Smoke Screen (17 page)

R
ELEASING HER AS SUDDENLY AS HE’D GRABBED HER, HE
turned abruptly and climbed into his truck. He cranked the engine and left it to Britt to leap out of the truck’s path as he wheeled it around and headed for the road. She choked on the dust cloud that rose behind him.

Tears of outrage made red blurs of his taillights. Once they had disappeared, she was left in total darkness. Quickly, she retrieved her handbag from the ground and got into her car. The driver’s seat had been moved back as far as it would go to accommodate Raley Gannon’s long legs, and all the mirrors had been adjusted. Having to reset everything made her even angrier than she already was, and she was bristling.

The condition of the road didn’t improve her state of mind. It allowed for only one speed—slow. She never caught sight of Raley’s taillights again, although she continued to eat his dust all the way to the main road. It was nothing to brag about, but at least at some point in time the road had been tarred. Maybe during the Truman administration.

She consulted the directions he’d written out for her—she supposed she should be grateful for that much consideration—and turned as indicated. She kept her car at a moderate speed, not only because the road cut through dense forest, making it dark and winding, but because she needed time to reflect on her experience with Raley and prepare herself for what lay ahead. Before things could get better, they would get worse, and she dreaded that interim.

She had been on her own since her parents had died less than a year apart—her father of lung cancer when she was a senior in high school, her mother of a stroke a few months later.

As a college freshman, she hadn’t had the luxury of mourning her mother. Not wanting to skip a whole semester, she’d taken only a week off from classes to handle the funeral and deal with all the paperwork left in the wake of a sudden passing. Then she’d dusted herself off emotionally and returned to her studies, accepting that she was an orphan now and that what she made of her life was strictly up to her.

She was the beneficiary of her parents’ modest life insurance policies, which she used to finance her education. Upon graduation, she sold the family home. That had been a painful decision, as it represented a definitive severance from the only family life she’d had, but she’d needed the proceeds from that sale to subsidize the menial wages she earned at various cable stations. These jobs amounted to little more than internships, but she used them to gain experience with video cameras and editing equipment, in addition to writing and producing her reports.

At one station, in exchange for access to the editing room, she had to empty the wastepaper baskets and sweep up each night after everyone else had gone home. She didn’t like it, but she did it, telling herself that it was character building. It also earned her an extra thirty-five dollars a week.

Eventually she moved to a station with a wider viewership where she didn’t have to pull janitorial duties to augment her salary. Over the course of the next few years, she went from station to station, always moving up, learning, gaining experience, and developing her on-camera technique.

By the time the job in Charleston became available, she had acquired industry know-how along with an engaging TV persona—salable assets. Being hired as a feature reporter represented a quantum leap in her career. The job wasn’t going to make her rich, but she could afford her mortgage and good designer knockoffs.

Although she would always lament the premature deaths of both parents, she was suited to living independently. Or maybe she had embraced her solitary state only because she knew she had no choice. Either way, she was accustomed to earning her own keep and standing on her own two feet. She was reliant on no one. She was free to make decisions without interference from anyone.

Tonight, however, she wished to be not quite so free. She didn’t feel so much independent as alone, friendless, and vulnerable. These were rare and unwelcome sentiments for her, so she wasn’t sure how to cope with them. Why, after living totally on her own, was she wishing for someone on whom she could lean, from whom she could seek counsel, receive reassurance?

But there was no one, was there? Just as there had been no one when at age eighteen she’d been left parentless. Now, as then, she must accept and deal with the circumstances with as much determination and dignity as possible. She had survived so far. She would survive this.

But how could she help but be apprehensive over what the next few hours would bring? Would the policemen staked out at her house treat her kindly, or would they swarm her as she alighted from her car? Would she be handcuffed, read her rights, and hustled into a squad car before being given a chance to offer any explanation for her disappearance?

However it played out, it would be unpleasant and humiliating. She was a suspect now. The detectives wouldn’t extend her any more courtesies just because she was a television personality. Clark would be less polite, Javier more cynical. The interrogations would be more grueling.

Even if Bill Alexander acted with dispatch, he couldn’t get her released on bail until her arraignment hearing, and that wouldn’t take place until tomorrow at the earliest, requiring her to spend at least this night in police custody.

Jail. The very thought of it, even for one night, made her physically ill.

And then something even worse occurred to her. She was accused of murdering a police officer. As if that weren’t bad enough, to the court’s eye, it would appear that she had fled to avoid arrest.
Thank you, Raley Gannon.

While his kidnapping stunt had given her ammunition for a more solid defense than the feeble “I don’t remember,” it also had greatly reduced her chances of being released on bail. Prospects were good that she’d be kept in jail until her trial, and God knew how long that would be.

One second she was grateful for Raley’s intrusion, because his information would be invaluable to her defense. The next second she wanted to throttle him. For a number of reasons.

When he’d grabbed her like that, why hadn’t she pushed him away or put up some kind of resistance? She hadn’t been afraid that he would hurt her. If he hadn’t harmed her in the last twenty-four hours, he wasn’t going to.

Still, she shouldn’t have just stood there and let him manhandle her like that.

Calling him a coward had been a calculated attempt to keep him talking. As much as he’d told her, there was more he had omitted. She’d deliberately goaded him, hoping to make him lose his temper and blurt out something that would help exonerate them both.

The taunt had sparked more of a reaction than she’d bargained for. And a different kind of reaction than she’d anticipated. Her ill-chosen words had given him an opening, and he’d taken it. He—

The thought was interrupted by her cell phone’s musical ring.

Automatically she reached for her handbag, then thought:
My cell phone?

