The Medusa Game

by Cindy Dees

  Quietly, she said, “I know you don’t put any stock in gut intuitions, but I’m convinced I’ve pegged it. I just have a feeling that she’s taken off with Lazlo.”

  “What does your gut have to say about when she’ll be back?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d like to think she’s responsible enough to make it back for her practice session at noon, but I doubt that’s going to happen. I think she’s gone for the day. Assuming she doesn’t get herself killed, either through her own folly or my wringing her neck when I catch up with her, she’ll come back on her own. She has made it clear that it’s important to her to skate in the next round. I can’t imagine her blowing that off. The ladies’ short program is in three days. Worst case, I expect her back for that.”

  He shook his head. “Three days is a long time for a lamb like her to survive among the wolves. We need to find her before then.”

  Isabella nodded grimly and turned to leave.

  She was surprised when he said to her back, “Let me know if your gut sends you any more intuitions about where she has gone.”

  She stopped. Turned around. Nodded slowly. “Since you asked, it seems as if there are two obvious places she’d go if she has left the local area. New York City or Niagara Falls. It’s a long drive to the Falls, though, and I don’t see her being comfortable doing an overnight trip with young Lazlo. She has a crush on him, but she doesn’t want to see her family kill him or force the two of them into a hasty marriage.”

  Dex blinked. “Her family would kill him?”

  Isabella smiled without humor. “Welcome to life in a traditional Muslim family. If this boy has besmirched the honor of their daughter, they’d absolutely consider it their right to kill him.”

  He looked at her closely. “And were you raised in that kind of conservative home?”

  It was her turn to blink. And why did he want to know? “My dad acted as a moderating influence over my mother’s extended family.” Then she added flippantly, “Never fear. I’m not usually lethal to date. I won’t kill Beau unless he deserves it.”

  That dropped Dex’s jaw. Hark! Was that a blush climbing the man’s cheeks?

  She waxed serious again. “We have to find Anya before something bad happens.”

  Dex matched her seriousness. “I know you really like this girl. But stay objective, Adder. Keep your head on straight and keep thinking. You know Anya better than any of us. I need your input if we’re going to find her.”

  Wow. He’d actually complimented her. “Understood. And thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Stunned, she headed out into the ops center to find her teammates. To them she said, “You’ll never believe it. His Highness just said he needs my input. The inmates in Hell must be having a snowball fight right about now.”

  Aleesha lapsed into her heavy Jamaican accent. “Aw, girlie, dat mon, he gots it bad for thee.”

  Isabella gaped. “Get out. He does not.”

  Misty laughed. “Open your eyes. He’s crazy about you. That’s why he’s so hard on you.”

  Isabella retorted, “Isn’t he a little old for yanking my braids and throwing spit wads to show he likes me?”

  There was no time for a response as Vanessa divvied up assignments. Vanessa opted to take Karen, Kat and Misty with her to check out the Petrovich house. When she announced that choice, Isabella protested. “C’mon, Viper. This is my girl who’s missing. Let me do something to help find her.”

  Vanessa was firm. “You may be needed here to answer questions about Anya. You also haven’t had any sleep in two days, and I need you to get some rest. You’re running on empty.”

  As the other Medusas left, Dex walked up to her, watching Vanessa’s retreating back. “I see Scat taught her about taking care of her team,” he said approvingly. “You are too tired to be out crawling around doing surveillance right now.”

  She ignored his comment on her state of fatigue and replied, “We all look out for each other. The hard part is listening to the others when I know they’re right. What can I do around here to help? I’ll go crazy with nothing to do.”

  At least he had the common sense not to try to convince her to go home and sleep. No way could she sleep right now. “You can look at the surveillance tapes. Figure out how she got out of the building without anyone noticing. Maybe get a description of her clothes.”

  She nodded. Dex pointed out a free console, showed her how to input the camera imagery she wanted to review, and how to rewind and fast forward the digital video. It was a reasonably similar setup to the one she’d used at the Pentagon to review footage taken from unmanned aerial reconnaissance airplanes.

