Operation Proof of Life (21 page)

“But you
do
work for the Secret Intelligence Service.”

“Did,” she corrected. “As a legitimate consultant, just like for your government and half a dozen others, but yes, SIS was my main employer.”

“And you got Gunn into meetings and places where he could do the spying for Britain.”

“I see the penny’s dropped,” she said, smiling halfheartedly and confirming his charge. “I’ve also worked kidnappings, especially those that fit Peter’s MO, and I treat kids who’ve been kidnapped. Having been an abducted child, I have firsthand knowledge of what it’s like.”

Michael couldn’t decide if he was more pissed at Peter Donovan or more relieved Brigit had survived all the asshole had put her through. “The doctor wants to keep you awhile for observation, and I agree it’s a good idea. I want you here, safe and protected. Flynn’s working on keeping your name and the fact you’re alive out of the media for now, and that’s the best way to keep you safe from Donovan.”

She struggled to sit up. “But you need me to help you find him.”

He laid a hand on her arm and gently pushed her back down. “I can find Donovan on my own, and when I do, you won’t have to worry about him any longer.”

The old Brigit surfaced, eyes flashing with determination as she pushed against his restraining hand. “He’s
my
brother. I’m the one he tried to blow up. If anyone gets to go Batman on him, it’s me.”

“Batman?”

She waved her hand at him. “Yeah, you know. That thing you do to anyone who gets in your way. I’ve been taking notes. I don’t have the big shoulders you do, but I have the eye squint down pat.”

He chuckled. “I would like nothing more than to see you kick his ass, but you’ll have to get in line. I’m first.”

Her resistance faded as fast as it had appeared. “Please let me handle this.”

He patted her arm, ran a finger down to her hand, his focus following. He wanted to imprint on his mind, in his very anatomy, how her skin felt, how she looked. “I can’t. When Donovan kidnapped Ella, this became my fight.” Raising his gaze to hers, he continued. “When he hurt you, it became my war. He may have started it, but I’ll finish it.”

Brigit’s index finger came up to meet his. At her touch, Michael’s racing heart skipped a beat. He took her hand in his and gave it a squeeze.

She returned it, just like she had the first time he met her. “He’ll be headed to Belfast.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “That’s where his headquarters is. He moves it around a lot, but he never strays far from the city for long.”

“I’ll find him.”

“We had a deal.” She cleared her throat, drummed up her earlier determination. “You can’t leave me behind and think I’ll stay put.”

She had him there. If he did try leaving her behind, she’d only check herself out and take off again. He found it easy to give in. “I have some calls to make and some red tape to work through with the Irish. I’ll check back in a few hours, and if the doctor vets you clean enough to be released, we’ll go to Belfast together.”

She scanned his face, looking for the lie. “That was too easy. What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing.” He squeezed her hand again. “Gunn’s outside waiting to see you.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“He cares about you.”

“He cares about his job, and hanging out with me is a sure ticket to Libya. He should go back to London and get his next assignment.”

A wave of relief rolled through him like warm maple syrup. “The guy gave you his mother’s lucky rabbit’s foot.”

Brigit let loose a derisive laugh. “Yeah, and look what that got me. I nearly ended up being yet another source of global warming.”

As they’d talked, he’d been leaning closer to her face. Now, he couldn’t stop himself and touched his lips to her bruise. “You survived.” Dropping down, he kissed her, just a brush of his lips to hers, seeking her warmth. He was so damn glad she was alive. “I’d say that’s lucky.”

Even her swelled eye widened at his bold move. Then she laughed again, with less derision, and sighed. A smile curved her lips. “It’s about time my luck turned around.”

“Mine too,” he said, reaching deep for the willpower to leave her even for a short time. He released her hand in small increments and walked out of the room, ready to get to work and considering himself to be a very lucky man.

Two hours later, Brigit still cradled her hand to her chest thinking about Michael. For some reason, his presence, so solid and powerful, made her believe everything would be all right.

And it would, once she found Peter. She knew him better than anyone, and she knew he’d never let himself be taken alive. No way could she let Michael go after him in order to get revenge for her. Killing Peter would go against everything he stood for, and she couldn’t let him do it and then have to live with one more item on his guilt list.

