by Tara Janzen
Fuck. He plunged into the crowd after them, and suddenly the chaos was on his side. They'd never see him coming.
* * *
CODY worked her way past the last group of dancers in front of the stage and slipped into the shadows at the back of the room. She had one hand wrapped around her middle. The other was clutching a glow stick somebody had shoved in her face.
Leaning against the makeshift platform, she closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath. Everything was going to be okay, she told herself. She'd flashed a few smiles, made a few promises, and found a ride with a guy named Spence who'd been bragging about his new Escalade—just the kind of car she needed to get her where she wanted to go. All she had to do was give Spence a few minutes to close his deal and they'd be out of there.
Just a few minutes for Spence to unload the last of his disco biscuits.
Hell. She'd dealt with worse than drug dealers these last three months, a lot worse.
She wasn't worried about getting rid of Spence once he got her to the library garage. Spence was no Creed Rivera, not even close. She wouldn't have any trouble losing him.
She straightened up, taking another breath and looking around. The run across the courtyard had been unexpectedly icy, and unexpectedly painful. She'd fallen twice, scraping her knee on somebody's front bumper the first time and landing hard on something under the snow the second. She was going to have a bruise for sure, had ripped her fishnet, and even in the huge crowd of people she was still cold to the bone, her body trembling.
Glancing back over the crowd, she tightened her arm around her waist, trying to still her trembling. God, was she never going to be warm again? Forget Mexico. She needed something equatorial. She needed a jungle, a steaming sauna of overgrown vegetation and heat.
She'd gotten away from Creed Rivera, though, and Reinhard, and Khalesi hadn't even gotten close to catching her. By all rights she should be feeling a little more confident, a little less frantic. She was coming out ahead.
Sure, she thought, not buying her own bull for a minute. She had plenty of reason to feel uneasy, if not downright petrified with fear. How in the hell had the Iranians found her? By following Reinhard, was her best guess. She'd known he'd be the first dog Sergei would sic on her trail—but still, she was unnerved by the suddenness with which he and Bruno and the Brauns—and the Iranians, for crying out loud—had shown up, right in the library. They'd pinpointed her location, and that was no coincidence. She'd done something—or maybe left something undone, something she better damn well figure out and not do again.
Wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, she looked to the shadows behind the stage. There was a stairway back there somewhere, and a hallway off the third floor that circled around to the front of the building. It would be a lot less crowded than the dance floor. She was meeting Spence in South Morrison's lobby, where she'd left her clothes, and the last thing she wanted was to miss her ride because she couldn't make her way back through the crush of people.
Unbelievably, the blizzard had really brought out the party rats and ravers. She'd never seen the basement so crowded, literally packed like one huge can of slithering, glittery sardines. She'd come before a couple of times just to check things out, get the lay of the neighborhood, and she'd been fine. She knew how to stay out of trouble, how to work a party to her advantage if she needed something, but tonight the party and the music and the crowds were enough to turn her stomach—and all she needed was to get away.
Pushing off the stage, she glanced back over her shoulder, then turned into the shadows and headed toward the rear stairwell.
CREED spotted her just seconds before the two men tracking her came up behind her, a slender form in a body-hugging fishnet cat suit, her short hair falling over her face, her head bowed—and his heart sank.
The man with the tracking device did something he couldn't quite see through all the flickering strobes, but in rapid, stop-action motion he saw her go limp as a rag, falling into the other man's arms—and he was too fucking far away to do a damn thing about it.
She never had a chance.
He shoved his way forward, pulling the Mossberg free—something, anything to get all these damn candy ravers out of his friggin' way, but shit, most of them were too high to notice that their wasted lives were in danger.
A few of the dancers noticed the mean-looking shortened shotgun and stumbled away from him, but he was still too damn late. When he finally reached the back of the room, Cody Stark and the two men were nowhere to be found.
