Femme Fatale

by Doranna Durgin

  The fact that the catamaran was currently crawling with people in full party mode would have normally been daunting. However, with the goof Kylee had planned, the number of people was going to be helpful.

  Before she could stop herself, she wondered if Mr. Mystery would be impressed by her stunt. Of course, there was a better chance of him being impressed if he wasn’t going to be one of the main victims of the goof.

  The party aboard Guilty Pleasures had been going on since eight o’clock. It was currently midnight, the witching hour. During those four hours, small boats had constantly carried caterers, food and drink to the catamaran. A five-piece band on the second deck pumped out bluesy jazz music that spread out over the Old City and the Lesser Quarter. The music wasn’t something Kylee would have expected from her potential quarry.

  Kylee adjusted the binoculars, zooming out with the touch of a button, and picked up Scherba. Besides being powered, the Zeiss lenses were also packed with light amplification circuitry. Some of the things that she liked best about the spy biz were the toys. They were almost as good as those she got to play with in the movies she worked on. And Stony Man Farm always provided some of the best toys.

  Pallid and grungy-looking, Krystof Scherba didn’t look like an internationally known and feared computer cracker. His razored black hair lay in disarray. Facial piercings along his eyebrows, nose and mouth glinted in the lights ringing the catamaran. A red dragon tattoo covered nearly all of the left side of his face. The fantastical creature’s head nestled over Scherba’s left eyebrow and its tail reached down to coil around his neck.

  Shifting her view back to Mr. Mystery, Kylee wondered what connected the two men. Mr. Mystery had a certain rough charm about him, but he knew how to wear a suit. But why wear a suit?

  Almost immediately, the answer dropped into her head: Mr. Mystery was creating distance. The suit was like armor, a posted warning to the rest of the party goers aboard Guilty Pleasures that he stood apart from them.

  You didn’t have to do the suit, Mr. Mystery. You would have stood out from that crowd anyway. Or are you normally a suit-and-tie kind of guy?

  Scanning the crowd aboard the catamaran again, Kylee decided that the man didn’t fit in at all with the young bohemians that filled all three of the vessel’s decks.

  You’re the hired help, Mr. Mystery. Security, definitely. But how good are you?

  The thought floated another smile to Kylee’s lips. The adrenaline inside her burned a little sweeter. She was a throwback, her mom had told her on more than one occasion and with more than a little mortification and ire, to the Highland rogues and rascals in her mother’s family tree. Sometimes Kylee acted chastened, but she secretly loved the thought that she was so much like her mother’s people.

  Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

  He presented a challenge because he kept watch over the boat. Taking the notebook computer Barbara Price said was aboard wasn’t quite the same as ferreting Scherba away from under the mystery guy’s nose. That would have been a goof worth pulling off.

  Another time.

  “He’s not going to be a problem.” Kylee shifted and put the microbinoculars away. From the way she had been standing in the middle of the bridge next to the statue of Saint John the Baptist, one of thirty statues of saints along the structure, no one could have seen the binoculars. “When this goes down, his first order of business is going to be to protect his boss.”

  “If the principal happens to go belowdecks where the computer is—”

  “He won’t. The show’s going to be out here.” Kylee checked the three men that were keeping her under surveillance.

  All of them were young and gaunt, festooned with body piercings and tattoos, and wore thick coats that had seen better days. The three men turned and looked away, afraid of meeting her gaze.

  Oh man. That is so not good. Kylee felt exasperated. Three guys, and you still don’t feel like you can take one woman.

  Part of it, she was certain, was that the three men had wanted to take her in Charles Alley before she reached the bridge. She hadn’t allowed that and had stayed ahead of them.

  The three men were hunters. Kylee was sure of that. During her travels on Stony Man missions, as well as working on films as a stunt person around the world, she had seen plenty of men like these three that had singled her out in the bar. She had sought them out for that reason. And like natural predators, they wanted the security of the dark and the advantage of their home ground.

