The Medusa Game

by Cindy Dees

  Liz shook her head. “It was a miracle we even got permission to represent Bhoukar, let alone put together an actual delegation with a team doctor.”

  The American team’s head coach spoke over Anya’s head. “We have an orthopedic surgeon on our delegation. If you’d like to have him take a look at Anya, I’ll be glad to arrange it.”

  Isabella said quietly to Liz, “That would be a good idea. Just to be safe.”

  The surgeon was duly summoned to the rink while a male pairs skater from Russia volunteered to carry Anya off the ice.

  Isabella jumped as a voice barked in her ear, “Report!”

  Dex. She stepped away from the crowd and murmured, “It was a crash. Another skater ran into Anya and knocked her down. She doesn’t appear to be seriously injured.”

  “Jesus, Torres! You just sent the entire ops center onto high alert because two people bumped into each other?”

  She snapped defensively, “It was a little more serious than that. They were both going about thirty miles per hour. It knocked her unconscious.”

  “Are we clear to stand down?” Dex growled back at her.

  She gave one of the required responses to that query. “All clear.”

  “Get your girl under cover and get your butt back here. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.” Crap. She was about to get chewed up one side and down the other.

  Anya waited in a dressing room for the American team doctor. The other Medusas came in a few minutes later. They were walking calmly, but Isabella noticed they were all out of breath. It took a lot to make them pant. They must have sprinted the mile from the ops center. Could this mess get any more humiliating?

  “Everything all right?” Vanessa murmured.

  “Yeah. False alarm,” Isabella answered heavily. “Another skater collided with Anya. She got the wind knocked out of her and sprained her knee. Nothing serious.”

  Her teammates sagged in relief. Vanessa commented, “The way Dex alerted us, it sounded like a full-out assault was under way.”

  Great. Not only was Dex going to ream her out, but she was going to catch endless grief about this from everyone she’d panicked in the ops center.

  Vanessa put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Better safe than sorry.”

  Except Dex sure as hell didn’t look like he shared that sentiment when she walked into the ops center an hour later. At least the doctor had agreed that Anya’s knee would be fine in a few days. The girl was back in her room with her leg propped up and ice on her knee. Aleesha—a trauma surgeon before she’d joined the Medusas—was babysitting Anya while Karen and Kat pulled guard duty.

  Dex looked up from across the ops center and growled at Isabella, “In my office.”

  Vanessa murmured, “Need me to come along and run interference?”

  “Nah. But thanks for the offer. I’ll take the ass-chewing alone.”

  Vanessa looked her in the eye. “You did nothing wrong. Your subject went down and was injured. Next time, you call it the same way you just did, regardless of what Lord Dexter the Fourth has to say.”

  Isabella smiled at the vote of confidence from her team leader. It took a little of the sting out of what was to come.

  “Close the door.”

  Her heart sank. Oh, this was gonna hurt. But at least he had the decency to do it behind closed doors.

  Thorpe sat at his desk with his chair turned to face a computer monitor on the table behind him. “Come watch this,” he ordered briskly.

  She moved—gingerly—to stand beside him. She had to lean down to see the picture clearly. And she just about fell over as she caught a whiff of the guy’s aftershave. It was smooth and sophisticated. Sexy as hell, actually. She blinked and focused on the video.

  She saw herself standing at the edge of the figure skating rink, watching somebody off camera move.

  “That’s the figure skating venue this morning,” she said in surprise.

  “This is the footage from camera 14. Keep watching.”

  She leaned down further, placing her hands on the table to support herself. She relaxed her eye muscles as she’d been taught in live image analysis school, allowing the scene to flow past her while she absorbed every detail and nuance. About half the ice surface was visible from this angle. Anya flashed across the screen, gliding backward, her left foot raised behind her, preparatory to performing a jump. Her head was centered on her shoulders, chin up, looking straight ahead—hadn’t Liz Cartwright yelled something to her about that? Anya had no way of knowing what was behind her. She was skating blind.

