“Money solves many problems,” she said coolly.
He rubbed his back. “Let me guess, in addition to foreign-language immersion classes, you also have time for martial arts.”
She fingered the gun before releasing the hammer and placing it in the pocket of her robe, which she cinched up tightly. “I heard something in the rear yard, but I didn’t see a man come over the wall. Well, that is, except for you.”
“But you must’ve seen the lights come on next door. And there’s a van out front with two men in it.”
She gazed at the wall separating the two villas. “Maybe I did. I… I can’t be sure.” She looked back at him. “So you can see my villa from the cliffs?”
“Yeah. The tourist buses come there every day and take photos of the villas, the valley, and the mountains.” For some reason Shaw could tell that she knew all of this. That along with her having a gun now rekindled his suspicions. “Your pool is the only one directly visible from that vantage point. The pool next door is mostly hidden by a garage and some trees.”
She glanced at the dark waters. “The pool?” She shot him an accusatory look. “Could you see me swimming then? And afterwards?”
Shaw didn’t hesitate. “All I saw was the guy. That’s why I came down here, to make sure you were okay. I would’ve knocked on the front door, but again there were the dudes next door and I wasn’t sure what was going on. And it is after one in the morning.”
“Yes, it is. I’m surprised you’re still up.”
“Yeah, I was surprised to see you too. Guess I’m still on U.S. time. You sure you didn’t see anyone?”
“No one, and the doors are all locked.” She paused. “I didn’t know lobbyists were so good with defensive maneuvers and guns.”
Shaw managed a chuckle. “Hell, it was all luck. When I felt the muzzle against my head I just sort of freaked. Last time I fired a gun I was thirteen. It was a .22 caliber rifle and the targets were tin cans stuck on a fencepost. But where did you learn to sneak up on people like that? I never even heard you.”
Shaw had thought it impossible for anyone to do that to him.
“I took ballet. I’m light on my feet.”
When she didn’t say anything else, he lightly touched her arm and said, “I’m just glad you’re okay. I better get going now.”
“Maybe we can see if the men are still out there,” she said, turning toward the villa.
Shaw mutely followed her, noting the grass stain on the backside of her cotton robe from where he’d thrown the woman. The house was dark and she didn’t turn on any lights as they moved through the space, Shaw following her lead. He could tell that she had excellent night vision. They reached the front room, where Shaw could see the oak double doors leading outside. The room was barrel-vaulted, supported by visible curved wooden trusses in a style often seen in older European homes. The interior walls were thick, with a stucco veneer. They kept the cool or heat in as needed. The furnishings were eclectic, costly, and plentiful to the point of the large room feeling slightly cluttered but cozy. To his left he noted the corkscrew limestone staircase that provided access to the interior five floors. A lot of space for one person.
They drew close to the door and he watched as Janie eased back a curtain of the sidelight next to the doorway. Shaw peered over her shoulder. He breathed an inaudible sigh of relief when he saw the Citroën van still there with the dark shadows in the front indicating the men were also still present and accounted for.
She closed the curtain and took a step back, turning to him. “Thanks for your concern, Bill.”
“Anytime. You have any idea who those guys are?”
She shook her head. “Maybe we should report this to the police.”
“Maybe we should,” said Shaw. He had no intention of doing any such thing, and something made him suspect that she wasn’t going to call them either. “Well, I better get going. Do you mind if I go out the way I came in? Those guys look a little rough for my tastes.”
She nodded absently, her gaze on his face. “I’m sure you could handle yourself just fine.”
She followed him out to the rear, where he used his jacket as protective cover while he hoisted himself back up on the wall. While he perched there momentarily, she said, “Maybe we can get together soon?”
“Okay. I feel after tonight we’ve really bonded.”
She seemed to force a smile. “I think so too.”
“Look, I’m planning to grab some coffee and a croissant at the little village bakery around nine tomorrow morning. Why don’t we meet there?”
