North’s Nikki Read online

  “And you have no way to know if that’s a lot or a little or involved any kind of a change as to the individual wine or amount or frequency of delivery over time?”

  “I don’t know if it’s a lot or a little, but it hasn’t changed for two years,” she said, flicking through the screenloads of pages. “They started with us two years ago. Thirty cases every three months.” She looked up, over the top of the laptop. “Do you need to know anything else?”

  “Yes,” Anders said. “What else do they order through you?”

  She searched the database by the company name and came up with two other products. “They ordered champagne and oils,” she said with a frown. “Gourmet olive oils.”

  “By the cases?”

  She nodded. “Yes, twenty cases per month.”

  “Isn’t that a lot of olive oil?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. Depending on what they’re using it for and who they’re selling it to. We have companies that bring in hundreds of cases in a month.”

  “So are these suppliers of these orders on the up-and-up, and you’ve dealt with them a lot over the last five years you’ve been with the company?”

  “That’s a different search,” she muttered, typing away into the database. She brought up the supplier of the thirty cases of wine. “Yes, but this is not the maker of the wine. They bring it in from Italy and Spain apparently. It goes to France—where they sell it to us. We buy it, turn around and sell it to the company here.”

  “So typical distribution channels.”

  She shrugged. “Some. There is a tendency to go as direct as you can with winemakers. But often they have contracts, so we get it from whoever holds the contracts.”

  “Any sign of any irregularities in all these years?”

  She lifted her gaze again. “No, not that I know of. But I haven’t looked, and I’ve never come across anything like this.”

  “So what really alerted you was the fact that you had a double shipment?”

  “Yes, like I said. The question was whether my company had ordered twice the amount, but, as I told you, they didn’t. So I went to the warehouse to ensure we were talking about the same product. And there the men came at me and told me to get the hell out.”

  “Is it your warehouse? So the export company owns the property?” Anders asked. “Or do you lease space in a big warehouse from someone else?”

  She glanced up in a surprise. “That’s exactly what we do. We lease out the entire space. But it’s a massive warehouse. It is our only warehouse, but we lease space out to someone else.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Booker & Sons,” she said. “And we’ve done this for years now. We had the original lease on the building, but we didn’t need all the space, and income is income, so we lease out part of it. It’s well set up in the warehouse district with lots of loading bays, easy access. It’s just space. Booker has been using it for a long time now.”

  “Then we need to double-check that Booker hasn’t further subleased part of that space to yet another company. If they didn’t need their space, that’s an easy way to bring in money for them too.”

  She frowned. “I don’t think so. They asked for more space for themselves a year ago. Besides, they’re not allowed to sublease any of the space they lease from us. It’s in their contract.”

  Charles chuckled. “Just because people aren’t allowed to do something doesn’t stop them from doing it. Particularly if they’re in financial difficulties, they’ll do their own sublease without you knowing about it.”

  She sniffed. “That would be highly irregular and would not make my boss very happy at all. He’s always been very exclusive as to who uses his space. But, I have to admit, he’s not very involved in the business anymore.”

  “How old is he?”

  “He’s only sixty-six, I believe,” she said slowly. “But he’s got cancer, and the treatments aren’t working.”

  “Hence him wanting to sell,” Anders said. “There’s nothing quite like an unpleasant diagnosis to make you reevaluate your life and your end-of-life decisions.”

  “He made it well known to his employees that he had the company up for sale. How it might not survive in its current business format. So that we could make contingency plans. I’ve been squirrelling away a little more money from each paycheck, just in case the end comes sooner than later,” she admitted.

  “And, if you’ve been with this import-export company for five years,” North added, “you know the ins and outs. It’s quite likely that whoever buys the company might want your continued assistance, even after the transfer.”

  “Maybe,” she said steadily. “I have to admit that had been my first thought. But often they hire you for a little while, and then you’re very quickly relieved of your position as they hire their own staff.”

  “And you can’t really blame them for that either,” Anders said. “When you think about it, that’s just good business practice.”

  She winced. “Maybe. I’ll be looking for a job regardless.”

  “Can you send me any other company details you may have to my email?” North asked. He pulled out his phone and gave her his email address. “I want to do some research into the history of every company we’ve just discussed, from Booker & Sons, to the company that’s importing the wine, Only the Best, and also the supplier of the wine. And I want the address of that warehouse as well.”

  She brought up an email and typed in the requested names and addresses. When she was done, she checked it over and hit Send. “Okay, that’s the information I have.”

  “Great. Now, how good is your memory of what this guy looks like who threatened you?”

  “Men,” she corrected quietly. “There were two of them. Swarthy, as if they were maybe Corsican, Sicilian, dark Italians, a nationality like that, although I’m not very good at distinguishing ethnicities. Their English was extremely good. Their diction was clear, while they did have an accent, but again I couldn’t tell you what for sure.”