They wouldn't kill her, not right off, he told himself. Information, that's what they wanted: maps, directions, coordinates—but he could guarantee they wouldn't be asking for any of it nicely.
Where in the hell had they taken her?
The thought no sooner formed than a flash of light revealed the shadowy risers of a stairwell. He took off running, taking the stairs two and three at a time. At the first landing, he found himself looking down a short hallway with half a dozen doors, most of them open, more than a couple of them hanging off their hinges. He discovered a gutted apartment with a kitchen and a bath behind the first door, five kids doing a group grope behind the second, and a cooking party behind the third, but what they were cooking was cocaine.
He swore under his breath, finished checking the other doors, and went back to the stairs—knowing he had seven more floors to go and that every minute she was out of his sight put her deeper in danger.
* * *
CODY drifted up into consciousness through an endless wave of pain. Her head was breaking, and she couldn't figure out where she was—except she was upside down, being carried over somebody's shoulder, and they had their hand flat on her ass. Something had happened.
She lifted a tentative hand to the back of her head, and her fingers came away smeared with something warm and sticky: blood.
She'd been hit. Hard. Most likely by the jerk carrying her. She wasn't that far from the floor, which meant he wasn't very tall, which meant he wasn't the badass, angel-faced Creed Rivera, who she was pretty sure wouldn't be feeling her up or have resorted to physical violence to subdue her. He wouldn't have needed to, and so far that hadn't been his style, not with her anyway. Edmund Braun would probably disagree.
The man carrying her walked through a circle of light, and she saw his pants, brown and baggy, and his shoes, soft, worn leather. Definitely not Creed Rivera. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw another man dressed the same way, at least from the waist down. She didn't have it in her to raise her head to see his face, not yet.
Then he spoke, his accent foreign, the language straight out of the Hindu Kush—Dari—and she didn't need to see his face. A memory flashed in her mind of a dark warehouse, the smell of cordite, and the scent of blood that wasn't her own. Panic, stark and razor sharp, skittered across every nerve ending she had. Nausea coursed through her, and she had to fight being sick.
Karlovy Vary—she would never forget the place, or the man who had died there. Keith O'Connell had died because of her, and she'd been captured by the same men who had killed him—Ahmad Hashemi and Qasim Akbar, the two Afghans negotiating with Sergei Patrushev for the Taliban. They were getting paid to get the bomb for their ousted leaders, and they weren't above cold-blooded, brutal murder to insure their success.
But they'd done more than murder O'Connell; it had been butchery by the time they'd finished. She'd lost count of the shots they'd fired into the agent as O'Connell had hung there in the warehouse, his hands tied above him, Reinhard and Sergei standing off to one side with the Brauns, all of them as culpable as the men pulling the triggers. Reinhard had kept an iron grip on her arm, making sure she learned her lesson. She hadn't watched. She'd turned away, but the German had held her, keeping her close, and she'd heard O'Connell die.
Now Hashemi and Akbar had her, and she was alone, terribly alone. She should never have left Creed in her apartment. The Afghans wouldn't have had a chance against wild boy, and anything,
even a lifetime in prison, was better than what she was afraid she faced next.
Music, subdued but still raucous, coming up from below, made the building hum around her, telling her she was still in South Morrison. She hadn't been out that long, a few minutes at most, and she had to get away—now.
Staying perfectly limp, she started counting down in her head. When she got to three, she jammed her elbow into the middle of Akbar's back as hard as she could. The Afghan faltered, his hold loosening, and she twisted free, kicking at Hashemi. Her foot connected with the side of his head, stunning him for a second as she scrambled to her feet and took off running down the hallway. She got all of ten feet before she was hit from behind.
Both men landed on her, taking her down, and she cried out.
ON the third floor, Creed jerked his head up, hearing the sound—half scream, half cry of pain—coming from somewhere above.
