Wilderness of Mirrors (29 page)

But for that, she would have missed him. He was dressed as the rest, walked like the woman beside him was his wife and perhaps their hands had just come apart when he adjusted the skate hanging from his shoulder. His face was forgettable. The look in his eyes was not.

She held his gaze for as long as it took to reach the bin nearest her. Then, without glancing at the directives, she cast them through the slot. Her contact snarled once in the direction of the Pagoda.

Which was when Sam did the same.

Boots didn’t need glasses to tell him something was wrong.
Bugger all
, he fumed.
Hadn’t that bastard’s nephew been enough inducement?

The mobile in his pocket vibrated. He yanked at it. “What the devil just happened?”

The contact’s voice was low. “She tossed your info into a bin.”

“Well, go and get them.” Boots squinted out the window.
What the fuck?
Now she was heading directly for him. Her eyes locked at the height of his window. He stepped back, surprised to feel her anger. Subtle resignation was more her style.

He clicked the mobile off, reminding himself she couldn’t possibly see him. Not at this distance. She’d likely parked her Audi by Lion’s Gate and had to pass near the Pagoda on her way out. If she saw his car, she’d simply assume he’d taken an evening stroll around the gardens. She was well aware he loved it here.

She was closer now, face still tilted up. He watched her for a few seconds – fine example of her sex, Ms. Bond.

Then her mouth, that ripe wide slash of ecstasy he’d always wanted wrapped around his cock, moved very slowly to a sardonic smile.
Christ, she can see me!
Or if she couldn’t, she bloody well knew he was there.

“Fuck you, Mr. Turner. I’m out.”

His hair was charged with fear.
She knows? When? How?
He waited a moment more, sifting his options. Perhaps he could threaten the actuary. Or Jane Teller. Tamar even – where the hell was the dog?

She raised her hand. Crooked a finger at him. Then walked away on a perpendicular path. He fairly fell down the stairs trying to catch her.
Damn bitch! Just like her mother, vulnerable and overconfident right up to the end.

He crashed through a family of Chinese tourists milling at the bottom of the structure. “Move!” His feet hit the icy grass running, and only momentum kept him from sprawling. By the time he rounded the corner, she was far ahead: her aim, no doubt, the Treetop Walk. He increased his efforts, hoping to catch her before she made the ladder.

His gun was heavy against his ankle; it kept him from reaching top speed. He contemplated shooting her. There wasn’t a soul to see him do it in this section of quiet trees. He would catch her in the leg and have Ivan help him carry her back to his flat. He could get a doctor in to treat her and no one would be the wiser.

She was on the stairs now. Rust-colored and caged. He cursed, knowing his shots would be deflected. What in Christ’s name was she up to? There was no escaping the two-hundred-foot-high canopy walk.

He made the bottom of the five-turned stairwell as she started out along the wobbly mesh and wood walkway stretching above him through the darkened wood.

Boots pulled his gun from its holster and charged up behind her. She wouldn’t hear the clanging of his feet, but she sure as hell would feel him coming. It was dark up there. Empty. He would begin to turn that anger of hers to fear. He would be her worst nightmare.

Fuck him?
She sure as hell would. Up there. In the bloody, wide-open cold, he’d finally have done with it. And when he was finished, God help her.

His hand slid over the rail as he crested the fourth turn.

It was a mistake pretending she was his daughter. One look at her told an honest man otherwise. Boots supposed he should have thanked Vasily Demidov before having him driven off the road.

It would have been a bookend memory to Kirstin’s death.

And the perfect post-coital tale for their only daughter.

He laughed, wishing quite unselfishly that Sam
could
hear him.

Having just entered Kew, Brad missed the exchange by a pair of heartbeats. What he did see puzzled him. Sammy tossed the tube of papers into a rubbish bin without once glancing at it. Her eyes were busy, locked on a Slavic-looking bloke dressed like someone’s parent.

It was the glasses that threw Brad for a moment. Those and the goofy, pompom hat. But there was no doubt; the contact was Ivan Drasnov. Brad had seen the man’s photo at a debriefing. This was the piece of shit Russian who’d gone and fucked with Nigel’s head. So why the hell was he in London brush-passing documents to an interior decorator?

