Garret's Gambit, page 12
“But we don’t know how factual any of that is,” Astra said.
“We never do.” Jonas raised both hands in frustration. “This is all just hearsay.”
“Sure, it is,” Garret said, “but it’s all we’ve got.”
“Of course it is,” Charles grumbled. “I’ve already got a run happening on this Rick.”
“No known residence in town. He’s actually a citizen of France,” Garret said.
Kano entered the conversation. “So what are the chances that Amy’s been taken across the channel?”
“God help us then,” Jonas said. “We’ve got alerts set up, and they are spot-checking everybody going across.”
“And would they leave, without my brother?” Garret asked.
“Not yet,” Charles said. “I don’t think that’s the plan. I don’t think they want to take these people back to Paris. Absolutely no reason for it.”
“No, that’s true,” Jonas said, “at least no reason we know of.”
“And what about Deedee from Kingdom? She said she’d help anyway, right?” Garret asked.
“Yeah, she’s playing games,” Kano said. “I’ll have to go over there and have a personal talk with her.”
“Well, you’re not going now,” Jonas said. “Nobody else is leaving. You’re not splitting up. I don’t want to track any more of you down again.”
“Right,” Kano said, looking at Garret. “I’ve tried to contact her, but she’s not being cooperative.”
“Gee, what a surprise,” he said. “Do you know this Rick guy?”
“No. I really don’t,” Kano replied.
“But she does?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’m just not sure.”
“We need more. We’ve got to have something more from her,” Garret said.
Kano groaned and pulled out his phone. Moments later, he said, “Deedee, it’s Kano.”
Everybody else heard the woman laughing loudly on the other end.
“Listen. This Rick? What kind of an asshole is he?”
They couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, so waited, not even pretending not to eavesdrop.
“Great, so one of the worst. And you don’t have anything to do with him anymore? You’re sure? Okay. You just haven’t been very forthcoming with any kind of information, and I know you must have some. I know you want something in return, but right now we’ve got a problem, since Rick has taken Gregg’s girlfriend.”
He listened again and nodded. “Yeah, you say you don’t know anything about him. But you must know if he has any haunts in England, any places where he’d go? … He better not. Use your network.” Kano sighed loudly. “Well, I don’t want him using my network either,” he said, “but that doesn’t change anything. We still need to have some idea of what he’s got going on. We haven’t tracked down any of his family, though hopefully he hasn’t brought them into this bullshit anyway.”
Kano rolled his eyes at his audience. “Good. Okay, let’s see what—what do you mean, he has a friend?” Kano shook his head. “You know he’s doing deals himself, right?” With that, there was a shout on the other end of the phone. He nodded slowly. “Well, apparently he offered Gregg a private job. What do you know about that?” He grinned. “Well, sorry if that shit’s going on right under your nose, but it sounds like it is, and I would think you’d want to do something about it.”
Astra listened to the conversation between Kano and this other woman, who was apparently pretty high up in the Kingdom Securities hierarchy. As in possibly the owner now, after taking control a decade ago. Astra was slowly piecing together bits and pieces of what she’d learned. Not only was the airplane explosion supposedly targeted at Bullard, but it had also taken out Garret and another man. Bullard was the only one missing. He had had a relationship with this woman, so the team was looking fairly closely at Kingdom.
Astra quietly asked, “Wouldn’t it kind of muck up the business for everyone if one company attacked another?”
Garret looked at her, nodded, and said, “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening though.”
“Do you suspect her?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. She once had a thing for Bullard. Then she always hunted for younger men.”
“There’s nothing more dead than a dead relationship,” she said.
He smiled. “I get that,” he said, “but, in this case, I think she really did care for him.”
Astra nodded and didn’t say anything for a moment. “She doesn’t seem to know what’s going on in her own backyard though.”
“And that seemed to be a bit of a surprise to her,” he said. “That’s interesting because that means she doesn’t have her fingers on all the pulses that she thought she did.”
“Which is bad news for everybody,” she murmured.
Finally Kano got off the phone. He looked at them and said, “There is a friend here in town who apparently this Rick guy spent a lot of time with. Deedee did not know anything about private jobs, and she’s fairly unimpressed with the concept,” he said, “so that’s one thing.”
“But it’s not enough,” Garret said, “not enough for anything yet.”
“No, you’re right,” Kano said. “We still have to do some more digging.”
“Not just more digging,” he said. “The issue is, we’ve got to find these people, and we’ve got to find them now.”
“And what about the threat I got?” Astra asked, worried about her sister.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m still trying to figure out if that’s a diversion or not. Obviously your sister’s been taken.”
“What is it they want with your brother?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like they necessarily have my brother either,” he said. “That threat was fairly ambiguous. Just we’ve got your sister.”
“I know,” she said, “and they want your brother.”
“Which means they don’t have him. So we’ve got two parties going here, one that’s got him and one that doesn’t but wants him.”
