Читать книгу Shannon McKenna Bundle: Ultimate Weapon, Extreme Danger, Behind Closed Doors, Hot Night, & Return to Me - Shannon McKenna - Страница 15

He’d failed. The world as he knew it had ended.

Val stood in the middle of the room, staring at the hole in which she had just stood. She’d left abruptly, distorting space, sucking the air out with her. Leaving a vacuum that made his lungs burn. The one time in his life as a professional liar in which he gave a shit, and the woman had seen right through him, effortlessly. Smoke and mirrors. A gutted hole. A lifetime of training good for nothing. Now what?

McCloud came in, looking baffled. “Hey, Janos,” he said gruffly. “Look alive. You heard the lady. Move it.”

He just looked at the man stupidly. His throat ached. His brain stalled out.

McCloud made an impatient gesture. “Your business here is finished. Go on back to where you came from. And don’t come back.”

Val roused himself, retrieved his briefcase. In the anteroom, Nick Ward silently handed him his coat and knife. He shrugged the garment on, sheathed the knife, moving stiffly, like a robot.

Ward cleared his throat. “Hey, uh, don’t take it too hard.”

Val looked at him, utterly blank. “I beg your pardon?”

“A woman like Tam…” Ward waved his hand helplessly. “That’s, like, her way of showing that she likes you.”

Val felt a crazy urge to laugh. “Likes me? Me, the lying piece of walking shit that you have been ordered to shoot on sight?”

“Oh, don’t take that personally,” Ward encouraged. “At least you made an impression. And let me tell you, that chick is hard to impress.”

“True,” McCloud interjected dourly. “You’re still alive, so you must have something going for you. Now move it. This isn’t a fucking therapy session.”

The men flanked him, escorted him down the elevator and walked him out of the club in stolid silence. They left him a few hundred meters from the building and strode briskly away without looking back.

With an extreme act of will, Val gathered his wits and looked around. There was a bar across the street, a seedy place with few people inside. He would take refuge in a glass of scotch. He might as well continue to act like Val Janos until further notice. He had no better persona to assume. Certainly none he could call his own.

He ordered, and sipped morosely at the shot of Glenfiddich, hunched over the scarred wooden table in the backmost booth. The flavor reminded him of those gleaming, tilted eyes, taking him in, sizing him up over the rim of the cut crystal tumbler.

Piercing him through.

He could not hide from those bright eyes. Empty, paper nonentity that he was after all those years of killing and whoring for PSS.

He rubbed his face. The woman had power, he acknowledged silently. To make him creep into a bar with his shoulders hunched, to suck liquor and feel sorry for himself. But he did not have that leisure.

In forty-eight hours, Novak would start to cut. Val could not acknowledge defeat. Not yet.

He got his laptop out of the briefcase, unfolded the collapsible liquid crystal monitor into a twelve-inch screen, unfolded the tiny skeleton keyboard, and booted up. He took another swallow of scotch, let it burn its way down his gullet, and opened the file of Novak’s photographs that he had scanned into his computer that morning.

They shone, turning in the matrix. It never bored him to meditate upon them. There was always something new to discover in a photograph of Steele, even while squirming under Novak’s boot heel.

He clicked through them until he found his favorite, the most mysterious and enigmatic of them all. The black dress, the sad face. The bouquet of wild daisies and lavender laid on the bronze plaque. He put it in the matrix and took three steps back, letting it turn and shine.

A shiver went up his back as an idea took form. He began to magnify the photograph, enlarging the plaque until it filled the screen.

Other bouquets were piled below the plaque, obscuring what was engraved on it. He barely made out the word Zetrinja, a date, 1992, and some quote in a language he did not know. Then a list of names.

It was a very long list. The names were indecipherable, at least with this program, at this pixelation.

The memorial plaque and the names suggested a mass grave. There were crowds of people. Men in suits, television cameras.

A memorial service, honoring the dead from some wartime atrocity. His mind raced. 1992. The Serbo-Croatian conflict. Not his area of expertise, but Henry had spent time in the Balkans and spoke the language well. PSS had many operatives deployed there. And Henry was the only person he had spoken to about this mission.

He pulled out his phone and called him. His fellow operative was currently at the main PSS headquarters outside Paris. The phone rang six times before his friend answered, his voice thick with sleep.

