The Bestseller Job

  Ordinarily, Eliot would have snickered at the hacker’s frustration. He preferred things old-school himself. But not when it meant that Gavin’s killers might get off scot-free. Right now he’d sign up for Facebook if it meant catching the bad guys responsible for his friend’s death.

  “Just find me proof,” he said. “I’ll handle the rest.”

  Various scenarios, more brutal than elaborate, were already playing in his mind. Even if they couldn’t track down the murder limo’s nameless driver, he already knew where Brad was, and how to get to him. Sometimes the direct approach was the most effective—and final.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Eliot,” Nate said. “And I don’t blame you for wanting to take matters into your own hands, but that’s not how we work. You know that.”

  Eliot didn’t want to hear it. “Don’t get in my way, Nate.” He was in no mood for a lecture. This wasn’t Nate’s call, not this time. “I’ve killed men before, and for worse reasons.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know for sure that Brad’s responsible for Gavin’s murder. Slow down and let us do this right.”

  “What if I don’t want to wait? I’m not you, Nate. Maybe you’ve got the patience to work out some complicated, long-term, ironic way to get back at the people who’ve wronged you, but that’s you.” He recalled that it had taken Nate years to exact poetic justice on the insurance firm responsible for his son’s death. “Me, I’m more hands-on.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” Nate said. “You’re more than just a hitter. Let’s be smart about this.” Nate called upon Hardison again. “You still hacked into Brad’s computers and home security?”

  “Does a Timelord regenerate?” Hardison asked rhetorically. “When I hack something, they stay hacked.”

  “Good,” Nate said. He went into action like a general mobilizing his forces. “Keep watching him and record every minute, twenty-four/seven. Parker, you help him. The more eyes the better. If Brad was involved with the attacks, he’s bound to slip up eventually, especially now that he’s losing everything. Desperate people make dumb mistakes. If we’re lucky, maybe he’ll lead us to that smoking gun… or limo.”

  A troubling thought snuck up and ambushed Eliot. “You think he might go after Denise again?”

  “Why?” Parker asked. “What would he gain from that?”

  “Gavin’s estate, perhaps, if something happened to Denise,” Sophie speculated. “Or so he might hope.”

  Eliot didn’t like the sound of this, not with Denise currently heading home alone. He remembered how close she had come to being abducted before. That murder limo was still out there.

  “What’s Brad doing now?” he asked urgently. “Show me.”

  Nate nodded at Hardison, who obliged by clearing the screens and calling up a live feed from Brad’s mansion. It was a little after four in the afternoon; with any luck, Brad would still be cooling his heels at home.

  “Please, God, not the hot tub again,” Sophie prayed. “I’m still trying to expunge those visuals from my mind.”

  “You and me both,” Hardison agreed.

  It took him only a moment or two to locate Brad, who was pacing back and forth in the mansion’s oversize, luxury kitchen. Stainless-steel appliances that looked as though they had never been used crowded the granite counters. A built-in refrigerator and freezer matched the kitchen cabinets. Unwashed dishes were piled high in the sink. Judging from the angle of the shot, Brad’s hijacked laptop was sitting open on a nearby counter or table.

  Food and drink had taken over the massive kitchen island. A half-eaten pizza, chocolate cream pie, and a demolished six-pack suggested that Brad had attempted to drown his sorrows with booze and comfort food, or maybe he just wanted to empty the pantries before they were repossessed. Cigar stubs filled up an overflowing ashtray. Tendrils of smoke rose from the fallen warriors. You could practically smell the tobacco over the screens.

  “No, I’m not joking,” Brad said aloud. He sounded more than a little agitated, no surprise given his recent reversal of fortunes. A Bluetooth earpiece was clipped to his ear, and he was smoking up a storm. He seemed to be desperately trying to milk some money out of the sequel while he still had a chance. “Cash up front, that’s what I’m saying. Transfer the money tonight and the book’s all yours. You can snatch it right out from beneath the noses of everyone else… like a preemptive strike, you know?”

