Vendetta

by Iris Johansen

  She stiffened.

  Not surprise, shock.

  It was a photo of herself, her hair tousled, her eyes wide with fear, a bruise on her cheek. There was stone building in the background with an arched doorway.

  “It’s me.” She moistened her lips. “Or it was me. I’ve never seen that photo.”

  “No, it was probably sent as a souvenir to Huber from the Taliban.” His lips were tight. “He must have enjoyed it. It was taken at Sazkar Prison, wasn’t it? It had to be, you look so damn young and scared.”

  “Fifteen.” She swallowed. “And I was scared. It must have been taken during those first months before I learned that was a victory for them. I don’t believe I looked like that later. I hope I didn’t.”

  “Don’t look like that.” He was cursing. “Of course, you didn’t let them see a damn thing. You were always stronger than they were. They didn’t take one single thing from you.”

  She drew a deep breath. “I know that, it just took a little while to learn it.” Her lips were trembling. “And I don’t like that Huber had this photo. Can we burn it?”

  “No, it’s mine. I’m going to hold it in front of him while I tear his heart out.”

  She felt a ripple of shock at the sheer savagery of his tone. “That doesn’t seem fair.” She smiled unsteadily. “Maybe we should flip a coin. I have such fine plans for him.” She drew a deep breath. “And maybe we should concentrate on why this photo suddenly appeared here instead of on the memories it’s triggering. It doesn’t make sense.” She reached a shaky hand to her temple. “None of it. Why this photo?” She was looking at the picture more closely. “He wanted to make sure I’d recognize it and remind me of what I’d gone through.” She looked up at him. She whispered, “Did he know I was coming? How long has it been here? Was it Nemesis? Was this all a trap?”

  “Possible.” Brandon took the photo from her. “Nemesis could be a paid assassin or just so clumsy that he let Huber find out he was an informant. He might have sold you out.”

  “But why leave this photo?”

  “Whether he knew you’d be here or just knew the police would find it later, he wanted to let you know he still had you in his sights,” he said flatly.

  “I don’t see how he could have left it today,” she said. “San Kabara is teeming with police, FBI, Homeland Security, and CIA, and it would have been difficult not to be seen or even to get off the island. It was already in lockdown, any suspicious action would have stirred up a hornet’s nest.” She was trying to work her way through his thinking process. “No, I don’t believe it was a direct threat. I think that it was aimed at making me feel as helpless as I did when the Taliban had me at Sazkar. He mentioned that when he called me last night, and I could tell the bastard enjoyed it. He wanted to show me that nothing had changed since I was fifteen. He was still the master.” She was going step by step, working it out as she did one of her potions. “But he wouldn’t give up blowing up that hotel just to mock me and cause me a few nightmares. It had to be something else. I couldn’t be that important to him.”

  “Oh you’re important. He wouldn’t have showcased you so spectacularly with that bomb if you weren’t. But he might not be willing to give up his demonstration.” His lips twisted. “I’d bet he wanted you to see it. That’s why I told that captain of the bomb squad to keep on going through the hotels to make sure that they don’t run across another device.”

  She went still. “Dear God, of course that’s what he’d do. Give us a little time to let our guard down, then hit out.” Her gaze flew to his face. “What hotels?”

  “They were at the Sea Surf when I came here after you. They might have moved to the Vineyard by now.”

  “The top five hotels…” And the Neptune had been in the top five also. Huber had given them exactly what they had expected with that explosive. And now they were busily looking in the same direction. “But what if he isn’t interested in destroying the best and most splendid,” she asked suddenly. “What if he’s looking for something else this time?”

  His eyes narrowed on her face. “Where are you going with this?”

