by Cindy Dees
“I’ve got voices,” she whispered down.
Isabella concentrated on keeping her balance and breathing.
“It’s Lazlo. And a female voice. They’re speaking Russian, though. We need Misty up here.”
Isabella inched her hand across Kat’s thigh and freed up a finger to press her throat mike. “Only way Misty’s coming up here is hanging all over the clerk. Let’s get a mike and transmitter in place and then get her outside to listen to it.”
Vanessa replied, “Makes sense. Wire it up, Adder.”
Kat’s hand appeared in front of Isabella’s face, indicating that they should go down. Carefully, Isabella descended the ladder and then squatted so Kat could climb down. The two women stared up at the ceiling again.
Isabella said, “I need to get up high enough to work with my hands.” They looked around the space. Although lots of boxes sat around, none of them looked sturdy enough to climb. And the ladder wasn’t tall enough.
Kat said, “How about we bring the desk over here and put the ladder on top of it?”
That would work. “Misty, can you hold the clerk’s attention for another ten minutes or so?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Isabella and Kat worked fast. They moved the computer onto the floor and each grabbed a corner of the desk. It was the old-fashioned kind, solid wood with six drawers. It was a bitch to pick up and move without dragging it across the floor noisily. Isabella was panting hard by the time they set it into position. Kat lifted the ladder onto the desk and then jumped up beside it to steady it. Isabella wasted no time. Three minutes of the ten she’d asked for were already gone.
She had one transmitting microphone on her, and she pulled it out quickly. It wasn’t made to work through a heavy wood subfloor and whatever covering was on top of it. She’d have to enhance it, somehow. She unfolded the collapsible parabolic dish that went around her long-range microphone. It was twelve inches across and the preferred tool of paparazzi because of its concealability and rapid deployment capability.
Quickly, she tore out the long-range mike and taped the remote-transmitting mike in its place. Next, she tore off half a dozen strips of duct tape and applied them lightly to her sleeve. Then, it was up the ladder. Damn, this thing was tottery. She activated the microphone and taped it and the parabolic dish against the ceiling. That should do it.
“Karen, switch to the receiver frequency and see if you can hear anything.”
A pause. “Nope. It’s garbled.”
Damn! “Ideas anyone? I’ve got my parabolic dish around the mike right now.”
Karen said, “How about we put the mike against a window instead?”
“How do we get to it?” Vanessa asked.
Karen replied, “Fire escape. I’ll climb up to the roof. Drop a rope down. Adder can climb up to the window and plant the mike.”
Vanessa’s response was immediate. “Do it. Time’s a-wasting here.”
Isabella and Kat carried the behemoth of a desk back to its original position and put the computer and its jumbled wires back into place while Karen got into position on the roof. Two minutes left in the ten.
It took a razor blade around the window sill to loosen it from the last time it had been painted shut, and it took both Kat and Isabella shoving at it to finally get it to move. It gave a terrible squeak and both of them stopped pushing abruptly. Crap.
“Hide,” came the terse order from Misty. “I lost him. He’s coming up to see what that was.”
There wasn’t a chance in hell they were getting that window back down without at least as much noise. A cold breeze was coming in, too.
“Quick,” Isabella hissed. “Help me block it with some boxes.”
She and Kat threw half a dozen boxes of T-shirts into a stack in front of the window and then ducked for cover. The floor squeaked as someone stepped into the room. A moment of tense silence.
“Everything okay up there?” Misty’s voice drifted up the stairs.
“Yeah, I guess so,” the guy called back.
A pause, and the floor squeaked again. He was gone. God, that had been close.
Quickly, Isabella squeezed through the narrow window opening. They dared not try to move the window any further. A rope slithered down in front of her nose.
“Tied off?” she asked Karen.
“Go for it,” Karen replied from above. “I tied in a foot loop a few feet below window height for you.”
Thank God. She wasn’t the strongest in her upper body, and she hadn’t been relishing trying to hang on to the rope and place a microphone simultaneously. She wrapped her left foot around the rope and stepped on it with her right foot where it crossed the top of her left foot. A big reach up. Pull. Reposition her feet. Again.