  “That shameless toad,” Sophie observed. She took out her own phone. “Time to leak the news about Denise getting the rights back.”

  Not a bad idea, Eliot thought, although Brad already seemed to be having trouble closing the deal.

  “What do you mean you need to see the book first? It’s Assassins Remember, what else do you need to know?” Brad angrily ground a cigar stub into the marble counter. Multitasking, he harangued the guy on the other end of the line while checking his e-mail for any takers. His sweaty, porcine face leaned into the screen, causing Sophie to recoil instinctively. “Fine,” he said sourly. “Just think of it as a reading fee. Give me a down payment right now and I’ll e-mail you the first three chapters.”

  Whoever was on the other end of the line didn’t seem to be buying it, much to Brad’s exasperation.

  “Yes, I said a reading fee,” he blustered. “You got a problem with that?” He waited for a response. “Hello? Hello? You still there?”

  Eliot watched Brad redial. As much as he enjoyed seeing the guy sweat, he was more relieved to see that Gavin’s no-good brother didn’t seem to be targeting Denise at the moment.

  Unless the black limo is already heading back toward her place, he fretted. Maybe I should head on over there?

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “I’m not seeing any smoking guns. Just a lot of smoking.”

  “Me either,” Nate replied, “but this could take time. We may need to be patient while we come up with a new avenue of attack.”

  “I could break into his mansion again,” Parker volunteered, with a hopeful tone in her voice. She got twitchy when she wasn’t scaling a building or wiggling through an air duct. She’d once stolen the Hope Diamond and put it back just because she was bored. “Poke around a little more.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Nate promised.

  Meanwhile, Brad was still trying to drum up business, without much success. “What? Where did you hear that?” He stomped around the kitchen, barely able to contain his exasperation. He tugged on what was left of his hair. He finished off a beer and angrily hurled the bottle into the sink. He lit another cigar. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve heard about Gavin’s old squeeze getting the rights, but—”

  Sophie smiled smugly as she put down her phone. “Amazing how fast a well-placed leak can travel these days.”

  “I’m surprised he’s not on the phone to you already,” Hardison said to Nate. “To ‘Max Dunfee,’ I mean.”

  Nate checked his messages. “New Zealand must be low on his list, but I suspect I’ll hear from him before the night is out.”

  “That could be our opening,” Sophie suggested. “For the Viking Horn Reversal, perhaps, or the Blurry Morning After scam?”

  A familiar look of concentration came over Nate’s face. “I’m working on it.”

  Eliot decided to leave the plotting to the experts. He had better places to be. He headed for the door. “I’m going to check on Denise,” he announced. “Just to be safe.”

  “Uh-huh,” Parker said. “Enjoy the pretzels.”

  Eliot chose to ignore that. He was halfway out the door when a sudden commotion, coming from the video wall, stopped him in his tracks. He spun around and stared at the monitors.

  Four armed thugs, wearing ski masks, burst into Brad’s kitchen, menacing him. A Glock was shoved in his face. A gloved hand yanked off his Bluetooth device and flung it against a wall. Another hand shoved him against the counter.

  “You’re coming with us!” the gunman announced. He sounded like he had a cold—or maybe a broken nose. Eliot rec
ognized his stance and posture from the fight outside Denise’s apartment. “Don’t give us any trouble!”

  “Hardison?” Nate asked urgently.

  “The mansion’s security just went down,” the hacker reported. He called up a diagnostic on a screen. “Somebody’s disabled it at the source.” He frowned at the scrolling data as he tried to regain control of the system. “That’s just rude.”

  Sophie watched the shocking home invasion unfold in real time. “Should we be calling the police?” She must have realized how odd this sounded, coming from her, because she quickly added, “They do serve a purpose sometimes.”

  “Or maybe we should just let Brad get what’s coming to him,” Eliot said grimly. He headed back into the suite, his gaze glued to the screen, where Brad was backed up against a granite counter. “Looks like Brad’s buddies might take care of one problem for us.”

  I could live with that, he thought.

