Two Evils (38 page)

“Fuck. I’d almost forgotten about him,” Rebecca said.
“I’m kinda surprised he hasn’t come down here already—but then I guess someone has to steer the boat.”

Billie looked down at
her. “Hold your gun on that door,” she said, gesturing behind her. “If either one of them comes through it before I come back, don’t hesitate to shoot.”

Rebecca adjusted her grip on the gun and nodded. Billie then put a hand on her s
houlder and headed for the exit, chambering a round in her own weapon as she went. With the safety off and a finger by the trigger, she mounted the steps and took hold of the sliding door’s handle, then pushed it slowly to the side. She saw nothing immediately in front of her save for the deck table.

A
nd the dock as it was slowly receding from view.

She made a quick note of the firefight going on between men positioned on boats tied at the dock—obviously in the employ of the general—and at least five others on the shore. All but one of those were familiar to her, and her heart skipped a beat as she prayed that John and the team (and whoever they’
d brought along to help) stayed safe and emerged victorious.

“Tell me, Miss Ryan,” came Wainright’s voice from above and to her right. “What was my first mistake—choosing your team for the experiment?”

At the right of the cabin door were four steps topped in gleaming wood. Billie walked cautiously over to them, turning quickly with her gun at the ready, pointing it up to the open bridge above. The pilot’s seat was directly in front of her; Wainright sat there with his back to the steps, his hands steady on the wheel save for a movement to adjust a control off to the side.

“Don’t feel so surprised I knew it was you,” he said. “Stan and Malone are smart boys, up to a point. But there’s really no one that quite compares to you, is there? I should have told them to shoot you if you survived going off the bridge. Bringing you onto the boat was a mistake.”

“One of many,” she replied. “And no, choosing my team wasn’t the first—choosing them was the second. Not drugging all of them was the third, as I said before, and giving me up to Grigori Sardetsky was the fourth.”

He kept his back to her still, though he laughed a little at her words. “So
you found out that little secret too, I see.”

The yacht was picking up speed steadily
as it moved down Boundary Channel. Ahead was the wider stretch of Pentagon Lagoon, and before long Wainright would be able to turn the wheel left toward the underpass that would take them to the river proper.

“I made a logical assumption based on the facts at hand,” she said in reply. “I mean, you deal in sex slaves, far too many of which are lured out of Russia.”

Wainright shook his head. “Please, Miss Ryan—let us not soil the conclusion of our acquaintance with lies.”

Billie scoffed. “You’re kidding me, right?” she asked incredulously. “You have been lying to me from the moment I met you, and you have the audacity to lecture me about honesty?”

She shook her head in disbelief. “However, if you insist on the truth in your final moments as a free man, so be it… Rebecca took a listen to one of the conversations between yourself and Vasily Krupin that you kept on file, though I honestly can’t imagine what you hoped to gain by recording even a single phone call. Your rank and his name were the only two words she understood, but when she told me about what she’d heard it was enough to tell me what I wanted to know—at least in part. Only thing I can’t figure out is why you even bothered with the pretense of wanting my help when you were planning to send the Sardetskys after me all along.”

He spared a brief glance over his shoulder. “That’s just the thing, Miss Ryan,” he said slowly. “I did want your help—or rather I needed it. By all accounts, given the close-knit relationship betwee
n the five of you, you truly were the person deemed most qualified to find the remaining three men on your team. And so you did.”

“But then wh
y try to kill me?” she asked. “Either before I’d even had the chance to look for them or after I’d started?”

“Because by those same accounts, once dedicated to a task you’ve a determination that borders on rabid tenacity. In reading your dossier I got the feeling—accurate, given our present circumstances—
that should you discover the truth of what IQ-56 was capable of, you would not rest until justice had been served.”

Pressing yet another control, Wainright at last stood and faced her. “So what, pray tell, was my first mistake?”

Billie allowed a scowl to cover her face as she said, “Breaking your oath as a United States Marine. Now sit your ass back down and turn this boat around.”

“I’m afraid I just can’t do that.”

“Where the hell are you going to go, General? What could you possibly hope to gain by resisting now?” she asked him.

The general’s expression darkened. “I won’t go to prison, Miss Ryan. I’m a brigadier general of the United States Marine Corps—my end is either a quiet retirement or death on the battlefield. No other option is acceptable.”

It dawned on her then what he was planning to do: he’d either kill himself, or force her to do it for him via the old “suicide by cop” routine.
Coward
, she mused darkly. Billie did not want to let him take the easy way out—Wainright deserved to go to prison for his crimes. He needed to answer for all the young women who had been stolen from their loved ones and sold for the sick pleasure of others like himself. Their families were owed answers as to what had become of their daughters, sisters, and nieces.

“
Take us back to the dock, General,” Billie said firmly.

Wainright stepped around the double seat. In but three or four more steps he would be in front of her—she needed to make a move, or he was going to make his. Billie could see in his eyes that he’d made up his mind:

Death before dishonor.

Moving up the remaining three steps slowly, on
the deck she was only about two arm-lengths away from him, her gun pointed squarely at his chest. She was not remiss to the irony of having been in nearly the exact same scenario just 24 hours ago with Andre Sardetsky. Unlike that standoff, however, she didn’t want to have to kill Wainright—being fairly certain that while he could give up plenty of information on the wider spread of the trafficking network, his high-profile job meant there was probably little chance of his getting a deal. There would be no new name, no new life, no second chance to turn criminal mastermind all over again. For him, it was prison or hell.

