He sat up suddenly, catching her in his arms. “You’re not going back to him. I’ll see to it.”
She let herself be hugged tight against his warmth, trying to be comforted. “Thanks for the sentiment,” she said.
“No, really,” he said, more forcefully. “I’ll die first.”
The words made her heart freeze. “Don’t,” she said, thinly. “I really, really don’t want you to die. So please, don’t even say it. Don’t put that thought out there. Please. Don’t.”
“I’ll do my best,” he assured her. “I promise.”
As promises went, it was a damn good one. It rang with heartfelt sincerity. And she had seen his best, with her own eyes. His best kicked ass. It was superb. Superhuman, even. But that did not calm her fears.
Not after having seen Thaddeus Greaves’ worst.
She wasn’t ready to be this brave, to care this much, but she didn’t have a choice. She hid her face against his chest, squeezed her legs aound his waist. Sought out the bright safety of the Citadel, in a deft flicker of mental maneuvering. In a moment, she was in.
The safest place in the universe, for everything but her heart.
Oh, God. This was bad. She didn’t fear death anymore, after the rat hole. She didn’t fear solitude, or hunger, or pain, or even madness. She’d come so close to being free of caring about anything. She’d had nothing on earth left to lose, except for her own body. Everyone she cared about, gone. Nothing left to fear.
And hey, presto, out of nowhere, she had just acquired a whole new set of things to be terrified of losing.
And wasn’t that just fucking perfect.
Greaves paused by the window, struggling for patience. Crushing the man’s mind in a temper would yield him nothing, but he was so angry. He reminded himself of the results of his anger at Geoff. He’d lost control, and look how that had turned out. Disaster.
Easy does it. Don’t kill the goose.
“Tell me about his speech patterns,” he said to Hu. “I’m still astonished you didn’t have the audio in her cell. I can’t imagine what possessed you to turn it off. Start at the beginning.”
He turned to meet Hu’s dim, bloodshot eyes. The man drooped like a wilted flower, head slack on his chest. A judicious zap of coercion jolted the man’s spine, straightening it with a jerk.
Hu whimpered. His battered face was almost unrecognizable. His broken arm hung useless, his hand hugely swollen and empurpled.
“Jason,” Greaves said gently, “sharpen up. Again, from the top. And perhaps I will let you have some painkillers.”
“Yes. Ah . . . the tire blew. In the mountains,” Hu faltered. “I stopped to change it. That must have been when he got into the trunk of my car, but I just don’t understand how I didn’t feel it, or hear him, or something. He was huge. Enormous, six seven at least—”
“Just under six five, according to the video from Kirk’s cell,” Greaves corrected. “Do not exaggerate. It is unhelpful.”
“Ah, no, sir. And he said . . . he said—”
“What was his accent?” Greaves prompted. “East coast, Midwest, Northwest? California? New York? Southern? Foreign?” He’d tried to hear the attacker’s speech in Hu’s stored memories, but Hu’s brain was not wired particularly well to retain aural impressions.
“I didn’t notice any accent at all, so I’m guessing West Coast.”
“Guessing,” Greaves said. “I did not hire you to guess, Jason.”
“Sir, I’m sorry. I—”
“So at the car park, he grabbed you and put the gun to your head. And then?”
Hu stumbled and stuttered once again through his pathetic litany of failure, defeat, and betrayal. Whimpering cravenly while the attacker had slashed all the tires in the garage and gutted the security center. As if he had not had a single opportunity to raise the alarm.
Worthless, gutless, ball-less turd.
But he listened carefully, for the umpteenth time, trolling for that one fragment of information that might yield some new avenue of inquiry. He had reamed the man’s brain telepathically three times, now. The smallest detail that Hu was too stupid to see as salient could be the key to everything.
“He was so strong,” Hu whimpered, tears bubbling in his nose.
It was painful to watch. Greaves walked to the sideboard for a cup of coffee, upping the volume on a newscast that played on the computer monitor, so as not to hear the man’s wet, phlegmy gasps for breath.
