Garret's Gambit Read online

  “Don’t kill them,” Jonas’s voice came through the phone, sharp and crisp.

  The two men stared at the phone in shock.

  “I’ll try not to,” he said, “but you don’t like it when we cause damage. Isn’t that what you said when you picked us up at the airport? That we always cause damage?”

  “Yeah, and, in this case, I suspect you’re about to cause damage to a hotel room and several people. Well, if they need to be damaged, then I guess I’m okay with it.”

  “You know how I feel about assholes.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

  “Better get here fast.” He hung up the phone, looked at the two intruders, and asked, “You want to talk to us, or you want to talk to MI6?”

  “We don’t want anything to do with MI6,” one man said, looking at the other. “We’re actually from Scotland.”

  “You don’t have accents,” she said, stepping up beside Garret. “I don’t believe you. What do you have to do with my sister? Did you have anything to do with her disappearance?”

  The first man raised his hands, palms up. “No, we were hired to keep an eye on the apartment and to see who came to look after her, to look in on her, I mean.”

  “It’s a hotel room, not an apartment, dumbass,” Garret said. “So you better get things straight here. Because we’ll check it out, and, if you’re lying, I will personally take you apart.”

  “Look. We were hired to keep a watch on this place. That’s it. It was my watch, when you guys showed up. I reported seeing you go in. That’s all there is to it.”

  “And you told who?” Kano asked, coming around to study the two men, as he sent pictures to his team and to Jonas.

  “The guy who hired us,” he answered. Then quickly added, “And I don’t know anything about him. I get a phone call. I get a deposit of money in my account, half up front, half when the job’s done. Other than that, I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Not sure I believe you,” he said. “What’s the number?”

  He hesitated and immediately Kano came and searched him. He pulled out his wallet, cell phone, and, with a quick search, found a piece on his ankle. He pulled that out and whistled. “Jonas will love this.”

  “No, he won’t,” Garret said, “he won’t love it at all.”

  “But that’s all right. He needed a reason to come and get you guys anyway.” Kano sent a picture of the handgun to Jonas, and then they went through the guy’s wallet.

  “Hey, you don’t need to do that.”

  “What I see is that you don’t have enough to buy yourself some chips at the corner store,” he said. “So maybe you better try that line again.”

  “It’s the truth,” he said. “I don’t have any money. That’s why I’m even doing this, and it’s all bullshit.”

  Kano checked out the guy’s name. “Funny, you got IDs in here but two different names.”

  “So what?” he said. “That’s just the life I live.”

  “Got it,” he said. “It kind of sucks though, huh? You never really know which name to answer to.”

  “Fuck off,” he said. “You guys ain’t nobody to talk.”

  As they waited and watched, now with the weapon in Kano’s hand, they searched the second man. “One set of ID, a little more money than you, but not much. Both of you stooges are broke.”

  “That’s the reason we’re doing this,” the second man said, in a quiet voice. “And we really just want to get the hell out of here.”

  “If you don’t offer up something useful,” Garret said, “then we can’t let you go.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The guy who hired you,” Astra said. “Are you that stupid?” Both men just glared at her. “Listen, assholes. She’s my sister, and I want her back, now.”

  “I’m sure you do, but we don’t know anything about her disappearance.”

  “Well, presumably the guys who took her are the ones wanting to keep track of who comes here,” Garret said. “So you need to tell us who that is, before I even think about letting you go.”

  “You don’t understand. We’ll never get any more work, if we do that.”

  “Well, he won’t be hiring you anymore anyway, so you’ll have the same problem either way. We’ll find this guy no matter what. It’s just a matter of whether we find him sooner or later.”

  “But, if he finds out we snitched on him, it won’t be good for us,” he said.

  “It’s already ugly,” Garret said, “because we’ll make sure your faces hit the news today, and they’re already writing you off as people who may have turned on them.”

  “We’re not snitches!”

  “But they don’t know that, do they?” Garret said.

  Kano looked at the men. “You said you’re broke, right? A little money must go a long way then, huh?”

  “So you’ll pay us then?” asked the second man, eyeing him. “We might do a deal then.”

  The first man hit him. “Look, Sonny. We’ll get in a shit ton of trouble this way.”

  “We’re already in a shit ton of trouble,” Sonny said, “just in case you didn’t get the memo.”

  The first man looked directly at his buddy. “We’ll never get more work after this. You know that. Not with them anyway.”

  “Not too many choices for us,” Sonny said.

  “I know, but this isn’t going well.” With a long exhale, he turned to Garret. “How much?”

  “You tell me,” he said, with a sigh. “Everybody’s got a price. What’s yours?”

  “One thousand pounds,” he said instantly.

  “Interesting figure,” he said. “And you answered pretty quick. Why?”

  “That’s what we were supposed to get for this job, which we won’t get now, thanks to you.”

  “That’s a decent amount for watching a hotel room. Especially the room of a woman nobody has anything to do with,” Garret said.

