Seeds of Iniquity (In the Company of Killers, #4)(27)

“ ‘They barely spoke,’ Victor said. ‘Claire answered. There was a pause and the man simply asked who he was speaking to. Claire replied by asking him who he was trying to reach. And then the call ended.’

“ ‘Sounds like it was just a wrong number,’ I said.

“ ‘It is possible,’ Victor said with a nod, ‘but it was also suspicious. We were not taking any chances and I was ordered to come here right away.’

“ ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

“ ‘You were still over an hour away,’ Victor said. ‘I was just fifteen minutes out.’

“That may have been true, but he was keeping something from me and it didn’t take long for me to figure it out.

“ ‘Victor, tell me the f*cking truth,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I already knew the answer.

“He sighed. ‘You were being removed from the mission, Niklas. Joran Carver received his orders last evening to take over.’

“ ‘Take over?’ I said with anger and disbelief. ‘And how the hell was he gonna do that?’ My voice began to rise. ‘I had a relationship with Claire. She…loved me, Victor’—I had started to say that I also loved her, but my wall of denial was still up and had to stay that way—‘How could Joran possibly just take over?’ I was enraged—the thought of another man, operative or not, taking over for me, did things to me that I couldn’t control—I almost punched my brother.

“Blue and red lights bounced against the surrounding trees in the darkness as a police car and an unmarked came up the long gravel driveway. The house I lived in with Claire was on six acres of tree-engulfed land; the closest neighbor was half a mile away.

“Joran Carver stepped out of the unmarked vehicle dressed in a suit.

“I beat the shit out of him because he was there, why he was there. And I didn’t talk to my brother for a month after that. Because he kept the truth from me until the last minute when The Order’s plan to replace me with Joran, died with Claire that night.”

“Why was Joran Carver there?” Nora asks.

Letting the memory fade, I look back at Nora sitting on the other side of the table.

“I thought you knew everything?” I say sarcastically.

“This I don’t know,” she says. “And I want you to tell me.”

I shake my head with a sneer. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“It is now,” she says. “I’m curious to know.”

I want to be my pissed off, defiant self with Nora right now, but at this point I don’t even care anymore. I feel so goddamned defeated, not by Nora, but by myself.

“Joran’s role was to play the kind and caring homicide investigator who was going to show up at Claire’s house to question her about the last time she saw me. To rule her out as having anything to do with my murder.”

“They were going to kill you?”

“No.” I shake my head. “They were just going to take me out of the mission. Tell her I had been found murdered. She would’ve been devastated. And Joran, handsome, slick f*cker that he was, was going to be the one to console her, and her only hope of getting the charges dropped against her for being the one who killed me.”

Nora’s eyes narrow. “So they were going to make it look like she was a murderer, play on her vulnerable state just so Joran could replace you.”

“Fucked up, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s extreme,” she says.

“You wouldn’t believe how often things like that happen,” I say, and even now, long after I’ve left The Order, I feel like I’m committing treason against it by freely telling this woman this information. Again, I don’t give a f*ck; a part of this feels strangely freeing. “Vonnegut’s operatives were, and still are, everywhere. Working as police officers, EMT’s, IRS officials, lawyers, actors, street sweepers—sometimes I think Claire is better off dead because they would’ve put her through nine kinds of hell to find out what they wanted to know, and ruined whatever life she tried to make for herself. I like to think that the last eleven months of her life with me was my way of getting back at them. Because I was good to her. And what I felt for her was real. I wasn’t just another Joran Carver sent in to lie to her. Claire would’ve died either way, whether by the other organization after Solis, or eventually by The Order itself. I’m glad I was the last person in her life. Because I f*cking loved her.”

I get up from the chair and look down at Nora.

“When this is over,” I tell her in a calm voice, “I will kill you. On principle.”

“Those are bold words,” she says with no emotion on her face. “Threats like that—”

“Oh, it’s not a threat,” I cut in. I point my finger at her. “You don’t f*ck with somebody’s loved ones; innocent people who never asked to be related to, or involved with someone not-so-innocent like the rest of us. Only cowards shoot somebody from behind. If you wanted something from one of us, then you should’ve called that person out from the start and dealt with it head-on.”

I take my pack of cigarettes up from the table, shuffling one into my fingers and then slide the pack into my back pocket. Fishing my lighter from a front pocket, I set the end aflame and take a quick drag.