  “I’ve got to go,” Kylee said. “I’ve got to make this thing happen. I’ll be back in touch with you as soon as I’m on board.”

  “Affirmative,” Barbara said. “Be careful. If you’re caught—”

  “I won’t be—I’m never caught.” Kylee palmed the earpiece and shoved it into the waterproof pack she had strapped to her left thigh under the long coat.

  The three men stopped talking and watched her.

  Weaving a little, as if she’d had too much to drink and the effects were just starting to hit her, Kylee walked toward the three men. She hoped they didn’t turn and run.

  “Hey,” she said. “Do any of you guys speak English?”

  They all just looked at her.

  Rocking on her feet, putting on a look of exasperated disgust, Kylee said, “English. English. I’m lost. I need directions. Man, you guys watch American TV over here on your satellite dishes. Surely you can speak the language.” Her words were designed to provoke, to push the men into doing now what they were waiting to do later.

  One of the men, a lank individual with long hair, took a hit off his evil-smelling cigarette. He shrugged, then nodded. “Yeah. I maybe speak English. A little English.”

  “Good.” Kylee walked toward them.

  Automatically the three men flared out, forming a triangle around her like wolves getting set to take down a lamb that had wandered from the protection of the flock.

  “Where you want to go?” the man asked. The cigarette coal glowed orange against the creased, pockmarked face.

  “Kampa Island,” Kylee said, slurring her words just a little. “I’m supposed to meet a friend at the John Lennon mural.” She intended to see the murals on the island before she left with the film crew.

  “Ah.” The man grinned. “Finding Kampa Island, that is very easy, yes.” He pointed. “Other side of bridge in Mala Strana. You know Mala Strana?”

  Pointing toward the west side of the bridge, Kylee said, “I know Mala Strana. It means Lesser City.” She pointed to the east end of the bridge. “Stare Mesto. That’s the Old City.”

  The man smiled, but the effort looked like the hungry attention on a wolf gone gaunt with winter. “Yes.”

  Kylee hiccuped and covered her mouth. “I just got turned around looking out at the river, that’s all. Thanks for the help.” She started to walk away, knowing she needed to get closer if the men didn’t take advantage of the moment.

  “Wait,” the man called.

  Kylee looked at him, her body gearing up, getting more ready for the goof.

  “Finding Kampa Island,” the man explained, performing the wolf’s smile again. “Very easy, yes. But finding mural…” He spread his hands. “That maybe not so easy.”

  “Do you know where the mural is?” Kylee asked.

  “I draw you map, yes.”

  “All right,” Kylee agreed.

  “Come here.” The man took a small pad of paper from his shirt pocket. “I draw. I explain.”

  Knowing she was stepping into a trap, actually relishing the amount of danger she was in, and knowing that Barbara Price wouldn’t exactly be happy with the fact that she did or knowing that she enjoyed it, Kylee stood at the man’s side.

  He took out a pencil and started to draw, talking about directions to occupy her attention.

  From the corner of her eye, Kylee saw the man on her left slip a short-bladed combat knife from his coat pocket. The way that the man on the right moved told her that he had also pulled a weapon.<
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  Spreading her feet slightly, Kylee felt the adrenaline pushing through her. Every movement she made felt oiled, loose and exact. Her brain, working with muscles that had trained for split-second timing for years, choreographed her next moves.

  Just as the man on the left started to move forward to place the knife at her back, Kylee blocked the movement with a sweeping left forearm, planted her left foot, twisted her torso, then brought her left arm back around in a whipping motion that slammed her left elbow forward into the man’s face.

  The guy’s nose broke with an audible snap. He staggered back, blood streaming down his face. By the time he landed on his butt, Kylee had stepped back and thrown her right arm out, catching the second man under his left arm. Whirling again, she hip-tossed the man and brought him down with smashing force against the stone bridge. A kick to the temple stretched the man out prone.

