by Toby Neal
Sophie felt blackness closing in. A sense of hopelessness and inevitability rose up and swamped her. It was as if the whole five years between her escape and this moment had never happened.
“You’re mine until I’m done with you,” he breathed into her ear. Goose bumps erupted as she shuddered, gasping in vain for breath. One arm was trapped beneath him, one raised beside her head but still nerveless from the blow. Her heart lurched as his big hand depressed the nerves and veins in her neck, just as he’d done a hundred times in the past.
She was disappearing, conditioned by his assault and smothered by his weight.
He’s going to kill me this time. She’d seen that in the exultant certainty in his eyes as he recognized her. Her heart felt like it was bursting. Her vision dimmed as he raised the razor.
The graceful Thai writing of the tattoo on the inside of her arm reflected on the mirror-like blade in an instant of comprehension.
Hope. Respect.
Her mind filled in the rest of the messages written on her body so she wouldn’t ever forget them: Power. Truth. Freedom. Courage. Love. Joy. Bliss.
She had a lot to live for. She wasn’t going down without a fight.
Sophie still had her feet on the floor beneath Assan’s muscular bulk. She heaved, twisting to the side with all the strength of a thousand sit-ups, throwing him off and wrenching her neck out of his grip. He slashed at her with the razor as she rolled away. She felt the fire of its touch but didn’t have the breath to scream.
He’d landed on his back on the coffee table. She heaved herself toward the bathroom. She had to get her weapon.
“Bitch!” He hurled himself after her.
Sophie grabbed the ceramic lamp on a side table with her good hand, heaving it at him. Assan dodged. The flying lamp splintered with a crash, and he leaped, grabbing her calf. She kicked, but he hung on, swinging the razor at her leg. It caught in the fabric of her pants as she dove into the bathroom. He pulled on her leg, a mighty heave, and she slid backward, her fingers scrabbling for purchase on the slippery floor.
She caught hold of the base of the toilet, grunting with effort. All of her hours in the gym paid off as she broke his grip on her leg with a powerful kick and heaved herself toward the weapon. She grabbed and retrieved the Glock, rolling over and sitting up, her back to the macabre scene in the tub.
“Drop the blade or I’ll shoot.” Her voice was a breathless rasp.
Assan was on his feet just outside the door of the bathroom. “No, you won’t.” He swung the blade by its metal handle, holding her eyes with his dominating stare, advancing a step toward her seated position on the bathroom floor. “My Sophie. I’ve missed our games together.”
“Stop. Now. This is your last warning.” Her voice was thready. Her throat felt crushed.
“The new girl. She doesn’t have your fight, your fire. You knew I’d come to you someday, didn’t you? I told you I would. You’re mine until I’m done with you.” His voice, rich with silky threat, made her finger tighten on the trigger as he continued to swing the blade by its handle in a flashing, hypnotic arc.
She couldn’t shoot him yet. She needed answers, needed to keep him talking.
“You got me. I totally didn’t expect this. What are you doing here, Assan?”
“I came to tie up loose ends. On a number of levels.” He inched another step toward her.
“So you were working with Chan?”
“He’s been on my payroll since you met him.” Assan seemed totally confident Sophie wouldn’t hurt him. He tossed the blade from hand to hand. She found her eyes watching it instead of how he was advancing on her. “He gave me information. Information I used for various purposes. But he was going to talk.”
“Lee spied on me?” Sophie whispered.
“I wanted to be sure you really went to those classes and were doing what you were supposed to, going where you were supposed to go.” Assan shrugged. “You told yourself you could get away. Really, my dear, I thought I taught you better.”
He’d definitely taken another step closer. Sophie’s finger tightened on the trigger. She forced herself to relax, though her hands were shaking and her heart pounding so hard she felt sick. She still didn’t know enough. “Lee sold out the company? Were you behind the kidnapping of Anna Addams?”
“The beginning of a nice little shared operation with Chan.” Assan’s natural arrogance made him expansive. “Which, unfortunately, has to be put on hold. You thought you could touch someone else? I’m your first and only, Sophie. You belong to me.” His eyes were hungry and invasive, roaming over her.
