Chapter 6
LUKE
The link to the file lands in my inbox before I even make it back to my warehouse apartment on the Thames.
I put off opening it for now. I loosen my tie and take my jacket off.
I need a Scotch. A big one.
And a very cold shower, Macarthur, if you’re serious about this fucking job.
My apartment is old style rather than a sleek renovation. Timber floorboards, doors that open to let in the breeze, and a balcony where I can kick back with a beer and watch the river move.
There are some luxurious touches. A gleaming stainless steel kitchen, because after a lifetime of army food, I like to cook the good stuff.
An enormous bathroom with an open rain shower for similar reasons.
And a custom-made bed big enough for at least three people, because if you’d spent years trying to put your six-and-a-half-foot frame to sleep on a fucking naval carrier cot, you’d want one, too.
I have several large plants that I pay a kid from a local gym to come and water when I’m away, because I can’t stand artificial shit.
Several rugs from Afghanistan, where I did a lot of time.
Books, but no TV. A scrubbed wooden table and chairs made by a mate of mine. It’s spartan, but I like it that way.
After several years of working for Mak, I could easily afford the gleaming walls of a glass penthouse.
I’ve just never liked the fucking things.
They all look the same to me: completely soulless.
My phone shows two missed calls. The first one is from Mak: “I’ve sent you the brief.
Call me with any questions.” There’s a brief pause, in which I can hear the sound of female laughter in the background and the popping of a champagne cork.
“On second thought, just text me,” he drawls. “I plan to enjoy my Sunday.”
The message cuts off, leaving me shaking my head but smiling anyway. Fucking Mak.
There’s a second message from an unknown Australian number.
“Hey, Luke, it’s Kate, your sister’s friend.” I can hear the clink of glasses. Kate is clearly out drinking somewhere. “Liana tells me you’re still overseas with work. Hit me up when you get back, okay?” She lowers her voice. “No strings, you know. Just fun.”
I grin despite myself. In our few brief exchanges to date, Kate has seemed blissfully free of head fuckery and extremely open to a good time. Her profile photo shows her doing a handstand on a surfboard, wearing a white string bikini that leaves very little to the imagination.
It should be enough to put me on a plane back home.
Mak’s voice rings uncomfortably through my head: The truth is, if you really wanted that life, you’d have stayed in the army and worked toward a pension.
“Oh, piss off,” I say aloud, stripping as I walk toward the bathroom.
I leave Kate’s voicemail for now and take a long, luxuriously hot shower, trying my hardest not to picture Zinaida Melikov naked.
It’s a fucking struggle.
I emerge from the shower and pull on sweatpants, then return to the kitchen with my laptop. I pour myself an enormous Scotch.
I take a few good swallows then top it up before I switch my head into the game and open the job brief.
Christ. I wasn’t wrong about it being dangerous.
Half a dozen assassination attempts in the past months, several that got uncomfortably close to succeeding, and none that could have even been attempted without intimate knowledge of Zinaida’s routine and security arrangements.
An unexpected bolt of anger rips through me.
She’s got a traitor in her own house.
Someone is watching Zinaida. Spying on her in her most private moments. Using their position of trust to not only infiltrate her organization, but to try to actually murder her.
A very dead someone, when I find out who it is.
Even the thought rouses something primal in me which definitely isn’t strictly professional.
I flip to the objectives Mak has included in bold text.
The job has two parts:
1. Overhaul every aspect of security throughout the entire Melikov organization. Hiring, training, systems, protection. Put an impenetrable protective wall around our client and make it sustainable.
2. Find the leak in her organization. When you find it, alert us both immediately, but do NOT neutralize. We need to know who wants her dead, but more importantly, we need to know why.
My mouth twists as I read the last sentence.
I don’t need to find the bastard to know his “why.”
Follow the money.
It’s the oldest saying in the hunt-and-kill playbook, and for good reason.
Zinaida has a lot to lose, and her employees have billions of very good reasons to betray her to the right buyer.
I analyze each attack in detail, then start familiarizing myself with her organization.
It’s going to be a tricky, not to mention fucking dangerous, job.
It’s messy, with a lot of human resources issues and no clear target. There’s easier money to be made, let’s put it that way.
So tell Mak you’re not taking it.
But it’s also intriguing.
Zinaida’s entire world is intriguing.
Oh, get real, Macarthur.
It’s Zinaida who is intriguing.
And wanting the client so badly I can barely breathe is definitely the wrong damned reason to take a job.
I stare at the screen until it turns black, then check the time on my phone.
Midnight here, which makes it eight a.m. in Australia.
I call my sister Liana, smiling at the noise in the background when she picks up.
“Tommo says to tell you the surf is, and I quote, ‘fucking filthy’ today,” she greets me. “Which I gather means good.”
“Bastard,” I say flatly, staring out at the freezing darkness over the Thames.
“So get your pommy arse home, then, dickhead,” yells her husband in the background.
“Yeah, Uncle Luke!” comes a chorus from my two nephews. “Get your pommy arse home, dickhead!”
“Tommo! Language!” Liana hisses. “No, Max, just because Daddy says it does not mean you can call your brother a dickhead. No, Mummy was just repeating what Daddy said—oh, for goodness’ sake! Ollie, stop hitting Max over the head with your boogie board. Tommo!”
She yells her husband’s name so loudly I hold the receiver away from my ear, grinning like an idiot at the familiar sounds of my sister’s domestic chaos.
“Get your sons out of here . . . I don’t know where to!
I don’t care. Take them to the beach. Take them anywhere else but here, before I murder the lot of you.
Sorry, Luke,” she says rather breathlessly into the receiver as the cacophony gradually fades.
“Please tell me you’ll be back in time for summer holidays?
