Without A Trace

by Sandra Moore

  Nikki regarded Dana for a moment. “I have leave coming up. Might be able to get a couple of weeks if I ask nicely.”

  “Then you’ll do it.”

  Dana was all business, even when she was being friendly. She knew about Nikki’s origins in Lab 33, just as she knew Jess’s. She also worked for the mysterious Delphi, who herself—or himself—was the mouthpiece for the more mysterious Oracle.

  And all these pieces came together around the Athena Academy, where Nikki had found herself surrounded for the first time by women. Not just women. Like-minded women who were driven by a sense of purpose, and who weren’t afraid to sacrifice whatever it took to achieve a greater good.

  Like the people on the shrimp trawler this morning, who’d been willing to sacrifice everything—homes, jobs, community—to bring their children to a foreign land for a chance at a better life. For the greater good of the family.

  Nikki knew about the greater good of the family. She had her own family full of crazy, laughing brothers and loving parents. She had the Hecates and Jess.

  She had Athena, which suddenly faced threats against it, threats against its students, past and present.

  The waiter placed steaming platters of food in front of them, but neither woman touched her plate.

  Nikki’s jaw clenched. “Arachne has it in for Athena.”

  Dana’s silence spoke volumes. It just didn’t give details.

  Nikki nodded, satisfied. For the moment. “Hong Kong.”

  Chapter 3

  T he moment Nikki stepped into the Hong Kong International Airport terminal, she turned on the GSM quad-band phone Dana had given her. Not only was Delphi well-informed, Nikki thought, but she provided cutting-edge technology to her field operatives. A built-in scrambler kept messages safe.

  Nikki snorted. Field operative. Yeah, that’s me.

  Still smiling, she slung her backpack over her shoulder, preparing to shoulder her way through the throng flowing toward the illuminated sign that read Trains to city. A chirping sound started up and it took her a moment to realize it was her new phone. She slid sideways through the slipstream of travelers to a vacant spot by the wall.

  Nikki answered the phone with, “Your timing’s good.”

  “There’s a problem,” Dana replied. “We lost your contact.”

  Nikki settled her backpack between her feet. “What do you mean ‘lost’?”

  “Regina Woo’s been killed.”

  Shock coursed through Nikki’s veins as she let her back make contact, hard, with the polished stone wall. She didn’t know Regina—she was another Athena student who’d graduated before Nikki arrived—and had had limited contact with her to set up their meeting, but…she was Athena. She was a sister. And having grown up in Hong Kong before moving to the States, she was a natural contact for this mission to find Diviner.

  “What happened?” Nikki asked.

  “She was ambushed leaving work late last night. It looks like a gang murder to the police, but we think the gang was reporting to someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Triads.”

  Well, hell. Nikki knew of the triads only by reputation. The gang specialized in cocaine and heroin export with side businesses in extortion and child prostitution. They also had a nasty habit of cutting off the fingers of members who’d disappointed them and giving a traitor the “Death By a Thousand Cuts.”

  “What about the guy Regina hired to keep watch for the SHA vessel?” she asked. “Is he still working for us?”

  “As far as we know.” Dana was silent for a moment. “Regina worked with several people. Let’s hope Johnny Zhao is one of the less…interesting…ones.”

  “I don’t have a way of contacting him. I’ll have to meet up with him in port.” Nikki cursed inwardly. Meet up with a man whose face she didn’t know in a city she’d never visited and without her familiar Smith & Wesson 9 mm in her hand. This didn’t look good. Or feel good. She could be walking toward her death just as readily as Regina had. “I don’t like it.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  Nikki didn’t hesitate. “Finish the job.”

  “You sounded unsure.”

  “I was just stating a fact.” She lowered her voice as a tourist couple, English by their tweed slacks, walked by, gawking and dragging heavy suitcases. Nikki tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice as she said, “I couldn’t bring a firearm into the country and I’m stuck now without a weapon. Or a translator in case this guy doesn’t speak English like the rest of post-Brit Hong Kong. I don’t like it. These are facts, but they don’t mean I won’t finish what I’ve started.”

