On Thin Ice (5 page)

Lambert had been known for her loyalty to her men; it was one of the reasons Thomason had been kicked upstairs to a powerless position on the governing board. She wouldn’t abandon operatives if she could help it. She also wouldn’t let MacGowan screw up his life by wreaking vengeance on whomever he could blame, he would bet his retirement on it. It would be easy enough to fan the flames of Committee concern, make it clear that MacGowan was out for blood, whether he was or not. And Isobel Lambert and her husband would emerge from hiding, just to make sure that didn’t happen.

How glorious to come back to his superiors, on the eve of his retirement, and tell them Killian was dead, that the one leak had finally been plugged. It was worth any risk.

He would send Sully, he decided. Sully was a crack shot, perhaps better than Killian in his prime. Once MacGowan made it down out of the mountains, Sully would find him, snatch him, and wait for Isobel Lambert to emerge to set the cat among the pigeons. And she wouldn’t come alone.

In retrospect he might have let the Committee know that MacGowan was a hostage, but he didn’t trust them. Peter Madsen, who’d taken over when Thomason had died in a so-called explosion and Lambert had disappeared, was too efficient, and he would have extracted MacGowan without Lambert ever knowing.

No, this was better. Enough people in the intelligence community had heard about it that he knew the word would get to Lambert. And he had complete faith in Sully. If MacGowan proved too hard to kidnap he could always cancel him. Lambert didn’t need to actually find MacGowan, she just had to believe that he was heading for Madsen. Killing him might even be easier. He would trust Sully.

Maybe he’d buy himself a sports car for his retirement. Drive fast, with the top down, except that his very expensive, undetectable hairpiece would probably get blown to heck and gone.

No, he was better with a solid American car, something large and comfortable but not too ostentatious. Too bad they didn’t make Oldsmobiles any more.

MacGowan really was a bastard and a half, Beth thought as she half-climbed, half-slid down the narrow trail after him. If she were feeling fair she wouldn’t blame him – by the looks of him he’d been held for a long time, and it was little wonder he was lacking compassion, sensitivity, or even manners. He was getting her out of there; that was all that mattered. Reluctantly, on his part, but he knew she was worth hundreds of millions of dollars at last count. He’d be well-paid for his efforts.

She hadn’t had a really good look at him. She knew he was tall, thin almost to the point of gaunt, but she didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was weak. She’d felt the strength in the hard hands that had clamped around her arms. They’d probably added to the panoply of bruises on her tanned skin. He was nothing but hair and dirt and rags, and she found herself wondering what he looked like under those layers of grime. Ugly as sin and twice as mean, most likely. It wasn’t her concern. So she was feeling grateful, pathetically so. It was only logical. He was getting her out of here. No wonder she wanted to see him as heroic.

They walked on in silence. Her feet were sopping wet, she felt as if she’d been walking for days, her stomach was so damned empty it hurt, and she was frightened. It was taking everything she had to keep from panicking, and her reserves were running low. She would have given everything she had just to be able to curl up in a corner and rest, pull together the tattered remnants of her courage. But she had no choice. She would follow him, silent and uncomplaining. Anything else meant degradation and probably death.

She’d understood more than he thought. It hadn’t taken a linguistic expert to know what Carlos had in store for her, and the other scrawny rat had looked just as dangerous. He was right about the blonde hair, of course. The children she taught had loved it, loved to touch it and stroke it. She had very pale hair, thanks to her part-Scandinavian heritage, and it stood out. She should have dyed it brown before she got here.

She stumbled, going down on one knee, and she felt her pants rip. Her unwilling rescuer didn’t stop, didn’t even slow, and she scrambled to her feet, hurrying after him, keeping her curse between her teeth. She was at war with her own stamina, and she was at the losing end. If she fell and couldn’t get up, if he decided to abandon her to the Guiding Light again, she might just ask him to kill her instead. She was sure he could, quite easily, with those strong hands of his. It wasn’t a case of death before dishonor. It was more a question of death before rape, torture, and death. Might as well skip the uglier parts and get straight to the pay-off.

