Everything was pleasing to look at. Someone with a very good eye had decorated. The furniture was sleek, elegant, comfortable. There were a few pieces of art scattered around. A laser-etched hand in a Plexiglass cube. A hand-thrown and hand-painted enamel vase. And — my goodness!
“Wow.” Honor stood up and took a few steps toward the wall where a large, exquisite watercolor was hung. Just a few brush strokes of a fall of wisteria in a ray of sunlight. Absolutely stunning. She looked over her shoulder at Matt, ignoring Jacko, who probably disdained watercolors. Or ate them for breakfast. “Is this a Lauren Dare?” She peered and, yes, saw the precise signature in the lower right hand corner of the picture. Honor had a tiny Lauren Dare, her thirtieth-birthday present from her father. Typically, he’d bought it, had it framed and delivered to her in Portland without ever leaving Los Angeles, after she’d told him she’d been to a show of Lauren Dare’s works and loved them.
She’d been exasperated at her father, who hadn’t come up for her birthday because of his thousandth work crisis. But she loved the tiny oil painting he gave her.
She walked back to the table. “Sorry, but I just love that artist. She’s amazing.”
Matt’s face had an unusual expression. “Yeah,” he said in a choked tone and looked at Jacko.
Honor didn’t particularly want to look at him but she followed Matt’s gaze and did a double take. What just happened? What was wrong with the guy? It looked like his face had melted.
He’d taken his cell out, scraped his chair to the left so he was elbow to elbow with her.
Honor didn’t want to draw back because it would be rude, but having Jacko so close was unsettling. Jacko thrust his cell under her nose, big finger scrolling through shots of … Lauren Dare artwork?
How could that be?
“That series is a big favorite,” he was saying, tapping hard on his cell screen. “This one, this one for instance, I love this one.”
His big finger was fixed on an image of a huge peony in pastels, creamy petals like velvet. He sighed. “It’s so great, isn’t it?”
Jacko turned to look her full in the face, having morphed from dark pit bull to dark Golden Labrador. He all but had his tongue hanging out, dark eyes intense but friendly now.
“And look at these.” His finger started scrolling again, image after beautiful image of flowers and trees. “Her landscape series. She’d never done landscapes before but just look at them.” He lifted his eyes and stared at her intently. “Right?”
Honor felt frozen in place, wondering what was happening. What had turned this fierce taciturn warrior into an oversized puppy dog?
“Lauren Dare is Jacko’s wife,” Matt offered, then shrugged.
It was rude, but Honor stared. This man was married to Lauren Dare? She’d never met the woman but at the exhibit she went to, there was a photograph on the back cover of the catalog. Lauren Dare was a delicate beauty, ethereal and almost fairy-like. And she was married to Jacko?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Jacko said and she immediately stopped thinking it. Could he read minds? Oh, God.
“Why isn’t she Lauren Jackman? She kept her professional name after we married. Though Dare isn’t really —” He waved a huge hand. “Never mind. And look, look here —” He simply beamed as he stared at his cell screen. He held it out to her. “Our daughter, Alice.”
Lauren Dare had mated with Jacko. Honor tried to wrap her head around that. She wouldn’t have been surprised if their offspring was purple and had tentacles. But what she saw on the screen was Lauren holding a remarkably beautiful dark-skinned child, with — thank God — Lauren’s delicate features and amazing silver eyes. The little girl was absolutely stunning.
“What a lovely child,” she said and Jacko’s chest, already the size of a gorilla’s, swelled.
“The best,” he said and gave her a sappy smile.
Matt sighed, placed an elbow on the table and leaned toward her. “Now you’ve done it,” he murmured. “There’s no stopping him now.”
Jacko was still scrolling, holding individual screenshots up to her. She nodded and smiled.
A pneumatic hammer started up and another man arrived. A darker older version of Jacko, like his identical twin brother born thirty years earlier, except he had Alice’s silver eyes.
Honor had taken three genetics classes in med school but the effects of genes sometimes still surprised her.
“Dante.” Matt reached out a hand. “Glad to see you.”
