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* * *
D’Arcy hefted the suitcase. “I won’t bother counting it here,” he told Vishenko. “But if it’s short by so much as a dollar...”
“That is not a concern,” Vishenko assured him. “So where is she? My pilot must file a flight plan.”
“Tomorrow,” D’Arcy said. “Assuming there is indeed five million dollars in here, I’ll tell your pilot what he needs to know.” He smiled coldly. “This plane can make the flight without refueling if you start with full tanks. I’ll be here at seven. Plenty of time.” With that he was gone.
Aleksandrov Vishenko watched D’Arcy walk across the tarmac, carrying the suitcase instead of rolling it. Five million, he reminded himself. It wasn’t the first time he’d paid a bribe. And he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. But he had never paid so much at one time to one man. He had every intention of recovering the down payment after D’Arcy’s death tomorrow. His men were already working on a home invasion scheme that would, if necessary, force the location of the money out of D’Arcy’s wife if it wasn’t found in his house. There was still the slight possibility the money would be unrecoverable—in which case he would have paid five million dollars for his freedom. Expensive, but worth it. And he had the added incentive of making Caterina pay. Not to mention throwing the agency into turmoil once their highest-ranking official was eliminated in a gruesome fashion.
He walked over to a cabinet and removed the semiautomatic pistol it contained. The gun was new to him, but completely untraceable. He checked the action and the clip, even though he’d checked them several times before he left Long Island—he couldn’t afford to have the pistol fail when he killed Caterina and the man who had sold her out.
Once they were dead that would leave only the extradition to Zakhar to worry about. And Vishenko wasn’t particularly worried about extradition. He had money secreted in bank accounts around the world. If worse came to worst and his high-priced attorneys failed, he would buy himself a safe haven in some country with no extradition treaties. Not with the US, and not with Zakhar.
* * *
The cell phone chirped once, then stopped. Liam was out of bed in a flash and picked it up, but it didn’t ring again. He tried to see if a missed call had registered, but it hadn’t. And when he attempted to check voice mail it wouldn’t go through. “Guess I’ll have to go outside,” he told Cate, who was awake now and watching him from the bed. He tugged yesterday’s jeans on, not bothering with his boxers, zipped up but left the button undone and pulled on his T-shirt inside out. When he saw what he’d done he didn’t bother changing it. He grabbed his shoulder holster from where he’d left it on the nightstand and shrugged it on, then picked up the cell phone again and went out on the front porch.
The air was early-morning cool, despite being late August. It would warm up later in the day, but right now, with the sun not yet over the horizon, Liam could have done with more than a T-shirt. He didn’t worry about it—he didn’t plan to be out here very long. Just long enough to check voice mail, and if nothing was recorded there, call Callahan to see if he was trying to contact them for some reason. Voice mail yielded nothing, so Liam punched in the number of Callahan’s cell, which was answered almost immediately.
“Callahan.”
“It’s Liam Jones. Were you trying to reach us?”
“Yeah. I wanted to let you know two things. First, I’ve got an emergency here—a school bus hit a guardrail. Nobody hurt, but I’m not going to be able to make it out there this morning.”
“No problem. Cate and I don’t need—”
“Which brings me to the second thing,” Callahan said, interrupting him. “D’Arcy called and there’s a change of plan.”
“Oh yeah? What?”
“The new prosecutors want to interview Cate now, not wait until the week before the trial. D’Arcy’s not about to let her go to DC at this point—too dangerous. And he doesn’t want the prosecutors to know where this place is—they don’t have a need to know, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“He never gives away an edge if he can help it.” Admiration—not something easily earned where Callahan was concerned, Liam knew—was evident in his voice. “So he doesn’t want the prosecutors coming here. He wants Cate to meet them at the agency’s safe house in Casper. It’s not that far—if you take the other road and don’t go through Black Rock it’s only a couple of hours away.”
