Dangerous Secrets (18 page)

“You
think
? Jesus, Nick, you
think
you’re married? That’s like being a little bit pregnant. What the hell’s going on?”

The promise of that slate gray sky was kept. Snow started
falling in earnest, thick white sheets dropping out of the sky, reducing visibility to just a couple of feet beyond his front fender. Even he had to pay some attention here. He put his cell on the dashboard and switched to speakerphone.

“Listen, I don’t have time to explain. I want to change my will. I’m going to disinherit you. You okay with that?”

His first day in the army, when he had exactly $10.75 to his name, when asked about next of kin and asked to make out a will, he’d put down Jake as his next of kin and beneficiary. Over the years, as he renewed his will, that hadn’t changed. Jake had power of attorney over his affairs and was his heir.

If Jake didn’t inherit all Nick’s worldly possessions, even if they topped an unlikely million bucks, it wouldn’t make any difference at all to Jake. What was a million bucks to him? Walking around money, that’s what it was.

“Hell.” It wasn’t the thought of losing Nick’s money that made Jake’s voice so somber. “You’re in trouble, Nick. I can feel it. Something really bad is coming down and you’re right in the middle. Oh my God. Oh shit. Oh
fuck
. I just flashed on your funeral. Fuck this, fuck whatever you’re doing. Wherever you are,
get out now
!”

Jake’s voice rose with anxiety.

A trickle of sweat ran down Nick’s back. Jake’s hunches were good, almost as good as his. Jake was a genius at crunching numbers, but his incredible success was also due to the way he could sniff trouble coming and could slalom his way out of it, fast. As the
Wall Street Journal
said, “Jacob Weiss’s hedge fund, JLW, has demonstrated a sixth sense for emerging markets and, in today’s volatile world, an even more useful sense for tanking markets. JLW has the golden touch—it knows, to the day, when to abandon ship.”

When Jake talked, markets listened. More to the point, when Jake talked,
Nick
listened. Ordinarily, when Jake said jump, Nick answered how high? He couldn’t bail now, though. There was no way out now but straight through the heart of trouble.

Nick didn’t even try to snow Jake. He was too smart to swallow false reassurances. “Whatever’s coming down, Jake, I’ll deal. You know me. I’m harder to kill than a cockroach. But there’s a new element now. A…a woman. I…married her.” The words were hard to get out. They sounded surreal and false. He was married. He wasn’t married.

Yes, he was. No, he wasn’t.

This was messing with his head.

Concentrate
.

It didn’t make a lick of difference if he was married or not. What was important was to settle his affairs right now so he could face the showdown that was coming with a clear head.

“Yeah? About time.” Jake’s nanny gene rose to the fore. He’d been nagging Nick to get married for almost ten years now. “About time you tied the knot, you idiot. I don’t know what you were waiting for, hell to freeze over? So tell me that means you’re going to settle down, find yourself a job that won’t get you killed—”

It was Jake’s favorite rant and Nick was tempted to zone out and let him get it off his chest for the billionth time. But he wanted to drive as fast as he could to the van and the weather was worsening with every passing minute. The snow had let up a little, but the temperature was dropping and ice was building up. He needed to pay attention to the road. These conditions tried even his driving skills.

“Can it.” Nick fought the wheel as a sharp, strong blast of wind rocked the vehicle. “Listen, I’m tight for time, so I can’t
explain the whole situation. Believe me when I say it’s…complex. All you need to know is that one Nicholas Ames—that would be me—married one Charity Prewitt a couple of hours ago.” He gave Charity’s full name—which turned out to be Charity Prudence Prewitt. He had smiled at that and the smile had earned him a poke in the ribs from her sharp little elbow. He gave Jake DOB, SSN, and address. “If something happens to me, you’ll know.” Jake was the only person on the government “To Be Notified in Case of Death” form. “Can I change my will on the phone? Right now? I want her to be my sole beneficiary. Sorry, Jake. When I kick the bucket, Marja’s going to have to do without her fiftieth fur coat.”

“She’ll live,” was Jake’s wry reply.

“Okay—so now I really need to know whether I can legally do this over the phone. This is a formal request to you. You have power of attorney. I want to change my will and make Charity P. Prewitt my sole beneficiary. Is that possible right now?”

