“Let’s not forget the matter of that statue of St. Benedict,” Luis reminded her, turning serious. “I’m still not convinced its fall was an accident.”
She wasn’t, either, but they’d found no evidence to the contrary. A little self-consciously, she fingered the silver chain looped around her neck.
“If that wasn’t an accident,” she said slowly, “if someone deliberately tried to harm us, the attempt has to be linked to this visit to Prague and to Stacy Andrews’s nightmares. But how? Why?”
Frustration ate at her as she came full circle.
“The only concrete facts we’ve uncovered here in the Czech Republic suggest Stacy’s nightmares are genetic. If so, that will make her treatment more difficult and prolonged.”
Claire would have to locate a specialist with more expertise in genetic predisposition for dreams than the colleagues she’d consulted so far. If such a specialist existed. The science was still new and pretty far out there.
“Or you could try some of the remedies I procured for you on Stacy Andrews,” Luis said casually.
The suggestion produced an instant groan. “Oh no! Promise me you will not bring that stuff aboard the aircraft.”
His noncommittal shrug left the issue unresolved.
“Luis, be serious! You can’t really think I’m going to march into the White House with a sackful of fennel root and the hair of a yellow dog.”
“Why not, if they work?”
“We have no evidence they do.”
“I beg to differ. You didn’t have nightmares last night, did you?”
That took the heat from Claire’s argument. She hadn’t dreamed last night. Luis had kept her too busy—and too exhausted!—with his hands and mouth and hard, driving body.
Then, of course, there was the marriage proposal he’d dropped on her. That had crowded almost everything else from her conscious mind. She suspected her subconscious was still trying to deal with it. How else to explain the doubts that surfaced briefly this morning, when she’d faced herself in the bathroom mirror?
Doubts she now had to struggle to recall. She’d grown more sure of her decision with each passing hour, she realized as they hit the outskirts of Prague.
Claire enjoyed a last view of the castle and magnificent cathedral dominating the city skyline before they took the bypass to the airport.
They turned in the rental car and hopped a tram to the main commercial terminal. After going through airport security and verifying their credentials, they were ferried to the auxiliary airport hangars across the runway from the main terminal. Various smaller aircraft sat outside the hangars, including the twin-engine Gulfstream with its distinctive USAF markings.
Major Talbot had indicated she’d have the jet preflighted and ready to go. But when security dropped Claire and Luis off beside the transport, they were greeted by a clearly frustrated pilot and crew.
“Sorry, ma’am. We’ve hit a glitch.”
While the crew chief relieved Luis of the bags, the honey-haired major gestured to the hangar behind her.
“The auxiliary airport manager called down a few minutes ago. He’s holding up our clearance to depart.”
“Why?”
“He said something about an accident at St. Vitus Cathedral yesterday.”
“What’s that got to do with our departure?”
“Evidently, a representative from Bureau of Tourist Affairs just showed up at the airport. He needs you and Colonel Esteban to sign a release of liability.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, ma’am.”
Claire curbed her impatience with this example of bureaucratese. In a country as dependent on tourism as the Czech Republic, she supposed the government wanted assurance she wouldn’t hit them with a million-dollar lawsuit and all its attendant bad press.
“The airport manager requested you stop by his office,” Major Talbot said. “He’ll have the release there.”
“Very well.” Claire passed her briefcase to the crew chief and hitched the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. “Where’s his office?”
The major hooked a thumb at the hangar that served as the Fixed Base Operations Center. “Inside, top of the stairs, fourth door to the right.”
She and Luis started for the hangar. The sharp scents of a busy airport followed them. Diesel fumes from the refueling trucks outside mingled with the industrial-strength cleaner used to scrub hangar floors in an effort to keep them free of foreign objects that might be ingested into jet engines.
Judging by the rickety metal stairs leading to the offices suspended above the hangar floor, the facilities on this side of the airport were considerably older than those in the big, bright main terminal. The stairs led to a narrow corridor illuminated by bulbs hanging at the end of their cords. Several of the bulbs had burnt out and needed replacing. Their absence left large sections of the hall in deep shadow.
Luis’s cell phone rang just as they started down the corridor. Frowning, he tipped the phone back toward the light to see the digital display.
“It is the Cartozan embassy here in Prague,” he told Claire. “I should take this.”
“Go ahead. I’ll find the airport manager.”
Claire counted down the doors and twisted the knob for the fourth on the right. It opened onto a small, dusty, unbelievably cluttered outer office. Aviation charts covered every available horizontal surface. Clipboards hung haphazardly from pegs. A monitor displaying weather data flickered from its perch high atop a row of metal file cabinets.
“Hello?”
A male voice responded from the inner office. “Yes?”
Claire edged past the precariously stacked charts. From what she could see of the second office, it contained as much clutter as the first. It also, she saw when she stepped through the door, contained a corpse.
The body lay sprawled on the floor, out of sight from the other office, but unavoidable once inside. It was a male, she noted in a single, searing instant. Mid to late forties. With tobacco-yellowed lips, a purple birthmark on one cheek and a neat hole in the center of his forehead.
