The Other Crowd (20 page)

“I need to know for certain Eric will be released if I do this,” she said.

“He’s…out of it right now,” Neville said. “Unable to talk.”

“High on LSD, just like Beth?”

Neville shook his head. “Beth was a mistake.”

“Why didn’t you kill her right away?”

“I am not a cruel man, like you want to believe, Annja.”

She mentally rolled her eyes. Why did the bad guys always think by not pulling the trigger they were doing good, or at the very least, a favor?

“There are others missing, as well,” she prompted.

“A few people got in the way. I took measures into hand. Now, I do love this chat. It’s so rare an intelligent woman intrigues me. But I want to get rolling before the sun sets.”

“You think this truck will get far with a flat tire?”

“Got it under control.” Neville gestured to his uninjured thugs, who shuffled toward the back of the truck and began to release the spare tire from the undercarriage. “Slater, why don’t you get Murphy and Miss Creed situated while we wait.”

Slater slapped a hand on Annja’s shoulder. She kicked his shin, setting him off balance, and managed to swing under his bulk before he landed on the ground.

A gun barrel stabbed her under the chin. Neville helped her to stand. “Play nice, Annja. You won’t do your friend any good if you’re dead.”

She nodded and put up her hands in placation. A shove from the pistol pointed her toward the truck cab. Slater slapped a hand on her shoulder and shoved her forward, but didn’t release her.

“Drive,” he muttered, so others could not hear. “Follow Neville to the warehouse. Whatever you do, don’t get out of the cab. These vehicles have been outfitted specially. The windshield should be bulletproof.”

“Should be?”

“You are a bloody pest,” he hissed. One final shove put her beside the truck cab, “Open it!”

Annja stepped and opened the door. A body fell from the driver’s seat. She jumped to the side to avoid getting plowed to the ground by the dead weight.

“Martin,” Slater directed. “Get this thing out of the way.”

Martin, who had put the spare tire in position, walked over and gripped the driver’s body under both arms. Half the skull was gone. Annja guessed he’d taken a high-caliber shot at close range.

“Hop in, Miss Creed,” Slater said.

Steeling herself to put the dead man out of her thoughts worked only so long as it took to look over the spray of blood across the back of the beaded wooden seat cover. Small chunks of skull bone and flesh glinted with sunlight.

Slater invaded her space so quickly Annja didn’t realize he’d cuffed her left wrist to the steering wheel with a plastic zip tie until it was too late.

“I can’t sit in here with this…” She swallowed.

He pressed his bulk along the length of her body and leaned in to wipe across the seat back with his sleeve.

“You are far too comfortable with dead bodies and their parts,” she muttered.

“Comes with the territory. Now play nice if you want to get out of this alive, got that?”

“Is that offer still good to put me on a flight out of the country?”

“Expired when you decided to become a royal pain in my arse.”

“Get away from me,” she snapped. “That’s good enough.”

He jumped down and Annja settled onto the seat. It was so large she didn’t need to sit all the way back against the wet beads.

She wrestled with the zip tie. “I’m not going to jump out of a moving vehicle,” she said.

“I certainly hope not.” Slater shrugged off his suit coat, the sleeve thick with human remains, and tossed it to the ground.

She didn’t understand why Neville needed her to do this when his thug could easily drive the truck. And there’d be no body count that way. Though it was a great way to keep her under thumb, as he’d explained. And the bad guys were always less rational than they believed themselves to be. He probably thought this was a grand plan.

“The directions are programmed in the GPS. But the SUV will drive ahead of you so you won’t get lost,” Neville explained as he approached the truck. “Don’t need you diverting off course. Now I’ll let Martin give you a little instruction on driving a truck and then we’ll send you off. Good day, Miss Creed. Happy to have you on board.”

Neville and his entourage drove a quarter mile ahead of Annja. The SUV didn’t push beyond thirty kilometers an hour. She knew passing them on this narrow road and taking off for freedom was out of the question.

Annja wanted to follow Neville to the warehouse, or wherever it was he was leading her. If the slightest chance existed that she’d find Eric at their destination, she couldn’t pass it up.

She’d gotten the hang of the ride, and could manage steering without twisting her wrist. But a sharp turn caused the thin plastic zip tie to bite into her flesh.

Summoning the sword into her grip, she carefully clasped the blade and worked it under the plastic band. The zip tie severed and she dropped the blade into the otherwhere. Freedom obtained.

Now, to follow the bad guys to their lair.

Ten minutes into the drive, Annja’s cell phone rang. She tugged it from her pocket and checked the caller ID. “Garin?”

Sucking in her upper lip, she vacillated on whether to answer. Whatever the man wanted was never a simple “Want to do lunch?”

On the other hand, sometimes it was an invite to dine, in a country at least two thousand miles from her current location. She appreciated his intent to seduce her—because that is what it was, a drawn-out seduction. But just because
she
knew it would never happen didn’t mean she had to shatter the man’s hopes.

