by Jade Powers
No one answered the door.
Lucas knocked again. He didn’t dare knock too loudly. The last thing he needed was a complaint about noise.
“Go away.”
It was Lauren’s voice. She sounded angry. Drake must have discovered the joint ops and told her. That sucked. Lucas was innocent of betraying Lauren, even if his reasons for the first meeting had more to do with SpaceTech
“Lauren, I’m exhausted. I need to talk to you, and I’m not leaving until you open this door.” Lucas wanted to collapse right there in the hallway. He certainly was in no mood to hear the rant of a bitter woman. He’d screwed up so bad. He wanted Lauren, even after having her. She was beautiful, classy, intelligent. No wonder she didn’t want him in her hotel room.
She lowered her voice and Lucas could swear her voice carried sharp pointy spikes, “Lucas, I’m not joking around. Get out of here. I don’t care if you came up with some great idea to fool Drake. I’m not interested.”
Drake? What the hell was she talking about? Lucas and Lauren had barely even mentioned Drake. He knocked again, “Let me in.”
He heard a small squeal from behind the door. When the door opened a fraction, Lucas pushed his way in. Not roughly. He expected Lauren on the other side of the door. He didn’t expect a gun in his face.
Chapter 7
LAUREN HAD BEEN HUNKERING in the hotel chair by the window when someone knocked on the door. She still hadn’t figured out her mistake—how they had found her—and Kendall’s men weren’t talking. Lauren assumed it was Sven. He was due to arrive at any time. Maybe they had intercepted messages to Sven with Lauren’s whereabouts. Kendall’s bugs were all over AIT property.
“Tell them to go away,” said one of her captors. The first captor was a tough Cuban-American with a heavy accent. His black hair was slicked back and curled around his ear. He was nicer than the other one who glowered at her from the other corner, a tall lanky fellow who slouched like he was uncomfortable with his height. Neither would sit. Lauren couldn’t blame them after her last escape. They were probably nervous that she would try something else.
When Lucas spoke, Lauren felt her heart in her throat. She would have sent a different hint to Sven, something that made no sense. Lauren knew that Sven would have figured out that she was signaling him to back off. Lucas didn’t know her well enough. Not to mention that his face was puffy, and he probably couldn’t even see out of that eye, it was swollen so badly.
After her second attempt to send him away, the tall guy pulled her out of the way. Lauren wasn’t expecting him to grab her and squeaked in surprise when she found herself moving back.
His gun drawn, he answered the door, waving Lucas into the room.
The other man frowned. He asked, “Why’d you bring him in here?”
Great, now I get to listen to these two argue again. Lauren thought. Maybe they were supposed to argue in front of her. The military tech spies used all kinds of tricks to get what they wanted. They lied well and often, and nothing was beyond their scope.
“He broke in. I was there.”
Lucas sat on the bed beside Lauren, his hand inching over hers until they held hands. She smiled ruefully at him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to him and scooted closer. It was comforting to have the warmth of his thigh against hers.
“Get a room.”
The guys laughed at their stupid joke. Lauren rolled her eyes. She said, “I have to be at work in seven hours.”
A knock on the door interrupted their conversation. Sven. Damn. Somehow she’d hoped that he would have figured out that she was being held captive. But she totally expected him to come in with gun blazing, not a polite knock.
Lauren opened the door with a gun barrel against her ribs. Carson, Sven’s team leader, leaned against the door jamb. “Hey there, pretty lady, wanna dance?”
Great. The first time in years that Lauren had a boyfriend, and Carson’s undercover act is to play her lover.
“Uh, Carson? You should go dancing alone. My card is full.”
“Aw, I’ve only just arrived. Get your purse and let’s go.” Carson and that deep voice. Lauren wondered if Lucas was feeling at all jealous.
Carson was one of those muscular guys with the stereotypical blank stare, a well-crafted expression that Carson spent years perfecting. Beneath that brawn was a well-trained, intelligent and cunning man.
