Endless Night (20 page)

“Don’t play games that you can’t win,” he chastised.

“I—I’ve already won,” Megan challenged, even though her lips had difficulty forming the words, numbed into uselessness. “We have Serge,” she charged, “and other people know what happened that night. You can’t kill everyone off—”

The haughty arch of his black eyebrow could be perceived in the minimal light, perhaps evident because his forehead was so high in contrast. Gordon chuckled, the sound combined with the condescending expression, proving colder than anything the Atlantic could muster.

“We…?”

He purposefully left it at that until Megan’s innards churned.
No! Oh God, no. Jake.

Out on this cliff—all the time, all the preparation, all of her weapons had been rendered useless. The dexterity with the gun, the strategic advantage of Wakefield House—all her physical prowess was debilitated by the frigid temperature and the sheer intimidation of Gordon Fortran. All she had left was Gordon’s greatest talent…deceit.

“
We
—in town, have Serge locked up,” she declared. “He’s already confessed to the police that you sent him up here to kill me. He has also testified that you killed Vladimir Romanov, the man
I
saw you murder.”

Under the beam of the flashlight, Megan could distinguish Gordon’s long raincoat and black slacks. His hands were in his pockets, and she had to presume one of them was wrapped around a gun. What she didn’t like was the slash of white across his shadowed face, a sure indication that he was smiling.

“You mean the guy I saw wrapped up in wire upstairs?” He chuckled hollowly. “The one I just shot?”

Beneath her feet the cliff felt as if it rumbled in the first stages of an earthquake and that it was just a matter of time before the bedrock crashed down into the heaving surf, taking her with it. All that kept her together was the fact that he had not mentioned Jake. Maybe he was still alive. Maybe he was safe.

Please, dear God, let that be the case.

“The police are on their way here now,” she tested. “I radioed them.”

Gordon snorted and took another step toward her. “On that?” He nodded toward the device in pieces on the ground.

For each step he advanced, Megan negotiated a step of retreat until the icy grass beneath her boots gave way to unstable rocks, hinting that the ledge drew near.

“Go ahead, Gordon, kill me. But it’s not over for you. Not at all. Ask me what I’ve done this past year.”

It was a small victory, but Gordon’s advance came to a halt. His head tilted to the side and he studied her with the uncanny focus of a wild animal, the feral grin of a hyena.

“Okay, Ms. Simmons. I’ll play your game—” wide shoulders hitched back, “—for a few minutes at least. What were you doing this year, besides hiding from me?”

Bastard.
In the final moments of her life, Megan was pleased to discover that fear gave way to rage. She would die on the offense after all.

“Everything is in writing,” she charged. “Everything I saw. Every piece of information I had while I worked for you. You think you were discreet? You think that I wasn’t smart enough to be suspicious. It took this year to form my theory, and then Serge filled in the pieces I didn’t know.”

Verbal ammunition dared her to take a step away from the ledge, toward him. “You can go ahead and kill me, but I’ve left the information in a safe place with instructions to take it to the police in the event of my death. Your cruelty ends tonight, Gordon. You can’t kill everyone.”

To her horror Gordon took one stride and grabbed her around the wrist, twisting till she doubled over in pain. Any human contact should produce heat, but the fingers around her wrist felt as if shackled by ice.

“Why can’t I?” The soft voice was scarier than the prospect of death itself.

“I don’t care what you think you’ve seen, Margaret,” Gordon hissed. “You think I’m threatened by you? You—you’re an apprentice at best. And, except for the Romanov man who was not grateful for the opportunities I provided for his daughter, I have not murdered anyone. Andre was about to be exposed by that arrogant blue-blooded son of a bitch, Barnes. It was Andre’s own father that prompted that little drama. He didn’t want the goose to lose its golden eggs.”

“Then who killed Andre?” Megan challenged.

Gordon shrugged his shoulders and the long raincoat rippled in the wind. “He killed himself with a drug overdose is what the papers say. Distraught over the impending trial in a foreign country, I hear.”

“The puppeteer,” she sneered. “That’s what you are. But your puppets are moving on their own now. Their strings have snapped. My strings have snapped. You can’t direct me.”

