Читать книгу The Mercenary: The Savage Seven - Katherine Garbera - Страница 9

AUGUST 1, ONYX DIAMOND MINE, CULLINAN

“Fuck!” Ray Lambert threw his mobile phone against the wall as Olivia hung up on him. It shattered into several pieces just as his carefully ordered world was doing. He didn’t need this right now. Not from Olivia. She was part of his perfect world. The one that couldn’t be touched by the dirtiness of his life here at the mines.

“Dammit. Anita, get in here.”

“Yes, sir?” Anita, his secretary, asked as she stood in the doorway to his office.

“I need a new mobile phone.”

She nodded. “I have two replacements in my supply cabinet, Mr. Lambert. If you give me your old phone, I can send it back to the dealer.”

He gestured to the floor where the pieces still remained. She looked at it and then got down on her knees to pick up the pieces. “What shall I say happened to it?”

“It fell off my belt when I was in the mine,” he said.

“No problem,” Anita said. She left his office and returned a few minutes later with a brand-new phone. She handed it to him along with his SIM card.

He took the replacement BlackBerry and put the SIM card in the back. He hit the power button and waited. The phone worked fine and he dismissed Anita from his office.

“Go with her, Nels,” he said to his bodyguard. The other man left his office.

The Onyx Diamond Group was part of a larger diamond-mining consortium and Ray had been working for them since he’d come to South Africa nearly twenty years ago. He had started a lucrative sideline of off-the-record mining five years ago. The diamonds he sold on the black market provided a nice extra income that he used for gambling, women, and the good life.

He didn’t have to worry about what he spent and what he lost, thanks to the two-pronged profit stream he had created at this mine in Cullinan. He’d worked his ass off trying to figure how to keep his bosses at the consortium happy and how to take care of the huge debts he had from gambling.

Every single time he got caught up, he’d play a big game and almost win enough to be satisfied and then lose. Luckily he’d always been able to come back here and replenish his bank accounts.

The deal with Olivia angered him. He liked her and had planned to have a family with her. She was going to be the perfect cover to his other life. He hadn’t really planned on getting engaged, but once he’d met her and realized she was the cousin of Phillip Michaels, the idea had come to him. Being in the family with one of the executives of the Diamond Consortium would definitely be a perk.

And now that was all screwed up. Part of it was Olivia. He had no idea how much she’d seen this afternoon. Judging by her pale face and the way she’d gunned her engine to get away from him, he had to assume she’d seen him shoot Thomas and he had aimed his gun at her. If her car hadn’t had bulletproof windows, he would have shot. But wasting a bullet hadn’t seemed like the best idea.

In retrospect he may have been able to scare her enough to make her crash her car or something. He should have thought that through, but he’d panicked.

Killing a man was never an easy thing for him to do. And Thomas had been young, which made it a bit harder. Somehow, for him, if a criminal was older it was easier.

And that was the other part of the problem. His black-market operation worked because he controlled the volume of the diamonds that were sold there. He made damned sure that they were well under the radar of the consortium, but Thomas had been slipping extra diamonds out of the mine to fund some sort of rebel faction in his hometown. That stinking ghetto of Soweto.

And that had been unacceptable. Ray didn’t tolerate thievery.

Now Lars Inglessin and Phillip Michaels were on Ray’s back about the leakage from this mine and were both coming here to personally make sure the operation was back on track.

Phillip was Olivia’s cousin by marriage, which was going to make that entire mess a bit uncomfortable. But he’d deal with it. He always did.

The fact that Thomas had been stealing gave Ray an easy scapegoat for the stones he himself had been funneling out, but he wasn’t sure how much Lars knew and how long he’d have to play along with Lars until the man left.

This mess wasn’t what he needed right now. And with Olivia added to the mix…he had no idea what to do next. Of course, with Burati in the house, he didn’t have to worry too much about Olivia. He’d farm the task of taking care of his fiancée to the bodyguard. Somehow Ray wasn’t sure he could kill her.

