Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

“Rachel, honey?” she called. “Come on in here. We’ve got to do one last potty stop for you.”

  Rachel peered around the bathroom door, resplendent in her new red velvet dress trimmed with black ruffles. The flamenco three-year-old.

  “No pee,” she said darkly.

  Tam shoved the new Tigger potty seat on to the toilet, tugged down Rachel’s tights and swung the little girl up onto the toilet. “You just concentrate,” she said. “I want to hear that tinkling sound, OK?”

  With Rachel cooperating, Tam took a deep breath, stuck out her tits, and sauntered out.

  Janos glanced up. The receipt dropped to his lap, forgotten.

  She struck a pose, and let him look. She turned, very slowly, showing off. “Do you like it?” she asked throatily.

  Janos cleared his throat. “Sì,” he said. “You are magnificent.”

  He stood up, and she walked toward him, standing close enough so that he could smell all the outrageously expensive perfumed body and face creams she had bought on his dime.

  “Thank you for the dress,” she said softly. “I love it.”

  “The investment was worth it,” he conceded.

  She dropped her lashes demurely. “How sweet. Such a generous thing to say.” She held up the clasps of the heavy beaten gold necklace with the big, padlock-shaped, moonstone-studded pendant. “Clasp this for me?”

  He took them in his fingertips and bent over her head, inhaling her scent. He leaned closer still, until she could feel the brush of his warm breath. He smelled good. His breath smelled good, too. He was so hot, still faintly smelling of patchouli oil, sweat, and man.

  She clenched her teeth. Grabbed the pendant in one hand, slid her fingers down to the third bead of the necklace with the other. She found the textured cluster of moonstones, pressed the pendant against his bare shoulder—and pushed the button.

  Janos arched and shuddered with a strangled groan for the entire duration of the nerve-scrambling electric zap that she gave him. It was a long one, not out of spite, but because she badly needed an extra margin to get Rachel and all their stuff into a cab and away before he was capable of pursuing them.

  He toppled backward onto the bed. It made an enormous rattling crash as his big body hit. Rachel appeared in the corridor seconds later, her tights wound like soft shackles around her wobbly ankles.

  Her face was woefully confused. “Val sick?” she asked anxiously. “Need medicine?”

  So he was Val to Rachel already, was he? She gritted her teeth, stuffing the taser necklace back into her jewelry case. “Just taking a nap, honey.”

  Val groaned and tried to speak. Shit. Her margin of safety was slim. The bastard was a tough one. Tam cursed, and hastened to tug up Rachel’s panties and tights and get her into her brand-new red winter ski jacket, also bought on Janos’s dime. A flurry of gathering shopping bags and scattered toys, babbling incoherent explanations to Rachel, and finally they were out of there. Tam held the wriggling Rachel with one arm and shoved the new stroller, which was heavily laden with bag, purse, potty seat and a cluster of shopping bags, with the other arm.

  It started up when they were finally in the cab. Fat, hot tears, sliding right down through her undereye coverup, the cosmetic she could least afford to do without. Goddamn him for making her feel guilty. She dabbed, sniffed, cursed. Tried again to justify herself.

  She couldn’t give him what he wanted. She could not trust him for a split second. If what he said was true, he had his nuts in a vise, which made him deadly dangerous.

  And if he was lying, he was more dangerous still.

  She could not expose her friends to him and his organization while they were drinking and partying and dancing, their babies toddling around their feet. She couldn’t let him see who she left her child with. He couldn’t expect her to. He would not have done so in her place. No one with a functioning brain would. He’d be stupid to take it personally. And Val Janos was anything but stupid.

  Still, those tears kept sliding down, one after the other, bringing a gooey landslide of foundation and mascara along with them.

  Chapter 11

  The satellite phone in Val’s pocket vibrated. He counted the rings, twenty of them, but lay there, inert. Unable to coordinate his muscles. All he could do was twitch and fume and wait, furious with himself for letting her drop him. And with such humiliating ease, too. All it took was the short skirt, the long legs, the gleaming lips, the erect nipples.

  He struggled until he managed to get his weak, trembling limbs to obey him, and hoisted himself up into a sitting position. He sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over. The phone rang again.