Clacking in the background. Nick waited patiently, wrestling the wheel, trying to concentrate on the road.

“Done. Let me read it out to you.”

Jake read out the new will, which was identical to the old one except for the date, the name of the beneficiary, and an addendum to the effect that Jacob Weiss, who had power of attorney over Nick Ireland’s affairs, recognized Ireland’s voice and was willing to swear an oath in court to that effect. “I’ll get that notarized, just to be on the safe side. Soon.”

“Now,” Nick said.

Silence. Jake processed that. “Okay, I’m leaving the office right now. There’s a very grateful notary on Lexington who bought himself a vacation home in Tuscany with what JLW
earned him, so he owes me. I’ll get this notarized within the hour, Nick. That’s a promise.”

Nick knew it was as good as done.

“Thanks, buddy.” Nick felt an overwhelming sense of relief, as if a granite block he didn’t know was on his back had been lifted. “I owe you. Big time.”

“Pay me back by staying alive.”

“Do my best and thanks.”

Nick hit the Off button and devoted all his attention to the road. Though it was early in the afternoon, the sky was almost black. The few cars he passed on the road all had their headlights on and were driving at twenty miles an hour, feeling their way over the roads rather than driving their way along.

The surveillance van was only twenty-five miles away, but there was a dangerous patch of road that wound in hairpin turns up a steep hill. It would be hairy with ice on the road. He wanted to get there, fight with Di Stefano and Alexei and get back before sundown.

Most of his head was taken up with negotiating the turns, but what remained of his hard disk was focused on Charity, and on what he was going to do to her when he finally got back to her.

Tonight was going to be probably the closest he would ever come to having a wedding night, and he was going to make the most of it. He had no intention of sleeping tonight. They were going to fuck all night long, punctuated only by food and wine and maybe the odd shower or two.

Nick was shaken out of those pleasant thoughts by a sharp jolt. Instantly back in combat mode, he checked the rearview mirror and saw high headlights coming closer, close enough to ram him again.

It was only now that he realized his subconscious had noticed the black SUV all along. He’d simply put it down to some nervous driver following another driver on a night of bad visibility.

It wasn’t that, it was a tail. Shame on him for taking so long to pick up on it.

Nobody tailed him for long. He was hypervigilant in and out of a car. That this guy had been able to follow him just went to show how much Nick’s head was up his ass. Or up his dick.

God, if he did get offed, he’d fucking deserve it.

Thoughts of Charity and everything else fled from his head when the bastard behind him bumped his rear fender again.

Nick pulled away fast. The SUV had tinted windows. All he could make out behind the windshield was a male figure, tall and broad shouldered, wearing a watch cap. Mud had been smeared on the plate. There was nothing to call in.

Nick bared his teeth when the guy behind him bumped the Lexus again, only this time harder.

Fucker was making a bad mistake. Nick was a good shot, but there were better shots around. He was a good man in a fight, but he had never won any martial arts awards. He’d been a damned good soldier and was shaping up to be a fine law enforcement officer, but he wasn’t the best there was.

But by God, no one could beat him in a car. No one. If Watch Cap wanted to kill him while Nick had a steering wheel in his hands, he had the wrong guy.

The guy behind him bumped the Lexus again, only this time harder, maintaining contact while swerving hard to the left. He was angling to drive Nick across the next lane and off the road. This stretch of winding road had a thin guardrail against a sheer drop of four hundred feet. The guardrail
wouldn’t hold against a big heavy car like the Lexus crashing into it.

Another jolt, harder this time, just as they were coming up to a curve. The SUV driver messing with his head.
I’m coming after you.

Did the guy know this road? Nick did, intimately. Besides strong driving skills, he had a natural compass in his head. He never got lost, ever. All he had to do was drive a road once to find it again and if he drove it a couple of times, it was as if he’d been driving it all his life. He’d been driving this road to the surveillance van several times a day for the past ten days. He could do it blindfolded.

With a little luck, the scumbag behind him had been called in from outside. By Worontzoff, no doubt about that. Whether he’d made Nick for a cop or he was just crazy jealous of Charity, it didn’t take much detecting to realize that Worontzoff had put out a contract on him.

Nick didn’t think Worontzoff would send one of his goons out on local wetwork. That would be fouling his nest in case something went wrong. Mobsters like Worontzoff were executives. They thought along cool, rational lines and the cool, rational thing to do would be to bring in hired muscle with a cut-out for deniability.

