Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  Janos walked quickly, not looking at her. “Not our problem.”

  “It will be when they dust for prints, and investigate that goddamn passport,” Tam said sourly. “Just what I need. A murder rap, and I didn’t even have a gun. Like I don’t have enough problems.”

  “Faster, please. Do you want to talk to the police about it now, while half the world is trying to kill you, or later?”

  She speeded up to a shambling trot. Rachel wasn’t heavy at all, but those oft-repeated adrenaline zaps were taking their toll on Tam’s motor control. “Later is fine,” she said. “In the next lifetime, maybe.”

  “We’re in agreement then.”

  They hurried along. Tam panted, the muscles in her arms trembling with strain. Legs wobbling. She could not crash yet, goddamnit. “How did you know where I was?” she demanded.

  He let out a sharp sigh and slanted her an irritated glance. “A radio frequency transmitter. In your jewelry case.”

  She stopped in her tracks, mouth open. “How did you—”

  “Later. Move.” He yanked her arm, getting her going again.

  She noticed that they were passing the fogeymobile. “Stop,” she said.

  “We’re not taking this car,” he said. “Hurry. We don’t have time for—”

  “I have to get Rachel’s car seat,” she told him.

  The blank disbelief on Janos’s face bugged the shit out of her.

  “It’s the law,” she said more loudly. “Children have to be properly restrained. You can’t let them rattle around in a vehicle. It’s not safe.”

  That you-have-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-lady expression pushed her raddled nerves right to the snapping point. “Look, asshole, I have left everything behind!” she said, her voice shrill. “My home, my stuff, my friends, my work, my stroller, Rachel’s Tylenol and diaper wipes and allergy medicines! I left our entire fucking identity behind, thanks to you! I am not leaving Rachel’s car seat, so get the fuck out of my way!”

  Janos lifted both hands in the air, eyes wide behind the weird glasses. “Calmati,” he murmured. “Keep it down. And hurry, please.”

  He looked incredibly different with that hair and bushy beard and that stupid-ass knit cap stretched over it. Tam stared at him for a second, shook her head, and stuck Rachel right into his arms. What else could she do? No way was the kid capable of standing on her feet.

  She dug keys from her purse with stiff, shaking fingers, opened the door, and struggled with straps, clamps and tethers until she got the car seat out of her vehicle.

  Then she wrenched open the trunk and grabbed the jewelry case too. What the hell. It didn’t look like she was going to be taking a plane trip anytime soon, and the way things were looking, some of this stuff might well come in handy. And she could always melt it down for gold and gems later on if she got desperate. Which was looking more and more likely, the way she was running through money.

  She had to get her hands on a gun. Preferably more than one. The McCloud Crowd could help her, but she hated to involve them. They were so inquisitive, so damn protective. She didn’t want to put their families in danger. But she would, for Rachel. Oh, yes, she would.

  She’d gotten out of the habit of packing heat, having a curious three-year-old crawling all over her, but what happened in that bus was a brutal reality check. She’d gotten sloppy. She gave herself a mental slap as she jogged alongside Janos, clutching the heavy seat.

  Rachel was as slack as a doll. She looked so small, curled up against his huge chest. He stopped at a black van with tinted windows, and opened it without the benefit of a key. “Is this your car?” she asked.

  He gave her a significant look. “No.”

  She flung open the back door, and hoisted the car seat into place, again struggling with tethers, belts, and straps. “Stolen?”

  Another duh glance from behind his shaggy fake locks. “Borrowed,” he said. “We will take it back now to the mall parking lot where I found it, and the owner will need only to fix the locks and the steering column. Perhaps I will even leave money for repairs.”

  “How civil of you.” She grabbed Rachel from his arms. “Not often one meets a car thief and killer who’s such a good citizen.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “I do my best.”

  “How did you get from the parking lot to the terminal?” she demanded. “You weren’t on my shuttle. You weren’t in the lot.”

  “I had a motorcycle in the back of the van,” he said. “And that is the last question I am answering for now, so shut up. Try not to leave prints on the van, no? Things are complicated enough. Do not put the child in the seat yet. Stay down on the floor until we are on the road.”