“Fuck this, Val. It’s five in the morning,” Henry complained.

“I need a favor,” Val said without apology.

“Don’t you always,” Henry grumbled.

“Ever hear of a place called Zetrinja?”

Henry thought about it. “Rings a bell. Croatia, I think.”

“Go into the archives. Find what you can about what happened there in 1992. See if you can get me a list of the girls and young women from the age of, say, ten to twenty who might have been involved in it.”

Henry whistled. “You think Steele is Croatian?” he said finally.

“Could be,” Val said. “Or this could be completely irrelevant.”

Henry was silent for a long moment. “What’s going on?” he asked quietly. “Something off?”

Val hesitated. He’d been trying to decide whether or not to involve Henry in this snakepit ever since he had left Budapest. But if he needed to mount a rescue mission, he was not going to be able to do it alone. He needed backup, and Henry was the only one he trusted.

He took the plunge. “Something’s off,” he said.

He detailed Imre’s hostage situation to Henry in a few terse phrases. His friend was grimly silent afterward.

“That rots, buddy,” he said. “You are truly fucked.”

“Ah. Thank you for the encouragement. I am heartened.”

“What next?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know,” Val said. “I’m improvising. I may come up with something extremely dangerous and crazy. Can I count upon you?”

“Don’t insult me, asshole. I live for dangerous and crazy. Want me to come to—”

“No. Stay in Europe. I’ll let you know what I need. And check on Zetrinja for me as soon as you can. I need a hook into this woman.”

They closed the call, and he pulled up the phone numbers.

Time to start bothering her. In a couple of hours, Steele would know exactly who was putting it to her. With luck, she’d get angry enough to try to track him down and kill him. That old schoolyard attitude: negative attention was better than no attention at all.

He would do anything to make her notice him. Anything at all.

He should have told the boy.

Regret for not having done so ate at him worse than the physical pain. Imre tried to breathe, to relax into it, but he could not. His lungs had contracted, clenching like fists that would not relent.

He rocked back and forth on the small, hard cot, gasping for air.

The room was small, stinking. Squalid and desolate. A dim cube of concrete blocks with no natural light. Day and night were artificial constructs, defined by a brutally bright, jittery fluorescent light on a timer that was switched on for twelve hours, and off, to utter blank darkness for the other twelve. The room was filled with dismal, hopeless graffiti from its previous inhabitants, most of which appeared to have been written in human blood, or other substances even less appealing.

Imre tried not to look at it. Not wearing his spectacles helped.

The pain was grinding, unrelenting. He’d had his share of aches and pains even before the doctor’s revelation, and there were the two beatings, but the worst now were his bones, degenerating inside him.

He desperately missed the morphine tablets the doctors had given him. He missed even more the other techniques he used for pain control. Bach was his favorite. The suites for violoncello, or the partitas for violin. Music could make the mind take flight from a failing body. Also poetry, philosophy. Even just the pigeons cooing outside his apartment window, the clouds turned pink by sunset. A cup of tea and a game of chess with his old neighbor down the hall. Humble pleasures. They seemed so precious now.

He tried to call to memory his favorite psalms for comfort. He had tried to pray. He had even called on Ilona for help, and her sweet memory was always a blessing. But he was no saint, no superman.

He was terrified out of his wits.

It had been hard enough, to face up to his own impending death even before the abduction. Pancreatic cancer, they had told him. Advanced stage. They had offered him the usual treatments, but he read the look in the eyes of the doctors, he listened to what they said about infiltration, lymph nodes, metastases to liver and bone. He understood the futility of fighting it. Three months if he did nothing. That was almost a month ago now. And he had not told Vajda.

It wasn’t that he was afraid of death. He was almost eighty. Thirty years of his adult life he had lived without his darling Ilona and little Tina. He was ready—he had faith—he was almost certain that he would find Ilona and Tina on the other side of the veil, but death was still a great unknown. It was hard to let go. But it tormented him that his poor Vajda was being ground up in this monster’s infernal machine for Imre’s sake when Imre was practically a dead man already.

Not that the cancer would matter to Vajda. Seeing his foster father tortured would hurt the boy terribly. Vajda was so brittle, so vulnerable and alone. He had established no other ties, from what Imre could see, tenderhearted though he was beneath his defenses. Imre had always sensed the depth of the boy’s love for him. His need, too. Though his proud Vajda would surely rather die than admit it.

