Читать книгу Shannon McKenna Bundle: Ultimate Weapon, Extreme Danger, Behind Closed Doors, Hot Night, & Return to Me - Shannon McKenna - Страница 30

András sat in the beachside bar, sipping his sixth espresso as he studied the monitor that revealed Janos’s position. The man had been wandering around the beach aimlessly after renting himself a car. The local man with the handheld monitor had him under visual surveillance, not far away. Everything was firmly under control.

Unfortunately, he had not brought Tamara on this pleasure jaunt. András had hoped to wrap this matter up this morning and get on his way. He wondered, with a stab of doubt, if Janos had bonded with Steele. Fucking a beautiful woman could have that effect on an unwary man. But Janos was anything but unwary. He was a seasoned professional and Novak’s hold over him was strong.

He would order the man to deliver her today, and perhaps the matter would end there. A swift, professional exchange.

If not, however, the situation would probably require protracted, sophisticated torture, and he suspected that Janos would take a great deal of time, effort and soundproof privacy to break. András was more than equal to the task.

His cell vibrated. He glanced at it, and was surprised to see that it was from the big boss himself. He answered promptly. “Yes?”

“Do you have them yet?”

András paused, startled at the urgency in the old man’s tone. “I have Janos under my eye physically right now, but not Steele.”

“Bring them in,” Novak rapped out. “Today. Immediately. Do everything you can to bring them in. There’s been a change in plans.”

“What change?”

“We’ve lost our leverage with Janos,” Novak said. “The old man killed himself. Slashed his femoral artery, right over my favorite Turkish rug. While on the videophone to Janos.”

András leaned back and was grateful that his boss could not see the appreciative smile that curved his mouth. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring him in. The woman as well. And I have another prize for you.”

“And that is?” Novak’s voice sounded sulky.

András savored the moment. “Steele’s daughter. Three years old. A lovely flower for you to pluck. Already en route from Seattle.”

There was an astonished pause, and then a harsh, wheezing crack of laughter. “András, you are a genius.”

I know, you selfish old bastard, and so why did you favor that fawning pup Luksch over me? “I live to serve you, boss,” he said.

“Call me when you have them,” Novak said.

András considered his options. He had no idea when Janos would rejoin the woman. No idea what she might do in the meantime. Too many unknowns. She could take off on her own and fuck them all.

Best to force her whereabouts out of Janos now, reduce the number of variables immediately. He texted the others of his makeshift local team to converge on Janos’s beach. If the man decided to be difficult, one of them had to know of a deserted garage or warehouse nearby where András could exercise his special talents to the fullest.

Val put the computer on the passenger seat very carefully. As if it were a wounded person who could not be jarred. His hands felt numb.

On autopilot, he grabbed the car keys and pushed open the car door. He stumbled out onto the rocky beach and kept walking, all the way to where it sloped down to the rocky little coves.

He fell to his knees. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move. He was cut loose, spinning in space.

Memories played in his mind. Games of chess in the twilight, cups of tea. Philosophy, lectures and arguments and admonishments that made him roll his eyes and scoff, secretly enjoying the attention. Bach and Chopin, Dante and Socrates and Galileo. Van Gogh, Picasso, Rembrandt. The world Imre had shown him. So beautiful, outside that squalid hole he was mired in like a fucking tarpit. Beautiful, even though Val could never quite reach it. Like a mirage in the desert, forever taunting him.

The pebbles roared with each wave that slapped the beach. He realized that he’d come to the place Domenico had brought him when he’d been infiltrating the smuggling ring and fucking Donatella.

The honeycomb of smugglers’ caves.

Tourists came from all over the world to stroll the beach, sip cappuccino, and take boat rides inside the glowing, flickering lakes inside those mysterious caves. No idea of the cruelty and violence and greed that always lurked just out of sight behind the mask of beauty.

Imre. He started to cry, covering his face, shoulders jerking. He felt like the twelve-year-old boy he had been when Imre had befriended him, and showed him what trust looked like. How kindness felt.

The first time he had understood what kindness even was. He had never known it before, not really. Val’s own mother had not been cruel—but she was broken, weak. Too degraded by drugs and disappointment to trust. Too lost in despair to be kind.

He had loved her anyway, desperately, but he knew even then that she was broken. Kindness required strength and courage. Coherence.

