Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She rushed him. Scooping up a double handful of Eau de Disgusting, she came straight at him.

  Time to come clean—in an attempt to stay clean.

  “I was kidding,” he said. “I do know that this works. I just . . . when I learned about it, I didn’t pay attention to the part about when it can be washed off, because, frankly, bad smells don’t bother me.”

  She was intending to coat his hair with the rotted plant crap in her hands, but he could see that she’d managed to do a pretty halfhearted, half-assed job on not just her own hair, but her entire body.

  It didn’t take much—she was a cream puff, after all—for Ken to divert what she was holding onto her own head. But that still wasn’t enough to get rid of her fancy scent.

  He threw her over his shoulder and carried her back to the pit of slime as she kicked and proved that she had both a great set of vocal cords and the ability to invent some really creative compound words even with her limited Miss Manners PG-13-rated vocabulary.

  Fart-face. He liked both fart-face and asshole-bastard.

  It cracked him up, which unfortunately didn’t help ease her transition back to a better, less angry place.

  When he set her down in the glop and, holding her with only one arm, proceeded to properly slime her with his other hand, she made a very admirable attempt to knee him in the balls. But he twisted his hips and she probably ended up bruising her knee on his thigh. He spun her around, so that her back was to his front, pressing her against the old family jewels so there was no way she could reach him and do him any real damage.

  Thankfully, this time he wasn’t aroused.

  At least not yet.

  “Let go of me!” she said through gritted teeth. “I mean it Kenny! Let go!”

  “Yeah? What are you going to do? Beat me up?” He tried not to think about where he was touching her or how smooth her skin was. He just started at her neck and went methodically southward.

  “I’ll . . . I’ll never forgive you,” she said wildly.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll never forgive you either, so we’ll be even.”

  The fight went out of her at his words, and for a moment Ken thought he’d finally made her cry.

  But no, she didn’t burst into tears. She didn’t say anything else, didn’t try to get away from him. She just stood there. Submissive.

  Which, of course, made it a hundred times harder to touch her the way he was touching her. Her breasts. The smooth softness of her belly. He got it done, got it over with by making his touch as impersonal as he possibly could. Then he released her.

  Savannah scrambled away from him, up onto the bank.

  “It’ll probably smell a little better when it dries,” he told her.

  “Yes,” she answered politely. “I’m sure it will.”

  He followed her out of that stinkhole. “Savannah—”

  “Let’s just get out of here,” she said quietly. “Let’s get this over with. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more that needs to be said.”

  “Actually, there is,” Ken told her as he wiped the plant slime from his scraped elbow. She shook out his pants—ever vigilant about spiders and bugs—and stepped into them as he fished in her purse for the antibacterial gel. “You should put some of this on your feet again, too,” he told her.

  She nodded, zipping his zipper and tightening his belt to the new hole he’d punched into the leather with his pocket knife. Without that belt, his pants wouldn’t have stayed around her waist.

  “There are some ground rules we’ve got to set,” he told her as she rolled his pants legs up. “No drinking any water that you find, no matter how fresh it looks. In fact, no eating or drinking anything unless I give it to you. Understand?”

  “Yes.” She finished one leg and started another.

  Ken squeezed a dime-sized drop of the antibacterial gel into his hand and—”Jee-zus!” He hopped around in pain. “You didn’t tell me this stings like a bitch!”

  “It’s got alcohol in it,” she informed him coolly. “Of course it’ll sting.” The look she shot him was pure “what a baby.”

  She’d put it all over her busted-up feet without so much as a sound.

  “I just want you to know,” Ken told her, “that I’ve noticed how tough you are. I’ve noticed—and appreciated—the fact that you don’t complain about anything. I apologize for yanking your chain about the plant slime. It really does work. We really did have to do that. But why don’t we give it a couple of hours and then try washing it off. I’ll see if I can still smell any perfume and—”

  Ken saw it happen.

  He was talking as he watched her take his shirt from the branch of the tree where he’d hung it, and he knew—he absolutely knew before it even happened—that she was going to shake the shit out of it to rid it of any spiders or creepies that might’ve crawled onto it.

  “Don’t!” He dropped the bottle of gel and lunged for her, but it was too late. She shook the shirt like a fricking hurricane.

  “Oh, fuck!”

  And Ken watched the miniaturized tracking device he’d put in his pocket back in San Diego go flying into the stagnant pool of plant crap.

  He thought he saw where it went and he dove after it, but Jesus, it was so fucking gone. He sifted through the slime, searching for it for longer than most people would have. Finally giving it up for lost, he slapped the water.

  “Fuck!”

  Savannah was staring at him as if he’d completely lost his mind. Of course, she had no clue. She probably didn’t even see the MTD fly out of his pocket. She’d just seen him randomly dive back into this shithole and act like a flipping lunatic.

