Chapter 285: Chapter - 285
Chapter - 285
Crimson Sparrow was a pathetic sight, a broken, sobbing mess held against the alley’s grimy brick wall by Rick’s unyielding grip. The air was thick with the stench of his fear, a smell far fouler than the rotting garbage in the nearby dumpsters. Sharon watched from a few feet away, her arms crossed, her face a mask of cold disgust and grim necessity. The time for procedure was over. This was something else entirely.
"Okay! Okay, man! God, okay!" Sparrow blubbered, snot and tears carving clean tracks through the filth on his face. "I’ll talk! Just... just don’t do any of that stuff you said! Please!"
Rick’s grip didn’t loosen. His voice was a flat, dead thing in the darkness. "Talk."
And so, the story came tumbling out, a panicked, choked confession from a coward who had finally seen the abyss. "I met her about a year ago," he began, his voice trembling. "At a bar, kinda like this one, only cleaner. She was... magnetic. Beautiful. She had this energy, man, like she was plugged into a different socket from everyone else. I thought it was love, or lust, or... something. For her, I was just a tool. A useful, disposable tool."
He took a ragged breath, the words spilling out faster now. "Don’t get it twisted. Nadia wasn’t some poor girl trying to survive. She was a predator. A viper in a cocktail dress. She wanted the five-star lifestyle—the champagne, the designer clothes, the fancy cars—but she had zero interest in doing a single honest day’s work to get it. She was purely about the score. She could charm the wallet right out of a dead man’s pocket and make his corpse feel good about it."
"What was your role in this?" Sharon cut in, her voice sharp as broken glass.
Sparrow flinched. "I was logistics," he stammered. "She was the honey pot. She’d find the marks—always some rich, arrogant asshole at an upscale hotel bar—and she’d work her magic. Lure them up to a room with promises of a wild night. I’d be the lookout, sometimes I’d sneak in while she had him... distracted... and lift his watch, wallet, whatever wasn’t nailed down. I hated it," he added, a pathetic whine entering his voice. "Watching her with all those guys... it drove me crazy. But I was too scared to say anything. Scared of losing my cut, but mostly... scared of losing her."
"Get to the big one," Rick growled. "The one that got you here."
"The Croft affair," Sparrow whispered, the name itself seeming to terrify him. "It was supposed to be our masterpiece. The one that would set us up for life. The mark was Julian Croft. Twenty-two years old, heir to a global logistics fortune. A spoiled, debauched piece of shit who thought the world was his personal playground."
He described the setup with a weird mix of fear and pride. Nadia, posing as an edgy freelance photographer, had ensnared Julian at an exclusive party. She played on his massive ego, his known fetish for bondage, and convinced him to do a "private, artistic" photo shoot.
"She got him to the hotel room I’d rented," Sparrow continued, his eyes wide with the memory. "She had him willingly tie himself to a chair. He was laughing, thought it was all a kinky game. Then I walked in. We took dozens of pictures. High-res. Him, stark naked, gagged with one of his own thousand-dollar silk ties, looking like a helpless, pathetic pig."
"But the pictures weren’t the real score, were they?" Rick pressed.
Sparrow shook his head frantically. "No. That was just the insurance policy. While he was all tied up and crying, Nadia grabbed his laptop. That was the real prize." He leaned forward conspiratorially, his voice dropping. "We couldn’t decrypt the files, man. It was some high-level corporate shit, way above our pay grade. But you could just tell from the file names—’Offshore Transfers,’ ’Customs Payments,’ ’Project Nightingale’—and the insane level of security, that it was the jackpot. Something big. The kind of thing that could make you rich forever or get you killed in a hurry."
"So the key is for a locker with that laptop in it," Sharon stated, piecing it together.
"Not a locker," Sparrow corrected, his eyes darting nervously around the alley. "It was too hot to keep. We rented a shipping container at the Portstown Shipyard under a fake name. Anonymous. Untraceable. The key is for the heavy-duty padlock on Container 7B."
"So what went wrong?" Rick demanded.