These types of thoughts were so unfamiliar to his mind, it almost hurt to think them. Like eyes opening up for the first time, squinting and awash with tears, unable to bear the brilliant light.

Tamar was the strongest, most courageous woman he had ever known. Strong enough to trust. Strong enough to be kind, too, whether she knew it or not. Kindness from her would be something real. Something he could touch, grab on to. Something he could live in.

He had a dizzy sense of being adrift, swirling, with no oars, no sense of direction. He had to find a course to set, fast. To save the last chance he had for a real life. Him and Tamar and Rachel. They could run together to the ends of the earth. Disappear like smoke.

Anything so that Imre’s desperate last move would not be in vain.

Get Tamar. Get away. He was equal to that with the resources he had, if he moved his ass, made his weak knees, his jelly-like thighs move. If he could stop the tears.

There would be time enough for tears later at that haven at the ends of the earth. With his family around him.

His family. His heart felt like it would burst. Ah, Imre.

He rubbed the tears out of his eyes again, and that was when he saw them, gleaming in front of his face. Highly shined, pointy-toed, hand-tooled black Italian leather shoes. Well-tailored pants draped over them. A long black cashmere coat, flapping in the raw sea breeze.

Val’s gaze traveled up, saw the big, silenced pistol. Big shoulders. Thick neck. Sealed, hard mouth. Black snake eyes.

András. There were five other men with him. Large, bulky men. Italian, and local, from the looks of them. They shifted into position around him.

“You’ve been called home,” András said. “Where’s the woman?”

He started to rise to his feet. The pistol swung up, aimed at his face. He sank back down. In his peripheral vision, tourists wandered on the beach, too far away to blunder by and help or be witnesses. One of András’s men held a tracking device.

A tracking device? How had they tagged him? How?

Two thoughts blazed in his head. Contradictory thoughts. The first was that finally, he was free to die after Imre’s gift. Tamar was smart enough, crafty enough to slip away and save herself on her own.

The second was that they could not kill him outright—yet. Not without prying her position out of him first.

So fuck the guns. He’d trained hard for years in the art of fighting from a crouching or kneeling position. Fighting six men on their feet from that position was problematic, but who cared. He had nothing better to do. He was free to die if he damn well felt like it.

No. He thought of Tamar, and suddenly, he did not feel like it.

His lower body exploded upward, balanced on his hands, boot heel connecting with the chin of the man nearest him, crunch. The man pinwheeled backward and fell to the ground, gurgling. Val’s other leg whipped around like a lash and hooked the legs of the next man, dragging him down with a vicious jerk.

Action detonated something inside him, the anger and fear and humiliation of the past days abruptly channeled into berserk madness. He got in a vicious punch to the point of the man’s nose, which loosened his grip on his gun, which Val wrenched loose and out of his hands. He swung it up, shot the man point blank in the gut.

Another man was diving for him. Thhtp, he got one into the thigh, knocking his legs out from under him. The man toppled in Val’s direction. Two heavy bodies weighing him down to the jagged rocks.

He struggled, heaving, breaking loose just in time to roll away from a kick from András that would have cracked his spine. He caught it on his hip, let its energy keep him rolling up onto his feet.

He kept the pain at bay as András came on with a growling shout. Parried a slashing blow to the neck, trapped András’s wrist in a tendon-twisting hold, spun him around and sent him flying into one of his men, who tripped and fell on his ass.

András sprawled on top of him, roaring with rage.

Go. This was his cue to run and test the hopeful theory that they could not shoot him, not without Tamar. Not fatally, at least.

Two shots rang out. Neither hit him. András howled in his thickly accented Italian. “No, dickhead idiot! Hold your fire! We need him alive!”

He slipped, rolled, slid down the steep rocks to the drop-off to the little cove beach where Domenico had showed him the belly-crawl entrance to the cave—and stopped, teetering on the brink.

That entrance had been accessible at low tide. At high tide, on a cold, blustery winter’s day with the sea wildly agitated, that little cove was deep beneath a seething, heaving bowl of frigid foam.

He leaped.

The living room was full of people, but no one seemed to be able to speak. The words had all been said and repeated, over and over. Now they were locked in a nail-chewing, coffee-sipping, miserable silence.

Sveti stared down into the cup of cold herbal tea, rocking back and forth. Her taped ribs hurt every time she drew breath, her wrist throbbed in the brace, her bandaged knees and hands burned and stung, but she deserved it. Worse, even, for letting that happen to Rachel. Again.