But even if this shit head trying to ram him off the road had been born and bred here, he’d just signed his death warrant.

Okay, Mr. Hired Gun
, Nick thought grimly.
Let’s see how good you are.

They were coming up on the first leg of a big, sharp
S
curve. At the next jolt, Nick applied the brakes, hard, as if panicked. As if he were someone who has just now realized that the taps from behind weren’t minor accidents and that the other driver was trying to drive him off the road. The
first thing a civilian would do is freak and then brake. Nick could almost feel the smile of satisfaction behind the dark windshield.

Enjoy that feeling while you can, fuckhead. You’ve got about five minutes left to live.

The SUV rammed his back fender again, violently, and this time stayed in contact with the Lexus. Then the driver gunned his engine as Nick braked harder. The Lexus had excellent brakes, Nick was almost completely stopped. The only thing propelling him forward now was the SUV. Even above the wind, he could hear the SUV’s engines whining as it took the burden of driving two heavy vehicles uphill in the snow.

Nick waited until the road started its first curve, long enough for the driver to have gotten used to the feel of strain in his vehicle. Long enough to make him complacent.

Just after the SUV shifted gears to start the steep, climbing curve, Nick gunned his engine, shooting forward, the Lexus taking him from almost zero to sixty in a couple of seconds. He rounded the curve, losing the SUV, and then took the other curve as fast as he dared. He’d effectively disappeared from sight.

As soon as he rounded the second curve, he made a bootlegger’s turn, big hood pointed back from where he’d come. He pulled over to the extreme left-hand side of the road and waited, engine running.

Sure enough, a minute later, the SUV appeared, headlights on bright, cutting through the darkness. He saw Nick too late and stood on his brakes. He didn’t have Nick’s experience driving in extreme weather and he lost control of the heavy vehicle. The SUV spun almost 180 degrees on the ice, and Nick rammed into it hard.

He used the momentum of his own heavy vehicle to keep the SUV pinned in, then suddenly swerved left, hard, straight into the SUV, ramming it against the cliff.

The impact could be heard over the wind as the SUV’s front fender ran into the cliff. The airbag inside deployed. Nick could see the driver slumped over the airbag. An airbag deploys at two hundred miles an hour in the first fractions of a second. As a distraction, it wasn’t as good as a flash-bang, but it would have to do. The guy would be disoriented for at least two minutes and that’s all the time Nick would need.

Inside twenty seconds, he was out of the Lexus and had picked the SUV’s lock. The airbag was slowly deflating and the man was moaning, moving slowly, still in shock. His eyes sharpened with panic when he saw Nick and he fumbled for the Sig Sauer P210 in the passenger seat. Expensive gun. Nothing but the best for Worontzoff’s goons.

But the airbag impeded his movements. He never had a chance.

There was a quick way to do this. Nick placed the flat of his hand against the man’s right temple, his other hand on the left side of his neck and in one quick motion, broke his neck.

He pulled out his Maglite and looked around the vehicle, checking registration papers.

The SUV was a rental. The name on the rental contract was Stephen Anderson, no doubt a false name. The inside of the vehicle was clean, almost sterile. He checked the ashtrays, under the seats, inside the side pockets. Nothing. No cigarette butts, no food packages, no marked maps. No clues, no prints, since the guy was wearing gloves and probably no DNA.

Nick frisked him, fast. No ID, no labels on his clothes. He
was more or less Nick’s height, more or less Nick’s weight. Perfect. This would work.

Nick ran back to his car, popped open the trunk, and got out his suitcase and emergency kit hidden under the spare tire. He always kept a jerry can of gas and got that out, too.

Go, go, go!

Even in this weather, someone might come up along this road any moment. Bending down in the SUV, he pulled the man up in a fireman’s lift, carried him over to the Lexus, and put him behind the wheel. His neck was broken, but that would be attributed to the fall of the vehicle from over four hundred feet. The clothes would burn up and with any luck the skin of his fingers would, too. Together with the skin all over. A suspicious coroner might want to match dental records but there weren’t any for Nicholas Ames and who was going to demand it, anyway? There would be a six-foot-two male charred body in Nicholas Ames’s car and Nick Ireland would drop out of sight.