The gunman pushed the door opened further, targeting Carson
Right now, Carson was acting, and doing a fantastic job. Lauren kind of wanted to punch him herself, even knowing it was all an act when he said, “Oh, man. Here, take it. It’s all I got.”
Carson unclipped a gold watch that looked like it went for forty bucks at the local Shopko. He pushed it on the gunman frantically. Now Lauren’s kidnapper had a watch in one hand and a gun in the other. Carson took several steps back.
Lauren knew Carson wasn’t going to run. Carson once held up under enemy fire with thirty troops for seventeen hours in an extraction from one of those police actions that ended up in a single sentence buried at the back of the news, if it made the news at all.
Even as he backpedaled, Carson fixed his gaze on Lauren, as if by staring he could somehow communicate what he wanted out of her. She was no slouch when it came to martial arts. She could at least provide a distraction. The real question was what Lucas and the second guard would do.
What was Carson hoping to gain by this? The gunman answered for Lauren by shifting his weapon away from his ribs and toward Carson. There was a sweet spot when it no longer targeted any part of her body and had not yet reached Carson. Lauren shifted as he did.
Timing was everything. As the gun shifted, Lauren brought her instep down on the man’s leg, her sneaker to his knee. At the same time, she went for pressure points on his wrist. That was a failure. Even while he screamed in pain and crumpled, those hands held tightly to the gun.
Lauren knew she was dealing with an expert when the gun didn’t go off. This was no shaky amateur whose wits were lost at the slightest assault. No, this guy kept his gun steady even while he used his body to slam Lauren against the door’s edge.
He growled, “Don’t even think it.”
But Carson was already moving into position. In the next instant, Carson’s blade was at the gunman’s neck. “Stalemate. I’ve got friends downstairs. They’re hoping to do this without a fuss, if you know what I mean.”
“I shoot you. You cut me. But that still leaves your two people unarmed and my guy with a gun. Sounds like checkmate to me.”
“Maybe if you and I were kings, but we’re all pawns in this room. I have a dozen men downstairs. Before you do anything foolish, call your surveillance crew.” A few of Carson’s dark hairs floated in the air from static. Lauren wanted to smile, even though Carson was deadly serious. That was the problem with non-stop stress. It made a person feel hysterical.
Lauren said, “I have work in the morning, and unless I’m mistaken, my boss is your boss. Can’t we pick this up another time and let me get some sleep?”
Just then one of the doors down the hall opened and a little old lady in her eighties peered out. When she saw the gun and the knife, her mouth dropped open and she slammed the door shut.
“Shit.” Carson and the gunmen both swore at once.
Carson said, “Look man, that lady is right now calling the cops or hotel management. Either way, neither one of us wants to be arrested. Tell you what, you and your buddy there hide with Lucas in the bathroom. You get one of the guns. We get the other. Lauren and I can do a reasonable acting job with whoever shows up. Once we’re clear, we can all talk about what to do next.”
From the back the other kidnapper said, “Dude, if some lady saw you, let’s go.”
Lauren could see by the way the older one’s gaze flared and went cold that there would be a long lecture later about someone keeping his mouth shut during operations.
Lauren wasn’t sure quite how it happened. They were
still talking when the gunman flipped back like a ninja, sweeping his feet and catching Carson by the back of the knee while he grasped the door handle with one hand and the gun with the other. It was an elegant maneuver.
Carson brought the knife down, cutting deep into the man’s calf. When Lauren saw the anger on the gunman’s face, she thought Carson would die right there. Carson dove to the right, into the hallway and ran for the corner while the gunman pushed Lauren out of the way in an attempt to stop Carson. He was too smart to go shooting up the hall and dropped back into the room.
With a heavy accent, he said, “Fine. He has a dozen men. I choose to believe him.” He grabbed Lauren’s arm and shoved her into the hall. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” This from the sidekick whose nasal whine was getting on Lauren’s nerves. “We shouldn’t leave. People will see us.”