  “I might be able to call in some backup from New Mexico—”

  “Our window’s closing,” Nikki snapped. “The ship is due in tonight and I need to be on it as soon as I can get on it. I can’t afford to wait for someone else to fly in as backup. Our mark will have disappeared by then.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I’ll hook up with the contact if I can find him and go from there.”

  “Call me tomorrow.” A pause. “If you get a chance.”

  Nikki nodded. Dana actually meant if you’re still alive. “Will do.”

  She snapped the phone shut.

  Her first priority was to locate this Johnny Zhao guy, assuming he was still alive. He was supposed to be stationed at the container terminal, but as she didn’t know his face, she had no idea who to look for.

  It’s easy, she reprimanded herself. Look for the armed Chinese guy in black hanging out in the shadows.

  Right.

  This mission would be a challenge, but she’d faced challenges before. Unbidden, the Cuban girl’s face surfaced in her mind. She ruthlessly shut the vision out of her head. Time to get moving. The sooner she hooked up with Zhao, the sooner she’d get her hands on a sidearm. Or a rifle. Preferably both.

  She headed down the wide tunnel toward the trains, and a huge party of Chinese caught up to her, talking amongst themselves in complex, tonal Cantonese. As they swirled around her, dragging their luggage and waving at small children to catch up, Nikki caught the clean cotton scent of new clothes layered on warm flesh that exuded garlic, ginger and some other scent she couldn’t name. They closed around her tightly, enveloping her completely until her wide-open-spaces, American self felt almost claustrophobic, then hurtled forward to close around her as if she were a tree planted in the middle of a stream.

  A hard bump knocked her elbow forward. Nikki instinctively rocked onto the balls of her feet, ready to fight.

  A little girl in a pleated skirt and crisp white shirt shot her a half-fearful, half-apologetic smile as she sprinted past, her perfectly straight blue-black hair shimmering on her shoulders. A man who might have been the girl’s father cuffed her gently and guided her in front of him.

  Nikki decided she was a helluva long way from home.

  The wind kicked up and the scent hit her face-first: sea and salt mixed with diesel fumes and old fish. Now this felt more like home.

  Nikki flattened into the shadow of massive metal containers stacked four high and hoped the security guard wouldn’t hear the water dripping from her wet suit. He walked briskly, his boots crisp on the pavement, and disappeared down past a line of containers laid out like a child’s carefully arranged toy blocks.

  The Kwai Chung Container Terminal was a city that never slept. It gleamed at night, lit partly from its own high-powered floods and partly from the high-rises packed along the southwest shore of the New Territories. Of its nine terminals—Kwai Chung was the busiest container terminal in the world—Terminal Eight would accept delivery of the SHA shipment.

  And it had taken a heckuva lot of cunning to get inside. Fortunately, no one had been watching the water for sneaky swimmers. The ladder bolted into the concrete pier was just as convenient for her as it would have been for a clumsy sailor, and the metal gate guarding it had yielded to some basic lock-picking.

  Her goal was simple. Get aboard
the SHA vessel and use her PDA to scan for a signal. If Diviner was on the ship, the signal strength would lead her to him. Then she’d contact Delphi.

  Nikki peeled out of her wet suit to reveal a black long-sleeved shirt and the formfitting black pants she used for her martial arts training workouts. Her face she’d already smeared with grease, and her hair was swept back in a secure ponytail. The waterproof gear bag was slung on her back like a backpack.

  She glanced around the corner of the container stack that hid her. The SHA vessel loomed at the pier’s edge, its massive dock lines—as big around as her waist—looped over the equally massive mooring cleats. Lights blazed on deck as dockhands moved back and forth, adjusting lines and checking the payload. A man in a hard hat and carrying a clipboard emerged from the bridge tower, shouted something to the workers, then headed down the boarding plank for the dock.

  Getting aboard that vessel wouldn’t be anywhere as easy as getting into the terminal.

