White Heat (32 page)

She thanked Antonio, urged him to be careful, and then hung up. “How do I get in touch with Max?” she asked Carol. One more thing Max hadn’t shared with her. Not one freaking
scrap of
contact information.

The girl’s blue eyes widened. “1 don’t know. I just serve food. I’m not an operative.”

“Who would know?”

“I can ask my supervisor,” Carol offered. “It may take me awhile. I’m not exactly on the ‘eyes only’ list around here.”

“Can you have someone bring my purse, and the rest of my things?” Her cell phone was in her purse. She could try the number she’d used to call him when Daniel had died.

“Oh, sure. No prob.” Carol left the room and Emily picked at the food.

When no one returned in the next half hour, Emily got up and tried to open the door. She was not prepared to sit in here all day waiting and reading the same magazine all day. She twisted the handle.

She was stunned to find the door locked.

Her heart jumped up into her throat. Why would they lock her in? To prevent her from wandering around a secret facility? Probably. The logic of that didn’t annoy her any less. In fact, it pissed her off. Going back to the bed, she grabbed the buzzer and rang for a nurse. She wanted to go. Now.

She wanted the rest of her clothes, her money, and her ID. And while she didn’t know where the hell Max had disappeared to, he could always find
her.

She was going home.

Her anger mounted as her repeated summonses on the bell produced not a single freaking soul. “Where the hell
is
everybody?” she demanded, slapping a hand on the closed door. “Hey people! Patient wants out! Come and get me!”

No one came. She couldn’t hear anyone outside the door either. Had she heard footsteps and voices before she’d realized the door was locked? She couldn’t remember. Other than the nurse at eight, and Carol and breakfast at nine, Emily hadn’t seen a soul in hours. There’d been no follow-up visit from the doctor either, which she found strange.

“This is
way
too
Twilight Zone-ish
for me.” After an hour she figured they’d just forgotten about her, and were busy with other patients.
Eventually
a nurse would have an ah-ha moment and come racing in.

When nobody came racing in Emily went from furious to scared, and back to furious.

She paced the small room. Reread the magazine. Lay on the bed. Jumped up. And paced some more. Pounding on the door was a waste of time, and hurt her hands. Ringing the buzzer was useless as well. She’d run out of cuss words in the first hour.

Hour two of pacing had her imagining a nuclear attack. Everyone had vacated the building, and her decomposed body, when found, would have a half-life of a million years.

Max would be sorry as hell that he’d left her here.

It was nearly three full hours later when a man and woman entered her room.

Emily rose from the chair she’d been sitting in long enough to have the shape of the chair imprinted on her butt. “About time. I appreciate the accommodations, folks, and the T-food was great, but I have a life, and I’d really, really like to get out of here.” She was so angry, she didn’t want an explanation. She just wanted to get the hell out.

The man was tall and bulky and dressed from head-to-toe in black. The woman was exotic with features and coloring that made country of origin or even race indiscernible. She wore bright red lipstick, and was also dressed in sleek, tight-fitting dark clothing. They didn’t introduce themselves.

Which was fine and dandy with Emily. She would be hard- pressed to be polite at the moment.

“You’re getting your wish, Miss Greene.” The woman, who was wearing designer, black-framed glasses, handed her a small stack of clothing—black, of course—and a pair of lighter than air black sneakers. “Please change quickly. Aries instructed us to bring you to him without delay.”

Irritation warred with relief as Emily accepted the clothes. “Really? Then perhaps he shouldn’t have left me here cooling my jets for hours. Where is he? And if I find out he had anything to do with my incarceration I’m going to do him bodily harm. A simple, ‘Emily, I need to keep you secure. I’ll be locking you in for your own safety,’ would have sufficed.” Her jaw ached from grinding her teeth together.

“That’s on a need-to-know basis. Aries asked that your departure from the facility be discreet. Please change quickly, we have a plane waiting.”

“I can assure you, I need to know.”

“Then I’m sure Aries will fill you in once you’re on board.” The man glanced at his watch. A very nice Rolex Submariner. She recognized the ebony face. She’d given Daniel the same watch for his birthday several years ago.

