So far no one had shown any interest in the sudden death of a woman in late middle age. The newspapers universally spoke of a heart attack.
Baker understood Offutt completely, even though he despised the man. De Haven was trying to take Offutt’s very lucrative business away from him. And it was De Haven’s own fault she was targeted. She wasn’t happy with damaging just some of Offutt’s business, oh no. She wanted Blackvale’s total destruction, and the only response to that was total war. Why couldn’t she have been susceptible to a bribe? Even a big one, like a million dollars? Would have saved everyone a lot of trouble and would have saved Offutt fifteen million. But no.
She had signed her own death warrant.
There would be no fallout, no investigation. De Haven died a natural death. There probably would not even be an autopsy. And if there was, nothing would emerge. And if by some stroke of terrible luck, the ME wasn’t happy, Baker had an envelope full of unmarked bills to give to the medical examiner. Shocking what they paid MEs these days for doing a nasty job. And if the ME wasn’t amenable to a little persuasion, well, Baker’s operatives could arrange a car accident, a mugging gone wrong, a dog attack while he was out running, electrocution at the building site of his new home. All sorts of things could happen.
Not Superdeath, though. He was careful not to shit in the same place twice. So far, use of Superdeath had been spread out geographically and over time. There wasn’t even a hint about it. He should know, he kept his ear close to the ground.
He hadn’t used the virus either for Bill Morrell or that Indian bitch. Morrell was the man who’d created the weaponized Spanish flu that Frank bonded to the particular DNA of an individual. He’d been very well paid, but he had been starting to make waves, so he’d had to go. That Indian bitch Priyanka Anand had definitely had to go.
And now another woman was a threat. Baker had informants everywhere, and one had told him that Priyanka Anand had been in touch with Mike Hammer. Mike Hammer was the pen name of a muckraker called Jeremy Robsen. Just finding out who the hell Hammer really was had cost two hundred grand. But he had a complete file, including his address. The instant he found out that Anand had been in touch with Hammer, he had two of his guys break into Hammer’s house and gather DNA. As a precaution.
Baker thought ahead.
The fucker had quite a following. Baker had kept a close eye on Hammer. He had to, because Hammer’s cell and computer security were top rate. Nobody on Baker’s team had been able to penetrate anything. As far as they knew, Hammer didn’t communicate by phone or by computer, though of course that was crazy.
In the end, it was a member of Hammer’s team that betrayed him. A junior member of the editorial team who received an anonymous email promising information on a weaponized virus created at the CDC, information from a very dead Priyanka Anand. The anonymous emailer asked for a meeting in Portland, Oregon.
Baker had had to get himself and a team to Portland via private jet before Hammer, and get a drone locked onto him.
He’d sent a plane to get the DNA to Frank, who edited it. Frank got the DNA-bonded virus out fast and loaded into the drone, so they were ready. Because Hammer was meeting someone, someone with information, and he had to be stopped.
Baker turned back to his computer monitor, where he stared at the footage for what seemed the thousandth time. The camera followed Hammer to a small hotel in a seedy part of town. He entered and didn’t leave until the next morning, when he made his way downtown. Ducking into an alleyway and stopping. Then, out of nowhere, the woman appeared. Slender, dressed in a blue pantsuit with a wide-brimmed straw hat. At the first iteration, the hat seemed like a coincidence, but checking the footage of the big avenue where she must have come from, there was no recording of a slender woman in a blue pantsuit with a big hat. She’d been careful. Which meant that she was either trained or had been well-advised.
Baker watched, switching to slow motion as she walked down the filthy alleyway, trailing the wheelie. So—she was a visitor to Portland? Planning on flying out immediately afterward? What?
Baker slowed the video down even more, inching his face closer to the monitor, watching carefully. Hammer’s face could clearly be seen. For all his tight cybersecurity, he hadn’t counted on a drone. The alleyway itself was without security cameras. Hammer had had every reason to believe that this meeting would go unrecorded.