  It would have helped if she’d been able to find Johnny Zhao, but he either wasn’t around or he was a ghost. She just hoped he wasn’t the kind of ghost who started out alive but was now dead. Or the kind of ghost who turned on his employer, killed her and then faded away.

  Anger mingled with fear trickled through her muscles. If he’d killed Regina Woo—and if she could find him—she’d have his hide.

  Nikki waited until she counted eight men leaving the vessel. If whatever was on board was important, it’d likely have security teams crawling all over it. She saw only one man still on deck, a pistol holstered at his belt, so perhaps the ship was running a skeleton crew.

  The terminal’s security guard made another pass through the stacked containers. Nikki checked her watch. His schedule gave her about ten minutes to get up and out of sight.

  She shimmied through shadows until she crouched next to the bow mooring cleat. The huge dock line arced gracefully up to the vessel’s scupper; the nearest big floodlight pointed away from the bow. Perhaps her unorthodox entrance would go unnoticed. Either that or everyone would see her grappling for purchase on the way up. Not pretty.

  Nikki hopped onto the cleat and tested her footing on the dock line. Her soft shoe soles gripped the rough, twisted line, and its texture gave her plenty of purchase. The good news was that it wasn’t anywhere as difficult as dragging herself up a Coast Guard cutter’s wave-washed deck in high seas. In moments she had inched her way up to the scupper and hoisted herself over the rail and onto the deck.

  Another minute of sticking close to shadows and moving silently had her sequestered near the containers still stacked aboard the ship. Above her, a crane’s giant hook hung in the air, abandoned, as if the five o’clock whistle had just blown. On the ship, the containers sat bunched together and tied down by massive cables, with little space for a smallish woman to slide between them. Still, she managed to squeeze in.

  Hard-soled boots clanged on the steel deck, driving her deeper into the shadows. While she waited for the deckhand to pass by, she scanned the containers that hid her. Nothing out of the ordinary. She needed to get inside, where passengers—including Alexander Wryzynski—would be awaiting the captain’s permission to disembark.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noted a blip of black between the metal containers—someone had passed the gap where she hid. The better place to evaluate the situation would be up top, she realized, and pressing her feet and hands on opposite containers, she crept up between them, using leverage to keep herself suspended. Another blip of movement. Nikki froze. When the person disappeared, she crab-walked the rest of the way to the top.

  Far enough from the ship’s deck lights to be in shadow even up here in the open, she could safely assess the situation.

  The ship’s five-story bridge gleamed like a Hong Kong skyscraper. She counted six men walking purposefully past windows that were probably crew quarters. Another two, judging from their footsteps far below, paced the deck. Might as well assume another two, maybe three, in the engine room.

  Were they all crew, or a security team, or what?

  And where the hell was Johnny Zhao? According to her last phone call with Regina, he was supposed to meet them here.

  Ten crewmen. One potential but notably absent ally. One unarmed woman.

  That sounded about right.

  Nikki stifled a snort and pulled her PDA from her gear bag. It fired up instantly.

  “Wireless signal, come to mama,” she mouthed as she launched the signal probe.

  The PDA registered two wireless signals: one from the terminal that looked like a wide area network, and one whose network name was complete gibberish. Not even random numbers and letters, but blocks, as if it used an alphabet unavailable to her PDA.

  Is that you, Diviner? she wondered.

  Her PDA faithfully monitored the signal without attempting to access the machine producing it. Dana had told her that Oracle believed the signal to be a sophisticated satellite hookup rather than part of a standard network. The gibberish seemed to confirm that.

  The mystery signal was pretty strong, seventy-four percent. Nikki scuttled aft, toward the bridge, then paused. The signal strengthened a fraction to seventy-six.

  Nikki stowed the PDA back in her gear bag. There was little chance she’d manage to get onto the bridge or into the hold unnoticed. Maybe she should try to arm herself first.

