Smoke and Mirrors (30 page)

But the flint inside her had already turned to iron. “It’ll have to do. It’s all that’s left.”

T
hey’d been driving almost an hour when ‘Andrus Sepp’ – British Agent Nigel Forsythe’s alias – heaved his boot across the grit on the Land Cruiser’s dash. The hunk of Japanese metal had long since lost its doors, and even the familiar jounce of springs was missing from his passenger seat. His back was aching and his head wasn’t much better. Sleep. He needed a few minutes of it or he’d cark it. Wouter, his driver, content to listen to the nonstop whine of earbuds, wasn’t in need of a navigator, so Nigel closed his eyes.

He’d already hooked his thumb through a belt loop in his fatigues and yanked the seatbelt tight. His left hand found a niche in the vehicle’s mangled roof, and for a moment, hammocked in the sandy, uncluttered heat of Africa’s dusk, he let relief flood his tense limbs.

The Colombian-grown cargo was secured. His rendezvous point was, as yet, uncompromised. And even his revenge against Ivan and Jaak, Vasiliv’s Kriminalnaya hit men, was beginning to take shape. As for Vasiliv, he’d save his execution for dessert.

Unfortunately, Nigel’s eyes didn’t believe any of it. They roved around beneath his lids, discontent and ever vigilant. He could hear his driver humming off-key. The sun was still bright enough to sink through the layers of skin and lashes. Bits of sand flecked against his outer arm. A bloody good recipe for insomnia if anyone was asking.

With a sigh, he tried to further calm himself.

Maybe he’d be able to conjure a mirage. Conjure
her
.

It wasn’t the first time.

Sleep had never come easy to him.

As a child he’d lain awake for hours, imagining what he’d build with his toys. Imagining away the Duke’s rage and Barkley Manor’s cold gray walls. Imagining how happy he’d be when summer rolled around and he was back in Africa with his grandfather.

As an adult, he tried other things. Alcohol. Exercise. Sex.

Not sleeping pills though. One night, stuck in the sticky fog of those little fuckers, had been quite enough for him. Better not to sleep at all than be trapped by it.

Because Nigel hated being trapped.

Which left him with
her
.

The blonde he’d encountered at Hong Kong Airport.

Ten years later, he still thought of her – the only woman who’d utterly perplexed him.

She had been tall and maybe twenty. Worn her long, long hair loose, with the pride of a lioness. Her dark eyes were a most unusual shade of topaz. She had an aquiline nose, Slavic cheekbones, and a determined jaw. But it was her mouth, a windfall of fickle genetics, which had imprinted itself upon his memory. Precisely the reason he’d asked to kiss her. Asked and been completely ignored…

The truck lurched as it bounced along the track exiting Laayoune. Nigel cracked an eyelid. He didn’t think there’d be trouble, but after the last eighteen months of MI6’s undercover work building a solid reputation as a drug dealer, he was damn protective of the cocaine concealed in the Land Cruiser’s cargo space.

“Qu’est-ce qui ne va pas?” he asked while his gaze swung to the wing mirror. Nothing there except miles of sand. Perhaps his driver, a wiry mid-twenties mechanic, had been looking further up the road.

But the snicker of Wouter’s Baikal trigger disabused him of that notion.

Merde. The bastard’s been bought off.

“Ce n’est pas dirigé contre vous.” Wouter shrugged as he pulled the trigger.

Snapping to life, Nigel used the break between shots to his advantage. He whipped loose a knife and sent his knee along as backup. A crack of white pain relayed success. He managed to shatter Wouter’s shooting arm and cut a straight, clean line beneath the man’s chin.

Blood spurted and the driver’s hand dropped from the steering wheel. Stuck behind his seatbelt, Nigel scrambled to grab the spinning object. Unfortunately, it eluded him and the Toyota winced once before spinning straight into hysteria. Nigel flung aside the filthy weapon and braced himself for the ride to come.

Two bloody shots
, he seethed, head cracking side to side. And where they’d visited remained to be felt. His nerves were playing games, keeping things secret until they could tally up the truck’s contribution. And the truck, which still thrashed madly across the desert’s back, had abandoned its sense of direction along with the deceased driver.

Fuck.

