Steal, page 25
“A purchase?” I asked. Gun laws in this country have more loopholes than a piece of knitting, but buying with a fake ID still remains a stretch.
“No. A robbery. Scared the shit out of the gun shop owner, too. Toyed with him. He likes to play games.”
So that’s what Foxx had, and it was more than enough. I didn’t need a name to know that this guy didn’t come to my apartment to call a truce.
“If he wants me dead, I suggest we give him a shot,” I said.
Foxx nodded. “I figured you’d say that.”
Which was all he needed to say in return. Foxx hadn’t come for von Oehson. He’d come for me.
“It’s not worth it,” said Julian, chiming in for the first time. He always knows how to pick his spots. “Go be with your family. Go see your little girl.”
In other words, go into hiding. Let Foxx dispatch an operative or two to track this guy down.
“Fine,” I said. Still, there was one last thing I needed to know. I couldn’t imagine that this guy got a good-enough look at me at von Oehson’s house in Darien. Even if he had, how was he able to ID me?
I was about to ask Foxx when it suddenly hit me. I already knew the answer. It explained why the Hungarians were cooperating. It wasn’t from the goodness of their hearts. It was more like guilt.
“What is it?” asked Foxx. He could read it all over my face. Panic.
I turned to Julian. “If he knows who I am,” I said, my voice trailing off.
It only took Julian a heartbeat. “Oh, shit. Then he knows who she is, too,” he said.
Elizabeth.
CHAPTER 102
The Hungarians didn’t like getting played by Elizabeth and me. Not enough to kill us, but more than enough to make sure we didn’t interfere with the killing of Brunetti and von Oehson. Security stills from our visit to the consulate had been shared with their hired gun. Now they were being leveraged in the worst possible way.
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Lizzie…pick up! Answer the phone!
After five rings I got her voicemail. Instead of leaving a message I hung up and immediately called again. Five more rings that felt like a lifetime. “Call me as soon as possible,” I said after the beep.
“Maybe she’s still asleep,” said Foxx, looking at his watch. “It’s only six-thirty.”
“Only if it was Sunday,” I said. “She’s up. She’s definitely up.”
Julian looked at me. He could see my panic growing by the second. “What do you want to do?”
No sooner did he ask than my phone rang. It was Elizabeth.
“Hey, sorry,” she said. “I was just pulling out some laundry from the dryer. It’s early. What’s up?”
“Are you on speaker?” I asked. She hates when people put her on speakerphone. Even more than I do.
“Yeah, I know. Do you mind? I just want to fold these sheets before they start to wrinkle.”
“No, that’s fine,” I said. “I need to talk to you, though.”
“I can fold and talk at the same time, Dylan.”
“Not over the phone.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I need to tell you in person.”
“Okay. How about lunch?”
The last thing I wanted to do was scare the hell out of her. I just needed to get over to her place as fast as possible. I could explain everything when I got there.
“It can’t wait until then,” I said. “I’m going to come over now, okay?”
“No, it’s not okay. What’s going on?”
I wasn’t so much scaring her. Pissing her off was more like it. “Frank Brunetti’s dead,” I said. Silence. She didn’t respond. She didn’t say anything. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” she said.
“It happened yesterday. It’s not public yet.”
“How is it not public?”
“That’s a longer story. But last night someone also tried to kill von Oehson. I was with him at the time.”
Again, she didn’t say anything. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“What?”
“I said, are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m just taking it all in.”
It was a lot for any time of day, let alone first thing in the morning. Still, that was only the half of it.
“Listen, there’s more,” I said. “But not over the phone, okay? Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be there in about a half hour.”
“All right, sounds good. I’ll see you then.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked. “Besides everything I just told you?”
“Of course I’m sure. I mean, yeah, besides what you just told me,” she said. “Everything’s peachy keen.”
CHAPTER 103
For the life of me—literally—I didn’t know how she did it. Keeping her cool. The composure. Waiting for exactly the right moment to tip me off without giving herself away. Or, at least, that’s what I was hoping.
Did he catch on? Did he figure it out?
Either way, I was walking into an ambush. There was no other choice. No path around it. He had Elizabeth. He got to her so he could get to me, and I was about to deliver myself on a silver platter. There would be no negotiation. Any chance for that had come and gone. When pushed to the brink, all that remains is your most primal instinct.
Kill or be killed.
Can I help you? no one asked.
The security provided by a doorman is only as good as the size of the building. When there are hundreds of apartments, there’s no checking the IDs of everyone coming through the revolving doors. There’s no waiting to be buzzed up. Just walk through the lobby like you live there, and no one says a word. I always told Elizabeth how I thought that arrangement was a little risky, given her line of work. Of course, it was nowhere near as risky as her line of work itself. “Besides, I like my place,” she’d often say. “It gets great light.”
She lives on the twenty-third floor. It’s the corner apartment. The living room faces east.