“Then you stay here with the guy.” He said, meaning Lucas. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one tired of the whine. She hated the way the guy grabbed her arm and pushed her forward, like she couldn’t understand the basic instructions to walk forward.
“I’m walking,” she hissed the third time he put hands on her.
She was pushed once more around the corner, past the elevator. A spot of blood from the knife wound dripped onto the orange-gold carpet. She said, “You should probably bind that before you lose any more blood.”
“Shut up.”
“Fine.”
Lauren really hadn’t been planning an all-out fantastic escape with the suggestion. She just wanted to stop somewhere and sleep. The adrenaline had been wearing on her, and now she was exhausted. After four opportunities to shoot the gun, her captor had yet to use it, which meant that he was a lot steadier than most of the kidnappers and thugs out there.
He pointed toward the stairway exit.
Lucas and the other captor were somewhere behind them and out of sight. When a gun shot rang out, Lauren’s heart pounded in her chest. She froze, unwilling to leave Lucas if he needed her but terrified to see that he’d been shot. When her captor pushed her forward, Lauren fell to her knees.
“Get moving. Stairs. Let’s go.”
The elevator jangled and started moving from the bottom floor up. As men went, this one was big and beefy. He hauled her to the stairs, dragging her away from the elevator, and away from the room and Lucas.
“You know, I can move faster if my feet work.” From the hall, she heard the sound of a shattered picture frame.
He let her go. She imagined his fingers marked purple spots into her skin in the form of four bruises. The way her arm hurt, she wouldn’t be surprised. She worried about Lucas, but noting the sweat forming on the forehead of the guy who was pushing her around, she figured she should focus on getting out alive first, and then help Lucas.
When he let go on the next push, Lauren ran to the stairwell, pushed the door open and stepped through to the landing. Her feet were in those large fluffy socks with the little dots on the soles that made them grip the floor better. After running down the hotel stairs, her socks would be ruined beyond repair.
When her kidnapper saw the direction she would take, he said, “Not down. Up.”
Lauren had already taken three steps in the down direction. She stopped and turned. She had to hand it to this guy. He might be a kidnapping jerk, but at least he kept his head in difficult situations. He limped now and his jeans were soaked through with an ever-spreading blood stain. Eventually he would get dizzy if he let himself bleed out.
Seeing her glance toward his jeans, he said, “I’m not going to prison. I’ll kill us both before that happens.”
Good to know where things stood.
“Then we’ll move faster and escape,” Lauren said.
Lauren took the stairs two at a time. She didn’t look back. Her hope was to outrace him up the stairs and get through the door and down the hallway ahead of him, maybe duck into a conference room or something.
Even with a knife wound, he kept up too easily for her to do anything. When she stopped at the next landing and started to go through the door, he grabbed her arm, “Not there. All the way to the top.”
Lauren lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Holy Hell. You want us to walk to the top of this?”
“Actually I want you to run. Go.” At least the bastard didn’t push her this time. Maybe at the top she could sleep. All those kickboxing and aerobics classes should be good for something. All the way to the top. Hell, maybe she could lose him.
Lauren double-timed it up the stairs steady and fast until her lungs burned. When she was two landings from the top and the guy still two steps behind, Lauren stopped, her breath ragged. She put her hand on the wall to steady herself. She said, “I need to rest.”
It didn’t take long for the gunman to manhandle her, yanking away from the wall and herding her up the stairs. Lauren muttered, “Going. Going.”
The last door opened onto the hotel’s premier floor, the one where movie stars and politicians paid thousands of dollars to rent when they visited Miami.
Smart, hiding up there. Traffic on the top floor would be limited to the person who checked out the suite. Still, getting out of the hotel was going to be a challenge. The desk clerk would have called the police by now. Shots fired in a hotel. That would probably bring news crews sniffing out a story, not to mention Drake’s team downstairs.
Lauren was ordered to go to the door. Once there the man knocked, three times firm.
A familiar voice called, “Come in.”
