Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  But even after investing a fortune in his training, even though he was one of their best operatives, PSS never let him forget what he owed them. He was a tool, like a grenade, bomb, gun—but ultimately, he was just mafiya scum to them, to be kept under careful control.

  Vajda was still on the street, just with a more powerful pimp.

  Hegel belched and wiped his face on the checkered napkin. “What the fuck are you doing in Budapest?”

  “Why even ask?” Val said. “You already know everything.”

  Hegel grunted. “I thought you were more professional than this. Although your performance on that last operation gave me doubts.”

  Val imitated Imre’s air of impenetrable calm.

  “Tight-assed bastard,” Hegel muttered. He grabbed a shot glass, sloshed a generous amount of palinka into it, and shoved it across the table at Val. “Relax, for fuck’s sake. You’re giving me gas.”

  Val made no move to taste the liquor. Hegel grabbed the glass and downed the shot himself in one noisy gulp. “If I meant to kill you, I wouldn’t do it in a restaurant,” he announced. “And poison’s not my style. Woman’s weapon. I don’t do chick tricks.”

  “You have no style. You do whatever is expedient. It’s the first thing you ever taught me,” Val said. He reached for the shot glass, sniffed it, and set it down, untasted.

  Hegel glugged more palinka into his glass. “You want to know a secret, Janos?”

  “I’m not sure,” Val said. “Do I?”

  “You were supposed to die that day, eleven years back, in Sierra Leone. Did you know that?”

  “Really.” His response was emotionless. He was feeding data into the matrix, observing from within a core of utter silence. Waiting until he knew where Hegel was going with it. It was no surprise, in any case.

  “We were monitoring the arms suppliers to all of the African conflicts. It was concluded that you were dangerous, young as you were. Better to kill the poisonous snake right out of the egg, right?”

  “I see,” Val said.

  Hegel shook a cigarette out. “Then I saw you fight in Moidu. You were a fucking maniac, even without any formal training. Natural talent, languages, and brains. All the makings of a brilliant operative. I decided to take a huge risk. For you.”

  “I’m touched,” Val said coolly.

  Hegel lit his cigarette and took a drag. “That day could have gone one of two ways. Either I held your nose shut, or I offered you a job.”

  He gazed at Val, breathing out a long stream of smoke.

  Val stared back, expressionless. What did the man expect ? Gratitude for not killing him? He’d spat blood for PSS for years.

  Hegel’s lips pursed around his cigarette. “I’m starting to regret that decision.”

  “I am devastated,” Val murmured.

  “Don’t mouth off to me. What happened in Moidu was damn lucky.” He grunted. “For you, anyway.”

  Val was not sure that his life over the past eleven years was that much more desirable than a bloody but mercifully quick death.

  Hegel made an impatient sound. “Get your ass back to work, Janos. You made me look like shit, going incommunicado for three days. Luksch is riding my ass. He wants that woman now.”

  “Sorry,” Val said, unrepentant.

  “This is your last chance to redeem yourself for that Fuentes disaster,” Hegel went on. “Do not fuck this up.”

  “That op went by the book,” Val argued wearily. “Every member of the Fuentes cartel was dead at the end of the day. What’s to criticize?”

  “Emilia Fuentes,” Hegel snarled. “Don’t play dumb with me.”

  Val saw the girl in his mind’s eye. Puppy fat, school uniform, eyes huge behind thick glasses. In shock. Spattered with her parents’ blood.

  “She was eleven,” he said tightly.

  “Yes, and she was the daughter of Francisco Fuentes, and she saw everything. You knew she had to die. You fucking knew it.”

  “I don’t . . . do . . . children.” The words dropped out of him, heavy and clanking and cold. And so fucking futile.

  “You can’t afford a code of conduct,” Hegel hissed. “We own your ass, Janos. We tell you what to do with it. Who to kill, who to kiss, who to fuck. And I don’t appreciate being forced to clean up your shit.”

  “Is that what you call that car accident?” Val retorted. “The one that killed her grandmother and her two cousins and her pregnant aunt, too? That is what you call ‘cleaning up my shit?’ You hack.”

