‘Now, Michael,’ she whispered into her microphone.
She crossed the street, dodging the traffic as she hopped up onto the sidewalk a few paces behind Wilms. The Majestic Twelve agent reached his vehicle and reached out for the rear door handle.
‘Victor!’
Lopez’s delighted cry made several heads turn, including Wilms’. The old man stared directly at her from less than two yards away, and to her genuine delight Lopez saw a brief tremor of panic flicker behind his eyes. The momentary lapse revealed a powerful man who was weak within, cosseted and protected from the vengeance of those he controlled and victimized.
The panic dissolved as Wilms straightened from the door, Lopez knowing that he could not get into the vehicle faster than Lopez could tackle him.
‘Nicola,’ Wilms replied with a smile devoid of warmth. ‘Good to see you up and about.’
Lopez closed to within a couple of feet of Wilms, her hands still in her pockets as she fought the urge to swing a right hook across this asshole’s jaw.
‘No thanks to you,’ she hissed back. ‘How much did the assassin cost you, Victor?’
‘Me? Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Don’t worry yourself, Nicola. You’re not worth an expensive hit, and before you even think about it we can’t be recorded. There are enough digital distortion devices in this vehicle to prevent any external monitoring.’
Lopez wasn’t interested in Wilms’ ride.
‘We got you,’ she said simply. ‘Got Majestic Twelve on film, right here in the city and in the company of none other than Gordon LeMay, Director of the FBI. That’ll look good on the evening news, don’t you think? Federal boss cavorting with billionaires in Manhattan Penthouse suite, being drugged by them and abducted.’
Wilms did not shift an inch.
‘You have footage of a man in the company of friends, Nicola, nothing more.’
‘Then where is he?’
‘Somewhere safe,’ Wilms replied, ‘a private hospital. Not one of the grubby halls that you and your kind fester in, believe me.’
‘My kind?’
‘The unwashed masses,’ Wilms sneered.
‘We’re coming for you,’ Lopez said. ‘One at a time, we’re going to bring every last one of you down to our level and see how long you last, starting with you.’
‘Is that so?’ Wilms taunted as he looked about them. ‘And how are you going to do that, Nicola? You have no power of arrest over me, and even if you did I would be out within hours. I have friends so powerful the President of this country would piss his pants if they so much as looked at him.’
‘And where are they, right now?’ Lopez asked casually as she too looked about the street.
‘Go ahead,’ Wilms challenged her as he thrust his wrists in her direction and scowled. ‘Arrest me and see how long it is before I’m out and your life as you know it is over. I can have your face all over the media within hours, arrested for crimes you haven’t even heard of. You’ll spend the rest of your life rotting in some forgotten cell and nobody will give a damn about you.’
Lopez smiled but said nothing as she turned and walked away, Wilms shouting behind her.
‘You’re nothing, Lopez! You’re not even history because you’re not important enough!’
Wilms climbed into his vehicle and slammed the door shut, enveloped in a cloud of anger as he snapped at the drive.
‘JFK, right now! My jet is waiting.’
The driver slipped the vehicle into drive and pulled out into the flow of traffic as they headed north out of Manhattan. It was only moments before Wilms noted that they were headed in the wrong direction.
There was no need to scold the driver, no sense in arguing about which direction they were taking, for Wilms knew that he would not be taken to JFK in this car. He did not know how it had been done, but he did know that this vehicle could not be the one in which he had arrived at the hotel.
Wilms dove for the door handle but it was already locked. He reached for his pistol, concealed as it always was beneath his coat, but it was already too late for that as he saw the driver point a pistol over his shoulder at Wilms.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ the driver snapped. ‘Sit still.’
The driver pulled into the sidewalk again and the door opposite Wilms opened. A large form climbed into the vehicle and slammed the door shut, and Wilms’ guts contracted involuntarily as he looked into the eyes of Aaron Mitchell.
‘I did what you said,’ Wilms uttered in feeble defiance. ‘I gave you MJ-12!’
Mitchell reached out with one giant hand and retrieved the pistol from Wilms’ hand, then passed it to the driver who stashed the weapons before he drove back into the flow of traffic and headed north.
‘You’re making a mistake,’ Wilms uttered to Mitchell, masking the dread in his belly with a thin veil of defiance. ‘I’ll be free within hours.’
Aaron Mitchell sat with his hands folded in his lap as he considered his reply for what felt to Wilms to be hours. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and yet seemed as threatening as ever.
‘No, you will not,’ he rumbled. ‘You will tell me where Gordon LeMay has been taken.’
Wilms scowled.
‘You think that I know that? You think that even if I did I’d tell you? This is a game far too big for you to handle, Aaron. You’re a spent force, too weak to be of any value. MJ-12 will find you no matter what you do to me, and when they do they will crush you without mercy.’
Aaron smiled and looked across at Wilms.
‘So much for the idea of an MJ-12 family,’ he replied.
‘You walked away from us.’
‘You betrayed me,’ Aaron countered as his voice dropped to a growl. ‘And now you’ll pay the price.’
Wilms scoffed and sat back in his seat.
‘Thumb screws and electricity?’ he snapped. ‘None of it will do you any good Aaron, I don’t know where LeMay is and I don’t give a damn. The fat ass had it coming and if I’d had my way we’d have liquidized him years ago.’
Aaron inclined his head.
‘I don’t doubt it, Victor,’ he said. ‘Of course, you do understand that this vehicle is not being driven by your normal driver and that all of the distortion devices have been deactivated, so in fact every word you’ve been saying to me and to Nicola Lopez has been recorded.’
Wilms’ features paled, outrage quivering like sheet lightning behind his eyes.
‘It doesn’t matter!’ he spat back. ‘You can’t touch me!’
‘No, we can’t,’ Aaron replied. ‘But we can touch Timothy Morris.’
Wilms stared blankly at Aaron. ‘Who? What the hell are you talking about?’
The vehicle was leaving the city, and with a sudden jolt of fear he spotted the signs heading out of the Upper East Side that the driver was following.
‘What are you doing?!’ he demanded.
Aaron smiled, his eyes as cold and black as oil as he leaned closer to Wilms and replied.
‘You’re coming back down to Earth with a thump,’ he growled, ‘and you’re going to spend the rest of your life where you should have been all along. With the scum of the Earth.’
Wilms looked at the signs passing them by, his blood running cold in his veins.
RIKER’S ISLAND
‘Timothy Morris,’ Aaron said, ‘sixty two years old, a convicted pedophile and murderer. You were arrested in the company of two pre-adolescent girls trafficked from Lithuania, both of whom were strapped to your bed in your apartment, the victims of repeated rapes. Your fourth arrest across several states, which means that you’re going down for life without parole, although it’ll take at least a year for your trial to be heard.’