A map of Oregon was on the screen. He stared at it, mentally superimposing all the roads and byways the thieves might have taken.
How had they gotten past his telepathic sentinels? He’d posted people on every exit from all the roads they might have taken. His range was enormous, but even he had to narrow them down to within a five-mile radius before he could telepathically sweep with any effectiveness.
“. . . in her psi-max visions.” Hu’s voice, somewhat steadier.
“Excuse me?” He looked at Hu.
Hu was staring at the newscast. “The terrorist attack,” he said. “In Tokyo. Lara must have called them and told them about the bomb. She was always on me and Anabel about that. Begging us to tip them off.”
Greaves shook his head angrily. “Call who?” he snarled. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Hu jerked his chin toward the screen. “The bomb. At the train station in Tokyo. They found it just in time. Lara kept seeing it in her visions. It would have taken out a big chunk of the central Tokyo train station.”
“. . . an anonymous tip,” said the attractive Asian female newscaster. “This tip led to the recovery of a duffel bag of explosives on a commuter train, which was discovered at two this afternoon. There is no information yet as to who is responsible for the bomb, and the investigation is ongoing. An amazing story, with hundreds if not thousands of lives saved—”
Greaves muted the audio and turned back to Hu. “You mean to tell me that you and Anabel knew about a terrorist plot to blow up the Tokyo train station, and you did nothing?”
Hu looked confused. “But, ah . . . well, at first, we didn’t know if she was having true visions, or . . . and with the secrecy we need to maintain for you, we just assumed—”
“Two gifted, highly trained minds put together, and you could not eke out enough creativity between you to come up with a way to discreetly, safely notify the authorities in Tokyo about this bomb?”
Hu’s mouth worked frantically. “Ah . . . ah—”
“Don’t.” Greaves held up his hand. “There’s nothing to say. You don’t care about my mission. You don’t care about the health and well-being of the people in the world around you. You are self-interested, thick and heartless. And you do not belong on my staff.”
Hu sagged, panting in short, ragged breaths, which Greaves, with his heightened senses, could not fail to smell from across the room. The wretched man lifted his eyes. Awareness of his impending death was clearly written there. Greaves did not even need telepathy to read it.
Luckily, as he did not have the stomach for it.
“Sir,” Hu said, his voice weary, but clear. “Please, just tell me. The attacker said he’d changed the info in the database. The suxamethonium. For my wife’s surgery. Please. Do you have any news about her?”
“You mean, is she dead from malignant hyperthermia, as your ogre threatened? No. The ogre was bluffing, Jason. He evidently has a kinder heart and more scruples than you do. Willing to let hundreds die in a pointless explosion, for the love of God.”
Hu sagged in relief. Tears trickled down his face. “Is she . . . did they—”
“Remove the tumor? Certainly. She’s still in intensive care. Doing well, all things considered, from what I was told. Asking for you, poor woman. Oh, good God, Hu, don’t start crying again.”
“Thank you, sir,” Hu said, brokenly.
“Don’t,” Greaves snapped. “Your ogre might have been bluffing, but I do not, Hu. Since this woman is clearly the only thing you care about, th
ere is only one appropriate punishment for you.”
Hu started shaking his head. “No,” he said, wagging it back and forth as if he could not stop. “No, no, no. Please don’t hurt her.”
“Don’t worry, Hu.” Greaves smiled. “You’ll be there to greet her.”
“But I . . .” Hu’s voice broke off, as he fought for breath.
But there was no more breath. Greaves had caught him on the exhale, and would not allow his diaphragm to descend.
But it took many tedious, long minutes to asphyxiate, and such a lengthy period of twitching was unpleasant right before lunch. So he applied a telekinetic clamp onto the man’s heart, too, squeezing vessels shut, stilling the pump. He felt the man’s organs with his psi senses, fighting to continue their functions, and tightened his grip.
Hu’s face contorted with agony. He fell from the chair, lay sprawled on the floor. The twitches slowed, stilled.