As soon as he disappeared over the wall, Reggie stripped off her robe to reveal dark shorts and a navy blue tube top underneath. She waited for a few beats before going back in the villa and exiting through a door on the lower level that emptied out onto the public path. Finding the same blind spot in the observation lanes of the men in the van that Shaw had earlier, she started following him. He took the shortcut up to the village and wound his way slowly back to his hotel through the silent streets. If he knew he was being followed he gave no indication of it.
Reggie broke off her tail when he entered the hotel’s front doors. At least she knew now where he was staying. She made her way slowly back down to the villa, skirted the men in the van, and re-entered her villa the same way she had left it. She retrieved her robe where she’d dropped it on a table and carefully lifted out the gun. She put it in a plastic baggie. It had Bill’s prints on the muzzle.
She searched the place from top to bottom after locking all the doors. Satisfied, she put on a long T-shirt, climbed into bed, and made a call.
Whit answered on the second ring. His voice did not sound sleepy. He and Dominic were staying at an isolated cottage barely fifteen kilometers away. She filled him in on the night’s events.
“I don’t like this guy,” Whit said.
“There were two men out front,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, but you still don’t know what his angle is. I think we can safely assume that he’s not some bloody lobbyist from the States. The whole mission could be compromised now.”
“I don’t see him working for Waller, if that’s what you’re getting at. He wouldn’t have pointed out the man’s advance team to me and then warned me about the man watching me.”
“So if he’s not with Waller, what then?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got his prints on my gun that I’ll send along to you. I want to see if we get a hit somewhere.”
“Okay, I can pick it up tomorrow. But look, Reg, it’s hard enough going up against Kuchin. We don’t need any unknown shit on top of it.”
She put the phone down and lifted the sheet over her. But she couldn’t sleep. She rose, padded over to the window, opened it, and stared out. She was on the top floor of the villa with excellent views of Gordes. Up there was a tall man who’d just manhandled her. He could have killed her tonight but he hadn’t. She’d never seen anyone move that fast, that fluidly. Not Dominic or even Whit. Or even her.
Who is he?
“Damn,” she muttered before closing her window and flopping on the bed with a long groan. This complication was the last thing she needed right now, if it somehow caused them to miss getting Kuchin. It took another hour for her to fall asleep.
In his room Shaw had just finished talking to Frank, reporting in what had happened. He stripped down to his skivvies, but couldn’t sleep. Lying down he sometimes found it hard to breathe because of a recent nasty attack on his windpipe by a fellow named Caesar. Shaw’s muscles were long and ropy and he was actually stronger than he looked. Yet the giant Caesar had been more physically formidable. However, Shaw had gotten a little help in their confrontation from unexpected sources. Love. Hate. Rage. But mostly hate and rage. The result was he was here and Caesar wasn’t.
He rose and opened his window to let in some fresh air. His window didn’t have a view of the villas below, but he could see them clearly in his mind.
So who was the woman and
why was she really here? She might be simply who she said she was. Rich and traveling alone, a woman might carry a weapon—it was not unreasonable. And the database search on her fingerprints had produced no hits. Then an image drove into his mind that he tried but could not get rid of. Her bathing suit coming off and revealing the long, tanned torso sliding down into the smooth, shapely, and naked backside. Massive waves of guilt poured over him. He got back into bed and finally fell asleep.
CHAPTER
25
EVAN WALLER closed his eyes and let his mind wander back twenty, thirty years. In his mind’s eye the trappings of the legitimate Canadian businessman with the underlying criminal enterprise fell away and the soul of Ukrainian Fedir Kuchin emerged like a serpent discarding an old faded skin for a supple new one. His gaze wandered over his bare arm, searching for a spot to do it. He made a bicep, the clench tightening the rubber strap around the muscle. The veins in his forearm swelled. His eye lit on one tunnel of blood and he pushed the needle in and forced down the plunger. The customized cocktail flowed into him, some steroids, some purified drugs, a bit of his own expensively purchased elixir from the Far East. It was totally unique, what he was shooting in himself. As it should be, he felt. What was good enough for everyone else was not good enough for him.
