Capitol Danger

by J. D. Tyler

  “Uh. Yes,” Kelsey managed. “Right.”

  Conscious of Greg’s gaze on her, she smiled at Fee and strolled away. But her heart still beat fast, and her breathing hadn’t settled.

  Okay, what was that? Yeah, the guy’s smokin’ but geez. Get a grip, Kelsey.

  A woman in a black gown gave her an odd look, and Kelsey turned up the wattage on her smile. It wouldn’t do to have a guest complain that she’d been surly.

  Even if this wasn’t her longterm job, effectively maintaining this cover and handling the covert op after the ball could get her the slot she wanted.

  What had she been doing?

  Oh, right, surveillance. She gave herself a good, swift mental kick. Screwing up her first op as lead agent was seriously not the way to get that plum job in the New York office. Working there would bring her into the area where the drug runners who’d killed her brother, Todd, ran their poison.

  Someday, she’d bring them down. Dorton Keyes was a stepping-stone to that goal.

  Arachnid had placed her here so she could watch him during the inaugural celebration. Afterward, she would call in her waiting team and snatch him. Despite his good ole boy demeanor, he lived in a compound that probably made the guards at Fort Knox jealous. This was the best chance at him that anyone would have for months.

  She glanced back at the buffet again. Wilt was looking a bit grim. Should she go remind him to smile?

  Hmm, considering his attitude toward any advice from women, no, she wouldn’t waste breath giving him a hint. Better to go get a fresh tray of drinks, or whatever the kitchen needed sent up here, and tend to her cover job.

  Yet her eyes turned back to Greg and Fee. No harm checking out his B side, as it were. The tux draped smoothly from those wide shoulders. The smooth fall of the black trousers implied his legs were long and straight.

  And the hand holding the champagne flute was large, square, and long-fingered. Nice.

  And totally irrelevant to her mission.

  Kelsey turned back to business.

  * * * * *

  “She’s cute,” Fee—short for Ophelia—volunteered. “You should ask her out.”

  Raising an eyebrow, Greg went for obtuse. “Who, her?” He nodded toward the middle-aged woman in a red evening gown who stood directly in his line of sight. “I try not to date women Mom’s age.”

  As his cousin rolled her eyes, he added, “Besides, she’s wearing a wedding ring and is glued to that guy beside her. Married women are off-limits, too.”

  He’d kept his tone light, but the sting of his divorce made the words taste bitter. Five years he’d wasted trying to build a future with someone who decided early on that he was just too much work.

  “It’s too bad Lacie’s gigolo didn’t have your scruples.” Fee scowled at her champagne.

  Her loyalty warmed him inside. She hated his cheating ex, but that was only natural, considering that he and Fee had grown up like brother and sister.

  He hugged her with his right arm, stifling a grimace because the movement was so awkward.

  “Hey, the arm’s better than it was.” She patted his hand. “You’ll get there.”

  If only he shared her confidence. Despite surgery and three months of therapy, he still didn’t have full range of motion. Still hadn’t requalified on the FBI firing range. He could shoot just fine, but he couldn’t draw or change magazines as fast as he needed to.

  But he wasn’t going to spoil tonight for Fee, who so loved a fancy-dress anything. She already felt guilty because the two of them were using her parents’ tickets, thanks to her dad’s back problem flaring up.

  She turned toward the dance floor, and Greg turned with her. Waitress Jane, whose name he’d gotten from her employee badge, circulated easily along the edges of the parquet square.

  No harm in admiring that smooth stride or the graceful way she slid through crowded areas. She should get an extra gold star for that because some of the guests in those knots of people were none too steady on their feet.

  Fee poked him. “What’re you frowning at? Surely not the waitress.”

  “It’s not even ten o’clock,” he said softly, under cover of the easy rock coming over the speakers, “and some of these people have passed three sheets to the wind and are going strong toward four.”

  When he’d agreed to escort his cousin, who’d not only wheedled and invoked the Guys who are recuperating need to get out more theory but enlisted both of their mothers to help, he hadn’t figured on so many drunks. Some of them had even groped him in the lobby earlier, and not only the women.

