Ultimate Weapon (7 page)

“We talk terms,” Val said. “My terms.”

“And they are?” Novak’s voice had a humoring tone.

“The kill fee, to start. Five hundred thousand euro, expenses excluded.”

There were assorted snorts and snickers from the men assembled. Novak looked amused. “You think well of yourself, Valery. But why a kill fee? It is not necessary to kill her. I will take care of that personally.”

“Bringing her to you alive is more difficult than a straight kill,” Val said. “I require no interference, no backup team. Live webcam conversations with him upon request.” He gestured toward Imre. “As well as your solemn word before witnesses that he will not be harmed.”

Novak’s pale, poisonous gaze narrowed. Val kept his face impassive. His heart thundered.

This was a wild gamble. Novak had a pathological hatred of being lied to. There were whispers about what he had done to his wife years ago to punish her for lying to him. It was said he’d cut off his own son’s finger when he was a child as punishment for lying about some trivial childhood sin. The underlying message was brutally clear.
If the boss did that to his own son, what might he do to a piece of shit nobody like me?
It had been a very powerful deterrent to lying.

But the corollary was that in his own twisted way, he considered himself a man of honor. If Novak gave his word not to harm Imre in front of his men, he would consider himself bound by it. Val hoped.

On the other hand, the man was utterly mad, after all.

“Vajda.” Imre cleared his throat, coughing. “You cannot—”

“Shut up, old man,” Val said harshly. “I did not ask you.”

Tense moments crawled by. Novak pondered, rubbing his chin. “The demand for money is absurd,” he said. “But I do appreciate a man who gives good sport. For this, I will spare the finger—for tonight. And in return…” His voice trailed off, eyes sparkling with amusement.

Val waited, not allowing himself to swallow or breathe.

“You will provide me with video footage of your affair with Steele,” Novak said. “Something juicy and explicitly sexual, something to entertain the men on dull nights. You will have a few minutes of communication with your friend. If at any point the video rendezvous is missed, I will start to remove pieces of him. I require my first installment—let me see—Monday. I am giving you a few extra days of grace, to allow for travel time,” he concluded, his tone magnanimous. “After that, I will expect something every three days.”

Val’s jaw ached with tension. “I cannot guarantee—”

“Then I will start with his fingers,” Novak said lightly. “Do not try to intimidate me, Vajda.” His grin stretched wider. “Look into my eyes. Do I look like a man who has anything to fear from your poison gas?”

Val’s fingers tightened on the ampule. The faces of the other men in the room were rigid with terror. Novak’s was alight with triumph.

“Do we have an understanding?” Novak asked.

Val nodded. Novak jerked and wheezed with laughter. He gestured to one of his men. “Give him his things.”

The man jerked into movement, producing Val’s wallet, cell phone, Palm Pilot. He dropped them onto the table.

Val pocketed the items. He seized the file that held the photographs, and shoved the case that held the torque under his arm.

“I need this,” he said. “For pretexting an approach.”

“As you wish.” Novak’s voice was oily with satisfaction. “Be sure to bring it back when you deliver her. I wish to kill her with it.”

Val gave Imre one last look. The old man’s eyes were hollow and bleak. Val felt helpless. “We will speak on the videophone,” he said.

Imre did not reply. Novak’s men shrank away from Val as he made for the door, their eyes on the ampule. No one accompanied him as he made his way out of the labyrinth of subterranean passageways beneath the warehouse district in Köbanya. He remembered the way. The fully functioning businesses above were money laundering fronts for Novak’s other, more profitable businesses. He had organized the front company documentation for some of them himself many years ago.

The men at the guardposts stared at him as he stumbled out into the frigid night. He had left his coat behind. Snow brushed his battered face. It felt good against inflamed flesh. The water in his hair and shirt promptly froze solid. He shuffled aimlessly through ankle deep slush. Whoever saw his blood-spattered face scurried away, unnerved.

So they should. He was soiled, corrupt. Sent out to play roles he could not shake, despite all his desperate effort. Whore, liar, betrayer.

