The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  Forget about the heat. Bianca felt cold all over again.

  No way were they going down for something they hadn’t even actually done.

  Twenty yards. Nineteen...

  Theft in Bahrain was punishable by a public lashing. Many of those upon whom the sentence was carried out didn’t survive. Picturing it was enough to make her dizzy, which was stupid and counterproductive and something she absolutely did not have time for.

  Reminding herself of why she really didn’t need to worry about that particular fate provided a quick cure. Given the dirty nature of the missing money, it was unlikely that, if captured, any of them would live long enough to go to trial, much less come face-to-back with a lash. They’d be murdered within the hour to keep them quiet about what they knew.

  She made an unamused sound under her breath. What was that saying about dark clouds and silver linings?

  “Miss Ashley!”

  Every tiny hair on the back of Bianca’s neck shot upright. Jennifer Ashley was the name she was currently using. Without looking around or slowing her stride or giving any indication whatsoever that she’d heard, she pulled her small compact out of her evening bag, flipped it open as though to check her makeup and used the mirror to identify the man calling to her, chasing her, as one of the prince’s personal bodyguards. Her stomach clenched. This could not be good.

  He was close. Too close, head-and-torso-filling-up-the-mirror close, his heavily accented voice sharp and distinct as it cut through the waves of music and laughter and conversation that spilled from the French doors he’d left open behind him. Oh, God, she needed to move, without making it look like she was running away.

  Snapping the compact closed, she thrust it back into her purse and lengthened her stride, silently cursing her four-inch heels for slowing her down.

  “Miss Ashley, stop!”

  Her skin crawled. He was catching up fast, she could tell from his voice.

  Two yards. One...

  The stairs were right there.

  Reaching the backside of the lions, she picked up her full skirt with both hands in preparation for a hasty descent to the limo—her limo—that was at that very moment pulling up below.

  “Miss Ashley!”

  A hand clamped onto her arm.

  3

  Bianca’s heart lurched. Her stomach plummeted.

  Making like Cinderella and fleeing the ball before the clock struck midnight, when the security guards were scheduled to make the next of their every-thirty-minute checks of the now-empty vault, at which time they would inevitably discover that the money was missing and raise the alarm, had seemed like the best thing to do at the time, she reflected grimly as the bodyguard’s meaty hand tightened around her bare, slender upper arm, forcing her to a halt only a quick run down a flight of stairs short of freedom. But then again, Cinderella hadn’t had to contend with the mother of all disasters combined with a Mossad-trained bodyguard coming after her as she tried to slip away from the ball.

  And Cinderella’s life hadn’t been on the line if she didn’t quite make it out of the palace, either.

  In hindsight, Bianca thought in the eternity-long-seeming split second she had before she needed to react to being grabbed, maybe it would have worked out better if she’d simply gone ahead and returned to the prince’s side and tried bluffing things out until she could excuse herself. After all, she didn’t know the prince knew that she was there to rob him. In fact, she didn’t know for sure that he’d been robbed. Maybe he’d simply had the money moved. Maybe this was all just a Mount Everest–size misunderstanding.

  Yeah, and maybe she was Little Bo-Peep, too.

  The thing was, Durand was there. And her instincts were screaming at her that this whatever-it-was was directed at her father, their team, herself—and it was bad. As in, potentially fatal.

  The fingers clamped around her arm dug in painfully. Bianca gritted her teeth. There was nothing to do now but deal with whatever curveball came hurtling her way next.

  Going for a gambit from the wide-eyed, innocent blonde playbook, and never mind that tonight her hair was a sexy, shoulder-length fall of flaming red waves, she whipped around as if startled at the contact, shot her captor an alarmed look and gasped, “Who are you? What do you want?” while making a deliberately feeble but hopefully desperate-appearing attempt to free her arm.

  No surprise, he didn’t release her. She could have made him let her go, but going all ninja on his ass was just about the best way she could think of to blow her cover.

  And blowing her cover was the last thing she needed to do. At least, as long as there was still a chance she could escape without doing it.

  Besides, there were four more bodyguards behind him.

  “His Highness requests that you rejoin him immediately.” The bodyguard’s grip on her arm eased. It was still meant to be unbreakable, she could tell. His bald head gleamed in the golden light spilling from the arched windows behind him. His large, bulky frame towered over her slender five feet six inches, which when she added in her shoes was actually about five-ten tonight and made him a solid six foot six. His evil genie face could have served as an illustration for the word intimidating. The fact that he and the other equally large bodyguards fanned out behind him were clad in immaculate black tuxedos did nothing to disguise the danger they represented. These were single-mindedly loyal men armed with deadly weapons. They would do whatever their master ordered, including killing her, without a qualm.

