A Wanted Woman Part 57

In severe pain, he bled, he sweated, panted. "The bank. Where it all went wrong."

"I have questions."

"I'm hurting."

"Why the h.e.l.l did the bodyguards stay in the car?"

"Those were my orders."

"Why? Why was the metal detector turned off at the bank?"

"Be honorable. Let me . . . too much pain."

"Breathe, breathe. Now, adjust to the pain. Talk."

He panted, sweated, bled.

I asked, "Why did the politician have a loaded gun inside a bank?"

"You are a lucky one. A very lucky one."

"I heard. A preacher told me that, only I doubt if he was a preacher."

"It was as if G.o.d was on your side."

"Why did the target recognize me twice, once at the Carlton and the next day at the bank?"

He coughed. "Saved by a priest. You were saved by a gregarious, narcissistic, money-laundering priest who saw cameras and saw a chance to press flesh and steal some publicity for himself."

"I was saved by a priest who was at the right place, wrong time."

He could barely talk. "First off, why were you allowed to walk into a bank with a gun?"

"When I step back, that makes no sense. What would've made sense, and it's something I knew before I was told, was that a sniper could have done that job and never been seen."

"You were allowed to walk into a bank with a gun because they wanted you there with a gun."

"What was going on?"

"I will tell you. Then let me go."

"Depends on what you say."

The man with the Chelsea smile, the man who was once handsome, had much to say.

SIXTY-NINE.

I removed bloodied plastic gloves, wiped my brow, then sat down at one of their computers. I turned it on and contacted Hacker. From there, she could create a remote access and get into their files, could get into whatever computer network was linked to this one. Anything regarding me would be redacted, the rest sent to the news media. Let Trinidad see their saviors as the devils they really are.

Gla.s.s of wine in hand, wearing a pair of War Machine's wingtip shoes, leaving bloodied footprints that marked my journey, I toured his extravagant home, touched much Trinidadian art.

The home was an armory by the sea, stocked in preparation for a terrorist attack on Trinidad and Tobago. Emergency power generators, large canisters of propane, bulletproof gla.s.s, and each wall fortified to endure an economic collapse, a worldwide pandemic, chaos and the depths to which humanity might sink when there was no law in place. Enough nonperishable food to last six months, maybe nine.

They were ready for an apocalypse, maybe even a major zombie attack.

They hadn't been ready for me, an army of one. The Kiwi killer. After walking through five bedrooms, I went into the master suite. Their sprawling ber-king-size bed was a bed/bunker that was bolted to the marble floor, the rest of the room carpeted. Not a bunk bed for a child, but a bed that was custom made and housed a military bunker underneath the mattresses, a king-size metal compartment used for storage, as in one used for the preparations for war, or for storage of weapons and valuables.

Theirs was an immovable safe. It was a bank vault underneath pillow-top comfort.

Hundreds of gold coins, thousands of silver coins, Rolex watches, thirty-six handguns, twenty-seven rifles, ammo, and $125,000 in cash. The first cash that I uncovered was in American money. There was more. Many layers. Underneath that neat stack of cash there also were over 800,000 Trinidad and Tobago dollars. That money was sleeping with 250,000 Bajan dollars, 81,000 British pounds, and 95,000 euro. At the bottom of the pile was over 4 million in Russian rubles, 700,000 in Argentine pesos, 130,000 in Canadian dollars, 700,000 in Chinese yuan, 139 million in the South Korean won, 140,000 in Australian dollars, 1 million in Eastern Caribbean currency, and 800,000 in Swedish krona. My mind did its best to do the math. That might have been close to $2 million US dollars. The money and the jewels.

The cricketer had owned the same style of high-end bunker bed.

He had said there were only two in the West Indies, that the big man he worked for had the second one, and this was the second one, so that double-verified that he worked for the LKs.

I'd bet the cricketer's bed had money under it as well-not this much, but a nice amount.

I'll bet his pregnant wife had no idea she was sleeping on top of a nice amount of cash, guns, and other jewelry, whatever his obsession with material things drove him to buy. I'll bet he had seen the rings that the LKs wore, admired the men of power, then ran out and bought himself three to be like them.

I could see the connection now. I saw a man who idolized another man.

The cricketer had tried to turn his home into a version of Pa.s.sy Bay.

War Machine was his role model.

The pregnant wife might have been his Diamond Dust without a cause.

I went inside the luxury shower, turned on a dozen shower heads, put the music on, kept guns at my side, and washed away the dead man's blood, washed my scarred skin, and again I changed, decided who I would be for the next few hours, and dressed. While I applied makeup and latex, War Machine's words, his final words, stung. That last conversation as he lay in pain, suffering, bleeding, facing death, made me tighten my jaw, made me want to break and burn everything inside of this wretched home. Once I was dressed, I stood in the doorframe, adjusted my cap, looked at the blood all over the floor.

I stood and looked to the right at his bloodied corpse, then looked to the left at other parts that had once made a disarticulated man whole, stood and reheard his words, War Machine's words, our last conversation played over and over, its ugliness an infinite loop in my head.

