James Patterson - Kill Me If You Can

“Everything but eighty thousand euros.”

Katje counted out the money and put it in a pale yellow bank envelope for me. We spent another twenty minutes filling out papers, and then Schoningh escorted me to the front door.

Kino was still parked outside.

He rolled down the window and called out to me. “Hey, Matthew, you need a ride to the airport?”

“You didn’t have to wait. I could’ve caught a cab.”

“Cabs are expensive,” he said. “Get in, kiddo. I’m damn happy to do it.”

And he was. I think the only thing that would have made Kino happier was if Marta Krall had still been around, taking shots at us.

THE NEXT AVAILABLE flight to New York wasn’t until two o’clock the next afternoon. That left me with seventeen hours to cool my jets at the airport.

But life changes when you have money. Maybe it can’t buy happiness, but it sure as hell can get you where you want to go in a hurry.

Kino dropped me at the General Aviation Center. Two minutes later I was walking across the tarmac with Captain Dan Fennessy, pilot of the Falcon 900EX jet I had chartered.

By the time we got to the plane, I knew everything I needed to know about him. He’d been a pilot for thirty years, got laid off by Delta two years ago, and was happy to give me a bargain rate of only seven thousand dollars an hour so he wouldn’t have to deadhead back to the States.

I paid cash.

The copilot was in the cockpit. “Where would you like to land?” he asked. “JFK, Newark, or Teterboro?”

“For forty-nine thousand bucks, I’d like to land on the corner of Bleecker and Perry in the West Village,” I said.

The two flyboys laughed, and I opted for Teterboro, a small general aviation airport in New Jersey used mostly by corporate jets and small private planes.

“Good choice,” Fennessy said. “Much less hassle with customs.”

He gave me a short tour of the aircraft, pointing out the amenities and explaining emergency procedures.

“You have fourteen seats to choose from, Mr. Bannon,” he said. “Too bad there’s only one of you.”

I’m sure it was his standard icebreaker. I didn’t correct him, but as far as I was concerned, he had two passengers — Matthew Bannon and the Ghost. And Vadim Chukov was determined to kill us both.

I sat down in a window seat and buckled myself in. Five minutes later we were wheels up.

If the Ghost had been calling the shots, we’d have been heading anywhere but New York. The Ghost was hardwired to be as emotionally detached as humanly possible. With the Russian mob after him, and seven million dollars in the bank, he would gladly disappear and start a new life elsewhere.

On the other hand, there was Matthew Bannon, the passionate, caring, wannabe artist, whose mission would be to fly home, win back Katherine’s heart, and live happily ever after.

But there was a third choice. And after a lot of soul-searching, that’s the one I finally made.

I was going back because I had screwed up the best relationship I’d ever had and I needed to apologize.

I was going back because, even though Chukov would be gunning for Matthew Bannon, I had put Katherine’s life in danger, and I had to make sure that she was okay and that she stayed that way.

The old me never would have been on that plane. I was always so careful, so self-involved. But something had changed me. Actually, someone had changed me. Katherine. I loved her desperately. I didn’t want to lose her. I wanted to set things right, and then maybe, just maybe, start my life over again.

Was that too much to ask? Probably, yeah.

THE FALCON TOUCHED down at Teterboro at a few minutes after 10 p.m.

The customs and immigration agent who met our plane checked my passport and asked me why I went to Paris, Venice, and Amsterdam.

“I’m an artist on tour,” I said.

He stifled a yawn. My name wasn’t on his watch list, so he stamped my passport and sent me on my way.

A customs agent asked me if I had anything to declare.

“Only that I’m happy to be back in the good old U.S. of A.,” I said.

He nodded like he’d heard it before. “Welcome home,” he mumbled.

And that was it. Maybe in these times of young rock stars and baby-faced Hollywood celebrities, nobody wonders why a thirty-year-old in jeans and sneakers flies in from Europe on his own charter jet. Or maybe it was the end of a long day and nobody gave a shit.

Captain Fennessy had ordered a town car for me, and the driver took the Jersey Turnpike to the Lincoln Tunnel, then went down Ninth Avenue to Bleecker.

I got out three blocks from my apartment and walked south toward Perry. I checked the cars and the windows along Bleecker. Nobody was staked out waiting for me to come home.

I unlocked the front door and climbed the stairs to my apartment.

It was exactly as I’d left it.

I dropped my bag and stashed what was left of the eighty thousand euros I had taken from the bank in Amsterdam. Then I dug Marta Krall’s Glock out of my bag. I had been ready to ditch it, but there had been no security at Amsterdam and even less at Teterboro. It was a nifty gun. A definite keeper.

And then I heard the scratching at the door. It was followed by a long-drawn-out meow. My cat was home. I opened the door a crack and Hopper strolled in, looking well fed.

“What’s new, pussycat?” I said.

I pushed the door shut, but it wouldn’t close. I swung it open wide to see what was holding it back.

And there they were. Three men, armed to the teeth.

“Welcome back,” one of them said.

Then they shoved their way into my apartment and shut the door.

“BOY, AM I glad to see you guys,” I said.

Zach Stevens, Ty Warren, and Adam Benjamin are Marines Corps — to the core. We met in boot camp, trained together, and fought side by side against ruthless fanatics in the mountains of Afghanistan and the streets of Iraq. Once I decided to become the Ghost, I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. And there was nobody I trusted more than these three. They were my best friends in the world.

So I had hired them to be my backup and my bodyguards, and they’ve been living in apartment 1 ever since. They are loyal, lethal, and, while you’d never know it to look at them, kind of lovable.

We exchanged bro hugs all around.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot sneaking in here,” Adam said. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming back?”

“I was going to knock on your door at a more civilized hour. How did you guys know I was home?”

“You tripped the silent alarm,” Zach said.

“No I didn’t,” I said. “I totally bypassed—”

“Sorry, boss,” Zach said. “I’m talking about the new silent alarm. I installed it on the third step below the fifth-floor landing.”

“You had a nasty-ass visitor the other day,” Ty said. “We figured she’d be coming back.”

“What did she look like?” I said.

Zach took a picture out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was a black-and-white screen grab from the closed-circuit camera at the front door.

“Her name is Marta Krall,” I said.

“She tried to pass herself off as one of your art teachers,” Zach said.

“Well, I guess I taught her a few things,” I said. “And we don’t have to worry about her ever coming back. She flunked the final.”

None of them even blinked; kill-or-be-killed was in our DNA.

“We’ve been at threat-level red since she showed up,” Ty said. “You think we should ease it back to orange?”

“If Marta Krall was the only one who wanted me dead, I wouldn’t even bother locking the front door,” I said. “But I’ve made a lot of new enemies recently.”