Her veins icing, Claire made a slow quarter turn. A second male lounged in a tipped-back chair behind a dented metal desk. His eyes were as steady and unswerving as the silenced semi-automatic aimed at her heart.
“You’ve led us quite a chase, Dr. Cantwell.”
Before he’d even opened his mouth, Claire had switched into operative mode. In the blink of an eye, she’d assessed the man—American, late thirties, a good twenty pounds overweight. His weapon, a polycast Walther P-22 with a Gem-Tech suppressor screwed onto the muzzle.
“Us?” she echoed coolly as she made a show of clenching her fist around the strap of her shoulder bag. In the process, she slid her hand a surreptitious inch or two lower on the strap. “Who is ‘us’?”
Her best option—her only option—at this point was to keep him talking until she could make her move. Claire’s extensive research into the criminal mind supported what most street cops knew from experience. Vicious killers such as this one liked to brag about their crimes. Show how much smarter they were than their victims or the police.
With consummate skill, she managed to project the image of a woman stonily refusing to show how terrified she was while clutching her bag in a shaking, white-knuckled fist. Her hand was only inches from the purse’s flap when the man on the other side of the desk pursed his fleshy lips.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet? And you, with all those degrees hanging on your wall.”
“Why don’t you enlighten me, Mr. Dawson?”
Her guess hit home.
“That’s one of the names I use,” he admitted, his face tightening. “How did you make me?”
“You signed the register at the ossuary in Sedlec.”
“Crap! So that’s where you went.” Disgust rippled across his fleshy features. “I tried to tail you when you left the hotel this morning, but lost you in traffic. Had to hang around here at
the airport for hours waiting for you to show.”
“Which gave you plenty of time to concoct a story about needing me to sign some kind of release and have the auxiliary field manager relay it to my crew.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
All too well, Claire admitted silently. She speared a glance at the body on the floor while Dawson’s gaze swept to the open door behind her.
“Where’s your lover?”
Before she could respond, her cell phone pinged inside her purse. “That’s probably him now,” she lied.
Luis wouldn’t call when he was only steps behind her. She knew that, but Dawson didn’t. She guessed he wouldn’t let her answer the call, but used the moment to release her death grip on the shoulder strap and move her hand toward the flap.
“Leave it!” Dawson snapped. “I need him to come looking for you.”
They faced each other across the desk while the phone rang a second time. A third. After the fourth, it fell silent. Claire broke the stillness that followed with a terse question.
“Who hired you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he sneered.
Claire’s lips curled. She was fast developing a severe dislike for the man but had to keep him talking until she could get her hand inside her bag.
“Tell me one thing. Was that you yesterday on the roof of the archbishop’s palace?”
“Yeah, it was.” Malicious amusement tinged his pale blue eyes. “I couldn’t believe you leaped like a damned cat out from under that statue. Just like you escaped Eddie. You’re a little too quick for us, Doc. Too damned slippery. That’s why we had to give up trying to make this look like an accident.”
The pseudoamusement left his eyes. Claire’s throat closed as they went flat and cold.
“I owe you for Eddie, Doc.”
“I assume you’re referring to Ed Porter, the man who attacked me outside my home.”
“Yeah, bitch, I am. You crushed his windpipe. You and your greaseball lover. I intend to take care of him, too, as soon as he shows his face.”
Almost before he’d mouthed the words, footsteps sounded in the corridor. That was Luis. Claire knew it. The fat pig across from her knew it.
Instinctively, his glance swung toward the office door. His gun barrel followed. It moved only an inch. Two at the most. Claire knew that was all she’d get.
“Luis!” she screamed, whipping up the flap of her purse as she flung herself to the side. “Down!”
Her hand closed around the butt of her Baretta. Her thumb hit the safety. She fired through the leather bag at the same instant her assailant’s weapon kicked.
Her shot caught the beefy triggerman square in the chest and sent his chair crashing back against the wall. His, Claire saw on a shaft of sheer terror, caught the figure in the outer doorway and spun him around. Staggering, he went down on one knee.
Claire leaped around the desk and took only enough time to make sure the threat had been neutralized before rushing to Luis. He had a hand pressed against his side. Blood stained his white shirt and dripped through his fingers onto the office floor.
“The embassy…got word,” he got out through clenched teeth. “OMEGA and…Interpol ID’ed…Dawson. He’s…here in Prague.”
“I know. That’s him with his lungs decorating the wall.”
Luis grunted and Claire skimmed a frantic glance around the office for something to stanch the blood. A windbreaker hung from a wooden coatrack in a corner. She leaped up and snatched it off the rack. Folding it into a thick pad, she eased it under Luis’s blood-soaked palm.
“You’ll have to hold it. Just for a minute, while I call for help.”
As it turned out, she didn’t have to call. Dawson’s weapon had been silenced, but hers wasn’t. The shot brought all kinds of folks running.
The first was a young woman in jeans and a faded blue T-shirt advertising a Czech airline. When she rushed into the office and spotted Claire on her knees beside Luis, she choked out a strangled gasp.
“Call an ambulance!” Claire implored.
Either she didn’t understand English or the bodies sprawled on the floor scared the crap out of her. She took off, shouting at the top of her lungs.