Killer. Worse. Delivering Steele alive to Novak was more cruel than the swift mercy of a bullet through the nape. Far worse than delivering her into Georg Luksch’s hands. Killing her outright would be kinder.

And he had to make her trust him. Hah. If not for Imre, he would not know the meaning of the word. But if he could not do it…

He seemed to stumble and shuffle for hours through the pelting snow. He stopped on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, and stared up at the pitiless, implacable stone face of one of the lions. Wind whipped his breath from his mouth. He saw Imre, hunched in his cramped kitchen, frying egg-soaked bread for him as he lectured on Socrates, Descartes.

Imre, with blood streaming from his nose and mouth, his eyes full of mute suffering. Imre, with mutilated hands, dripping blood.

Val lurched to the side, and vomited up his guts. The heaving went on long after his stomach was empty. His eyes streamed, his nose ran. The dark water of the Danube roiled sluggishly below. He longed for the icy, airless darkness of it. Not for the first time. He thought of his mother.

No.
It was not his nature. Fuck them. He was too angry to give in.

He straightened, wiping his face with a sleeve stiff with ice, and resumed his shambling way to the hotel, the jewelry case and file of photos clamped beneath his arm. The conversation with Hegel flashed through his mind. It seemed so long ago.

He began to laugh. At least he no longer had to worry about Hegel hurting Imre. His friend could only be savaged by one villain at a time.

Laughter hurt his cracked ribs. He stopped it.

At least Novak did not know about the child. He clung to that.

He was still clutching the ampule in his hand, he realized, though his numb fingers barely felt it. His hand tightened on the hard cylinder. He broke off the tip and inhaled deeply.

It was a sample vial of a new scent, blended exclusively for him by his personal
parfumeur
in Provence. An extravagant affectation, but fuck it, he had the money. Why not? He liked good smells.

The scent was voluptuous, hints of sweet wood, fleshy depths of forest mushrooms, the warm, spicy tang of pine, lavender and sage. A pathetically small victory in the face of the leverage that Novak wielded on him, but he would cling to any minor triumph.

Three more days of safety for Imre’s finger, for a vial of perfume.

He rubbed some on his skin, inhaled. His body was too cold to release the scent, and the inside of his nose felt frozen solid, but still, he smelled it, just barely, and the earthy, sensual essence warmed him.

It made him think of Tamara Steele. The way her red lips curved in that secret smile in the evening gown photograph. The picture of her in the black dress, wildflowers in her outstretched hand. Lavender and daisies. Her pale, beautiful face, filled with ancient sadness.

But the image of Imre’s mutilated hands battered at him.

He was unaccustomed to the sensation of fear after years of cultivating detachment. It was intensely unpleasant.

If they killed Imre, that was it. There was no other reason for Val to remain even remotely human.

You are a whining dog begging for scraps.

True. His stock portfolio had a net worth in the millions now, and look at him, still living on scraps. A chess game every few years. Distant memories of egg and bread fried in butter, Socrates and Descartes, Bach inventions played on the grand piano. That lumpy, dusty old divan.

And soon enough, a mossy grave in the cemetery with Imre’s name carved on it.

Scraps. All that he would ever be allowed to have.

T
am muttered something foul in some half-remembered language as she tore off her goggles. She wiped her hair back off her sweaty forehead and flung down the troublesome pendant with disgust.

She hated it. The colors weren’t melding. She had envisioned a tangle of bronze and green-tinged copper clockwork bits layered with delicate filigreed gold to hide the mechanism that housed the little hypodermic, but it wasn’t fitting together right, and the semi-precious stones she’d chosen looked dull and blah. The piece didn’t throb or hum, or whisper seductive, ominous things; it had no menace, no driving intensity, no sex appeal. It was a necklace that a funky college girl with a pierced nose might buy from a pothead vendor in a Seattle open-air market for fifteen bucks. Not Deadly Beauty.

She was losing her touch, her eye, her concentration. In a word, everything. Lack of sleep, maybe. Not that she’d ever slept much.

