As she started toward the doors to the suites, a British-accented voice said behind her, “Hold on there a moment, miss.”
Megan put a smile on her face as she turned and said sweetly, “Yes?” She let a trace of her native New Orleans creep into her voice. Most men couldn’t resist a beautiful woman with a Southern accent.
This one looked like he didn’t give a damn where she was from. Big, shaven-headed, broken-nosed, clearly not comfortable in the tuxedo he wore. He glared at her and said, “You’re not on the list of approved visitors on this floor, miss.”
“How do you know?” she asked coyly. “Do you have it memorized?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah. It’s only got two people on it. Wasn’t much of a chore.”
His voice held a trace of dry wit, and to Megan’s surprise, she found herself liking this guy. Even more surprising, she was attracted to him.
Not that she didn’t have the usual appetites. Very healthy ones, in fact. But she’d always been able to switch them off when she was working.
Well, it was nothing to worry about. No matter what she was feeling, she wasn’t going to let it distract her from the job at hand.
She frowned slightly as she took a step toward him.
“Isn’t this the ninth floor?” she asked.
“Tenth. And I suspect you know that.”
She tried the coy smile again and said, “You caught me. But doesn’t it make a difference that Mr. Mahmoud invited me up here?”
“Which Mr. Mahmoud?”
“Peter.”
The bodyguard shook his head stoically. “I work for the lad’s father. He and Peter are the only ones allowed up here. You’ll have to go back down to the party.” For the first time, he smiled. The expression didn’t make him any less ugly, but it made a throb go through Megan anyway. He went on, “Nice try, though. But you know the boy’s only twenty, don’t you? He doesn’t come into his trust fund until next year.”
“Close enough,” Megan said.
And in fact, she was. Her hand came up and drove the hypodermic needle into the side of his neck. The syringe was small enough that she had been able to conceal it in her palm, but the drug inside it packed plenty of punch, which she delivered with a push of her thumb against the plunger.
The guard made a grab for her in the second he had before he passed out. Megan darted back, kicked her shoes off, and bent sideways at the waist as she drove her right heel into his midsection. That doubled him over, and the drug took care of the rest. He hit the floor, out cold.
Too bad, Megan thought as she shook her head. He didn’t seem like a bad guy . . . and he would probably lose his job when this was all over.
She slipped back into her shoes, tucked the empty syringe away in her handbag, and bent to take hold of the unconscious man’s coat collar. She had spotted the little alcove with a tiny round table and a chair where he had been sitting to keep an eye on the elevator. He was a load, but she was stronger than her slender frame seemed to indicate. She dragged him in there, took the gun from the shoulder holster under his tux, dropped the magazine, and ejected the round that was in the chamber. The magazine and the extra bullet went in her bag, too.
Then she straightened her dress, took a deep breath, and sauntered toward the door to Peter Mahmoud’s suite.
He looked surprised when he swung the door open in response to her knock.
“You came!” he said, then quickly went on, “I mean, I didn’t really expect to see you up here. I didn’t think Keegan would let you get by him.”
“Who’s Keegan?” Megan asked, all sincere innocence.
“The minder who stayed to watch over me.” Peter leaned to the side to look past her along the short corridor. “Huh. I don’t see him.”
“Maybe he stepped out for a smoke.” Megan smiled and rested a hand on Peter’s chest. He had taken off his coat and tie but still wore the tuxedo pants, cummerbund, and white shirt. “No matter where he got off to, let’s not waste the opportunity.”
“I should say not.” He stepped aside to let her into the suite. “Please. I have some champagne . . .”
“I’ve already had quite a bit, but some more would be lovely,” Megan said. “You don’t mind if I’m a little drunk, do you? I promise not to get too crazy.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he told her.
Her tolerance for banter like this was pretty small. As soon as the door was closed behind her, she moved into his arms, wrapped her arms around his neck, and pressed her body against his. Again Peter seemed surprised, but obviously he didn’t mind her boldness. He brought his mouth down on hers.
He wasn’t the greatest kisser in the world, Megan thought. But he was young yet and certainly had plenty of enthusiasm. He would improve with practice, and he would get plenty of practice because he was young, handsome, and rich. He still had years to look forward to in which an abundance of beautiful girls would throw themselves at him. She hoped he was smart enough to appreciate just how lucky he was.
In the meantime, she had work to do. She was going to make him slightly less rich. He wouldn’t miss it, but it would be a fortune to her.
She jabbed a needle like the one she had used on Keegan into his neck.
Peter jerked back, his eyes widening in shock and pain.
“What . . . what did you—”
He threw a wild punch at her. She blocked it easily and took him to the floor, which was so thickly carpeted in this fancy suite that it was almost like knocking him onto a mattress. He tried to struggle as she pinned him down, but the drug was already taking hold and he weakened rapidly.
The shot didn’t knock him out like the one she had given Keegan. It just made him too groggy and feeble to put up a fight. And it had an effect on his brain, too, removing all the safeguards that might have been there otherwise. Megan figured she could have seduced him into telling her what she wanted to know, but this way was so much quicker.