  “Who are you?” a terrified Brad asked the invaders. “What do you want?” He cowered against the counter, turning his ashen face away from the muzzle of the gun. He gaped at his attackers’ concealed faces as though trying to penetrate the wool masks with X-ray vision. His cigar slipped from his fingers. “Is this about that poker game in Atlantic City? I paid that off weeks ago… I think!”

  Hold on, Eliot thought. Brad didn’t seem to know who the invaders were. Did that mean he hadn’t had anything to do with Gavin’s murder after all? Eliot’s suspicions reluctantly switched gears. It was starting to look like Brad might actually be innocent, at least where a certain “accident” was concerned.

  So who were the actual killers working for?

  “Move it!” Broken Nose demanded. He ground out the fallen cigar beneath his heel as his men dragged Brad toward the door. Brad squirmed helplessly in their grasp, unable to break free.

  “Please!” he squealed. “Just tell me what you want!”

  “Tarantula.”

  Brad’s jaw dropped.

  “But… I don’t know anything about that!” He seemed to recognize the name, which implied that he had learned a thing or two about his brother’s work, not that it was doing him any good right now. He shouted frantically, “I don’t even know if Tarantula is real!”

  “Yeah,” Broken Nose said, unconvinced. “We’ll see about that.”

  He signaled one of his men, who pistol-whipped Brad from behind. Eliot fumed, remembering how Denise had been whacked the same way, possibly by the same guy. He wished he could leap through the screen and shove that pistol right up the thug’s—

  “Ouch,” Sophie said. “These guys play rough.”

  “Tell me about it,” Eliot said.

  Brad sagged limply between the two thugs holding him. His chin drooped onto his chest. Eliot didn’t envy the men having to support Brad’s deadweight. He would have walked the man out at gunpoint before knocking him out. These guys were too vicious for their own good.

  And Brad’s.

  Broken Nose reached for the laptop. He closed the lid and the screen in the team’s suite went blank.

  “Hardison!” Nate said sharply.

  “Working on it,” the hacker said. “I need to reboot the mansion’s security cameras.”

  By the time Hardison managed to fire up the outdoor cameras, the men were tossing Brad into the back of a distinctive black limo. Eliot noted darkly that the dent in its hood, left over from the collision that killed Gavin, had long since been repaired. The blood had also been washed away.

  Doesn’t matter, he thought. I know it’s there.

  The limo raced away from the estate, through the open front gate. Hijacked cameras tracked the vehicle’s departure until it quickly zoomed out of range. Hardison’s screens showed nothing but a stretch of empty road.

  The murder limo had gotten away… again.

  The crew stared at the useless video, watching the dust from the limo’s departure settle. Brad had just been abducted before their very eyes.

  “Okay,” Sophie said, “I didn’t see that coming.”

  Nate frowned. His grim expression gave Eliot serious competition.

  “No,” he said. “Neither did I.”

  | | | | | | TEN | | | | | |

  MANHATTAN

  “So Gavin’s death wasn’t an accident?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Eliot confessed to Denise.

  He had rushed to her apartment right after Brad’s kidnapping, just in case she was in danger, too. Along the way, while urging the taxi to go faster, he had decided that it was too risky to keep her in the dark any longer. She needed to know what had happened to Brad—and how badly matters had escalated.

  “I’m sorry for not telling you earlier,” he said. “We didn’t know for sure until tonight.”

  Slightly more than an hour had passed since Brad’s abduction. The sun was just starting to go down. Eliot had drawn the curtains to discourage spies or snipers and had made sure every window was locked. A fire escape outside the bedroom window made him nervous. He peered out through the drapes at the street below.

  “I see,” she replied.

  Her muted reaction surprised him.

  “To be honest,” he said, “I expected you to be angrier… and more shocked.”

  She smiled ruefully. “You’re not telling me anything I didn’t already suspect. I think I’ve known all along that Gavin was murdered. I just didn’t want to admit it.”

  “And you don’t mind that I kept this from you?”