  She was terrified at where her mind was going. “He passed up on the Neptune. He used it as a tool to show me how helpless I am. And Nemesis said something the first time he contacted me…” Her gaze slowly lifted to the cliff and the three small hotels that looked out over the Pacific. “He said Huber was arrogant and wanted to change the coast of California. This is an island off the coast. Maybe he’d want to change it, too. Look how those hotels are balanced on that cliff…”

  And Catherine had told her she was going up to those hotels when she’d sent Rachel into the Andorra.

  “No!”

  She started running up the beach toward the path that led to the cliff. “Call that bomb squad and tell them go check those hotels on the cliff first, Brandon. A powerful enough explosion would send that cliff into the sea…” She was calling Catherine as she reached the path.

  Answer me, Catherine.

  Get out of there! Please get out of there.

  No answer.

  She punched in the number again as she started running up the path.

  No answer.

  She was halfway up the cliff and could see the men, women, and children milling around the lush grounds of the three hotels that Catherine had been trying to evacuate.

  But she didn’t see Catherine.

  It might be fine. She could be wrong.

  She started to dial her again.

  Please, make me wrong, she prayed.

  She could see two little children playing tag near the wall that bordered the cliff.

  So close to that cliff …

  No!

  Catherine, dammit, answer your phone!

  I need you to—

  The entire mountain blew!

  Darkness when there had been sunshine.

  Pain.

  A roaring, shaking, screams.

  She had been hurled to the ground, Rachel realized dazedly. Her shoulder had struck one of the hibiscus trees beside the path. What had happened?

  Cracking.

  Shifting.

  Screaming!

  Oh God, the screaming …

  Someone needed help.

  She managed to lift her head to look up at the top of the cliff to the hotels.

  There were no hotels.

  There was no top of the cliff.

  And she saw where those screams had come from. All of those people who had been milling around the gardens of the hotels had been swept away by that hideously strong blast. Rachel could see bodies lying everywhere on the slope that had been torn from the side of the cliff as the hotels had plunged into the sea below. Some people were clinging to debris from the ruin of the hotels or the scrawny trees that had been unearthed as the cliff tumbled into the ocean.

  As she watched, a woman lost her desperate hold on a boulder and slid down the slope toward the sea.

  And then she was screaming, too.

  Rachel struggled to her knees. She had to get to them. She had to get to all of them.

  “Rachel!” Brandon was suddenly beside her. He grabbed her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

  “No.” Didn’t he understand? No one was okay. They were screaming. She had to get to them. “I didn’t want to be right. But he did it, he did this. I have to get to them.”

  “The hell you do.” He was feeling her arms, legs, looking at her shoulder. “Can’t you see that every rescue crew on the island is streaming up that path? What there is left of it … I’ll be down there myself as soon as I get you down off this cliff. The rest of it could collapse at any moment. That blast must have undermined this half of the island.”

  “Then he won,” she said dully. “He changed the coastline. All those people didn’t matter, did they?”

  “No.” He was helping her to her feet. “Not to him. But they do to us. Come on, let me take you where you can get some first aid. I want to get down there.”


  “So do I.” The screaming. “That sounded like a child.” She started to go toward the cliff edge, which was now only a scant twenty feet away. “I don’t need first aid. I need to help.” She shook her head to clear it. “Catherine. I couldn’t reach her. She could be down there, too.” Panic was growing as she spoke, and she tried to pull away from Brandon’s restraining hand. “I have to—”

  His hand tightened. “You have to leave here before the rest of this cliff falls into the sea,” he said grimly. “Come willingly, or I’ll lift you in a fireman’s hold and carry you down.”

  “Screw you.” She jerked away from him. “Can’t you hear them? I have to get to where I can—”

  “Catherine.” He was looking beyond her down the slope. “You wanted Catherine. There she is. She’s skidding down the slope, trying to get close enough to the rescue area.”

  Relief. “I’ll go and see if I can—”

  “No.” He was at the edge of the cliff and calling down to Catherine. “Get up here, Catherine. I need you! Just give me two minutes.”

