Ethan Justice: Origins (Ethan Justice #1) (16 page)

“What time is it?” he asked, as she rolled away.

She jumped. “Don’t do that. How long have you been awake?”

“Only about ten minutes. I didn’t move because I didn’t want to wake you up.” John reached over and grabbed his new Rolex. “The time is exactly nine oh one,” he announced.

Savannah had bigger worries than the time. How long had she been spooning up to him? Whatever did he think of her? Last night she had offered him sex in return for a favour. Very un-prostitute like, not! Now he had woken up with her attached to him.
Get cooler, Savannah,
she told herself.

“I’m used to sleeping alone,” she said. “Sorry if it bothered you.”

“Hardly noticed it.”

What was that supposed to mean? Was he used to waking up with lots of different women? It didn’t seem that way when he had found her in his bed yesterday. Talk about a scene. Then once he knew she was on a rate, didn’t his face change. Whatever could have been between them had been destroyed long before she had offered herself in return for the agents’ help with Christos. She realised that, even if they got through today and whatever lay beyond, they were never going to be an item.

Savannah’s musings were curtailed by a knock at the door. Rather than venture downstairs and eat breakfast with the rich and influential, they had elected to have breakfast in the suite where they could talk about her predicament in private. She had quite fancied a delve into how the rich and successful behaved at breakfast but she doubted if circumstances would have permitted her to appreciate the exercise.

John made no move to answer the door, so she pulled off the covers, slid out, and did it herself. In the fluffy white dressing gown provided to all guests and worn by both bedfellows, in the agreed pursuit of avoiding further embarrassment, she released the chain from the door.

“Wait a sec,” John said.

“What is it?”

“How do we know it’s breakfast?”

Savannah sent John an ‘are you nuts’ look. “Because we ordered it for nine o’clock,” she said in answer to his daft question. She gripped the door handle.

“Just humour me and check.”

Savannah withdrew her hand and shook her head. She knew that he was right but nobody would be crazy enough to attack them inside the world’s most prestigious hotel - would they? She leaned over to the door keeping her feet well back in case whoever stood on the other side attempted to break the door down. It all seemed so bizarre.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Room service, Madam. Breakfast for two.”

Savannah looked back at John who shrugged. What else could she ask? She opened the heavy door slowly, remaining behind it all the time. If they had a gun they could shoot at John first. A smartly dressed man in a dark Ritz uniform entered with a trolley loaded with wonderful smells. There were two tall glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice; two covered plates containing scrambled eggs with grilled bacon, sausage, mushrooms and tomatoes; a pot of steaming-hot tea; two Danish pastries; two enormous muffins and finally, two golden croissants.

If the elderly gent who kindly unloaded the trolley of its treats and laid them all lovingly out at the dining table for two was going to murder them, she hoped they could eat first.

“I’m very sorry, Madam,” the uniformed man said.

“You are?” Savannah replied, frowning.

The waiter cleared his throat behind his hand before continuing. “As you are cash customers, I’m afraid that management has instructed me to collect payment for breakfast upon delivery.”

Savannah and John looked at each other. Savannah remembered that all of their cash was in John’s big waxed jacket. She ran to the wardrobe and returned with a fifty pound note which she offered to the waiting employee. He didn’t take the note. His training clearly forbade him to show surprise, discomfort or any other emotion that the situation might have been causing him. He was very good at his job.

“Sorry, Madam, but two English breakfasts at thirty-six pounds each makes a total of seventy-two pounds.”

“I’m sorry,” she said returning to her hanging coat. “I thought I’d picked up a five hundred pound note.”

What had she just said? She knew there was no such note, right? She looked at John whose mouth had disappeared behind his hand but she could see the laughter in his eyes.
Bastard.
This time she took small and slow steps on her way back with two fifty pound notes in her hand. She looked into the old man’s eyes. There wasn’t a hint of emotion in there. She handed him the cash.

“Keep the change,” she said.

