More sounds from behind and she turned to see other homeless men advancing around her car and cutting off any escape.
‘Bail bondsman,’ she snapped as she reached down and pulled an identity badge from her belt and held it high above her head. ‘This is police business and there’s a camera in the car with a live feed to the local station.’
The advancing ranks of men did not stop shuffling toward her, their eyes devoid of anything approaching emotion that she could recognise. Desperate men, with nothing to lose in this life and everything to gain. She realized belatedly that three square meals a day in jail or prison was infinitely preferable to their suffering outside in the elements of a Chicago winter.
‘There ain’t no cops watching!’ Dyson yelled as he scrambled to his feet and backed away from Lopez. ‘You can have all of her!’
‘Back off, now!’ Lopez yelled as she aimed her pistol into the sky and fired a single shot.
The gunshot caused many in the crowd to flinch, but others were now looking at her in a way that she knew would mean nothing would stop them. She glanced over her shoulder at Lake Michigan, the only possible means of escape a leap into the frigid black water as she began backing away and aimed the pistol at the shuffling hordes gathering before her.
She saw Dyson and his scrawny friend scramble away through the ranks of men as they sought their escape. She had fourteen rounds left in the Glock pistol, and she counted at least thirty men closing in on her from all sides. The closest of them reached out for her pistol, his features alive with a volatile mix of excitement and desperation.
Lopez aimed her pistol at his head and made to squeeze the trigger.
A deafening gunshot crashed out and was followed by four more as a sudden blaze of sirens and vehicles pulled beneath the underpass, bright beams of headlights sweeping in and illuminating the shuffling vagrants.
The crowd whirled in surprise and scattered away from Lopez, running on unsteady legs back towards the salvation and anonymity of the fires in the shadows. Lopez lowered her pistol, suddenly aware of her heart pounding inside her chest as four black vehicles screeched to a halt in front of her. Lopez holstered her weapon as the door of one of the vehicles opened and a man stepped out.
He was tall, a black overcoat rippling in the cold wind, his bituminous skin dark. He walked with his hands in the pockets of the coat, apparently impervious to the chill, his features without emotion. He moved to within a couple of yards of her and watched her for a long moment before speaking in a voice so deep it sounded as though he were underwater.
‘Nicola Lopez?’
‘Who the hell are you?’
Lopez glanced at the vehicles and their distinctive plates and recognised them as government pool cars, something she had seen many times before in her career as a bail bondsman and occasional contractor for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
‘I’m your saviour,’ the man replied.
‘I had everything under control.’
‘Of course,’ the man said. ‘Just like Dyson and his accomplice?’
‘They got away.’
‘Only as far as the highway,’ the man replied. ‘My people will pick them up. I take it they are worth quite a bit of money to you. I’d be happy to hand them back over if you can spare me a moment of your time.’
Lopez surveyed the man for a moment longer.
‘What did you say your name was?’
V
The interior of the vehicle was much as Lopez remembered government vehicles being: smart but Spartan, with a smoked glass screen between the rear and front seats where two agents drove the vehicle back towards the city.
Lopez sat on a rearward facing seat with Aaron Devlin opposite. Upon closer inspection she figured he looked a little old for a DIA agent, somewhere in his late forties, his hair speckled with grey and his physique surrounded by a palpable aura of competence that verged on the threatening. His dark eyes watched her for what felt like an eternity as the car whispered along the asphalt.
‘You want a photo?’
‘I already have several. I’ve been studying them for some time.’
‘I bet you have.’
If Aaron Devlin had ever possessed a sense of humor, Lopez wasn’t sensing it.
‘You’ve got quite an attitude, Miss Lopez,’ Aaron said as he opened a file on his lap. ‘You seem to be doing quite well for yourself running Warner and Lopez Incorporated.’
‘It’s Lopez Incorporated,’ she corrected him. ‘And yes, things are busy and time is money. What do you want?’
‘It must be tough having to do all of this work on your own,’ Aaron observed as though not hearing her last. ‘And I suspect you’re wondering where Doug Jarvis is?’
During the course of five investigations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, her superior officer had been Douglas Jarvis, a former Marine officer. An elderly man with a wealth of experience of intelligence gathering, Jarvis had been something of a mercurial boss who had been willing to take chances with the lives of those under his command in order to advance the needs and requirements of the United States government. There was no doubting in Lopez’s mind that Jarvis was a patriot through and through, but it had been her decision to cease working for the DIA over a year previously due to the inherent and increasing risks to life and limb.
‘I really hadn’t thought about him,’ she replied. Aaron did not reply as he continue to leaf through the file. ‘Do be sure to send on my warmest regards.’
Aaron looked up at that, as she had intended — her tone conveyed anything but the warmest regards.
‘I have not met him,’ Aaron informed her. ‘I’ve been sent here by a different branch of the agency.’
‘I don’t work for the government anymore.’
‘I’m not here to ask for your work, I’m here to ask merely for a little help in finding somebody. I understand from your record that doing so is something at which you excel.’
Lopez shrugged. ‘If you can call digging crap out from under stones a skill.’
Aaron closed the file and folded his hands over it. ‘I’m here to talk about Israel.’
‘Beautiful country, never been there.’
‘But you have a connection to somebody who has. His name is Ethan Warner.’
Lopez smiled tightly. ‘Then why don’t you go ask him?’
‘We tried. Unfortunately, we have been unable to find him.’
‘Shame, can I go now?’
‘I think you know where he is.’
‘I think you know nothing,’ Lopez replied. ‘I haven’t seen Warner in almost a year.’
‘So I see from the file we have on Warner and Lopez Incorporated.’
‘Lopez Incorporated.’
‘Of course,’ Aaron smiled without warmth. ‘Warner took off. I suppose that must have left you feeling rather jilted to say the least?’
‘What’s your point, Devlin?’
‘That you probably do not hold Mr Warner in high regard, and that therefore it might be of some interest to you to have him found so that you can bring him to task for leaving you to work alone here in Chicago.’
‘It was a mutual decision,’ Lopez replied.
‘That so?’
‘He suggested he might want to leave, I agreed.’
Aaron raised an eyebrow. ‘Is setting fire to somebody’s motorbike and punching them in the face what you consider an agreement?’
‘It was an emotional moment,’ Lopez shrugged. ‘What’s this about?’