  It took seven rings just to get his slack hand into his pocket and pull the thing out. The display informed him that it was Henry.

  He answered promptly. “Sì? What have you got?”

  Henry didn’t answer for a few moments. “Uh, Val? Is that you?”

  “Who else would answer this phone?” he snarled.

  “Your voice sounds strange.” Henry sounded suspicious. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you drunk?”

  “She tased me,” he grimly admitted, “and ran.”

  “Oh.”

  Henry said nothing, but Val could see his friend in his mind’s eye, trying not to grin. The image did nothing to help his mood.

  “So, ah, you lost her then, I take it?” Henry asked.

  “No. I put an RF transmitter into her diaper bag,” he said. “They are going to a wedding now. I will follow them there. As soon as I can walk.”

  “Want me to monitor it for you?” Henry’s voice was a little too solicitous. “I’ve got nothing happening this evening, and this chick sounds like a real live wire . . . so to speak.” He chortled at his own wit. “Give me the frequencies, and I’ll—”

  “No,” Val said curtly. “Thank you, but I will handle it myself.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Henry said. “So, did you want to know what I’ve got on Zetrinja? Or is this, you know, a bad time?”

  Excitement welled up, energizing him. “Tell me,” he said.

  “August 24, 1992,” Henry said. “Colonel Drago Stengl of the JNA and his secret police squad rounded up the Muslim men and boys in Zetrinja and shot them. Thirty-seven dead. The women and girls were loaded into trucks and taken to the concentration camp at Sremska Mitrovica.”

  It was a familiar enough story. Val had heard countless versions of it. “Did you check the—”

  “Yes, of course. I made the calls to the city hall, I checked the census records,” Henry assured him. “There were five girls between the ages of ten and twenty who were related to the men and boys who died that day. One of them was the daughter of Petar Zadro, the goldsmith. She was fifteen years old. Her name was—get this—Tamar.”

  A shiver went up his spine.

  “Don’t get excited,” Henry warned. “I personally think it’s just a random coincidence. A woman like her is not likely to use her actual given name, after all the aliases she’s used so far. And unless I go there in person and start tracking down school photographs, I can’t verify—”

  “It is her,” Val said. He was dead sure in his balls. He understood perfectly why Steele might risk taking back her own given name. After years of being a blank slate, sometimes a person felt the need to write something on that slate, however simple, and have it stand. And the daughter of a goldsmith might well be drawn to metalworking.

  It was enough to convince him. “What happened to Tamar?”

  “Her mother and sister died at the concentration camp in the end of September,” Henry said. “Your typical heart-tugging Balkans tragedy. No more data on little Tamar after that. She vanishes into thin air.”

  Henry’s cool, cynical tone grated on him. “Who ordered the shooting?” he asked. “Drago Stengl, you said? I have heard the name.”

  “That’s because he hired PSS personnel in the nineties,” Henry said. “We did some of his dirty work for him, like as not. Bastard’s in hiding now.
Charged with a bunch of gruesome war crimes in Croatia. Word is he’s dying from some disgusting disease. Appropriate, huh?”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I know where his daughter is,” Henry offered. “Found the info in the PSS files on Stengl. Ana Santarini. She lives in Italy on the Amalfi Coast. She married Ignazio Santarini, a rich import-export merchant with ties to the Camorra. Don’t you have contacts down there? Weren’t you fucking some Camorra mafioso’s wife for PSS a few years back? Maybe you can just, ah, insert yourself into that slot again, wangle yourself an introduction to Ana? If it comes to that?”

  Val grunted, noncommital. “Maybe. Could you go to Italy—”

  “Already there,” Henry said. “I’m in Salerno. I thought you might want me to follow Ana Santarini around, so I took the liberty.”

  He was speechless. “Thank you,” he said. “Please carry on.”

  “Hey, no problem,” Henry said. “I have nothing better to do right now, and Italian girls are hot. I got here this morning. Followed Ms. Ana all day. She’s got a nice ass. She went to a private clinic for a couple of hours this afternoon. My guess is Stengl’s languishing there. But in any case, you better move your ass before Ms. Live Wire gives you the slip for good. Are you mobile yet?”