Her screams brought two mechanics in grease-stained overalls. They peered cautiously through the door of the outer office. When they spotted the corpse of the man she assumed was the airport manager, she thought for a moment they were going to take off shouting, too.
“Call an ambulance,” she ordered, fighting to sound cool and authoritative.
It didn’t help that her voice cracked on the last word. Or that Luis had now crumpled against the file cabinets. Her heart pumping pure terror, she was reduced to begging.
“Please! Doctor. Medico. Please!”
She almost sobbed with relief when Major Talbot and her crew chief pushed past the mechanics.
“What the hell?”
“Veronica! Get a medical team here. Now!”
Goggle-eyed, the major whipped her cell phone from the pocket of her flight suit. While she struggled to relay the urgent request, her crew chief knelt beside Claire to help hold the wadded and blood-soaked windbreaker against Luis’s side.
A black-suited SWAT team burst into the office mere moments later. Only after they’d secured all weapons and judged the situation safe, did they allow in the medical response team. The helmeted and heavily armed SWAT members watched closely as two EMTs edged Claire away from the now unconscious Luis.
It felt like hours, but probably took less than ten minutes, before they’d packed his wound, hooked up an IV and had him on a gurney. Claire tried to follow when they wheeled him out but wasn’t surprised when the SWAT team leader detained her.
“You must give statement.”
She threw an urgent look at Major Talbot. The pilot interpreted it with no difficulty.
“I’ll go with him.”
“Call me if—” Claire swallowed, hard, and amended her plea “—when you get to the hospital.”
“I will,” the major promised.
Claire spent the next thirty minutes alternating between teeth-grinding frustration and gut-wrenching terror.
She couldn’t lose Luis, too!
She couldn’t!
Sick fear curled in her belly as she struggled to overcome the language barrier. Using gestures and short, succinct phrasing, she tried to describe the sequence of events to a patently suspicious team of investigators. Belatedly, she remembered the card she’d slipped in her purse yesterday.
At her urgent request, the officer on the scene called the detective who’d investigated the incident at the cathedral. He confirmed that Dr. Cantwell had indeed been the victim of what now must be viewed as a deliberate attack. Given the physical evidence they described in this one, he felt sure she’d been defending herself against a second attack.
But it took a call to OMEGA to effect her release. Lightning himself appeared on the cell phone screen for a very direct, very emphatic conference call.
“Call Henri Celusniak, director of your country’s Interpol division,” Lightning instructed the Czech investigaotrs. “He’ll confirm this man Dawson, aka Winston Rutherford aka Harold Popejoy, tops Interpol’s list of suspected hit men.”
Mere moments later, Claire raced down the metal stairs. One of the responding officers directed her to his parked vehicle. Once she was strapped in, he put the vehicle in gear and peeled away from the hangar. All the way to the hospital, one thought kept hammering at Claire’s frantic mind: she told Luis she would marry him, but she’d never told him she loved him.
Chapter 11
When Claire rushed into the hospital in one of Prague’s modern suburbs, she learned Luis was undergoing emergency surgery. The fear that had held her in its paralyzing grip during the way in dug deeper and twisted her insides.
Claire found Veronica Talbot in the surgical waiting area. True to her word, the pilot had stayed with Luis right up to the moment he’d been
wheeled into the operating room.
“The good news is that the bullet ricocheted off a rib and exited,” she related. “The bad news…The rib splintered and a shard of bone perforated his left lung.”
“Did the lung collapse?”
“I’m not sure.”
She hesitated, and Claire felt the air squeeze out of her own lungs.
“He lost a lot of blood. The docs didn’t come right out and say so, but I got the impression it could be touch and go.”
After calling her crew to give them an update, the major stuck with Claire during the tense hours that followed. It was mid-afternoon before Luis was out of surgery and moved to the ICU. Claire was there when they wheeled him in. She had to bite her lip until she tasted blood at seeing him so pale and still.
The staff was briskly efficient as they hooked him to a heart monitor and IV drips. Claire held his hand in a gentle grip until a male nurse rolled in a cart.
“Excuse, madam. I must work here. You will wait in the lounge?”
She understood the rationale for restricting visitors to ten minutes each hour, on the hour. The ICU cubicles weren’t designed for family confabs and gatherings. Besides which, Luis would be out for hours. Reluctantly, she relinquished her place at his beside. She knew he couldn’t hear her but leaned over to murmur to him anyway.
“I’ll be right outside.”
Veronica Talbot had waited in the family lounge for an update. “He okay?”
“As best I can understand, his condition is guarded.”
The pilot nodded, her face grave above her flight suit. “I called in to my scheduler. Since you’re staying with the ambassador and he can’t be moved for an indeterminate time, they’ve tagged us to return to the States. They’ll send another crew whenever you say the word, ma’am.”
“Thanks.”
“I had your luggage delivered.” She gestured to the bags sitting beside one of the sofas and hesitated. “I hate to leave you here alone.”
“I’ll be all right. So will Luis.” Claire gripped the major’s hand and worked up a smile. “I know an agency in Washington that could use someone with your cool head and leadership skills. If you ever decide to leave the air force, call me.”
Seduced by the Operative Page 12