Gordon twisted harder until Megan yelped.

Fight the pain, she told herself. The cold made her so numb that she could barely feel the talons about her wrist, as only a prickly sensation reminded her that her fingers were falling asleep. Gordon didn’t notice the change in her demeanor, the eerie sense of calm that came over her.

He continued in a voice so soft the Grim Reaper himself would have stooped in closer to hear.

“My dear Margaret. What do you have? You are a loner. You have no family really. Your own mother barely spoke to you in the years we worked together. And now Serge is dead. And your one
friend—
well, he was killed along with Serge.” Gordon’s lips twisted as he watched her knees buckle in reaction to that statement.

“And now you will be gone,” he said. “So yes, Margaret, yes I can kill everyone. All of you are inconveniences. I now have an established business. New scholarships coming in. Two of my recruits have received multi-million dollar contracts with the pros, of which I will make a substantial cut. I will be fine, Margaret. You, you should have made your move a year ago if you wanted to pack any sort of punch. But no, you chose to run. What did that get you?”

With that, Gordon released his grip on her.

Megan lost her balance and stumbled backward. Arms akimbo, she heard the loose rocks crumble beneath her foot, starting to give way to erosion. Desperate, she forced her weight onto her left heel, which, though numb from cold, suspended her on the power of one leg. The roar of the ocean crashed beneath her, sounding as if the earth had opened to swallow her in a savage mouth of gnashing teeth that now spit a veil of frigid saltwater against her face. Wind lashed at her and threatened to be the catalyst to shift her precarious balance and send her to that maelstrom below.

This was it.

Megan’s heart ached for Jake. A life with him flashed vividly in her mind. The promise of happiness, the hope of children with his beautiful golden eyes, an eternity in his embrace—none of it was to be.

But if she was going to die here tonight, she was damn well going to bring Gordon down the cliff with her.

Jake heard voices. Or was it just another vicious deception of the wind? Every time he caught the echo of Megan’s muffled call, the avenue came up empty. Without the aid of the flashlight, or the faintest benefit of moonlight, he located the shed, only to find it empty, with perhaps an imaginary scent of citrus trapped in its timber shell.

The voices persisted. Close enough to hear the detached male tone.

In Jake’s grasp, the frozen metal barrel of the gun fused with his flesh. Certain now that the voices were real, only steps away, he hugged the rotted façade of the shed and slipped along its edge to angle his head around the corner. The Atlantic tempest did her best to blind him, lashing wind that stole the moisture from his eyes, and the breath from his lungs. But nothing could block the horrific image before him, an image that welled up a roar of rage from deep in his chest.

Megan’s silhouette seemed literally suspended by the wind as if its icy fingers wrapped about her waist and dangled her over land’s end. If the tempest were to cease, that grip would be lost and Megan would surely plummet into the abyss.

An even greater threat than the wind bore down on her. Cloaked in darkness, the tails of his black coat snapping like a matador’s cape, a man stood before her, his dominant profile boxing her in, trapping her into a fate that shouldn’t be his to impart.

Jake fought the urge to ambush this beast of the night—this evil entity that sought to take what he’d come to cherish so much. In the scope of the failing flashlight Jake saw Megan’s hair whisked back from her face to reveal high white cheekbones and dark wild eyes. She was aware of nothing but her assailant. Every muscle in Jake’s body pulsed with the need to attack, but a frantic motion could prove too hazardous to her unsteady balance. He couldn’t chance it. Slowly, he scaled outside that realm of light. Waiting. Strategizing.

To his surprise he heard Megan’s fervent threats.

“You know where you made your mistake, Gordon?”

Gordon’s gloved hand wavered across the gap of night with the promise of pushing her, but ultimately retreated to his side. Even with the wind screaming in his ears, Jake could make out the amused reply.

“No, do tell.”

“You saw me that night. At the police station. All you had to do was point and say, ‘She did it.’” Megan teetered and righted herself with a swing of her hand. “It would have been your word against mine and they would have believed you. And if they didn’t, I’m sure you would pay them to.”

“Funny,” he rumbled, “the moment you ran from that station, you lost any potential credibility. That was
your
mistake. You could never come forward after that—and certainly not a year later without looking like a hysterical fool.”

