Midnight Vengeance (18 page)

Chapter Eleven

Being operational was exceedingly tedious, Frederick thought. There was so much damned interaction with the physical world. He hated it. His world was virtual, rational and reliable binary code. It either was or it wasn’t. And in his hands, it mostly was.

He could sit in his very comfortable, climate-controlled study with every possible convenience at hand, and shift the levers of the world.

Instead of sitting in his $800 Eames chair that did everything but make coffee for him, he was sitting in a freezing cold midrange rental waiting for his pilot to bring the briefcase.

The driver had taken Paul Andrews to the airport. Ten minutes later, Lawrence E. Macy rented a sedan, drove two miles along the perimeter of the airport and parked. That had been an hour ago. It was pointless calling the pilot. He knew he was supposed to be here an hour ago. He knew he was in trouble.

Snow was falling softly, visible only in the cones of light of the streetlights, invisible otherwise, until it fell on the windshield. Frederick glanced up sourly at the sullen gray sky, seemingly an inch above the roof of the car. He changed his mind about the charm of Portland. Miserable town. Provincial and
cold
. Frederick vowed never to go to a northern city in winter, ever again. How did people stand it?

He could switch on the engine, put on the heater, but he preferred to keep the full tank of gas. He didn’t want to pull into any gas station with its video cameras. The plan was to drive to Anne Lowell’s house, shoot her boyfriend if he was there, inject her with a syringe of fentanyl, bundle her in this car and drive straight to the plane. But anything could happen and he wanted to keep as much gas in the tank as possible.

But it was damned cold. And he was bored.

The thought of the half million dollars warmed him, though. Down to his bones.

It would have taken him two years of Alfonso to make half a million dollars and now look at him. A simple twenty-four-hour mission to Portland and 500K was going to be deposited in his account. Of course, Frederick was going to have to kill the bodyguard/boyfriend, and Anne Lowell would be smoked, but still.

And the Caymans deal. Man, if he played his cards right that was going to be a real moneymaker. Maybe he could establish the servers directly in the Caymans and—

He jumped when someone rapped sharply at his window. The pilot, holding out the briefcase. Frederick buzzed the window down irritably, face impassive, heart still racing.

“Here, sir. I apologize for the delay. The access road was blocked and has just been cleared.” The pilot glanced up at the sky, snowflakes falling on his face, then bent down to Frederick again. “The control tower said that if it keeps snowing like this they’re shutting the airport down by 10 p.m. So whatever business you have, it would be best to be back here in two-and-a-half hours at the most.”

Frederick nodded. He intended to be very fast. Anne Lowell’s house was about a thirty-minute drive away. Forty, maybe, in this weather. She didn’t have a landline but he had checked power contracts in the name of Lauren Dare and bingo! One had come up. Then some more rooting and he came up with a cell phone number.

His business once at her house would be fast. Shoot the muscle, drug her and carry her outside to his car. Then drive to the airport, get her onboard, wait while the pilot drove the rental to the long-term parking lot—he was resigned to sacrificing his ID as Lawrence Macey—and took the shuttle back.

They should be wheels-up by 8:30 p.m.

“There will be another passenger on board on the way back,” he told the pilot through the open window. The pilot nodded. He was being paid three times the usual price for this trip. He wasn’t going to question an unconscious passenger. Not if he wanted to be paid.

Frederick waited until the pilot left to open the briefcase. Not being an operator, he was more interested in the five insulin-sized syringes in their foam cutouts than the gun. Five syringes was overkill, but better to be safe than sorry. He’d bought the syringes from a dealer who also supplied Florida’s professional elite. Fentanyl was a powerful drug that had to be calibrated carefully but it also guaranteed sleep, because fentanyl was a form of anesthesia. If you suffered from massive insomnia, as two of the dealer’s clients did, you used fentanyl or one of its opiate precursors and you could be guaranteed sleep. Too much of it and you could be guaranteed death. But the kind of insomnia suffered by the clients was cocaine-induced so they were used to dancing on the abyss.

Frederick’s dosages were carefully calibrated.

