Kick A** Heroines Box Set: The UltimatumFatal AffairAfter the DarkBulletproof SEAL (The Guardian)

by Karen Robards

  He let go. The lid flew up and hit him in the chin. He squealed and fell back. Literally. Landing on his ass in the lake on the floor. Looking dazed and confused.

  The toilet fountain shot toward the ceiling again.

  Her guide clapped both hands to his cheeks Home Alone kid-style.

  Mr. Toilet Lid swore and clapped a hand to his chin.

  Trash Can Man bounded into the bathroom with his water-filled trash can, dumping its contents in the sink, which was too small to hold all that water, which meant that about half of it ended up back on the floor.

  Bianca sighed and took charge.

  “I’m going to need you two in there,” she said to her guide and Mop Guy, who were still outside the bathroom, and pointed inside.

  Putting her toolbox down on the elegant console table that stood, legs awash, in the hall right outside the bathroom, she followed them in.

  “We’re going to try something,” she said when they were all inside the bathroom. In there, the water was deep. It was creeping up toward the top of her boots. “If it’s going to do the trick, we need to work together.”

  “For God’s sake, make it stop.” Her guide was wringing his hands as he stared at the gusher shooting out of the toilet. “It’s going to flood the entire floor.”

  “I’m going to make it stop,” she promised, which had the advantage of being the truth. “You’re going to help.” Which wasn’t the truth, but oh well.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Toilet Lid moaned, “My chin’s bleeding,” from his spot on the floor.

  “You—” Bianca pointed at Trash Can Man “—put the trash can down.” He did. “Come over here.” She pointed to the toilet, where the white column of water was spouting six feet high and throwing off droplets like a wet dog. “When I tell you to, I want you to push the flush button on the toilet. Keep pushing it until I tell you to stop. But don’t start until I say so.”

  As he got into position, she pointed at Mop Guy. “See that vent on the side of the toilet?” She pointed to the small grate in the white porcelain base. “I want you to press the head of the mop against it as hard as you can. When I tell you to.”

  Mop Guy nodded and splashed toward the toilet.

  “You—” Bianca pointed at her guide “—are going to turn on the taps and keep the water pouring out of them at full blast. Don’t let the sink overflow, though.”

  She looked down at Mr. Toilet Lid, whose chin now dripped blood, pulled a paper towel from the dispenser and handed it to him.

  “You’re going to sit there and hold this to your chin,” she told him. Accepting the paper towel gratefully, he complied.

  “Get ready,” she told her troops and splashed toward the door.

  “What’s the purpose of this?” her guide asked. He was standing ready by the sink.

  “We’re going to try to equalize the pressure in the toilet,” Bianca said. She had no idea if there was such a thing as pressure in a toilet, but it sounded good. By then she had reached the door. “Everybody ready? We need to work together on this. One, two, three—go.”

  They jumped to do her bidding. Water poured from the taps. The toilet flushed. The mop hit the vent. Oh, and Mr. Toilet Lid applied direct pressure to his chin.

  She walked out the door and shoved it shut, which was harder to do than one might expect against the force of the water pouring over the threshold.

  “I’m closing the door so the whole floor doesn’t flood while we get this fixed,” she called to her helpers through it, just in case it should occur to them that maybe a plumber wouldn’t be closing the door on them. “Keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll have it under control in no time.”

  Then she pulled a door jammer portable lock from her toolbox and, ignoring the water, thrust the bottom plate under the door, positioned the foot and screwed it in place.

  Voilà. The sixteenth-floor security team was now locked in the bathroom.

  The great thing about the device she’d used was, the torque on it was such that the more force that was applied to the door from the inside, the tighter and more secure the lock became.

  In other words, her helpers weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  “I’m going to go flip some switches,” she yelled through the door. Stripping off her wet gloves—she had surgical gloves on beneath—she dropped them in her toolbox, removed her glasses and tossed them in there, too, picked up the toolbox and walked away.

  Battle won, no casualties, not a shot fired.

  Her kind of operation.

  She glanced at her watch. From street to now, that part of the job had taken less than five minutes.

  Doc was in the van presumably listening in, so he’d know to start gradually dialing back the toilet fountain until it was eventually turned off. (Keeping it going for a few minutes more would serve to keep her helpers diverted until she was out of there, she hoped.) Talking to Doc directly was out. The rule about saying anything that might reveal that a job was going down was in force. For all she knew, she might not be the only one with ears on the sixteenth floor.

  Although Doc’s location in the underground parking garage made reception in the van a little iffy. But then it didn’t really matter if he couldn’t hear what was going on with her. They’d gone over everything he needed to do and established precise timetables. Right now, they were both on the clock.

  In three minutes, seven seconds, the power to the building would go out. That would open the Plexiglas security wall on the southwest corner room and turn the motion detectors off.

  When that happened, she would have two minutes to get in and out of there before the emergency generator kicked in.

  Meanwhile, the next order of business was to lock down the fire exit door to prevent any surprise visits via the stairwell. After that, she would do the same thing to the elevator until she was ready to use it to go down.