  “I think so. Later.” Val pocketed the phone, glanced in the mirror. He looked like shit, but he had no time for a shower or shave. He dragged on the black tee, buckled on the holster, shrugged on his gray Armani jacket. He had thought about ordering a suit from the department store, but he didn’t know how formal the event was. He could not draw attention to himself by being overdressed. In America, it was better to err on the side of overcasual. At least the jeans were black. He was lucky he had not pissed himself when she zapped him.

  He packed everything into his SUV, pulled up the frequencies of the beacon he had slipped into Steele’s bag, and located them heading south on I-5.

  It wasn’t difficult to overtake her cab. She had only a twenty-minute head start on him, and he drove fast. An hour on the road found him outside Tacoma, driving through an evergreen forest on a road that led to a resort hotel. Signs identified it as the Huxley Resort and Spa. The icon that indicated her position had stopped there minutes before he arrived. He pulled over at the entrance and waited until he saw a yellow cab pull out before he proceeded into the parking lot. The timing of his entrance was critical. She had to be seated in the hall, exit choked with the wedding party, the ceremony already well begun before she caught sight of him. No chance to protest his intrusion without disrupting the wedding and agitating the child.

  He caught sight of Rachel first, dressed as she was in hot red and black; tights, dress, shoes, coat, the crimson hair ribbon in her dark curls. She glowed like a holly berry against the dull grays and browns of the wintry forest, perched on Steele’s hip as they walked toward the hotel. Rachel was fussing, arching back, mouth open. He could imagine the rich alto tones of Steele’s voice as she wheedled and cajoled.

  He kept her in sight, falling casually in with other groups of guests making for the hotel, but he did not let himself stare at her or even think about her. Creatures who were accustomed to being hunted could sense a predator. He kept her in his peripheral vision and emitted a blank white noise screen in his head as he watched the matrix turn.

  The gray man. A classic technique for a covert operative, silently projecting, I am not here. You did not see me. I do not matter. He was good at it. In fact, it could be overdone. That silent chant could become actually noticeable to those who were trained in such things, like Steele. She would hear him if he chanted too loudly. Even in his mind.

  Steele and the child disappeared inside. Val the gray man blended into the crush of people near the entrance and loitered. A glance inside located Steele in the back in a chair far to the side, the child on her lap. Not surprising. He’d overheard enough sessions with the child psychologist to understand Rachel’s fear of strangers, particularly men. Steele was creating a safety zone, to limit pre-wedding socializing and have a possible escape route in case of tantrums.

  He caught sight of the blond man who had acted as Steele’s bodyguard at Shibumi near the front of the hall. Davy McCloud looked mildly harrassed, and held a chubby, squirming infant with wild red ringlets in a carrying pouch. Val glanced around for the other bodyguard, Nick Ward, but did not see him, until a clot of tuxedoed men in the front of the hall resolved themselves into a semicircle, facing the center aisle.

  One of them was Nick. His central position, and the nervous, strangled way that he was tugging at his bow tie indicated that he was the groom. Which meant that his attention was fixed at the back of the hall where his bride would appear.

  Gray man, gray man. Val slunk deeper into the shadows behind the door and cursed being so tall, not for the first time. He spotted a chair, snagged it, and sat, putting himself effectively beneath Nick’s line of sight. There she was at last. The bride. A rustling murmur arose from the crowd. Heads swiveled. He caught a glimpse of her as she passed through the vestibule. Pretty, a cloud of curly dark hair that reached her shoulders, big green eyes all misty with love and bridal nerves. A lace-covered sheath showed off a memorable figure. She was followed by two very pretty dark-haired girls in rust-colored silk, one of them her younger sister, from the looks of her. The other girl was younger still, only fourteen or so, slender and ethereal.

  The string quartet began to play, and everyone stood. Val sighed with relief as the collective point of focus shifted to follow all that dewy feminine beauty on up the aisle and away from him.

  Then a buzzing hum in the back of his mind indicated that someone was staring at him. He had to look around twice before he identified the observer.

  It was Rachel. Her arms were clamped around Steele’s neck, her face buried against the crumpled iridescent sheen of her mother’s scarf. Only her eyes were visible under the mop of dark curls and the floppy crimson bow. Huge, dark owl eyes, staring into his.

