“Just get your shit together.” Ishmael looked irritated. He glanced at Kris. “They are never this stupid. This whole affair has them rattled. It was too easy, getting you out.”
“Too easy?” Kris repeated.
“Yes. While Jonesy decided we might come and left the door unlocked, the fact is, there were no guards at the gatehouse. No one watching the perimeter. Everyone inside was asleep, except for Jonesy.”
“Like it was being made easy for you,” Kris whispered. “By who? Jonesy? I didn’t get the feeling he was high up on the totem pole at all.”
“No, not Jonesy. Someone else.” Ishmael’s lips thinned, but he said no more.
“Okay, that’s done,”
“Tell the pilot he can go Have him take the jet home,” Ishmael said.
Ezra’s eyebrows shot up. “We going to fly home commercial?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Ishmael said, his tone evasive.
“All right, I’ll tell him.”
“And call yourselves a cab,” Ishmael added.
“I already did,” Ollie replied. “Only one bar, but I managed to get a decent 4G signal and look up the number and place a call for them.”
“Good, good.”
Ollie waved at Josh. “See you when you get there. You have the address.”
“We do,” Josh assured him, waving back.
Kris marvelled at how casual they all were.
We just fled a major crime scene, leaving the country with a man tied up in the back of a plane, and now we’re about to go see some house Ishmael bought while taking the guy along in the trunk.
He pushed down his sense of hysteria.
“You’ll love the house,” Ishmael said to him. “It is surrounded by fields and there is a lake and some forest.”
“You’ve seen it? Or just pictures?” Kris asked.
Just focus on what he’s telling you about the house. Nothing else, or you’ll lose it.
“I grew up there,” Ishmael said softly.
“Oh! And your folks sold it to move to England?”
Ollie snorted. Ishmael met his eyes in the rearview mirror sharply.
“No. My father was disappointed in me. He sent me away to boarding school while my older brother and younger sister stayed home and attended the local schools. I bought it from my brother and sister as I was disinherited. After my father died, they put it on the market as neither wanted to move all the way out to the countryside to live in it. My brother has a medical practice in Stockholm and my sister is in in the Navy.”
“The Navy? Wow. That’s so cool.”
Ishmael nodded, pride evident in his voice.
“Umm, can I ask why he was disappointed in you?” Kris asked.
“You may. And to answer your question, he blamed me for my mother’s death.”
Kris’ mouth fell open? “What? How could a kid be responsible for that?”
“Because I had been invited to a birthday party. It was snowing and my father told my mother I shouldn’t go. But I insisted and so after Father left for work, she took her car out to take me. My brother and sister stayed home with my grandmother, who was living with us at the time. It was she who told my father that I cried when I heard I wasn’t going. So, when he arrived at the hospital and found out the only one of us to make it out alive out of the fjord was me, he said the wrong person had died. He left me there, alone. Two days later, when the hospital discharged me, he had a taxi pick me up and take me to the local airport where I was flown to the larger airport in Stockholm. There, a flight attendant met me and saw me to Britain.”
“And that’s how we met,” Ollie said. “He ended up in the same dorm as my brother, and at Christmas, he came home with him. They were both eight, so I was five.”
Kris wiped at his eyes.
How in the hell could anyone do that to a little boy? It’s no wonder he’s all fucked up.
