Hell for Leather

by Julie Ann Walker

  Pathetic. Deplorable. Unfor—

  Tap. Tap. She could just make out the shadow of a hand knocking against the glass. “Just a second!” she called, bending to grab one of the plastic drinking cups from the shelf beneath the sink. Unwrapping it from its hygienic covering, she filled it with cold water before reaching to unlatch the window. It was a bit tough. The windowpane having been painted a few times. But it finally gave way and she threw up the sash.

  “Here you g—”

  That’s all she managed before a hand grabbed her wrist, yanking her forward. Her forehead slammed into the window sash, causing stars to dance in her field of vision. She was half hanging out the window, her knees atop the toilet tank, the cup having fallen from her hand to bounce on the ground below. In confusion, she watched it land atop Agent Wallace…

  He was lying in the dirt beneath the window, his lifeless gaze staring vacantly into the sky above—a look that chilled her to the bone as it instantly reminded her of Buzzard—blood pooling beneath his head from the giant gash flaying his throat open in a gruesome, macabre smile. His foot was twitching. She didn’t know why she should notice such a thing in the split second it took her to open her mouth to scream, but she did. She saw it. That awful, twitching foot. She heard it. That terrible scuffling sound it made against the ground.

  Then…pain. White-hot agony. It exploded at the base of her skull. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a familiar set of brown Timberlands, felt the brutal bite of terror as it sank its sharp fangs into her galloping heart. The second blow to her head cut off the cry lodged at the back of her throat. And then…lights out…

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Mac was a coward.

  That’s all there was to it. Because he’d wanted to stay with her while she slept. Hold her in his arms. Pet her. Kiss her. Watch her dream…

  But he couldn’t. He had fallen…just a little. And he didn’t dare risk it. He was too afraid to risk it.

  On the other hand, it’d been nearly three hours since he slunk from her room like the lily-livered cur that he was, and that probably meant she’d be waking up soon. He couldn’t stand the thought of that, of her rolling over to discover his dastardly desertion.

  Yes, he was determined to stick to his guns, to let their dalliance end here, today. But that didn’t mean she deserved to be treated like some nameless, faceless hook-up. Like some woman he’d taken home from the bar only to ghost out on her in the middle of the night. Because she wasn’t that. She was so much more. She deserved so much more, so much better from him.

  Christ almighty, what the hell was I thinking?

  “Ozzie!” he barked. The guy was down at the end of the building, filling a bucket with ice from the machine. “Come take my place, will you? I need to talk to Delilah.”

  “Talk?” Ozzie snorted, sauntering toward him. “Yeah. By my count, this will be the, uh, fifth time you guys have…talked.”

  “I’m serious,” Mac growled. “And remember what I told you I’d do to you if you tell her you heard us?”

  “Oh, I remember,” Ozzie said, eyeing him askance. “The imagery of your description is sure to give me nightmares for years.”

  “Excellent.” Mac winked, lifting his hand to the knob of the Noel Motel’s room number four. He was stopped from turning it when Agent Duvall burst from her room, running to rap hard knuckles against Steady’s door. She turned and pounded on the door of the room Fitzsimmons and Wallace shared before marching over to Mac. Instantly, his operator senses were on high alert.

  “What have you got?” he asked.

  “Let’s wait until…ah,” she said when Fitzsimmons poked his head out of his room followed quickly by Steady down the way. “Good. Come join us, gentlemen.”

  “What’s going on?” Zoelner said, wrenching open the door beside them, wiping sleep from his eyes.

  “We’ve got a lead,” Agent Duvall announced, her gaze bright with excitement. Mac felt all the cells in his body slow down and come to attention. A lead… Those two beautiful words still spoke to his Federal Agent heart. “We found footage of Hasan and al-Hallaj buying cell phones from a store up near Thunder Bay, Ontario. We got the model and product numbers from the receipt. Now we’re talking with the phone company to try to determine which wireless numbers are assigned to those particular phones.”

  “And once you know the numbers, you can monitor when that device pings local cell towers, thereby allowing you to triangulate their locations,” Ozzie said.

