He turned and said, “I apologize for the jumble I’ve made of your rooms, but I’ve taken the precaution of locating the receiver which kept tabs on your tracking device. Still, I’d strongly recommend you remain in here for the next twenty to thirty minutes.”
“Why?”
“Because I am not the only operative eager to see Doctor Oujdad form a new arrangement with an organization other than the United States government.”
He meant Katie.
I’d have bet money on it.
“Who’s she working for?” I demanded.
“Working isn’t the proper word,” Philip corrected. “Ms. deMarco has been coerced. By a particular political faction.”
I didn’t believe it. Not for an instant. “Katie deMarco is an up-and-coming young professional in the U.S. State Department. She’s not connected to any political faction.”
“She wasn’t, until this autumn.” Philip’s eye fell on the sapphire at my throat. “Consider the pearl necklace Ms. deMarco always wears around her neck. From whom did it come, Jamie?”
I didn’t have the slightest idea. And then I remembered being stranded in the life raft with Katie. She’d shown me a photo of her beloved sister.
That sister had worn a strand of pearls identical to Katie’s.
Annie deMarco was her name. I’d found it listed on the electronic deed to Katie’s family home in Culpeper. And Annie had been a surrogate mother to Katie. She’d helped her little sister while she pursued her own dreams, too. These days, Annie was a drilling engineer, Katie had proudly told me.
And she’d worked all over the Middle East.
“Ah,” Philip said. “I see by the expression on your lovely face that the pieces of the puzzle have finally clicked into place.”
“Who has Annie deMarco?”
“The ruffians ruling Doctor Oujdad’s home country. Naturally, they’d like their physicist returned. The party’s secret police snatched Annie deMarco last month in order to persuade Katie to assist them. I’m afraid Katie found the arrival of Annie’s pearl necklace, liberally doused with her blood, to be an effective inducement.”
When we’d first reached London, as she’d nursed her twisted ankle on a silk sofa in The Elizabethan Rose, Katie had praised Ikaat for securing her father’s freedom as well as her own. She’d reminded me leaving a loved one in a nation like that meant leaving him vulnerable to torture and death. Now, at last, I understood her saying so hadn’t been an academic exercise.
“So,” I said, “in exchange for Annie’s freedom, Katie’s going to kidnap Ikaat?”
“No, Ms. deMarco will be a day late and a dollar short in that regard,” Philip replied. “I shall kidnap Ikaat.”
That’s when the building’s fire alarm began bleating like a lamb at slaughter.
The uproar also took Philip by surprise. But when I charged for the door, he blocked me. I opted for Katie’s exit and sprinted through the shared bathroom, ignoring the broken glass on her bedroom floor as it pricked my feet.
Blue smoke obscured the hallway. Strobes, mounted in the ceiling, flashed to warn of emergency and the alarm screamed. I spotted Barrett by Ikaat’s door—just in time to see a hulking man in black body armor slam him into the wall.
The guy was big and he was solid—exactly the way they still grew them in the Scottish Highlands. He could’ve been a mercenary working for Philip or he could’ve been a Royal Marine loyal to the Crown. But I didn’t know and I didn’t care—because he’d raised the butt of his rifle to pound Barrett in the head.
A blow like that would split Barrett’s skull.
And I couldn’t let that happen.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Get away from him!”
The guy glanced at me. I wasn’t much of a threat in my dusky pink bathrobe. But I’d drawn attention to him and he couldn’t have that.
He abandoned Barrett to take off down the stairs like a ninja.
Barrett had picked himself off the floor by the time I reached his side. “Jamie, you’ve got to get out of here.”
He turned, began hammering on the hardwood jamb.
And at his feet, smoke curled from beneath Ikaat’s door.
“Doctor Oujdad? Ikaat! Armand, open the door!”
Past him, by the stairwell, I spied a fire extinguisher and an axe in one of those red boxes built into the wall. I ran to it, wrestled it open. I released the clasps, yanked the axe free.
