Athena Force 9: Payback

by Harper Allen

  “Jolly—jolly good, Miss Swanson. It is you, isn’t it?” Roger’s weak voice came from behind her as she placed a booted foot on the operative’s chest and pulled the knife from his chest. Dawn looked swiftly over her shoulder and saw the shy Englishman attempt a smile. “That’s the ticket. Right…right through the murderous heart of that son of a bitch, as you Americans might say…”

  A spasm of choking racked him, and a look of apology crossed his face. Then his coughing abruptly ceased and his eyes dimmed in death.

  Grief threatened to engulf her. She pushed the wave of emotion away and replaced it with cold determination. A quick glance showed her that Asher had now entered the cafeteria and had taken out another opponent already, but as she looked she saw one of the two remaining gunmen take aim at the SAS man.

  This time the Beretta was her weapon of choice, but just as she brought it swiftly up to snap off a shot she felt a burning sensation at the side of her neck, as if some angry hornet had stung her. Ignoring the pain and the sudden trickle of blood, Dawn fired at her target and with savage satisfaction saw him throw his hands into the air as her bullet found its mark. She turned to face the fourth and final Lab 33 operative.

  Despite the poor light there was no mistaking Hendrix Kruger’s blunt features. The South African expatriate’s pale blue eyes widened in quick alarm and then he moved more swiftly than she would have guessed he was capable of.

  The woman he thrust in front of him as a human shield was one of the British lab techs whom Dawn had noticed during her time undercover as Dawn Swanson, but had never had the opportunity to speak with. Nearly fainting in terror, behind her glasses her mutely beseeching eyes held Dawn’s.

  “It is true what the doktor says, then.” Kruger nodded judiciously as he realized she wasn’t about to fire. “Once Lab 33’s top assassin wouldn’t have let such a small thing as a bystander’s death stop her from taking out an enemy. But you have become soft, it seems.”

  “I never would have sacrificed a civilian to save my own skin,” she said evenly. “I’m not about to now, either.”

  Kruger opened his mouth, but whatever his intended reply would have been, it remained forever unspoken. Asher’s shot was deadly and accurate, and as the South African crashed to the floor, the terrified lab tech took a few stumbling steps and fell into the arms of a group of co-workers.

  “Five down,” Asher said curtly as Dawn joined him in the doorway of the cafeteria. He saw her quick assessment of the gaping wound on his shoulder and shook his head. “A stray bullet tore me up a little, but it’s nothing that can’t be stitched together later. From the gunfire we’ve been hearing outside, I’d say there have to be at least ten shooters scattered around the grounds as a diversionary force to keep my people from reaching this building. If your original estimate of twenty is correct, we’re still outnumbered five to two.”

  “I’ve been up against worse odds. I imagine you have, too,” Dawn replied with a shrug. She lengthened her stride as they neared the stairs to the second level, suddenly not wanting Asher’s keen awareness on her. “Rog didn’t make it,” she said, her voice sounding too harsh to her own ears. “His death is going to tear your uncle…tear your uncle…”

  What the hell was the matter with her throat? she wondered angrily. Had Kruger’s badly aimed bullet nicked some vital cord necessary for speech? Because try as she might, she couldn’t get the rest of her sentence past the odd-feeling swelling that seemed to be blocking her voice.

  “I’m sorry, love.” Asher’s grip on her arm brought her to a halt as they reached the top of the stairs. “He’d become a friend, hadn’t he? Don’t try to talk about it right now while it’s still so painful, but later if you want a shoulder to—”

  Dawn wrenched her arm from his grip. “A shoulder to cry on, Ash? Give me a freakin’ break! I mean—” she made an all-encompassing gesture at herself “—look at me! Guns, knives—I’m not exactly the girlie-girl type who falls to pieces over every little thing, dammit. Rog was a nice enough guy and he didn’t deserve to die, but any friendship you thought I had with him was all part of my cover…just like the relationship I cultivated with Sir William and just like the one I tried to cultivate with you.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself?” His smile was tight. “Not true. You’re no lab rat, you’re part of the human race, and you’ve got all the emotions the rest of us poor mortals have. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, whatever that bastard Peters may have tried to make you believe. Like I said, you’re going to have to make a decision at some point, but for your own sake, know who you really are before you make it.”

