“Do you intend to kill her?”
He glanced up and said, “Of course.”
“We can’t do that. She isn’t worthy of killing. We should let her go.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She doesn’t deserve to die.”
He set down the phone and said, “And the man last night did?”
She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and said, “He stood between us and getting her out of the bar. So yes.”
“He was nothing. He was a drunk. Your actions may well have destroyed this entire operation. And now you want to spare the girl? That will do the same.”
“She doesn’t deserve this. The drunk did.”
He stood up and advanced on her, the fury growing. He backed her up with his rage alone, until she was against the wall. He said, “You harm anyone else without my permission, and I will kill you. I will. Do you understand?”
She glared at him, and he placed his hand on her throat, loosely. He said, “Do not test me. You want to try, raise that hand. Show me the nail. I’ll break your neck before you can bring it to bear.”
She rolled her eyes theatrically, then giggled, saying, “So does this mean we’re no longer lovers? Or is this our first fight?”
He dropped his hand and shook his head, saying, “Don’t test me. I need you here, but I mean it. The mission is more important, and that girl is going to die. Understand?”
She nodded, and the phone on the table finally rang.
He went to it and answered, hearing, “It’s the same. Different restaurant, but same area. Maybe a block over from the last time we checked.”
“So they’re not in the hotel we thought?”
“Might be, but if so, they don’t turn the phone on inside it. Only outside.”
Chen knew that wasn’t the case, because the phone had been tracked by the Third Department since it had miraculously come back to life. It hadn’t been turned off in the last twenty-four hours.
He had hoped to learn where the Americans were sleeping by tracking the phone, and thereby conduct a clandestine assault to eliminate them, but when they’d first targeted the geolocation, it had been inside a restaurant on the busy Argyle Street in the heart of The Rocks entertainment district. They’d pulled back and waited on it to move. When it did, they’d closed in again, and now he was learning it had just shifted restaurants, which was a problem, because he was running out of time.
Jake, the man his superiors insisted on calling Bobcat, was on an overnight train to Cairns, with a meeting in two days. Chen needed to leave here to ensure that went according to plan. That was the mission. This was a cleanup that would only matter if Jake did something stupid. And after the report from the meeting in Brisbane, Chen wasn’t too impressed with him so far.
“How did that phone not go to a bed-down location in the last cycle of darkness? It stayed in the same place?”
“Apparently so. So far, it hasn’t moved more than a hundred meters. It’s stayed in heavily populated areas.”
They’re smarter than I thought. They’re waiting on a call.
“So we need to go to plan B. We need to leverage the girl. Come back here. We need to devise a trap using her. I’m going to initiate contact to prepare them. We need to control this from every angle.”
Chapter 37
Dunkin and I rolled into the central market on Argyle Street, a grouping of conventional streets interspersed with lanes only allowing foot traffic, the pedestrian areas lined with cafés and booths selling handcrafted wares.
Dunkin was agitated and had been since we’d left the Nurses Walk the night before, which I understood, but I’d convinced him to wait and let it play out. We had no lead on where they’d taken Nicole, and I knew they hadn’t snatched her because she was a fount of information. They’d taken her because of Dunkin—which made her a lead I was hoping to leverage.
I’d made him turn on his phone, knowing that they’d track it, but also knowing it was the only number they had, if they wanted to contact us. Which I’m sure they did.
I wasn’t stupid, though. We didn’t sit around a hotel room with it turned on, waiting for a call, because I’d used that technique more times than I could count to turn the cell phone into a GPS beacon telling me where to hit. Something I fully intended to do when they made contact with me through that very phone.
My team had found a restaurant in a large food court area right off Argyle Street, surrounded by people out enjoying the bars, and had sat there all night. Now it was my turn to babysit the phone.
I dialed an encrypted number, saying, “We’re here. Where are you?”
I heard, “I’m with the jarhead. Where do you think he’d go? Look for the first beer garden you can find next to the street. Munich House or something. Right on the corner.”
I laughed and said, “I know it. Be there in five.”
Dunkin said, “Who are we meeting?”
My intent was to keep that phone in a populated area for as long as it took, and with just three of us—me, Jenn, and Dunkin—that would have been hard, but my team had landed in the middle of the night, giving me extra bodies.
Jennifer had picked them up, and at four in the morning I’d put them to work, babysitting the phone while I went back to the hotel to get some shut-eye. Dunkin had awakened me at eight in the morning, aggravating the hell out of me, but I’d agreed to take him with me, against my better judgment. He was the one person the people hunting could recognize on sight.
Jennifer was at the hotel coordinating with the Taskforce to track whatever phone contacted Dunkin’s, and we were in standby mode, just switching out bodies to wait on a call. If it ever came.
I saw the beer garden across the street, just now opening at 9 a.m. It was Saturday, and the roads were starting to bustle with the weekend markets, awnings and pop-up tents erected for the tourists and locals to come buy handcrafted artwork and knickknacks.
The beer garden had a slew of pine tables out front, just like you’d find in a similar spot in Germany, but all were empty except for one. In the back corner was a six-foot-tall man with long black hair, a ratty T-shirt from some band nobody had ever heard of, and a puka shell necklace, like he had washed ashore last night from a shipwreck and hadn’t bothered to change. Across from him was a black man built like a fireplug. Short, and all muscle, he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and cargo shorts with Solomon hikers on his feet, looking more like an outback tour guide than a tourist.
Dunkin saw them from across the street and said, “Is that who I think it is?”
I crossed, saying, “Yeah. It is. Don’t say anything stupid about Nicole. They didn’t come here for that.”
We went through the entrance and to the table. The castaway said, “I can’t believe I flew all the way here to sit watching a phone.”
I grinned and said, “Trust me, when it rings, you’re getting some high adventure. But if we sit here all day we’ll be too drunk to execute.”
He pointed at the black man and said, “Blame Brett. He picked the place.”
Brett held up his hands and said, “It’s not like there were a lot of choices. Other than the park bench we spent the night on. Knuckles wanted to stay where we were. I wanted breakfast.”