Wilderness of Mirrors (2 page)

Probably why she had noticed it in the first place. Sam had an eye for design that Parsons School of Design was in the process of refining.

Only now Marc won’t graduate. Won’t work for his uncle’s architectural firm. Won’t…

“Thanks.” She paid the driver and exited behind Tamar. He surveyed the unusual street, his eyes darting in every direction, until he glanced up at her.

She touched his head in thanks, always grateful, always safe with him. Then, legs finally regained, Samantha slipped through traffic toward the parlor, Tam’s steps perfectly at ease beside hers.

I’ll have them put it on my wrist, Marc.
Right on the spot where you liked to kiss me.
And brown. Like your hair and eyes.

She ducked under a maze of scaffolding and slipped into the unfamiliar parlor. A pink-haired girl at the chic floating counter glanced up from under a studded eyebrow. Her dress was Dior, her boots Salvation Army. “Nice wolf.”

Samantha wondered if it had been said with sarcasm. There was a bitchy edge to the vixen-wannabe that even fluffy tails and gleaming fur weren’t likely to buff.

Her gaze flitted down toward the immaculate marble flooring. Almost invisible against the onyx surface, her beloved German shepherd stared at the receptionist with baleful eyes. He obviously agreed with Samantha’s sentiment. “I wouldn’t be so certain,” she murmured.

But the girl’s words got her thinking straight for the first time in days. Even the shaky tension inside her began to settle.

A wolf. How about that, Marc? Tam loves you. We both do… did.

Flint began spreading out along the underside of her skin.

Strength bordering on defiance was starting to make a comeback. Her shoulders slid back into their normal place and her nearly six feet of height returned. She let her lungs fill slowly.

She may have been foolish before, but it wouldn’t happen again.

The asshole who killed Marc wouldn’t hurt anyone else she loved, because Samantha was planning on being a very good girl.

That way her uncles would be safe.

That way Tam would always be by her side.

She’d make fucking certain of it, even if it meant selling her soul.

Her eyes, clear and sure, sought the receptionist’s. She withdrew a sheet of paper and pen from her Louis Vuitton bag. “If I sketch a Chinese character, could your artists copy it?” Already her hand was forming the sleek lines her grandfather had taught her so many years before.

The girl let her wintry gaze visit Sam’s conservative pantsuit. She ran the tip of her tongue – pierced with yet another stud – over the black lipstick covering her lower lip. There was a daring smirk to the blue depths of her heavily lined eyes. “You know it hurts like hell?”

A fiery course of rage roared hot and unexpected through Sam’s veins. Circumstances might dictate she work for a psychopathic piece of shit, but this was altogether different.

She tilted her head, establishing with not-so-subtle technique that she was far taller, and let the smile she reserved for photographers and men unfurl with a slow burn.

“Oh, pumpkin,” she breathed soft and mocking, “I suggest you stay tucked in this little paradise. Because if you’d actual visited ‘h - e - double hockey stick’ instead of looking at the brochure, then you’d know we call this kind of pain foreplay.”

There was a brief spasm of surprise in those blue orbs. And Sam indulged in several seconds of absolute stillness.

Then two fingers slid across the pristine glass surface and touched the Chinese character Sam had formed. “Jun will be the best with your request.”

“There’s a good girl,” Samantha murmured, Cantonese effortless on her tongue.

“You can go through.” The receptionist pointed Sam toward a wide sandalwood opening.

In the curved doorway stood a slim, casually dressed Asian, arms crossed over his chest cowboy-style. He had artist’s fingers and an intelligent glint to his stare. “Not just a beautiful face.” His native language reached out, warm and river-like through the room.

Samantha allowed her anger to dissolve. There was no longer room in her life for emotion. “I need a bit of myself preserved.” She pulled up the sleeve of her jacket, displaying the white of her inner wrist. “That bit there. I can spare you four square inches.”

His lips came together for a moment while he considered her words. “That is not so much.”

But the flint inside her had already turned to iron. “It’ll have to do. It’s all that’s left.”