She’d dug this hole, screwed up her life all on her own, and now she was the one who had to fix it.

Truman had refused to return to London. No matter how she tried to persuade him to go back to his own life and his job, he’d told her to zip it and then changed the subject. Finally, just to get rid of him, she’d sent him shopping once again for her for some clothes. The new items sat in a bag next to the bed.

Dragging herself to a standing position, she held onto the edge of the bed until her knees stopped shaking and the room quit tipping to the left. Then she shrugged off the hospital gown and spent the next several minutes detagging and putting on the new clothes.

She’d eaten the hospital food at lunch to give her some energy and made Truman give her some cash for the vending machines before sending him off to start the process of getting her a new ID. She had ten U.S. dollars, no ID, no weapon and no phone, but she had a truckload of self-righteous fury and that had proven to be all she needed in the past.

Peter would lie low for a few days, but just like a dozen times before, he’d gotten away with murder scot-free. He’d be cocky and ready to celebrate his success with his comrades once he made it home. In Belfast, he had three bases he moved between. It wouldn’t be hard to find him if she bided her time, kept herself in the shadows and didn’t get distracted thinking about Tory.

There was a bedside table and she opened the top drawer to retrieve her meager possessions—her watch and the rabbit’s foot.

Securing her watch on her right arm, she thought about Michael again and smiled. Her luck had definitely changed for the better.

She grabbed her dirty trench coat and tossed the rabbit’s foot on the bed. Someone else could have it now.

Her bruised ribs hurt a bit, but as she walked past the nurse’s station and down the hall, a lightness filled her chest. Her nerves tingled. Her headache had subsided thanks to the pain medication and the new clothes felt like a whole new identity.

As the ER doors slid shut behind her with a soft whoosh, she cinched her coat a little tighter and hailed a cab.

Thad’s voice had lost its pre-election finesse as he cursed into the phone at Michael. “The election’s in three days. Three. Your scandalous affair is costing me major votes. Do something.”

In the backseat of the SUV, Michael avoided Flynn and Hoffman’s stares as the vehicle parked in the hospital’s lot. Even though Thad was on the other side of the Atlantic, his voice was loud enough to echo in the car.

“I’m not having an affair,” Michael ground out between clinched teeth. “And even if I were, there would be nothing scandalous about it.”

“You took Brigit Kent home with you before she was cleared of my daughter’s kidnapping.” Thad’s voice raised yet another notch. “She’s now suspected of terrorism.”

“Brigit Kent is dead.”

No yelling this round. Instead, startled silence. “What did you say?”

Jacking the door open, Michael slid out of the seat and started for the ER entrance. Brad fell into step beside him as a taxi pulled away from the curb. “Turn on CNN. You’re not the biggest story of the hour anymore.” He snapped the phone closed and shoved it in his jacket pocket.

The hospital doors opened and both he and Brad skirted an older woman in a wheelchair being pushed by an orderly. They passed the nurse’s station, where Michael nodded to one of the women behind the desk. She’d been there earlier when he’d left Brigit to return to the plane site, and just like then, she barely noticed him, a phone cradled on her shoulder while she typed frantically on a computer.

His bodyguard took up post as Michael pushed aside the curtain to Brigit’s ER room. The bed was a mess of sheets but there was no Brigit. An empty bag lay on the floor and the trench coat that had earlier draped the back of a chair was missing. Fear surged in Michael’s veins as he circled the bed and snatched up the gown.

Truman Gunn came sailing into the small area past Brad. He glanced around, confusion contorting his features. “Where is she?”

Michael fisted the gown in his hand. “She took off. Again.”

“Damn it.” Truman rubbed his forehead. “I knew I shouldn’t have given her any money.”

Michael squinted at him. “You gave her money?”

“She has a thing about not having any money. It goes back to her days on the street after her father kicked her out.”

Something on the bed caught Truman’s attention and he moved to pick it up. The pale cream fur of the rabbit’s foot had blended in with the sheets.

He turned it over, shaking his head. “She’s gone after Peter, hasn’t she?”

Michael clinched his jaw. “You know her better than I do. You tell me.”

