Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  He tried to smile, but the effort was hollow. “Promise me you won’t kill me,” he said.

  She did not smile back. “I make no promises.”

  He stared down at the remainder of their meal. “I don’t have any name other than Val Janos to give you,” he said. “The name I was born with means nothing to anyone, so you might as well stick with Janos. It’s one of several identities that I use. In my work.”

  She swallowed and braced herself. “Fine, then,” she said tightly. “We’ll stick with Janos. What work? Who sent you, Janos?”

  His Adam’s apple moved, as if he were trying to speak, but couldn’t bring himself to get the words out. Her neck prickled, her skin crept. Suspicion hardened into cold, blunt certainty. She knew.

  The two people who had most cause to actively search for her were Daddy Novak and Georg Luksch. Novak wanted her dead. Georg wanted her, period. This man was not here to assassinate her, of that much she was sure. Which meant . . .

  “Georg,” she whispered.

  His face did not change, his eyes did not drop. And he did not contradict her. The stony coldness spread.

  “I am an operative for PSS,” he said. “Prime Security Solutions. It is a—”

  “A private army for hire. Yes, I am familiar with PSS,” she said, tonelessly. “So Georg hired you? How did you find me?”

  It took him a long time to reply. “The McClouds,” he finally said. “I planted cameras outside their homes weeks ago. One day you showed up at Connor McCloud’s house. I got there in time to put a GPS locator on your SUV. It was a stroke of luck.”

  She put her hand over her eyes. “I can’t believe this.” She wanted to shoot herself for being so sloppy. Putting everyone in danger, especially Rachel. She’d just wanted so badly for Rachel to have a semi-normal life. She might have known that it wouldn’t be possible. Not with Tam Steele and her reality-warping force field anywhere nearby. Forget normality. Forget anything clean or healthy. Just give up the effort.

  “It took a while,” he offered, almost as if he were trying to console her for fucking up. “If it weren’t for the McClouds—”

  “Shut up. Just shut up,” she said through clenched teeth, and another unpleasant thought jolted her. “Hey. What about Erin?” she demanded. “You involved Erin. Stay away from my friends, understand? If you mess with my friends, I will cut you into bloody little pieces.”

  “I will not bother Erin, or any of your other friends,” he soothed.

  A worse thought occurred to her, with a wrench of stomach-turning fear. “Rachel,” she whispered. “Oh, no. I’ll kill you. I’ll gut you, put out your eyes, break every bone if you’ve done anything to my—”

  “No, no,” he said hastily. “I have not touched her. And I will not. Though those were my original orders. To use her as a bargaining chip.”

  “Oh yes? We’re not bargaining, Janos. Whatever Georg wants from me, the answer is fuck you very much, but no. I don’t want to see you ever again, you scumbag pimp. Get lost.”

  She slapped the door open and confronted a stupefied Davy and Nick. “Escort this lying piece of walking shit off the premises,” she ordered them, her voice shaking. “If you ever see him again, kill him.”

  She stormed out of the room, eyes full of furious tears. She despised herself for wanting him. When all he intended was to pass her over to Georg, that slobbering pervert.

  After sampling the goods himself first, of course. Why ever not?

  If there was one thing she hated more than anything else in the world, it was feeling stupid.

  Chapter 8

  He’d failed. The world as he knew it had ended.

  Val stood in the middle of the room, staring at the hole in which she had just stood. She’d left abruptly, distorting space, sucking the air out with her. Leaving a vacuum that made his lungs burn. The one time in his life as a professional liar in which he gave a shit, and the woman had seen right through him, effortlessly. Smoke and mirrors. A gutted hole. A lifetime of training good for nothing. Now what?

  McCloud came in, looking baffled. “Hey, Janos,” he said gruffly. “Look alive. You heard the lady. Move it.”

  He just looked at the man stupidly. His throat ached. His brain stalled out.

  McCloud made an impatient gesture. “Your business here is finished. Go on back to where you came from. And don’t come back.”

  Val roused himself, retrieved his briefcase. In the anteroom, Nick Ward silently handed him his coat and knife. He shrugged the garment on, sheathed the knife, moving stiffly, like a robot.

