He sat back, rocked onto his heels by her ferocity.
“But I don’t need to get pregnant to completely screw things up for myself.” She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, forcing herself to stop. Crying wasn’t going to help—in fact it was only making this worse. “I didn’t even need to do this—” She lifted her wrist that was handcuffed and raised his arm, too. “—to ruin my life.”
He didn’t get it.
“I only had to spend the night with you, Roger,” she told him. “That’s all I had to do. The really stupid part was that it should have been easy to keep from messing my life up. Staying away from you should have been a cinch. We don’t even like each other.”
He still didn’t understand. “You’re saying that spending the night with me has ruined your career? Get real, Locke—that’s just plain stupid.”
“You want to hear stupid? Stupid is being the best sharpshooter in the entire U.S. military and being assigned to work a desk. Stupid is dealing with goddamned innuendos and thinly veiled sexual comments day in and day out, and getting so that you’re used to it, so that you expect it. Stupid is being recruited for an FBI counterterrorist team because you’re the best person for the job and still having to face comments about quotas and equal opportunity. Stupid is doing a kickass job and having my supervisor congratulate me while he sneaks a look down my shirt. You have no idea what I go up against every single day that I go into work,” she told him. “I cannot, cannot allow my coworkers to see me as a sex object. I cannot have them talking about my sex life. I can’t even have a sex life!”
“You don’t,” Starrett pointed out. “You told me last night this is the first relationship you’ve been in in four years.”
“No.” She shook her head, wiped her eyes. “This is not a relationship. This is an accident. A terrible, terrible accident.”
He sat even farther back from her and laughed. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. Silly me. It was an accident. Of course. Four different times, you accidentally put my dick in your—”
“You’re such a jerk,” Locke interrupted him hotly. “I don’t know what I’m so worried about. No one’s going to believe you—go on, you can brag about this all you want.”
He stared at her, open mouthed with seeming disbelief. “You think I’d brag about . . . ?”
“Cut the insulted act,” Locke said, making sure the towel was secure around her as she leaned wearily back against the bathroom wall. “I know you. You like to talk. You’ll tell someone. WildCard. Or Jenk.” She closed her eyes. She could put in for reassignment. Maybe Chicago. Or San Francisco. No, San Francisco was too near the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado. Maybe Denver . . . “Definitely John Nilsson. I know you’re going to tell Nils.”
And then, forty-five minutes after they got these handcuffs off, the entire Troubleshooters squad would know that Roger Starrett had finally scored with Alyssa Locke. Or at least they would have heard the story. Whether they believed it was a different matter entirely.
“I’m not going to tell anyone, Alyssa,” Starrett said quietly. “Because you’re right. No one would believe me. To be honest, I hardly believe it happened myself.”
It was midmorning by the time Meg pulled into the Seagull Motel. She’d stopped several times at fast-food drive throughs to get coffee for herself and some water for Razeen. She’d managed to give him the last of the sleeping pills, and he was snoring again, and hopefully would be until she could get him inside the motel room.
The Extremist from the parking garage had told her the motel room would be reserved for her under the name Joan Smith. She had been told to check in and wait to be contacted.
Meg parked right outside the office. Leaving the window open only a crack, she locked Razeen in the car and went inside.
The clerk was a tremendously bored, tremendously pregnant girl of maybe sixteen. She gathered the paperwork for the room with infinitesimal slowness. It was all Meg could do not to leap over the counter and do it herself.
As long as she kept moving, she had the strength to keep going. In the car, she’d kept the radio on, distracting herself with music. But standing here, waiting, there was nothing to do but think.
Think about Eve and Amy, who—as John believed—might already be dead. Her precious baby might not have been taken from Meg just for these awful few days, but forever. It was too terrible to think about. Too devastating to consider.
Eve would die protecting Amy, Meg knew that. But even Eve, despite her sometimes seemingly mythic strength and determination, couldn’t protect Amy from terrorists who had a reputation, as John had reminded her, for putting bullets into the heads of their hostages.
Meg knew that John had firsthand experience dealing with terrorists. What he believed was based on a grim reality that Meg herself had come into contact with only very briefly during her stay in Kazbekistan.
But now she didn’t want to think about Amy, and she didn’t want to think about John, either.
Leaving him behind had been the right thing to do. She was probably going to die. She knew that, accepted it. She almost didn’t even care anymore. But she did care about John.
She cared too much.
“Joan Smith, huh?” the girl said. “We’ve been getting about ten phone calls a day, asking if you’ve checked in yet.”
Meg couldn’t breathe. “Really?”
“Is that your car?”
“The white one, yes,” she replied.
