Vision Impossible (19 page)

Mandy held the towel to her chest protectively and her lower lip trembled. “Are you going to?” she asked hoarsely.

“No,” Dutch told her.

I frowned. In my opinion he’d given in too easily. “We won’t,” I said quickly, “as long as you agree to tell us what we want to know.”

Mandy swallowed hard and looked absolutely petrified. “Is this about Rick’s gambling, or about his weapons dealing?”

My brow rose in surprise. “You know a little something about Rick’s business?”

Mandy nodded. “He talks on the phone a lot. I pretend not to listen.”

“What types of things have you heard him say?” Dutch asked curiously.

“Well, he talks a lot about guns and bombs and explosives and stuff. I figured out after the first two weeks we were together that he was selling weapons and shit.”

“To whom?” I asked carefully.

Mandy shrugged. “Anyone willing to pay. A lot of them have names I couldn’t even pronounce if I tried.”

“Have you ever met any of Rick’s associates?” Dutch asked her.

Mandy nodded. “Yeah.”

“Would you know if any of them would recognize you if they saw you?”

She shrugged. “Sure, I guess. I mean, he likes to take me to meetings sometimes and he shows me off at parties. Hey,” she added, as if the thought had suddenly occurred to her, “if you’ve been posing as Rick, does that mean that he hasn’t really broken up with me?”

I turned my head away so only Dutch could see and rolled my eyes. He ignored me and said, “We appreciate your willingness to cooperate, Mandy. And yes, you’re right, as far as we know, Des Vries hasn’t broken up with you.”

“Who are you guys, anyway?” she wanted to know.

“The good guys,” he told her.

Mandy’s eyes moved back to the gun in my hand, and she rubbed her swollen cheek. “Sure, you are.”

“One last question, Mandy,” I said. “How’d you know it wasn’t Rick Des Vries in the bed when you came in here?”

Rick’s girlfriend frowned distastefully. “It was the pajamas,” she said, pointing to the royal blue silk pj’s Dutch was wearing. The very ones I’d gotten him for Christmas. “Rick wouldn’t be caught dead in those. In fact, no
real
man would.”

I growled low in my throat. “Shih tzu,” I grumbled, glaring hard at Mandy.

Dutch glanced sideways at me. “What?”

“I wish my hand didn’t hurt so much so I could smack her again.”

Mandy flinched. “You asked!”

Dutch sighed. “Let’s call Frost. And Abs?”

“Yeah?”

“Better let me hold the gun.”

 

 

F
rost wasn’t at all happy to hear about Mandy. In fact, he was downright furious when he found her with both hands cuffed to the chair in the kitchen and my iPod playing tunes in her ears. “She’s a Canadian citizen!” he hissed as we all huddled in the living room, just in case she could hear us over the music. “Do you know how much trouble this could cause?”

“She knew Dutch wasn’t Des Vries the moment she laid eyes on him!” I countered. “What were we supposed to do, Frost? Just turn her loose so that she could go out there and tell every one of Des Vries’s associates that Dutch is an impostor? She’s already admitted that she knows his bookie! She could make
one
phone call and get us both killed!”

“She knows too much for us to cut her loose,” Dutch added. “She’s fully aware of what Des Vries buys and sells and she claims that he takes her along to some of his arms deals.”

Frost had his hands on his hips and was looking completely exasperated. But when Dutch told him that, his posture changed in an instant. “She said that?”

I nodded. “Yep. We showed her some faces of known weapons dealers and she pegged three guys right off the bat. And if I were Rick Des Vries’s girlfriend, and I cared about him as much as she apparently does, I would stop at nothing to try to find out where he was and try to help him. And I’d start by calling his bookie. She tells that guy and it’s all over for us. Word’ll get back to Grinkov, who will no doubt tell everyone else—including Boklovich. She could blow our cover right out of the water with one phone call, and we wouldn’t know it until it was way too late.”

I wanted Frost to take Mandy away to some nice quiet cell for a while where she couldn’t cause any more trouble until all this was over. But I also knew that her being a Canadian citizen really complicated things for the CIA. “We can’t hold her,” he said, confirming my fears. “And we can’t hand her over to CSIS. They’ll interrogate her, and she’ll spill the beans that the guy they’ve thought was Des Vries is an impostor, and then they’ll start asking us too many questions. But, if we let her go, we’ll have to call off the mission.”