“Did you call her again?” she asked.

Connor shook his head. “I’ve called her over ten times. She’s still unreachable.”

Sveti felt her face crumple. She covered it with her hands. “She will hate me so much,” she whispered.

“Wrong. Fuck, no,” Sean said roughly. “Nobody but nobody blames you, Sveti. Tam won’t, either. It was our fault for not being careful. Not taking this thing seriously enough. We’ve all gotten slack. You were right outside the house, for Christ’s sake.”

Sveti shook her head. “I didn’t even get a car license number.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Davy said flatly. “It would have been bogus and it wouldn’t have helped us. Anyone gunning for Tam is a hard-core professional.”

“Davy!” his wife snapped. “Isn’t Sveti miserable enough already?”

“Sorry,” Davy said.

The police had been and gone, an Amber Alert had been issued, but no one had any illusions that they would be able to find whoever had taken Rachel. All the McClouds and their close friends were there, crowded into Connor and Erin’s living room. All except for Nick and Becca, off on their honeymoon in Mexico on a beach in the sun. Sveti wished that he were here, too.

She rubbed her swollen eyes and struggled to breathe around the fear and grief. How scared Rachel must be, all alone with those bad men. It hurt to think of it, worse than any physical pain she could imagine. It would be so much easier to cut it off, to not care, but she had never had any luck with that. She’d tried very hard when she was with the organ thieves, but it had never taken. Not really.

So this was the truth she’d been wondering about. The lurking nightmare of cruelty was reality. Freedom and flowers and the blue sky—that part was just the hopeful dream. It was the answer to her dilemma.

Now she knew the truth. And her only refuge was anger.

“They will never do this to me again,” she heard herself say.

Everyone in the room looked at her, as if afraid her mind had cracked under the strain. She looked around, wild-eyed. She had to make them understand with the limited English that she had.

“They will not do this to me again. The assholes,” she said. “I won’t let them. I want to become like Tam. I want to be able to kick the asses of the assholes. Anyone who hurts or scares a little child, I want to…to cut off their balls. Put out their eyes. Rip out their guts.”

Then they were looking at her, and she knew they were seeing her ninety-pound frame, her skinny wrists, how wispy and weak and insignificant she was. Fury flashed through her. Her fingers clenched into fists as hard as diamonds, for all they were so tiny.

“It doesn’t matter that I’m small.” Her voice was high, shaking. “I’m not stupid. That’s more important. I can get stronger. I can use guns, bombs, rocket launchers. I will make those fuckers pay.”

Margot sat down next to her and slid an arm around her waist. “I don’t doubt it for a second, sweetheart,” she said. “But we have to get this thing sorted out. I understand how angry you are—and how scared. And how young.”

The men looked at each other with obvious alarm. Their women glared right back at them. There was a moment of curious tension.

Sean made a noncommittal sound. “Huh. Well, then. I guess it’s gonna be law enforcement for you, honey, just like your dad,” he said. “Someday.”

Connor’s head sunk down between his shoulders. “I can’t believe this,” he said for the tenth time. “Right outside the door. We should have sent Rachel to Stone Island with—”

“Bodyguards and an armored car, and two of us. Suck it up and let it go,” Sean said harshly.

“Jesus,” Con muttered, “Tam trusted me to protect her kid. And I let her down. I’m a fucking brain-dead idiot dick.”

“Stop right there, bro,” Davy said. “Don’t. Not useful.”

Connor’s head came up, eyes blazing. “It could have been Kev,” he said. “Easily. Or Jeannie. He’s got as much of a grudge against me and Erin as he does with Tam. If the people in my family ever have a hope in hell of sleeping through the night, those fuckers have got to die.”

“Of course,” Sean said. “So we’ll do it. Let’s move on.”

“Move where?” Connor’s voice was vicious. “We have no leads. Just a couple of badass lowlife fuckers in Eastern Europe with the means and the motive. But where? Which one?”

“Maybe they’ll make contact, just to taunt us,” Sean said. “Or maybe Tam will have a clue. Something’s got to give. Call her again.”

Connor picked up the phone, pushed a button, waited. He shook his head and let it drop into his hands. They fell into a silence as cold and heavy as lead.

How the fuck had they found him?