  A black shape flashed into view from the other side of the screen.

  The skater who’d slammed into Anya. He flew around the corner, knees deeply bent and leaning forward, doing powerful crossovers and picking up speed with every stroke of his blades. He cut diagonally across the ice and, in a fraction of a second, his image and Anya’s converged into a tremendous impact that sent both of them flying.

  Dex hit the pause button and the image of Anya lying crumpled froze on his screen. “What did you see?” he asked shortly.

  Something about that scene bugged her. One of the reasons she was the best image analyst in the business was because she listened to the little niggles in her gut. But what was wrong? If only she knew more about figure skating she’d have a better idea of what she was looking at. She replayed the scene in her head, letting the misplaced elements float to the surface of her awareness. And then it hit her. The male skater had been moving forward the whole time. He’d had plenty of opportunity to avoid Anya. And he hadn’t.

  “Who hit her?” Isabella asked urgently. “Who was that skater?”

  Dex leaned back in his chair. “You saw it, too, then.”

  She looked down at Thorpe. “Oh, yeah. That was intentional.”

  “The kid’s name is Lazlo Petrovich. He’s a male singles skater from Chechnya.”

  Chechnya? As in mostly conservative Muslim Chechnya? Dismay slammed into her. She should’ve researched the athletes expected to be at the games. Sloppy.

  Thorpe rocked forward and reached past her for a file. Her heart hitched as his arm went around her, missing her by inches. Stop it already. She was so not about to develop a crush on this jerk.

  “I pulled his background folder from the IOC for you.”

  The International Olympic Committee’s background check would be cursory at best compared to what the FBI could dig up on a person. But it was better than nothing. Isabella reached for the brown folder. And damned if her fingers didn’t brush against Thorpe’s. Her gaze snapped to his. She looked away hastily. Dammit, that was an immature thing to do! She wasn’t going to shy away from her reaction to him like some ditzy teenager. She forced her gaze back to him.

  He nodded at the corner of the room. “Sit down over there and read it, and then I want your take.”

  “You want me to do it now?”

  His mouth tightened into a thin line. “Do you always question orders like this? How the hell have you survived on a team?”

  The rebuke stung. Vanessa or Lt. Col. Jack Scatalone, who supervised the Medusas’ missions, could yank her off the team any time they chose, and neither one had done it yet.

  “And about your actions this morning,” he added grimly. “If you ever screw up like that again, I’ll bounce you out of here so fast your head will spin.”

  She frowned. “With all due respect, my subject was down. I made a legitimate call. I’m sorry if I worried everyone unnecessarily.”

  Thorpe waved an impatient hand. “I don’t give a damn about the false alarm. That was a good call.”

  Huh? Then what?

  He spun to face the computer screen and thumped his finger on the glass. “You took your eye off the subject. When the collision happened, you were talking on the radio and had your eyes closed for several seconds. Don’t ever lose focus like that on the job again, you hear? If this Petrovich kid had been trying to kill your girl instead of just ramming into her, she’d be dead
right now.”

  He was right. It was a sobering realization. She absorbed the kicked-in-the-stomach feeling and nodded slowly. “Fair enough. You’re right. I did screw up. I won’t do it again.”

  He blinked in surprise. As he continued to stare at her in what for all the world looked like mild shock, she finally snapped, “What?”

  “That’s it? No explanations?” he asked incredulously.

  Did he honestly expect her to try to wiggle out of what she’d done wrong? “What else is there to say? I did lose focus. And you were right to slam me for it.” No matter that she’d lost focus because he’d been exasperating her half to death. And no matter that without a gun, she couldn’t have stopped Petrovich from killing Anya if that had been his intent. “Lesson learned and I’ll do better next time.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

  That reaction was what finally pushed her over the edge. “Whether you like it or not, Major Thorpe, the Medusas aren’t going away. Not from your Olympic security detail, and not from your armed forces. Get used to us.”

