Gone Before Goodbye, page 25
“Who?”
“Everyone. Look, when I first got hired, WorldCures still had an office here, but, I mean, with Marc dead and you out of the picture, there wasn’t much to it. But Trace Packer still showed up every once in a while. You know this, right?”
“Pretend I do.”
“Trace and I hung out a little. We weren’t friends or anything, but when it all went down, well, people thought I was involved, because of my connection to you.”
“I’m not following. What went down?”
“One night, I’m lying in bed, dead asleep, and suddenly Malik is there. In my locked apartment. Sitting on the edge of my bed. He starts asking me if I know where Trace Packer is. I say no. He doesn’t believe me. So then he starts with the interrogation. He says stuff like ‘You went to medical school with Maggie McCabe, right? When did you last talk to her?’ Like that. I found out later that Trace broke in here after hours. He stole, I don’t know, something to do with WorldCures research—and then he flew out to Washington.”
Washington. Nadia and Maggie share a glance.
“When was this?”
“Five, six months ago. Hold up. You live, what, an hour or two from Dulles. Did Trace go to you, Maggie?” Steve snaps his fingers. “Of course he did. That would make perfect sense. Oh shit, this is bad. This is really bad.”
“He didn’t come to me. Steve, listen to me. Trace is missing. That’s why Nadia and I are here. Yes, he flew to Dulles five months ago. But I never saw him. In fact, as far as we can tell, no one has seen him since.”
“If that’s true—”
“It is.”
“—then maybe they found Trace.”
“No,” Nadia says. “Trace is smart, resourceful. He’d have found a way.”
Nadia’s words sound hollow with false hope. Maggie’s mind starts racing. She remembers the bill for the Wells Fargo safe deposit boxes she opened in Trace’s apartment.
Whoa. Slow down a second. Maybe that’s it.
Maybe whatever Trace had snatched from this building before leaving Dubai is now in those boxes.
That’s why Trace had to come back to the United States. Not to see Maggie. But to make sure he kept control of their innovations. So, okay, Trace goes into Apollo Longevity at night. He nabs the THUMPR7 and accompanying machinery. He heads to Dubai airport, flies back to the United States, and then…
What?
Steve’s phone buzzes again. An incoming call. He puts the phone to his ear and says, “What’s up?” His face loses color. “Wait, what, right now?” Pause. “Hold on a second.” He looks over at them. “What have you gotten me into, Maggie?”
Maggie offers up an elaborate shrug. “No clue, Steve.”
Steve heads to a monitor on the desk. He leans over, still standing, and types into it. As he does, he keeps glancing at the door behind him. “Someone is at reception asking for you by name.” He finishes and turns to her. “Do you know who he is?”
He flips the monitor so Maggie can see the live CCTV footage he’s brought up. The camera is focused on a man with a…
Big Mustache.
The cop from last night. He is in plainclothes but flanked by two men in olive-green police uniforms with matching berets.
Steve says, “Well?”
“I saw someone stabbed on the dance floor last night. He’s the cop who showed up.”
“Are you serious?”
“No, Steve, I’m making it up.”
“No time for sarcasm, Maggie.”
“Always time, Steve. Anyway, he didn’t believe me.”
“Well, he believes you now. I recognize him. He’s tight with Malik.”
“Maggie.” Nadia taps her on the shoulder. “Take a look at this.”
Maggie turns. Nadia shows her the screen on her phone. It’s the headline from a new article:
OLEG RAGORAVICH, RUSSIAN OLIGARCH, FOUND DEAD
“We have to get out of here,” Nadia says.
Steve takes the lead. Maggie stands on Steve’s left, Nadia behind him so that Steve blocks Less Beefy’s view of her hands. She keeps them together at the wrists so as to sell that she’s still zip-tied. Less Beefy gives them tough-guy vibes by the elevator. Steve smiles and says, “Hey, I need a favor.”
There is no hesitation.
That’s the key. Maggie learned this in military training. There are many things that make a great fighter—size, skill, athleticism, quickness, adaptability, experience, heart—but one thing can often overcome all that.
