Tanner removed the gun and Vernon bent forward from the sudden release of pressure.
“Get moving,” Tanner said.
Vernon walked slowly. When they were at the door, he reached down to pick up the backpack.
“Leave it,” Tanner said.
“There’s money, gold and jewelry in there. It must be worth over a million.”
“Open it up… slowly.”
With the pack sitting open, Tanner could see the stacks of banded bills, and the glint of light off a gold bar.
“See, I told you.”
“Yes you did, now zip it closed and lie on the floor.”
“What?”
“Lie flat on the floor. I want to put the backpack on and I don’t need you trying anything stupid while I do it.”
Vernon stretched out on the carpet as Tanner tightened the shoulders straps on the pack. Once the pack was secured, Tanner told him to get up. It was time to leave the hotel.
Luuc was walking toward a gold elevator while eating his candy bar when the doors shut. After pressing a button to summon the other lift, he thought about what he’d just seen. There had been a girl on the elevator, a blonde in a skimpy dress. For some reason, she had looked familiar to Luuc.
The other elevator pinged its arrival and Luuc stepped on. A man joined him, and not just any man. It was a security guard with a T-shirt that identified him as such. Luuc wondered if the guy knew he had stolen the candy.
The man spoke into a phone. “I’m headed up to Suite A now to check things out.”
Luuc felt relief. The man was going up to the suite for something else. He took another bite of his candy and stared straight ahead at the reflective golden doors.
Magyar’s daughter, Mirella, was riding up on the other gold elevator. She was wearing the blonde wig again and was holding a pair of dark sunglasses, along with a compact purse. Mirella wasn’t alone. The nanny and the little girl from Suite D were also on the lift.
Mirella had spent the night at a party her friend had thrown for herself before leaving for a two-week vacation. She then slept until three in the afternoon at another friend’s apartment. She had never called her mother to tell her she was coming to visit. She had called her father before the party started and pretended to be in Liverpool.
She knew there was no chance that her father would ask to speak to her mother. They hated each other and hadn’t spoken in years. With her father thinking she was in England she had a week of freedom in front of her. She planned to spend the night with Cal Vernon. And tomorrow? Who knew, maybe she would take a trip to France to visit another friend.
The little girl held a blue balloon in her hand that had the image of a popular cartoon character on it. She was eyeing one of the bracelets Mirella wore. It was made of turquoise and had animal-shaped trinkets hanging from it that were made from gold.
“I like lions the best,” the little girl said in English, as she smiled up at Mirella. She was seven and had honey-blonde hair and blue eyes. Her Australian accent enchanted Mirella.
Mirella smiled back at her. “Have you been to the zoo?”
“Mum and Dad are taking me tomorrow and I can’t wait.”
“You’re going to love it,” Mirella said.
The security guard asked Luuc a question.
“What suite are you going to?”
“Suite A. I have to deliver this package.”
The guard nodded but continued to stare, and there was a suspicious gleam in his eye. Luuc was once again afraid that he was about to be arrested for shoplifting the candy bar he was eating.
The guard’s phone rang. He answered it as he turned away from Luuc, and Luuc went back to eating the candy. Whatever was said on the other end of the line made the guard turn his head to stare at Luuc again.
“I don’t have to look for the kid,” the guard said. “He’s standing right next to me.”
Luuc stopped eating. He suddenly felt sick. When his phone rang, he jumped.
Magyar rushed into the hotel lobby and looked around for his daughter or Luuc. When he didn’t see either of them, he took out the disposable phone he was using and called Luuc.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?”
“I just got on a gold elevator with the key card you gave me.”
Magyar heard a man’s voice tell Luuc to put his phone away.
“Who is that?”
“A security guard. They think I stole a candy bar.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
There was a strange noise that sounded like the phone had been dropped. It hadn’t. It had been knocked out of Luuc’s hand by the guard.
“Luuc! Luuc!”
Magyar didn’t hear Luuc, but he did hear a sound he knew. It was the ratcheting noise made when handcuffs were being tightened.
Tanner, still wary of a trap, turned on his earpiece and spoke to Benedetti in a whisper.
“I have Vernon and I’m leaving now. What’s the corridor look like?”
Vernon gave him an odd look.
“Are you talking to me?”
Tanner shook his head as he listened to Benedetti’s reply.
“It’s all clear.”
“And what about the stairway?”
“They’re empty.”
“Elevators?”
“Both are on their way up.”
“How close?”
“You should have time to get to the stairs.”
“It doesn’t matter. Anything is better than being trapped in this suite.”
Tanner still had Vernon open the door to the hallway, just in case. As Benedetti said, there was no one there. The entrance to the stairs were five meters to the right. Nearby was a black leather sofa with shiny metal arms that sat across from a pair of matching chairs. Tanner prodded Vernon in that direction by using the gun.
A glass insert was in the center of the stairway door, it was reinforced with wire. The landing looked empty. As Tanner was about to tell Vernon to open the door, one of the elevators arrived. In his earpiece, Tanner heard Benedetti comment on how fast the damn elevators were. For once, he had to agree with her.
