time will come when you will be mine again.”

More than anything else he said, that told me they were on a leash. I would be a fool to trust that, but it did give me a little working room.

“You’re a scorpion, Jagiello. Get too close to me and I’ll stomp on you.”

He whispered something in Lithuanian and backed away. Then he nodded at the other two before fading into an approaching crowd.

I entered the café and soon stepped onto the patio, with my coffee in a tall paper cup. Jagiello and his two killers were out there, I knew, watching and making sure no one interrupted our tête-à-tête. I wondered if CIA operatives or FBI agents watched them.

The Chief was the same as ever, the white goatee trimmed as perfectly as it had always been and his dark suit of the finest cut and weave. I had mixed feelings concerning the small man. He was ruthlessly brilliant and single-minded in his pursuits. He also ordered killings as remorselessly as ordinary people called for termite exterminations. He had built an efficient secret organization: something to admire and hate in equal measure. I would not underestimate him. I wondered if someday for my own self-preservation I would have to kill him.

“So good of you to join me, Herr Kiel,” the Chief whispered as I sat down.

A bullet had once caressed his throat, doing permanent damage. He had an ugly scar on his larynx that darkened when he became angry.

I nodded in lieu of a reply and tasted my coffee. It was excellent, which didn’t surprise me. The Chief demanded excellence in all things.

“I am saddened to inform you of terrible news,” he whispered “Your former colleague has met with an untimely accident.”

“I hope he heals well,” I said.

There was no upturn at the corners of the Chief’s mouth, no tic across his features, nothing except that viper stare into my sunglasses.

“You know it is not a he, but a she,” he whispered.

“Is this what you’re here for?”

There was a fractional pause before he said, “You have been weakened, Herr Kiel.”

“I’ve become more human is what you mean.”

“Weakened,” he said sharply. He touched his cup, and there might have been the tiniest frown, the smallest of movement with his eyebrows. He removed his fingers from the cup. “Let us not mince words. Letting you live is a mistake. Letting you freely range among the sheep is an even worse affront to logic. If I tap my finger so—” with his pale hand on the table, he tapped his index finger. “If I do that three times in rapid succession, a laser shall burn through your skull. I will have neatly cleaned the mess your presence makes.”

“No,” I said. “An ambulance will arrive and the medics will discover some astonishing anomalies concerning me, including a burn-hole through my skull. That will create several sensations.”

“I will control the medics.”

“The wrong police officer might interfere. The laser-sniper might miss.”

“Jagiello is a champion marksman.”

I leaned back as my neck prickled. Coming here had been a mistake, one I wouldn’t willingly do again. My grief had made me incautious. But I didn’t want to squeeze out every human feeling from my heart. I didn’t want to become a monster like Jagiello, like the Chief. That didn’t mean I had to take reckless chances. It seemed Jagiello aimed a laser at my head. I didn’t doubt the Chief about that. To keep calm, I told myself the Chief wanted information. That was my guarantee Jagiello wouldn’t fire yet.

Therefore, I forced a grin, and said, “You’ve no idea how much I’ve missed your charm, sir.”

“Your present sorrow has unhinged you.”

I leaned across the table, making it creak. Maybe if I kept moving, twitching, I would present a harder target.

“Kay is dead,” I said. “Now you’ve interrupted the drunk I was going to have in honor of her memory. I don’t want to be impolite to you, sir. Not because I care about hurting your nonexistent feelings, but the possibility of those three little taps is making me nervous. If I become too nervous, I might become jumpy. Do you remember that I’m fast? It’s possible I’m faster than Jagiello’s trigger finger. That means I could crush your brain before he burns mine. But it still leaves me dead, and it would deprive the Shop of your sweetness.”