  “Good. Ages?”

  She shrugged. “Mid-forties?”

  After that came more questions until finally she said, “Honestly I don’t have anything else to tell you.”

  “We do need the admin’s name and contact information, plus the boss’s name and contact information.” This came from Anders.

  North looked at him, then glanced at Nikki to see what reaction they would get. And, as he suspected, she was already shaking her head.

  “No, I can’t have you contacting them.”

  “I don’t want to contact them. I want to start searching their phone numbers and addresses and emails,” Anders said. “We have to rule out if anyone in the company is involved in this.”

  Her jaw dropped as she stared at him. “They definitely aren’t involved. What the hell made you go in that direction?”

  Silence ascended in the small room.

  “And you can’t just hack into these people’s lives.” She shifted her gaze from one to the other and finally to her granddad. “Granddad, what is it that I don’t know?”

  Chapter 2

  Nikki studied her grandfather, seeing the intelligence gleaming in the back of his eyes. “Does this have something to do with what you secretly do all the time?”

  He gave her a bland look.

  She raised both hands in frustration. “Somebody start talking.”

  “Your grandfather has been of great assistance to a lot of people,” North said firmly. “Like us, he can’t give too many details. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know a lot and hasn’t been involved in a lot. But it’s all on the up-and-up, and it’s all related to security on an international level. And, in that line of work, there has always been a certain amount of intelligence gathering, whether about smuggling or terrorists or trafficking of people,” he said.

  “So do you have any connections who can track this down, Granddad?”

  He nodded. “That’s also why I brought in Levi and his crew. O
nce it starts getting life-and-death dangerous, we can’t do everything ourselves, my dear.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to look too closely at what was under the wine.”

  “Exactly. So what we need to do is go to your warehouse, find the crates and check it out ourselves,” North said.

  “Which brings up the question,” Anders added, “how does the merchandise travel from the warehouse to its final destination?”

  “We use several transport companies. Stan, our warehouse guy, handles all this,” she said. “You’re not breaking into the warehouse, are you?”

  North looked up in surprise. “Didn’t you just say it was your warehouse?”

  Feeling foolish, she nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Except for the Booker & Sons section.”

  “Do you have anything in your contract that says you can’t go into your own warehouse, even the sublet section?”

  She shook her head. “No, of course not. That’s why I went down there to check out the misdelivery myself.”

  “Right. So, if we enter the warehouse and check out its contents, surely that won’t cross anybody?”

  She sighed, snapped her laptop closed, hugged it up against her chest and said, “It’s just that all this feels wrong. I’m questioning everything right now.”

  “Good,” he said. “You should. Until we get to the bottom of this, we trust no one, and we look at everything three times, and then we check it a fourth time if there’s any inkling inside us that something is wrong.”

  Her gaze drifted to her granddad. “Are you okay with that plan?”

  Charles leaned forward, reached out and grasped her hand in his. “Absolutely. This is how we do business from now on. These guys will come up with a plan. I’ll okay it, and you will let us go ahead with it.”

  She wrinkled her face at that. “You know I don’t like taking orders.”

  “No, you never have,” he said with a gentle smile. “And these aren’t orders, but neither are they suggestions. Once you put something like this into motion, we need to let it happen. If you’re worried at all, then let’s get to the bottom of this.”

  She opened her mouth and said, “Honestly I was starting to think it was just my imagination.”

  Her grandfather shook his head. “You might think it was your imagination, but I saw you and heard you right afterward. You know exactly who you called and why.”

  She gave him a smile. “So true. There didn’t seem to be anybody else I could call, so I guess thank you is in order.” She looked at the two men. “The thing is, I can’t pay you. And I cannot authorize the company to pay you either.”

  North looked at her in amusement.

  She frowned at him. “This isn’t funny.”

  “No, it isn’t. Pride is a very useful thing to have and to work with. And that’s fine that you can’t pay us because we already got paid.”

  She thrummed her fingers on her laptop and looked at her granddad. “Are you paying them?”

  He shook his head. “Levi is doing this as a favor for me.”

  She stared at him suspiciously. “A favor for what?”

  He patted her hand again. “Nothing for you to worry about. I’ve helped out Levi lots of times. When I needed somebody to call, it was him I called. He’s happy to help me.”

  Realizing she sounded more churlish than she meant to, her shoulders sagged, and she faced the two newcomers. “Then the least I can do is take you upstairs to show you to your rooms, and then we’ll get you some dinner.” She bounced to her feet and waited for the two men to stand. She glanced at the teapot, their teacups still full and grinned. “When you come down, I’ll put on some coffee.” The relief on North’s face made her laugh out loud. “You’re so American.”

  “You’re so British,” he said.

  “Actually I spent more years in California than I care to remember.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “I went to UCLA for my degree.”

  “Yet you decided not to stay?”