She wanted to laugh at her thoughts, but try as she might she couldn’t find the humor in her melodramatic musings. Because they weren’t actually melodramatic – they were based in fact.

She slammed into him again, unaware that he’d stopped. “Christ, woman,” he muttered. “Must you always fling yourself at me?” It wasn’t even a whisper beneath his breath.

“As long as you keep stopping without any warning,” she said back, not quite as soft as his but close. “You could . . .” The words were cut off, as he moved, fast as the strike of a snake, yanking her against him and slamming a hand over her mouth.

“Make a sound and I’ll snap your neck,” he breathed against her ear.

Well, that answered that question, she thought. He could easily kill her by hand. She stayed absolutely still and silent against his strong, bony body, waiting, though she wasn’t sure for what.

Two figures loomed up out of the inky darkness, and she felt a panicked scream bubble up. If she tried he’d kill her – better than having him hand her over to Carlos and the other one.

He must have felt her sudden panic, because his arms tightened for an uncomfortable moment. “You made it,” he said, and she realized he was talking to the newcomers. Newcomers who, as they approached, were definitely not the two feral kids.

Relief hit so hard she sagged against him, and he held her for only the briefest of moments before he released her. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he grumbled.

She almost fell again, but she managed to keep to her feet by sheer willpower. “I thought you were handing me back to Carlos and his new friend.”

He only grunted – such a charming companion, she thought. She was almost light-headed with relief as she looked at the two men - one middle-aged, the other a kid not much older than Carlos.

“Who the hell is she?” the older man demanded in a German accent. “We’re paying you to get us out of here. She’ll slow us down.”

She felt MacGowan’s eyes on her. “If she does we ditch her,” he said. “Miss Beth Pennington, this is Hans Froelich, who works for Deutschland Oil, and the brat there is Dylan Hamilton. He says his father is a movie star, and the two of them combined have more money than God. As do you. I figure I get at least one of you down, I’m due a tidy sum. If I get all three of you down I’m set for life.”

A mercenary
, she thought, vaguely disappointed. She kept trying to turn him into a hero. It was no wonder – she was counting on him to save her life.

“Nice piece of tail,” the teenager said. “You feel like sharing?”

“I’ll let you know,” MacGowan said, faint amusement in his voice. “In the meantime, keep your mouths shut and follow me. I want to get as far away as we can by first light.”

“Where are we going, exactly?” the German demanded, still eyeing her uneasily.

“If I told you it wouldn’t mean anything, exactly,” he mimicked. “And Junior, keep your hormones to yourself. She’s tougher than she looks, and she’s had enough of horny teenagers to last her.”

“Dude!” the kid protested, but a sharp gesture shut him off.

“Okay, darlin’,” he said. “You follow me, then Froelich, then Junior. I figure he’s not worth as much as the rest of you, and if his father has any sense he wouldn’t pay a dime to get him back, so he’s expendable.”

“Harsh, man,” the kid said.

“Shut the fuck up and start walking,” he said. And they did.

CHAPTER FOUR

The home offices of Bradley Manufacturing and Import, Ltd., were still and quiet in the late November morning. Peter Madsen sat back in his chair, staring at the computer screen abstractedly, barely listening as the rain clicked against the windows with icy insistence. He was used to the cold of English winters. Only his bad leg protested, and he ignored it, as he ignored anything inconvenient.

He liked working in a vacuum. The board that oversaw the covert work done by the organization he headed left him alone, and it seemed as if even the CIA had stopped hounding him. It was always possible that they’d finally given up looking for the former head of the Committee, Isobel Lambert, and her lover and former CIA operative Thomas Killian, but he didn’t believe it. In four years they’d been unable to get any closer to finding them, and if Peter had his way they never would. Nor would the various other international groups that desperately wanted to take out Killian, or Serafin the Butcher as he’d once been known during his undercover work. Both Isobel and Killian were experts at getting so lost no one could ever find them. Not even the best in the business, which was, frankly, himself.

The fact that he knew exactly where they were, and always had, was due to Isobel’s choice and not any brilliance on his part. If anyone decided he held the answers and tried to get them out of him, Isobel knew that he was, simply, unbreakable.