The foot loop hit her knee. Hanging on hard with both hands, she let go with her feet and fished around blindly until her right foot slipped into the loop. She stepped down. Her shoulders burned like fire. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the microphone. A piece of duct tape across the back of it, and then she carefully taped the mike against the corner of the glass. She looked up. Karen peered down over the edge. Isabella tapped her ear and pointed at Karen.
“Just a sec,” her teammate transmitted. Karen disappeared to fiddle with her radio frequency. “Loud and clear,” Karen reported.
Time to get out of here. Isabella shimmied down the rope, swinging her feet in through the narrow second-floor window. Hands grabbed her legs, pulling her in. She nodded her thanks to Kat and glimpsed the rope sailing upward as Karen reeled it in.
“Misty, we’re heading down. One more minute of distraction and you’re off the hook. Make a noise if that’s a problem.”
Silence. God bless bodacious blondes.
She and Kat slipped downstairs quickly. Kat paused only long enough to stick a small periscope around the corner. She signaled an all-clear over Isabella’s shoulder. The small woman disappeared and, trusting her, Isabella followed blind. The guy’s back was turned while Misty modeled a T-shirt for him that was at least two sizes too small. Braless. The sacrifices they made in the name of duty.
Isabella said, “We’re clear, Sidewinder. You can put your clothes back on.”
“Say again?” Vanessa bit out sharply.
Isabella explained quickly, “She’s trying on T-shirts for the clerk.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Vanessa retorted.
Aleesha came up, laughing. “Them ta-ta’s of hers ought to be registered Double-D lethal weapons.”
Isabella chuckled as Vanessa ordered her and Kat to take up positions in opposite directions from each other a ways down the street. It took Misty another few minutes to buy a T-shirt and disengage from the drooling clerk without making him suspicious. Isabella spotted her leaving the store with a last wave over her shoulder.
As soon as Misty was outside, her demeanor changed completely and she headed quickly down the street toward the alley and Karen, who had the radio receiver.
In another two minutes, Misty’s voice came up over the radio. “They’re arguing. Lazlo wants to do it now. The father is insisting that Lazlo skate.”
Do what?
“Lazlo says it’s dangerous to wait. Papa says it’s more dangerous not to wait. One of the women is talking. Sounds like a young one. Says this is crazy. Is berating Lazlo for running from his responsibility.”
There was a long pause while Misty presumably listened some more. Then she came up and said, “She’s pissed off that Ilya paid for all of Lazlo’s training and now Lazlo’s backing out on the deal. Lazlo said he was a child when he was sent to the U.S. and he had no idea what he was agreeing to. The sister says he’s lying. Said he was as committed to the cause as the rest of them. Lazlo says, ‘Well, now our land is free. So why do I still have to be a sleeper for the rebels?’”
Yowza. A sleeper? As in a terrorist put in place for a long time, living undercover and staying dormant, sleeping as it were. Waiting to be activated?
Misty continued. �
�He says if they’re abandoning the cause, why the hell shouldn’t he? He’s accusing the sister of wanting to sacrifice him to pay for their freedom.”
Ouch. Little bit of familial discord, there.
“The mother’s intervening. Telling them both to stop. Says the nature of the rebels has changed. They no longer fight for their country. Now they fight for power and love of blood, even if they say it’s for their religion. If they were truly faithful, they would not fight. God does not love violence.”
Amen.
“The father is suggesting they get back to the plan. They’ll go to Lazlo’s competition tomorrow night. They need a way to get away from Ilya and get outside before Ilya’s plan kicks off. The women can wear the new clothes Lazlo got them under their robes and head for a bathroom. Once he—the father—distracts Ilya, the women can head outside. Lazlo is worried about how his father will get away. Is accusing Papa of planning to sacrifice himself to get the others out. Says they’re all getting out.”
Aleesha interrupted tersely, “Somebody’s coming. A woman. She just ducked into the store and headed upstairs.”
