Afterglow

by Cherry Adair

  There must be plenty of pharmaceutical labs across the country who’d hire someone with Dakota’s skill and training, yet she hadn’t gone back into the field after …

  “Man, this fucking place creeps me out,” Ham muttered, his shoulders practically brushing the damp walls as they corkscrewed down to the first level. Ahead of them by five minutes was a family with three teenage boys; even though Rand couldn’t see them, their voices were loud and echoing in the confined space.

  “Our guy hasn’t gone anywhere,” he assured his friend as he came to the bottom of the stairs. The narrow corridor filled with the sound of Ham’s labored breathing. “You okay, buddy?”

  “Yeah. Give me a minute.”

  Before Rand opened communications with Dakota, he and Ham tossed around various scenarios about the lack of communication from the team. They’d have to wait and see who—if anyone—responded to Rand’s texts.

  While his friend wheezed behind him, trying to catch his breath, Rand tried to figure out what the hell a drug dealer was doing in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Paris’s streets. It seemed an unlikely place to have a meeting. It wasn’t exactly well lit or signposted. There were a million more convenient places to do business. “You sure this is where he is?”

  Ham glanced up. “This was your idea, pal—oh, talking to Red?”

  He nodded at Ham as Dakota assured him, “One hundred percent. The numbers show he’s two point eight miles south of your location.”

  Rand vaguely remembered reading an ancient magazine last year while waiting to see his father at the prison. The Paris underground was not only a labyrinth of old quarries and the ossuary; it included hundreds of miles of tunnels comprising the oldest and densest subway and sewer networks in the world. Beneath the streets of Paris were canals, reservoirs, crypts, and bank vaults.

  Old wine cellars that had been transformed into nightclubs and expensive art galleries did a thriving business down here. It was a city beneath the city.

  No one was allowed in most of the old tunnels, mine shafts, and catacombs anymore. Just this one-hour walk from point A to point B to see the millions of bones, then out the other side halfway across town, unless they had special clearance for research or repairs.

  Without Dakota’s navigational skill, they wouldn’t have a fucking hope in hell of ever finding anyone down here. He’d noticed that some of the tunnels had street names, presumably correlating to the streets above-ground, but he suspected that was only on this level, not farther down where the public wasn’t allowed to roam freely.

  Rand stayed close behind Ham, who filled the tunnel with his bulk. Poor guy was already huffing and puffing. Garbage, newspapers, cans, and cigarette butts littered the stone floor, soaking up small spills of murky water that dripped from the ceiling and walls. Well-done graffiti covered the rough walls. Some people with a lot of time on their hands apparently spent considerable time down here. Druggies? The homeless? Counterculture artists? Away from the glare of the city’s laws … why not? The subterranean lair of their quarry began to make a little more sense. Still …

  Dakota would be hyperventilating in this confined space, and they hadn’t even gone two hundred yards.

  “There’s a branch off to your right.” Her voice in his ear sounded calm and even. “Turn off after you go through the crypt.”

  “Got it.” He wiped a trickle of water off his ear, grateful when Ham picked up the pace. Water droplets gleamed inches over Rand’s head. When they got into the tunnels where visitors were prohibited, he’d assume the lead. For now, they were well behind the family ahead and a good distance from the people bringing up the rear.

  Sound rippled around him; indistinct voices, the crunching of shoes on centuries-old dirt, the uneven drip-drip-drip, and Dakota’s even breathing in his right ear.

  In the early hours of this morning, he’d listened to her breath hitch as he’d lain two feet from her slender, tense back, and a hundred miles from any connection they’d once shared. The smell of her skin and hair had made his dick hard and his fingers itch to reach out and touch her. God, he missed her.

  No. No, he didn’t miss her. He missed, with an intensity that rocked him, the memory of her. The memory of them. Not just the sex, which had been phenomenal, but the laughter. The connection. The communication without verbalizing. The quiet and the noisy. The soft and the hard.

  “They used to grow mushrooms in the tunnels, did you know?”

