The Player, The Thief and The Broken Heart - Chapter Twenty-Eight - An Obvious Ruse

Agent Le Bon drove along the narrow highway, barren greyish-yellow scrubland spreading to the horizon in every direction. Agent Matins sat next to him in the passenger seat, her eyes fixed on some brochures spread across her lap. The sun blazed down overhead, but in the rented Lotus with the air conditioning on full blast, the car was refrigerator cold inside.

"I thought we'd spend the afternoon at the Ethel M Botanical Cactus garden," she said, "as part of my plan to keep you out of trouble. Then, if we have time, the Hoover Dam."

"A cactus garden," he said, catching her reflection in the dashboard indicators. "Better keep close by; it would be quite easy to lose you in there."

Agent Matins bristled at the comment. "Szabo's out of the game, by the way. Car accident."

"So you said ... he's fighting dirty." Not that he was surprised. The only shocking thing was that the man hadn't done it sooner or in a less obvious manner.

"You really think he's behind it?" she asked.

He suppressed a snort. When he'd first met her, she hadn't seemed that stupid. She was a junior agent nosing into business she had no clearance for. As if he'd tell her a thing. "You think for a moment he isn't?"

"In my experience it's a bad idea to assume things on no evidence whatsoever."

"Not in mine." Le Bon checked the rear-view mirror; a black S-class Mercedes sedan with tinted windows trailed them by some hundred yards or so. Remembering that certain highways in Nevada were without legal speed limits, he flattened the pedal and watched, smiling, as the indicator for the speedometer slanted right.

"Drive carefully!" Matins clutched the dashboard with both her hands.

He kept accelerating, relishing the crack in her voice.

"He's not going to try knocking off an SIS Agent. At least not before he's got my money inside his safe."

"But why would Yushenko's agents be after us?"

He ignored her. Because they aren't, you stupid bint, he thought.

"Slow down!"

He turned the wheel hard right, throwing up billows of dusty sand in their wake. Braking sharply, the car skidded to a stop, facing the same direction they'd been coming from. The sedan was gone like a mirage. "I don't like spies that are not me," he said like a sullen schoolboy.

"You think someone has seen through our ruse?" she asked.

"Our ruse was about as subtle as putting on false noses and mustaches a la Groucho Marx. If you think the point of us being here is to pull some surprise on Yushenko, then I hope you enjoy your low-level rank because you're going to be there for a long time yet."

She clamped her lips together and her brows knitted into a scowl. Agent Le Bon idled the car forward, did a u-turn and continued along the highway towards the botanical gardens. Although he'd been in plenty of deserts before, this one looked particularly alien, with its rocky hills and scraggly shrubs that were all the same yellowish-green-grey.

"What is our real purpose here, then?"

"You don't have the proper clearance for that," he said. She'd been getting rather uppity lately and it was time to remind her of her proper place. At least until she became more conciliatory.