Tanner grabbed Vernon by the collar and placed the taller man in front of him to be used as a shield.
He was expecting a group of seasoned well-armed assassins to exit the elevator with assault rifles at the ready. Instead, he saw an innocent little girl holding a balloon, along with two attractive blonde women.
The younger of the two was waving goodbye to the little girl, who was walking off in the opposite direction. When she turned to look their way, Tanner recognized her from her photos as Magyar’s daughter. She broke out in a wide grin and was moving toward them fast.
Down in the lobby, Magyar was torn with indecision.
He couldn’t, no, he wouldn’t, let anything happen to his daughter, and yet, if hotel security was to open the package Luuc had and found the explosives, he would be in for a world of trouble. Luuc would certainly talk and name him, and now his face was on the lobby cameras placing him at the scene.
Given the political climate in the region in recent years, he’d likely be assumed to be a terrorist, perhaps even be accused of training his men to act as terrorists.
The relationships he had cultivated with crooked cops and corrupt judges wouldn’t be enough to keep him out of prison.
Those thoughts flashed through Magyar’s mind in instants as he watched the elevator Luuc was on climb toward the level of the luxury suites. It was time that he didn’t have. Magyar loved his daughter, but he also loved himself. The thought of rotting away the rest of his life in prison was unbearable.
There was time, he told himself. There was still time enough to salvage things. Luuc’s elevator appeared to still be two floors away from the level of the luxury suites.
As he closed his eyes and said a prayer for Mirella’s safety, Magyar’s hand reached into his pocket and sent a signal to the detonator embedded in the plastic explosive.
As Mirella came closer, she sent Vernon a little wave. “Hi, Cal.”
Tanner cracked open the door to the stairwell in preparation of hustling Vernon away. As he did so, he spoke to the man in a soft voice that Mirella couldn’t hear.
“She can’t save you, Vernon. Get rid of her.”
That’s when the doors on the other elevator opened and unleashed hell.
35
Priorities
Inside a CIA safe house in Brussels, Vanessa Benedetti screamed out in agony as a tremendous cacophony of sound entered her right ear from the communication device she wore. The earpiece was created to magnify any sound it captured, the noise of the explosion had been fed into Benedetti’s ear at three times its true volume.
She ripped the earpiece out and studied it as if the answer to what had just happened could be discerned on its plastic surface.
“Holy hell,” said one of the CIA technicians. He was a man in his thirties and it had been his job to man the cameras. “There’s been an explosion inside the hotel... on the level of the luxury suites.”
Benedetti’s right ear was ringing, but she’d heard what the tech said with her one good ear. Another tech was present, a woman. Benedetti handed her the earpiece.
“I’ll be damned if I’ll wear that thing again. Switch its audio functions to your computer. I need to speak to Tanner.”
“He might be dead,” said the male tech. “Look at the scene on grid eight.”
There was a huge computer monitor in front of the man which showed different scenes from sixteen locations within the hotel, or it had. Three of the grids were displaying static. Grid eight was a view of the luxury suites level. The camera was functional, although it recorded only a haze of smoke and debris particles.
“I can’t make anything out,” Benedetti said. “Show me the other camera angles.”
“I can’t. Those cameras were destroyed in the blast.”
“Shit! And what view are we looking at? What will we see when it clears?”
“That camera is pointed toward Suites C and D.”
“It figures.”
The man changed the screen and sixteen more camera angles appeared.
“Whoa, look at the parking level. There’s a fire down there and it looks like that second elevator crash landed there. I hate to say it, ma’am, but I doubt our operative survived that.”
Benedetti smiled as she thought of Tanner lying dead amid rubble.
“Tanner was expendable, the data drive is another story. With any luck we’ll find the device in one piece.”
The man brought grid eight back up and had it fill the screen. The haze had lessened, but the scene was still obscured.
The woman tech had transferred the audio functions of the earpiece and was able to receive and transmit audio. When she informed Benedetti, the CIA case officer called Tanner’s name several times. She received no answer, however, there was some sound coming from the scene. It sounded like the hiss and crackle of electrical wiring; mixed in with it was the sound of someone crying out in pain.
The female tech wiped a tear away.
“It sounds like the little girl.”
Cal Vernon opened his eyes and wondered why Mirella was looking at him while hanging upside down. Mirella was patting him on the cheek, and she was crying.
“Get up, Cal. I smell smoke.”
Vernon moaned from the sharp pain in his back the same instant he understood that Mirella wasn’t upside down, he was. He was lying across a set of concrete steps in the stairwell. When the explosion occurred, he and Mirella had been thrown off balance to tumble through the doorway that led to the stairwell. That same door was sitting open and hanging crooked.
“Help me sit up,” Vernon said.
Mirella gave him a hand and he saw that her wig was missing, while above her left cheek was an angry red welt.
“What happened?”
Mirella spoke through tears. “Something blew up.”
“A bomb?”
“Oh no, could it be terrorists?”
