Gabriel West Still the One

by Fiona Brand

  No matter how determined he was to protect her, she wouldn't allow him to compromise his reputation and his business for the sake of her career.

  The steps she would have to take to cut ties to the business and the career she loved sent a cold chill through Tyler. Once she resigned, her career was effectively over. She wouldn't work with artifacts or jade again.

  It was also possible that she would have to go away. And once she left, she would have to stay away.

  She'd thought the process through, and each time the solution was the same. For her strategy to be effective, she would not only have to leave her career, she would have to be seen to separate herself from her family.

  She could feel the grief lurking just below some invisible barrier in her consciousness, a sharp little ache waiting to overwhelm her, but her mind had reached saturation point and she was suddenly incapable of thinking, incapable of feeling.

  Her eyes drooped, closed, and refused to open. Her body felt heavy and curiously disconnected, the door a cool, solid anchor at her back. She took a deep breath, she pushed away from the door and willed herself to take the few steps needed to reach the bed, frightened that if she didn't move now, she'd go to sleep while she was on her feet, then fall and knock her head again. She took two steps toward the bed, then a third. The front of her knees connected with the edge of the queen-sized bed, and she half toppled, half crawled onto it, and curled on her side, too exhausted to get undressed or pull anything over herself. She inched her shoes off, heard them plop on the floor. All of the tension gradually seeped from her limbs. She felt boneless, heavy, her mind blank as she finally gave in to the pull of sleep and slid down into darkness.

  West did a quick tour of Tyler's apartment. Aside from the fact that it was situated on the ground floor, it was an exact duplicate of his own; three bedrooms, a study, a spacious lounge and a small kitchen, with a separate dining area. But that was where the similarity ended. His place was classy, nice—it could have been pulled from the pages of a designer magazine—but it was essentially empty of character, and he hadn't bothered to inject any. He already owned a house just a few minutes' drive away, and he didn't envisage keeping the apartment any longer than it took to get Tyler back.

  Tyler's apartment was crammed with comfortable furniture, books, potted plants and bright, quirky prints. She had lived here for the past three years and it showed.

  A whirring sound behind him made him turn. A small cat was sitting just inside the cat flap—a dainty little multi-colored ball of fluff with crazy markings on its face and calm, curious eyes. A second cat sat beside it—this one larger and stripey.

  West went down on his haunches and waited until the cats approached. After a few seconds, they sniffed at his fingers and nuzzled into his palm, tails swishing. The fluffy one was female, the stripey, a male.

  Both cats walked pointedly toward the kitchen. West followed and found them grouped around a set of bowls with Tiger emblazoned on the sides.

  "Tiger One and Tiger Two, huh?"

  His mouth twitched. He'd never had a pet—he had never been at home long enough to have one—but he liked animals, and for some odd reason they seemed to like him. "So, what do you eat when you're not scaring up mice?"

  There were already biscuits and water there, so he found milk in the refrigerator and filled a bowl, then examined the pantry and found a can of designer cat food and emptied it into a second bowl. The tuna was delicately flaked and looked-good enough to eat. A few months ago, on extended patrol, he would have killed for some of this stuff. Standard army issue rations came in cans, tubes, some of it was freeze-dried and shrink-wrapped in plastic and foil. You had to be hungry to eat most of it, and it wasn't packaged to attract, just to travel.

  The cats tucked in, ate the tuna, then delicately licked at the milk. When they were finished, they trotted past him, crawled out of the cat flap and disappeared.

  West made some calls. He didn't like it that the apartment complex, which was supposedly secure, had been so open to attack. In theory no one but a resident should have been able to gain access to the underground garage, but there was nothing too sinister about one of the remote-control devices that activated the gates to the apartment complex—and the PIN that went with it—being stolen. But someone had not only gained access to the complex, they had also located the fuse box in the service area of the building and knocked out the lighting for the entire garage.

  This morning, before he'd gone to the hospital, West had talked to the maintenance service that looked after the building. There was an alarm system on the electrics, so that if anything blew, the specific area that had failed flashed up on their screens and they could respond instantly. Last night the first indication they'd had that something was wrong was when a resident had phoned in complaining that the garage was blacked out. That meant that the men who had attacked Tyler had also gone to the trouble of researching the building's maintenance system and had found out how to disable the alarm.

  The only working lights in the area had been those attached to the elevators, but it made sense to leave those alone. If they'd knocked out the elevator lights, they would have run the risk that any resident who used the elevator would have been alerted to the power failure and would have called maintenance in, which would have interfered with the crime.

  The planning and premeditation behind the mugging seemed out of all proportion to what had actually happened. They had left Tyler's handbag alone and had targeted her briefcase. That wasn't so unusual in itself if the thieves were specifically after a laptop and were stealing to order, but this crime didn't bear any of the hallmarks of that kind of organized theft. What they'd gained was minimal compared to the effort they'd expended, and he would have expected them to have snatched the purse when the opportunity presented itself.