The front of the truck swerved dangerously close to the gravel shoulder. Gripping the wheel, she realigned the truck on the road with a squeal of the tires.

She checked the side mirror. Slater, behind her, hadn’t reacted. The Jeep remained four car lengths away.

“No time for chatting.” She tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. He could leave a message.

Though she could handle the stick shift on the gravel roads, she had to keep a keen eye out for bumps and stray turtles. And sheep. And keep far enough behind Neville. The SUV stirred up the dust.

Her phone jingled again.

“No time for this, Garin. Not unless you can swoop in and—” The man
was
skilled at rescue operations. He’d had a hand in helping her out of a few tight spots. Not that Annja felt she needed to be rescued at this very moment. Slater was close in her wake. Bringing another person into the mix might only spook Neville, and ultimately, she may never learn where Eric was being kept.

She let the call go to voice messaging.

The green fields segued to city grays and tarmac as their cavalcade entered the outskirts of Kinsale. The delivery truck bumped across a railroad track, the warning horn from the engine announcing an oncoming train.

Moments later, Annja’s phone rang and, thinking it was Garin again, she ignored it. It rang unceasingly and she finally slapped it open. “Yes?”

“Annja, I’ve been cut off.”

“Slater?” She checked the side mirror. No sign of his Jeep. “What’s up? How’d you get my number?”

“Never mind. I wasn’t able to beat the train. I think it’ll put me about five, ten minutes behind you. There’s a harbor in Kinsale that Neville has been accessing for the river drop-offs. First, you’ll stop at a warehouse to load more weapons.”

“If Eric is there—”

“I know, you intend to save the day. Don’t be stupid, Annja. The man shot Wesley in cold blood. You think he’s going to let you live after you arrive at your destination?”

“No. And I’m not being stupid. I just wasn’t given the ‘run now and seek freedom’ option.”

“Annja, listen to me. Follow Neville to the warehouse, but don’t drive inside. Once he’s got you inside, your number is up. Stay outside, you hear me?”

She nodded.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Okay. Stay inside the truck. Dangerous inside the warehouse. Windows are bulletproof. What are you going to do? You can’t blow your cover.”

“I don’t intend to. I’ll figure something out.”

“Figure something out? You don’t have a plan?”

“Trust me, Annja.”

Since no one else was making the same offer, she accepted. “I’ll meet you in the city.”

T
HE
SUV
PULLED
into a warehouse at the edge of the small harbor town. Annja suspected it wasn’t large enough to be a major shipping port and probably catered to fishing boats, maybe the odd yacht or two. That was a lot more convenient for running guns than a larger port, which would employ a port authority to check all incoming and outgoing shipments.

She noted the warehouse was set apart from what looked like the city proper. It was private, and there were no residential houses in the immediate vicinity.

The warehouse sat at the bottom of a hill that blocked direct view of the sea. The harbor was ahead, flocks of white seagulls her clue. The clear blue sky looked too perfect for this moment.

She slowed the truck to a stop before the corrugated steel warehouse door that slowly rose on pulleys. Neville’s vehicle drove inside and parked. The man got out and shook hands with a waiting man.

A couple of men who were already in the warehouse rushed to the SUV to assist. Murphy, clutching his injured arm, was helped out. He flipped off Annja, and unstrapped his gun.

Neville signaled with a wave of his hand for her to drive forward and park to the right next to the steel loading ramp. Normally a truck such as she drove would back inside to be loaded. She was facing forward.

And she didn’t intend to drive any farther into the lion’s den. Shifting into park, Annja scanned the side mirrors for the cavalry. It had been five minutes; Slater had to be close behind.

An angry bark accompanied a rap on the truck’s steel door. Annja waved the thug off and locked the door.

She knew it was a risk to consider leaving the vehicle. “I didn’t exactly promise to sit tight,” she muttered.

Slater was a trained professional. He had been working with Neville for months, and knew the man’s foibles and modus operandi. He obviously knew when to do exactly as he’d been commanded, or when to wing it to save the day, even when Neville would sooner jump ship and abandon his profits to bandits.

A quick count tallied four men besides the wounded Murphy and Neville. All were armed. Neville didn’t appear to be one to get his hands dirty. He just pulled out a gun and shot anyone who pissed him off. And he had no reason to keep her alive from this point on.

Could Eric be somewhere inside the warehouse?

She surveyed the loading ramp that angled up to a wooden dock. It was stacked with the same wooden boxes she’d seen being hauled to the river the other night. Weapons and ammunition set to be loaded into the truck she sat in—along with the guns already inside—and then driven to the harbor, was her guess.

She did not want to participate in transporting illegal arms to be shipped off to some war zone.