The man took a seat next to Jacko, who nodded, put his cell away and morphed back into his excellent imitation of the Grim Reaper.
“Dr. Thomas, I am Dante Jimenez. I worked at the DEA for thirty years and I still have contacts there and in other government agencies.” His outstretched hand was callused and huge, the grip firm but not crushing. He pushed an iPad into the center of the table. “Back at ASI we’ve been working on your case nonstop. Both because of Matt and Suzanne and, well, because no one at the company likes the idea of people going around abducting women. Makes us mad. So.” He cricked his thick muscled neck to the left, to the right. “What I’m about to show you is footage taken off a KH-15 satellite.”
“KH-15?” Honor repeated. She had trouble focusing, still fixated on Jacko and Lauren Dare.
“Keyhole Satellites. They orbit about two hundred miles in altitude. Basically orbiting cameras with a really good lens. Operated by the NRA.”
“I imagine that isn’t the National Rifle Association,” Honor said.
“Nope.”
“So it would be the National Reconnaisance Agency,” she said and three pairs of eyes, two dark, one silver, turned to her. She shrugged. “I read a ton of thrillers. It’s a hobby of mine.”
Matt gave a faint smile.
“I also imagine any images would be confidential. Top Secret, in fact.”
Silence.
Well, she didn’t care. If what they were about to show her could help her recover her lost memory, she was all for it. “Show me.”
Dante swiped and tapped and all of a sudden there was a black and white image filling the screen. Honor turned the tablet so she could see it better. A mountain scene, a twisting two-lane blacktop, a black SUV in the middle of the road. The image had an enormous gray arrow in the center of the screen, pointing right.
Honor tapped on the arrow and the image came to life as a video of an SUV being driven erratically, the truck crossing over the narrow road into the opposite lane often, and at every curve. Granite walls to the right, a steep cliff to the left.
The SUV made a hairpin turn, the back of the vehicle hanging over the cliff for a second, then shuddering back onto the road.
Honor studied the crazy dangerous driving, the landscape. Something about the road … “Oh my God!” She leaned closer to the tablet. “That’s me! That’s me driving!”
“Watch,” Dante said. He didn’t need to say it, she was riveted to the screen, couldn’t wrench her eyes away. She barely remembered living through what she was seeing on the screen. It was as if she were living this for the first time, only there was an echo, a déjà vu effect. She’d done this before, though she couldn’t remember it. She was remembering it as she saw it.
Everyone was silent as they watched the SUV — the one she was driving — veer over the median line again and again.
“Looks like I was drunk, but I wasn’t.”
“You were fighting the drugs,” Matt said and she nodded.
The asphalt ended and the road became a dirt track, strewn with rocks which she imagined had fallen from the cliff face. In parts, the cliff had netting to keep boulders from crashing to the road.
“Plates?” Matt asked without taking his eyes from the tablet.
“Fake,” Dante answered. He, too, was riveted on the tablet. “Not stolen, which is interesting. Perfectly normal-looking plates, registered to a non-existent company.”
Honor was barely listening, following the SUV’s dust trail. On the unpaved ro
ad, the dust kicked up camouflaged the vehicle, but it made it very easy to follow. She winced as the vehicle came so close to the edge the dust fanned out across the canyon.
“I’m going to go off the road.”
“You are. Right … now,” Dante said. Another hairpin turn, something dark crossing the road. A deer. The vehicle missed it by a hair, dust rising from the wheels as they suddenly braked, but the vehicle couldn’t hold the road.
Honor gasped as the back of the vehicle slid to the left, the driver — her — overcompensating. The SUV teetered on the edge of the cliff, then slowly slid over.
The vehicle rolled slowly, once, twice, then picked up speed as it tumbled down the cliff, bouncing over and over in clouds of dust. It was a horrible, fascinating thing to watch.
“Fuck,” Jacko breathed then moved his eyes to Honor when Matt elbowed him hard, so hard it would have broken the ribs of a lesser man. “Sorry.”
