Fatal (7 page)

*****

“Here’s what going to happen to your friend,” Cassie said, sitting on the captain’s bench, the .22 held loosely in her hand. Brooks was propped up against the transom. The morning was still cool but sweat ran down into his eyes. Ronnie was leaning against the side of the boat, drinking a Coke scrounged up from the cabin. It was warm but he was thirsty. Every now and then he would hand it to Cassie and she would take a sip. It had taken ten minutes or so to get Brooks up and fully aware enough of his situation that they could talk.

“Bodies tend to sink at first,” Cassie continued. “But when it’s warm like this the gases from decomposition build up pretty quickly. Right now, he’s just bobbing along right above the lake bed. The tide is going out, so by this afternoon he’ll probably be somewhere close to the Rigolets, I guess. From there, who knows?” She shrugged and reached for the Coke. “But let me tell you the best part. This lake here is pretty good for crabs, so I’m guessing they’ve already found him. That’s why I brought you way out here. One, I wanted to be alone when we talked to you. Two, chances are he’ll never be found. And even more important than those two things is I didn’t want to dump your friend anywhere near where we’re going to be crabbing. It would ruin my appetite. I like boiled crabs and wouldn’t want to think they’d been munching on your friend.” She took a sip and handed the Coke back to Ronnie. “The bigger question is whether or not you want to join him. We’re going to ask you some things, some pretty simple questions, and you’re going to answer them. Do you understand that? If you cooperate you might not end up crab food.”

Brooks nodded. He was watching the .22, but more than anything he was watching the eyes of this girl. They were deep brown,flat and hard. She was talking to him almost offhandedly, as if the big decisions were already made and this was just a small sidetrack on the road. The gun passed back and forth from hand to hand. He was thinking, calculating the odds of getting the gun. But since he was taped up and four feet away from her — and the boy was also there — he calculated the odds at exactly zero. He began to figure the odds on them really killing him. A picture of his partner on the bottom of the lake with crabs tearing him apart came into his mind. Better to try and talk his way out of it.

“Right now you’re thinking you might be able to give us a bullshit story, right?” Cassie said. “Let’s get that idea out of your head. Ronnie?” She made a gesture with the gun. Ronnie grabbed Brooks by the leg, hauling him forward and flat on his back. Ronnie kept pulling until he could get the man’s lower legs over the side of the boat. Brooks started to protest and Ronnie kicked him in the head. Cassie stepped over, pressed the pistol against the top of Brooks’ left foot, and pulled the trigger. The pistol made a short sharp crack in the still air. A hole appeared in the top of the shoe, another in the bottom. The bullet kicked up water fifteen feet away. Brooks screamed and Ronnie kicked him again.

“You probably think I’m going to stop now. Let me remind you that you came to our house in the middle of the night. You had orders to either kidnap us or kill us. I’m thinking kidnap, which means the people you work for want us pretty badly. I hate it when people come to my house uninvited. It’s rude. So just to show you that we’re serious, I’m going to shoot you in the other foot. If you want to live, you’ll take me seriously and answer my questions. If I have to shoot you again, it’s going to be because I’m tired of your lies. When I shoot you that time it’s going to be between your eyes.”

With that, Cassie stepped over next to Ronnie, placed the muzzle of the pistol on top of Brooks’ right foot, and pulled the trigger again. Brooks screamed again. Ronnie kicked him again. Cassie sat back down on the captain’s bench. Brooks began to talk.

*****

Andre Kohl was eating his breakfast, a two egg combo sided with hash browns and ham, but he wasn’t enjoying it. His night had been spent pacing the hotel room waiting on some word from the two men sent to retrieve Cassie Reynold and Ronnie Gilmore. He was prepared for whatever he might find and whatever he might have to do. Or so he thought. The idea that any of his people might not return from such a simple assignment never crossed his mind. Something else was going on here, something he was failing to see. His first thought was that Luke Francis had put a watch on the house. If he had, it had gone undetected, and that was an unlikely thing. Surveillance was as easy to detect as it was difficult to do without someone tripping over you. The number of things that could go wrong multiplied every hour.