  Now what? Tell her what she’d just done or not?

  He wiped slime from his face, slicked back his hair as he slogged back out of the swamp—with an added bonus of a couple of leeches on his leg. “Shit!” He quickly got them off by using a fingernail to break the suction of their mouths.

  Savannah looked like she was going to hurl, and he added leeches to her hate list of crawling things and made a note to himself to keep her out of the slower moving parts of the river.

  As he wrung out his boxers the best he could while he was still wearing them, he knew that he had to tell her. She would feel like shit, but she deserved to know. She wasn’t some child that needed to be protected from the truth.

  She knew something major was up. “What did I just miss?”

  He told her as calmly as possible about the MTD, about his tracking software, about the fact that it was just a matter of time before Sam or Nils went to his house to see if he’d activated the program, about how he’d been banking on the fact that if he and Savannah didn’t get out of there on their own, within a week or so, some branch of the U.S. military would come looking for them.

  “The MTD’ll keep working for only a few more hours,” Ken told her. “At best. See, I still haven’t developed a completely waterproof device.”

  Savannah looked stricken. “I am so sorry.”

  “It’s just as much my fault,” he said. “More. I should have told you about it before this. I just . . . I don’t know, it was my ace in the hole, you know? My Get Out of Jail Free card.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “I don’t know, maybe I was afraid that it wouldn’t work—and it won’t unless someone’s got a satellite dish, or unless they bring some kind of system in—and I didn’t want to get your hopes up. Or maybe I thought it would impress you more if a Navy helo just suddenly made the scene, with all my buddies inside.” He looked up at her. “Savannah, this really isn’t your fault at all. It’s my fault.”

  “You’ve already impressed me,” she told him. “And you’ve pissed me off, but . . . mostly you’ve impressed me.”

  “Yeah, well, not this time, huh?” Ken blew out a laugh of exasperation. What a freaking loser.

  “I’ve decided to forgive you,” Savannah told him.

  As he sat there, as he looked at her dressed in his clothes again, her hair a wild riot of we
t, slimy curls around her face, as he gazed into her eyes, those incredible eyes, he was the one who almost broke down and cried.

  She looked like his Savannah again, like his fantasy, like the woman he’d fallen so hard for in such a short amount of time. But that woman didn’t exist. Instead, there was only this woman, her evil twin.

  Except, maybe she wasn’t so evil after all. She was an incredibly tough, strong-willed woman, who maybe wouldn’t have been his first choice of a companion to be stranded in the jungle with, but who certainly wouldn’t have been his last.

  At least not anymore.

  He cleared his throat. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t deserve it, but . . . thanks.”

  Max Bhagat himself met them at the airport in Los Angeles.

  “Mrs. von Hopf,” he greeted Rose with a handshake, helping her down from the airline cart that George had insisted was provided to take them from the gate to the waiting limo because they were in a hurry—not because anyone thought she was too old to walk. “I’m sorry we have to meet again under these circumstances, ma’am.”

  She was about to ask if there was any news, but he beat her to it, in tune with the fact that she was anxious about Alex’s safety.

  “No word on the whereabouts of your son,” he reported as he helped her into the limo. “I’m not going to lie to you—that’s not particularly good news. The earlier the ransom request comes in, the better the chances are that we’re dealing with rank amateurs. People who know what they’re doing tend to wait, play mind games with the victim’s family, let them get good and worried before they make known their demands.”

  “But isn’t it also more likely that the pros—the people who know what they’re doing—will ensure that the victim is safely returned?” Rose countered. “It’s got to be bad for business if they don’t return their victims in good health.”

  “That could be important, yeah, if our intentions were to negotiate. I know I don’t need to remind you that the U.S. government doesn’t negotiate with terrorists.” Max climbed into the limo next to her, but then switched to sit across from her. And next to Alyssa Locke. Now, wasn’t that interesting?

  “You may not be willing to negotiate,” Rose told him, “but I am. If it comes down to it, if it seems as if that’s the safest way to go, I will pay whatever it takes to get my son back. I expect you to honor my decision, Mr. Bhagat.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But we won’t be able to help you with either the negotiations or the delivery of the ransom.” He looked at George, Jules, and then Alyssa, giving her a different sort of smile than he gave the other two. Wasn’t that interesting? “Flight okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your flight to Jakarta leaves first thing in the morning,” Max told them. “I’ve got you rooms at the airport Hampton Inn.” He looked at Rose. “If you need anything at all, ma’am—”

  “Is there a reason why we aren’t flying out tonight with you?” she asked. “I assume you are flying out tonight.”

  Max looked her straight in the eye. He was a good-looking man, with dark hair, melting chocolate brown eyes, and a somewhat swarthy complexion that told of his part Indian heritage. He had told her, last time they’d met, that his father’s father had come to America from Raipur right after World War II. He had been an engineer, quite a brilliant man, and had gone to work, interestingly enough, for Grumman.

