Chapter 28 Ingrid #2
Ingrid and Rodrigo eased around the pool of blood that had spread like a halo around Gray Hoodie’s head.
With every step they took, they risked leaving forensic traces of their presence, but they had already violated the death scene just by stepping inside, and they could not stop now; they needed to understand how this had happened, how their targets, the men sent to kill Beatriz, had instead been targeted.
The living room seemed startlingly pristine, almost sterile, after the kitchen.
Ingrid saw white walls, unadorned by any artwork.
Polished wood floors, a black leather sofa, a glass-topped coffee table.
Not a residence where people actually lived, but a house for visitors who would rent the place long enough to enjoy their holiday, or accomplish their mission, and then move on.
She reached the stairway and paused. She saw no blood on the steps, no clue yet that anything was amiss on the second floor.
A suppressor would have kept the killing of Gray Hoodie so quiet that anyone upstairs would not have known anything was amiss.
And why should they expect an attack? Hunters never imagine they are, in fact, the prey.
Rodrigo started up the steps, moving in catlike silence, and she followed him, her heart beating faster with every step as she steeled herself for what waited upstairs.
Thank God Lloyd wasn’t here, but was safely tucked away in the parked car with a loaded gun at his side, just in case.
By now he was probably wondering what had happened inside the house, but he’d agreed to stay put.
He would not have to see this, would not be haunted by these images.
They reached the top of the stairs. Nothing here to alarm them, just a hallway with white walls that still had the scent of fresh paint.
Rodrigo’s man, who’d come up the stairs behind them, said grimly: “In the last bedroom.”
They moved down the hall. Past a bathroom with men’s toiletries on the sink counter, past a guest room with rumpled bedcovers and an open suitcase on the floor.
The men hadn’t intended to stay long enough to unpack.
They’d come to do the job and get out. Instead, the plan had changed on them, in ways they’d never expected.
At the last doorway, Rodrigo halted. His broad shoulders blocked her view into the room, but his shocked stillness warned her of what lay inside. She pushed past him, through the doorway.
The man lay on his back on the floor, his arms stretched out at his sides, as though to embrace the heavens.
He was young and bare chested, and a black tee shirt lay crumpled on the floor, as if he’d just peeled it off and tossed it there when the first bullet punched into his back.
He must have spun around to face his attacker as the second bullet sliced into his throat.
It would have sent him reeling backward, gasping and fighting for air as his trachea filled with blood.
Was he still conscious as the gunman stared down at him?
Was the face of his killer the last thing he saw?
“This makes no sense,” said Ingrid. She crouched down and stared at the tattoo on the man’s bare arm. “He’s Vory. Who did this?”
“A dispute over death contracts? A rival gang? That would not be such a bad thing.” Rodrigo stood up. “Vory versus Vory. The underworld eating itself. We could just stand back and let them eliminate each other.”
Ingrid stared at the dead man’s face. He was only in his mid-thirties, like the dead man in the kitchen. “They’re both too young,” she said. “They wouldn’t have been in France.” She turned to Rodrigo’s operative. “Did you find a stiletto on either of these men?”
“No, ma’am.”
“So our fifth man is still out there.”
“And we’ll keep looking for him,” said Rodrigo. “There’ll be other chances to draw him out. Other targets to tempt him.”
A voice suddenly said, over their headsets: “Sir, we have a situation down here. The kitchen.”
“Now what?” muttered Rodrigo.
Ingrid followed him back down the stairs, through that spotless, soulless living room, and into the kitchen.
As she stepped through the doorway, the first person she saw was Lloyd.
He stood frozen, staring down at the body on the floor.
He didn’t look up at her; the sight of death seemed to have paralyzed him.
“Lloyd, what are you doing here?” she said. “I thought we agreed—”
“It’s not Mr. Slocum’s fault,” said another voice. She turned to see a dark-haired man she did not recognize walk in through the kitchen doorway. He was in his forties, tall and athletically built, and he coolly eyed the body on the floor. “I see this particular problem has been addressed.”
“Not by us,” said Ingrid. “The men were both dead when we got here.”
Lloyd looked at her, stunned. “Both?”