  Ward cleared his throat. “Hey, uh, don’t take it too hard.”

  Val looked at him, utterly blank. “I beg your pardon?”

  “A woman like Tam . . .” Ward waved his hand helplessly. “That’s, like, her way of showing that she likes you.”

  Val felt a crazy urge to laugh. “Likes me? Me, the lying piece of walking shit that you have been ordered to shoot on sight?”

  “Oh, don’t take that personally,” Ward encouraged. “At least you made an impression. And let me tell you, that chick is hard to impress.”

  “True,” McCloud interjected dourly. “You’re still alive, so you must have something going for you. Now move it. This isn’t a fucking therapy session.”

  The men flanked him, escorted him down the elevator and walked him out of the club in stolid silence. They left him a few hundred meters from the building and strode briskly away without looking back.

  With an extreme act of will, Val gathered his wits and looked around. There was a bar across the street, a seedy place with few people inside. He would take refuge in a glass of scotch. He might as well continue to act like Val Janos until further notice. He had no better persona to assume. Certainly none he could call his own.

  He ordered, and sipped morosely at the shot of Glenfiddich, hunched over the scarred wooden table in the backmost booth. The flavor reminded him of those gleaming, tilted eyes, taking him in, sizing him up over the rim of the cut crystal tumbler.

  Piercing him through.

  He could not hide from those bright eyes. Empty, paper nonentity that he was after all those years of killing and whoring for PSS.

  He rubbed his face. The woman had power, he acknowledged silently. To make him creep into a bar with his shoulders hunched, to suck liquor and feel sorry for himself. But he did not have that leisure.

  In forty-eight hours, Novak would start to cut. Val could not acknowledge defeat. Not yet.

  He got his laptop out of the briefcase, unfolded the collapsible liquid crystal monitor into a twelve-inch screen, unfolded the tiny skeleton keyboard, and booted up. He took another swallow of scotch, let it burn its way down his gullet, and opened the file of Novak’s photographs that he had scanned into his computer that morning.

  They shone, turning in the matrix. It never bored him to meditate upon them. There was always something new to discover in a photograph of Steele, even while squirming under Novak’s boot heel.

  He clicked through them until he found his favorite, the most mysterious and enigmatic of them all. The black dress, the sad face. The bouquet of wild daisies and lavender laid on the bronze plaque. He put it in the matrix and took three steps back, letting it turn and shine.

  A shiver went up his back as an idea took form. He began to magnify the photograph, enlarging the plaque until it filled the screen.

  Other bouquets were piled below the plaque, obscuring what was engraved on it. He barely made out the word Zetrinja, a date, 1992, and some quote in a language he did not know. Then a list of names.

  It was a very long list. The names were indecipherable, at least with this program, at this pixelation.

  The memorial plaque and the names suggested a mass grave. There were crowds of people. Men in suits, television cameras.

  A memorial service, honoring the dead from some wartime atrocity. His mind raced. 1992. The Serbo-Croatian conflict. Not his area of expertise, but Henry had spent time in the Balkans and
spoke the language well. PSS had many operatives deployed there. And Henry was the only person he had spoken to about this mission.

  He pulled out his phone and called him. His fellow operative was currently at the main PSS headquarters outside Paris. The phone rang six times before his friend answered, his voice thick with sleep.

  “Fuck this, Val. It’s five in the morning,” Henry complained.

  “I need a favor,” Val said without apology.

  “Don’t you always,” Henry grumbled.

  “Ever hear of a place called Zetrinja?”

  Henry thought about it. “Rings a bell. Croatia, I think.”

  “Go into the archives. Find what you can about what happened there in 1992. See if you can get me a list of the girls and young women from the age of, say, ten to twenty who might have been involved in it.”

  Henry whistled. “You think Steele is Croatian?” he said finally.

  “Could be,” Val said. “Or this could be completely irrelevant.”

  Henry was silent for a long moment. “What’s going on?” he asked quietly. “Something off?”