  These days, with all the kick-butt action movies and television action shows featuring women, a stuntwoman wasn’t worth her salt unless she was familiar with martial arts. Kylee’s four brothers had been very involved in sports and had joined her father’s stunt team out in Los Angeles. She’d grown up physical and had gotten into stunt work, despite her mother’s wishes and her father’s chagrin.

  The third man tried to break and run. The pad he’d been drawing on fluttered over the side of the bridge.

  Kylee grabbed the front of the man’s coat and yelled loudly. “Help! Muggers! Somebody call the police! Help!”

  The man tried to get away from her, pushing at her hands. Fiercely she held on. He cursed. Kylee didn’t have much more than rudimentary knowledge of the local language, but she knew most of the words the guy used. None of them were complimentary. She shifted and twisted her wrists, easily breaking his frantic attempts to get away.

  “Help!” Kylee screamed again. She stood an athletic five feet nine inches tall and carried more weight than her build would suggest, all of it in toned muscle. From all the fight scenes she’d taken part in, she knew how to hold her own.

  But the man she was detaining was driven by sheer terror at the moment. Possibly he was afraid of being picked up by the Czech police for outstanding warrants, but more than likely he feared the madwoman that had grabbed hold of him.

  “Help!” Kylee screamed again. She stayed close to the mugger, knowing that the passersby who turned to look would believe the man was assaulting her.

  A tugboat passing in the river below shined a spotlight on the bridge. The ellipse of white light sliced through the night and tracked along the bridge.

  The man cursed again and threw a hard right fist at Kylee’s face.

  Twisting, Kylee slipped the blow like she’d learned to do when she was eleven and her older brothers had practiced their stunt skills on her. She’d always been a quick study when it came to muscle memory.

  When the man drew his fist back to try again, Kylee ducked forward and head-butted him in the nose. He shuddered and would have gone down but Kylee propped him up against the bridge’s low wall.

  The conscious mugger with the broken nose got to his feet. He hesitated as if torn between fleeing and helping his comrade. The tugboat’s spotlight flared over the man, causing him to instinctively throw up his hands, then he turned and ran like a vampire avoiding daybreak.

  A man’s voice, strong with insistent authority, blared from a PA system aboard the tugboat.

  “Let me go, you stupid bitch!” the man demanded, trying English. He pushed at Kylee’s hands but she kept slipping his grip. He didn’t try to hit her again.

  When the tugboat’s spotlight fell over her, joined by at least three others almost instantly, Kylee knew she had to close the show and sell the goof. Timing was everything in stunt work.

  “Get away from that woman!” someone cried in a British accent. A quartet of tourists, two men and two women, all of them young and obviously scared and half-drunk, halted a safe distance away.

  Kylee feinted another head-butt, causing the would-be mugger to lift his hands in immediate defense. Then she kneed him in the crotch, a quick burst of movement that remained hidden in the shadows left by the explosion of light from the beams pouring over the wall. The man sagged toward her, his legs completely going out from under him now. Instinctively he put his hands on her, trying to get her to stop, trying to find some kind of support.

  In the bright light, though, Kylee knew the situation looked like the man was pushing her. She screamed again, then fell back over the low bridge, whirling her arms and kicking her legs to make the dismount more dramatic.

  Thankfully, the maneuver caught the spotlight operators by surprise and they weren’t able to track the beams after her as she expertly turned the fall into a headlong dive. She thrust her hands in front of her, fingers outstretched, and reached for the dark river twenty feet below her. The tugboat was less than a dozen feet away. Her peripheral vision revealed at least three crewmen scrambling across the forward deck.

  Then she dove deeply into the dark, cold water. Here I come, Mr. Mystery. Ready or not. I’ve got my game on.

  Chapter 2

  Helpless frustration filled Mick Stone as he stood in Guilty Pleasures’ bow and watched the rescue effort taking shape under the Charles Bridge. Everything in him cried out to go to the unfortunate woman’s aid. But that was primitive instinct, and he recognized the impulse for what it was. Tough and seasoned as he might think he was, he wasn’t any more proof against the deathly icy chill of the Vltava River than the woman who had plunged over the bridge’s side.