“There’s another body upstairs, in the bedroom.” She eyed the man who had just joined their little party, and it unsettled her, how dispassionately he regarded the dead body. How at home he seemed in this blood-spattered kitchen. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure.”
Lloyd said, “This is Jon Marcus. He’s the man who saved my life in Amsterdam. If he hadn’t stepped in, Maggie and I would both be dead in that warehouse.”
Ingrid’s gaze sharpened. “You’re Agency.”
Marcus nodded. “And you’re the woman this gentleman has been chasing around the world. Imagine my surprise when I found Mr. Slocum sitting in a parked car down the road.”
“He didn’t give me a choice, Ingrid,” Lloyd said. “He made me get out of the car.”
“You aren’t supposed to be here at all, Mr. Slocum,” said Marcus. “You were supposed to fly straight home from Amsterdam.”
“I was worried about my wife.”
“Your wife seems perfectly capable of looking after herself.” Marcus turned his attention to Rodrigo. “I’ll deal with the police. Your team should leave before they get here.”
Ingrid looked at Rodrigo, then back at Marcus. “This man is our client?”
“Purely off the record,” said Rodrigo. “It’s the only way the job can get done.”
“The job being?”
“Identify and capture Moscow’s assassination teams,” said Marcus. “Hopefully before they carry out their missions.”
“Identify and capture?” Ingrid looked down at Gray Hoodie’s corpse. “Someone, it seems, has gone a step further.”
“And this is a problem,” Rodrigo said to Marcus. “Argus can’t be implicated in these deaths.”
“Yet here we are,” said Ingrid. “Inconveniently, we’re the first people at the crime scene.”
“The Agency will manage this,” said Marcus. “We’ll point out to the Spanish police what happened here. It’s just Russians killing Russians.”
“But is it, really?” said Ingrid. Her question was met with silence. She looked down at the body on the checkerboard tiles. “What am I missing here?”
“Clearly, it’s an underworld power struggle. A lot of money gets paid out in death contracts, and rival Vory gangs are fighting over it.” Marcus shrugged. “We should let it play out, let them eliminate each other.”
“That’s your cover story, an underworld power struggle?” said Lloyd, who’d been listening to the conversation with an expression of disbelief. “Or was this your real strategy all along? To just eliminate whoever shows up?”
“No one’s going to miss these men,” said Marcus.
“Ingrid could have ended up dead!”
“But she didn’t, because we were ready for them,” said Rodrigo. “We’ll be ready the next time too.”
“The next time?” Lloyd looked at Ingrid. “Do you really want to be part of this? What if those men managed to get you in their van, and Rodrigo couldn’t save you? It was an insane risk, and for what? The thrill of being back in the game?”
“You don’t understand,” said Rodrigo. “For us, this is personal.”
“Oh, I understand perfectly. You call it justice, but it’s really about revenge.”
“Sometimes,” Marcus said quietly, “they’re one and the same thing.”
“And when things go wrong, who’s going to take the fall?
” said Lloyd. “Argus operates in the gray zone, without official sanction. Its operatives would be left completely out in the cold. Look, I was an analyst. I can see the bigger picture here. To you, these people are just chess pieces, being moved around the board. And occasionally, one of them may get sacrificed as a pawn.” He turned to his wife.
“Is that how you want to spend your last years, Ingrid? Risking your life for this?”
She looked at the man she had loved for almost thirty years, the man with whom she’d built a safe and comfortable nest. She thought of their life together, where cocktails were always served at five o’clock, and dinner was at seven, and their lives were utterly predictable.
Then she looked at Rodrigo, the poster boy for unpredictable.
Yes, that damned spark was still there between them, and being with him made her feel like the woman she used to be, young and fearless and desirable.
But she was reminded, too, of why she had left him—because desire was not love, and the hottest flame is the first to burn out.
Once, Rodrigo had thrilled her. Ultimately, he had failed her.
He would always fail her.
“We still have work to do, Ingrid,” said Rodrigo. “This is not the time to walk away.”
“But that’s what I’m going to do,” she said. She turned to Lloyd. “I’m ready to go home.”