by Cindy Dees
Taylor’s reply floated up to her, “Be careful.”
Yeah, right. She took a deep breath, and transferred her body weight gently to the new rope. She thought she felt a small slip in the grappling hook and froze, her feet dangling in space. She made the mistake of looking down. The ground spun in a slow circle beneath her, beckoning her to a messy end. She willed her heart not to beat so fast, but for once, it failed to cooperate.
Praying the lurch had only been the rope stretching, she reached up and grasped the line over her head. The rubberized palms of her climbing gloves gripped the slick nylon, and she hauled herself an arm’s length higher. It wasn’t far to the window ledge overhead, just a few arm lengths. But each time she released one hand to reach higher, her heart constricted sharply.
Finally, she reached up and felt a metal lip. Grabbing on with both hands, she hauled herself up the last few inches. There was a dicey moment when she had to hang by one hand and tie off her climbing harness with the other. A temporary slip knot, and then she was able to release the ledge and use both hands to secure herself more firmly. Mountain climbing never had been her favorite pastime.
She took off her gloves and stuffed them into a zipper pocket. Reaching up once more, her fingertips touched cool, smooth glass. The penthouse window. The wind gusted, swirling even more strongly near the top of the tall building. She twisted slightly, first to the left, then back to the right. She felt slightly nauseous.
Concentrating fiercely, she pulled out a thin, black rubber hose with a tiny, wide-angle camera attached to it. She’d gotten the camera from a surgical-supply house—it was used for photographing people’s colons. She grinned briefly at the irony. She planned to send something much worse than this camera up Viktor Maldonado’s arse tonight.
Earlier, Taylor had cut a ring in a suction cup and glued it around the camera’s lens. The diameter of the whole thing was slightly less than two inches. She smeared a little spit on the suction cup, being careful to keep it off the lens of the camera, then reached over her head and pushed the suction cup against the bottom of the window glass. She peered through the eyepiece at her end of the hose. A darkened room sprawled in wide-angle distortion before her. Perfect.
She put a length of clear, high-strength tape across the back of the camera, attaching it more firmly to the corner of the window. She untied her climbing harness and descended carefully, letting out the length of rubber hose as she went. She taped it down to the side of the building with lengths of duct tape she peeled off the thigh of her suit.
When her feet finally touched the window ledge of their room, a giant surge of relief washed through her. And then strong arms swept around her, pulling her inside. To safety. She huddled against Taylor’s heat, soaking up the feel of him.
Eventually, he loosened his grip enough for her to slide down his body until her feet touched the carpeted floor. A shudder of need passed through her. But it was more than just his body that called to her. It was the whole devastating package.
Abruptly, Amanda realized her knees were shaking. From that blistering embrace or the relief of being back on solid ground, she had no idea. But she was happy to stand back while Taylor reached outside to flip the hook free. She jumped aside as he pulled sharply on the line and the grappling hook sailed through the window, narrowly missing her.
“Watch it!” she protested laughingly. “I didn’t just risk my neck out there for you to go and kill me while I’m standing in a perfectly safe hotel room!”
“Sorry. How’s the optic scope working?” he asked.
“Have a look for yourself.”
Amanda passed Taylor the end of the black tube and he peered through the telescope-like lens. “Perfect. I’ve got a straight-on view of Viktor’s chair. You did great.”
She arched one eyebrow. “Did you expect anything less?”
He laughed at her, “Now who’s copping the macho attitude?”
She stuck out her tongue at him as he picked up the scope again. He took a few measurements using a tiny red laser beam in the camera for reference, then he measured a commensurate distance on the ceiling of their room. “If I’m right, that X I just made marks the spot where Viktor’s poker chair will sit tonight.”
“You better be right,” she said with abrupt seriousness. “This plan doesn’t have any room in it for error.”
“Never fear, darlin’,” Taylor drawled, “we’ll nail this bastard.”