  “Mrs. von Hopf,” Max said. “With all due respect—”

  “Please call me Rose,” she interrupted. “If you’re going to be painfully honest, we may as well be on a first-name basis.”

  He laughed. “Okay. Rose. You’re eighty years old. You’ve just taken a six-hour flight from New York to LA. Now, I don’t care if you can still run an eight-minute mile and bench press two hundred pounds. I’m not putting you on another endurance test of a flight across the Pacific Ocean until you get some time to rest. You’ll be stopping over in Hong Kong, too.”

  Hong Kong. Just what she needed. A night in Hong Kong, of all places.

  Max started to ring. “Excuse me.” He fished in his jacket pocket and flipped open his cell phone. “Bhagat.” Pause. “Who?” Pause, this time looking across the car at Rose. “I need more information. Was she traveling with anyone or alone? Did she declare anything to customs? See if you can find out if she made any major withdrawals from any of her bank accounts over the past few days.” Pause. “Yeah, and do it fast. I want answers.”

  He snapped his phone shut. “It seems that one Savannah von Hopf was aboard a recent flight to Jakarta via Hong Kong.”

  “Savannah?” Rose was completely taken aback.

  “Her granddaughter,” George informed Alyssa and Jules.

  “My son Karl’s daughter,” she told them. “His only child, as a matter of fact. We used to be quite close, until her ninny of a mother insisted they move back to Atlanta.” She was still convinced Priscilla had forced Karl to move to Georgia to get Savannah away from Rose’s “bad” influence.

  Now she saw Savannah only once or twice a year, despite the fact that she’d returned to the New York area after attending law school. Rose had made little attempt to reestablish their relationship because it appeared the girl had been artfully molded and shaped into a Priscilla clone.

  She never—not in a million years—would have expected Savannah to come within two thousand miles of someplace as far from the big-hair and matching-shoes-and-handbag crowd as Indonesia.

  “She made it to Hong Kong,” Max reported. “The airline insists that she boarded the flight to Indonesia, but once she hit Jakarta, she dropped off the map. She didn’t pick up her luggage, didn’t check into her hotel.”

  Alyssa looked at Max. “And you think Savannah . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence, she just gazed into Bhagat’s eyes and apparently read his mind.

  He read hers, too. “Yeah,” he said.

  “You think Savannah what?” Rose had to ask.

  Alyssa answered. “It’s possible your granddaughter was contacted by the people who took Alex. And that she came to Jakarta to make a ransom drop.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Rose said.

  “Do you think that’s possible?” Max asked. “Would she do that without notifying anyone? Without even telling you?”

  “I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know her well enough to answer that.”

  Max’s phone rang again. “Bhagat.”

  He listened to whoever was on the other end, and they all watched him. George—bless him—reached over and took Rose’s hand.

  “Son of a b—” Max started to say then looked up at her and stopped himself mid-bitch. “Yeah,” he said into the phone. “Right. Thanks. Good work.”

  He snapped the phone closed. “Savannah took a total of a quarter mil from various bank accounts on Wednesday. Thursday, she flies from JFK to San Diego. Saturday night, she’s on her way to Jakarta.”

  “San Diego?” Alyssa interjected. “Why the delay in San Diego?”

  Max had already picked up the telephone that connected him to the limo’s driver. “Turn around. We need to go back to the airport. Find out which airline has an hourly shuttle to San Diego and head for that terminal.” He hung up that phone and addressed Rose. “Does the name Ken Karmody mean anything to you?”

  Rose shook her head, no.

  “WildCard Karmody?” Alyssa said.

  Jules was sitting forward, too. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “He’s not Savannah’s boyfriend or significant other or . . . ?” Max asked Rose.

  “Her mother told me she was seeing some Romanian man. Vlad somebody,” Rose said. Priscilla had imparted the news with a certain amount of smugness. Vlad apparently was a count or a duke or something equally ridiculous in this day and age. How could her son have married this ninny?

  “Apparently Savannah didn’t travel to Jarkarta alone,” Max informed them. “She also bought a ticket for one Kenneth Karmody, who according to the info on his passport, is absolutely the Ken Karmody we kno
w from SEAL Team Sixteen.”

  Savannah had gone to Jakarta to make a ransom drop for her uncle, and had had the presence of mind to take along a U.S. Navy SEAL. It was possible the girl had a few cells still firing in her brain.

  “I need you to go to San Diego,” Max said to Alyssa. “Right now. Talk to Tom Paoletti. Talk to Nils and Starrett. See if they know where Karmody went, where he was heading once in Jakarta. Find out who’s got a spare key to his apartment or wherever he’s living and check the place out. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he intentionally ditched their luggage and checked into a different hotel.”