  “I do.” She kept her voice low and jerked her head in the direction of Sir William’s door, now only yards away. “I’m a woman who’s itching to take out some Lab 33 thugs, with or without your help. Any friendlies in your uncle’s study besides the old man himself?”

  He kept his attention on her. “I posted Keifer and Reese to guard his research. My uncle and my men, Swanson—so before we make our move I need to know how far you’ll go to get those notes for yourself.”

  It took a second for her to understand what he meant. When she did, outrage filled her. “You’re asking me if I’d let you help me take out Peters’s men and then turn my gun on you and your people?”

  “You said without that research you’re dead,” he reminded her in a tense whisper. “I have to assume that means you hope there’s still a chance you can deliver on your contract with Aldrich Peters and have him rescind the shoot-to-kill order he’s put out on you.”

  “Dammit, I—” He’s got every right to ask the question, O’Shaughnessy, Dawn thought suddenly. A few minutes ago you told him not to trust you…and he shouldn’t. But at least you can set his mind at ease on this particular point.

  “A man named Lee Craig taught me everything I know, Ash,” she said quietly. “He was an assassin and a liar and if he hadn’t been killed I would have had to take him down myself. But he lived by his own code, and for what it’s worth he passed that code on to me. I won’t betray an ally. Your men and your uncle are in no danger from me.”

  “Your word as a geeky lab tech?” He gave her a wry smile and she felt some of the tension ease from her.

  “May I be forced to hold my hand over a Bunsen burner flame if I’m lying,” she said with mock solemnity. She took a deep breath. “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” he said, his smile thinning. “Let’s party, Swanson.”

  They hit the door running, and without its security system in place it burst open instantaneously. Dawn got a split-second glimpse of the scene and threw herself into a roll, dimly aware that beside her Asher had done the same. They came up firing, each on opposite corners of the room, each choosing the nearest targets. She felt a searing pain claw its way through her right arm. Wincing, she tossed the Beretta into her left.

  She’d been wounded, but she would heal, she thought as she aimed with cold deliberation at the black-clad operative who spun around from the open safe and began to bring his rifle into firing position. She didn’t know if she could say as much for Reese, whose prone body was lying half under the desk, and she was almost certain that wasn’t the case with Keifer. Ash’s friend looked more dead than alive. Her quick assessment of the scene as she’d entered had shown her Sir William as being the only non Lab 33 member unharmed, although from the pallor of his face as he strained against the gag stuffed into his mouth and the cords binding him to the chair behind his desk, his health situation could become critical at any moment.

  The man in front of the safe was one she’d seen dozens of times in the underground corridors of Lab 33. His eyes widened in brief recognition. “You bitch, O’Shaughnessy!” he snarled as he began to pull the trigger of his assault rifle. “This is my lucky—”

  “Day?” she suggested as her bullet smashed into him, driving him back against the open safe. He slid sideways along the wall, leaving a smear of crimson, before tumbling to the carpet.


  “Two and two.” Asher’s voice was ice, but its coldness wasn’t directed at her. His angry glance swept over the bodies of the two men he’d eliminated, and then to Dawn’s lifeless opponents. “Our estimate was off by one. Too bad.”

  She nodded, already on her way to Sir William. “I know. It wouldn’t have caused me any sleepless nights either if I’d been able to take down a few more of those bastards. And it sounds as if the situation outside is under control, too.” She squatted down by the old scientist’s chair. “Check on your men, Ash,” she said quietly. “I’ll take care of your uncle.”

  Taking the gag off was her first priority, she realized, alarmed by the way Sir William’s eyes were bulging desperately at her. It was some kind of tough nylon material, so instead of trying to untie the knot she used the stiletto.

  “Now for your hands and ankles,” she said as Sir William’s mouth worked soundlessly. “Don’t worry, your saliva’s just dried up, sir. Give yourself a minute to recover before you try to—”

  “Watch out!” Sir William shouted hoarsely.