Baker studied the face. Hammer never appeared in public. He operated under anonymity and under a pen name. It wasn’t clear from the drone footage how tall he was but he was thin, with a narrow, clever face. A thinker’s face. Not a doer.
Hammer straightened when he saw the woman walking down the alleyway, expecting her. The woman walked right up to him, parked the wheelie against the wall, turned to him. Damn! With her back to the drone and its lens.
Hammer and the woman talked briefly as they increased in size. The drone coming closer. The woman placed something in Hammer’s hands. Something tiny, something Baker was sure was a flash drive.
This was the point of the meeting. Hammer’s fist closed around it and he closed his eyes briefly. Triumph. The exchange had gone off without a hitch.
Suddenly Hammer looked up and Baker saw him frown, his eyes opening wide in recognition and fear as he saw the drone. The drone sprayed him, the woman’s face almost completely turned away. Hammer shot out his hand and shoved the woman against the wall, hard. She bounced, went down on one knee, turned her head toward Hammer.
By now, Hammer’s terrified face filled the camera. Drops falling off his cheeks and nose. The virus in a solution.
Both Hammer and the woman were frozen, uncomprehending. Hammer lifted his hand and wiped his face, puzzled. He’d probably been expecting a bullet. A liquid spray didn’t seem dangerous to him.
The woman started to turn her head up, but Hammer pushed it down before the camera could capture it. The camera showed him speaking to her, unfortunately at an angle that didn’t allow for lip reading. Baker vowed that next time he’d capture sound, too.
Then Hammer brought a hand to his throat and started turning red. He swayed, his head bobbing. The woman stood still for a moment, then tried to catch Hammer as he fell to the ground.
Fuck fuck fuck! The drone had been programmed to follow Hammer’s face and it focused on him exclusively. It could have swooped around Hammer, taken footage of the woman’s face, identified her, but no. Smart as the drone was, it wasn’t smart enough to change the mission parameters mid-mission. And the mission had been to follow Hammer and take him out.
Which the drone had done.
It was supposed to be a smooth, clean taking out of a potential enemy, a flawless operation that would leave no traces. Instead it had turned out to be messy, and with a witness.
Hudson watched for the tenth time as Hammer died, gasping for a breath that never came. Baker watched again and again as the woman reached with a visibly shaking hand to get the flash drive from Hammer’s hand, then disappeared through the door into the building.
Not even on the tenth attempt did Hudson manage to glimpse more than a fraction of the face of the woman. Definitely not enough for facial recognition.
Well, if ten iterations didn’t work, the eleventh wouldn’t either. There had to be another way. He sat back, drumming his fingers.
Baker could have sent the problem to his cybersecurity team in Vladivostok. A group of ten highly gifted and larcenously expensive hackers who seemed to be awake 24/7. If this were a normal mission, he would have, and then charged his client ten times what the hacker collective, known as Badboyzz, charged him. In this case, he was his own client and this was the motherlode. His most lucrative business, what in a few years would make him ludicrously rich. The Boyzzz were wicked smart and dedicated, but didn’t understand boundaries, and they were amoral. They were perfectly capable of adding two plus two to make a billion, and they were also perfectly capable of blackmail.
And they were ten thousand miles away, which was awk
ward if he needed to eliminate them. Not to mention, he had no idea where their base was in the city of over four million inhabitants.
No. Try to deal with this in-house, he told himself. Keep the circle small. So far, the operational circle was him, Frank Winstone, who could cook a fatal viral cocktail in two hours as long as he had viable DNA, and two drone operators who were paid so much money they would never talk. Baker was making them very rich, very fast. There wasn’t that huge a market for ex-military drone operators, and they knew they’d lucked out with him and weren’t going to endanger that.
So. The drone footage was useless with regard to the identity of the woman who had incriminating information. Who, indeed, was the origin of the incriminating information via the Indian woman. That flash drive had gone from Anand to her to Hammer, not the other way around. The woman had very dangerous knowledge.
Who the hell was she?
She had to have come from somewhere.
