Page 78 of The Shadow Friends

Marcus nodded. “And you’re the woman this gentleman has been chasing around the world. Imagine my surprise when I found Mr. Slocum sitting in a parked car down the road.”

“He didn’t give me a choice, Ingrid,” Lloyd said. “He made me get out of the car.”

“You aren’t supposed to be here at all, Mr. Slocum,” said Marcus. “You were supposed to fly straight home from Amsterdam.”

“I was worried about my wife.”

“Your wife seems perfectly capable of looking after herself.” Marcus turned his attention to Rodrigo. “I’ll deal with the police. Your team should leave before they get here.”

Ingrid looked at Rodrigo, then back at Marcus. “This man is our client?”

“Purely off the record,” said Rodrigo. “It’s the only way the job can get done.”

“The job being?”

“Identify and capture Moscow’s assassination teams,” said Marcus. “Hopefully before they carry out their missions.”

“Identify and capture?” Ingrid looked down at Gray Hoodie’s corpse. “Someone, it seems, has gone a step further.”

“And this is a problem,” Rodrigo said to Marcus. “Argus can’t be implicated in these deaths.”

“Yet here we are,” said Ingrid. “Inconveniently, we’re the first people at the crime scene.”

“The Agency will manage this,” said Marcus. “We’ll point out to the Spanish police what happened here. It’s just Russians killing Russians.”

“But is it, really?” said Ingrid. Her question was met with silence. She looked down at the body on the checkerboard tiles. “What am I missing here?”

“Clearly, it’s an underworld power struggle. A lot of money gets paid out in death contracts, and rival Vory gangs are fighting over it.” Marcus shrugged. “We should let it play out, let them eliminate each other.”

“That’s your cover story, an underworld power struggle?” said Lloyd, who’d been listening to the conversation with an expression of disbelief. “Or was this your real strategy all along? To just eliminate whoever shows up?”

“No one’s going to miss these men,” said Marcus.

“Ingrid could have ended up dead!”

“But she didn’t, because we were ready for them,” said Rodrigo. “We’ll be ready the next time too.”

“The next time?” Lloyd looked at Ingrid. “Do you really want to be part of this? What if those men managed to get you in their van, and Rodrigo couldn’t save you? It was an insane risk, and for what? The thrill of being back in the game?”

“You don’t understand,” said Rodrigo. “For us, this is personal.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly. You call it justice, but it’s really about revenge.”

“Sometimes,” Marcus said quietly, “they’re one and the same thing.”

“And when things go wrong, who’s going to take the fall?” said Lloyd. “Argus operates in the gray zone, without official sanction. Its operatives would be left completely out in the cold. Look, I was an analyst. I can see the bigger picture here. To you, these people are just chess pieces, being moved around the board. And occasionally, one of them may get sacrificed as a pawn.” He turned to his wife. “Is that how you want to spend your last years, Ingrid? Risking your life for this?”

She looked at the man she had loved for almost thirty years, the man with whom she’d built a safe and comfortable nest. She thought of their life together, where cocktails were always served at five o’clock, and dinner was at seven, and their lives were utterly predictable. Then she looked at Rodrigo, the poster boy for unpredictable. Yes, that damned spark was still there between them, and being with him made her feel like the woman she used to be, young and fearless and desirable. But she was reminded, too, of why she had left him—because desire was not love, and the hottest flame is the first to burn out. Once, Rodrigo had thrilled her. Ultimately, he had failed her.

He would always fail her.

“We still have work to do, Ingrid,” said Rodrigo. “This is not the time to walk away.”

“But that’s what I’m going to do,” she said. She turned to Lloyd. “I’m ready to go home.”

Chapter 29

Friday