I stepped off the elevator and headed left, all the way to the end of the hallway. With my back against the wall next to her door, I reached out and knocked with my left hand. I shoot with my right.
There was no response, no sounds of approaching footsteps. I knocked again, waiting.
“It’s open,” came her voice, calling out.
One, she was nowhere near the door. Two, she would’ve never just left it open for me. Three, that’s the number I was counting to in my head. One, two, three…
I flung the door open as hard as I could from the side, hoping to draw his fire. He might have been a pro, but reflexes are often just that. Sure enough, he squeezed off two shots through a suppressor on movement alone, the bullets piercing the hallway wall opposite the door at roughly chest and head high. Immediately, I swung around, coming in low, crouched behind the barrel of my gun. All I was looking for was a barrel pointed back at me.
What I got instead, what I saw, was his gun pressed tight against Elizabeth’s head.
He had her in a choke hold, her body blocking his. I had no shot, and he knew it. He was twenty feet away, standing in the middle of her living room with the blinds closed, and even though I could barely see his face, I could tell that he was smiling. He was in charge.
“Drop it,” he said.
“You first,” I said back.
Just because he was in charge didn’t mean I was going to make it easy for him.
He jammed the end of the silencer hard, grinding it into Elizabeth’s temple. She winced from the pain. “I’m not going to tell you again,” he said. “Drop it.”
“Don’t you do it,” Elizabeth pleaded with me. “Don’t you dare.”
But it was my only move. This was the play. “As soon as you let her go is when I lay it down,” I said. “You can kill me as many times as you want, but only after you let her go.”
Sometimes you have to say the quiet part out loud, but this wasn’t one of those times. He already knew. He couldn’t shoot us both. If he killed her, I was killing him. But he didn’t have to tell me the flip side, either. Someone had to go first in this stalemate, and that someone was me.
Slowly, I lowered my arm as I kneeled to the ground. I could see the tears falling from Elizabeth’s eyes. “No,” she said. “Nooooo.”
I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be okay, but that was a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.
I didn’t want my last words to her to be a lie.
CHAPTER 104
I rested my gun on the floor. My arm was outstretched, but my fingers weren’t letting go of the gun just yet.
He could shoot me first, but he had no guarantee I wouldn’t fire back. I knew Elizabeth would do her part to give me a target. I think he knew it, too.
“Was it worth it?” he asked.
I understood exactly what he meant, but this was about buying any time that I could. He was still holding Elizabeth, using her as a shield. The barrel of that suppressor was still pressed against her head. “Was what worth it?”
“Dying for some asshole billionaire.”
“I could ask the same of you,” I said. “Sorry about the flat tire.”
I watched as his smile, what I could see of it, widened. Still, as he shifted his feet I could tell he was suffering from more than mere cuts and bruises. He was pretty banged up. He nodded. “The things we do for money, huh?”
“I promise you I was getting paid more,” I said.
That tested his smile. He tightened his choke hold on Elizabeth, her head snapping back. “Yeah, that was a pretty good shot,” he said. “Hitting my tire at that speed?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“Do you think you can do it again? Get that lucky?”
“What did you have in mind?” I asked.
“I’ll bet you all the money you got paid that you can’t get off a shot before I put one between your eyes.”
I remembered what Foxx had told me. He likes to play games.
Most men are mountains of confidence built to conceal insecurity at their core. But sometimes the core is just as cocky. There was no tricking this guy. I couldn’t distract him with a gym coupon in my wallet. Nor could I distract him with insults, get him angry enough so as to lose his cool and then his focus. But what I did have was what he’d already revealed. Him and me? This was extremely personal. Because I’d already outplayed him once, he wanted the chance to return the favor.
Pride goeth before a fall.
I didn’t wait to hear the rules of his game. I gave him my own. One, in particular, I was sure he’d like. I would do what he never thought I would do.
I let go of my gun.
Elizabeth watched helplessly as I pulled back my arm, my hand at least two feet from the trigger.
“Your turn,” I said.
He never hesitated. He threw Elizabeth to the ground, whipping his arm at me with his elbow locked. He had me dead to rights.
“Right back atcha,” he said.
It was my move. That’s what made it a game. He wouldn’t shoot until I reached for my gun.
I looked at Elizabeth. She looked back at me. I could see it on her face. For the first time she was realizing there was something a little different about me. All things considered, who could blame her for not noticing until now?
Finally I could promise her that everything was going to be okay. Only I didn’t have to say a word. All I had to do was wink from behind my new glasses.
She lives on the twenty-third floor. It’s the corner apartment. The living room faces east.
Fire away, boys.
CHAPTER 105
It took less than a second. The blinds barely even moved. More important, his trigger finger never moved at all.
He dropped to the floor in a shower of blood. Foxx took out his heart, the .224 Valkyrie cartridge entering through the back a few inches below the clavicle. As for exactly where on the head Julian’s jacketed hollow point fired from his Bergara B-14 hit, the answer was somewhere. Suffice it to say, there wasn’t much left of the guy’s head for the coroner to make any determination.
