St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

she mumbled, flushing.
    “I read your file.”
    “When do I get to read yours?”
    “What do you want to know?”
    Everything. Nothing in particular. “Is this a one-night stand?” she asked.
    “I’ve been wondering the same thing,” he said. “You know, don’t you? You knew last night when you held out your hand to me.”
    “What did I know?”
    “I’m going to kill Andre Bertone.”
    She looked at Rand’s eyes, sage green and clear. Cold.
    “I knew,” she said. “I saw it at the party.”
    “You didn’t let it stop you last night.”
    It wasn’t a question, not quite, but it was close enough that she answered.
    “You haven’t killed him yet,” she said.
    “And when I do?”
    Silence came, grew, and vanished into a sigh. “I don’t know. I’d like to kill Bertone myself. I thought about doing it. A way out of this mess, you know?”
    Rand nodded and watched her like a feral cat.
    “It wasn’t so much a thought,” Kayla said, “as a bone-deep desire to wipe him off the face of the earth. For the first time in my life I understood how someone could be driven to kill.”
    “If you back a mouse into a corner, it will try to rip your throat out. And you’re no mouse.”
    She let out a long breath. “Were you and Reed working for St. Kilda when he died?”
    “Sort of. The Camgerian government was paying, but we were hired through St. Kilda, though we didn’t know it at the time.”
    “You were soldiers?”
    “As in mercenaries?”
    She grimaced. “I guess.”
    “No. We were hired to train Camgerians to use the kind of arms that would give them a chance against the ivory poachers who were destroying the elephant herds. We were also trying to teach Camgerians management techniques for their game preserves. So officially we were members of an international wildlife conservation group helping the locals to protect and manage their valuable resources. Unofficially…” His voice faded.
    “What?”
    “The poachers were all rebels bent on overthrowing the government. Ivory, oil, coltan, hardwood, whatever would sell, they stole it and got arms in return, AK-47s and RPGs.”
    “Bertone.”
    “Krout, the Siberian, Bertone. All the same man.”
    “So you were training men to fight the rebels.”
    “In a side-door kind of way, yes. Back then Reed and I were young enough to be idealists and smart enough to know that idealism is a young man’s game. We didn’t think of ourselves as starry-eyed virgins, but we were.” Rand’s mouth flattened. “We believed that the good guys always win in the end.”
    Kayla bit her lip and didn’t ask any more.
    Rand kept on talking. “We thought we’d seen it all. We hadn’t. Somebody once described Africa as a place where anything that can be done by a gun has been done there. Faroe knew that.”
    “Joe Faroe was over there, too?”
    “Through St. Kilda, Faroe was working an operation on behalf of an American NGO, trying to discourage the arms trade. Reed thought Faroe was the greatest man he’d ever known, smart, tough, resourceful. I wasn’t quite as charmed. I kept telling Reed that Faroe could get us in trouble.”
    “Did he?”
    “No, hell no. We did it all by ourselves. Our training gig was up, but we both were sick of seeing what the arms trade was doing to Africa. We talked to Faroe. St. Kilda hired us to gather information on Krout/Bertone and his operation. To shut the bastard down.”
    Kayla’s hand touched Rand’s cheek, stroked lightly above the soft beard. “It was a job worth doing.”
    “Intellectually, no argument. But my gut doesn’t think that Reed’s death was worth it, no matter how many others might have survived because of what we did. His death was goddamned real. The lives he saved…” Rand shrugged. “Not real enough.”
    “So you set out to get proof that the Siberian was a gunrunner,” she said, luring Rand away from his bleak thoughts.
    “Reed and I figured out the Siberian’s smuggling network, his cutouts, who took his bribes. We wrote down the tail numbers on all his planes, documented the arms he was delivering. But none of that was quite enough. We needed solid, undeniable proof to nail the Siberian’s ass. Reed got wind of a planeload of arms coming in. We went to the dirt strip, built a blind, and waited.”
    “Did the plane come?”
    “Yeah. The pilot was either certifiable or clanged when he walked. I got it all—the plane, the waiting rebels, the cargo offloaded, the coltan loaded in