Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  She shoved it away instinctively. “Toughen up, Val.”

  “Leave the subject alone,” he growled. “It is irrelevant now. We have burned that bridge, and thank God for it.”

  “Not at all,” Tam said crisply. “As far as he knows, you burst in and abducted me. I could contact him, feed his vanity—”

  “No!”

  She sighed. “Damn it, Val. Do you want to save Imre, or not?”

  “Don’t put it in those terms. It is an intolerable thought. Just let me protect you. Please. For once.”

  She was startled, and moved. “I don’t need protecting,” she told him.

  “Of course you do not,” he said wearily. “I do not give a fuck whether you do or not. I want to protect you anyway.”

  She shook her head.

  He grabbed her shoulder, squeezed it, shook it. “Tamar. My love.” His voice sounded exhausted. “If someone offered to protect me, I would not spit in her eye. I would be flattered. Perhaps even . . . touched.”

  “Oh, I think we’ve got the touching part all covered,” she murmured, smiling in the dark. “Do you need protecting, Val?”

  “No. But it would be nice to have someone care enough to try.”

  She pressed her face against his shoulder and licked, savoring the deep, salty flavor of his dried sweat. Relaxing against his heat, his strength. She inhaled and realized that her chest had relaxed.

  She was breathing so deeply. The breaths so unforced.

  It was true, what he said. It would be tragically futile, to try and protect someone like her.

  But it was so nice that he cared enough to try.

  The overhead light switched on, without warning. Val and Tam both sprang up, Tam lunging for the purse, with the gun . . .

  Ah. Never mind. It was just Signora Concetta, her hand on the light switch, her eyes huge and shocked. She crossed herself.

  Tam grabbed for the towel that lay on the floor and wrapped it around herself. Val had no such recourse. He got up, picked up his trousers, and started putting them on. Lazy and unhurried.

  The signora took a long look at Val’s body, and cleared her throat, with a great, phlegmy, gurgling cough. She looked as if she were trying not to smile, though the expression looked a bit rusty.

  “Scusatemi. You wanted dinner,” she said stiffly.

  “So I did,” Val said calmly. “I still do. Especially now.”

  The good lady had taken Val’s suggestion of wine, bread and cheese as a challenge to inflict death by food. The assault started with a jug of homemade wine and two thick crockery cups to drink it out of. Then a crusty loaf of bread, and a wedge of cheese with a filthy green rind that looked like it had been rolled in dead grass and a creamy, yellow-white interior that smelled powerfully of sheep. A huge, phallic chunk of homemade salami followed.

  “Cinghiale,” the signora said proudly. “Wild boar. My sons killed it.”

  Then she went out onto the patio and bent over what they then realized was an enormous wheelbarrow. She began bringing in earthenware oven crocks, each wrapped in its own artfully knotted dish towel, each filled with a fragrant hot baked or stewed dish.

  She covered the rickety table with them and went out again. Her next armful of jars held vegetables preserved in vinegar, oil, and garlic: sun-dried tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, olives. A basket of freshly picked oranges was the crowning touch, or so they thought until the signora reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a slender-necked corked bottle filled with a pale yellow liquor.

  “Limoncello,” she announced proudly. “My own lemons. Very good.”

  Val grabbed the lady’s hand, which fortunately no longer appeared to be covered with chicken blood, and kissed it fervently.

  “Signora, you are an angel sent from heaven,” he declared. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  The signora yanked her hand back with a smirk and took a long, appreciative look at Val’s naked chest and half-fastened pants. She grunted her approval. “You will need it,” she said. “Buon appetito.”

  “God, yes,” he said in heartfelt tones.

  The signora frowned at Tam and pinched her upper arm. “Eat some of my braciole,” she admonished. “You’re too skinny. That man will squash you.”

  After the signora had gone, they perched on the rickety, termite-riddled chairs on each side of the loaded table, and dug into the feast.

