Seeing Red (Gareth Red Thrillers Book 1) Read online

  Good, that gives us more time. They wouldn’t have to simultaneously wrestle the girl out of a burning vehicle and contend with the fact that she probably wanted to kill them.

  Roderick reached the car first, slowing to a walking pace as he held the assault rifle up and aimed at the vehicle. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out of the car, now!”

  The woman didn’t move. Her head was lowered, her white parka nearly filling the small space that had been made much smaller because of its impact with the tree.

  Gareth walked up to the driver’s side while Roderick approached from the opposite direction, like two traffic cops playing it safe. Roderick repeated the order, but still the woman sat in the seat, motionless.

  “She might be dead,” Gareth said. “Or knocked out.”

  “Then put a bullet through her head and let’s go.”

  “No.”

  Roderick looked at Gareth, both men feeling the tension in the cold air ignite, a fuse, growing closer and closer to its final destination.

  “Kill her,” Roderick said. “Make sure she is no longer breathing.”

  “Not here. Not like this.”

  “What?”

  “We need to question her. See what she knows, especially if we’re supposed to figure out why she was doing all of this.”

  Gareth looked through the broken driver’s window, his gun leading. Her head was bobbing, slowly. “She’s alive,” he said. “Time to wake her up and see what this is —”

  Her head heaved backward, she took a huge gasping breath, and Gareth saw the woman’s hands rising up.

  Unarmed.

  “Move,” Roderick said, aiming his rifle at the woman in the front seat of the car. Gareth immediately stepped in the way, preventing Roderick from getting a straight shot.

  Man, I’m stepping in front of a lot of bullets these days.

  Roderick’s gun lowered, but Gareth noticed it was still very much armed and that the man wielding it needed no more than a quarter-second to get it back on target. Far faster than Gareth would have to move out of the way.

  But he assumed Roderick was on his side.

  “I’m ordering you to move out of the way, Red. Or put a bullet through her head now and get it over with.”

  “Roderick,” he said. “Easy there, big guy. No one really explained to me the hierarchy here. And first time we met, you were serving me drinks, which I can only take to mean you’re a bit below me on the totem pole. I’m getting a cool bag of cash for this mission, so I’m very much interested in seeing it through. No answers, no dice. This chick has answers. See?”

  Roderick shook his head. “This is a poor decision, Red.”

  “That’s just it — I don’t see it that way. And unless you’re really interested in killing me and her, we’re going to do it my way. Got it?”

  Gareth felt the pressure in his shoulders. Physical manifestation of tension, stress. Common in his line of work. He forced a longer set of breaths. Focused on his heart, the rhythmic beating.

  The truth was, he had no idea what Roderick really wanted. Maybe he’d gotten a better deal? Two million instead of one, just for taking the girl out. No way to know without Roderick just coming out and telling him, and so far his teammate had been rather light in dishing out crucial details.

  The woman next to him coughed. Blood on her cheek, she wiped it off with the back of her white jacket. Dark crimson smeared a line down the outside of her parka’s white sleeve.

  “She’s fine,” Gareth said. “Help me get her out.”

  Roderick finally nodded, then came around to Gareth’s side of the car. His rifle was stowed away over his shoulder now, a much safer place for it in Gareth’s mind, but he knew the man was riled up. He was probably not used to taking orders from anyone but his direct boss, and he had a feeling there was a reason the hierarchy of this mission hadn’t been fully explained.

  Keep them in the dark, keep things interesting, he’d heard commanders say. Keep them on their toes. Neither was a particularly good strategy for building teamwork, morale, and friendships within the ranks, but both were bulletproof methods for keeping troops focused on a singular mission while simultaneously ensuring they weren’t focused on what their leadership really wanted. They were both all-too-common favorite strategies in the Army.

  Perhaps the bank was attempting this now? Keep Gareth unsure about what was really happening so that he would revert to his default setting that years of training had drilled into him: accomplish the mission that had been given to him.

  For now, Roderick was playing along. Gareth hoped he’d continue doing so, but he vowed to keep an eye on things, try to control as much as possible from here on out.

  The door was mangled, but it opened easily enough and Gareth reached inside. She was pouting, her face masked in rage. She pushed his hand away.

  “Listen, chick, I’m not going to hurt you. Yet. Just cooperate and —”

  Her voice cut back at him in Russian, a stream of what could only be obscenities. He glanced up at Roderick. He just shook his head.

  “Seriously, lady, I’m getting real tired of this country, real quick. You help us out, we’ll —”

  Another stream of curses, this one even more staccato and punctuated by coughing phlegm.

  “We should just leave her here to die,” Roderick said. “After an outburst like that.”

  Gareth winced. Maybe she is injured, after all. He felt a bit sorry for her, falling so far from woman-on-a-mission to woman-who-can-barely-speak, unable to move out of her own vehicle without help.

  But the compassion was quickly replaced by the knowledge of who she was. She was a sniper, assumedly well-trained, and she wasn’t new to her profession.

  “You were going to kill that man,” Gareth said, hoping Roderick would translate into Russian for her. “Why?”

