“Jules can drive you,” Max said, as his phone just kept ringing and ringing.
“I know you have business to discuss,” Gina said stiffly.
“It can wait,” Max said.
“Whatever,” Gina said, and left the room.
Jules was holding that guitar. “You want me to—”
“Leave it,” she said as she walked away.
Jules went into the room as his boss answered the phone.
“Bhagat,” Max said. “Yeah.” He closed his eyes. “Yeah.”
He had to know that Gina wasn’t coming back.
Didn’t he care that she hadn’t even bothered to say good-bye?
Jules’s stomach hurt for both of them as he set the guitar down in the corner. What a waste.
Max opened his eyes, saw Jules was still standing there, and waved him away, mouthing,
Go,
from between clenched teeth.
“I’m sorry for your loss, sir,” Jules said, but he wasn’t even sure that Max heard him.
H
OTEL
E
LBE
H
OF
, H
AMBURG
, G
ERMANY
J
UNE
21, 2005
P
RESENT
D
AY
There was no doubt about it, good FBI agent/crazy FBI agent didn’t work so well when there wasn’t a good FBI agent in the room.
Not to mention the fact that the insanity was supposed to be part of an act.
As Grady Morant went limp, reality slapped Max in the face with two hard facts: One, the son of a bitch hadn’t tried to jab him with that pen, and two, if he was dead, he couldn’t help Max find Gina.
Correction. If Morant
stayed
dead, he couldn’t help find Gina.
Carefully, in case the limpness was feigned, Max let go of the bastard and . . .
The good news was that Max didn’t have to fight off an attempt by Morant to put that pen in his eye.
The bad news was that he had absolutely no idea how much time had passed since he’d grabbed Morant in that chokehold—or how long it had been since oxygen had last reached the man’s brain.
Max rolled the body onto its back, lifted the chin, checked for obstructions in the airway—yeah, right, whoops, that was unnecessary.
He’d
been the cause of the obstruction in the bastard’s airway.
He breathed into Morant’s mouth—come on, come on—quickly tossing the pen out of reach, searching for any other weapons he might’ve missed during their fight, checking for a pulse on a wrist that had blue ink on it. What the . . . ? Instead of stabbing Max with that pen, Morant had started to write a novel. On his freaking arm.
The words
Gina
and
alive
stood out—ah, Christ!—but there was no pulse there, goddamn it. He tried the pulse point in Morant’s throat as he breathed for the son of a bitch. If it was back there, it was flipping faint, and whatever he felt may have been just his own wishful thinking.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Max leaned on Morant’s chest, training kicking in as he automatically pressed, breathed, pressed, getting into the rhythm.
Come on, come on, please God, come on . . .
He was on the verge of sticking his fingers down the bastard’s throat, to try to see if he’d damaged something in their struggle. If Morant’s throat had swollen, if air couldn’t get through . . .
But then he got a pulse—yes!—right as Morant coughed up a spray of spit and blood and God knows what directly into Max’s face.
At least it wasn’t vomit.
With shaking hands—that had been too damn close—Max wiped his face as he nudged Morant onto his side, letting him gasp and wheeze and cough up the rest of the smoke and embers and poisonous slime of hell that had slipped down into his lungs during those long moments that he’d been dead.
Max leaned back against the wall, and tried to steady his own breathing. His nose was bleeding—not too badly. Just enough to be annoying.
“Do you need a hospital?” he finally asked. Sometimes the throat tissue got so badly bruised that medical attention was necessary. Sometimes it wasn’t enough merely to stop strangling someone and then bring them back to life.
Not that he was in the habit of throttling people. He had, however, studied anatomy. He was very familiar with all of the various kill points—and the throat was particularly vulnerable.
But Morant shook his head. “No.” It was little more than a whisper, but he left no room for doubt. As Max watched, he rolled onto his back, eyes closed, as he just breathed.
His clothes weren’t as badly torn as Max’s.
One sleeve of Max’s suit jacket was completely down around his wrist. And he’d ripped out the back seam. He could feel cool air against the sweat that drenched his shirt.
Morant, however, looked pretty damn good for a man who’d just returned from the dead, for a man who’d allegedly died months ago, for a man wanted by too many different governments on too many different charges to count.
