Wilderness of Mirrors Read Free Page A

far from the city. When he finished dry cleaning, he rolled to his heels and felt the tilt of blood rushing where it shouldn’t.
    “Fils de pute.” He sucked a shot of air through clenched teeth and shoved the handful of spongy tala and Wouter’s watch into his vest. Then he cleaned his retrieved knife on the dead man’s sleeve and hauled himself upright.
    Cold sweat pricked his ribcage. Part of him was upset it had ended this way. Yet, Wouter
had
double-crossed him. He’d taken the Queen’s shilling and tried to shift it for cocaine. Death, Nigel decided, was a fitting end, just like darkness after a blistering day.
    And tonight was darkness personified. There was comfort in its obscuring embrace.
    Tonight, his mistress-of-a-job spoke Moroccan Arabic and wore a veil of Sahara sand. She was, in Nigel’s view, cross as well. Things had been quiet for too long, and her name wasn’t Peril without cause.
    He coughed the ubiquitous sand from his mouth and put in a request to the gods for mist at his mission’s end. Living was supposed to be a superior substitute for edge-cut black leaves, so he placed one Vibram-soled boot in front of the other and made for the dead man’s battered vehicle.
    He slid through the door-less gap, wondering if it had been lost in the MdS desert race, and turned a tight ‘U’. He’d make it to the nameless beach before the helicopter left, sleep en route to the Canary Islands, and then get some tea.
    To hell with ‘what ifs’. He played The Game as he played chess – reactively. Change as you go. Be fluid. Boxless. Barless. Bottomless. He liked his options to surprise him, even if his former chess instructor and SIS Director in the Field thought it sacrilege.
    He consulted his Omega AquaTerra. The dagger hands glinted in the faint starlight, assuring him of both time and distance. Only 15k to the rendezvous point. Open desert, then - without more help from Lady Peril - open sea.
    A walk in Hyde Park.
    Ground undulating beneath him, Nigel let the vehicle traverse the dunes with the hand of a ship’s captain. He kept the seatbelt off, held his gun across the curve of the wheel and flinched fractionally when the tossing vehicle pressed against the torn flesh of his thigh. A thigh about which he really should have done something.
    Yet the stars appeared less than worried about his fate, so he took his cue from their indifference. Who was to say if he stopped to bandage himself, he wouldn’t step on a snake or, worse, a landmine?
    Forty minutes later, sea sounds and cool fog a pleasing contrast to baked leather and too much of his own blood, Nigel flashed the vehicle’s lights at the spot where his ride would be waiting.
    A flicker echoed. Code correct, he drove forward a few hundred meters, then dragged himself out and waited until two men came closer. One was his friend, Agent Bradley Milton, the other, their MI6 pilot.
    Nigel traced cigar smoke in the mist’s hold. “I hope you saved one for the ride.”
    Brad clasped Nigel’s shoulder, his dark head of hair absent in the night. Some warmth passed between them. “I did; though where you’ll get yours is a mystery. Havana’s not a layover on this flight.”
    Then the surly Anglo-Italian was away, rummaging through the SUV, having left a cigar in Nigel’s hand with the precision of a Roman Fagan.
    They loaded the Toyota’s contents into the Bell Longeranger’s hold, and at last, Nigel passed into the back and collapsed into a position of marginal comfort. God, he was tired. His eyelids dropped, and he pinched the remnants of sand from his white-blond lashes.
    “Nasty,” Brad muttered, English shoving aside French.
    So Brad had noted Wouter’s work.
    “Hmmm.” Nigel straightened his good leg to keep it from falling asleep. “Just find me a pretty doctor in Lanzarote and I won’t bore you with the details.” Now his other leg was asleep. He longed to fidget, but his chest was kicking its heels about breathing.
    “Fuck