“How many people are you going to have in this room? Because we have these rules and . . .” There was a flicker of something—life maybe—in the girl’s eyes and voice that made Meg turn around and look out the window into the parking lot.
Five men in long, dark raincoats surrounded her car. A cargo van, its front door open, stood nearby.
“Oh, my God!” Maybe this was what the Extremist had meant when he’d said she’d be contacted. Maybe these men had Amy and Eve in that van.
“What about the room?” the girl asked plaintively. “And there’s a—”
Meg didn’t bother to answer, didn’t hear the rest of it as she rushed for the door.
The morning sunshine seemed to dance across the surface of her car and make five pairs of mirrored sunglasses shine. One of the men wore a necklace that glistened in the bright light.
It was surreal.
The raincoats seemed oddly out of place under the perfect blue sky, but they hid great, huge guns. The kind of guns John Nilsson and his men had carried when they’d arrived at the Kazbekistani embassy. Assault weapons, John called them. The kind of guns that could cut a person in half with a spray of deadly bullets.
The men kept their guns under their coats as she approached, but they made certain she knew they were there. As if she could possibly miss them.
“Do you have my daughter?” she demanded. “I want to see my daughter, and I want to see her now.”
Two of the men exchanged a glance, and Meg realized with a sharp surge of dread that the flash of sunlight she’d seen was glinting off stylized Kazbekistani symbols that hung from a thick gold chain around the one man’s neck.
Those symbols were the Kazbekistani letters for G, I, and K.
These were not the Extremists. These were Razeen’s own men, come to set him free.
Before Meg could move, before she could reach into her pocket for her gun and—God help her!—shoot Razeen right through the car window, two of the men had taken her swiftly by the arms and a third patted her pockets and took her weapon.
Oh, God! She’d come all this way, only to lose now. She could barely stand, barely breathe, barely think.
“You’ll see your daughter soon enough.” The necklaced man spoke in a heavy accent. “Unlock the car.”
Think. Think, she ordered herself. If she burst into tears, they’d know she knew they weren’t the Extremists. If she just unlocked the car door, they’d take Razeen and be gone, leaving her, probably with a bullet in her head.
Meg could see the mot
el clerk watching them with unabashed interest through the big plate glass windows.
One of the raincoats glanced warily toward the clerk, too. And Meg knew they didn’t want to create a scene and bring the police into this. They didn’t want to break the windows of her car, they didn’t want to shoot her, they didn’t want screaming or the sound of breaking glass or gunshots.
“We will take him,” the necklaced man told her, “and you will stay here for thirty minutes, doing nothing, talking to no one. After thirty minutes, you will get into your car and drive to the McDonald’s, four blocks west. Your daughter will be there, in the ladies’ room.”
Hope and doubt flooded her simultaneously. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe these were the Extremists, and getting Amy back would be as simple as unlocking her car door and waiting thirty minutes before driving four blocks west.
Think. Think. “What about my grandmother?” Meg asked. “And my . . . my grandfather?”
“Of course,” the man said. “They’ll be there, too. You’ll have them all back, all safely.”
Her hope sputtered and died. All her hope.
No, she refused to accept that the situation was completely hopeless. There had to be another way, another option, another choice.
Escape seemed impossible.
Her only option was to somehow grab one of the big assault guns and blast Razeen into hell. Then she had two choices: to kill Razeen or die herself, trying to kill him.
But wait. She had another gun, the one she’d taken from the FBI guard, still hidden in her boot. She could feel it, hard against her ankle. To get it, she’d have to lean over, pull up her pants leg, reach into her boot . . . Impossible. Hopeless.
Or maybe not.
She’d unlock the door, climb into the back to untie Razeen from where John had tethered him to the floor. And while she was doing that, with her back to the raincoats, she would pull up her pant leg, reach into her boot for her gun.
And she’d fire a bullet into Razeen’s head at close range.
She had to do it. It was Razeen or Amy.
She had to kill Razeen. She didn’t have a choice.
Razeen would forgive her. She knew that.
She would die right now, too, because after killing Razeen, the gunmen would kill her. She knew that, without a doubt.
She reached for the keys, and around her, the world had gone into sharp focus. The motel clerk was still watching them through the window. A maintenance man, baseball cap pulled low over his face, was pushing a cart of dirty sheets and towels across the driveway, the wheels rattling noisily on the cracked pavement. He shouted in rapid-fire Spanish up to the maids who were cleaning a room on the second floor, a vacuum cleaner holding the door open, “Ho, Renetta, there’s a phone call for you in the maintenance room!”