  Tam discovered, to her astonishment, that food just kept on going right into her and space kept opening up for more. It was so different from her usual feeling when eating or trying to—that the food was bumping up against a blank stone wall that would let nothing through.

  Not tonight. Tonight, she was open, yawning wide, eager.

  Usually, strong tastes repelled her. Tonight, they were strangely marvelous. She ate three times as much as she usually managed to choke down, and Val inhaled over ten times that much on his own.

  When she finally stopped, stuffed, she sat back and just watched in awe as he continued to eat, and eat, and eat.

  “You’re risking your life with that stuff, you know,” she informed him. He layered sun-dried tomatoes with the wild boar salami, cheese, and fleshy red festoons of peppers on a huge chunk of dripping, oil-soaked bread. “Salmonella, botulism, and ten other lethal bacteria that I could name.”

  “Don’t name them.” His white teeth bit down, eyes closing in delight as he chewed. “And this from a woman who travels with at least twenty different types of deadly poison in her beauty case?”

  Tam grabbed an orange and began to peel. At least its contents would be more or less sterile. “That’s different. Those compounds were cooked in a lab under controlled conditions by people who hold advanced degrees in chemistry from MIT and Stanford.”

  He ripped off another chunk of bread and fearlessly prepared another heap. “But they do not taste as good,” he pointed out.

  She took a bite of orange. The explosive, tangy sweetness made her gasp. “The chicken blood alone might carry you away,” she warned.

  Val stabbed his fork into the crock that held thinly sliced dark meat wrapped around flavorful cheese, hot pepper, parsley and garlic, floating in a rich lake of spiced tomato sauce. He chewed fearlessly and stared her in the face, a suggestive gleam in his eyes.

  “Don’t think for one second that you’re going to kiss me after you eat all that garlic,” she warned him.

  “Don’t think for one second that you can deny me,” he retorted coolly. “I’m much bigger than you are. Faster, too.”

  “Ah, but I’m more treacherous,” she teased him.

  His face sobered. He looked at the food in his hand as if he’d forgotten what to do with it. “I would not want to put that to the test.”

  She missed that fleeting moment of lightness. It was so rare in her life to laugh and joke, kick around a man and have him come back for more. To have fun. Typical Tam. Trust her to kill it by accident.

  She tended to kill things, as a rule. She abruptly hated herself for it. “I won’t betray you if I can help it,” she said, a lame attempt to save the moment.

  “Me neither,” he replied quietly. “I swear it.”

  She lost her appetite for the uneaten orange, delicious though it was. She held it out. “Freshen your breath with this,” she commanded. “And then come back to bed.”

  That worked, but sex always did with men. His face brightened.

  He devoured the orange, stripped off his pants to reveal his already lengthening cock, and slid between the sheets, holding the covers up for her. Oddly, his doggish male predictability bothered her less than usual tonight. She eased between the covers, curling up against his heat.

  He was, of course, at full salute. It was ridiculous, but she felt too mellow to say anything about it, even when he rolled on top of her.

  She was wet and soft from the last time, and very sensitive. He pushed his big phallus slowly inside her. Tam looped her arms around his shoulders and wiggled, seeking the perfect angle
.

  “Do not come inside me again,” she warned.

  “I will not come at all,” he assured her. “I’ve come enough.”

  She made a dubious sound. He took her face in his hands and looked earnestly into her eyes. “Trust me,” he said. “Please.”

  The snide comeback was ready on her lips, but somehow she stopped it. It was the look in his eyes, the intensity behind the words.

  He wasn’t feeding her a line, jerking her around. It was a plea from someplace deep within him. He wasn’t even talking about sex.

  She swallowed, clamping down on her mortal dread of being made a fool of. She could risk this. Maybe just this much, for once.

  “I will . . . try to,” she said, haltingly.

  He bent his head down and kissed her reverently on the forehead.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I will try to be worthy of your trust.”

  That was too much for her. “Oh, stop it, you melodramatic fool,” she snapped. “Don’t get swishy on me, Val. I can’t handle it.”

