by Cindy Dees
Dex shook his head regretfully. “Doing that to a large crowd is incredibly time consuming. You have to swab each person down individually and then run the test paper through the machines. Schmidt and his IOC buddies would never go for it. Not unless we had a specific and verified threat to the venue.”
“Well, it’s verified that traces of a nerve agent were there today.”
Dex’s eyes went a steely shade of gray. “Schmidt’s convinced that the chemical the biohazard guys detected will turn out to have some innocuous commercial usage.”
She shook her head. “Does that guy live with his head buried in the sand?”
Dex grinned. “I dunno. But he sure leaves his ass sticking straight up in the air often enough. He said we overreacted to the chemical hit.”
“Overreacted? That’s nuts! If anything we underreacted.”
“Welcome to the world of civilians who don’t see things quite the same way we do.”
She’d run into this before. Regular people living regular lives didn’t always grasp the reality of threats. In her capacity as an intel analyst, she’d been privy to some narrow misses with catastrophe that made her toes curl. But never had she seen such solid evidence ignored so completely.
“What are you going to do?” she asked Dex.
“I’ve asked the lab boys to verify their findings and tell me everything they can about that bag. If we’re lucky, we’ll get more evidence to back up the threat.”
She shook her head. “And in the meantime?”
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Alone. Outside the office.”
Lazlo slouched in the booth in the back of the noisy pub. At least it was dark back here. He’d chosen this as a place to meet Ilya because it was the sort of bar where hockey fans might hang out to get drunk and rowdy, but not where anyone who watched figure skating would be caught dead.
Ilya was late. But the guy was crazy security conscious. He was probably lurking in a trash can somewhere, making sure no one had followed him. Lazlo shifted in his seat and swore under his breath just as a familiar figure slid into the seat opposite him after all. Damn, he didn’t like it when Ilya snuck up on him like that!
“She’s skating again,” Ilya snarled without preamble.
“Were you there today?” Lazlo asked. He knew damned good and well the guy’d been there. He’d seen Ilya sitting in about the sixth row the second he’d stepped onto the ice. He’d wondered all afternoon if Ilya was behind that bag of dog crap that had chased everyone off the ice. It seemed too sophomoric for this seasoned terrorist, though.
The guy waved off Lazlo’s question. “Irrelevant. What is relevant is what you’re going to do to make sure this whore doesn’t compete.”
His gut churned. He’d already hurt Anya’s feelings by ignoring her today. Not like he’d had any choice with this maniac watching him. Especially not after the maniac in question had threatened his family the last time they’d talked. “How are my parents? My sisters?”
“Fine. For now.”
Oh, brother. Cut the drama already. Must be part of the terrorist handbook—talk in threats. The bastard had whisked them away from the airport before Lazlo’d done much more than hug them. “When can I see them?”
“Tomorrow.”
Lazlo sat back, smiling. Tomorrow. After all the years of waiting, of being held hostage and forced to skate as if his life—or rather their lives—depended on it. And it was all about to end. Maybe not tomorrow, but very soon. The biggest hurdle, getting his family onto American soil, had been crossed. He’d dreamed about this ever since he’d been dragged away from his family and carted off to America, under orders to become a champion skater, or else. To hell with being this man’s sleeper. Lazlo had been a child when he’d agreed to come to America and establish a long-term cover. Chechnya was a nation now. He’d almost made it. Freedom for him and his family was just around the corner.
Isabella laid down her chopsticks. She knew that calculating look in Dex’s eyes. “Spill it. What do you have in mind?”
“First, I have to ask you a difficult question.”
That sounded ominous. “Uh, okay.”
“I had a look at your personnel file today.”
She frowned. Now why did he do that? And why today?
He continued, “And I noticed that you are of mixed heritage. Mexican on your father’s side, but Iranian on your mother’s. Is that correct?”
“It is,” she answered shortly. He’d been looking at her Top Secret personnel file?
“What religion were you raised in?”
“You said you had one difficult question to ask me. That’s two.”
“Neither of those are the difficult one.”
Damn. She’d been afraid of that. “How did you get a hold of my classified folder?” For that was the only place her mother’s nationality was listed.
“I’m chief of the U.S. military security mission to the Olympics. I can have anything I want from the Pentagon right now short of the nuclear launch codes.”
“So what’s your question?”
“Answer mine first. What religion were you raised in?”
She smiled without humor. “Hell of a choice, isn’t it? Catholicism or Islam.”
He waited, silent, for her answer.
She sighed. “I was exposed to both and not forced to practice either. Whenever we’d go visit my father’s family, my grandmother dragged me to Mass and taught me how to say rosaries and Pater Nosters. But whenever we visited my mother’s side of the family, I was expected to pray five times a day in Arabic and the whole nine yards.”
Dex frowned. “Do you have a preference for one over the other?”
“How is this relevant to my job?”
“You’re caught in the middle of a religious controversy involving a young woman and her interpretation of Islam. You tell me how relevant it is.”
“It’s not. While I am familiar with its tenets, I am not a practicing Muslim.”