Greaves walked over and stared down, sickened. He nudged at the man’s face with the toe of his shoe. Hu’s staring eyes were spotted with broken blood vessels. Greaves could feel no vibration, no trace of mental activity. No hiss of labored breath, no thud of a heartbeat.
He hit the mute button on the computer to stop the female newscaster’s yapping, and hit the intercom on his wrist. “Levine.”
“Yes, sir?” she replied.
“Who do we have on the Tokyo police department?”
“I will look that up for you, sir.”
“Be quick about it.” Stupid bitch. All that enhancement, and she couldn’t even keep their bribe roster straight in her head.
She was efficient in her information retrieval, fortunately for her, considering his state of mind. In less than a minute, she was back.
“Sir? We have a Liutenant Tanada in Tokyo.”
“Get him on the phone. Immediately.”
“Right away, sir.”
He put some distance between himself and Hu, and the unpleasant odors seeping into the room as the dead man’s bowels relaxed. “And send a cleaning crew in here, too.”
“Of course, sir.”
Greaves sipped his coffee, more to mask that unpleasant smell than from a desire for coffee. He mused upon his own behavior. He tried to be stern and uncompromising with himself, as well as his staff, to hold himself to the same high standard, and he had to admit that it had been rather spiteful, tormenting Hu with threats to his wife right before executing him. Perhaps he would let the woman live after all. After having probed her mind, for the sake of security. If she was clean.
But he had been sorely proven. Saving the ungrateful world from its own worst self was thankless work, and he could expect no reward other than the personal awareness of a job well done.
For God’s sake. With the effort he made, and the stress he faced, he was entitled to a little tantrum now and then.
18
“Shut up, asshole.”
John Esposito spat the words over his shoulder as he negotiated the hairpin turn on the mountain road. He rubbed the sore spot on his knee. He wasn’t usually so bad tempered on a job, but Franz, the target’s asshole boyfriend, had put up an unexpectedly good fight, and John was feeling it, being no spring chicken. Franzie boy had gotten in a vicious kick to the knee during their brief tussle. Of course, Franz was no match for John, who was unmoved by pain while in combat. He felt it, but did not give a shit, not while he was working.
Afterward was a different matter. He gave a shit now, after two hours sitting in a car, driving up here from Seattle with that crybaby piece of shit trussed in the back, blubbering through his gag.
It was going to be very tough on Franzie boy if the directions he’d finally coughed up about Keiko’s hidey-hole were incorrect. Stakes were high on this one. Pay was great, if things happened very fast. His client needed conclusion by mid-afternoon. If things didn’t work out, pay dropped to zero. With the added implicit threat of a bullet to the head, of course. Live by the sword, die by the sword, and who gave a fuck.
But today would not be his day. Today was the day for frisky Franzie, with his fucking Tae Kwon Do roundhouse. Sobbing pussy sonofabitch. And here was the place. Conveniently isolated. Not much of a hideout, considering that it was Keiko’s boss’s vacation property, and that he’d blabbed his location to the big-mouthed pussy boyfriend.
John pulled on his mask, negotiated the long driveway, and parked. An attractive lodge-style mountain retreat, huge windows with views of the mountains. He did not see videocameras. He got out of the Jeep, deciding to stick with plan A, using the mask just in case.
He heard not a peep. Just the wind in the trees. Keiko was cowering in the house, peeking out a window. No idea what to do.
John jerked on heavy-duty rubber gloves. He pulled the back open, hauled out the duct-taped Franz, dumped him onto the concrete. He wrenched the tape off the man’s mouth, and pried out the slimy little ball, sticking it back into his pocket for later.
Franz gulped for air. John grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and pressed a gun to the nape of his neck. “Call him,” he commanded.
“Huh? Who?” Franz was purple, disoriented from lack of oxygen.
“Call Keiko, shit-for-brains. Now.” John grabbed the guy’s balls, and squeezed. Hard enough to repay the kick to the knee.
Franz shrieked and complied, calling out his boyfriend’s name.
It took Keiko about twenty seconds to come to the door. John smiled at the sight. No problem here. Asian pretty boy, long shining hair, rolling eyes, girlish hands. Clutching a kitchen knife. Oh, please.