Vajda was the son he had never had. And what a son. Such intelligence, such potential, abandoned in a sewer. Pearls before swine.

He had failed his foster son. He had not succeeded in freeing him from this pigsty. Imre had wanted so badly to see Vajda bloom and grow, to see him take his rightful place in the world. He was wasted as a mercenary soldier, just as he had been wasted as a mafiya thug’s minion. That cruel, stupid waste angered him. Ate at him, for years.

Now, at last, he understood why Vajda had always insisted that he had no choice but to continue working for Novak. How ignorant, how arrogant Imre had been to scold the boy, call him foolish, defeatist. He realized now that Vajda’s caution was just a calculated bid for survival. He’d simply been displaying the pragmatic realism that had kept him alive against all odds. He owed the boy an apology.

More than an apology. He owed Vajda everything. But this was a price that the boy could not afford to pay. This would cost him his soul.

He should have told the boy. He’d been so afraid that Vajda would dig in his heels, insist on staying near if he knew Imre was ill. Budapest was a dangerous place for him, full of bitterness and painful memories. He’d thought it best that the boy stay away from his past. But the past had overtaken them with a speed no one could have foreseen.

Only Imre’s death would liberate Vajda. But how? The room was empty but for the cot, the blanket, the metal toilet sticking out of the wall. They gave him food twice a day on a plastic plate, a plastic tray, with a single flimsy plastic spoon to eat it with. There was no metal in the room to file to sharpness, no glass to break.

He shrank from the idea of taking his own life, but surely it would not be a sin if it was done for love, out of desperation. At the very least, it was less of a sin than the one that Vajda risked for his sake.

If he could only find a way.

Tam still shook with rage when the camo’d doors ground open out of the mountainside to let her into the underground garage. She’d hoped the drive would calm her down, but she was nowhere near calm. She was utterly freaked out. So angry she wanted to vomit.

Perhaps the lure of overtime pay and some abject begging would persuade Rosalia to stay for another couple of hours so Tam could throw herself onto the computer and start thrashing out a plan.

That hope vanished when she heard Rachel’s wails. They had that nails-driving-straight-into-the-brain quality that always meant a very bad night. Shit. Why now? Tonight, of all nights. She was meat.

Tam had barely put down her purse before Rosalia thrust the shrieking toddler into Tam’s arms and lunged for the closet to retrieve her coat and purse.

“Hey, Rosalia, hold on,” she protested, pitching her voice to slice through Rachel’s howls. “I was going to ask you if you could stay a little bit longer tonight, just until I have a chance to—”

“No! I have to go right now! My boys just got arrested over in Olympia! I just got the phone call, a half an hour ago, and I was going to call you, but the baby was crying and I didn’t have a chance. I have to go to my boys right now!”

Tam was startled out of her own problems, finally noticing the ashen cast of Rosalia’s face, the stress sweat on her forehead, her rolling, reddened eyes. “But—but how…” Her voice trailed off.

A terrible suspicion dawned. Oh, that evil, evil son of a bitch. Suspicion grew instantly into certainty. He would suffer for this.

“I don’t know! They were working in that restaurant, and the cops come in and say they are dealing drugs out of the kitchen!” Rosalia’s voice vibrated with outrage. “Drugs! It’s a dirty lie! My boys don’t deal drugs! They’re good boys! Roberto was going to get married next month, and Francisco, he was enrolled in night school at the community college! He’s going to be a pharmacist! They are good boys, both of them! I have to go, right now! I am sorry.”

Tam’s heart sank. “From this, I gather you won’t be able to come in for a while,” she said.

Rosalia threw up her hands. “I don’t know! How can I know when I can come again? I tell you, I am sorry! This problem, I have to fix it! I don’t know how long it will—”

“Yes, I know,” Tam said, through clenched teeth. “I understand perfectly. Hold on, Rosalia. Don’t run out just yet. Let me get something for you.” Tam tried to put Rachel down, but the kid stuck to her like she was smeared with superglue, so Tam wiggled into the pantry closet with Rachel still clutching her neck. She shoved cereals and cans carelessly out of the way and pried a board out of the wall to reveal a hidden safe. She tapped in the codes until it swung open and grabbed a few packets of emergency cash. Enough to help the hardworking Rosalia out with whatever came up, but not so much that it would frighten her.

