I swallow hard; the backs of my eyes are beginning to sting.
Victor’s lips fall on mine.
When the kiss breaks, he’s smiling faintly at me; his long fingers combing through the hair down the side of my face.
I smile back, giving him my answer.
“Oh Vic-tor,” Nora’s singsong voice streams through the speaker system, “you can’t avoid this forever. Clock is ticking.”
We turn around to face the screen together.
“I’m really looking forward to your confession, Faust.” She smiles up at the camera.
I look over at him. He’s still staring into the giant glowing screen, a deeply contemplative look at rest on his handsome face.
“I hate to say it, but she’s right, Victor—there isn’t much time.”
“There is still over four hours,” he says, focused on Nora.
“Are you going to go in there?”
This is the first time I’ve begun to question Victor on this, letting my naturally suspicious mind run away with me again. What is his secret? Does he even have one? Why is he taking his time about it? But my worst fear—does he really intend to play her game for Dina’s sake?
“Yes, I’m going in,” he says. “I have enough on her now that I can take in with me.”
“What are you—”
The door bursts open behind us and Woodard comes into the room, winded and red-faced, holding up a cell phone in one hand.
“Sarah and Ann-Marie,” he says, trying to catch his breath, “my daughters…t-they escaped”—he practically stumbles toward us in his khakis and loafers. Niklas walks in behind him—“t-they just called me.”
My heart begins to race.
“What about Dina? Tessa?”
Woodard shakes his head. “No one said anything about them,” he says and the sudden surge of hope I felt is snatched away from me just as quickly. “Just my daughters. I asked Sarah while I was on the phone with her if anyone else had been with them where they were kept, but I had to be vague. She said it was only her and Ann-Marie. They’re at the police station.”
“Shit,” I hear Victor say.
One of Victor’s pet-peeves is having to deal with the police. It takes a lot more than a cleaner coming in and removing all evidence of a crime in the middle of the night, than having to orchestrate believable stories to tell authorities, and to remove evidence and files from their systems. Sometimes a job like that can take months depending on how many outsiders are involved. And if it makes it onto the news, damage control can be an even longer and more complicated process. I told Victor once that he should invest in one of those ‘flashy-thingies’ Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones used in ‘Men in Black’ to erase everyone’s memories—he didn’t find the humor in it.
“And they’re asking a lot of questions, naturally,” Niklas chimes in. He smiles and adds with an air of dry humor, “Oh, and reporters are already outside the police station—imagine that.” He would’ve found my ‘Men in Black’ joke funny.
“Great,” I say with a sigh, “we don’t need this shit right now.”
“Are they on the phone?” Victor glances briefly at the cell phone in Woodard’s hand, and then up at him with a threatening gaze.
That would be a really stupid thing—having them on the other end of the phone while we’re discussing this—but sometimes Woodard doesn’t use that big brain of his for important things like common sense.
His chins jiggle as he shakes his head rapidly and drops the phone in the pocket of his khakis.
“No, I-I just got off the phone with them,” he says. “Sarah called me from the police station. I-I had to pretend I didn’t even know my daughters were missing.” Thankfully, their mother, Woodard’s wife, has been in London the past two days, otherwise she would’ve reported them missing and the police would’ve been involved a lot sooner. Also, his daughters are of legal age.
“They need me to come down to the station,” Woodard says eagerly, hoping that Victor will grant him permission to leave.
“Victor, no,” I say, looking over at him with desperation. “There’s no time. It could take hours just for them to file a report and try to recall what happened and to explain it and to—”
“He has to go, Izabel,” Victor says and my heart sinks like a stone. “We can’t draw any unnecessary attention. If Woodard doesn’t immediately go to the police station and”—he looks right at Woodard as if to drill the next sentence into his head—“put on a believable act, they will be questioning him next.”
“Not to mention,” Niklas speaks up, “we need to know what his daughters have to say about their abduction—who the fuck else is involved, what they look like, how many there are.”
I shoot Niklas with a hateful glare. He brushes it off.
He’s right though; it’s important that we know those things. Extremely important. But I still can’t convince myself that this is a good idea. It’s cutting it too close. Nora said that all of us had to be in the same room when whoever she came here for realizes why, and would have to confess in front of everyone. First Fredrik still hasn’t shown, then Dorian gets thrown in a cell, and now Woodard is leaving? I think I’m going to be sick.
“I will go in and talk with Nora next,” Victor says looking at me, trying to ease my mind. “I won’t wait until Woodard returns, but I’ll have to buy as much time as I can in there with her to give Woodard enough time to send me the information he obtains. I may be able to use it against her as well.”
Sighing deeply and spearing all ten fingers through the top of my hair, I stare at Nora in the screen for a moment.