  Greg shook his head. This was a celebration of the first woman president’s inauguration, not a stag—or stagette, or whatever they called the female equivalent—party.

  Fee grinned. “Yes, but they’re not your problem. You should intercept that waitress. Whose name tag, by the way, says Jane.”

  Only an idiot would admit he already knew that.

  Fee bumped his elbow. “You were looking at her like you’d been on a diet for a year and she was a hot-fudge sundae.”

  Damn. Was it that obvious? Regardless, admitting it would be a tactical error.

  “Always chocolate something with you,” he replied.

  “You should get her number.”

  Not a bad idea, but she probably had lots of guys hitting on her at functions like this. He wasn’t going to be one of the crowd.

  A friend of Fee’s dad came up to speak to her. Greg greeted the man but drifted a little apart to watch Jane in peace. No harm in watching, after all.

  She was a few inches shorter than his six one, probably about five seven, in her flat, practical shoes. Her blue eyes glinted with intelligence, and he had the distinct sense she was sizing up the people around her.

  Following her gaze, he saw a guy in a black waiter jacket wheeling a cart of empty steel warming dishes toward the door. That seemed normal enough, so why were Jane’s eyes so watchful above her bright smile?

  None of his business, of course, but the guy had seemed almost curt when Greg and Fee filled their plates earlier. Curt and antsy. Weird.

  “Why’re you staring at the odd waiter?” Fee asked.

  “Just wondering what bug crawled up his ass.”

  Fee sighed. “This may shock you, Gregory, but not everyone treats wait staff decently. Or even politely.”

  “You’d know.” She’d waited tables for years, eventually working her way up to her current job managing Carlo’s, the best Italian bistro in Bloomington, Indiana. It had the best staff, too, because she treated them like vital parts of her team.

  “Indeed.” She grabbed his half-full champagne and set it with her empty glass on a passing waiter’s tray. Her hand caught his. “If you’re not going to go chat with Jane, you can dance with me.”

  “I live to serve,” he said, and she laughed.

  Greg stepped onto the dance floor with Fee. But his gaze drifted back to Jane. Heading for the door, her tray now empty, she was watching the guy at the dessert table.

  His radar pinged. Something was wrong here.

  * * * * *

  Kelsey pushed through the service door to the back corridor. The white cinder-block hallway ran the length of this side of the building, behind the smaller ballrooms and along the office suites the public rarely saw. Wouldn’t want politicians to have to mingle with the little people en route to picking up their fat speaker fees.

  Not that little people could afford rooms at the Fierenze. But everything was relative.

  The corridor felt cramped, the walls lined with linen carts from the private functions held before the inaugural celebration and tall, slotted carts for empty buffet dishes. There hadn’t been time to get the used tablecloths and napkins down to the laundry and still set up for tonight’s big bash.

  Kelsey stepped between two linen buggies to make space for a woman approaching with a tray of smoked salmon hors d’oeuvres.

  “Crazy night,” Manuela Escobar said, her black eyes shining.
“Kinda fun, though.”

  “Yeah. Manuela, do some of the guys seem a little off to you?”

  The other woman frowned. “Yeah, now that you mention it. I didn’t pay particular attention, but it’s like they’re on edge. Fidgety.”

  Kelsey swallowed against uneasiness. Her trainers had always said it was best to trust your gut first and worry about looking stupid later. Her gut was ringing alarm bells, but she had no reason to warn her colleague off.

  Manuela moved by with her tray, and Kelsey walked on down the hall, turning left into the corridor that ran the width of the building and held the service elevators and assorted storage. Maybe the guys were pissed because their presidential candidate had lost. But none of them had said anything in the weeks leading up to the event.

  The service elevator lay halfway down the hall, behind the main ballroom. Kelsey pushed the button and waited.

  Seconds ticked by. Frowning, she looked up at the display above the elevator. Sub-basement? And not moving?