“I work in the ER,” she said absently. “I’ve heard it all. And I’ve heard that particular word as a noun, a verb, an adverb, an adjective and an exclamation.”
But she didn’t take her eyes off the vehicle careening down the steep cliff until it juddered to a stop at the river bank, upside down, steam coming from under the hood.
Honor shuddered.
“Watch,” Dante said. He didn’t have to, everyone was riveted.
Honor saw something white and red exit from the driver’s side window. The vehicle was upside down so the window was at ground level. The white and red thing moved. Though the resolution was excellent, it took Honor a moment to realize that the moving thing was a hand, then an arm. Her hand, her arm.
The red was blood.
She watched herself crawl out of the shattered window, slowly, painfully. She had no memory at all of this.
On the screen, she moved toward the river, crawling with the help of her hands and elbows. Though Honor didn’t remember it, she could recognize that despite her drugged-up concussed state, she’d headed for the river because she somehow knew she had to get away from the vehicle as fast as she could and the only way to do that was to let the river carry her away. No way could she walk or run.
Steam was pouring out from under the hood, blown away by the wind. She watched herself tumble into the water, where the current simply took her away. She disappeared in a matter of seconds. It was as if she’d never been.
“Continue watching,” Dante said quietly.
Honor didn’t understand why until she saw another vehicle drive along the road and pull up at the top of the cliff. The satellite had moved on in its trajectory and the view was slanted, but the image was clear enough.
“We didn’t get enough data from the face for facial recognition,” Dante said, regret clear in his voice. “And he didn’t move outside the vehicle enough to get gait recognition.” A man got out of the black vehicle. The slanted image never showed his face. He took three steps to the edge of the cliff and looked down. He towered over the roof of the SUV so he must have been tall. He was dressed in black, and looked very bulky in the torso.
Honor peered more closely. “Is he wearing body armor?”
Matt touched her hand. “Yeah. Good call.”
She looked at him indignantly. “He was wearing body armor to chase me? I wasn’t armed. He must have known that.”
It was Jacko who answered. “One.” He held up a thick dark finger. “He can’t know whether you are or aren’t armed. Not for sure. It’s always better to have armor and not need it than need it and not have it. That’s true for more or less everything. And two,” he held up another thick finger, “I’m assuming that if you escaped, he thought you might be some badass ninja chick and wasn’t taking any chances.”
Honor nearly smiled. “Badass ninja chick, I like that.” Though of course it was so far from the truth it was ridiculous. True, she wielded a knife — scalpel — but only to do good. “I don’t know how I escaped.” She met each man’s sober eyes. “I have no memory at all of that.”
On the screen, the man was standing on the edge of the cliff, broad back to the camera, head bowed as he looked below through binoculars. He jerked back and at first Honor couldn’t understand why. Then she saw red-black smoke billowing far below in the canyon. The fuel spilling from the vehicle had caught fire.
The man observing it all from the clifftop got back into his black SUV, executed a smooth K-turn on the narrow track and drove back the way he’d come. In a few seconds, the car was gone from the screen.
Honor sat back. “I was very lucky,” she said. “They must think I’m dead.”
The three men nodded.
“That’s to our advantage,” Matt added and she turned to him, grateful for the plural pronoun. He made her problem his. Theirs.
All three of the men nodded again.
“So.” Dante swiped the tablet closed. “Let’s deal with the obvious conclusion first.”
“Obvious? There’s an obvious conclusion?” If there was, it was beyond Honor’s confused and muddled understanding.
“Yes.” Dante watched her face. “Do you think you were kidnapped for ransom?”
“No.” The answer came straight from her gut and all three men reacted. They reacted in minute ways, almost imperceptible, but she was used to reading people’s body language. Often in the ER, people’s bodies said the opposite of what their mouths said.
No, I haven’t taken drugs.
I fell down the stairs.
My kid is hyperactive, keeps hurting herself.
“Why do you say that, Dr. Thomas?” Dante asked.
“Please. Honor.”
“Okay. Why do you say that, Honor? I understand your father is a wealthy man.”
