had the common look of a bully-little eyes, pug nose, reddish skin and thin lips. Put him in a wife-beater and he’d look like every other piece of trailer trash, a baseball cap and he’d look like a million other ex-fraternity boys gone to seed. She often wondered about the genes that produced this same look over and over. If a defective chromosome could produce mongoloid features in children with Down’s Syndrome, perhaps that same kind of genetic anomaly could produce the generic bully facial features. Taylor could see the cruelty in his face. She watched him have an internal debate, then nodded when he settled for giving her a belligerent glare.
“Good. We can be friends now.” She lowered her voice, playing up the huskiness, and leaned forward in the chair. “Tell me, Mr. Gorman. Do you like watching strangers have sex?”
He didn’t answer, but his eyes gleamed. He licked his skimpy lips and Taylor felt the gorge rise in the back of her throat. Ugh. This guy was even less appealing than she’d first thought. No wonder he needed to watch.
“I’ll take that as a yes. I’d appreciate you giving me some information about this Internet club you belong to. Selectnet. com, I believe it’s called?”
Tony Gorman was an excellent liar. He was a champion liar. He looked Taylor straight in the eye and told her all about Selectnet. com. He never looked away, never flinched. The skin around his eyes didn’t tighten, he didn’t move his hands or shift his eyes. His body language alone could have won him an Oscar. He talked and talked. What he didn’t realize was the entire time he spoke, his pupils dilated and contracted as he thought up his falsehoods. All in all, she had to give him props. He was a very creative fake.
Taylor was better. She’d known men like this her whole life. Men who felt the woman’s place was in the kitchen, cooking gourmet meals, shaking up a martini and making sure their man was serviced properly.
So she let him talk. She didn’t listen so much to what he was saying. She wondered, though, why he felt he needed to create such an elaborate fabrication to cover his true intent. After fifteen minutes of his bullshit, she yawned and stretched.
“Well, that is absolutely fascinating stuff, Mr. Gorman.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“And it was all crap. If you’d like to get out of these handcuffs, get out of this room, I suggest you start telling me the truth about Selectnet. com.”
He sputtered, and she let him go through his denials. Taylor stared at her nails, and nodded. Then she tried again. She only hesitated a moment. Desperate times called for desperate measures. She sat back in the chair, casually draping her arm over the back.
“Tell me the truth now, Mr. Gorman. You’ll notice that you haven’t been booked. You’ve just been brought in for questioning in a very informal environment. No one knows you’re here. I haven’t turned on the cameras. I can do whatever I want to you, and no one will ever be the wiser.” As she spoke, she used her right hand to slip her Glock out of its holster and set it on the table between them. Gorman’s eyes popped open.
“Are you threatening me?”
“No. I’m giving you options. You can talk to me now. Or you and I can slip out the back door, without a single person knowing where you are.” She ran her fingers playfully along the slide of the weapon. “I’d sure hate to have any accidents with you, you know. We’d have to go on the news and explain your role in today’s little charade, explain how we picked you up for…hmmm…child pornography sounds good.” She raised an eyebrow at him, smiled.
“I bet we could make that stick, too. You look like the type that might just get curious every once in a while. Am I starting to make myself clear, Mr. Gorman? I hold the reins here. You start telling me the truth about this little club you belong to, or things can go very badly for you this afternoon. Got it?”
He got it. In typical bully fashion, the moment Gorman was presented with real strength from the opposition, he caved. The story he told Taylor made the fury rise in her stomach all over again.
Twenty
T he conference room was warming under the mid-afternoon sun despite the dark curtains that covered the windows. Baldwin sat at the rectangular table, Garrett Woods by his side. Atlantic’s round moon face was superimposed on the wall, the plasma screen that they used for secure video feeds connected to Berlin, his home base for that day.
Baldwin was bleary-eyed. He needed sleep. Soon. He ran his hand through his hair and yawned, then rubbed his eyes for a second before he continued.
“Sorry about that. Just a little tired. Didn’t get the whole story put together until breakfast.”
“Not a problem, Baldwin,” Atlantic assured him.
“Okay, let me continue. The first name I flagged was Ali Fatima, traveling from Lisbon to Paris three weeks ago. He stayed there for a week, we’ve got hotel records for him under the alias Andre Guigernon. He flew under the Guigernon name from Paris to Montreal, where he also stayed for a week. It’s going to take more extensive searching to determine what he was up to, but we can revisit that. You may want to notify the French and Canadian authorities, see if they have any unsolved murders from those two weeks that our boy might be responsible for.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Garrett said.
“Okay. In Montreal, he became Alexandre Cadoc, flew to Seattle. We had a bit of luck there, SeaTac has a convenience corridor for international passengers which allows people to move more quickly through customs. The cameras in the corridor got a beautiful shot of him. He exited to baggage claim, left the building, and returned two hours later, checked in as Arthur Bleheris, flew to Denver. We have him renting a car there, and that’s it. BOLOs are out on the rental, but there’s been no trace of him since he started out from Denver. The rental agency has GPS in their cars standard, he specifically requested one without the device. The clerk remembers him saying he preferred to get lost, that was the only way to truly see the country.
“That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I don’t know where he is, what he plans to do. There’s still no word on who’s contracted a hit in the States.” He slumped in his chair, stared Atlantic dead in his cold eyes. “Where was his tracker? How could Aiden have engineered all of this so quickly without our knowledge?”
“The tracker is dead.”
Baldwin narrowed his eyes. “When?”
“Florence, four weeks ago.”
Florence? Baldwin and Taylor had been in Florence four weeks ago. He’d bought her a new ring, they’d giggled like teenagers. And then it hit him. Aiden. Taylor. Both in the same city, with Baldwin as the common denominator. He exploded out of his chair.
“You knew. Damn it, you knew. Why didn’t you warn me?”
“We don’t know his intentions.” That was all Atlantic would say.
“We don’t know them,” Baldwin said. “Right. He may be on a job, a hit that no one has a record of? Come on. A few weeks ago, he just so happens to be in the same town where my fiancee and I are on vacation. His tracker is found dead, and he comes to the States. What the hell do you think his intentions are? He’s after me. He vowed to take me down after the debacle with his family. And here I am, in Quantico, insulated as hell, when I should be back in Nashville making sure he doesn’t blow up my life like I blew up his.”
Atlantic merely tipped his chin down and said, “We need you to find him, Baldwin.”
Baldwin was too tired to fight. Arguing with Atlantic was fruitless, he’d learned that long ago. He turned to Garrett. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this. You know that I need every ounce of information to find this fool. You held back the most important piece of the puzzle. Jesus, Garrett. I thought I could trust you.”
Atlantic cleared his throat. “He was acting on my instructions. We didn’t want your judgment clouded. If you thought he was targeting you, you wouldn’t have been of any use to us.”
“Of course. Because that’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? That I give you what you need. Screw you.”
Baldwin stormed out of the room, went back to his makeshift office. Damn them all. They were going to get people killed, and for what? To preserve their gravy train of illicit activities? It hardly seemed worth it.
He put it aside for now. Somewhere out there, Aiden was driving a car toward a certain destiny, and Baldwin could only pray that he’d find him in time.