It was ridiculous standing here arguing. They weren’t going to tell her anything. And it wasn’t as if she wanted to stay down here forever. Emily went into the bathroom to change. Max probably wanted her to go back to Richard Tillman and see if she could identify any more paintings.

Which she was happy to do. Nice of him to bother asking her himself. But en route to wherever he was taking her, she had some personal questions she wanted answered by T-freaking-FLAC operative Max Aries.

Seventeen

“Is IT ALWAYS THIS QUIET IN THE AFTERNOONS?” EMILY ASKED her two companions. She knew the answer. No. From what she’d seen on the two occasions she’d walked around T-FLAC’s headquarters, there’d been at least a few people one bumped into in passing. Several of the doors to various offices had been open when she and Max had arrived yesterday. She could easily be in any multistory office complex. But now all the doors were closed, and the brightly lit hallways were empty A faint slither of foreboding crawled down her back.

The kind of intuition that she would normally dismiss as an artist’s imagination. But it hadn’t been her imagination when a stranger had broken into her palazzo and tried to kill her. It hadn’t been imagination when she’d walked into the Bozzatos’ home and sensed that something was horribly wrong.

She’d ignored her rusty intuition when they’d been pulled over by the fake
volizia
and she’d almost been kidnapped.

Emily straightened her shoulders, outwardly keeping a smile on her face just as inwardly she promised never to ignore her intuition again. If she made a fool of herself, so be it.

Flanked by the two operatives, she stopped walking. They each took an extra step before halting and Emily’s skin chilled. God. This was insane.

No matter how stupid she felt asking two
maybe
T-FLAC operatives to ID themselves in the counterterrorists’ own building, she asked anyway. “I’d like to see your identification.” Looking from him, tall and deadly, to her, who appeared just as dangerous, and back again. Every flight instinct in her body was telling her to get the hell away from these two.
Fast.

“Are you out of your mind, Miss Greene?” The woman grabbed Emily’s arm tightly just above the elbow. “Look around. We don’t have time for this shit. Who do you
think
we are?”

I think that just because you dress like ducks, and carry weapons like ducks, you’re turkeys.
“You didn’t introduce yourselves,” Emily pointed out, striving to sound both puzzled and reasonable. Tipping her hand wasn’t in her own best interests. They hadn’t been holding onto her when they’d been walking, even though the couple had flanked her from the moment they escorted her from her room. Now the woman’s fingers dug into Emily’s arm like a vise.

Maintaining eye contact, Emily peeled the woman’s fingers off her arm one by one. “I don’t like being manhandled. I’m perfectly capable of walking on my own.”

The woman’s red lips thinned as she let her hand drop away. “Then
walk.
I’m Catherine Seymour,” the woman introduced herself briskly, urging Emily to move. “Bob Stover. We have a finite window to reach the landing strip, Miss Greene. Aries isn’t a patient man.”

Definitely the bad guys, Emily knew with conviction as she reluctantly fell back into step with them. Max was the personification of patience. Annoyingly so.

Emily had seen a photograph of Catherine Seymour. The woman speaking definitely wasn’t the same person she’d overheard Max and his team discussing. In addition to being a traitor, the real Catherine Seymour was a well-endowed, tall redhead. The woman next to her was barely five foot two, brunette, and built like an adolescent gymnast. Emily might not know who she was, but she definitely knew who she wasn’t. The knowledge wasn’t comforting. The only reason for anyone to yank her away from T-FLAC headquarters stilled her blood but her brain kicked into overdrive.

Get away. Quickly.

“Will you be going with us?” Emily asked as she scanned the corridor up ahead.
Come on T-people. Where the hell are the good guys with big guns? I need rescuing here!

“We’re to deliver you to the plane. We’ll receive orders there.”

Dead or alive?

Wherever the rest of the T-FLAC personnel were, they weren’t
here.
While it would be dandy to sit right down on the floor and wait for the guys in the white hats to save her, Emily realized that wasn’t going to happen. Any rescuing that was to be done would have to be done by herself. They were approaching a bank of elevators. If she made a run for it, they’d probably shoot her. They had the guns, and the corridor was damn straight. They wouldn’t miss. She figured if these two were smart enough to get inside such a high security facility they were smart enough to kill her and efficiently dispose of her body without a trace.