Surprise.
Maggie smiles. Casual as can be. She doesn’t call out. She doesn’t offer up or even hint at a warning. She doesn’t tense up or slow down or rear back or any of that. She just keeps walking, arms swinging, almost breezy.
Less Beefy isn’t worried. He’s a big man. She’s a small woman.
No threat to him at all.
The whole thing takes less than five seconds.
Maggie picks up speed as she gets closer, her smile grows into something almost flirty. It throws him off, distracts him, and then, before Less Beefy can react, Maggie attacks.
The Web Strike—also called the Y Strike—uses the web between your index finger and thumb. Coming from below, Maggie bends her knees, powers up pistonlike with her legs, and drives the “Y” with as much force as she can muster into his trachea.
It’s a dangerous blow, designed to incapacitate. Maggie doesn’t relish hurting anyone—the physician in her cannot stand to see a person in pain—and yet there it is, the grin on her face, the undeniable thrum in her blood, the adrenaline spike she knows she will never stop craving.
Hello, darkness, my old friend…
Her blow lands clean, unimpeded. Maggie can feel his windpipe give way a little. A gurgling sound escapes his lips. He staggers back, both hands protectively on his throat. But now it’s Nadia’s turn. They had planned this in the seconds before coming out here. It isn’t a complicated plan. It relied on the three S’s—speed, simplicity, surprise.
Nadia jumps toward him like a feral cat. With both his hands out of the way, the path is free. Nadia’s hand darts toward his waist, unstraps the holster, and pulls his gun free. She steps back and points the weapon at the man.
Steve puts his hands up too. “Please don’t shoot me.”
Maggie tries not to make a face at Steve’s overbaked performance. It’s her turn again now. She opens the pouch on the other side of Less Beefy’s belt. According to Nadia, that’s where he keeps his zip ties. She pulls them out. Nadia puts the gun hard against the big man’s temple. There is crazy in her eyes.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Nadia commands.
The man complies. Maggie throws on the zip tie and tightens it. She uses her knee to make his collapse so that he’s now sitting on the ground.
Nadia moves in closer. “Make a sound. Please. Because then I can pull this trigger and blow your head off. I’ll have the excuse to kill you, see? And I want that. So go ahead. Call out.”
Less Beefy seems to be holding his breath.
Nadia gives him one final smile before she turns the gun toward Steve. Steve throws his hands even higher in the air. “Don’t shoot!”
“Call for the elevator,” Nadia orders him.
Steve nods to please and uses his lanyard to get the elevator. He knows, of course, Nadia isn’t going to shoot him. This act of pretending to hold Steve at gunpoint is to peddle the fiction that Steve didn’t cooperate with them, that he too was taken by surprise.
Nadia may be acting, but that gleam in her eye is enough to make Steve glance at Maggie and make sure that they are all on the same side.
The elevator arrives. Only one elevator comes to this floor—this one—so once it is occupied, it will take whoever wants to reach them that much longer to use the stairs and figure out exactly where they are.
“Move,” Nadia says, pushing Steve in the back with the barrel of the gun.
The three of them enter the elevator. Once inside, Nadia points the gun at Less Beefy until the doors close.
When they do, they hear him shout for help.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Inside the elevator Nadia keeps the gun pointed at Steve’s head. “Zip-tie him,” she tells Maggie. “Take his phone, just in case.”
Maggie is about to ask what’s going on—why does Nadia still have the gun up and in Steve’s face?—but the answer is frighteningly obvious.
The elevator has a camera.
It probably has sound too. Nadia is continuing to sell it. Steve plays his part too: “Please, don’t shoot me.” Maggie is about to take out the zip tie, but the elevator stops.
They are already at the garage level.
When the doors open, Maggie expects there to be men with guns or police cars or sirens or something waiting for them. But there are not. There is nothing. The garage is silent. She gives Steve one more look, trying to say thank you with her eyes. He answers back with the most imperceptible of nods. Maggie doesn’t know Steve’s fate. Will Malik and Big Mustache believe whatever story of abduction he comes up with—or will they realize he was in on this?
