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Chapter 23

I stare at the Dutch farmhouse through binoculars.

The flight from Rome to Groningen Airport Eelde in the Netherlands took two and a half hours. The ride from the airport to this farm in Assen took twenty minutes.

“Only four people in the house, dreamboat,” a heavily accented voice says to me.

I turn to Zorra. Zorra’s real name is Shlomo Avrahaim. He is former Mossad and a cross-dresser, or whatever the appropriate term is for a man who likes to dress as a woman. I have known many cross-dressers in my time. Many are quite attractive and feminine in appearance. Zorra is neither. His beard is as heavy as his accent. He does not manscape in the brow area, so both appear to be hairy caterpillars with no interest in turning into butterflies. His knuckles could best be described as midtransition werewolf. His curly red wig looks like something he stole from Bette Midler’s show trunk in 1978. He wears stiletto heels, literally, as in an actual blade is sheathed in the heel.

Way back when, Zorra nearly killed Myron with that blade.

“We know that from the thermal imaging?” I ask.

“The same Zorra used in London, dreamboat.” His voice was a deep baritone. “This will be too easy. How you say? Fish in barrel. You waste talents of legendary professional like Zorra.”

I turn to him and look him up and down.

“Problem, dreamboat?” Zorra asks.

“Peach skirt with orange pumps?” I say.

“Zorra can pull it off.”

“Glad Zorra thinks so.”

Zorra’s head swivels back to the house. The wig doesn’t move with it. “Why are we waiting, dreamboat?”

I do not believe in intuition or sensing something is not quite right. But then again, I don’t simply dismiss what I’m feeling either. “This seems too easy.”

“Ah,” Zorra says. “You sniff a trap.”

“Sniff a trap?”

“English is Zorra’s second language.”

We turn back to the house.

“We have one goal,” I say.

“Your cousin, yes?”

“Yes.” I think about the various possibilities. “If you were Fat Gandhi, would you keep Rhys here?”

“Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe Zorra would hide him so if bad man like Win come after me I have leverage.”

“Precisely,” I say.

We met years ago, when Zorra was on the other side, a sworn enemy. In the end, I had chosen to spare Zorra’s life. I’m not sure why. Intuition perhaps? Now Zorra feels that he must be forever in my debt. Esperanza compares this particular outcome to one of her pro-wrestling scripts where the bad wrestler is shown kindness by the good wrestler and thus turns good and becomes a fan favorite.

I am debating my various options when the door of the farmhouse opens. I do not move. I do not pull out my gun. I stand and wait for someone to appear at the door. Five seconds pass. Then ten.

Then Fat Gandhi steps outside.

Zorra and I are standing behind shrubbery. Fat Gandhi turns that way, smiles, and waves.

“He knows we are here,” Zorra says.

Zorra, Master of the Obvious Observation.

Fat Gandhi begins to stroll casually toward us. Zorra looks at me. I shake my head. As has been pointed out, Fat Gandhi knows exactly where we are. I consider that for a moment. We had been careful in our approach, but this is a quiet road. If Fat Gandhi had men posted-and clearly he had-they would have seen us turn down the road.

Fat Gandhi waves again when he sees me. “Hello, Mr. Lockwood. Welcome!”

Zorra leans close to me. “He knows your name.”

“Your Mossad training. It’s really impressive.”

“Zorra misses nothing.”

Fat Gandhi could have figured out who I am via a hundred different avenues. He could have employed some complicated hacking scheme, but I doubt that would have been necessary. He knew Myron’s name. Myron and I are business partners and best friends. He also knew about Rhys and Patrick and the kidnapping. He could have done a modicum of research and learned of my personal connection.

Or, more to the point, Rhys could have told him.

Either way, here we are.

Zorra slowly slides off the sheath on his heel. “What’s our play, dreamboat?”

I check my mobile to see if our other two men are still in place on the perimeter. They are. No one has taken them out. Fat Gandhi continues to stroll toward us. He tilts his face toward the sun and grins.

“We wait and see,” I say.

I take out my weapon-a Desert Eagle.50 AE. Fat Gandhi stops when he sees this. He looks disappointed.

“There is no need for that, Mr. Lockwood.”

I had “sniffed” a trap, hadn’t I? Had he known that the Italians would try to track him down via that contest? Had he let them? Apparently. Many believe that I am infallible in such matters, that I am so professional and dangerous that death itself gives me a wide berth. I confess that I do all I can to encourage, amplify, and intensify this reputation. I want you to fear me. I want you to cringe every time I enter a room because you do not know what I might do next. But I am not naïve enough to buy my own press, if you will. No matter how good you are, a sniper can take you out.

As one of my enemies once put it, “You’re good, Win, but you ain’t bulletproof.”

I had tried to be careful, but missions such as this require a degree of rush. No one had followed us from the airport. I know that. But still Fat Gandhi knew that we were here.

“We need to talk,” Fat Gandhi says.

“Okay,” I say.

He spreads his arms. “Do you mind if I call you Win?”

“Yes.”