“What is your personal opinion as to whether or not Anya should skate?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Dex. I think she ought to be allowed to do whatever she pleases. This is the twenty-first century and figure skating hardly qualifies as obscene behavior.”
“So there’s no conflict of interest?”
“None,” she snapped.
“I just had to ask,” he responded mildly.
“Okay, my turn,” she fired at him. “Why were you looking in my classified personnel file?”
His gaze slid away for the merest moment but then came back to her. “I wanted to know more about you.”
Whoa. Open to several interpretations, there. And a couple of them made her pulse leap. “Why?”
“I can’t remember the last time I met a woman who speaks six languages, runs a six-minute mile, can shoot a gun better than most professional snipers and who’ll spit in my coffee just to make a point.”
She shrugged. “Obviously you don’t hang out with the Medusas much. We’ve blown up buildings just to make a point.” She noticed that he hadn’t really answered her question, either. Maybe one of those pulse-leaping reasons was closer to the truth than he cared to admit. Double whoa!
“Here’s another one for you, Dexter Godfrey Thorpe the Fourth. What kind of family do you come from to end up stuck with a name like that? Do your parents just hate you or are they as rich and stuffy as it sounds like they are?”
“The latter.”
“What do they think of your career?” she blurted out, surprised.
“I’m the black sheep of the family for not going into the actuarial business.”
She gaped, trying to envision him sitting at a dusty desk all day forecasting how many old, fat men would keel over from heart attacks next year or how many kids would get drunk and drive off bridges. She couldn’t do it. She hadn’t seen the guy in combat, but she didn’t need to. The leashed energy of a special operator oozed from him. He’d be a force to reckon with in the field. Heck, he
was a force to reckon with now, sitting on her floor mopping up the remnants of a takeout dinner.
“I know the feeling,” she said. “Neither side of my family is too keen on my Air Force career. If they found out about this new gig in the Medusas, they’d croak.”
“Are you ladies allowed to reveal it to your immediate families?” he asked.
It was common practice that special operators didn’t tell their loved ones what they actually did. “We were given permission in very broad terms to tell our families we’d taken jobs on a traveling team that assesses problem spots in the world.”
He laughed. “That’s one way of describing what we do.”
Isabella managed not to stare. For the first time, he’d talked in the same breath about the Medusas and his Delta team doing the same work. It was a major breakthrough for the guy.
“Speaking of which,” he said seriously. “I’m going to talk strictly off the record here, and I’ll deny having said it until my dying breath.”
Finally. He was going to get to the point of why he’d shown up on her doorstep bearing food. “Okay. Lay it on me.”
“There’s something bad going on. And whatever it is, it’s building around Anya. And my gut says it involves religious fanatics and that nerve gas.”
“Hark! The man finally admits that he listens to intuition!”
Dex scowled. “I never said I don’t listen to it at all. I just think you depend on yours too much.”
“Until my gut steers me wrong, I’m inclined to keep right on listening to it.”
“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t steer you to your death, and Anya along with you.”
She exhaled a little harder than necessary. “It’s not like I rely solely on crystal balls and Ouija boards. I do back up my intuitions with hard facts.”
“What are the hard facts telling you right now?”
She frowned. “Darned if I know. We’ve got this radical Islamic cleric in town issuing fatwas. Then there’s Holt. He’s acting completely weird and his wife is missing.”
“His wife is missing?” Dex squawked. “How the hell did I miss that?”
Wincing, she answered, “Well, we would have had to tell you about it for you to have actually missed it.”
“Start talking, Torres.”
She hated when he used her last name like that. It always meant she was in trouble. “We paid a little extracurricular visit to Syracuse last night. I tried all day yesterday to track down his wife and I kept getting different stories. Holt told her employer she was sick. He told the neighbor she was out of town. But when we had a look around his house—”
“His house?”
“Well, yeah. We found signs of a forced entry and barefoot female footsteps frozen into the snow leading away from a bedroom window, along with several sets of male prints.”
“Jesus H. Christ! And why did you neglect to share all this with me?”
“Because we knew you’d have a cow and we couldn’t figure out what it all means. We have no jurisdiction to file a missing persons report on her—we don’t, in fact, know that she’s missing.”
He scowled. “Okay, so there’s something weird going on with Harlan Holt and his wife. Anything else?”
“Well, there’s that kid, Lazlo Petrovich. He was acting really strange this morning.”
“How so?”
“First, he intentionally ran into Anya and hurt her. Then, he stopped by her room to apologize profusely, apparently sincerely, for slamming into her. The two of them were completely gaga over each other, and I’d have bet my life that it was a legit crush. But before the brown bag incident today, for no apparent reason, he gave her the coldest shoulder this side of the North Pole. Something’s going on with that kid. His mood changes are too abrupt and too inexplicable.”
“Maybe he’s bipolar?”
She shook her head in the negative. “I smell a rat. I just can’t see it, yet.”
“So we’re looking at a minimum of three threads that need to be followed to their logical conclusion.” He leaned forward, tension pouring off of him. “Tell me something. How would you and your teammates feel about doing a little behind-the-scenes pulling on the ends of these threads?”