“He’ll need to be untied,” she said to necklace man, her voice amazingly smooth. “I’ll have to go into the back to reach the ropes.”
One of the maids came out of the room and leaned over the railing, shouting back, still in Spanish. “You must be mistaken. There’s no one named Renetta here.”
“Maybe they asked for Rene. How do I know?” The maintenance man was nearly on top of them with the cart, and the raincoats shifted uneasily, looking to Necklace for direction.
Meg took advantage of the distraction to unlock the front door and to push the button that would release the child restraint lock in the back.
“There’s no Rene here, either,” came the reply in Spanish. “What are you doing with that cart? I just took that to the laundry room!”
Meg froze. Could it be . . . ? Was it possible . . . ? She didn’t want to turn around, didn’t want to look at the man. Please don’t let it be John, she prayed as she reached to open the back door of her car. Please don’t let him be killed, too.
Necklace shook his head at the raincoats in warning, pulling the open front of his own coat closed, murmuring, “Let him go past.”
From the corner of her eyes, Meg saw that the maintenance man was paying them no attention at all. He was still pushing the cart, looking up at the maid, shouting angrily back to her. “I don’t have time to act as your secretary. Next time the phone rings, you take your big fat ass down the stairs and answer it yourself!”
The maid screeched with outrage, raining an eruption of Spanish down upon them.
Meg opened the back door just as the maintenance man pushed the laundry cart—hard—into the raincoats.
It happened so quickly. One second she was about to step into the back of her car, and the next she was being pushed inside, pressed down onto the floor.
“Nobody moves, nobody blinks or Razeen’s brains are on the back window!”
It was John.
Meg turned her head to see that somehow he’d taken one of those deadly assault weapons away from one of the raincoats. He held it with an easy familiarity, its barrel jammed right beneath Razeen’s chin.
No one moved.
“You okay?” he asked her quietly.
She nodded, unable to speak, trying not to shake. God damn it, she could have done this!
“You still have the car keys?”
She did. She’d slipped them back into her pocket. She managed another nod.
“Good. Get ready to use ’em,” he ordered. “When I tell you to, climb over the seat and get us the hell out of here. Can you do that?”
“Yeah.” Meg found her voice. He must have followed her here. How in God’s name had he managed to follow her here?
“Hands on top of your heads,” he commanded the raincoats in a voice that implied dire consequences should he be disobeyed. “Move slowly, keep ’em where I can see ’em. And step back, away from the car.”
Meg couldn’t see the raincoats. All she could see was John’s ear and the tense muscle jumping in his jaw as he waited to see if the GIK terrorists would follow his orders.
Or try to kill him without injuring Razeen.
Meg wanted to shout at him. To ask him why he’d followed her and put himself back into this danger. She wanted to hold him close and thank him, reverently, for coming to her rescue yet again, for making it so that she didn’t have to kill Razeen right here and now. She wanted to apologize again, to tell John she really was sorry. She shouldn’t have gotten him involved in any of this. She should have executed Razeen in the K-stani embassy men’s room, while she had the chance.
She kept her mouth shut, knowing that the last thing she should do was distract him while he was attempting the impossible—and managing their escape.
“Now!” he said to Meg.
Meg went. Out from under him, up and over the seat. But one glance in the rearview mirror reminded her that they were parked in by the cargo van—there was nowhere to go.
“Go, go, go!” John shouted.
She had the key in the ignition and the car in reverse and she braced herself and floored it—slamming them back into the van with a screech of bending metal, pushing it out of their way.
“Keep your head down!” John shouted, and she ducked just as the windshield shattered with a deafening roar.
Necklace was shooting at them.
Meg jammed the car into first and pulled out of the parking lot, tires squealing.
Still alive.
For now.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twenty
ALYSSA LOCKE WASN’T wearing any underwear.
Last night Sam had broken the front clasp and torn the strap off of her bra and damn near shredded her panties, and this morning she’d silently pulled on her jeans commando-style while he’d tried hard not to watch.
Tried and failed.
She’d taken her broken and torn underwear and tucked it carefully into the pocket of her jacket—no doubt to keep him from having a souvenir or material proof that last night had actually happened.
She’d put her T-shirt back on, too. It was wet, but she had no choice. It was that or nothing. It wa
s extremely hard to put on a shirt with one hand cuffed to someone else.
Sam had found a tank top and cut the left shoulder strap, tying it together after he’d pulled it on.
They’d dressed in silence, combed their hair, took turns putting on their sneakers and tying their laces.
After Alyssa had gotten sick for the second time, after the fiasco in the shower where they’d had unprotected sex, neither of them had had much to say.
Troubleshooters 02 The Defiant Hero Page 36