One Wrong Move (3 page)

Roy could wait. Rudd fumbled for contact with Stillman’s mind. It was easier to find this time. When he had it, he locked eyes with Anabel, who was sipping soda water at a nearby table.

He smiled, as if only just noticing her, and gestured her over.

Stillman turned to look, and did a double take. He dabbed with his napkin at his purplish, discolored lips.

Time for the big guns. Which was to say, Anabel’s tits and ass.

She used them the way a terrorist used a fertilizer bomb. No mercy.

Anabel’s face brightened. Her finger flutter said
Oh, goodie!

What a coincidence!
She jumped up and headed toward them, weaving gracefully between tables. Beaming. Shining. For the love of God, she’d dosed up, the naughty slut, and after he’d expressly ordered her to wait. His teeth ground. Her psi-max-enhanced glamour had taken hold. Rudd winced, as heads turned all over the club.
Don’t overdo it, you vain, whorish bitch. It’s just
Stillman. You don’t have to fuck the whole room.

Too late. Slim, curvy, blond Anabel was lovely enough to turn heads even without a psi-max-fueled push, but there was nothing she liked better than starting to sparkle, watching men trip over their feet, forget that they were arm in arm with their own wives. Anabel had been known to cause car accidents when she sparkled at peak dose. And that was on top of telepathy, her pri-mary talent. She stopped at the table, and bent to give Rudd a peck on the cheek. “Hi, Uncle Harold!”

He beamed at the self-indulgent slut. “Anabel, this is Senator Ben Stillman. This is Anabel Marshall, the daughter of a family friend,” he explained to a transfixed Stillman. “She’s working on my campaign, and she’s a pearl beyond price, so don’t even think of trying to steal her!”

The two men chuckled. Anabel blushed. Stillman eyed her jutting bosom, beautifully showcased in the tight black ribbed turtleneck. Anabel preened and posed and sparkled, extrava-gantly beautiful. In that unguarded moment, Rudd gave the final, tipping shove . . .

. . . and Stillman’s decision clicked into place, covered by Anabel’s tinkling laugh, her chatty bubbling. Stillman’s support was his.
Yes.

He smiled at her. “My dear, would you be kind enough to entertain Senator Stillman for a few minutes while I go see what Roy needs? We shouldn’t be more than ten minutes or so in the suite.”

Anabel knew just what to do. “My pleasure,” she cooed.

Rudd made his way to the door, allowing his disapproval to fla-gellate Roy’s sullen, unresponsive mind, as soon as he was close enough to make it really sting. “Let’s find a private place,” he hissed.

Roy was cowed on the ride up to the suite where Anabel would soon bring Stillman. The senator was in his pocket, yes, but a sweaty bout with Anabel with the cameras running would not be a bad addition to the archives. Rudd had an extensive video collection of Anabel’s exploits. Political figures, judges, corporate heads. Men, women, young or old, Anabel wasn’t fussy.

She would do anything for her dose.

Rudd followed Roy into the suite and slammed the door.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here? I told you to stay away!”

Roy reeled as the punishing energy of Rudd’s compulsion battered his mind, stumbling into the architectural model that dominated the room. The costly model his staff had painstakingly finished putting together just that morning. “You idiot!” Rudd bellowed. “Get away from that! Do you have any idea how much that thing cost?”

Roy jerked away, bouncing off the wall, and thudded down onto the king-sized bed, cringing. “Don’t,” he pleaded. “Stop.”

Rudd strode over to inspect the model of the future Greaves Institute, to make sure nothing had been broken. “You knocked off four trees. Clumsy idiot. This just arrived today! I need to have it delivered to the Convention Center at Spruce Ridge before Saturday, so if you could avoid crushing it to splinters, I would appreciate it!”

“Uh, yeah.” Roy rubbed the mottled, purplish burn scar that covered his entire neck, extending up under his chin like a turtleneck sweater. Rudd found the man’s nervous habit intensely annoying.

“What on earth are you doing here?” Rudd hissed. “You should not be near me in public! We had this talk! I am in the public eye! It was not a gentle suggestion to stay away, you idiot, it was an order!”

“Stop whaling on me! I can’t fucking think when you do that!”

“You have trouble with that in the best of circumstances,”

Rudd snapped, but he scaled back his attack. Roy sagged, panting. “And watch your language,” he added, as an afterthought.

“Family values.”

“My ass,” Roy spat out. “Hypocrite.”