  Val hesitated. He’d been trying to decide whether or not to involve Henry in this snakepit ever since he had left Budapest. But if he needed to mount a rescue mission, he was not going to be able to do it alone. He needed backup, and Henry was the only one he trusted.

  He took the plunge. “Something’s off,” he said.

  He detailed Imre’s hostage situation to Henry in a few terse phrases. His friend was grimly silent afterward.

  “That rots, buddy,” he said. “You are truly fucked.”

  “Ah. Thank you for the encouragement. I am heartened.”

  “What next?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Val said. “I’m improvising. I may come up with something extremely dangerous and crazy. Can I count upon you?”

  “Don’t insult me, asshole. I live for dangerous and crazy. Want me to come to—”

  “No. Stay in Europe. I’ll let you know what I need. And check on Zetrinja for me as soon as you can. I need a hook into this woman.”

  They closed the call, and he pulled up the phone numbers.

  Time to start bothering her. In a couple of hours, Steele would know exactly who was putting it to her. With luck, she’d get angry enough to try to track him down and kill him. That old schoolyard attitude: negative attention was better than no attention at all.

  He would do anything to make her notice him. Anything at all.

  He should have told the boy.

  Regret for not having done so ate at him worse than the physical pain. Imre tried to breathe, to relax into it, but he could not. His lungs had contracted, clenching like fists that would not relent.

  He rocked back and forth on the small, hard cot, gasping for air.

  The room was small, stinking. Squalid and desolate. A dim cube of concrete blocks with no natural light. Day and night were artificial constructs, defined by a brutally bright, jittery fluorescent light on a timer that was switched on for twelve hours, and off, to utter blank darkness for the other twelve. The room was filled with dismal, hopeless graffiti from its previous inhabitants, most of which appeared to have been written in human blood, or other substances even less appealing.

  Imre tried not to look at it. Not wearing his spectacles helped.

  The pain was grinding, unrelenting. He’d had his share of aches and pains even before the doctor’s revelation, and there were the two beatings, but the worst now were his bones, degenerating inside him.

  He desperately missed the morphine tablets the doctors had given him. He missed even more the other techniques he used for pain control. Bach was his favorite. The suites for violoncello, or the partitas for violin. Music could make the mind take flight from a failing body. Also poetry, philosophy. Even just the pigeons cooing outside his apartment window, the clouds turned pink by sunset. A cup of tea and a game of chess with his old neighbor down the hall. Humble pleasures. They seemed so precious now.

  He tried to call to memory his favorite psalms for comfort. He had tried to pray. He had even called on Ilona for help, and her sweet memory was always a blessing. But he was no saint, no superman.

  He was terrified out of his wits.

  It had been hard enough, to face up to his own impending death even before the abduction. Pancreatic cancer, they had told him. Advanced stage. They had offered him the usual treatments, but he read the look in the eyes of the doctors, he listened to what they said about infiltration, lymph nodes, metastases to liver and bone. He understood the futility of fighting it. Three months if he did nothing. That was almost a month ago now. And he had not told Vajda.

  It wasn’t that he was afraid of death. He was almost eighty. Thirty years of his adult life he had lived without his darling Ilona and little Tina. He was ready—he had faith—he was almost certain that he would find Ilona and Tina on the other side of the veil, but death was still a great unknown. It was hard to let go. But it tormented him that his poor Vajda was being ground up in this monster’s infernal machine for Imre’s sake when Imre was practically a dead man already.

  Not that the cancer would matter to Vajda. Seeing his foster father tortured would hurt the boy terribly. Vajda was so brittle, so vulnerable and alone. He had established no other ties, from what Imre could see, tenderhearted though he was beneath his defenses. Imre had always sensed the depth of the boy’s love for him. His need, too. Though his proud Vajda would surely rather die than admit it.

  Vajda was the son he had never had. And what a son. Such intelligence, such potential, abandoned in a sewer. Pearls before swine.

  He had failed his foster son. He had not succeeded in freeing him from this pigsty. Imre had wanted so badly to see Vajda bloom and grow, to see him take his rightful place in the world. He was wasted as a mercenary soldier, just as he had been wasted as a mafiya thug’s minion. That cruel, stupid waste angered him. Ate at him, for years.

