by Dana Marton
“Not bad,” she said and swung it with purpose to try her hand, giving him second thoughts about having handed the blade over.
“What would you have done if I turned out to be Towers’s man through and through?” he asked out of curiosity.
She didn’t even blink. “You would have had an unfortunate accident in the woods.”
Chapter Four
“So how long have you known Towers?” Gina asked as they moved forward in the night. The going was easier now that they were walking downhill, but they still had to watch their footing to make sure they didn’t slide on the soggy soil.
She was relieved to be walking with Cal. Following him through the night jungle had been a nerve-racking experience. She’d been scared stiff thinking she might lose sight of him and get lost.
“Most of my life, I suppose, in the sense that I knew of him. You know, the family grapevine. As far as the aunts and uncles know, he’s a successful businessman, all legit. We didn’t meet until a couple of months ago.” He sounded uneasy.
“So how did you two end up meeting?”
He hesitated.
“We’re on the same side,” she reminded him.
He walked on, watching the narrow forest path they were following. “I’m glad, actually.” He glanced over. “It’s a good feeling not to be alone in this.” He flashed that half grin of his. “I’m sure that’s not terribly macho to admit.”
“I’m glad we’re coconspirators, too. The others will feel the same.” She hoped. She’d already told Cal about Carly, Sam and Anita. He’d guessed most of it anyway, since they’d come to the island as a team, together. “So how did you hook up with Towers?”
“The Secret Intelligence Service set him up,” he said after a while. “I was approached by the SIS. They somehow figured out that I was a distant relation. They tracked me down, told me about what he was doing in the world and asked if I would cooperate.” His voice sounded a little off.
“Torn loyalties?” she guessed.
“He’s a bloody bastard, no question. But at the end of the day…he’s still family, you know?”
She nodded. Her family was back in Philadelphia, thinking that she was in some kind of an experimental program somewhere in the U.S. that was readying her for reentry into society. They didn’t care that she’d done something that was colossally stupid, not to mention a capital crime. They kept right on loving her without pause. Tsernyakov, alias Joseph Towers, was on a whole other scale, however. She told Cal that much.
“How about your family?” he asked after a while.
“They know nothing about this, that’s for sure.” She didn’t feel like giving him the details of her meltdown as an officer of the law and her subsequent conviction and the deal she’d eventually made with the government. It was enough for him to know that she worked on the right side.
“Husband and kids?”
She shook her head. “Seven sisters. Traditional Italian family. Pop kept trying for a boy. Wife and kids waiting for you at home?”
“Hold on, I’m still stuck on the seven sisters thing. Stunning concept. I’m an only child.” He shook his head. “Frankly I find the idea of eight rambunctious girls running around in the same house a tad frightening.”
“Rambunctious—yes. Girls—not so much. My youngest sister is twenty.”
He flashed a smile that was the devil’s own. “So we are talking about eight beautiful women. They must look at least a little like you.” He let his gaze sweep over her. “I’m warming up to the idea.”
He thought she was beautiful? She felt flustered and covered it by going on the offensive. “What does your wife think about you taking off to the other side of the world on an undercover mission?”
“No wife,” he said with a look that seemed to insinuate that he knew she’d been fishing for that piece of information with a purpose.
She was so not. She glared at him.
“But don’t get your hopes up. Confirmed bachelor.” He flashed a cocky grin.
She put her nose in the air. “As if.”
“Are you close to your family?”
“They are…We’re close.” And she would be back in the thick of things again once she went home. But what would she do once she returned? She could never go back to her old job….
The path. The bunkers. The mission.
That was the only thing that mattered right now. If their mission failed, she would never see her family again. A fact that Cal had to be aware of, as well. “How about your parents?”
“We’re close, even the greater family,” he said, plodding after her. “Even with the Russian branch. My mother keeps in touch.”
“So what did Towers want from you? Is that his real name?” He seemed to want to avoid the subject. Too bad. She was good at keeping focused.
“Joseph Tsernyakov,” he said. “He told me he changed it to Towers a few years ago because he had some global businesses coming in and Westerners felt more comfortable doing business with a familiar name.”
She felt a weight lift from her. So Towers was Tsernyakov. This was the first real confirmation they had. They got to him. God, it had seemed impossible at the beginning, but somehow they had managed. She grinned into the semidarkness, feeling lighthearted all of a sudden. But not so much as to forget the question she was seeking an answer to.
“So what are you doing with him here?”
He took a deep breath. “This is all classified information.”
The wind was picking up, shaking the canopy above.
“I think we’ve moved beyond that.”
He thought for a while.
“SIS recruited you….” she prompted him.
“Right. They set up a scenario where I got in trouble with the law. Insider trading. A big fuss was kicked up over it. I lost some business.” That last sentence was said in a tight voice. “The family was mobilized, of course. Then, the next thing I knew, Joseph was stepping up to the plate, clearing the way for a dismissal of charges.”