Rudd was unoffended. It was impossible to hide one’s true nature from employees who were enhanced with psi-max, but he knew the ugly secrets squirming in Anabel’s and Roy’s minds just as they knew his. It balanced out into an uneasy parnership, if he managed to control them. Between the heads Roy had broken and the dicks Anabel had sucked, the two might soon become a liability for his shining future.

But that was an issue for another day. “So what’s the crisis?”

“It’s Kasyanov, boss.” Roy wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I lost her.”

Rudd’s guts chilled at the implications. “Lost her?” he repeated. “How is that possible? You can follow a target at a mile or more! You said you couldn’t lose her frequency if you wanted to!”

Roy’s high, balding forehead was shiny with sweat. Rudd suddenly noticed the purplish knot on the side of his head. “She was at this house, out in Brooklyn. Anabel told me she was planning on trying to get to JFK or LaGuardia today, so I was going to take her when she came out to get in her cab. And she, uh . . . she got me.”

“Got me,” Rudd repeated, his voice like stone. “Define

‘got me.’ ”

Roy squirmed as Rudd battered at him, using his psi on Roy the way a lion trainer used a whip. Roy’s jaw shook. “It was the drug,” he choked out. “The new one, Psi-Max 48. Stop it, boss, if you want me to tell you, ’cause I’m gonna puke, right here on the bed, I swear.”

An odorous mess would be inconvenient for Anabel and Stillman, so Rudd grudgingly released the pressure. Roy sagged, wheezing.

“Fucking asshole,” he gasped out. “Cut that shit out!”

“Just tell me,” Rudd said, with chilly patience.

“Like I was trying to say! It was the formula you shot into the doctor’s arm last weekend, up at the lab! Remember that tantrum, Mr. Fucking Family Values? When you got into a snit, and decided to conduct your own little private medical experiment?”

A snap of the mental lash made Roy grunt and twitch. “Do not presume to scold me,” Rudd said. “Just tell me what happened.”

“I had her pinned, in Brooklyn. But . . .” He trailed off. “It must have been the drug. She made me see things. It was . . .”

He shook his head, speechless. His eyes looked haunted.

Rudd folded his arms over his chest. “What did she make you see? Come on. You know telepathy isn’t my thing. Tell me.”

Roy’s reddened eyes flicked away.

Rudd laughed. “Oh, something personal? Mean Mommy, coming into your bedroom to put the nightly clothespin on your dick? Straight pins to the testicles? Something sadistic and inces-tuous?”

“Fuck off,” Roy muttered.

“Interesting,” Rudd mused. “So the enhanced formula gave Kasyanov a brand-new talent. How would you characterize it, Roy? Illusion? Invasive telepathy, like Anabel?”

“Worse,” Roy blurted. “Deeper. A mix, maybe. She pulls it from your head, and then she throws it back at you. Sick, crazy bitch.”

“Enterprising of her,” Rudd murmured. “But what I don’t under stand is how she got away. No matter what she hit you with, on ten mg’s of psi-max, you should have been able to narrow in on her frequency afterwards, from miles away! How the hell did you lose her?”

Roy’s eyes slid down. “I was unconscious,” he muttered.

“When I came to, she was out of range. No trace at all. Just gone.”

“You fainted?” Rudd started to laugh. “Scrawny Helga Kasyanov, scared you unconscious? Roy. I’m disillusioned.”

“I hit my head when I fell down,” Roy protested, gingerly prodding the lump on his pate. “And when I came to, I—”

“Shut up, Roy. The details of your failure are not interesting to me. So you have no leads?”

“Not exactly. Our guy in the NYPD checked out the nine-one-one calls. A guy at a corner grocery on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn called an ambulance for a woman found lying on the sidewalk only fifteen blocks from the house where I lost Kasyanov. She was gone by the time the ambulance arrived, though. A car service driver stopped, some guy who spoke Ukrainian. He took her away in his car.”

“And . . . ?”

“The clerk gave me the number of the car service.” Roy looked pleased with himself. “I called the dispatcher, described the guy, told her I’d left a briefcase in his car. She gave me the guy’s name and cell, just like that. Such a nice girl. So sweet and helpful.”

“People are such idiots,” Rudd said, with dark satisfaction.

“Yeah. Yuri Marchuk. Came from Odessa fifteen years ago.

One divorced daughter. Preschool-age grandson. Apartment on Avenue B.”

Rudd pondered that for a moment, rubbing his chin.

“Well, boss? How far should I go with this Yuri character?”

“As far as necessary. We don’t want tales told, do we?”

“You want me to outsource this one?”