  She raised her face. Her eyes looked solemn and wise.

  He waved at her. Her face dove into the scarf, but in seconds, she peeped up again. This time he ventured a smile. The cycle repeated, but this time when she emerged from the scarf, her eyes were sparkling. The child was smiling at him. Dimpling. Flirting. Her head tilted.

  The strangeness of it made him want to laugh. The minister droned on. The sound slid over his ears without penetrating.

  Now, he decided. He grabbed his chair, strode over to Steele. He sat down beside her and grinned widely, right into her face. “Ciao.”

  The child dove into the scarf again with a squeak. Steele gasped.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she hissed in Italian.

  He kept the smile nailed firmly on. “Keeping you company,” he murmured back in the same language. “Resign yourself. I am your date. You invited me.”

  “Oh, no. No way are you my date, you—”

  “Shhh!” A woman shushed them, frowning. Several others were looking over curiously.

  Val leaned closer. “You could scream and yell and throw me out if you want to ruin your friend’s wedding,” he said softly. “And I’m sure your daughter would help to make the event memorable, too. You could even try to kill me with one of your hair ornaments. That would make a big impression, no? Or you could smile and accept reality. Those are your options. After what you did to me in the hotel room, I will not hesitate to embarrass you.”

  “Vaffanculo,” she hissed. “Stronzo.”

  “I’m a good dancer,” he offered.

  “Maiale,” she hissed. “You are not welcome here. Va te ne, before I really do kill you.”

  Rachel began to whimper. “Mamma?”

  Tam shot him one last poisonous look and murmured something soothing to the child. Rachel was emboldened, and soon began to flirt again while her mother stared up at the wedding, mouth clamped. Furious, but neutralized—for now.

  Ah, well. He winked at the child. He’d charmed the l
ittle one, at least. And the evening was young.

  He would take it as progress.

  Manipulative swine. He’d assessed the situation perfectly. If she got agitated, Rachel would freak. If they made a scene, Becca would never forgive her. Becca had doubts about Tam, even though Tam’s efforts on behalf of the children kidnapped by the organ pirates had forced her to grudgingly admit that maybe Tam might have some small redeeming qualities—the operative word being “small.” Becca was still pissed at the way Tam had kicked her man around during the organ pirate debacle. It wouldn’t do to underestimate Becca. After how she’d acquitted herself in that whole Zhoglo nightmare, she’d proved she was not to be fucked with, and Tam respected that.

  But it was so silly of her to take it personally. That big galoot Nick had deserved every kick in the teeth that Tam had given him, and he was tough enough to take it. Nick himself had no hard feelings.

  It didn’t matter. Becca was still convinced that Tam was a rude, raving, dangerous hellion. Which, of course, she was. No arguments there. But Nick insisted that they grit their teeth and feign friendliness.

  So fuck it. Whatever.

  The upshot of it all was if Tam wrecked Becca’s wedding, no matter how justified she might feel, being jerked around by this gigolo pimp asshole with his big, terrifying agenda, that fragile truce would be dissolved, and the bride would proceed to take Tam apart. Physically. Unpleasant for everyone. Not good for Rachel. To be avoided if at all possible.

  Tam cuddled Rachel, glancing down at the little girl’s face to see how she was handling . . . holy crap! The kid was smiling at him! Giggling at that smirking pig dog! And he was smiling back, using that knock-you-dead sidelong grin, white teeth flashing, eyes crinkled. God, what a lethal smile. She wanted to backhand it right off his face.

  Bastard. How dare he use Rachel to back her into a corner.

  She didn’t hear a word of the ceremony. Sveti looked great in her bridesmaid dress, alongside Becca’s sister Carrie, but Tam couldn’t help notice the sad looks she kept casting at Josh, Becca’s brother. Josh was twenty-two years old to Sveti’s fourteen. Guaranteed heartbreak. Sveti was already very pretty if a bit too serious, and prone to moping. But Nick and Tam both would beat up Joshie in a heartbeat if he even looked at Sveti cross-eyed, at least for the next four or five years or so. She was far too young, and she’d been through too much horrendous shit already, but still, there it was.