“Tell me the code for your trust fund drawing account,” she said.
She wouldn’t be able to touch the bulk of the fund, but Peter’s father made sure he had plenty for day-to-day expenses, which in Peter’s case could be astronomical compared to a normal person’s. Megan’s contact at the bank had assured her that the balance in the account never dropped below half a million pounds and might be twice as much as that.
Peter said groggily, “Wha . . . wha’ you do—”
Megan slapped him hard enough to make his head jerk to the side.
“The code,” she repeated. “Now.”
He started slurring numbers. She struggled to understand him and commit the string of figures to memory. When he was finished, she stood up and went to the laptop that she had already spotted sitting open on an antique writing table.
It took her only a moment to get into the bank’s database. Her hacking skills were excellent. She had a natural talent for it, and her years in Special Forces had only increased her abilities. She had been driven to succeed, in no small part because there were so few women in the unit. Ninety-five percent of male soldiers couldn’t make it; the odds against women were even higher. They had to be even better.
She typed in the code Peter had given her.
ACCESS DENIED.
Megan took a deep breath. Maybe she had hit a wrong key somewhere in there. It was a long number, after all. She went through it again, slower this time.
An account screen popped up. She sighed in relief. Her glitch had cost her a moment or two, but that was all. Quickly, she initiated the transfer and watched in satisfaction as the money in Peter’s account began draining into her Cayman Islands account.
Out of curiosity, she looked to see what the balance was in his trust fund. Her eyes grew big with amazement. She had known he was rich, or soon would be, but that number was just . . . astounding. And that was just a trust fund. Peter’s father, Hasan Mahmoud, was many, many times richer.
Maybe she had made a mistake. Maybe she should have p
layed a long game and gotten Peter to marry her.
Even better, Hasan was a widower. He might have enjoyed having a gorgeous young American wife . . .
The transfer finished, ending that line of speculation in Megan’s mind. Time to get out of here.
She had just stood up from the writing table when the door to the suite burst open and Keegan charged in like a bull.
That was crazy. He should have been out cold for at least another half-hour. His metabolism had to be incredible for him to start throwing off the drug’s effects this soon.
But he wasn’t at the top of his game, that was for sure. He swung a wild punch at her that she easily avoided. She chopped at the side of his neck, but she might as well have been hitting a block of wood for all the effect it had.
As he lunged at her again, she bent low and swept his legs out from under him. He hit the floor with a crash. She started to dart past him.
He caught her ankle and dragged her down. She cried, “Oh!” and kicked at his face. That didn’t make him let go. His fingers were locked around her ankle like bands of iron.
She was afraid she was going to have to hurt him to get away. She was reaching for the little knife she carried in her bag when more men rushed into the suite from the hallway. They had guns, and they leveled the weapons at her as they shouted for her to surrender.
She looked at Keegan, who was staring along the sleek lines of her legs as he clung to her ankle. He had to have triggered some sort of alarm when he came to. She said, “You damn fool, look what you’ve done.”
“It’s a . . . soddin’ shame . . . innit?” he forced out.
Then he lost consciousness again, his forehead thudding against the floor, but too late to keep her from being captured.
CHAPTER 22
Indianapolis, two years before the New Sun
Braden Cole watched from his van, parked up the block from the motel. It was one of the budget places, and Cole thought that if it were him planning to cheat on his wife, he would have taken his girlfriend to a better rendezvous than this. He would have been ashamed to ask a woman to sneak around in such a low-class fashion.
Of course, he thought as he pushed his glasses up, he wasn’t married and never had been. His relationships with women had all been of the commercial variety, and not just the obvious sort. So he didn’t really know what he would do under the same circumstances, now, did he? He told himself that he shouldn’t be judgmental about his targets.
After all, it was enough that he killed them. He didn’t have to look down on them, too.
It was hard not to get a little judgmental, though, when you dealt with the dregs of humanity for the most part. Adulterers, embezzlers, blackmailers, abusers . . . You had to have done something pretty bad for somebody to want you dead badly enough to pay a total stranger to do the job. Now and then a client hired Cole’s services strictly for reasons of profit, but usually there was a personal angle to it as well.
Well, without all the pissed-off people in the world, he wouldn’t have a job, would he?
The door of the unit he was watching opened. The woman came out first. Her name was Holly McAleer. She was blond, thirty-five, reasonably attractive. She worked at the same federal office building as the man who followed her out of the motel room, Allan Dubbert, who was as bland and unappealing as his name. In Cole’s opinion, Dubbert was batting out of his league as far as Holly was concerned.
But there was no accounting for the taste of a woman looking for an affair, was there?
Even though there were layers of cut-outs and intermediaries between him and the client, Cole felt relatively certain that Margaret Dubbert was the one who had hired him to a) make sure her husband really was cheating on her, and b) kill the son of a bitch and the slut who was sleeping with him. Although it was possible that Holly McAleer’s husband Todd was the client.
