His smile turned evil as he eyed Kong. “I was going to use them as blackmail material – you know, maybe threaten to pay her a little visit – until I found out Cleary had a daughter. Nowshe’sgot some nice big tits. Firm.”
Seeing red, Kong’s fist plowed into Godwin’s face, snapping his head back. The blow would have put him on the floor if he wasn’t tied to a chair that was bolted down. And if Lark and General Davies didn’t immediately restrain him, Kong would havejumped on him and kept hitting him until the smug sonofabitch was no longer breathing.
Blood was gushing from Godwin’s nose and he spat a mouthful of blood on the floor before he grinned with bloody teeth. He started laughing like a lunatic, sheer madness shining in his eyes. “Woo! That was a good hit, Monkey Boy! I taught you well.”
“Enough!” Lark stepped in front of Godwin, getting right in his face to snag his eyes and mesmerize him. “Tell me what you did for August Cleary.”
His eyes slightly unfocused, and his voice without inflection, he confessed, “Cleary needed my black-market contacts. They would only do business with me, so he needed me to be the middleman.”
The general stepped up. “And do what?”
“Sell weapons.”
“To whom?”
Godwin listed off several names, known heads of terrorist groups on their watchlist, and some that would be added as soon as this interrogation was over. Teams would be deployed to dismantle the operations and recover the weapons.
“To what purpose?” The general asked. “What was Cleary’s goal?”
“To start another war.”
It was what they’d suspected, and enough to bring in Cleary for questioning, but General Davies wasn’t finished.
“When you were in Venezuela, you received a call. Were you tipped off that the location had been compromised?”
Kong was glad the general was on his game because he’d forgotten all about the leak.
“Yes.”
“Who called you?”
“Cleary.”
“How’d he know?”
“No clue. Didn’t ask. Didn’t care. It was part of our agreement. In addition to my cut, he kept the heat off me.”
The general stepped back and motioned for Lark that she could release Godwin. “Lock him in the hole.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
August forced his mouthinto a tight smile to keep from curling his lip in disdain. The venue for Katherine’s birthday party was lovely – rustic yet refined. The guests Harper invited were anything but. Her family was solidly upper-middle class, yet many of them dressed and acted like trailer trash. One man, who he believed was Harper’s Uncle Charlie, had a bushy, unkempt gray beard, his arms were covered in badly faded, poorly done tattoos, and he was wearing a t-shirt with the word HUGE over the silhouette of a rooster.Charming.
An overly endowed woman in a pair of obscenely short denim shorts nearly fell out of her flimsy tank top every time she bent over – and she’d already bent over at least five times in the last ten minutes for no reason August could discern – while another woman, a rather large one, was testing the structural integrity of a pair of purple yoga pants she’d paired with a hideous chartreuse top.
Meanwhile, on the sprawling lawn, a younger set that had to be Katherine’s friends embarrassed themselves with a childish game of tag. Still, August would persevere with his mission. He’d already begun planting the seeds as soon as he’d arrived, playing the part of the remorseful father looking to make up for his past neglect.
Harper had not been happy to see him. She hadn’t bothered to hide her displeasure as her eyes had skated over him with thinly veiled disgust before she’d snapped out, “What are you doing here?”
“You invited me, Harper.”
“Yes, well, we both know that’s merely a courtesy. Up to now, you’ve respected that.”
He put on a fair show of molding his expression into one of contrition and launched into the speech he’d rehearsed. “I’ve recently taken a long, hard look at my past behavior. I have regrets, Harper. The biggest one is that I missed so much time with Katherine.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you dying?”
August blinked, wishing he’d thought of that. What better angle than a man facing his own mortality? Katherine surely would have invited him to visit her at Black Bay out of sympathy alone.