The two men were bored.

They were extraordinarily patient men who could sit for hours without moving, or even blinking, if the job required them to do so, but they’d rather be out and about, active, doing something instead of sitting in a room waiting for their next assignment.

They were presently playing an unambitious game of gin rummy and monitoring a telephone line on which they’d planted an illegal bug earlier today. Of all the boring aspects of their work, monitoring a telephone line was perhaps the biggest snore.

They were currently operating under the aliases of Johnson and Smith, and like the false names, the two men were practically interchangeable, having matching skills and personalities. They had no ties to anyone on the planet and had loyalty only to whoever was paying them at the time. In cash.

Their names weren’t on any rolls for taxes, driver’s licenses, Social Security, nothing. They’d left the country a decade and a half ago to fight a secret war against various factions in an African nation that few Americans had even heard of, much less could point to on a globe. There, the individuals they had been vanished. When they reentered the United States, they had different names, fingerprints, identities, and even those records had soon been destroyed.

Their employment was always temporary, but they sometimes worked for a client more than once, and they had a long list of satisfied customers—nations, cadres, individuals. They always worked as a team and were exceptionally good at what they did because they had absolutely no compunction about doing whatever was necessary to get the job done. Neither possessed a conscience. Their souls had been sacrificed in a wasteland of unimaginable violence.

Most remarkable, however, was that they weren’t at all remarkable. The violence they were capable of was belied by ordinary looks. They didn’t wear paramilitary camouflage. The weapons they carried were well concealed even to people trained to look for such, and their weapons of choice were their hands. Their strength came from conditioning, not bulk. They could pass for accountants, junior professors, or something equally benign. In a crowd, they could blend in so well as to become invisible.

They had blind obedience to whomever was paying them for their services. They never suggested an alternate plan, never expressed their opinions unless asked for them. They were incurious to the point of indifference about their orders. They didn’t care a whit about the whys and wherefores of a job. They were apolitical and nonreligious. They did what they were told to do without question or discussion.

Those attributes made them ideal for their current retainer’s needs. They’d been hired to disable Britt Shelley and kill Jay Burgess.

They’d been shown Britt Shelley’s photograph and had seen her on television. They’d picked her out the minute she came into the bar. The Wheelhouse itself had served their purpose because it was crowded and busy, and the waitresses were so rushed that trays of drinks were kept on the bar long enough for a sleight of hand to take place without anyone noticing.

They’d been given explicit instructions and had carried them out to the letter. They’d been told to neutralize the woman and leave it to look like she had killed Burgess, and that was what they’d done.

It had helped that Burgess was careless about setting his security alarm. Getting inside the town house had been a matter of opening a terrace door and strolling in. The drug had hit Britt Shelley hard, and when Johnson and Smith had ambled into Burgess’s living room, Burgess was anxiously asking her if she was all right. Clearly she wasn’t.

Taken by surprise, weakened by his illness, and more than a little intoxicated himself, Burgess had been easily overpowered. The two pros had then forced the couple to drink the bottle of scotch. Burgess had protested, but he’d complied. The woman was too far gone to care what was being done to her, so they’d funneled the scotch down her throat with no difficulty.

When both were incapacitated, Johnson and Smith had stripped them of their clothing, put them in the guy’s bed, then smothered the guy. They’d planted the empty condom packet on the sofa, all the while being careful not to leave any traces of themselves for a clever crime scene investigator to find.

The stage had been set precisely as they’d been told to leave it. Everything had gone as planned…until this morning, when it was discovered that Britt Shelley had up and disappeared. This had really pissed off their retainer, who hadn’t anticipated that development. Initial efforts to track her had rendered nothing.

So they’d been ordered to keep tabs on Bill Alexander, attorney at law. At first their client had considered having them torture the lawyer until he gave up the whereabouts of his client. But it was soon determined that his frantic nervousness was genuine and that, when he was seen in news reports averring to police that he had no idea where Britt Shelley had gone, he was telling the truth.

However, the assumption had been that he would be the first person she’d contact when she resurfaced—if she wasn’t found by the police and arrested first—so Johnson and Smith had been ordered to bug the lawyer’s phone.

Duck soup. He was a bachelor who lived alone and was too penurious to hire a maid. During the day, while he was at his law office, his house stood empty. The two-man team had been in and out in a matter of minutes and had spent the rest of the day monitoring their equipment, waiting for something to happen.

Finally it did. Their ears perked up when they heard the dial tone and the beeps of Alexander punching in a number. Johnson dropped his cards and made note of the time. Smith started the recorder.

Three rings, then a hello. Female voice, sounding hesitant and puzzled, then exasperated.

“Ms. Shelley! Thank God you answered!”

“Mr. Alexander?”

“Where have you been? Haven’t you heard the news? The police have issued a warrant for your arrest.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Where did you go?”

“I didn’t exactly…go. It’s a long story. I’ll explain everything when I get home. I suppose the police are watching my house.”

“Yes, you’ll have quite a reception committee. I must warn you, Ms. Shelley, that they obtained a search warrant this afternoon. Prepare yourself for a mess.”

“A search warrant? Why?”

“Because you’re a fugitive!”

“No, I’m not.”

“What would you call yourself then? When a person flees to avoid arrest—”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, that’s how it looks to the police. To everyone.”

“I know, but I can explain. I—”

“As you said, save the explanation until you arrive. And the sooner the better. Where are you now?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure?”

“I’m an hour away, at least. I’ll be there as soon as I can get there.”

“If you’re not captured first. Both Twenty-six and Ninety-five are crawling with—”