On Sunday, as the sun was setting, Pablo Cruz plunged a thick knitting needle that he held with vise grips into the flames of a gas stove burner. He watched the metal tip turn a glowing red.
Cruz had given Kristina Varjan no chance to try to overpower him once they were in her car. He’d disarmed her right away. Then, at every stoplight or stop sign, he’d pressed the muzzle of her Glock into her side and given her directions that took them across one arm of the Chesapeake Bay and onto Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
According to the satellite radio, they’d gotten across the bridge just in time. News reports said the president’s assassin had been hiding in a veterinary hospital west of there and had managed to elude federal agents once again.
Cruz smiled. He liked elusion. He took pride in staying ahead of the dogs. It was an art form, as far as he was concerned, and he was the master of it.
Like his choice of safe house. He’d spotted the shuttered beach cottage from the road and had Varjan park the car behind an outbuilding. After looking for signs of an alarm system and finding none, he had her crowbar the back door open.
Cruz turned from the stove in the cottage’s kitchen with the glowing knitting needle before him and looked at Varjan, who was tied to a chair and eyeing him like she wanted to rip his throat out.
“I’m going to ask you again,” Cruz said. “Who hired you to kill me?”
She sneered. “I’m going to tell you again: I don’t know. He calls himself Piotr.”
“A Russian?”
“Who knows.”
“I don’t believe you,” Cruz said, bringing the still-glowing knitting needle by her cheek. “There is more you are not telling me.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
Cruz dropped the nose of the needle to her collar and pushed it aside. Fabric burned before he touched her skin, right above the carotid artery. Her skin sizzled, and she shrank back, gritting her teeth.
He said, “A second or two longer and you’d be bleeding out, Varjan.”
Her pained expression returned to a snarl. “How do you know my name?”
“I make it my business to know my competitors,” Cruz said.
“Who are you?”
“Me? I am nobody, nowhere, in no time.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Cruz did not answer. He returned to the rustic kitchen and put the knitting needle back in the flame, saying, “I have nowhere to go, Varjan. I have nothing to do, and so I will do this until you tell me what I want to know.”
She said nothing, but watched him sidelong.
A few moments later, he came at her again. Varjan raised her head in contempt.
He stopped, laughed. “You don’t think you’re going to somehow reverse this situation and kill me, do you? Who hired you?”
Varjan did not reply and would not look at the red-hot knitting needle that he brought toward her neck again.
Cruz stopped the tip less than an inch away from her skin so she could sense the heat. Then he poked it through her shirt and bra into the side of her breast.
She screamed and cursed at him in Hungarian. He went back to the stove, saying, “Even if you could have somehow managed to kill me, Piotr wouldn’t have paid you. My payment request upon completion of task? Delayed, which is as good as denied in my book. Think about that. If I’m expendable, you are too.”
Varjan stayed mute, but something changed in her carriage. She’d relaxed slightly, a small reaction, but he’d gotten her attention.
“Think about it,” he said, watching the needle tip begin to glow again. “They’re stiffing me and trying to kill me. What do you think they’ll do to you? Pay? No way. You will be expendable, and dealt with appropriately. In our profession, to believe otherwise would be…well, stupid. And I know you’re not that.”
Varjan tried to remain contemptuous. He touched the needle to the collar of her shirt again, let the singed smell reach her nose.
“Where will it go next?” he asked, and he glanced down the front of her body.
After a pause, he gazed into her eyes. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. There’s another choice here.”
She twitched, and he knew he had her properly leveraged.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Cruz took a step back, set the knitting needle down. “I propose we join forces, find out who is behind this plot, and go get our money. Does that work? Or do I continue to knit?”
Varjan glanced at the needle, then at the floor, then up at him.
“We don’t need to find out who’s behind the plot,” she said evenly. “I already know. I laid a trap and caught them in it right from the start. They haven’t got a clue.”