“What about the guy at the bar who was looking after him, who wanted Gregg moved?”
“The dead gopher guy? We got an ID on him. Running that,” Garret said.
“At the first bar, right? So, instead of searching Maggie’s place, which place do we need to go back and check on?”
At that, Charles popped up. “Maggie’s home is under surveillance, and there’s been no activity at her place, at all.”
“Dammit,” Garret said. “I was hoping they would still go there, but, of course, as soon as there was a problem, that place became off-limits.”
“Still, the gopher guy had to be holding Gregg somewhere,” she murmured. “We should find that.”
“We’re tracking his vehicle location,” Garret said. “So far we haven’t found any place that he would have taken Gregg that was his own property.”
“And now we’ve expanded on the places that the bar owner owns.”
“I guess it could be anybody, couldn’t it?” Astra asked.
“Absolutely,” Garret said, “and chances are, it is anybody. It’s just never as clear-cut as we want it to be.”
“And that’s just ridiculous.” She got up and paced. “We need this to come to a conclusion.”
“Yes,” Charles said gently, “but, if we rush things, we’ll get people killed.”
She raised her hands in frustration and flung herself onto the couch. “So you’ve got people running down all these leads, right?”
Charles, Garret, and Kano all nodded. Even Jonas. On that point, they all agreed.
“And, so far, nothing?”
“Correct.”
“So why don’t we go back to good old-fashioned threats,” she said. “Go back to the pub owner and pound him into the ground. Wouldn’t that be simpler?”
“I like it,” Garret said, with a big smile. “But?”
“I feel like I’m missing something,” she said.
Jonas nodded.
“You are,” Garret said. “We’ve already got information on that guy’s house—the first bar owner—and we’re checking to see if there’s any chance Gregg is there.”
“You don’t want to just go threaten him?”
“Well, he won’t be alone. It’s hardly legal, and what we don’t want to do is get caught or push any panic buttons, so that he moves Gregg, and we can never find him.”
“But wouldn’t it be easier to find Gregg in transit, instead of squirreled away somewhere?”
“Only if we knew where he was. That’s what we were hoping to do earlier. We wanted to grab Gregg, while he was being moved this last time. Only he wasn’t there.”
She sat back, closed her eyes, and whispered, “This is so wrong.”
“You deal with this all the time in your job, don’t you?” Charles asked.
Jonas listened with interest.
“Not really,” she said. “Other people deal with this kind of frustration level. It’s not really something that touches my aspect of the job. I know what we’re always working on, and I get involved, and we get big cases, but I’m not the one sitting there at the computer, working my way through all these processes.”
“Oh, so this gives you a whole new understanding, doesn’t it?” Charles asked.
“And a whole new level of frustration, yes,” she said, with a smile. “And that’ll be an issue.”
“Okay, so then what?” Garret asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Kano, looking up from his laptop, suddenly said, “I do. This Rick guy, who’s holding Amy and wants Gregg, Rick doesn’t have a full brother, but he has a half brother. And the half brother lives in town.”
“In town, in town?” Astra asked.
“No, not in town, just outside of town, at an old farmhouse,” Kano explained.
“That sounds positive. That’s certainly an interesting location. How often has anybody been there?” Garret asked.
“Seems brother actually lives there, so there should be a fair bit of traffic,” Kano said.
“I’m coming this time too,” she said.
Garret and Kano stopped and glared at her. She shrugged. “For all you know, my sister’s there,” she said. “And, if that’s the case, you won’t want to deal with her.”
The men looked at each other but back at her and frowned.
Charles chuckled. “She’s right, you know? If Amy is there, which is quite possible, then you’ll need somebody to look after her.”
“Speaking of which,” Kano said, “did we get any intel on the vehicle she got into?”
“We only had the basic model,” Charles said, “and it disappeared into a parking lot and never came out.”
“Is anybody looking to see who’s in the parking lot?” Garret asked, looking straight at Jonas.
“Yeah, we found it deserted and checked it already,” Jonas said. “It’s empty.”
“So they moved her into another vehicle then?”
“Yes,” Jonas said. “And, yes, I know. We have traffic cams all around there. We’re tracking that, but over three hundred vehicles came and went.”
“During that hour?”
“No, not during that hour,” he said, “but what I can tell you is that not one vehicle went out with two people sitting upright.”
“So she was either stashed in the trunk or lying down in the back seat?”
Jonas nodded. “And, yes, of course we’re tracking all of those, but that’s a lot of vehicles and a lot of data to sort through.”
“Right, and we don’t have any connection to Rick.”
Kano held up his phone. “I just got an address for him, and it looks like they’re only maybe two miles apart.”
“Do you think they’re connected?”
“I wouldn’t think so, but who knows?” he said.
The men just looked at each other and then turned and stared at her.
“I don’t care what you say,” she said. “I need to come.”
“It’s safer if you stay here,” Garret said.
“As long as I stay inside, you mean?”