  That sounded wise, so she placed Rachel on the floor in front of the backseat and huddled beside her until she felt the van stop. The window hummed down, the exchange was made. The turn, a smooth acceleration, and they were off. She went limp with shivering relief.

  “All clear,” he said.

  Tam hoisted Rachel up into the car seat and strapped her in. She grabbed the clammy, chilly little hands and chafed them. It alarmed her, the way the child’s head lolled. Her heartbeat was frantic, like a little bird. It made her feel horribly helpless.

  “Janos, do you have a plan?” she demanded. “And does it include telling me what the fuck just happened back there?”

  “Yes and yes.” He was using that super-cool, even voice again. “We leave this van in the mall parking lot, retrieve my car, and go straight to a comfortable hotel where we can rest safely, and talk at great length about many things that will interest you. That is the plan.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about the things that will interest me now, and then I decide if I’m interested in going to this hotel with you?”

  “No,” he said. “I am driving now. Not talking.”

  “What bullshit,” she said sharply. “You appear to be a very talented multitasker. And I am curious right now. Not later.”

  “You will be just as curious later. How is the child?”

  Hah. The master of diversion. She stroked Rachel’s clammy cheek. “Ice cold, racing heart, won’t talk to me, won’t make eye contact. Shocky. Why? Don’t try to tell me that you care.”

  He caught her glance in the rearview mirror and gave her a reproving frown. “That is unjust.”

  His aggrieved tone set her right off on a rampage. “Oh, is it? None of this crazy shit would have happened to her at all if you hadn’t fucked with our lives and put us on the run, you meathead moron.”

  “It would have happened,” he said. “Be glad it happened here and not at your home, where I would not have been able to help.”

  “I’m supposed to be grateful? Spare me. Rachel, baby, are you in there? Anybody home? Talk to Mamma. Come on.” She patted Rachel’s cheeks, gulping back tears. Now was not the time, damn it.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a large dark splotch high on Janos’s coat sleeve. She leaned over the seat to take a closer look.

  “Hey. You were shot,” she said in an accusing voice.

  He grunted. “It is nothing.”

  Macho cave man talk. Nothing, her ass. “Nothing meaning what?” she demanded. “Meaning there’s a bullet embedded in your arm, but it’s really nothing?”

  “It is not embedded. It grazed me only. It is nothing,” he reiterated, his voice hard. “Please do not try to tell me that you care.”

  Was he for real? “I most certainly won’t and don’t,” she informed him. “Go ahead, Janos. Bleed. Do you need me to drive?”

  “No,” he growled.

  “Do not, I repeat, not faint behind the wheel with my kid in the car,” she warned. “Or I will rip your head off your neck. Is that clear?”

  He made a frustrated sound. “Be silent. We will talk later.”

  He stopped responding to anything she said after that, maintaining a silence that drove her insane, but it wasn’t long until he pulled into the strip mall lot. He pulled in next to a BMW SUV,
and began transferring her diaper bag, purse, and jewelry case from one vehicle to the other while she pried Rachel out of the car seat.

  As if it was a done deal. Arrogant dick.

  He jerked open her door and held out his arms for Rachel. Tam shrank back, clutching the limp child to her chest. “Actually, this is the part where Rachel and I thank you for your help, and wish you a very nice life,” she said. “Good-bye, Janos. Please don’t keep in touch.”

  The steel in his dark eyes was utterly at odds with his goofy disguise. “You need help,” he said.

  “And you think you’re helping me?” she flared. “By messing with my babysitter? Turning the cops on me, slandering me to Rachel’s adoption agency? Trashing my passports?”

  “I did my best for you and your daughter back in that shuttle,” he said. “Draw your conclusions, but draw them fast. If you want to fight me, you will lose. You are strong, but I am stronger. You have your poison trinkets, I have knives and guns. You have a child who needs rest, perhaps medical care. Think, Steele. If I wanted you dead, you would be dead. Don’t be a fool. Get in the fucking car, and stop giving me trouble.”