  Dawn reached swiftly for the Beretta, lying on the floor beside her where she’d placed it. As her hand closed around it she saw a red pinpoint of light race up her arm, across her chest, and then up higher where she couldn’t see it…to the one vulnerable area on her body.

  Fear tore through her. About to roll out of the line of fire, she saw that her only available option would place her directly in front of Sir William and put him in danger. Desperately she tried to see where the shooter had hidden himself, but as she glimpsed the barrel of a rifle protruding from behind the velvet drapes at the window, she knew her time had run out.

  An unseen finger pulled an unseen trigger. A flash of muzzle fire lit up the dim room. And the round that had been fired caught SAS Captain Destin Asher as he made a flying leap to cover her.

  “No!” Dawn was barely aware that she’d screamed out the denial. Asher crashed to the floor in front of her, but already she was on her feet and firing at the Lab 33 operative who had stepped forward from the curtains and was aiming at her. “You bastard, you killed my partner!”

  Afterward, she never could recall exactly which of her shots took him down. She didn’t remember standing over him, firing the last of the Beretta’s fifteen rounds and then continuing to pull the trigger on an empty chamber. But at Sir William’s gentle reprimand, she came to, as if she had been shaken roughly from a nightmare.

  “That’s enough, my dear. He’s dead. And we have men here to save.” She turned a blank stare toward the old scientist and saw him rise with difficulty from Ash’s body. His bushy eyebrows drew together in a scowl, but his faded blue eyes were bright with moisture. “My nephew’s badly wounded, but he’ll survive if he gets medical attention right away. So will Private Reese, although if Lieutenant Keifer pulls through it will be a miracle, I’m afraid,” he said heavily. “I’ll phone down to the infirmary.”

  “The phones aren’t—” Dawn closed her mouth as Sir William began speaking into the receiver of the obviously now working instrument. She looked down at Asher.

  Beneath his tan his skin was a muddy-gray, and under the hastily tied strip of cloth Sir William had used to stanch the wound seeped a dark flow of blood. But his eyes were open and he was watching her. “One…one of them called you O’Shaughnessy,” he rasped with difficulty. “It was good fighting alongside you, O’Shaughnessy. Think we might do it again sometime?”

  Swiftly she bent down and touched her lips to his. She straightened and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Ash. You risked your life for me, and I’ll never forget that. But if I stuck around you’d just have to arrest me, and I can’t let that happen.” A few feet away from him on the floor was a familiar sheaf of papers. She walked over and picked them up, tucking them inside her top, before striding to the doorway.

  “The truce between us is over,” she said tonelessly. “If we ever meet again, we won’t be fighting side by side, we’ll be fighting to the death against each other.”

  Chapter 15

  Status: nine hours fifty-eight minutes and counting

  Time: 1402 hours

  “I made an error in judgment, Dawn.” A trace of annoyance crossed Aldrich Peters’s aquiline features. “As I told you when you delivered London’s notes to me three days ago, I was wrong to doubt that you would accomplish your mission and doubly wrong to suspect you might have turned against Lab 33. But now that my people have come up with the serum that will save your life, we should look to the future, not the past.”

  “Agreed, Doctor.” Dawn nodded curtly at a passing Lab 33 guard clad in the familiar gray-and-red uniform, noting the fear that darted in his hastily averted eyes. “But I can hardly look to the future if I don’t have one, and after what happened at Sir William’s lab I see that as a very real possibility. I’ve been talking with Drs. Sobie and Wang, and they tell me that the serum has no effect on an ordinary human being. That being the case, I took the precaution of setting up a blind control situation.”

  Peters frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  In front of them the hallway came to an abrupt halt at a pair of steel doors. She glanced upward at the electronic lens positioned there, pretended to hesitate just long enough for her retinas to be scanned, and then stood aside to let Aldrich Peters precede her through. The doors closed behind her as she and Lab 33’s director entered the extensive laboratory facilities of the complex.