This time a thin-lipped broad smile stretched across his face giving him the look of a man ten years younger, although, what age that placed him at, she wasn’t at all sure. She was a dither with acute embarrassment which the heat from her cheeks confirmed.

“Thank you very much, Madam,” he said, backing away. “Thank you very much indeed.”

When the door closed behind the waiter John removed his hand from his face to reveal cheeks full of air. Savannah delivered her fiercest stare.

“Don’t say a bloody word,” she said.

*

A chilly wind greeted John and Savannah as they turned off Piccadilly and into the side street where Aphrodite’s Angels was situated. The sun appeared intermittently between fast-moving, cotton wool clouds. As expected, the street was quiet, offering little to attract the masses at this time of day.

John’s new and improved Rolex Daytona told him it was 9:15 A.M. He unscrewed the smaller button above the winder on the watch. Unlike his original this did not enable the stop/start function but sent a signal to agents Johnson and Wilson. Hopefully, if the need arose to set off the transmission, the pair of agents would make good on their promise of rapid assistance. With the button already unscrewed he could now activate the watch without making it too obvious. They stopped one door down from their destination and peered into the window of the independent travel agents.

Savannah wore John’s black coat over her new black dress. John wore the jacket, shirt and trousers from Harrods. He could have done with an extra layer to protect him from the cold but his anorak didn’t suit the image he was looking to portray. Savannah fiddled with her earlobes in which she had inserted simple gold stud earrings bought on route. Her fidgeting was clearly down to nerves and John could hardly blame her. He put his need to urinate down to the cold but he knew he was kidding himself.

“Remember what I said and we’ll be fine,” John said, gently taking her hand from her ear.

“They itch. They’re probably not even real gold for ten quid.”

John spoke slowly and clearly. “Keep calm, Savannah. It’s just nerves. You’ll be perfect. It will all be over before you know it.”

Savannah’s reaction was far from calm. “That’s easy for you to say. If this goes wrong, I could be in Saudi Arabia tomorrow.” She pleaded with her eyes, which conveyed emotion more readily and powerfully than any other part of her face. “Couldn’t we just run with the money that we’ve got? Wouldn’t that solve all of our problems?”

“And go where?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long do you think the money would last?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Savannah. You’ve been a victim all your life. This is your chance to take a chance on me. I’m scared too, believe me, but stick to the script and we’ll get through it together.”

She grabbed his hand and held it with both of hers. Her grip was tight and her eyes still begged him to take care of her. “You promise?”

“Trust me,” he replied. He had said the same words many times to his parents and probably to others, but for the first time in his life, he actually meant them.

The shop front of Aphrodite’s Angels consisted of two large glass panes, from floor to ceiling, and a pair of electric sliding doors with long vertical brushed-aluminium handles at their centre. The glass alone looked thick enough to stop bullets but in addition there were steel security shutters and an alarm system for after-hours protection. Did the escort business have after hours? Wasn’t it a twenty-four-seven kind of industry?

Each spotlessly bright pane had a larger-than-life, large-breasted silhouette of a model in hot pink below ‘Aphrodite’s Angels’, which was written with an exotic font in the same brash colour. Savannah slid her arm through John’s as they entered the escort agency. It wasn’t how John had planned it but it didn’t look out of place. He gritted his teeth, hoping that her action was down to nerves and she would keep to the script from now on.

As the doors swished together behind them, Savannah nudged John at once to signal that it was Christos’s wife behind the large contemporary desk. The plump woman with long straight dyed-black hair looked up when they entered. John reckoned she was in her mid-thirties. A quizzical look appeared on her face but she said nothing and soon returned her attention to the glossy magazine she was holding.

A plasterboard-walled office to the right of Christos’s wife took up one-quarter of the available space. The remaining floor area formed an ‘L’ shape around the office where the more secretive business was undoubtedly processed. The floor was covered in a cream carpet so thick it significantly gave when John walked on it, like old wooden flooring but without the spring. The walls were painted in a soft pink and carried large framed photos of the prize girls on offer. A black leather sofa leaned against the right-hand wall a few feet away from the office. The office door was to the right of Christos’s wife. John wondered if his plan had backfired and Christos was waiting inside.

