These thoughts spun in her brain as she surveyed the patrons taking seats on the crowded bus, using only her peripheral vision.
A short, stocky Latino man strutted down the bus aisle, loud mariachi music blaring from earbuds stuck to his hear, a fedora perched atop his head at a jaunty angle. He had a hideous scar on his neck.
He took a seat next to her as the bus lurched westward on its route. She moved over to accommodate his wide frame.
She pretended to stare at something outside, but she was gathering details out of the corner of her eye. Late thirties. Latin descent, but Sam had no idea from which region. He looked out the window with a vacuous expression on his face, smacking his chewing gum loudly and bobbing his head to the music, both hands in his jacket pockets.
Not an obvious threat, but there were other available seats the man could have chosen. He didn’t have to sit next to her, but that’s where he’d plopped down without so much as a nod. That wasn’t uncommon in DC, but the man didn’t look like he was a native or a transplanted government policy douche, so basic human courtesy wasn’t an unreasonable expectation.
She decided to play it safe and get off the bus at the next stop.
Above the tinny noise of the loud music in the man’s headset, Sam heard a metallic click from the vicinity of his pocket. It was a noise she would recognize anywhere.
As she moved her head to locate the source of the noise, the traffic light ahead changed to red, and the deceleration of the bus caused her body to lean into the stranger’s bulk.
She felt his arm tense and move backward toward the seat, and her eyes settled on his midriff just in time to see a shiny streak of metal emerge from his pocket and slice toward her midsection.
Switchblade.
Rather than fighting her body’s momentum, she used it to her advantage. She continued to drive her shoulder into the stocky man, using the force of that interaction to scoot her hips away from the arc of the knife. Her ass cheeks slid across the smooth seat cushion.
She felt a searing pain in her side, and a tugging sensation on her clothing.
Sam brought her right hand across her unbalanced body in a lightning strike at the stranger’s neck, aiming for his windpipe. She didn’t get enough force behind the blow for it to be lethal, and the jostling of the bus and her unbalanced body position hurt her accuracy. Her curled knuckles connected with the tip of the attacker’s nose, and she felt the crunch of his cartilage breaking beneath the force of her blow.
Blood gushed instantly from his face, but he had already begun an attack with his opposite hand. It moved with surprising speed across his body and toward her own face.
She continued to twist in her seat until she slid off completely, her knees landing hard on the floor of the bus as her torso flattened underneath the arc of the man’s left hand. She thought she caught the glint of a metal shiv as his hand passed inches from her face.
Sam slid backward out of the seat and onto the floor, sprung to her feet, and pounded the emergency stop button below the opposite window as she ran to the front of the bus, shouting at the driver to open the door for her.
As she bounded toward the exit, she turned to assess the situation. Bloodied and pissed off, her attacker sprinted after her.
“Help!” she shouted. “That man is attacking me!”
She didn’t wait to find out whether anyone else on the bus would rise to her defense. She dashed down the steps and out the door. She sprinted across the street and down the escalator into the metro station, glancing over her shoulder to see whether her attacker had followed.
He hadn’t.
Sam dashed into the subway station women’s room and locked the stall door behind her, pulse pounding.
A funny thing happened on the way to the airport, she thought to herself as she lifted her bloody shirt to assess the damage.
She hoped it wasn’t serious. She had a plane to catch.
9
Peter Kittredge was well on his way to another fine drunk, not at all unlike the impressive state of inebriation he had attained the previous Friday at Festive, the fantastic DC gay bar with the fantastically pretty boy-toy waiters.
That seemed like a lifetime ago. What had started as the beginning of a very promising one-night stand had turned into one hell of a week.
And he wasn’t quite sure what to make of the latest development. He didn’t know exactly what he had witnessed a few hours earlier during the extremely strained meeting between the US Ambassador and the President of Venezuela, but he was pretty sure that he needed to tell El Grande about it.
His contact showed up somewhere between the beginning and end of his third double vodka.
“On the rocks with a twist?” was the approved opener, which the wiry Latino delivered with a thick accent.
“Is there any other way?” Kittredge responded, already feeling weary and disillusioned with the clandestine games after his ignominious introduction to the less enjoyable aspects of life as a spy. It was fun to have secrets, and it was even occasionally fun to keep them, but as his scabbed and scarred lower back could attest, it could sting more than a little when those secrets were discovered by the wrong people.
“Someone wants to see you,” the wiry man said. “Wait five minutes, then leave. Get in a red Dongfeng sedan at the curb.”
“How will I know it’s the right sedan?” Kittredge asked.
“You’ll know.”
The man left without another word.
The red Dongfeng four-door idled at the curb outside the pub, just as the wiry man had said. Its hazards were flashing.
Kittredge approached as nonchalantly as he could manage, fighting his nearly irrepressible urge to look around in search of the inevitable CIA tail.
As he approached the passenger’s side door, Kittredge saw the sedan’s driver through the windshield, wearing a dark ball cap pulled low. Kittredge didn’t recognize who it was until he’d opened the door and sat down in the passenger’s seat.
Then his heart leapt.
Maria.
