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

by Karen Robards

  And given that she suspected a Mickey-esque law enforcement type was going to show up to retrieve the briefcase, a rental car left too many potential leads behind: fake driver’s license and credit card used to rent the car, possible security footage from the rental place, clerks that could be questioned, etc.

  “You gotta be kidding me” was Doc’s reaction when she’d dragged him out of bed before dawn while the fog was still rolling in from the bay to blanket the steep, crooked streets. He’d stood watch while she’d stolen a battered blue Ford Fiesta from a block in the Tenderloin area, which was one of those places that only a resident could love and tourists were advised to avoid if they wanted to go home with their valuables and lives intact. That particular vehicle had gotten the nod because the owner had been careless enough to leave a spare key in one of those little magnetic boxes under the car. A key was important because whoever came to get the briefcase would need it to unlock the trunk.

  Unless they wanted to break in, but that seemed unnecessarily messy.

  If she got the chance, she would return the car before leaving town.

  If not, she was confident that it would be found. It was, at the moment, parked in a very public spot at the Vagabond Inn near San Francisco International Airport, because, when dealing with situations with a high potential for violence, public was good. If the car remained there longer than twenty-four hours, a security guard or patrol officer could be counted on to check it out.

  She was in a rental car parked in the lot of the In-N-Out Burger two businesses down, conveniently situated so that she could keep an eye on the Fiesta. Alone.

  She’d repositioned the car a couple of times so it wouldn’t always be in the same place, but so far she’d been sitting in it watching the Fiesta for six hours. Six long hours, in which she had nothing to do but think.

  Marin’s face as it had looked in the video haunted her. The memory of the fear in the child’s eyes was as corrosive as acid eating away at her concentration. Bianca’s every impulse urged her to rush to the rescue. But there was nothing she could do until she knew where to go.

  Speculating on the conditions in which the little girl and her mother were being held was useless. It made her angry. It made her sick to her stomach. It kept her from focusing on everything she would need to do to find them. On what she might need to do to get them out.

  It was counterproductive.

  Wondering if her father could possibly be alive, processing the apparent truth that his real identity was Mason Thayer, ex–CIA agent, and coming up with various scenarios in which he could possibly have hooked up with her mother was counterproductive, too.

  Any thoughts of Mickey—not that she had any—were just a waste of brainpower.

  She needed to stay alert, to keep her focus on her surroundings. It was possible that the client might be wary about approaching the Fiesta, might be hanging around keeping it under surveillance in an effort to spot her father.

  She might not be able to physically recognize whoever it was, but she could recognize patterns of behavior. That was what she was looking for.

  She couldn’t read. She couldn’t watch YouTube videos or play games on her phone. She couldn’t turn on the car or even roll down her specially requested tinted windows because she didn’t want to attract attention or be seen. She could watch the planes take off and land out of the corner of her eye. And count them. Unfortunately, the effect was like counting sheep, and she didn’t need that. She could listen to her playlist of songs. She could sing (badly) along. She could eat, and she did. She ate a protein bar. She ate an apple. She succumbed to the temptation of the In-N-Out Burger and made use of the drive-through window and ate a burger, with cheese. She drank water. She drank soda. She drank more water.

  And now, at 2:00 p.m. on a busy, sunny Sunday afternoon, she really, really, really had to pee.

  There were restrooms all around her: in the burger place, the motel, the service station on the other side of the burger place.

  She figured she’d be gone five minutes, tops.

  What were the chances that whoever was coming to retrieve the briefcase would show up within those five minutes?

  Probably, she decided glumly, about one hundred percent.

  Two quotes—well, a quote and the hideous maiming of a quote—that summarized her situation kept chasing themselves through her mind.

  A watched pot never boils and bathrooms, bathrooms everywhere, nor any spot to pee.

  She was really starting to regret making Doc get on the motel’s airport shuttle right after he (in the rental car) had followed her (in the stolen car) to the motel. If he was with her, he could watch the Fiesta while she ran inside.

  “You might need me,” he’d protested when she’d told him it was time for him to go.

  She’d assured him she wouldn’t, that she could take it from here. At the time, she’d thought it best to get him safely out of harm’s way.

  So now he was flying back to Savannah and she was stuck doing what seemed like never-ending surveillance in the hot, uncomfortable, bathroom-less front seat of a tiny little rental car.

  James Bond, take me away.

  Last night, she and Doc had holed up in a Quality Inn in Oakland. Even under a fake identity she’d been uncomfortable, because she was confident that Mickey and the Mouseketeers (her new name for the group he worked for) had launched an all-out search for her/her father/their supposed gang. There’d been nothing on the news about the theft or the hole she’d blown in the Thurber/Wilkes Building, but that didn’t mean the police weren’t after her. That just meant that San Franciscans were incredibly jaded, or Sturgeon/Mickey/somebody had come up with an explanation for the explosion that didn’t involve theft. Which made sense, since what she’d stolen from Sturgeon had been stolen property and he wouldn’t want that getting out.

