Chapter 12
A s bombshells went, that was a big one. Heather stared at Jonas in shock.
Even Rick whistled, and Royce stepped up to Jonas’s side, asking, “What do you mean, she was on the inside?”
“Those letters you asked about,” he began, “were from her, and they were coming to me. To a PO Box that we had set up in the name of one of her old school friends. We sent letters, innocuous letters, back and forth. It was her way of getting a message out. She’s also the one who warned us that you were in danger.”
“So, we shared those details with you, including the letters, and you still denied it?” Royce asked, eyeing him with a flinty expression.
“Get over it. It’s part of the job.”
She dropped onto the nearby couch in shock, as Royce sat down beside her and held her close. She buried her face against his neck as she tried to process the information. She lifted her head and looked over at Jonas, bewildered. “Why?”
“Because she figured that she was being drugged, didn’t think she had any way to get out of her situation, and wasn’t sure she wanted to.… Something about the gilded cage or something,” Jonas gave her a confused look. “She wanted to be there but felt strongly he had to be stopped. Does that make sense to you?”
She sobbed slightly. “Oh, yes, it does. But it would have been so much easier for her if we could have just put him away first.”
“It would have been, but she also wasn’t looking to fight for herself. Hannah was trying to get you to safety.”
Heather just stared at him, as she struggled to begin to understand what he was talking about.
“Maybe you should start at the beginning,” Royce suggested, pulling her back into his arms.
When she protested, he just pulled her back in again. “Please, we all need to understand this.”
She sagged against him, realizing that this had been a blow to him too. She looked over at Jonas. “He’s right. I need an explanation.”
He nodded. “Your sister contacted us several months ago. She was very much afraid that arms dealing and murder-for-hire contracts were coming out of her husband’s office. She shared that she absolutely loved him and didn’t want it to be him but had heard enough to realize that somebody who used to work for MI6 had just up and disappeared one night. It was somebody Hannah had been getting closer to, almost to the point of being able to confide in her those suspicions of what was going on here, when suddenly the woman just disappeared.”
“Are the MI6 missing an agent? That would likely be her. Faheed would not take a betrayal like that easily,” Heather muttered.
“Hannah told me that you didn’t know anything and that you weren’t a part of this. Still, Hannah was pretty sure that, once she was gone—should there be no way for her to get out of this—that your life would be in danger next. She’d made the mistake of telling Faheed something about the way the company worked and how you were doing a hell of a job managing it. Apparently that upset her husband tremendously, and he looked into the details.
“He then found out that you not only had majority control—because Hannah had signed over her voting power—but that, in the event of her death, her shares would also revert to you instead of him, as stipulated in your father’s will. He was so mad. Hannah realized that her hopes and dreams of being loved for herself were going up in smoke and that Faheed was just after her money.”
Tears came to her eyes as Heather realized all her sister had kept from her. “Why wouldn’t she have told me?” she asked.
“Toward the end, she thought that everything she said and did was being recorded—or listened to, at least. They had taken away her hair clips and even her reading glasses and replaced them with new ones, similar but different. She mentioned how they felt different too, somehow heavier. She could never really figure out what was going on but was under the impression that her every word was being recorded.”
Heather stared at him in disbelief. “There was no way to write me a note or to do anything?”
“I think she was mostly concerned about keeping you alive. She also said something about the family business needing you.”
“Says the woman who had nothing to do with the family business,” she muttered. “She wanted nothing to do with any of it.”
“Anyway, due to her, we started looking into this and found out that Faheed now has four dead wives,” Jonas shared. “We didn’t know what had happened to Hannah until suddenly an announcement was made that she had died of a sudden heart attack. We tried to get it looked at via the diplomatic office in public relations,” he noted, with a wry look. “That doesn’t work for shit.”
“No, of course not,” Heather agreed, “particularly in Faheed’s case, when he wields as much power as he does.” She sagged in place and looked up at Jonas. “So, she knew? She knew she was in danger and didn’t do anything?”
“It’s possible, yes,” Jonas replied. “You yourself said that she enjoyed that lifestyle that Faheed gave her.”
“Sure, but we had money. We could have made it so that she had a whole lot more than what Faheed gave her,” she whispered, still stunned and unable to process all the implications.
“You thought she was off somehow during those last few weeks?” Jonas asked.
“Yes, she was. I just didn’t know what it meant. I kept asking her if she was okay, and she would give me this really sad smile and say, Yes, everything is fine , but I knew it wasn’t fine. I just couldn’t get her to open up and to tell me what was wrong. I thought it was, you know, marital problems. God knows there was plenty to feel bad about there,” she whispered. “This is not what I expected.”
“No, but it makes sense now because how else would MI6 have had any idea of what was going on?” Royce noted.
“Faheed had four dead wives,” she exclaimed. “Doesn’t that trigger some kind of a global response?”