“Look straight ahead,” she said as she drove away from the curb, her voice soft despite the terse command it conveyed. She grabbed his hand and squeezed affectionately as Kittredge fought the urge to stare at her stunning profile.
“Two of your friends are out for a stroll this evening,” she said. “Maybe they want to enjoy the Friday night life.”
“Shocking,” he deadpanned. “Really, it’s great to see you, Maria. I’m sorry again about the other day.”
“I was very pissed off at you, Peter Kittredge. It could have been a big problem.”
“I knew better than to call the hospital.”
She nodded. “Si. And I knew better than to sleep with you,” she said.
He smiled. “I’m glad for your poor judgment. Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It will end poorly.”
“It doesn’t have to,” he said, realizing that he suddenly cared very little about President Hugo Chavez, the US Ambassador, the CIA, Quinn, and Bill Fredericks.
“I’m too old for hope to triumph over experience,” she said.
He nodded. “But too young to quit the game.”
Maria smiled. “It is a fun game, no?”
She drove deftly through downtown Caracas, looping around several times to trap their CIA tail. She honked and waved at one of the vehicles in the Agency tracking team, a beat up green pickup truck with two incongruously white men inside. The men pretended to ignore her, but Maria was certain they’d gotten the message.
They changed cars in the relative privacy of an alleyway between two horrendously dilapidated buildings, and Maria drove around until she was certain the Agency tail had given up. Then she took a circuitous route to their destination, driving just insanely enough to blend in with the locals.
Finally, they arrived at a parking structure, one that was unfamiliar
to him. It seemed to serve several residential buildings. She parked in a reserved spot on the first floor.
“Won’t the car get towed?”
“We have friends here.”
They got out of the car, and she took his hand, interlacing her fingers between his. She led him down a dimly lit stairway to the underground walkway connecting the garage to a residential building across the busy street. Graffiti announcing various political and criminal affiliations adorned the puke-green tile and gray concrete hallway, and their footfalls echoed in the otherwise empty corridor.
“Great place to get knifed,” Kittredge observed.
They reached the lobby beneath the apartment building and walked into a waiting elevator. Moments later, Kittredge found himself on the tenth floor of a lower-middle class residential tower, Maria’s strong but feminine fingers still gripping his hand.
She led him to a nondescript apartment, wedged her hand into the front pocket of her skin-tight jeans, and pulled out a single key that opened the lock and deadbolt. Kittredge eyed her figure as she worked the lock, feeling a familiar tingling in his loins.
Must and mothballs hit Kittredge’s nostrils as he followed her inside. She locked and dead-bolted the door behind them.
Without a word, she met his eyes, reached her hand around his neck, and pulled him forward for a deep, passionate kiss. After a long, breathless moment, she spoke. “Against my better judgment, I like you, Peter Kittredge.”
“It’s possible that for the first time in my life,” he said, “I’m in jeopardy of becoming pussy-whipped.”
She laughed, her body pressed against his, a pleasant light in her eyes. “There are worse fates, I think.”
He didn’t disagree.
They moved from the entryway floor to a bedroom, well-appointed but impersonal. It was clearly a safe house, as there were no pictures on the wall or personal items anywhere in view.
They took their fill of each other, then dozed together.
Kittredge awakened with a start at the sound of the apartment door slamming shut.
Maria was up in a flash, large-caliber handgun in hand and trained at the bedroom door, her naked body bathed in the light of the harvest moon.
Footsteps, then a familiar voice. Rojo.
The handsome older man seemed indifferent to their nakedness as he took in the bedroom scene. Maria seemed equally unfazed, and made no move to cover her exposed breasts or nethers.
An uncomfortable thought formed in Kittredge’s mind. Had Rojo had Maria as well? How many others were in her life? Not that he minded in principle, but Kittredge didn’t care to meet them all.
I’m hetero and jealous? I’d never have guessed.
Kittredge found his own nudity unsettling in Rojo’s presence, and felt himself wither a little under the distinguished-looking spy’s hard gaze. “At least you know I’m not wearing a wire,” he said. He covered himself with a pillow.
Rojo chuckled. His laugh was short-lived. “It was Chavez, wasn’t it?”
Kittredge nodded. “Fredericks brought four gunmen. I told him I wasn’t okay with anything violent, but he didn’t give a shit. Anyway, the snipers were arrested, so it must have worked out.”
Rojo shook his head. “Too clean. Had to be decoys.”
Kittredge raised his eyebrows. “Nothing else happened though. I mean, nothing other than the showdown between Chavez and the ambassador. Chavez even had the gunmen paraded in front of us for effect. Like he was showing off. It was tense, but nothing violent.”
“Wrong,” Rojo said. “A thousand things happened. Handshakes, embraces, gifts. El Presidente is more careful than he used to be, but he is still far too open.”
Maria stood and went to the bathroom. Rojo’s eye followed her, but Kittredge couldn’t read his expression. Any mortal man would have had obvious lust in his eyes, unless he’d slept with her recently.
So, Rojo’s slept with her recently.
Maria left the door open. Such easy familiarity, Kittredge thought. If Rojo took any notice, it didn’t register on his face. More evidence of intimate history between them.