He took a deep breath and let the fire rain over him, from the inside out. He smiled, sat back, then the adrenaline hit. He jumped up, did some jacks, then some rat-a-tat push-ups, then more jacks, and then he snagged the pull-up bar and did a quick ten, grinning with each one.
He dropped back to the matted floor, breathing hard. He looked in the mirror. For sixty-three he was in extraordinary shape. For sixty-three, fifty-three, hell, probably even thirty-three, at least by softened Western standards. He had small wedges of love handles and the rock abs were no longer there, but the belly was flat and when he clenched it the muscle underneath was hard. His thighs were a little thinner than before, but his arms and shoulders still bulged. He rubbed his bald head, checked the gray mat of hair on his chest. It didn’t really matter anymore what he took, how much he exercised, how far he ran, he was still getting old. A part of him was grateful about this, grateful that no one had managed to kill him yet. The other part, well, he was just getting old. And he didn’t like it.
He showered, rubbing the sting out of his arm around the injection site. Wrapped in a robe, he walked through the confines of his Montreal penthouse. He had fabulous views through the latest generation of ordnance-proof material. He knew this because the U.S. president had similar materials on his limo and at the White House. Also laced into the thickened window glass was a membrane that distorted the image portrayed to the outside world. He was now standing in the middle of the room, but the image projected through the glass wall had him seven inches to the right. Five minutes later and at another spot in the room, his image would be nearly a foot to the left. It constantly changed so no one could draw a perfect bead on him. At least in theory.
As he stood looking out into a cool summer night he glanced down at his chest for the telltale red dot from the sniper scope. There could be something out there that could calibrate the image illusion and shatter the whiz-bang barrier he’d put up between himself and his enemies. Yet he didn’t step back into the shadows. If they wanted him badly enough they could try. They had better take him down with the first shot, though, because they wouldn’t get a second chance. In his world whoever killed harder survived.
The Muslims would soon find that out. The man they’d captured had not lasted long. After thirty minutes alone with Waller and his little toolbox the fellow had told him everything he’d needed to know. Well, almost everything. He knew the names of the men who’d ordered his death and their locations. And there was one more fellow, Abdul-Majeed. He had been Waller’s initial point of contact, leading him down the road that had nearly resulted in his death. Waller was not easily fooled, and yet Abdul-Majeed had managed it.
What the captured Muslim could not tell him was why they had attempted to kill Waller, because he didn’t know. At least he’d sworn that with his last dying squeal. That was the most perplexing question of all. Was there some other force out there targeting him?
He changed into dark slacks and a white silk shirt, then rode the private elevator down to the garage where his men met him. He allowed no one in his apartment, not even cleaning personnel. Not even tough, faithful Pascal. It was his private sanctuary. They climbed in their caravan of SUVs and rode out from under the cover of the parking garage.
Their route was north and the metropolis quickly fell away to more open spaces. Waller tapped his fingers on the glass, watching the large trees pass by in the darkness. He thought he saw a moose near the roadway and then it was gone. His father had hunted animals for food back in the rural part of Ukraine where he’d grown up. Now his son hunted human beings for pleasure and profit. This was one of those excursions.
The building was drafty, cold. Because of the poor insulation, condensation clung to the windows like a fungus. Waller slipped on a warm coat and walked through the door opened by one of his men. The room was large, warehouse-size, with girder ceilings that disappeared into darkness. Six people stood lined up in the center of the space. They wore black jumpsuits and hoods covered their heads. Their feet were shackled, their hands bound behind them. The tallest one barely came up to Waller’s pecs.
“How’s the leg?” he asked the slender man who appeared out of the shadows.
Alan Rice had apparently recovered from nearly being blown up, though even in the dark his skin seemed paler than normal and he was limping a bit. “Nothing a handful of Advil can’t fix.”
“How many do we have tonight?”
Rice opened his mini-laptop and the light from the screen burned like a small fire in the dark. “In this shipment, ninety-eight. Sixty percent from China, twenty percent from Malaysia, ten percent from Vietnam, four percent from South Korea, and the remainder a hodgepodge from Myanmar, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Singapore.”
