Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Seattle
“Fuck fuck fuck!”
Montez paced around the small rental storage unit muttering, walking in circles around the dead body of the woman, all but tearing his hair out.
Piet watched him emotionlessly. This was a real waste of time and energy, but the fokken gek—fucking moron—clearly had to get it out of his system. Some operator, wasting time on this shit.
But—he was the boss. Though really, he wasn’t the boss of anything, least of all himself. Still, Piet always followed the client even when the client was stupid.
It wasn’t his problem. If it had been, he sure as hell wouldn’t be walking around in circles with a dead girl at his feet. He’d have already taken care of the girl and moved on.
After a while he got tired of watching Montez. It was one thing for Montez to piss away his time in theatrics. But every second in which Piet was with that dead body was another second in which he could be caught.
Doing time in a US prison for this asshole was not in the cards.
“Calm down,” he said finally.
Montez whirled. “Calm down? Calm down? This—" his shaking index finger pointed at the girl lying on a tarp in the middle of the small space. “This is a disaster! Goddammit, this should never have happened! Now we’re left with nothing but dead meat!”
Piet tuned him out and studied the girl’s face.
He’d laid her down on her back. Whatever poison she’d taken had acted incredibly quickly.
The only poisons he knew that worked so fast were neurotoxins.
Only an autopsy with a tox screen would tell exactly which one, but there sure wouldn’t be one carried out.
He studied the face carefully. A pretty woman, pretty even in death. Death had come for her so quickly her features weren’t distorted. She looked like she was sleeping quietly, in a better place than she’d be right now, because he’d have inflicted a lot of pain and he’d have made her talk.
Montez had been getting hard looking at her, thinking of the pain to come. He hadn’t realized it, but Piet had seen. Those guys were the worst, the ones who got wood during interrogation.
It amazed Piet that Montez had been in the army at all, though he knew the Yanks had become less selective about the boots they were putting on the ground.
Back in the day, qualifying for South African Special Forces as a Recce, that kind of sick fuck would have been weeded out right at the start.
No place for them in a man’s military. Violence was a tool, not an end in itself.
For just a second, Piet allowed himself a brief flash of regret, a short intense wish that he could roll back the clock and be with his mates in the bush again. Good men, all. No sick fucks, just warriors.
While Montez was ranting, Piet continued observing the body.
The girl’s skin still held a faint flush, which was of course fading fast as the blood drained away from the skin.
She’d dropped dead ten minutes ago. Right now, gravity was draining the blood in the capillaries from the front of her body to the back, which soon would turn dark red.
He’d made very very sure that there was nothing underneath the tarp that could make an imprint on the skin. The pooled blood would show any object up as clearly as an image on a negative. Montez wasn’t thinking straight, but Piet was.
The capillaries were draining the blood right now. They had a little window of opportunity…
He kneeled and started skinning her, making a sharp, straight surgical incision along the mid-body line of the torso from base of neck to sternum and stripping away the skin on the left from her breast and shoulder.
Like field-dressing a deer. No blood spurted of course, the heart wasn’t pumping any more.
But there was still enough blood in the arteries to pool sullenly around the body.
Piet made sure none of it touched his shoes or trousers.
He had to get this done before rigor set in. Handling a body in the throes of rigor mortis was hard. Not to mention the fact that the internal organs had already begun decomposition. He’d seen bodies explode with the force of the build-up of internal gas in the intestines, though that took a while.
Montez was watching, slack-jawed. He’d stopped his ranting and stared. “What the fuck?”
Piet didn’t sigh, though he wanted to. This guy was supposed to be smart. He headed up a multimillion dollar company.
“We’re going to do with her what we did with the agent, only this needs to be scarier. This has to be a real message to Palmer, look what we can do. Do you have the tape?”
“Yeah.” Montez held up a flip camcorder the size of a USB key.
They’d filmed the first part of the interrogation.
The idea had been to film the entire session and send it to Palmer. But instead of an hourlong session they’d had about ten minutes.
“Didn’t last long, so we’ll use stills,” Piet said. He cut a fine incision on her forehead along the hairline and starting pulling back the skin.
“Jesus!” Montez shouted. He held a hand to his mouth. “God, you’re scalping her.”