  Hegel’s eyes narrowed to puffy slits. “That was damage control. And you can chalk the grandmother, the aunt, and the other kids up to your own incompetence, since you didn’t have the stomach to do your job. God knows who she talked to in that forty-eight hours—”

  “She couldn’t talk,” Val said, his voice hard. “She was catatonic.”

  “Shut up. Your sulking has been remarked upon, Janos. Your usefulness has been put seriously into question. Understand ?”

  Val poured some palinka into the glass and took a reckless swallow. “I’m bored with the threats. What puzzles me is why you haven’t killed me yet. Do it, if you can. Since retirement doesn’t appear to be an option, death is starting to look very restful.”

  Their eyes locked. Seconds ticked by. Val saw death in the other man’s eyes. He smiled at it with all his teeth. Unintimidated.

  “You owe us,” Hegel grated. “You owe us your fucking life.”

  Val shrugged. “I’ve paid and paid. Enough.”

  Hegel rose to his feet. “All right, then. Time for the big guns, old friend. You might be hard to kill, but your shriveled old grandpa is not.”

  Something froze inside him. Hegel sensed it and smiled. Fuck.

  Hegel peeled bills out of his pocket, and tucked them under his plate, grinning. “Never knew you had a sentimental side. Dangerous to your health. Like principles. Ditch them if you want to survive.”

  “Fuck off.” Val’s voice was strangled.

  Hegel chuckled, genial now that he had won. “Aw, don’t take it so hard. Consider this. If you’d followed instructions and stayed away from Budapest, you wouldn’t be in this position right now. There’s a flight for London that leaves in three hours, with a tight connection back to Seattle. Be on it. I want that uppity bitch fucking Georg’s perverted little brains out within forty-eight hours. If you have to stick pins under the baby’s fingernails to make her do it, that’s your problem.”

  Val stared after Hegel’s broad, blocky back as he stumped out of the restaurant. He was unable to move for several minutes.

  Finally, he lurched to his feet and left the place. He turned his face up to the sky. Snow brushed his face, caught in his hair. The car was gone, of course. There were no taxis to be seen anywhere. Snow was piling up. Cars were crawling, skidding in the slush.

  He tried to think it through on the long, cold walk back to Józsefváros. He and Imre were leaving the country tonight, if he had to club the old man over the head and carry him over his shoulder.

  And when they were safe, he just might discreetly contact Tamara Steele and warn her about whoever Hegel might send next. Why not?

  It was strange. He had never even physically met the woman, but he had begun to feel almost responsible for her. And her child.

  Then his neck began to crawl, as he approached his rented car. His stomach sank. He looked around himself, wishing he’d called a cab.

  A mistake. His last mistake. A culmination of an infinite series of mistakes, false moves, errors in judgment that stretched back over generations. To his stupid mother, who should have stayed with the boring pig farmer from the country she’d married after she got pregnant with Val. Who should have been grateful to live a life of hardworking respectability in Romania rather than coming to the big city with nothing but her beauty and her young son, to meet men, drugs, ruin. And her son’s ruin.

  That and other irrelevant details flashed through his mind as the flickering shadows converged upon him in the des
erted street. He pulled his knife. He should have brought a gun. Another mistake, he thought.

  Time to stop thinking. He spun to meet them, staying in constant twirling motion as they came at him. Four men. Five. More.

  Lunge, spin, duck, kick. The heel of his boot crunched through the bridge of someone’s nose. Blood spattered the dirty snow. A high parry blocked a blade that slashed through the thick wool of his sleeve. He lunged low, a stabbing blow, blade punching through cloth, piercing flesh, grating on bone. He saw blue eyes widen, stringy blond hair swirl and flap as the man spiraled back, shrieking. Val lost his center of balance as he followed through on the blow, lunging too far forward to jerk back and evade the blackjack that whipped down—

  An explosion, all white, all black, and pain blotted out everything.

  Chapter 4

  Val had been drawing reluctantly nearer to consciousness for a pain-blurred eternity. The bucket of ice water clinched the job.

  He gasped, choked. The realization was a hammer blow. He tried a slit-eyed peek, gasped at the searing pain in his head.