He had two men missing and no answers. He had a pair of college kids connected to a national intelligence organization by some tenuous string he couldn’t pull. His problem was twofold: either risk the threat of exposing himself and his operation trying to find the string, or return to a waiting game. The last option had problems of its own. Watching subjects in a neighborhood was almost impossible unless you were a permanent operation. Renting a nearby apartment, staffing it twenty-four hours a day, maintaining some type of cover, it all added up to time and expense and manpower he didn’t have. He was still mulling things over when a scrubby man dressed in jeans and a blue denim work shirt came into his office.

“Mr. Porter?” Kohl asked.

“We’ve got nothing,” said Porter. He waved the waitress over, pointed to a breakfast on the menu, and flipped his coffee cup up for a fill. The waitress moved off. Porter reached across the table for sugar, dumped a healthy portion into his cup. Tall and lanky, he could have passed for a dock worker in any city in the country.

“We’ve got the car back. Brooks left his cigarettes in the visor so he can’t have been planning to be gone long. I rang the bell on the house. Nobody answered, so I walked around back and looked in the window. Everything looked right. Nothing out of place.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. They’re gone.”

“So we’ve got four people missing,” Kohl mused. “I think it’s safe to say our people didn’t run off with the kids. Francis has them. They must have been watching the house. Brooks and Mead missed it. It is interesting that Francis is protecting them, don’t you think? These two become more and more interesting all the time. Why would Francis, and Archer before him, be so concerned with two college students that they’d keep them under watch twenty-four hours a day?”

Porter shrugged. “Maybe it’s a research project or something?”

“It would have to be one hell of a research project, and if it was we’d have gotten some hint of it long before this. No, this is something else. They did quite a good job of keeping these two under wraps while Archer was around. He traveled to New Orleans three or four times in the last few years, but we never caught on to what he was doing or who he was seeing. Hell, these kids would have been thirteen or fourteen years old.”

“Beats me,” Porter said. “It looks like all we can do is keep an eye out for them. If they show up, we grab them.”

Kohl leaned back and took a sip of coffee. “I’m going to make a few calls. We need everything we can find on these two. In the meantime, keep an eye on Francis too. He might get careless again.”

*****

Cassie brought the boat in slowly, moving against a slight breeze coming in off the shore. To her right, a small bayou drained into Lake Ponchartrain. The boat slowed, eventually coming to a stop twenty feet off a bank of low reeds. Ronnie dropped the anchor off the side into shallow water. It caught, held, and the boat settled in, the wind pushing it into position. A good morning for redfish if you could find them, and this was as likely a spot as any. An hour after dumping Brooks into the water with his partner, Cassie and Ronnie had made a quick stop at a marina for food, drinks, and live bait. With that done, they crossed Lake Borgne, making a run up the Rigolets and into Lake Ponchartrain.

Most of that hour had been a running argument about the best way to proceed. Ronnie was of a mind to contact Francis and bring him in on the situation he had created. It seemed to him that Francis could be educated, made to understand their position. He was welcome to use their talents as long as he maintained the same deal they had worked with Archer. Occasional use, tight security, and freedom would get him more than bullying. Given those three things, their lives could go on as before with school and family and each other. Ronnie believed they could make Francis see the light.

“Why wouldn’t he?” Ronnie argued. “He can’t be all that stupid. He worked with the general for years. Yeah, he screwed up big time coming to see us like he did. But he’ll learn.”

Cassie was listening, but coming at the thing from a completely different angle. She waved Ronnie off as she cast her line out toward the mouth of the bayou. The croaker on the end of her line splashed into shallow water. She let it settle and took up the slack in the line.

“Well, for one thing,” she said, “you saw his reaction at the hotel room. He wants to control us, and that’s not a good thing. He isn’t going to just change his stripes overnight.” She shook her head. “No, he’s not going to be happy with that. Secondly, these two guys last night, they aren’t who we have to worry about now. We have to worry about who sent them. It wasn’t Francis, so we’ve got two groups interested in us now, Francis and the Soviets, according to this guy. They’re both still out there. Now shut up and let me think.”