The light over the door strobed. Rosalia was intercomming her. She pulled off the earphones, thinking wistfully of the twelve-hour-long trances she used to go into to work. Absolute concentration, no distractions. Miles inside the sweet privacy of her own twisted mind.

Those days were gone. And she had no one to blame but herself.

She stabbed the button that stopped the savagely melancholy Spanish gypsy lament howled out by broken wine-and-cigarette-roughened voices. A sentimental choice. Unusual for her. Usually she went for hard rock. Something feverish and raucous, to burn out the fog in her head and help her get to the faraway place where the images of the jewelry came to her, glowing and glittering and

twisting in her mind.

She hit the intercom. “Yes, Rosalia? What is it?”

“A visitor,” Rosalia replied, in her native Brazilian Portuguese. “The red Volkswagen. I think it is the dark lady with the boy baby.”

Tam dropped her face into her hands. No. Please. Not Erin again.

It had only been a week since the last concerned visit, full of great examples of beatific madonna-style mothering and tit-sucking and cooing and crooning and gentle, well-meant, incredibly irritating advice.

She tossed down the goggles and punched up the security program onto her studio computer monitor. Sure enough. There was Erin’s red Volkswagen Bug, parked outside the outermost line of defense. Waiting to be beckoned in. Tam switched to another camera angle, and made out the car seat in the back, with Kev’s chubby, heavy-cheeked profile. Probably already hungry for his liquid lunch. She was in for it.

Her sigh felt almost like a growl as she deactivated the various devices. Time to brace herself for the irritating questions. Had she done a fucking blood test to check for anemia? Was she taking a fucking multivitamin and mineral supplement? Did she want to do another fucking barbecue lunch on Sunday with the McCloud Crowd? To which the answers were
always no
,
no
,
no
, and
leave me alone
,
already
.

But Erin was tough. Thick-skinned. She didn’t back down easily.

Erin’s car started up again, and Tam watched it glumly as it advanced up the road. The McClouds made big fun of all her security doodads, but she could care less. Daddy Novak would probably love to kill Connor and Erin and their spawn too, for their part in Kurt Novak’s death. But if they wanted to paint targets on their asses and hang them out in the breeze, that was their affair. She wanted no part of it.

She washed her hands and headed down the stairs to the entrance. Rachel was heaping towers of blocks with Rosalia on the floor in the big living area. The instant she saw Tam, she dropped everything and hurled her little body in Tam’s direction, squeaking, arms outstretched. Tam scooped her up and hugged her hard. She hefted the toddler, gauging her weight. A little heavier this week. Thirty grams, maybe, depending on whether the diaper was wet. Since taking on Rachel, Tam had become a human precision scale.

Erin was parked in the garage and getting little Kev out of his car seat when Tam opened the door. Kev was almost as big as Rachel was, even though he was two years younger, the snorting little piglet. Tam tried not to hold that against him. It was difficult sometimes.

Tam ran an appraising eye over Erin as she hoisted the chubby kid onto her hip. The other woman was finally slimming down from her baby weight, though she was still very soft and squeezable. Tam suspected that Connor liked his wife just that way. Whatever. To each his own.

“And to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” There was no way to modulate the bitchy edge in her voice, so she didn’t try.

Erin ignored her completely, saving her smiles for Rachel. “And how is this pretty little sweetheart today?” she crooned. She bent forward and gave Rachel a kiss on the back of her tousled, black-curled head. Rachel clutched tighter, buried her face in Tam’s neck, fingers digging in like little kitten claws.

Progress. Four months ago, that brief kiss would have sent Rachel into screaming convulsions of fear. She was mellowing. Her little body was tense, but not trembling much. As Tam reset the alarms, Rachel even lifted big dark eyes a little to peek out at the baby on Erin’s lap. Little Kev returned her regard with grave, oddly adult curiosity.

“You’re not quite so thin this time.” Erin’s voice was full of motherly approval. “That’s really great. You look better already. Much.”