“Nobody follows anybody enough for that,” Jonas stated. “Particularly since each of the deaths were easily explainable. It was just seen as a case of a poor man with terrible luck who maybe should choose heartier wives.”
“ Right .” She stared at him in horror. “How long had Hannah been corresponding with you?”
“Months,” Jonas stated simply. “We were trying hard to find a way to get her out of there. He’d been invited to England and still has an open invitation, so, if he shows up now, I won’t be surprised.”
“If he does show up, can we nab him?” she asked Jonas.
“Not without something seriously solid. Diplomatic immunity goes a very long way.”
She blinked. “Even murder?”
He winced. “In theory, no. But, if he leaves the country before we’ve got him, that would be it,” Jonas conceded. “And we would only go forward with an ironclad case, so I suspect he wouldn’t stay in jail anyway.”
She shook her head. “Meaning he would be released?”
“You have to realize that his own country can’t handle that level of embarrassment either, and there’s a good chance that they would ensure he didn’t survive.”
She winced. “Meaning they would assassinate him themselves?”
“That’s possible, but I really don’t want to speculate.”
“No, you don’t have to,” she said. “It’s very much the world they live in, isn’t it?”
“It is, absolutely. They know very well that every day they are playing the game, they’re fighting for their lives.”
She sucked back her breath. “What else did she say in those letters?”
“That she suspected Faheed was running arms and that his brother was heavily involved as well and was possibly even more involved in the arms dealing than Faheed was. He was collecting as many businesses around the world as he could for the day that he retired from his job. Not that such a thing would ever happen because it was all way too convenient to protect him from his crimes.”
“She didn’t say anything about the wives?”
He shook his head. “No, she didn’t say anything about the wives, though she did say that other deaths were suspicious that she didn’t know anything else about.”
“I’m sure there are lots of them,” Royce muttered, massaging her shoulders now.
She nodded. “It’ll never be just one. If they got away with it once, then you know how it goes.” She just sighed and went on. “I’m still in shock that she never told me, that she never did anything to save herself.”
“Did she try to send you away? Didn’t she try to send you back to England?”
Heather nodded. “But I knew that she wasn’t well, that she was off somehow. She was despondent and not her normal self, so I,… I stayed. I didn’t want to desert her.”
“And your remaining in Faheed’s sphere probably would have sent Hannah into more of a spin. One of the last letters I had from her mentioned how she was afraid she was being poisoned and wouldn’t be around much longer.”
“Jesus,” Heather exclaimed in a frustrated tone, almost hysterical. “Couldn’t you have done something?”
“At that time you were all traveling constantly. Besides, there wasn’t anything we could do without revealing that the intel came from her.”
“Of course… and that would have either sped up the process or he would have had her locked up as being completely unstable.” Heather had just so much to process, and yet all of it made a sick kind of sense. “It just hurts me so much to consider her going through all this alone and not thinking she could tell me,” she whispered. “I didn’t see any of it.”
“No, but I think she feared, if you knew about it, you would go on a rampage,” Jonas shared, as he motioned at the gunman on the ground in the nearby bathroom.
She winced. “Right, and I would have,” she declared. “I would have barged into Faheed’s office and raised hell.”
“And you would have been dropped right where you stood,” Rick declared, his tone harsh. “You must have known that. Otherwise you would have done something about it. Did you ever check your cards?”
“I did,” she said, looking up at him. “All my instinctive answers that came through the readings were that my sister was deeply troubled, but, because I couldn’t get her to open up, it didn’t help me understand what was going on. I wanted to fight it all, but I didn’t have a target.”
“What about your instincts, without the cards?” Rick asked her.
“Again that’s why I didn’t leave,” she whispered. “I just knew she was in trouble, but I didn’t know how or what to do about it. Only after her death did I realize just how accurate my assumptions were, and then I found myself a prisoner,” she stated. “I didn’t think I was a prisoner before because I hadn’t made any attempt to leave.”
“Exactly,” Royce agreed. “If you think about it, as soon as you would have made an attempt to leave, you probably would have become that prisoner you weren’t yet aware of. As long as you didn’t fight back, Faheed didn’t have to enforce his will. However, the minute you put up any kind of resistance,… then he would have been forced to act and to hold you back.”
“Bloody hell,” she muttered. “Just when you think you know somebody, you find that you don’t know anybody.”
Jonas added, “We did ask her if she wanted us to put an op into play to pull her out, but she told me no,… several times in fact. She repeatedly said that she was right where she needed to be.”
“Wow.” Heather stared at Jonas in shock. She looked up at Royce. “You didn’t know?”
He shook his head. “No, that information was withheld from us too,” he shared, staring at Jonas.
Jonas shrugged. “Come on, you guys know how it works,” he replied. “Too often nobody ever really knows until something blows up.” He looked down at their prisoners on the bathroom floor. “Speaking of which, we should have company soon.”