  She slipped back between the containers and shimmied down to the deck. Moments of darting between big metal boxes, pausing to check for guards and sprinting across the occasional open area put her beneath the overhang of the bridge’s house and once more out of the light. She was ready to go inside, and the starboard door sat invitingly open about six feet away.

  Shouts drove her to drop to her knees. A split second later, a bullet pinged off one of the containers. She lunged for the bridge door and spun around it—

  And stopped short.

  The guard’s eyes widened. Without thinking, Nikki swept her right arm down to block the gun hand he was raising, then snapped a front kick to his kneecap. It crunched. He went down. She snatched the firearm from his loosened grip, then threw all of her one hundred and twenty-five pounds behind a left cross to his cheek.

  This guy weighs more than he looks, she thought as she dragged his unconscious body behind a mess of old tarps. She checked the weapon. A semiautomatic of undetermined make, though she suspected it might be a bootleg QSZ-92 liberated from the People’s Liberation Army. Eleven rounds out of fifteen.

  The room was a storeroom from the looks of the gear thrown every which way. A single door led deeper into the bridge. She listened hard, but when she heard nothing on the other side, she opened it.

  The scent hit her hard, the wet-penny smell of anger, the burnt coffee of terror. Concentrated, it nearly exploded in her nostrils, cloying and acidic.

  What had happened here?

  Nikki suppressed a cough and breathed through her mouth. The scent was concentrated from the small, dimly lit space, but several days old. Had it been fresh it would have put her on her ass for sure.

  She’d ponder this one later, when she had time. Heart pounding from adrenaline rush, she slammed the door shut.

  Outside, a man’s panicked cry was cut short.

  Nikki thumbed the safety off the 9 mm and slipped back outside. It was a regular pattern: men would yell, go quiet, then guns armed with silencers would spit. Almost like they were hunting someone.

  Or someone was hunting them.

  The coffee smell was starting to be so strong, she thought a pot was brewing under her nose. No time to be scared, she reminded herself.

  Nikki ran back to the stern and nearly tripped over a wounded crewman lying half-in, half-out of a pool of deck light. He screamed, shielding his head with his hands. Nikki quickly frisked him but found no weapon. Only a flesh wound in his thigh.

  She tucked the semiautomatic in her waistband and tore a strip off the man’s untucked shirt.

  He lowered his arms. “You Am
erican!”

  “Do you speak English?”

  The man nodded warily. “You’ve come to rob us.”

  “Not exactly.” She ran the strip underneath his injured leg and cinched it tight above the wound. “What’s going on?”

  “We are doing our job.”

  “What job?”

  “Guarding the ship.”

  She knotted the strip and sat back on her heels. “Who’s shooting at you?”

  “Triads.”

  Nikki bit her lip. “These triad guys. Can they be identified by what they wear?”

  He shook his head.

  “Great. I bet there’s no secret handshake at the clubhouse, either.” At his puzzled frown, she said, “Forget it. Listen, where’s your passenger?”

  The guard looked confused again. “I don’t know. We guard the ship from robbers. We’re not crew. That’s all.”

  Well, hell. So much for getting information the easy way. “Stay put and don’t move.” She started to leave, but thought better of it. Instead, she leaned toward him and said softly, “I wasn’t here.”

  And suddenly, lemons.

  Nikki sprang back and to the side. A knife whisked out of the darkness, caught the injured guard in the throat. She pounced. She grabbed the assailant’s wrist, still outstretched from his throw, and twisted down toward his body. He bent forward, his elbow locked up. She saw him winding up for a sweep-kick. As it approached, she palm-heeled his vulnerable elbow. The snap was followed by a grunt of pain, and the kick lost its momentum. She applied more pressure to his wrist, driving him face-first to the deck.

  After that, it was dealer’s choice.

  She chose the choke hold. In moments he’d passed out. She liberated another sidearm and a throwing knife. This guy she left in the open. His lemony triumph, always a sign of arrogance, had given him away before she saw him.

  Nikki drifted into the shadows on the starboard side again, following the sound of the screams. They grew less loud, less frequent, as she threaded between containers. By the time she reached the bow, silence.