“I’m not sure how you expected this to end,” Harry said, almost whimsically. “All your political friends in Canberra are probably shitting themselves right now.”
“It was never... it was never supposed... They wanted more money. It was never enough—”
“Shut the fuck up. I don’t want to hear one excuse out of your filthy mouth. It’s too late. It’s all over. You can expect the cops to come rolling in at any minute. Now, I dunno if it’ll be the feds, or military police, or even state. Never did get the jurisdiction thing. Either way, you’re screwed.”
All Clive could do was shake his head. Harry was lying. This was all bullshit. He wanted money. That had to be it. “I can give you—”
“You can’t bribe or pay your way out of this. You’re going down. Personally, I wanted to kill you for what you did to Asher, in a spectacularly painful way, maybe do to you what they did to him. But this really was better.” He sighed happily. “You’ll be pleased to know a good portion of your money has gone back to Professor Taleb’s wife and her three boys. And if you think you can make a plea deal, if you think you can give them me and Asher as a trade-off, think again. One, Asher Garin doesn’t exist. Two, I’m not even in this country right now. And three...” Harry’s voice dropped low, cold as steel. “You will take full responsibility for everything you have done or I will scrub every trace of your DNA off this planet. Starting with everyone that’s at your house today. Understand?”
Clive thought he might vomit. His vision was going blurry. The world was spinning way too fast.
A siren sounded in the distance, and Harry cocked his ear. “Oh, right on cue.”
Clive was cold all over. “I trusted you,” he said, struggling to speak at all. “Ten years ago. I trusted you to do what had to be done. You were my first mistake.”
“No. Your first mistake was sending Asher to kill me. Not because you wanted me dead, not because you betrayed your country. But because by giving Asher to me, you gave me a reason to live.Thatwas your first mistake.”
The sirens grew louder, too loud. Not a common sound in this expensive suburb. Then men were walking through his house. A team of them. Some of them in military uniforms, some of them in suits.
Linda was panicked, trying to stop them. “What is this? What are you doing? Clive, what’s happening?”
All his friends and family stood, watching. Horrified.
He didn’t hear a word of what the men in suits said. All he could see were the faces of his kids, his grandkids, his wife.
And Harry smiling.
Clive was escorted out through his house, through his gathered family, and when he scanned the crowd, searching for one last look at that smug son of a bitch’s face, to burn it into his memory, he couldn’t find him.
Tim “Harry” Harrigan was gone.
* * *
Harry gotinto the passenger side of the car, still smiling. “Let’s go.”
Asher grinned at him. He’d been listening to the whole transaction, of course. “How do you feel?”
He couldn’t actually describe how he felt. There were no words that captured it. “Good. I feel real good. And relieved.”
“His face?”
“Priceless.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Absolutely.”
Asher laughed. “You told him I was watching.”
“Well, he assumed that. I just didn’t correct him. I did a stupid hand signal thing where I put up fingers, like if I got to three you’d take out one of his grandkids.”
Asher laughed so hard he winced and held his ribs. “I heard. I almost choked on my mint.”
The truth was, Asher was waiting in the car for him down the street. He was listening, of course, and watching for anyone who entered. But there was never any gun.
Harry sighed, an unspoken weight now off his shoulders. “His face when he saw me, oh my God. And the more I spoke, the greyer his face got. And to see him handcuffed, in front of his entire family, on his wife’s birthday. Fucking poetry right there.”
Asher laughed again and reached for Harry’s hand as he drove. “We leaving Sydney now?” He looked at the GPS map on the dash screen. “Going north, yes?”