  “You don’t have to entertain me,” Rand told her shortly.

  “I know. Sorry. I’m—”

  “Ham. Get the lead out. Close the gap.” He didn’t want to hear what she was. Scared. Worried. Lonely. Her feelings weren’t his business anymore. And he was glad of it.

  The fact that their quarry had been wherever he was—not moving much—since very early this morning indicated he’d reached his destination, either a meeting of some kind, or his final destination. He was in the right place for a very private burial. He’d join the six million bodies exhumed and reinterred in the tunnels of the old mines, which had become an ossuary in the eighteenth century.

  The air got cooler, smelling moldy and dank as he followed Ham, and tried to tune out Dakota’s soft breathing directly in his ear. Her silence pulsed with unspoken words. He was totally fucking fine with that. Other than this business that brought them together again, there was nothing that needed said. Part of him regretted what he’d said last night, but he was glad he’d clarified his stance.

  He knew in his gut she wouldn’t keep her promise to help his father. He could even understand. To vindicate Paul, she’d have to incriminate herself. She wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t ask again.

  They came to the crypt with its walls of bones, disarticulated and anonymous. Some of their owners died more than twelve hundred years before.

  “Holy shit,” Ham said, looking around. “I thought they just, I don’t know, tossed the bones in here. This took some serious work.”

  There was a macabre beauty to the way the bones had been arranged in elaborate and intricate patterns, but the two men didn’t linger. Rand wanted to disappear down the side tunnel before the people he could hear behind them closed the gap.

  Ham muttered a vile curse, yanked his hand off the wall, and reached for his weapon as something large, wet, and feral raced between his legs. “Hate this fucking place! Where next?”

  “Stop. This is it.” The black ornamental wrought-iron gate was right where Dakota said it would be, barring the tunnel they should take. It was quick work for him to pick its padlock with the tools he always carried. They slipped into the darkness, and Ham closed the gate behind them.

  Rand set the padlock back in place and tucked in the post enough to make it look closed. Unlike the corridors used by the tourists, there was no light here. Turning on their Maglites, they continued. The ceiling was dark with soot from the oil lamps and torches of the past, and the path ahead was nothing but a stygian void.

  It was a good thing Rand wasn’t given to flights of fancy. The place seemed to pulse eerily; it was like being in the belly of a beast. Whole damn place was the stuff of horror movies. His mind moved along the line he’d seen on the map as it curved and jogged for another half mile or so. The chances of finding his man down here, alive, were slim to fucking none, and he knew it. But Dakota had been so convincing… . More fool him. Veracity wasn’t her strong suit. She believed truth was something she could bend to suit her own agenda.

  She had her own reason for finding this guy, and he’d bet it wasn’t to stop him selling Rapture as a street drug. Someone reinvented the formula. Did she want in? God only knew the sale of any illegal drug was ridiculously lucrative, and the effects of Rapture guaranteed the dealer, manufacturer, and everyone else up and down the food chain untold billions of dollars.

  The question of what she was hiding—of what she was really doing here, and why she was so intent on his heels—spun circles in his mind. Had Stark sent her, not knowing she had anoth
er agenda? Or had she lied to her boss to get him to send her? More immediately, had she sent Rand down here to get him out of the way while she did … what?

  An enormous, mangy rat scrabbled by his foot, the beam of the flashlight picking up its red eyes. Behind him, Ham swore, a muffled sound of surprise. “Holy shit! Did you see that? Size of a fucking dog! What do those things eat? Steroids?” His breath rasped and he braced a hand on the wall for a moment, his head bowed. “You got a map, right?”

  “We’re good, buddy. Dakota has our backs.” Or not.

  “Wouldn’t put it past the bitch to leave us down here with our dicks swinging in the wind.”

  Rand was surprised at his knee-jerk reaction to hearing Dakota referred to as a bitch. “Ease off, Ham.” Not that he had to defend her honor, but the mic was open. “One thing at a time.”

  Ham cleared his throat. Fool should give up smoking before he killed himself.