  He proceeded to wrap her in a breathlessly tight, hot, marvelous embrace and express himself nonverbally, most eloquently . . . and to her utter satisfaction.

  András strolled down the darkened corridor of I Santi Medici. The security of the place was lax. He’d slipped in a door that someone had left conveniently propped open; he’d sauntered through dim, deserted halls and stairwells, and he’d been obliged to kill no one so far. The nurses and doctors on call at this indecent hour had all been elsewhere, chatting in the nurse’s station, or dozing on unused beds. No one noticed him sliding by like a big, quiet ghost.

  He knew exactly where to go, having sent flowers earlier that afternoon. The stringy youth who he’d paid to deliver them had ascertained the room number for him. Ah, yes, there it was, a big bouquet of calla lilies and birds-of-paradise. The nurses had placed it with the other flowers clustered around the white and blue ceramic statue of the Madonna who presided at the end of the corridor, her electric crown glowing eerily in the darkness.

  A grim-faced old man in pajamas and a green bathrobe sat outside his room door with an IV in his arm, the rack clutched in his fist. No doubt trying to evade the groaning or flatulence of his roommates. He blinked at András with clouded eyes. A witness. Pity. András took note of the room number. Unfortunate for the old man, but he was well into his eighties and clearly not enjoying his life overmuch. András would probably be doing him a favor by holding his nose shut for a few minutes after he finished with Hegel.

  Hegel was not alone in his room either, András was irritated to note. He hadn’t wanted to conduct a full scale massacre tonight. At least the other man was sleeping. A stringy, grayish creature with a chicken neck and a mouth that gaped wide and toothless.

  Hegel’s eyes were closed. His head was bandaged and one arm was in a cast. András grasped the nurse call button, which dangled on the end of a plastic cord, and looped it up high over the IV rack next to the bed. Well out of the man’s reach. He grabbed a chair and sat down.

  Hegel’s eyes popped open at the scrape of the chair, widening with alarm when he saw who sat before him. András was ready with the rubber ball, which he shoved into Hegel’s mouth. He wrapped a gag of rubber around the man’s mouth to hold it in, knotting it behind his head. He fastened Hegel’s good hand to the metal bedstead with a cable tie, pulling it tight enough to cut off the circulation.

  Then he laid a heavy hand over the other man’s throat, putting a relentless pressure on his larynx. “We need to talk,” he said. “My original plan was to cut or burn you for a few minutes before we started to demonstrate my commitment, but you must be loaded with pain medications right now. My skills would be wasted on you. But I could puncture your eyeball, for instance, with this.” He held up a long, gleaming needle. “Or saw off one of your ears with this.” He held up a serrated blade, one of the offerings of his multi-blade pocketknife.

  Hegel’s eyes protruded. He made a gurgling sound in his throat.

  “Or we could skip that part of the conversation and speak of Tamara Steele and Val Janos,” András suggested.

  Hegel nodded frantically.

  “I will take off the gag,” András told him. “If you speak above a whisper, I will put it back in, saw off one ear, and deflate one eye. Do we understand each other?”

  Another frantic nod. András reached back, loosened the rubber gag, and plucked out the ball, wiping the spit off on Hegel’s sheets.

  Hegel coughed, staring wide-eyed at the other man. His jowled face glistened with pain and fear sweat.

  András reached into his briefcase and took out the laptop which he had taken from Hegel’s hotel room after speaking with Ferenc. He opened it, perched it on the man’s chest, and unfastened the tourniquet that held his arm to the bed. “The password, please.”

  András observed carefully as the man’s stubby, trembling finger punched a sequence of letters, numbers and symbols into the computer. He committed the password to memory.

  “And now, explain to me how you have been monitoring Janos and Steele,” he said.

  Hegel cleared his throat. “Janos has an RF trace implanted in his body.” His voice was thick and hoarse. “He doesn’t know.”

  András chuckled. “How despicable of you, Hegel. That’s cheating. Tell me about the frequency, and how the tracking software works.”