  “His Highness sent you?” She infused her voice with what she hoped was just the right, squeaky combination of girlish surprise and relief. Instead of continuing to resist, she let her arm relax in his hold as if the notion that his accosting of her had occurred at the prince’s instigation had gone a long way toward allaying her alarm. She knew that he was seeing a milky-skinned, fine-boned young woman in an haute couture ball gown complete with long black evening gloves and a small fortune in diamonds around her neck and at her ears. Even her wristwatch, anachronistic in this digital age but necessary to her line of work, was the centerpiece of a diamond bracelet that she wore fastened over her glove. Wide green eyes, carefully sculpted features and bee-stung scarlet lips completed the picture. She looked exactly as she’d meant to look tonight: beautiful, expensive, a fragile flower of high-end femininity. All of which was working for her. She could see it in his eyes.

  Woo-hoo. The pretty wrappings were doing their job.

  For now, much as it galled her, her best bet was to play Fay Wray to his King Kong.

  His grip loosened even more. It was clear that he did not consider her any kind of a threat. Nodding in a silent affirmative, he said, “Please come with me, Miss Ashley.”

  “I was leaving. I’m feeling ill.” It was worth a try, she thought as she swept a furtive, longing glance down the graceful steps falling away inches beyond her toes. The wide marble staircase exiting the palace looked like something straight out of Disney. So did the beautiful light pink palace itself with its pearl-colored, onion-shaped, artfully lit dome glowing against the midnight-blue sky. In front of her, the limo waiting at the foot of the stairs, the shooting fountain in the middle of the motor court and lush gardens and wide avenue lined with palm trees, the gilded palace gates and pale stone wall washed by the light of the three-quarter moon, all added to the fairy-tale illusion. Unfortunately, she didn’t think she was looking at a fairy-tale ending to her night.

  The rusted garbage truck that was her father and his crew’s ride, the one that should have been carrying the cash away from the vault but was instead presumably still filled with the bogus bills they’d meant to leave behind, lurched into view on the side road that fed into the Al Fatih Highway from the palace’s back gates. Trash was collected late at night in the city, which made a garbage truck the perfect vehicle for spiriting the money in and out. The three men ins
ide the truck were on their way to the harbor, to the faux garbage scow that would take them across the gulf to Qatar, where a private plane was standing by to whisk them all away.

  A corner of Bianca’s mouth quirked upward in wry acknowledgment of the fact that her father was making his escape while she was caught up in the rapidly disintegrating web he’d spun. He would never wait for her. Don’t be a hero was practically his mantra. Richard always landed on his feet, world without end. He was famous for it. Lucky for her that in the course of their long collaboration she’d become adept at the same thing.

  Her gaze dropped automatically to her watch. Oh, God, she had just under twenty-five minutes to make it to the boat, which would be pulling away from the dock at precisely 12:10.

  Be on time: that was another of the rules, and it was strictly enforced. Whoever wasn’t at the extraction point precisely when they were supposed to be was out of luck. If she didn’t handle this, manage it, fix it, quickly, she would be left behind to make her own way to the plane, or worse—if she missed that ride, too—home.

  Which was a problem to worry about after she avoided being arrested now, or, alternatively, fourteen minutes, thirty-one seconds from now when the guards discovered the empty vault at midnight and raised the alarm.

  “I am sorry. But it is His Highness’s pleasure that you rejoin him,” King Kong said.

  Do they know who I really am? Do they know about my father, and the missing money, and the rest? Bianca could read nothing in his dark gaze. Flutters of panic curled through her stomach, which she instantly squelched.

  If they did know, her best bet was to make a run for it. Now.

  She calculated what it would take to break free of King Kong, make it down the stairs and into the limo and through the gates and—

  It could be done, but not quietly. And in the wake of what she would have to do to get free, the hounds would be coming after her in full cry.

  “I’m afraid I’ll be poor company for His Highness, feeling as I do,” she said. If she could talk her way out of this, life suddenly became way simpler.

  King Kong shrugged. “I am sorry,” he said again. “His Highness has sent me for you, and bring you to him is what I must do.”

  All righty, then. So much for talking her way to freedom. She could see in his face and in his body language that he meant to convey her to the prince by force if necessary.

  Make the wrong decision here and she could die. If His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Isa Al Khalifa thought that she so much as knew about his ill-gotten millions, much less had planned to steal them, she was pretty sure she could kiss her fanny goodbye. Because His Highness couldn’t afford to let anyone know about the cash in his vault, and that would be because he had stolen the money just as surely as her father had intended to steal it from him.

  The personal fortune that Muammar Gaddafi was rumored to have spirited out of Libya during the so-called Arab Spring in hopes of living out his life in cushy exile was more than a rumor, as it turned out. The money was not supposed to have ended up in Bahrain, in the hidden vault of an ancient palace, right beneath the noses of the US Fifth Fleet, but that was where it was.

  Or at least that was where it had been until sometime less than six hours ago.

  In the motor court below, the limo driver got out to open the long black car’s rear door. He was one of her team, the fifth man as it were, and the plan was for the two of them to leave together. With the door open and his hand still on the handle, he looked up at her.

  “Mam’selle?” he called. Despite a crash course in the language, his French accent was by way of the Bronx. That was why he’d been ordered to speak as little as possible while acting as her driver, but she doubted the bodyguards would notice. Unlike the chauffeurs and waitstaff who had been hired especially for this occasion and were all French nationals, the bodyguards were locals and, if anything, their French was probably worse than his.