No time to worry about it.
Nadia grabs Maggie by the arm and pulls them out of the elevator. They hurry-walk (not run because that would draw attention) toward the car ramp. No one stops them. Again the element of surprise. Whatever Big Mustache or Malik had in store for them, there would have been no need to surround the perimeter of the building or get men to the garage. The elevator, like every elevator in Dubai, was superfast. It had been only ten, maybe twenty seconds since Less Beefy started to call for help. Even if he was heard immediately, they’d have to figure out where the cries were coming from. Once they did, they’d probably call for the elevator. But of course, the elevator was already taken. So it would take time to get up to their floor. Maybe some of them would choose to run down the stairs…
All of that takes time.
Maggie and Nadia slow their steps as they reach the ramp. They stroll up it and out. Simple as that. No one gives them so much as a second glance. The sun is at full power, blinding, debilitating, unbearable, but right now Maggie feels fine with it. Nadia is speaking Arabic into her phone. They move quickly down the street and enter the palatial shopping mall next door.
As they walk, Nadia pulls the phone away from her face and says to Maggie, “You told me Charles gave you a second passport.”
“Yes.”
“Give it to me.”
Maggie does. Without slowing, Nadia opens it to the front page, takes a photograph with her phone, hands it back to her.
“What’s going on?” Maggie asks.
“I saw the news report right before they caught me. Oleg’s body was found in the Dubai Water Canal.”
“Wow.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I should just go talk to the police—”
“No.”
“Why not?” Maggie asks. “I’m the one who called them. They can’t think I’m involved.”
“You’re being naive,” Nadia says.
“How so?”
“You fly into Dubai for sketchy reasons. On your first night here, you, a single American woman in her forties, go to a nightclub alone. You claim you saw the stabbing of a rich man who no one else saw, who you happened to bump into and whose house you happen to have just been staying in before you arrived—and this all happened right after you met with his mistress at the same club… Do I need to go on?”
“You do not,” Maggie says. “You’re good at this.”
“I’ve had some practice.”
“You want to explain?”
A small smile plays on her lips. “Another time. Now give me your phone.”
Maggie does. Nadia presses it up against hers, transferring data from one to the other. “I’ve uploaded a mobile boarding pass in the name Emily Sinclair into your phone’s wallet. It’s for the Emirates flight to London—that’s the next international flight out of Dubai. It leaves in an hour.”
They rush through the corridor, take the escalator down the steps and past an ornate fountain into the parking garage. There is a sign with an arrow for Uber and Bolt riders. Nadia gestures toward it.
“I ordered you an Uber to the airport. It’ll be downstairs in two minutes. The ride should only take fifteen minutes. There won’t be time for the police to have covered the airport yet. They may have time to put your real name in the system.”
“But not Emily Sinclair’s.”
“Exactly.”
“And what about your name?”
“I’ll definitely be in the system,” Nadia says. “That’s why I’m not going with you. I’ll figure another way out and meet you when it’s safe.”
They head down toward the rideshare pickup zone. Three vehicles are waiting. Nadia checks the license plate on the app. “That’s yours,” Nadia says, pointing. “The blue one.”
“Got it.”
Maggie slides in, and Nadia closes the car door. The Uber pulls away. When the Uber hits the highway, Maggie takes out her phone and calls Porkchop.
He answers on the first ring. “Where are you?”
“On my way to London.”
“Flight number?”
She tells him.
“Once you land,” Porkchop says, “I’ll have you covered.”
“How?”
“Let’s pretend you didn’t ask me that. No contact until you arrive.”
He hangs up.
Porkchop.
But he’s right. Every word she says is being heard by Charles Lockwood. Does she care? Who knows? But the thing is, Porkchop doesn’t want Charles Lockwood to hear. He isn’t saying why. Not yet. But right now, that’s enough for her.
