by Leon, Judith
She waited. Noting that her breathing was rapid, she sucked in a deep breath to slow it and her heart rate down.
The door behind her creaked, and she heard soft footsteps. She resisted the urge to check behind to see who had come in, and moments later Angelo Santiago took the seat on the aisle. He laid a long, slender object covered in what looked like a red mechanic’s rag on the seat between them, his hand solidly holding down his end.
From her bag she pulled out the fifty twenty-dollar bills, wrapped in a napkin from her hotel’s bar and held together by a rubber band. She slipped the money down the bench.
“Do you need to count it?” she asked in a whisper.
Before he could answer she heard the creak of the door behind her. This time instinct caused her to turn toward the sound. The two men from the Bronco, now without hats, stepped inside. Both drew guns as they approached what they probably thought was a silly American woman and an unskilled laborer.
Angelo Santiago snatched up the packet of cash.
In one smooth motion, Nova rose into a crouch, shifted the rag-wrapped machete onto the floor under the bench, and knocked Angelo down as a shot rang out. Wood splintered in the back of the bench in front of him. She jumped onto the bench and launched herself toward both thugs, both hands out and her eye on their gun hands. She pushed their gun hands upward as the force of her weight brought all three of them to the floor. The women were screaming.
Nova grabbed onto one man and rolled with him. His buddy leaped to his feet, shouting something in Portuguese and waving his gun at them, trying to get a clean shot at Nova without hitting his partner.
With her left hand, she grabbed the gun hand of the man now below her and with her right, she delivered a breath-crippling blow to the man’s windpipe. As he went limp, she quickly rolled him as another shot from the standing man rang out and the man in her grip took the bullet meant for her. It struck him in the back.
A booted kick to her side sent an electric shock of pain to her heart and stopped her breathing. She scrambled to her knees and tackled the legs in front of her. If she didn’t get him down, his next act would likely be to send a bullet into her head. She sucked in a breath as he tumbled backward to the floor.
Another pair of legs—Joe in jeans—appeared beside her attacker’s head. Joe stepped on the wrist of the man’s gun hand. The man howled in pain as Joe ground his foot into the wrist. Joe then stooped and took the man’s gun.
“I could have taken him,” Nova said, as she pushed to her feet, sucking in another breath that made her side hurt again. The pain didn’t seem to be sharp enough to signal a cracked rib, but she was going to have a horrid bruise.
“Of course. But I have to be useful now and then.” Joe gave her that big, heart-stopping grin.
She checked the pew and the room. Angelo was long gone.
Joe flipped her attacker onto his belly. “Hands behind your back,” he said in Portuguese.
Given that Joe was holding a persuasive Glock, the man readily complied.
They needed to get out and quickly. Joe pulled a plastic security tie from a pocket and knelt to bind their bad guy. The two elderly women, having sufficiently recovered from shock to get their feet into gear, shuffled out the door. A priest was scurrying toward them from the front of the sanctuary.
“Let’s get out of here without questions,” Joe said.
She snatched the machete from under the pew, and the two of them rushed outside. Maybe a dozen people hovered, hesitant but also curious.
“This way,” Joe said.
She followed him to the rented Toyota.
He turned the ignition. “Where to?”
“Start for the airport. I’ll check with Oscar.”
When she reached Oscar by cell, she told him the police should pick up a body and a prisoner in the church. He explained that a charter plane was waiting at the airport to take her and her backup to Rio.
“Obrigado, Oscar,” she said. “For everything.”
“Boa sorte!” he said. “May God help you find your Americans before another one dies.”
“We’ll need a lot of luck,” she replied. “Only fourteen hours until their killing deadline, and I can’t imagine that any amount of negotiation will persuade them to cancel this one.”
Chapter 18
At nearly one o’clock, Leila unlocked the door to her condominium. Nova followed the CIA head of station inside with Joe following. “I’m perfectly happy to have you both crash here,” Leila said, dropping her keys onto a yellow-and-blue-butterfly cloth covering the top of a small cabinet by the entry. A fresh lemony scent lingered in the air. “It’s too damn early in the morning for you to be checking into a hotel anyway when I have a guest room and comfortable couch.”
They had lost some time coming to the condominium while waiting for a fingerprint expert to come to the CIA’s lab and take the machete off their hands. At the airport, Leila had said, “We’ll get this to the fingerprint tech first thing tomorrow. Six o’clock. It’s pointless to go there tonight. No one will be there to lift any prints until morning.”
Six in the morning wasn’t much more than six hours away, but waiting even one extra hour, let alone six, to get the experts working on their best clue had troubled Nova.
“Are you certain it’s out of the question to call your main fingerprint guy and ask him to come in now and get started?” she’d asked as tactfully as possible. “They’re threatening to kill a hostage at noon tomorrow. Actually, that’s today.”
After a brief pause, Leila made a call, and when they arrived at the CIA offices, a chubby man with sleepy eyes and a coffee cup in his hand greeted them at the lab door. He would look for prints and, if he found any, digitize them and send them off to the FBI, Interpol, and several other places. He smiled but said little as he took their package.
