Skylar was one of three camo-clad men, observing the descent of the chopper, their hair blowing wildly around their heads. With them was a guy in officer’s whites.
Raznick.
Skylar had a one-armed chokehold around a struggling May Wen, who he was using as a human shield. Beside them, Randy Howell didn’t look to be under duress. No one was having to restrain him. The Quans didn’t have a hand on Howell. No one had a weapon to his head or body. He was moving of his own free will, walking next to Skylar, and looking up at the sky as though anxiously awaiting the chopper ride.
“Ragno. Anything new on the Howell prostitute thing?”
“We ran the facial recognition analysis again,” Ragno said. Given the noise from the chopper, he had to strain to hear what she was saying, but he had an advantage with the embedded mic system. “It’s still pinging with the same result. Amsterdam prostitute. The weird thing is that we can’t find a hole in her Miranda Lake identity. Whoever created it is damn good. Though Howell’s history raises questions, we’re throwing everything we’ve got at him and can’t find anything that suggests complicity.”
“Keep looking,” he said, as the chopper hovered in landing position before dropping. “I know there’s no conclusive link between video games and psychopathic behavior, but there are flags. Look for anything tying Howell to anyone at Quan Security. Or Commissar Ming, given that Ming was slow playing us and Wen raised questions about him. Phone calls. Emails—”
“I’m not telling you how to shoot the chopper’s tail rotor, am I?”
He chuckled as he aimed his rifle at the tail rotor, as the chopper descended. “I know, but you could. I wouldn’t be offended. I’m just saying that what my eyes are seeing now, of Howell with the other Quans, is a far different image than what I saw when Miranda Lake was executed when the other hostages needed to be persuaded to pay up.”
“Copy that. We’ll keep looking on our end. Two and a half minutes to zero,” Ragno said.
Ace squeezed off shots at the tail rotor. The screeching clang of bullets hitting metal filled the air. The front windshield of the chopper exploded simultaneously as Ling fired. The chopper’s whir stalled. It choked to life again, and instead of a controlled descent, the tail rotor spun around. The chopper turned sideways, its blades grinding the deck with a chainsaw effect. Chunks of teak and fiberglass decking jettisoned through the air, before the chopper righted itself and slid further sideways. The chopper gained a bit of lift, resting on the railing, before tumbling into the ocean.
Taking off at a run towards the group, and flanking them from the side, Ace aimed and fired at a Quan who walked on the edge of the group. From above, Scott took out another one. Ace herded Skylar, Raznick, one Quan operative, and a hysterical, fighting-for-her-life May Wen in the direction of Ling Wen, who was waiting and ready to fire. May Wen screamed and struggled harder.
“Two minutes to zero,” Ragno said. “Radar images show that Follower is closing in.”
Either to get into a better firing position or for protection against incoming missiles. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
“Ragno. Zeus. Tell Ming to hurry.”
“The President just did,” Zeus answered.
“Scott. Spray deterring gunfire in front of Skylar’s group.”
The pop-pop-pop of Scott’s gunfire persuaded Skylar’s group to stop in their tracks.
“Skylar,” Ace called.
The group turned at the sound of his voice. “In less than two minutes the People’s Liberation Army of China will blow up your escape route. You have nowhere left to run. I have men above you and behind you. Let May Wen go. Let Howell go.”
Skylar’s eyes darted with the wild look of a trapped animal. When he focused on Ace, he sneered as he tightened his arm around May Wen’s neck. She lifted her hands to his arms as she struggled to breathe. “She’ll die when I die.”
Ace had a clear shot at Raznick, standing to Skylar’s left. From the Compass Rose, above, Scott had a clear line on the camo-wearing Quan who stood to Skylar’s right.
“Scott,” he muttered so that his audio would pick it up, as he started squeezing the trigger to shoot Raznick. “Guy on Skylar’s right. Now.”
As Raznick went down, and the camo-wearing Quan operative to Skylar’s right went down, gunfire sounded behind the small group. Ling Wen had fired. Evidently, Skylar hadn’t seen Ling Wen, and hadn’t realized that when he turned with May Wen, using her as a shield from Ace’s gunfire, he was exposing his back to Ling Wen, who was more than ready for the siege to be over.