“Absolutely, and Charles’s staying this time, so he can run command central from here.”
“I’m not staying,” she said smoothly. “I’m coming with you.”
“Why?” Garret asked, sincerely curious.
“I already told you, about my sister,” she said. “And there’s another aspect, which is that this is the part of the job that I never see, and I think I’ll be a better person and better at my job if I do see this part.”
“You better be careful what you wish for,” Garret said. “A lot of ugliness is out there.”
She stood up straight, shoved her hands into her pockets, and glared at him. “I already killed two men tonight,” she said. “At some point in time, after all this, I’ll have to deal with that. But, right now, I’m dealing with the loss of my sister. Through her own foolishness, she’s got herself caught up in something very ugly again. Let’s just get her out of this, please, and find your brother.”
He took a slow deep breath, looked at her and then Kano, who shrugged.
“Let’s go,” Kano said. “We’re wasting time.”
*
Garret didn’t know how he felt about bringing Astra again. She was here, and she was safe at the moment, but she was right. If Amy were there, it could get difficult. At the same time, he didn’t really want Astra to see any more of the ugliness of the seedier side of life. As they grabbed up jackets, he warned her, “You may not like what you see.”
“I never like what I see in my job,” she said, with all seriousness.
He thought about the work she did and nodded. “At least there’s a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day.”
“Only on the good days,” she said. “Some of these cases take years.”
“I know,” he said. “Some of ours do too. They’re just—” And he stopped. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder and led her through to the other apartment. “We’re going out a different way,” he said. “Nobody uses the front door.”
“Is that why it’s got the alarm set?”
“Charles sets the alarms anytime he’s inside or when he leaves,” he said. “He’s been caught off guard once too many times for peace of mind.”
“It’s also very difficult,” she murmured. “He takes it so easily.”
“He’s very good at what he does, and he’s been doing this for a very long time.”
“I can imagine,” she said. “It’s still a surprise though.”
“Of course it is. You don’t expect anybody in his generation to be active in this. But you know? He’s been doing it for so long, I’m not sure he could stop.”
“He should be sitting in front of a fireplace, with a partner,” she said. “Having tea and cookies.”
“Don’t write him off. He’s not that old,” Garret warned. “He’d be insulted if you thought he was past his prime.”
She chuckled. “There’s nothing past prime about him,” she said. “He’s heading into a wonderful age group, and he’s so very graceful.”
“He also has some of the best self-defense moves you’ve ever seen,” he said. “Like I said, don’t think you know him. There’s a reason he does the work he does.”
She nodded slowly. “So easy to place people into little boxes that fit what we think they are, isn’t it?”
“That’s one of the biggest lessons about the work we do,” Kano said. “Learning not to pigeonhole people but to open up your mind and see what people really are like. Whether it’s what you want to see them as or not. And that’s kind of hard too because, seeing those people, and what they can do to others, it’s just disgusting.”
“It is,” Garret said. “That’s another reason why it’s so important that we take as many of these guys off the streets as we can.”
“We don’t get many of them off though, do we?” she asked, as he led her downstairs and into the vehicle. “It seems like all we end up with is more slime.”
“I’d like to think we’re winning the war,” he said. “Technology’s made that both easier and harder because a lot of the scumbags out there are techies as well.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s where we come in.”
“So you know exactly what I’m talking about.” He helped her into the back of the vehicle and said, “Now let’s go.”
She sighed, buckled up, and said, “Don’t write me off either. I might not have the skills that you guys have, but I have a lot of common sense.”
“Glad you got that, but not your sister,” he said, “because I don’t know what she’s thinking.”
“I suspect she saw Rick as a friend, somebody she could go out with and spend a few hours in a pub,” she said quietly. “Of course that’s the opposite of what he is, but Amy wouldn’t have seen an enemy coming. She’s just not the kind of person to see it.”
“Is she stupid?” Kano asked.
“Not stupid, per se, but naive,” Astra said, “definitely naive.” She was seated in the back, with both Garret and Kano in the front, Kano driving, while Garret brought up the addresses they were heading to. Jonas remained at Charles’s house, tidying things up about the murders. The car ride to the potential country residences, where Gregg could be held, was silent for twenty minutes, until they came close to the first house in question. Lights were on, and several vehicles were parked in front. Loud laughter came from inside.
She leaned forward and said, “That doesn’t look likely.”
“Why is that?” Garret asked, interested to hear her response.
“Well, surely it wouldn’t be party time, if something like a kidnapping was going on, would it?”
“Well, it’s a great way to hide what’s going on in the deep dark recesses of a house. Nobody would hear him screaming.”
“Oh, God,” she said and sank back.
He wasn’t sorry he’d said that because absolutely nothing was clean, neat, or tidy about this business. It was quite possible to stage such a gathering, if somebody wanted something from Gregg and if he were being tortured in an attempt to get it. Garret looked at Kano. “I suggest you leave me here, and you and Astra go drive past the other address and check that out.”
