“What will happen now to our business in Afghanistan?” she asked him.
“I’m not too worried,” said Nickerson, switching out his club for a five iron. “Another will take his place. Nature abhors a vacuum.” He cleared his throat. “Meanwhile, you have again failed to kill Morgan, and those photographs are still at large. I thought you were a professional. What is it you said last time? ‘Dead by morning’? Tell me,” he taunted, interrupting his practice swings to look at her with a derisive smile, “are you trying to fail?”
He savored her seething silence and, after a calculated pause, said, “Well, it’s no matter now. I’m not the only one who grew impatient with your ineptitude. I’m told that the CIA has sent an operative after Cobra. This time, he will be dead by morning.”
“What?” she spat in venomous indignation.
“You are reassigned to focus on your primary task,” he told her. “Which, by the way, you should have been doing to begin with.”
“That is unacceptable.” she fumed. “I kill Cobra!”
“Ah, yes,” he said, as if he had forgotten. “Your little. . . vendetta.” He packed the last word with contempt. “How very old-world of you.”
“I do not expect a man like you to understand,” she said. “Nor do I care. You will not deprive me of my revenge.”
“Think of it as outsourcing, my dear.” He swung, punctuating his statement with a thwack, sending the ball into a smooth arc. The ball bounced three times on the green and came to rest a few feet from the hole.
“You pathetic little man,” she said in white-knuckled anger. “What stops me from killing you where you stand?”
“We both know why you haven’t killed me already, and why I’m quite sure you won’t,” he said, sounding unperturbed. “But I’ll humor you. What stops you is that, while at my side, you will become fabulously rich and powerful.”
She looked at him with restrained contempt. She had enormous pride. It made her irrational, but Nickerson understood that it also made her formidable.
“You will do what I tell you. At the rally, in five days,” he said, like a schoolteacher giving homework instructions.
“Cutting it a bit close,” she grumbled.
“Are you suggesting that you can’t do it?” he said airily. “I thought you were supposed to be the best.” She scowled at him in response. “Excellent. That’s the kind of spunk I expected from you. And I understand you found yourself a way to get close?”
“You understand correctly,” she said acerbically.
“I have something for you,” he said. “Look in the large pocket of my golf bag.”
She unzipped it and found a cardboard tube. She popped the top and slid out the schematics from inside.
“You called me here just to deliver these? You could not have sent your trained monkey to do it?” She pointed at Vinson, watching them from the tree line and looking surly.
“Since you were kind enough to make your introduction before, I thought it best to conduct our affairs face-to-face when possible. Now tell me this is going to go off without a hitch,” he said.
“There will be no problem,” she said.
“Then that’s that, isn’t it?” he said, satisfied, and he motioned for Vinson to come over. “I knew I could count on you, partner. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a ball to sink.”
He hopped onto the golf cart, let Vinson get into the passenger’s seat, and drove away, watching in the rearview mirror as Natasha receded from his sight and disappeared into the wood.
“She’s trouble, sir,” said Vinson. “You won’t be able to keep her on her leash much longer.”
“Not like you, eh, Vinson?” said Nickerson. “Faithful as a dog.” The man scowled at the comparison, but kept quiet. “But you’re right. She’s becoming a liability. We will have to dispose of her in good time. But for now, she is still useful.”
“Yes,” hissed Vinson. “For now.”
CHAPTER 27
Morgan sat at the rough wooden table in the hunting cabin, perusing Plante’s documents by the light of a single, flickering, lightbulb that hung from a wire from the ceiling. Alex had been gone for several hours now, and the sun was close to setting.
He had been staring at the same piece of paper for the past half hour, unable to concentrate—not because of the bloodstains along the corner of the page but because his eyes were anxiously drawn to the door every few seconds. His ears caught every rustle he heard, over the low rumble of the generator, wondering if this time it might be the sound of his daughter returning. He had taken the old hunting rifle from its rack on the wall, loaded it, and shot at a few squirrels outside to see how it handled. It had one hell of a recoil and was so unpredictable, he couldn’t count on hitting a stationary target twenty feet away. Still, he left it on the table within reach, just in case.