No shit, Sherlock.
Montez wouldn’t have been averse to torturing this woman to death, but scalping her after death made him retch.
Piet couldn’t wait to finish the job and get away from this moron.
Piet finished scalping and stood back, assessing the effect.
Should scare the shit out of this Ellen Palmer.
He waited for the woman to bleed out then lifted the woman in his arms. He settled her back in the chair, wrapped the duct tape around her chest again.
The woman slumped, head down, red skull gleaming, looking like she had on a patchwork red shirt.
“Take a couple of stills of her, we’ll add it to the still of her screaming and send it to that bulletin board. ”
Montez took out his cell, took several snapshots and downloaded them onto his laptop.
Piet put together the stills into a narrative anyone could understand. The woman bucking against his hand on her, mouth open in silent screams, then the stills of her now, after what Palmer would think was horrible torture. It worked. He switched on the laptop’s mike and digitized his voice.
“Ellen Palmer. Look at your friend Kerry. She’s still alive but won’t be for long if you don’t get in touch with us.
Call 716-3547892 right now or we’ll keep on hurting her.
Eventually she’ll die, but it will take her a while.
Get in touch with us and we’ll take her to a hospital right now.
If you don’t get in touch, you’re signing her death warrant.
It’ll be on your head.” Piet sent the file with the stills and the digitized voiceover to the message board.
It was in the lap of the gods now. Palmer would open it when she opened it. But when she did…they’d have her.
Montez watched and didn’t speak until Piet powered the laptop down. “Now what? We need to be close to where she is when she opens the laptop. Where is she?”
Piet thought about it.
He’d had Montez take him to Palmer’s apartment and leave him alone in it for an hour. The human equivalent of giving a hunting dog the prey’s shirt to sniff.
In an hour, he’d gotten her measure. No drugs, no alcohol beyond a dusty bottle of whiskey in a cupboard with half a glass missing. No fancy clothes, no fancy jewelry, very little makeup. Basic cable. Lots of music on a thumb drive. Lots of books, second hand paperbacks and on a cheap ereader.
Montez said she hadn’t missed a day’s work in two years working for him.
The singing was a surprise because she had apparently kept her talent hidden, which was interesting. She’d only put her voice out there when she needed the money when on the run. Otherwise it looked like she’d been perfectly happy being an accountant, earning a reasonable but not high salary.
She was a perfectly ordinary woman who’d been on the run for a year, who’d been flushed out of one safe haven, who’d found another in San Diego, and found a protector with it. She wasn’t a warrior or an operator. Protection would be welcome.
She wouldn’t leave where she’d found it.
“She’s still in San Diego,” Piet said. “I’d bet anything on it. Let’s bury this—" he flicked a thumb at the redly gleaming corpse on the chair, “and get down to San Diego fast. I have an idea.”
In flight, over Sacramento, California
A private jet is a good way to travel, Piet reflected. It beat military transport hands down. He’d been around very rich men for a long long time now, but their luxuries still fascinated him.
He was a man who’d been flown half way around the world on retrofitted C-130s for personnel transport, sitting on canvas seats, strapped to webbing for 30-hour flights. No food, no water and you pissed in a bottle. If you had to shit, tough shit.
The South African Armed Forces for a while had used beat-up Vietnam-era Hueys. The noise level penetrated even the cheap ear baffles. It had been like riding inside a huge, metal shaker with sharp edges designed to rip you to bits if you didn’t hang on.
Miles and millions of dollars away from this Gulfstream G700. They’d flown in style and comfort from Georgia to Seattle and now were flying in style and comfort from Seattle to San Diego.
The cabin smelled of new leather and lemon polish. The Captain and his copilot had welcomed them aboard like royalty and they’d taken off from the General Aviation section of Sea-Tac ten minutes after they’d boarded.
No waiting, no fuss, no inspections.
Piet would never be this rich, and even if he were, he wouldn’t have a private plane.
Keeping a plane like this meant leaving a huge footprint in the world.
You had to hire pilots and maintenance crews, file flight plans, hire a hangar to keep the damned thing when you didn’t need it.
It was a giant fist in the face of society—look how fucking rich I am.
Montez clearly needed to wave that fist, make the point.
Piet didn’t.