  Then it would be time to go get the prototype.

  The fire exit was at the far end of the hallway with the bathrooms. She used a door jammer on it, too.

  Heading toward the elevator, she paused to yell toward the bathroom, “I think I’ve found the right switch. Keep on doing what you’re doing. We should see some improvement soon.”

  The walls were thick. And concrete. She barely heard the shouted reply that sounded like “We’re on it.”

  Sometimes things were just that easy.

  Water had begun to spread significantly throughout the main floor, she saw. But the seepage was shallow, and given that the floor was polished concrete, all it did was make the surface underfoot slick. Fortunately, her work boots had nonskid rubber soles.

  Pulling from her toolbox the metal bar that she was going to use to lock the elevator door open and thus imprison it on the sixteenth floor, she checked her watch again. One minute, fifty-three seconds to go.

  She was right on schedule.

  The elevator pinged when she was still some eight feet away from it. The ping meant somebody was coming up.

  Alarm stopped her in her tracks. Her eyes locked on the rectangular, deep purple floor-to-ceiling column that held the single elevator servicing the floor.

  Too late to stop it. Nowhere to hide.

  Okay, then. She dropped the metal bar she needed to lock the elevator open in her toolbox. With one minute, twenty-nine seconds to go until the power was interrupted, taking out whoever emerged from the elevator was priority number one. She didn’t need a metal bar for that.

  Positioning herself opposite the elevator as if she was waiting for it to arrive so as not to spook her victim, she set her toolbox on the ground and pulled off her shoulder tote to rest on top of it.

  The elevator door slid open.

  Mickey stepped out. Big and tough-looking in his black suit. Handsome. Grim-faced. With a slight limp that favore
d his left foot. The one she had stomped.

  Ha.

  Forget the unholy tangle of emotions that erupted inside her at the sight of him.

  She was on him like a tiger on a gazelle.

  Chop to the neck, with the intent of disabling with a single blow.

  Thunk. Her hand slammed into a rock-hard forearm as he deflected her blow with stunning quickness and a surprised “What the—”

  The impact sent a tingle up her arm. So he was trained, she thought with savage satisfaction when he whirled away with an answering leg sweep that would have brought her down if she hadn’t leaped over it like it was a jump rope and launched an ax kick to his chest. Special forces? Some kind of advanced military martial arts, for sure. She’d expected it. She relished it. She would dance on his head when her ax kick took him down.

  But to her surprise, he caught her foot before it could connect, wrenching it up so that she found herself flipping head over heels in a backward somersault. It was, she thought, the fault of the foam body wrapping. It was throwing off her timing just that vital little bit.

  As she three-sixty’d through the air, her hat fell off.

  In a fight she was like a cat, always landing on her feet. That was what she did now before bouncing off her toes and delivering a double palm heel blow to both his ears.

  Whomp.

  “Shit.” He fell back, but instead of covering his ears with his hands as most recipients of that blow instinctively did and thus leaving himself open for a devastating follow-through, he yelled, “Damn it, kumquat,” while assuming a defensive stance.

  He recognized her. Of course he did.

  Their eyes locked. Sparks crackled in the air between them. Anger, and something more.

  “How was your swim?” Her tone made it a taunt.

  “Cold. Wet. You left me to drown.”

  “I threw you a life preserver.”

  Her already bubbling anger was amplified a thousandfold by the thought that he might have had something to do with the kidnapping of Marin and Margery. That was the spur that separated itself from the emotional pack and threatened to derail the ice-cold concentration that dropped over her like a mantle whenever she fought. Powering through it, she fell on him like a chopping, kicking dervish even as he parried with body blows that might have actually done some damage if she hadn’t been wrapped in layers of padding.

  But she was.

  He yelled, “Stop it! We need to talk,” and grabbed her arm before it could connect as she let loose with a should-have-been-fight-finishing roundhouse to the temple. Yanking her off balance, he twirled her into him, trying to put her on the floor.

  Inwardly she sneered. He didn’t have the goods.

  Driving her elbow into his stomach, she wrenched free with a backward kick to the kneecap that missed breaking his leg only because she was distracted at the last nanosecond by the lights going out and the Plexiglas doors rising and the knowledge that she was now on the two-minute clock.

  “Save your breath for your inflatable doll,” she hissed at him, leaping out of reach as he grabbed for her.

  They circled each other like wary wrestlers. Bianca’s eyes narrowed as she realized that, like herself, he wasn’t even breathing hard. Whoever he was, whatever he did, he kept himself in fighting shape.

  A distant, barely audible thumping reached her ears. Her helpers, pounding on the bathroom door, at a guess. Mickey paid no attention to the sounds. He probably thought they were coming from outside somewhere.

  “I get that you’re mad because I kissed you, then handcuffed you to the rail,” he said. “What you want to keep in mind is, you kissed me, then Tasered me unconscious first.”

  “You think that’s what this is about? Tell me something, what kind of man colludes in the kidnapping of a seven-year-old?”

  “Wha—”

  He didn’t even get the word all the way out before she was on him. Aiming a round kick at his chest that deliberately missed, she used the momentum of the feint and his reaction to latch onto his arm and throw him over her hip.

