Pacific Force, page 2
Closer, she was still the same woman she’d been when he first met her at thirteen. Older by twenty-five years, sure. He suspected that her long, black hair wasn’t naturally that color anymore, but it wasn’t his place to say anything to her. It looked good against her dark, Persian skin.
Chiseled cheekbones. Perfectly manicured eyebrows that made her face seem even more warm and lively. Maybe the nose was a little long for the inverted triangle of her face, but she was still beautiful.
Five foot one. Slender, only in the way that barbed wire was slender. Hard. Deadly. Hopefully still a goof.
“Did you hear the news?” Jake asked as she stopped about six feet away.
She nodded just enough to call it a thing.
“Spencer sent me an email to let me know,” Hollyanne replied in a quiet, calm voice.
It was Jake’s turn to nod.
Spencer was the nerd. The journalist forever tracking down information, data, stories, hints, and rumors. He had probably emailed everyone else about the time he texted Jake last night. But that would be right.
They watched each other for a long moment.
“Why are you here, Jake?” Hollyanne asked finally, probably realizing that she couldn’t wait him out.
“I dunno,” Jake replied with a fake shrug. “I figured that Nathaniel Hoestler breaking out of an English prison might be important enough to do something about.”
“You don’t think the police can do anything?” Hollyanne retorted.
“They couldn’t before,” Jake reminded her. “Has anything changed?”
“We’re two years older,” she replied. “The Team has been retired that long. Unless you’re here to tell me we have to get it back together.”
“We don’t have to do anything, Hollyanne,” Jake said. “But I don’t think that anyone else can stop him. Plus, being locked in a stone box for two years isn’t likely to have made Nathaniel rethink his life. Pretty sure he’s still pissed at all of us for putting him there. And everything else going back twenty years. If nothing else, he’s likely to come after at least one of us.”
“You, or me?” she asked with a faint grin.
He shrugged, for real this time.
“Nathaniel has his reasons to hate us both,” he reminded her.
It was her turn to shrug.
“It won’t ever be over, will it?” she finally asked in a voice that was too tired for the day.
“I thought it was over when we finally caught him and put him in jail,” Jake said. “But we forgot about his people. I’m guessing we’ll need to take them all down as well this time.”
“I won’t kill,” Hollyanne said bluntly.
“Not asking you to, Hollyanne.” Jake let a little fire build now. “You are probably the best suited to control the damage if it comes to that. To not kill, in that eyeblink. But the rest of the world wasn’t enough to stop Nathaniel before. He knows too many people and has corrupted too many officials for anyone to move against him. That was why we had to get involved.”
“We’re private citizens, Jake McNeil,” she said tartly.
“Which means corrupt cops and governments don’t like us any more than criminals do, Hollyanne Kadjar,” he replied. “Last time, he nearly blew up London before we stopped him. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be sitting in my big mansion and wake up one morning to the news that he’s blown up something else because somebody thought his threats were idle and empty. Do you?”
Jake took a deep breath when he finished, aware that his voice had gotten a little loud. Hollyanne watched him for a long second and then a smile appeared on her face.
“Who would have imagined that a little computer club would have made such a huge difference to the future of the world?” she asked.
“Made us all rich,” Jake pointed out. “How many people do you know could retire at seventeen and never have to work? Set us up to make a difference.”
She nodded now, her shoulders pulled in a little and hunched against a nonexistent breeze.
“Too bad Nathaniel didn’t stay with us,” she said quietly.
“It would have never been big enough for him.” Jake nodded as well.
“But he might have chosen a different path, Jake,” Hollyanne offered. “He might not have chosen to become such a villain.”
Jake shook his head ruefully.
“No, that was always in the cards for Nathaniel.”
CHAPTER
THREE
Nathaniel stood facing a big picture window with a magnificent view of East London and the Thames, hands clenched angrily behind his back.