  There was no need to see. He knew the nightmare smell of the place. Bleach, disinfectant, humidity, mold. Beneath all that, a deathlier smell. Old blood, shit, worse. Novak’s secret torture chamber. Designated for executions, interrogations. No need for luxury here, just privacy, soundproof walls, and a drain in the floor for easy cleanup.

  His past had caught up with him altogether. Its fanged jaws clamped down, crunching his bones.

  He braced himself against the pain and nausea, and forced himself to look up at the blazing fluorescent lights. Eight men stared down at him. Seven held guns. All were pointed at him.

  It had been eleven years since he had seen Daddy Novak. He’d been hideous then. He was a death’s head now: bulging eyes, jaundiced skin, long teeth. An old, pitted skull dipped in yellow wax.

  Novak dug an ungentle toe in Val’s kidney. He flinched. Someone had already found the place and given it a thorough pounding.

  “Wake up, fool,” Novak said. “We have business to conduct.”

  Val ran a quick damage assessment as he rose carefully to his feet. A couple of teeth loose. Ribs cracked but probably not broken. A knot on his temple, sticky with blood. Hot red pain pulsing in his head with every heartbeat. Bruises, a shallow slash across his forearm, clotted and black, oozing fresh blood through the white sleeve.

  Not so bad. He’d taken much worse on other occasions. They hadn’t meant to hurt him, just subdue him.

  He looked around. He recognized András from the old days. That hulking, beady-eyed sadist had been Novak’s main man for years. Three more he remembered from the old guard, the rest were fresh blood. The blue-eyed blond man he had stabbed was not there. Dead, perhaps, or close to it. Several were marked. By him, he surmised, glancing around at the crushed noses, the split lips, the cold, murderous eyes.

  New enemies. God. As if he needed more of them.

  His eyes flicked back to Novak. He coughed to clear his throat and tasted blood. “This drama was not necessary,” he said. “You could have e-mailed or called.”

  Novak smiled. “You would have ignored me, as you have done for eleven years. Now that you have risen so high in the world, you have forgotten your old friends, no? And besides, important business is best conducted in person.”

  Dread settled deep inside him, heavy and greasy and cold. “We have no business,” he said. “I work for another organization.”

  Novak steepled his skeletal fingers, smiling thinly. “Yes, of course. PSS bought you from me for a tidy sum, but I always suspected that I accepted too low a price for you. But this is special. I have a business proposition that you might find interesting.”

  “I’m out of this business,” he repeated.

  “Yes, yes. We know the success story. Vajda, prostitute, drug dealer, and gunrunner, who repented his wicked ways and now conducts a glamorous double life—covert operative by night, pampered entrepreneur and gigolo playboy by day. I follow your cover career on the Internet, you see. Very inspiring. Makes the boys weep with envy, particularly all the women you fuck. Bad for discipline, Vajda.”

  “I do not want to—”

  “What you want does not interest me.” Novak’s voice cut through his. “You’ve forgotten your manners. Must I re-educate you?”

  Val shut his eyes against the light, the pain, and Novak’s probing gaze. The man’s hot, foul breath was inches from Val’s face, like gas escaping from a decomposing corpse.

  Val hardened his belly to iron to control his gorge. He’d endured worse. In fact, he would endure worse tonight. Far worse, before this was all over. No way out. He tried to wrap his mind around it.

  He swallowed. “What do you want?”

  Novak seized Val’s shoulder, spun him around, and shoved him, stumbling, against a long, dented metal table. A file lay open upon it, a sheaf of photographs fanned out across it. “Her,” he said.

  Val stared at the photos. They were of Tamara Steele. The one on top showed her in a bikini, on the arm of a hairy middle-aged man on the deck of a yacht. She was laughing, holding a champagne flute. Blond hair swirled out in the wind like a pale flag.

  The next was a closeup. She wore a silvery evening gown. Her hair was red, coiled close against her head. She was looking over her shapely shoulder, listening to a man whisper in her ear. He recognized the blond, tight-lipped, pale-eyed young man. Novak’s son, Kurt. Her crimson lips curved in a secret smile. Jeweled earrings dangled low. Her huge eyes looked past the man, almost directly into the camera.

  In another, she was getting into a black Jaguar, beaded with rain. The place looked like Paris. Dark hair, long against her white raincoat.

