He tried it himself and came to the same exasperating conclusion. The windows were both automated. Turning the key in the ignition did not bring the vehicle back to life. The windows remained where they were. Sealed.
A sense of claustrophobia, not to mention alarm, was setting in. Pru could feel her breath growing short. She turned to look at the man next to her. “Think of something,” she ordered.
Joshua was quickly beginning to believe that someone up there was trying to make him pay for his errant ways. “Well, since you put it so nicely—what the hell do you think I’m doing?”
She glared at him. If she concentrated on being angry, she reasoned, she wouldn’t have time to be afraid. “Failing.”
Joshua didn’t trust himself to answer her. An idea had come to him. Still seething, he leaned back in the driver’s side, then slid down until his shoulders were almost on the seat and his feet were raised up above the top of the steering wheel.
Pru stared at him incredulously. He looked as if he was doing some kind of outlandish exercise. “What—?”
Joshua didn’t wait for her to frame a question. Given her track record, it would probably be insulting and he was in no mood to hear it.
“Trying to get us out of here before I strangle my assignment,” he informed her tersely.
With that, he kicked at the windshield with both feet as hard as he could. Nothing happened. He did it again. And again. And again. The impact reverberated in his thigh, sending shafts of pain shooting through his leg. He did what he could to block it. He couldn’t let the pain stop him. As far as he could see, this was their only way out.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Pru sliding down in her seat and raising her legs up, emulating him. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Two sets of feet are better than one,” she retorted, pounding both feet against the windshield.
He grinned. “There’s hope for you yet, Prudence.”
Pru hated being called by her full given name. She took her ire out on the windshield.
He’d almost lost count the number of times they kicked the windshield when the surface suddenly dissolved into a thousand tiny spiderlike veins, fanning out to cover the entire area.
Enthused, he shouted, “Again!”
“No kidding, Sherlock,” Pru retorted audibly under her breath.
Two more times did it.
Glass went flying out and rain, now just a fine mist, immediately came in.
“We’re free!” Pru cried, elated.
She almost looked human then, Joshua thought. Pulling his boot off, he quickly moved it along the perimeter of the windshield, getting rid of as much of the glass as possible.
He went through first, wincing as glass he’d missed scraped along his bare skin and snagged his pants. But that was the point of going first, to keep the cuts she sustained to a minimum.
Twisting around on the hood to face her, Joshua extended his hand to the prime minister’s daughter and his newest cross to bear.
“Let’s go,” he instructed.
He didn’t have to say it twice. She was out and onto the hood in a blink of an eye. If any of the glass cut into her, she didn’t indicate it. Grabbing her by the waist, Joshua helped her down. She didn’t weigh all that much, he thought. Was she one of those weight-conscious women who threw up all their meals? No, on second thought, he had a feeling she didn’t care what other people thought of her.
“Let’s go,” he said again the second her feet touched the ground. The next moment, they were sliding down the short path to the flat ground, away from the demolished vehicle. The actual road was high above them, but right now it was safer down here.
“Which way?” Pru wanted to know.
Joshua was surprised that she didn’t insist on taking the lead. Maybe the woman did have the sense she was born with.
“That way.” He pointed south and explained, “I saw a cottage back there when I drove past earlier.” And it had looked exactly like that, a cottage out of a quaint fairy tale.
Pru turned south. “Cottage it is.”
He nodded, noting that, for the first time since he’d taken her duct tape off, the prime minister’s daughter wasn’t giving him an argument.
“What do you mean you lost them?” Cassandra DuMont demanded sharply, her well-manicured fingernails all but digging into the surface of the highly polished mahogany desk she was leaning over. She glared at the wide flat panel mounted on the opposite wall. Glared at the man she saw in it, shifting uncomfortably as he called in the new development.
The man calling her headed the team that had been sent to abduct the British prime minister’s daughter. Though this was the sort of assignment the organization she now helmed undertook, this particular time it was also to set another spoke of her plan into motion. The first had already been satisfactorily carried out, but the same could not be said for this.
For her to have what she wanted, what had been her heart’s prime focus for so many years now, it all had to work, not just parts.
The man on the screen hesitated. If he were actually in the room with her, he would have towered over the woman from whom he took orders. That did not alter the fact that he feared her.
They all did.
They knew she could kill in cold blood without blinking an eye. Brilliant, she was deemed completely unpredictable. No one could say with any certainty what she would do next. She could embrace someone or stab him, it was all the same to her. She made sure her employees understood that. It was best to remain on the good side of someone like her as much as possible.
“It’s just temporary,” he promised.
Cassandra raised her chin and narrowed her green eyes into small, deadly slits. “Oh, like your life.”
She watched as the single sentence cut him to the quick like a sharp knife. Good. Her meaning was crystal clear. If Prudence Hill was not found and found quickly, his life would be forfeited.
Cassandra did not trouble herself with empty threats. There were no “do-overs” in her book. She’d become more deadly than her father, from whom she wrested control of his organization on his death bed. Payback for the fact that nothing she ever did seemed good enough to him. She’d lived in the shadow of the brother who had died years ago, the brother whose death her father never got over, saying more than once that it should have been her who died, not Apollo.
