“Sorry.” Her gaze dipped away, and she plucked at a stray string on the hem of her costume. “So the whole ‘I am Mars, god of war’ thing . . . Does that pickup line actually work on women?”
“You would be surprised.” Although it appeared it didn’t stand a chance of gaining traction with her. Not that he wanted it to. Back to that subject change. “Actually, the word martial comes from Mars. So in essence, martial arts means the art of Mars.”
“Damn,” Vapor appeared beside him, the big guy moving as quietly as—well—vapor. “Next thing you know he’ll be pulling out the pocket-sized copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War he carries around in his flight suit.”
“Hey pal, don’t you have a rubber chicken or whoopee cushion to go play with?”
“Nah, I’m good.” Vapor scrubbed a hand over his shaved head with that aw-gosh-golly-and-shucks shit he pulled to romance women. Nobody would guess right now that he’d once been a hard-core biker. “Sorry about the ruckus over there, ma’am. I can help you find your quarters if you would like to leave.”
Chloe backed away from them both. “Actually, I should check in with the stage manager to see if we’re finishing the show. I’ll be careful to stay clear of trouble.”
Vapor scratched his shiny head. “Isn’t the stage manager the dweeby guy dressed all in black like Dieter from those old Saturday Night Live episodes? If so, he’s in the head hyperventilating.”
Chloe winced.
Vapor winked at her as she stepped farther away. “Just call if you need me.”
Good. She had a new protector now. Even one up to speed on old TV pop culture references. Given the rumors about Vapor’s teenage days on the street, he could handle anything, anywhere. Bodyguard duty over and done.
Jimmy eyed his friend. Eyed Chloe.
Next thing he knew, Jimmy called out to Chloe, “If you’re really serious about protecting yourself when no one’s around, I can teach you some basic self-defense moves.”
She raised a hand over her shoulder and waved some kind of noncommittal response that set his teeth on edge with frustration at himself as much as her.
Why the hell didn’t he just walk away from this woman? For that matter, Vince—his whole damn crew—should be staying away from her and anyone else until they found Chuck. The implanted chip showed he was still alive, but that could change at any minute.
Given all the missing airmen and recent incidents, it did, in fact, seem they were all wearing red shirts.
* DOWNTOWN ISTANBUL
Marta Surac slammed the door shut on the basement cell.
The damp smell of mold and fear saturated each breath. How sad she did not have time to savor this moment of power as she raced back and forth between bars, dealing with her current captive and scoping out future possibilities.
However, the continued success of her operation depended on keeping her captures widespread, and she’d already pushed as far as she dared in this country.
Her heels clicked a slow tattoo on the cement floor as Baris ended his “interview” with the airman. The jeans the flyboy had worn to the bar were now stained with blood. So far they’d only found out a smattering about him. Just his first name, Chuck, and that he was a pilot. In fact, the scarcity of information available led her to believe his missions were classified.
Even the drugs did not work beyond babblings of childhood games. He’d obviously been trained in avoidance techniques and possessed a strong will. But she had so many other options for her captives.
Chuck’s face was swollen and bruised beyond recognition, but she’d studied him early on and determined him to be of some Polynesian descent, although his accent was 100 percent American.
“Baris, enough. Leave us now.” Rarely did she have to participate in interrogations anymore, but this gentleman was proving difficult. She had another mission in mind for Baris later, anyway.
Her hulking employee cracked his knuckles and eyed her with a possessiveness she would deal with later. These animals she employed always angled for sex after a session.
But first . . .
“Close the door behind you.”
Their guest didn’t pose any threat to her, thanks to the shackles that secured his wrists and ankles to the chair, which was bolted to the floor. She pulled her hands from behind her back and placed a water bottle on the table beside Airman Chuck. In her other hand, she held a key, a ruby ring glinting as red as the blood trickling from the corner of his lips.
Marta unlocked his left hand, the broken one. “Have a drink.”
He eyed the bottle suspiciously.
She twisted the cap, the seal hissing. “It has not even been opened, so it’s safe to drink.”
He grasped the plastic bottle and brought it to his mouth. His shaking grip sloshed water until he finally managed to steady the opening between his teeth. He drained a third in a single swig before swiping his wrist across his face, leaving a smear of blood.
She circled his chair, lingering longest in front. “You are wise to question whether the drink has been tampered with. They will use any means possible to achieve their goal.”
“Not just they,” he rasped. “You, too.”
She nodded. “Of course. You show your intelligence again. Your brain and strength make for quite a combination in holding out against our methods of persuasion. Your military has trained you well in resistance techniques.”
Both a challenge and a frustration for her. She had a buyer in mind for the type of information she believed Chuck held, a buyer pressuring her for more U.S. military secrets. She’d upped her number of kidnappings recently in hopes of obtaining the nugget that would bring the payoff dangled in front of her. That kind of money would allow her to transplant her network into Southeast Asia.
He took another swallow of water, eying her silently then placing the bottle back on the small wooden table.
“A smart, strong man such as yourself must realize this can only end two ways. Either you give us what we need on your own terms and you live, or we will coerce some portion of information from you, and you will lose what little control you have over your situation before you die.”