The day had dawned wet. Not a misty drizzle like he grew up with in Seattle, but that nasty, pissing mess that soaked you in the distance from the curb to the door and threatened to drown you in the time it might take to walk to a pub.
And umbrellas wouldn’t work in this wind. You’d just end up Mary Poppins-ing yourself right off the ground when a gust hit, then you’d either land in the river somewhere, or maybe the front parking lot of Scotland Yard if the gods were feeling particularly malevolent.
He checked his tie in the reflection as he ignored the three men waiting patiently behind him. Bright blue and white stripes, reflecting his first love: Brighton & Hove Albion F.C. Expensive silk. He’d gotten it on that one trip to Macao. Nathaniel smiled at that memory. Better times.
Before.
Severely blue suit. Single-breasted with three buttons and pinstripes cut with a razor and painted with a hand better suited to sumi-e.
His hair was growing back out. In prison, he’d kept it exceptionally short, just because you never got all the bugs and things unless you fully shaved it. He’d washed religiously instead. Now, he had a stylish faux hawk that that made his long, rectangular face and square jaw almost look aquiline.
Someone had actually told him that with his shallow, sharp cheekbones he looked like that one American sports reporter. On the one hand that was good, because it would distract. On the other, Peelers looking for him might suggest a name to jog a memory, and they would light up for having seen him.
Give him another two months and it would be back to shaggy.
But Nathaniel didn’t have two months. Someone had screwed up.
It was a minor thing. It might have even been glossed over in the larger milieu of his prison break, but someone had posted a recruiting call for members of his old gang on one of the Brighton & Hove Albion F.C. web boards where the more hooligan set frequently hung out.
All well and good, but he hadn’t approved it. Too soon. It had been taken down as soon as someone mentioned it to him, but the damage had been done. Nathaniel had to assume that Spencer or one of Jake’s other people would have seen it and thus presume that Nathaniel was still in England.
Nathaniel sighed quietly, took a breath, and turned to the three men.
Tommy was standing behind the chair, but he was a short man. Big, in the way of thugs who eat and drink too much, but still five-foot-seven inches tall, nonetheless. He always reminded Nathaniel of an English bulldog that had been crossed with a rabid American badger and then beaten with a tire iron a few times to toughen him up. His hands looked like he’d put them into a running garbage disposal a few times, but that was the years of bare knuckles brawling in underground tournaments before Nathaniel had given him a better job.
Standing next to him was Sokoro, the Kenyan. Lucky. Bastard claimed to be Masai, but that was just height and skinniness. His father was a judge back in the home country. The son was an embarrassment sent off to England for an education that was supposed to have involved law school, instead of petty crime convictions. His brothers and sisters had all stayed straight, but there was always one runt in the family, even at six foot four.
Mikhail was seated. Nervous. Sweating a little, even, in spite of the room being a bit cool.
Nathaniel had managed to rent an office configured for a lawyer. A barrister, since he was in England and not Seattle. It had come with nice furnishings, mostly in dark wood. There were even law books on the shelves, but they had been left by the previous tenant, the one who had fled six hours ahead of an Interpol indictment on drug smuggling charges.
Nathaniel figured that they’d negotiated a reasonable discount on the space, since the landlord would have been stuck waiting for the rest of the lease to expire had he not been able to sublet like this.
And Nathaniel liked that big, heavy, imposing desk as he moved next to it. That did something for the psyche. Right now, it provided him a spot to flip a leg up and rest his hip as he stared down at Mikhail from up close.
“Normally, I like ambition and enthusiasm to figure out what needs to be done and just going after it, Mikhail,” Nathaniel began.
The punk in the old jeans, black shirt, and grungy jacket started to smile, but then the words registered. But English wasn’t Mikhail’s first language. That would be Russian. Nathaniel had picked him up with a bunch of others when the Chechen Wars finally ended in 2009. Mercenaries for the most part, with experience in Russian and sometimes Soviet special forces.
Killers without a conscience.