  Catherine stopped, looked up at his face, then was climbing back to the top. Rachel saw that she had a length of rope over her shoulder, but she didn’t use it for the climb. “Two minutes,” she said grimly. “I have to—” Then she saw Rachel. “You were here? Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t think so. Not badly.” Brandon answered for her. “But I can’t keep her from going down that slope without knocking her out. You do it.”

  “They’re screaming, Catherine,” Rachel said. “They need help. They need me.”

  Catherine stared at her for an instant, then strode over to her. “Yes, they are screaming, and they do need help.” She took her by the shoulders. “And you do need to do it.” She looked her in the eyes. “You’re the only one who can do it now. But not down there with us, pulling them out of that hellhole. You need to go down there on the beach and set up a triage center for us to send those injured people we manage to rescue. It might be too late for some of them by the time they scramble and get medical teams here from San Francisco. You need to treat them now and try to save them. That’s your job now, Rachel.” She gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. “Now go down and do it. I hope we’re going to need you very soon.” She turned back to Brandon. “And you come with me. I think you’re right, she’s not badly hurt though she might have a minor concussion. But she’s not going to let anyone hold her hand through this nightmare. No one knows better how to cope than Rachel.” She was already skidding down the steep, jagged slope. “So cope, Rachel. I’ll see you later. I think I heard a child…”

  “You did,” Rachel called after her. “I think he was near those rocks by the—” She stopped. Not her job. Not right now. She wasn’t thinking too clearly herself, but Catherine had been able to point her in the right direction as she had so many times before. She turned to Brandon. “You heard her, help her find that kid.” She turned and had to steady herself before she started down the path to the beach. “And I want him alive when you bring him to me, Brandon. See to it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He was going down the slope. “And I’ll call Monty and pull him off the rescue team to give you a hand. You might be able to cope, but Monty has certain talents that might come in handy…”

  CHAPTER

  11

  8:40 P.M.

  Rotors overhead.

  More helicopters, Rachel thought wearily. She was used to the sound now. They had been operating nonstop since the disaster. Bringing in supplies, social workers, medical help, and equipment, families of victims, military … Thank God, they’d managed to keep out the politicians and the media. Though she’d seen news helicopters buzzing around since noon. She didn’t think she would have been able to stand having them tour any of the tent facilities she’d managed to set up. It had been bad enough fighting all the military brass to get her way when she’d started setting up this makeshift hospital next to the disaster zone.

  “That helicopter was for the amputee.” Monty came into the tent to stand beside her. “It has room for another patient. Do we have one?”

  “No, but that pregnant woman died on the operating table. I wasn’t able to save her. We couldn’t find any ID on her. Send her to the medical examiner in San Francisco.”

  “I’ll tell them.” Monty started to turn away, then stopped. “You don’t have to stay here, Rachel. There are only five patients left in that tent. They’ve got more than enough doctors and nurses here now. And there are more volunteers landing on every other helicopter. They’re standing in line at the Red Cross and all the hospitals from here to the Oregon border. You’ve done your part, now let them do theirs.”

  She shook her head. “The rescue workers are still on the slope. They’ve not located all the survivors yet.” All day long, she had seen the dogs and the rescue teams fight their way to that mangled wreckage of a cliff, looking for miracles. But miracles were few and far between. She’d had to order a morgue tent set up an hour after she’d begun receiving victims from that horror of a slope. The young pregnant woman had made the dead a total of sixty-four, and she’d lost count of the injuries she’d treated and sent out to hospitals in San Francisco, way over 150. She didn’t want to remember right now. “I was told that there might be air pockets under that hotel debris that trapped those people under the water. I have to stay.”

  “No you don’t,” he said gently. “Brandon just called me from the slope. The divers say no possible survivors in the water. They’ve changed the mission from search and rescue to retrieval.”

  She flinched. “They could be wrong.” She desperately wanted them to be wrong. But she had worked these disasters before, and she knew how hard it was for rescue workers to make that call. They’d still do their very best, but rescues would be rare. “What did Brandon think?”