Megan’s lips trembled, but she thinned them and continued, “If I’ve lost credibility, Gordon—then what the hell are you doing standing here? If I’m not a threat to you, why are you about to shove me off a cliff?”

Jake had circled far enough to discover that the amused pinch on the man’s lips now narrowed into a stripe of rage. Cold black eyes looked like vacuous holes in this limited light. They stared out of a chiseled face—a face Jake recalled well.

You are no longer contracted to work on this project, Mr. Grogan.

It was Gordon Fortran. Maybe up until this very moment, Jake felt the whole situation too fantastic. He believed in Megan. The torment in her eyes was genuine. The fact that her life was stolen from her—no one would voluntarily put themselves through something so haunting. And, well, there was the two-hundred-and-sixty pounds of living proof left behind in the house to validate her fears. But until the moment he saw the cold hatred in Gordon Fortran’s eyes, Jake had still doubted that this pretentious man might truly have succumbed to the act of murder.

Gordon stuffed his fist in his coat pocket and came away with a small handgun. Neat, crisp, clean, with a silencer affixed to the end—everything Megan had relayed.

“Loose ends, dear.”

Megan snorted, and a puff of air clouded her face. “Oh, come on now. That’s what Serge was here to take care of.”

Her foot had enough time to locate a stable plateau. She planted it, but her toes had grown so numb, she could barely stand. A white hand which had been splayed to touch the wind, now clenched into a fist.

“You didn’t have much faith in him if you had to follow him.”

Gordon cocked an eyebrow. “It’s glaringly apparent why I didn’t have faith.”

The moment Gordon took a step in Megan’s direction, Jake’s finger flexed—a jerk reaction that nearly depressed the trigger of the gun. What prevented him from firing was that Gordon’s own handgun was now raised level with her neck. He didn’t dare take the chance when Gordon’s last gesture could be to pull the trigger. Frustration and helplessness tormented him.

“You’re going to kill me,” Megan reasoned in a flat voice. “So then tell me how you did it.”

Gordon took another resolved step till the barrel of the gun cut into her chin and tipped it back. The weapon did not have to fire to kill her. Just the slightest pressure would propel her over the edge.

“This isn’t a confessional, Margaret, and I know you’re just trying to buy another few minutes of life.”

She glared at him. “You can’t stop yourself from bragging. I’m just giving you the venue.”

White teeth flashed in the dull glow of the beam. Gordon grinned, idly reaching up with his free hand to finger-comb gelled hair which the wind sought to dishevel.

“Three years in my firm and you think you know me so well. Maybe I should have brought you in on the action.” He hesitated to see if she rose to the bait, and then shrugged.

“It all started with a sports-agent client of mine, someone I was representing for embezzlement. At the time, he chastised himself for not taking on foreign clientele—people he thought would be desperate and not know any better.”

Gordon shrugged his shoulders and watched as Megan’s eyes followed the motion of the gun. “The guy was on his way to jail, so I just picked up on his unwitting suggestions. It was so simple. Take professional athletes from Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and falsify some documents—erase their professional credentials so they can qualify for scholarships.
Professional
in some of these countries does not equate to the salaries you’re talking about here. In that part of the world, they don’t have high-school or college programs. They breed their athletes and pay their way, which makes them ineligible for some viable scholarships here in the States. You’re talking about freak athletes bogged down by red tape. They are desperate.”

Megan twisted her neck to get away from the cold steel tip. “How did you get Andre Kohut to kill Gregory Barnes?”

Gordon pursed his lips and followed the tilt of her head, connecting with her chin once again, gratified by the falter in her balance.

“Who says I did that? Andre was being threatened by that kid. Barnes was jealous…he used his money and did a little too much research. He discovered that Andre’s ‘scholarship’ was solicited through suspicious channels, and also found out that Andre had been a member of a professional basketball team back in Russia. That wouldn’t necessarily prohibit him from receiving a scholarship, but Gregory Barnes
the Third
felt that it did not fit into the equation. Barnes felt there were other more viable candidates. He was preparing to present his case to Boston Tech.”