His clothes weren’t expensive—typical relief worker gear—and thus were harder to destroy in a brawl. Cargo pants, boots, denim shirt, denim jacket.
The man himself looked like Africa agreed with him. Healthy. Trim.
Max nudged Morant’s hand with his foot, so he could read what was written on his arm.
It looked like an e-mail address—
[email protected].
Then the letters P and W, and what looked like . . .
chair
?
Gina
+
Molly alive
then
SAVE THEM
—underlined three times. Then something that looked like
trace . . . the . . . form
-squiggle. It was impossible to read.
The rest, too, was illegible, but Max didn’t need to see more to know that he’d come goddamn close to killing an innocent man.
A man who’d used what he thought were his last moments of life to try to get Max the information he would need to save Gina and Molly.
It was humbling.
“I’m really sorry,” Max said. It seemed like such an inadequate thing to say.
Sorry I tried to kill you
? It wasn’t even honest. He hadn’t merely tried, he’d succeeded.
Morant turned his head to look at Max. “Smells like her in here,” he whispered. “My wife.”
His . . . ? Max took a deep breath. Remembering to breathe was good.
“Bet you never thought I’d use those two words one after the other like that,” Morant continued. He coughed again. Tried to clear his throat. “Never thought I would either.”
“Molly?” Max asked.
“Yeah, Molly,” Morant said with a look of incredulity. He was hoarse—he would be for a while. “Who’d you think I meant? Gina?”
Max blotted his nose on his ruined sleeve. “I’ve been having a particu-larly bad day.” Gina finally finding happiness with a dangerous, wanted criminal would’ve fit the running pattern. Although
day
wasn’t quite accurate. Bad year was more appropriate.
“She always said how brilliant you were,” Morant said. “A total prick, but brilliant. Don’t prove her wrong.”
Was
prick
her word or Morant’s? And wasn’t
that
the last question he should be asking. “Where are they?” Max asked instead. “Who has them—Leslie Pollard? Did you ask for proof of life?”
“Indonesia,” Morant said. “All I have for the man who grabbed them is an initial—E.—and a description. Don’t get excited. It’s just this side of useless. He’s medium height, medium build, medium complexion, dark hair, mustache, speaks the Queen’s English with an accent, possibly French. Unless maybe he’s a friend of yours . . . ?”
Max shook his head. Although with that description, this could have been anyone. It could’ve been Max, with fake facial hair, doing his Inspector Clouseau impression.
“Didn’t think so,” Morant continued. “What I
do
know is he’s not Leslie Pollard because I buried him—what was left of him—in Thailand. And thanks to the indigenous fauna, there wasn’t that much left by the time I found him.” His smile was grim. “I figured he didn’t need his name anymore. His passport, sadly, was chewed into unsalvageable bits.”
So Grady Morant, aka Dave Jones, was also Leslie Pollard—who was married to Molly Anderson. Or so he claimed.
The pieces of the puzzle that were still missing had to do with Gina. Her letter to Jules—
I have met the most fascinating man
!
“Did you know Gina’s pregnant?” Max asked Morant.
He got a flash of total surprise in response. Surprise and something else. Max wasn’t exactly sure what else, but the surprise was real. No one was that good an actor. “Gina?”
“So the baby’s not yours,” Max said.
“Hell, no.” Morant laughed, but then stopped. “Jesus, was that why you tried to kill me?”
“Was she seeing anyone?” Max asked. “This E., maybe?”
“No.” Morant was certain. “He showed up at the camp—at least I’m assuming he’s the same man who e-mailed me—but it wasn’t until after Molly and Gina left for Germany. He flew in, in a rented helicopter, spoke to Sister Helen—who told me she’d never seen him before. She was the one who gave me the description—I only saw him from a distance. He walks like an operator, by the way.”
Terrific. “Did Gina leave the camp?” Max asked. “On weekends or . . . I don’t know, her days off?” It was possible she’d met this E., whoever he was, in Nairobi.
“Nah,” Morant said. “I mean, she and Molly went into Nairobi only once the entire time I was at the camp. As far as days off . . . She never stopped working. She also never talked about anyone else—a boyfriend or lover or . . . But I was only at the camp for about four months, so . . .”
