Satan (20 page)

The housekeeping cart was parked in her doorway. She edged around the bulky trolley. A woman wearing the Hilton’s distinct uniform vacuumed the carpet on the other side of the bed. She glanced up and turned off the appliance. “I was just finishing up, miss. This is your room? I apologize—”

“Yes, yes. You need to see my ID. I understand.” Angel retrieved her wallet, ambled over to the woman, and flashed her driver’s license.

“Thank you. Some people get annoyed, but especially at Carnival time, we have to be very careful. Would you like extra shampoo or lotion?”

“No thanks.” Angel put away her wallet and waited until the woman had left, and the door clicked closed. She went straight to her laptop, signed in, and checked the delivery status of her letter. Jess had signed for it. At least one other person would know what really had happened to her brother and maybe…her.

For the first time in her life, she was afraid. No, terrified. The rage and anger that had fueled her this far ebbed away. Her phone rang. She threw her bag on the desk, fished the cell out of the outer pocket, and read Jess’s name. Of course Jess would call, so would she if their positions were reversed, and she received an envelope labeled “Open on February 19, 2017.”

The date was Jess’s birthday and Jess would assume it was a birthday card. Angel figured Yaman’s men in Iraq would hear of the massacre of his Trinidadian terrorist cell right away. But with Carnival in full swing, and all available flights booked to capacity, none of them would be able to fly to Trinidad right away to exact revenge. She fully expected to be killed before the date specified on the envelope. It wasn’t as if she intended to hide her actions. She wanted the world to know that one person could take out a whole bunch of bad guys.

The phone finally stopped ringing, and the ping of voice mail sounded. Angel changed into cotton black pants, a scooped-neck short-sleeved matching cotton sweater, and traded her flip flops for a pair of canvas black loafers. Angel opened the hotel safe and retrieved the small handgun she’d purchased at a Vermont gun show.

She switched the contents of her beach bag into a crotched drawstring shoulder purse. She opened the hard plastic case that contained her tiny Kahr CW380 double action only handgun, unsnapped the case, and removed the gun. She loaded the pistol, wrapped a sanitary napkin around the barrel to mask its shape, and placed the gun at the bottom of the purse.

Angel stood, slung the bag over her shoulder, and tested the reflection from various angles in the mirror. Satisfied no one would notice anything out of the ordinary, she headed to the front desk, left the extra key for Merylle, and asked the bellman to call her a taxi.

On a Carnival Thursday, Angel expected the traffic to be heavy, but she didn’t anticipate the jam around The Savannah, the world’s biggest traffic circle. By the time, the taxi dropped her off at Sail’s Inn restaurant, she was running an hour late. A tad flustered, she hurried to the reception desk, and tried to hide her shock when she saw not just Nooda, but also Yaman Moses.

“Sorry I’m late. Traffic was a nightmare. I didn’t realize you’d be joining us, Yaman. What a nice surprise.” The man gave her the creepy-crawlies.

Yaman Moses had leathery skin, piggy eyes, a hook nose, and a square jaw. For his age, fifty-eight, he was in good shape. He had a wiry, but muscular build.

She tried not to look at his mouth. A wave of bile coated her tongue at the memory of him smashing her lips against her teeth.

“Actually, I’m taking Nooda’s place.”

Angel’s stomach hollowed out. She had to lock her knees to remain upright.

“I’m so sorry that I can’t stay, Angel, but our step-mother’s having one of her conniptions and you know Yaman won’t tolerate the woman. Bye.” Nooda air-kissed Angel’s cheek.

“Bye Yaman. I’ll call you if it’s anything serious.” Nooda jangled a mass of keys at them and ran off.

“As if I’d fucking care. The kitchen’s closed. You’re an hour late.” Yaman made a point of checking his diamond-encrusted Rolex.

“That’s okay. We don’t need to do lunch. I’ll grab something when I get back to the hotel. Sorry you drove out all this way for nothing.” Relief washed over her.

“I didn’t. We’re having lunch at Dolphin Paradise. I keep a full staff there and they’re already in the process of preparing our meal.”

Angel saw black spots. Her legs shook.

Dolphin Paradise was the name of Yaman’s Down the Islands home. The only way to get to the island located off the north coast of Trinidad was by boat.

