Ultimate Weapon (13 page)

Janos had guessed it. He’d put his finger right on it. And yet, he was the one who they sent to pimp her out to that scum Georg. He was the one charged with the task of throwing her back into the sewer.

Bastard. Putting Rachel’s safety at risk. She would pulverize him, eviscerate him, iron-maiden him. She punched in his number.

He picked up swiftly, even at this late hour. “Ms. Steele?”

“Don’t you Ms. Steele me, you stinking turd,” she hissed in Italian. “How dare you?”

“Ms. Steele.” The velvety amusement in his voice infuriated her. “I’m pleased to hear from you again so soon—”

“Shut up,” she snarled. “Mess with me and my daughter again, and I will annihilate you.”

A thoughtful pause on the other end. “Try to calm down,” he said gently in Italian. “Let’s meet and talk about this like two reasonable—”

“Fuck you,” she snarled. “You make me sick.”

She hung up on him and burst into tears.

T
am raced feverishly through the house. No time for blubbering or second thoughts. She’d practiced this routine in her mind hundreds of times until it was as automatic as a martial arts kata.

First, the big suitcase that was always packed, and updated every single week on Sunday evening after Rachel was in bed, inventoried to make sure it was up to date on Rachel’s constantly changing survival gear. The nose aspirator, the aerosol machine, the cortisone drops, the emergency antibiotics, the Tylenol syrup, the allergy ointments, the wipes, soaps, and anti-allergenic toiletries. Changes of clothes, diapers, underthings. A few bare essentials for herself tucked in around the corners. She pulled it out into the hall.

Then it was off to the kitchen, to grab some kiddie snacks. Crackers, carrot sticks, yogurts, cheese sticks, boxed fruit juices. The pantry safe, to yank out all the money and the envelope of bearer bonds. Her stash of passports. She thumbed through them, picked out her favorites, sealed the rest in the bag, and took them too. A tiptoeing pass through her bedroom to gather up emotional survival items; pink fuzzy blanket, curly-haired Sveti bear, battered blue binkie.

That son of a bitch. Her Rachel would never see her beloved Sveti again because of that meddling scum. She was alarmed to notice that tears were streaming down her face. She hadn’t known how much she valued what she had built here. Her comfortable house that felt almost safe. Her drop-dead beautiful view of the Pacific. Her beach access to a secluded cove that no one else could reach except by boat. The outrageous sunsets she could see from her kitchen, living room, studio and bedroom windows. Her fabulously equipped studio, the best she’d ever had. Her work, which she loved.

And her friends, too. No matter how much they irritated her, it hurt to let go of that sense of almost belonging. A group of people who knew her more or less for what she was and still accepted her—she wasn’t going to find that again, not in this lifetime. She mourned it even more for Rachel’s sake. All those aunts and uncles and cousins, lost.

Goddamn
him. But she had no time for this. She knew when she’d been outmaneuvered. Poor little Rachel, who counted so heavily on habit for her emotional equilibrium. She had to give up her home, her name, her nanny, maybe even her language, depending on where they ended up. And dragging a three-year-old on a high-stress, illegal cross-continental adventure was not going to be fun.

But she had no one to blame but herself for complicating her life beyond all reason. Enough bitching.

She packed as many of her Deadly Beauty designs as would fit into the carrying case she’d taken to Shibumi. Not that she would be able to sell them again, not without announcing her location to her enemies with a trumpet fanfare. She had the time it would take to drive to the airport to think of a brilliant plan to dispose of them. She couldn’t risk trying to carry them onto an airplane, at least the ones with hidden blades. If she put them in a checked bag, they would go through X-rays too, and a possible inspection by some airline employee would be too dangerous.

She threw her own personal favorites into her travel carrying case, sorting out and discarding the ones with explosives. Bad mix, airports and explosives. Just soporifics, and a couple of poison needle and spray pieces, for her physical person. The amount of dangerous substances in their reservoirs were small enough to risk going through airport security with them. She’d designed them that way on purpose.

Traveling could be dangerous. A woman always needed options.

Then, the computer. Dried tear tracks tickled her cheeks as she pinned down the first e-tickets she could find. Seattle to Hawaii, Hawaii to Auckland. Fine for now. Nice and far. She and Rachel could play on a warm beach and try being Kiwis. She closed her laptop, packed it.

She packed everything into the fogeymobile, an antiquated, butt-ugly beige Ford Taurus that the McClouds’ computer geek buddy Miles had sold to her some time ago. Invisible cars came in handy sometimes.