Vernon stood, then sat on a step. His mind was in a fog and the back of his head hurt. When he touched the area causing him pain he felt wetness.
“You’re bleeding,” Mirella said.
“It’s a cut,” Vernon told her, and wondered if he had a concussion. His mind cleared in an instant when he recalled that Tanner had been with him before the blast. He sprang up from the step and looked through the open door at the hallway that led to the suites. He couldn’t make out much because of the haze and smoke.
Vernon’s first thought was to run and get away. That reaction was overridden when he remembered that Tanner had his wallet, phone, passport, and the data drive. The hit man was wearing the red backpack as well, which was worth a fortune.
Vernon stared at the open doorway.
“He’s dead, otherwise he’d have come after me.”
“Who’s dead?” Mirella asked.
Vernon had forgotten she was there. Again, he wondered if he was suffering from a concussion.
“The man you saw me with before the explosion. He has something on him I need. I’ll have to go back in there and take it from his body.”
“No, Cal. We need to get out of here before the fire gets worse.”
“Wait for me,” Vernon said, as he edged toward the open doorway. “And one more thing, keep an ear out for a helicopter. One should be landing on the roof at any moment.”
“A helicopter?”
“It’s our ticket out of here.”
On the other side of the damaged doorway, in a corner of the hall, Tanner was rising to his feet with his ears ringing. The blast had lifted him up enough so that his feet left the floor, and he was smashed hard against one of the leather sofas that were in the hallway. His head had been spared impact, but his back had slammed into the metal arm of the sofa.
The impact had been enough to bend the metal and he would have sustained a serious injury if not for the backpack he wore. The money inside it had acted as a cushion and spared him a broken back. While his spine hadn’t sustained an injury, Tanner couldn’t say the same for the front of his torso. He felt as if he’d been squeezed like a tube of toothpaste by the force of the blast, and his organs were aching.
Something was on fire, no, a few items were ablaze, including the brown wig he’d been wearing as part of his disguise. It lay near a section of wallboard that had fallen from the ceiling. When he looked down at his hand Tanner realized he no longer had the gun he’d been holding and wondered where it had gotten to.
A soft wind drifted in where the window glass had been. It stirred up more dust and moved the smoke around. It occurred to Tanner that had he been standing a few feet to the left when the explosion went off he would have followed the window glass down to the street.
The constant ringing in Tanner’s ears was fading, and his hearing was coming back, as was the memory of the last moments before the blast. Vernon, he was with Cal Vernon, and he wondered if the man had survived. A check at his back confirmed that the weapon he’d taken off Vernon was gone as well, along with a watch he’d been wearing. He was searching the floor with his eyes when he heard a voice in his right ear.
“Tanner!”
“I hear you, Benedetti.”
“Where’s Vernon?”
“I’m okay, thanks for asking.”
“The hell with you. You have to get Vernon. We need that data drive.”
Tanner was about to tell her that he already had it when he heard the sound of a child whimpering. He looked in the direction where he thought the sound was coming from, and through the haze he spotted her. It was the little girl who had gotten off the other elevator before the explosion. She was lying on her back amid a growing puddle of blood. The blood spurted from a wound on her left leg, directly above her knee.
As he neared the elevator farthest from him he saw that the metal doors had been peeled back by the force of the explosion. The doors were dripping with gor
e and Tanner could make out bits of flesh and bloody cloth. When a bright blue scrap in the amalgam of disgust caught his eye, he looked closer, then he determined what it was. It had once been part of a candy bar wrapper.
Radiating outward from the cavity in the wall where the elevator had been was a streak of blood. The red streak ended at another hole that had been an outer wall of Suite B. The blast had collapsed the wall and devastated the room beyond it. Electrical cables hung loose while spitting sparks, and fire was visible behind a growing haze of black smoke.
Tanner glanced again at the doors of the elevator and understood that they must have been partially open when the explosion occurred. Had they been sitting wide apart the devastation he was viewing would have been far worse.
Upon reaching her, he assessed the child’s wound. It was life-threatening. He suspected that a piece of debris had nicked the side of the girl’s leg and struck an artery. He clamped one hand over her wound to apply pressure while with the other hand he dragged over a chair to elevate her feet.
The woman who had been with the little girl was dead. She lay crumpled against a wall, in a corner. Her skull was split open and her brains leaked out to cover her face. Tanner thanked God the child was lying in a position that spared her a view of the sight. Given the woman’s age he doubted she was the girl’s mother, at least he hoped not.
Tanner was about to speak to the girl in French when he remembered hearing her tell Mirella goodbye in English.
“What’s your name, honey?”
She looked up at him, her blue eyes were filled with pain and tears, but she answered his question in a soft voice.
“My name is Olivia.”
“That’s a beautiful name, and what’s your last name?”
“Connors.”
“You’re going to be fine, Olivia. I’m going to get you to a doctor.”
“It hurts.”
“I know, honey, and I’m sorry, but you’ll be feeling better soon, okay?”
The Spy Game (A Tanner Novel Book 21) Page 19