  People went to jail for things like that.

  She’d chosen to grab a few hours’ sleep before notifying the client (aka threatening criminal kidnapper) that she’d recovered the prototype, on the assumption that there was no telling when she might get the chance to sleep again. Once the client picked up the prototype, all bets were off. The thing was, the previous email from them had explicitly stated that delivery instructions would be forthcoming.

  She preferred an arrangement where they picked up.

  Choose your ground: it was another one of the rules.

  If she allowed them to dictate the terms of a delivery, she had no doubt that she would be walking straight into a trap. True, the trap would be aimed at her father, but she was pretty sure that once she showed up with the prototype, they weren’t going to just say thanks and oops, our bad and let her go. She would be detained, possibly killed, depending on who or what was behind this. And then she would be no help to Marin and Margery at all.

  By placing the briefcase in the trunk of the Fiesta and telling them to come and get it, she stayed free. And while whoever showed up might be ticked that they hadn’t succeeded in capturing her father, they would have to take the briefcase somewhere. Hopefully it would be back to wherever Marin and Margery were being held. If not, at least it would give her a place to start looking.

  She no longer had any doubt at all that her father’s so-secure-the-NSA-couldn’t-hack-it email account had been penetrated by someone bent on tracking him down. Who, she wasn’t quite sure. She would have immediately suspected Durand, except Mickey, whom she was ninety percent sure worked for him, had seemed to genuinely not know anything about the kidnapping of Marin and Margery. So, was there another player in the game?

  Considering the number and resources of her father’s enemies, the list of possibilities was long and frightening.

  One thing she was convinced of: the company from which the prototype had been stolen had not hired her father to recover it. They had nothing to do with this, had p
robably never been a client of his and had no idea that anything out of the ordinary was going down. Sturgeon had hired Justin Lee to steal the prototype in good faith, and Lee had done what he’d been paid to do.

  Thieves’ honor being what it was, she would have sent the prototype back to Sturgeon, but she needed it to find Marin and Margery.

  The crux of the matter was, the emails, the threats, the money, the kidnapping, had all originated from an entity bent on hunting her father down.

  A rich, powerful, dangerous enemy.

  That morning, before they’d left the hotel room to go steal a car, she’d had Doc email the client and tell them that the prototype had been acquired. The message had included the place and conditions of the pickup.

  Their reply: Unacceptable.

  Her response: Take it or leave it.

  So here she sat, waiting for them to take it.

  For all she knew, they were coming from halfway around the world, which could account for the delay.

  But she didn’t think so. If she’d managed to track the prototype to San Francisco, and Mickey had managed to track the prototype to San Francisco, she was willing to bet that whoever this was had done the same thing. Probably they’d been hanging around since before she got here just like Mickey, waiting for her father to show up.

  A woman came out of the In-N-Out Burger slurping a soda through a straw. She stopped to say something to the man with her, then took little sips all the way across the parking lot until she walked right past Bianca in the rental car to dump what was left of her soda out in the grass.

  Bianca watched the long spill of liquid from cup to grass and grimaced.

  To hell with it. She couldn’t wait any longer. She was going to roll the dice, take a chance, tempt fate.

  She had to pee.

  * * *

  “We’ve got eyes on somebody we think might be the woman.” The voice in Kemp’s ear was terse. It belonged to one of his team, who’d been monitoring the parking lot of the hotel where they’d been told the object was available for pickup and the area immediately around it. The blue Ford Fiesta that held the recovered prototype had been identified four hours previously. They hadn’t approached it, hadn’t gone anywhere near it, for fear of spooking Thayer or his team. Their surveillance was carried out by drone.

  “Where?” The hours-long wait without anything happening was making Kemp edgy. He was as certain as it was possible to be that Thayer was doing the exact same thing he was doing—keeping the object under surveillance to see who turned up—and would spot one of the team, or especially Kemp himself, no matter how careful they were. If that happened, Thayer might disappear for another twenty-two years. Or he might renew old acquaintances by reverting to the crack sniper he’d once been and pumping a bullet into Kemp’s brain. Or both.

  What Thayer didn’t have that Kemp did was access to the full surveillance arsenal of the US government.

  Thayer could stake out the Fiesta all day and never spot the eyes in the sky that were watching for him.

  The voice in Kemp’s ear said, “Going into the burger place two doors down from the hotel.”

  “What makes you think it’s her?”

  “She’s wearing a hat and sunglasses, but we got a close-up on the jaw, mouth and nose and they seem to match. She’s about the same age, height and build. She got out of a car in a nearby lot that’s parked so that anyone inside it can see the Fiesta. The car’s a rental, with tinted windows. We’re checking with the rental company for information on the renter now.”

  “Get me a feed of her. What about Thayer?” His team of six crack operatives had been given access to Thayer’s picture, age progressed, along with a rendering of what the little girl he’d failed to kill all those years ago might look like today. Of course, there was no guarantee that either image was accurate enough to be helpful. Long ago, when Kemp had known Thayer, he’d been a master of disguise.