  “Carter’s going to be taking the serum at the same time I do. The hypos will be filled from the same sealed vial, and I’ll choose which one I get and which one’s injected into the director of your Identities Department. I think that’s fair, don’t you, Doctor?”

  This was the moment of truth, Dawn thought, watching Peters’s reaction. Carter was too valuable an asset for Peters to gamble away. If his chilly gray gaze showed even a flicker of hesitation she would know that his plan to have her killed hadn’t been discarded but merely revised.

  “To everyone but young Carter.” He sounded unperturbed, and she let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “If you believe there’s a chance I’ve given orders for you to be injected with a poison instead of a lifesaving compound, your paranoia doesn’t bode well for our relationship, Dawn.”

  “See, I would have said that your attempted hit on me had taken care of the ‘not boding well’ thing already,” she drawled. “Like Uncle Lee used to say, it’s not paranoia if they’re really trying to kill you. Do we do it my way or not?”

  It really wasn’t fair to Carter, Dawn thought a few minutes later as she and Peters entered the procedure room. Large and spotlessly gleaming, its walls and floors were of white tile and a bank of high-intensity lights flooded out even the faintest of shadows. Near the high ceiling a barrier replaced the white tile, and behind it she could see what looked like the full contingent of Lab 33’s scientific team, obviously gathered there to witness the procedure that would take place below. Behind a glass partition stood two stainless-steel gurneys. Strapped to one of them was the skateboarding head of the Identities Department.

  Of course, if Carter for whatever reason had deliberately failed to reveal to her the fact that her partial thumbprint was on Interpol’s files, he deserved everything that was about to happen to him, she thought coldly as Peters conferred with Dr. Wang and Dr. Sobie. And although neither he nor Peters knew it, getting a harmless injection would be the least of his problems today.

  Her phone call to Kayla Ryan three nights ago had been brief and to the point. “Tell your people that Lab 33 goes down in seventy-nine hours exactly,” she’d said tersely. “That’ll be just after nine, three nights from today. I’m on my way back there now and I’ll make sure that all the arrangements we agreed upon are in place for you and the authorities.”

  “Slow down.” Kayla’s tone had held a burr of sleepiness, but her next words had proved she was anything but fuzzy minded. “What’s the matter? You sound like—” She’d given an uncertain
little laugh. “Well, if you were anyone else I’d say you sound like you’ve been crying.”

  Anger and doubt had warred in Dawn. Could Kayla and the others really have betrayed her? It just didn’t feel right, not when they’d obviously cared so much for her biological mother. Not when they’d tried so hard to find Dawn and her sisters. But she couldn’t take any chances now. “What you hear in my voice might be urgency—I’ve broken into a gas station and I’m using its phone to report in to you as I promised I would. When the Cassandras and their backup forces storm Lab 33 they’ll have no problem with the facility’s air locks and retinal scans—I’ll have disabled everything a few hours before. Having doors opening for them won’t alert the suspicions of Lab 33’s staff and guards, of course, because that’s what should happen. They’ll assume their retinas have been scanned or they punched in the right code for a lock. But the doors will open no matter who’s trying to get access, understand?”

  “I understand.” All trace of sleepiness in Kayla’s voice had disappeared, but the caring tone remained. “Just remember, you aren’t in this alone any more. You’ve got allies.”

  You don’t want to be my ally, Ryan, believe me. The last one I had ended up hating me. Clutching the receiver to her ear, Dawn had closed her eyes, trying to shut out the scene that had been replaying itself in her mind ever since she’d walked away from Asher: the disbelief in his eyes, the pain that had tightened his features, the coldness that had replaced all other expressions just before he’d lost consciousness and she’d slipped out the door while Sir William was still on the phone. Had there been another way to handle the situation? You know there wasn’t, she thought bleakly, not without revealing who and what you are to too many people…and in the process, revealing that Faith and Lynn are equal candidates for the kind of research that some shadowy government department would want to conduct on the three of you if your secret got out. If the price you have to pay to keep that secret to yourself is making the man who saved your life wish he’d let you die, then you’ll just have to pay it.