It was the least she could do, since she was terribly afraid that Rosalia’s problems were Tam’s own goddamn fault anyhow.

She came out into the kitchen again. Rosalia waited, clutching her purse with white-knuckled hands. Tam held out the wads of cash.

“Take this,” she said brusquely. “It might help. Bail, and all.”

Rosalia took it and hefted it gingerly, her eyes big. “This…this is clean money?” she asked timidly.

Hmph. Rosalia was no fool. She had a nose for anything outlaw, despite the language barrier. “Clean enough,” she assured the older woman. “I didn’t steal it. I earned it with my jewelry business. I even paid taxes on it, wonder of wonders. Go on, get out of here, and go see to your boys. I’ll call you to see how it’s going.”

Rosalia shoved the money into her purse and grabbed Tam in a tight, impetuous hug. Tam stiffened, unprepared for it, but Rosalia didn’t care. She just chucked her on the chin, gave the whimpering Rachel a fervent kiss, and scurried down the stairs.

Her exit was another upset to Rachel’s already precarious emotional balance. It touched off a brand-new screaming, flailing fit. The kid had supernatural endurance and vocal technique that would put a Wagnerian opera diva to shame. An hour went by, and her wails were still so loud Tam didn’t even hear her alarm. Only the red strobing light over the doors informed her that there was a breach of security.

She’d installed the system so she could keep an eye on her domain while rocking out at high volume on headphones, never thinking she’d need it for dealing with a three-year-old’s high decibel tantrums. Life was funny that way.

She carried the shrieking child over to the security monitor and stared at it, a sour, sinking feeling in her belly. A police cruiser idled outside the apparently falling-down barn that camoflauged the entrance to her driveway. Two men were inside. One lifted a cell phone to his ear and talked into it, scowling. A bad sign, that they had found her at all. Someone had blown her cover. Her teeth gritted.

That filthy rat bastard. Fucking with her. Again.

She chewed her lip, barely hearing Rachel’s shrieks. If she ignored them, they would get huffy, go away, and come back in force. A siege she definitely did not need. That was a game she could not win.

She hit the button that activated the intercom hidden in a hollow tree right next to the police cruiser and typed one-handed, changing the audio settings so their responses would be loud enough to hear over Rachel’s noise. “Good evening, officers,” she said into the mike. “What can I do for you?”

The guy behind the wheel, the beefier one, jumped hearing her voice and Rachel’s coming out of nowhere. His window buzzed down, and he leaned out the window, scowling. “Ms. Steele? Is that you?”

So they knew her name, too. Worse and worse. “Yes, I’m Tam Steele,” she said. “May I ask what this is about?”

“May we come up to the house?” the man asked. “We’d like to speak to you.”

Shit, shit, shit. “May I ask what it’s about?” she asked again.

“Ms. Steele, may we come up to the house and speak to you?” the man repeated doggedly.

She mouthed a vicious curse against Val Janos’s ancestors back to the seventh generation and hit the buttons that would open up the barn passage. So much for her clever, costly camo job. It would be a public sideshow from now on. She might as well call Seth’s workmen to come and dismantle the fucking thing. What a pain in the ass.

Maybe she could sell it. Right. At an assassin’s garage sale.

She used the few minutes of grace that she had before they reached the house to dress the wiggling, shrieking Rachel in a coat and shoes, and she was waiting for them with the toddler wailing on her hip as the cruiser pulled up to the garage. A grizzled, burly older man and a skinny younger one got out, looking avidly around.

“Good evening, officers,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“Good evening, Ms. Steele. I’m Sheriff Meechum, and this is Deputy Licht,” said the older man. “Can we come in?”

She considered asking if they had a search warrant, just out of principle, but decided on the spot that it would be counterproductive. Besides, they would never find anything incriminating. She was careful that way. “Certainly,” she said, resigned. “Follow me.”

It irritated the shit out of her, being bullied into letting strange men into her private space when she and Rachel were alone. She was reasonably sure she would be a match for the two of them, even armed as they were, but not one-handed, with Rachel clinging to her neck.

Rachel changed everything. All her formulas, all her rules.