Cassandra did nothing to dispel the rumor that she had hastened the old man’s steady decline with a salad dressing liberally sprinkled with finely crushed oleanders. If she could do that to her own flesh and blood, then no one was safe.
The fact that she had shed tears at his funeral only compounded that feeling.
“We’ll get her back,” the man on the screen promised with feeling.
She kept her eyes cold, flat, as she said, “See that you do.”
Nerves were evident in his voice as he asked, “Do you want a report?”
She waved a dismissive hand, sweeping away the question. “I’m not interested in hearing about your failures, Conrad. Only your successes.” She drew her finely shaped eyebrows into one commanding line. “The next time you call, you’d better be ready to tell me that you have her.”
With that, she terminated the teleconference, cursing less than softly under her breath. Her one show of temper was to send a stack of papers on her desk flying, courtesy of the back of her hand.
“Incompetent imbeciles. I’m surrounded with incompetent imbeciles.”
“You should have sent me to get the PM’s brat. She wouldn’t have gotten away from me.”
Cassandra looked up to see Troy, the blond boy she had presented to her father as her adopted son nineteen years ago, walking into her office. Each time she saw him, she was struck by how handsome he had become. How tall, how self-possessed. And how eager to show everyone what he was made of.
Too eager, she thought. And when you are too eager, you make mistakes.
Her son was not to make mistakes. Not because s
he was demanding, but because she could brook no one saying anything against Troy. He was her pride and joy, the single thing that made everything she had been through worthwhile.
Troy’s raw eagerness both amused her and made her proud. When the time came, she would use that eagerness to deliver the death blow. It would be incredibly satisfying and supremely poetic.
But for now, she intended to keep Troy reined in. “All in good time, my dear, all in good time.” She beckoned him to her. When he came, she slipped her arm around his shoulder, completing the circle that was just the two of them. “You need seasoning.”
Troy frowned petulantly. She knew he was tired of the excuses, tired of being treated like a child when he was a man. He wanted to prove himself.
“The way to get seasoning is in the field.” Turning, he shrugged her off and faced her. “How am I supposed to live up to my heritage if you insist on protecting me?” It was an accusation.
The smile on Cassandra’s lips had frozen the blood in more than one man’s veins. She didn’t like being challenged, wouldn’t stand for it. But this was Troy, the only male she had taken to her heart since the last one had betrayed her twenty years ago. And so she smiled tolerantly at her eager foot soldier.
“You sit and you learn, Troy, like a good student. You sit and you learn,” she repeated. “And when the time is right, you will take your place in the organization. No one will take it from you.”
He raised his chin, an exact copy of the way she raised hers. Defiant. “And how will we know when the time is right?”
She looked at him with eyes that Corbett Lazlo had once found both mesmerizing and penetrating. There was not a single thread of doubt in her voice as she told him, “I will know. And I will tell you.”
“Anything yet?”
So engrossed in trying to untangle what was so hopelessly tangled before her, Lucia Cordez, the Lazlo Group’s computer expert par excellence, hadn’t heard her boss enter the room.
The man moved like smoke, she thought. It was a hold over from his early days in MI-6, where he had gotten his initial training. It wasn’t until Lazlo spoke that she even knew he was there.
As he asked the question, Lazlo absently placed his hand on her shoulder, looking over her to his computer screen.
Lucia tried not to react to the soft pressure, the slight, fleeting contact that registered so intently, causing the hiccup in her stomach. She doubted that Lazlo was even aware that he had placed his hand there as he peered at the screen. Actual physical contact was not his way.
For the most part, her employer was removed. It was what made him Lazlo, a mystery that none of them were ever going to solve. Unless he wanted them to. Which she sincerely doubted.
Taking a discreet breath to still the momentary flutter, Lucia focused on the blue screen. It’d had her full, undivided attention since Lazlo had called her in this morning and shown her the single ominous line printed in the middle of it.
Now the screen was filled with all kinds of coding, none of which, unfortunately, was getting her any closer to finding where the message had originally come from or who had sent it. The only thing that was crystal clear was that whoever had sent it had covered his or her tracks with the meticulous care of a government agent whose very life depended upon his ability to preserve his nonentity and remain invisible.
Lucia rotated her neck from side to side, warding off the encroaching stiffness. For all she knew, the threat could have come from someone associated with one of the world agencies they dealt with. A disgruntled agent who had been uncovered to his superiors due to the investigative efforts of one of the operatives with the Lazlo Group.
Or it could have been sent by someone with a personal vendetta against one of them, if not Lazlo himself. The agents who worked for Lazlo were not careful when it came to treading on toes if those toes were in the way of bringing a mission to a successful conclusion. And they always, always accomplished their mission. Sometimes quickly, sometimes not so quickly, but the outcome, once the Lazlo Group was brought into it, was never in doubt. That was why they were hired and why their unorthodox methods were accepted.