  Poised at the top of the long flight of stairs, Bianca met her confederate’s gaze through the flickering shadows cast by the flaming torches that lit the way down. She was fairly sure that if she gave him any kind of sign, he would come running up the steps to her assistance, but that would only get him hurt or worse. Five-ten, well north of three hundred pounds, with dark brown frizzy hair and a baby face, Miles Davis “Doc” Zeigler, known as Terry Brown to everyone except herself and her father for this job, was an affable marshmallow of a computer genius whose many talents did not include anything approximating hand-to-hand combat. As she could think of no kind of computer magic he could work to extract her from her current situation, there appeared to be nothing he could do to help her. They were almost the same age—he was twenty-five to her twenty-six—but he’d been committing crimes on this kind of grand scale for only the past six months and change, when he’d been recruited onto their team for this one specific heist, instead of for most of his life as Bianca had been. From his ad hoc workstation inside the limo, it was Doc who had remotely disabled the motion detectors and vibration receptors and infrared sensors that had been part of the security apparatus protecting the vault. That, plus conducting electronic surveillance as needed, providing fake web histories for them all, vetting the web histories of those they came into contact with and driving the getaway car that would take himself and Bianca to the boat, was a bare-bones summation of his part of the job. The other members of the team—forger Thomas Findley and muscle Nate Grangier—were with her father and, as she’d just witnessed, safely away. She and Doc were the last.

  And now the most at risk.

  Backlit by the limo’s interior lighting, Doc was wide-eyed and pale in the black chauffeur’s uniform as he stared up at her from his place beside the open door, his awareness of the unfolding disaster visible, at least to her, in every rigid line of his body.

  “Ça va,” she called back to him airily. It’s okay. “J’en ai pour une minute.” I’ll just be a minute. Now, there was an optimistic statement if she’d ever made one. In case he was having trouble translating her French, she warned him with a gesture to stay where he was, stay in character, stay cool, as she shifted her attention back to the frowning bodyguard.

  “Whatever His Highness wishes, of course,” she conceded with a smile, and a pointed look down at the thick-fingered hand digging into her arm just above the edge of her satin glove. When with only the slightest hesitation his hand fell away, she knew that her cover was not blown, at least not completely. If His Highness had had any idea that Jennifer Ashley, the art expert whom he’d brought in to authenticate his Matisse collection, was an impostor who had in fact made his acquaintance and was attending tonight’s gala for the sole purpose of relieving him of his ill-gotten fortune, King Kong wouldn’t be treating her so courteously. She didn’t think. Unfortunately, one never knew anything for certain when it came to interactions with megalomaniacs such as the prince.

  It was very possible that King Kong hadn’t been clued in as to exactly why he’d been sent to fetch her. It was equally possible that this semblance of courtesy was a ploy to keep her from panicking and making a scene until His Highness and his minions could get her alone. There were a lot of rich and influential people in attendance tonight. The prince might not want them to be upset by the sight of a screaming, struggling woman being dragged off to his dungeons (and, oh yeah, he did have dungeons).

  Even more important, he wouldn’t want his guests to know about the money in case she should start to babble before he could shut her up.

  “Please come with me.” King Kong’s hand was back on her arm, but this time it was in the guise of a pseudo-gentlemanly cupping of her elbow.

  Like she was fooled by that.

  Making the call, Bianca allowed him to escort her back inside the ballroom. When she shivered as she stepped through the French doors she’d so recently exited, she told herself it was because of the renewed onslaug
ht of air-conditioning. She could find no such excuse for the fierce pounding of her heart.

  Tony Bennett—yes, the Tony Bennett, alive and in person—had taken the stage, which had been newly constructed at the far end of the ballroom for this particular event, while she was out getting collared on the terrace. He was crooning “It Had to Be You,” one of her favorites. In the context of Music to Be Possibly Led to Your Death By, however, she discovered she wasn’t liking it quite so much.

  Ordinarily she would have stopped whatever she was doing to soak up the performance with pleasure. Tonight what it meant to her was that a large portion of the crowd was focused on the stage, which could be useful if at some point she decided she needed to cut and run, or equally not useful if the prince decided to have her discreetly clobbered over the head and carted off.

  A singer and song she loved became background noise as her quintet of keepers escorted her through the crowd. She was hyperaware of her surroundings now, observing and mentally cataloging everything that might be of use to her. The ballroom was enormous, what seemed like acres of white marble and soaring ceilings held up by dozens of Doric columns. The intense, saturated colors of the paintings on display stood out vividly against the all-white background. Small knots of admirers surrounded each work of art.

  Despite its size, the venue was packed to overflowing with a cross section of the jet-set version of high society, the nouveau megarich, minor royalty and a motley collection of celebrities, who mostly had been paid to appear. A wide selection of nationalities was present. Hijabs and kaffiyehs were less numerous than designer gowns and tuxes, but only because there were a lot of designer gowns and tuxes. Nick-worthy jewels were being worn by the yard.