by Sandra Moore
“You must stay here,” Inspector Lam insisted.
Johnny leaned forward slightly, arms now uncrossed and his body smelling clearly of wet pennies. “We can help you find the girls!”
“You and your family are implicated in a gang war,” Lam continued. “As a courtesy to your grandfather I am not letting my men tear through the place and scare the other children.”
Johnny scowled at that. He snorted and stalked to the kitchen, where some of the girls remained congregated, wide-eyed. He tousled the nearest’s hair, then motioned them away. They scattered out of sight, presumably back to their shared bedroom.
Nikki wanted to help but had no idea even where to start. It wasn’t just the cultural differences that inhabited the abyss between her and these men; it was the unfamiliar police procedures, the obvious personal respect Lam seemed to have for Master Wong, the fact that she wasn’t sure what her real status was in this country.
If Johnny was basically placed under house arrest, did that mean her, too? Would they expect her to follow their rules despite suspecting there was something besides kidnapped girls involved?
The other problem, too, was how she was supposed to figure out who these women were. The Spider Woman, whom she suspected might be Arachne, was definitely interested in Diviner, but was it really this giantess who had hired the Wo Shing Wo to guard him at the port? Or had Spider Woman hired the Sun Yee On after she found out the Wo Shing Wo had brought Diviner here on their SHA container ship?
As she watched Inspector Lam gather up his men, some in crisp uniforms and some in the traditional rumpled Western-style suits that were apparently the universal uniform of the police detective, she wondered if any of this was part of what Delphi wanted her to check out.
She slipped through the kitchen—Johnny had disappeared—and found her way back to the tiny bedroom she’d slept in. She calculated the time change before using the speed dial number coded into the phone, but then shrugged. She didn’t even know for sure if Delphi was located in the United States.
It took only seconds to connect to the computerized voice, provide the appropriate codes and passwords to prove her identity, and then fill in the mysterious speaker—she was almost convinced it was a woman—on the developments.
“I don’t think I’ve been sequestered by the police,” Nikki said after giving Delphi as much information as she knew.
“Your priority is Diviner,” Delphi said, and Nikki wished she could smell the woman so she could tell if the hesitancy in her tone really was regret. “I’m sorry about the children.”
“I understand.” Nikki’s throat abruptly closed and she set her jaw against a sudden desire to cry.
“The stakes are higher than even those children’s lives, Nikki. If this Spider Woman is Arachne, she might be after more than just Diviner. She’s after special girls like you. She’s already succeeded once.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Imagine what she could do with a genetically modified girl or woman. Your gift, modified again and again, could create a superrace of bloodhounds doing her will.”
“Chasing down her prey,” Nikki said.
“I know it’s not fair to ask you to stick to the mission, but I have to. You understand why.”
Nikki could only nod. She’d suspected that. She didn’t like feeling like a chess piece shoved around on a board not of her own choosing, but that couldn’t be helped. Her queen was ultimately the Athena Academy, and if following Delphi’s orders kept the academy safe, so be it.
But Mingxia’s lovely dark eyes and Yanmei’s pigtailed, running form haunted her. They weren’t pieces in this particular chess game, but they’d been pulled onto the board, anyway.
Nikki managed to say, “As soon as the police leave, I’m headed back to the port terminal.”
“It might be worth biding your time until Zhao’s contact is able to get a lead on the container,” Delphi advised. “I know you’re eager to get out there, but there are times when patience pays a higher dividend than you might think.”
Nikki gritted her teeth, hearing her mother’s voice in Delphi’s intonation. Annoyed, she snapped, “I wasn’t planning on going in unprepared. I’m not an idiot.”
Delphi waited, silent.
Shit. Nikki scrubbed her face with her hand and said, “I’m sorry. It’s pretty tense around here and I just want to get going on this.” Her voice rose in frustration. “I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels for hours—”
“I understand.” A soft chuckle. “I was much like you at your age.”
Nikki was suddenly sure Delphi was a woman. Maybe even an Athena graduate? Is that why Athena seemed to be the common denominator, which Dana had implied?
“I advise you to be patient, as I suggested. I suspect you’ll make things happen soon enough.”
Nikki sighed heavily. “Did you ever get tired of being twenty-four?”
“Often,” Delphi assured her. “But what you’re doing now will give you experience to rely on later. Trust me.”
And almost against her will, Nikki did. She didn’t like waiting. She knew she could be a hothead. She knew she had the impulse to just blast into a situation, guns blazing and nose on high alert—and sometimes that impulse had served her well—but maybe this time she needed to do things differently. Maybe Delphi was right.
“I’ll try to pretend I’m not Cuban,” she muttered.
“Your passion makes you the right woman for the job,” Delphi said. “Call me again when you have something new.”
Nikki stowed the phone in her belt holster. Yanmei’s pink ribbon snugged her wrist. She needed a good cry. She knew it, and she hated it, and she didn’t have time for it.
“We’ll get them back.”
Johnny’s deep voice made Nikki raise her head—when had she dropped it into her hands? He stood in the doorway, lean and competent and humming with energy.