After an interminable time, there was a hiccup of sand being thunked, and the metal heap concluded its panic-attack with a final squeal of wipers on the windscreen. Nigel dislodged a white-knuckled hand and put an end to the machine’s screeching. Remarkably, the vehicle remained upright, now facing the tracks it had made.

He knocked back a profound breath. The cut of gunfire poisoned his spit and he wondered bleakly if the darker undertone of blood was his own or the splatter of his driver’s. Nerves still mum, he inspected his tremor-ridden right side. Crimson fireworks embroidered his sleeve and chest, while twin dark spots along his outer thigh eyed him over the mock mouth of his pocket flap.

Pain had yet to crash the party
.
So he dropped from the vehicle and limped, legs edgy and disobedient, in the general direction of Wouter’s crooked form. The sand’s voice was monotone beneath the heels of his boots. And wind striations fanned away from him, catching his dead driver in their tilted swathes.

Eying the body of the man he’d just killed – dusty and dark-flecked in the gathering night – Forsythe shivered. The chills were already beginning to descend upon him in ruffled layers.

He thrust a handful of fingers through his hair and sighed in the direction of the sun’s final bloom. The day’s heat was hurrying past, anxious as an abandoned child. He waited, hoping the red unblinking father might yet change his mind; then the parsimonious creature slipped away altogether, and so followed Nigel’s hope.

The SUV was all snarls behind him. He could sympathize. He hadn’t expected the day to blast away on such a depressing note either. His morning, in the city of Laayoune’s dichotomous sprawl, had begun brightly enough with mint infused hot water and fruit.

The lack of proper tea hadn’t even been a dampener.

It was what came later, the part when Wouter had become an enemy and then another corpse on the African landscape. The young man, with an eye on immigration and an admirable indifference to religions, had ultimately reminded Nigel of the bedbugs he’d found at the crest of his mattress, disappointing, but not unexpected.

The sun was well and truly gone now. A cruel shudder racked the agent’s lean frame. His balm-like adrenaline rush had faded and the spiky dullness of Pain’s bite was just warming up. His eyes had begun to burn and he was flirting with dizzy. He forced himself to focus and bent to rifle the driver’s pockets. No use leaving evidence for the local gangs or UN officials. Let them scratch their heads and wonder how this body came to be so far from the city. When he finished dry cleaning, he rolled to his heels and felt the tilt of blood rushing where it shouldn’t.

“Fils de pute.” He sucked a shot of air through clenched teeth and shoved the handful of spongy tala and Wouter’s watch into his vest. Then he cleaned his retrieved knife on the dead man’s sleeve and hauled himself upright.

Cold sweat pricked his ribcage. Part of him was upset it had ended this way. Yet, Wouter
had
double-crossed him. He’d taken the Queen’s shilling and tried to shift it for cocaine. Death, Nigel decided, was a fitting end, just like darkness after a blistering day.

And tonight was darkness personified. There was comfort in its obscuring embrace.

Tonight, his mistress-of-a-job spoke Moroccan Arabic and wore a veil of Sahara sand. She was, in Nigel’s view, cross as well. Things had been quiet for too long, and her name wasn’t Peril without cause.

He coughed the ubiquitous sand from his mouth and put in a request to the gods for mist at his mission’s end. Living was supposed to be a superior substitute for edge-cut black leaves, so he placed one Vibram-soled boot in front of the other and made for the dead man’s battered vehicle.

He slid through the door-less gap, wondering if it had been lost in the MdS desert race, and turned a tight ‘U’. He’d make it to the nameless beach before the helicopter left, sleep en route to the Canary Islands, and then get some tea.

To hell with ‘what ifs’. He played The Game as he played chess – reactively. Change as you go. Be fluid. Boxless. Barless. Bottomless. He liked his options to surprise him, even if his former chess instructor and SIS Director in the Field thought it sacrilege.

He consulted his Omega AquaTerra. The dagger hands glinted in the faint starlight, assuring him of both time and distance. Only 15k to the rendezvous point. Open desert, then - without more help from Lady Peril - open sea.

A walk in Hyde Park.

Ground undulating beneath him, Nigel let the vehicle traverse the dunes with the hand of a ship’s captain. He kept the seatbelt off, held his gun across the curve of the wheel and flinched fractionally when the tossing vehicle pressed against the torn flesh of his thigh. A thigh about which he really should have done something.