“What are we currently getting per unit?”
Rice clicked some computer keys. “Twenty thousand U.S. dollars. It’s up five percent from last year, even though the economy tanking affected some of our downstream buyers. That’s an average. We get more for the Malaysians and Koreans and less for the Stans women.”
“International tastes?” said Waller as he walked around the hooded figures. He clicked his finger and a spotlight hit the small group. “Prejudice against the ladies of the former Soviet Union?” he said with disapproval.
“Well, the ones we’re getting from there are pretty scrawny,” noted Rice. “And you have the exotic factor still with the Far East Asians.”
“Actually I’ve always found Eastern European women the most beautiful in the world.”
Waller looked over where Pascal stood, hands clasped in front of him, not behind, so the gun pull from the holster would be faster if necessary. Seeing Pascal always gave him a measure of comfort, and not just because of the man’s protection skills.
Pascal was his son.
His bastard son conceived with a Greek woman Waller had met on holiday. Pascal of course did not know this. He had no emotional attachment to the younger man, nothing that approached love or devotion. Yet Waller had felt some obligation to the boy, particularly since he had done nothing to support the mother. She’d died in extreme poverty, leaving only her orphaned son behind. He had allowed this to happen for no other reason than he’d lost interest in the woman, who’d been lovely to look at but really was only a simple, uneducated peasant. He’d taken Pascal, at age ten, trained him up, and now the boy turned fierce warrior worked for him, protected him from all harm. Yes, Pascal had well earned his rank in Waller’s little army.
“Pascal,” he said. “What sort of women do you like? Eastern Europeans or the Asians?”
Pascal did not hesitate. “Greek women are the most sensual things God ever created. I would take Greek over anything else.”
>
Waller smiled, lifted one of the hoods, and looked down at the revealed girl, whose facial features evidenced her Chinese origins. She was barely fourteen and blindfolded and shivering from equal parts cold and fright. Her mouth was taped over so her whimpers were muffled even though there was no one around to hear her scream who would care.
Waller did the calculation in his head. “So one million nine hundred and sixty thousand for the current shipment?”
“Correct. Minus expenses. The net is still north of one point six million. All in U.S. dollars, so far still the currency standard-bearer. Although I’ve been hedging our cash flow reserves in Chinese RMBs and Indian rupees just in case.”
Waller turned to look at him. “The margins have softened. Why?”
“Fuel costs on the ships primarily. They don’t travel on the QE II. We go on the cheap, transporting them in cargo containers, but it’s still expensive. And we have to use two boats for one shipment because of the logistics and to avoid detection. That alone doubles the fuel costs. We have to provide basics like food and water and bribing crewmen to let in oxygen on a regular basis. But it’s really the only way. Air transport is too problematic and they’ve yet to invent the car that can travel over the Pacific. But it’s still an enviable net profit.”
Waller nodded as he continued to circle the women. “How many shipments are we receiving?”
“Four a month, roughly the same number of units in each. We’ve discovered that figure fills the containers quite nicely, and we find we only lose two to three percent on the trip over due to starvation, dehydration, and sickness among other factors. That’s well below industry standard for human trafficking, which averages about a twelve percent loss factor.”
“Why did you select these six?”
Rice shrugged. “The best. In looks, in health. Your choice, of course. But we did a thorough prescreening.”
“I respect your efforts.”
Rice drew closer. “It beats dealing with maniacs in turbans.”
“You think so?” asked Waller in amusement. “I found it quite exhilarating. And it’s given me a new goal in life. To exterminate every last one of them.”
Rice spoke in a voice so low only Waller could hear him. “Do you think that’s wise, Evan? These people are truly insane. They’ll kill us, themselves, anybody.”
“But therein lies the challenge. I want Abdul-Majeed in particular. He was the frontman and he wasn’t there. That means he was the one who betrayed me. And his betrayal cost me two of my best men, may God watch over their souls.”
Since Dimitri and Tanner had killed at least six people that Rice had personally witnessed, he doubted God was doing anything with them.
“But why would they do that? You had what they wanted.”