The Bestseller Job

  Eliot didn’t bother asking the caller who he was. “Who ordered Gavin killed? Was that you?”

  “Let’s just say we thought the matter was contained after Gavin’s unfortunate accident. Imagine our dismay when we found out about the sequel.”

  Great, Eliot thought. This is all our fault. We painted a great big target on Denise—and everyone else connected to the make-believe book.

  It was surely too late to admit there was no sequel. The crew had done too good a job of spreading the word.

  “Assassins Remember,” the voice continued. “A most worrisome title, I must say. Some things are best forgotten.”

  “Yeah, I get it.” Eliot struggled to control his temper. “You and your friends have dirty laundry you don’t want aired. So what do you want with Denise?”

  “We just had a long, if somewhat fruitless, conversation with Brad Lee. He insists that he knows little or nothing about the sequel or Tarantula, and that Denise is the person we should be talking to about Gavin’s work. Indeed, it seems that he was never in possession of the sequel at all, unlike Denise.”

  Eliot mentally kicked Brad in the crotch. He should have known that creep would throw Denise under the limo.

  “Don’t even think about trying to snatch Denise again,” he warned. “Or it will be more than your flunky’s nose that gets broken next time.”

  “Ah, this is the chivalrous gentleman that came to the fair lady’s rescue the other night. I suspected as much,” the voice said. “Ideally, it won’t be necessary to put Denise in jeopardy once more. We don’t want her, only the manuscript and Tarantula. And we’re prepared to offer Brad’s safety in exchange.”

  “And what makes you think I care one bit about what happens to Brad?” Eliot said coldly. It wasn’t hard to sound like he didn’t give a damn. “He’s a lowlife scumbag who tried to screw Denise over.”

  “But he is Gavin’s brother,” the voice pointed out. “I assume that counts for something.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “That’s unfortunate for Brad, then. It’s clear to me now that he knows less than nothing, which means that he has no value except as a bargaining chip. But if you would rather he disappear, I can easily accommodate you…”

  Eliot and Denise exchanged a worried look. Despite everything, neither of them wanted more blood on their hands. Not even Brad’s.

  “Wait,” Eliot said. “How do we know that you haven’t gotten rid of Brad already?” He knew the drill; this wasn’t his first hostage negotiation. “I want proof of life.”

  “Naturally. I expected as much,” the voice replied. “I trust that Denise is listening as well? There’s somebody here who wants desperately to speak to her.”

  The electronic distortion was switched off. Brad’s voice erupted from the phone:

  “Denise? Anybody? You gotta help me here! These guys mean business. They want the sequel—and this Tarantula dude—and they’re not going to take no for an answer.” There was no mistaking the naked fear and desperation in his voice. Sobs and sniffles punctuated his frantic pleas. “Please, you gotta do what they ask! I know you don’t like me, and I don’t blame you, but my skin’s on the line here! You can’t let them kill me. Please, I’m begging you. I wish I’d never gotten mixed up in this!”

  Now you tell us, Eliot thought. A bit late for that, pal.

  “Please!” Brad squealed. “Do what they say! Don’t let them kill—”

  He was cut off abruptly.

  Damn it, Eliot thought. I really didn’t need to hear that.

  And neither did Denise.

  The first voice picked up where he’d left off:

  “A heartrending plea, don’t you think? Are you truly willing to trust Brad to my tender mercies, which I assure you are neither of the above?” The mystery caller spoke as though he already had Eliot’s number. “I don’t think so. You strike me as something of a white knight.”

  “Trust me, I’m more gray than white.”

  “Be that as it may, I want the new book—and Tarantula. Do we have a deal?”

  “Not so fast,” Eliot said. “What if we don’t know who Tarantula is? Or how to contact him?”

  “Then Brad will soon be reunited with his brother.”

  Denise bit down her knuckles, stifling a gasp.

  “Hold on. Let’s talk about this!”