Rachel was redoubling her efforts. She always flipped out in the presence of strangers, men in particular. It had taken her many months to get used to the McCloud Crowd’s male contingent, and she was letting it be loudly known that those policemen were not on her security list. The noise grated on Tam’s sanity. She was good at blocking out unwanted sensory data. She’d had intensive training in biofeedback, but Rachel’s fits challenged her skills to the utmost.

She led them through the security room, up the stairs and into the kitchen. Between shrieks, she heard the TV. Winnie the Pooh singing about how much he loved honey.

Rosalia had left a pot of coffee, bless her. “May I offer you some coffee, officers? Cookies?” she asked politely.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Meechum said. “We’ll get right to the point. We’ve received a tip that you are using controlled substances here. Making illegal weaponry. Drugs, explosives and…whatnot.”

Tam widened her eyes in feigned shock and shook her head, switching the flailing Rachel from her exhausted right arm to the left and hoisting her higher. “No, I’m just a jewelry designer,” she said.

The guy cleared his throat. “Hmph. Well. Can you think of any reason why this accusation might have been made against you?”

“I’d better look over my list of jealous ex-lovers,” she said. “Their wives, too. You never know. The green-eyed monster.”

The officer grunted and eyed Rachel. “Ma’am, is there by any chance someone else who can look after the kid while we have this conversation? It’s, uh, hard to talk over this racket.”

“No,” Tam said. “There’s no one.”

The two men shot each other pained glances. “Couldn’t you just, you know, put her in a playpen in the other room, or something?” the younger one suggested hopefully.

As if. She’d tried that only once, and learned her lesson but good. In fact, once she thought it through, she’d felt like an insensitive idiot for trying it. Like she could put Rachel in a pen and leave her alone. A flipped-out, scared little kid who’d spent the first two and a half years of her life locked in a fucking cage.

Not in this lifetime, buddy boy. Certainly not for your convenience.

She gave them a big smile. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

Licht blushed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and his eyes slid wildly away. They darted around to try and find a place to rest, always drawn back to her face. She let him flop on his hook for a few seconds and decided that this stupid sideshow was too fucking tedious to prolong.

Best to make it mercifully quick. She sighed. “Care to come up and see my laboratory?” she asked.

The two men stumped heavily up the stairs after her. There was nothing for them to object to. The questionable substances she had on the premises were hidden in such a way that the house would have to be knocked down to get at them, or she herself drugged or tortured to reveal their locations. Meechum and Licht didn’t look like they were up to electrodes or waterboarding.

There wasn’t much of the stuff, in any case. Just a little stash for her own personal emergency use. She did not arm the needles, sprays, daggers, grenades, or bomblets before she sold them. It was too risky. Too much exposure, too much accountability. The most she did was to post recommendations for arming them in a private, password-protected place on the Internet. The rest was up to the buyer.

No doubt disseminating even that much deadly information was illegal, but what the hell. Her conscience was a callused, leathery one. It had seen some hard use in its time.

Fortunately, she had an innocuous dummy line of jewelry without any hidden weapons to show, if necessary. The wearable weaponry pieces were kept in the safes camo’d into the walls.

Tam juggled, coaxed, and vainly cuddled Rachel while the two policemen poked around her laboratory. They squinted at the dummy pieces laid out on the display table for their benefit, poking gingerly as if they expected them to bite, and examined the heavy equipment, looking bewildered. Men usually were when they dealt with her. What a bore.

They were soon ready to leave, having found no plastic bags filled with pills or powder, no bricks of hashish or explosives. Just a working studio. She politely gave each of them one of her Deadly Beauty business cards. Meechum stared at it.

“Why the ‘deadly’ part?” he demanded.

She gave him her most mysterious, lash-fluttering smile. “Oh, that’s just a little inside joke I had with an old lover, years ago,” she said, throatily. “It was his nickname for me.”

Licht chortled a little too loudly. “Must’ve been a real interesting relationship,” he blurted.

She turned a wide-open, limpid gaze on him. “Oh, yes. It was.”

He blushed, and started the squirrely eye dance again. She had to force herself not to groan and roll her eyes. Callow twit.

“Hmph. Well, then. Please don’t take any long trips. You’ll be hearing from us again, Ms. Steele,” Meechum said.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said.