“So . . . where does that leave us?” I asked.

Frost sighed, took out his cell and began to punch the display. “We have no choice. It’s over.”

I slapped my hand on his wrist. “What if there was another option?”

Frost frowned, switched the phone to his other hand, and placed it to his ear. “There is no other op—”

I squeezed my hand on his arm, urging him to listen to me. “What if we
recruited
her?”

Through the earpiece of Frost’s phone I could hear someone answer the ring. I stared right into Frost’s eyes, willing him to at least hear me out.

Our handler hesitated. The person on the other end repeated the greeting. I nodded, knowing Frost was close to agreeing to listen to my idea. “Director,” he said at last. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I’ll have to call you back.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and let go of his arm.

“All right, Cooper,” he said once he’d disconnected. “You have sixty seconds.”

I pitched my idea to both Dutch and Frost, hoping they’d go for it. “Think about it, guys. Mandy said it herself: Rick brought her to meetings to show her off. And you used her image when you set up my original cover, right?”

Frost’s brow furrowed and he stole a glance at Mandy, who was now singing—off-key—to Beyoncé.

Turning back to me, he said, “What’s your point?”

“My point is that she’s obviously memorable, and she could further cement Dutch’s identity as Des Vries. We can totally use her to our advantage! If we make it to the auction, Mandy and Rick can look like the happy couple everyone remembers, while I mingle in with the crowd to figure out who has the drone. With those boobs and that hair, she’s the perfect distraction. No one’s gonna look at me or Dutch twice with that eye candy around.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, hot stuff,” Dutch said.

I grinned broadly at him. Such a good fiancé!

“How the hell do you plan to convince her to go along with it?” Frost argued.

“By promising to reunite her with Des Vries.”

Frost’s eyes widened. “
Are you insane?
Cooper, I can’t promise her that! Des Vries is in a secure location being held by the Israelis!”

“We don’t have to bring Des Vries here,” I snapped, eyeing Mandy over my shoulder to make sure she hadn’t overheard. She was still singing along to Beyoncé.

“Then what’re you suggesting?” Frost asked.

“We just have to get the Mossad to agree to let the two of them meet,” I said. “I mean, it shouldn’t be hard to sell them on a visit of, like, ten minutes or so, whatever it takes to get them to agree to let the two see each other, and we can be vague on the particulars when we offer that as an incentive to Mandy. In return, we get her to agree to help us and not tell the Canadian authorities about holding her here against her will for the past two hours or so.”

Frost glanced at my knuckles. “Or about assaulting her, huh?”

“Hey, that was self-defense,” I told him.

“It was,” Dutch agreed. “I’m the witness.”

Frost’s hands went back to his hips and he hung his head while he thought the idea through. “Fine,” he said at last. “See if you can recruit her and I’ll try to sell the idea to the director. Assuming she goes for it, I’ll have the paperwork drawn up and Mandy can sign it this afternoon.”

“Perfect!” I said, feeling really confident.

 

 

A
n hour later I was feeling notably less confident. “Let me get this straight,” I said through gritted teeth as Dutch and I sat with Mandy and worked through the terms. “You want one hundred thousand dollars
and
a guaranteed spot in the
Canada’s Got Talent
semifinals?”

Mandy nodded. “I’m an awesome singer,” she said. “I know you’ll have to rig the judging for the first round, but if I make it into the semis, I’m pretty sure I can go all the way.”

I turned to Dutch. “I’m so sorry.”

I couldn’t be sure, given the swelling, but I thought he was smiling a little. “For what?”

“Obviously, I hit her too hard. She’s delusional.”

“I am not!” she yelled at me. “I
do
have a good voice!”

I rolled my eyes and texted Frost the terms. A minute later, after receiving his reply, I said, “There is no way we can guarantee that. The best we can do is fifty grand, and a spot in line for
CGT
.”

“And I want to see Rick.”

“He’s in custody and we’re trying to clear that,” Dutch told her.