  “He thinks that you should let the volunteers you have in those tents do their job while you take a break.” He paused. “And come to terms with the truth. He said if you didn’t, he’d send Catherine after you. And they both need to be up there for the wrap-up before they come down.”

  They were coming down. Neither of them would ever abandon those victims if they thought there was a chance. She whispered, “It’s over?”

  “All you can do right now,” he said quietly. “Go over to the mess tent and get a cup of tea. You haven’t stopped since you came down from that cliff and hit the ground running. You’re so tired, you’re more a hindrance than an asset right now. I’ll take care of delegating duties and responsibilities.”

  She didn’t want to let go. She opened her lips to argue with him. Then she closed them and turned away. He was right, those few remaining patients deserved someone fresher and clearer-headed than she was right now. “Yes, do that. Tell them to call me if anything changes.” It was hard to move one foot in front of the other as she left the tent. She hadn’t felt the exhaustion while she was working, but that was always how it worked after the adrenaline began to fade. She went past the mess tent and turned to walk toward the pier. She kept her eyes averted from the steep, rutted slope and the hotels that were mere twisted piles of concrete in the surf. It hurt too much. So much destruction. So many deaths. She just wanted to find someplace to curl up and look at the sunlight on the water instead of that horror that had been her life for the last hours.

  And pray for the souls of all those innocents who had died today.

  * * *

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Brandon said as he came toward the piling that she was leaning against beneath the pier. “You didn’t answer your phone. I didn’t need that, Rachel.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she said wearily. “I didn’t do it on purpose. My battery was down. I’ve been using it all day. I didn’t realize it until I checked to see if Monty had called me when I got here.” She gazed up at him. He looked powerful and tough but stretched to the limit. Who wouldn’t be after the day he’d had on that damned slope? He was dirty, his jeans and shirt torn. There was
a long scratch on his forearm. “You came straight from the slope? You didn’t need to do that. You have to take care of yourself. Didn’t Monty tell you that I’m fine?”

  “As fine as you could be. I had to see for myself.” He dropped down on the sand beside her, his gaze raking her face. “Exhausted, numb, heartsick.”

  “Not numb.” She looked out at the sun, which was almost down. “Every one of those people you sent me from the slope is still with me. How can I let them go? You can’t, can you?”

  “No.” He reached out and covered her hand on the sand. “But that’s me, I don’t like to see you hurting. How can I help?”

  “You’re doing it.” She looked down at his hand on hers. It was also dirty and cut, but it was warm and strong, and both the dirt and lacerations had been earned in the same battle she had fought. “You’re making me feel that I’m not alone. That’s good right now.” She was silent, staring out at the water. “Huber wanted me to see it, didn’t he? That’s what that photo was about. Do you suppose he managed to use Nemesis to draw me here? He wanted me to come and see it and not be able to do anything about it.”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “But you did do something about it. It would have been even more of a catastrophe if all those guests had still been inside the hotels. At least fifty percent survived who were registered in those cliff hotels. And all the hotels on the beach strand were left untouched.”

  “You’re wrong. No one was left untouched today.”

  He nodded. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Do you think it was enough for him?” she whispered. “It was such a horror. Do you believe he’s still planning another disaster for the twenty-fifth?”

  “Catherine thinks this is only the preview Nemesis told you it was.” He paused. “I tend to agree with her.”

  She was silent. “It can’t happen again,” she said unsteadily. “It’s not that I haven’t been caught in the middle of monstrous ugliness before. But this coldness is a wickedness beyond…” She drew a deep breath. “Catherine sent me to set up those tents to take care of survivors, and I went along with it because I knew I’d be more help there. But my father said there were times when you had to go after the bad guys and stop them.” She forced herself to look away from the sea to the jagged, rutted slope at the far end of the island. Was it only imagination that she thought she saw blood in those ruts? “I won’t let anyone send me away again, Brandon.”