Now, as Joe sat his overnighter on the floor, Leila said, “I’ll fetch some bedding.” To Nova she said, “Make yourself comfortable in the same room you had before. I’ll lay out towels and stuff in the bathrooms. Nora’s room has its own bath, Joe, but there is a small one off the kitchen you can use. It has a shower.”
Nova stood way longer than necessary in the hot shower followed by a cool rinse. She’d tossed her khaki slacks, the cotton top and her underwear in a heap on the floor. To be able to hear sounds in the condo, she left the bedroom door slightly ajar. This was surely unnecessary, given who Leila was and the tight security on the building, but years of experience had developed protective habits. It was always better to be as much in contact with your surroundings as possible. The sooner warned, the sooner armed.
She preferred to sleep nude, but she usually brought along something, in this instance a red, spaghetti-strap nightie that folded into something not much larger than a handkerchief. She slipped it on, thinking that if for some reason she would have to get up in the night or if her hostess should for some reason come into the room, she didn’t want Leila to be embarrassed to find her guest au naturel.
Nova was standing next to the bed when the door opened. She turned, and Joe stepped inside and closed the door. Only a white towel covered the midsection of his tanned and chiseled body. His hair, still wet from a shower, gleamed.
Nova hugged her waist with one arm, her breathing suspended.
He walked to one of the room’s windows and looked out at the nighttime view of Rio. The bedroom faced Ipanema Beach and the string of high-rise hotels that lined it. Between the buildings that made up the band of dazzling light lay the deep, velvet blackness of the Atlantic Ocean. “I thought I’d take a look at your view.” He turned from the window and looked her over, tip to toe, nice and slow. “The view is superb.”
That’s when she noticed the condom package in his hand. He was a professional at many things, and one of them was the ability to slip into a condom so fast a woman hardly knew when it happened. “You shouldn’t come in here dressed like that.”
“Okay.” He dropped the towel to the floor.<
br />
“Jeez, Joe.” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have come in here at all.”
Three steps and he had her in his arms. She shivered. He smelled faintly of lemon. He kissed her. Her legs felt shaky. She felt her judgment oozing like a lump of butter spreading on a hot skillet. He used his tongue to part her lips, and she let him inside. Then, after he’d pulled back and played long, lingering, delicious moments with her lips, all sanity fled and she slid her tongue into his mouth.
That was enough of a signal for Joe. He backed her to the bed, sat her down, knelt in front of her and slowly spread her legs. Low in her body, that amazing fire struck.
She leaned back, knowing what was coming, longing for the pleasure that was coming. Warm hands slid up her outer thighs. He pushed up the nightie and spread her legs still more. As he bent to her, she put her hand on his wet hair. She could smell him strongly now, the scent of lemon soap, clean, fresh.
His fingers slid to the inside of her thighs and she sighed. “Oh, God, Joe. This is not good.”
He spread her and his tongue licked.
I shouldn’t let him do this.
But it was too late. The ability to reason departed to wherever it went when passion overrode it. She was hot all over, the pleasure starting to swell. “Oohhh. Yes.”
The perfect licking continued. “Uh-huh.”
He went slower, to make her linger, to build her up.
Then very fast.
She moaned as the world finally disappeared in a burst of throbbing heat that for a moment flashed through and shook her whole body.
“Good,” he said.
He climbed onto the bed, lying beside her. With that skill that both amused and amazed her, he ripped open the condom package and had the damn thing on in no more than two heartbeats. “Come here,” she said as she pulled him over her.
She watched his face every moment until he climaxed, remembering that she loved him and that it was he who had walked away. Not her.
As he always did afterward, he kissed her forehead and then her lips and finally both of her eyes before he went into the bathroom to get rid of the condom and bring her a warm washcloth.
“I still love you,” he said as he lay beside her, his arm across her belly. “But I understand your feelings. Just consider this a bit of fun for old times’ sake between good buddies, okay? Nothing to get serious over.”
She couldn’t think what to say. The man was maddening. She’d refused to marry him. He’d left her with not a goodbye or one further word in over six months. And now he’d made fabulous love to her, before announcing that, of course, they were just friends.
He left soon thereafter.
And she had the dream again. Panic overwhelmed her as she struggled to untangle her parachute lines, struggled to find a ripcord.
The smell of coffee pulled her out of the dream in time to avoid hitting the ground. Leila fed them juice, croissants, fresh guava and coffee. Joe said nothing and gave Nova no special smile or secret signal. Total zip. So it seemed that they were going to pretend last night’s exchange of pleasure had never happened.
Since the fingerprint expert, Peete, had the machete, Leila had let them sleep late. Leila had checked with Peete at six and learned that he had found two prints. When they arrived at the CIA headquarters at ten, Peete still had no identification results.
Nova did her best to hide her disappointment and stifle a nagging sense of urgency. Waiting was one of the hardest parts of the work. Since the kidnappers had been speaking Guarani, a language used in Paraguay and second in usage in that country only to Spanish, Nova and Joe settled down with files on Paraguay: what were the main illegal operations going on there, where were they centered, who were the major players?