Merylle’s words boomeranged around her brain.
I saw you bouncing around on the floor of a boat. You were in a body bag.

Satan jammed his palm against his forehead and stared at the flat panel HD screen attached to his desktop. This was his fifth time reading Lucifer’s backgrounder on a new client, and he hadn’t absorbed a single word.

His concentration had been shot since Rutger phoned to tell him that Angel had attended the U.S. Embassy’s Carnival fete in Trinidad with Yaman Moses, a prominent local businessman. According to Rutger, the man was all over Angel. Jealous rage ate at him. Some other fucker was touching
his
Angel.

Rutger also said she looked ready to barf every time Moses palmed her ass. What was Angel up to? Why was she flirting with a man who made her want to puke her brains out?

Satan glanced at his landline. He could be in Trinidad before the end of the day. Confront her. Have the mental shouting match he needed to have with her to vent his fury and frustration. He had expected his feelings for Angel to recede with each ticking second. Instead the inferno inside him continued to mushroom to Hiroshima proportions.

Go or stay? Confront or seethe?

It was so not like him to waffle. But that’s exactly what he’d done since finding out Angel might know the true identity of Malik Mansoor. Torn between contempt and concern for her safety, he “almost” called her at least thirty times a day.

Why had she returned to Trinidad? And why so abruptly?

He didn’t buy the explanation Angel had given Jess. That she was homesick. That she wanted a clean cut.

As of January the first, Rutger had been assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Trinidad. Since then Satan got a daily call or an email from Rutger with a report on Angel.

The desk phone rang, Satan grabbed the landline. “Yo.”

“We might have caught a break on your tail.” Nikar, a new member of the Hades Squad, had been assigned to tail Satan’s tail since Rutger had enlightened him on the subject.

“Talk to me.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. Every single, day Satan’s tail changed. It usually took them until noon to identify the tail. And they continued to fail to identify when exactly the tail changed.

“Your night tail didn’t shake me. He’s entering a building. It’s a bank. Never heard of it though. Caribbean Worker’s Bank.”

That tidbit jolted him. After Rutger told him about Angel flying to Trinidad, Satan had surrendered to curiosity and researched her. Caribbean Worker’s Bank had been owned by Angel’s family since its inception in 1867. After her parents’ deaths, her brother Martin and Angel inherited the bank fifty-fifty. Martin had sold his shares in the bank to a Swiss investment firm six months later and then he had vanished.

“Good work. You heading home now?”

“I was thinking of going in and pretending I’m interested in opening an account.” Nikar offered.

Satan considered the idea. “No. I don’t want to alert anyone we know about this. Go home. Get some rest.”

“K. Later.”

“Later.” Satan snatched a pencil from the holder and twirled it. Angel had partial ownership of Caribbean Workers Bank. Had she been having him tailed?
Why?
It made no sense.

Rutger and his team had detected two tails, one on him and one on Angel. She had lied by omission to him, true, but he couldn’t reconcile the Angel he knew with a woman capable of orchestrating such deviousness. He needed to inform Rutger of this latest development.

The cell lying on his desk rang. He checked the screen. Talk about the devil, he thumbed Accept. “Yo. Whatsup?”

“Your girl’s vanished.”

Satan straightened. “You lost her?”

“I’m stateside. We’ve a local agent there in Trinidad. He lost her. She was last seen talking on her cell by the Hilton’s poolside just before eleven a.m. yesterday morning. Five minutes later, the housekeeper who was cleaning her room checked Angel’s identity when she returned from the pool. According to the reception desk, at approximately eleven-forty-five, she asked the bellman to hail a taxi. Direction wasn’t given. We’re trying to locate the driver, but so far no go. This fucking carnival crap’s got the whole island in chaos.”

Satan’s gut hollowed. His incoming email ping sounded. The screen went bright, he glanced at the email address, glimpsed the subject, and his lungs stopped functioning.

“Hang on. I just got an email with Angel Dare’s Death as the subject.” While he spoke Satan clicked the message open. “No text. A video.”

He double-clicked the attachment and bolted out of the chair. His gaze glued to a shot of Angel naked, blindfolded, hands bound behind her back, feet tied at the ankles, he couldn’t suck in a molecule of oxygen. A loose noose lay around her neck. The top of the rope forming the hangman’s knot was threaded through a round bolt cemented into the ceiling.