So it was possible the relationship had already ended.
Did she ever talk about Max
? Besides, of course, calling him a brilliant prick.
The question was not relevant to this investigation. But she must have—how else would Morant have known he’d be here, in Hamburg, searching for her?
“What about Molly?” Max asked instead. “Did she ever leave the camp without you? Was it possible she might’ve hooked up with—”
“No.” Morant bristled. “And fuck you for suggesting it.”
It was standard in an investigation to raise questions about whether the abductees were familiar with the abductor. It was easier, from a kidnapping standpoint to befriend the victims and have them willingly get into the car. If this guy had been hanging around—not at the camp, because it was clear he was a stranger there, but in Nairobi . . .
If Max was going to find Gina, he was going to follow every lead possible. He’d already made a mental note to have Peggy check out helicopter rentals in Kenya.
“Just because you don’t want to believe that Gina’s not this perfect little angel,” Morant was saying, “instead of what she really is—a flesh-and-blood woman who—” He cut himself off. “You know, maybe I’m wrong about the no boyfriend thing. There was this one Kenyan man . . . Paul Jimmo. He was killed shortly after I arrived. The entire camp took it pretty hard, Gina in particular.”
Paul Jimmo.
His intense hatred of a dead man named Paul Jimmo wasn’t helping him find Gina. Still Max couldn’t let that one word slide past without asking, “Killed?”
“Part of some ongoing battle over water rights,” Morant told him. “I don’t think he was involved. I think it was a wrong place, wrong time, innocent bystander thing.”
And wasn’t
that
just swell. Max didn’t want to think about the fact that, if it turned out to be true that Gina was romantically entangled with this Jimmo, it was just luck that she hadn’t been with him at the time.
But right now he had to focus on finding her. “Did you leave that message, on the hotel phone?” Max asked. “Telling Gina and Molly to go to the Embassy?”
“Yeah. That was me.”
“They didn’t get it,” Max told him. “It was new on the voicemail when I got here.”
“I figured. Considering they didn’t go to the Embassy. E. did send proof of life, by the way—a photo in a j-peg file—via e-mail. It was a picture of them both, sitting next to a TV showing Sunday’s soccer game. Yeah, it could have been digitally altered, but I doubt it. It looked like they were in some kind of warehouse. The TV was one of those little cheap ones.”
Gina was alive. Or at least she was as of Sunday night. Now Max’s hands were really shaking.
“You all right?” As Morant sat up, he grabbed his head. “Ow, Jesus!”
Along with the hoarse thing, he was going to experience a headache and dizziness for a while, too.
He wasn’t the only one. Max was actually seeing stars. “I want to see the picture,” he said.
“They’re okay,” Morant told him, back on the floor. “They look okay—not too happy, but they haven’t been hurt. Whoever has them knows the abduction business. They’re being taken care of.”
“I want to see the picture,” Max said again. “And then we need to e-mail this son of a bitch and tell him that nothing happens—nothing—until I talk to Gina on the phone.”
And tell her . . . what?
I’m so sorry
. . .
“What we need to do is get out of here,” Morant said, sitting up again, more slowly and carefully this time. “I’ve already been here too long.” He tilted his head from side to side, hand up on the back of his neck.
Whoever has them knows the abduction business.
Considering the company Grady Morant had kept back in Indonesia, it could be said that
he
knew the abduction business. And it
was
a business in that part of the world.
“If we take the time now to sign online,” Morant was saying.
Max cut him off. “You had Internet access at the camp in Kenya?” He knew for a fact that wasn’t true. Yet this E. had allegedly e-mailed Morant?
“No,” Morant said. “We were lucky if we had warm water when we showered.”
“But you have an e-mail address . . . ?”
Morant had a nifty explanation all ready to go. “When I worked for Chai—”
“That would be the notorious drug lord and murderer Nang-Klao Chai?” Max clarified.
Morant was silent then, just looking at Max. “Okay,” he finally said. “Yes, I’m talking about the same Chai. And point taken. You have plenty of reasons not to trust me. Are you going to hear me out or do you want to beat the shit out of me again? I’m ready, either way.”