He did not show even a flicker to indicate he’d heard her. He must have deep secrets to guard.
A thrill tickled low in her belly. Apparently she could still feel after all, because this man’s unusual strength brought a rush of pleasure. Breaking him suddenly became about more than the money she could garner from selling his information.
He reached for the bottled water, his teeth gritted as he forced himself not to shake.
She whipped her hand from her pocket, flicked the switchblade, and stabbed the wood a centimeter away from his fingers. The knife vibrated in her grip with understated menace.
“You drink when I tell you to drink.”
* INCIRLIK AIR BASE
Nunez entered the hangar that housed the CV-22, his eyes blurry from the bar’s smoke but his mind still clear, thanks to the experimental drugs he’d popped to combat the effects of the alcohol. Sure, there were times he winced at taking unapproved meds for his job, but at least he wasn’t a total guinea pig like the guys who’d run the first round of testing on the pills.
That made him think of the four dudes in front of him and how much crap they tried out, not knowing if their asses would be blown up.
He’d worked for three hours reviewing video feed from his hidden camera, searching for some clue to give him a better handle on the bar and the Surac woman. Shit out of luck so far. Once his eyes started to blur, he’d decided to check in on the air crew because . . . Well, he needed to do something after a frustrating two days of no progress and no answers.
The crew of four gathered around a table set up next to the airplane. The flat surface was lined with laptops and a spaghetti jumble of wires running from the computers into random open panels on the airplane. They seemed to be calibrating or testing something. Probably the advanced sensor suite they hoped to use to find Chuck Tanaka.
“Is there a problem here, gentlemen?” Tearing the plane apart sure didn’t look like a good sign, and damn it all, he needed their technology.
Vince Deluca poked his bald head out from behind a cluster of wires and cables, a doughnut in hand. “Nice duds, Nunez. Are you pimpin’ on the side?”
“I’ll be taking a personal day when the bill for this wardrobe hits the boss’s desk.” He stepped deeper into the hangar and tried to make sense of how these test aviators thrust their hands into the tangle of wires and cables. “This mess you’ve got here looks worse than when my mom’s Christmas lights come out of storage. Is something wrong?”
Jimmy Gage stepped from around the line of laptops. Word had it, he pounded his body relentlessly in the weight room and on the basketball court since his four-month captivity. Captain Invincible could do it all. That kind of arrogance could make or break the op. “We’re just tweaking the sensors and conducting continuity checks. Looks like everything is up and running. No ill effects from our rough ride in.”
“Felt smooth to me,” Nunez said and meant it. “I never would have guessed this wasn’t your primary plane. How many test drives do you get in something like this before they clear you to take it out for a spin solo?”
Lieutenant Colonel Scanlon glanced up, looking over the rims of his Buddy Holly glasses. “You don’t want to know.”
“So you test dudes really can fly anything.”
The commander nodded. “That’s the point of the training. We’re writing the tech manual on new aircraft and equipment no one’s flown yet. Makes sense we need to be able to step inside anything and figure out how to make it do that flying thing.”
Gage jerked a thumb toward Vince Deluca. “Vapor here is famous back at test pilot school. An instructor came in and dropped a dash one—that’s the flight manual—for an A-7 attack plane they flew back in the dark ages. Then he told him to be ready bright and early for a live weapons release, flown in formation with two other planes. Next morning, Vapor clocks in, bags under his eyes. But he fired up that engine, rolled the baby out to the runway, and flew his mission flawlessly. When he landed, the ground guys noticed something off in the way he was sitting.”
Vapor shrugged massive shoulders. “Yeah, yeah, who the hell thinks to read about how to slide the seat backward and forward? I had to eat my knees for the whole flight.”
Nunez leaned a hip against the table. “You could have asked for help.”
The line of crewdogs eyed him as if he’d blasphemed.
Smooth backed away, hands up. “That would have been as bad as stopping for directions. Can’t be cutting off the cajones that way, or someone may get a leg up on you with the ladies.”
“Point made.” Nunez kept his perch by the table while the crew went back to their stations.
He’d understood in theory that these men were scientists and engineers as well as aviators, but seeing was a whole other matter. Sure, he played with high-tech gadgets in the field, but so much of his job involved the human factor of going undercover. How much of his field work could be outsourced to their technology?
They shrugged off the risk with jokes and posturing. But how many of them would die to make that technology available?
Gage reaffixed a metal panel onto the plane with exaggerated concentration. “So, Nunez, what’s the scoop on the fight that broke out?”
“That’s the million dollar question. Tough to decipher exactly how it began. No one’s claiming responsibility, so we don’t know yet if there’s a connection with the explosion on the boat. We’ve got guys tracing bomb parts and working the underwater recovery mission to gather more evidence.”
Smooth clicked through computer keys without even looking their way. “Probably just horny guys out of control.”
“Quite possibly,” Nunez answered, unconvinced. “We’re as sure as we can be for now. Any particular reason you want to know, Gage?”
“Just curious.” He gave the panel a final fist-thump. “Once you’ve got Chuck’s locale better pinpointed, we’ll close in with surveillance.”