He hefted the gun with distaste. Beyond some lessons at a gun range he wasn’t proficient with firearms. But that was okay. He wasn’t going to try for a headshot. He’d aim at center mass. The boyfriend had a really broad chest. Frederick couldn’t miss.

Frederick texted his client to expect to pick “the package” up at a private airfield near Palm Beach around 4 a.m. the next morning. All in all, he didn’t expect to be responsible for Anne Lowell for more than eight hours. Everything had gone smoothly so far. This would all be over very soon.

Tomorrow morning, Frederick would be on his terrace, sipping an espresso in the sunshine, half a million dollars richer. And Anne Lowell would be singing like a bird, after which her dead body would probably be dumped into the big, wide ocean.

* * *

Jacko did take orders well. She told him what to do and he did it quietly, with no fuss, and extremely efficiently. She had splurged on a set of crystal wineglasses and crystal water glasses, which she’d left behind because crystal wouldn’t go well with her new life on the run. Now she could use them again.

Though Jacko had huge hands, he handled the glasses delicately, precisely. The cutlery was lined up like...well, like soldiers. Perfectly. When she raised her eyebrows, Jacko quirked one side of his mouth up.

“First month in the navy,” he said quietly, “and we’re all raw recruits and most of us come from what a sociologist would call disadvantaged homes and what we called dumps, and we’re sent into a mess hall with seats and a blackboard at one end. And this tiny little lady comes out, not a hundred pounds dripping wet, and she was scarier than the scariest Drill Instructor and believe me when I say that most DIs boiled straight up from hell. But even they were scared of Mrs. Billings. She gave us long talks, with diagrams on the blackboard.”

Lauren stopped stirring the frozen split pea soup she’d made a month ago, in another life, and listened to him, fascinated.

He continued working, placing the napkins with mathematical precision, folding them carefully. You could shave with the crease. “Half of us barely knew how to use cutlery. Most of us held forks like spears. Mrs. Billings walked up and down the mess halls during meals for six weeks. We’d have a lesson in dining etiquette from informal to highly formal meals and then we’d have a practice meal. You didn’t hold your cutlery right and you got whipped across the knuckles with a stick. Hard. I had some Catholic buddies and they said Mrs. Billings was meaner than any of the nuns they had as kids, and that was saying something. But she got the job done. By the end, any of us could have gone to dinner at the White House and not disgrace ourselves.”

“And you learned,” she said as he lay a dessert spoon horizontally above the plate, spoon ladle left, handle right.

“Oh, yeah.” He shook his head. “I learned everything the navy could teach me, from handling a fifty cal to eating soup.”

She turned off the burner and brought the pot to the table. “Well, you’re going to be able to show me your soup-eating skills right now. I hope you like split pea soup.” She ladled some into his bowl. He didn’t begin until she sat down, placed her napkin across her lap and started eating. Only then did he eat himself, delicately, without spilling a drop.

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “I’m not fussy about food. I’ll eat most anything, and have. But this is delicious.” He looked over at her. “Everything looks delicious.”

She still had a lot of stuff in her freezer, certainly enough to offer Jacko a decent meal. The soup, a square of eggplant parmesan, a baguette, a whole frozen cheesecake.

Lauren smiled, pleased. “Well, you saved me from a life on the run. A meal seems like a poor thanks.”

He put his huge hand on hers. “Don’t,” he said, deep voice serious. “I keep telling you. Don’t even think that way. You don’t owe me anything.”

Oh but she did. She turned to him, opened her mouth to argue, and he stopped her with a kiss. Soft, hard, soft again. Enough to make her senses swim. He pulled back and she opened her eyes with difficulty. Her eyelids felt heavy.

When he was so close like this it was as if he were this huge planet that exerted its own gravity and it messed with the neurons in her head like the moon did with the tides. He sat back, watching her closely, and she was sure she had turned beet red.

Because, well... that kiss had been pure sex. Her entire body lit up, pulsed hot.

He put his hand on hers again, her hand disappearing under his. He gave a gentle squeeze then let her hand go. “This is a great meal. But why don’t we go out to dinner tomorrow night? I heard Suzanne talk about a new French restaurant. You look like the kind of chick that likes French.”

Lauren sighed, smiled. “A restaurant. I haven’t been out to a fancy restaurant in two years.” She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “It would be like—like a date.”