  “This is not a negotiation. You have forty-eight hours. I’ll be in touch to arrange the terms of the exchange. And, please, don’t bother trying to trace this call. We have taken the necessary precautions. Good-bye.”

  “Wait!” Eliot blurted. “We’re not done here!”

  “Yes, we are.”

  The line went dead.

  “Hello, hello?” A dial tone mocked Eliot. He fought an urge to throw Denise’s phone across the apartment. He cupped a hand over his ear. “Hardison! Tell me you ID’d the caller.”

  “Sorry, man,” the hacker replied. “These guys know what they’re doing. They covered their tracks by bouncing the signal through a dozen networks, spoofed numbers, digital scramblers…”

  “We get it,” Eliot said, cutting off the geek speak. “We’re dealing with professionals.” Which made sense given their interest in Tarantula and the black-ops secrets that had been outed in Gavin’s book. This job had moved out of the relatively bloodless world of the book racket into far more dangerous territory.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Hardison agreed. “Call the Ghostbusters. We’re talking spooks here.”

  “Okay. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Eliot popped out his earbud so he could converse with Denise in private. She watched him anxiously, having heard his half of the back-and-forth with Hardison. She leaned against her tiny kitchen counter, hugging herself.

  “He couldn’t trace the call?” she asked.

  Eliot shook his head. “’Fraid not.” He offered her a sliver of hope. “But give him a shot. I hate to say it, but Hardison’s pretty good at that digital juju. If there’s some geeky, googlely way to pick up their trail, he’ll find it.” He double-checked his earbud to make sure it wasn’t transmitting. “But if you quote me on that, I will disavow every word.”

  She managed a slight smile before the severity of the situation weighed her down again. This afternoon’s jubilation had not lasted long.

  “Brad’s right,” she said. “He’s a cheat and a scumbag and no friend of mine. But I don’t want his death on my conscience.”

  Eliot guessed that, rightly or wrongly, she was already carrying a bigger load of guilt than she ever bargained for. He knew how it felt not to like what you saw in the mirror. A troubled conscience could be a heavy burden.

  “I get that.”

  She sighed. “So now what do we do?”

  He knew the answer to that at least.

  “We talk to my friends.”

  “The question has to be asked,” Sophie said. “How far do we want to go to save Brad Lee of all people?”

  The crew had convened at the hotel suite to hash out their next moves, if any. They were seated around a long conference table. It was early the next morning and a continental breakfast was going largely ignored. Sophie would have liked a few more hours of sleep.

  “As far as we have to,” Nate said. “Brad may be a slob and a jerk, but those aren’t capital offenses. We can’t just let him be murdered.”

  “I understand that,” Sophie said. “I truly do. But before we rush into anything, we should take a moment to recognize the very real hazards involved. If we’re truly dealing with black-ops assassins, this entire job just became a good deal dicier. We need to take that into consideration.”

  Sophie often found herself cast in the role of the voice of caution. The other members of the crew were all gifted in their own unique ways, but they each had their issues:

  Nate was probably the smartest man she had ever met; she was frequently blown away (and, yes, occasionally turned on) by the way that brilliant mind of his worked. He was lik
e a grand master at chess, always thinking several moves ahead. But alcohol, and the demons in his past, made his judgment suspect at times. His need to win, and enforce his own brand of justice on an unfair world, could lead him to take unnecessary risks, especially after he’d had a few too many stiff drinks.

  Eliot tended to be more pragmatic, most of the time. You could usually trust him to keep a level head, no matter the crisis. But Gavin’s death had hit him on a personal level, and his obvious involvement with Denise complicated matters further. Sophie couldn’t trust him to talk sense to Nate this time around. He was in too deep.

  Hardison knew technology like nobody else, and had promise as a grifter, but he sometimes let his enthusiasms get the better of him. Real life was more complicated than a comic book or computer game, and you didn’t get another life if your cockiness got you killed. Hardison was so smart he could outsmart himself, which was the last thing they needed when going up against professional killers.

  And Parker… well, Parker was crazy.

  Which leaves it up to me, Sophie thought, to make certain that we all know exactly what we’re getting into.