Not that an actual coroner would ever get anywhere near the body. Or the police, for that matter. After Foxx and Julian took off their thermal headsets, which had a sync feed to my glasses, they packed up their rifles and vacated the otherwise unoccupied apartment on the twenty-third floor of the building across the street. The super had let them in after Foxx made a couple of calls. As for the cleanup crew, they were on standby.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, when you see a van for a carpet-cleaning company driving around town, it’s actually a carpet-cleaning company. But that time? The one that pulled up in front of Elizabeth’s building less than thirty minutes after the shooting? That was no carpet-cleaning company.
Although they did roll up Elizabeth’s living room rug to carry out the body.
His alias was Dr. Hans Kestler. He had an American passport, a Social Security number, even an Uber account. As for his real name, or anything else about him that was true—those details would take some additional digging. People in his profession spend their lifetime concealing their identity with layers of forged documents, misdirection, and a tenacious dedication to picking up every bread crumb behind them that they might ever drop. Eventually we’d find out more, and for Foxx’s sake, I was hoping the information might in some way help with an unsolved file or two down in Langley. Until then, it was a classic case of the contract killer’s credo. You die just like you live—as if you never existed.
Meanwhile.
The four of us were sitting at Elizabeth’s kitchen table once the cleaners had left. She’d made a pot of coffee, and we were all partaking. “Cream or sugar?” she asked.
“How about some whiskey?”
That, of course, was Julian. It was also one of the best ideas he’d ever had. As fast as you can say Jack Daniel’s, the four of us were drinking coffee and whiskey. Never mind that it wasn’t even nine a.m. yet. We’d earned it.
“What do you want to do about von Oehson?” I asked Foxx.
He reached for a little more Jack to add to his mug. “Well, let’s see,” he said. “The guy stole fifty billion dollars from—technically—an ally of the United States, and jeopardized our relationship with their intelligence agency while we scrambled to get them their money back without creating the top story of every newscast in the civilized world. He nearly got you killed, more than a couple of times, and forced me to risk getting my ass hauled before a congressional oversight committee in order to save his ass and yours. And don’t get me started about the headache that Frank Brunetti’s death creates, no matter how Machiavellian we might all be feeling about that. Personally, I have about a dozen different ideas about Mathias von Oehson suffering an unfortunate accident while deep-sea diving or helicopter skiing or whatever it is that filthy rich guys are doing these days for leisure. But I know that look on your face, Reinhart. You’ve got an idea or two of your own.”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said.
CHAPTER 106
My first stop was city hall for a sit-down with the Honorable Edward “Edso” Deacon to thank him for giving me the cover I needed to borrow Elizabeth from her boss, Evan Pritchard, and the Field Unit within the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
“I really pissed Pritch off, keeping him in the dark like that,” said the mayor, before breaking into a laugh. He and Pritchard had had their run-ins in the past. “Trust me, I’m the one who should be thanking you.”
“All the same, I want to express my gratitude,” I said.
“You mean, by explaining why you needed the favor from me in the first place?”
“Not exactly, but I promise you’re going to like this.”
“Okay,” he said, making a show of putting his feet up on his desk. “What are you giving me?”
“It’s what you’re giving Mathias von Oehson,” I said. “A key to the city.”
Deacon squinted. “That sounds an awful lot like you’re asking me for another favor, Dylan.”
“Not after I tell you why,” I said.
My next stop, after city hall, was the last place I’d ever expect to find Allen Grimes during a workday. That is, actually at work. But there he was, just as his assistant, Vanessa, had told me, sitting in his office on the editorial floor of the New York Gazette building in Midtown. “I know,” said Vanessa, when I called looking for him. “I’m just as surprised he’s here as you are.”
But maybe not as surprised as Grimes himself when I shut the door to his office behind me and told him why I was paying him a visit. I had not one, but two scoops for him.
“Frank Brunetti is dead,” I said.
“What?”
“He was killed outside his restaurant yesterday afternoon as he was getting into his limo. One shot to his head from a long-range rifle. The triggerman was a contract killer. He’s now dead, too.”
Grimes was staring at me, stunned, until finally it occurred to him that he was a reporter. He frantically began searching the drawers of his desk. “Wait, wait, wait…”
“Forget about the recorder,” I said. “We’re off the record.”
“No way. We can’t be.”
“Fine. We’re not, then. But you’re not going to write that story.”
“The hell I’m not.” So said his mouth. The rest of him, however, was quickly catching on to how confident I sounded. “Okay. Why not?” he asked.
“Because your paper needs two confirmed sources to run it, and you’ll never get the second source.”
Grimes could always read between the lines with me. When I said stuff like that, I wasn’t the professor with a PhD in psychology, I was the former CIA operative. All the more reason why he didn’t need to ask the obvious question. How could this news not have gone public yet?
“Why are you telling me, then?” he asked instead. “And what’s the second scoop while we’re at it?”