He still holds the grin. I still hold the gun. He glances at Zorra. “Does she have to be here for this conversation?”

“Who you calling she?” Zorra snaps.

“What?”

“Does Zorra look like girl to you, dreamboat?”

“Uh…” There is no good answer to this.

I hold up my hand. Zorra steps down, if you will.

“Both of you can relax,” Fat Gandhi says. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

“Wrong,” I say.

“Pardon?”

“You’re bluffing,” I say.

Fat Gandhi continues to smile, but I can see the light flickering.

“You know who I am,” I say. “That would take very little research on your part. You probably had a man watching the airport and another man watching the road. My guess is, it was the bearded guy in the Peugeot.”

“Zorra knew it!” Zorra says. “You should have let me-”

Again I stop him with my hand.

“You have eyes on us,” I continue, “but that doesn’t mean you have a sniper who would be good enough to hit us at this distance. I have two men out there. If you had someone, they would know. You have other men inside. Three to be exact. None have a long-range weapon pointed at us. We’d have spotted it.”

More flickers in that smile. “You seem very sure of yourself, Mr. Lockwood.”

I shrug. “I could be wrong. But the odds you have enough firepower hidden to take out all four of us before you die seems beyond remote.”

Fat Gandhi does a slow clap. “You live up to your reputation, Mr. Lockwood.”

Reputation. See what I mean by encourage, amplify, and intensify?

“I would go into an entire bit about this being a stalemate,” Fat Gandhi says, “but we are both men of the world. I came out here to talk. I came out here so we can make an arrangement and put this matter behind us.”

“I don’t care about you,” I say. “I don’t care about your enterprise.”

His enterprise, of course, involves teenagers being raped and abused. Zorra makes a face at me to indicate that maybe he cares.

“I’m here for Rhys,” I tell him.

The smile slips off Fat Gandhi’s face. “You were the one who killed my three men.”

Now it’s my turn to grin. I am buying time, drawing his eye. I want Zorra to keep checking the house and perimeter, just in case.

“You were also the one who blew that hole in my wall.”

“Are you looking for a confession?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“How about vengeance?”

“Not that either,” Fat Gandhi says too quickly. “You want Rhys Baldwin. I understand that. He’s your cousin. But there are things I want too.”

There is no reason to ask him what. He will tell me.

“I want my life back,” Fat Gandhi says. “The police have nothing on me. Patrick Moore is back in the United States. He won’t come back to testify. Myron Bolitar may claim to have seen me stab him, but in the end, it was dark. I could also claim self-defense. Someone had obviously attacked us. The hole in the wall proves that. None of my people will talk. All the files and evidence remain locked away in a cloud.”

“The police have nothing,” I agree. “But I don’t think your big worry is the police, is it?”

“My big worry,” Fat Gandhi says, “is you.”

I grin again.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for you to knock on my door, Mr. Lockwood. May I be honest for a moment?”

“You can try,” I say.

“I didn’t know for certain, but when ‘Romavslazio’ put up that challenge, well, after what we had uncovered about you, we realized that it would be a risk. That was when I knew. I knew that I would have to face you directly, so we can put an end to this once and for all. We debated-and I’m just being honest-getting a bunch of men and trying to kill you.”

“But you changed your mind.”

“Yes.”

“Because I would have spotted the men. And I would have brought more men. And I would have killed your men and killed you. And even if you and your group somehow got the upper hand on us-”

Zorra makes a choking noise and laughs out loud. “On Zorra?”

“We are talking hypotheticals,” I assure him. I turn back to Fat Gandhi. “Even if you somehow could kill us, you knew that it wouldn’t end there. Myron would go after you.”

Fat Gandhi nods. “It would never end. I would have to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.”

“You’re wiser than I thought,” I say. “So let’s make it simple. Give me Rhys. I take him home. The end. I never think of you again. I forget you exist. You forget I exist.”

It is a good deal, I think, but I wonder whether I can keep it. Fat Gandhi had tried to eliminate Myron. That was no small matter. I wouldn’t kill him out of revenge for that act-it was, in its own way, quite understandable-but I have to worry about both his mental stability and self-interest. He wanted to show strength to his workers. He wanted to show power. That motive was still present.

His “looking over my shoulder” concern works both ways.

“It’s not that simple,” Fat Gandhi says.

I put a little steel in my voice. “It’s just that simple. Give me Rhys.”

He lowers his eyes and shakes his head. “I can’t.”

There is a moment’s hesitation, no more. I know that it is coming, but I do nothing to stop it. With grace that never fails to surprise me, Zorra spins and sweeps Fat Gandhi’s legs. Fat Gandhi drops like a sack of peat moss onto his back. He makes an oof noise as the air leaves his lungs.

Zorra stands over his prone form. He raises his razor-sharp (literally) heel, perfectly poised to stomp down on Fat Gandhi’s face. Instead Zorra lowers the point of the heel so that the blade is scant millimeters (again literally) from Fat Gandhi’s cornea.

“Bad answer, dreamboat,” Zorra tells him. “Try again.”