  It didn’t take her long to spot Anya. But then, she had the advantage of knowing the girl like her own sister.

  “I’ve got her,” she called out.

  Dex leaned over her shoulder. Isabella pointed at the screen. “That’s her in the black leather bomber jacket and hat.”

  “She used a disguise?”

  Isabella nodded. “Yup, and I’ve seen that coat before. It’s Lazlo’s.”

  “Where’s he?” Dex asked, scanning the screen.

  “No sign of him. He probably went out ahead to pick up a car, maybe meet her out front. Do we have video of the street?”

  He nodded. “We’ll have to patch in to the IOC security cameras.” He reached past her to type in a set of commands. Their shoulders brushed, and he did nothing to pull away from the contact. But then, neither did she.

  “There you go,” Dex said.

  Was she imagining it, or did his voice sound a little tight? Sort of like her throat right now. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  She started scanning images of the streetside curb of the Olympic village in the early morning light. She picked up Anya leaving the building, but the girl disappeared down the street too far for the camera’s resolution to make out. If Anya and Lazlo had a rendezvous, it happened out of camera range. Damn! Dead end. She’d been so hoping to get a description of a car. Then the police could swing into action and find the teens fast. She sat back, glaring at the screen in front of her.

  “Go home.”

  She turned her glare on Dex.

  He said gently, “I’m not telling you to sleep. I’m telling you to get a hot meal in you and rest. Take it from an old field operator. I know what I’m talking about. You need to disengage from this for a little while.”

  She sighed. He did have a lot more operational experience than she did. And as much as she might protest, he did know what he was talking about when it came to pushing the human body to its limits.

  “Okay, fine,” she grumbled. “I’m out of here. But you call me the second you hear anything. None of this I just thought I’d let you sleep a little longer crap.”

  He threw her a sharp, sarcastic salute. “Yes, ma’am. Now get out of here.”

  She threw him an equally snappy salute, with the middle finger of her right hand extended and the others curled down in a fist. He laughed at the bird she’d flipped him.

  As she’d predicted, Anya’s practice time came and went with no sign of the girl. Her coach alternated between panic and fury. Liz agreed with Isabella’s guess that Anya was with Lazlo, who had indeed disappeared as well. Surveillance of the house where Lazlo’s family was staying yielded no sign of the missing teens nor any conversation regarding their whereabouts. The Medusas stayed parked in the woods behind the home to keep an eye on it.

  None of the other investigations turned up any leads, either. The police, both local and state, were keeping an eye out for the teens, but that was all anyone could do for now. They were blind and helpless until a development changed the situation.

  Isabella wandered the Olympic village until the buildings closed in on her and her eyeballs pounded with a headache. She was tired. But there was no way she could sleep as long as Anya was possibly in danger. Isabella left the village and took to the streets, examining every face in the crowd, hoping against hope that s
he’d spot Anya.

  Her cell phone rang as the sun slid low in the winter sky, and she yanked it out of her pocket hopefully. Please, God, let it be news. “Hello?”

  “No news yet,” Dex said quickly, quelling her anticipation. “Where are you?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m standing at your front door, and you’re not resting like I told you to.”

  Busted. “Uh, I couldn’t sit still. I decided to go for a walk.”

  “Come on back. I know what the situation calls for,” he said.

  Suspiciously she asked, “Oh yeah? What?”

  “Just trust me for once. I’ve been in this business a long time.”

  She sighed. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  He was sitting on the steps leading up to her floor when she rounded the corner of her building. He didn’t say much as she unlocked the door and went inside. But as soon as the door closed behind him, he said, “Put on some workout clothes.”