Wandering around the floor area, they stopped occasionally to look at the hanging photographs. The women were obviously made up to the nines and airbrushed before being given their space on the wall. Such creatures were not natural beauties but the result of breast implants, beauty products and Photoshop effects.

John gently tugged Savannah in the direction of the desk where they occupied the two soft-cushioned black chairs. He felt her tremble through the big coat. He hated himself for putting her through this but the fear suited her role. John spoke in a thick Russian accent, stolen and spliced from many an old Cold War movie.

“You are Helen, no?”

Helen was taken by surprise. She put the magazine in a drawer and sat up straight.

“And you are?”

John held out his hand.

“I am Dmitri Varushkin from Moscow. It is pleasure for me and for you too, yes?”

It took four or five stuttered movements for the chubby hand to grip John’s. The woman forced a smile.

“How ... can ... I help you?”

“Straight to point, I like this.” John turned to Savannah. “You should be more like this.”

John whipped his head back around to the woman behind the desk.

“As you don’t like to beat up the bush I will say now what I say.” John pulled out a roll of fifty pound notes in the sum of one thousand pounds and planted it on the edge of the desk. He flicked the roll with his finger into the middle of the desk.

“It is like agreement. I pay one thousand British pounds and the girl is mine, okay?”

Christos’s wife shot a glance at Savannah and noticed her for the first time since they had entered.

“I think Christos has plans for this one,” she said, as she reached for the phone.

John shot forward, scaring the woman into dropping the phone. “So girl is lying?” he asked, fury in his words. He turned to Savannah, his lip curled in a sneer. “In my country we cut out tongues of liars and make liar eat tongue. It is good job you need tongue to give pleasure to man.”

John dry spat at Savannah, who looked truly scared.
Good girl, Savannah.
John tapped the desk and stared into the fat woman’s blinking eyes. She looked completely out of her depth. He knew how she felt.

“You have money, now we go. All is good, yes?”

“I have to call Christos.”

“He is close? I have business.”

The woman’s bottom lip trembled as she spoke. “I think he is collecting money nearby. I’ll call him if you like?”

John banged his fist down hard on the desk and the woman shot back two feet on her wheeled office chair. “Yes, we make drink together to celebrate business,” he said.

Both hands of Christos’s wife shook as she struggled for her words. “I will call him from the office.”

Not a chance. Forewarned would most definitely be forearmed. She must not leave their sight. John leaned over the desk as far as he could stretch without his bottom leaving the seat. He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes in an attempt at conveying utter meanness.

“Use this phone,” he spat, tensing his face and neck muscles.

“I need the toilet,” she whimpered.

“You are trying to renege from deal. In Russia we cut off ears of those who do renege.”

“You ... you need to talk with my ... husband. I will call from here, but please ... let me go to the toilet.”

Gone was the rosy face and uninterested expression from earlier. Christos’s wife was teetering on the brink. But John knew that now was no time for backing down. If this was going to work he had to be worse than the enemy and be willing to go way beyond his comfort level. It was the only way to be sure. He picked up the handset of the phone and threw it down on the desk at the woman.

“Call husband here. Piss in bin,” he said.

As a trembling fat arm retrieved the handset from the desk, John felt a sharp elbow in his ribs. He barely resisted the need to exclaim. Bloody Savannah. Didn’t she remember what was at stake here? He couldn’t look at her and risk discovery. One wrong look and their scam was blown out of the water.

Christos’s wife dialled her husband. “There is a man here to see you,” she said.

John reached over and punched the hands free option on the base of the phone. Christos’s wife flinched and put down the handset.

“Chistos, your good wife she tell me you have plans for girl I have paid debt for.”

“What? Who is this?”

John sat back looking confident and in charge, at least that was the intent. His insides moved around of their own accord and his heart raced. This part was make or break. He imagined how the words sounded before he let them escape from his lips.