“OK,” I give in. I drop my arms back at my sides and march over to stand in front of Woodard. “You listen to me James,” I demand, pointing my finger at him. “When you go into that station you need to play the part—you had no idea they’d been abducted, but you’re frantic and worried and you don’t even hear anyone else other than your daughters at first because you’re too busy hugging them, and looking them over for signs of abuse, and asking them if they’re OK. You’re distraught, James, do you understand?”
He nods briskly several times.
“One hour,” I go on, pointing my finger upward. “Don’t spend any more time in there than that. Say you want to take your daughters home. Tell them no more questions today. They need to rest. They’ve been through a traumatic experience. OK?”
He nods again.
“Get them out of that police station,” I say, “take them to a hotel somewhere and use one of your other identities to check them in. Then you come straight back here. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am, I-I got it.”
“Do not ever fucking call me ma’am.” I feel flames coming out of my eyes.
Niklas chuckles.
“O-OK. Sorry.”
I grab my phone from the table in front of the screens where I had been sitting earlier, punch in a number and put the phone to my ear.
“Take two cars and follow James Woodard to the police station,” I order one of our men stationed on the bottom floor of the building. “Stay out of sight, but watch his back going in and coming out. Then follow him to the hotel afterwards and watch over the room he leaves his daughters in.”
I hang up to three sets of eyes focused on me.
“What?” I ask, confused by their silence and stares.
Niklas laughs and shakes his head but says nothing. Victor’s lips turn up vaguely at one corner. Woodard has too much on his mind and just looks eager to leave.
“What are you still standing there for?” I ask Woodard, raising both of my hands, palms-up; my eyes hard and concentrating.
Woodard hurries out the door without another word.
15
Victor
Izabel stops me at the surveillance room door.
“I’m going to try getting in touch with Fredrik one more time,” she says. “I swear Victor, if Dina dies because of him—.”
I touch the side of her face with my fin
gertips.
“That will not happen,” I tell her, kiss her on the edge of her mouth and leave.
I never would have gone in first. Or second. Or third. And up until this point I intended to go last. When given the opportunity, I learn everything I can about my enemy before I approach them. Or take them out. Woodard was an easy target for someone like Nora. Izabel is too blinded by anger and vengeance to have the kind of patience that I have. Dorian and my brother are both quicker to act than I feel is appropriate—it is in their nature. And Gustavsson—if Nora Kessler can stay alive to meet him face to face—will tell her nothing. It will be the other way around.
Izabel may have to face the death of the woman she loves like a mother.
After punching the code on the door panel, I lock myself inside with a rarity. People like Kessler are not necessarily rare in numbers, only in exposure. To have one like her bound inside a locked room is extraordinary enough, but to have one indirectly admitting who and what she is, is unheard of. If what she told Izabel is true, I believe she will willingly tell me even more. The real question is why.
“Ah, finally the boss-man himself,” Kessler says with a smile that might otherwise be intimidating if I could be intimidated by her. “I wondered if you’d come at all.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Placing a hand on the back of the empty chair, I pull it from the table and have a seat, propping my right foot on my left knee. I tug casually on the cuffs of my dress shirt with my fingers, and then place my hands within my lap.
She shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says, letting her eyes drift upward in a bored fashion, “because you’re more intelligent than the rest of them, I suppose.”
“Just more thorough,” I say.
She smiles, though it shows more in her eyes than on her lips. “No, I’m pretty sure I’m right. Because, you see, you’re not that much different from me, Faust. You did exactly what I would’ve done—scoped the building out before barging inside blindly.”
I say nothing.
“So, you’ve come to confess,” she says. She stretches and curls her fingers against the arms of the chair to relieve some of her discomfort.
“Eventually,” I say. “But first we’re going to talk about you.”
“Oh, we are, are we?” She grins; the light from the ceiling reflecting in the brown of her eyes. “Maybe you forget that this is my game, not yours. You play by my rules.”
“I will play within the boundaries of your rules,” I say, “until those boundaries become a problem, and then I will cross them.” I drop my foot on the floor and lean forward, interlocking my fingers with my hands draped between my knees. “Perhaps you forget that you are the one in the chair.”
“I’ve already told you,” she says, losing confidence and replacing it with frustration, “I’m not afraid to die.”
I lean back again and cross one leg over the other, smoothing out invisible wrinkles in the leg of my black pants, taking my time.
“Why don’t you tell me, Nora Kessler, why someone from the Shadow Sect would be here in my organization, playing games based on a personal vendetta.” I look away from my pants and up at her. “SC-4 operatives have no personal vendettas because they have no personal lives or possessions or burdens…unless of course one was…compromised.” I glance briefly at her marred pinky finger. “Tell me—what other parts of your body did your father, Solis, mutilate when he found out that you had been compromised?”
A flash of anger crosses her eyes, but she does well to contain it before it does further damage to her self-control. She smiles instead and then glances at her finger momentarily as if it’s an insignificant thing.
“I’d be happy to show you,” she says sultrily, “if you’d like to see the rest of my body.”
