Dirty Deals: Olesia Anderson Thriller #1 Free Epub Edition (7 page)

Olesia hefted the pistol. "And... here we go!"

She yanked the wheel, and the car swerved out to the left. Olesia was pressed against the window, and she groped out for the handbrake. Pulling it nearly broke her wrist, and the car shuddered to a stop. She was already out and on the ground, aiming at Rostam's chest. He turned, his eyes white and huge in the car headlights. "On the ground!"

Rostam was smiling. He'd traded his torn suit for a puffy black jacket and gloves, and there was something in his hands that might have been a phone, or a gun. "Are you going to arrest me, Olesia?"

"Are you going to give me any trouble? Because it's easier for me to shoot you and clean up the mess than drag you back to a police station." When she sighted on Rostam's gut her jacket pulled back from her wrists and she saw the livid marks left by the cuffs. Her aim was steady. She stroked the trigger. "Give me a reason."

Behind her, Melton was revving the car, but the Cessna was already accelerating across the runway. Olesia wavered. The plane was a good hundred yards away, and it was dark, but if Melton couldn't catch them and knock the plane into the scrub before it got airborne...

The plane shot past, Melton in pursuit. "Don't move!" Olesia shouted at Rostam, and snapped around. She fired three shots at the receding aircraft, but whether any hit she couldn't tell.

By the time she turned back, Rostam was already running. "Stop, or I'll take you down!"

Rostam didn't slow.

The Cessna's single engine roared as it lifted off. Olesia didn't have time to turn around and watch it vanish into the night sky. Rostam was making for the tall grass on the side of the runway, and once he was deep into that scrub there'd be no hope of catching up. She went after him barefoot, the gravel nipping at her toes. Headlights shone behind her, although whether it was Melton coming back to assist or their pursuers catching up, she couldn't tell. "Rostam!"

He ducked down into the grass and was gone. She could hear his laboured breath floating up on the chill night air, and she scanned the grass with her pistol held out before her. "Don't make me shoot you. You know I can, and you know I don't care either way-"

"It's too late." His voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, echoing off the spiny trees growing by the side of the runway. "They have the plans. You do what you want with me. My job is done."

Olesia swallowed hard, realising how big of a target she made against the night sky. She entered the tall grass and crouched until only the top of her head showed above the swaying reeds. "Was anything you told me true?"

A long silence. Then, "Do you trust a spy?"

Behind them, a car screeched to a stop. Shouting carried across the runway. She risked a glance back; four men in white hooded sweatshirts had tumbled out of a jeep. Melton and Paul were crouched behind their car, pistols drawn, yelling. There was a flash, and a crack like a boulder splitting down the middle, and one of the men in white fell on his back on the tarmac, kicking at the air.

Rostam said, "They came for me, not you."

The three men reached inside the pouches of their jumpers and drew out wicked black hunks of steel, what looked like Israeli sub-machine guns. There was a rattle of bullets, and Melton and Paul ducked down behind the car as the windshield exploded in a hail of glass.

Olesia spun, sighted, and dropped one of the Zero Error thugs with a bullet between the shoulder-blades. The others turned, and she dropped flat in the grass as they opened up with their Uzis. The whine of bullets overhead made her scream into the dirt, and the ends of chopped grass floated down into her hair.

She couldn't see more than a foot ahead. A pistol roared again, and one of the sub-machine guns stopped firing. Somewhere, someone was screaming. Then Melton called, "Got them! They're down! Eight-Oh-Six, are you hurt?"

She stood slowly, brushing the dirt from her sleeves. Melton and Paul had the last of the Zero Error boys flat on the ground with his hands over his face. She waved, signalling that she was unhurt, and turned back to the field. "Rostam? Get out here. I don't want to drag you out in front of the boys."

There was no reply. Olesia raised her pistol. "Rostam?" She advanced into the field, stepping lightly over pebbles and broken branches. "Rostam, are you okay?"

Moonlight shone slick on black blood.

Rostam lay on his back, one arm thrown up as if to shield his eyes from the moonlight, the other twisted beneath him. His eyes were open, and he coughed weakly as Olesia approached. She crouched beside him, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. "Rostam?"

