The Right Hand (20 page)

He looked at the faces of his family. They were terrified, in shock. Kate looked up at him, her eyes searching for answers. Her eyes. In that moment, they reminded him of another young woman’s eyes.

And then it all came back to him.

Austin Clay answered the phone on its first ring. He assumed the techie in DC was calling to tell him he had decoded something else in all those bits of data floating around Fourticq’s hard drive. But it was Adams on the line, speaking over sirens in the background.

“He has her address.”

Clay stood up straight, as if he had been jolted with electricity.

“What? Who?”

“The Snow Wolf. Fourticq. He has her address. Marika’s—”

“How—”

“He’s here. He’s in LA.”

Clay didn’t hear any more, because he was already sprinting for the exit.

The Grove was a sprawling shopping complex built adjacent to the landmark farmers’ market smack-dab in the middle of Los Angeles. There was a Disneyland, movie-set feel to the shop fronts and stores that lined the long, curving paved street, complete with an old-timey trolley that ferried shoppers from one end of the complex to the other.

Marika stopped to look at the signs in the Apple store, announcing the latest smartphone, which seemed to be replacing another smartphone that had come out the previous year. The place was hopping, mostly with kids her age bustling in and out or mingling over the computer monitors. A young man stood near an iPad, explaining the newest features to a middle-aged customer, and something about the way he stood, the way he held one arm at the elbow with his other crossed in front of him, reminded her of David. She felt her throat tighten as the young man and the customer shuffled off and the feeling passed.

She had started to move west toward the farmers’ market when an uneasy feeling that she was being watched struck her. Goose pimples rose on her arms. She looked around but didn’t see anyone who stood out in the throng of shoppers milling around the Grove.

It was probably just the residual effect of the last year of her life, when looking over her shoulder had become an involuntary reflex. She told herself to relax. She was safe here.

She moved down the street but checked the reflections in shop windows to see if anyone was following her.

Clay drove his government-issued Taurus down the 110 freeway as if it had been launched from a missile chute. Five lanes let him weave in and out of slower traffic as though the other cars were standing still.

Cutting left, he easily caught the fork for the 10, saw an opening, and scooted up the shoulder. A stalled Jetta up ahead forced him to swing back out, and he nearly ran right up the backside of a slower bus. What the hell was it doing in the fast lane? No matter, he swept around it and shot down the freeway unimpeded, headed west.

With a little bit of room, he thumbed his phone, finding Marika’s number. She answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?”

“I walked over to find something to eat in the farmers’ market. They have—”

“Find a policeman or a security guard and stay with him until I get there.”

“What?”

“Five minutes.”

He hung up and slid diagonally across three lanes, hitting the Fairfax exit doing close to seventy.

Clay banked a hard right, ran the next five red lights, and swerved onto Third Street, blitzing toward the farmers’ market.

Marika heard the worry in Clay’s voice and bit down her fear when the line went dead. She was in danger, that much was clear, and she cursed herself for not trusting her instincts when she’d thought she was being watched.

She looked around the market and saw only the usual mix of tourists and LA strangers—emphasis on
strange
—amid the maze of restaurants, trinket shops, candy booths, and coffee kiosks. The corridors were tight here, and the patches of sky glimpsed over the awnings felt close. Everything felt close.

Run
.

Her eyes scanned the area for men in uniform, cops or security guards, but she didn’t seen anyone except for a burly guy in a UPS shirt.

The jangle of smells accosted her—roasted pig, sushi, doughnuts, pizza—the market offered everything and nothing and she couldn’t get her thoughts straight.

That was when she saw a bald man with hard eyes moving her way.

Run
.

Her legs wouldn’t move. The man didn’t even pretend to look elsewhere. He was cutting a swath through the crowd, knifing toward her.

Run
.

She turned and spun directly into the arms of the Snow Wolf.

Clay didn’t bother to find a parking space. He peeled up to the outside of Du-par’s deli in the corner of the farmers’ market and sprinted into the sprawl of shops, leaving the car with the keys in it where it stopped.

The inside of the market was a madhouse, packed to overflowing with shoppers and eaters, and he scanned the masses for any sign of the girl. His eyes lit on a table of police officers eating tacos, and he hurried over. No sign of Marika, and as much as he wanted to ask after her, these guys wouldn’t be sitting there stuffing their faces if a pretty girl had hurried up asking for assistance.

Cars were honking a symphony in the parking lot, most likely because of his illegally parked car blocking traffic both ways, and he must’ve been standing there looking like a lunatic, because all four officers were staring in his direction with disapproving looks.

Then he heard a high-pitched scream above all the other noise in the market, a young woman yelling the name “Clay!” and he broke for the sound.

She didn’t think.

The man had a knife in her side and told Marika he’d finish her if she didn’t keep her head down and walk quickly with him. His feet were already moving and she was matching his stride more or less involuntarily.