  When West had spent time on the streets, he'd known gangs who stole to order. They were organized, methodical and ruthlessly practical—they kept the risk factor as low as possible, and they didn't expend one bit of energy they didn't have to. The name of the game was the same as in any business— profit.

  Tyler had lost her computer, but, big deal, that kind of theft happened every day, and in this case the insurance money would replace the computer. He knew from the statement that she'd given to the police that she had also backed up all her work on disk, so the physical harm that had been done to her aside, other than the inconvenience of making the insurance claim and buying another briefcase and laptop, Tyler hadn't lost a thing.

  When he'd bought his apartment, the security had seemed adequate, although not top-notch, but West hadn't cared about the security specs, or about any aspect of the complex other than it was where Tyler lived. Now he was more than interested. Something was badly wrong, and Tyler was at the center of it.

  He didn't know if last night's attack had anything to do with the theft of the jade. Maybe the two events were completely unrelated, and the fact that the attack had happened so soon after the theft was a coincidence? But West didn't like coincidences—especially not when they involved Tyler.

  Tyler woke late in the afternoon. She sat up slowly. Her head still throbbed, and she was still stiff and sore, but she felt better than she had this morning. Gingerly, she flexed the fingers of her right hand. The swelling had gone down, and the grazes on her knuckles had begun to heal over, but the bruising was now spectacular.

  A yawn rolled through her. Gingerly, she swung her feet to the floor, and pushed hair back from her face.

  Rich sunlight poured in through the bifold doors which opened onto a leafy terrace, filling the room with dappled golden light. She checked the bedside clock and saw that it was nearly six o'clock, which explained why she was so thirsty and her stomach felt so hollow. She'd slept for approximately six hours. Beside the clock, there was a sandwich on a plate, covered in plastic wrap, a glass of water and some pills.

  The bedside phone rang, but before she could pick it up, the ringing stopped, and she heard the low r
umble of West's voice as he answered the call in the lounge.

  She blinked, adjusting all over again to the fact that West had not only brought her home, but he was still in her apartment and intending to stay the night.

  She nibbled at the sandwich, took more painkillers and Voltaren, and drank the water. After using her en suite bathroom, she crawled back into bed and laid her head carefully on the pillow. The phone rang again, minutes later a door opened and closed, and she heard the clink of crockery.

  Her eyelids drifted closed. It seemed that after days without being able to sleep, now all her body wanted to do was rest.

  Another yawn worked its way up from deep in her belly, leaving her feeling limp and exhausted, and she let sleep pull her under again.

  A man dressed in black pants, a black crew neck sweatshirt and black sneakers exited his car. He extracted a small matte-black backpack from the passenger seat, closed the door, then strolled away, half turning to lock the vehicle. There was no cheerful beeping, no flash of car lights, just the gentle thunk of the lock engaging.

  Seconds later, he approached an imposing plastered wall which surrounded an expensive apartment complex. He took a pair of thin black leather gloves from his pocket, pulled them on, shrugged into the backpack, then gripped the gnarled limb of a large pohutukawa tree and levered himself up and over the wall with fluid ease.

  During the day, the pohutukawa was a spectacular sight, its limbs spreading far enough to shade several metres of pavement and part of the road. The tree was large enough and old enough that it would have a protection order on it. No doubt the speculators who had built the apartment block had seen the tree as an asset to the value of the property—which it was—but it completely negated the security of the wall.

  He turned north, walking in the direction of a dark clump of ornamental shrubs that butted up against the wall. When he was within the thick shelter of the shrubs, he extracted a penlight torch from his pocket and squatted down beside a gray metal telecommunications box—the external siting of which was another fault of these older apartment blocks.

  He grinned coldly. The hell he would ever invest in such a sloppy operation.

  Setting the torch down, he eased out of the backpack, extracted his laptop and set it down on the dirt. The door of the box hung a little ajar, which meant that no one had been to check it since he'd jimmied the lock open a week ago. Satisfied that the security personnel who serviced the apartment block were still unaware that the box had been tampered with, he propped the torch so that it would shine into the interior of the box, then pulled the door open, removed the internal plastic housing, and examined the thick, multi-colored snake of coded wires.

  He separated the strands that he'd previously selected and stripped, and slotted the wires into a standard plug. Seconds later he plugged his laptop in and booted the computer. The screen lit up, and with a few keystrokes, he had the building's security system on line. He keyed in a password and waited for verification. It was possible that the password had changed from the last time he'd used it, in which case he would resort to a password-breaking program—but that necessity wasn't likely. He'd already researched the security firm that had done this installation, and had visited two of their sites, posing as a repairman. In all instances the same password had been used. They might be in the business of security, but like a lot of people, when it came to passwords and PINs, they clung to stupidity, using sim-ple-to-crack passwords for the same dumb reason: they didn't want to forget the password themselves. Seconds later, the security firm's logo and menu appeared. He tapped a key, and the specs for the building flashed onto the screen. Anticipation rolled in his stomach.