The question burned in Val’s mind as he dragged himself up out of the icy water. The jagged rocks tore and sliced at his hands and knees. Fortunately, he was too numb to really feel it.

When he’d last been here with Domenico at low tide, they’d been equipped with scuba suits, neoprene gripper gloves, flashlights attached to their headgear. It had been high summer, five years ago.

He composed his mind as best he could to remember the twists and turns of the place, the loops, the dead ends. Only one access to the caves was large, light and attractive enough to develop for tourists. The rest was a dank, dripping labyrinth, most of which had to be squeezed through to keep from ripping off one’s scalp.

How had they found him? Every stitch of clothing he had on had been bought two days before in Sorrento en route from the airport.

The ugly truth sank in, slithering into his mind, starting with his belly and creeping its slow, relentless way into his conscious mind.

Not his clothes. Not his equipment. Him. He himself, Val Janos, his physical body, had an RF transmitter in it somewhere.

That was how Hegel’s Seattle team got to Tam and Rachel at the airport—by following him. That was how they’d been nailed the day before at the hotel. That must have been how András had gotten him today. Which meant that Hegel must be dead.

He felt humiliated. He lacked the mental flexibility to think an unthinkable thought. Fucking thick-skulled idiot.

Being deep inside a cave solved the problem in the short term. There was no way they could trace him now. But unless he intended to take up residence there and eat eyeless fish who subsisted only on bat shit, he had to come up with a better idea, and fast. If they knew where he was, they could very well know where he had been. That would be András’s next move once he got tired of searching for Val here.

Tam was waiting in one of those places that was almost certainly archived in their files—unless she had already thumbed her nose at him and left. Altogether possible, knowing her. Probable enough even to hope for. He hoped she would be her usual difficult, independent self and get the hell out of there.

There was the pebbly underground beach that he remembered. He felt the smoother surface, the little sliding rocks beneath his feet. Underwater, of course, but he remembered this spot because it had not been entirely lightless. A deep crack in La Roccia had created a narrow canyon that let in a gleam of indirect light from the outside. From some distance beyond, he could hear the waves crashing, and a dim glow filtered down. What had been three meters of pebbly wet beach at low tide was now a narrow, half-meter strip of jagged rock, the weird, stalactite-sprouting ceiling slanting down low to meet it. Too low to sit.

He shook violently from the cold. His torn knees and hands stung from the salt water. His face and hip stung and throbbed from blows he hadn’t noticed during the fight, and his shoulder—

His shoulder. He reached up to touch the scar from the bullet wound last year. He’d been examined and treated by doctors in PSS’s pay, after having infuriated Hegel and several others with his inconvenient scruples about child killing. Those doctors had been the ones to sew him up in that secret clinic in Bogotá.

The shoulder had been slightly inflamed ever since. He felt nothing out of the ordinary palpating it, although his fingers were numb. He’d thought the chronic pain in the scar was normal enough. It wasn’t the only old wound or scar he had that ached and throbbed. He didn’t heal as fast as he had ten years before.

So he’d assumed. Not anymore.

He could not leave this cave and go to Tam with that thing inside him. He could lead them away from her, but eventually they would catch up with him and overcome him. His resources were almost tapped out, whereas Novak’s were limitless.

And unfortunately for him, he had witnessed what András could do to a man to extract information. He had never forgotten the experience. Val could not hold out forever. Not against that.

The shoulder was his best and only guess. He had to do it here and now. He could think of no place where he would have more light, other than La Grotta’s tourist chamber. What a show that would be for the English and German visitors on the pleasure boats.

He would rather not be sitting nipple deep in ice cold saltwater for an operation like this, but there was no alternative. He freed his knife from the sheath Velcro’ed to his ankle. Not easy. His hands barely functioned. Getting off the waterlogged jacket and unbuttoning his shirt was the next challenge. His fingers felt thick, dead. He was lucky the wound was in front of his shoulder.

Luck? Hah. He was the only miserable fool on earth who could call a detail like that luck. The knife point shook over the scarred meat of his shoulder as he breathed deep, gathering the courage. Wasn’t this just the story of his fucking life. Forever contemplating the knife he had to stab himself with.

Self-pity would not help him. Nor would he warm up any more, waiting. He would only get colder until he was in shock.

So do it, testa di cazzo. Cut. Now.