But success, achieved their way, did tend to yield a hefty crop of enemies.
Lucia leaned back against her seat, staring at the screen, willing it to all come together.
“Not yet,” she confessed, answering his ambiguous question.
She hated the taste of the negative words as she uttered them. Lucia stifled the urge to drag her hand through her long, dark curly hair. That was a tell, a sign of nervousness, and Lazlo preferred his people steady. It was just that she was accustomed to getting whatever was asked of her done in a matter of a few hours. This was going to be different.
“Whoever this is,” she tapped the screen, “is damn good.”
“Apparently,” Lazlo agreed, his voice emotionless. “But you’re better.”
She smiled. A compliment. The rarest of things when it came to Lazlo. But then, he and she had been together for quite some time. He had been, quite literally, her Svengali. Blessed with both brains and beauty, she had used the former and hidden the latter. Until Lazlo had found her and recruited her near-genius with the computer for his newly formed group. Taking her in hand, he’d taught her how to make the most of all her assets, to be proud of her looks and bring attention to them.
Men, sadly, did not expect a beautiful woman to be intelligent—and that was her ace in the hole. She’d thought at the time, as she trained and learned all the skills that went into being a successful agent destined to live a long life, that he was training her to be a field operative. But despite all her training and despite the fact that she knew several languages fluently and had exotic looks, thanks to a Latin father and a mother who was half Caucasian, half African-American, Lazlo insisted that her time be spent in the offices at the computer. There was the occasional outing, but again, as a computer expert, not as a spy.
There was a time when she’d bristled against that. Now she had come to terms with it. Lazlo used his people to their best advantage. And he always knew best. Which was why praise was so heady and so dear. Because it was so sparse.
She looked at his reflection in her screen. “You make it hard to fail, Lazlo.”
“Then don’t.”
She closed her eyes briefly. When she turned around to reply, he was gone.
Like smoke, she thought again, then turned back to the monitor.
Chapter 6
The minute Joshua tried to actually run, he realized that there was going to be a problem. The leg with the bullet wound rebelled against supporting his weight. Instead of being able to hurry alongside Prudence, he found his leg buckling beneath him. Going down, he cursed roundly.
Already several feet ahead of him, Pru swung around and saw Joshua on the ground, one leg under the other. The first thing she thought was that they’d been discovered and someone was firing at them. But she hadn’t heard any gunshots, only the rumble of the now distant thunder.
Doubling back, Pru quickly reached his side. “What’s the matter?”
Joshua tried to get up, but there was nothing for him to use as leverage. “I can’t run,” he ground out, the answer throbbing with frustration.
It was the wound, she thought, looking at the leg she’d tried to bandage with the ripped length of cloth from the bottom of her T-shirt.
“Oh,” was her only comment as her mind raced. This would be the perfect opportunity to leave him behind. Let whoever had kidnapped her deal with him. Maybe that would even buy her a little time. Besides, what did she really know about this man? For all she knew, he could have rescued her for his own reasons, reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with getting her back to her father. Her father would have never sent just one man. Her father would have sent an army of men.
But what if this Joshua was what he said he was? And he had come to rescue her? She couldn’t just leave his sorry behind here like this. He was bleeding again and there might be wild animal
s roaming the countryside at night, looking for prey. Wounded, Joshua would be at the top of their menu. Dinner à la carte.
So she squatted down beside him and grudgingly took his arm, drawing it around her. “Here, put your arm across my shoulders. You can use me as a crutch.”
The offer offended every bone in Joshua’s alpha male body. He looked around even as he rose to his feet, leaning heavily on her very slim shoulders. This just wasn’t right.
“There’s got to be a broken branch or something I can use for a crutch.”
She was beginning to regret the offer already. “Sorry, I left my whittling tools in my other jogging shorts.” Her eyebrows narrowed in a less-than-tolerant glare. “Will you stop being a macho man and let’s get out of here before those cretins find us?” She started moving before she finished her sentence.
He had no choice but to move with her. He wasn’t about to go anywhere on his own, at least not with any sort of speed. “All right.”
“So nice of you to agree,” she retorted, slipping one arm around his waist. With her other hand, she took a firmer hold of the arm that was resting across her shoulders.
She’d danced a less awkward dance in her time, Pru thought. She wanted to move fast, but that was next to impossible. Helping Lazlo cut her speed by at least half. She hoped the abductors didn’t know their way around in the dark.
“Maybe you’d better leave me here,” Joshua told her after several minutes.
His leg was throbbing and their progress was painfully slow. He was impeding her getaway and if the kidnappers were after her—and since this abduction was political in nature rather than just motivated by greed, there was every reason to believe that they were—then there were more people involved than just the ones back at the farmhouse. Who knew where the others were? And in his present state, he was slowing her down drastically.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she bit off, doing her best not to huff and puff her words out. Being a human crutch was hard work. She could feel perspiration pasting her T-shirt to her back and her already wet hair to her forehead. If she concentrated, she could feel the drops sliding down her spine.
My Spy Page 5