They’d been driving almost an hour when ‘Andrus Sepp’ – British Agent Nigel Forsythe’s alias – heaved his boot across the grit on the Land Cruiser’s dash. The hunk of Japanese metal had long since lost its doors, and even the familiar jounce of springs was missing from his passenger seat. His back was aching and his head wasn’t much better. Sleep. He needed a few minutes of it or he’d cark it. Wouter, his driver, content to listen to the nonstop whine of earbuds, wasn’t in need of a navigator, so Nigel closed his eyes.

He’d already hooked his thumb through a belt loop in his fatigues and yanked the seatbelt tight. His left hand found a niche in the vehicle’s mangled roof, and for a moment, hammocked in the sandy, uncluttered heat of Africa’s dusk, he let relief flood his tense limbs.

The Colombian-grown cargo was secured. His rendezvous point was, as yet, uncompromised. And even his revenge against Ivan and Jaak, Vasiliv’s Kriminalnaya hit men, was beginning to take shape. As for Vasiliv, he’d save his execution for dessert.

Unfortunately, Nigel’s eyes didn’t believe any of it. They roved around beneath his lids, discontent and ever vigilant. He could hear his driver humming off-key. The sun was still bright enough to sink through the layers of skin and lashes. Bits of sand flecked against his outer arm. A bloody good recipe for insomnia if anyone was asking.

With a sigh, he tried to further calm himself.

Maybe he’d be able to conjure a mirage. Conjure
her
.

It wasn’t the first time.

Sleep had never come easy to him.

As a child he’d lain awake for hours, imagining what he’d build with his toys. Imagining away the Duke’s rage and Barkley Manor’s cold gray walls. Imagining how happy he’d be when summer rolled around and he was back in Africa with his grandfather.

As an adult, he tried other things. Alcohol. Exercise. Sex.

Not sleeping pills though. One night, stuck in the sticky fog of those little fuckers, had been quite enough for him. Better not to sleep at all than be trapped by it.

Because Nigel hated being trapped.

Which left him with
her
.

The blonde he’d encountered at Hong Kong Airport.

Ten years later, he still thought of her – the only woman who’d utterly perplexed him.

She had been tall and maybe twenty. Worn her long, long hair loose, with the pride of a lioness. Her dark eyes were a most unusual shade of topaz. She had an aquiline nose, Slavic cheekbones, and a determined jaw. But it was her mouth, a windfall of fickle genetics, which had imprinted itself upon his memory. Precisely the reason he’d asked to kiss her. Asked and been completely ignored…

The truck lurched as it bounced along the track exiting Laayoune. Nigel cracked an eyelid. He didn’t think there’d be trouble, but after the last eighteen months of MI6’s undercover work building a solid reputation as a drug dealer, he was damn protective of the cocaine concealed in the Land Cruiser’s cargo space.

“Qu’est-ce qui ne va pas?” he asked while his gaze swung to the wing mirror. Nothing there except miles of sand. Perhaps his driver, a wiry mid-twenties mechanic, had been looking further up the road.

But the snicker of Wouter’s Baikal trigger disabused him of that notion.

Merde. The bastard’s been bought off.

“Ce n’est pas dirigé contre vous.” Wouter shrugged as he pulled the trigger.

Snapping to life, Nigel used the break between shots to his advantage. He whipped loose a knife and sent his knee along as backup. A crack of white pain relayed success. He managed to shatter Wouter’s shooting arm and cut a straight, clean line beneath the man’s chin.

Blood spurted and the driver’s hand dropped from the steering wheel. Stuck behind his seatbelt, Nigel scrambled to grab the spinning object. Unfortunately, it eluded him and the Toyota winced once before spinning straight into hysteria. Nigel flung aside the filthy weapon and braced himself for the ride to come.

Two bloody shots
, he seethed, head cracking side to side. And where they’d visited remained to be felt. His nerves were playing games, keeping things secret until they could tally up the truck’s contribution. And the truck, which still thrashed madly across the desert’s back, had abandoned its sense of direction along with the deceased driver.

Fuck.

After an interminable time, there was a hiccup of sand being thunked, and the metal heap concluded its panic-attack with a final squeal of wipers on the windscreen. Nigel dislodged a white-knuckled hand and put an end to the machine’s screeching. Remarkably, the vehicle remained upright, now facing the tracks it had made.

He knocked back a profound breath. The cut of gunfire poisoned his spit and he wondered bleakly if the darker undertone of blood was his own or the splatter of his driver’s. Nerves still mum, he inspected his tremor-ridden right side. Crimson fireworks embroidered his sleeve and chest, while twin dark spots along his outer thigh eyed him over the mock mouth of his pocket flap.