Amanda passed him a hand saw that he used to cut a hole roughly two feet in diameter around the X on the ceiling. She fetched towels from the bathroom that he wrapped around the electric drill they’d brought. He was just climbing onto a chair under the hole when the door burst open.
Amanda started violently and Taylor nearly fell off the chair as he lurched. The maid was just as startled and they all stared at each other. Taylor began to laugh and the maid joined him.
The woman laughingly fired a scolding spate of Spanish at them to the effect that they were making a mess when she was supposed to be cleaning this room. Amanda replied in Spanish that they were testing for asbestos contamination and this room should be left alone for several days or else the woman could catch a fatal lung infection. The maid retreated hastily.
As the door closed behind the woman, Amanda sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “Lord, that was close.”
“What was she doing here?” Taylor asked.
“Apparently these rooms are getting ready to be occupied.”
“Viktor’s leaving town, is he?”
He couldn’t! Not after they’d done all this work to nail him. The setup was perfect. They’d never get another shot at the guy like this. She answered Taylor grimly, “Let’s pray he doesn’t leave until after we hit him tonight.”
Taylor matched her grim expression. Then he asked, “What did you tell the maid?” His frown turned into a grin when she translated for him. “Great cover story.”
She retorted, “Well, you’ve got to admit, we look like alien invaders in these getups.”
He stepped over to her and pulled her to her feet. “I dunno. I think you’re too cute for an alien.” He dropped a light kiss on her lips and then stepped away, climbing back onto his chair.
A ripple of intense pleasure started at the back of Amanda’s neck and ripped through her, making her shiver with its passing.
“Hand me the drill, will you?” Taylor asked.
Numbly, she handed him the tool.
Taylor grinned to himself as he put the scope to one eye. Then he carefully drilled up through the floor of the penthouse. Too far under the table. But he had a good reference point now. He switched to a circular bit that would take out a two-inch circle of flooring.
He adjusted the position of the drill and drilled a second hole. He was careful to just break the surface of the floorboard and not rip through the layer of plush carpeting under Maldonado’s seat. A neat disk of wood came away with the drill bit. Perfect.
Next, he bolted a crisscrossing sling of flat steel bands to the steel floor beams. Then came the hard part. He and Amanda donned lead aprons and lifted the X-ray machine out of the trunk. With every muscle straining, Taylor climbed onto the chair and lifted the machine with Amanda helping from below. He managed to wedge a corner of it into the waiting sling. Some of its weight lifted off his shoulders. Whew.
Taylor settled the apparatus more securely in the nest of steel bands, then turned it to align it with the hole in the ceiling. He climbed down from the chair. Lord, his neck hurt. Hefting that much awkward weight overhead was a bitch.
He sat down on the bed, and started when soft hands settled on his shoulders. He savored the massage Amanda gave him, not so much because it eased his cramping neck muscles, which it did, but because of the milestone it represented. She was voluntarily touching him in a way meant to give him pleasure. Son of a gun.
Finally, he sighed and stood up. “Hold that thought. When we’re done here, I could use another one of those.”
Amanda moved aw
ay from him nervously and went to work using a glass cutter to take a small notch out of the upper corner of the plate-glass windowpane. Using the suction cup handles, Taylor lifted the heavy sheet of glass back into place while Amanda routed the black rubber hose from their hidden camera through the notch.
Taylor held the window in place against the buffeting force of the wind while she put in a couple screws to secure the glass. He finished installing the rest of the screws and then caulked the whole thing. Then he ran an extension cord up to the X-ray machine and plugged it in. Now for the acid test.
He turned it on. It made a low hum. Outstanding. He turned it off and climbed down out of the crawl space. They were ready to go.
He and Amanda spent the next half hour cleaning up and putting all the debris into the trunk. He stripped off his clean-suit by the door and checked the hallway. Clear. The maids must be done cleaning these rooms. He carted the now-light trunk to the elevator. A quick trip down to the hotel’s garbage incinerator, and the scraps from their labor went into the flames.