I seriously don’t think I can handle six weeks of those two monsters, even with Tommo being so helpful. ”
“How’s his business?” I dodge her question.
“Good, busy. But he’s always home for bath time, so I can’t complain.” Her voice softens, as it always does when she talks about her husband.
Tommo is an electrician, just as his father was before him. He and Liana were married at twenty-two and had Max a year later. They live in a sprawling suburban house with a barbecue and a pool, in walking distance of the beach. Tommo is solid as a rock, and he adores Liana and the boys.
It’s the life Liana has always wanted, and compared to the way we both grew up, it’s a fucking fantasy.
I’m happy for her.
I listen for a while as she tells me about how well the boys are doing in the local surf club competitions, and how badly they’re doing in school.
“I’m pretty sure they’ll both take after Tommo, if I’m honest,” she says, but there’s only pride, no hint of regret, in her voice.
“They’re both much better at doing things than studying them.
But so long as they inherit Tommo’s character along with his practical bent, I’ll be happy.
I know there aren’t many men out there like Tommo, so I’m definitely not complaining. He’s always got my back.”
I hear Mak’s voice in my mind: “Zin needs someone to have her back . . .”
The coincidence gives me a queer kind of jolt. If Liana were telling this story, she’d say it was some kind of sign.
I don’t know about that.
But I do know that for some weird reason my doubts are suddenly gone.
“Speaking of complaining,” Liana is saying, in a slightly sterner tone, “you need to start returning Kate’s calls. She’s perfect for you, Luke. If you don’t make the effort, she’ll be off the market by the time you get back here.”
“Yeah. About that.” I wince, rubbing a hand through my hair and leaning against the exposed brick wall, staring out at the mist hovering over the slow-moving water of the Thames.
“Oh, come on, Luke.” She sounds exasperated. “You’re not taking another job, surely? Can’t the bloody wars run themselves without you?”
I’ve never told Liana exactly what I do.
She knew I passed SAS selection soon after I entered the British army, which had been my lone goal since I was old enough to understand what the SAS was.
She also knew that once I did, I couldn’t tell her much about where I was or what I was doing.
By the time I left the forces, she knew better than to ask too many questions.
If anyone asks, she tells them exactly what I told her: that I work in private security.
It’s not a lie.
But lately, it’s not the entire truth, either.
“Hey, work is what it is. And besides, your friend is better off with someone like Tommo, and you know it.”
“Well, that’s just not true—”
“Yeah, Liana, actually it is.” Normally I would joke with my sister. But the divide between Pigalle’s dark thrill and Liana’s sweet suburban life is so wide that, for once, I just can’t manage to hide the part of me I usually keep locked deep inside.
“Women like Kate need a man like Tommo, one who comes home every night.” The words spill out of me before I think them through properly.
“Not somebody who is better at bombs than bath time, who sits with his back to the wall and eyes on every exit, scanning each face in the crowd for incoming fire.”
I wince, regretting my words instantly.
I don’t ever talk about my job like this.
If I’m honest, I don’t even think of the impact of it very often.
War is just who I am, who I’ve always been.
I’m the man our childhood made me become, probably long before I was ready for it.
But I’ve never regretted the choices I’ve made, and I’ve certainly never used them as an excuse.
The truth is that I don’t mind being a machine, to use Mak’s term.
But I think it’s time I stopped pretending to be anything other than exactly what I am.
“Luke.” Liana’s voice is soft on the other end of the line.
“The right woman will want you, wars and all. They’ll see you for exactly what you are, like I do.
” Her voice chokes slightly. “I’ve never really said thank you, for getting me away from how we grew up.
Not properly. But I know I owe you everything—”
“You don’t owe me a damned thing.” I cut her off more sharply than I mean to.
“You’re my family, Liana. The only family I’ve got.
I’d do it all again, in a heartbeat. Getting us both out of that house, and away from that sick bastard of a stepfather, was the best decision I ever made.
I just wish we could have managed to get Mum out of there before it was too late. ”
“Oh, Luke.” The sympathy in her voice makes me desperately uncomfortable. “That wasn’t your fault. She was an addict. There wasn’t anything either of us could have done.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I cut her off again, rubbing my forehead.
I never should have brought this shit up.
“Look, all I meant to say is that I think it’s time we both stopped pretending that I’m a good choice for any of your friends.
I’m not, Liana. I don’t think I ever will be a good choice, for anyone.
My life isn’t really set up for a wife and kids, no matter how much my face is giving marriage, as you put it. ”
I’m relieved to hear her laugh, even shakily.
“I’ll come home as soon as I can take a break, okay?” I go on before she can start up again. “And tell Tommo my boat better be in pristine condition when I do. I know what those little terrors of yours are like with chocolate and a white paint job.”
We chat for a few moments more and hang up in a reasonable state of peace.
But I’m more unsettled than I want to admit. Not because Liana brought up the past, and the abusive motherfucker our mother married. I took Liana and ran when I was fifteen and she was only eleven, and like I said, I’d do it again tomorrow without an ounce of regret.
I’m edgy because something about this job feels different.
Zinaida Melikov feels different.
Once, years ago, I was in a small village in Afghanistan, running surveillance on the local Taliban from the home of an old man who was opposed to their regime. One night when we were talking, I asked him why he had chosen to help us, even though it would likely cost him his life.
“Every choice we make kills a life we might have led,” he told me through an interpreter. “You Westerners, you tell yourselves you can have it all. We Pushtan understand that every choice decides what we allow to live and what we let die.”
I haven’t thought of that old man for years. But now, when Zinaida’s flawless face seems to lurk just beneath the inky shadows of the River Thames, and her world reaches for me like a seductive whisper, I know I’m about to make a choice.
One that just might kill any chance I have left of returning to the life I’ve always told myself is waiting.
And I have no idea what life will take its place.