As promised, the drive takes fifteen minutes. The Uber drops her at Terminal 3. She hops on what they call an APM—Automated People Mover—though Maggie has no idea what the difference between an APM and a small train is, and gets to Concourse A in three minutes. The security line is short and moves fast. Maggie is on full alert as she makes her way through it, sure that every employee is looking at her. She feels exposed. She wishes she had a hat or sunglasses or something, though that just usually makes a person stand out more.
When she reaches her gate, her flight to London is already boarding. She gets on the queue. Part of her keeps waiting for someone to grab her arm and pull her out of the line. There are, of course, plenty of security officers walking about the gleaming terminal. When she scans her boarding pass, the Emirates employee at the gate asks to see her passport. Maggie has it opened to the right page. It’s the same photo as the one in her real passport—Charles had just had it duplicated to create “Emily Sinclair’s”—but the agent seems to be taking a longer time than she should studying it. The gate agent looks at the photo, then at Maggie, then back to the photo.
“Have a nice flight, Ms. Sinclair,” the agent finally says, handing her back the passport.
Maggie hurries to her window seat. A man in a “groutfit”—gray sweatpants, gray hoodie—drops into the seat next to her. He says “Well, hello there” with a little too much enthusiasm. Maggie isn’t a plane-engager under the best of circumstances. Engaging with a plane passenger is up there with her major phobias, the most terrifying being when you get an aisle seat at a Broadway show and the actors come offstage for audience participation.
Shudder.
Still, she gives the man a tight-but-polite nod back. Then she stares out the window and doesn’t relax until the plane taxis down the runway. She closes her eyes and flashes back to one of her first flights with Marc. In a surprise move, Marc gripped her hand tightly and asked her:
“Why do we say we ‘taxi’ down the runway?”
“Good question. Well, not good, really. Pretty inane as a matter of—”
“I mean, when else do we use the term ‘taxi’ as a verb to describe movement? Why only with air travel? What else besides airplanes ‘taxi’ and why do we use that term for it? Sorry, I babble when I’m nervous.”
“You’re nervous?”
“Maybe a little.”
“But you ride motorcycles.”
“Which, you may have observed, stay on the ground for the entire ride.”
“I didn’t have you pegged as a nervous flyer, Marc.”
“It’s kind of sexy, right?”
“Would you settle for barely cute?”
“I would, yes.”
She shakes her head, and a sad smile, the only kind she had known for the past year now, comes to her face. The next time she and Marc flew:
“I looked it up, Mags. Why they use ‘taxi’ for aviation.”
“God, you’re a dork.”
“So in the early 1900s, two French aviation pioneers named Blériot and Farman started using the term ‘taxi’ to describe how primitive aircraft moved slowly across an airfield because it seemed similar to the way a taxi moves through city streets. Ergo ‘taxiing’ on a runway and whatnot. What do you think?”
“Barely cute. But also, okay, kind of sexy.”
The pang—that ever-present Missing Marc pang—strikes deep in her chest. This is how grief works, isn’t it? Grief doesn’t attack her on Marc’s birthday or their anniversary or any of that. Grief knows you are expecting it on those days. So Grief bides its time. It lulls you, makes you think it’s not such a threat anymore, and then when your defenses are down—when a plane simply starts down a runway, for example—boom, it attacks.
Marc.
When the plane’s Wi-Fi comes up, Maggie tries to read all she can on the death of Oleg Ragoravich. They don’t call it a murder yet. Just a dead body. They don’t even say foul play suspected or any of that. Like maybe Oleg was taking a swim and drowned.
Dubai just being Dubai, Maggie figures.
But some of the details bother Maggie. The articles note, for example, that Ragoravich was “positively identified by close colleagues.” That seems an odd thing to mention. It’s not like the body was found after years underwater. Why mention that? The article also notes that “hundreds of guests recently saw the normally reclusive Oleg Ragoravich at an extravagant ball”—yep, they actually use the word “ball”—“he hosted at his private residence in Russia.”
