Midnight Vengeance (9 page)

Runner: Thanks. Will ask for new docs when I get to where I’m going. Probably be best if I don’t operate on anyone.

Felicity: If you’re going to go, do it fast. Speed is life.

Runner: Don’t I know it.

Felicity: Sorry you’re ejecting. Sounded like you had a really good deal going there. Hard to give it up.

Runner. A very good deal. V sorry to go. Breaks my heart.

She wiped wet eyes. The screen was blank for a moment.

Felicity: OMG. A guy! You found a guy and now you have to dump him and run! Bummer!

Pity Felicity was so very smart. Lauren had to put a spin on it to save her heart.

Runner: Probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Hard to be with a guy when you’re on the run.

Felicity: So how was the sex? On a scale of one to ten?

Lauren typed before thinking.

Runner: 100

Felicity: sigh. You can’t take him with you?

Taking Jacko with her
. Heat shot through her at the thought. Heat and hope. Feeling safe all the time. Hot sex at night. Oh yeah. She’d give anything to take Jacko with her. But of course that was impossible. In another life, in another universe, maybe. But not in this one.

And, frankly, she couldn’t imagine Jacko wanting to abandon his excellent job and his life here to follow her into exile.

Runner: Double sigh. No.

Felicity: Take a lock of his hair with you. For memory’s sake. And maybe I can clone him from the DNA. Make sure to get follicles.

Lauren laughed and wiped away a tear. Felicity probably
could
clone him. All this time she’d imagined Felicity as some super analyst somewhere but maybe she was a lab rat in a white coat who could pipette a new Jacko into life. Of course Lauren would have to wait for Jacko to be born and grow up and she’d be sixty when he was thirty. That would totally work for Doctor Who but not for her.

Runner: Can’t. Shaved head.

Felicity. Yum. Tats?

Runner: Tribal. Shoulder. Barbed wire around wrists. V sexy.

Felicity: Take some pubes with you. That guy definitely needs cloning.

Runner: I wish.

Felicity: Get going. Like I said, if you have to go, do it fast. When you land, get in touch. I’ll be here.

Runner: On my way. And thanks.

Felicity: np

Their chat page blinked out. Lauren powered down her MacBook Air, resting a hand on the cover, fingers caressing the smooth Apple logo. It felt, for just a moment, as if she were still connected to her virtual friend. It was crazy but she could feel Felicity’s support coming over the ether. Pixels and digits and friendship. She knew nothing about Felicity except for the important things. Felicity was smart, she had secrets too, and she was on Lauren’s side, always.

At least Lauren could plug back into the chat room when she finally landed. Jacko and her friends here were already in the wind, lost. This virtual friend on a secret network was the only constant in her life now.

God, it was already nine and she hadn’t packed yet.

Good thing her wardrobe was deliberately small. Good pieces, but not many of them. Everything she owned fit into a midsized suitcase. She wheeled it out to the garage and went back in for her artwork. Her artwork could possibly be used to track her down if any of Jorge’s people searched her house so everything she had went into the car. All her computer-generated graphic work was stored in the cloud under a fictitious name.

By ten she was ready to walk through the house for the last time, hand lingering over various items, as if touching them would store them better in her memory. The house was so pretty. She’d fallen in love with it immediately. Basically, a living room/kitchen, bedroom and a huge room with a skylight where she worked. More than enough. Snug and cheerful. The place where she’d hoped to make a life for herself, and damn it, she
had
. She’d made a wonderful life for herself.

Lauren angrily wiped a tear away. She never cried, never allowed herself to, and this morning she was leaking water like a faucet.

At the door to her bedroom she stopped. This was the last time she’d see where she’d made love with Jacko. It had been the best thing to happen to her since her mother and stepfather had died and this whole mess started.

She looked at the bed across the room, reliving some of the highlights of last night. Maybe the memory of last night would fade, as memories did over the years. Right now, though, the memory was vivid, hi-def, 3D.

Never again. Never again a mind-blowing love affair. Never again would she have friends in the flesh. Never again warmth and closeness with others.

Goodbye house.

Goodbye life.

Goodbye Jacko.

It had started snowing again, light flakes that drifted down like afterthoughts, the world outside light gray, nebulous. Pretty. Dangerous. She wasn’t a good driver. Driving in the snow was terrifying, one more horror.

South. She’d head south. Maybe somewhere with a beach. San Diego would be perfect but it was still West Coast. Maybe it was best not to repeat herself. Florida was out, of course. Texas, Louisiana? Time enough on the road to decide.

Lights out, heat off.