Could this shipment be legal? There were so many variations and fine print to the arms-dealing trade. Annja knew there were three types of deals. White, gray and black. White deals, dominated by governments and weapons manufacturers, were considered above the table, completely legit. The black deals, freelancer central, were strictly under-the-table and illegal.

It was the appropriately named gray trades that were the most confusing and hardest to label good or bad. They involved clandestine deals made by freelancers on behalf of governments.

The windshield cracked. Annja jumped. The glass did not shatter but the crackling continued out from the initial hit, spidering to all corners of the window.

Neville stood in front of the delivery truck, his pistol aimed for a second shot. Bulletproof generally meant no cracks, at least not as much as this windshield was cracking. The vehicle was old. She had maybe two or three more shots before the bullets pierced the window.

“I can’t just sit here,” she said.

Unlocking the door and opening it, Annja gave it a kick. The thug standing outside took the steel door in the jaw and stumbled backward. Arms splaying, he didn’t drop his weapon, but it clattered as he hit the concrete.

Annja summoned the sword to hand. In the compact truck cab it stretched out over the passenger seat. She knew what she was doing. And she had been given this power; she was not assuming a thing. The dream could not have been portentous. This was her fight to own.

Annja leaped out into the fray.

Thug number one lay sprawled on the loading-dock floor. He was out cold after Annja had clocked him in the jaw with the truck door. He still held the pistol in hand, which she had time to kick across the floor. It landed under the left front tire of the truck.

She now only had three thugs to deal with. Murphy was standing, but she wasn’t too worried about his ability to fight with his wounds. And Neville remained an amused bystander.

Slashing the sword before her soughed the air crisply. The battle sword was nothing fancy, but it did hold a fine edge and could cut through flesh with ease. She had no compunctions about doing just that if any approaching attacker threatened her life.

From the back of the warehouse where the loading platform stood four feet high, two men in sandy-colored overalls charged at her. They didn’t pull out guns. As they got closer to Annja, they synchronized their moves. Arms stretched out, they clasped the forearm of the other to form a bar between them.

Sword blade upright, Annja pumped her arms and ran toward the men. Three feet from the oncoming battering ram, she leaped, did a summersault in the air and came down on bended knee behind the two surprised thugs. As possessor of the sword she’d learned a few impressive moves.

Lunging up to stand and swinging the sword in warning toward the thugs, she turned, bringing her sword arm down and behind her as she faced Neville.

He crossed his arms high on his chest, his gun tucked in his waistband. A shrug silently conveyed the message “I’m watching. Show me your best.”

At the moment, Annja detected no danger from him and so focused on the three remaining deterrents to her continued breathing. Behind Neville the loading platform stretched along the wall; one end was connected to a steel roller ramp used to slide boxes into a waiting truck, the other end stopped at the wall. On the second floor, at the top of a stairway that hugged the brick wall, an office door caught her eye.

Annja made a run for it and jumped onto the platform. If Eric was here, he was behind that second-floor door. She spun to sight her opponents as a pistol cracked. The sound was off. The weapon hadn’t fired correctly. And it hadn’t come from Neville.

The third thug who hadn’t yet approached her yelped and dropped a pistol near his feet. Gripping his bloody hand he swore in Gaelic. The gun must have misfired, which was virtually impossible with a well-made weapon. If those were the kinds of arms Neville was selling, Annja wondered how he could keep up the business and not bring countless unsatisfied customers after him with blood in their eyes.

She didn’t have time to struggle with the right and wrong of the quality of product offered in illicit arms sales. The two thugs who had failed to corral her earlier moved to opposite ends of the platform. The dock thundered under her feet as they clambered up in pursuit.

She met the first, but the clatter of the steel platform distracted her and she lost her timing. He charged into her body with a grunt, fearless of the sword. The impact loosened her grip on the sword. Even with it she couldn’t fight effectively when the man was so close. He punched her in the gut. Her shoulders hit the corrugated steel wall. The wall clattered like close thunder.

Releasing the sword into the otherwhere, Annja used the fact she was pinned by the shoulders to lift her knees and jam her heels into the thug’s shins. The hard rubber soles of her boots scraped down his shins, but his heavy overalls protected his skin from damage.

A forehead to his chin reverberated in Annja’s skull. Her opponent released her long enough to receive an open-palmed smack aside his jaw. Following quickly with another palmheel jab to his ribs, she kept the punches coming, keeping her elbows in and close, and head down.

She pressed her opponent backward against the wall—and was grabbed from behind. Two iron-strong arms banded about her shoulders and upper chest. Sucking in a breath, Annja kicked from her standing position, pushing backward, but she couldn’t topple her aggressor.

Calling the sword to hand, she slashed it across the other thug’s chest. A diagonal red line stained his overalls. He gripped his chest, not believing that he’d been cut.