And then the hard part. Waking Rachel, dragging her out of a warm bed, dressing her, wrestling her into the car at this ungodly hour of the night. It would be an insult to anyone, let alone a toddler.

Rachel was as unhappy about it as Tam had anticipated, but once she got the kid strapped into the car seat, the worst of it was over. There was nothing like earsplitting wails of rage to keep a woman awake and alert on the road—and incidentally, to distract her from any impulse to look nostalgically back over her shoulder, as the closest thing to home she’d had since she was fifteen receded into the distance.

Back to zero again. What a bore. And she couldn’t even vow revenge on that goat-fucking bastard.

Her stomach burned, her chest was tight, her throat ached. She’d considered herself detached, but she needed a pair of bolt cutters to detach from all this. Snip, snip. Watch her bleed.

After a half hour, Rachel had shrieked herself into an exhausted doze, leaving Tam in blessed silence. She had less than two hours to come up with a clever plan for stashing her jewelry, other than the trunk of the car, abandoned in the long-term parking lot. There were worse places. No time to do anything else with them and still make the flight.

Either she’d get back to them, or she wouldn’t. Let it go. It was only hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in pure gold, platinum, precious gems, and creative designs that she’d spent years of her life developing. No biggie. Snip, snip with the bolt cutters. Let it go.

Rachel was sleeping when they got to the airport. Tam tucked her into the stroller and watched her breath fog around her pale, tiny face as they waited for the shuttle. Long in coming at this desolate hour.

The lines weren’t bad once they got to the terminal. She willed Rachel to stay asleep until the security gate. Not a chance that the kid would sleep through getting pulled out of her stroller, having her shoes removed and going through the bomb-puffing portal, but if Tam could hear herself think up until that point, she would count herself lucky.

Things went smoothly at the e-ticket kiosk as she put Rachel’s ticket info through, but it choked on her own. Tam hissed through her teeth as the message on the screen told her to talk to a ticket agent. Now for an interminable fucking wait in a long, slow line. The back of her neck was crawling madly as it was.

She spent the time in line analyzing everyone she could see, including the airline personnel, identifying potential attackers. One never knew. She wished she could have disguised herself, but then again, why bother? Rachel was a dead giveaway. It wasn’t as if she could pass the kid off as a bag lady or a Hasidic banker.

When she got to the head of the line, Rachel was awake, and starting to fuss. The apple-cheeked woman at the counter looked over their passports, tapped into her computer, and frowned.

She tapped some more, blinked, and shot a furtive glance at Tam. The woman’s eyes slid quickly away. Tam’s stomach clenched.

This, too. Janos must have accessed her computer, intercepted the data somehow. He’d red-flagged her.
Shit.
Tens of thousands invested in travel documents for Rachel and herself squashed in one deft move, and now what the fuck was she going to do?

This meant that Janos and God knew who else knew exactly where she was right now. Her heart sped up. She looked over her shoulder and reassessed everyone she’d studied before.

“Um, ma’am? I’m sorry, but there’s a problem with your passport.” The woman blinked nervously, as if expecting Tam to sprout horns. “I’m afraid you’ll have to, um, talk to security.”

“Security?” Tam made her eyes innocently big, and pulled Rachel out of her stroller. The toddler wrapped her arms around Tam’s neck in her octopus hug. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s just a little glitch in the system,” the lady assured her. “But if you’d just step over there to the side and wait, I’ll have ’em come right on over and sort this out for ya right away, OK?”

Tam exchanged big, fake, golly-gee-aren’t-these-machines-a-pain-in-the-behind smiles with the woman and walked the way she’d been pointed. Leaving behind the survival suitcase full of medicines, toys, equipment. Leaving behind the stroller and the compromised passports. Keeping only the diaper bag, her purse, and Rachel. Snip, snip went the bolt cutters. She walked past the place the woman had indicated.

“Um, ma’am? Wait right there, please,” the woman called out anxiously. “Security’ll be right with ya!”

“Sorry, but my daughter needs the bathroom,” Tam called back. “Urgently, or we’ll have an accident. I’ll be right back, OK? Gotta scoot!”

She ducked around the corner, circled a crowd of Japanese tourists being herded into the ticket line by a harrassed tour operator, and sprinted down the escalator to the ground transportation area. There were several people in line for the taxis, and no taxis to be seen. She could not wait in that line. They would be on her in minutes.

The shuttle to the other terminals and the long-term parking lot was in the far lane. She darted across the road and climbed aboard the short bus, slumping down in the seat to be less visible. A minute or so later, a tall guy in an army jacket with a battered knapsack, long tangled brown hair and a bushy beard climbed aboard. She’d seen him in the terminal, asleep in one of the chairs, legs sprawled, mouth hanging open. Shaded John Lennon glasses covered his eyes.