That was what family was for when you were in trouble. Hers stood by her to the end, showing up in court every single day, supporting her every way they could. She was doing this for them.
“He needed access to my warehouses in England,” he said somberly.
Given the business Tsernyakov dealt in—illegal weapons trade—she had a few ideas about what he meant to store. “Was that why you were in the business papers? Because of your indictment?”
“It had to look like it was all for real. Got a lot of publicity. I’ve been working my way up to the top in the U.K. and just signed some major contracts with China.”
He was probably losing a good chunk of business and a ton of money over this. He had put his reputation and livelihood, not to mention his life, on the line for this mission. The choice had been an easy one for Gina. She had nothing to lose. Cal stood to lose everything. She squelched the grudging sense of admiration that bubbled up from some unexamined corner of her mind. She’d decided to trust him because it was in the best interest of her mission. She drew the line at liking the man. He was too full of himself by half already.
“So what does SIS have on him?” she asked.
The wind was now howling on the bay side of the island. The treetops shook above them, but the mountain was blocking the worst of the weather.
“They think he hired a handful of rogue scientists to make a modified version of the smallpox virus that’s vaccine-resistant.”
She gasped, her mind lurching into overdrive as she considered the implications. This was major new information for her team. A huge piece of the puzzle.
“The FBI and the CIA didn’t know that?” He cut into her thoughts.
“All we have is a date. November twenty-seventh.” She didn’t want him to think she was coming to their alliance empty-handed.
His turn to be surprised, it seemed, because he stopped in his tracks, his eyes going wide. “That’s five days from now.”
The thought sober
ed them both.
“Bloody murder. Sure wish the people we work for coordinated with each other.”
So did she. And there was no way to get that information back to Brant and Nick now. They had no way to communicate with anyone off the island, although Carly was diligently working on combining their four cell phones and the radio in their bungalow into some sort of a super communication device. She was a whiz with everything that ran on a chip and could be programmed. If anyone could do it, she’d be the one. “Maybe they were each extra cautious considering T’s extensive grid of paid men in every branch of law enforcement in most every country that counts.” She listened to the wind. “You think another cyclone is coming?”
“Just some strong winds. I’ve been tracking the weather-service announcements. There’s a new cyclone forming to the east of us, but it’s way out at sea. We’re not in the projected path this time.” Cal rubbed his hand over his forehead. “So what’s the date? Handover of the virus to the terrorists or the day of the attack?”
She shrugged. “We don’t know. Could be one and the same.”
“Good God.”
He said that with such English tone and expression, if their situation wasn’t so dire, she would have smiled.
They reached a semiopen area. Dawn was breaking somewhere over the ocean, the sky lightening. They’d walked and fought through most of the night.
“We have to be close,” he said.
She glanced up the tree they were passing under and paused. “I’ll go up and look around.”
“Sounds like a plan.” He gave her a hand.
And since having him touch her felt more than a little disconcerting, she shimmied up the tree extra fast—not an easy task as, even with the mountain blocking most of the wind, the branches swayed precariously.
“Anything?” he yelled up when she was a good thirty feet off the ground.
“Vertigo,” she joked.
“I’ll catch you if you drop.”
The funny thing was, even though they were just kidding around, she knew he would. He was competent, had stepped up to the plate each and every time so far.
“I think I see something.” She squinted toward the east. “About a half a mile from here.”
“Very well. We should get going,” he said and watched as she climbed back down.
They cut through the jungle without trouble, more and more light available from above, and reached the structure at full daybreak, approached it carefully to make sure they didn’t run into Tsernyakov’s guards. The bunker appeared deserted.
A fifteen-minute observation confirmed that first impression. Gina kept an eye on Cal as they circled the place. He moved well for a guy who had supposedly only gotten a month of training from SIS.
The low entry door, no more than four and a half feet tall and covered in rust, was a formidable steel monster, sealing the square cement structure. Locked, of course. She stared at the old-fashioned lock and wished Sam were there. Sam could open just about anything.
“Mind if I give it a go?” he asked, fiddling with his flashlight.
“Go ahead.”
He neatly twisted off the back where the batteries were stored and pulled out several long metal picks.
“Nice.”
He gave her a wicked smile. “I try to be prepared.”
For the next couple of minutes he worked the lock without success, however. “Didn’t say I was an expert.” But just as he said the last word, the door did pop open.
She looked to the inside frame immediately to check for sensors and signs of an alarm system. There didn’t seem to be any. The reason became obvious once they aimed their flashlights farther in: a second door blocked the narrow area about five feet from the first.
They ducked their heads and stepped in.
“Seems more sophisticated.” She looked at the stainless-steel second door and the LCD-display keypad on it.
“Would you like to give it a try?” he asked, all gentlemanly manners.
“You got any more secret tools?”
“I might have a little something,” he said modestly and took his watch off and popped the back cover.
He pulled two thin wires and attached them to the keypad while she did her best to keep her chin from dropping.
“SIS has a lot of gadgets.” And, of course, as a trusted family member, Cal had greater freedom sneaking his tools onto the island. Her team hadn’t dared bring anything.