Either way, somebody was both suspicious and vindictive, and it hadn’t taken Cole long to determine that the suspicions had merit. At one point in his life he had been a licensed private investigator, and a skilled one, at that. He could have stayed in that line of work, but branching out had proven to be so much more lucrative.
Dubbert and Holly went to his car. It would have complicated things if she had brought her car, too, but as was their habit, they had left it in the vast parking lot of the office building four miles away. They really were careless, as if they believed that nobody would ever catch them.
They paused outside the car. Holly leaned in for a kiss, which Dubbert gave her with one arm around her. Then he opened her door—chivalrous bastard, wasn’t he, thought Cole—and went around to get behind the wheel.
Cole hadn’t done anything so crude as to rig the detonator to the ignition switch. That took the control out of his hands. He liked to choose the precise moment himself. He waited until Dubbert turned to Holly and smiled and she smiled back at him and he opened his mouth to say something . . .
That was when Cole pushed the button.
The blast that engulfed the car in a fireball shook the ground. Cole felt it a block away in the van. He smiled faintly as he set the remote on the seat beside him and started the engine. Most people wouldn’t drive away from the scene of an explosion like that one. They would want to see what had happened. Somebody might notice him leaving and get suspicious, but it didn’t really matter. The van was completely nondescript, the license plates were smeared with mud so as to be unreadable, and anyway, it was stolen and he would dump it in the airport’s long-term parking lot later tonight. Nor did he have to worry about fingerprints, since his had been surgically altered so as to not be on file anywhere in the world.
He drove away at a leisurely pace as the bombed car burned furiously in the night behind him. Like any other law-abiding citizen, he even stopped at a red light a couple of blocks away and didn’t go on until the light turned green again.
He had just started across the intersection when a pickup with a drunk driver at the wheel ran the light, rammed into the passenger door of Cole’s van, and knocked the vehicle on its side. Cole was so shocked by the unexpectedness of it all that for a long moment after the grinding crash all he could do was lie there, not even thinking about trying to get out.
Then he smelled smoke and heard the crackle of flames and knew that he had to climb up the now-vertical seat and squirm through the crumpled, shattered window before the fire hit the gas tank. He reached for the seat belt release.
Jammed.
No matter how hard he tried, it wouldn’t come loose.
He had a knife in his pocket. He could cut the seat belt with it. Trying to stay calm as he worked his fingers into his pocket, he searched for the knife.
He couldn’t find it. How could it have slipped out while he was being thrown around? It should be there.
But it wasn’t, and the seat belt release still wouldn’t work, and Braden Cole started to laugh as he listened to the fire burning around him. If that didn’t beat all. The detonator remote was still somewhere in the van, more than likely, and other things he wouldn’t want the cops to find, but none of that mattered anymore.
Nothing mattered except the sheer irony that made Cole laugh.
Then the windshield, which had somehow survived the impact, shattered only a few feet away, spraying him with glass, and hands reached through, groping for him.
Help had arrived.
Maybe he wouldn’t die here after all.
South Dakota, two years before the New Sun
Jackie Thornton pushed the curtain aside a little, just enough to glance out across the front yard of his ex-wife’s house. He stepped quickly to the side and let the curtain drop. He was sure the police had a SWAT team out there with snipers covering all the windows. He didn’t want to give them time to line up a shot at him. If he was being honest with himself, he would have had to admit that he didn’t much care if he lived or died, but he didn’t want to go out until he was good and ready.
And he wouldn’t be ready
until Maggie Louise Redmond had paid for her sins.
Maggie Louise Thornton, he amended. She had taken his name when she married him, and it was hers for life, no matter whether she’d divorced him or not. It sure didn’t matter that she had married that fella Greg Redmond. He was the one sinning, sleeping with another man’s wife the way he was.
Well, he wouldn’t do it anymore, because he was lying on the floor under the arched entrance from the living room into the dining room, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The blood had stopped leaking from the red-rimmed hole in his forehead where Jackie had shot him. There really hadn’t been much blood, probably because Redmond had died so fast.
A quiet moan came from Maggie. She was regaining consciousness. Jackie hadn’t meant to hit her so hard, and he felt bad about that. He’d just been trying to get her attention. He wanted her to die, but he didn’t necessarily want her to suffer.
“What . . . what have you . . .” The words trailed off into a gasp. “Oh, my God! Greg!”
Jackie looked over his shoulder and saw her crawling toward the corpse.
“Might as well save your breath,” he told her. “He’s dead, like he deserves to be for takin’ another man’s woman.”
She ignored him—that was no surprise; when they’d been married she had ignored him most of the time—and threw herself on her husband’s body as sobs shook her. Jackie just shook his head. She oughtn’t be carrying on so. Redmond had had it coming.
The phone rang.
Jackie looked at it. It was a cordless phone, sitting with its base on a little table next to Redmond’s chair where he watched TV. The shrill rings got on Jackie’s nerves in a hurry, and it didn’t seem like the damn thing was going to stop ringing, so with a sigh he went over to it and picked it up with the hand that wasn’t holding a gun.
“Yeah?”
“Is that you, Jackie Thornton?”
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