Sometimes Nathaniel thought of them as a box of guns. Point. Shoot.
But occasionally they jammed.
“You fucked up, Mikhail,” Nathaniel continued as the Russian mercenary’s face fell. “I have to assume that my enemies know where to look for me now. We went through a lot of effort to make it look like I had escaped to Spain and then maybe Algeria. Some of those folks will start looking closer to home because of you.”
“Set a trap?” Mikhail offered in a thick, brutish accent, smiling helpfully.
“Oh, we are,” Nathaniel replied.
He looked up at Tommy and nodded.
The rabid badger had a sap in one hand. It connected with the back of Mikhail’s head with a harsh, meaty crunch that knocked man and chair over onto the thick, lush, slate gray carpet. Tommy being Tommy, he dropped to one knee and gave the man an extra whack, just to be sure.
Tommy looked up hopefully now. Sokoro had only moved enough that Mikhail hadn’t spilled blood onto his shoes. Both men smiled.
“I want his body found in South London,” Nathaniel said coldly. “Battersea would be best, but Peckham would be acceptable.”
“Either, boss?” Tommy asked with a voice like an industrial meat grinder hitting some bones.
“The Russians don’t care who he is, once he’s dead,” Nathaniel replied. “The Brits are incompetent. The Americans would say something, but the right people will know to kill any mention of his more recent activities, so they’ll just assume an underworld hit and mark it case closed.”
“McNeil and Kadjar?” Tommy asked in a voice filled with wonder and hope, in the same way that a starving dog whines when you put the bowl down in front of them.
“Someone will let them know,” Nathaniel said. “We’ll draw them in and finish them off this time.”
“Right, then,” Tommy slipped the sap into the pocket of his dark jacket. “Lucky, grab his feet and we’ll put him in the boot of Davey’s car.”
Nathaniel watched the two men lift the soon-to-be-dead mercenary and carry him from the room.
Two years. Jake and the Pacific Force had cost him two years. Only the fact that he’d gotten out of all his bitcoin investments early had kept Nathaniel from being completely broke right now. Real estate was always a better choice, since the English didn’t care where your money came from as long as you were quiet about things.
It was only when you pissed off the locals that they started allowing American regulators access to the bank records.
Even that would dead end, as some of the towers he owned had been bought with boxes of gold bars, but the Gulf folks preferred that to electronic transfers. Safer. Anonymous.
If he’d had a year, Nathaniel could have come up with something truly extravagant. But Mikhail had told the Hooligan Crew to gather up in London.
That would bring Nathaniel’s old friends, too.
At least he would finally get his revenge on Jake McNeil.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Jake was in his kitchen, a space so huge that it almost needed its own zip code, but the house had come like this when he’d inherited it from his parents. And, truth be told, he did entertain just frequently enough that having this much space for a catering crew to take over made everything run smoother.
But he hardly used any of it. How many people needed two dishwashers, a walk-in freezer, double-oversized-refrigerators side by side, two stoves, and two grills, one of which was scaled for a small restaurant?
Jake was seated at the long counter that separated that space from the smaller dining room, sipping some espresso. That machine and the microwave in the nearest corner were almost always sufficient.
A shadow appeared in the archway next to him. Utterly silent, but she was like that.
Rik. Technically Erika, but she hated that name. Kept the Rik part just piss off her parents, who had run in the same circles as Jake’s had when his were still alive.
She had a bottle of pre-made, flavored coffee in one hand, not liking his espresso habit. Starbucks brand with mocha. Cold, like she liked it.
Rik Farrell was a big woman. Five-foot-eleven. 165 pounds. Her grandmother had been Japanese, come to the States as a war bride in the ’50s. In Rik, all the recessives had lined up just right.
Naturally curly hair down to her shoulder blades. A natural blond, too, eyebrows and everywhere else. Busty and curvy, with bright blue eyes. But Japanese bones in her face and eyes. Beautiful and exotic.