Truman sighed like he’d just lost his best friend. “She’s gone after Peter.”

“Then”—Michael tossed the gown back on the bed and headed for the hallway—“we go after her.”

Brad fell into step beside him, and Truman brought up the rear. “But she left the GPS here.”

The younger generation had relied on technology their whole lives. Michael hadn’t. The ER doors flew open in his wake. “We’ll find her the old-fashioned way.”

“And what is that?”

As soon as Michael opened the door to the SUV, he pointed at Del Hoffman. “Get me Lawson Vaughn, and get him here yesterday.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Belfast

Two days later

The assassin’s umbrella consisted of a projectile, a carbon dioxide cartridge and a spring-loaded piston. The trigger engaged the piston, driving the cartridge into the firing pin and propelling the projectile out the hollow tip of the umbrella. The projectile had to be tiny but hold enough poison to kill the intended victim.

Old-fashioned umbrellas worked best, and Brigit had found one easily enough in a resale shop. She’d pawned her Tag Heuer and bought a used digital camera, an older laptop and a pocket-size, battery-operated drill with charger.

The drilled-out hollow in the metal ball held less than a milligram of rat poison. Strychnine injected directly into the bloodstream produced serious symptoms, even in small doses. Left untreated, it could be just as deadly as if the person had ingested a larger dose.

Killing Peter wasn’t her objective. Disabling him was. A slow, painful disabling.

Brigit used a plastic spoon to transfer a drop of melted wax from a nearby candle to cover the hole. Once the pellet was injected, Peter’s body heat would melt the wax and release the poison.

She assembled the gun with quick, efficient movements. After all these years, her father’s training still clung to her mind like an annoying song she couldn’t shake.

At thirteen, he’d taught her self-defense. She’d sucked at it and the harder she tried to please him, the worse her timing and execution had grown.

At fourteen, he’d insisted on weapons training, whether it was because hand-to-hand defense would get her killed, or because it was all part of his master plan to turn her into a candidate for MI5, she didn’t know, but weapons were easier to understand. Taking them apart and reassembling them was like working a puzzle, breaking a code. She understood the parts and how to put them together in order to make them work.

By her fifteenth birthday, she had acquired a cache of knowledge on maiming and killing with everything from pencils to rifles. While she never used her knowledge, her conscience acquired even more guilt.

In school, she excelled in all her classes and graduated at seventeen. Ivy League universities came calling and so did her father’s employer. When she refused to consider spying as a career, they argued daily, harsh, hateful words chilling the air in their quaint suburban home.

Tory hated it, retreating constantly to her room, where she cranked R. Kelly, or tearing out of the house to crash with friends. One night she didn’t come home.

William blamed Brigit for Tory running away, just like he’d blamed her for a hundred other things over the years. But when he refused to go after Tory, they argued yet again, and unable to bear the pain of all her guilt, Brigit had pushed past him, making for the door to follow Tory’s footsteps. William tried to stop her, shoving her away from the door, and the self-defense training he’d ground into Brigit kicked in with precise instinct. Stunned by his bleeding nose, her father had then shoved her out the door.

He’d told her never to come back.

Homeless and devastated at her family’s demise, Brigit could only focus at first on survival. Odd jobs helped her gather enough money to follow Tory to London, and when a nice businessman in spectacles offered her a job as his assistant, she accepted.

Edward turned out to be a senior officer in the British Army’s shadowy Force Research Unit who had infiltrated the IRA during the height of the Troubles. Her fate was sealed from there on. Several years later she learned it was no coincidence Eddie had entered her life at that precise time. Her father had been looking out for her the only way he knew how.

Eddie, or his employer, footed the bills to send her to university, and while she studied psychology, she also passed information between Eddie and on-campus contacts, spied on the Irish students sympathetic to the IRA, and nursed Eddie after a facial surgery to conceal his identity.

She never wanted to become a full-blown spy. Nor was she all that good at lying, and she had no stomach for killing. However, her code breaking and people-reading skills were topnotch, and her fucked-up family experience had put her light years ahead in survival of the fittest.

Funny she was still dead to the world at large. Whatever Michael had done to hide the truth had worked. For now. The advantage was hers in this game with Peter, but time was running out. First she would mess with his mind, then his body. Give him a fat dose of his own medicine.