C HAPTER
15
S HE WAS AS GOOD as dead, and Cody knew it. Hashemi was bleeding where she'd caught him with the heel of her shoe, and if looks alone could have cut out her heart, she'd already be gasping her last breath on the floor.
They'd dragged her out of the hallway and slammed her into a chair inside one of South Morrison's apartments. She didn't know what floor she was on.
She did know she was losing the feeling in her arms. They'd jerked them behind the back of the chair and tied her with some cord that had been lying on the apartment's kitchen counter. They'd also tied her around the waist and secured both her legs to the legs of the chair. Like the rest of the building, the apartment had been ransacked, with its few shabby contents in pieces and the walls broken through.
Short and brutish, Akbar, the man who had been carrying her, had busted another leg off a different chair and was holding it like a baseball bat, as if he was going to bash her brains out. As a threat, it was very effective. She was hyperventilating herself right into a heart attack. Her mouth was so dry, it hurt.
She'd been vulnerable in Prague. Getting through the hours of her days had been like negotiating a mine field, always having a guard on her, always being at Sergei's beck and call; the nights had been even worse, with the incessant parties and tension-filled meetings Sergei demanded she attend with him.
But she'd never been helpless, not like this. She couldn't move, and her wits weren't going to be enough to save her—not with Hashemi pulling a knife out of his pocket.
He opened it with a touch. Switchblade.
Oh, God. Oh, God.
Keith O'Connell's was the only murder she'd ever witnessed, but she'd spent three months with the Russian mob, traveling all over Eastern and Western Europe under Sergei's “protection,” and violence was their way of life.
Freedom. God, the price of her freedom was going to be her life. She'd known it for weeks, but thought if she could run fast enough, far enough, she could escape the Russian's net.
The more fool she.
Hashemi stopped in front of her, his lips thinned with fury, the knife balanced in his hand. He was taller and narrower through the face than Akbar, his dark eyes more deeply set between a prominent brow and his hawklike nose. Both men were wearing dark leather coats, but given the temperature in the building and the blizzard still raging outside, neither of them showed any signs that they were feeling the cold. Their focus was all on her—frightfully on her.
“Patrushev gave orders not to kill you, Dominika . . . not yet. He wants you back, you and the book, and has offered a generous reward, but I think taking a few small pieces will not distress him too much,” Hashemi said, touching his fingers to the side of his face where she'd kicked him. They came away smeared with blood. He took a look and grimaced, his mouth twisting in anger before his gaze came back to her. “If you don't answer my questions, I will cut off your left ear. If you continue to refuse, I will cut off your right ear and then start on your fingers, one by one until you tell me where the book is, the one your father gave you.”
His voice was cold and flat and as he spoke, Akbar roughly pushed her head to each side with the chair leg, pointing out the parts she would be missing.
Cody tried to duck away, turning her head to keep from getting hit too hard, and was only about half successful. Behind her back, she instinctively clenched her hands, drawing her fingers tightly together into fists, protecting them. Hashemi wasn't bluffing. He meant every word, and she knew it down to the depths of her soul. The world safe and secure for the price of her left ear? It shouldn't have even been a question in her mind.
But it was.
And her fingers? They ached just with the thought of being severed. It was an atrocity too horrible even to acknowledge.
“Reinhard Klein is h-here. In Denver. I . . . I saw him, and he wants me unharmed.” She could barely speak, barely breathe around the knot of terror squeezing her heart—but she couldn't just sit there and wait for Hashemi to start cutting her up, or for Akbar to hit her hard enough to kill her. She had to stall them, and they knew as well as she who was on top of Sergei's food chain. Reinhard would always take precedence over the Taliban, no matter who they had killed for him.
As for Sergei, she'd been right. He'd realized what Tajikistan Discontent really meant.
“Of course Klein is here, along with the Iranians and the Zurich Seven,” Hashemi said. “Sergei sent us to track you down. Akbar and I almost had you this afternoon at the post office, but we lost you in the storm, and the others didn't do any better, I see.”
