Everly was about to find himself between a rock and a very hard place.
ELLIOTT BRADEN BOARDED his flight at Heathrow, brimming with a certain bonhomie. The Americans had already deployed their undercover cop into international affairs that did not concern them. Braden had been assigned the watchdog job of Interpol “liaison.” Surely the most glorified term for the thankless and impotent position of making sure the Americans did not screw it up.
In fact, he knew they would. He knew they didn’t know when to quit. Americans prided themselves on their never-say-die attitude.
In a haze of contempt, both for his superiors in Interpol and the necessity of involving the Americans, Braden took his first-class seat, graciously accepting the crystal goblet of Chenin Blanc from the flight attendant. The aircraft took off after a delay of only seven minutes.
He had no desire to embroil himself in the Americans’ doggedness, but he supposed his sacrifice might pay off handsomely in the not-too-distant future. Very soon now he would meet them.
Garrett Weisz. J. D. Thorne. Matt Guiliani.
These were the players, the heart of the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-TruthSayers task force, the men running the current undercover operation against Kyle Everly. And as touchingly loyal to one another as blood brothers, all incapable of minding their own petty, provincial business, even when their loved ones were threatened.
The small son of Garrett Weisz, for instance, a child named Christo. He’d been kidnapped by leaders of TruthSayers when Weisz, Thorne and Guiliani’s undercover operation threatened them. The threesome prevailed and the child was restored to the bosom of his family. The TruthSayers were left without much leadership.
Months later, their numbers greatly reduced, the rabid TruthSayers made an attempt on J. D. Thorne’s life. And then on the teenage son of Thorne’s girlfriend, a Seattle detective named Ann Calder. Enter Kyle Everly. The wealthy local rancher and Truth-Sayers sympathizer had, for some inscrutable, arrogant reason, lent his considerable resources to the straightforward attempted assassinations of J. D. Thorne and Ann Calder.
The trained killers failed. Guiliani rescued the teenager. Everly, however, proved untouchable. That fact had done nothing to faze the dogged investigations of Weisz or Thorne, least of all Mateos Guiliani.
Such a hero, Braden thought.
But Braden was stuck. Interpol had enough to move on a few of the other suspected members of La Fraternité but nothing concrete on its wealthiest and therefore most powerful member, the wily, wealthy, twisted rancher. To make a clean sweep and put an end to their scattered reign of terror, Everly must be caught up in the sting, and the other unconfirmed members with him. But he was an American citizen, and it was Guiliani who could, if all went as expected, force Everly’s hand.
Such an unexpected bit of luck, Braden reflected.
He allowed himself a vinegary little smile. Perhaps the stars and the planets had aligned themselves in just the most pleasing configuration. Perhaps Guiliani would give him the most amazing coup de grâce.
He blinked, and lifted his goblet in silent salutation.
SATISFIED WITH HIS night’s work, Matt shut down the computer and turned soundlessly in Everly’s leather chair. Staring off into the night, he took a few moments more to visualize his first face-to-face meeting with his quarry. In his mind’s eye, he watched Everly’s trademark, guileless smile fade dead away.
Matt left the computer and started toward the back of the house when he heard a vehicle approaching. His senses went on high alert, his pulse slowed. He had no fear of being caught. He could still slip away unseen in a matter of seconds. But his thirst for the chase had been whetted.
He decided to go back and let the sting begin. To let Everly find him here now rather than in the morning. He moved silently as a ghost back into Everly’s study and took up a position to the side of the picture window looking out, within several feet of the front door.
It was Everly who had driven into the yard. Matt watched him turn toward the garages, cut the engine, get out and shut the door on his shiny black Lexus four-wheel-drive. Deep in conversation, he had a cell phone plastered to his ear.
He turned back momentarily, clearly expecting Geary to have appeared by now to put the Lexus away. Still talking, his breath making puffs in the freezing air, he strode back to his vehicle, jerked open the passenger door, leaned in and laid on the horn.
Interesting, Matt thought, that Dennis Geary still didn’t come running.
Everly must have decided to ignore it. He left the Lexus with the door open, reached the first riser and kicked the dirt off one boot and then the other as the motion-detector turned on the porch light. He took the next two steps in a single stride, landing him on the veranda.
He cast a look over his shoulder, grimaced, then snarled into the phone and moved out of Matt’s sight. He had only cracked open the door when a shot rang out in the valley of the Bar Naught. The cell phone went flying onto the floor of the entry, and Kyle Everly fell with a sickening thud to the floor of the foyer.
A powerful shudder roiled through Matt’s body. Seconds passed in its grip. He thought he heard another shot, but revised his opinion in a split second. What he’d heard was the cell phone crashing onto the parquet floor, and behind that, an echo of the gun blast. He moved swiftly to the front door, careful to stay concealed. A massive amount of blood had already pooled on the hardwood floor. Too much loss to survive? Matt laid a finger at Everly’s carotid artery. He felt nothing.
Everly lay dead in his tracks.
A chill train wreck of emotions rose up in Matt. To see a man dropped in cold blood without warning, shot in the back like that, crossed the line. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He crossed himself with the motions his mother had taught him when he was too young to know what he was doing. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take…
He wasn’t sure he believed any of that anymore. He knew if there was a hell, Everly deserved to be set on that path. But shooting Everly in the back had never occurred even in the stark revenge fantasies Matt had harbored.
The freezing night air rolled in through the open door, but failed to carry off the stench of blood. Aware of the commotion the shot had caused in the stables, of horses half-frenzied, he fought the overwhelming temptation to return fire blindly just to draw it again. He might get a fix on the direction the shot had come from or the direction the shooter had moved. There was no other noise. No sounds of a retreating vehicle. But even if the ruse worked, how would he explain his own presence?
The murder of Kyle Everly changed everything. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see that Everly’s death opened the door to a huge power struggle among the members of The Fraternity. That someone would move in soon to fill the vacuum of power.
Matt made the split-second decision to reinvent himself and his mission. He could not be seen here tonight. He moved out of range of Everly’s bloody corpse, stood and began to move soundlessly away. He snatched up the papers he had printed and shut down the computer.
When he left there must be no hint that anyone had been inside the mansion at the moment of Everly’s demise.
No more than sixty seconds had passed. Still no one appeared in the yard to check out a shot in the dark, but the turmoil in the stables escalated.
Six months ago what Matt knew about horses could have fit onto the head of a pin, but even then he’d have recognized the high-pitched whinnying and the sounds of hooves crashing against barriers for what it was. The edge of stampede behavior in what amounted to a lockdown situation. A disaster waiting to happen to very pricey animals.
Was it the gunshot, or the scent of death permeating the frozen night air that incited the panic?
Fiona