Brad watched the woman he thought he knew walk away. When Ivan dipped back to retrieve the discarded papers, Brad moved. Two minutes passed before the opportunity was right. Squeezed between a kiosk and a pair of heavy tourists, Brad intercepted the communiqué.

By the time Ivan noticed, Brad was tucked into an alcove on the far side of the greenhouse, snapping photos of the Chinese Embassy’s floor plans and guard rotations, and talking to HQ. “Agent Milton here. COMINT from the man in the second picture, Ivan Drasnov. Check affiliation with Samantha Bond, first photo. There’s already a file on her.” Brad watched Sammy through the breaks in stark trees wondering just when he’d lost his touch.

He finished the transmission as she paused. The tilt of her head suggested her eyes were resting on the Pagoda’s top floor. Someone was up there. Brad could feel him now. It was not a friendly encounter. Frisson crackled in her posture. Then she lifted her right arm and beckoned the unseen watcher.

She turned, abruptly, and Brad lost sight of her. He flung himself into motion, covering the ground between them on silent, blurred feet. When he got within site of her trajectory, he stilled his body and breath against the weathered bulk of a horse chestnut tree.

She passed him by at a clip only endless legs could muster. She wasn’t running, but it was damn near close. So she expected to be followed. The path to his right tapered and turned until it spilled out beneath the Xstrata exhibit. He’d gone to its opening with Giselle. A miserable bloody experience. Why on earth the woman had chosen to wear heels was beyond his skills of deduction.

Brad heard a flurry of fractious Chinese. He kept his breath within the snapped crossover of his jacket until the object of their displeasure charged by, all bullish neck and thudding fury.

Wellington Turner.

The night was carbonated with all and sundry.

Brad kept pace, just out of Boots’s sightline, until they reached the wrought-iron access. But when Turner stopped to retrieve his hidden semiautomatic, Brad’s chest exploded with terror. He contemplated a tackle, deciding against it when he reached the same conclusion as Boots. There was no clear shot.

Brad’s eyes swung high to where Sammy had exited onto the catwalk. Only then did he guess her plan.

It was the proverbial end of the line. She’d purposely burned her mission, compromised her identity and cut off all avenues of escape. She was using herself as bait, figured Boots couldn’t do anything until they both stood along the shadowed skywalk. Brad thought back to the day he’d navigated the iron length, Giselle bitching up a storm behind him. It was fitted with nature-observation cameras hidden below each of the information stations.

He grabbed his mobile and texted the ICT department. They’d pull the feed from Kew’s cameras, and if he knew Sam, they’d be able to ‘hear’ everything she said. Tonight she laid a trap that would have made C proud.

It was a simple one.

And it terrified Brad.

Because it ended with Boots being incriminated and her being tagged and bagged.

N
igel couldn’t decide if his vision was blurring or if the lights around him were hazy. Either way, he was an ocean’s length from feeling par. He let the knife rest against his right hand. There was still time. Maybe pain and exhaustion were making him hallucinate.

“Sit down.” Vasiliv didn’t indicate which of the five seats he meant.

Nigel took the one kitty-corner to the mob-boss’s right hand. It would be an awkward shot, even for a professional. It gave Nigel the advantage.

Vasiliv pushed over a silver platter of macaroons. “They’re tastier than they look, which is saying something. I thought the waiter had brought me dried dog shit. It is obvious looks can be misleading, no?” His scarred face rippled as he touched a napkin to it. They were creations of glass and fire, those scars. Mean ones. Like Vasiliv had been thrown through a windscreen by a gusting inferno. Too bad he hadn’t died.

“You would have me believe you’re all sweetness under that wreckage?” Nigel asked.

His host managed a smile, a feat given the loss of muscles on the right half of his jaw. “I’d say try me, but I didn’t figure you for a queer.”

Nigel broke off an edge of brown meringue. Clean, smooth chocolate met his tongue. Beneath was burst of fine sugar and pistachio.

“Nice, yes?” Vasiliv pointed to his own plate with a fork. “But this, the grapefruit sorbet, it has no equal. Try some.” He stabbed up a portion of pink puree.

Nigel dismissed the curious request. “I think I’m coming down with a cold. One of your men was kind enough to favor me with it.”