Her throat worked for a minute, but she managed to say, “They’re telling me to get Diviner. The girls are expendable.” It wasn’t quite true, but it wasn’t quite a lie, either.
Johnny silently came to sit next to her, slipped his arm around her shoulder. Nikki leaned into his anchoring strength, grateful that he didn’t speak. Tears pricked her eyes and she let them well and spill. He pressed his cheek to her hair.
She caught old tires again. Part of her wanted to ask him what he was feeling, so she’d know what she was smelling, but part of her didn’t care. If Johnny felt it, it was akin to whatever the girls had been feeling.
Then she realized the scent was emanating from her, and that what she was feeling was despair.
Chapter 11
N ikki took one look at Li Bai and didn’t like her. She didn’t like her long, silky hair that fell in a shimmering raven-fall down her back, she didn’t like her long-limbed gracefulness as she sat at her neatly kept desk and she didn’t like the movie-perfect makeup that made the woman look like she wasn’t wearing any. Nikki didn’t like her almond-shaped eyes, her full, richly glossed lips, or her pushed-up cleavage straining her low-cut blouse.
She really didn’t like the way Johnny was leaning over the woman’s desk, clearly trying to see down the blouse, and the way Bai was angling her shoulders to let him look.
Pretty damned offensive, really, Nikki thought. Impolite. Time-wasting.
She thought harder. Juvenile.
She concentrated instead on the view out of the twenty-fourth-story office of the Information and Public Relations Section of the Hong Kong Marine Department. Victoria Harbor spread out below them; bright white ferries and garishly painted private taxi boats coasted through water the color of new denim. In the distance, a container ship appeared to stand still, but its wake lingered like a jet trail on the harbor’s surface.
“Did you find what we’ve been looking for?” Johnny asked, and if voices could drip with anything, his was slathered in raw sensuality.
Nikki tried not to roll her eyes like an exasperated teenager. Bai
was the closest thing they had to someone who could figure out where Diviner was going to be loaded up next, and they were at her mercy.
Bai smiled prettily. “I might have it.”
“Show me.”
The woman turned her flat-panel computer monitor around so Johnny could focus on something other than her chest.
“I’m no longer in the shipping department, so it took me a while to get access to the right database.” She batted her long lashes in apparent apology. “Once I got in, I ran several searches. The container was not included in any manifests, so it took some time to find.” She cast another sexy smile Johnny’s way.
“It was on the manifest in Florida,” Nikki pointed out.
“The paper manifest, as you told me, yes, but not the electronic one,” Bai said reasonably. “Our database queries aren’t set up to find containers that haven’t been logged,” Bai continued in a less flirtatious voice, “so I had to write one that would retrieve containers being loaded onto other ships that didn’t have a matching incoming log entry.”
Johnny smiled warmly. “Nice.”
“It should have been easy, but it wasn’t. I had to call in a favor or two to be allowed to write a custom query.” Bai flicked a glance Nikki’s way. “I’m in marketing communications now. My permissions are quite low on this system.”
Clever, Nikki grudgingly admitted as she nodded her understanding. That wasn’t something the average marketing suit would know how to do, but this woman had pulled it off.
“I finally found some containers that matched our criteria. Three of them were keyed into the system incorrectly, so that took some time to resolve. We had to track them down manually. The fourth looks like the container you want.”
She pointed at an entry on-screen. “The container was transferred here, you see, from Terminal Eight East.”
“Where’s it going?” Johnny asked.
“Went.” Bai did look genuinely apologetic now. “It was scheduled to be loaded two hours ago.”
“Dammit!” Nikki muttered. “Where?”
“On a freighter headed for Singapore.”
Nikki paced to a worktable holding up a forest’s worth of glossy posters and brochures of smiling people in hard hats standing in front of massive, brightly painted cranes and a pristine cargo ship. “So we could have stayed in the terminal and kept watch over the container.”
“We still wouldn’t know which container we wanted,” Johnny said.
The urge to blame, to be pissed off, swept over her. If she’d been smarter, if she’d been more careful, if she’d kept control of the situation instead of handing that over to Johnny Zhao—
“Nikki.” His voice was soft now but his hands lay firm on her shoulders. He leaned close to whisper, “We’ll find Diviner. It’s not your fault.”
She shrugged him off and turned to Bai to snap, “Did the container have any identifying marks? How will we know it when we see it?”
“It has four red slashes, like a cat’s claws striking,” she replied. “The serial number is painted on the side.” Bai handed over a sheet with the serial number, freighter registration number, destination and estimated arrival time in Singapore. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
Nikki’s nod was terse.
As she strode out to the elevator bank, she heard Johnny murmur something and Bai’s low voice replied, with a wealth of undercurrent, “My pleasure.”
Nikki let the door close behind her. She wasn’t in any mood to put up with their flirtation. Diviner’s next destination was in her grasp and she didn’t intend to let the bastardo get away from her again.
The door abruptly opened and Johnny emerged smelling like a copper mine.
“What the hell was that?” he snapped.
“We got what we came for. Let’s get on with it.”
“You were rude to my friend.”