“No,” Sophie panted. She could feel her cheek stinging as sweat ran into the scratch the razor had left on her cheek. “You’ll never touch me again. I’ll die first.”
“Oh, that can be arranged.” He actually laughed. He seemed to get larger as she felt herself shrinking, helplessness activated by all the times he’d tortured her. “I had to teach you a lesson, so I had the Boyz take out your boyfriend at the docks. They got the whole messy business on video for me. We can watch it together.”
Bile surged up Sophie’s throat in a choking wave. Assan had been behind Alika’s attack.
He threw the razor as she squeezed the trigger. The detonation of the shot in the enclosed space deafened her. She felt a jolt of fiery pain.
The razor clattered against the bathtub as Assan crashed backward into the coffee table.
Through the ringing in her ears, she heard Assan moaning and cursing. She rose, one hand against her bleeding ear, and flipped her ex-husband onto his face, looking around for something to tie him with.
“You shot me!” He seemed genuinely shocked. She put her foot on his wounded shoulder and stepped down, a snarl twisting her lips. He yowled in pain. Her aim had been true—she’d gotten him right below the collarbone and shoulder joint, a painful but nonfatal wound.
She wanted him dead, but needed him alive—for now.
“Don’t move.” She left Assan gasping in agony and went into the spotless little kitchen, finding a ball of twine in one of the drawers. She hog-tied his feet to his arms behind his back, ignoring his cursing cries.
Finally, she stepped back, her whole body trembling and bathed in sweat. Her ear was still streaming blood, and she wondered how much of it was missing. She found a kitchen towel and held it against her head, setting down her weapon on the counter. She thumbed her phone out of her pocket and speed-dialed Waxman’s private cell.
“Why are you calling me on your mandatory day off, Agent Ang?” her boss’s voice was dry and crisp.
Sophie cleared her throat, but her voice was still reedy. “Because we’ve got a body.” That first searing glimpse had shown her it was too late for the victim.
That shut Waxman up for a moment, but he quickly regrouped, rattling questions at her like automatic fire. Sophie gave him enough to get the rest of the team and the first responders on their way, and cut the connection. She pocketed her phone and looked down at Assan, putting off the moment she had to go and look at what was inside the bathroom.
“Thank God she’s out of your reach, you sick scum,” Sophie whispered.
Assan turned his head to look at her. “What?”
“Your new wife. She’s free.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I got word just a few hours ago. A friend did me a favor. She’s down at the station in Hong Kong testifying against you as we speak.”
“Whore! Bitch!” Assan thrashed, glaring. “You can’t escape me. Wherever you go, I’ll find you! I’ll make you pay!”
“You can try.” And Sophie stepped on his injured shoulder with her full weight as she walked toward the bathroom. His gasping screams were music as she looked at the bathtub from the doorway.
She shut her eyes, unable to process what she was seeing for a moment. The horror was just as bad when she opened them again.
Blood filled the bathtub, and there was a body floating in it. She could see sho
rt black hair breaking the surface of the red water, and the curve of a shoulder. Sophie breathed shallowly, trying to screen out the harsh reek of blood with its metallic aftertaste.
Deliberately not looking at the bathtub, she scanned around the rest of the small bathroom. White towels hung neatly folded. The sink gleamed, and so did the mirror. The toilet lid was closed, and a note on it was held down by a small black laptop. A bloody washcloth Assan must have been using to wipe up after the murder had fallen to the ground beside the toilet.
Sophie took a step toward the carnage and, her hands behind her back, leaned over to read the note, which was printed out on plain computer paper but signed in wavering ballpoint.
“I can’t live with myself any longer. I sold out my friends and colleagues and the clients of Security Solutions who put their trust in me. This is the only honorable recourse left. In taking my own life I will right the wrong I’ve done. ~ Lee Chan.”