The elevator doors pinged open. The three of them walked inside. The doors pinged closed and the elevator began to climb.

If they’d wanted to kill her, Emily reasoned, watching the numbers above the doors climb from five, to four to three, then she’d be dead by now.

Two.

One.

Ground level. They wanted her outside. Alive.

Good. She was fine with that. Outside was open space. Outbuildings. Places to hide. The chance of someone seeing them and alerting other someones.

The man used two key cards at the front doors. Then held up something half wrapped in plastic and pressed it to a scanner.

Emily choked back bile as the man slipped the severed finger back into his pocket.

OhGodohGodohGod. Definitely the bad guys.

Snow lay thick on the ground, and the icy air bit into her lungs with each rapid breath she dragged in. Sunlight reflected back from the stark whiteness as they stepped through the doors of what, from the outside, looked like a modest ranch-style office building. Emily knew the airport was less than five minutes away by car. If they were actually going to the airport.

A black car with tinted windows sat in the driveway about fifty feet away. If she was going to make a run for it, she’d damn well better do it before they got her into that car.

If she was wrong, and they’d really been sent to bring her to Max, then she’d apologize like hell. Later. But she was trusting her instincts and making a run for it.

Now.

To the left was a row of low buildings, beyond that an enormous open field, beyond that—way beyond that—trees, beyond that, mountains. Boy, talk about being out of her comfort zone. Not an art gallery for miles, Emily thought as panic continued to build, almost choking her. How in God’s name was she going to get away from two armed and determined people?

All she knew was she would die trying because it was either make a break for it here, or get into that car and die somewhere else.

It was a lose/lose proposition.

“Bob” went around and opened the driver’s side door and got in.

“Turn the heat on. I’m freezing,” “Catherine” instructed, then placed a hand on Emily’s back and shoved her toward the car. “Get in front.”

Catching her balance as she staggered, Emily dropped to one knee on the stamped concrete walkway. “Go ahead, I just need to retie my sh—”

She felt a prick on the side of her neck and tried to swat away the hand beside her face. “Nooo da . . . mn i .. .“ The ground came up to meet her, and everything went black.

“You FUCKING LET THEM
TAKE
HER?” DARIUS DEMANDED.

“Someone with inside knowledge sent them in to take Greene,” Marc Savin, head of T-FLAC, said calmly. He and five of his key strategists were seated in the secure boardroom on the third floor. Darius, one of his best operatives, and the one who had decided to waste his training to live in Paradise, looked incongruous in his Hawaiian shirt on the big screen at T-FLAC HQ. Dare was another loose end that needed tidying, Marc thought, draining the cold coffee in his cup.

“We were impressed that they managed to get inside and activate that particular alarm code:’ he told Dare. The alarm code that placed everyone inside their respective offices, and locked the doors from the outside. The thought was that if anyone—anyone at all—somehow managed to breach T-FLAC’s intense security at ground level, it would be almost impossible for them to breach any of the floors below. And if somehow they managed
that
near impossible feat, then they couldn’t access any of the labs or sensitive communication stations.

In theory, the plan had worked. If Marc hadn’t permitted the first fingerprint/keycard entry, the couple wouldn’t have gotten farther than the lobby on ground level. While the couple were his guests he’d been secretly collecting data about them. While his people ran face recognition scans and X-rayed their bodies, Marc had watched their bold progress through the building on his monitor.

They’d known
exactly
where Emily Greene was located. Not just the floor, but her room number. They were in a labyrinth of offices and labs filled with custom-designed electronics, state-of- the-art encryption software, surveillance technologies, military- grade and prototype weaponry; sensitive and classified scientific and forensic equipment. A veritable buffet of tools any terrorist organization would give their eyeteeth to acquire. All that at their fingertips and yet Greene had been the prize.

“We’ve only ever run that as an exercise,” he told the irate Control evenly. “It worked without flaw.”