As he watched someone pulled on the rope slowly. Angel struggled and cried out and then the noose closed around her throat, and she was forced to tiptoe precariously.

“Your life for hers. Come alone. And come fast. Next video, she won’t be so pretty, her legs will be spread wide, and I’ll be fucking her.” The voice had been digitized.

The screen went blank.

“Fuck.” His hand trembled when he attempted to play the video again. “Get your ass here, stat. The video’s of Angel. She’s being held hostage. And I’m the ransom.”

He ended the call, grabbed his laptop, sprinted out of the room, and vaulted down the hallway roaring, “Lucifer, Devil, Demon, Jinn, Volac—drop everything. Crisis meeting in the conference room. Now!”

By the time he’d synched the laptop to the sixty-inch flat panel hanging on the wall opposite the conference table, the entire Hades Squad save for Nikar, had assembled.

“Watch.” He snatched a fat black remote from its cradle and pressed Play.

“Shit.” Devil’s jaw dropped. He hipped the table.

When the tape ended everyone looked at him. “Lucifer, find me the fastest jet money can buy and a pilot who knows Trinidad and Tobago inside out aerially. Demon—you’re point man. Too many people know your face in Trinidad now.”

Demon and his wife, Jacinta, had visited the country twice in the last eighteen months to spend time with her recently discovered Trinidadian uncles.

Devil locked glances with Satan. “Jess received a couriered letter yesterday from Angel. It’s labeled as to be not opened until February 19. That’s Jess’s birthday, and she figured—”

“Have Jess run the letter here immediately, but first have her take a picture of it and email it to me.” Satan dragged a hand through his hair. “Have Jess and Angel been in touch, since she left the country?”

“They’ve Skyped a few times. Mostly Haven business relating to Angel’s handover to the new CEO. Jess tried calling her yesterday and earlier today, but Angel’s cell went right to voice mail. Satan, you can’t be serious about going there alone. We’ve no intel on this and you’ll be going in blind.” Devil glowered at him.

“It’s obvious he, whoever he is, wants me. I’ll take his attention off Angel. Lucifer, you’ll be behind on this one, too. Your height and coloring will make you stand out. I’m depending on you and Demon for strategy. I’ll fly in and make myself obvious. They’ll be expecting me.” Satan paced up and down.

“I’ll gear you up. You willing to have a GPS implanted?” Lucifer loved gadgets and his collection contained a few surreal devices.

“Yes. They’ll anticipate that too.”

“We’ll get creative.”

His email pinged again. Satan cringed when he recognized the address. His hand shook when he clicked Open and then Play.

Satan rammed his fist against his mouth when Angel came into view. They were torturing her. She bit down on her lower lip when a hand holding a lit cigarette pressed the red-glowing tip into the underside of her breast. She jerked, the noose tightened, and she straightened herself slowly. The camera panned out and around and a series of angry red dots scattered over Angel’s stomach and back became evident.

“Jesus.” Demon collapsed onto a chair. “They burned her with cigarettes. That many burns takes a while. They’re trying to fuck with our timing estimates. Go back to your mail view, Satan.”

Satan clicked Close.

“Exactly eight minutes between each email. I figure, unless there were four or more men doing the burning, at least a couple of hours must’ve elapsed.” Demon glanced at him. “Do we have any idea when she was taken?”

Satan repeated what Rutger had told him. “They could have had her since yesterday morning.”

“Get out of here, Satan. Grab what you need and head down to the executive airport. I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes. We’ve got your back and Angel’s.” Lucifer pointed at the door.

On total autopilot, Satan went back to his office, packed a collection of weapons and accessories into a tactical pack, and left the building. He drove to the house he hadn’t slept in since Christmas Day. He climbed the stairs, went to his bedside drawer, pulled the wooden slab open, and smoothed a finger over the angel pendant he hadn’t been able to force himself to throw out.

She would wear his Angel again.

He loved her.

There was no doubt in his mind. And there was no fucking way he’d lose her. Not a fucking chance. He scoured the house and added a few more choice tools to his collection.

He tried not to replay the two tapes in his head, and concentrated on analyzing the situation from all angles while stuffing clothes into the already bulging sack.

Twenty-five minutes later, he arrived at the executive airport to find both Rutger and Lucifer waiting for him.