Baker’s hacking skills weren’t bad. The CIA trained its operatives well and he’d been taught a lot of tricks by the best. It was probable she’d come from Clement Street, down the alleyway, then turned left. Clement was lousy with video cameras and she was wearing a distinctive turquoise color.
The last the drone had seen of her had been at 10:02. Hudson hacked into the citywide security-cam system and carefully checked the tapes of security cams on Clement starting at 9:30 a.m., fast forward and reverse and slow motion. Over and over again.
He bolted upright when he saw what he hadn’t seen before. Nine twenty-one a.m. A tiny stripe of turquoise blue at the outer reaches of the security cam at the corner of Clement and Drummond.
Mystery Woman had somehow known to avoid the cameras. Hmmm. Had she been trained? Was she an operative? Was there someone in the security apparatus—CIA, Homeland Security, FBI, NSA, any of the other alphabet soup agencies—who was on to him? That upped the stakes considerably.
What was on the street? He checked an internet map. Four restaurants, eight boutiques, two jewelry stores, a big department store connected to an even bigger office building, a hotel. The Astoria. Where had he heard that name?
Oh God. His blood ran cold. The Astoria Hotel was where the World Virology Conference was being held, right now. As a matter of fact, Frank was going fly in to deliver the concluding speech. She couldn’t be staying there, could she? If she was…
Hotel security video was amazingly easy to hack into. Unlike city footage, a commercial entity like a hotel, with no known security issues, wouldn’t keep footage for more than 48 hours, so he had to be thorough. Luckily, if she was there, it would be footage of this morning.
He accessed hotel security and put in a time frame: 7 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. The color resolution was crap but it would show turquoise. He checked the breakfast room, putting it on fast forward. A lot of fat tourists and dandruffy scientists scarfed down an amazing quantity of coffee, croissants and yogurt. No slender lady in a turquoise pantsuit. He ran it back and forth, as they comically rushed from the tables to the buffet and back in quadruple time, like ants.
She hadn’t eaten in the breakfast room. Maybe she’d had room service, but since he didn’t know the name, it would be pointless to check room-service orders.
That left the lobby.
And the lobby’s cameras were blank from 9:15 to 10 a.m. The same for the cameras in the hotel corridors.
Christ.
Where had she disappeared to? He needed to find her and eliminate her, now. Not via the virus. No way could he have two choking deaths in one small city. And there’d be a connection between her and Hammer. Using Superdeath would be insane. But there were plenty of other ways.
Now it was a question of finding where she’d gone.
His drone had picked up on the three identical black SUVs. The woman hadn’t left the building complex all day. Not on foot. Every instinct said she was in one of those SUVs. Or definitely in one of the many vehicles that had exited the department store.
This went way beyond his skills and his crunching power.
Okay, now it was time to spend some money.
He contacted the Badboyzz, patiently waiting for the call to be bounced from the US to Europe then back to the US, through Singapore, and on to Vladivostok via Riga.
“’Allo?” Fuck. It was the joker who tried to pass himself off as French. Baker didn’t have time for this.
“Cut the crap. I’m sending footage of three SUVs in Portland, Oregon. I need you to follow them, find out where they went. Inspect who comes out. Give me shots if a woman dressed in turquoise pants steps out from one of those vehicles. And follow all the vehicles exiting a department store in a specific time frame. I’m sending coordinates and as much intel as I have.”
“Duuude.” Oh shit. Now it was the one who pretended to be a California dope dealer. “That would have to be off Keyhole 15. That’s going to take time and monn-ayy.”
“Find her. A million.”
Even over the bounced line he could hear his interest. “Yeah, dude? A mill? You got it.”
“How long will it take you?”
“Mmm.”
The mercenary shit was going to bargain. Not going to happen. Baker put command into his voice. “Get me footage of the inhabitants of as many of those vehicles as you can, and particularly those SUVs. It has to be inside twenty-four hours or forget it.” He hung up. There. That was a challenge. He knew the hackers would turn themselves inside out, both for the money and to show that they could.
Kay slumped into Nick’s arms and they sat there, under the shower, for a long time. The sex had kept the bad memories at bay, but as she nestled her head against his neck, tears joined the water falling on him from the shower.