She shivered in the garage, cold seeping into her bones. The car was packed, ready to go. She was lingering, not wanting to take off. Wanting a few minutes more here, in this magical city where she’d met some magical people.

She was going to hurt them by disappearing. For a second, crazily, she thought of going back in to leave a goodbye note.

No. That was dangerous thinking. No more stalling. It was time.

She reached into her purse for the keys and didn’t find them. She scrabbled a bit around the bottom, frowning. She kept a neat purse. Car keys in one internal pocket, house keys in another. The house keys weren’t there because she’d left them on the kitchen table. And...the car keys weren’t there, either.

She searched again, more thoroughly. Clearly, she’d missed the car keys because she was hurting, worried. So she looked again. But they weren’t there.

Sighing, Lauren opened her purse wider, angling it so it would catch the meager light of the overhead bulb.

No keys.

How could she leave if she didn’t have car keys?

Search one more time.

This time she carefully placed the contents of her purse on the car fender. Wallet, fake driver’s license, fake ID, makeup case, her ereader with a thousand books on it. No keys.

This was a disaster. The snow was falling more heavily now. If the keys weren’t in her purse—which they
should be
—then she had no idea where to look. It could take her hours to scour the house, hours she didn’t have.

Now that she wasn’t in the Jacko Force Field of Safety, danger was drumming in her head. She’d made a huge mistake last night and she was going to pay. She could feel it; she could almost smell it. Her neck prickled with the sense of impending danger. Jorge’s goons could be coming for her
right now.

She had to leave
right now.

She huffed out an angry, scared breath, turning to walk back into the house, when a huge hand appeared in front of her, car keys dangling from thick fingers.

“Looking for these?” Jacko’s deep voice asked.

Chapter Five

Palm Beach, Florida

The next day Frederick found it on the front passenger seat of his car. He was on his way to the airport where he’d fly under another identity to George Town. His Caymans’ banker had contacted him for an “interesting proposal,” which would have to be discussed in private and in person. He suspected the banker had somehow discovered Frederick’s gifts and was proposing a money laundering scheme. This was perfect. The profit potential would be huge and above all, Frederick wouldn’t get his hands dirty. He knew how to cover his traces. And it probably meant several trips to the Caymans a year, which was a pleasant thought. What was wealth in the United States was unimaginable riches in the Caymans. He could live like a king, outside the jurisdiction of the United States.

Finding something in his car was interesting in and of itself. Frederick’s security everywhere was superb, and that included his car, a Lexus LS whose already-strong security system had been tweaked. The car door opened to his electronic key but it also required his thumbprint.

So if someone left something for him in the front seat of his car, that someone was serious.

A sat phone. Bigger, bulkier than most smartphones. He recognized it immediately. The latest Thuraya. Guaranteed non-hackable because it operated off a Saudi-owned satellite and the Saudis were not in the habit of sharing intel with the NSA, or anyone else for that matter. The Thuraya was an expensive, difficult-to-obtain piece of tech.

A small slip of paper with laser-printed words was on top of it.
Password: money.

Okay. Good password.

He fired it up, put in the password and saw that it was preprogrammed with one long number. He didn’t recognize the prefix and was sure that it didn’t correspond to any specific geographic location. It was a connection to a forwarding service. The number itself would be of no help in understanding where the person on the other end was located.

Someone had gone through time and trouble to talk to him.

Frederick made his considerable living helping those in trouble. He pressed the call button and waited.

“Hello.” The voice at the other end was mechanically altered. There were no hints as to identity. He couldn’t even tell the sex.

“Hello,” Frederick answered. “I’m listening.”

“I understand you work for Jorge Guttierez.”

“In a manner of speaking,” he hedged.

This was tricky. Was this one of Jorge’s many enemies? Was he going to get an offer to work against Jorge? Frederick had no loyalty to Jorge at all, but generally speaking it wasn’t a good idea to get a reputation as someone who’d betray a client. If this was Jorge’s enemy, though, he wouldn’t play by any sane rules and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Damn. Why did Alfonso go get himself killed?

“This is not about Jorge. It is not even about Alfonso. It is about his wife, Chantal.” Mechanical Voice dropped the little bombshell.

Frederick wasn’t an easy man to surprise but this did.
Chantal?
To his knowledge Chantal had been a beautiful clotheshorse whose only real talent was spending money, and nothing more. What would some Mafioso want with Chantal?

“What about Chantal?”

“She had a jewelry collection. A famous one. Some pieces are designer classics.” The mechanical voice all of a sudden sounded pained. “My wife wants the collection. Badly.”