  He leaned forward, a violently displeased scowl on his face. “Women don’t belong in this business. You get in the way of men paying attention to their job.”

  “Why?” she shot back. “Because they can’t get past their Neanderthal urges to protect the little woman, or because they can’t control their Neanderthal urges to throw us down and have their way with us?”

  His eyes went nearly black, snapping brightly in irritation. “I don’t have to explain myself to you, Captain.”

  “Nor I to you,” she retorted coolly. “Your correction is duly noted and I will do my best to act on it. Now if you don’t mind, sir, I need to read that file and assess the potential threat to my subject.”

  Eyes narrowed dangerously, he cracked his stiff neck just enough to nod fractionally at her. She picked up the file, and just to get his goat, moved over to the chair in the corner of his office and sat down to read the file. She could’ve gone outside into the main ops center, but she’d be damned if she’d give him the satisfaction of chasing her out of his office.

  She read through Lazlo Petrovich’s file quickly. His parents were both well-known Chechnyan freedom fighters who’d been confirmed participants in several terrorist hits on Russian targets before Chechnya gained independence from a fed-up Russian government last year. Lazlo had been sent to the United States at the age of ten to take up figure skating. He lived with an American sponsor family, and all of his ice time, coaching, equipment and living expenses were funded out of an anonymous bank account that received periodic deposits.

  The IOC employee who’d performed the brief background check had been unable to ascertain where the money came from. But Lazlo’s parents didn’t appear to earn a fraction of the thousands of dollars per year necessary to support the career of an up-and-coming figure skater.

  Isabella frowned. Where did his family get so much money, and why did they fork it over for his training? Supposedly, he’d only skated recreationally before coming to America so how did they know he’d turn into a world-class figure skater? Something didn’t add up.

  Thorpe sat at his desk, making a note in the margin of a typed document. “Have you seen this?” she asked.

  A nod.

  “Were his parents skaters?”

  “My impression is no,” Thorpe replied.

  “Were they friends of a skater?”

  “No record of it.”

  She frowned. “Then how in the hell did they up and decide to send their only son halfway around the world to take up such an expensive and difficult sport?”

  Thorpe leaned back in his chair. “No idea. Talk to me about Chechnyan Muslims.”

  Isabella blinked. How would he know she had any expertise on that subject? Very few—very few—people knew that her mother was Iranian, raised Shiite, same as many of the Chechnyan rebels.

  Finally, she answered. “The Chechnyans practice all the major sects of Islam, although extreme conservatives numerically and politically dominate the landscape. But, like the rest of the Islamic world, there’s a spectrum of beliefs even within the fundamentalist elements. Over a billion people from nearly every country and culture in the world are Muslims, and not all of them believe the same things.”

  “What about the Chechnyan rebels?”

  She shrugged. “They tend to come from the Shi’a sect, which holds that the straightest route to paradise is to die a martyr for your faith. The belief led to a certain willingness to engage in extreme forms of protest.”

  “Like suicide bombings?” Thorpe asked.

  “Among other self-destructive and violent acts, yes.”

  “Like risking injury to yourself to take out a figure skater who flaunts the faith?”

  Isabella’s gaze slid to the image of the two figure skaters lying on the ice that still flickered on the computer screen. “Absolutely.”

  He leaned forward, reaching for his intercom. “I think a more thorough background investigation of our boy, Lazlo, is in order here.”

  For once, they agreed on something.

  Abdul connected quickly to the Internet. He typed in a long, memorized domain name and waited while it connected to a closed-circuit surveillance camera giving a live feed to the very private Web address.

  The Holt woman sat on the floor, her knees hugged to her chest, the black bag still over her head. She had been surprisingly strong and his nose was still tender from where she’d bashed it. A less patient man would have hurt her for striking him. But she’d been panicked, in the middle of being dragged from her bed. Besides, he didn’t bear her any ill will. She was a tool. Simply a means to an end. She was how they would force her husband to cooperate.