She refrained from rolling her eyes. “That depends on your definition of wealthy. Some years my father is rolling in it. Some years he is up to his eyeballs in debt. This past year it’s been more the latter than the former.”
“You okay with your old man?” That was in Jacko’s basso profundo rumble. Jacko’s father, Dante, shot him a wry glance. “What?” Jacko asked. “Not be the first time someone’s kidnapped and the ransom isn’t paid.”
This was a dead end and Honor had to make them understand it. “My father and I have had our differences, and twice we didn’t speak to each other for a couple of months. The first time was when I enrolled in pre-med instead of business school. Though I’ve never shown the slightest interest in the shipping industry, and Quest Line Shipping in particular, my dad got it into his head that I’d take over from him. Never going to happen. I told him that over and over and over again. From the time I was a kid I knew I wanted to be a doctor. And the second time is now. Dad’s had one massive heart attack, he’s got three stents, he’s overweight. His blood pressure hovers around 180 over 100 and he’s pre-diabetic. And he refuses to slow down, refuses to even contemplate retirement. When I told him he had to take better care of himself, he reacted angrily. We haven’t spoken in a month.” Even talking about it, Honor could feel herself become agitated, worried sick and angry as hell, equally and at the same time.
Dante nodded. “I see.”
She shook her head. “No, actually, I don’t think you do. Whatever our differences, even when we’re not talking to each other, I love him and he loves me. I wasn’t kidnapped for ransom and held a prisoner because my father didn’t pay. He would’ve paid immediately. No way would he have let me be held captive for six days. No matter what amount they asked, he’d have sold everything.” Something in her voice must have convinced them. And she knew it from the bottom of her soul. If she’d been kidnapped for ransom, her father would have moved heaven and earth and certainly would have impoverished himself without a second thought. “So it wasn’t a kidnapping for ransom. Not if I was held for almost a week.”
“Do you think it might be something work-related?” Matt asked. “You crossed some drug dealer or mobster? Is that a possibility?”
Honor thought about it and sighed. “Well, we ge
t plenty of addicts and drug dealers in the ER. And unsavory characters. I suppose it is a possibility, but I don’t know how I could have become a target for anyone. I didn’t hear any deathbed confessions, no one gave me anything for safekeeping. Not that I remember, anyway. I just can’t think of anything that would make someone abduct me.” Even just saying it made her feel ridiculous. She was a busy, tired doctor who knew no secrets and knew no bad guys. All she did was work and go home. And yet, the bruises and the scabs from the shackles were still fresh.
“Here.” Matt held out a smartphone. “Call your dad. Unknown number will show on his end and no one can trace it. If it goes to voicemail, don’t answer. Just hang up. I’ve put it on speakerphone.”
“Okay.” She punched her father’s private line number and waited. Very few people had this particular number. He always picked up. But she got a voicemail. “Hello, this is Simon Thomas. Leave a message.”
Matt shook his head and she thumbed the connection closed. “Well, that’s unusual,” she said, perplexed.
“How so?” Dante asked.
“It’s a number very few people have. Me, his personal lawyer, I guess Marianne, this Frenchwoman he’s been seeing, his CFO. Maybe a few others. But he always picks up, even just to say he’s busy and he’ll call back. Can you find out where he is?”
A faint smile creased Dante’s face. “Yeah, we can. And we will. In the meantime, I suggest you stay here. Matt will make sure you’re safe. Right, Matt?”
Matt’s face tightened. “Count on it.”
Laurel Canyon
Los Angeles
“The shipowner received a call on his private line,” Ivan Antonov said.
“Who cares? Here.” Chamness waved one hand while pouring a twenty-year-old Macallen into two cut crystal tumblers. He handed one to Antonov and sank into a light gray designer leather armchair.
Everything about the house — mansion really — was stylish. Perched high in the hills above Laurel Canyon, with high stone walls and no neighbors with line of sight, it had perfect privacy. The mansion was huge with a large patio, an infinity pool, a professional kitchen, all marble and stainless steel.
Midnight Renegade (Men of Midnight Book 7) Page 9