“No.”
I’d been standing by the little wooden sign that had Blue Trail, 4.7 Miles carved into it since 11:00 p.m. From this vantage, I could just make out the main resort parking lot in the orange glow of the sodium lights. The last car pulled in at 11:17. None had come or gone since. A soft quiet had settled over the place, the kind that usually only comes on the heels of a snowfall. It was 11:45. The Persian was due in fifteen minutes.
“Are you ready?” Erica asked.
I took a deep breath and let it out. “As I’ll ever be.”
After re-burying the box, I’d driven to a Bass Pro Shops and picked up a pair of brown leather boots and a wool-lined denim jacket. In the pocket of that jacket was a new chrome flashlight, powerful enough to light up the woods like Yankee Stadium. I opened and closed my hand around its shaft, my palm slick with sweat despite the cold night air.
“Good luck.”
“Call you in an hour.”
I hope.
I’d been leaning against the sign during my check-in with Erica and started to stand up straight as I pocketed the phone when something hard and cold pressed into the tender space between my jawbone and skull behind my right ear. The silence around me would have given a librarian wet dreams, but I never heard even a single footfall.
“You were supposed to be unarmed,” I said, hands at my side, palms out. Slowly, she reached around my chest and pulled my Glock out of its holster. She popped out the magazine, thumbed the slide release, and the pistol landed next to my feet in three separate pieces.
“Any others?” she asked. Her voice tickled the hair on the side of my neck. Under different circumstances, it would have been incredibly sexy. Now, I was just hoping they weren’t the last words I’d ever hear.
“No ma’am,” I said, but she patted me down anyway. “Trish told you what would happen if I die, right?” I took a tentative step away from her, waiting for the muzzle to jam back into the bundle of nerves behind my ear, or for her to force me down onto my knees and press it into the back of my skull, but none of that happened. I took two more steps and turned.
It had been a long time since we last met face-to-face. Several years, in fact. Nima Heydari, The Persian, was not beautiful, at least not in the traditional sense. She also wouldn’t give a shit whether you thought she was or not. She had an athletic build that filled out her clothes in all the ways some men liked, but her face had a hardened quality that dulled her eyes, which were a deep, haunting shade of green.
She was dressed in black from head to toe, like Ghost had been, but it wasn’t some kind of tactical outfit. Just a pair of black leggings with matching boots, sweater and leather jacket. Combined with her jet black hair and olive skin, she was damn near invisible in the dark. Taller than I remembered, too. Almost my height. In one hand she held a Desert Eagle L5, which normally looks huge in a woman’s grip but seemed custom made for hers. The nail of the finger stretched out along the trigger guard was also painted black. In her other hand was a black duffel bag, its sides bulging with what I hoped was neatly wrapped stacks of hundred-dollar bills and not something more nefarious, like plastique.
“You kill me,” I continued, “and in twenty-four hours, every news station in America gets a detailed report on what’s in that box. Not to mention a healthy list of all the CEOs that Trish has been working with, and the details on what she’s done for them.”
That stoic face betrayed nothing as she continued to point the Desert Eagle at my chest.
I wasn’t bluffing. Erica had strict instructions to dump everything we got from Sergei onto all the major news sites if I missed a check-in by more than ten minutes. Standing there in the dark, though, with even the breeze through the naked trees no more than a whisper, staring into the face of a woman who had made a career out of killing, the threat of destroying Trish’s cash flow felt like a flimsy suit of armor indeed.
Slowly, never taking her eyes off mine, she dropped the bag and pulled her phone from her jacket pocket. She thumbed in a code, scrolled a few times, then punched in something else. The Desert Eagle never wavered. Never even quivered. My phone buzzed against my hip just as she put hers away. I reached for it, asking permission with my eyes. She twitched hers down, like a snake flicking its tongue. I pulled the phone out and saw there was a new message in the chat room I’d established with Trish. But this message was from The Persian.
It was a link.
“This better not be some kind of malware,” I said, “because I already gave the last of my money to a Nigerian prince who really needed my help.”
No response. The statue with the gun just kept staring at me, her blackened fingernail resting on the trigger guard. I clicked the link.
It was a live feed from a webcam. On the floor of a modest living room sat two girls, between seven and ten years of age. They wore matching pink pajamas that I’d seen before. Except this time they were alone, Taylor Swift wasn’t playing, and they weren’t giggling. They couldn’t even if they’d wanted to, since their mouths were sealed with a thick strip of black duct tape. The same tape secured their hands behind their backs, and also bound the two girls together where they sat, back-to-back, tears streaming down their delicate chestnut-brown skin. The video feed had no sound, but I didn’t need it to know what their cries sounded like. Every father would.
They were bound together another way as well. Each wore a vest, far too big for them, laden with bricks of plastic explosive. A red light blinked on the chest of each vest, and a tangle of wires connected the two.
“Goddamn you,” I said, but it was little more than a whisper. I don’t know if she heard me. It wouldn’t have mattered if she did. The words would have no effect on her. “I told Trish the kids weren’t to be harmed.”
“And they won’t be,” she said, “unless you’re lying about the box. In that case,” she held up her phone, which displayed a keypad. A four digit code was pre-entered. Detonator by way of Samsung. What a world we live in. “All I have to do is hit Send. You’re not the only one with an insurance policy, here.”
“I’m not lying about the box.”
“Take me to it, then.”
The faces of the girls were all I could see, dancing in my mind’s eye, but I couldn’t let her know that she’d rattled me. If my head wasn’t in the game, then this wasn’t going to work.
“Let me see the money first,” I said.
Her hardened features cracked the briefest of smiles, the sardonic kind, and she unzipped the duffel, revealing neatly wrapped stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
“Would you be insulted if I count it?”
She closed the bag, kicked the pieces of my disassembled Glock into the underbrush, and gestured toward the trail with her Desert Eagle.
“It’s a good thing you have a trustworthy face,” I said as I stepped past her.
Good, keep joking. Let the quips and one-liners smother the sound of those silent cries in the video feed. And keep breathing. Just keep breathing. Mr. Cool, you do this kind of thing all the time.
God, I hoped my legs didn’t give out as we walked. Or my bladder.
CHAPTER FORTY
The Persian wouldn’t let me use my new flashlight. I pulled it out of my coat pocket when we started, but she snatched it out of my hand and tossed it into the woods.
“No weapons,” she said.
“It’s a flashlight,” I replied, but the conversation was over. If she thought I would pull some Jason Bourne shit and blind her with it, then she had clearly overestimated my combat abilities.
The moon was nearly full, but it didn’t make the going any easier. Twice I nearly slipped on fresh mud patches, and my face had to have almost half a dozen tiny scratches from branches I didn’t see until I was right on top of them. The nub at the tip of my pinkie finger throbbed from the cold, almost in time with the hole Ghost had gored into my leg. I pressed my hand against it, counting all eight stitches beneath my jeans, making sure none had popped out.
