Mission Critical
“I hope you’re right.”
“You have a plane to catch, mate. We’ll see you once you get to London. I’ll have a taxi pick you up, one of ours, with a driver who knows what he’s doing. He’ll take you to the Peruvian embassy; I have an arrangement with them that they’ll shelter people before I get them out of the country.”
“You do this sort of thing a lot, do you?”
“Only when required. Just relax, do what you do, the same way you always do it, and everything will be fine. In forty-eight hours you’ll be at that dacha we bought for you in Ekaterinburg, and living an easy life.”
“Don’t try to sell me bullshit, Black. It won’t be an easy life.”
“It definitely won’t be if you don’t find a way to modulate your tone before the two of us finally meet face-to-face tomorrow.”
Wheeler closed his eyes. He needed Black now. Everything that had led up to today had resulted in this mysterious Englishman being his only lifeline. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t trouble yourself. You’ll be fine when you get here.”
Wheeler hung up, eyed the big man in the aviators again, then stood to head back to his car. It was farther up the lot from the man surveilling him, so he didn’t have to walk by him, but still he gave the man an extra-wide berth.
Soon he was in his Nissan and heading towards Ronald Reagan to board a commercial flight to London.
* * *
• • •
Court Gentry and Donald Fitzroy sat patiently in the Mercedes, eyeing the Red Lion Club across the street. They were giving Cassidy enough time to scan the room for bugs and to settle in before flipping on the transmitters.
Soon the Englishman broke the silence. “Let’s say Cassidy says something that implicates him in whatever’s going on. What are you going to do?”
“Whether or not he says anything, when he leaves here I’m going to grab him by his collar, put a gun in his ribs, take him to a basement somewhere. Then I will start cutting pieces off him till he tells me what I need to know.” He turned back to Fitzroy. “I’ll wait for him to leave your club. I won’t burn the place to the ground.”
“I do greatly appreciate your discretion.”
Court nodded to his friend and former employer. “Thanks for all this.”
“For nothing, lad. Anytime. But allow an old man to offer some advice.”
“What’s that?”
“You know . . . you know you can’t do this sort of thing forever, don’t you?”
Court touched his still-painful jaw with his fingertips, then looked down to the laptop with the listening software on it. “Depends on your definition of forever. I wake up every morning wondering if today is the day that forever runs out for me. But this is all I know, and I’m pretty good at it, so—”
Fitzroy leaned forward, between the seats. “Let some other poor sod get good at it! You need to get out of it! You’ll die on this bloody job, and you are smart enough to realize that.”
It occurred to Court that Sir Donald had never talked like this back when he was making a commission on Court’s operations. But he still felt the old man had genuine affection for him, so he didn’t judge. “Yeah, no question I’ll die on this job. But there’s always some new asshole that needs dealing with, and I have a hard time turning away from that.”
Fitzroy nodded. “Well . . . if I can’t convince you to stop, perhaps I can remind you to keep your head down.”
Court said, “That I can do.” He put his fingers on the buttons of the micro notebook. “Okay, let’s listen in on this asshole.”
Court flipped the transmitter on, but as soon as he looked back up he saw a pair of black Range Rovers pulling up in front of the Red Lion Club. Court’s eyebrows furrowed as a three-man security team exited the chase vehicle, and a single young, fit man climbed out of the front passenger seat of the first Rover and opened the back door.
A man in his sixties exited the vehicle; he was heavy with a mostly bald head and an expensive-looking suit. He headed up the steps and through the front door of the Red Lion Club with three of his body men staying close to him the entire time.
Court said, “Is that bald-headed dude a member?”
“No,” Fitzroy said. “But I recognize him. That ‘bald-headed dude,’ as you put it, is on the list you showed me.”
“The list of Russians? I thought you said your club didn’t let Russian gangsters in.”
“Yes, well, this bloke isn’t a gangster. That’s Vladimir Belyakov, the oligarch. Owns a football club, department stores; hell, he owns as much land as the queen.”
Court looked back over his shoulder in astonishment. “Really?”
Fitzroy snickered. “An exaggeration, lad. The point is, he’s got the money to walk in any door in this dirty city he wants to walk in. He’s not a member of the Red Lion, but I’ve seen him there a time or two.”
Court reached down and turned the volume up on the receiver app on the laptop. Almost immediately he and Fitzroy, who had his own Bluetooth earpiece in, listened to the squeak of a heavy door straining on its hinges, then the sound of the door shutting.
“The room’s been swept?” a Russian-accented voice asked.
The response came in British-accented English. “Just did it. Let me pour you some tea.”
“I don’t want tea. I want to know what happened.”
“Dead bodies all over my office. That’s what happened. The police are swarmin’ the bloody place now.”
“What might they find as they look around, Terry?”
“My safe was broken into.”
“Your safe? What would someone possibly be looking for in your safe?”
Court detected a tone from the Russian that indicated he was aware of more than he was letting on.
Cassidy hesitated. “After I got the call about the gunfight from building security, I managed to get in and take out all the incriminating evidence left behind before the cops arrived.”
“All the evidence left behind. You are saying there was something missing.”
“Yes,” Cassidy said, after a moment’s delay. “The computer with the client data. It was well protected, but the bloody thing is gone. It’s got your name in there, Vladi.”
Even through the audio Court could tell that Belyakov already had this information. He seemed completely unfazed when he said, “That is extremely unfortunate for you, because I was a good client, whom you have now forever lost.”