“Tell me everything, start to finish.” Rojo spoke with the quiet presumption of a man used to having his demands satisfied and his proclamations obeyed.
“Please.”
“Excuse me?”
“Tell me everything, please, you mean,” Kittredge said. “I’m not your subject or your employee.” He wasn’t sure where it came from. Probably from the resentment and jealousy of Rojo knowing Maria, or maybe from his discomfort at being naked in front of a sexual rival.
An attractive rival, at that. I clearly haven’t gone totally hetero.
Rojo’s eyes smiled slightly, but his face was otherwise impassive. “Yes. Tell me everything, Peter Kittredge, if you please.”
Having made his point as well as a naked man could reasonably hope, Kittredge recounted the day’s events, including as much detail as he remembered.
Rojo asked the kind of questions that betrayed a great deal of prior knowledge. Kittredge asked in several places about whether Rojo had been present during the proceedings, but the handsome older man never even acknowledged the questions, and didn’t come close to answering them.
But Rojo’s knowledge had an interesting side effect on Kittredge. If Kittredge had had any doubts about the VSS’ access to the upper reaches of Venezuelan power, he harbored those doubts no longer. It was clear that Rojo was plugged into the illuminati of Venezuelan society. Probably El Grande, too.
And, vicariously, so was Kittredge.
He liked that.
He relished the unlikely juxtaposition: beleaguered mid-level embassy econocrat by day, international power player by night.
He wasn’t yet the guy, but at least he was in the game.
Climbing ladders and sleeping with girls. What has become of me?
A more sobering thought: What would Charley think of me?
Charley probably wouldn’t be surprised at anything, Kittredge realized. At least, if what he’d heard from the VSS people, and what he’d surmised from the CIA people, was anywhere close to correct, Charley Arlinghaus had a ton of explaining to do the moment he awoke from his coma.
“What do you think today was all about?” Rojo asked.
In spite of himself, Kittredge felt flattered at Rojo’s question. It felt good for a distinguished heavy like Rojo to ask Kittredge’s opinion.
But he had no idea what the day’s events might have signified, or what Quinn and Fredericks’ participation might portend. “I agree that it’s a little suspect the way the snipers were found and arrested so quickly. But if that was a diversion for something else, I sure as hell don’t know what.”
Rojo nodded.
Maria returned, still nude, and perched on the edge of the bed facing Rojo, who still stood near the doorway. The distinguished-looking fifty-something glanced briefly at Maria, then abruptly turned to leave. “Enjoy yourselves,” he said as he walked from the bedroom. “I’ll show myself out.”
They heard footsteps, then the door opening, shutting, locking.
10
Sam walked quickly through security at Reagan International Airport, grateful for the uncharacteristically light foot traffic and uncharacteristically efficient TSA crew.
She patted her side, feeling the shred of cloth she had torn from her bloodied shirt and wrapped around the entire circumference of her torso to stem the bleeding from the long, nasty cut. Had her reflexes been any duller, she’d certainly have bled out. The attacker’s expert thrust was sure to have punctured her solar plexus, on an upward vector toward her heart.
It wasn’t quite accurate to say that she was lucky to be alive, but she was certainly lucky that the attacker had chosen to open his switchblade within earshot. It was this audible warning that had put Sam’s senses on alert, which gave her the advance warning she’d needed to jump and squirm out of the way of the razor-sharp knife.
She’d changed into her only spare
shirt, and cut the bloody one to ribbons for use as bandages.
The cut in her side was more than superficial, but as far as she could tell, nothing critical had sprung a leak. But it was extremely painful, and she’d certainly need stitches. For the moment, however, the bleeding seemed to be under control.
She passed the last TSA agent on her way through the security checkpoint. The agent looked at her breasts and her ass, but otherwise ignored her. It was a huge relief. She had half expected to be detained for further questioning, a consequence of having the local cops and a few Homeland officers breathing down her neck. And maybe a foreign intelligence service. It was tough to tell.
Tricia Leavens, her passport read. Along with an equally new and equally inauthentic driver’s license, it had sufficed for TSA purposes, and she walked past the gate for her Caracas flight, looking carefully but surreptitiously at the people waiting in the lobby area in front of the airline kiosk.
Nothing jumped out at her as abnormal in the gate area. She wasn’t relieved – it didn’t mean everything was in order; it just meant that anything untoward was well disguised.
Sam walked several hundred feet past her gate, pondering. She hadn’t seen Ekman since she’d spotted the surveillance team right outside the DHS front door.
More importantly, she hadn’t seen Brock, aka Thomas Brownstein, since they’d taken separate buses to get away from the hot zone around Homeland.
It took a great deal of discipline not to worry herself sick about whether Brock’s bus ride was anything like hers had been, complete with a switchblade-wielding thug waiting to slash through her left ventricle.
They’d become separated before she could replenish her stock of burner phones, so she and Brock had no means of communicating with each other.
He’s a big boy, she reminded herself. Brock was a decorated veteran of a hundred combat missions, and he’d used wits and guts to get himself out of all sorts of unhealthy situations over the years.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 36