Walking The Edge: A Romantic Suspense/Espionage Thriller (Corpus Brides Trilogy Book 1) (22 page)

The man still lay slumped against the mattress, the medication having knocked him out.

“Wake him,” Gerard said.

“
Commissaire
—”

“Do it!”

“What is it you want in the end? First you ask us to wake him, then to drug him, and now you want him awake again.”

He had no time for her theatrics. He stalked to the cabinet in the corner and rummaged through the drawers.

“What are you doing?” she screeched.

A syringe of adrenalin. Should he find one, he’d plunge it into the man’s heart and jerk him awake.

“Wake him or I will,” he said.

She jumped under the command. His glare brooked no argument when he levelled it on her, and with a loud sigh, she reached for a small syringe and went to inject it into the IV line.

“Leave,” Gerard said when she finished.

She scurried from the room, closing the door behind her.

Scott slowly regained consciousness. The man greeted him with a sardonic smile as his green eyes focused on where Gerard stood. “Need to plumb my mind again?”

Gerard didn’t deign to reply.

“Where’s Fey?” Scott asked.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Good thing you asked. He took her.”

This caught Scott’s attention; he attempted to straighten before the bonds tying him to the bed restricted his movements. “Who took her?”

“Peter. Or Max. The man who looks like your body double.”

“Bloody hell,” Scott exclaimed. “We’re in deep shite.”

“He intends to kill her?” As much as he didn’t want to contemplate this potential outcome, Gerard couldn’t kid himself.

“No. Worse. He intends to bring her to his side.”

Gerard narrowed his eyes and frowned. It didn’t make sense. “What are you talking about?”

“Max. He’s a defector. He—”

“
Commissaire!
” came the loud admonishment.

Both men turned their heads to look at the doctor who had barged into the room.

“What are you playing at, eh? I told you to stop harassing my patient—”

“Shut up, Doctor. It’s a matter of life or death.” Gerard interrupted the diatribe.

“There’s not just her involved,” Scott said.

He heeded the warning in the man’s words. Things beyond his scope of understanding, even as a cop, were at stake, with her as only a small fragment of it all.

But none of all this mattered.
She
was important. To him. And he would do all he could, use all the means at his disposal, to find her and make sure she’d be safe and sound.

Because—he realized without fighting it now—he loved her. Whoever and whatever she happened to be, he had fallen for the woman she hid deep down inside, and this, no alias, no legend, no carefully crafted, synthetic identity, could obliterate.

“
Commissaire,
” the doctor whined.

Gerard glared at him, clearly spelling murder in the look, and the little man fell silent.

He then turned his attention to Scott, then went to the bed and released the straps holding the man down.

He saw surprise in the green eyes, and he met the gaze with iron-hardness in his own. “One wrong move and you’re dead.”

Scott nodded, and Gerard turned his attention to the doctor, who remained rooted to his spot after having fallen silent so swiftly.

“I’m taking this man with me, Doctor,” Gerard said. “Please make sure he can leave the hospital within the hour.”

Chapter Twelve

Marseille.
Vieux Port

Wednesday, December 19. 2:21 p.m
.

The nurses found Scott some doctor’s scrubs to wear, seeing as they’d thrown out his bloodied clothes. With his left arm in a sling, and pumped up on medication, he shuffled out of the hospital and into Gerard’s car.

“I’ll need a phone.”

“I’m taking you to the
commissariat
,” Gerard replied.

“No. Don’t. No one must know I’m alive.”

Gerard glanced at his companion before returning his attention to the road. He’d take Scott to his place, even though the other madman had his address.

Scott stared out of the windshield. “All the agents of the
Corpus
think I’m dead. I faked my demise in a diving spree gone wrong about eight months ago.”

Some things started to click into place in Gerard’s mind. The same time lapse again. He’d bet Mirka—no,
Fey
, had learnt that; the reason prompting her to leave everything. With the man who had reeled her into the organization gone, she’d been free.

“Did she know?” he asked, just to get confirmation of his suspicions.

“She must have,” Scott replied. “But if she lost her memory, it might be that she doesn’t recall it now. She wasn’t surprised when she saw me yesterday, like she didn’t expect me to be coming back from the dead.”

To go to such lengths? All for what, in the end?

“Why did you do it?” he asked.

Scott sighed.

“You better tell me the whole story.” He injected a growl of warning and menace in his words. “And who’s Max?”

“My twin brother,” Scott answered. “Also an agent of the
Corpus
.”