Panic flared in Sparrow’s eyes again. "Before we could figure out how to sell the info, Croft’s people came for us. Not cops. Quiet, professional guys in black sedans. They were ghosts. I barely got out of town with my life. I don’t know what happened to Nadia. For all I know, they caught her and put a bullet in her head. I have no idea she lost her memory, I swear."
He added, his voice cracking with paranoia, "A few weeks after it all went down, I got desperate. I figured if I could get the laptop, I could disappear for good. I snuck back to her apartment to find the key, but it was gone. I tore the whole damn place apart and found nothing. Since then... I swear I’ve been watched. Like a ghost is following me everywhere I go."
Rick listened to the whole sordid tale with a cold, detached focus. The sweet, innocent Jemimah was a fiction, a ghost created by a trauma he couldn’t yet comprehend. In her place was Nadia, a competent and ruthless operator. A part of him, a dark, pragmatic part, wasn’t disgusted. The setup was clean. The execution, ruthless. He had to admire the sheer, cold professionalism of the con.
Sharon, however, was radiating pure fury. "So we’re not saving a victim," she seethed, taking a step forward, her voice a low, angry growl. "We’re in the middle of a goddamn blackmail plot, risking our lives and my career to recover stolen goods for a con artist?"
A sharp, bitter argument erupted in the filthy alley. "She’s still a hostage and they’ll still kill her!" Rick snarled, turning on Sharon. "I don’t give a damn what she did to get here. We get the laptop, we trade it for her life. That’s the mission. Nothing else matters."
"It matters to me!" Sharon shot back. "I’m a cop! I’m not a damn accomplice to a felony!"
"You crossed that line the second you lied to your department and got on this bike with me! You’re in it now, whether you like it or not!"
To end the debate and silence the loose end, Rick turned back to Sparrow. Before the terrified musician could even beg, Rick landed a single, precise, brutal punch to his temple. Sparrow’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he crumpled to the ground, unconscious.
"Problem solved," Rick said flatly.
Sharon stared, horrified and utterly exasperated. Rick knelt beside the unconscious man and efficiently frisked him, pulling out a worn leather wallet. He took the few crumpled bills inside—maybe sixty bucks—and shoved them in his own pocket.
"An inconvenience fee," he explained to Sharon’s stunned silence.
The mood on the Harley was colder and harder than the steel of the engine. This wasn’t a rescue mission anymore. It was a transaction. A dirty, ugly business deal. They were going to commit a felony to trade for the life of another felon, and the air between them was thick with the unspoken weight of that reality.
Miles away, in the front seat of the black sedan, Sparrow Two pulled an earphone out and spoke quietly into his collar mic. "Raven, we have confirmation. The asset is a laptop containing the Croft files. It’s located in Container 7B at the Portstown Shipyard. Targets are en route."
The filtered, emotionless voice of Raven replied instantly. The time for passive observation was over.
"Excellent work, Sparrow Team. Their usefulness is at an end. Sparrow One, rendezvous with Sparrow Two at the shipyard. The targets have located the asset for us."
There was a slight, almost imperceptible pause.
"Retrieve the laptop by any means necessary. Then, eliminate them both. I want this handled before sunrise. No witnesses."
The Harley Davidson pulled up to the main gate of the Portstown Shipyard. It was a desolate, industrial labyrinth of steel and shadows. Massive, skeletal cranes loomed against the starless night sky like silent, sleeping dinosaurs. The only light came from the cold, white glare of security lamps mounted on tall poles, casting long, distorted shadows that seemed to create more darkness than they illuminated. The air smelled of salt, rust, and diesel fuel.
As they dismounted, a cold wind whipped through the canyons of stacked containers, making a low, mournful, whistling sound. Rick felt a prickle on the back of his neck, a cold sense of being watched that went beyond simple paranoia. He scanned the deep, dark spaces between the towering metal walls, seeing nothing but shadows within shadows.
At the far end of the shipyard, a black sedan glided silently through a service entrance, its headlights off. The engine was a barely audible hum. The doors opened, and Sparrow One and Sparrow Two got out, their movements fluid and practiced. Both men now held compact pistols, fitted with long, black silencers. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. They looked at each other, gave a single, curt nod, and melted into the industrial night, becoming just another pair of shadows in a place full of them.
The hunters were in position.