Taylor got into the elevator and pushed the button for the eighteenth floor. But it stopped at the lobby. The doors opened and his heart skipped a beat at the sight before him. Two of Maldonado’s goons stood right in the middle of the lobby, talking to each other.
If either one of them happened to look up, he’d be smack dab in the middle of their line of sight. Crap. He dared not make any sudden movements. He stood there, frozen, for the eternity it took a couple to step into the elevator with him and the door to close. Maldonado’s men never looked up. Christ, that had been close.
The couple got off at the twelfth floor and Taylor rode the rest of the way up to eighteen. He sprinted for their room, and the door opened before he came to a full stop. Amanda’d been keeping watch for him through the peephole. The door latched behind him and he checked his watch. Six-thirty.
He slipped his clean-suit back on. One last bit of work to do. Standing on the chair, he lifted the circular piece of ceiling material he’d sawed out earlier and slid it into the ceiling space, perched beside the hole. He attached a half-dozen inch-long brass strips to its back side. All he’d have to do when it was time was lower the Sheetrock into place. The brass pieces would catch the edges of the hole and hold the ceiling where it belonged.
He climbed up into the crawl space one last time. Amanda passed him a lead apron, which he draped double thick between himself and the X-ray machine. The lights went off below. Now all they had to do was wait and hope that Maldonado showed up.
The trick would be to deliver just enough radiation to make Maldonado good and sick without killing him. Amanda’s plan was to irradiate the bastard enough to cause him a lifetime of health woes, serious enough for him to end his career and spend the rest of his days in and out of hospitals.
She wouldn’t murder the guy, just permanently incapacitate him. Hopefully that would satisfy Xavier’s contact enough for the source to spill the information on Four Eyes. The guy’s exact instructions were to take Maldonado out. To remove him from the business and crime scene permanently.
Clearly the guy’s intent had been for them to kill him. They’d just have to convince the client that doing the job this way ultimately accomplished the same goal. It kept all their hands clean of murder, and more to the point, it would appease her newly forming conscience.
When she’d suddenly developed an aversion to taking out a bad guy who was getting in her way, Amanda had no idea. They’d had to go through an awful lot of extra effort to do the job this way instead of just putting a bullet between the bastard’s eyes.
But the thought of looking into Taylor’s eyes, of seeing the disappointment in them if she took the easy way out and killed this guy—she just couldn’t do it. For some reason, she wanted Taylor to approve of her. To be proud of her. Hell, she wanted to be proud of herself.
The sweet part of the plan was that Viktor wouldn’t get sick right away. And when symptoms did show up, they’d look like a case of acute food poisoning. The odds of a local hospital checking him immediately for radiation poisoning were slim at best. By the time he got a correct diagnosis, the two of them would be long gone from here, back on track to find out where those damned diamonds were coming from and why everyone associated with them seemed to want her dead.
Taylor’s crawled toward eight o’clock. Through the scope, he watched waiters set up a buffet in the penthouse and a bartender take his place. At about seven-thirty, the other poker players began to arrive. At 8:03 on the nose, Maldonado strode into the room. Even shortened and broadened absurdly by the wide-angle lens, there was no mistaking the guy’s arrogant profile.
Taylor breathed a sigh of relief when Maldonado took his usual chair. However, the bastard was lounging farther back than Taylor had counted on. He debated with himself whether to proceed or to wait a little longer. He decided to wait.
Ten minutes later, Maldonado looked at his cards and laid them down, then hitched his chair closer to the table. There! Maldonado was in the perfect position. Taylor waited for a burst of laughter from overhead, and under cover of the noise, flipped on the switch.
These first few moments were the most critical. The low hum from the machine mustn’t be noticed. Taylor watched carefully through the scope, but no one reacted. None of the bodyguards moved from their lounging positions around the room. He started his stopwatch.
As the minutes dragged by, Taylor ran the calculations again in his mind. He needed to deliver between three and four hundred rads of radiation. This machine would take about two hours to achieve a three-hundred-rad exposure level, taking into account the guy’s chair and the scattering of the X-ray beam, which was eighteen inches away from its target instead of the usual inch or so in a hospital.