  She assessed her options in a split second. She could call the McClouds for backup, but if these men had gotten so close to her, chances were they already knew about her connection with the McClouds, which meant that Rachel wouldn’t be safe with any of them.

  Nor would any family be who was looking after her.

  But she could not deal with this alone and unarmed. With a toddler in her arms, she was toast. If she’d needed any further demonstration of that, she’d gotten it this morning.

  She was just so tired, so rattled. She needed so badly for Janos’s offer of help to be real, she could not trust her own instincts. After all, Georg Luksch had paid him to drag her in, for God’s sake. And the man had a hidden agenda the size of Hong Kong. She could feel it like a subterranean earthquake, rumbling in the depths. And whatever the hell his agenda might be, it could not possibly be good news for her.

  But God, she was tired. Inside and out. Tired of being alone, relying only on her own strength, her own energy. And already well into an adrenaline crash, as if some part of her had decided that the danger was past and she was safe to have her meltdown here and now. Hah.

  She looked around. It was the crack of dawn, it was really cold, they were in a desolate, deserted strip mall where nothing would be open for hours. Rachel was shivering in her arms.

  Janos waited, challenging her with his eyes to look inside him and find a lie. She blinked at the stinging fog of tears and looked, hard.

  She did not see one. Fuck it. He’d saved their lives, even if he’d messed with them first. She let out a jerky breath and handed Rachel to him. “All right,” she whispered.

  Chapter 10

  Val slouched in a chair by the bed, grateful for the warmth and silence of the hotel room. Steele cuddled her child under the blankets.

  He was immensely relieved that he had not been compelled to use force. He did not want to hurt her, and she was so quick and strong, it would have been inevitable if she had resisted. With the child already so traumatized, it would have been unpleasant, to say the least.

  Steele was not doing well. Her lips were bluish, her eyes shadowed, her face an ashy gray. She hugged the child tightly to her body, stroking and murmuring. Rachel’s closed eyes looked sunken in her pinched white face.

  He, on the other hand, was keeping his long coat on, oozing blood splotch and all, to camouflage his erection. An inconvenient physiological reaction to combat stress. He was sure that Steele would not be surprised by it, but also not amused in her present mood. He had no desire to hear what she would say. Imagining it was enough.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Better. She’s calmed down and breathing more deeply now. And she’s almost asleep, so shut up,” was Steele’s caustic reply.

  Val sighed and flung his head back. His face itched from the glue, his scalp from the wig. The cotton batting stuffed inside his nose, lips, and cheeks irritated him beyond belief. He wished he could shower to get the cloying stench of marijuana and patchouli out of his nose, but getting naked under a deafening stream of hot water was unwise. If she slipped away now, he no longer had the RF tag on her jewelry case to follow. The first thing she’d done when she’d gotten to the hotel room was to pry the thing out of the case and flush it down the toilet.

  He got up and headed to the bathroom, leaving its door wide open so he could see the path to the room door. How had the other team found her? He peeled off fake facial hair and soaped his face as he pondered it. As yet, Novak had no reason to think that he would not comply with the terms of their bargain. It had to be Hegel, PSS.

  He pried and spat the cotton out of his mouth into the toilet, flushing it, not about to leave that much DNA where anyone could find it. He rinsed and spat again, thinking. No one but him had the codes and RF frequencies he had tagged Steele’s stroller and vehicle with. Hegel knew where she lived, but how could he have known about her trip to the airport in time to get a local team in place? The Taurus she drove had never been tagged. And she would have noticed if anyone was following her on a lonely highway at night.

  The only explanation was that Hegel had marked him, not her. That the B team had located her by following him. But how? He’d taken care of the usual things before he left Budapest. New laptop, new phone, new organizer. He had changed every piece of luggage, footwear, clothing.

  He’d used every trick he knew to shake followers, checking repeatedly to make sure he was clean. To the point of outright paranoia.

  Val stared into the mirror, trying to form a matrix, but he was too exhausted. He looked haggard, his face carved out and shadowed with stubble. He hadn’t slept since before he went to Budapest. It showed.