Suddenly Annja’s equilibrium altered. The thug holding her lifted her off the ground. Her body tilted too far off balance. Wrapped in her opponent’s grasp, together they teased gravity—then fell.

The thug shouted. They both landed hard on the floor. Jaws clacking, Annja struggled against the sudden blackness that grasped at her consciousness. Wheezing in a breath of oxygen, she countered the near-blackout.

Thankful for the padded landing, she pushed off from the thug’s barrel chest. He was out cold. Standing, she turned, sword in hand, just in time to catch the other man as he leaped from the platform and into her embrace.

With no time to swing, she sent the sword clattering across the floor while she wrangled with the man who was bleeding profusely from his chest. Bending her knees would center her gravity and make the catch easier, but the man was too big for it to matter. Her muscles gave way and Annja dropped, twisting, so the man would be beneath her when they landed on the floor.

Not allowing him time to think through his next move, Annja gripped his head on both sides, grabbing hair, and slammed the back of his skull into the floor. The first hit made him blink and groan. With the second he stopped moving at all.

She sensed someone rush toward her as she knelt over the fallen man. It was Murphy, and he was injured, but determined. She wouldn’t have time to stand and meet his attack with the sword, so Annja rolled off the man’s body and looked up to find Murphy’s feet swept out from under him.

Slater locked his arm across the man’s neck. Just when it looked like he’d snap his neck, he instead applied pressure to both sides of his neck, focusing on the carotid, reducing the man to unconsciousness.

The subtle
snick
of a gun safety sliding off alerted Annja. It wasn’t a Walther P99.

“God, I love a woman who can fight,” Neville said. His aim was squarely for her forehead. “It really turns me on.”

Annja scrambled to her feet. Unsure of whose side Slater would stand on, she backed toward the truck, keeping herself in the middle between Slater and Neville.

“Whoa, Frank!” Slater stepped before Annja in a protective stance. That answered her question. “What’s going on?”

“I can ask you the same.” Neville waved his gun at Slater. “What’s with the hero stuff? Fighting on the wrong side?”

“I’m trying to keep down the casualty count.”

“You weren’t hired for that.”

“No, but I was hired for discretion. And if you had kept the barge captain out of the land operation, we wouldn’t even have this problem right now because no one would have been kidnapped to get them out of the way.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Slater. Taking the woman’s side?”

“You know whose side I’m on.” Slater avoided eye contact with Annja. He shrugged his shoulders and touched the gun at his side, but didn’t take it out of the holster. “Can’t be murdering innocent women now, can we?”

“I can, and I will, if that is what is required from one with a spine. Christ, no wonder this operation is going tits up. But I will admit, you’re right. Miss Creed is far too interesting to dispose of in such an unoriginal manner. Bullets are so passé.”

Neville paced the floor in front of the loading platform, surveying his fallen men. “I’ll say it again, she’s quite the talent. Amusing to watch her take out my men so easily. I won’t even ask about the sword. I have a feeling that falls somewhere along the lines between mysterious caches of diamonds and the other crowd.”

Annja breathed in, lifting her chest. Hands at her hips, she maintained a ready stance. Slater was not breaking his cover, which could put her at the disadvantage. But he had protected her so far; she wasn’t willing to give up on him yet.

“Where is Eric?” she asked.

“You—” Neville pointed the gun at her while he spoke “—don’t get to talk. You,” he said, switching his focus to Slater, “had better do some fast talking.”

“Just preventing collateral damage,” Slater said.

“You always have my back, Slater. You’ve been a valuable asset to my team. But we can’t let her stroll out of here now. She’s seen everything.”

“Miss Creed can keep her mouth shut.”

“Are you going to see to that?”

“If I have to.” Slater looked at her, but she didn’t react.

“You’ve done a lousy job of it so far.” Neville cocked the trigger. “I think you and the woman have a thing going on.”

“That is ridiculous,” Slater said.

“You don’t say that very convincingly.” Neville eyed Annja up and down, his reaction more disgust than interest. “The only reason you would protect her is if you’re involved with her. Honestly, I don’t care who you screw on your own time, Slater. But in this situation, your extracurricular shagging has caused me one hell of a headache.”

“We are not—” Annja began.

“Shut up,” Neville barked at Annja. “I know how to handle this. We’re going for a ride, the three of us. I’m tired of you shadowing me, Slater. I should have done this days ago.”

Neville nudged one groaning thug with his foot. The man managed to pull himself up to stand. He was the least damaged of the men, and quickly retrieved a rifle and magazine from a nearby box. He directed Annja and Slater to the SUV Neville had arrived in.

“Annja,” Slater whispered as they approached the car, “you were supposed to wait inside the cab until the cavalry arrived.”

“Did you take a look at my final resting place?”

He glanced over at the damaged windshield. “Bloody hell. Sorry. You okay?”

“Sure. Did you blow your cover?”

“Let’s hope not.”