“What, Roy? Lost your nerve?” Rudd taunted.

Roy waved that jab away. “I have contacts in Brighton Beach who can communicate with this clown in his native language,” he said. “Dmitri Arbatov is good. And in my experience, once the hedge clippers come out, people tend to revert to the mother tongue.”

Rudd considered that. “Fine, but Anabel should be there when this guy talks, no matter what language or what methods of persuasion you use. Your telepathy’s not strong enough. You’re only good for long-range surveillance. You’re a tracker, Roy.

Nothing more.”

Roy looked stung. “My talent’s been plenty useful to you so far.”

“Not today,” Rudd murmured, pointedly.

Roy shrugged, defensively. “So I bring Anabel with me.”

“She’ll be busy fucking the senator this morning. Which can’t wait.”

“Neither can this. Ah, boss? One more thing you should know.”

Rudd braced himself, eyes closing. “Yes, Roy?”

“Arbatov could be our telepath for this job,” Roy said cautiously. “He’s good. As good as Anabel.”

Fury rose in Rudd’s head like a red fog. “You’ve been passing psi-max around to your
friends?
”

Rudd’s outrage battered Roy down onto the bed and pinned him there, writhing. But at this rate, he would have to completely remake the bed for Anabel’s impending exploits with Stillman.

He let Roy go.

Roy struggled up. “Sorry, boss.” His voice burbled with snot.

“I was actually trying to kill the guy. I figured, he’d be like the others, the ones we tested back at Karstow! I thought he’d go bonkers, and his brains would pop! I’d used him for a job, and I was cleaning house. Figured I’d flush him that way, so I wouldn’t risk his uncle Oleg coming after me. But, uh . . . he didn’t die.

He, uh, went telepath.”

“And you’ve been supplying him with psi-max? Behind my back?”

Roy nodded sheepishly. “It was that or kill him.”

“You should have killed him. No wonder you’re always short.”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “All right, Roy. If you say you can vouch for your Arbatov friend’s ability, I will authorize this. But only today. Are you sure you can control him?”

“If I have psi-max for him, I can,” Roy said. “He’ll do anything.”

Rudd rolled his eyes. “Well, then. Go to the supply site, get whatever you need, drugs, paraphenalia. When you get the information from him, have your mafiya friend do the honors. A drug deal gone wrong. One thing.” Rudd’s voice hardened. “Being linked to this would not enhance my tough-on-drugs platform, so explain to me why we couldn’t discuss this on the dedicated, encrypted phone.”

Roy hemmed and hawed. Rudd stuck his hands in his pockets and waited for it.

“I’m low,” Roy admitted. “I used two hits to power up while I was going after Kasyanov, and if I supply Arbatov, I won’t have enough—”

“You idiot,” Rudd snapped. “You can’t eat it like candy!

Kasyanov was the only one who could cook it up properly, and you lost her, Roy, along with the last two known doses of Psi-Max 48 that exist! I take it you didn’t find out whether it’s true? About the new formula stabilizing the psi? Or is that just another one of Helga’s lies?”

“Kasyanov didn’t talk, boss, and Anabel wasn’t there to read her.”

Kasyanov had made a big deal about the enhanced formula, promising that it would render their psi powers permanent, and much stronger. Kasyanov was hard to read, heavily shielded, but Anabel had still sniffed out the stink of a half-truth, so Rudd had deemed it prudent to try out Psi-Max 48 on the good doctor herself, in case it was a trap. Figuring that he’d see for himself just how well it functioned upon her.

Well, hell. The drug made her strong enough to escape from the lab where they had been holding her for three years, ever since they faked her death at the research facility fire. Strong enough to fell a vicious thug like Roy. Psi-Max 48 was strong stuff. He wanted it.

“Get on this, fast,” he said curtly. “We lose Kasyanov, we lose Psi-Max 48 permanently.”

“If you want me to catch her frequency, I’m going to need more hits,” Roy said. “Give me twenty, at least. Thirty would be better.”

Rudd pulled out a stoppered tube, and shook some small red pills out of it. “I’ll give you ten.” He passed them to Roy.

“I’ll need ten for Arbatov, too,” Roy reminded him.

“Eight,” Rudd said sternly, measuring out more. “But you want the magic pills? Do your job. And keep Arbatov under control. If you fuck this up, the well goes dry, and you’re just any old worthless schlub again, my friend, like in the bad old days. You want to go back to that?”

Roy’s Adam’s apple bobbed beneath the red scar tissue that covered his throat, swallowing saliva at the sight of the pills.