“Please toss away your gun.”
Her hand instinctively tightened around the weapon. She could lie about having one, but he wouldn’t buy it and the lie would hurt her credibility with him. She looked to each side of him to see if there was some kind of angle that she could use, but there was none. Any shot she fired at him, she risked taking out the kid instead. The kid who now had snot running down his nose that he couldn’t even wipe away with his sleeves.
This was the legendary Sal Ploxm? She had to say she was a little disappointed.
“Your gun, Sabrina.”
“You understand what I’m doing here is a show of faith. I have no quarrel with you, Kahsan. I only want my money.” Sabrina pulled the gun slowly from her pocket and tossed it on the ground a few feet in front of her.
“That’s excellent. Now, where is our friend Mr. Quinlan? You have to know how excited I am to be reunited with him.”
They had worked out a lie as a secondary plan to taking him out instantly, but already she knew it wasn’t going to play out. Every decision before his arrival had been based on the premise that he needed her. Only now he had options.
“I killed him,” she said, for the moment sticking with the script. “Once I had the location of Arnold’s computer I didn’t need him anymore. I figured it would be less hassle for you if I took him out.”
The kid was pushed a few steps forward and Kahsan’s face came into view over his shoulder. Dark eyes, latte- colored skin, cultured expression. Handsome actually. She wasn’t surprised. She’d always figured the devil had to look good, otherwise he wouldn’t be so tempting.
He made a tsking sound and pouted his lips. “Really, Sabrina. You don’t expect me to believe that, do you? You, killing your former mentor? Oh yes, I know all about it. How he plucked you from Harvard obscurity, much like I plucked this young fellow from Brookfield, Connecticut. Doesn’t that sound like such a charming place to be from?”
He wasn’t going to buy it and he wasn’t going to give Quinlan a shot. It was time to change the play, Sabrina realized.
“You’re right. Of course. I think it’s time to end this game. He’s in the boat.”
Kahsan spoke a few words in Arabic to the driver that Sabrina didn’t have to interpret. In seconds the driver was standing on the dock. “The smaller boat,” she told the driver. “Under the tarp.”
The driver lifted the tarp and Quinlan came to his knees.
“The gun,” the driver commanded, and Quinlan was forced to drop it in the river. The driver backed off and let Quinlan get on the dock then to the dirt road. Sabrina turned around and smiled at him. His expression was closed, but she knew what he was thinking. She only hoped that he had enough sense to get beyond his first instinct.
“Check the rest of the woods. Make sure there is no one else,” Kahsan ordered his driver. “Then find a spot and stand guard.”
The driver moved off and Sabrina took a few steps back toward Kahsan. He moved the boy slightly to the side and she could see the gun that must have been pointed at the boy’s back was now aimed at Quinlan.
“You gave him up awfully quickly,” Kahsan noted with a hint of amusement.
Sabrina turned to him and kept her hands wide so that he could see she wasn’t going to attempt any sudden movements. “What you don’t realize, Kahsan, is this little game I’ve been playing is twofold. Yes, I want the money. Still do. And if you think this kid has a chance in hell of hacking into Arnold’s computer-forget actually breaking Salinski’s encryption code-you’re wrong. But if you want to give him a shot that’s fine by me. Because the other thing I get is…revenge. Ten long years I’ve waited for a chance to meet Quinlan again. Ten years of hate. Ten years of anguish. You said you heard he was my mentor. Did you also know that he was my lover?”
She watched the expression on Kahsan’s face change slightly.
“He was,” Sabrina continued, even as she made her way closer to Kahsan, but not so close for him to feel threatened. “He made me fall in love with him. He seduced me. He fucked me for, I swear, twenty-four hours straight. Then the next day, do you know what he did? He introduced me to his fiancee. Some senator’s daughter with blond hair and fake white teeth. I was a kid, not much older than this guy. I lost my heart, then my focus, then my job.”
“So sad,” Kahsan said without sincerity. “But I’m tired of the soap opera.” He raised his gun hand toward Quinlan’s heart.
“Wait!” Sabrina stopped him abruptly. Immediately, he turned the gun toward her in preparation for some kind of attack, but she merely smiled. Sinisterly, she hoped. Calming her nerves, she focused on what she had to do. She had one chance to get this right and one chance only.
“I want to do it. I didn’t have the chance before you came. Now, I do.” She had covered enough distance to be standing over where she had tossed her gun and in a smooth, fluid movement used her sneaker-clad foot to pop one end of it up and then the other foot to kick it back into her hand.
Kahsan retrained his gun on her, but Sabrina turned her back to him and aimed straight at Quinlan’s head.
“You really thought I wanted to be some kind of hero?” she asked him, her voice as hard as she could make it. His expression continued to give nothing away. “You used me, then threw me out like so much garbage. Then the U.S. government did the same thing. Any loyalty I might have felt toward you and America died that day. So I set it all up. I was the one who made contact with Arnold to let him know that I wanted to help him with his work. I was the one who came up with the plan to contact Kahsan, and I contacted the CIA knowing they would send you. Only you. I did all of it so I could have this moment. How does it feel, Q? To know you’ve been betrayed.”
Sabrina lifted her hand, walked a few paces to the left, found the angle she’d been waiting for and fired.
There was a noise, then he collapsed to the ground and she watched as a pool of blood spilled from the wound at his head.
Coolly, even though her heart was pounding fiercely in her chest, Sabrina turned back to Kahsan. The boy’s eyes were wide and no doubt he was going into shock if he wasn’t already there. Kahsan still had his gun trained on her. She tossed the Colt behind her as another show of faith.
“Now, are you ready to go get the information you want?”
Kahsan looked past her to Quinlan’s body. His expression was suspicious, his eyes narrowed to slits, but he continued to stare at the body until something, no doubt Quinlan’s stillness, seemed to satisfy him.
Then again it could have been all the blood he was losing from his head.
“If you think this means I trust you…” he began.
She forced herself not to look at the body. “I don’t give a damn if you trust me. I want the money. The sooner the kid tries and fails, the sooner you know you have to pay me to get what you want.”
“The boat.” He pointed to the motorboat as opposed to the rowboat. Sabrina walked in front of him, right past Quinlan’s motionless body, and onto the dock. She jumped into the boat, found the key in a box on the floor, and once Kahsan and the kid were safely on board, started the engine. Kahsan untied them from the dock and she pushed the throttle forward driving them deep into the Susquehanna toward Arnold’s tiny kingdom.
She didn’t once look behind her. But mentally she sent a silent message.
Chapter 19
His head hurt. Quinlan looked down at the glassful of whiskey and thought about how this was going to make his head stop hurting.
“Of course, it’s also probably going to make it hurt worse tomorrow,” he told the empty apartment.
That didn’t stop him from taking another sip. He’d just gotten back from what had been a bitch of a mission, a failed mission, and he needed to forget. He’d been close. Maybe as close as anyone had gotten to that bastard Kahsan. He was in the right country, the right province and the right city. He had an address. He had been a step away from taking him down…then the explosion.
Six of his men were dead. The only thing that had saved him was that he’d been in the car radioing the location to his backup team. The explosion had been destructive enough to take out the entire apartment building, deadly