There was no smile on his lips now. "Hurts," he whispered.

"Where?"

He didn't move, and she reached out gingerly to tug his shirt open. There were two gaping holes just above Rostam's hip, each the size of a can of coke. Entry through the back, exit through the front. His pants were soaked with blood.

"Idiot." She pulled off her jacket and pressed it over the wounds. "Keep breathing, okay?" With her free hand she dug her phone out of her pocket, but it slipped, the screen covered in blood. "Keep breathing. Melton! Paul! Call Jean, get an ambulance here now!"

She turned back to Rostam. His eyes had rolled back in his head and his breath came in fits. The dirt beneath him was soaked. She slapped him across the face. "Look at me!"

Rostam's lips fluttered. His eyes fixed on her. "You didn't... get them."

"Get them? Get what?"

"There's more," he said. "Zero Error. You should be... careful."

"If they paid me to be careful, I wouldn't be here. Don't die on me. I still have to kick the shit out of you. Hey!" She pressed down harder on the jacket but the blood still pumped slickly between her fingers.

His eyes rolled back again. His breath rattled between his teeth.

The ambulance arrived eventually, but by then Rostam had already fallen still.

Olesia hung up her phone and set it on the couch beside her. Her ear was still tingling from headquarters shouting at her down the line, and she'd learned eight new synonyms for
fucking idiot
. She sighed. "Where did I go wrong, Jean?"

Jean sat at the other end of the couch, hunched over a laptop. His broad, craggy features were lit in white by the glow of an excel spreadsheet. "Where does anything go wrong? You're a spy for hire. You're paid to eat shit, Olly."

She sagged. "I'm out, aren't I? Blackrock aren't going to keep me on after this. Three dead, one kid in hospital, and I didn't even find out who Rostam was passing the schematics on to. I really screwed up."

"You'll get a second chance." Jean hadn't looked up from his laptop in nearly an hour. "At least you found out where he was from. That's something, right?"

"I guess." Isfahan province, as it turned out, was dead in the centre of Iran. But Iran was a big country, and whether those fake schematics were destined for the ruling party or the militant opposition was something Blackrock would have dearly liked to know. She didn't even know whether Rostam had been telling the truth. As for Lockheed's contract, and the real plans...

"Anything on Zero Error, yet?"

Jean winced, almost imperceptibly. "That kid they brought in doesn't know shit. Got hired over the net to smuggle some guns and shoot at some guys. They didn't even know who you were. Teenage gangsters for hire - they didn't even have any weapon's training outside their Playstations. We asked him about killing Young, but he didn't know anything. The guys sent to steal the schematics out of his apartment were probably a totally different team of professionals." He shrugged. "Hey, at least we solved the mystery of the missing machine-guns, right?"

"That's not good enough!" Olesia stood, hands clenched into bloodless fists. "There's so much wrong with this. The two Lockheed staff watching Young's place, where the fuck are they? And how the fuck did they find me and Rostam? Twice? What did they even want, if they already had the schematics? I don't want to get fired, Jean. I don't... I don't want to fail. This is my job. This is all I'm good at."

Jean gave an exasperated grunt. "Olly, I have work to do-"

"Don't call me Olly!"

He closed his laptop with a snap. "Fine. You want answers? They followed you because you were sloppy. Maybe you hung around too long at Young's house and they followed you from there. Maybe Rostam's getaway wasn't so clean. Maybe you should've been doing your job and interrogating the guy with something other than your ass, how about that? Fuck!"

Olesia ducked her head. "They told you."

"I read their reports. 'Found agent Eight-Oh-Six immobilised with cuffs and rendered assistance'. There's only one thing that means, with you." He threw his hands up in the air. "Look, I'm not angry you fucked someone else. I'm angry that you fucked a target. I'm angry that, instead of getting the info and getting away clean, you wasted time and got into the middle of something you had no business with." He stood and placed his hands on Olesia's shoulders. "I don't want you hurt."

She met his gaze. "You used to be a target."

"And you should've stayed well away then, too."

She scowled. "I don't want pity, Jean. I want to get this sorted, before headquarters calls me back and tells me I'm out in the cold. If Sparks could just trace those Zero Error emails-"

Jean turned away. "He won't."