“Look, you want to flirt with a girlfriend for a couple of hours, great, but you were wasting my time.” She punched the elevator’s down button. “I have work to do.”
“I’m involved in that work. You think I would dishonor Regina’s memory?”
She hesitated. “Of course not.”
He didn’t wait for her when the elevator doors opened, but stalked in. Nikki paused, considering whether to wait for the next elevator, but he grabbed her arm and hauled her into the car with him. “So what’s your problem?”
“I should have known about Diviner. I should have figured it out.”
“Nobody could have figured it out.”
“If we’d had the information sooner, we could have caught the guy here in Hong Kong,” she retorted. “Now we have to go to Singapore.”
“Bai is trustworthy. Someone else in shipping could have been on the take. I couldn’t risk that.” He gestured at the paper she held in a trembling hand. “And she got you that.”
“Yeah, a day late and a dollar short.”
“What?” He frowned in confusion, then dismissively shook his head. He widened his stance as the elevator began to plummet. “You should be more grateful.”
“You think I should be grateful that I was hanging out with you while Diviner was getting loaded up on his next ride?”
He grabbed a corner of the paper she held and shook it. “We have this at least.”
“It’s not enough—”
“It’s what we have. This is how things are. You should work with that.”
“I’m just saying that it’s going to be a lot harder now. You’re not even supposed to leave Hong Kong.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
“Inspector Lam might be watching you,” she pointed out. “Plus we have two street gangs out to get us over this thing and we don’t even know what Diviner actually has yet. Everything we know is pure conjecture.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“You can’t guarantee that! You’re not God, no matter who your grandfather is.”
Johnny’s jaw clenched hard before he said, “Stop judging me and everyone else because you’re not getting your way. This is reality.”
“I’m stating the facts as we know them.”
“As you know them. This is my country, my people. I know who to trust and who to run from. You should listen to me and trust my judgment.”
Nikki’s throat began to ache. She waited until the elevator slid smoothly to a stop to say, “I’m an adult. I don’t need your advice.”
“I will give you advice when I see you need it.”
Johnny shoved past her as the steel doors whispered open, his anger still filling her nostrils. Nikki watched his back, clad in that gleaming white T-shirt, move away to the tall glass-and-chrome of the foyer. She took a slow step out of the elevator and stopped. Still, he kept walking. She kept standing.
When he reached the revolving door, he almost entered it, then discovered she wasn’t there and paused. He said nothing, but waited.
It seemed to her now that something important was happening, that what she was experiencing at this moment was somehow larger than just for this day and this mission. She was watching a strong man, an annoying and strong man, who expected her to cross the wide expanse of marble toward him like a good dog come to heel. Because he insisted on seeing her as less than.
She’d not known anyone like him before. Maybe it was that most of the men in her life were her relatives or respected her more or were more mature or maybe it was just sheer dumb luck, but she’d never run into a man who wouldn’t even make an attempt to understand her. It was like he hadn’t heard her at all. Sure, he was a good guy at heart, but there were certain things that no amount of goodness could overcome, and bullheaded arrogance was one of them.
If she walked across that cold, pale blue marble, she’d be giving in, knuckling under, taking on the role he thought she already inhabited.
She couldn’t do that.
For an instant, he seemed poised on the edge of walking away, even without her and the information Bai had written on t
he paper crumpled in her fist. Go ahead, she dared him. See if I care.
But even as she recognized the childish impulse, he turned suddenly and strode back to the foyer’s center. Across the crisp, cool expanse and amid the well-dressed people crisscrossing the space, she felt for a moment as if she’d been immersed in an abandoned but well-stocked library.
Her feet moved since her brain seemed not to be engaged, and she found herself standing with him. The regret she sensed had darkened Johnny’s expression.
“We want the same thing,” he said. “We should not argue.”
More orders, she thought, but decided to accept whatever olive branch he was extending. She simply nodded. He was right—arguing was distracting her from her purpose. They were both losing focus.
It was stupid, really, she mused as she pushed through the revolving door. Getting bent out of shape because of what he thought about her wasn’t helping, either. This trip wasn’t personal. It was about Athena Academy, which was as personal as it ought to get.
And no more.
Chapter 12
“O ur flight to Singapore will leave at seven in the morning,” Johnny said as he flipped his cell shut.
Nikki nodded. She knew that. He’d made the arrangements in English. For her sake? she wondered. So she wouldn’t feel so…alien?
She sat cross-legged on the floor of his tiny Hong Kong flat, staring at a pile of clothing an elderly woman, with much finger-waving and craning of her bent neck, had just dropped off. Johnny had smiled and charmed the old lady until she left. Now Nikki was folding the hand-me-downs into neat piles. Her own clothes, retrieved from the hotel room she’d barely seen, lay in her gear bag, packed and ready for anything. Except this.
“Great,” she muttered. “Another wait.”
“We don’t have to waste time.”
She eyed him warily. “By doing what?”
“Finding out which boat is taking Mingxia and Yanmei.”
Nikki’s hands clenched in the shirt she was holding. “Talk to me. Where do we start?”
“The Sun Yee On work their child prostitution business out of a warehouse near the port.”