“You’d almost got done staging this scene,” Sophie said over her shoulder to Assan. “You pig.” She made herself lean over the bath and verify that the body floating in the tub was indeed Lee Chan.
At least the young man’s eyes were closed. Remembering Lee’s eager grin, she felt a stab of grief for the enthusiastic young tech she’d studied with in Hong Kong a lifetime ago. She wondered where, along the way, he’d gone wrong—or if Assan had just got his hooks into him early, too deep to get out. She suspected the latter.
“I’m going to kill you. It’s just a matter of time and place,” Assan said as she reappeared.
Sophie leaned down and spat in his face. “You’re only alive because I’m going to watch you lose everything, and suffer before you die.”
The next several hours were a blur of the controlled chaos that follows death. HPD arrived, Ken, Gundersohn, and Waxman showed up, and lastly Dr. Fukushima, the Honolulu medical examiner.
One of the EMTs bandaged Sophie. The razor had scratched her cheek and taken a bit off the top of her ear. Her wrist was severely bruised. Her throat was the most painful injury, and there was nothing to be done for that but rest.
She gave a statement to the responding officers and detective about coming by the apartment, hoping to ask Chan a few more questions, and the attack that had followed. Waxman stood in the background, arms crossed on his chest. She dreaded talking to him.
“We already had a case open involving Lee Chan,” she told the officers. “I’m taking his computer in. It has information we need for our case.”
After a brief turf battle that the FBI definitively won, Sophie walked out of the apartment carrying the evidence-bagged laptop while Waxman was distracted by Dr. Fukushima, the medical examiner. She didn’t look at the medical personnel working on Assan. No one had commented on her excessive use of restraint on an injured man.
In the apartment’s doorway, she snagged Ken Yamada by his jacket sleeve. “Ken, I need to talk to you. About something other than this.”
“What could be bigger than catching your ex as one of the men behind the craziness at Security Solutions?” But Ken followed her into the hall.
Sophie told him that she now had a general physical description of someone who had access to apartment 9C in the Pendragon Arches, had retrieved a package, possessed a black belt in some sort of martial arts, and was near enough not to have to change when he went to pick up something at the apartment.
“Who do you think it was?” Ken’s even brows were pulled together in a frown.
“I don’t know.”
They both turned to look at Assan Ang being wheeled out on a gurney accompanied by two uniformed officers. He refused to acknowledge either of them, and Sophie shut her eyes until he passed.
Maybe she should have killed him.
“No. You shouldn’t have killed him. It would have looked bad,” Ken said. “He’ll get what’s coming to him.”
She must have spoken aloud. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
“I was just going to call you from the kidnap building when Waxman sent us here to Chan’s apartment. We scooped up some wrong on the fourteenth floor, all right. The room was being used to shoot a porn flick.”
“What?” Sophie was nonplussed.
“Yeah. We all saw more than we wanted to when we broke down the door. Apparently that floor is available for all sorts of shenanigans. We’re going to have to keep an eye on it through your contact at the building.”
“Shenanigans?” A new word.
“Stuff like pornos. Not illegal, necessarily, but not savory either. We interviewed the man who booked the room and he said he found the number to call to reserve it on a forum. So if we can connect that with Ang and Lee, we’ll have a lock on them for the kidnapping too.”
“Assan admitted to me he killed Lee to shut him up, and that he was behind the kidnapping.”
“We’ll need to focus on building a case against Ang with what we can prove—which is that you practically caught him killing Chan, and then he attacked you. That should be enough to put him away for a good long time.”
“We can be sure that what’s on Lee’s laptop is what Assan wants us to find. Probably frames him for everything. But there’s still more going on.” Sophie told Ken about the man who called himself the Ghost, leaving out the personal nature of their correspondence. “Maybe all we have to do to find the Ghost is watch apartment 9C.”
“I think there’s enough in what you’ve told me to get that apartment opened,” Ken said. “We are, after all, still searching for Sheldon Hamilton, who’s a missing person. Now you’ve found a second residence. Personally, I think Sheldon Hamilton’s going to turn up floating in the bay in Hong Kong.”
