Blindside (Michael Bennett 12)

I said, “Your dad and mom are worried sick about you.” That had the effect I wanted. She looked stricken. Then I threw in, “Why haven’t you called them?”

She took a moment, then her brown eyes settled on me. “I wouldn’t bother my father about anything. He’s too tied up trying to save the world and raise his new sons. But I don’t want my mom to worry. I’ve thought about calling her, but I can’t risk exposing our operation. We still have a lot of work to do. I’ll figure a way to get a message to her tonight.”

Damned if she didn’t sound sincere. I was starting to think I’d wasted a trip. I hoped I hadn’t wasted my life. I wasn’t here to compel someone to return to the US. I was here to save a girl I thought had been forced into doing something she didn’t want to do. I knew she was smart, but I’d still been worried about her.

When she put her arm around Henry’s waist, then dropped her head to his shoulder, I understood the situation.

The door behind me opened and closed again. I turned and watched an odd pair of men strut toward the center of the room. One was tall with neat, blond hair. The other looked like a character actor in a cheap stoner movie. His stringy, dark hair spread out over his shoulders. The T-shirt from an AC/DC concert drooped over his belly like an awning.

Henry stepped up to the railing and leaned over it. He was clearly annoyed. He said, “Finally Ollie and Christoph have decided to grace us with their presence. And they never completed their assignment. I had to do it for them.”

The slovenly man smiled and said, “Thanks, Henry. It’s nice to get a little help once in a while.”

I didn’t try to hide my smile. I liked a radical, no matter who he worked for. Radicals tended to make life more interesting. It was the kind of comment I might have made. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew this guy. At least I knew I’d seen him.

I studied the two men. They looked so familiar. Then it hit me. They were the shooters from the coffeehouse, Brew, back in New York.

CHAPTER 70

I WASN’T IN New York, where someone might call in the cavalry, or at least the cops. I would’ve loved to see a SWAT team about now. I’d never again make fun of their fixation on tactics and training. In fact, if I got out of this, I had some apologies to make. Maybe to some cybercrime experts in the Intel Bureau as well.

I felt like I was doomed. Henry wouldn’t have called in these two if he was going to let me walk away. These were the kind of men who killed you, then stuffed you in the trunk of a car. The irony of it was, now that I knew Natalie was safe, I would gladly walk away. That is, if I was given a choice.

The guy with the teardrop tattoo and the sleek thug were still on either side of me. I couldn’t just break and run. They’d have no qualms about shooting me in the back.

Still, no one had searched me. That was going to be a hell of a surprise. I calculated the advantages of pulling the pistol now or waiting. The longer I waited, the better chance someone had of discovering the gun. It also gave them the opportunity to bind my hands and keep me from moving.

But if I waited, I could surprise whoever drove me in the car. It would probably be just the three of us. I liked those odds if I had the element of surprise.

I still had hope. That was the key to a happy life. Hope. Just like I hoped to see my children grow up. I still had hope that Brian would get out of prison. I hoped to marry Mary Catherine soon, and I hoped these assholes would be careless enough not to search me.

I looked up at Henry. “You don’t have the guts to do your own dirty work?”

“I see you still haven’t given up. Good for you. I don’t know what kind of trap you’re trying to walk me into, but I already told you I’m too smart for that. No matter what you think you’ve worked out. I’m a step ahead of you.”

I could tell by the way he’d delivered the little speech that he believed it. Absolutely and completely. In his eyes, he was equivalent to Einstein. And that would be his weakness. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually someone with that high of an opinion of himself always got knocked down.

The main problem, at least in my mind, was that if he was knocked down in the future it wasn’t going to help me now.

The two men I’d seen in New York—Christoph and Ollie—stepped closer to me. They spoke English with an accent different from anyone else’s in the room. It sounded German or Dutch. It wasn’t anything I could

use at the moment.

I said to the slovenly man in the AC/DC shirt, the one who looked like an Ollie, “I was in the coffeehouse in New York when you and your buddy opened fire.”

He chuckled. “Wild show, eh? Good thing those don’t happen every day, no?”

“I imagine in your line of work they happen more often than most people think.”

It was his buddy, the tall guy—probably Christoph—who answered. “We’re professionals. It depends on the circumstances and what our assignment is. If we don’t want a public shoot-out, we don’t have one. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If it wasn’t for Alice and Janos, there wouldn’t have been any problems at all.”

“Are those the other killers you gunned down?”

The neat, well-groomed Christoph smiled. “We’re used for contracts on professionals.”

The heavy, sloppy Ollie added, “And on cops.” He had a breezy, endearing smile. It’d be hard not to like him in other circumstances.

Christoph said, “Aren’t Americans used to public shootings?”