  The sight of his powerful body cartwheeling through the air brought her more satisfaction than anything had all day.

  He landed with a thud and a curse and skidded on his back across the slippery-when-wet floor.

  His foot caught the back of her knees as he slid past.

  Damn it. To her shock, she went down, landing hard on her ass. Pain shot up her spine.

  He dived at her. She rolled. He got a hand in her jumpsuit. She chopped his wrist. He yelled and let go. She followed up with a knife hand strike to the throat that he managed to partially deflect but that was still powerful enough to put him, coughing, on his back. She leaped to her feet, glanced at her watch, snatched up her toolbox, tote bag and hat, took another second to drop the elevator-locking rod in the door channel and sprinted away toward the southwest corner room.

  She had—another glance at her watch—sixteen seconds left before the Plexiglas wall descended again and the motion detectors powered up and the whole security apparatus kicked back in.

  And getting the prototype out of the safe got a whole lot harder.

  She should have been in and almost out by now.

  What to say? She’d gotten distracted.

  The lights sputtered and came back on.

  The Plexiglas wall was on its way down even as she reached it.

  “Stop!” On his feet now, Mickey pounded after her. The fast slam of his footsteps matched the thumping of her heart. “Stay out of there!”

  Sliding her toolbox and tote bag across the slick concrete ahead of her, she rolled under the edge of the wall seconds before it made jarring contact with the floor.

  The wall was the barrier that turned the twenty-by-twenty-foot space into a containment unit. It was designed to keep whoever was trapped inside it in.

  But it also served to keep whoever was outside it out.

  In other words, her fight with Mickey was officially over. There was no way he was getting to her now.

  The next sound she heard was the motion detectors beeping as they sensed her presence in the secure area. Then came the sound she’d been steeled for—the horrible sucking sound of the air being pulled from the room.

  CHAPTER 21

  “No!” Mickey threw himself against the clear wall like a bug hitting a windshield. As Bianca got to her feet, he slammed a fist into the Plexiglas. He was a big, strong guy; he hit that wall like he meant to knock it down, and not only did it not crack, it didn’t so much as shake. Bianca was impressed—with the wall. “There’s a security device—it’s sucking all the air out of the room right now. In a minute or two you’ll suffocate!”

  He sounded—and looked—panicked.

  Bianca let her mouth go all open and round with horror and made big, terrified eyes at him. Just for the hell of it.

  “Jesus. Stand back.” Looking wildly around, he picked up one of the pedestal-style columns that served as display stands for the objets d’art. The columns were solid concrete, she was pretty sure; this particular one was hot pink and held—had held, it went crashing to the floor—a bust of Pallas. Or somebody.

  The bust went rolling away as he slammed that concrete column into the wall.

  Not a crack. Not a dent. Not a shiver.

  In the meantime, the air continued to get pulled out of the room with a hiss that sounded like a giant deflating balloon. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the building, alarms from the breach of the area protected by the motion sensors would be going off. The entire security team would be assembling for a charge to the sixteenth floor.

  Unfortunately for them, the doors were locked and the elevator wasn’t going anywhere.

  Could anybody say access denied?

  “Goddamn it.” Mickey slammed the
column into the Plexiglas over and over again, huge crashing slams that would have made her jump if she hadn’t been expecting them and would have knocked a hole the size of Texas in most walls, then flung it aside in disgust as he saw that he was making no headway at all. The wall hadn’t suffered so much as a scratch.

  Crouching, he pulled up his trouser leg to reveal an ankle holster—aha, so he was armed!—then stood to aim the Glock 27 he drew from it at a corner of the Plexiglas, taking care to aim away from her.

  “No!” she shouted just before he fired, because firing a bullet into an enclosed space with nothing but concrete walls was dangerous. She winced as the bullet slammed into the Plexiglas—then went ricocheting around the room, whining, kicking up a chunk of concrete from the floor, whistling past Mickey and causing him to duck and cover.

  The wall remained as pristine as ever.

  Bianca’s opinion of the wall, already high, soared higher.

  “That was just stupid,” she told him, picking up her toolbox and tote bag and carrying them over to the orange wall. Mickey jammed the pistol into his waistband.

  “There’s got to be a release switch.” Sounding desperate, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and started to punch in numbers. Bianca would have been seriously alarmed—the last thing she needed was more witnesses for what she was about to do—except for the fact that, after the call to the plumber, Doc had started jamming all phone signals from the building. Really, nobody wanted to get the cops or the fire department or a SWAT team or anything of that nature involved. Or at least she didn’t.

  “No signal.” His fingers tightened around his phone. He stared down at it as if he wanted to crush it in his hand. His eyes shot to her. His face was hard with fear for her. She might have found his performance downright touching except for the whole he’d-possibly-had-something-to-do-with-the-kidnapping-of-her-sister and he’d-definitely-kissed-her-for-the-purpose-of-chaining-her-to-a-rail thing. So, not so much. “You need to try to find an air pocket. Maybe under the—”