The fork was redirected. Vasiliv swallowed, nodding. “That would be Jaak, one of Ivan’s pets. London born. Muscovites don’t speak Russian with such piss-poor accents.” He scooped up a second bite, dipping it into the accompanying soufflé. His eyes flashed merriment. Altogether Sam’s, they were.
Gonna make the bastard difficult to kill
. “Which means either you
are
queer or Jaak had better luck feeding you.”

Nigel finished the macaroon. “I caught him spying and got too close disarming him.”

“That can’t have been pleasant.”

“No.”

Things remained civil a few lingering, aromatic moments longer. Then Vasiliv’s face solidified. “I don’t like being lied to, Nigel Forsythe.”

Nigel studied the mutilated countenance. The fury beneath it wasn’t an act. A handful of seconds was all he had left. He owed Sam this at least. So he said, “Neither do I, Vasily Demidov.”

Demidov hadn’t used his true surname in a pair of decades. It lunged at him, startling as a viper. His eyes flitted to the curtain. But neither Sergei nor his driver had entered the private salon.

For now, my secret is shared with only one. An interesting one at that.

Andrus Sepp, drug supplier or Nigel Forsythe, English actuary and aristocrat?

Either way, the man kept his left shoulder bent to ward a blow and chose a seat that would make his killing difficult. Yet his eyes were relaxed and gave nothing away.

Vasily respected the quality of his guest’s Russian too. Perplexing how well spoken this Englishman was. Nothing in the formation of even the most-mouthful of Cyrillic words hassled him. For his part, Demidov pronounced English diphthongs like a pinched cat and interchanged w’s with v’s. Kirstin had mimicked him one night over too much wine.

Vasily swallowed thoughts of her with the last of his pudding. He too had learned to control his impulses. To keep from showing surprise. The fact his face was cemented into Kruschev’s burial mask, wide, high cheeked and full of vile formidability, didn’t hurt either. “An interesting piece of gossip for a cocaine salesman,” he said at length.

The blue eyes flicked beneath sandy brows as Forsythe bit into another meringue. It was an unhappy thing that Demidov liked this man when he was planning to kill him.

“You haven’t paid me for the first installment.”

“Dead men don’t have much use for rubles.”

Forsythe washed down the threat with a mouthful of the water. “Tell that to the Greeks and Egyptians.”

Vasily snorted.

Nigel leaned in, sinew and the scent of dried blood emphasizing his competence. He wasn’t afraid, this man. Not a bad trait in Vasily’s experience. “And while we’re at it, tell
me
why the hell you’ve never once tried to contact your daughter.”

If the Englishman had skewered him with a broken almond, Demidov would have been less surprised. “My daughter,” he felt his lungs constrict and growled, “and her mother were killed seventeen years ago.”

Nigel was excellent at reading people. And whatever Vasily’s current crimes might have been, lying about his child’s death wasn’t one of them. There was a settled grief imbedded in his features like an insect in amber. “How did they die?”

“A car bomb.”

“Like the inferno that shredded you?” Nigel felt a brush of air where Vasiliv’s freshly acquired weapon twisted beneath the table. He added, “It won’t be an easy fight. Not in here.”
You’re fast though.

Vasily wasn’t cowed. “For whom do you work? Absolutely no bullshit or I’ll gut you.”

Nigel’s knee went wide without a flash of counsel. He pinned what he now took to be a knife against a table leg and whipped his hand round to grip Vasiliv’s wrist. Nigel’s own knife was locked between his sleeve and corded tendons. “SIS, not unlike your daughter’s mother
– and you
.” He paused, wondering if the dampness seeping through his jeans was blood or grapefruit juice.

A snarl pulled at the less damaged portion of Vasiliv’s lips. “Then you’ll know
who
as well as
how
it was done. Your fucking government had a leak. Regrettably for my family, the blame was put on Kirstin.”

Nigel remembered C’s words only too well.” “And you maintain her innocence? Your innocence?”

“Enough.” Vasiliv’s fingers released the knife. Nigel spun it with his knee and kicked it away. “What business do you have with this? It’s my story, my heartache, my revenge.”

Nigel let his own weapon drop between his third and fourth fingers. The lights around them were indeed growing hazy. Perhaps Vasily had nicked Nigel’s lateral circumflex artery. Or maybe the macaroons were fouled. He said, “It’s my business because I owe it to her.”

Vasiliv stilled. “Who?”