Hayward was grateful for the Guardia Civil’s help and cooperation, expensive as it had been, but he was not eager for them to know any more about his whereabouts. That their services could be bought so easily was both useful and problematic. It had come in handy to get him out of a jam, but the Agency could easily outspend him to buy their momentary fealty, which would put him again at a big disadvantage. The less they knew about what he was up to, the better.
He snuck out the back alley behind the veterinarian’s office, leaving the Guardia officers to mill about the veterinarian’s lobby. He hoped to be long gone before they learned of his departure.
He stopped at the first hotel he could find, rented a room, and used his room key to unlock the business center on the ground floor. Two aging computers sat adjacent to each other on a modest desk unit. Hayward chose the one furthest from the door and angled the monitor away from the window. He jiggled the mouse, waited for the computer to wake up, then double-clicked on the browser application.
The Spanish incarnation of the ubiquitous search engine smiled at him. The two o’s in Google were made to look like eyeballs. Hayward didn’t bother to read the fine print to discover their significance.
He clicked on the address bar and typed the IP address he’d written down at the veterinarian’s office. He waited as the page loaded. His heart raced and he broke out in a nervous sweat. Butterflies swarmed in his stomach. He was about to find out what had been important enough to be buried beneath Maria Ferdinand-Xavier’s skin.
“Son of a . . .” Hayward breathed as the screen changed and the writing came into focus.
Is this it? Could it possibly be? He re-read the document header a second and third time: “ChemEspaña Protective Coating Formula, Revision 17.3.”
“My God,” he said aloud, scrolling and reading, eyes darting side to side as he devoured the text.
Joao must be fucking crazy, he thought. Or desperate.
Then he thought he must be reading it wrong, that it must not be what he thought it was because it made no sense. It looked like the data. It looked like the reason the Agency had assigned him to worm and weasel his way into the Ferdinand-Xaviers’ world. Hayward believed he had found the ChemEspaña formula for the neutron-absorbing paint the CIA coveted.
It can’t be, he thought. It must be a decoy, some gruesome trick. The Agency must be toying with him, luring him, baiting him.
But why? His mind returned to the condo where they could easily have done away with him. Where they would have done away with him, he concluded once again, if they had found what they needed.
But they hadn’t killed him, which meant that they didn’t have what they were looking for. It had to be the reason they’d let him live. No other reason made sense. They wanted him to help them find it.
Except they did have it all along, from the moment they kidnapped Katrin and her family.
“They had no clue,” he said aloud. His mind returned to the grim business of carving out the RF identification tag from beneath Maria’s skin. There were no new scars around the tag’s location on her leg, which meant that it hadn’t been inserted any time in the recent past. The implication was clear: the CIA had not inserted the tag. It had not been part of some scheme, some ploy undertaken for his benefit. Maria had been walking around for weeks, maybe even months, with one of the most powerful industrial secrets on the planet buried under her skin.
He scrolled through the document again, more slowly this time, pausing to look at all the chemical notations and molecular diagrams. He wasn’t a chemist, but he had studied up on the ChemEspaña breakthrough. What he saw before him looked completely authentic.
“My God.” Hayward whistled. The mother lode.
Then he shook his head. No way. It’s too damned good to be true, he thought. The CIA delivered Maria’s corpse to him and her body held the key to the information they had been seeking for months, the data they had been plotting and scheming to obtain by any means necessary. It seemed a little naïve to believe they had no knowledge of the embedded tag, that they went to all the trouble of staging the grisly scene on the Swan Song but had no clue that Maria’s body itself pointed the way to the crown jewels. It certainly wasn’t necessary to extract the tag to read its digital contents. That was the whole point of the tagging devices, after all, to enable animal-control officers around the world to identify the owners of lost pets just by waving a wand over Fido’s back. So it was entirely possible that they knew.
“Suppose they do know,” he mumbled. “How would that mesh with the timeline?” He thought back over the previous night’s events. He had discovered Katrin’s brooch, raced to Malaga, opened the safe in Joao’s study in the beachfront condo, and had his lights turned out by a blow to the head. They’d searched the safe, left plenty of money behind and left him on the floor, unconscious but very much alive.
Maybe they hadn’t found what they were looking for in the safe, but a good bit of time had passed between when he had been knocked unconscious and when Fredericks, that vile ghoul from his past, called him on the condo’s landline. Perhaps they had discovered the RF identification tag in Maria’s leg in the interim, extracted the information they needed, tied her up inside the boat and slit her wrist, then reeled him back in with a phone call.
He shook his head. It didn’t pass the sniff test. Why bother with a phone call and a midnight non-meeting on some boat? Why not just send a hit team back to the condo to finish him off?
Because they had no clue, he decided, the logic taking him full circle. They didn’t know what Maria was hiding. They hadn’t killed him because they needed him. They killed Maria in a brutal, cruel, and outrageous way to motivate him, to spur him back into action.
Because they were out of ideas. Because the Ferdinand-Xaviers—Joao, Maria, and Katrin—his beautiful, amazing Katrin—were holding out. They were resisting the Agency’s exploitation attempts. Hayward couldn’t imagine how brutal and twisted those attempts must have become by now. A pit grew in his stomach. Was Maria the only casualty, or had Joao and Katrin also been killed?
If they were still alive by some miracle, he wondered if it wouldn’t be better for Katrin and her father just to succumb to the punishment, to let go and welcome death, than to deal with the scars the Agency’s depravities would undoubtedly inflict.
Hayward’s hands clenched and his jaw tightened. I will kill every last one of you, he vowed again.
A noise in the hallway jarred him. The hotel proprietor swiped his key and opened the door. “Everything okay, señor?” the man asked in English. Hayward’s accent had obviously given him away as an American when he checked into the hotel. Not a great sign. He was leaving traces, little bread crumbs the Agency could follow. He would eventually meet the Agency murderers, without a doubt, but he needed to do so on his terms.
“Everything’s fine,” he said. “Thank you.”
The proprietor nodded, then smiled and went on his way.
Hayward saved the document onto the computer’s hard drive. Then he powered off the computer and used his penknife to pry open the computer’s cover. He removed the hard drive from the rack inside the housing, then tucked the drive into his pocket and left.
He wasn’t certain what to do next, but there was no doubt about one thing: the game had changed.