  She frowned, but actually, the idea of working up a good mindless sweat sounded appealing. About two minutes later, she emerged from the bedroom in red Lycra shorts and a matching tie-dye tank top. She pulled on gray sweatpants and her white, Olympic parka.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He was silent in the car, maybe to allow her to study the pedestrians on the sidewalks, maybe because he didn’t have anything to say. Aleesha and Misty were smoking dope if they thought he was interested in her. Here they were, all alone and he said not a word. He parked in front of the Olympic village, and they signed in to the incredible workout facility.

  “What’s your poison of preference?” he asked as they gazed around at every conceivable piece of workout equipment known to man.

  She grinned. “If I’m into pain, I go for a stair climber. If I’m into sweat, I head for the treadmill. After I’m good and warmed up, then I head for the weights.”

  “Let’s go for sweat. Stair climbers make me feel like a Hollywood housewife.” He headed over to a treadmill and stepped onto the big machine.

  She stepped onto the treadmill beside his and took off at an easy jog. As her muscles warmed up, the tension across the back of her neck began to ease. For once, it felt really good to be doing this. She speeded up the machine to a brisk run. Within a few minutes she’d broken a sweat and pushed herself to a six-and-a-half-minute mile pace. The Medusas liked to do six-minute miles on their group runs, but it was always just a little faster than she was comfortable going. Except today, the slower pace felt sluggish to her. Experimentally, she pushed up the speed to a six-minute mile. Hey, it wasn’t bad!

  She stretched out her stride, let her arms swing naturally, and found an easy rhythm she could sustain all day. Hmm. Was her trouble running with her teammates all in her head? Was she tensing up in the group runs because she thought she was slower than the others? She inched up the speed a little bit more. Okay, she was working hard at this 5:45 pace, but her breathing was holding up and she still felt strong.

  She noticed Dex glancing over at her control panel. He was probably doing four-minute miles beside her, but she didn’t care. She was running as fast as the other Medusas usually did and was holding her own very nicely, thank you very much.

  She did six miles at the killer pace, and then she slowed the machine down to a baby jog to let her heart recover gradually. Dex’s machine wound down beside hers.

  He said, “I admit it. I’m impressed. That was a good run you just put in.”

  She replied, “Where we suffer in comparison to the men is when you add weight to our backs. We can run long distances loaded down, but we lose a lot of speed.”

  “Is it strength or aerobic capacity that gets you?” he asked curiously.

  “We don’t have the extra lung capacity to take sixty or seventy extra pounds and still run fast. The trick is, we know that. So, we profile our missions around it. We’re inserted closer to the target and we egress away from the op closer in so we don’t have to hump gear twenty or thirty miles fast to get to our extraction point.”

  “What other adjustments do you make to ops to compensate for being women?”

  She didn’t take the question as an insult. He sounded genuinely interested. “We have to watch the lifting and climbing requirements. Obviously, women don’t have near the upper body strength in ratio to our weight that men do. We can all do pull-ups and climb ropes and lift and carry an adult male, but we try not to make doing a lot of that central to mission success.”

  “What are your special strengths? For surely you must have some or General Wittenauer would never have brought the Medusas on board.”

  She grinned. “He was a bit of a tough nut to crack. Our greatest strength is that we’re invisible. Nobody out there expects women operatives, so they don’t look for us. We can stroll in right under someone’s nose and they never peg us for who we are. A whole lot of the trouble spots in the world today marginalize their female populations—maybe that’s why they’re in trouble. We can enlist the aid of all those unhappy women in a way that a male team can’t.”

  “And then there’s sex,” he remarked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You can sleep with people to get what you need.”

  She gazed coldly at him. “Before I hurt you very badly for saying that, were you making that comment purely in an operational context?”

  He looked startled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Honest. I was talking about it in the context of missions.”

  She unclenched her jaw as he further explained, “It’s just that I’ve thought about it on some of my missions when we’re trying to run an infiltration. It would be so much easier to be a woman and sashay into some bar or restaurant and proposition the bad guy straight up. It would save so damned much time over having to prove ourselves and win the trust of a group before they’ll let us in.”