  “I did for several years, and then I thought about coming home again. I had a hankering to get back to English soil, and I started working over here. It’s been great, but it’s coming to an end. Now I have no clue what I’ll do.”

  “You’re pretty sure the company will be sold quickly?”

  “Or shut down. I don’t see how the boss can keep going. I can’t even get ahold of him to ask him questions anymore. It’s always his assistant now.”

  “Do you share an office?”

  “With his cancer diagnosis, he set up an office in his house because he can’t do the traveling anymore. So I now work from home mostly. It saves money for the company. We do have two other staff members who work out of a much smaller corporate office. I could have joined them there, and I do go there once a week or so, if needed. But, other than that, I work remotely. I handle the import and export paperwork, and the men in the office take the orders and handle sales.”

  “That must be nice,” North said.

  She shot him a look. “It would be, but it also reminds you how your job is coming to an end. At least in an office setting, you meet people, have a business network. You have a social life and a feel for how things are going. But, when you’re removed from that, going in once a week makes you feel more like a guest, a visitor, an outsider, and you see the changes that are happening faster. So, every time I go in, it seems like everybody is less and less busy, people are quieter, less jovial. I believe this has been happening for the last few months now, and I think we’re probably coming to the end. I don’t know what will happen if the owner dies before he sells the company.”

  “Well, it’s also possible somebody realizes the business is in trouble and has taken advantage of your distribution system to do a bit more smuggling than is expected.”

  “Expected? None is expected.”

  “Unfortunately a lot more smuggling is going on than any of us want to consider,” North said. “The smugglers are just getting more sophisticated.”

  “That’s quite possible but never with our company,” she said firmly. She led the way up the stairs, and, at the top, she pointed to two rooms opposite each other. “One on each side.” She walked to the one on the right, opened the door and motioned at North. “This one is yours. In a straight line down there is a rooftop exit and fire escapes down either side.”

  “Interesting that you would tell me that.”

  She snorted. “You look like the kind of guy who will immediately find the first way out now that you’ve arrived.”

  She spoke in such a dry tone that he had to laugh. “True enough.”

  She motioned to the door on the opposite side. “Anders, this room is for you.” She opened it to show a duplicate room. But the color scheme was very different.

  “These are nice rooms,” Anders said, stepping in. “Nice suites, big beds.”

  She nodded and smiled. “Very true. Granddad has been here for decades. It was his parents’ house before him.”

  “And maybe, if you’re lucky, it’ll be yours one day.” North looked at her and added, “Do you have other family?”

  “A brother in the States and my parents, who live in Switzerland.”

  He nodded. “At least you have Charles right now.”

  She gave North a sad smile. “Yes, but seeing my boss waste away just reminds me that my grandfather is that much older than my boss. Although I have him right now, how much longer will he be around?”

  North gently squeezed her shoulder. “The thing is, you do have him now. There’s no guarantee of tomorrow for any of us. So enjoy what you’ve got while you’ve got it, and, if fate steps in and takes him from you, then be grateful for the days you took the time to enjoy him. And he has to look at the same thing from his point of view. There’s no guarantee for any of us. We’re here today, but we all can be gone tomorrow.”

  *

  North quickly unloaded his bag, grabbed his laptop and stepped out of his room. He wait
ed at the top of the stairs for Anders to do the same, and the two marched downstairs with their laptops and cell phones. They returned to the same sitting room they’d been in before. It was empty at the moment, but that was fine. They had some research to do. They needed to check in with Levi also.

  North emailed Levi to say they had arrived safely, met Jonas and then gave Levi the story about Nikki, as much as he knew at the moment. After he hit Send, he opened up a new Google page and started researching the import-export company that Nikki worked for. Then North forwarded Nikki’s email list of related names, companies and addresses to Levi.

  When they went on a job like this, North had to keep reminding himself how he was no longer in the military, with its covert ops and segmented partitions to add further levels of secrecy, akin to the right hand not knowing what the left hand did. Plus, it was an added disconnect between what the SEALs did and the resulting effects. In many ways all the secrecy probably hindered a lot of cases of PTSD among the troops, since they didn’t have a clear picture of what went down. Not the actual details.

  But working for Levi was a job with layers and layers of transparency, even among Levi and Ice and all the other guys. The guys never went anywhere alone while on assignment; they were always in constant communication with the control room team at the compound. Research was done in conjunction with everyone else. Sometimes the men in the field didn’t get a chance to do very much research at all. They relied on people back at their base of operations to fill in the holes.

  As soon as he sent off that list, North looked at Anders. “I don’t know about you, but I want to head to that warehouse first.”

  “Exactly.” Anders looked at his wristwatch and frowned. “It’s not open now.”

  “Even better,” he said. “She works for the company, so she should have keys or digital access to the building.”

  “We don’t exactly have permission from the owner though,” Anders said. “Just from her. Although the admin did give her permission to go and check it out initially.”