Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  At least Novak was down. Maybe Rachel had gotten her miracle. Then again, maybe not. András had her, and András loved to hurt just for hurting’s sake. And Georg was walking toward her, Tam, his face a tight mask of lust. Her body recoiled. Her ordeal had only just begun.

  Imagine. The man was turned on by a woman hanging from a hook, a woman with a broken arm. She shook with a mix of tears and hysterical laughter. What was it about her and sadistic madmen? Why were they so attracted to her? She must have been a bad girl in a past life to deserve this insanity. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly.

  When András came back with Rachel, bullets would start to sing again with her baby right in the middle of it. Val was immobilized, a gun to his head. She was hanging up like a cow in a meat locker—helpless.

  Except for one thing. She rolled the tongue studs in her mouth as Georg touched her breasts, eyes shiny and rolling with hot excitement. His hands were stickily damp as they clamped over her breasts and squeezed. He groped at her crotch. Gripped it painfully hard.

  She marshaled her self-control to put a look of heavy-lidded longing on her face. “Kiss me,” she whispered. “Please. You saved me. Kiss me before you do it. I have been dreaming of your kiss.”

  He jerked her toward him, pulling her off balance again. The arm, oh God, the arm . . . she clamped down on a shriek of pain to not waste spit.

  His face came closer, filling her field of vision, distorted, grotesque in every lurid detail. His breath was sour and damp, pulsing wetly against her face, stealing all the air.

  She placed the poison capsule between her molars, estimating distance, velocities, counting seconds, crunching data. Cold and sharp. Robot Bitch. Not yet . . . not yet . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . crunch.

  The capsule broke.

  Her mouth filled with a granular, metallic bitterness. His lips touched hers, hideously slippery with mucus. His mouth yawned.

  She spat the poison wad into it.

  Georg reeled back, spitting, pawing at his mouth and tongue as the corrosive burn began to spread. He lunged forward, slapped her. She did not feel it. He slapped her again and again. Her cheek was numb. He was screaming, bellowing, but she could not hear his voice.

  The calculating machine in her head reminded her that she had less than fifteen seconds . . . thirteen . . . twelve, before it was too late to bother with the antidote, but she couldn’t coordinate her jaw muscles to bite again. She’d gone limp, spent her strength . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . the icy tingle, the numbness of impending death crept through her . . . five . . . four . . . blood trickled from her nose . . .

  Rachel.

  She bit down on the other capsule. The antidote was bitter too. She needed more spit to swallow the stuff, but she was dry, her mouth full of sand and dust. She flung her head back so that the blood streaming from her nose would run down her throat.

  Come on, Steele. You’re good at swallowing bitter pills.

  Georg was falling, writhing, twitching. She saw it as if through the wrong end of a telescope. She could not enjoy her victory. It was too far away, too long ago. It had happened to someone else.

  She gulped her own blood and fought the darkness.

  It was Imre who saved him, in the end. Imre, who had taught him to use his brain like the high-functioning machine that it was.

  Val cut loose from the fear battering at him like a hurricane wind. He took the three steps back and floated free. He still smelled Henry’s sweat. Still felt the cold circle of steel the other man pressed against the pulse point of his throbbing temple. Still felt the burning agony of his wounded arm and shoulder.

  Still saw Georg, slavering and groping the woman Val loved.

  But he floated apart from it. Waiting in the vast stillness inside his mind for his opportunity. There was always a split-second opening, if the mind was wide open and soft enough to sense it, flexible enough to recognize it for what it was. And quick enough to exploit it.

  . . . he’s kissing her, fucking pig rapist . . .

  No. That thought would shatter his focus. He let the thought go, wrenched his concentration back to the matrix. Wait. Just . . . wait.

  Georg reeled back and began a strange dance, screaming and pawing at his mouth. He slapped Tamar, once, twice.

  “What is it? What is it? Where’s the antidote?” he bellowed. “What is the antidote, you fucking bitch?”

  Antidote? Poison. Oh, God, no. Tamar. No.