  “How’re you two getting along?”

  “Fine,” Rand said shortly. He had no intention of discussing Dakota with his friend, who already had his own prejudices against her.

  “How do you get a redhead to argue with you?” Ham asked, a smile in his voice. “Say something!” He whooped with laughter at his own unfunny joke.

  “Keep it down, we don’t know who’s around.” Rand’s tone brooked no argument.

  Ham, crude as he was, was not an idiot. “Point.”

  Whose, Rand wasn’t sure. His shoulders brushed the narrow walls of the corridor, and he was aware of the ceiling a mere couple of inches above his head. Ham’s heavy breathing seemed to fill the space around them. He felt for the guy; he was having a hell of a time squeezing between the damp stone walls.

  Rand’s light showed an uneven circle of limestone six feet ahead, just in time. Without the Maglite, he would’ve missed the small opening in the floor. “Stairs,” he warned, his low whisper too loud in the dark confines of the passage. He’d almost dropped straight down the narrow stairwell. Another set of carved stone stairs spiraled into deeper blackness. If either of them fell here, they could remain unfound for a hundred years. Was that Dakota’s plan?

  “You okay?” she murmured in his ear.

  “Going down to the next level now.” Hands braced on the unevenly chiseled curved walls, he stepped cautiously down the worn, cracked steps cut out of the bedrock. The walls oozed moisture, and the lower he went, the stronger the stink of sewage became.

  “Jesus, what died in here?” Ham’s voice was right over his head as he took one cautious step at a time on the dangerously slick, triangular stone treads.

  “That’s raw sewage.”

  “Keep your hands away from your face, and walk fast,” Dakota advised prosaically in his ear. “You’re less than two thousand feet from him now.”

  “Can’t see much farther than ten feet in front of me.” The world was reduced to blackness, dank, smelly air, and Ham’s labored breathing above him as they literally walked in circles to get to the bottom of the vertical stairs. At this point, it was unlikely that the guy they sought was even alive. “Are yo—”

  Rand heard a familiar pop directly overhead, followed instantly by a muzzle flash. He braced, half-turned, but he was too late. Ham’s full body weight crashed into him, knocking the breath out of his lungs and sending him down the remaining dozen stairs on his back.

  Everything went black.

  NINE

  Rand?” The faint crackle of the Bluetooth’s feedback was all Dakota’s straining ears picked up. No conversation. No breathing. She’d heard a pop, then static. She got to her feet, finger pressed to the small device on her ear. “What was that?”

  Silence.

  Silence.

  Holding her breath was counterproductive, and she let it out slowly. Think. Law-abiding citizen that she was, her first thought was to go to the local authorities. Terrific idea, if she weren’t on the run herself. They’d arrest her, maybe remembering to ask questions later. Not going to help Rand.

  Her heart double-tapped. “Damn it, Rand, say something.”

  He wasn’t alone. Ham was with him… . “But what if something’s happened to both of them? Shit, shit, shit.” She walked to the door of the room, then paced back to the window. “Okay. Not alone alone.”

  He had a team of highly trained security guys back in Monte Carlo, she reminded herself with relief. They were hundreds of miles away, but at least he had backup.

  She curled her fingers around the sock in her pocket. His numbers glowed bright in her mind’s eye. He was alive. “Thank God. Because one way or the other, Rand Maguire, we’re going to have a come-to-Jesus moment one of these days, and soon. If I have to handcuff you to the bed—no, bad idea. No beds when we talk. Tie you to something, and sit on you—we’re going to have the conversation you weren’t ready to hear two years ago. Whether you want to hear what I have to say or not.”

  Through her fear and pent-up anger, Dakota was left with a stark and unequivocal truth. “I still love you, you jerk. You better be all right.” Now all she had to do was find him.

  Using the hotel phone so she could maintain her connection with Rand, Dakota called his assistant’s cell phone. The phone rang, then abruptly went dead. Impatiently, she tried it again. Same deal. With a growl of impatience, she got the number for the hotel in Monte Carlo and asked for him, only to be informed he’d checked out. She frowned. Had he gone back to the States? Wasn’t an assistant’s job to stay close to his boss so he could assist?