“What have you done to him?” Keiko’s voice was shrill, shaking.
“Nothing yet.” John strode toward him. “Give me time.”
Keiko actually did attempt to use the knife, making a few amateurish slashes, but a smooth parry, grab, torque, and the weapon flew to the ground, bouncing. John sprayed the guy briskly with knock-out juice, held Keiko still until it took, and dragged him inside.
It took some muscle and creativity to set the scene. First Keiko had to be firmly bound into a chair, hand and foot. The chair was placed strategically in front of the big beam, from which hung a wrought iron medieval-style chandelier. Very handy, that.
John hung up the silken noose, and went about the business of persuading Franz to stand up straight on the stool, and put his head into it, which he was understandably reluctant to do. A few feints at cutting off Keiko’s ears got him moving, and eventually, there he was, jaybird naked, clothes sliced off. Gagged and duct-taped.
Just in time for Keiko to wake up and start freaking out.
John didn’t really have to do all that much to Franzie to get results. It was clear that Keiko would tell him anything, but sadly for Franzie, he did not seem to have much to tell. Just that Lara Kirk had called late last night, after being missing for months, and had begged him to call the Tokyo police department and tip them off about a bomb set to blow, which he had subsequently done. The number was on his smartphone. That was all he knew. He repeated himself frantically.
John located the smartphone in question. Indeed, there was the number. And no, Keiko did not know her location. John made very sure of that. To Franzie’s great cost.
It was clear, based on his experience with interrogation, that Keiko was telling the truth. No more info would be forthcoming.
Clean-up time.
John set to it, meticulously careful to see that the appropriate fingerprints and genetic material were deposited on the right items. Keiko’s boss was in for a shock. Handy, that there were no neighbors to hear the screaming, or the gunshot.
He cleaned and put away the kitchen knife Keiko had dropped, moving carefully and deliberately. Every move thought through, like a game of chess. His trademark was “no mistakes.” He scrubbed and exfoliated himself before every job, wore latex, shaved his head and body. Never left even the faintest trace of himself behind.
He seeded Keiko’s car with a few extreme S&M magazines, as he had done in Keiko’s a
partment. He left also a small laptop, bought used and reconfigured, with rough gay porn sites bookmarked on it. To explain the bruises, the ligature marks.
Once the work was done, he called the contact.
“What have you got?” she demanded.
“A cell phone number,” he said.
“That’s all? We needed an address! We have a time crunch here!”
“She didn’t give him an address when she called,” John said. “With your contacts, you can find the location with the number more quickly than I can. I did what I was told to do, and I expect to be paid.”
“Give me the number,” the woman grumbled. “Have the phone couriered to the Portland address. Immediately.”
“Agreed.” John rattled off the phone number.
“What’s the status of Keiko Yamada?” the woman asked.
“Dead,” John said. “He was playing nasty S&M games with his boyfriend. Sexual asphyxiation game gone tragically wrong. He shot himself, out of guilt and remorse. True love, and all. Poignant.”
“Hmmph.” The woman’s snort was heavy with disapproval. “Sounds news-mongering to me. I would have preferred a simple missing-person case.”
“You wanted info, not just a simple hit,” John said, through his teeth. “I fished for it. That’s messy, and the mess has to be accounted for. It doesn’t just disappear.”
The bitch hemmed and hawed, but finally gave him the transfer number before breaking the connection.
That quantity of money transferred into his bank account had a salutory effect on his aching knee. In fact, the pain vanished.
He got a rush of energy from it, so much so, he was sorry he’d already dispatched poor Keiko and Franz. Usually, John preferred to conduct celebratory fun and games with women.
But he could be flexible.
Sun streamed through the blinds when Miles opened his eyes.
He was disoriented. Hardly knew who the hell he was, waking up in a soft, warm bed, in a bright room, no pain in his head, no tension in his body. And a silken soft fragrant angel in his arms.
Wow. It was real. She was real. Holy fuck. It blew his mind.
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