The ruthlessness in her heart gave her pause. She’d lived for so long trying to help others, the desire to hurt someone seemed dishonest somehow. Alien. If she followed through with her plans, she would cross a distinct line in the sand. Would there be any way to go back?

A dull pain flared in her ribs as she took a deep breath, wanting to cleanse her soul as much as her lungs. Her bruises were fading and the gunshot wound itched, healing quicker than she expected. Her heart too. Both were due to Michael Stone’s capable care.

As with all decisions in life, there was no going back. She’d already turned a corner, thanks to Peter’s cruelty as well as Michael’s intervention. The only path for her was straight ahead.

Snapping the hollowed-out end on the umbrella, she checked the clock above the door of her rented room. Peter was a block away, getting ready for his evening stop at the Roaring Cock. Ballsy, he’d fallen back into old habits with ease, and those old habits would be his undoing.

After washing her hands and donning her tourist persona, Brigit took the assassin’s umbrella and slid out the door into the night.

The Irish had not outlawed smoking, and a fine shroud hung in the air with the smell of strong stout. Like many traditional pubs in the heart of Belfast, the Roaring Cock sported an ancient bar, battle-scarred from serving hundreds of hard-working Irish. While a few adventuresome tourists stopped in on occasion, the majority of patrons were natives.

Natives sympathetic, if not outright supportive, of Peter’s cause.

Brigit had donned a thick farmer’s jacket over her wool sweater and jeans. She’d tucked her hair under a tweed cap and now kept the brim down as she nursed a decaf coffee and read the local paper, all the while keeping a low profile in a back corner booth. A couple of men who had to be nearing eighty had given her brief attention, but she’d brushed aside their flirting and they’d left her alone. A younger man, tall and gorgeous in a leather jacket and working boots, had set eyes on her when he’d entered the bar, his tan skin tight over his cheekbones. A fisherman, she’d guessed, before averting her gaze. There were many of those in these parts as well.

The hour was late enough to ensure a packed-out place, and a championship boxing match on the semi-circle of televisions above the bar enthralled them. Every few minutes a collective whoop or groan would rise from the viewers.

Brigit was grateful for the crowd. They kept the bartender and waitress busy, so neither had time to wonder about her, and they also acted like a human screen so Peter couldn’t see her from his stool at the far end. He was absorbed by the fight and surrounded by his compatriots. Around his neck, he sported a cashmere scarf in Irish colors. He’d hid his bald head under a cap that nearly matched Brigit’s.

How many times had he come here after one of his crimes and went right back to a halfway normal life? The men and women in the bar were staunch Irish Catholics. Most knew Peter and treated him like family. A few had probably hidden him at one time or another in their very homes.

As several more patrons filed in, Brigit hailed the overworked waitress. When the woman stopped at her table, Brigit handed her two euro notes worth roughly fifty U.S. dollars and a folded piece of paper. “The man at the bar with the Irish scarf, supply him another Guinness and give him this with it.” She tapped the folded piece of paper. “The left over change is for you.”

The waitress winked at her, ecstatic about her tip. “He’s a handsome one, ain’t he?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Oh.” The waitress pocketed the money and hurried away.

Brigit watched her work her way through the crowd before rising from the bench to follow her. She positioned herself behind several large, bulky patrons crowded around Peter as one of the boxers sent his tank of a fist into the other’s chin. The boxer went down and the men’s glasses of beer went up along with a hearty cheer.

Out of all of her skills, being calm under pressure was the one Brigit most valued. While the men bellowed a countdown with the referee and the waitress poured the drink, she bumped the man nearest her into another to start a domino effect while pressing the sharp end of the umbrella into the back of Peter’s lower calf and pulling the trigger. The shove of large bodies against his back diverted his mind from the pinprick sensation.

Over in a heartbeat, Brigit slipped away from the bar as the waitress slid the glass of Guinness in front of Peter with the note. Just as she knew he would, Peter looked up from the note, bolted upright from his barstool and scanned the crowd.

As their eyes locked, Brigit touched the edge of her cap with the umbrella, saluting him as she pushed the door open and left.