Skylar’s head exploded into a rain of gray and red. When he fell, he took May Wen down with him. Skylar’s rifle clattered to the deck, landing just inches from Howell’s feet. May Wen’s screams filled the night as she clawed and crawled away from underneath Skylar.
Ace kept his attention locked on Howell, waiting for him to reach for Skylar’s weapon. He didn’t. Which made him seem innocent. Or, at least too smart to show guilt.
Which is it?
Meanwhile, May Wen had fallen a foot or two away from Skylar’s body. As she tried to stand, her husband ran forward and caught her in his arms. Howell once again remembered to wear the mask of a man who’d been afraid for his life. The contrast with how he looked now, with wide eyes, hands shaking as he wrung them together, and shoulders slumped, and how he’d looked just moments ago as he anticipated the chopper’s arrival, was marked. He looked like a defeated, bewildered man now, while before he’d looked like a man whose only concern was how fast the damn chopper would arrive.
“Branch,” Ace said, his eyes on Howell, but having to know. “How’s Leo?”
“Still with us.”
“One minute to zero,” Ragno said.
In his peripheral vision, Ace saw May Wen clinging to her husband. She said something only her husband could hear. Stone-cold rage formed on Ling Wen’s face as he looked up from his wife’s shoulder and stared at Randy Howell. Before Ling Wen could remove his arms from his wife, Ace stepped forward, reaching for Ling Wen’s rifle and pulling it from the man’s hand.
“No,” Ace mumbled to Ling, as he moved to stand between Ling Wen and Howell. Lowering his voice to the barest whisper, he said, “He’s ours. No threat now. We can’t kill him.”
“If you don’t kill him,” Wen said, “I will.”
Ace’s gut also said, kill him, but it wasn’t so simple. While Wen might have the stature of a man who was best friends with the President of his country, and perhaps had the leeway to be a judge, jury, and executioner, Ace didn’t have such freedom. From his last mission as a Marine, Ace had a reputation as a loose cannon. Howell was a guest aboard Imagine and a client of HUG. Until facts conclusively proved otherwise, and Howell gave him a reason to kill him, Ace had to stand down.
“I cannot let you do that.” Ace kept his voice low enough so that only Wen could hear him. Not Howell. “I’ve got this.”
“Thank God you’re here,” Howell said to Ace, keeping up the pretense.
“Yeah,” Ace said, watching for any sign that the man would hang himself by reaching for Skylar’s rifle. It was a test. The same sort of test he’d employed in an Afghanistan village, four years earlier, on the men he’d felt responsible for Kat’s death. “I’ve had a few conversations with God myself tonight.”
“They killed my fiancée. They wanted…”
As Howell tried not to be pegged as a perpetrator of the heinous crime that had occurred aboard Imagine, fury pumped through Ace’s veins. His vision became blurred and red at the edges. His mind flashed to the people who lay dead on the casino floor, as the air vibrated with the distant sound of fighter jets. He thought of Agent Amy Ryan, lying dead. The other agents on their team. The security personnel who he didn’t know. Leo, fighting for her life. “You mean the hooker you picked up in Amsterdam last week?”
“How dare you!”
“He’s one of them. One. Of. Them.” Proving that she was stronger than she looked, May W
en hadn’t devolved into tears. Her voice was strong and full of certainty. “He told the others I was enough. They’d get all the money they needed from you if they only managed to take me off the ship. He’s one of them.”
“Thirty seconds to zero,” Ragno said.
Ace heard the rumble and hum of the approaching jets. His understanding of the strength and capabilities of the PLA’s Air Force gave him faith that they’d hit their target. Before the night sky became alight with the sound of fury and wrath, Ace gridlocked his gaze on Howell. He remembered his pledge to Leo, a little more than two hours earlier, in the crawl space above the casino, that they’d kill the perpetrator of the massacre.
Reach for that rifle, you fucker. Just. Reach. For. It.