Tam suppressed a sharp reply. Her appetite was as crappy as ever, but Rachel had this annoying new mealtime game without which she would not eat, called you-take-a-bite-and-then-I-take-a-bite. So, by brutal necessity, a certain quantity of butterfly pasta, banana slices, crackers, fish sticks, Cream of Wheat, yogurt, and turkey burger patties were introducing their fat and calories into her system.

She supposed it wasn’t so terrible. She’d been looking pretty damn haggard, not that she cared much. Rachel didn’t give a damn what her new mother looked like. Beauty had just been another weapon in Tam’s arsenal, but it was not one she cared to ever use again. It was only useful to attract and maniuplate men, and she’d aggressively phased that necessity out of her life. After that last revenge stint with Kurt Novak and Georg, she was so,
so
done with that groping, sweaty drama. She swallowed down a greasy clutch of nausea at the mere thought of it.

Rachel consented to being put down on the kitchen floor, where Rosalia was laying out coffee things and a plate of shortbread cookies. Cookies, for God’s sake. While Tam wasn’t looking, her house had morphed into a cozy, fluff-lined nest. That was what came of letting other people into it. Tam watched with something akin to horrified fascination as Erin dove face first into those lethal cookies. Look at the girl go. Cellulite city. No fear, no shame. It boggled the mind.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Erin said, reaching for her second cookie. “You make me feel like a captured space alien whose feeding habits are being studied by scientists. If you don’t approve of amazing homemade shortbread cookies, why serve them?”

“I didn’t,” Tam said, casting a speaking glance toward Rosalia. “She did. Can you see me baking cookies? I don’t do cookies. I’m not even on speaking terms with cookies.”

“True enough. I can see you cooking up deadly poisons to dip hairpins into, but not pastry,” Erin admitted as she unrepentantly poured a heart-clogging quantity of half-and-half into her coffee.

Tam winced. “Jesus, Erin. Watch it with that stuff.”

“Don’t be afraid for me,” Erin soothed. “Nursing makes you fearless. The cookies are fabulous, Rosalia. Can I have the recipe?”

Rosalia smiled her thanks and nodded as she herded the little kids into the adjoining room. Tam abruptly missed the noise and distraction. The sudden silence and Erin’s sharp, amber brown eyes made her twitch. After an endless string of stress nightmares and largely sleepless nights, she was too raw and rattled and frustrated right now to keep her shields properly up. She hated that.

“Are things going any better?” Erin asked gently.

Irritation made Tam lash into attack mode. “Is what going better?” she snapped. “What the hell are you referring to?”

Erin shrugged. “In general. Your health. Your sleep, your appetite, your daughter. Since you won’t tell me any specifics, I have to ask general questions.”

“You don’t have to ask questions at all. Where is it written?”

“I ask you because I care,” Erin said, quietly stubborn.

Being shamed into feeling like a spoiled, sulky bitch did not do any favors to her mood. Tam felt her irritation ratchet up a couple notches. “I didn’t ask you to care,” she said.

Erin gave her a reproving look. “Cope,” she said dryly. “I know you may find this hard to believe, but I actually came here today for a reason other than just to torment you and waste your time.”

“Oh. Astonishing,” Tam muttered.

Erin was silent for a long moment, her mouth pressed into a thin line. Tam could actually hear her, in the ether, counting to ten and praying for patience. It gave her a pang of mingled guilt and satisfaction. She’d pierced the protective layer of Zen-like, cow-hormone-induced calm. Zing, she’d scored a point. Tam tried hard to enjoy it.

Erin let out a long, slow breath that she had surely learned in a mellow new-age yoga class. In with the good vibes, out with the bad. “It’s about this really weird thing that happened to me at work yesterday. It might be a business opportunity for you,” she said.

Tam blinked. That was, in fact, utterly unexpected. “Huh?”

“At the museum. I did a consultation for this guy. He came all the way from Rome. He wanted an expert opinion on a replica of a piece of Celtic-themed jewelry he’d found. He’s trying to locate the designer, and he had a lead that she was in this area. So he opens up the case, and I look in, and I just about drop my teeth. It was one of your designs.”