“I’m sorry,” Frederick answered. He was sincere. He was
very
sorry. If there was money to be made knowing where Chantal’s jewelry collection was, he wasn’t going to get it. “I have no idea where that collection is.”

“Chantal’s daughter does,” the voice said.

Frederick blinked. “Anne?”

“Yes. Anne. Chantal said that her collection was in a safe place and only she and her daughter knew where.”

Ah. Frederick straightened in his seat. This was getting interesting.

“I am actually looking for Anne.” He put that forward cautiously.

“Yes, I know. For that moron Jorge. Jorge wants her dead. I don’t want her dead, certainly not before she has revealed where the jewelry collection is. I don’t know how much Jorge is paying you, but I’ll make it more than worth your while to find her, so long as you remember that a live Anne trumps a dead Anne.”

Who will become a dead Anne as soon as wifey gets her bling.
The subtext was unspoken but there.

“I can’t start right now. I can only start in three days. Seventy-two hours, take it or leave it.”

He couldn’t do anything on the road; it would never be secure enough. He traveled clean and he always worked from home.

At home he could take precautions. His keyboard was TEMPEST-proof. His computer had a firewall that, if it were a real wall, could be seen from the moon.

The walls of his home had a special cladding that bounced any type of electronic surveillance, and the windows had a molecule-thick graphene film coating that protected against laser listening devices.

Essentially his house was what intelligence agencies call a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Intelligence Facility. What happened in his home stayed in his home.

Everything on his computer was saved to a cloud managed in Estonia, guaranteed anonymity for ten thousand USD a year, cheap at the price.

His home was as secure as he could make it, and he preferred to work there.

Long silence. Then finally Mechanical Voice spoke. “Word has it you’re the best.”

Damn straight.
“Yes,” he said.

A mechanical sigh. “All right. But I want results soon.”

“You’ll have them. And now...about the fee.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

Not enough for what would eventually lead to a dead body. Frederick didn’t care what happened to Anne Lowell but blood shed was always more dangerous than shifting bitcoins around. The police were more tenacious about blood spilled than money lost. There was a remote possibility that this could somehow boomerang.

“Half a million,” he replied.

Another pause, then—”Done.”

“Half now and half when I make her available to you.”

“Ah.” The mechanical voice stopped. “I was thinking you could, um, extract the information yourself.”

Frederick was many things, but he wasn’t a thug. Nor a torturer. He shuddered at the thought. He was a civilized man. “No,” he said firmly. “I hand Anne over to you and you do the honors.”

A slight hesitation. “Done. Text your account details to this number.”

Nail it down
, Frederick thought. “Two hundred and fifty K, up front.”

“Yes. The second half when I take possession of the girl.”

It was clear that Mechanical Voice wasn’t going to let Anne live after he got his hands on the jewels. Whether by Jorge’s or MV’s hand, Anne Lowell was already dead. The only difference was that one option would net him half a million dollars more. This guy sounded serious. Frederick didn’t think Jorge had much money anymore. There was no question which boss Frederick was going to choose.

“So I call this number when I have the girl?” he asked.

“Yes.” The connection was broken.

Frederick texted his Caymans account number and waited. Gratifyingly, the money showed up in minutes. In untraceable bitcoins.

It was always good dealing with a better class of criminal.

Portland

Lauren screamed and turned as white as the snow outside. She stumbled.

Fuck! Jacko hadn’t thought it through. He took a fast step forward and put his arms around her.

“Whoa.” She was shaking so hard she vibrated against him. He held her tighter. “Hey. Sorry to scare you. Let’s get you inside. It’s cold here in the garage.”

She didn’t move. “Jacko?” she whispered, voice trembling. She pushed against him weakly. “How did you—you don’t understand. I have to go.”

Jacko looked down at her. He hated the look on her white face. The same look she’d had last night when the fucker’d taken her photograph. Drawn, terrified. His instinct then was right. She was scared to death of someone. Jacko had no idea who that fucker could be but he was a walking dead man. And he wouldn’t lay a finger on Lauren, guaranfuckingteed.

She was panting with distress, breath a cloud around her beautiful head in the freezing garage. She was shaking so hard her teeth were chattering.

The hell with this.

“Come on, honey.” It was really hard to keep his voice even because just the thought of someone after Lauren, someone wanting to hurt her...shit.

Jacko knew he had a deep, rough voice. Nothing he could do about that. But he tried to modulate it, keep his rage out of it, be reassuring. He wasn’t good at the reassurance thing, he was better at being a badass, but this was Lauren and whatever she needed, he needed to give it to her. Right now she needed him to be calm and reassuring. “Let’s go back inside. You can’t stay here—you’re freezing to death.”