Pain had yet to crash the party
.
So he dropped from the vehicle and limped, legs edgy and disobedient, in the general direction of Wouter’s crooked form. The sand’s voice was monotone beneath the heels of his boots. And wind striations fanned away from him, catching his dead driver in their tilted swathes.

Eying the body of the man he’d just killed – dusty and dark-flecked in the gathering night – Forsythe shivered. The chills were already beginning to descend upon him in ruffled layers.

He thrust a handful of fingers through his hair and sighed in the direction of the sun’s final bloom. The day’s heat was hurrying past, anxious as an abandoned child. He waited, hoping the red unblinking father might yet change his mind; then the parsimonious creature slipped away altogether, and so followed Nigel’s hope.

The SUV was all snarls behind him. He could sympathize. He hadn’t expected the day to blast away on such a depressing note either. His morning, in the city of Laayoune’s dichotomous sprawl, had begun brightly enough with mint infused hot water and fruit.

The lack of proper tea hadn’t even been a dampener.

It was what came later, the part when Wouter had become an enemy and then another corpse on the African landscape. The young man, with an eye on immigration and an admirable indifference to religions, had ultimately reminded Nigel of the bedbugs he’d found at the crest of his mattress, disappointing, but not unexpected.

The sun was well and truly gone now. A cruel shudder racked the agent’s lean frame. His balm-like adrenaline rush had faded and the spiky dullness of Pain’s bite was just warming up. His eyes had begun to burn and he was flirting with dizzy. He forced himself to focus and bent to rifle the driver’s pockets. No use leaving evidence for the local gangs or UN officials. Let them scratch their heads and wonder how this body came to be so far from the city. When he finished dry cleaning, he rolled to his heels and felt the tilt of blood rushing where it shouldn’t.

“Fils de pute.” He sucked a shot of air through clenched teeth and shoved the handful of spongy tala and Wouter’s watch into his vest. Then he cleaned his retrieved knife on the dead man’s sleeve and hauled himself upright.

Cold sweat pricked his ribcage. Part of him was upset it had ended this way. Yet, Wouter
had
double-crossed him. He’d taken the Queen’s shilling and tried to shift it for cocaine. Death, Nigel decided, was a fitting end, just like darkness after a blistering day.

And tonight was darkness personified. There was comfort in its obscuring embrace.

Tonight, his mistress-of-a-job spoke Moroccan Arabic and wore a veil of Sahara sand. She was, in Nigel’s view, cross as well. Things had been quiet for too long, and her name wasn’t Peril without cause.

He coughed the ubiquitous sand from his mouth and put in a request to the gods for mist at his mission’s end. Living was supposed to be a superior substitute for edge-cut black leaves, so he placed one Vibram-soled boot in front of the other and made for the dead man’s battered vehicle.

He slid through the door-less gap, wondering if it had been lost in the MdS desert race, and turned a tight ‘U’. He’d make it to the nameless beach before the helicopter left, sleep en route to the Canary Islands, and then get some tea.

To hell with ‘what ifs’. He played The Game as he played chess – reactively. Change as you go. Be fluid. Boxless. Barless. Bottomless. He liked his options to surprise him, even if his former chess instructor and SIS Director in the Field thought it sacrilege.

He consulted his Omega AquaTerra. The dagger hands glinted in the faint starlight, assuring him of both time and distance. Only 15k to the rendezvous point. Open desert, then - without more help from Lady Peril - open sea.

A walk in Hyde Park.

Ground undulating beneath him, Nigel let the vehicle traverse the dunes with the hand of a ship’s captain. He kept the seatbelt off, held his gun across the curve of the wheel and flinched fractionally when the tossing vehicle pressed against the torn flesh of his thigh. A thigh about which he really should have done something.

Yet the stars appeared less than worried about his fate, so he took his cue from their indifference. Who was to say if he stopped to bandage himself, he wouldn’t step on a snake or, worse, a landmine?

Forty minutes later, sea sounds and cool fog a pleasing contrast to baked leather and too much of his own blood, Nigel flashed the vehicle’s lights at the spot where his ride would be waiting.