Vision Impossible (11 page)

That was all he got out before we heard the squeal of tires. The car down the street had revved its engine and it was now roaring straight at us. I used my hand on Frost’s shoulder to pull him toward me, to the side, and down low. In the next instant a hailstorm of bullets tore the quiet night apart.

B
efore I could even cover my own head, I was pulled sideways and a heavy weight fell right on top of me, mashing my face into the leather upholstery. I heard sounds like golf balls pounding against the metal of the car. Over our heads, glass crackled and splintered, while outside there were shouts and one piercing scream, and all the while it continued to rain bullets. The assassin’s car roared past, but it seemed to hit something, because there was a loud thud mixed into the cacophony of noise.

Even after the car had passed us, the assassin continued to shoot bullets, but when the car got to the end of the block, it squealed at the turn and was gone. For the next several seconds, all was quiet. Well, save for the sound of my panicked breathing and thundering heart.

I was still smunched against the leather seat, so I used my hands to try to get up from under the weight on my back. “Stay still!” Frost growled.

I stopped struggling. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Freaked-out, but otherwise I’m okay.”

“Good. Stay down and don’t move until I tell you it’s clear.” The pressure on my head and back lifted as Frost moved off me.

Once he’d had a chance to survey the area, he said, “Okay, you can get up now.”

I moved and heard the sound of tinkling glass. Sitting up slowly, I could see that our windshield had been struck by a hail of bullets, many of which were still stuck in the glass. Two bullets had made it all the way through, however, and one of them had lodged dead center into my headrest, and that hit me like a ton of bricks. If I hadn’t ducked at the exact moment I had, I’d have been dead for sure.

My car door was suddenly yanked open and Dutch’s panicked face filled my vision. “Thank Christ!” he said, reaching into the car to pull me out and hug me so tight I couldn’t inhale.

“I’m fine!” I squeaked. “Dutch, sweetie, please let go. I can’t breathe.”

Dutch released me from the embrace only to hold me at arm’s length and inspect me head to toe. “You’ve got a cut on your cheek,” he said, wiping his fingers gently at the side of my face.

“It’s nothing,” I told him, really hoping it wasn’t.

The other side of the car opened and Frost stepped out. “You okay?” Dutch asked him.

“Fine,” he said, eyeing something lying in the middle of the street. I looked to what had caught his attention and my stomach lurched. “Ohmigod!” I said, pulling out of Dutch’s grasp to hurry to the corner and lose my dinner.

After I’d stopped retching, I felt Dutch’s hand on my back. “How you doin’, Edgar?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I managed to say, before wiping my mouth with my sleeve. “Jesus,” I whispered. “Who would
do
that to someone?”

Dutch looked over his shoulder at what remained of Viktor Kozahkov. From what I’d seen, he’d been shot up but good before being run over. It was an image I didn’t think I’d ever get out of my mind.

“Someone who wanted him very dead,” I heard Dutch say to Frost.

“Cooper could have just as easily been the target,” our handler replied. “Did you catch the bullet holes on her side of the car? It looks like someone was aiming at her.”

At that, I turned and looked more closely at Frost’s car. Sure enough, most of the bullets that had landed on our car had favored the passenger side. It was a miracle I was still alive. “How is it that we weren’t hit?” I asked.

Frost knocked the side of the car. “Bulletproof,” he said.

I said, “Maybe the shooter fired at us using his left hand and most of those that favored my side of the car were just wild?” I was thinking there was no way I could have been the target, and it made sense to me that the driver was likely trying to steer the speeding car with his right hand and shoot out the window with his left. Dutch looked at me doubtfully, and I had a moment to consider that a professional hit man would probably be pretty skilled shooting either right- or left-handed while maneuvering a speeding car. “Yeah, scratch that,” I said with a gulp.

Dutch appeared seriously stressed, especially when he went over to inspect my side of the car. “Let’s get inside,” he told me as we heard the first sirens approach.

“Keep away from the windows,” Frost told us. “I’ll be up later and we’ll talk.”

 

 

I
t turned out that there was one more victim besides Viktor and his two bodyguards. The doorman we’d suspected was a spy for CSIS was dead in the doorway with several shots to the chest and head. I felt terrible, because even though he’d been working undercover to keep an eye on us, and in spite of the fact that he’d given Mandy a key card, knowing full well Rick Des Vries had arrived with another woman, he was still technically one of the good guys.

It also took until Frost was through with the police—about three hours—for me to stop shaking. Dutch had made me some tea, which helped, and he held my hand and told me I was okay, which helped even more. He also received a text from Frost, who was meeting with a high-ranking member of the CSIS. Dutch showed me the message and I grimaced. So much for keeping under the Canadian radar.

Our CIA handler came up close to midnight, and by then I was slumped in my chair, heavy with fatigue.

“How’d it go with CSIS?” Dutch asked him before the guy even had a chance to sit down.

Frost tugged on his tie to loosen it and took his seat. “Not as bad as expected,” he said. “They’re not happy that we’re working with Rick Des Vries, but they weren’t sorry to see Kozahkov taken out. It was a little stickier because their agent got hit.”

“I liked him,” I said dully. “He seemed like a nice man underneath the subterfuge.”

Frost nodded and rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Yeah, it sucks, but as bad as losing one of our allies is, I still have to point out that it works in our favor.”

“How’s that, exactly?” I asked, disgusted that he could find the agent’s death beneficial.

“We offered to put one of our own guys into the building undercover and take the risk. CSIS took the offer, no questions asked. We’ll feed them a few tidbits about Des Vries’s comings and goings, and that should keep the heat off of us for now at least.

