The Full Story

He glanced at her.

She shot him a friendly smile and tried not to feel badly when he didn’t return it.

After a few beats, she said, “I haven’t forgotten what you were saying earlier—that you don’t want your name in print. Or any mention of the company you work for. But is it okay if I ask you about it? Completely off the record?”

“Ask me what about it?”

“Well, for starters, it must have a name.”

“You wouldn’t recognize it.”

“I might.”

Dan broke eye contact with Mickey and sat gazing out the window for a moment, considering where he should go from here.

Given what Lydia had learned, he figured he could believe Mickey when she said “off the record.” So it wouldn’t hurt to tell her a bit about RCI.

Besides, even though the company kept a low profile its existence was hardly a state secret. And Mickey was a journalist.

She’d know exactly where to look for whatever information she was interested in finding, which meant that it would probably take her all of five minutes to learn most of what she might want to about either RCI or him.

Confidential information had almost become a thing of the past.

He drank some of his beer, then said, “The company’s called Risk Control International.”

“Oh. Okay, you were right. I’ve never heard of it.”

“Most people haven’t. It’s in the survival business.”

“You mean wilderness survival?”

“No. I mean keeping people alive.”

“Oh,” she said again.

For a moment he thought she was done, but then she said, “So it provides bodyguards?”

“Uh-huh. That’s one thing. It also runs a lot of training courses. Most of them are basically aimed at law enforcement types, but they attract civilian students, too—usually executives who work in countries with terrorism problems, or other people at high risk.”

“And the courses teach…?”

Man, the way she could fire questions made him suspect she was a better reporter than he’d been giving her credit for.

“They cover things like self-defense, tactical driving, handgun training,” he told her. “And there’s one called Special Technics that touches on everything from hot-wiring cars to picking locks.”

“People need to know those sorts of things to stay alive?”

“Sometimes. You can never tell what kind of jam you’ll find yourself in. At any rate, the company can pretty well provide any service, handle anything a client needs. Most people working for it are independent contractors, which gives it a large pool of experts to draw on.”

“Is that what you are, then? An independent contractor? And an expert?”

“Uh-huh. I’m a personal security advisor, which basically means that I analyze a situation, settle on a way of safeguarding the individual—or individuals—at risk, and then take things from there.”

“And that was what you did in Billy’s case.”

“Right. Only the plan should have gone a whole lot more smoothly. All it involved was Billy laying low with Ken Heath, who also does work for RCI, while I lured the killer to the retreat. Then, according to the script, once he got there I’d make him tell me who’d hired him. After that, I’d turn both him and the information over to the police.”

“Make him tell you?”

He merely shrugged. He wasn’t getting into that with her.

For a moment she looked as if she was going to try pressing him about it, but she finally just said, “Do you have any idea who might have hired this guy? I mean, I’m assuming you discussed that with Billy.”

“Of course.”

“And he thought it could be…?”

“The list is endless. I’m exaggerating,” he added quickly, even though he wasn’t exaggerating by a lot.

“In any event,” he continued, deciding it would be wise to change the conversation’s direction, “what happened today just goes to show how even the most straightforward plan can fall apart.

“Billy wasn’t supposed to give Ken the slip and head for New York, I wasn’t supposed to end up on the wrong end of a gun and the killer wasn’t supposed to get away.”

He had another swig of beer, assuming he must have satisfied her curiosity by now.

However, she barely waited for him to swallow before saying, “But now that he did get away, and now that you think he might show up at NBS in the morning, how will you deal with it?”

“Well, if we haven’t found Billy before then, we’ll go with Plan B—watching to see if the hit man does show up at NBS. And insuring Billy’s safety if that happens.”

Mickey looked thoughtful, then said, “I asked you about this before, but you didn’t tell me. How did Billy know someone was trying to kill him?”

When he hesitated, she added, “I wouldn’t use it in a story unless I’d checked with him, first.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said slowly, reminding himself once more that he didn’t have much reason to be overly cautious. He’d never known Lydia to make a mistake.

Besides, as soon as Billy was back in circulation he’d be telling anyone and everyone what had happened. He knew their star well enough to be sure of that.

Focusing on Mickey again, he said, “A couple of weeks ago, Billy almost totaled his Porsche—was incredibly lucky that he only got shaken up. And when his mechanic checked over what was left of the car, he discovered that the brakes had been tampered with.

“Then he had a look at Billy’s other vehicles and found that someone had done the same thing with all six of them. That was when his people contacted RCI.”

“And RCI contacted you.”

“Uh-huh.”

He watched her take a sip of champagne, absently thinking that he’d never in a million years have imagined today unfolding as it had, would never have pictured himself winging his way across the country at all, let alone with a beautiful woman who smelled like…