"What?"

"He won't trace them. I already know where they'll end up. Some local net cafe, I'll bet. Look, Zero Error aren't some gang of teenage shitheads. The guys who killed Young, who took the data, who hired those teenagers to shoot you... they'll be ten steps removed. Already vanished. It's done, Olly. The schematics are gone and the contract is fucked. Just sit the hell down and wait for headquarters to figure out what to do."

"There are still two men-" Olesia stopped. "What did you mean, before?"

"When before? Zero Error being a gang?"

"No." She stepped back, eyeing Jean up and down. "Getting into the middle of something I had no business with."

Jean's brow furrowed. "It's just an expression."

"Yeah, well, maybe you can express why you weren't there, and why Sparks couldn't call you. Or how Rostam knew my name. How did he know my fucking name, Jean?"

His adam's apple bobbed. "There are always leaks-"

"And where's the leak? Sparks never said any info was getting out. His networks are secure."

Jean stepped back. "You need to go."

"Yeah." She couldn't meet his eyes. "I think I do."

* * *

She collected her clothes, her gear, and her iPad from where they'd been scattered across Jean's house, but only once she was half a mile down the road and still walking fast did she call Sparks. "I need you to check me in to a hotel. Anonymously."

"I always check you in anonymously, Eight-Oh-"

"Different anonymous. Don't record the name anywhere on our files. Nowhere Jean can see. And get me nightwork gear, goggles, a balaclava, climbing shoes, everything. Have it delivered to the alley behind the hotel. Jean can't know."

"Hold on, hold on. Jean can't know? Where the hell do you expect me to get this stuff? And we haven't even chosen a hotel!"

"Figure it out. I've got an itch, Sparks. You know what happens when I get an itch." She looked over her shoulder. The street was empty, but for all she knew there were Zero Error goons hiding out in the trees and stationed in the alleys. "Oh, and one more thing. A car, something inconspicuous."

Sparks grumbled on the other end of the line. "How am I supposed to explain all this to accounting?"

"You'll figure it out, kid." She flagged down a passing taxi and climbed inside. "You always do. Now, where's my hotel?"

* * *

The gear was waiting in a briefcase behind a dumpster, locked to Olesia's thumbprint. Night clothes, an array of tracker dots, a fresh laptop, and extra ammunition. She almost smiled. Sparks was always thinking one step ahead.

It took nearly an hour to squeeze into the tight kevlar mesh, and by the time she was done it was nearing sunset. She packed the rest of her equipment into the briefcase and left via the fire stairs, hiding her face from the streetlights. Only once she was in the little Prius Sparks had delivered to the hotel garage did she relax.

It was near an hour's drive to Jean's place. She stopped a mile away and walked the rest of the distance, keeping to the side streets, hugging the shadows. The house directly across the road from Jean's was a two-story bungalow with a peaked roof, and she scaled the outside wall via a picnic table and a poorly placed electricity meter.

The lights were on inside Jean's house, and she could just make out his silhouette shifting in front of the widescreen TV. He was pacing, head down, hands behind his back.

She wondered, briefly, if this was all paranoia. Trying to find patterns where there were none. And for it to be Jean, of all people...

She shook her head. The only way to disprove a theory was to test, and she was testing. She set up the first of the webcams on the edge of the building, trained on Jean's front door, with another aimed at the garage. They streamed directly to cloud storage; a little data vault she'd set up years before, one that not even Blackrock knew about. Whether she was wrong or right about Jean, at least she'd have a record of when he came and went.

She scurried back down the wall, leaping over the fence and into the safety of the rhododendrons. She flipped out her iPad, checking that the cams were broadcasting correctly. The angle was perfect.

A car was approaching, and she waited for it to pass before darting across the street. It felt good, running with boots on again. Her feet were blistered from the chase through the airfield but the familiar squeak of rubber on macadam was enough to wash that pain away.

She made it to the shadows beside Jean's house and crouched, panting. She'd seen Jean operate his own security system enough times over the past days - while he was at home, the sensors were off, with the exception of the garage security door. The garage window, however, was on the same circuit as the house.