  Okay, that was weird. Maybe somebody had taken trays to the guys stuck in the security station down there.

  Meanwhile, time was a-wasting.

  She turned toward the stairs and caught a strange, rhythmic sound from the stairwell. Booted feet? Coming up in quick-time?

  What the hell? Kelsey edged back into the long corridor, around the corner from the elevator bank and stairs.

  The elevator dinged.

  A moment later, a gruff, male voice said, “Brothers, our moment is at hand.”

  Brothers? What moment?

  More booted feet tromped down the corridor she’d just left.

  Suddenly, from the ballroom she’d been working came the distinctive pop-pop-pop and rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The booted feet were coming closer, and Kelsey’s gut sounded Red Alert. She pulled her gun, a Glock 26 subcompact, from her ankle holster. If the shit was hitting the fan, something with more punch would be better, but the pocket rocket would have to do.

  Three long strides brought her to the nearest linen cart. She slid her tray under it, scrambled inside, and pulled dirty linens over her.

  As she tightened her grip on the Glock, the footsteps came around the corner, into the area behind the ballrooms. Kelsey held her breath.

  “Roger that, brother,” a man’s voice said. “The north corridor is secure. Staff has been contained.” A pause, and then he added, “One casualty at the kitchen level, brother, two in the service corridors. So far.”

  Casualties? That had to mean hotel staff, people she knew. Kelsey’s throat burned with rage. God, she hoped nobody was dead. Casualties included wounded, too.

  “I heard gunfire from Renaissance. We will secure the room while the brothers there finish arming themselves.”

  What brothers? Arming themselves? Why?

  Kelsey desperately hoped she was wrong, but this had all the makings of a hostage situation.

  The footsteps went past her, toward the ballroom she’d left.

  If those men were going to secure the room, did that include leaving a guard in the hall? If it did, she was stuck here.

  Heart hammering, she eased up in the cart to peer over the edge. No one in sight.

  For all she knew, though, more were on the way. If she stayed here, she was trapped. And she shouldn’t bet on remaining undetected.

  Kelsey climbed out of the linen cart, Glock in hand. Maybe she should hole up in a storage closet while she figured out what to do. Staying out in the open was too dangerous when she didn’t know how many of those goons were roaming the corridors. Or why they were.

  Since the bad guys were interested in the ballrooms, she headed away from them, past the cross-corridor with the elevators and into the dimly lit halls of the office suites. One long corridor like this one ran down the opposite side as well, with another cross-hall connecting the two.

  There were two storage closets back here, one janitorial and one for office supplies. Thanks to a handy gadget from the Arachnid labs, she knew the combinations of their number-pad locks and so could hide in either one.

  As she slipped into the cross-corridor between the offices, another short burst of gunfire came from far behind her. Sounded like it came from the next cross-corridor over, the one that ran behind the main ballroom. The noise echoed eerily off the cinder-block walls.

  Cautiously, she peered around the corner.

  Jason, one of the waiters, emerged from the Renaissance ballroom. Kelsey was about to call him when she realized he was wearing black combat gear instead of his uniform. He was looking down at his gun, an AK-47—not usually a weapon of choice for law enforcement.

  She ducked back hastily, her chest tight. Trapped and exposed at the corner of two hallways was not a good place to be. She had to get to cover.

  Squeaky footsteps moved away—rubber soles on tile. One set of them. She tightened her grip on her Glock and slipped to the other corridor wall, “slicing the pie” by easing forward so she saw as much of the space around the corner as possible without being visible herself.

  Heading toward the far end of the hallway, Jason passed the linen carts where she’d hidden. The back of his combat vest bore no agency identifier. The front hadn’t either.

  Without looking directly at him, lest he somehow become aware of being watched, she tracked his progress. Swaggering, he made no effort to muffle his steps.

  Because of the inauguration, the city swarmed with every form of security on the planet, so making assumptions about who was or wasn’t undercover was risky. But trained personnel had a look about them, a way of moving, on or off duty.