At twelve thirty, Leila fetched them into a conference room where she joined them in consuming damn good take-out food: burritos and a fresh salad. Nova didn’t enjoy a bite of what she forced down. It was quite possible one of her ten people—she thought of them as hers now—had already been killed.
And in the peculiar way that the subconscious mind works, the meaning of her bad dream had become clear in the middle of working on the Paraguay files. This nightmare she’d had from childhood had an almost ridiculously obvious meaning. It had nothing to do with anxiety about skydiving, something she was actually good at. It represented lack of control, her greatest fear. In the dream, the jump master was in control, setting the pace, forcing her when she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t in her comfort zone. Living in fear of Candido had been the beginning of the dream. Prison its continuation. And the fear of losing control in a marriage, even to Joe, had triggered it again. The moment she realized the dream’s meaning she had thought, Do we ever really escape from our childhood?
As she half listened to Leila and Joe discussing soccer, she once again mulled over the dream’s meaning. Just because she knew the cause didn’t change, probably couldn’t change, how she felt. Being married was never going to be an option for her. But maybe, just maybe, she could convince Joe to stay with her on her terms.
Peete strode into the room, his smile encouraging. “We have an identification from the Asuncion police. The prints belong to a low-level Paraguayan thug. Carlito Gomez. He has a long arrest record for petty stuff. He’s employed by a man named Felipe Martinez. Martinez owns a big cotton ranch. Cotton is big in Paraguay and of course legal, but the authorities suspect Martinez of smuggling.”
Nova felt a spark of hope warm her.
“Excellent, Peete,” Leila said.
Peete laid a file on the table showing a photo of Gomez and two sheets of information.
“Anything else?” he asked Leila.
“No. And thanks for coming to work in the middle of the night.”
He smiled. “Just get the pigs.”
He left. Joe said, “So we’re off to Paraguay?”
Leila stood. “I’ll get tickets lined up, and by the time your drivers get you to the airport, the tickets will be waiting. Joe in coach, Nova in first class. I’ll also arrange for you to meet our man in Asuncion. Separately, of course, at least in public. You are not to be seen in public together. Directions for where to meet him will be in the packets you’ll receive at the airport.”
As Nova settled into her car’s backseat, she thought about the kidnappers’ deadline. Twelve noon, tomorrow, they would kill someone. Maybe the negotiators would secure a delay.
She pushed that line of thought away.
No, better not to think she had more time than she really did. Better to keep focused on the thought that they only had twenty-four hours reprieve to find the hostages or lose at least one of them. The pressure was on.
Chapter 19
The winter’s first snow had arrived last night and a soft white blanket covered cars, signs and the branches of trees. Suleema’s driver braked the black Cadillac sedan to a halt beside a row of cars parked in front of Andre’s Salon, three blocks east of the entry to the National Zoo.
From the backseat, Suleema opened her door and stepped out. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to be picked up,” she said, then closed the door.
Her driver zipped the window on the passenger side down and leaned across the seat toward her. “You want me to pick up your cleaning before I find some place to park?”
Sam was a dear, no doubt about it. “Yes, please, Sam. That’s very thoughtful.”
She bit her tongue to keep from begging him to stay right in front of the salon and keep an eye out for anyone with a shiny bald head and an earring in one ear. The last three days of hell had crawled passed. Three days of worry about Alex. Three days in which she had not told anyone of the threat to Alex’s life or her own.
From moment to moment she swung between panic and dread. Her heart would race. She felt suffocated. She could not escape from feeling guilty. She thought she might explode from holding it all in, from pretending that she knew nothing, but the news about the kidnapping had got only worse. And the more details she and the f
amily learned, the stronger grew her compulsion to protect Alex at all costs.
Whoever these monsters were, they did in fact have her grandson. Half her mind urged her to inform the FBI and the Marshal’s Office that she was being blackmailed. The other half said that what little she could tell them wouldn’t be useful. The authorities would either find Alex and the others or they wouldn’t. But if these manipulative, sadistic criminals kept their word, her vote, to be announced in only five more days, might keep him alive.
If she voted the way they wanted.
She realized, like waking from a dream, that she was still standing motionless on the snow-covered sidewalk. She trudged up the four steps to Andre’s entry. The silver bell on the door jingled as she strode inside, where smells of perfume, shampoo, nail polish and coffee assaulted her. As Andre himself hurried toward her, she hung her coat and scarf on the coatrack.
“Well, Sulee,” he said, a genuinely warm smile on his tanned face, “come right on in. I’m ready for you.”
All of the hairdressers, four women and four men, smiled or waved a comb or curling iron as she moved between the two banks of stations. Doris Madsen, the head of the Children’s Zoo, always had her appointment at this same time. Doris smiled and called out, “Don’t you just love the season’s first snow?”
Suleema forced a smile to her lips and nodded.
“Coffee?” Andre asked.
“Yes, please.”
He waved his hand and one of the two hair washers, Suzie, hurried to fetch a cup. Suzie knew that Suleema took it black. As Andre draped Suleema’s shoulders with a glitzy gold and silver cape he said, “Just relaxing and a trim. Or shall we consider a bit of a style change?” He ran his fingers over her chin-length hair and lifted its edges.
Suzie handed her the black coffee.