  The shocked gaze of the man holding the gun on him skittered over to the spectacle. Val felt the relentless pressure of the gun barrel against his head waver for an instant—

  Val flung himself backward against Henry, ignoring the flare of pain, forcing the man to shift his bulk, brace himself—

  Now!

  Val ran up the wall in three big steps, and flipped his body over Henry’s head. Henry shouted, and tumbled backward. They crashed to the ground together. The impact knocked Henry’s grip loose.

  He grappled for Val, flipping him over with a roar of rage, and pinned Val beneath his huge, muscular bulk. Val heaved, struggled . . . and pushed with his thumb against the stone on the ring he wore, Tamar’s ring, that released the spike. Short, but razor sharp and wickedly pointed.

  Henry’s grip slipped on Val’s bloody wrist. Val wrenched it loose with a shout—and stabbed the small spike into Henry’s carotid artery.

  Gouts of hot blood splattered him, rhythmically. Henry choked, convulsed, stared down into his face, a look of betrayal in his eyes.

  Val crawled out from under him, grabbed Henry’s gun, and clambered to his feet, blood-drenched and swaying.

  He pointed it at the man whose job it had been to hold the gun to his head and asked a silent question with his eyes.

  The gunman shook his head in reply. His wide eyes darted, from Georg’s corpse to Henry’s, to Tamar, and back to the gun in Val’s hand. The place was silent, but for Val’s breath sawing in and out of his mouth, and the moaning whisper of the wind. Heavy brocade drapes billowed and swirled. Candle flames leaped and flared.

  He lifted his hands, pointing his gun in the air, and began to back warily toward the door, boots crunching and sliding on the broken glass. He stumbled over his colleague’s dead, bloody body. Caught himself, without even looking down.

  “I’m gone,” the gunman said. “I’m out of here. I was never even here at all.”

  Val nodded, and waited until the other man had slunk out the door. His running footsteps retreated. The silence was absolute.

  Val turned to Tamar. She sagged in her ropes, eyes closed, face deathly pale. Blood streamed from her nose. More trickled from the corners of her mouth. Georg lay still, though his feet still twitched. Bloody froth foamed from his mouth. His face was blue, tongue protruding.

  She’d pulled some poison trick. A kamikaze move. Ah, God.

  All the times in his life that he had numbed himself to endure some atrocious thing had not prepared him for this. He was a helpless child again. Staring at the end of the world, lying on the bathroom floor.

  Then, to his astonishment, her eyes fluttered open. They focused somewhere beyond him, and widened. She sucked in a bubbling breath.

  “Watch out!” she cried.

  He jerked to the side, and the bullet grazed his hip, plowing a deep furrow to join his other wounds. Novak grinned from his pool of blood on the floor, thin neck straining, and lifted his Walther PPK to try again.

  Val emptied Henry’s Taurus into the old man and kept pulling the trigger compulsively even after the gun was empty.

  He glanced wildly around the room. “Anyone else? Anyone?”

  No one moved. No one spoke.

  Val stumbled over to the dead man, the young one, who lay on his back with Val’s knife sticking out of his throat. He yanked it out and lunged toward Tamar.

  He put his arm around her slender body as he reached up to saw at the rope. Just a few passes of the blade severed it, and her slight weight dropped into his arms. Sh
e was covered with tiny rivulets of blood. Small wounds, from the shards of flying glass.

  He gathered her up, looking around for a place to lay her down that was not strewn with glass. There was none.

  He dropped to his knees and cradled her.

  Her eyes opened. Her gaze was still sharp. “Don’t . . . k-kiss me,” she croaked in a halting whisper. “I’m poisonous.”

  Despair slammed through him. “Oh, fuck,” he said, his voice high and shaking. “You are killing me, Tamar.”

  Her lips twitched. “Melodramatic,” she whispered. “Idiot.”

  Their eyes met, full of pain and longing. She hitched in a shallow breath and said her daughter’s name with a whispering sigh. “Rachel,” she said. “András has her.”

  Her eyes commanded him back into action.

  “Yes,” he said thickly, smoothing back her sweat-stiffened hair. “I understand.” He pressed a kiss to her damp, icy forehead. “There’s glass everywhere,” he said, helpless. “I don’t know where to put you.”