His muscles jerked, driving the knife into what he desperately hoped was the right direction—the spot where the most pain was concentrated. He stifled the scream into a strangled moan. Tears streamed down his face. He locked his jaw into a grimace that threatened to loosen his teeth—and thought of Imre. That shard of glass, stabbing downward with such resolve. Imre’s courage. His gift.

Again. He prodded. Blood welled up, slippery and hot as it trickled down his arm. Salt burned in the wound. He prodded deeper, making a low, desperate sound in his throat.

Again. He dragged in a sobbing breath, changed the angle of the blade. Cut again.

This time he could not stifle the shout of pain. Faintness threatened. He dug around with the knife tip, willing his blood pressure to stabilize—and felt it. Yes. A tickety-click, of something non-organic, something that was not muscle, tendon, cartilage or bone.

He dug in with his fingers and felt the very tip of the thing. Hard and smooth. Then it slid away from his blunt fingertip. He needed tweezers, he needed light. He tried again, pressing down on the ragged, tormented flesh on either side of where it had been to force it out.

It popped out and almost dropped into the inky black water. His shaking hand grabbed at the air. It bounced four times. Amazingly, he caught it.

He rocked back and forth, gasping desperately for several minutes before he could bear to open his eyes and examine the thing.

A bloody little capsule, no larger than a pill. So small, made of plastic or ceramic. He puzzled for a split second about the power source. His own body’s electromagnetic field, perhaps.

He didn’t have the mental energy to wonder, wavering a breath away from vomiting or fainting. If he fainted, he would drown.

More decisions. He could drop the thing into the water here and be done with it. That would stall the search but not divert it. He needed to play for time, and the transmitter was the only card he had to play.

He stuck it into his pocket.

He had nothing to bandage the wound with, and he had to swim through the caves anyway, so he dragged his sodden shirt and jacket back on over his shuddering torso, almost screaming at the rasp of soggy, salty fabric against the wound. He could only hope that the salt would help disinfect it. He lurched forward into the cave.

What felt like hours of blundering and suffering followed. Finally, by pure chance, he saw the flickering glow of the light from the larger caves filtering in from the other side of the huge rock formation. He swam out into the lake, and found himself looking up at one of the boats that brought groups of tourists in to tour the scenic part of the Grotta. The boat slid by. A row of astonished faces stared down as the tour guide droned on in English. “…butterfly chamber, so called for the shape of the mineral formation in the center…”

“Would you look at that, Rhonda?” a fat, middle-aged man called out in English. “In January! Must be a German or a Swede.”

The tour guide looked over and gaped. “Ehi! Tu!” she shouted out. “Swimming is not allowed in La Grotta!”

It took several attempts to get the words out of his throat, he was shivering so hard. “Va benissimo,” he spluttered. “Believe me, signorina. I was just leaving.”

He was grateful when he finally crawled up onto the rocks at the entrance. He could barely move, but he couldn’t crouch there and just shiver and quake while passersby watched wide-eyed, and the transmitter betrayed him with RF bursts. He forced himself to trail behind a departing group, following them into the crowded port. Trying not to stagger and lurch like a zombie. Failing, for the most part.

San Vito was a tourist trap even in winter for the English and Germans and Scandinavians, for whom this nippy air was balmy and this watery sunshine practically tropical. He picked up his pace as he moved through the surging crowd, but did not allow himself to run. He was dead if he acted like prey. Nor could he look over his shoulder, up at La Roccia, although the effort not to was killing him. András or one of his men was almost certainly peering down with binoculars.

A ferry heading to a cluster of nearby islands was docked and loading, with a long file of vehicles in the chute to drive on. Val ducked through the line of cars and staggered alongside it, shoulders hunched, head down. Trying to look as unobtrusive as a dripping, bleeding, beaten up, hypothermic man at the point of going into shock could be.

Finally, he spotted a diversion. A small, three-wheeled agricultural utility vehicle driven by a grizzled old man. From the stink, it had held fish that morning. The fisherman had come to the mainland to sell his catch and was heading back to his island home.

Val dug the bloody capsule out of his pocket, tossed it into the back of the rickety contraption, and began to walk faster and faster.

Soon he was heading up the steep hill, taking every short cut through the meandering cobblestoned switchbacks. If he could get down to the car without being seen, he had half a chance.

He finally gave in to the nervous urge to lope, despite jolting agony in his shoulder at every step. Everyone was staring at him anyway.