Vanessa commented quietly, “Maybe the apartment’s owner.”
“Lazlo says once they get to the van,” Misty continued, “they’ll drive down to New York City. He knows the way.”
Ya think? After his little road trip with Anya, he damn well should.
“They’ll go to the State Department and ask for visas. If that’s a no-go, they’ll go to the FBI and trade what they know for asylum. The father says that’s a last resort, though. They don’t want Ilya to come after them, and he will for sure if they do that.”
These people were defecting? Because of Gorabchek? Had to be. Because Chechnya was a free nation. They could apply for regular immigration status to the U.S., no problem.
“New voice. Must be Aleesha’s lady. Says they’ve been here long enough. It’s time to go. Says she’s got sandwiches for them so they can actually eat supper like they’re supposed to be doing. Mom’s griping that it’s hamburgers. Doesn’t like them.”
Beggars can’t be choosers. So, they’d ditched Ilya to have this little planning session, eh? What the hell was Ilya’s grand scheme, then? If Lazlo was a sleeper, he’d clearly been activated.
But to do what?
Chapter 17
They followed Lazlo uneventfully back to the Olympic village and talked over their options. It was less than forty-eight hours until the ladies’ figure skating finals and whatever Gorabchek had planned. Vanessa went back to the ops center to report on what the Medusas had learned, and Isabella refrained from begging to go with her. Dex was a busy man, and she needed a decent night’s sleep. But she missed him as she crawled into bed, and she fell asleep wishing he were with her.
Isabella spent all of the next morning going from interview to interview with Anya, and came away knowing more about television studios than she’d ever cared to. They’d declined all interviews with any potentially hostile news agencies. Anya didn’t need the stress of being attacked, and Isabella didn’t need the security risk.
Liz Cartwright was awake, and Anya went to visit her after lunch. Liz’s brother, Peter, was also at the hospital, and at Liz’s request, agreed to step in for his injured sister and coach Anya for the next couple days.
To that end, he met Anya at one of the practice rinks late in the afternoon. Dex had arranged with the ISU for the session to be closed to the public, and the space echoed with the slicing sounds of blades digging into the ice. Anya ran through her long program and then the American coach worked with her on her jumps. It was a light workout that looked designed more to build Anya’s confidence than anything else.
Peter skated off the ice with Anya. “You’re ready. Go home, have a good dinner, and go over to the athletes’ spa for a rub down. Then get a good night’s sleep and we’ll see if you can’t snag a medal tomorrow. You’ve got the point value in your program to do it.”
Anya nodded in determination. The girl already had her game face on. Usually Isabella didn’t see it until three or four hours before the competition. Anya was tucked into her room for the night by eight o’clock, with Misty babysitting her.
Isabella didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She wasn’t used to being done this early. She wandered over to the ops center to see if there’d been any new developments. Nada. She sat down at one of the empty desks and laid out the entire folder of case notes on Anya. Maybe there was something in here they’d missed. Some clue as to what the Red Jihad and Gorabchek had planned.
It was nearly midnight when she spotted it. She rocked her chair forward abruptly and read the last paragraph again. It was an inventory listing all the equipment in Harlan Holt’s lab. She picked up the phone in front of her and dialed Dex’s cell phone.
He sounded falsely alert, like she’d woken him up and he was still in that thirty-second window of jolted awareness before his body’s protest at being dragged from sleep slammed into him. “Thorpe here.”
“Hey, Dex, it’s me.”
“Hi, sweetheart. Are you coming over to help me get back to sleep?”
“I wish. I just found something in Anya’s file. I should’ve seen it earlier.”
“What did you find?”
“I don’t think Harlan Holt’s lab is adequately equipped to manufacture Agent Alpha.”
Dex sounded wide-awake now. “Talk to me.”
“I was looking at a list of the equipment in his lab. When I was in college, I took some chemistry classes, and I recognize most of this stuff. It’s really basic. I don’t think any of it is high-tech enough to engineer complex chemicals.”