  “Look, I don’t want any of you to put yourself in danger on my account,” Denise said. She sat at the end of the table, next to Eliot. “You’ve already done so much for me already. Brad is my problem. You can walk away from this.”

  Denise had insisted on taking part in the meeting. It was against protocol, but Nate had gone along with it, which made Sophie suspect that he was already formulating some sort of scheme that required Denise’s involvement. Sophie wondered what he had in mind—and how dangerous it might be for all of them.

  “The hell with that,” Eliot said. He rested his hand on her arm, not caring who was looking. “We’re not going anywhere.” Flinty eyes challenged the rest of them to disagree. “Right?”

  Nate spoke for the crew, as he was prone to do.

  “This is our responsibility, too,” he reminded everyone. “We invented the imaginary sequel that brought the kidnappers out of the woodwork and nearly got Denise nabbed as well. The way I see it, this job’s not done until we get to Gavin’s killers—and see to it that they don’t hurt anyone else.”

  “We’re with you, man,” Hardison chimed in. “The con continues. Bring on part two.”

  “Sequels suck,” Parker said. “But sure, I’m in.”

  Sophie was very good at sizing up the feel of a room. She could usually tell just by stepping into a boardroom or sales conference whether a company was turning a profit or not. She saw the writing on the wall.

  “Very well, then,” she said, going along with the consensus. In truth, she hadn’t felt comfortable abandoning Denise, or even Brad. She had simply wanted to inject a healthy dose of caution into the proceedings. “It seems we’re doing this. But what precisely are we doing?”

  Nate stepped up to the plate.

  “As of this moment, we have two new objectives: ransom Brad and turn the tables on Gavin’s killers.” He tapped his watch. “We have exactly forty-one hours and eight minutes. Hardison, set the clock.”

  “I’m on it, man.”

  Denise dabbed at her eyes. “Thanks so much… again. And, please, don’t keep me in the dark this time. I want to help, however I can.”

  “I may take you up on that,” Nate said. “Sooner than you think.”

  Sophie could practically see his brain working the problem, taking it apart and analyzing it from every angle. She couldn’t wait to see what he came up with.

  “You’re already putting together a plan, aren’t you?”

  “Possibly,” he admitted. A carafe of hot coffee rested on the table. He refilled his mug. “But first we need to know who our target is.” Cup in hand, he circled the table to come up behind Hardison, who was tapping away at his laptop. “Hardison?”

  Hardison grinned up at him, like a cyber-wizard about to pull a digital rabbit out of the Internet. The indefatigable hacker had clearly been busy.

  “I may have something for you there.”

  “Y’all remember this footage,” Hardison said, waving his clicker like a pointer. He had to admit it, he enjoyed these moments in the spotlight. “Taken by a traffic cam a few blocks away from the ‘accident,’ and ingeniously enhanced by yours truly.”

  The crew, plus Denise, was seated before the screens while Hardison got his emcee on. The monitors offered a glimpse of the murder limo’s driver, as seen through the town car’s front windshield.

  Denise, who hadn’t seen the face of the driver before, stared stonily at the screen. Her jaw clenched. Her whole body was tense. Her face flushed. You didn’t have to be able to read people as expertly as Sophie could to see that she was barely keeping a lid on some serious anger. Throw in some gamma rays and she’d be Hulking out on them for sure.

  Not that Hardison blamed her. The bad guys had run down the love of her life.

  If somebody had Parker killed…

  “Yeah, I remember,” Eliot said tersely. He also looked like he wanted the homicidal driver in his sights as soon as possible. “What about it?”

  “Well, I’ve had my own, custom-made facial-recognition software running overtime for the last fifteen-plus hours.” That was time enough to compare the driver’s face print to literally millions of photographs. “It took a while, for reasons I’ll get around to, but I finally got a hit.”