“You’ve got to believe me.” Despite his words, Howell’s eyes had hardened with the look of a man who was cornered. His eyes flashed with the realization that he’d made an enormous mistake by dropping the pretense of being a hostage in front of May Wen.
Howell bent fast, reaching for Skylar’s rifle. The action made him a threat that sealed his fate. Before Howell managed to fully lift the rifle and take aim, Ace lifted his weapon and fired. As Howell fell to the ground, Ace took off at a run.
Leo. Alive. Please, God.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Denver, Colorado
One week later
The ding of a text message awakened Leo. She shifted on the couch, where she’d been dozing for most of the afternoon, and lifted her phone to read the text. Trick, who’d snuggled up to her under the blanket, protested the change in position with a yawn. The text was from Ace. She’d been expecting it.
‘Just landed. Be there for kickoff. Wheels up again at 2300.’
The evening football game was starting in twenty minutes. Her team, the Giants, were playing the Cowboys. Both were fighting for a playoff spot.
She replied with, ‘Hungry?’
‘Starving. Your appetite back?’
‘Getting there.’
Truth was, she wasn’t hungry at all, because she didn’t know where their conversation would go. She’d been worried about it ever since she’d awakened a few days earlier.
‘Want me to pick up something?’
Nice of him to offer. She thought about what he might feel like eating, and replied, ‘I’ll order in. Luigi’s?’
Even without a fast reply, she knew his answer would be yes. With the exception of spending the day at Last Resort, in Georgia, Ace had been in China since the Imagine job, dealing with after-action reports from Macau. God knew he had to be craving some familiar food.
Unexpectedly, new work had come out of the job for Ace. Ling Wen wanted to transfer a large chunk of security work to Ace and Black Raven. Ace had spent the day at Last Resort, personally selecting twenty agents who would head security teams for the Wens at their Beijing and Macau residences. The twenty agents were just the tip of the iceberg for the enormity of the projects that Wen had in mind. In the corporate world of Black Raven, where the monetary value of work that an agent brought into the firm was a large factor in the agent’s overall value to the firm, Ace had scored the motherlode. If the jobs from Ling Wen Enterprises panned out, Ace would join the ranks of Black Raven partners before long. The company had many agents, but very few partners.
In a lightning-fast move, Trick stole her attention when she leapt from the couch, flying over the stepstool Leo had placed there for the clumsy, six-pound, long-legged puppy. She sprawled with all four paws spread out, then stood and shook off the after-effects of the fall. “You should use the stepstool, silly.”
Mostly snow-white, with coal black ears, the dog was adorable. Black patches, not quite round, surrounded her coal-black eyes, giving her a baby panda look and making her irresistible.
Trick gave her an over-the-shoulder glance, as if to say, ‘but that’s not fun.’
It had been hard for her not to tell Ace that she knew about the puppy. The cava-poo had stolen Leo’s heart the minute she’d seen her in the photos the breeder had sent to Ace, and that had been early December when she’d hacked his new phone. In those godawful moments when she’d been worried she was dying, those last few minutes in the side stage area before she’d lost consciousness, Leo had worried about Ace as much as she was worried about herself. Telling Ace she knew about Trick, and mentioning Halloween, had been her way of saying, ‘I love you, too,’ without explicitly using the three words that she doubted they’d ever actually allow themselves to say to each other. Which was yet another issue they’d have to confront if they went down the path of being anything more than platonic friends.
Trick, walking around the room, and wagging her tail with her nose down, gave Leo a solid clue to stop letting her mind drift and get her ass off the couch. She sat up, wincing with the effort. Searing pain emanated from where the bullet had entered her right upper arm, nicking her brachial artery. Her arm was bandaged and in a sling. Two of her ribs had cracked, where bullets had hit the body armor. Her chest was black and blue. Even regular breathing hurt. Coughing was pure torture.
As if on cue, her phone rang with a call from Ragno, who’d been monitoring the puppy’s walking schedule. It had been four hours since she’d last been out. “Should I send someone up to walk her?”
“I’ll just let her out on the balcony.” Tucking the cell phone between her shoulder and her left ear, Leo stood slowly, giving herself a few seconds to gain her equilibrium. “Ace is coming over. He’ll take her later, and I’ll let him feed her. He’ll get a kick out of seeing how fast she eats.”