  Since she didn’t know the names of any of Rand’s other men, and the only guests she remembered were the movie-star couple—probably on their honeymoon somewhere—and the big-time director, she asked for Seth Creed. They’d been in his suite when Dakota arrived from the airport. It made sense that he was at the top of the food chain. Unless he, too, had checked out?

  By the time the call went through, she was already regretting involving him. She wasn’t paranoid, but as Rand and Ham’s sudden silence proved, they couldn’t trust anyone.

  “No comment!” Seth Creed said the moment he answered the phone.

  “Mr. Creed, this is Dr. North. I’m working with Rand Maguire—”

  “You found the son of a bitch who drugged us?”

  “We’re working on it. I wonder if I could talk to whomever he left in charge?”

  “Don’t you know who he left in charge?” he demanded, suspicion lacing his impatient tone.

  “It wasn’t relevant.”

  “And it is now?”

  Not a fan of his cool tone, Dakota answered his question with her own. “Is Rand’s second-in-command there, Mr. Creed?”

  “Everyone split this morning. In fact, I’m on my way to go see his father before I head back home myself.” He expelled an impatient breath. “Is there anything I can do … ?”

  “No, thanks. It’s no biggie. I’ll ask Rand later. Thanks.” Weren’t they investigating on their end? Maybe not. Had he thought as she had—trust no one—and sent them all home? Maybe his men had accompanied Ham, and they were here in Paris already. Available to come to his aid if he needed them?

  Dakota put the hotel phone back in the cradle and started pacing the small room. To the door. To the window. To the door. To the window. “Damn it! Okay. What to do? Breathe. Think. Form a plan of action.”

  She could tell the line was still open, but try as she might, she couldn’t hear either Rand or Ham. The good news was that she knew Rand was alive. If he weren’t, his GPS numbers would blink out. She had no way of knowing the condition of Mark Stratham. Rand wasn’t moving, the guy he was looking for wasn’t moving either, and she was stuck in a hotel room blocks away.

  Or not.

  The cavalry wasn’t coming. Or rather, the cavalry was coming. Like it or not, she was the cavalry.

  RAND CAME TO WITH a vengeance, pain spearing through his head in a white-hot sunburst. There wasn’t a vestige of light, and the weight of Ham’s considerable girth pinned him to the cold stone floor. He
shuddered with the chill that seeped around his body. His clothing was wet—moisture from the seeping rocks, and possibly Ham’s blood. He smelled it above the notes of mold and decay, the sharp, metallic stink of death.

  He knew his friend was dead, but he fumbled to find a pulse at his throat anyway. Nothing. Goddamn it. He hadn’t heard anyone approaching. But the noise Ham had made struggling for breath, Rand’s own responses to Dakota’s questions, and their feet scraping the gritty stone floor probably masked the approach of the killer.

  He managed to roll Ham off him and pressed the lighted dial on his watch so he could look for his weapon and headset. He discovered both nearby. Automatically, he checked his weapon, something he could do with his eyes closed. The clip was still in it. That was the good news. The bad was that the flashlights—both his and Ham’s—shattered on impact.

  No phone reception, and no light source other than the faint and ineffectual blue light on his watch. He was effectively out of communication with Dakota and had no idea where the hell he was, or how to go on.

  Staggering to his feet, he found Ham’s weapon close to his body, and shoved it into the back of his jeans under his jacket. Someone had known they were there. Someone who’d been stupid enough not to check to see if he was alive or dead. The only thing Rand had going for him right now was that the killer wasn’t aware he was alive and at large in the tunnels.

  Dakota had said his objective was less than a quarter of a mile ahead. He could go back, up the stairs, back to the ossuary, and follow the tourists out. Or he could continue on the path that he was on.

  Either he’d find his man and a way out, or … he wouldn’t.