No Fortunate Son (Pike Logan, #7)(91)

I grinned and he saw I was jerking his chain. I shook his hand, then he went about slapping the rest of the team. He got to Nung, and his face showed confusion.

I said, “You guys wouldn’t help, so I brought in an independent contractor. Nung, this is Blaine Alexander.”

Nung stuck out his hand, and Blaine said, “Pike, can I see you a minute?”

He’d stomped to the far end of the room, me following. He said, “Who the hell is that?”

“I told you. An independent contractor. He’s from Thailand and helped me with that Knuckles problem we had a year ago. You remember? The same one where you tried to f*cking kill me?”

Which was an extreme exaggeration, but I wanted to rock him a little bit. It didn’t work.

He went into command mode. “Jesus, Pike, you’ve got a civilian working Taskforce problems? Have you lost your mind?”

“Hey, he’s handy in a scrape and can keep his mouth shut. He doesn’t know what we do. And honestly doesn’t care. As long as he gets paid.”

“Paid? What are you talking about? Does Kurt know this?”

“Uh . . . not yet.”

He turned in a circle, his hands on his head. “You have mercenaries working for the US government? Seriously?”

I said, “He’s not a mercenary.” Blaine looked at me like I was a child, and I said, “Okay, I guess he is a mercenary, but I needed the help. I pulled him in when I was PNG’d from the Taskforce.”

He said, “What’s the cost? What do we owe him?”

“Uh . . . we haven’t really discussed that yet. He wanted the jewels in the apartment in Paris, but the support team took them.”

His mouth fell open. “I . . . I’m really at a loss for words.”

I grinned. “Don’t worry. It’ll work out. Now that you’re here, you can break the news to Kurt.”

He said, “Screw that. He’s all yours. Let’s get to Cork City.”

We’d gotten a caravan of rentals, downloading whatever we thought we’d need from the Rock Star bird, pulling equipment out of the very walls themselves. The mission was pure reconnaissance, so we went heavy on that aspect. If we found anything, it would be Blaine’s job to coordinate a rescue force, while we faded to the background. I didn’t envy him for that. If it had been the UK, we could count on support from the SAS or some other organization much closer to our government, but here, I had no idea how he would effect a rescue. But that wasn’t my problem.

We’d established a tactical operations center in a hotel next to the River Lee in Cork City, then had set out to the address we’d found for Clynne. It was in a decidedly seedy part of town, and Blaine had wanted to do some type of Mission: Impossible break-in, implanting bugs and everything else. I’d told him, “We do the mission. You deal with higher.”

He’d said, “So, what do you recommend?”

“Knocking on the damn door. It’s worked for Jennifer and me so far.”

We’d driven to the address, leaving Nung fuming in the car yet again. Brett and Retro had staged left and right, and I’d taken Jennifer with me, both of us armed but our weapons concealed.

A skeleton-thin girl strung out on something, her hair listless and greasy, had answered the door. We’d asked for Clynne, and she’d snorted.

“He’s not here. Doing ‘business.’ You see that shit, you tell him I’m not waiting all night.”

I didn’t want to ask what she was waiting for, in fact didn’t want to get too close because I was sure she was carrying enough disease to cause the next Black Plague. I asked, “Where’s the business being conducted?”

And she’d given us the name of the pub. No subterfuge or questioning of our motives, which led me to believe the man known as Clynne wasn’t a master terrorist.

“You have a picture of him?”

She’d squinted, then said, “You don’t even know what he looks like? I thought you were friends.”

“I never said that.”

“I got no picture.”

I’d turned to go, and Jennifer, being quicker on the uptake than me, said, “Can I use your phone?”

I mentally kicked myself, knowing where she was going. The skeleton said, “He don’t have a phone. It was cut off months ago.”

I said, “Then can I have your cell?”

“No way. You want to call him, you pay me first.”

I withdrew my pistol and said, “You misunderstand. I don’t want to call him. I want to prevent you from doing that.”

Her eyes had widened, and she’d said, “I won’t call. I got no reason to.”

“Give it to me. I’ll give it to Clynne. You’ll get it back.”

She had done so, and now we were sitting in a pub, letting Clynne conclude his “business.”






64




As we were milking our pints, Retro said, “We could get drunk here waiting. If he has a revolving door of ‘clients,’ we may not get a chance to brace him.”

I was thinking the same thing, especially since the woman had indicated he spent an inordinate amount of time on his “business.” I was considering just busting up the meeting, but decided against it. A decision that I would later regret.