Athena Force 9: Payback

by Harper Allen

  About to lower herself through the vent, she suddenly froze, words she’d read more than nine months ago searing their way through her mind.

  Subject actively working against the Cassandras; must be considered extremely dangerous…

  “No.” The instant denial came from her lips in an almost inaudible whisper. “The Cassandras couldn’t be trying to kill me. Not after they showed me the truth and persuaded me to work on their side. Kayla Ryan treated me as a friend, dammit—I can’t believe she was lying to me. I won’t believe—”

  I promise I’ll always stay strong enough to keep them from owning you—even if staying strong costs me everything I care for in this world…. When the man she’d thought of as her uncle had made that vow to her, she’d believed him, Dawn thought slowly. She’d unquestioningly believed everything Lee Craig had told her, and some damned important things he’d told her had turned out to be lies. If she’d learned one bitter lesson from the experience, it had been that no one could be trusted.

  And yet she’d given her trust to a group of women she hardly knew—a group of women who had sent one of their own to eliminate Lee Craig and who might well still see her as an enemy whom CIA agent Samantha St. John should rid them of. Again denial flashed instinctively through her. She forced herself to focus on the facts.

  There was a hit out on her—a hit that had come chillingly close to success three days ago. The Cassandras had reason to want revenge for the actions she’d taken against them at the time when her loyalty had been to Lab 33. And except for Aldrich Peters and a handful of his people, the women who had professed themselves her friends were the only ones who knew she was here—Dawn had told Kayla where to look for her if there was an emergency.

  And finally, the Cassandras included Sam St. John, a trained operative who was one of the few professionals whose lethal talents might prove to be a match for her own. They’d been a match for Lee Craig’s.

  But now wasn’t the time to analyze the possibility that she’d been betrayed by those she’d trusted, Dawn admitted coldly to herself. She was in the middle of an operation that would require all her skill, nerve and attention, and if any of those necessary components were lacking during the next hour, there was a good chance Des Asher would have her behind bars before the night was over.

  It’s almost a pleasure going up against Mr. SAS, she thought grimly as she gave a cautionary glance into the small anteroom below her before dropping silently to the floor. At least he’s never made any secret of the fact that we’re on opposite—

  “Amber? With a sexy name like that, I bet you’re a real knockout, right? So, uh, what are you wearing, Amber?”

  What she was hearing from the room just beyond her was so much like an echo of Carter’s earlier infantile query that for a split second Dawn was confused. Then she reacted.

  “Kruger! Are you reading me, Kruger?” she asked hoarsely as she dodged down behind some metal shelving. “I’ve got a situation here, do you copy?”

  “I copy, Dawn.” Hendrix Kruger’s accented voice sounded in her ear. “What kind of situation?”

  “I’m in the outer entrance to the electrical room,” she answered tersely. “You know, the electrical room that isn’t supposed to have anyone in it at this hour? Well, guess what—it’s got an occupant, and from what I can hear, said occupant’s a lonely soldier on a phone sex line. I’m going to have to try again tomorrow night, dammit.”

  Too late she realized how out-of-character her agitated pronouncement would sound to the South African. Hastily she tried to think of some acceptable reason for her decision to delay, but before she could, Kruger’s voice was in her ear again.

  “Why not simply kill him now?” There was an edge of puzzlement to his tone, but it was shadowed with something else she couldn’t immediately define. “That’s what you assassins do, don’t you? You kill people. Then you wash the blood from your hands, fall into bed and sleep as soundly as if you had merely swatted a fly. That’s what your onkle Lee taught you. That’s what he did until the day his own blood ended up being spilled, am I right?”

  She knew what was in Kruger’s tone, Dawn thought, a sliver of anger piercing her worry. It was hatred. Lee Craig had been right—Hendrix Kruger, Lab 33 criminal that he was himself, had been glad to see the Cipher killed and he would be equally glad to witness her death…as long as he could protest to Aldrich Peters that he had nothing to do with it. She controlled her sudden revulsion and answered him evenly.

  “You got that right, buddy. Say, I never did hear what happened to that diamond-heist pal of yours who tried to have you bumped off. He got away with the whole score, didn’t he? Is he living the life of Riley in some tropical paradise, with servants and yachts and beautiful women, while you’re still working like a dog to make a dishonest buck, or what?” She heard the South African’s indrawn breath, and put a shrug in her voice. “But hey, that’s your business and you probably don’t like talking about it…just like I’m not real crazy when you talk about my business. You catch my drift, Kruger?”

  “You talk like your uncle.” His voice shook slightly, and then steadied. “Yah, I understand. We stick to the job at hand from now on, agreed?”

  “Agreed,” she answered flatly. “And like I said, we’ve got a problem with the job at hand. Aldrich Peters doesn’t want anything screwing up his chances of making a deal with the government after Lab 33’s finished with the material I’m here to steal, and killing anyone who crosses my path is the fastest way to screw up I can think of. I guess I’m just going to have to put Mr. Lonelyhearts temporarily out of action.”