  “He is already dead,” she shot back. Gareth was surprised, but he didn’t let it throw him off.

  “No, he’s sitting in his big ‘ol armchair in his big ‘ol house, probably watching all the shenanigans out here.”

  “It change nothing,” she said. “He is dead. I was here to ensure it was finish.”

  “You’re saying he’s still going to die?”

  She shook her head. “We all die, no?”

  “But you’re not going to kill him?”

  “Not now. Later.”

  “I see. Well, I’ll tell you what. You come with us, talk it out, and we just might let you continue your little killing spree.”

  “I do not believe you.”

  “Good,” Gareth said, “you’re not a complete fool. Still, since we’re the guys with the guns, and you’re the one with a few broken bones, you’re going to do what we tell you to do.”

  She glowered at him, a look so cruel Gareth was both impressed and a bit scared. Who is this woman? he thought. He reached in again and this time clamped his right hand around the top of her arm, squeezing as hard as he could.

  She winced, but he didn’t let up. He pulled her, one handed, out of the vehicle, where Roderick grabbed her and helped hold her up.

  “We’ve got a bit of a walk,” Gareth said. “But our ride’s in a bit better shape than yours, and I think we even have heated seats.”

  She continued to glower, but Gareth pushed her ahead of him. “Looks like you can still walk, so let’s get moving. I don’t have to tell you the rules, do I? Running gets you shot, and all that?”

  She made no discernible motion with her head, and he wondered if she could still understand him. To her credit, though, she marched forward, her black boots the only non-white piece of her outfit. Roderick held onto her arm, but Gareth dove back into the car to find her weapon.

  It was in the back seat, but it looked like it had flown there from the front seat during the crash, or she’d simply tossed it back there carelessly, focusing instead on her getaway than in taking care of her gear.

  “Right behind you,” Gareth called up to them. He started walking, exami
ning the rifle while he moved. There were no markings on it, and he was unfamiliar with the model. It seemed to him like some sort of black market purchase, from a supplier who was very interested in remaining anonymous. Interesting, he thought. Very interesting.

  The woman was walking directly in front of him now, Roderick still guiding her along. Gareth examined her, trying to put it all together in his mind. She was thin, her hair black but also thin and wiry, and her stride was lilted a bit from either a scrape from the car wreck or a limp from a previous injury. The parka hid her figure, but she had a belt around her waist, pulling it in tight and revealing that she did seem to have been dealt a lucky hand in the looks department, as far as build was concerned.

  Her face, from the few seconds Gareth had seen it, was what really struck him, though. She was young, maybe no older than thirty. Her eyes were deep hazel and green, beautiful but full of untold stories. Her face was weathered, similar to some of the faces on the women he’d seen in the past lying on beaches for hours on end, day after day, unaware that their constant battle against the sun was a losing one. But this woman was pale, not tanned at all. Ghostly white, actually.

  So she was the type of woman who was beautiful, youthful enough to be fit and healthy, but undoubtedly aged beyond her years from some dreadful experiences in her past.

  Gareth shuddered again, this time because he felt the weight of this woman’s struggle. It wasn’t at an end, not yet. She was still alive, and she would still fight. With her words, or with the lack of them, but she would fight.

  And he was not looking forward to that battle.

  24

  “WHO ARE YOU?” RODERICK ASKED again.

  The woman glared. Gareth sighed. This was the third time he’d asked the question, and the third time they’d gotten no response. Well, no response besides an evil glare.

  They were driving, heading back toward the airport at Vladivostok, to catch yet another plane to yet another somewhere. Gareth was feeling two things simultaneously: first, he was tired. Worn out, ragged and exhausted to the core after nearly a week of travel, chasing, and not getting much sleep. Second, he was disappointed. He wanted to close the case, seal the deal, but this woman wasn’t giving them any help. She offered nothing, and no question they asked her once she was in their Chrysler was answered.

  “You said earlier that that man was already dead. What does that mean? You obviously missed your window, and he’s very much still alive, last I checked.”

  She glared at Gareth. “I say I kill him later.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “It is his choice. He make choice long ago, I finish it now.”

  Gareth shook his head and sighed again. They were still on the dirt road that led to the warehouses and mansion on the hidden property, so he figured they had plenty of time to get comfortable.

  The woman was sitting in the front seat, next to Gareth, who had taken the driving role for now, while Roderick sat in the back, peppering the woman with questions that weren’t getting answered.

  “Listen, uh, whatever your name is, we —”

  “Latia.”

  “Latia?”

  “Latia. Yes.”

  “No last name?” Gareth asked. “Or is that your last name?”

  “My name is Latia. If I have other name, I do not know it.”

  “I see. Well my friend and I, Roderick here, we want to figure out why you’re killing his clients. He works —”

  Roderick cleared his throat, a very obvious signal for Gareth to shut the hell up. Gareth obliged, waiting for Roderick to redirect the conversation.

  “I work for an entity that has sent me here to find you,” Roderick said. “My interest is in making sure there are no more deaths by your hand.”