  She shook her head. “I understand about secrets, and keeping quiet to protect the people you care about.” She fingered Gavin’s “lucky” compass. “Maybe if Brad and I hadn’t been so hell-bent on dragging Tarantula’s secrets into the light, Gavin would still be alive. And Brad wouldn’t be in danger.”

  “Hey, you can’t blame yourself for any of this.” He reached out to comfort her. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Isn’t it?” She stepped away from him, denying herself his embrace. “If I had stopped Gavin, talked him out of trying to expose all that nasty black-ops business instead of egging him on and encouraging him, none of this would have happened!”

  “Listen to me,” he said. “You didn’t kill Gavin. You didn’t drag Brad into this. None of this is on you, you got that?”

  He knew all about guilty consciences and how they could fester over time; it wasn’t something he’d wish on anybody, let alone Denise. She had enough to deal with already, maybe even more than she was willing to admit.

  “I wish I could be sure of that,” she said. She plopped down onto a secondhand love seat and buried her face in her hands.

  “Be sure.” He sat down beside her and placed his arm around her shoulders. “We’re going to get these guys and make them pay for what happened to Gavin, I promise.”

  “But how?” she asked. “And what about Brad?”

  Eliot glanced at his watch. It was a quarter after six. The kidnappers might have made it back to their lair by now. Chances were, Brad was currently on the receiving end of a harsh interrogation. Eliot didn’t envy him. If his abductors really did want information on Tarantula, they were bound to be disappointed. Brad didn’t know anything about his brother’s sources, which meant that the bad guys were going to have to look elsewhere, closer to home.

  “Nate figures the kidnappers will be in touch,” Eliot said. “He’s usually right about these things.”

  “In touch with who?” Realization dawned in her eyes. “Me?”

  Eliot nodded.

  “So here’s what we have to do…”

  Nate’s prediction was right on target.

  The call came shortly after midnight as Eliot and Denise were having a late-night snack. Both of them were too tense to even think about turning in for the night. Denise started at the ring.

  “You expecting a call?” he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “Let me handle this,” he suggested. She handed him her phone and he checked the caller ID, which listed t
he caller as unknown. Letting the phone keep ringing, he popped his earbud into place.

  “Hardison? You reading me?”

  “I’m here, man. Just waiting on you,” the hacker said. “The bad guys call Denise already? They’re not wasting any time.”

  “Nope,” Eliot agreed. For once, he had been hoping Nate was wrong.

  “You ready on your end?”

  “The tap is in place,” Hardison promised. He had already linked his own hardware to Denise’s phone, in anticipation of this call. “Let’s hope it’s your buddies from the limo.”

  “They’re no friends of mine,” Eliot said. He answered Denise’s phone. “Hello?”

  “Who is this?” an electronically distorted voice asked. “Not the lovely Ms. Gallo, I take it.”

  Eliot went on high alert. Telemarketers didn’t need to disguise their voices. The phone was set on speaker and he put it down on the counter so that Denise could listen in.

  “If this is about Brad, you can talk to me.”

  “Interesting,” the voice commented. “I don’t suppose I have the privilege of addressing the infamous ‘Tarantula’ himself.”

  For a second, Eliot considered saying yes, but he wasn’t sure what the long-term ramifications of that might be. Nate and Sophie were better at improvising scams and false identities on the fly. He had no idea if claiming to be Tarantula would open up the right can of worms. And what if the bad guys already knew more than they were letting on?

  “Deny everything,” Nate joined in. He must have been sitting up waiting for the ransom call as well. “Keep them guessing.”

  Eliot appreciated the advice.

  “Think again,” he said. “I’m just a friend.” He hoped Hardison was getting all this. “What do you want?”

  “What we all want, ultimately. Peace of mind.” The unknown caller chuckled wryly; the artificial distortion could not conceal his cultured tone and speech patterns. They weren’t dealing with another Brad here. “Assassins Never Forget made certain parties uncomfortable. It hinted, albeit in fictionalized form, at matters that would have been better kept out of print. Those same parties, including myself, are naturally concerned about the contents of the sequel—and the identity and whereabouts of Gavin’s anonymous informant.”