Putain
. Did it get any worse?

“We were recruited together as young adults, trained and taught everything we needed to know by the organization.” Scott continued his tale. “Imagine having one person in two places at the same time. Our identical appearance proved an advantage we used with great efficiency.” He paused. “But while Max turned out to be a good agent, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and I started going up the rungs while he remained in the field. We split cells, then, and I became the case officer for my own cell. Fey was assigned to my team, and she worked under my orders.”

Gerard swallowed hard, knowing he had to push the question through. “When did you have a child together?”

Scott gave a small laugh. “His name is Seth. He’ll turn thirteen next month.”

He had to grip the steering wheel harder for a second. “She’s been working for you for all this time? Even thinking you killed her child?”

“It was the job, and the job had to be done.” Scott’s voice didn’t waver.

“
Putain
,” he said softly.

“Ideology,
Commissaire
. Meaning in the service of power. It’s what we are about, first and foremost.”

“Then why did you make your own side think you’re dead? What ideology does that fit?”

“No organization is immune to defectors, unfortunately. We found out some cases weren’t going as we planned. When the Stepanovic case veered off-track, I thought my own cell had been compromised.”

“You thought she had defected?” He couldn’t keep the horror out of his words, more so because he knew she’d actually planned on leaving them.

“It’s what we thought at the time. We failed to get any constructive results on the man’s operations. Then we figured something must be wrong when a raid the police had planned took place with only half the men supposed to go in.”

Gerard hitched in a breath. The operation in which Mirka—
Fey
—had saved him from certain death.

She’d done it—gone against her own organization—to spare his life.

The realization made his chest constrict with pain.

“Fey went missing right after,” Scott continued, “and Stepanovic also vanished into thin air.” He sighed. “Now, I know she was snatched. I had trouble believing she’d gone rogue on us, too.”

He frowned. “Why?”

“Something didn’t fit right. You know what the MICE acronym stands for,
Commissaire
?”

He nodded. “Money, ideology, corruption, and ego. The main levers for inciting an officer or an agent to switch sides or defect.”

“Exactly. Fey didn’t fit any of these.”

Then why had she been leaving? “It wasn’t just about her, was it?”

“Unfortunately, no. Some people inside the
Corpus
itself had gone rogue, and they wanted to annihilate us while helping the criminals we sought to put behind bars. I know for sure now that Max is one of them, when I’d only had doubts before.”

Putain
. “What does he want with her?”

“Fey is our arms dealership and human trafficking expert. She holds extensive knowledge in those areas. To have her on their side would be a tremendous edge.”

Gerard wanted to curse again, but he had run out of expletives. So that’s what it had been about. The mind games, the drugs. They wanted her to come to them, to trust Max posing as Peter. If her memory had been triggered, she would have recalled Scott; the two men being identical twins, she could have thought he and Peter must be one and the same.

But they hadn’t duped her. No, she’d remembered
him
.

They had reached the garage, and he quelled the apprehension that Max may come by. Fey represented his target. Not him.

He drove the car inside and parked.

“Where do you think he took her?” he asked as they both exited the vehicle.

“It’s what I intend to find out,” Scott replied. “I’ll need to place a few calls.”

He directed him to the landline.

Gerard settled down next to Scott on the mattress, paying no heed to the glare the man sent him. He wouldn’t move; whatever the guy had to say, whoever he had to contact, he’d do so right in front of Gerard.

Scott dialled a number, then replaced the receiver after a few seconds.

“Now what?” Gerard asked.

“We wait.”

A split second later, the phone rang, and Scott picked up. He spoke in a strange code of monosyllables and discordant words.

How had his contact known to call him there?

Proxy servers. The call had probably been routed through different remote locations so as to be untraceable. Awe gripped him.

He dealt with the real big guns, obviously.

“Where is she?” he asked when Scott cut the call.

“I won’t have any backup for you,” the other man replied without beating around the bush.

He couldn’t ignore the fact that whoever had Fey would be trained and dangerous, but
merde
if he’d leave her on her own and not attempt to help her. “I’ll take my chances.”

“You’re conscious of the danger?”

“I know I cannot sit around on my ass doing nothing.”

*

Scott cursed softly. The
commissaire
proved a goner for his agent. For a minute, he grew tempted to feel sad for them, because the two of them would never get to be together. Even if they escaped alive, Fey belonged to the
Corpus,
an agent meant to remain in the field. As for the cop, he knew too much about them. No way would the
Corpus
allow Besson to see the following daybreak.

