Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [150]
Pawnhill finished his cake. Asking for the check, he threw some bills down on the table, leaving his customary large tip, and went out. It was late morning, humid, the clouds yellowish with the threat of a storm coming up from the south. He walked for a couple of blocks until he spotted a cruising taxi and took it to within three blocks of Billy Warren’s apartment. After the crime scene investigators were done with it, Billy’s father had slept there for a couple of nights, further impeding Pawnhill’s access. But now the people Pawnhill had surveilling the building reported that the father was gone. The apartment was empty; it hadn’t been visited in more than forty-eight hours.
Time, Pawnhill thought, to go in.
* * *
WHEN THE Syrian didn’t hear from Baltasar at the appointed time, he spent a fruitless thirty seconds trying to raise him on his sat phone. Then, with a grim expression, he went to where Caro sat hunched over her computer and whispered in her ear.
Her fleeting startled expression was quickly replaced by one of resignation. All her work was either on her laptop or on remote servers in Holland. Nothing was ever saved on the desktop here. Still, she shut it down, removed the hard drive, and destroyed it. Then she packed up her laptop. The Syrian had gone to talk to Xhafa. She unlocked the drawer, removed The Little Curiosity Shop, and lovingly nestled it into the case beside the laptop.
As she was walking to where her shoes sat beside the front door, Taroq appeared.
He eyed her laptop case. She hardly left the compound, and never at night. “Where are you going?”
“The Syrian and I have a meeting outside the compound.”
“At this hour?” Taroq frowned. “I was told nothing about a meeting.”
Her expression hardened. She had no time for Taroq’s jealousy. “You’re told what you need to know, nothing more.”
He stood looking at her for a moment. He was hurt, of course, but something had stirred his inner alarm. The Syrian was exceedingly deliberate in all his appointments and meetings. The word “spontaneous” did not exist in the Syrian’s world, therefore anything that smacked of it was suspect.
She was spared further discourse on the subject as the Syrian returned and joined her at the door.
“Taroq, we’ll be gone for several hours,” he said without a hint that anything might be wrong. “In the interim, keep Xhafa here.”
Taroq blinked. “Here?”
The Syrian offered an encouraging smile. “He’ll be safer inside the compound.”
They took the big black Lincoln Navigator that had been imported as a gift by one of the entities he supplied. He had many cars; he’d paid for none of them.
“You didn’t want to take Taroq or a driver with us?” Caroline asked.
“In this situation,” he said tersely, “it’s best to travel light, the better to ensure that we arrive at our destination.”
He drove very fast and with the lights off. He knew these back roads well.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
“The enemy has arrived.” He made a sweeping turn, then stepped heavily on the accelerator. “The enemy is coming.”
She sat cradling her laptop case as if it were an infant. She supposed she should feel concerned, but, as usual, she felt nothing at all. “And just where is our destination?”
The Syrian stared straight ahead and smiled.
* * *
PAWNHILL MADE three circuits of Billy Warren’s building without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Via his Bluetooth earpiece, he was in constant cell contact with his surveillance team, who reported no police activity anywhere in the vicinity. It appeared as if the neighborhood had returned to the sleepy state it had been in before Warren’s torture-murder caused a media frenzy. Since no photos of the crime scene had been leaked, even the tabloids,