Downfall by Jeff Abbott Read Free Book Online Page A

her to avoid the stretch of Haight where The Select was, but she could not help herself. Only one lane was open, an officer letting the traffic take turns. She eased the car past the police lights, the silent red-and-blues throwing shadow and light like cards across a table. She saw a cop talking to homeless people outside the bar, a small fleet of cop cars in the front. Had anyone seen her, noticed her in the Audi before all hell broke loose? But no cop stopped her car as she inched by; no one had reported the vehicle’s license plate. She wondered what she would have done if they had. The nightmare would be over but at a terrible price. She shivered, and then she drove the Audi back to the rendezvous point, a parking lot off Stanyan. Several other cars sat in the lot, and she wondered if one was the Russian’s. Did you take a bus or your own car when you were hired to kidnap someone, when you didn’t have to worry about the transportation? She felt ill. She’d seen the terror in the young woman’s face, in a momentary gleam of a car’s headlights, as she ran away from the bar. She shoved it to the back of her mind, out of the light.
    She wiped the prints off the car. Glenn had another key; he would pick it up tomorrow, assuming he could drive, or Belias would take care of it. She walked out of the lot. A homeless man ten feet away entreated her for loose change, and she tossed him a five-dollar bill she had tucked into her jeans pocket. She didn’t know why she did it; she never gave to bums. He looked too young to be a bum. She could never figure out the young homeless in the Haight; what were they looking for, sitting around, doing nothing, playing drums? It scared her to think that her kids could ever make that choice; that was why you had to do everything right for them, everything you could to give them every advantage. So they didn’t make a grand mistake.
    She walked the four blocks to her own car and she drove home, wondering who had made the bigger mistake tonight: Glenn in hiring the Russian or her leaving Glenn with Belias.

7
    Thursday, November 4, evening
    Y OU’RE MINT TO ME . So valuable,” Belias said. “I know I shouldn’t have sent you on a kidnap job, but…I trust you and Holly so. You were my first. My best.”
    Glenn’s voice was sluggish with painkillers. “I’m sorry we failed.”
    “Because of this bartender.”
    “You think she knew the bartender?” Roger asked.
    “He was certainly the right guy at the right place for her,” Glenn said. “You’re sure she won’t go to the police?”
    “Diana Keene doesn’t want her mother in jail,” Belias said. “I’ve erased several rather panicked voice mails she’s left for Janice where she’s said she won’t go to the cops until she talks to her mom.”
    “You seem very sure,” Glenn said.
    “It’s what I do,” Belias said. “Understand the way people program themselves to behave in certain ways. Describe this bartender.”
    “About six feet, very lean build. Midtwenties unless he’s got a boyish face. Dark blond hair, wearing a fitted suit. At one point Rostov spoke to him in Russian and he spoke back.”
    Belias’s gaze narrowed. “Did they know each other?”
    “I don’t think so. But the bartender clearly knew how to fight. The Russian was bigger than him, by four inches and fifty pounds, but the bartender took him down. I was fighting with Diana then, trying to get her purse…”
    Belias laughed at him. “You couldn’t even snatch her purse, Glenn? You’re so handy at wresting money from people on a good day.”
    Glenn stared at him, and Belias saw a flash of anger in the dulled gaze, cutting through the painkillers. “You and Roger go find her, then. It’s not my fault we’re in trouble. If there’s a problem, it’s yours to fix.”
    “You do what I tell you to do. You were supposed to be the fix.”
    “I can’t be kidnapping women on the streets of San Francisco. A career, a reputation. Children. A