  Hegel swallowed, licked his lips. “But I can’t—”

  Pop, the ball was wedged into his mouth again, and András’s big hand ground the man’s teeth into his lips on top of it. “I do not want to hear those words again,” he said. “First your eyes, and then your ears. Is that turd Luksch worth that kind of loyalty?”

  Hegel squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

  András lifted his hand, and let the other man push the ball out with his tongue, coughing desperately. András gestured toward the laptop. “Tell me everything,” he said softly.

  It took twenty minutes to pry the technical information out of the man: the frequency of the trace, the use of the software, how to access archived data, how to monitor in real time. Relatively simple for András, who had used similar technology many times before.

  He stared at the screen, committing to memory the exact spot where the man was lurking this very night. Some obscure point in the mountains, several kilometers from the main coastal highway. Thinking he was safe and hidden. It gave András a pleasurable feeling of power.

  Good. It was all good. This was becoming so easy, it might not even be a worthy challenge, he reflected with faint amusement. But he would gladly exchange challenge for speed. It reflected well upon him in any case. And his work here was done.

  He took the laptop, stowed it, and stood. He looked down at Hegel, trying to think if there was any reason on earth, any reason at all, not to kill him. The man saw death in his eyes and held up his hand to ward it off. András had seen that classic gesture many times.

  “There’s more,” he said hastily.

  András fondled the knife in one pocket. “More? What more?”

  “Don’t kill me. Help me get away from here, from Georg, and I’ll tell you everything I—”

  “Don’t try to bargain with me, fool,” András said. “You will tell me everything you know now, or I will cut off your dick and choke you to death with it. What more do you have?”

  Hegel swallowed repeatedly. “The child,” he said hoarsely.

  András frowned down at him. “What child?”

  “She has a child. Steele. She adopted a girl. Three years old.”

  András began to grin. Ah, yes. This would make the old man very happy. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know exactly. She appeared on the airport security cameras in Sea-Tac International three days ago. I had three men following Janos in an attempt to locate Steele and the child. He killed the men, took Steele and the girl, and from that point, all I know is that he climbed on a plane in Portland with Steele alone. Somewhere between Sea-Tac and Port
land International Airport, they left the child with someone. I do have some archived footage from the night between those events, and I know he spent them at a luxury resort between Tacoma and Seattle,” Hegel babbled on. “A place called the Huxley. I assume they left the kid with someone during that interval, but I didn’t investigate any further because Luksch just wanted Steele. Nothing else.”

  András sat down on the chair, chewing the inside of his lip.

  “She has, ah, dark curly hair,” Hegel added, a note of desperation in his voice, the sound of a man with no bargaining chips left. “She’s small, very thin for her age. And she’s extremely—”

  Thhtp. The silenced Glock drilled a bullet between Hegel’s eyes. The man flopped back onto his pillow and gazed blankly into the air.

  “Thank you,” András said softly.

  He gazed at his handiwork for a moment. The slumped body on the bed lacked dramatic impact. He really ought to put a bit more artistry into it. He didn’t have time to get truly creative, but the boss always appreciated that personal touch.

  András shrugged off his jacket to save the bloodstains, clicked open his case and took out a small saw and a pair of industrial strength rubber gloves. A few minutes later, he was relatively pleased by the artistic effect of Hegel’s head, nestled in the center of the blood-soaked coverlet, severed hands clasped piously beneath his chin. He snapped a picture on his cell phone, encrypted it, sent it to the boss. The old man needed a pick-me-up. Waiting made him frantic.

  András heard an unintelligible sound, turned, found that the man in the other bed was awake and staring at him, eyes bugged out.

  Automatically, András aimed the gun at the man’s forehead—and then paused, taking note of the lopsided mouth, the fellow’s garbled attempts at speech. Stroke. András’s grandfather had suffered from a stroke when András was a child. He still remembered the horrified fascination he’d felt at the old man’s distorted face, his helpless frustration. His vain attempts to communicate.