He slouched promptly down into his seat and fell asleep again. The reek of his patchouli and marijuana filled the shuttle. He must be going somewhere in Asia, to smoke massive quantities of weed and dream his days away in the Himalayas, or the sun-drenched beaches of Phuket. The lucky bastard.

“Is this bus leaving?” She couldn’t control the edge in her voice.

“Two minutes,” the guy said.

Two minutes were a goddamn eternity. The next passenger to board was a tall, burly guy with a square chin, and a thick neck, and a swollen, reddened face that screamed
steroids.
Late thirties. Long, layered blond hair. Big white teeth. Hulking shoulders. No suitcase, just a knapsack. He slumped into the seat opposite hers. His thick thigh muscles bulged, straining his tight jeans.

Tam’s neck crawled. She had no guns or knives. They were out of the question for anyone hoping to fly. She had nothing helpful on her except a topaz-studded sopor-spray barrette with a very small reservoir. A one-squirt deal. Maybe two squirts, if she was lucky.

Rachel was starting to tug at Tam’s coat and ask questions she could not focus on sufficiently to answer. Two more guys got on the shuttle, both suspiciously young, fit and unencumbered. One was a lanky black man with a hooded sweatshirt, a duffel bag over his shoulder. The other was a crewcut jock type in polar fleece with a backpack. Both of them had cold, hard faces. Neither looked at her.

That, in itself, was strange enough to warrant alarm, even at an airport at the crack of dawn. In the normal universe, any straight man who saw her looked at her and then looked again. It wasn’t vanity, just a simple fact of life. The fact that three men in a row had not done so was a very bad sign.

In the very second in which Tam decided that throwing herself on the mercy of airport security was preferable to the ominous possibilities of these strange men, the bus lurched abruptly out onto the road.

She leaped up. “Hold on. Wait! I’m getting off here!”

The driver accelerated and cleared the end of the terminal, easing the bus into the chute of an exit ramp. No escape.

“Too late,” he said, his voice faintly triumphant. “You can get off at the next terminal, or you can make the loop.”

Tam sank back down into her seat, jaw clenched, and fought with the urge to panic. She murmured something senseless but soothing to Rachel’s inquisitive babble, and she started rummaging in the diaper bag for her jewelry case. Her hands were cold, shaking.

She was an idiot for having put Rachel into this situation. For not finding a solution sooner, not doing the hard, necessary thing before it came to this. There were some possibilities in her purse, but she disliked the thought of spraying toxic substances in an enclosed area near Rachel. She identified each by touch, discarding one after the other as too risky. The barrette she currently wore was her best bet. It was a small dose, and just a soporific, not a poison or a corrosive, if Rachel should accidently take a hit.

She pulled it out of her hair, positioned it between her fingers.

Maybe she was being paranoid, she thought. These men might just be mercenaries off to Iraq or Afghanistan. Men like that tended to have that hard, suspicious vibe. They kept to themselves, traveled light.

Yeah, right. Her stomach churned. Rachel picked up on Tam’s unease, and went very quiet, clutching Tam’s collar with damp, clammy kitten claws.

Thick Neck slid across his seat, across the aisle, and into the seat behind them. He leaned on the back of their seat, grinning.

Adrenaline ramped up in her overloaded system. Her hand tightened on the barrette. Thick Neck fluttered blunt, bolt-knuckled red fingers at Rachel. “Hi there, cutie,” he said in a hoarse voice.

Tam gave him a big, sweet, sudden-death smile. Rachel dove for cover in her bosom. He watched appreciatively. “Nice,” he said.

“She doesn’t like strangers,” Tam said.

“She’ll like me when she gets used to me,” Thick Neck said.

The hell she will, shithead,
she told him with her eyes. “Why don’t you just piss off?” she suggested sweetly.

The segue into doom had been so smooth, she wasn’t even surprised when the SIG with the silencer rose up, cleared the top of the seat, and pointed at the back of Rachel’s curly head.

The guy clicked his tongue. “Rude,” he whispered. “Now listen to me, bitch. Do exactly what I tell you. Move real slow, and don’t make a sound. I’ll let you just imagine what’ll happen if you don’t, because I don’t want to have to say it in front of the little cutie-pie. Got me?”

Tam’s eyes darted around the bus. The men who’d gotten in after Thick Neck watched what was happening with expressionless faces. Patchouli Pothead dozed blissfully on, head lolling, mouth slack.