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Jared remembered the combination to the safe the moment he looked at it. His brain was good for stuff like that. He scooped up the phone, the computer and the power cords sitting in the safe and took them out to the kitchen and plugged them in. There was nothing else in the safe. This was it.
He made himself a rare roast beef sandwich—tomato, lettuce and pickle included—in the two minutes he had left before Damon rang again. His brother was excruciatingly punctual. If Damon said he’d call back in five minutes, he meant five minutes.
He was mid-bite of his sandwich when one of the ‘safe’ phones rang. Damon and his insistence on black market phones that couldn’t be traced … Mind you, they were useful.
‘You know that phone you left in Seb’s toiletries bag at the wedding?’ Damon began when Jared picked up, referring to their sister Poppy’s partner.
‘I thought that was your toiletries bag?’
‘Nope. It was Seb’s. Luckily he’s a sharing, caring kind of guy and he told me about it. I brought it home with me and I’ve been keeping it charged. I figured if you wanted it you’d ask for it.’
‘Thanks.’ Jared eyed his sandwich longingly before putting it down. ‘It has information on it that I didn’t feel like sharing.’
‘Someone called the phone last night.’
‘Say what?’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘Only one person ever used that number. And he’s dead.’
‘It’s Antonov’s kid, from what I can gather. I’m going to play the messages for you now. First one’s just a hang-up call—didn’t leave a message,’ Damon said. ‘The second one’s more interesting.’
Damon did something to the phone at his end and Antonov’s seven-year-old son’s voice came on the line.
‘JB? Jimmy? You said to call you if I ever got in trouble, so I’m calling,’ the boy said in his native Russian. ‘My mother doesn’t want me. She thought I’d come with money but there isn’t any. And my father’s friends don’t believe her, and she’s scared because they’re saying that my father owed them and now she owes them and they’re really bad men. She says I’m too sick and that I’m more trouble than I’m worth and that she can’t protect me. She doesn’t want me.’ The boy’s voice broke. ‘She never did.’
Jared slumped against the counter and closed his eyes against the wash of remorse that slid through him like poison. Antonov’s little boy had always been his weak spot when it had come to bringing Antonov’s operations to a halt. What would happen to the sick little boy with Antonov in prison and a mother who’d been nowhere in the picture and didn’t want to be? Only Antonov had died, which had changed the equation again. Celik’s mother had become the boy’s next of kin and Celik had been shipped off to her.
‘You still there?’ asked Damon.
‘Yeah,’ he rasped in a voice that wasn’t his. ‘I’m listening.’
‘This next one came in a couple of hours after the second message.’
Jared waited to hear what the boy had had to say this time.
‘You promised I’d be okay. I’m not okay. Please,’ Celik begged. ‘You promised my father that if anything bad ever happened to him you’d look after me. I heard you. Can you come and get me?’
The message ended and once again no one spoke.
And then Damon cleared his throat. ‘Did you really promise that?’
‘Yeah.’ His brother hadn’t been there. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘I love you, man, and I know you move mountains—you’ve been my hero ever since I was a kid, think Superman—but how the hell do you intend to make good on that promise?’
‘I can make good on it.’ Jared’s hands might be trembling but he had to believe it. ‘Can you trace the calls?’
‘The calls track back to a canal house in Amsterdam, and all three of them came in overnight—my time. Truth be told, I didn’t check that phone for messages when I first got up. I didn’t even look at the phone until after lunch. It’s been silent. I’ve only being paying cursory attention to it.’
‘I never asked you to check for messages. I didn’t think there’d be any.’
‘So what’s your plan?’
‘Go and get him.’ Nothing else he could do.
‘You need any help with that?’
He was going to need a great deal of help with that. Not to mention some kind of real plan. ‘Don’t you have a pregnant wife to be with?’
‘Just saying that I’m right here if you need anything by way of information or assistance. I don’t have to be there in order to help you. Have computer will cyber-travel, man. If you’re planning a covert extraction … if you’re aiming to disappear the boy out from under everyone’s noses … don’t count me out. Count me in.’