Tam felt a cold, unpleasant chill spreading from the pit of her belly outward through her limbs. “Which one?”

“One of the torques. The one you named for me. The Erin.”

Tam drummed her fingers and stared down into her cup of black coffee. The Erin. A piece she’d done to help exorcise the demon of Kurt Novak, not that it had helped much. “Describe it,” she snapped.

Erin looked puzzled. “I just did. It’s part of the series of—”

“No two pieces are alike,” Tam said. “Tell me which stones were in it, the number, the color scheme, the number of gold threads in the braid, the size of the finial. Rubies or garnets? Amythyst or sapphire?”

“Oh.” Erin thought for a moment. “It was similar to the original,” she offered. “But the stones were cabochon rubies, I think. Not garnets.”

“Gotcha.” Tam filed that into her database, made a mental note to call the broker in Marseilles who had handled that particular sale, and went back to drumming her fingers, silently processing data.

She was alarmed. And unnerved. Someone who had been able to connect Erin to the creator of Deadly Beauty had access to information that could only spell trouble for all of them. She had passports and multiple alternate identities set up for herself and Rachel, and various emergency bolt-holes already prepared in remote parts of the globe, but those identities weren’t as ripe or well constructed as her current one. And a woman with a child was more visible, more memorable.

More vulnerable.

Besides. She liked this home. Rachel liked it, too. And she liked her work, a lot. If she changed identities, she would never be able to do metalworking again. The very thought of it made her furious.

Plus. The McCloud Crowd might bug her, but they were the only safety net Rachel had. If she took the kid to South Africa or Sri Lanka, their space station would be that much farther from solid ground and normality. Relative safety, maybe, but not a life. Not an extended family.

Still. If her identity was compromised…she should get those extra passports out of the safe, pack up Rachel, and go. Right now.

Erin waited, and waited, growing visibly impatient. “What?” she prompted sharply. “What are you thinking?”

Tam hesitated for a moment before replying, her voice hard. “I think you and Kev and Connor should take a very long, quiet vacation somewhere. Like an uncharted island in the Pacific, maybe. By private boat. I think Seattle just got a whole lot more dangerous for everybody.”

Erin’s gaze darted nervously to the kitchen entrance to her son, who was flopping and rolling enthusiastically on the carpet in the other room while Rachel giggled her appreciation and egged him on. “Um…” She swallowed, visibly. “Aren’t you overreacting a little?”

“No,” Tam said bluntly. “Not even a little.”

“Damn,” Erin sighed. “I have this verbatim conversation all the time with Connor and my brothers-in-law. Not you, too. Isn’t it remotely possible that a thing can sometimes be exactly what it seems?”

“It is exactly what it seems,” Tam said. “A trap.”

Erin’s mouth tightened. “I can’t keep looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life,” she said rebelliously. “I just can’t. It drives me nuts.”

Tam shrugged. “So don’t complain when you get stabbed in the back, honey.”

“Oh, shut up. You are hopeless,” Erin snapped.

“Literally and figuratively,” Tam agreed. “But come on, Erin. What are the odds? Of all the experts on Celtic antiquities to consult with about this piece, he picks you? Granted, you’re good, and a lot of people know it, but you’re far from the only one, far from the most famous one, and certainly one of the youngest ones. Five years ago you were finishing grad school, doing unpaid internships.”

“But he has consulted other experts,” Erin said stubbornly. “He mentioned some of them. He even talked to my old thesis advisor, who’s the head of the Antiquities Department at—”

“Did you call and corroborate?”

“Yes, I did!” Erin’s voice was defensive. “And yes, he’d been there. They all admired the workmanship of your piece, by the way.”

Tam grunted. “How gratifying. So this guy’s prepared. And awfully motivated, don’t you think? Scouring the world to locate the maker of some obscure jewelry reproductions? It smells, Erin. Like a dead dog.”