“The post office? Track me down?” What was he talking about? “How?”
In answer, he touched his knife to her ear and tapped her earring. It was all she could do not to cringe.
“Your jewels, little fool. Sergei had them bugged. We followed them across Europe to New York, and across the United States to Denver, but you were never with them. It was post office to post office only, until today.” He lifted the knife a fraction higher, and touched the tip to her skin. “Very clever, but not so clever today.”
For a second, Cody could only stare at him, stunned. She'd been bugged. Sergei liked “insurance policies,” and that's what the earrings had been for him. He hadn't expected her to escape, not with his guards on her twenty-four/seven, but he must have figured only a fool would leave behind something as valuable and saleable as an expensive pair of earrings, if she did escape—and he'd known she was no fool.
“Untie me . . . now,” she said, taking the only chance she had, “and I'll get you the book. I swear.”
The library was probably still crawling with cops. It was the best place to go to buy herself some time. Maybe, with luck, Creed Rivera had gone back there. She'd give anything to be in his custody right now, to have him back by her side.
Anything, she thought again, realizing with startling clarity just how true it was. She needed a friend, and somebody who had fed her candy bars and saved her from Edmund Braun was as close to a friend as she'd had since Keith O'Connell. Even if Rivera was taking her to jail—and that was so pitiful; if she hadn't been on the verge of death and disfigurement, she would have been on the verge of tears.
“No, you will tell me where it is,” Hashemi said, declining her offer. “Quickly, before I lose my patience.”
She hesitated, despite his threat, but only for a second. She needed to pull her head together. She needed to make a deal, fast.
“You're right,” she said, talking even as she formulated a plan. “I know where the bomb is, and I'm willing to work with you. We don't need Sergei Patrushev. We can make our own deal, and it'll be better than anything he offered. I guarantee it.”
His answer was a short, humorless laugh. “You may be that stupid, Dominika, but I am not. Anyone who tries to take Patrushev's bomb will die an ugly death, and then their children will die. We wouldn't get two kilometers before he'd have our carcasses hanging from hooks. Not even my government would protect me. They owe him too much money. Everyone does, which is why no one double-crosses Sergei Patrushev. But you know t
his, don't you, Dominika?”
Before she could admit that yes, so help her God, she knew why nobody dared to cross Sergei, Akbar spoke up, saying something to Hashemi in Dari.
A sly grin twisted the taller man's mouth, and he reached out with the tip of his knife and snagged a piece of her fishnet. Cody's heart slowed to a near stop. Without understanding a word, she knew exactly what Akbar had said. The two had been notorious in Prague, widely known for their sexual deviances. It was said Akbar often flagellated himself afterward, in penance to Allah for his sins—and then the next night he would sin again, drinking the infidel's vodka and screwing the infidel's women.
Death, disfigurement, but first rape. She'd fallen into an abyss and was headed straight to hell.
Hashemi's dark gaze held hers, his smile fading as he said something back to Akbar, something the shorter man didn't like hearing. Akbar cursed and swung the broken chair leg, bringing it crashing against the back legs of her chair, knocking it over with her still tied to it. Her head snapped forward with the force of the blow. The breath was knocked out of her. She landed on her side, hard on her arm, facing Akbar, and had to bite back a cry.
Hashemi came around behind her and grabbed a fistful of her hair, pulling it back, exposing her left ear . . . God save me, she thought through a haze of pain and fear.
“Now.” He ground the word out between his teeth. “Tell me.”
She gasped as his fingers tightened and he jerked her head around. The stiletto length of his blade glinted in the light from the hallway.
She tried to speak, but her courage and her voice failed her. She felt sick with fear, the taste of it like bile in her mouth.
The Afghan shifted the knife in his hand, readying it to cut her.
And then he wasn't there.
Two shots sounded in near instant succession, a deafening blast in close quarters, and Hashemi jerked away from her. The knife clattered to the floor in front of her.