  It was hot in the room. Steele had turned up the heat to the maximum to get the baby warm. He popped a sweat under the coat.

  Fuck the erection. It wasn’t as if she’d never seen one before.

  He had to deal with the wound. The bullet had ripped through the fabric of his coat and torn a bloody furrow across the meat of his upper arm. It stung, but he’d taken far worse.

  He shrugged off the coat and the bloody shirt, and hissed through clenched teeth as he washed the shoulder with soap and hot water. The sink was spotted with pink, but the wound barely oozed at this point.

  He went out and retrieved the medical kit from his bag. Steele and the child were both asleep, at least apparently. They needed it.

  He dressed his arm, and sank into the chair again, not bothering to put another shirt on with that heat blasting. He held his gun in his hand, resting on his leg, and watched them sleep.

  Steele moved restlessly. Once, she muttered something in a language he could not place. From the tone, it sounded like a plea. He had no intention of dozing off, but the blackout blinds were down and the excessive heat could make him sleepy. His arm throbbed dully.

  Tiny hands on his knees jolted him awake. The little girl, huge-eyed, was reaching out to grab the barrel of his Glock.

  Cazzo! He jerked the thing up out of her reach. Just what he needed, another brutal shock to his nervous system. “God, no,” he whispered. “Don’t touch it, piccola. Dangerous.”

  Rachel thought it was a game, of course, and leaped to grab it, gurgling with glee. The nap had evidently restored her. She looked fine.

  The laughter woke Steele. She jolted upright and took in the situation in an instant, diving from the bed and grabbing the child around the waist. “Rachel, Jesus! Don’t you ever, ever touch one of those, baby. Not ever, hear me? God, Janos, what the hell were you thinking, leaving that thing lying around?”

  “I did not leave it,” he said grimly. “It was in my hand.”

  “Just keep it the hell out of her reach!” Steele hissed.

  Startled and upset, Rachel began to cry. Tam hugged her tightly, looking resigned. “I guess this means she’s not in shock.”


  A shrill and stressful half hour passed before the child was happy again, distracted by an array of tiny toys, random colorful objects and books that Steele produced from the black bag. Val put on a clean shirt and strapped on his shoulder holster in the meantime. He would keep the gun fastened tight and high on his body from now on.

  The little girl soon decided that he was more interesting than her toys. She toddled over, holding two small dolls. She held one out.

  He took it. And now? Should he animate it? Make admiring comments? He’d never been around children, just Giulietta’s baby, when he was young, and that had ended so horribly. He still had queasy dreams about it now and again.

  Rachel resolved his dilemma by holding up her other doll and pressing it, chest to chest, against the one he held. She adjusted its stiff, hard little plastic arms until it embraced his.

  “Hug,” she explained solemnly.

  A hot sensation swelled in his chest, tight and uncomfortable. He breathed the strange feeling down and adjusted the arms of his doll until it returned the other’s embrace. As best it could, of course, hampered by unyielding plastic and stiff mechanical ball joints. “Hug,” he echoed obediently.

  Rachel rewarded him with a smile that startled him with its beauty. She pressed the dolls face-to-face. “Kiss?” she inquired.

  He laughed at her earnest request. “Let’s not rush things,” he said. “I am shy. And we barely know each other.”

  Rachel frowned and knocked the dolls’ plastic faces together. “Kiss,” she insisted.

  “Rachel, don’t bother Mr. Janos,” Steele said, in a warning tone.

  “She is not a bother,” Val said, realizing with surprise that it was true. He held up the doll to face hers. “Kiss,” he said, resigned.

  Rachel rewarded him with another radiant smile. Her doll kissed his with enough intensity for him to start feeling a little strange about it. And Steele was giving him a distinctly unfriendly look.

  “What?” he demanded. “I did nothing except get my doll kissed. Passively. My doll did not even kiss back.”

  Steele shook her head, looking uneasy. “It’s strange. How she goes for you. Usually she screams bloody murder around strange men.”