  Jason, or whatever his real name was, was not law enforcement.

  Besides, the good guys wouldn’t be firing off bursts in a ballroom. Or a kitchen.

  Kelsey pulled her head back and swallowed hard.

  First priority was getting out of this exposed trap of a hallway. Second was finding out what the hell was going on. Who the blazes were these people?

  To think, I figured tonight’s assignment wouldn’t be much of a challenge.

  The squeaky footsteps were coming back. Only they kept coming, passing into the office area instead of turning into the ballrooms or the hallway with the service elevator.

  Shifting her gun, Kelsey wiped one hand, then the other, on her black uniform trousers. With him roaming around, getting out of here was going to be a lot harder.

  On the other hand, he probably had the answers she needed before she sent out an SOS to Arachnid. And with him out of the way, she could peek into the ballrooms that backed up to this hall via the peepholes in the service doors.

  Best and most immediate choice, take him out.

  But quietly.

  Kelsey shoved her gun into the back of her slacks and deliberately slowed her breathing. If Jason went back to the ballroom, he could spare her the trouble.

  But no, his footsteps kept coming. He must be patrolling the non-public areas in case anyone tried hiding there. Damn.

  When the AK’s barrel showed in the corner of her eye, she wheeled. Clamping her left hand on the gun barrel, bearing it down—too bad the shoulder sling kept her from yanking it away—she stepped into him for a right elbow strike to the face.

  He made a choked sound and rocked backward, but the blow hadn’t been solid enough to knock him out.

  “Stupid bitch,” he rasped.

  He grabbed for her. Holding the gun barrel, Kelsey wheeled into a left roundhouse kick to his head. It knocked him headfirst into the cinder-block wall.

  With a grunt, he collapsed.

  She peered around the corner, listening. No signs of anyone coming to see about the noise, but they were several yards from the door. She and her prisoner needed a quiet place to have a little chat.

  Good thing there was a janitor’s closet down the next cross corridor. Kelsey slung the AK over her shoulder. His sidearm and knife went into her pockets.

  Leaning over to grab his black vest,
she swore silently. If only she had the zip ties sitting down in her locker with the rest of her gear. But there’d been no way to carry them inconspicuously in her waiter rig, even if she’d expected to need them before the predawn snatch.

  What was it her trainer, a former SAS sergeant major, had said about gear? Oh, right. The gear you don’t have will be the gear you need. If she got out of this, she’d have to buy him a beer.

  Kelsey set her jaw and put her back into dragging Jason. At least the storage closet wasn’t far away.

  As she made the turn into that corridor, his eyes opened. He grabbed her jacket, yanking her down.

  A shot would alert his friends. Focused on keeping the gun, she twisted so her knee came down on his chest. His breath whoofed out, but he grabbed her hip and shoved her down. Falling painfully on the AK, she aimed a strike at his throat.

  It connected, enough to keep him from yelling but not fatally. It also bought her time to get to her feet.

  “Fucking bitch,” he wheezed, pushing himself upright.

  He had five inches and a good sixty pounds on her. Kelsey’s heart hammered, but there was no walking away from this fight.

  * * * * *

  Greg emerged from the men’s room by the lobby staircase. The area between the ballrooms was empty. Odd. It’d been full of drunken revelers when he’d come this way before. They’d probably moved into the ballrooms.

  Yet prickles of unease rolled down his back. That odd sound when he was in the rest room, like gunfire, came back to him, but surely—

  Brrr-rrrr-rrrr! Rat-a-tat-tat!

  Gunfire, definitely. Automatic weapon…

  The hotel corridor vanished. He was back in the bank, sunlight streaming in the front windows and across the arm of the gunman swinging his Sig from the teller to Greg as he reached for his own gun.

  No!

  Gritting his teeth, he bore down. Flashback. It’s just a flashback.

  Gradually, it cleared. He was leaning against the wall, shaking, but with his Glock 26 in his hand. On medical leave or not, he’d felt naked without the familiar weapon under his jacket.