“I think it’s the whole double-oh-seven pressure. They must try to live up to the myth.”
“My team has a lock expert, too—Sam,” she said to let him know they hadn’t come completely unprepared.
He was too focused on what he was doing to respond.
Once again it took a couple of tries, but he got the door open after a few minutes. She checked for a security system. Nothing here, either. Maybe Tsernyakov thought the bunkers were impregnable. Or he wanted as few people involved in their secret as possible and didn’t want to risk a security team coming in to wire up the place. The two doors could have been made someplace else, then put in here by a simple mason. One man who could easily be made to disappear.
Was she getting too paranoid about Tsernyakov? She didn’t have time to ponder. Cal was already searching the twenty-by-twenty-foot room, poking at the floor-to-ceiling pile of cardboard boxes inside.
“What is it?”
He opened one of the boxes. “Five-gallon jugs of mineral water.”
She moved to the other side of the narrow aisle among the boxes and pulled one out enough so she could jiggle the sealing tape aside and take a peek inside with the help of her flashlight. “You won’t believe what this is.”
“MREs?” He came over.
Meals Ready-to-Eat. Dehydrated food packages manufactured for and used by the U.S. armed forces. “How did you know?”
“Joseph rented a couple of my warehouses in the north of England. Same stuff there.”
“He is laying in supplies.”
He nodded, scanning the towering mass of boxes, halting the circle of light on a wood door in the back.
“Allow me,” she said, feeling as though she hadn’t contributed much to their alliance so far, eager to demonstrate that she could handle what came her way.
She balanced on her left leg while pulling the right up and in, giving a formidable kick to the door. It flew open with a crash. She bit back a smile of satisfaction.
“It wasn’t locked.” He bowed slightly and gestured her forward with a hand.
What? She looked at the door frame as she stepped in. Damn. She glanced back at him. If he gave the slightest sign of mocking her, she would wipe the smirk off his face. But he seemed focused on the task ahead already, panning the room that was much smaller than the main area of the bunker. More boxes occupied the space here, each stamped with Rx.
“Drugs?” she asked.
He opened a box and held it up for her. She caught a name on one of the shrink-wrapped packages inside, well-known antibiotics.
When she looked up, the usual carefree smile was gone from Cal’s face. “How long is he planning on hiding out? How much damage is this virus expected to make?”
“What does SIS think?”
He shrugged, frustration sitting on his face. “I know the setup and what I need to do, not much beyond that.”
“I doubt this is all for him and the few he plans to save to serve him. This is probably stock he wants to sell at ten times the price once all hell breaks loose.”
He looked around, seeming to consider her words, then nodded.
“What’s that?” A low tunnel behind a stack of boxes had caught her gaze. It seemed to be carved into the hillside, not much more than a crawl space.
“My guess would be an emergency exit.” He was striding over and sticking his flashlight and upper body inside already.
“Should we go in and see where it leads?” She walked up behind him.
“Not far. The tunnel has collapsed.” He stepped as
ide so she could see.
Rocks blocked the way, looking as if the collapse had happened some years ago. “So we’re done here?”
“Wish we knew more.” He shook his head as if he were shaking off his frustrations. “We should make haste. We have three more buildings to check and the satellite to fix, plus getting back to the beach before nightfall. If we stay too long, somebody might find it suspicious.”
They put the boxes they’d moved back into place and locked the doors behind them.
She looked back at the bunker as they were walking away. Another clue. And still not enough. They were racing to discover more, always coming in short of the goal. And they were running out of time.
SHE WAS GORGEOUS AND tough and very capable. If he had to be trekking through the jungle with anyone, his first choice was definitely Gina Torno. Cal moved forward among the breadfruit trees.
“What’s that?” Gina was pointing to a small fruit-laden evergreen tree a little ahead.
“Nono fruit. Supposed to be very healthy.” The trees flowered and produced fruit year-round. “According to Mark, it’s becoming a major business on some of the other islands.”
He was becoming familiar with the island’s limited flora, had used it as an excuse to wander around and discover the place in the first few days. Coconut palms lined the beaches, guava and taro growing in great abundance on the south side of the island. “Hungry?”
She nodded, so he veered off the path and she followed and picked a handful of yellow fruit.
“Hold on. It’s ripe when it’s white and the skin is thin. Don’t expect much.” He’d tried the plum-size fruit before and found it unpleasantly bitter.
She took the white, ripe one he offered and made a face when it neared her nose. “Not too appetizing.”
“Smells sort of rancid, doesn’t it?”
She nodded, wiped the fruit on her shirt and bit off a chunk. “It has seeds.”
“Lots of them.”
She finished it with a less-than-enthusiastic look on her face. A drop of juice ran down her chin. She wiped it off, then licked her lips to remove the last of it. He didn’t think she’d meant the gesture to be tempting; she wasn’t even looking at him but was staring at the tree, considering. His mouth went dry all the same.