  “Fuck the glass,” she croaked. “Get . . . Rachel. Move your ass.”

  He cleared a spot on the rug as best he could with his boot and laid her down gently. Then he forced his shaking legs to bear him over to the bloody carnage on the ground to scrounge for loaded weapons.

  Rachel. The last thing that he could do for her.

  Chapter 29

  Connor stared out the windshield. His eyes burned like coals. The atmosphere in the taxi had the tension of a bomb countdown.

  There was nothing to say. It had already been said, repeated, hashed out, torn apart, attacked, picked to pieces. They were so on edge that anything anyone said annoyed the shit out of all the others, so they had collectively subsided into a gloomy, self-protective silence.

  Connor sat in the front, clutching the monitor with the satellite map. Their driver sensed the weirdness, despite the language barrier, and kept casting nervous looks at him and the others, in the rearview mirror. Seth, Sean and Davy were crowded into the backseat, everyone red-eyed, grim, and tense from the strain of suppressing the thoughts of what might already have happened to Rachel, considering her ten-hour head start.

  All they could do now was throw themselves at the location of the beacon in Rachel’s red coat and see what happened. Connor had called the FBI liaison in Budapest when they got to Hungary, and told him what was going on, just so that someone would be sure to follow up should the worst happen. They had been strictly forbidden to go anywhere near Novak.

  What the fuck. To a man, not one of them had ever learned to do what they were told. And they were the only ones whose prime agenda was Rachel’s safety. They needed to be the first ones on the scene.

  They were almost there, bumping over a narrow, ancient stone bridge over a narrow river and then down a long avenue next to a tall stone wall. All of them noted the cameras mounted at regular intervals along the top of it. The cab driver came to a stop at a big wrought iron gate. It was yawning wide open. Weird.

  “We are arrive,” the driver ventured timidly.

  As they watched, two men came sprinting out of the gate. They didn’t even look at the car, just ran, hell for leather, toward the bridge.

  OK. Weirder.

  The meter read 155 euros. Connor handed the guy two hundred-euro bills. They piled out and the cab peeled away, tires squealing. Connor didn’t blame him. It was very clearly a bad scene.

  Then another guy came pounding out the gate. Davy grabbed him, slamming one of his thick forearms across the guy’s throat.

  “What’s happening in there?” he demanded.

  The guy gibbered in Hungarian. Davy gave him a shake and tried the same question in French, then in German. The guy just struggled and squawked, voice high. Finally, Davy flung him away in disgust.

  “Get out of here,” he muttered.

  The man stumbled, flailing, caught himself and ran.

  “Rats leaving the ship,” Sean said. “Got a fix on Rachel?”

  Connor peered at the handheld. “Got her. Let’s just go for it. They’re not manning the cameras now. The shit’s hit the fan. It’s every man for himself.”

  They took off running, swift and silent, down the long, curving avenue of trees. No one challenged them; no one shot at them. A huge, decaying eighteenth-century palace came into view.

  They veered around it to follow the signal, and found a long, low building that must once have been a stable. Getting closer. Forty meters. Thirty. The icon blipped on the screen, tantalizing them.

  They burst into the building, peering around, guns at the ready.

  No one was there, just a long row of covered parking slots. Fifteen meters, ten, eight. Dead silence.

  The beacon was inside one of the cars. Connor’s heart pounded with dread. Five meters, four, three . . . there it was. A Mercedes coupe.

  No one was inside it. They flashed their penlights in every direction. No one. The doors were locked.

  They crowded around to the back of the vehicle, and stared at the trunk. The beacon was there. Connor tried it. Of course, it was locked.

  He swallowed hard and pounded on it. “Rachel? Honey?”

  No one answered. Seth elbowed through them, carrying a big, rusty garden implement, like heavy hedge clippers. “Everybody get the fuck out of the way.”

  They all moved back, and Seth went berserk, smashing and pounding and cursing, until the back of the car was unrecognizable.

  He finally jolted the lock loose. They wrenched the trunk open.

  A puffy red child’s ski jacket lay there. No Rachel. Connor smelled urine. He put his hand on the carpeting under the coat, felt around.