  Now, at last, he understood why Vajda had always insisted that he had no choice but to continue working for Novak. How ignorant, how arrogant Imre had been to scold the boy, call him foolish, defeatist. He realized now that Vajda’s caution was just a calculated bid for survival. He’d simply been displaying the pragmatic realism that had kept him alive against all odds. He owed the boy an apology.

  More than an apology. He owed Vajda everything. But this was a price that the boy could not afford to pay. This would cost him his soul.

  He should have told the boy. He’d been so afraid that Vajda would dig in his heels, insist on staying near if he knew Imre was ill. Budapest was a dangerous place for him, full of bitterness and painful memories. He’d thought it best that the boy stay away from his past. But the past had overtaken them with a speed no one could have foreseen.

  Only Imre’s death would liberate Vajda. But how? The room was empty but for the cot, the blanket, the metal toilet sticking out of the wall. They gave him food twice a day on a plastic plate, a plastic tray, with a single flimsy plastic spoon to eat it with. There was no metal in the room to file to sharpness, no glass to break.

  He shrank from the idea of taking his own life, but surely it would not be a sin if it was done for love, out of desperation. At the very least, it was less of a sin than the one that Vajda risked for his sake.

  If he could only find a way.

  Tam still shook with rage when the camo’d doors ground open out of the mountainside to let her into the underground garage. She’d hoped the drive would calm her down, but she was nowhere near calm. She was utterly freaked out. So angry she wanted to vomit.

  Perhaps the lure of overtime pay and some abject begging would persuade Rosalia to stay for another couple of hours so Tam could throw herself onto the computer and start thrashing out a plan.

  That hope vanished when she heard Rachel’s wails. They had that nails-driving-straight-into-the-brain quality that always meant a very bad night. Shit. Why now? Tonight, of all nights. She was meat.

&n
bsp; Tam had barely put down her purse before Rosalia thrust the shrieking toddler into Tam’s arms and lunged for the closet to retrieve her coat and purse.

  “Hey, Rosalia, hold on,” she protested, pitching her voice to slice through Rachel’s howls. “I was going to ask you if you could stay a little bit longer tonight, just until I have a chance to—”

  “No! I have to go right now! My boys just got arrested over in Olympia! I just got the phone call, a half an hour ago, and I was going to call you, but the baby was crying and I didn’t have a chance. I have to go to my boys right now!”

  Tam was startled out of her own problems, finally noticing the ashen cast of Rosalia’s face, the stress sweat on her forehead, her rolling, reddened eyes. “But—but how . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  A terrible suspicion dawned. Oh, that evil, evil son of a bitch. Suspicion grew instantly into certainty. He would suffer for this.

  “I don’t know! They were working in that restaurant, and the cops come in and say they are dealing drugs out of the kitchen!” Rosalia’s voice vibrated with outrage. “Drugs! It’s a dirty lie! My boys don’t deal drugs! They’re good boys! Roberto was going to get married next month, and Francisco, he was enrolled in night school at the community college! He’s going to be a pharmacist! They are good boys, both of them! I have to go, right now! I am sorry.”

  Tam’s heart sank. “From this, I gather you won’t be able to come in for a while,” she said.

  Rosalia threw up her hands. “I don’t know! How can I know when I can come again? I tell you, I am sorry! This problem, I have to fix it! I don’t know how long it will—”

  “Yes, I know,” Tam said, through clenched teeth. “I understand perfectly. Hold on, Rosalia. Don’t run out just yet. Let me get something for you.” Tam tried to put Rachel down, but the kid stuck to her like she was smeared with superglue, so Tam wiggled into the pantry closet with Rachel still clutching her neck. She shoved cereals and cans carelessly out of the way and pried a board out of the wall to reveal a hidden safe. She tapped in the codes until it swung open and grabbed a few packets of emergency cash. Enough to help the hardworking Rosalia out with whatever came up, but not so much that it would frighten her.