  She shrugged. “To date, we haven’t run any ops where it would’ve helped. And I have to say I seriously hope we never do. I can’t imagine Vanessa accepting any op that forced one of us to sleep our way into position.”

  “That sort of thing would be volunteer only.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “You say that like you’ve seen a mission or two where the operators did sleep their way in.”

  “It’s been known to happen,” he said cryptically.

  Gaping at his back, she followed him over to the gigantic array of free weights.

  “Spot me and I’ll spot you,” he offered.

  She nodded, still stunned over that little revelation. She stood behind his head as he lay down on a weight bench and commenced pressing nearly twice her body weight. When it was her turn, he made suggestions to correct her technique, which made managing the weight easier and allowed her to add ten pounds to her second set of lifts.

  She felt like a noodle from head to foot when they finally left the gym and headed back to her place. Dex looked energized, relaxed and refreshed, the jerk. He’d probably get better-looking with age, too!

  “Go take a shower,” he ordered.

  She disappeared into her bedroom, perplexed over all this one-on-one treatment. But hey. If he wanted to babysit her for grins and giggles, who was she to stop him?

  It took until she was almost done with her shower before the little voice in the back of her head kicked in. Okay, so she was flattered that he was spending time with her. She hoped it meant that maybe Aleesha and Misty were right after all. And dammit, she was attracted to him. Had a full-blown crush on the guy, for God’s sake. She was no better off than Anya. Well, maybe she was. She wasn’t a dead woman when she finally got her sassy little butt back home!

  She got out of the shower, towel dried her dark hair and brushed it back into a ponytail that promptly commenced dripping between her shoulder blades. With Dex in her living room, she wasn’t going to take time to blow dry it.

  She stepped out of the bedroom. Correction. Dex was in her kitchen.

  “
What are you doing in here?” she exclaimed as she wedged herself into the tiny space beside him.

  “Cooking dinner. I went back to my place and grabbed a few things.”

  “A man of many talents, are we?” she asked, peering into a pot of pasta boiling in some sort of broth.

  “Move over. I have to add the vegetables.”

  She complied while he dropped in colorful red and yellow peppers, asparagus tips, zuchinni and yellow squash. Then he tossed in a handful of something else about the size of corn, but light brown. She asked incredulously, “Are those pine nuts?”

  He glared over at her. “And what’s wrong with those? They add a crunchy texture and nutty flavor.”

  She shook her head, grinning widely. “Now I’ve heard it all. The trained killer enjoys crunchy texture and nutty flavor.”

  His gaze narrowed and he said menacingly, “You’re a trained killer, too, and you’ll like them as much as I do.”

  She did, indeed, enjoy the pine nuts. She enjoyed the whole meal, in fact. He’d even gotten the vinegar-and-oil mixture just right on the salad, a feat she’d never been consistently successful at.

  They’d pushed back their plates and laid down their napkins when she finally decided she couldn’t stand it anymore. “So what’s up? Why all this personal attention?”

  “You are direct, aren’t you?”

  “Another trait of the trained killer that we both share in common.” She threw him a challenging look that dared him to match her directness.

  “I’m interested in you. I want to know what makes you tick. I’ve never met another woman like you.”

  Okay, then. So he could be as direct as she could. “There are only five more women anywhere like me that I’m aware of.”

  He planted his elbows on the table and studied her. “Why this job?”

  “Initially, I’d have said it was because I’m no good at turning down a dare. When Vanessa offered it to me, I couldn’t resist the challenge.”

  “And now?”

  Damn, he was perceptive. He’d picked up on her reference to deeper motives. She mulled over how to put it into words. He waited, silent. Finally she replied, “I grew up in a world where women were expected to do a little school until they met a guy, got married, had kids, and faded into the background. Eventually, my sons would grow up and I’d be able to henpeck them and boss their wives around. And then I’d die, a grouchy, stooped old woman.”