“Well, then, when this is over, I want a conjungle visit with him.”

I blinked at her. “A con
jungle
visit with him?”

She had the nerve to look at me like
I
was stupid. “Yeah. You know, where you get to have hot monkey sex with a prisoner? Conjungle visitation is what they call it.”

I handed Dutch the phone. “You get to text Frost that one,” I said, moving away while I could still resist the urge to slap her.

 

 

F
rost brought over the paperwork later that night. It’d taken much longer than we’d thought to get the CIA, the State Department, and the Mossad to iron out a “conjungle” visit between Rick Des Vries and Mandy, which she flat-out insisted was put into the agreement. The issue was that the Mossad admitted that they’d used some rather inventive ways to extract information from Des Vries, and they weren’t sure that he’d be able to . . . uh . . .
perform
any act of lovemaking—“conjungle” or otherwise. They didn’t want to agree to something that might not be physically possible. Can you believe
that
was the sticking point?

Anyway, we got around it by putting the wording in that it would be completely up to Mandy to arouse Des Vries once the two were put together sometime after the auction was over and we’d recovered the drone. It didn’t surprise me that she didn’t actually read the agreement before signing it in big swirly letters. She just assumed we had met all her demands and would keep our word.

We then sat up with her late into the evening, picking her brain about all of Des Vries’s business dealings. The more we knew, the better prepared we’d be when we got to the auction—assuming we got to the auction, that is.

Mandy knew far more than she’d originally let on, which didn’t really surprise me. My radar had suggested she’d been holding something back and she was. She knew a great deal about Rick’s weapons deals, and the information was pure gold.

By the time we’d finished at two a.m., Dutch was completely wiped out and Mandy was yawning and whining that she was tired. I motioned to Frost that it was time to quit, and helped get Dutch to bed while he showed Mandy to the spare bedroom, locking her inside. “You’ll want to post someone at the bottom of the fire escape,” I whispered to Frost as he shuffled tiredly out from the hall. “Those windows open right onto it.”

Frost nodded, then texted to someone and a moment later said, “It’s done.”

I stretched and yawned, getting down a glass to pour Dutch some water so that he could take his medication before he drifted off to sleep. “That was a good call,” Frost said to me.

I eyed him over my shoulder. “What was?”

“Recruiting Mandy.”

I gave him a sideways smile. “Thanks.”

“Dutch can reach out to Grinkov in the morning.”

“You should send Mandy along for the meeting,” I said. “It’ll look like Des Vries’s girlfriend is nursing him back to health, and Grinkov won’t eye him too closely.”

“Exactly. We just have to make sure she keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t say something that’ll blow his cover.”

“Dutch can handle her,” I assured him. When Frost eyed me skeptically, I added, “Hey, he handles me pretty well, doesn’t he?”

For the first time since I’d met him, Frost actually laughed. It was a lovely sound and I felt sad that he didn’t make it more often. “You’ve got a point there, Cooper.”

And then the moment passed and Frost was back to his serious self. “Okay, I’m gonna crash out on the couch. Why don’t you give Rivers his pain pill and get some rest yourself. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

“Got it,” I said, and headed off to bed. I hoped the next day wouldn’t be too bad. Okay, so, what I really hoped? That when Dutch called Grinkov, Maks wouldn’t mention that whole part about kissing me.

Needless to say, sleep was a long time coming that night. No surprises why.

 

 

T
he next morning I was up by eight along with Frost, but Dutch was still fast asleep and so was Mandy. “I want to let Dutch rest,” I told Frost before he’d even taken a sip of the coffee I’d poured him. “We pushed him too far yesterday.”

Frost sighed and looked at his watch. “Yeah, okay. We’ll give him another hour or two.”

I took a seat at the kitchen table opposite Frost. “No,” I said firmly. “We’ll give him the day.”

Frost opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “Listen,” I said. “He’s in no shape to do this today. He’s been beaten to a pulp, and he’s still running that low-grade fever, plus he’s exhausted. The doctor told us we needed to give him a few days of rest, and so far we haven’t given him any time at all. It’s Sunday, and Grinkov’s probably taking the day off anyway. Let’s give everybody until tomorrow morning.”