  Yes, there it was. Dampness. Pee.

  “Baby piss,” he said. “They put her in the trunk. They put a three-year-old into the fucking trunk of a fucking car.”

  There were about three seconds of appalled silence. Sean broke it.

  “Let’s move,” he said harshly. “Let’s go hunt. I need to kill something. Now.”

  “Right on,” Seth growled.

  A ragged burst of gunfire came from the direction of the mansion.

  They took off running again.

  He would recognize Rachel’s screaming anywhere. It would cut throught any kind of noise, a gun fight, an air raid, even the roaring and ringing of his ears. Val followed the sound, lurching forward in an unsteady, limping run fueled by unmixed adrenaline. He left a trail of blood behind him, but he didn’t care. If his blood supply lasted long enough to kill András, that was all he asked of it.

  He lost the sound and stopped, straining to hear her again. The wounds throbbed and burned, all of them, the old ones and the new. There was a burning hole in his chest. Every panting breath hurt. Broken ribs, from the bullets that had punched into the Kevlar.

  He rounded a corner. The shrill, faraway wail crescendoed. He launched himself forward again. Blood ran from the gouge in his hip, down his leg, into his boot. His foot squelched with every step.

  The layout of the place was coming back. The sound seemed to come from above him, though it could be an aural illusion. He ran toward the grand staircase and took the steps three at a time, driven by terror. He would hang on as long as he could for Tamar’s sake, but he knew what his body could and could not do, wounded as he was. He knew that feeling: the faintness, the cold, the nasty tingle.

  He had only minutes before his body failed him.

  He stopped at the top to listen, guts sinking at the silence. There it was, a squeak, quickly cut off—to the left. He stumbled down the corridor toward the sound, abandoning all effort at stealth.

  András rounded the corner, clutching a writhing, squirming Rachel under one arm, brandishing his gun with the other hand.

  He stopped cold when he saw Val, jerking Rachel up so that she shielded his chest, neck and head.

  Val dove for the nearest doorway as András opened fire on him, tearing the rotten door loose from its antique, rusty hinges. He pitched forward into the sti
fling darkness. Bullets crashed into walls, the floor, sending splinters and shards of wood, tile, and stucco flying.

  At the first moment of silence, Val called out over the ringing in his ears. “It’s over, András. They’re dead. Put her down.”

  “Who’s dead?” András demanded.

  “Everyone,” Val said. “Dead, or else running. Didn’t you hear the guns?”

  András paused. He had heard them, and not known what to make of them. “I’ll judge when it’s over, dickhead,” András growled, but there was uncertainty in his voice.

  Rachel let loose with another piercing ultrahigh shriek that rattled all the molecules in his body. Val heard a slap, muffled cursing. “Shut up, you squeaking brat, or I’ll—”

  His words were obscured by another shriek, more ear-shattering than the last. Val lunged for the door, peered around the frame.

  Zing, a bullet flicked past his ear, ruffling his hair. He jerked back, having ascertained that Rachel’s squirming body still shielded all the good target points. Merde. Trapped, like a fucking rat in a cage. He couldn’t return fire, couldn’t give chase. He was useless.

  “I’ve got the gun to her head,” said András, his voice taunting. “Throw your guns out into the corridor, and step out of the room with your hands before you. We’re going to talk to the boss.”

  “He’s dead,” Val said wearily.

  “Of course he is,” András crooned. “And this screaming little darling will be, too. It can’t be too soon for me.”

  “It’s all over. Novak is dead. They’re all dead,” Val repeated.

  “Really? If the boss is dead, what reason is there for me not to kill her right now? Or better yet, I could shoot something off her, a hand, a foot. It would be a pleasure, after the trouble she’s given me. At this range, I could probably blow her leg right off at the knee. Shall we see? Should I try it?”

  “No,” Val said swiftly. “Don’t.”

  “No? You don’t like that idea? Then throw out your guns, fuckhead. Now.”

  The gun stocks were sticky with his drying blood. Val peeled them loose from his hand, the Beretta and the SIG he’d gleaned from the dead PSS agents.