  Kemp was five miles away from the Vagabond Inn parking lot, alone in a fourth-floor hotel room behind a locked door.

  The thought of Thayer in disguise still made him nervous. He caught himself glancing warily around.

  Thayer would perceive the taking of his wife and daughter as an act of war and respond accordingly. Unless the man had changed personalities in the intervening years, Kemp expected nothing less than scorched earth.

  The voice in his ear said, “No sign of him.”

  So where the hell was he?

  It was a zero-sum game. Kemp knew Groton well enough to know that if he came up empty on Thayer, or the woman, he could kiss his future goodbye. Not just his job, and the richly deserved retirement he was looking forward to. His life.

  Groton wouldn’t hesitate to kill anybody he had to kill to save his own skin.

  The monitor on the desk in front of him sprang to life. He watched a slim young woman in a black baseball cap, sunglasses, a cobalt-blue silk tee and loose black slacks cross the last few feet of a parking lot, step up on a sidewalk, then push through the door of a restaurant. A curly thatch of dark brown hair tumbled to her shoulders from beneath the baseball cap.

  The hair didn’t match, but he disregarded that. Hair was an easy change.

  The angle of the shot was such that he got a profile only: nose, lips, chin.

  His breathing quickened. It could be her.

  “You send a still shot of her in for verification?” Kemp asked.

  “We did.”

  “Good.”

  In the mountain aerie where these things were handled, a biometric program would at that moment be running a point by point comparison of nodal points between the woman’s face and the age-progressed face they were working with. Anything to do with the eyes or ears, which were covered by her hair, wasn’t going to work. But the width and length of the nose, the shape of the cheekbones, the length of the jawline, the distance between the nose and upper lip and the lower lip and tip of the chin, could be measured by computer.

  The voice in his ear said, “Results are back. They’re on the way to you right now.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kemp’s jaw tightened as he read the message that appeared on the monitor. It said, Absent all required markers, identity match probability estimate is eighty percent.

  That meant it was his call to make.

  If he got it wrong, he was very much afraid he would pay with his life.

  * * *

  Bianca was halfway back to her car when she saw the Fiesta backing out of its parking space.

  Her eyes widened.

  “Oh, no,” she said aloud. “Oh, no, no, no.”

  First, that old saw about the watched pot was evidently true. Six hours of inactivity, three minutes and—she glanced at her watch—twenty-two seconds in the bathroom, and stuff was going down.

  Second, this particular stuff should not be happening.

  Her instructions to the client had been to retrieve the key from beneath the car and get the briefcase from the trunk.

  Not drive the car with the briefcase in it away.

  Alarm quickened her pulse.

  Either the client was doing something unexpected or whoever was driving the car was not the client.

  What were the chances that the damned car was being stolen?

  Poor, Bianca judged as she beeped the door on the rental car to unlock it, opened it and slid behind the wheel. Although she had left the key in the little magnetic box attached to the car frame. She’d known to check there when she’d been looking to steal a car with a key. The types of people who might actually steal a car? They knew that, too.

  The Fiesta shifted into Drive and headed out of the lot.

  Holy hell, what to do?

  Her first instinct—race over there as fast as she could, block the Fiesta from leaving, bang on
the driver’s window and demand to know who they were and what they were doing—was obviously not the best course of action.

  Her choices boiled down to sit tight or follow.

  She went with follow. Just for a little way. Just until she could get a glimpse of the driver. She might be wrong, but she felt that any agent of the client’s who’d come for the briefcase would look very different from a car thief.

  Whipping out of the In-N-Out Burger parking lot, playing dodge-the-T-bone with oncoming vehicles, she saw that the Fiesta was already comfortably ahead on the Old Bayshore Highway heading away from the airport. Between shoppers patronizing the strip malls and fast-food restaurants and people traveling to and from the airport, there was a lot of traffic. Keeping an eye on the Fiesta while weaving in and out of cars whose drivers all seemed intent on changing lanes or turning left or slowing down for no discernible reason was nerve-racking.

  All her training in escape and evasion driving had not prepared her for this.

  “Who are you?” she asked the unknown driver aloud.

  Didn’t help. She still had no clue.

  Being careful not to get too close, Bianca shortened the distance between them, finally settling in when she was tailing the Fiesta from eight cars back. The good news was, she didn’t have to worry about losing it, at least not as long as the briefcase with the locator was in the trunk. But if the person behind the wheel was a car thief, probably just about the first thing he was going to do when he stopped was check the car for valuables. The briefcase in the trunk qualified as a valuable.

  It could end up anywhere.

  Instead of this ridiculous chase up the highway, it would probably be better to simply pull up beside the Fiesta and look in at the driver, Bianca decided. After all, unless the driver was Mickey—what were the chances?—he or she was not going to recognize her.