  “Exactly.” The agent nodded.

  “And now?” Mac asked, his eyes darting to Delilah’s door.

  “And now we wait for the numbers.”

  Wait. He was usually a patient man, but when it came to an op, he hated the word wait. Huffing out a sigh, he immediately thought, oh, sweet Jesus. Because he could still smell her on his breath, still taste her on his tongue. Swallowing, he glanced around, wondering if anyone else noticed that he was absolutely covered, head-to-toe, in Delilah Fairchild. Delicious, delightful, delectable Delilah Fairchild…

  “You want to be the one to tell her?” Chelsea asked, nodding toward the baby-blue door. “While you’re doing that, I’ll run around back and alert Wallace to the progress.”

  Dipping his chin in acknowledgment of Chelsea’s plan, he stepped up to Delilah’s door, waiting to push it open until the group dispersed. He’d left her naked, sated, and sprawled atop the mattress, her plump ass—and that wonderfully kissable tattoo inked above it—there for all the world to see. And, call him crazy, or territorial, or…yeah, just crazy, but he wanted what they shared, the glory of her nudity, to be his and his alone.

  Can you say dangerous thinking, boys and girls?

  Shaking his head at himself, he stepped into the room, blinking against the gloom in sharp contrast to the bright glow of the setting sun outside. The instant his eyes adjusted, he noted her absence from the bed. The sheets were rumpled and messy, proof of her presence, of their presence—Lord almighty, what an afternoon. But she was gone.

  Shit. She had woken up to find him missing. He had subjected her to that particular humiliation. Someone should definitely kick his ass. And, no joke, he volunteered to be first in line.

  “Delilah,” he called, marching toward the bathroom. “We’ve got some good news. Agent Duvall—”

  A loud gasp sounded from the bathroom, followed by a whimpering kind of squeak. He threw open the door, only to find the space…empty.

  Huh? Then where had the sounds—

  The window. It was open.

  He was across the bathroom in two steps, placing his palms on the windowsill in order to lean out. The first thing he saw was the pint-sized CIA agent. She was holding one hand to her mouth, her eyes trained on the ground in front of her.

  Mac glanced down. “Son of a goddamned bitch!” he roared, instinctively reaching into his waistband for his sidearm, his heart growing teeth and trying to gnaw its way through his breastbone. Wallace’s inert, bloody form lay in the dirt, staring unseeingly at the sky above. And Delilah was…gone.

  ***

  Qasim stood at the entrance to the cave, his eyes searching the twilight gloom of dense woods beyond. “Where are you, Haroun?” he said into his cell phone. “I do not see you.”

  “I am coming, habibi,” Haroun grunted. “Almost there. The woman is heavier than she looks.”

  Qasim’s heart beat with wild anticipation. When Haroun called earlier to tell him he’d captured the woman, Qasim tempered his excitement. Much could happen on the hour-long drive from Delilah Fairchild’s motel to the spot they’d chosen as their secondary location. And he’d learned over the years not to get his hopes up.

  But now Haroun was calling to say he’d made it, and Qasim allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief, to experience this crystalline moment of joy. Because, finally, finally, after all these years, it was beginning to look like he would have his revenge. It was beginning to look like he would, indeed, discover the location of the nuclea
r weapons. And then, he would sit back and watch American cities burn…

  The anticipation sent a thrill skittering along his nerves, heightened his senses, intensified his breathing. People liked to believe love was the strongest of human emotions. But Qasim knew better. It was hate. Hate was the strongest. It was hate that had fueled him for more than a decade. He felt its powerful pull much more than he ever felt the pull of love for his wife and children. And someday, hopefully someday soon, he’d sit by his television and watch as all his hatred was made real by the countless deaths of the wives and children and brothers and sisters and husbands of capitalist pigs. He’d sit and—

  There. Through the trees…

  Qasim blew out his pent-up breath when Haroun stepped into the small clearing in front of the secluded cave. Even in the waning light, he could see that the man looked terrible. Blood stained Haroun’s Western-style T-shirt. His hair was a mess. His face filthy with dust and sweat. But there was a smile curving his lips when he slapped a hand against the panty-clad bottom of the unconscious woman draped over his left shoulder.