  He clicked the remote and the screens divided themselves between the enhanced traffic photo and a series of color shots of what appeared to be the same man, albeit a few years younger. The stills were obviously undercover surveillance photos taken by a telephoto lens from long distance. The photos showed a lean, elegantly dressed man getting into a waiting black limo. A lucky gust of wind blew off his trilby hat, exposing a gaunt, aristocratic-looking face that bore a distinct resemblance to the driver of the murder car. He had a long, angular face with thin lips, a sharp nose, and calculating gray eyes. Wispy brown hair, going gray at the temples, led up in a widow’s peak atop his high forehead. He lingered outside the limo, scowling impatiently, while a flunky retrieved his hat.

  “A tad younger,” Sophie observed, “but he could be the same man.”

  “No need to guess,” Hardison bragged. “Let science settle this.”

  He split the screen between the driver and the man in the spy photos. Green dots mapped their respective faces. Lines connected the dots. In less than a minute, the program coughed up its ruling.

  confirmation: 88.6%, a dialogue box reported.

  Eliot grunted in approval. “Close enough for government work.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Hardison said. “’Cause our friend here does a lot of work for a lot of governments. Almost all of it off-the-record.”

  Nate signaled Hardison to speed it up. “Cut to the chase.”

  Really? Hardison thought. That’s how it is? We’re backseat-driving my pacing now?

  He didn’t like being rushed, and was tempted to drag out the suspense a few moments longer, but the look on Denise’s face—and Eliot’s—convinced him that now was not the time. This was too important to both of them.

  “Meet Anton Beria,” he said. “Or, if you want to be more precise about it, the late Anton Beria. That’s why it took my programs so long to ID him. He’s not listed in any current databases because he’s supposed to be dead.”

  Eliot glared at the photo of the limo driver. “Looks alive enough to me.”

  He sounded like he wanted to remedy that situation.

  “Tell us about him,” Nate prompted.

  “Not much to tell—officially, that is. His paper trail is shorter than my pull list at the comic-book shop, and Bigfoot has had more photos taken of him than this guy. Most of what I dug up—and it wasn’t easy—is more whispers than hard biographical data. Born in Hungary, educated in the UK, became a naturalized American citizen back during the Reagan years. Officially, he was a lobbyist for an obscure diplomatic think tank that’s rumored to have been a front for
a private black-ops outfit that specialized in putting down revolutionaries, reformers, and troublesome opposition leaders. Noted for his ‘flexible’ political loyalties; at one point, he’s said to have taken contracts from Pakistan and India simultaneously.”

  “Okay, that’s ballsy,” Eliot said. “And pretty shady.”

  “Beria has deep connections to the U.S. intelligence community as well,” Hardison continued. “CIA, NSA, Homeland Security… you name it. Built up a track record that’s impressive or scary, depending which end of the sniper scope you’re at. You want an inconvenient agitator eliminated, or an uprising nipped in the bud, he’s your man—at least until he conveniently died of a stroke three years ago, right before a congressional investigation into his activities. Did I mention that he died on his yacht, outside international waters, and that his body was buried at sea?”

  “How very neat and tidy,” Sophie said.

  “Tell me about it,” Hardison said. “I’m going to have to remember that one.”

  It wasn’t hard to fake a death, especially in certain parts of the third world, where a death certificate could be bought for the price of a large pepperoni pizza. Hardison had phony death certificates for every member of the team, just in case they ever had to drop off the map permanently. Unknown to Eliot, the cause of his death was listed as autoerotic asphyxiation.

  Hardison intended to be far away when that bomb dropped.

  “Take it from a former insurance investigator,” Nate said, “faking one’s death is surprisingly common. I cut my teeth on phony life insurance scams, usually perpetrated by the grieving ‘widow.’ Dying is the easy part. What trips people up is staying dead. Wait long enough and they almost always resurface to deal with unfinished business… like maybe a novelist whose book cut too close to the truth?”

  “Sounds like one of the characters in the book,” Sophie observed. “The nameless spymaster who ran things from behind the scenes, his true identity known only to his closest lieutenants. Not even Yvette ever found out who he really was.”