  He was in.

  Chapter 8

  Tyler woke, abruptly alert—her head clear. She lay still and silent. Something had woken her. A sound. She waited for the sound to come again and became aware that her room was completely dark, the absence of light so profound that for a moment dis-orientation gripped her, and she lost her bearings completely.

  A chill tightened her spine. She couldn't remember pulling the drapes, so West must have done that, and the fact that she was now covered with a quilt bore out the fact that he'd come into her room to check on her, but there should still be some light.

  Usually the streetlamps and the external security lighting threw a faint glow into all of the rooms. The glow was especially visible around the edges of the drapes, but now the blackness was so complete, she couldn't make out where the wall finished and the drapes began.

  The only explanation was that the power must have been cut, but she couldn't think of any logical reason for that to happen. There was no wild weather to interfere with utility services, and she hadn't been notified of any planned power outages. Any cuts would compromise the building's security system, so usually residents were notified well in advance.

  She turned her head just enough on the pillow that she could see her digital clock. The faint luminosity of the numbers told her that it was one-thirty in the morning, and that the power was on. The fact that the clock wasn't flashing told her the power hadn't been interfered with, which meant that only the power to the streetlights and the security lighting was off.

  A faint clunk came from the direction of her dresser—as if someone had placed an item down on the polished surface.

  Adrenaline flooded her system. Tyler's heart slammed hard in her chest, and for a frozen moment she couldn't breathe, couldn't think. After the mugging last night, she wouldn't have thought anything else could go wrong, but something had.

  Someone was in the room with her.

  West came out of sleep fast.

  He didn't know what had woken him, and he didn't question why he was awake, he just knew that something was wrong.

  The lack of any discernible light registered, and his heart slammed in his chest, the jolt of adrenaline flooding his system little more than a convenient tool that took him from normal to battle-ready in a heartbeat.

  Either the power was out, or they had company.

  A quick glance at the television told him that, despite the pitch blackness, the power to the apartment hadn't been interfered with because the small standby light was still glowing.

  One of the cats was asleep on his chest. Gently, he moved the furry weight to one side, shoved free of the blanket he'd pulled over his legs, and rolled to his feet. He stood for a moment, adjusting to the darkness and soaking in the unfamiliar scents of the room, the distant, muted sounds of the city. He was still dressed in jeans, and he didn't bother pulling on his T-shirt as he navigated the coffee table and an armchair, his bare feet soundless on the carpeted floor.

  He didn't have a weapon, but in the pitch dark, a weapon was a secondary consideration. He knew the layout of the apartment; his main concern was the exact placement of furniture in each room because he hadn't had time to familiarize himself completely.

  When he reached Tyler's door, he paused, listening. Maybe he was overreacting, but he didn't think so. The two men who had assaulted Tyler last night had interfered with the power. For it to happen a second time was too much of a coincidence for West to accept.

  Gently, he eased the door open, his mind coldly sliding through his options as he stepped into the room. In that instant he could feel the presence, as palpably as if he'd walked into a wall. The base of his neck tightened on a cold tingle as he tried to orient himself by forming a mental picture of the room, at the same time letting his mind go loose as he tried to locate the exact position of the intruder. His attention centered on a stirring of movement. A split second later, light flared, burning into his retinas. Tyler yelled out his name, and sound exploded against the far wall.

  West had an instant freeze-frame of the curtain swinging, as if someone had just gone through the bifold door, and Tyler standing on the far side of her bed, digital clock in her hand, ready to launch a second missile. As he sprang across the room, shoved the curtain aside and went through the open door, he realized that the explosion
of sound had been a glass smashing against the far wall.

  He paused to hear in what direction the intruder had gone, then lost precious seconds, navigating pots and shrubs before hitting the lawn at a flat run. He knew the general layout of the main gardens around the apartment complex, but he hadn't had time to familiarize himself with any of it yet. Until now, he

  hadn't seen the need—he'd been focused on Tyler— and now he cursed his lack of knowledge.

  He could hear the intruder ahead of him, but he couldn't see him, partly because the light had destroyed his night vision, but also because the bad guy was dressed all in black. There was no pale gleam of flesh to give away his position, which meant he must also be wearing black gloves and a black stocking or a balaclava.

  The gloves marked him out as a professional. Most amateurs would cover their faces because they didn't want to be identified, but they generally forgot about their hands, and whether it was day or night, skin reflected light—and in the dark, pale skin glowed.

  Apart from the light flooding from Tyler's room, it was very dark, which was odd for the city. There was no street lighting—he must have knocked that out—and if there was a moon it was hidden behind a thick blanket of cloud.

  Last night he'd had the cover of the storm to act; tonight, he'd created the conditions he needed to commit the crime, West didn't question that the perpetrator was the same. Two nights in a row the power had been interfered with and Tyler had been attacked. He didn't know what the motive was, yet. All he knew was that it was the same guy.