‘Then what do you need me for? You want me to kill her?’
Even as he said the words, Ryker questioned whether that was something he’d be able to do. At one time, certainly. But now?
‘I’d say it’s a little late for that,’ Winter responded. ‘We already found the Red Cobra. Dead. She’s been murdered.’
CHAPTER 5
Ryker needed a few moments to compose himself. Both men took a seat. Winter didn’t push Ryker. He’d laid down the bait. Now he seemed content to wait and let Ryker sweat over it.
The Red Cobra. A blast from the past. Her real name was Anna Abayev, though even Ryker – who’d come closer to her than most – had never known her by that moniker. She was an assassin. Born and bred. Highly trained but with a lethal hard edge that was simply part of her nature, her DNA.
Much of Ryker’s skill had been taught and nurtured by the JIA, a clandestine agency operated jointly by the UK and US governments. A long and gruelling schooling period with the JIA had turned Ryker into a robotic operative. Ryker had Charles McCabe to thank for that. Mackie. His old boss who’d taken a bullet to the head when his secretive life had finally caught up with him.
That was all in Ryker’s past, though. He wasn’t that man anymore, even though he still had a deadly set of skills that few others possessed, as Winter said. The Red Cobra on the other hand... she really was something else.
‘The car outside–’
‘Backup. In case you decided to run,’ Winter confirmed. ‘Or turned on us.’
‘What were you going to do? Mow me down? Shoot me?’
Winter shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to. But I wasn’t sure how you’d react to me finding you.’
‘So you covered all bases. Just in case.’
‘What more would you expect?’
Both men’s attention was grabbed by the sound of the front door opening. Ryker stood, turned, and stared as Lisa walked in. Her long brown hair was wet and clung to her shoulders. She had a large and colourful beach towel wrapped around her glistening and tanned body, her toned physique clear. Ryker felt a sense of betrayal slice through him. Because of Winter or because he’d been reminiscing about Anna Abayev?
Lisa was half a step inside when she spotted Ryker. She smiled. But when she saw Winter, her face went pale.
‘Angela,’ Winter said. ‘Or should I call you Lisa now?’
‘You shouldn’t call me anything,’ she grunted, before turning to Ryker. ‘What is he doing here?’
‘We were getting onto that,’ Ryker said.
‘Please, Lisa, come and sit down.’
‘I’d rather not.’ She moved over to the fridge, took a bottle of water then padded across the floor to the bedroom. ‘James, get rid of him.’ She slammed the bedroom door shut.
Winter looked at Ryker for a few seconds. Neither man said a word. Lisa’s demand reverberated in Ryker’s mind. She was right. He shouldn’t even have been contemplating helping Winter. He should have thrown him out of there the second he’d laid eyes on him.
But then what? Run away as far and as fast as they could once more? Another new location? Two more new identities?
Maybe that was what Lisa wanted. But it wasn’t what Ryker wanted. Not really.
Despite his protestation, even before Winter had mentioned the Red Cobra, Ryker had already been undecided as to whether he would agree to Winter’s request for help. Together, Ryker and Lisa had set about making a life for themselves, just the two of them. Away from the chaos that had clouded their lives, their relationship, for so long. It wasn’t them against the world anymore. It was just... them. Yet deep down, he wasn’t satisfied. Not completely. There was something missing.
Isn’t that basic human nature, though? Hasn’t every single one of the many billions of humans who have walked the earth felt the same way? Always clamouring for the perfect life but never quite reaching it, always wanting more. The grass is always greener. At least that was Ryker’s way of justifying how he felt.
And hearing the name Red Cobra... How could he not at least hear Winter out now?
‘How do you know it’s her?’ Ryker asked.
‘Purely by accident.’ Winter was still clutching the papers he’d taken from his pocket as though waiting to deal his full hand – should he need to. ‘She was killed three days ago. At her home in southern Spain.’
‘Who killed her?’
‘That was one thing I was hoping you might help with.’
‘I’m not sure what’s in it for me.’
‘What do you want? Money?’
‘To be left alone.’
‘I can’t figure out if you’ve actually managed to convince yourself of that or not.’
‘Would it make a difference to you either way?’
‘No. Because I need you. It’s as simple as that. You got close to her. Closer than anyone else I know.’
‘I tried to kill her. And it’s not much of a surprise that she’s dead now. Only that it took so long for someone to find her.’
‘Longer than it’s taken to find you, that’s for sure. Though keeping your tracks clean when there’s two of you is always going to be harder.’
Ryker couldn’t help but be offended by the statement, yet he knew it was true. The Red Cobra had disappeared nearly eight years earlier after jumping off a cliff in the middle of the night in northern Germany with three bullets in her.
Eight years. Not a sniff of her since then.
He and Lisa had been on the run for less than one year.
‘Maybe her death isn’t really a surprise,’ Winter continued. ‘And if we’d found her first then perhaps the outcome would have been the same. And therein lies the problem.’
‘How so?’
‘This wasn’t a random attack. Someone found her. They butchered her. This was a statement. Revenge.’
Winter threw down the papers he’d been holding onto the coffee table. Ryker leaned forward and glanced at them – photographs. He used his hand to sift through them. His heart pounded as he scanned the gory images. Butchered. Winter hadn’t been wrong. There was little left of the poor woman to identify what was what.
Although he didn’t outwardly react, Ryker was shocked by what he saw. He wasn’t unaccustomed to seeing dead bodies, or even to killing people, but such viciousness would never fail to trouble him. It brought closer to the surface his own painful memories.
‘We don’t know who did this,’ Winter said. ‘But we need to find out. And soon. There’s very possibly a leak within our own intelligence services.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The Red Cobra had a lot of enemies. Not just agencies like the JIA but all sorts of criminal gangs across the world who’d fallen foul of her... services.’
‘But why do you think this was a leak?’
‘We had a profile of the Red Cobra.’
Ryker raised an eyebrow. ‘And?’
‘For years, she carried out her work without leaving so much as a hint of tangible evidence. But we had a set of fingerprints linked to that profile – from way back, before she was an operative.’