Yet the stars appeared less than worried about his fate, so he took his cue from their indifference. Who was to say if he stopped to bandage himself, he wouldn’t step on a snake or, worse, a landmine?

Forty minutes later, sea sounds and cool fog a pleasing contrast to baked leather and too much of his own blood, Nigel flashed the vehicle’s lights at the spot where his ride would be waiting.

A flicker echoed. Code correct, he drove forward a few hundred meters, then dragged himself out and waited until two men came closer. One was his friend, Agent Bradley Milton, the other, their MI6 pilot.

Nigel traced cigar smoke in the mist’s hold. “I hope you saved one for the ride.”

Brad clasped Nigel’s shoulder, his dark head of hair absent in the night. Some warmth passed between them. “I did; though where you’ll get yours is a mystery. Havana’s not a layover on this flight.”

Then the surly Anglo-Italian was away, rummaging through the SUV, having left a cigar in Nigel’s hand with the precision of a Roman Fagan.

They loaded the Toyota’s contents into the Bell Longeranger’s hold, and at last, Nigel passed into the back and collapsed into a position of marginal comfort. God, he was tired. His eyelids dropped, and he pinched the remnants of sand from his white-blond lashes.

“Nasty,” Brad muttered, English shoving aside French.

So Brad had noted Wouter’s work.

“Hmmm.” Nigel straightened his good leg to keep it from falling asleep. “Just find me a pretty doctor in Lanzarote and I won’t bore you with the details.” Now his other leg was asleep. He longed to fidget, but his chest was kicking its heels about breathing.

“Fuck Lanzarote.” Brad’s hands prodded the damage, and Nigel cranked open an eye. There was a reluctant ripping sound.

“I paid a lot for those. They’re custom made rip stop UVA.”

There was more tearing, and the side pocket was a memory. Then came sloshing from Brad’s canteen, aided by the helicopter’s upward sweep. Oddly, Nigel couldn’t feel the silver stream against his skin.

“And fuck pretty doctors,” Brad swore, his latex-encased hands hard at it.

“I was planning to.” Too late, Nigel flinched in regret at the raw memory of flailing white hands and lovely wide-set Russian eyes.
Not now, maya krasaveetsa. Not ever again
. He tried to banish the bitter wash of anguish from his features. Brad didn’t know what had happened on his most recent Moscow op. Didn’t know Nigel had been forced by Ivan and Jaak to kill his girlfriend, Irina.

Brad ripped apart a plastic package. “They’d turn you down. You look like shit. Here.”

Nigel dumped the pills into his desiccated mouth. He managed not to choke, then felt depressed for a moment until he remembered dead men couldn’t seek revenge. “Just don’t expect me to sleep with you.”

“I’m not that desperate.” Brad’s retort blended with the rotor’s groan, and mercifully Nigel stopped noticing anything at all.

I
f Samantha had flown about Westminster on a black and cold night hunting for the perfect window through which to fly, she would have swooped right over the short columned balcony straight into the Regency’s sunny core.

Which was to say, she had chosen the location of
Bond and Teller Interiors
design firm in the manner of a tired moth.

And though her partner, Jane Teller, had not been selected in the same manner, she was certainly as iconic in style and warm in manner as the white brick manse.

So it was unfortunate then, that like a teetotaler who may only admire champagne’s bubbly grandeur from a safe distance, Sam couldn’t truly enjoy either. She had to treat both people and possessions – Tam excluded - with the chary eye of a Roman tactician; because, unlike the moth, she would not be lulled by wool’s soft warmth only to be broken between angry fingers.

Instead, when the time finally came, she planned on pulling those fingers with her straight into the flame.

What a fucking disaster.
Sam stared at the massive boxes - muted gray with sleek black pinstripes - lying like toppled cities across her workroom’s battered oak floors. It had seemed a good idea at the time, customized packaging for catered affairs. Now it appeared excessive and more than slightly menacing.

“Have you seen a roll of labels?”
I just had the damn things in my hand.

Jane emerged from a crevasse of silk shaking her head.

Reexamining the elegant, high-ceilinged interior, Sam fought disproportionate anger. They’d spent the better part of the day whirring about their chic universe like deranged planets and still seemed galaxies from finishing. “I should’ve hired someone to pack and load the drapes and centerpieces.”
I can’t believe I forgot. I never forget.