  The next was unlike the others. It was black and white, shot by a long-range camera. She was oddly unglamorous, wearing a simple black dress, rendered elegant only by the intrinsic grace of her body. Her hair was drawn back in a severe roll. Her face was free of makeup. Pale, stark, and sad. People milled around her, but she did not notice them.

  She was leaning over to drop a bouquet of small wild daisies and lavender in front of a bronze plaque on a big marble slab. He turned it over. The photo was date stamped. Five years ago.

  He reached out, rifled through the rest. No pictures of her with Rachel. All of them must be from the Kurt era, four years ago or longer.

  Perhaps Novak didn’t know about the child yet. He refused to let himself hope for that much grace. “Who is she?” he asked.

  Novak backhanded him with his fist on the temple. The hard blow knocked Val against the table. Bloody spittle flew from his mouth, and spattered the silver evening dress photo. His head spun, his vision blurred. The old man was much stronger than he looked.

  “Don’t even try,” the boss hissed. “I know that you are the one investigating her. That you know where she is.”

  He pushed the pain aside, forced himself to concentrate. Three steps back. “Why do you care?” he asked.

  “She was Kurt’s last mistress. The whore who delivered my only son up to his death.”

  “Ah.” He kept his voice neutral. “So you want her dead then?”

  “Nothing so quick. I want her chained to a table. I want to teach her what happens to a lying bitch who betrays my son.”

  He let out a long breath. “And what do I have to do with this?”

  Novak smiled. “You will bring her to me, Vajda. I know that you are looking for her, for PSS and Georg Luksch. But you will not bring her to Georg. You will bring her to me. Simple.”

  The prospect of pain was getting more and more imminent. Val’s knees felt watery at the prospect. Chilly detachment only went so far when it came to torture. He closed his eyes. “I cannot—”

  “Oh, but you can.” Novak’s voice oozed insinuation. “With your looks, your charm, your pretty body. Your respectable identity as a rich Roman business consultant. Your reputation as a gigolo and bon vivant. Any contract killer could blow her head off from a distance, but that
does not satisfy me. I want her seduced. I want you to gain her trust. I want her to fall in love with you. I want her betrayed, turned inside out, as she did to Kurt. One pretty, lying whore to catch another.”

  Val kept his face carefully blank. “Gain the trust of an assassin ?” He paused. “A difficult proposition.”

  “I did not say it would be easy. That’s why I am seeking out such rare bait for my trap, no?” Novak snagged the file with a thick, yellowed fingernail, and dragged it toward himself. “Everything we know about her is in these files. Her origins are obscure. She burst on the scene in 1997 on the arm of Sheikh Nadir.” Novak stabbed the yacht photo with his nail. “Said to be skilled with drugs and poisons, excellent with weapons, trained in hand-to-hand combat. Famous for bank, computer and credit card fraud. Skilled sexually, when she is not plotting her lover’s death, of course. She uses a dozen aliases that we know of, and certainly more that we do not. And now we have this.” He flipped open a jewelry case that lay on the table. “She designs jewelry.”

  Val stared at the torque. It glowed against the black velvet.

  “Interesting,” he murmured.

  Novak pushed a red stone on the finial, and the piece slid out, revealing a small dagger. “This was poisoned. It was found on the neck of one of Vassily’s women in Paris.”

  “Does she know who the—”

  “No, she does not. The woman is dead,” Novak snarled.

  Val sighed. Dealing with madmen was exhausting. It was difficult to pry useful intelligence out of a corpse, but explain that to a man like Novak. The lack of simple logic made his brain ache.

  “That is unfortunate,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Novak held up the business card. “It is a reproduction of an ancient Celtic relic that my son gave to a woman in the Seattle area, an antiquities expert. Erin Riggs and her husband were also involved in Kurt’s death. They will pay for their share, too, when they least expect it. But first, I deal with this treacherous slut.”

  Val peered at the card in the old man’s shaking yellow claw.

  Deadly Beauty. He recognized the name. He had moved some of those pieces before. They were very popular with many of his clients. Clever wearable weaponry with exquisite design and workmanship. They commanded handsome prices, and the mysterious anonymity of the artisan was part of their allure. He had not known that his target was the creator of Deadly Beauty. Interesting.