“It’s going to be even more important, though, Agent Rivers, for you to keep your identity a secret. We can’t risk the CSIS finding out that you’re an impostor working for us. They’d never trust the CIA again.”

I wondered why anyone would trust the CIA in the first place, but I kept that thought to myself.

“When word gets out that Kozahkov was hit outside Des Vries’s condo, it could attract a little too much of the wrong kind of attention. You two are going to have to work to keep a low profile from here on out,” Frost warned. “No paper trails or run-ins with the local authorities. Obey all traffic laws and local ordinances. If one of you gets sick or hurt, don’t go to the doctor; we’ll send one of our guys in to check you out.”

“Wait,” I said, putting up my hand. “You’re including me in that mandate? You think the CSIS would be interested in
me
?”

Frost sent me a piercing stare. “They’ve already asked about you, Cooper. They had more intel on Des Vries’s regular girlfriend than we did. Candy something . . .”

“Mandy Mortemeyer,” I corrected, liking that, for once, I knew more than he did.

“Yeah, her.” Frost yawned and scratched his chin. “We didn’t anticipate that she’d lose her job and show up here. What a pain in the ass. And we didn’t even know she’d entered the building until Rivers texted me.”

“How is that possible?” I asked. Weren’t they watching us like hawks?

Frost sighed heavily. “She came in through the garage, and our guy on watch by the entrance—who’s been reassigned—thought she was you in the blond wig again. He didn’t spot her until she came out driving one of Des Vries’s cars.”

“That must have been where she got the key card to the penthouse in the first place,” I surmised, feeling bad that I’d blamed the doorman. “How many cars does Des Vries have?” I’d driven one on my shopping spree and Dutch had obviously driven another. From memory there’d been a few cars parked in the garage when I’d gone out to do my shopping.

“Three. She took the only one worth less than a hundred grand.”

My eyebrows rose. “You guys gonna track her down so she doesn’t come back?”

“We’re working on it,” he said irritably, which let me know Mandy had given some other errant agent the slip. I wondered if he’d been reassigned too.

“I broke up with Mandy by text,” Dutch said. “She’s got to think Rick’s a tool for breaking up with her that way. I bet she moves on by tomorrow.”

I turned and smiled at Dutch. “But you’re her
soul mate
, Richard. Didn’t you know that?”

Dutch rolled his eyes. “Do you think she’ll be back?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“We’ll find her,” Frost assured us. “And we’ll make sure she gets the message. Anyway, the important thing here is that CSIS knows you’re not Des Vries’s regular girlfriend, Cooper—they’ve already run you through their facial-recognition software.”

My eyes widened.

“You haven’t come up in their system, which makes them extra curious about your identity. I’ve told them only that you work for us, but that’s not going to satisfy them for long. I have a feeling they’ll be trying to figure out who you are the whole time you’re here. They’ll be searching for any information they can find, and they’ll dip their fingers into any medical records, driver’s license, passport info, et cetera, if they can, so you
can’t
end up at a doctor’s office or the hospital, and you
can’t
file any police reports or get a ticket, okay?”

“We get it, Frost,” Dutch said. “Low profiles and no paper trails.”

A short silence fell on us until I asked, “Did the CSIS have any theories about who might have killed Kozahkov?”

Frost eyed me. “No. And I didn’t share with them that you’d gotten a good look at him either.”

That got my attention. “But I didn’t see him.”

It was Frost’s turn to look surprised. “Then what tipped you off before the shooting started?”

I sighed. My first day of actually being a spy and I was already tired of this. I tapped my temple. “My radar gave me a warning.”

Frost seemed to take that in. “You seriously didn’t see anyone? Maybe someone walking suspiciously up to their car before they got in and came at us?”

“Nope.”

Frost drummed his fingers on the table, probably reevaluating his estimation of me.

Dutch took the opportunity to speak next. “Whoever it was, he was a pro. Any theories on who might’ve ordered the hit?”

Frost’s fingers stopped drumming, but he continued to stare at me with scrutiny. I tried not to squirm. “Viktor Kozahkov had a list of enemies a mile long, including a few members of his own family. He was deep inside the Chechen Mafia and made enough waves to be forced to leave the homeland in a hurry. It was a foregone conclusion when we looked into his history that he was living on borrowed time. The important question is not who killed him, but did he know who stole the drone? Or even, did he have a hand in the operation and, by extension, was killed because of it?”

Dutch shook his head. “He didn’t take it,” he said firmly.

I frowned. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Dutch said. “Granted, he was still pretty out of it by the time I got here. . . .” Looking at me, Dutch asked, “By the way, Edgar, what’d you do to him? The guy could barely talk.”

I gave him a sly smile and pulled my stun gun out of my blazer pocket. “I hit him with about a thousand volts of stop-groping-me-you-Russian-pig.”

Dutch grinned. “Glad to know you can take care of yourself.”

“Why do you think he didn’t steal the drone?” Frost asked, his tone impatient.

“Kozahkov told me that he’d just scored a major deal. He said he’d made a connection to a newcomer who’d acquired some cutting-edge technology from the Americans and he stood to make a killing on it when he took the newcomer to Boklovich,” Dutch said.

“The drone thief!” I whispered. “
That’s
why I kept getting a sideways connection to Kozahkov. He really didn’t steal the drone!” For the record, I seriously love it when I’m right.

“Did he tell you who this newcomer was?” Frost asked anxiously.

Dutch shook his head. “He wouldn’t even give me a hint, and when I got pushy about it, I could tell he started to get suspicious, so I had to back off. He wanted to know why I was so curious, and I told him, point-blank, that I knew what the new guy was offering, and I also knew it was defective. I told him I had the real McCoy and just like the newcomer, I needed his help getting it to Boklovich’s auction.”