No wonder he’d quizzed her on her beliefs! He didn’t want her to turn out to be a religious fanatic herself if he was about to sic her on one. Aloud she asked, “What did you have in mind?”
“Going fully operational to track down what’s going on. Under Delta rules.”
Which meant there would be no rules at all. Anything went in the course of a Delta mission. “Have you talked to General Wittenauer at JSOC or our control officer, Jack Scatalone, about this?”
“Nope. It has to be completely off the books. Just between me and you ladies.”
“We’d have no sanction to operate. And we’d be on U.S. soil. That would really limit what we can do.” In the U.S., soldiers were not allowed to use deadly force without all kinds of special permissions from everyone and his brother. In a democratic country, it was strictly forbidden for the military ever to turn on its citizens.
Dex nodded. “You’re right. But I can’t spare anyone else to do it. The Medusas were only brought in to deal with Anya, so you’re not committed to lots of other security tasks. I need you to go into stealth mode. Stake out everyone who is suspicious and get a lead on what the hell’s about to happen. We’ve got to stop it. It’s going to be big-time bad. I can feel it.”
And now that he mentioned it, so could she. A sense of impending doom had been building around Anya for the last couple of days, like the girl was sitting in the middle of a giant bull’s-eye.
“Want me to talk to the other Medusas?”
“Regardless of what they say, I’d like you to do this for me. Make that, I need you to do this for me. This op is chock-full of big-time fundamentalists. Nobody among them will expect a woman to go after them. At the end of the day, you may be the most effective resource I can bring to bear on the problem.”
She looked him square in the eye. “And that’s precisely why the Medusas exist.”
He looked at her for a long time. Nodded slowly. “I get it now.” A pause. “So. Will you help me?”
Chapter 8
Isabella dialed the phone number and waited impatiently for the call to go through.
A voice said in her ear, “Detective Hoffman.”
The Lake Placid police officer sounded harried. Not that she blamed him. His sleepy little town had become an international metropolis overnight, and no amount of preparation could match the reality of partygoers from every corner of the globe descending on your turf all at once. “Isabella Torres here from the Olympic Security Group. I’m trying to track down a man named Ahmed al Abhoud. He’s visiting from the emirate of Bhoukar. I was hoping you might be able to help us find out where he’s staying. We’ve already checked the major hotels’ guest lists and he’s not registered.”
“There are no home owners in the area from Bhoukar that he’d likely be staying with, if that’s what you’re asking. He could be leasing a private home, though. A number of the locals have rented out their houses for the duration of the Games. There are also a couple of high-end resorts in the area that don’t release their guest lists—too many celebrities protecting their privacy. How urgent is it that you find this guy?”
“I’m afraid it’s a matter of national security.” She felt bad invoking those words. It forced the detective to help her, whether he had time for it or not, and whether he wanted to or not.
He sighed. “All right. I’ve got a sergeant named Mario Picconi who’s on desk duty with a busted leg. I’ll have him make some calls.”
“Thanks, Detective. I’m sorry to bother you with this. But it really is urgent.”
“No sweat. I hope we can help out.”
Isabella disconnected her cell phone and looked up at her expectant teammates. “They’re going to look into it and get back to us.”
Vanessa glanced at the fading li
ght seeping in around the closed curtains of the living room window. “It’s almost dark. We can get going soon.”
Karen asked, “Are we gonna sneak out of here or do we get to walk to the van like normal people?”
Vanessa frowned. “I think we’d better sneak. Too many of Schmidt’s people are staying in this complex. If someone spotted us, questions would get asked.”
Vanessa was right, but what a pain in the butt. Isabella sighed. She stuffed her gear into a white laundry bag and checked the hidden microphone connections under her sweater while the other Medusas, minus Misty who was on guard duty, disguised their gear, too. The plan was for Isabella to approach Lazlo this evening and talk about Anya. It was purely a fishing expedition to try to get a read on the young man. The other Medusas would hide nearby, listening via the wire taped to her stomach.
Time to go. It felt much later than 7:00 p.m. The only ambient light in the sky was the downtown glow of Lake Placid and the Olympic complex. Other than that, the night sky was the pure black of isolated, upstate New York.
Isabella’s wire and transmitter set off the metal detectors as she entered the Olympic village, but she stepped aside and had a quiet conversation with the guards manning the checkpoint. After checking her credentials, verifying her identity, and listening to a quick, but vague, explanation from her that the wire was official business, the men let her through. Vanessa, Karen and Aleesha would stay in the van with the monitoring equipment.
She strolled into the village, which was teeming with people. Athletes—uniformly young and beautiful in their fitness—roamed all over the place, and the atmosphere was joyous, almost carnival-like. A dozen languages floated around her, and the colors of many nations were bright everywhere she looked. It was hard to believe that within this exuberant show of global unity lurked a possibly lethal threat.
It was dinnertime. She headed for the buffet lines and eating area. It would be handy to bump into Lazlo in a public place like this. It would look less like she’d sought him out and more like a chance meeting. No such luck. Maybe in the arcade. He’d mentioned to Anya that he was enjoying the free video games.