Besides, he and Nels had to go back and dispose of Thomas’s body.

Ray didn’t panic because that wasn’t the type of man he was. Instead he sat back in his chair and listed the options in his head. Perhaps getting Olivia out of the picture would be the best option. If she were dead, then he wouldn’t have to worry about her going to the authorities. To be honest, he wasn’t sure what the authorities could do to him. The Onyx Diamond Group policed their own property and their own disputes.

But the diamond consortium would be angry that governments were involved in their business and they might come down hard on him.

His office phone rang and he answered it impatiently. “Lambert here.”

“Mr. Ray, it’s Burati. Ms. Olivia left the desk in your home office open when she left. I believe she took everything in there.”

Fuck. “Thank you, Burati. Did you follow her?”

“Yes, Mr. Ray. I am in the car now. She seems to be headed toward the airport in Jo’burg.”

Olivia had just helped make his mind up as to her fate. “Don’t let her get on a plane. I want her out of the picture,” Ray said.

“What do you mean, Mr. Ray?”

“I mean that she shouldn’t talk to anyone, do you understand me? She’s in danger. I had some trouble at the mine today and if she should run into the men who tried to kill me…”

There was silence on the line and Ray wondered if the guard understood what he wanted.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Ray.”

“Good. Bring me everything she has on her.”

“Yes, Mr. Ray,” Burati said. “I will talk to you after I find her.”

“Very well,” Ray said. “No mistakes, Burati. I want this matter settled as soon as possible.”

“It will be, Mr. Ray.”

Ray disconnected the call. He didn’t dwell on what Burati was going to do. He couldn’t. He’d liked Olivia, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked her to marry him. And he had enjoyed living with her. She hadn’t been the sexiest woman he’d ever dated, but she had been one of the nicest.

He had a moment of silence thinking of what their life might have been. He would miss her, but she knew too much to live and he knew that she’d never keep quiet.

If he’d learned anything from the past month of living with her it was that she had a strong sense of right and wrong and the gray areas of real life didn’t make sense to her.

He blamed her parents for sheltering her. As a matter of fact, it was their fault she was going to die. If they’d raised their daughter to see that there was more to the world than a cut-and-dried right and wrong, she probably wouldn’t have panicked and ran.

He had a meeting in ten minutes and realized he’d sweated through his dress shirt. Dammit. He took off his shirt and realized he had dirt and dried blood on it.

Where was his head? He went into his private washroom and washed his hands and face. He sprayed on his cologne and then redressed. All the while he watched himself in the mirror.

He made damned sure that the man looking back at him was cool and calm. The Managing Director of Mining Operations wasn’t a man who could be scared or not in control.

Ray had worked his way up the hard way and it took balls to operate a shadow mine under the watchful eye of the diamond consortium and not get caught. Ray had done that for the last few years with no hiccups until one of his workers had gotten greedy. But Thomas was dead now, and soon Olivia would be out of the way as well.

He walked out of the washroom confident of himself. And when he pulled his suit jacket on he realized that this morning was in the past, Olivia was in the past, and all he could do was move on.

And he would. That was what Ray Lambert did. Getting married had seemed like the next step in his plan to make himself into the successful man he’d always wanted to be, but a woman was more complicated. And Ray was revising his opinion on wives.

Mistresses were easier to control and not as needy. That was one thing he hadn’t liked about Olivia. She had clung to him, expecting him to be her social network here.

And the sex hadn’t been that great. In fact, since she’d moved here a few months ago, she hadn’t been able to feel comfortable having sex with him.

She said she didn’t feel safe with the barbed-wire fence around their neighborhood and the guards sleeping down the hall. He bet she really felt unsafe now that she was out there on her own.

It’d be so much easier for him if she broke down in one of the central Jo’burg neighborhoods. A random act of violence would be a nice neat way to tie up the problem.