“His jet landed fifteen minutes ago. Nice of him to detour to see you from Last Resort before returning to China, right?”
A flutter of keystrokes filled in Ragno’s expectant pause. There’d been more than a few of those pauses since the Imagine job. It was as though Ragno was waiting for Leo to say something about what had been made obvious to everyone who had listened to her and Ace’s conversation in the off-stage hallway. Leo had no intention of doing any such thing. She focused on taking the few steps across the room, to the sliding door. “What’s going on in the war room?”
“You and I are having no discussions about work. I’ve given Ace strict instructions on that as well.”
“I’m dying here. Bored out of my mind.”
“Dying? No. That ship sailed. Bored? Probably. Maybe watch Netflix. Surely there’s something you haven’t binge-watched. Or football.”
“But I can’t stay awake.” She looked longingly across the room at her computer monitors and laptop. She knew not even to try. Her mind wasn’t there. Doctors said her strength and mental energy would return quickly within a few days of stopping the painkillers.
Upon her arrival at home, two days earlier, Leo had given herself one more day with drugs. Her final painkiller had been last night. She wasn’t so worried about the pain. What bothered her was that she still felt flat-out exhausted and, worse, it was hard for her to put her thoughts in a logical order.
“I don’t think that boredom is making you sleepy. Losing most of the blood in your body, hours of surgery, broken ribs and jet lag on top of it all might have something to do with it, though. Call if you need anything. The entire cyber department is looking for an excuse to run up there and see you and Trick.”
Leo opened the sliding glass door that led to her rooftop terrace. The top two floors of Black Raven’s high-rise headquarters consisted of small, private residences for the partners to stay in when they were in Denver. The residence had been part of Leo’s recruitment package, and Leo was the only non-partner with a residence on Black Raven’s top two floors. She lived there when she wasn’t working in the field or training at Last Resort. She loved that the cyber division, with its hum of activity, was only a short elevator ride away. Loved even more that Ragno, who also lived at HQ full time, lived next door to her.
As she tried to breathe in crisp, cold air, pain forced Leo to stop. She tried again, more slowly, while watching Trick squat and
use the patch of grass that Ace, with Ragno’s help, had arranged to have placed there.
With a little fresh air in her lungs, she started to feel better, until she turned around, walked back in the house and saw her Christmas gift for Ace. The box, wrapped in simple brown paper and tied with a bow, sat on the dining room table, where she’d left it. She’d been debating about whether or not to give it to him. She thought about the letter that was enclosed with it.
Decision made.
She took the box, which she thought of as gift option A, and brought it into her bedroom, then stashed it in a drawer in her clothes closet. From the same drawer, she pulled out the backup gift, option B, that she’d ordered for him even before the Imagine job. It was a generic gift, with a generic card. Both were store bought. Nothing special. She’d wrapped option B and put a bow on it, just in case she chickened out of giving him the more meaningful option A, which, with the letter that went with it, had the potential to be the most meaningful gift she’d ever given anyone.
Not going there. What was I thinking!?
As she placed gift option B on the dining room table, she heard the ding of Ace’s reply text, no doubt replying to whether Luigi’s sounded good. After going to the bathroom, she walked to the door and unlocked it for him. She’d been up for a full four minutes. There was no need to have to get up again in fifteen when he arrived. It was just too painful of a process. So she went to the couch and settled there with Trick on her lap.
Her heart twisted a bit as she read Ace’s text. ‘Luigi’s – great. But do you feel like that? Really?’
His words reflected the essence of how he’d always treated her. Unfailingly considerate. Caring. Even when he was teasing. He’d been right, of course, in their suite on Imagine, before they’d fallen into bed. They’d always acted like two people who loved each other—from the very beginning of their friendship, until now.
Her eyes blurred. Shaking her head, she blamed her emotions on the after-effects of the drugs that she’d been on since the shooting and typed her reply. ‘Can handle chicken picatta and plain angel hair. Odd thing to crave, right?’
Imagine (Black Raven Book 4) Page 20