“I disagree. I think Hamilton disappeared on purpose. At the very least, there’s some sort of operative using apartment 9C as a drop. Because of the timing, the pickup I saw could have been the surveillance transmitter that ended up being traced to my location and leading to the breach into my apartment.” Sophie shifted from foot to foot in agitation, her wrist aching.
“I’m planning to bring all this to Waxman and see what he says.”
Sophie frowned in frustration, glancing back toward the grisly bathroom, where Waxman was still talking with the Medical Examiner.
“How about the two of us go to the Pendragon Arches apartment with the building manager, and get it unlocked? We need to see what’s inside. I don’t want it to be you and Gundersohn without me. I’ve tracked this beast this far. I want to find his lair.”
“Beast? Lair?” She’d startled a snort of amusement out of Ken. “You talk about him like he’s some sort of mythical creature.”
“I’ve begun to think of him that way. There are so many layers to this. We’re only seeing what he wants us to see. Getting this surveillance video is, I believe, the first real evidence that shows the Ghost.” She could feel Ken wavering. “Please. I’ve never asked for a favor before.”
“All right. But technically, you’re still on leave, and going to be more so after Ang’s shooting, so let me do all the talking. Meet me at the Pendragon Arches in two hours.”
“Thanks,” Sophie said fervently. “Oh, and I finally came up with an address for the shell corporation under Takeda Industries. Guess where it is?”
“Don’t tell me. Apartment 9C.”
“Right. Seems like that apartment is a handy location for all the ‘shenanigans’ of the top management of the Security Solutions.”
Ken smiled at Sophie’s use of his word. Waxman, done talking, spotted Sophie and strode forward to take the evidence-bagged laptop from her arms, frowning. Sophie cradled her wrist, wriggling it tentatively.
“You aren’t back on the schedule until tomorrow, Agent Ang,” he said coldly. “And then we have the investigation of this latest incident to deal with. I’ll take these back to the office and log them in. What possessed you to come by here, anyway?”
“I just had this feeling about Chan. I didn’t put it together with Assan—he wasn’t on my radar at all.
”
“Assan is refusing to talk about any of it and has lawyered up. Dr. Fukushima, the ME, says Chan’s body looks exsanguinated, which of course it is. The wounds on his wrists were deep vertical cuts—he bled out within minutes.” Waxman was still frowning. Somehow Sophie knew his anger was because she’d come so close to being killed.
“I surprised Assan. He was staging Lee’s suicide after he’d murdered him. If I’d come a few minutes later, he might have gotten away with it. A few minutes earlier, and I might have saved Lee’s life.” Sophie shook her head, regret tightening her already sore throat. She looked up to meet her boss’s eyes. “Lee was telling the truth when he said he was afraid for his life.”
“So Lee was the saboteur,” Ken said thoughtfully.
“No!” Sophie exclaimed impatiently. “I don’t think he had the—twisted sense of justice, the brilliance to be the saboteur. He was selling out Security Solutions’ intel. But Assan confirmed to me that he killed Lee to shut him up, tie up a loose end. Lee was set up to take the fall for everything.”
“On that note, go get some rest, Agent Ang,” Waxman said. “We can sort the details out later. For now, we’ve got a body and a murderer in custody, and that’s all we need to deal with right now.”
Sophie turned away with one last pleading glance at Ken, who gave her a slight nod. He’d meet her at the Pendragon Arches later. Relieved, Sophie walked down the hall, cradling her wrist.
Chapter Thirty
The rotund building manager of the Pendragon Arches was clearly annoyed to have to leave the comfort of his office, but Ken’s formal, no-nonsense demeanor left no room for argument. In front of the shiny door of 9C, the manager fumbled through a thick ring of keys.
Beside him, Sophie felt her pulse speed up. She’d gone home, taken a couple of Vicodin, napped like the dead and got up again when Ken appeared at her door. She’d draped a filmy scarf around her bruised throat, but there was no disguising the bandage on her ear, the Band-Aid on her cheek, the bruises left over from her fight.