She pulled away, movements slow, uncoordinated. Jacko recognized shock. He’d seen enough of it in his life. He kept her trembling, ice-cold hands in his.

Even terrified and shocked, she was still so fucking beautiful. Those frosted blue eyes searched his. He didn’t know what she was looking for but she wasn’t finding it. She wheezed, pulled in air. Though she tugged at his hands, he wasn’t letting go. His hold tightened, painless but firm.

“Jacko, you don’t understand. I have to go. Have to. Right now.”

Jacko brought her hands to his mouth, hoping he was transferring some warmth to her. “No, I don’t understand. Tell me about it. Make me understand. Whatever it is, we can face it together.”

Her hands jerked in his; she became even paler. “No!” Lauren shuddered deeply. “God no. He could hurt you too.”

Man, whoever this fucker was, he was dead meat.

“I’m hard to hurt, honey,” he said gently. “Now come inside and tell me what this is all about.”

She must have seen that he meant business, that she wasn’t going anywhere, because when he pulled her toward the door leading back into the kitchen, she didn’t resist. Good.

The first thing he did was sit her down on her sofa and drop his tux jacket over her knees. It would retain some of his body warmth, which she needed. He got up briefly to turn her heating back on. She jumped at the
whump!
of the boiler switching on.

When he sat down beside her again and held her hands, she pulled away.

“You need to let me go.” A small slender hand covered her mouth. “You don’t understand, Jacko. He’ll find me again. He killed two people to get to me. I’m putting everyone in danger by staying. I can’t do it. Please don’t ask me to.”

Two people had been killed?
The hair on his forearms stood up. This was worse than he thought.

Lauren, dead.

The image bloomed in his head, in vivid colors. Jacko had seen a lot of dead people over the years, some by his hand. It was never easy, never pretty. His head couldn’t wrap around the idea of a murdered Lauren.

Sure, she would die some day. A beautiful, white-haired Lauren seventy years from now, gorgeous and peaceful in her casket. Dead in her sleep.

Jacko knew, bone deep, what people who’d been killed looked like. Violent death was his thing, what he’d trained all his adult life for. He knew it inside out and it should never be anywhere near Lauren.

Violent death was grotesque. Lacerations, burned skin, blood everywhere. He couldn’t think of that in relation to Lauren—it messed with his head. That pale, perfect skin, slashed. Beautiful head, the pink mist of a head shot surrounding it. Slender limbs, broken.

Someone killing her, then walking away. It was bad enough thinking of her being hunted before he knew her. Now that he knew her, now that she was his—no. It drove him crazy, just the thought of it.

Something big had come into his world with Lauren. Bits and pieces of it had slid into his life as he spent time with his bosses’ women. Quick glimpses of a new world, a different world. Beauty and grace and stillness and peace. Things he had never had in his life. And then Lauren had arrived and a door had been thrown open. He hadn’t actually thought of walking through that door. It was enough to see what was on the other side.

But last night he’d walked through that door and there was no going back.

He didn’t believe in God and he didn’t believe in heaven or hell. But if he did, he could say he’d glimpsed heaven with Lauren. Which was crazy, of course.

But still.

She was watching him out of huge eyes. “How did you know? I thought you’d gone. How did you know to come back?”

Because the entire morning was a goodbye.
“Instinct,” he said. “I lifted the car keys from your purse. When I left, I parked around the corner and doubled back, picked your garage lock, waited for you.” It had been child’s play. For a woman on the run, Lauren had no notion of tradecraft. No matter. She didn’t need it. She had him now. “On my way in, I disabled the security cam across the street. There were no others. Right now there are no eyes on you.”

Her eyes widened. She’d had no idea of the existence of the vidcam on the front porch of her neighbor’s house.

“Okay. That—that’s good.”

“So you wanna tell me what’s going on?”

Lauren’s face turned serious. “I don’t know, Jacko. I’ve never told anyone. It’s—it’s so hard. Once I tell you, you’re involved.”

She studied his face and he let her. He didn’t think words would do the trick, and he wasn’t good with words anyway. All he really had was himself and what he felt about her, which was that he was a mean motherfucker and that he would lay down his life for her. It had to be enough.

She took her time, which was okay by him. If he was running from someone he’d be careful who to trust, too.

Finally, Lauren gave a sigh, turned her hands in his and held his hands tight. Her body told him before the words did that she had decided.

“My name isn’t Lauren, Jacko,” she started. Jacko wasn’t too surprised. In the military there were lots of guys who were running from their background and they all had nicknames.

He nodded. “Jacko’s not my name, either.”

“I know,” she said. “But you didn’t change yours to hide from a madman.”