The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller Read online

  Bianca’s lips tightened.

  “Let me see the video again,” she said. Something about it nagged at her.

  “Sure.”

  Doc did something with the keyboard. A few seconds later Bianca was once again watching her father stride across the screen. This time the image was not such a shock and she was able to concentrate on details. The pedestrians on the sidewalk, the vehicles on the street—

  That was it: the black Peugeot parked curbside at the far edge of the frame. Even as Richard recovered his hat and clapped it back onto his head, a woman and a young girl emerged from the car. They were small figures, background to the primary scene of a man losing his hat as he crossed the street. Amid all the extraneous vehicular and pedestrian traffic, they were insignificant. Bianca would have never given them a second glance, except—

  She recognized them.

  The little girl with the long nut-brown hair pulled smoothly back from her face was her half sister, Marin. The slim, attractive brunette with her was her father’s wife, Marin’s mother, her own (as difficult as she found it to wrap her head around the concept) stepmother, Margery Humphries. The film footage had probably been recorded sometime during the previous holiday season. She knew because Marin’s looks had scarcely changed. She was round-faced, rosy-cheeked, happy-looking. A sturdy child in the plaid skirt and navy jumper (Brit-speak for sweater) that was her school uniform. She skipped a little as she closed the car door, then headed toward her mother, who was rounding the trunk. A normal child, with a normal life. For whatever reason, Richard had chosen to raise his two daughters very differently. Bianca was glad of that, for Marin’s sake.

  As her mother joined her, they both looked toward Richard, who didn’t glance their way. The impression Bianca got was that he wasn’t yet aware of their presence.

  Bianca’s stomach tightened. What she was looking at was a rendezvous in progress. Richard used that café as a hub.

  Marin and Margery were most probably on their way to meet Richard there. From the shadows cast by the buildings, from the busy stores and the number of people and vehicles out and about, it was around lunchtime. Possibly Marin and Margery were early, because Richard clearly was not expecting them yet. It couldn’t be the other way around, because Richard was never late. From the eagerness in the little girl’s face as she looked toward him, she was excited about seeing him. From Bianca’s own knowledge of him, she guessed that he had most likely been away doing what it was he did. He would have changed identities en route and was now on his way to meet up with his family.

  Live your life in compartments.

  Those two belonged to a part of Richard’s life that was completely separate from the compartment in which he was Richard St. Ives, her father.

  To them, he was Edward Humphries, Margery’s husband and Marin’s father. They had no idea that he had any other life, any other identity. They had no idea about her.

  Knowing that they would join him in the café, that the three of them would sit together as a family at a back corner table (Richard always sat in back corner tables in restaurants and took care to take the seat that kept his back to the wall) and that Richard would order the banoffee pie, which was what he always ordered at that café, was beyond unsettling.

  Bianca suddenly felt the same way she had the first time she had walked into Evie’s house to behold that big Christmas tree with all the ornaments and tinsel and piles of presents beneath. Like she was on the outside looking in. Like she was standing in the cold with her nose pressed up against a big plate-glass window, yearning to be part of what she saw in front of her and knowing that she never could be.

  Much as she hated to acknowledge it even to herself, it hurt.

  Pushing past the useless, idiotic emotions stirred up by realizing that her father was going to eat with his other daughter, his family, who had no idea that she even existed, in the café where the two of them customarily met, she forced herself to concentrate on details.

  First, like her father’s, Marin’s and Margery’s faces were perfectly visible to the camera, which she thought must be one of the many now posted around London as a reaction to the past few years of heightened terrorist threat.

  Second, so was the Peugeot’s license plate.

  She knew that it was registered to Edward Humphries, Framlingham, Suffolk.

  She knew because once upon a time, after one of their café meetings, she had followed Richard to the home in Framlingham that he shared with Marin and Margery. She’d spent an embarrassing-to-remember hour trailing him and Margery as they took toddler Marin to a neighborhood park, then lurking anonymously in a nearby shop watching through a window as her father pushed her little sister on the swings.

  But the point, the point, was that the car, the child, the woman, outed Richard’s bolt-hole, the cover identity that was the main compartment in which he lived his everyday life. It was a dangling thread that astute investigators could pull and follow until, possibly, they unraveled the whole.

  Richard was in all likelihood dead. The video couldn’t hurt him.

  There was no way to know if Richard in his Edward Humphries identity possessed anything that might lead investigators to Bianca St. Ives.

  But it was possible.

  There was no way to know, if whoever had sent this email carried through on their threat and sent the video to investigators, whether investigators would even notice the child and the woman getting out of the car among all that busy background, much less isolate them and do the work required to establish their identities and/or trace the Peugeot plates.

  But it was possible.

  There was no way to know if whoever had sent this email was already aware of the identities of the child and woman in the background, or if they had picked up on the Peugeot’s license plate and traced any or all of those through to Edward Humphries.

  But it was possible.