Wainright, it seemed, had chosen hell. At that moment he advan
ced toward her, and she calculated all the possible moves she could make to avoid having to shoot. What she hadn’t thought to factor in was his pulling a gun, one he had concealed beneath his uniform jacket—and which she had simply hadn’t noticed when he’d gotten to his feet. He had clasped his hands behind his back when he turned to face her but she’d thought he was merely posturing.

She’d been wrong to assume.

The moment she saw the waning sunlight glinting on the barrel, her desire to see him behind bars was overridden by her strong sense of self-preservation. Billie depressed the trigger of Malone’s pistol on instinct, and following the loud crack of its report, Wainright staggered. He dropped his gun and it fell to the deck; he stepped backward, both hands rising to the wound in the middle of his chest, his fingers proving of little use against the flow of blood pouring in a bright red fountain down the front of his olive green uniform coat. He gave a little cough and more blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth, the vein in his neck throbbing madly as his damaged heart fought to maintain its rhythm.

And then it began to slow
as his blood pressure started to bottom out. Wainright staggered backward again, his legs bumping the bench seat along the side of the bridge, his eyes as he fell down onto it suddenly lifeless. Billie maintained her aim for another thirty seconds, assuring herself that he would never move of his own accord again, before she bent to retrieve his gun and slipped both weapons into the pockets of her jacket. She then moved around the pilot’s seat and sat down, taking the wheel in hand and turning it to the left, making an easy u-turn.

“Cap… Billie?” Rebecca queried cautiously from the lower deck behind her.

Locating the throttle, she dialed it down a few notches. “I’m here,” she replied simply.

She heard the younger woman climb the steps, heard her gasp of surprise as she took in the sight of the general slumped over just a few feet away.
She then came over and sat beside her, staring ahead for a moment before asking, “Are you okay?” in a soft voice.

Billie sighed. “I’m quite fine. But thank you for asking.”

Rebecca looked at her. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

A laugh escaped her. “Not a damn clue. But it can’t be too hard—just like driving a car, wouldn’t you say?”

For a moment Rebecca only stared, and then they both laughed.

It was a few
minutes before they reached the dock again, where Billie carefully maneuvered the yacht back into its slip with a little direction from John—though even with his traffic signaling, she still bumped the dock with the boat’s nose. But it was over, and they were seconds away from being engulfed by the strong arms of five handsome men who waited for them…along with a few dozen police officers.

“There are going to be a lot of questions asked before this mess dies down,” Billie said as she turned off the motor and stood alongside Rebecca.

Rebecca sighed as she took in the sight before them. “I’ll answer any question they ask, so long as my brother gets the honors burial he deserves.”

With that, she limped around the pilot’s chair and descended the steps to the main deck. John and Gabe had already climbed aboard to tie the boat to the dock, the former stepping up to Billie without hesitation and wrapping his arms around her, holding her tightly
like a drowning man clung to a life raft, like someone who had lost and regained something very precious…

He held her l
ike he never wanted to let her go.

“I was so afraid I might lose you,” he said hoarsely, his voice thick with emotion.

Billie returned the tight embrace even as Virginia State Police officers began to swarm the boat. She held onto him because she knew how he felt. “I was afraid you would be killed trying to save me,” she replied.

After a moment she let him go, turning her head at the shouts issued by the officers who’d c
limbed to the top—the flybridge it was apparently called, based on what someone nearby had just said. They’d found the general. More shouts came out of the main cabin, where someone had apparently just discovered Stan and Malone. With a look shared between them, Billie and John turned in tandem and climbed over the railing onto the dock. Wayne, Darren, and a strangely wet Teddy awaited her there—Gabe was already helping Rebecca hobble toward the shore, where medics were waiting.

Billie nodded at Wayne. “Good to see you up and about, Professor,” she said. “I’m kinda sorry I didn’t get to see you in action.”

Wayne stepped forward and hugged her warmly. “I could say the same, She-Devil.”

“No doubt you kicked ass as usual,” Darren said as he took his turn.

When he released her, she turned briefly to John and punched him in the shoulder. “Ow! What was that for?” he asked, rubbing the place where she’d hit him.

“That was for bringing my baby brother into an ambush and putting his life in danger,” she said with a slight scowl.

Teddy socked her gently in the arm before dragging her to his damp chest. “Can’t blame your boyfriend for that one, sis,” he said. “I answered the call, remember? No way was I going to stick around at the hospital after hearing you’d been driven off the bridge.”

“All right, you’re forgiven, so long as
you didn’t get hurt. You didn’t—did you?” Billie asked, stepping back to take a closer look at him.

Her brother shook his shaggy, wet hair. “Nah, I just took a little dip and knocked out an asshole or two.”

As a group they started walking along the dock, headed for shore. Billie soon became aware of no less than three men in suits who appeared to be in a rather heated discussion with a female full-bird colonel in a Marine service uniform over in the closest parking area. A young male captain—probably the colonel’s aide, she mused—stood to the woman’s right, slightly behind her, with a briefcase most likely belonging to his boss in his hand. The captain looked over and noted their approach, then stepped up and spoke to the colonel, pointing toward them. The suits looked as she did and all five started their way.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you… There are some people not real happy about what happened here today,” John said slowly. “My boss is kinda pissed at me for getting Presley shot during an unauthorized operation.”

“Agent Presley’s going to be all right, I hope?” Billie wondered.

John nodded. “He’ll be fine—bullet didn’t hit any major arteries, just the meaty part of his shoulder.”

“Glad to hear it. Do you know what hospital he was taken to? I’d like to pay him a visit and thank him for his help.”

“First, She-Devil, I think you’re going to have to pay the piper,” Wayne noted
as the Marines and the agency officials drew closer. “A brigadier general is dead and two of his subordinates are in police custody. The Pentagon is going to be just as pissed as the CIA is, if not more so.”