“I’ll be right there.”
While she was waiting for Dex to arrive, Isabella looked up the phone number of the FBI briefer who’d told them about Agent Alpha two nights before. She called the woman at home. “This is Isabella Torres from the Olympic Security Group. I was at your briefing night before last.”
The agent gave a cautious acknowledgement of remembering her.
“Since this is not a secure line, I’m going to read off a list of laboratory equipment, then I’d like a yes or no answer out of you. Would this equipment be sufficient to manufacture what you briefed us on?” Isabella read off the list.
At the end of it, the agent gave a succinct, “No.”
“Thank you,” Isabella replied. “You’ve been immensely helpful.”
“Do you need any help with your…research?”
“We may. We’ll call if we do.”
“You do that.”
Cryptic phone conversation over, Isabella hung up. She leaned back in her chair. If Holt didn’t make Agent Alpha in his lab, what was it doing there? Their assumption that he was part of the Red Jihad’s conspiracy might be premature. But he and his wife were still missing, and he did have Agent Alpha in his possession. Her gut rumbled in foreboding. The guy had access to Agent Alpha and to the figure skating rink. Was he trying to kill Anya?
She picked up the phone. Called the FBI scientist again. “Hey, it’s Isabella Torres again. One more question. Can our research product be packaged in individual servings?”
A long pause. “I suppose. Why?”
“Just asking.”
“I’ll be right there,” the FBI agent announced.
The line went dead in Isabella’s ear.
An hour later, all the Medusas minus Misty sat in the ops center’s conference room with Dex, Hobo, the FBI scientist, and a couple other unidentified men Dex vouched for but did not introduce. Spooks, then. Spies. Or guys with jobs so classified they weren’t really sitting here and didn’t legally exist.
The Khalid folder lay open on the table, and Vanessa stood at the big whiteboard. A green line ran vertically down the center of the board—a timeline of the threats and attempts on Anya’s life. Then, off to each side were two arcing lines that started at the top of the green line and ended at the bottom. The whole thing resembled a giant football standing on end.
The left curving line listed the events surrounding Lazlo, his family and Ilya Gorabchek. The right curving line listed the events apparently connected directly to the Red Jihad and its Middle Eastern operatives. Drawn like that, it made Anya appear as more of a catalyst than an end target.
And all three lines led to a box at the bottom of the board labeled, Ladies’ Finals. Vanessa finished her drawing with a flourish and turned around to face the room. “We have more than a simple security problem, ladies and gentlemen. We have a bona fide terrorist threat on our hands. I don’t think Anya Khalid is the target. I think the ladies’ figure skating final and its thirty thousand spectators are.”
Isabella nodded her agreement. “Put in this context, the attacks on me start to make sense, too. I was jumped in the alley by guys from the Red Jihad timeline. But, I’m convinced I was attacked in my apartment by guys from the Gorabchek timeline. Why me? I’m a measly bodyguard. Yeah, I symbolize Anya Khalid and I’ve been easier to get to than she is. But what if the attacks were a distraction? What if both groups are coming after Anya and me to draw attention away from themselves?”
Nods around the table. Dex commented, “That feels right.”
Isabella stood up and went to the board. “There’s somebody invisible up here.” She pointed to the top of the timeline. “Somebody out of sight. He or she wants to blow up the figure skating venue when it’s crammed to the rafters with people. So, he makes a stink about Anya and launches this highly visible chain of events down the middle. Then, he secretly sends out not one, but two terrorist cells to attack the end target. That way if one fails or gets caught, he’s still got a backup team in place. After all, an opportunity like this only comes along every four years—or every thirty years if you want to make the attack at an Olympics on U.S. soil.”
The line of reasoning felt spot on to Isabella. “These cells know about each other. Maybe they even met once or twice. But for the most part, they operate independently. They don’t know that both groups attacked Anya and me a few times, not with any intent to kill either one of us. Because let’s face it. If these guys wanted us dead, they’d have come at us with a hell of a lot more than bags of doggie doo-doo and snowballs.”