  What was indisputable was that the video represented a terrifying breach of security.

  It was a loose end that might prove dangerous to her.

  It might prove dangerous to Marin and Margery, if whoever had sent the video went looking for Richard and found them instead.

  It might prove dangerous to Doc, and to any and all members of the underground network of Richard’s associates around the globe.

  The question was, then, what to do?

  Did she dare ignore the threat and hope it was a bluff?

  Did she dare to take the chance that, if it wasn’t a bluff and the video was sent to the authorities, it would bring no harm to Marin or Margery? That it wouldn’t be used to hunt her, Bianca, down?

  That it wouldn’t be used to hunt down the whole loosely connected web of Richard’s contacts?

  What would happen if, say, she were to reply and simply inform whoever had sent the email that Richard couldn’t do what they wanted because he was dead?

  That answer was easy. First, she would expose the fact that someone was on the receiving end of Richard’s most private emails. The senders might believe Richard was dead, but they’d worry because their communication with whoever had received their supposedly secure emails had revealed their existence, their reliance on Richard and the types of activities that he undertook, and created a giant loose end that left them at risk. And, like her, they might feel the need to eliminate loose ends.

  Second, they might believe that Richard was simply trying to get out of whatever it was they wanted him to do. That they clearly felt he had an obligation to them to do.

  Neither scenario was good.

  So what if she swooped in and scooped Marin and Margery out of harm’s way? Tried to scoop Marin and Margery out of harm’s way, because of course they had no idea who she was and no reason to listen to her. If anybody was watching, attempting something like that might even endanger them more, bringing attent
ion to the fact that they were important to Richard—and it wouldn’t do anything to protect anyone else.

  Bianca asked, “What happens if we reply? Is there any possible way, any tiny sliver of a chance, that the email could be traced back here?”

  “You kidding? With me on the job? No way.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?” She trusted Doc, but caution had been bred in her DNA, she supposed, and reinforced a million times over by the life she’d led. Right now, she and Doc were safe. After what had happened, sending even the smallest feeler out into the world felt like a risky thing to do. But on the other hand, if whoever was behind this did as they threatened, would the video be the means of bringing the dogs sniffing around the life she had built for herself here in Savannah, around Guardian Consulting, around Bianca St. Ives? And around Marin and Margery and Doc and the rest?

  Doc said, “You ever hear of Tor encryption?”

  “No.”

  “It lets you hide out on the web. We’re using it. Trust me, nobody’s going to find us.” He frowned at her. “You thinking about replying?”

  “I’m thinking about a lot of things.” She gave herself a mental shake and headed toward the door. “Twelve hours, which means 5:00 p.m. We’ve got some time. Let me know if anything else comes in. And keep trying to trace those emails back to whoever sent them.”

  Doc’s expression was troubled as he watched her go. “Will do.”

  It was, Bianca saw as she walked into her office, exactly five minutes until nine. Setting her nearly untouched coffee cup down on her imposing glass-and-steel desk, she walked past it and her big black leather chair to the wall-to-wall expanse of windows that looked out over the muddy green waters of the Savannah River. Staring blindly down at the familiar scene as her mind raced, she barely noticed the brown pelicans flying in formation and dropping like kamikaze planes into the water as they fished, or the tanker-size barge gliding past under the guidance of the much smaller tugboat escorting it to the mouth of the river, or the flotilla of other boats zipping busily to and fro.

  Her insides were still in a knot. Seeing that on-screen image of her father so unexpectedly had knocked her for a loop, as much as she hated to admit it even to herself. Her feelings where he was concerned were a mess. A tangle of grief and anger, love and hate, hurt at his clearly stronger emotional attachment to his other daughter, his new family—and a terrible emptiness at the idea that she would never see him again.

  Buck up, she ordered herself fiercely. How she felt didn’t matter. What mattered was what she was going to do.

  “Bianca?” Evie’s quick knock on her open door interrupted her thoughts. “Leona Tilley with Claybourne Realty is here.”

  “Thanks.” Pasting a smile on her face, Bianca turned away from the window and went out to greet Guardian Consulting’s newest prospective client.

  * * *

  By 3:00 p.m., after getting a near commitment to provide a security guard at all Claybourne Realty open houses from Leona Tilley, who had to clear the expenditure with her partner before finalizing the deal, then schmoozing management at the Savannah Civic Center over lunch and concluding with a tour of the facility in hopes of persuading them that a locally owned company—Guardian Consulting—would be a better, more responsive alternative for their security needs than the Atlanta-based firm they currently used, Bianca was tired, sweaty (okay, glow-y in Savannah parlance) and still mulling over what to do about the threat posed by those anonymous emails as she walked back into the thankfully air-conditioned environs of her office.

  The situation with all its implications had been churning away in the back of her mind, and the direction her thoughts had taken hadn’t made her feel any cheerier.