Like him, she’d grown up in the gated communities of the East Side, back when Seattle was just turning into a technology town. Unlike him, she’d consciously turned herself into a redneck. Well, they’d both been rebels, hers just went against everything her parents had expected when they had dressed their little towheaded blonde in pink. Today she was in grease-stained jeans and a NIN T-shirt.
“Spencer just beeped the gate,” she said, pulling up the stool next to his and sitting down. They were almost eyeball level this way.
Jake nodded.
“Hollyanne should be here soon,” he said.
Rik brightened and took a drink of her cold coffee.
“Oh?”
“She still doesn’t like girls,” Jake said, watching Rik deflate a little.
“Oh.”
Rik preferred girls. Was open-minded enough that he and she occasionally slept together, but she was technically also his employee, so she had to ask, and didn’t have that itch all that often.
“Anybody heard from Grant?” Rik asked as she took another sip.
“Toronto,” Jake replied.
“How’d he score a residency permit?” Rik jolted back a little in surprise.
“Seduced someone, duh.” Jake laughed. “Emotional, physical, or financial is really the only question at that point.”
“Yeah, okay, I deserved that,” she laughed with him.
They sat and drank coffee companionably as they waited. There was enough drizzle to be seen through the window that Mrs. Johnson would probably remain in the guest cottage all day unless there was a problem. She was deep into mixing her next album, having previously convinced him to let her convert it to a professional-grade studio.
Occasionally, some of her friends chose to stay here so they could record with her, paying rent and understanding not to trash the place. She’d never made it as a rocker, but apparently had known everybody in town in music in the early ’90s, and still had some amazing big names on speed dial.
She didn’t need to be part of this conversation. Jake and Nathaniel had an understanding that even at their worst, families were always off-limits. Everyone’s, his included. Mrs. Johnson would be safe, regardless of what happened next.
Spencer came in the front of the house and yelled.
“Burglars,” he called. “Come to steal your shit.”
“Kitchen,” Jake yelled back.
He was surprised when Hollyanne walked in with Spencer, still holding her motorcycle helmet with the Go-Pro mounted on the side like a parrot. Must have snuck in behind Spencer.
Everyone hugged. Jake kissed Hollyanne on the cheek, got a harrumph, so he kissed Rik as well. Spencer got pissy, so everyone got kissed, just to shut them all up.
Spencer pulled a new bottle from the nearest fridge—that nasty energy drink he lived on—but Mrs. Johnson had known he was coming. Plus, she kept a supply anyway, since the team got together socially occasionally, at least when people passed through Seattle.
Hollyanne was drinking some sort of weird, faded yellow coconut/pineapple juice mix from the smell of her travel mug.
Jake studied Spencer as they all settled. Armenian ancestry, so just about as dark as Hollyanne, but he wasn’t Persian nobility like she was. Five-foot-ten. One-fifty. Skinny and wiry. Ran marathons competitively.
He and Spencer had started the little computer club when they were in seventh grade at that private school that everyone had attended. The man was still a computer nerd, able to grok an insane number of languages, though like the rest of them he didn’t need a job working for anyone else. Jake had designed the game and written a lot of the base code after Nathaniel told them all to take a flying leap. Spencer had written the primitive AI that handled bad guys. Hollyanne had understood close combat and got all that right for them. Rik had redesigned all the screens to make them “less stupid and ugly.” Grant, of course, had taught the machines how to interact with players in a way that might be seduction or intimidation. Even then, he’d been the expert.
“What’s so funny?” Spencer spoke up now.
“Thinking back to 2000, man,” Jake continued to chuckle. “Best damned timing possible, you know?”
That got a round of laughs. To sell a computer game in February 2000 for astronomical prices and take only cash instead of stock that six months later would have ended up worthless. One of the studios that sold to the biggest software company in the world, just up the road, had eventually ended up owning the IP after everything shook out, but the five of them had split forty million dollars when they were all sixteen or seventeen.
