Tightrope (Burning Cove #3)(18)

Chapter 11


The project had gone off the rails.

Once upon a time he had been a spy, a very good one. His instincts were still quite keen and they were telling him that he should walk away. In his experience, once things started to go wrong with one of his meticulously orchestrated plans, they rarely got back on track. A smart agent knew when to fold a hand and leave the table. He was nothing if not smart. He was a survivor.

But this project was different. This wasn’t about money—well, not entirely. It was about revenge. And that, he discovered, made it a lot harder to abandon.

Privately he thought of himself as Mr. Smith. He’d had a lot of other names over the years, including the one he’d been given at birth, but none of those names had seemed real for a very long time. It was his work under the code name Smith that had defined him, so he stuck with that identity, at least in his own mind.

Losing any sense of attachment to his original name was one of the side effects of living in the shadows for so many years, first as a patriotic spy for his country and now as a freelancer. He changed identities the way some men changed clothes. The skills required to stay alive in his world were not unlike those required of a successful actor. You had to be able to bury your old identity in order to adopt a new one.

He sat behind the wheel of the nondescript Ford and watched the front door of the run-down auto court cabin. The intruder had disappeared inside a short time ago.

Smith lit a cigarette and contemplated the intriguing events that he had just witnessed. He had been standing in the shadows just outside the high walls that surrounded the Hidden Beach Inn, trying to decide if it was worth taking the chance of breaking into the mansion to try to locate and search Pickwell’s room, when he’d seen the intruder arrive. The would-be burglar had broken the lock on the wrought iron gate at the rear of the big house and entered the premises via the conservatory door.

The problem with searching Pickwell’s room was locating it. The villa was a large mansion with three full floors of rooms. Yet the burglar had shown no hesitation about entering the villa.

Perhaps he knew exactly where he was going, or maybe not. Regardless, he had bungled the job and succeeded in awakening someone who had a gun. Sloppy work.

The intruder had descended from one of the upper floors using a rope. Smith had to admit he had been impressed with the speed and agility of the getaway. When it came to the escape routine, the guy looked like a professional cat burglar.

The intruder had fled through the garden as the shots rang out. Once clear of the grounds, he had jumped behind the wheel of an aging sedan parked at the side of the road.

Noisy departures and junkyard vehicles were not part of a pro’s repertoire. So what the hell was going on here?

Curious, Smith had ditched his own plans for the evening, climbed into his well-tuned but very nondescript Ford, and followed the intruder to the run-down auto court.

Now he sat quietly, smoking and going through possibilities.

The obvious explanation was that the intruder was an ambitious but rather inept burglar. A beginner in the profession, perhaps. Everyone had to start somewhere.

But Smith was not a fan of coincidences. It struck him as exceedingly unlikely that a common thief had decided to rob the Hidden Beach Inn on the night after Pickwell’s murder. Cat burglars were usually after expensive jewelry and fat wallets. Currently there were no guests in residence at the inn, let alone wealthy ones.

If the intruder was not a run-of-the-mill burglar, that left a more problematic possibility. The man who had been chased out of the inn’s gardens tonight could well be a competitor.

Smith knew he had only himself to blame for his current situation. His big mistake had been underestimating Pickwell. It had never occurred to him that the crazy, paranoid inventor would try a double cross. If there were, indeed, others after the cipher machine now, then things had, indeed, gotten complicated.

What was done was done. The best way to deal with the competition was to eliminate it. But first it would be a good idea to get some information.

Smith put out the cigarette and reached across the seat to pick up the gun and the mask.

He got out of the Ford and sorted through his extensive repertoire of accents as he walked toward the door of the cabin. He decided to go with Cary Grant. Everyone who went to the movies recognized that elegant transatlantic voice. And it just so happened that he and the actor shared a similar sense of style and the same taste in clothes—except for the mask, of course.

He adjusted the mask and stopped in the shadows near the door of the cabin. He was forced to take a moment to suppress the rage that threatened to overwhelm him. If this were any other project he would have walked away by now.

But this was not any other project. This was vengeance. During the Great War and in the years immediately afterward he had risked his life time and again for the elite bastards in Washington who ran the top secret intelligence agency known as the Curtain. In the end he had been tossed aside like so much trash. And then, just to add insult to injury, his spymaster—the man who had recruited him—had tried to kill him. So much for trust and loyalty. So much for gratitude.

He had tried to make the fool understand that after the war the country needed skilled spies more than ever. Anyone with half a brain could see that Europe was a powder keg that would soon blow again. Russia was enduring waves of violence and instability. And no one really understood what was going on in the Far East. If ever there was a time to put the best intelligence agents into the field, it was now. Instead, funding for the various agencies—and admittedly, there were several—had been severely cut back.