She and Rachel saw them out. The men climbed into their squad car with an air of relief. Thrilled to get away from the human ambulance siren, Tam reflected glumly as she watched their taillights recede into the night. Lucky them.

It took the better part of an hour to get Rachel calmed down, into pajamas and cuddled to sleep. At that point, she was too tired even to work up another fit of righteous anger at Janos’s malicious meddling.

What a cruel joke. Whenever she let down her guard, she got screwed. But did she learn? Never.

Seldom did any of her lovers crack through her armor and startle her into genuine excitement—and not surprisingly, every single time it had happened, it had proven to be a disaster.

The last time had been with Victor Lazar, Raine’s uncle. He’d at least been as fucked up as she herself, and every bit as shady, but so strong. He had radiated strength…like Janos did. That was the attraction, she reflected. Janos was right. She liked strength. A lot.

But Lazar had gotten himself killed before she even had a chance to enjoy him. Deservedly so, but still, it hurt. She’d wanted to punish his killer. Which was what had gotten her mixed up with Kurt Novak.

She shuddered. She’d considered herself up for anything, but that guy had been way over her head. Brilliant, sadistic, psychotic. Then there was Georg to add yet another flesh-creeping element to the mix.

Stop. She had more than enough fodder for nightmares in her head without dwelling on those guys.

She went down to the kitchen with a vague plan to stare out the window at the dark while sipping a shot of single malt when she noticed the light flashing on the answering machine. A rare occurrence, considering how few people had the number. She stabbed “play.”

“Ms. Steele? This is Emma Carew from the adoption agency. There’s been a hitch in the adoption proceedings. We really must talk about this in person, but I’m afraid that we may have to review the case. I’m not sure I should be calling you like this, but after all our conversations, I feel I owe you a personal explanation before we have to…well, this is terribly embarrassing, but we’ve received some alarming information regarding possible criminal activity in your household, and, er, your own unstable psychological condition. It may be necessary for us to take Rachel into protective custody pending a full investigation and psych evaluation for you, just until we can clarify that this—”

Rip. Tam yanked the machine right out of the wall. She flung it at the blank brick wall across the room. Crash, it fell to the ground in pieces. She stared at it, face red, heart revving.

Yes, very nice, Tamar. Lovely demonstration of your maturity, your fitness for parenting, lectured a dry, academic voice in her head. All ready for your psych evaluation, aren’t you?

It was her mother’s voice. It gave her a pang. She hadn’t thought or even dreamed in that language for years. Hadn’t known that she still remembered the sound of it. She hadn’t heard it since she was fifteen.

Certainly not. How could you, knowing exactly what I would say about your carryings-on? For the love of God, Tamar. Really.

Oh, shut up, she silently said back. The voice did. Another one of her mother’s dirty tricks. Haughty retreat. The silent treatment.

She instantly regretted having banished the internalized ghost, snippy though it was. The room seemed so empty without it.

She’d never suffered from loneliness before. She’d never minded solitude at all. On the contrary, aloneness meant safety, quiet, peace from the greedy, grabbing demands of other people. Aloneness meant cleanliness, freedom. She craved it.

That was why she loved working with metal and gemstones, beyond the natural love she had inherited from her goldsmith father. They were hard, shining, nonporous substances, impervious to stain. They did not absorb filth, they did not rot or corrupt. They were clean, stark, inviolable. She loved that. Longed for it.

Janos had guessed it. He’d put his finger right on it. And yet, he was the one who they sent to pimp her out to that scum Georg. He was the one charged with the task of throwing her back into the sewer.

Bastard. Putting Rachel’s safety at risk. She would pulverize him, eviscerate him, iron-maiden him. She punched in his number.

He picked up swiftly, even at this late hour. “Ms. Steele?”

“Don’t you Ms. Steele me, you stinking turd,” she hissed in Italian. “How dare you?”

“Ms. Steele.” The velvety amusement in his voice infuriated her. “I’m pleased to hear from you again so soon—”

“Shut up,” she snarled. “Mess with me and my daughter again, and I will annihilate you.”

A thoughtful pause on the other end. “Try to calm down,” he said gently in Italian. “Let’s meet and talk about this like two reasonable—”

“Fuck you,” she snarled. “You make me sick.”

She hung up on him and burst into tears.