  The woman only stared, first straight ahead out the windshield, then to the right, at the passing forest. They had searched her when they’d reached their car, Roderick checking for weapons and anything that might identify her. Neither of them had been surprised to find anything of the sort. She had packed light, and if there was anything at all that could incriminate her, it would be back at her wrecked compact. Gareth figured they’d be safe leaving it there — no one else lived out this way and there weren’t going to be any local law enforcement officials snooping around this area unless someone called it in.

  Gareth worried at first that the man in the mansion they’d just left — the client — might do just that, but Roderick felt it was more pressing to get back to civilization, to call it in and see what his boss wanted them to do. He made his case that if the man was going to do anything at all, he would have done it, and they would both have police crawling all over them by now. Odds were, he said, the man was simply waiting until the next time he was told he was supposed to die. He’d missed the first window, he’d try to make his next appointment.

  It was a strange thing, not understanding what was happening. Gareth had been in a few situations like that, long ago, but it was rare these days, after years in the military and acing his training regimens that he was ever in a situation where he didn’t understand just about every side of every aspect of the mission. It was part of the briefing, and since he was far from a regular foot soldier, a regular infantryman, he was typically given a wider scope in his briefings. Not just who the target was, but why he was taking them out. What the real mission was — not just ‘kill this person,’ but why it mattered.

  This mission was different. He was getting a much fatter paycheck, but the brief was essentially no brief at all: find the person killing our people, and stop them from killing any more. He hadn’t been told who he was working for, why, and what the true situation was.

  There was the chance that what he’d been told was the entirety of the situation, that the bank itself had no idea what was really going on besides the fact that their clients were being hunted down and murdered. There was a chance that Roderick had been sent out on a wild goose chase, the bank hoping that by spending a million on Gareth and however much on Roderick that they could scare up some results.

  But Gareth had been around long enough to know that there was most often more to the story than the hired help was allowed to know. He was the grunt, the man assigned to the dirty task of ending this woman’s killing spree, so he’d be pretty low on the totem pole. He knew for a fact that Roderick was not exactly forthcoming with information about himself, so he would likely be similarly nondescript about his employer.

  So Gareth didn’t like the situation. He didn’t understand it, so he didn’t like it. He felt out of his comfort zone. He was used to traveling to one destination, setting up, marking and taking a target, then driving back. Sometimes as part of a squad, most often by himself. He liked the solitude of the journey, the simplicity of it all.

  This was complex, and confusing. And neither the woman nor Roderick was giving him any help.

  “Latia,” Gareth said. “As he told you, we just want to figure out what all this is about.”

  “And then put me in prison,” she said.

  “Well, you did kill those other people, right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Gareth sighed once again, but Roderick’s cell phone rang. Saved by the bell.

  He picked it up, answered it, listened for a moment without speaking. Gareth watched him in the rearview mirror as he drove, just about reaching the end of the dirt road. He could almost feel the tension, palpable, rising in the car.

  “What is it?” Gareth mouthed into the mirror. Roderick didn’t answer.

  “That cannot… that is not possible.”

  Gareth stared back at Roderick, trying to keep his focus on both the man and the road at once. He couldn’t hear who was on the other end of the phone, but he could take a wild guess.

  Roderick listened some more, then he began to explain their own situation. “We picked her up. She had a rifle and everything, no — that’s back at the estate. No, we didn’t… yes, he seemed to be aware of what was happenin
g. No, we left him at his home. I believe he is safe.”

  He nodded along to a silent order, then he hung up.

  “You want to explain what that was all about?” Gareth asked.

  Roderick took a deep breath, looking from Latia over to Gareth and back. “That was my boss. There has been another death.”

  Gareth’s head fell sideways. “Another death. Like a sniper? One of your clients? Same situation?”

  Roderick nodded. His usual mask of stoicism was replaced by a thin, sharp line of anger where his mouth used to be. “Client #5 on the list.”

  Gareth smacked the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Shit.”

  “Correct,” Roderick said.

  Latia’s face was turned outward, looking toward the trees they were still passing. But Gareth could see a thin grin, just a sliver of excitement on her otherwise plain, empty face.

  25

  AS ONE OF HIS OLD executive officers used to love saying, this situation is a cluster. Gareth had known the man for only a year, but they all remembered him by comments like these. And it was true: this situation was absolutely a ‘cluster.’ He couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and Roderick was only as helpful as the gun in his hand.

  What Gareth needed right now was information.

  He threw his left hand to right, sending the car toward the shallow ditch on the side of the smaller highway they’d just started down, and his right hand worked the automatic transmission. From four to three, then his hand shifted to the handbrake and he pulled it straight up. The car spun, but he had moved the wheel a quarter-turn to the left, causing it to spin perfectly over the surface of the entire highway, ending up with the Chrysler pointed the opposite direction.

  Both Latia and Roderick were holding on for their lives, gripping anything close to them for support. Latia’s head bounced against the window, but Gareth knew she was fine. He floored it, the gas pedal and the floor meeting and becoming parallel, and the Chrysler’s powerful engine dug in and took off, sending its three passengers sailing back the direction they’d just come from.