“Is it the right kind of company though,” she asked, “or the wrong kind?”
He gave her the ghost of a smile. “My kind.”
“Yeah, you mean the ones who are still unconscious?” she asked pointedly.
He frowned at that. “I checked them, and they appear to be just knocked out.”
At that, almost as if understanding that he was being talked about, the driver started to moan and rolled ever so slightly.
She bent down beside him and patted his shoulder. “It’s okay. You’ll be okay.” He opened his eyes and stared at her in confusion. She motioned at the room around them. “You missed all the action though.”
He slowly sat up, noticed his partner on the floor beside him, and then his eyes widened as he caught sight of the two strangers, handcuffed to the plumbing, who were also down. “Good God.” He winced, reaching up a hand to his head. “I gather we were taken out as soon as we walked in.”
“That you were,” Jonas confirmed, “as was I.”
The driver stared at his boss and shook his head. “So what the hell happened to switch this around?”
Jonas snorted. “She happened.”
At that, the driver turned and stared at her in shock.
She shrugged. “Nobody ever sees the women as a threat,” she stated. “We’re just to sit up, to sit down, or to shut up. So, when we act in a way that they’re not used to, they don’t know how to handle us.” Of course what she didn’t say was she could feel—sense?—the positive energy coming from her tarot cards. She knew that would be one step too far for these people. Or maybe not.
Jonas noted, “Somehow I feel there’s a whole lot more to that explanation.”
“There is,” Royce agreed, with a half laugh, “but this might not be the time to tell it.”
She stiffened and looked at the door. “We have company.”
“Good,” Jonas replied, as he walked closer to the door. Then he stopped and looked at her. “Good company or bad company?”
*
Royce watched Heather carefully. Her fingers shifted to the box of cards stuck in the waistband of her leggings, as she stared at the door. He could see the change in her energy as she got the answer she sought. Her aura smoothed from the ruffled edge to one draping like silk around her. She stared at the door and then gave a nod. “Good company.”
“How do you figure that?” Jonas asked curiously.
She pulled out her tarot cards and shared, “They’re vibrating in a good way.”
Royce smiled at Jonas’s instant snort of disbelief.
Jonas opened up the front door and let in his team. Immediately the gunmen were cut loose from the plumbing and were picked up and moved out. The driver lifted his unconscious partner and followed the others.
Rick turned to Royce. “I’ll find a room for us.” Then he promptly left too.
When the apartment was emptied except for just the three of them again, Heather looked at Jonas, “And now what?”
“What do you mean, now what?” Jonas asked. “We start at the beginning again. And try to find the person the gunmen were waiting for.”
She groaned. “I really should be let off the hook of any questioning, considering you already had my sister feeding you whatever information you needed.”
“She had very little access,” he reminded her.
“I had even less,” she declared, “so don’t forget that.”
“I’ll remember,” he replied. “I just need a little bit more information than what we’ve got.”
“You’ll need a lot more,” she muttered. “Faheed’s very smart. He won’t get caught easily, and I don’t know what the hell’s going on in terms of his brother, but he’ll be in the middle of it as well. Saheed is far too involved in Faheed’s life.”
Just then Jonas’s phone buzzed. He looked down at the message and whistled.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Faheed and Saheed have both arrived in England. They just walked out on the tarmac. They have been cleared to visit London.”
“Well, damn.” She stared at him. “They must be coming after me.” She turned to face Royce, panic in her gaze.
He gripped her uninjured hand. “We’ll be fine, remember? So far, this has all come out okay.”
She glared at him, looked around the room. “Can we have it be not quite so close next time?”
Jonas glared at her. “Yeah, the plan was not to have any of this happen,” he snapped, “so it won’t happen a second time.”
“You couldn’t help my sister. You couldn’t stop them attacking you, holding you at gunpoint. You don’t know who these gunmen are working for. You couldn’t stop these gunmen from finding me too,” she muttered. “So how am I supposed to trust you the second time around?” He had been in the act of walking toward the front door, but he stopped and glared at her. She shrugged. “You want my trust, but I really want my safety first. I already know what these guys can do.” She shook her head in disgust, “My sister is a testament to that.”
He nodded and quickly left.
She stared over at Royce. “Are we leaving?”
Royce smiled at her. “Yep. I’m expecting Rick to call at any moment. But what would you like to do?”
“Go to my house and spend the night in my own place, after getting out these clothes and into a hot shower. Maybe get some food and a good night’s sleep.… Then go to my office. So much needs to be done.”
Rick rejoined them, and Royce nodded, then spoke. “Sounds like a hell of a plan. We’re good to go.”
“What about Jonas?” she asked.
“He left us behind, so we’re on our own timeline, at least for now,” Royce said. “You ready to skip?”
She laughed and raced to the front door.