There were no family photos on his desk or on the computer or in his wallet. He didn’t need them – he had a photographic memory. And there was no way he’d put them at risk. Their existence was no secret, but his reputation as the Iceman was so widespread that no one would dare touch them. He’d done just enough to terrify the most hard-boiled assassins. He’d installed other security measures as well, just to be on the safe side, and he’d made sure Genevieve knew how to shoot, and shoot well. Mahmoud, once a child soldier and now a seventeen-year old with the arrogant attitude of a teenager and the cold-eyed determination of a killer, would keep the only mother he’d known safe, as well as the two babies, six month old Sasha, and Isobel, nearing three. They were as safe as anyone could humanly be, and normally he didn’t even think about them when he was at work, compartmentalizing everything neatly.

But today he couldn’t help it. The message had flashed across his computer screen, the ghost messages that came from Isobel, merely a passing cloud of phosphors that vanished the moment he touched the computer. He had no idea where she got her intel. She and Killian were so far off the grid that they could have been on another planet. The tiny island in the middle of the Southern Pacific was almost impossible to find, like something out of a dream, and he liked to think of the two of them living alone there, dispensing with clothing and even conversation most of the time.

At other moments he wondered whether they’d ended up killing each other, two trained assassins so caught up in passion that it could have turned deadly. He didn’t think so. The last he’d seen of Isobel she was a different woman. Some of the shadows had lifted, and the bright southern sunshine would keep them at bay. The sun, and Killian.

He still couldn’t figure out how she could have discovered something that had eluded even his substantial efforts for the last three years, but she’d somehow managed to ferret out the truth. Finn MacGowan was alive.

He still couldn’t believe it. MacGowan had disappeared in the bloodbath Harry Thomason had instigated almost four years ago, a debacle that had ended with the loss of five of their best agents, the disappearance of Isobel Lambert, and the death of Thomason himself, just before the old bastard had been about to be knighted for his noble deeds, may he rot in hell. Peter had turned over every rock, looked everywhere for MacGowan, only to be assured that he had died in a gunfight in Callivera.

When all the time he’d been held prisoner, with the Guiding Light waiting patiently for word from Thomason on what to do with him.

At first he hadn’t been able to figure out why they’d waited so long, but once he’d had a place to start it hadn’t take him long to come up with the answers. He could hack into anything, leaving no trace, and he found the hidden account in no time. Thomason had set up a blind trust, sending automatic payments to the ever-bribable Guiding Light to keep MacGowan on ice. He could imagine just what he’d been through. Rebels like F.A.R.C. in Callivera were finally releasing prisoners who’d been held for up to seven years. The Guiding Light would have waited longer, seeing as they were being well-paid.

Even that would have been no guarantee that MacGowan had survived. The rebels would have continued taking the cash even if Finn had inconveniently expired. But the son of a bitch had finally managed to escape, and his movement was what had alerted Isobel in her island sanctuary. He’d taken off with a few of his fellow hostages, disappearing into the heavily-forested mountains with his captors hot on his ass.

Peter leaned back, considering. If Isobel had even a decent approximation of where they were she would have told him. Right now he had a country and nothing else, and no one he could trust to send after MacGowan. The rest of the operatives were just too new to the game.

He could always go himself. Genevieve would just look at him out of huge, sad eyes, but she’d let him go. Taka could take over the day to day running of the Committee – handing out assignments, gathering intel, and he could pull his cousin Reno in if need be. Peter had no delusions about his being irreplaceable – no one was. And Taka could be just as ruthless and coldly deliberate, if not more so, than he could. His wife would be just as happy if he stayed put for a while, and so would Taka.

But he’d promised. Even if Isobel wouldn’t hold him to it, he’d promised not to walk into a firestorm again, not if he could help it.

Tomas was on the ground there, and MacGowan would go to him. Tomas was an independent contractor, but he was the best man in the business for false papers. MacGowan would go straight to him, and Peter would make certain he had enough money to get where he wanted to go.