Finally, he turned the shower off and started drying them.
She was physically and mentally depleted but above all, he understood, shocked. Though she’d been raised by an FBI grandfather, Nick knew Al Goodkind enough to know that he’d have shielded Kay from the dirtier side of the job.
She’d talked about her relationship with her grandfather while they’d waited in Goodkind’s house, his blood on the floor, for news of him. Goodkind had been kidnapped by monsters and Kay had been out of her mind with frantic worry. She idolized her grandfather. She saw him as a knight in shining armor, and goddammit, he was.
So was Nick.
But Goodkind had never told her that he’d killed seven men in the line of duty, four of them in one raid when he was a rookie. Nick couldn’t count the men he’d killed.
Goodkind had shielded her from the nature of the world, which was raw and predatory. He knew she’d been dedicated to her studies, had lived in a lab coat since she was eighteen and was a world-renowned expert on things no one could see or hear or taste. She lived in a world where knowledge was precious and people were smart and dedicated to the common good.
She’d just found out that she’d been living a lie her entire life.
People were stupid and greedy, capable of vast cruelty. There were people who would kill for pennies, let alone for wealth. And there were people willing to kill for the knowledge she and her colleagues worked so selflessly to produce.
It was a real fucked-up world.
Nick had known this all his life. His dad had been a cop and his brother and two sisters were in law enforcement. The youngest, Roberto—Bobby—had inexplicably decided to become a spook, but was forgiven this transgression, because he was a kickass spook.
The entire Mancino family fought the bad guys and protected the innocent.
Nick had always had backup in school. Nobody, nobody bullied a Mancino because you’d have your ass handed to you, broken and bloody. In turn, he’d provided backup to the younger members of the extended family—which was three brothers, two sisters, twelve cousins and twenty-two second cousins. All of them lived in Philly and they all got together often. He’d grown up in a huge clan and though he knew the world was big and bad, he had a lot of tough guys—even the girls in the M
ancino clan were tough guys—on his side.
Kay had only had a loving grandfather on her side, and understandably, he’d shielded her from the shitty fuckup that was the world.
But one thing Kay had to understand. She had him on her side now. He had her back. She no longer had only a retired, ailing 80-year-old, she had Nick Mancino and the entire ASI team, who were all smart and tough. And, for that matter, all the Mancinos.
She wasn’t alone.
“Arms up,” he said quietly, and she obediently put her arms up. He slipped on the yoga top without bothering about a bra. Because it would be fussy having to put a bra on her and because, well…because he was a horn dog. Her breasts were so incredibly beautiful and they would be showcased with only that silky top on. Just like he slid the pants on without panties, because the thought of that warm, wet, soft little sex just a second away from his hands and his dick…
Fuck.
Good thing he’d put on jeans and a tee, and that the jeans were new and stiff, because his dick was stiff, too. Hard as rock.
After last night and in the shower, he shouldn’t be hard as a rock. He wasn’t twenty and perpetually horny anymore. He knew how to control himself. A hard-on—a painful hard-on—wasn’t appropriate or even politically correct right now. His dick didn’t give a fuck, unfortunately. It felt ready for sex anytime Kay Hudson was available, and having had her only made him want more, soon. She wasn’t out of his system.
At all.
He sighed when she looked up at him. Goddamn, she was beautiful. But right now, she looked so lost and sad, his heart warred with his dick and his heart won.
There was a first time for everything.
“Food’s waiting,” he said, as he moved around behind her. “You hungry?”
She waited a beat. “You know,” she said, sounding surprised. “I am. I am hungry. There’s food here, right? That’s what you said. Those military rations? What do they call them?”
Nick picked up a wide-toothed comb and lifted her damp hair out of the back of her top. “MREs?” he asked, amused. MREs were the most disgusting meals available and they gummed you up like nobody’s business. He’d lived off MREs for ten days once and had only taken a dump twice. Awful. “No, we have something better than MREs. Isabel set up the provisions.”
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