Breathing heavily, fear arriving, trying to be brave, he had said, "Reaper."

"Tell me before it's too late."

"You were sent to kill the politician; that was the lie you were told."

"That was the setup. Tell me the punch line."

"That was your task. If you had killed him, only him, it still would have worked itself out."

"If you want medical attention, no matter how humiliating that will be, tell me everything."

"The politician. However that turned out, was fine. That was sanctioned."

"Sanctioned? By whom?"

"By me."

"You knew about the hit in advance."

"I helped with the planning."

"Someone at home was on your team? Is that what you want me to believe?"

"Only, the politician was to kill you while you were here in Trinidad. Not our men. I made the call, took my men out of the bank so no matter what happened, we would suffer no casualties and be unable to be given any blame. If the politician managed to kill you, or if you had killed him, that would have kept us out of the equation because it would have been his choice to go in alone. His choice. His arrogance would have gotten him killed. It would have kept the Barbarians from having cause to start a war on us."

"He wore a bulletproof vest."

"Because. He. Knew. He was waiting on your arrival."

"He would have killed a woman in a crowded bank?"

"An a.s.sa.s.sin, not a woman."

"He a.s.sumed killing a young woman would be easier. Civilians as witnesses, civilians who would have praised him; it was the perfect setup. They had filled the safe house with everything you needed to make me look like an international hit woman before I arrived. It was all part of the setup."

"The politician knew you were coming. He was armed, waiting. We had practiced with him all morning. He could shoot. All he needed was one shot, but he had never had to shoot under such circ.u.mstances. He panicked. The priest stepped to him, you walked in, his view was blocked, but he could see you-saw you coming to kill him. It became a race to shoot, and he panicked."

I paused. "Who sanctioned it on the side that used to issue my paycheck?"

"Someone at the top."

"I need a name."

"I communicated with only one, the one with the power."

"Give me a name."

"There was no name. No one in your organization, no one on its dark side, has a name."

"We all have identifiers. What was his designation?"

He suffered awhile, each breath exacerbating his pain.

I said, "Just when I thought we were getting along swimmingly."

I poured more alcohol over his open wound. When he was done screaming, sweating, and jerking, then he panted and he told me. Still, I didn't believe him. He was desperate to live.

I asked, "Why would the Barbarians work with your organization?"

"Money. It would cost us a lot to have access and the right to kill one of their a.s.sa.s.sins, one who had status, one who had earned an M and an X. You were their Modesty Blaise, a secret agent whose hair color, hairstyle, and clothing changed at a snap of her fingers. You were their Lazarus. From what I heard, you were a pain in the neck, impossible to work with. You were expendable."

"Why not a man? Why not kill a James Bond? Why sacrifice me?"

"With your looks, it would have been international news. International fame."

"My curse."

"What curse?"

"My skin is my sin. My gender is my sin. Take your pick."

"What?"

"I live in a world where if a woman asks to be educated, and she presses for that right for herself, she is left for dead with a bullet in her head. Metaphorically, that's what they did to me. Trinidad was a bullet to my head. I was a strong employee, and when I demanded what I deserved, to them I was an uncontrollable b.i.t.c.h. I was a stunningly principled and fearless young woman, a girl who put those barbaric men to shame. If I were a man, I would have been called a maverick and given a corner office."

"The politician was to kill the a.s.sa.s.sin, the white foreigner, in public-the white woman, the symbol of all things that many have come to both emulate and loathe. He would have saved the people in the bank in Port of Spain, all captured on tape. Then your credentials would have magically been found, and he would be seen as a hero, receive tons of positive press, and elevate his status. He would have been the next prime minister and we would have owned the office."

"And with him in your pocket, every contract that came through would have benefited the LKs."

"Money is power. Politics is power. With both, with him, we would have been unstoppable."

"You were paying well to make that happen. Actually, the second plan sounds better, when you say it. Might be your accent. But the way you say it, killing me in a bank really sounds cool as s.h.i.+t."

"We were paying top dollar to have a top a.s.sa.s.sin's head on a spike."

I laughed a little. "To be able to kill a white foreign woman who would look good on TV. The Woman of a Thousand Faces. Kill a n.o.body, and become a somebody. Kill the white woman."

"You find that humorous?"

"You were conned."

"What?"

"And I find that tragic. When they drew my blood and tested my heritage, traced my genealogy, that would have been double hilarious. How much was I being sold for?"

"More money than ninety-nine point nine percent of the people here see in ten lifetimes."

"So, the hit was on me so the minister-of-whatever could look like a national hero."

"It's all part of the game. It's a move on a chessboard, nothing more."

"Not buying it. Sounds good, well thought-out, sort of, but not really, and I am not buying it. What's missing? All you have told me, with the facts you have pieced together, with the time that has gone by, it would be easy to reverse-engineer a bulls.h.i.+t story, an elaborate bulls.h.i.+t conspiracy story like that one."

"Does it look like I knew you were coming here today?"

I pulled my lips in, then I poured more alcohol on his open wound.

His scream echoed throughout the cavernous home.

He prayed for death. He prayed to a G.o.d he no longer believed in.