Still, with him wounded and not at the top of his form because of the pain meds they’d injected into him at the hospital, he wouldn’t be able to go out in the field and take down Max. The best he could do amounted to trying to figure out who else could be involved with his brother in the coup. They had to find Fey, though; the quicker, the better.

He took the pad next to the phone and penned down site coordinates. “This is a safe house, and it’s probably where Max took Fey. A barn, in the fields on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, the closest location any agent of the
Corpus
would think of when on the French southern coast. Max doesn’t know someone could be providing you with this classified information.”

Come what may now.
The matter no longer rested in his hands.

*

Gerard reached for the paper. Latitude and longitude points. He could enter them in the GPS of the car.

“I don’t know if he’s alone,” Scott said.

Gerard nodded. He wouldn’t go alone. He’d ask Rashid to come, but he wouldn’t hold it against his friend if he didn’t accompany him.
Rashid has no stake in any of this.

He left Scott on the mezzanine and went down to the locker where he kept his gun supplies. Gerard made sure his Sig was loaded and placed two spare magazines in his jacket pocket. On the way to the car, he pulled out his phone and called his right-hand man, bringing him up to speed on the plan.

“Meet me at my place,” Rashid replied without any hesitation.

***

French
Provence
. Outskirts of Aix-en-Provence

Wednesday, December 19. 4:57 p.m.

She came to slowly.

Her first instinct screamed she should move, but years of training and practice made her freeze when she regained consciousness. With her eyes still closed, and without making any movement, she tried to gauge her situation.

She sat on a hard chair. The air around her felt cold and draughty, even though a sliver of warmth tickled the side of her calf. A ray of sun, probably. Her ankles stayed tied to the legs of the chair, her wrists bound behind her. Not rope; something stiffer. A plastic coil, probably. She poked the tip of her tongue against her closed lips, relieved to find her captor hadn’t gagged her. The smell of rotting wood tickled her nostrils. This place must not have been used in ages.

Once she oriented herself in what she figured must be a big room, she focused her attention on her hearing, trying to pick up on any sound. A shuffle of feet, as if on straw.

A barn?

Figuring she wouldn’t get any more information out of her other senses, she opened her eyes.

“You’re finally awake,” he said, his voice jovial.

Peter, or Max, stood a few feet from her. Still in the grey trousers he’d worn when he came to her room, he had ditched the coat and jacket. The collar of his pale blue shirt lay unbuttoned, his tie loose and askew, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

They couldn’t be too far from Marseille—only on the Mediterranean coast would anyone be able to wear such light clothing in the thick of winter.

He pulled out a chair and twisted it around, settling his tall frame on it, his forearms on the back of the chair, facing her.

“Amazing, isn’t it? It’s winter and yet, here you can wear light clothes and not feel the cold.”

Did he realize he’d just confirmed their location? Unless it didn’t matter whether she knew or not.

He planned to kill her.

Then why hadn’t he done it yet?

“What do you want, Max?” The words came out as a croak.

“Come on, Fey. You know what I want.”

“Do I?”

He leaned forward. “Of course you do.” He reached out and touched a lock of her hair. “It’s you. It was always about you.”

She shivered under the chilling undertone of possession in his words. They rang true, but she also had the certainty that wasn’t the only reason behind the whole fucked-up mind game business. “Bollocks.”

His eyes narrowed, but then he let go of her hair and chuckled. “How did he do it with you?”

“Who?”

“Scott. My dear brother. He always got you to eat from his hand.”

She closed her eyes, suddenly tired. Remnants of the drug he’d given her still coursed through her bloodstream. She fought, though, trying hard to clear her head. “What is this all about?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet?” He slapped his hand on the chair’s back. “And they say you’re one of the best.”

“Max...”

“It’s simple, Fey. We want you with us.”

She stifled a gasp. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“The people you’ll get to meet shortly, as soon as you pledge yourself to us.”

“Pledge myself to do what?”
Buy time.
For what, though? A more prolonged death when she refused to play into his sick game?

He jumped up, sending the chair flying, startling her. “Are you really so thick? For years, the
Corpus
has gotten us to do their bidding, Fey. Now it’s our chance to do things as we deem fit.”

She’d started to get the picture. “The highest bidder?”

He smiled. “You’re catching up nicely.”

“Fuck off to hell!” she shouted with the utmost disdain.