  “Don’t forget there is a time line on this op, Dawn,” Hendrix warned stiffly. “Every hour on the hour an outside probe automatically checks the systems. There is nothing I can do to circumvent that, so if the power is still down at two o’clock the secondary override response will be deployed. It’s now—” he broke off briefly, and Dawn realized he was checking a chronometer “—now 0114 hours.”

  “And here I was thinking you didn’t care,” she drawled. “Don’t worry, I’ll be quick as a bunny.”

  Once again the plastic disc in her ear went silent as Kruger abruptly switched his end of communications into receive-only mode. Rising from her crouching position behind the shelving, she moved to the door that led from the anteroom to the electrical control room. It was open a crack. Carefully she pushed it open a little more and peered through.

  “A college student? Gee, it doesn’t seem right, you having to do this type of work just to put yourself through school. What are you taking?”

  Dawn felt a twinge of compunction for what she was about to do. The young Ranger sitting at the electrical console with his back to her and his cell phone clutched to his ear had to be straight off the hay wagon if he was falling for the old “co-ed trying to get an education” ploy, she thought pityingly. On the other hand, she was probably doing him a favor, she reflected, opening the door enough to slip through. Not that she had firsthand knowledge, but it was her understanding that 1-900 calls racked up big bucks on a credit card pretty darn fast…and from what she’d heard of the conversation so far the poor guy certainly wasn’t getting his money’s worth.

  “Nursing, huh?” Oblivious to her stealthy approach behind him, the Ranger sounded suddenly intrigued. “So are you wearing, like, a nurse’s uniform right now? You know, the white stockings, one of those cute little nurse’s caps—”

  “I gotta hand it to you, buddy, you certainly have a healthy imagination,” Dawn said dryly as she lowered his unconscious body to the floor. “Tell you what—imagine that the karate chop I just gave you was a love tap, and maybe you’ll get a good dream out of this whole incident. Remember—hot nurses, white stockings held up with frilly garter belts, you’re the husky patient getting a sponge bath.” She retrieved his cell phone from where it had fallen beside him and started to tuck it in his pocket, but on impulse she brought it to her ear. “You still there, college girl?” she asked perfuncto
rily. “Don’t look now, but I think your tuition just got cut off.”

  She terminated the call and dragged the Ranger to the far side of the room, propping his limp body against the wall before returning to the console he’d been seated in front of. She swiveled the chair he’d been using so that it faced the console. A bewildering array of knobs and dials and switches confronted her, and she took a deep breath.

  “Tower, the pilot’s just had a heart attack and I don’t know how to fly this thing,” she said under her breath. “You’ll have to talk me down, do you hear? You’re gonna have to talk me—”

  “I don’t copy you, O’Shaughnessy.” Kruger’s voice coming over the earpiece sounded confused. “Who had a heart attack and what do you mean, I must fly down? If you are calling for Lab 33 reinforcements, I should contact Dr. Peters before authorizing a team to—”

  Besides being a vengeful jerk, the man had zero sense of humor, Dawn thought in disgust. She sat forward in the chair, surveying the console. “Don’t mind me, Hendrix, I just had a lapse into disaster-movie mode for a second. Now, what do I do to shut down the power to this place without a whole bunch of alarms suddenly going off?”

  Sense of humor or not, when it came to his own specialty Kruger was the best, she told herself six minutes later. He’d walked her through every step of the complicated procedure as easily as if he’d been sitting beside her, his answers to her occasional worried questions patiently unruffled…up until now.

  “Wait!” There was an edge of nervousness to his command.

  She paused, the pair of wire cutters she was holding poised to snip through a final connection. “What’s the problem? You said cut the red one, right?”

  “Repeat the sequence to me once more. Green, red, yellow—”

  “Yellow, then two whites, a kind of mauve wire, and one that I guess I’d call tan.” She squinted at the tangle of wires. “Or maybe olive? Some kind of blah shade, anyway, but I’ll go with tan.”

  “You described the wire after the two white ones as mauve.” For the first time since he’d started giving her instructions Kruger seemed less than confident. “Mauve is pale orange, yah?”

  Dawn felt beads of sweat pop instantly out on her brow. “Negative, repeat, negative, Hendrix. Is this a language thing or a guy thing? Mauve is pinky-purple. Pale orange is freakin’ pale orange. Any other decorating questions?”

  “Then the sequence should have been yellow, two whites, lilac and olive,” he said, his tone a clear indicator that he was mopping his own brow. “Lilac everybody understands. It’s like the flower. Cut the yellow wire.”

  Gingerly she opened the jaws of the wire snips and released the casing of the red wire. Her jaw set, she moved the tool to the yellow wire, tightened her grip and paused.

  “You’re absolutely sure this time?”

  Kruger’s confidence had returned. “Of course I am sure, Dawn,” he said expansively. “Go ahead and cut.”

  She held her breath and cut. At the exact moment the blades in her hand sliced through the wire, the brightly lit room plunged into blackness.

  Chapter 10

  Status: nine days and counting

  Time: 0122 hours

  “Did it work?” Hendrix Kruger’s query was tentative, and at it, Dawn snapped.

  “Did it work? What the hell kind of question is that, dammit? Yeah, it worked—the lights are out, anyway.”