“It would. We could even go to the movies after. Eat popcorn. Hold hands. Maybe smooch. Make the experience complete.”

“Sure.” She handed him an extra-large slice of cheesecake. “There’s a film on by that Danish director. The one who doesn’t believe in special effects or fancy camerawork or artificial light. It’s about a woman sliding into Alzheimer’s. Three hours long.”

“Okay,” Jacko said equably. Nothing in his deep voice betrayed any kind of emotion.

“Or... we could go to the new Spider-Man movie,” Lauren suggested.

Jacko’s lips moved slightly. But she was beginning to crack the Jacko code—in any other man it would have been a grin. “That was another test. How’d I do, coach?”

She smiled sunnily at him. “It
was
a test. And you passed with flying colors. Congratulations.”

The contours of his face changed. Became hard, almost grim. His eyes narrowed, the dark skin over his cheekbones becoming even darker, lips red with blood. He looked at her mouth, then met her eyes. There was a question there and there was only one possible answer.

“Yes,” she breathed.

Afterward, she could never remember how they got to her bedroom. Floated there, possibly because one second they were in the kitchen eating cheesecake and the next they were in her dark bedroom, clothes flying.

She landed on her back and Jacko landed on top of her, his weight almost too heavy to bear. Almost. Because it was also so incredibly exciting having him on top of her. It was the perfect position for her to touch him all over. Her hands could roam over his back, over those amazingly hard muscles that were like an anatomy chart. She could trace each one. Trapezius, deltoids, lats...Fitting over each other perfectly. Perfect, everything about him was perfect.

Everything about him was overwhelming. He was kissing her deeply, mouth moving over hers, tongue tasting her mouth, and she could lose herself in his kisses alone. He left her mouth and moved to her neck, which was, she had been astonished to discover, a huge erogenous zone for her. She’d had no idea.

When he kissed it, with that double whammy of soft lips and slightly abrasive beard, she shivered. Goose bumps rose along her arms.

“You like that,” he murmured, and his voice was dark and enticing.

“Yeah,” she breathed. “But then I like everything you do to me.”

She could feel his smile against her throat. He nipped her lightly and she jumped, pleasure coursing through her like electricity. It seemed every time they made love she became more responsive, the feelings more intense.

At this rate, she’d be dead in a month.

There was never any awkwardness in the bed with them, ever. Everything he did to her seemed to be calculated to evoke maximum pleasure. And he seemed to enjoy every touch, every kiss of hers.

How many times had a man been rough, even unintentionally? Pinched her breast instead of stroking it. Sawing at her clitoris, holding her too tightly. There was absolutely nothing of that with Jacko, the strongest man she’d ever known. The strongest man she’d ever even seen.

He never hurt her, ever. His powerful hands seemed to know exactly how to touch her, better than she knew how to touch herself. She was like a book in a language he knew how to read.

His mouth drifted down to her breast and he did that perfectly too. He never suckled too strongly, never bit her nipple hard. He licked her breast and she shivered. One big hand moved down, over her belly, cupping her mound. He didn’t have to do anything—she understood. Her legs moved apart and there he was, hand touching her where her flesh was so sensitive. His touch was perfect here, too; so perfect her sheath wept with happiness.

That’s what it felt like, anyway. She could feel moisture welling, her body reacting to him instinctively. He gave a long sigh against her breast when he felt her softening for him, becoming wetter.

He loved that and said so.

A finger was circling her flesh. His hands were rough, callused, but somehow he never hurt her. If anything, the calluses excited her, just that tiny touch of abrasion that was exciting.

“How are we doing down there, hmm?”

Lauren lifted her head slightly to look down at him. There was just enough light from the living room to see him. His eyes were closed, black lashes over high cheekbones, mouth on her breast.

His hand between her legs moved and he slid a finger inside her where she was supersensitive and she stiffened. The breath went out of her.

“We coming along?” he asked. He took her hand and curled it around his penis. “Because I sure am.”

Lauren smiled and tightened her hand. He was huge, hard as steel, big engorged veins running up his penis. “Yes,” she said, “you sure are. But you always seem to be in this state.”