I hauled another hay bale through the barn, this one for Hawk’s ill-tempered stallion. I was wearing leather gloves. My .44 was holstered on my left hip, out of habit more than anything else. After everything that happened, I really didn’t like going around unarmed.
Jill Del Toro was standing in the barn, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and work gloves when I came back in. She carried a pitchfork and a shovel in her hands.
“Hey,” she said, sounding much more amicable than the night before.
“Mornin’,” I said, nodding at her. “Hawk drag you out of bed too?”
“What? No, I worked swing shift last night. He lets me sleep in on my days off.”
“Must be nice,” I grumbled.
“Look,” Jill said awkwardly, “I’m sorry about last night. You know, for trying to shoot you.”
“Well . . . I’m sorry I hit you,” I said.
“It’s just that I saw you, and I remembered from before, when you grabbed me, you know, and I kind of freaked, and—”
I held up my hand. “Hey, it’s cool. I know what it’s like to be twitchy.” We both fell silent for a few uncomfortable seconds.
Jill looked me in the eye. “Can I ask you something? How . . . whoa. Your eyes are different colors!”
I rolled my mismatched eyes and sighed.
“I’m sorry!” Jill insisted, embarrassed. “I’ve just never seen anyone like that before. I can’t believe I didn’t notice last night.”
“What were you going to ask me?”
“Oh, right. How did you end up here? Where do you know Hawk from?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said. “I know Hawk from way back. I used to work for him. Hell, my stuff is stored here. My Mustang is still in his garage. Unless he sold it. The question is, what the hell are you doing here?”
“We were in Zubara after that night. You know, when the fighting started. Lorenzo got hurt pretty bad dragging you out of there. He—”
I interrupted her. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop. Hang on. Back up the truck. What the hell do you mean, Lorenzo dragged me out of there?”
“Oh . . . you don’t know?”
“No, I don’t know! The motherfucker showed up in my room, pulled a knife on me, gave me this,” I snapped, pointing to the scar on my face, “and this,” I added, indicating the scar on my arm, “and I still don’t know what he was after. Now you’re telling me he rescued me?”
“Hey!” Jill said. “Your friends broke his fingers. They were torturing him!”
“What the hell was he doing in our compound in the first place?”
Jill deflated a little. “That’s, uh, that’s a long story,” she said.
“We’ve got a lot of shit to shovel,” I suggested.
“Fair enough,” Jill replied. We spent the next two hours doing various farm chores as Jill told me her story. She’d been an intern at the US Embassy when she had a run-in with Gordon Willis. Gordon had some embassy staff murdered. She went on the run, was kidnapped, and was eventually rescued by Lorenzo, in the very house where I’d blown Adar’s head off. The whole thing made my head spin.
I told her parts of my own tale as well. She laughed nervously when I explained that Gordon had described her as a dangerous traitor.
“I’m sorry about Sarah,” Jill said eventually.
“How did you know?”
“We had one of your radios for a while. and I was watching on camera when she . . .when it happened. Lorenzo has this little drone airplane.”
I exhaled. “Thank you. I’m doing okay, all things considered. So . . . where is Lorenzo now?”
“Honestly?” Jill said. “I have no idea. I haven’t tried to contact him. He could be anywhere.”
Chapter 25:
Undocumented
LORENZO
June 22
This part of the Red Sea was really more of a dirty blue.
The boat rocked in the mild waves, Saudi Arabia behind us and North Africa somewhere over the horizon. The air smelled of fish and diesel fuel. I leaned against the railing, contemplating our next move.
Reaper was sleeping in one of the passenger cabins. It had only been a couple of days since he’d been shot, and he was still looking haggard. My back still ached from the ricochet that I had picked up in the elevator, and the last member of my crew was dead. Right now I wanted to get as far away from this damnable place as possible. Our next stop would be Egypt. There was a safe house in Cairo that we could hole up in while we formulated a plan to deal with Big Eddie.
Eduard Santiago Montalban. Half brother to the billionaire businessman murdered recently in the Gulf. Raised in Hong Kong, educated at Eaton, and as far as the world knew a useless fop that lived off the family wealth. He was all over the high-society pages, philanthropist, humanitarian, playboy, all that bullshit.
In actuality, he was the one that took care of the dirty side of the Montalban family business: murder, extortion, bribery, money laundering, slave trading, you name it, Big Eddie was involved. All the years that I had worked for him, I would never have guessed who he was. At times, I’d thought that he was imaginary, a name put onto some cartel of powerful individuals. Surely, one man wouldn’t be capable of that much evil.
Allowing me to find out his true identity would be the biggest, and last, mistake that Eddie would ever make.
We would arrange a handoff for the scarab to string him along, but I planned on getting to him first. He was so fixated on getting it that a preemptive strike would be the last thing that he’d expect.
And what was in there that made it so valuable? The metal was something hard and black that I couldn’t recognize. The glowing amber liquid was a mystery. Nervous that I’d had it next to my skin for so long, I’d had Reaper check it with a Geiger counter. It wasn’t radioactive, and he couldn’t recognize it, so Reaper had hypothesized that perhaps the glow was some sort of bioluminescence. In other words, it might be alive.
Maybe it was some sort of bio-weapon? But its setting didn’t make any sense for that. Reaper, being absurdly inquisitive, had wanted to crack it open so he could get a sample to test. I’d shot that down, because I was afraid that opening it would kill us all. I just wanted to get rid of it as fast as I could. Maybe I was psyching myself out, but it made me uncomfortable just looking at it. All that we knew for sure was that it was more valuable than all of the other treasures in the prince’s vault and that Eddie was willing to kill crowds of people to get it.
My cell phone began to vibrate in my pocket, interrupting my thoughts of revenge. Glancing around, I made sure that there were no other passengers along the railing, just a couple of filthy seagulls. It was a forwarded voice mail from another one of my numbers. Suspicious, I punched in the security code. I did not give that phone number to very many people.
“You said not to use any names, so I hope you recognize my voice.” It was Jill Del Toro. “I hope you guys are doing okay with that thing you were working on. The date’s passed. I’m settled in pretty good here, thanks to you.” I was embarrassed to find myself grinning stupidly, not the way a cold-blooded criminal was supposed to act, but it was good to hear the recording of her voice. “You said to contact you if I needed help. There is something going on, something related to what happened before, from when you found me. I don’t know who else to turn to. Lo—” She caught herself then continued. “Please call me.”