The bald man had joined them and was leading the way toward the parking lot like some sort of fullback opening a hole in the line of scrimmage. She found herself staring at the back of his shaved head and the carving-board scars that looked a nasty white against his cream skin. It was as though there was a pattern there that she couldn’t quite figure out.

The sharpness of the knife in her side, the grip of the hand on her arm, were like someone hitting a buzzer in her brain; she couldn’t connect her thoughts and was only vaguely aware that her feet were moving. They were abducting her, she knew that. They wouldn’t kill her in this crowd, she knew that, too. But if they got her into a car, then what?

They steered her toward the little alley that left the market behind, and as she walked toward it, she saw a man pushing an elderly woman—his mother?—in a wheelchair and she didn’t think, she just reacted, twisting away with all her force from the man who held her, at the exact moment they were passing the wheelchair. She didn’t know what she was doing, was just trying to prolong her abduction, trying to cause a scene, trying to bring other people into her mess, and she hit the wheelchair and toppled it so that she and the man and the elderly woman all became tangled on the path.

“What the hell—?” cried the wheelchair pusher, and the man who was abducting Marika said, “So sorry, so sorry,” but was already snatching her back up by the wrist, his hand clamped like a vise.

In that instant, as she was rudely wrestled to her feet, a few shoppers moved a few steps out of her line of sight and she saw Austin Clay standing next to a table of policemen.

She didn’t think; she just screamed.

Clay felt the policemen chasing behind him without seeing them, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, only reaching Marika mattered, let them come.

He could see her jerked to her feet by Fourticq, and Clay was going to kill him as soon as he closed the distance, by breaking his neck. There wouldn’t be a standoff, or a discussion, or a negotiation, he was going to pounce on the man like a jungle cat and snap his spinal column as easily as snapping a twig.

Fifty feet away and Fourticq had successfully untangled Marika from the man and old woman on the ground and was shoving her rudely toward the corridor that led out of the market. Forty feet. Clay sprinted recklessly, and men and woman hastened out of his way, or maybe out of the way of the cops chasing behind him. He didn’t care. Nothing mattered and everything mattered. Thirty feet.

He closed, he was closing, and then a bald man stepped protectively between Clay and his target. The man had a gun in his hand, a Glock, raised it, and fired.

Clay saw the shot coming and somehow pivoted at the last second, shifting course as smoothly and quickly as a gazelle, and the bullet clipped the top of his shoulder and buried itself in the cop behind him. The bald man did not get off a second shot.

Clay erupted from his pivot and landed a fist in the man’s throat with every bit of his torquing body behind it. The punch did what a pair of Colombian knives couldn’t do. It collapsed the bald man’s trachea, and the man went down gasping for air that would never find its way to his lungs.

The three remaining cops pounced on the bald man then, and thank God he was the one with the gun, he was the one who’d opened fire, because they ignored Clay in their haste to make sure the shooter was incapacitated. Clay left them behind and focused on the Snow Wolf.

It’s not easy getting a woman into a car against her will. Fourticq decided he’d kill her right there. His chances of surviving this himself were diminishing steadily toward zero. He had a chance, however slight, and it was only if the animal zeroing in on him was preoccupied with saving the girl’s life.

He’d love to say it wasn’t personal, it was only business, but the two, the business and the personal, had intermingled like chemicals inside a bomb. The girl had cost him, the animal chasing him had cost him, and he might be going down into a dark hole in the ground, but he’d make them hurt before he did. His car was idling at the curb twenty feet away, but he’d never make it, never wrestle her inside and contain her and slip behind the wheel. No, the best chance he had was to end her life right then and there.

He spun her around so Clay would see, took the knife from her side, and raised it to her neck.

The sight of Clay jogged something in her memory, something he had told her a lifetime ago.

Eyes, groin. Eyes, groin. Eyes, groin.

The man holding her by the arm wheeled her around like a top and she saw Clay coming, saw the determination in his face, saw the panic rising. Then she felt the steel sharpness of the blade move from her side and she caught the flash of it moving upward, toward her neck.

She knew she should respond, should defend herself, but her limbs felt as if they were tied down.

Then a sharp noise surprised all of them, the
clang, clang
of the approaching trolley, pulling into the farmers’ market, headed directly for them. It caused the man holding her to lose his concentration for only a second. It was all she needed.

She raised her arm and pounded her fist into the front of his pants with everything she had, and like a tornado, spun again and scratched at his face.

He was already countering, closing his lids to avoid her fingernails, raising his hand to swing the blade down in an arc.

Clay caught him.

The Snow Wolf’s arm was raised and poised to swing down with lethal force, but Clay hit that arm right at its high point and damn near snapped it off. The shoulder made an audible pop as it flew backward, the knife banging uselessly on the pavement, and then the two adversaries came together and bounced off the front of the trolley as it braked to a stop.