  She’d been struck by the unsettling notion that the emails might constitute a trap. Although if they did, they were meant as a trap for Richard, not her. She was certain of that because the job, and the threat, had been sent to Richard’s private email account that she would have had no access to if Doc hadn’t been upgrading it at the time Richard had been killed.

  If it was a trap, then whoever was behind it clearly either didn’t know or didn’t believe Richard was dead. When she asked herself who would go to such lengths, Laurent Durand immediately sprang to mind as the most viable candidate, but he had been there in Bahrain and must be aware of the explosion and fire.

  So either Durand didn’t believe Richard was really dead or there was someone else who wanted Richard really, really badly.

  Who? She didn’t know.

  Which led her to another question: Why? Why would Durand or anyone else go to such lengths to attempt to capture Richard?

  And that brought her to the most disturbing realization of all: as the video with Marin and Margery had underlined, she was actually acquainted with only a small part of her father’s life.

  Who was he when he wasn’t with her?

  She knew some—many, she liked to think—of his identities and activities. But she didn’t even try to fool herself that she knew them all.

  So what didn’t she know?

  That was the question that was niggling away at her when she walked back into Doc’s office shortly after three. Hay was out, probably checking on what was going on with Dynex down at the docks. Evie was in the kitchen setting up the new coffeemaker, and from the look of things when Bianca glanced in at her, she was going to be busy for a while. Still, Bianca closed Doc’s door.

  “All quiet on the Hong Kong–ese front,” Doc said, looking up as the door clicked shut.

  Knowing he was referring to the emails, she nodded. “I figured.” Because she knew he would have let her know immediately if anything else had come in.

  Doc raised his eyebrows at her in silent question as she stopped in front of his desk.

  “I want you to do something for me,” she said. Her mouth was dry, but she consciously chose not to swallow or wet her lips because she didn’t want Doc picking up on how uncomfortable what she was getting ready to ask him to do made her. “I want you to get a still picture of my father off that video and use facial recognition software to run it through every database you can think of. I want to see what turns up.”

  Doc nodded. “Smart. Then we’ll know what the cops might find if they were to get hold of it and run it.”

  “Right.” Bianca agreed as if that was her primary motivation, which it wasn’t. She wanted to learn as much as she could about her father. Checking him out felt like a betrayal in a way, but it was something that she needed to do. His death and everything associated with it had raised urgent questions in her mind. The wonder was that she’d never attempted to look into his background before. Loyalty, love, familiarity with him and the way he worked, acceptance of her life and his because it was all she had ever known—those were some of the reasons she’d come up with over the course of the day to explain to herself why she had simply accepted everything he’d told her without really questioning it. But those reasons were no longer operational.

  She needed to know—who was Richard St. Ives?

  “Oh, by the way, I got that information you asked me for this morning.” Doc nodded in the direction of the printer, which rested on a table between the two tall windows. Rolling away from his desk, he scooted in his chair over to the table, grabbed a manila folder that was beside the printer, twirled around once with the glee of a six-year-old and scooted back to hand it to her.

  “You’re going to kill yourself in that chair.” She said it in the absent tone of someone who’d said the same thing many times before. Opening the folder, she saw a printout of a newspaper article headlined Tiffany Brady, 4, Named Little Miss Hamilton County Fair. The story was accompanied by a picture of a beaming blonde child having a crown placed on her head.

  Fantastic.

  The file was an inch thick. Anticipating many more such stories, Bianca closed t
he folder again in resignation. It was going to take a while to go through it, and right now she had bigger fish to fry.

  “So?” Once more behind his desk, Doc leaned back to look up at her expectantly.

  Bianca knew what he was asking.

  “I’m going to take the job.” She wasn’t even sure when she’d made up her mind. As she’d finished weighing the pros and cons, she’d found an answer for the most compelling reason not to answer the email: it might be a setup orchestrated by someone hoping to capture a thief.

  The thing was, if that was the case, then the thief they would be trying to capture was Richard. No one would be looking for her. She could nip in and get the job done without anyone even realizing she was there.

  Because she was really very good at what she did.

  And when she had her hands on whatever it was they wanted her to steal, she would put a tracer on it before handing it over. Then she would follow the tracer back to whoever had sent the threatening video and do whatever she had to do to eliminate the threat.

  That, plus keeping the video from falling into the hands of the authorities until she could take care of the problem, was the “pro” that had convinced her that she needed to take the job.

  Not that, in this particular case, the money had had any real bearing on her decision, but the prospect of earning some major bucks hadn’t hurt, either.

  “You sure?” Doc was looking worried again.

  “I’m sure.” He didn’t need to know any more than that. She was still playing by her father’s rules, and this one was Keep your cards close to your vest.

  “Can you pull that email up again, please? Skip the video.” She walked around behind him as she spoke.

  “Yeah.” The email popped up on the screen.

  “If I have a seven-figure payment sent to a numbered bank account in Switzerland, you can get it out of there fast and stowed away in another bank account I give you in a way that can’t be traced, right?”