  “A thousand pounds between the two of you isn’t a hell of a lot of money either. Particularly if you’ve already been given half of it up front,” Kano said.

  “A thousand pounds each and we walk,” the first man said.

  Garret laughed at him. “Didn’t take very long to find your price, did it?”

  At that, a hard knock came at the door. Kano walked over and let Jonas in. “They’re trying to sell the information they have for one thousand pounds,” he said. “Each.”

  “Wow, that’s almost insulting.”

  “It is, but these guys are lowlifes. All we can hope to get is the next rung up the ladder.”

  “Which sucks because we really need several rungs up the ladder.”

  “They don’t know anything,” she said. “They’re just losers anyway.”

  “We know enough,” Sonny said.

  “Do you?” she said, with another sneer. “Prove it. Why should anybody give you anything anyway? You should just get a life sentence for being two-bit losers.”

  “Hardly,” the first guy said, getting into it. “You’re the one who’s a loser.”

  She rolled her eyes at that.

  Garret reached out, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and said, “You have anything to say or not?”

  “Only if I get one thousand pounds,” he said.

  Garret shoved him over to Jonas. “Personally I would just deep-six them. Don’t even bother about a trial or anything. Nobody’ll miss these punks anyway.”

  “You can’t do that,” the second man said.

  “Sure we can, … Sonny. You don’t have anything useful to offer. So, as far as we’re concerned, you’re nothing but cheats. You’ve already turned on your boss, so we couldn’t trust anything we got from you anyway,” he said, with a sneer.

  The man studied him for a long moment. “We got something good,” he said.

  “Don’t do it,” the other guy said.

  “We don’t really have a whole lot of choice,” he said. “Think about it. We got to get out of this.
”

  “It doesn’t matter if we get out or not. We’ll still be gone.”

  “Which is why we need to get what we can,” he said. He looked at Jonas. “You MI6?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “In that case,” he said. “We just want freedom.”

  “Not sure that freedom is something you can have,” he said.

  “We have rung number one and rung number two,” he said, looking back at Garret. “We don’t know who is above them.”

  “So, who’s the first one?” he asked, and the man gave up the guy’s name easily enough.

  “His name is Larry. He runs a bunch of cons here in town.”

  “Larry Overhaul?” Jonas asked.

  They looked at him and nodded.

  “He does a lot of smuggling from the mainland over here, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jonas looked back at Garret. “That checks out.”

  “Sure, but that’s minor stuff. Nobody’s talking about why my sister’s gone missing,” Astra said. “Without something hard, these guys shouldn’t get squat.”

  “She has information they want,” he said.

  “Do they have her?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. They tried to snag her, and she ran.”

  “Well, that would be good,” Astra murmured, feeling a sense of relief take over. Her sister was flighty, but, since the pregnancy, Amy had changed in many ways, and one of the things that she’d been adamant about was that she needed to leave. And she had, so maybe it was for the best. “So maybe she’s not missing then. Maybe she just took off on her own?” She faced Garret with a frown.

  “Maybe. They want to know where she is though,” the second man said. “They won’t stop until they find her.”

  “What is this information she has that they are after?” Kano asked.

  “Kingdom Securities.”

  “What about them?” Garret said, glaring directly at him. “What about Kingdom?”

  “Some question of loyalty there.”

  “What does it matter to them?”

  “They didn’t get paid for something,” he said. “A big job, somebody was supposed to be involved, and they didn’t get paid.”

  “So?”

  “There’s some discrepancy as to who in Kingdom hired them.”

  “Does this have to do with the flight?” Garret asked.

  “Well, they hired the subcontractors and had to pay that out. But it was a big, big plan that didn’t come to fruition, and they didn’t get paid.”

  “Well, if they failed at the job, why would they get paid?”

  “They told him there was a slim chance of success, so they wanted payment regardless.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Garret said. “You think they got hired by somebody within Kingdom who didn’t have the backing of the company?”

  “Yeah. Like a private deal.”

  “And who was it that set up this private deal?”

  “That’s why they wanted her.”

  “Why?” Garret said. “I want to hear it. Why?”

  “Because it was her boyfriend, and a lot of money is involved. They think she has the money or at least access to it. And, if not to the money, they think she can lead them to him. Gregg. His name is Gregg.”

  *

  The two men were gone. Jonas had taken them away, and Garret was back in Astra’s room, pacing the floor.

  “You don’t have to believe him,” she said.

  “I don’t believe him,” he said. “I know Amy came between my brother and me, but I’d like to think me and my brother had a whole lot more between us than her.”

  “Do you think she could have poisoned the relationship that much?”

  “I would like to think not,” he said, but his tone was cold, cutting. The last thing he wanted right now was to analyze his brother’s relationship with Amy. It was bad enough that Garret was even here, having to deal with Gregg’s disappearance. And that Gregg’s girlfriend, and apparently the mother of his child, had obviously booked it and was hiding out somewhere. But to think that his brother actually had a hand in the plane crash that nearly killed Garret, that was taking things farther than Garret was comfortable with. He spun around and stared at Kano. “There has to be another explanation.”