  “…eight, nine, ten.” Seemingly oblivious to her irritation, he followed the last number with an expectant pause. “The backup system hasn’t come on?”

  “Did you hear me say oh crap, what now?” she asked impatiently. “No, the backup system hasn’t come on, Kruger. That means the alarms are disabled as well, right?”

  “For another thirty-seven minutes and eleven seconds,” he informed her. “Don’t forget, at two o’clock—”

  “Yeah, at two o’clock all hell breaks loose.” She pulled on the night-vision goggles slung around her neck and adjusted the refracting lenses. The room became visible again, although everything around her looked greenish and ghostly, including the still-unconscious Ranger in the corner. “Since I won’t be needing your help for the rest of this operation, I’m closing down this comm-channel now. Been swell doing business with you, Hendrix.”

  Not, Dawn thought with a grimace as she moved surefootedly past the Ranger and into the adjoining anteroom. She opened the door to the main corridor and glanced out before setting off with a frown toward the part of the building where Sir William’s rooms were.

  Whether or not the Cassandras had betrayed her, they’d done her one massive favor: they’d given her a reason to break free of Lab 33 and the people she worked with there. Kruger was far from being the worst of the lot, but her interaction with him tonight had shown her just how alienated from her former profession she’d become.

  “Which leaves me with the question of what I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life,” she muttered as she came within sight of her destination. “I don’t think I have what it takes to be a kindergarten teacher or a librarian, and with my résumé the federal agencies wouldn’t want to touch me with a ten-foot pole, much less offer me a job. But retiring at twenty-two sucks, dammit. I’ve got at least fifty more years to go before I’m ready to start lining up for early-bird bingo.”

  And those fifty years depended on her movements in the next thirty minutes, she reminded herself as she came to a halt in front of Sir William’s door. Just inside was her only chance for survival—his notes on the regeneration process, secreted away in his bookcase safe. As luck would have it, when she’d shown up on some pretext yesterday afternoon London had been perusing them, and although he’d hastily gathered them up and returned them to the safe when she’d walked in, she’d seen enough to get the confirmation Aldrich had required. Dawn reached for one of the smaller items on her belt, a tool that would be enough to land her butt in jail if she were ever caught with it in her possession, and squatted down to work on the lock.

  It was a tedious job, made more so by the unwieldy night-vision goggles. During her brief visit to Lab 33 the night before, she’d decided against using a penlight; her reasoning being that a beam of light, no matter how minuscule, would be too dangerously noticeable in a pitch-black building.

  She cursed as the pick slipped for the second time in as many minutes. A penlight would help, but it would be visible if anyone happened by. So far she’d only had a near miss with two lab technicians who’d almost blundered into her in the corridor on her way to London’s office. Still, she couldn’t be too careful.

  Presumably the military personnel had been roused to post extra guards while they tried to get the power up and running again, but at that time of night most of Sir William’s staff were asleep. In fact, the old guy was probably all alone in the lab right now, cursing the darkness and trying to figure out how his latest experiment got contaminated.

  Behind the goggles her gaze darkened briefly in compunction. In the short time she’d known him, she’d grown to like William London and, despite his irascibility, she knew the feeling was mutual. Now she was about to betray him by stealing his research and handing it over to Lab 33.

  “What option do I have?” Angrily she maneuvered the pick into the lock mechanism. “Walk up to him and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I happen to be a genetic mutant and I could sure use your regeneration method right about now, mind if I borrow these notes?’ Nice old guy or not, there’s a damn good chance his scientific curiosity would get the better of him and the next thing I’d know, I’d be waking up strapped to a table with a bunch of white-coated freaks shoving needles into me. So this is the only—”

  Her muttered diatribe broke off as she felt the pick lift the tumblers inside the lock. Unconsciously holding her breath, she delicately turned the doorknob.

  The door swung open.

  Replacing the pick in her belt, she rose from her squatting position and strode into Sir William’s deserted study, making sure the door locked again beh
ind her as she entered. It had seemed cozy and untidily comfortable the previous times she’d been here, she thought with a frown. But the greenish hue from the night-vision lenses robbed the room of its familiarity and turned its shabbiness into unsettling disorder.

  “And if you were here to do a While You Were Out makeover that might actually be relevant,” she said under her breath as she circumvented the oak table with its resident rodent’s skull and made her way to the wall of bookcases. “But this is a B & E, in case you’ve forgotten. All you need to worry about is cracking that safe, finding the information that’s going to save the lives of you and your sisters, and getting the hell out of here within the next—” she glanced at her watch “—twenty-four minutes. So focus, dammit.”

  Her time limit had dwindled to thirteen minutes when she finally set the folio-size box in which Sir William kept his treasures on the oak table. She took a moment to roll her shoulders free of the tense kinks that had settled in them during her unexpectedly prolonged efforts to break into the safe. Who would have guessed an eccentric old Englishman would even know such a thing as a Rose-Jackman Commander Mark IV existed, let alone have one installed, she thought in outrage. R-J’s are the crème de la crème of unbreakable safes, and most of the stuff London keeps in it could be stored in a discarded cigar box, for God’s sake. What do you wanna bet the ever-meddlesome Destin Asher insisted on the Mark IV?