The clock had been running for one hour and ten minutes when Maldonado excused himself from the table. Taylor swore silently and turned off the machine. Don’t let the bastard start barfing yet.
Maldonado returned a couple minutes later, obligingly returned to his seat and assumed just the right position. Taylor turned the machine back on. When his stopwatch read two hours and thirty minutes, he turned it off. Maldonado had just embarked upon a long and sick retirement.
Taylor eased himself out of the crawl space, pulling the circle of Sheetrock back into place overhead. Amanda passed up a little pot of spackling, which he spread around the seam. Dabbing at the wet compound with a paintbrush, he textured it to match the ceiling. It wasn’t a perfect patch, but it would escape a casual inspection. By the time anyone was seriously looking for it, he and Amanda would be on another continent.
He cleaned up the last bit of dust on the carpet while Amanda stepped to the window. She jerked sharply on the black hose, disconnecting the suction cup from the window above. She used a pocketknife to cut through the hose close to the notch in the window and shove the tail out through the small hole. The camera snaked downward into the darkness.
A bit more caulking, and the notch in the window was sealed.
Again, not perfect, but it would pass a casual inspection. Amanda nodded at Taylor, and they stripped off their clean-suits by the door, wadding them into a big shoulder bag she carried. He scratched the spot of gold paint off the door lock with his fingernail and followed her quickly and quietly down the hall.
They returned to their room just long enough to don a set of disguises. Once their appearances were altered into that of an aging couple who could pass by Maldonado’s men unrecognized, they cleaned their room meticulously, wiped it for fingerprints and walked out.
It was shockingly easy to stroll past the phalanx of security. Retired tourists were a dime a dozen and no one gave them a second glance. They headed out to the beach, and Amanda unobtrusively picked up the thin, black tube of the camera and slipped it into her purse.
They crossed into Belize without incident. They holed up for the night in a cockroach-infested rattrap that passed for a hotel in Belize City. The next morning they boarded a disrep
utable-looking plane bound for Caracas, Venezuela, where Xavier had told them to go after they killed Maldonado.
Neither Belize City nor Caracas was high on the list of garden destinations for American tourists these days. With Taylor’s dark hair and Amanda’s fluent Spanish, they were able to blend in with the locals without too much trouble. They’d checked into a hotel and finished eating a miserable room-service meal that evening before Taylor began to feel the tension of the past couple days drain away. They’d made it. He didn’t know whether to be exhilarated or just plain tired.
He looked up at Amanda. “Now what?”
She met his gaze squarely and said quietly, “Let’s go to bed.”
Fourteen
Amanda did her damnedest not to flinch as fire leaped in Taylor’s eyes. No doubt about it, he’d caught her meaning. She wanted this. She was ready for it. And besides, this was Taylor she was talking about making love with, not the handful of awkward boys she’d tried uncomfortable sex with in her school days.
Thankfully, he didn’t say anything. She didn’t think she’d have the courage to go through with it if he insisted on psychoanalyzing her reasons for her decision. He just nodded and turned out the lights. And when the safety of the darkness had enveloped them both, she knew it would be all right.
Taylor’s big shadow moved toward her slowly in the dark, and his hands were light upon her shoulders. He slipped his fingers into her hair, massaging her scalp gently, and she was lost. Pleasure uncurled within her at his touch. His lips brushed the side of her neck. Oh, yes. That felt lovely.
Amanda let her head fall back to give Taylor better access to her sensitive flesh. His lips touched her neck again, resting on the pulse leaping wildly at the base of her throat. She exhaled on a sigh that was half a moan, and his arms tightened around her waist.
She reveled in the sensation of pressing against him from her toenails to the part in her hair. Tonight, she could crawl all over his gorgeous body like she’d been dying to for weeks. The relief of finally feeding that need made her feel like sobbing.