  “Did I not tell you this was our chance?” Haroun said. Qasim could hear his voice through the cellular connection but also across the short distance. He thumbed off the device and shoved it into his pants pocket. “Did I not say trust in Allah and all would be well?”

  “You did indeed, brother.” He squeezed Haroun’s shoulder when his second-in-command pulled even. He glanced down at the limp, scantily dressed woman and spotted the small patch of blood matting the back of her head. He raised a brow. “You hit her?” he asked as they carefully made their way inside the cave, moving toward the lamplight dancing at the back.

  “I had to act fast. But, rest assured, she isn’t too badly hurt. We can revive her with the smelling salts.” Smelling salts…a standard component of any torture arsenal. After all, pain didn’t work nearly as well when the one being tortured was unconscious.

  Haroun grunted when his ankle turned on a loose stone. Qasim reached out to steady his second-in-command. In doing so, his hand brushed against Delilah Fairchild’s soft hip. Curiosity…and lust…stirred at the contact. His lips curved into an anticipatory smile as it occurred to him that perhaps his initial plan of holding a gun to Miss Fairchild’s head in order to get Theo to talk wasn’t necessarily the most expedient course of action. After all, forcing someone to watch the rape of a loved one was not only a tried and true method of information gathering, but also there were times when it was more powerful and motivating than the promise of death…

  They made their way into the small circle of light cast by the kerosene lanterns and Qasim found everything just as he’d left it. Theodore was on the ground, his back propped against a wet boulder, his broken leg stretched out in front of him. With his hands tied behind his back and his head bent forward—he’d been losing consciousness often from shock and loss of blood—the old Marine couldn’t see their approach. But soon…soon he’d understand Qasim was a man of his word.

  Sami and Jabbar stood on either side of Theodore. Jabbar munched on an apple, his blackened eye having turned an angry purple, and Sami sucked down a can of Coca-Cola through a striped straw. Both smiled widely when they laid eyes on the nearly naked woman. It was obvious that they, too, had ideas about how the interrogation should proceed from this point on.

  Haroun bent to carefully lay the redhead on the ground and Qasim sucked in a startled breath. Because she was even more beautiful from the front. Ripe, round breasts. Even, lovely features. His cock swelled inside his trousers.

  Yes, he rubbed his hands together, this could be quite fun.

  Jabbar tossed away his apple, stepping forward to hand Haroun a handkerchief to be used as a gag and a plastic zip tie to be used on the woman’s wrists. Haroun applied both, then glanced up at Qasim. “Shall we begin?”

  Oh, yes. Qasim was very, very ready to begin. With his blood running hot, he smiled at his men and nodded. “Let us enjoy this first step, my friends, on the journey that will see our names immortalized…”

  ***

  Delilah jolted from the darkness to discover her heart pounding, her brain buzzing, her lungs heaving, and her head…

  Ow!

  With her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she reached up to touch the tender spot—

  No. No, she did not reach up, because something was tied around her wrists. Something was tied around her wrists, and something was tied around her mouth, and—

  Timberlands! The terrorist! It all came back to her in a flash.

  Her eyes flew open, but she could make no sense of her surroundings. Darkness? Dancing light? Craggy shapes?

  She blinked. Trying to focus beyond the splitting ache of her head. Eventually the world snapped into view, and she could see a low rock ceiling hanging above her. Flickering yellow light created macabre little shadows in its crevices and glinted on the droplets of water occasionally falling from it. Beneath her was cold, wet stone, but she could hardly feel the chill for the hot terror burning through her blood. The smell of wet earth and bat guano filled her nose just as the dark faces of four men filled her vision.

  She recognized one of them. Al-Hallaj… He’d taken her. Against all odds, against four Black Knights and three CIA agents, he’d managed to take her. It seemed impossible. And she might have thought she was in the middle of a nightmare had not the excruciating pain in her head been so unmistakably real.