It wasn’t a fair fight from there. Fourticq crashed to the ground, his arm useless so he hit the pavement with his nose unprotected. It shattered.

A primal instinct within Clay surfaced at the sight of Fourticq’s blood. He growled without realizing he was doing it and rolled onto the back of the Snow Wolf. Then he picked up Fourticq’s head by the hair and smashed it back down into the ground, again and again and again.

Somewhere a young woman screamed, but Clay couldn’t hear it. The sound of the ocean waves crashing on the hull of his uncle’s boat drowned out the noise.

W
ARREN SUMNER
ducked into the bathroom to wash his hands. He had prepared Adams’s transfer to Prague down to the last detail, but he still had so much to do. That was the way it was with the best assistants: first they took care of their boss, then they took care of themselves.

The water felt good, cleansing. His kindergarten teacher had taught him how to properly wash his hands, first rubbing the back, then the front, then intertwining the fingers, and all these years later, he could remember her face, how it lit up when he did it right.

He was just turning off the faucet and reaching for the paper towel dispenser when the door of the bathroom opened and Austin Clay walked inside.

Warren swallowed but couldn’t seem to get any moisture into his mouth. Clay wasn’t moving toward the stalls; he just stood in the doorway, looking directly at him. Warren grabbed a paper towel and pulled, but it broke in the middle so he only got a small triangle from the dispenser. Absently, he dried his hands with that piece rather than try again.

“Is she okay, then?” He tried to put the proper amount of concern on his face.

“Marika? Yes.”

“I was about to head to the hospital to check on the Adams family.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. How this could happen here is—”

“How was it supposed to happen?”

Warren stopped. He could feel his eyes darting and wished they wouldn’t, but he couldn’t make them stop. He forced a smile.

“I’m sorry?”

“You heard me.”

“How was what supposed to happen?”

Clay folded his arms across his chest and stepped closer. “I have a theory, and you tell me where I’m wrong.”

“Okay?” Warren tried to suppress the rising panic inside him.

“I think you tried to pull off your first mission.”

“I don’t—”

“I think you looked at it like this. There were two dangling threads left over from the attempted assassination of Adams. Two threads that would keep him from starting his EurOps position with a clean slate. Snow Wolf and Marika Csontos. So you came up with a way to kill two birds with one stone. You’d give Fourticq the address where Marika was staying, and then you’d make sure I got the news too late to stop him but in time to kill him. Fourticq would take care of the girl, and I’d take care of him.”

“That’s not—”

“What you weren’t counting on was a bomb on Adams’s plane.”

Warren stopped trying to respond. His face felt flushed with blood. His eyes shifted again, and Clay’s widened.

“Or…wait. Wait. Kudos, Warren. I didn’t think you had it in you. You
did
know about the bomb on Adams’s plane. Hell, you arranged it. And if it all went down the way you wanted, you’d have all your problems tied up in one swoop. Adams would be dead, leaving a vacuum in power that you could help fill. Snow Wolf and Marika Csontos would be dead. And you’d have me in your arsenal, unencumbered.”

“That’s…none of that is true.”

“Do you know how many men I’ve gotten to tell me the truth over the years? How many men, bigger than you, maybe not meaner, maybe not more despicable, maybe not as evil as you, but bigger men nonetheless, who have told me their secrets?”

Clay stepped closer again, and Warren’s eyes tracked to the door. Could he get around Clay? Break past him before the field operative could reach out an arm and stop him? Then what? Warren heard his voice come out squeaky, breaking like the voice of a teenager going through puberty. “What? You’re going to torture me?” He couldn’t keep the alarm out of it.

“No, Warren. You’re going to confess to what you did. What your plan was. All of it.”

“How did you—?”

“Because you and Fourticq were in contact before all of this. You were his inside man in Los Angeles long before Adams got on a plane for Prague.”

“You couldn’t know that. His files were all cleaned out.”

“It’s not on his hard drive. It’s on yours.”

Warren decided he’d just stick his chin up and blow past Clay, take a haughty air, act offended, and just…go.

“You’re lying,” he said. “And I don’t have to stand here and listen to this.”

“You got your loyalties confused, Warren. I don’t know what Fourticq told you, or promised you, but you put your cards in with him instead of with the Agency.”

“Absurd.” Warren brushed past Clay and was surprised when the larger man didn’t stop him. He breathed easier. He would walk out to the elevator, head down to his car, and drive away. He didn’t know where he’d drive, but he would head south and then—

He opened the door to the corridor and shrank back when he saw the hallway filled with people. Twenty dark-suited men stood on either side of the door, blocking his way. He searched their faces until he saw one he recognized. Half of the face was peeling, as though the man had fallen asleep on his side in a lounger on a beach.

“You’re going to tell us everything,” he said.

“Michael. It’s not what you think. I didn’t—”

“Take him.”

And then he was grabbed rudely under his arms and led forcefully away.