Die Twice by Andrew Grant Read Free Book Online Page A

saw where I’d been sewn up.”
    “That’s all?”
    All? Twelve stitches. Neatly done. Barely a scar left, now. Small beer, in the scheme of things. But it had caused way more than its share of trouble. Nothing good had happened since that incident. Looking back, it seemed more like a curse than a wound. I wondered if it would ever stop haunting me.
    “Yes,” I said. “That’s all.”
    “Well, that’s something, I suppose,” he said. “Saves having tocall for a replacement. The last thing I need to be doing right now is talking to London. Not till I’ve figured a way to explain this latest fiasco. How the hell did it happen?”
    “Looks like McIntyre had a couple of friends in town we didn’t know about.”
    “You’re sure they were friends?”
    “They blew his door off its hinges and tried to haul him out of there. Who else could they be?”
    “If they were friends, why break down the door? Why not just knock and wait to be let in?”
    “ ’Cause of Rollins. He’d already knocked. I told him to do that and then run away. They must have bumped into him on the stairs.”
    “You think he’d have alerted them?”
    “In a heartbeat. He was a flake. He’d have spilled everything, immediately.”
    “I guess. Fat lot of good it did him, though.”
    “Shame he couldn’t have kept it buttoned a little longer.”
    “Shame you got him involved at all.”
    “I didn’t. He got himself involved.”
    “You could have let him go. He may not have asked for any of it. He may have been coerced.”
    “How? Was someone threatening to bludgeon him with a sack of cash?”
    Fothergill stood up slowly and moved over to the central window, keeping his back to me for a few moments.
    “You should see the paperwork I’ll have to do on him,” he said. “Mountains of it. It’ll take weeks. And if we can avoid making his widow a millionaire, it’ll be a miracle.”
    “She’s probably already a millionaire,” I said. “Forget about her. McIntyre’s the problem. I can’t deal with him if we don’t know where he is. So what are you doing about finding him?”
    “Not much, right now. And certainly a lot less than if we couldtalk to either of those guys who raided the apartment. If you’d just shown a little restraint . . .”
    “Interesting idea. I suppose I could have. I knew someone who showed some restraint, once. A policeman, in Holland. He was up against guys with MP5s, too. And do you know what he got for his trouble?”
    “No. What?”
    “A bronze star. Set into the wall in the foyer of their HQ.”
    “Really?”
    “Really. They put one there for every officer who buys the farm.”
    Fothergill was silent for a moment, and then came back to the desk.
    “OK,” he said. “We can’t talk to them. So let’s draw a line under that. But what else can we figure out about them? Every contact yields some kind of intelligence. And what we really need to know is, where did McIntyre go when he got out of the building?”
    “No idea.”
    “Was he hurt?”
    “Not by me. And I’d say he wasn’t in too bad shape generally, by the way he dived through the gap between his mates. And he was on his feet again pretty quickly, too. He was out of the door before the others hit the ground.”
    “Did anyone help him? Someone waiting outside?”
    “I didn’t see anyone. But I can’t rule it out.”
    “So he could be on his own again. Or being sheltered by others?”
    “Right.”
    “We don’t know which?”
    “No.”
    “Then we need to find out. That has to be our first priority.”
    “Agreed.”
    “What about the two you took care off Did you hear them say anything?”
    “No.”
    “What accents did they have?”
    “Neither of them spoke at all.”
    “We don’t even know what language?”
    “No.”
    “So we don’t know where they’re from? What country, even?”
    “No.”
    “Could you tell anything from their clothes?”
    “Not without some work. Everything looked new. Jeans, trainers, hoodies.