With a lift of the eyebrows, the gunman told Lauren to go first. When she first arrived at the hotel, she had hoped for sleep. Now she hoped to live.
Lauren stopped cold.
Kendall sprawled on the couch, in what could only be classified as high quality man pajamas. The whole thing looked affected. He had no book beside him, no television or laptop, not even a cup of coffee. His whole posture was a charade. In short, he had decided that greeting Lauren on the couch was his best move.
“Come in, my dear. You look tired.” Kendall waved her to the other end of the sofa.
Feeling like a fly in a Venus trap slowly crawling to its doom, Lauren edged toward the couch in tiny steps. If she could look in a mirror, she would probably look incredulous. Lauren had never learned to school her expressions, no matter how hard Drake tried to teach her.
She sat delicately on the opposite end of the couch. “Now that you have me, will you let Tom go?”
“Who’s Tom?” Kendall asked. He scrunched up his face just a little too much for Lauren to believe he really didn’t know. Even if he didn’t know the name of his captive, he certainly would know why she was asking.
“Do we have to dance like this? I can’t believe my misfortune in picking the same hotel you frequent.”
“It was the logical choice for both of us. The only accommodation closer is that motel, and who wants to sleep in a shit hole?” Kendall said.
He was lying. Lauren didn’t know how or why she knew, but even with location, it was just too coincidental, too convenient for him to be here in the same hotel at the same time. Lauren considered her movements. Kendall wouldn’t have the entire hotel tapped. That was a stretch of the imagination. That the specific phone call she made had been tapped was an even bigger stretch. She thought of Lucas and his computer program digging into all of the competing companies.
“Drake’s phone is tapped.” Lauren sat on the edge of the couch, as if running was an option. She was so tired.
Kendall put a finger to his nose and then pointed at her. Lauren wondered whether his mannerisms were real or feigned. Hard to tell in the spy game but he was trying too hard this time. Kendall said, “That brings us to the problem at hand. Whose side are you on?”
Lauren took a deep breath. It was worth her life to give the right answer. But the right answer wasn’t always the obvious answer. No matter how much she protested her loyalty to Kendall, the truth was in her actions. She’d dug herself a hole there, o
ne that would be hard to crawl out.
“To be honest, I didn’t expect to have my loyalty challenged this early,” Lauren said. This had to be good. She had to say the right thing. “Tom’s a friend. So I’m going to keep at this until he’s safe at home with his wife. I know this game does crazy things to people. I won’t stand for you hurting the friends I made at my former employment, but I know that they’re not completely innocent either. My plan was to go back to work tomorrow and act as if nothing had happened, and hope that Drake and Sven get Tom and Lucas back.”
Kendall sat with pomp, like a Roman emperor eating grapes. He enjoyed power. Lauren could see how pleased he was that she figured out he was spying on Drake in his own house. He loved even more the words as they rolled off his tongue, “Drake is hovering over his new girlfriend, and Sven’s Minka wakes up with terrible nightmares. It will be an upset when Drake tells Hannah that the phones are bugged. He’s been careful, but those women sure talk.”
Drake was still a wound for Lauren, even after all these years. She shrugged, “Maybe he doesn’t know. I’m not sure he talks work much to anyone.”
Actually she knew Drake didn’t. None of the AIT guys were what one would call chatty, and they would all suspect the possibility that someone might listen. But Drake would think his home phone safe, even if he was supremely careful about what he said across any phone line.
“Where is the sphere? We had it tracked to Spokane, but the trail ended there.”
“Let Tom go, and I’ll tell you.”
“If I let Tom go, I’ve got nothing to bargain with.” Kendall leaned back and his pajama top fell open a little.
Lauren frowned. Those little movements were some lame attempt at seduction. Some people went for men like Kendall. Lauren was not one of those women. She said, “Bargain for my job. For my life. None of the other companies will have me. Working in the bowels of AIT has ruined my career. I care about the people. I do. But I have to live. I want a job in research, one with challenges.”