A faint smile appears on one side of my face.
“I bet you would,” I say.
I can only imagine what Izabel is thinking right now. This is yet another issue where Izabel will have to learn self-control, but I have little confidence in that ever happening; she is a jealous woman by nature—an incapacitating kink in the armor in this business.
“So then you know where I came from,” she says, giving up the playful, seductive act. “I knew you’d have that much figured out at least before you took your turn. Yes, Solis is my”—she looks up in thought, pursing her lips contemplatively—“well, I wouldn’t go as far as calling him anyone’s father; a more appropriate term would be sperm donor.”
“How were you compromised?”
“That isn’t something you’ll get out of me, Faust. It’s inconsequential.”
“On the contrary,” I say, “it is the reason you are here. A personal vendetta. But that raises another question—if you were compromised, how is it that you are still alive?”
“Unlike Vonnegut,” she says, “the Sect doesn’t immediately kill its operatives because of a mistake. There aren’t as many of us, and we are, shall I say…worth a lot more than dispensable operatives like yourself. When one of us makes a mistake, we’re punished in ways that your Specialist cannot even fathom. We get one chance to come back from our…lapses in judgment, and then if we still cast suspicion, we go the way of the grave.”
“Something tells me,” I say, “that you might have gone the way of the rogue.”
Her eyes crease with curiosity.
“And what would make you think that?”
“Because you flinched when I taunted you about that finger,” I point out. “And because you attacked Izabel when she taunted you. An SC-4 operative does not show anger because they do not feel anger.”
Kessler’s chest, bound to the chair by paracord, rises slowly as she inhales a deep, concentrated breath.
“You’re right,” she admits, “I was compromised. And they tortured the hell out of me—you should see my back. But unlike the others who go through what I went through, the treatment had the opposite effect on me. I didn’t revert back into the soldier I was bred and born and trained to be”—she grins—“I guess you can say they pissed me the fuck off and I became someone different. I had a mind of my own for a change, and it was so…liberating, Faust.” She looks upward at the ceiling; a euphoric expression manipulating her features. She drops her chin and looks back at me. “Freedom to me is how I imagine heroin might feel to an addict. I wanted more of it after I had tasted it the first time. And I was willing to do anything to get it. Kill anyone to keep it.” There is a hidden meaning behind her last admission.
“Who did you kill?”
“Whoever got in my way.” She smiles.
She will not give up anything she does not want me to know, but by withholding certain answers to my questions, that will give me more clues as to her reason for being here. Any topic she does not want to talk about is surely behind the source of her intentions—how she was compromised, who she killed for her freedom.
“But like I said before,” she goes on, “you and me, we are a lot alike. I bet I’m more like you than anyone else in your entire organization, even that beautiful redhead of yours. How long do you think a relationship with her will last?” There is nothing provoking in her question; she seems quite serious.
But I find myself deeply provoked, nonetheless.
“We will not talk about Izabel,” I say, “or my relationship with her.”
“You love her,” Kessler says, and again, she is being honest and not just trying to elicit a reaction from me, which I find peculiar. “I wouldn’t know much about love,” she continues, “at least not that kind, but if my instincts are as human as the part of me that separated myself from the Sect, then I’d say you do love her. I can see it in your face, as stoic as the mask you wear is.” She pauses and then adds, “But do you want to know what else I see when I look at you?”
“No,” I answer, and open a hand, palm up, as if to say ‘but by all means’.
“You’re conflicted,” she says. “You love her, but there is still a huge part of you, of who you were b
efore she became a part of your life, who you were for nearly all of yours, that isn’t so sure you can do everything it takes to maintain that love. You are, and always have been, a professional, methodical killer, a man of business whose only passion in this life has been to play God.” She pauses once more, tilting her blonde head to one side and looking upon me thoughtfully. “And another part of you doesn’t intend to tell me anything. It has already made peace with itself in accepting that Dina Gregory is going to die because you’re not willing to compromise yourself or your organization just to save a little old woman, even if she’s important to the woman you love.”
I swallow hard, but maintain my composure.
“Believe what you want,” I say. “You cannot manipulate me like you have the others.”
“Yes, I know,” she says. “You and Fredrik Gustavsson I knew coming in here would be the two who would never cooperate. No matter whose lives were on the line.”
“So then if you already knew these things, why are you wasting your time here? What are you getting out of any of this if you know you will not get the confession that you seek?”
A small smirk appears on her face.
“Because whether I get the confession or not,” she says with confidence, “I’ll still get what I came here for, either way.”
“And what would that be?” I know she will not answer, but I ask in case by some chance I am wrong.
“You’ll know in approximately three and a half hours,” she says.
I just look at her, quietly admiring her as much as I want to kill her. The main reason she is still alive is because of Izabel, but I admit, the more I learn about her and interact with her, the more I want to put her under a microscope—I’ve never been face to face with a female version of myself. It is intriguing.