  And, as a sailor, he was aware that the men working the river knew the current and the location better than he did. He would have been in the way even if he’d gotten to one of the outboards tied up astern of the catamaran, and that knowledge rankled him. Mick Stone wasn’t a man accustomed to feeling useless.

  “Is there a problem, Stone?” Krystof Scherba’s voice was calm and controlled, the quiet stillness of water sluicing between two rocks tightly jammed together.

  Making certain his features were neutral, Mick turned to face his present employer. Damn, I hate this job. I should have never taken it on. The thought wasn’t a new one. Mick had experienced similar lines of thinking since he’d entered his present employ. But he hadn’t been able to take one more empty day on the quiet Pacific Ocean. He’d craved excitement and the chance to measure his skills and his ingenuity against others.

  And in the end, when the job offer had come to watch over Krystof Scherba, he’d taken the assignment on for those reasons rather than for the money. He had three older sisters in Australia, all of them married to good men, but since their parents had passed away a few years ago, he had always envisioned himself as the family patriarch, always striving to put money away in case they ever needed it. None of them had, but he still felt responsible.

  Krystof Scherba stared almost blankly. The dragon tattoo near his left eye glowered malevolently. He sipped his drink. “You’re supposed to be a professional, Stone,” the computer cracker accused. “Yet you find your attention divided between me and the woman who fell into the river.”

  A small Prague police car eased down the length of the Charles Bridge. The whirling light ripped away the night’s shadows over the statues of the saints along the bridge as the vehicle passed.

  “No,” Mick replied. “I’ve had my eye on you the whole time we’ve been up here. Even during this bit of confusion.”

  “Still, as highly recommended as you have come as a bodyguard, I would not have expected you to be so hypnotized by the sight of a woman plunging from a bridge. From what I understood of your background, death was a constant companion.”

  “Aye, sir,” Mick said. He caught his response too late to stop it. Aye. As though he was a sailor instead of a professional bodyguard.

  But that had come from months between jobs when he’d taken his houseboat to the open Indian Ocean and made his way up to Singapore and Macao for extended visits. Those places had netted small security or recove
ry jobs, violent and nasty bits of business, and he had needed them. Not for the money so much, because he had enough of that tucked away for a while, but because he had craved the action.

  The action was the only thing that staved the periods of melancholy and loneliness that caught up with him. He’d needed the sea, needed to feel the harsh pull of her beneath him and to be kissed by the wind and warmed by the sun to remember that he preferred being alone in his life. Time in the boat allowed him to get away from the seemingly endless procession of prospective dates his three older sisters threw at him.

  At first the job Mick had taken with Krystof Scherba had seemed like the answer to a lot of prayers. Scherba had a lot of enemies, and most of them did not wear badges. Authorities in several countries—and Scherba had given Mick a list of those countries—still had warrants out for his arrest regarding some infraction of cybernetic espionage.

  Even more than that, though, were the wheelers and dealers of the shadow world, born of greed and savagery, that wanted information Scherba had or could get for them with his skills. Terrorists and criminals alike wanted Krystof Scherba. If the man had possessed any common sense at all, he would have gone into hiding in that fortress of a castle he had outside Prague. Instead, Scherba seemed determined to flaunt himself at his potential enemies.

  In the five weeks he had been on the job, Mick had foiled three attempts to kidnap or kill Scherba. The attempt just before Mick had taken over had resulted in the death of his chief of security. Despite that, Scherba still didn’t see fit to heed Mick’s advice and warnings, or even consider giving him an agenda.

  Within the past few days, something had happened in South Africa, perhaps in Cape Town if one overheard fevered whisper was to be believed. Mick still didn’t know what that event was, but he knew it was big and people had been killed.

  Scherba’s eyes were cold as ice. “The people I got your name from said you were resourceful, dedicated and brutally rash. Even to the point of jeopardizing your job.”