  “There will be,” he said comfortably. And that was one of the great things about Kano. He was always there to be on your side. If they found out that it would be something uglier than Garret wanted to look at right now, they would both deal with it later.

  Garret took a long slow deep breath. “Right.” He spun and looked at Astra. “Think about places that she could have gone,” he said. “Where would she go, if she’s hiding out because she’s terrified?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out,” she said, feeling bewildered. “I just don’t know where she would go.”

  “Do you have any other property? Or does she? Did your parents have any property?”

  “Oh, crap,” she said, staring at him in surprise. “Remember the cabin? You guys went there, and I met you there that one day. Remember?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yes. What about it?”

  “She used to always go there, when she was upset. We both did. It gave us time to think.”

  “Which is why she was there then, after I proposed, but I thought it was her favorite place.”

  She gave him a sad smile. “No, that’s where she used to go to make the major decisions in her life.”

  “That’s where she told me that she would marry me,” he said, frowning.

  “I know,” she said. “I presume she was struggling with her answer because that’s where she goes when she has those kinds of troubles.”

  “How far away is it?” Kano asked.

  “About an hour, hour and a half or so from here,” she said. “Up the coast.”

  “Well, let’s go then,” Kano said. “Because I’d put money down on this one.” When they didn’t jump up, he looked at Garret on the left and Astra on the right, from one to the other. “So, have you got any other ideas where she could be?”

  “No,” she said slowly. “That would be my bad.”

  “Then let’s go.” At that, the three of them jumped up and headed downstairs.

  “Wait. We don’t have a car,” she said.

  “Yeah, we do,” Kano replied. “It’ll be here in a minute.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “Charles’s,” he said. “I’ll have to remember to thank him. So far, we haven’t even seen him yet on this trip, but some trips are like that.”

  “Unfortunately a lot of our trips are like that,” Garret said. He looked at Astra, who was standing outside, her hands in her pockets, her purse slung over her shoulder, and her long blond hair blowing back in the breeze. She was stunning. How come he hadn’t noticed that before? Well, he had, but it hadn’t been kosher at the time. She was his girlfriend’s little sister, after all, so he’d always kept the looking to a minimum. But no need to do that any longer, and, man, she was gorgeous.

  She turned and looked at him, noticed the look in his eyes and then frowned. “What are you looking at?”

  “A beautiful woman,” he said, and she frowned even more. “Still don’t know how to take a compliment, huh?”

  “Haven’t received very many of them in my lifetime,” she said. “Not enough to get comfortable with it anyway.”

  Kano looked at them, frowning, as he picked up on the conversation, his gaze going from one to the other. Then he gave half a headshake and turned away.

  She looked at him. “What was that look for?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just see the cycle happening again. It’s bloody amazing.”

  “If you say so,” she said, obviously not understanding.

  But Garret understood. He gave a hard frown in Kano’s direction. “Hardly the same thing.”

  “Exactly the same thing, Garret,” he snapped. “Just don’t let it infect me, will you.”
>
  At that, Garret laughed. “Well, buddy, if I’m infected, you’re already exposed.”

  “Better not be,” he snapped. “I don’t need that shit in my life right now.”

  “Nobody ever needs it when it comes,” Garret said. “You have to be ready, just in case though.”

  “Hell no, I don’t. You can go play that game all you want, but I don’t have to.”

  “Says you,” he said. “Anyway, it’s a minor point.”

  “Says you.”

  Just then a car pulled up in front. The driver got out, walked around, and handed Kano the keys. “Please bring this one back in one piece, if you can.”

  Kano laughed. “Always,” he said. “If I can, anyway.”

  “Says you,” the man quipped, as he walked down the street and disappeared.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “Somebody I’ve met a time or two,” Kano said, with a big grin. “Jump in. We’ve got places to go.” With that, they all climbed in and hit the road.

  Chapter 5

  Astra didn’t want to admit, even to herself, how uncomfortable Garret’s comment about her appearance made her feel. It’s what she had always wanted, but, in this instance, and in these surroundings, it’s not what she wanted at all. She wanted to be somewhere else, far away with him, where they could just spend time getting to know each other again. The fact that she’d always wanted him didn’t mean it was the right thing. She couldn’t convince her heart that it was anything other than the right thing, but sometimes it was hard to know what to do. And what she really didn’t want to do was have him see her as Amy.

  Astra settled into the vehicle, watching as the city disappeared behind them. It was hard to even keep track of the traffic, it moved so steadily, becoming part of the surroundings. “How is it people live like this?” she asked, as they finally exited London.

  “I think they don’t know any other way,” Garret said. “Unless you deliberately tried to change or to make change happen, it’s pretty hard without that.”