  Crying out when two of the men reached down to grab her shoulders, she absently noticed how the noise was muffled against the salty-tasting gag pulling the corners of her mouth tight. Crunch! The sound of her kneecaps slamming into the rock floor echoed in her ears a split second before her central nervous system registered the agony.

  Somebody screamed. Was that her?

  Her face felt hot. Were those tears?

  She knew she was on her knees. Knew there were hands supporting her. Knew the air inside the cavern was cold. But she could feel none of these things. Not when her body was inundated with pain signals from every direction. Her head pounded. Her knees throbbed. Her shoulders ached from having her hands wrenched behind her back.

  But all of that was nothing compared to the agony in her heart when her eyes fell on her uncle. This time she knew the scream that echoed around the cavern was hers. It was her uncle’s name, garbled by the gag.

  Oh God, Uncle Theo… Her mind tried to make sense of it all, to claw through the thick, sticky cobwebs the pain and disorientation had stitched through her mind. Uncle Theo…

  She couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. There was so much blood. It matted his white hair and stained his shirt, dripping onto the stone floor from a cut near his temple. She couldn’t see his face. His chin was touching his chest. But the blood. So much blood. Just like that awful afternoon with Buzzard…

  She screamed again, struggling against her captors, her heart like a flame, her lungs on fire. And now she knew the wetness on her face was tears, rivers of them. They poured from her burning eyes as she screamed over and over again, despite the sledgehammers bashing away at the back of her skull. Trying to wake Theo. Praying she could wake him.

  “Aren’t you a vocal one?” observed one of the men as he skirted around in front her. He was dark like the others, with a hawkish nose and a cruel mouth. Was this Qasim? The man Agent Duvall spoke of? The mass murderer of innocents? He didn’t look all that impressive, below average in height and underfed. But he did look like he could be the leader of the group. It was the way he held his chin high, his spine straight.

  “Fuck you!” she yelled around her gag, crying out when one of the men holding her in a kneeling position slapped her across the face. Her head whipped to the side. Her lip split open. Pain seared. Blood trickled and dripped from her chin. She could smell it, the iron richness of it. But she didn’t cry out. She wouldn’t cry out. Not again. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. The bastards!

  Slowly turning back to face the leader, she didn’t attempt to hi
de her hatred. It was there in the hot glow of her eyes, in the wide flare of her nostrils.

  The leader tut-tutted when he saw her bloodied lip, frowning at the man who hit her. He said something in a language she couldn’t understand before smiling down at her. The expression reminded her of a snake. Vicious. Venomous. Savage. She gulped. She couldn’t help herself.

  “Would you like me to tell you what I just told Sami?” he asked conversationally, as if this was a social occasion and not an abduction and precursor to what she knew would be a torture session.

  Torture session…

  Would she be able to withstand it? She prided herself on her strength, but she never bargained to be put to the test this way. Mac! Where are you? Are you coming for me? Do you even know I’m gone?

  “Miss Fairchild,” the leader spat, his smile fading. “I asked you a question. I expect an answer. This will go easier for you if you cooperate.”

  “Fuck you,” she snarled again, but the volume was gone from her voice. All that screaming had shredded her vocal cords. When she swallowed, her tears ran down the back of her nose and burned her damaged throat.

  “Indeed,” the man said. “That is the plan. Which is why I told Sami he would have to wait to bloody you. Because the rest of us like our women to look pretty while we fuck them.”

  Her limbs began to shake uncontrollably as the fire in her blood turned to glacier ice, as the flames that had mere moments ago been her lungs and heart banked, leaving the organs frozen solid.

  Evil…

  The word whispered through her head. And, yes. As she stared into the soulless pools of Qasim’s dark—he had to be Qasim, right?—eyes, she knew she was seeing pure evil. There was no humanity there. No compassion. Just ugly malevolence and…death.

  And that’s when it hit her. She was going to die here. But first…she was going to experience horror.

  Jesus, help me! Mac…!

  ***

  “If you think we’re stayin’ here,” Mac thundered at Agent Fitzsimmons as they stood in the small clearing around an abandoned ranger’s station in Shawnee National Forest, “you’re crazier than a shithouse rat!”