  And so far, it was working like a charm. Abdul’s nephew, Hassan, reported that the ice was being melted and replaced in the Hamilton Arena at this very minute. The first, and most difficult, portion of the plan was almost in place.

  He would not—could not—stand idly by and let America insert itself into the internal affairs of his homeland. The way he’d heard it, a secret American military force went into Bhoukar last year and crushed the Bhoukari Army of Holy War and then let the emir of Bhoukar take the credit.

  Admittedly, the Army of Holy War was an extremist group that attracted mostly bored and disaffected young men with nothing better to do than cause trouble. They’d lacked a clear vision. And maybe the emir should have eliminated them. But it was an insult to Bhoukar’s honor to use infidels to clean house.

  The woman on the screen before him reached out with her hands, tentatively feeling her way along the wall at her back. When she reached the doorknob, she froze. Pressed her ear to the panel for several long seconds. He’d told his nephews to speak only Arabic around the prisoner, so she wouldn’t understand anything she heard on the other side of that door.

  She backed away slowly. Went back to her corner and sat down. Waiting. She was probably thinking hard about dying. About facing her God. A God who had failed her. He took no joy from the woman’s terror, but it was necessary.

  A commotion behind him made him jump, and his youngest son came flying into the bedroom excitedly, shouting, “Daddy! Daddy! Can I use your computer to play Robo Wars against Amir? He says I can’t beat him, but I can.”

  Abdul reached for the keyboard fast, slapping the escape key. The image of the woman before him disappeared. The screen went bright blue.

  His son clambered into his lap. “Can I? Can I?”

  He asked indulgently, “What’s this Robo War game all about?”

  “Here, I’ll show you. You can help me. Then I’ll beat Amir for sure.”

  He laughed and let his son explain the finer points of blowing up the bad guys before they got you first.

  Lazlo stepped into his room, his body and heart sore. He’d been going at nearly top speed when he’d slammed into Anya Khalid. Her elbow had caught him squarely in the gut, not to mention they’d cracked heads. He’d seen stars
afterward. Of course, he’d been the lucky one. By knowing he was going to ram into her, he’d been able to protect himself from the worst of it, to lead with his shoulder and let himself relax into the fall.

  Up until now, he’d had a good reputation in the skating community. He wasn’t vicious or self-centered. Wasn’t. Past tense. That had all changed this morning. He’d thrown away his good reputation in a single act of cowardice.

  He’d seen the way the other skaters had looked at him after the crash. They knew. That lady security guard with Anya hadn’t figured it out, but the rest of them had silently condemned him. They’d turned their backs on him and huddled tightly around Anya. No one had even looked at him as he’d limped off the ice.

  He dumped his bag and turned on the TV to numb his mind. The flickering glow filled his darkened room, and he jolted violently when a male shape rose from the chair in the corner. What the hell? His heart leaped into his throat until he realized who it was. Then he flopped down on the edge of his bed, his knees weak from the scare.

  “What do you want, Ilya?” Lazlo asked tiredly. “I did what you wanted.”

  “Have you knocked her out of the competition?”

  “An American doctor had to look at her knee. Her qualifying competition is in five days. If she feels half as lousy as I do, she won’t be ready to skate by then.”

  “Let us hope for your family’s sake that you succeeded.”

  Lazlo’s anger flared up, and he rose off the bed. “Listen, you piece of shit. You leave my family out of this. I did what you told me to. There’s no need to threaten them, and I’m getting damn sick and tired of you holding them over my head.”

  He saw a shadow of a shrug. “I don’t care what you think. I made you what you are, and I can unmake you just as easily.”

  Lazlo spluttered, “Like hell—”

  Ilya cut him off. “You are a tool. A weapon. And I am the hand who wields you. The sword does not tell its master where to swing.”

  “I don’t give a damn for your platitudes.”

  Another shrug. “Someday you will. The only question that remains is whether or not it will come too late for your parents and your sisters.”