Half an hour later, with no luck, they were moving fast across Lake Ponchartrain. The railroad trestles offered a better opportunity for speckled trout, and Cassie wanted fish for lunch. They found a spot alongside the long expanse of the five-mile bridge, downwind from a group of other boats, and killed the engine. Cassie watched the other fishermen for a few minutes. “Live shrimp,” she said, and proceeded to rig her pole. An hour later, they had hauled in a half-dozen decent-size trout and were settled in for the duration.

Cassie sat on the captain’s bench, drinking hot coffee and occasionally pulling in a fish. Ronnie worked his pole in silence, giving her time to go over things in her head. He trusted her completely, but Cassie did tend to run to extremes. He had a bad feeling about the way this thing was going. Since the death of Archer, Cassie had been on high alert. Francis had angered her, and what was even worse he made her feel trapped. That was a dangerous thing. It was like cornering a rattlesnake. Leave it alone, give it a chance to escape, and chances were you could walk away unharmed. If you backed a rattlesnake into a corner you were going to get bit.

Casting back toward the pilings, Ronnie thought back to the beginning of the summer. They had been in the middle of preparing the apartment, cleaning, moving furniture, doing all the things necessary for making a space. “You’re building a nest here, aren’t you?” he had asked, teasing her as she fussed over swatches of cloth. Her mother had delivered samples, offering to make drapes.

Cassie had looked at him, tilted her head, smiled at him and said, “Yep, that is exactly what I’m doing” She’d got up and walked over to him. He had been sitting on their old couch and she plopped into his lap, put her hands on his shoulders. “This is our place, Ronnie. Our place. It’s our first place together and I want it to be right. This is just the beginning. We’re going to have all the things we want.” He was startled at the intensity in her voice.

“We’re going to get out of school, settle in and have jobs and kids and a normal life. We’re going to forget Archer and all that as much as we can. Nothing is going to stop us.” She got up and went back to her swatches. Ronnie watched her as she bent over the small pieces of cloth and had loved her more than ever, and worried more than ever.

The fish stopped biting. They had an ice chest with a dozen trout, plenty enough for lunch and dinner. One by one, the other boats pulled anchor and took off, and soon enough they followed, making their way back across the water. During the hour-long boat ride, Cassie said nothing, watching the choppy water and the landmarks, guiding them back to camp. She idled the boat into the slip and killed the engine. Ronnie tied it front and rear, leaving plenty of slack for tide changes, and tossed the bumpers back between the boat and the dock. The ice chest came out, heavy with the day’s catch. As he was carrying it up to the camp, Cassie fell in beside him. She brushed her hair back away from her face. “Let’s eat,” she said. “Then we’re going to talk about how we’re going to end this thing.” She ran ahead to open up the camp.

*****

Andre Kohl spent most of the following day allowing himself and his thoughts to wander. The French Quarter drew his attention, and he found his way down to the French Market. The lines of fruit stands, broken up by souvenir vendors and t-shirt sellers, held him for some time. As much time as he spent in the West he could never get used to the abundance, the overflowing bins of ripe fruit. A trip through a grocery store left him envious of the citizens of this country, his sworn enemies, and yet so friendly a people it was hard to picture them as the evil his superiors proclaimed them to be. Yet he knew it was so. He’d been given enough examples of their aggression, spent enough time being indoctrinated in his own ideology, to make doubts something to be cast aside.

Coffee and pastries with white powdered sugar followed a lunch in a small restaurant off Bourbon Street. He walked the few blocks back to his hotel, following the curve of the river. Canal Street was crowded as he made his way through, a busy and seemingly unending center of commerce and entertainment. The people were well dressed for the most part, in bright colors, a far cry from the drab clothing of Russia. When he entered his hotel, the lobby was quiet and the air conditioning a welcome relief. He reminded himself that this city seldom saw the snows that so often blanketed Moscow, holding it in a frigid embrace until the white powder went dark with dirt and soot. Perhaps that was why this New Orleans was so open.