Nunez bypassed the nearly empty coffeepot and box of doughnuts to stride down the line of equipment. “You can really see through walls with this thing?”
“Absolutely,” the commander answered without hesitation. “We worked the kinks out of this particular piece of equipment during the surge over in Iraq. With miniature munitions we developed, you could take out a lone sniper in a room and not even knock the knickknacks off the mantel.”
Gage leaned forward with intense eyes. “This one time, some Iraqi policemen were kidnapped and hustled off into a particularly bad neighborhood in Sadr City. We trolled over the area until we found a whole bunch of bodies crammed into one room in this walled compound. There were eleven missing policemen and eleven warm bodies in there. We called in the cavalry on the ground, told them where the other bodies in the house were, and turned them loose. They got those guys out of there before anyone had a chance to roll out the torture table.”
The commander stroked a computer screen with reverence. “The inventor of this system saved at least eleven families a lot of pain. I would say this thing has already proved it was worth the money.”
Nunez looked to the undercurrents of their fireside storytelling. “And that was the first time you used it? In combat while the enemy shot at you?”
“Sure,” Gage answered, adrenaline all but crackling in his eyes.
“You work the kinks out in operation.” Nunez twisted the camera button on his jacket, praying like crazy the thing wouldn’t explode into flames. “I so didn’t need to hear that.”
The commander nudged his black-rimmed glasses in place. “Agent Nunez, sometimes there’s a push to deliver, and we have to go with our gut.”
“What if it had gone the other way?”
Gage grinned. “Our guts are pretty fucking good.”
Nunez hoped for Chuck Tanaka’s sake that Jimmy Gage could back up that cockiness.
SIX
Eyes closed, Chloe eased down the cinderblock hall wall to sit on the floor and savor the sensation of undiluted Boston Philharmonic pouring through her iPod earbuds. Oh yeah. Just what she needed to pass the time as she waited for Livia to finish her rehearsal in the base basketball court allocated for their use.
Hanging around seemed to be the status quo lately. They were still waiting for the go-ahead to resume their tour. At least they had practices to pass the time, even private rehearsal rooms. The event director had worked her tail off this morning for shows they weren’t even certain they would present.
For a hijacked moment in the deserted back corridor, Chloe indulged in a Mozart fix. She hadn’t expected to miss her job this much, since she would be singing. It had always been about the music for her, the one thing sporadic bouts of poor health couldn’t leach away.
Don’t go there. Just let the waterfall of notes obliterate all else. Her hands gravitated by instinct to “conduct.” Peace melted her muscles.
Then it tingled away. Someone was here, in the remote passageway. The tile floor underneath her went ice cold.
The sense of being eyeballed crescendoed in time with the music. She jolted to her feet, her eyes snapping open, muscles tensed.
Jimmy lounged against the wall by a Turkish tapestry. Even wearing air force sweatpants and a T-shirt, he carried that unmistakable confidence. So much for chalking his charisma up to the uniform.
She thumbed her iPod off and pulled out the earbuds. Muffled music from the gymnasium vibrated through the wall as Livia nailed high C.
“Jamming?” He crossed one Nike-shod foot over the other.
“Not exactly ‘Rock Me Amadeus,’ but yeah, I have Mozart plugged in today.”
“You’re a classical buff?” He sounded surprised.
“An orchestra conductor in Atlanta.”
His brows shot high. “No shit?”
His total shock was a little insulting. Did he really consider her a ditz? Then she
recalled his irritation when she’d assumed Jimmy “Mars, god of war” Gage wouldn’t be the type to study up on Roman mythology. Apparently they’d both made some erroneous assumptions about each other.
“No shit. Classical music is my life, whether it be through conducting or playing the piano or even singing.”
“So that’s why you were doing the . . .” He waved his hands in a not-half-bad imitation of her conducting a three-four beat.
She stared down at her motionless fingers with their nails trimmed short for playing the piano. “It’s instinctive when I listen.” Enough of the chitchat. Her years of intense health concerns had left her with a deep-seated need not to waste precious time on picayune crap like pissing contests. “What brings you here?”
“My job.”
“Duh. I meant here, to see me.”
“Self-defense class for our local mayhem-prone Mozart groupie.”
She’d heard his invitation as she’d walked away after the concert fight, but she hadn’t thought he meant it. “You were serious about that?”
“Serious as the next riot you’ll probably land in the middle of.”
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes and reached for her earbuds. “Thanks all the same, but I think I’ll just invest in a can of mace.”
In a flash so fast she barely registered the blur of his sweat suit in motion, Jimmy looped his arms around her torso and neck, hauling her back flat against his front. What the hell?
Her iPod dropped from her restrained hand. She wriggled to get free. Unsuccessfully. His arms locked her tighter against the hard-muscled length of him. The roots of her hair began to tingle.
She stilled, half-afraid to move and stir those tingles into a body-wide wave.
His head lowered, his mouth beside her ear. “How effective do you think that mace is going to be right now?”
Warm breath steamed over the sensitive skin along her earlobe, farther to her cheek, until she shivered. Her lashes fluttered closed in utter frustration, humiliation even. How disturbing to be so acutely attracted to someone she wasn’t even sure she liked.
Defender Page 7