Barrett grabbed the axe from me. He swung it at the doorknob. Wood splintered and the lock gave way.
Barrett kicked the door in.
Smoke, black and choking, billowed out.
I coughed, tried to shield my face with my hands. “Ikaat? Are you in there? Ikaat? Answer me!”
The room was as disordered as mine. But here, flames ate up every scrap of fabric and were chewing their way across the couch. At one end of it, on the floor, I spotted a pair of men’s shoes. Armand Oujdad was still wearing them.
A splintered chair lay smashed around his head. He wasn’t going to get up on his own. I shouted his name, anyway.
When he didn’t move, Barrett went in after him.
Wright appeared at my side. Three firefighters crowded in behind him. They wore face shields and full gear and dragged a fire hose as fat as a python.
Wright seized my arm. “Time to go. Take the stairs.”
But I wouldn’t budge. Not while Barrett was in that burning room. Heat devils danced between him and me, bending everything I could see into an orange, undulating wave.
The firefighters opened up with the hose. One took charge of Ikaat’s father, carried him into the hall. Barrett, however, shook off the grip of a second fireman. He jogged deeper into the suite. Smoke swallowed up any trace of him.
“I mean it,” Wright snarled at me. “Time to go.”
The fireman set Armand in the hall.
An EMT slapped an oxygen mask on him.
The next door over banged open. Like my room and Katie’s, it was part of the Oujdads’ suite. Barrett tripped into the hall.
He bent at the waist, wheezing. “Ikaat’s not in there. Nobody’s in there.”
Armand roused, tore off the mask. His first words were in a language I didn’t understand. But the second were in clear, concise English.
“My daughter is gone.”
He passed out once more. That’s when Wright got in my face. “Ms. Sinclair, I won’t tell you again—”
“I know,” I interrupted. “Time to go.”
With the fire seemingly corralled in the Oujdads’ suite, and Barrett sucking down some of the EMT’s oxygen, I ran back to my room.
Philip was nowhere to be seen.
Forgoing my sling, I struggled into jeans and a T, boots and a broadcloth shirt. I grabbed a black jacket and stuffed my cell phone in its pocket. I was almost ready to go, but I had one more thing I needed to retrieve. I slipped my hand beneath my pillow and felt for my .22.
The gun wasn’t there.
I joined Barrett and Wright in the hall. The corridor stank of charred fabric and the carpet squished underfoot, but at least someone had switched off the alarm now that the firemen had the blaze under control. The paramedics had Ikaat’s father halfway to the hospital.
“My Beretta’s gone,” I announced.
Barrett and Wright exchanged looks.
“The agent in the far stairwell,” Barrett said, “has a hole in his gut. He bled out before anyone found him.”
I closed my eyes as I guessed the rest.
The size of that hole likely fit my .22.
“Katie took my gun. She must’ve realized Philip was coming for Ikaat.” I told Barrett and Wright how I’d found Philip in my room, how he’d filled me in on Annie’s abduction, and how he’d intended to get to Ikaat before Katie could.
“He probably thought he brought enough private soldiers to get the job done.” Wright shook his head. “Those mercenaries are like cockroaches. For every one you see, there’re plenty more you don’t see
.”
Well, those cockroaches had had superb circumnavigation skills. They’d known exactly where to find us on this top-secret military base. Just as Philip had known where to find me in the hush and seclusion of Rabbit’s Revenge.
But I didn’t give a damn about that.
I only cared about finding Katie and Ikaat before he did.
Because I had no doubt he was already looking for them.
Chapter 33
Down on the first floor, behind what passed as the reception desk, Barrett and Wright got to work in a room that would’ve been a manager’s office in a regular hotel. In the Hooch, it was more like a high-tech security center. With banks of monitors relaying signals from closed-circuit cameras; direct phone lines to the local sheriff, highway patrol, governor, and an array of offices in Washington; and a walk-in vault of weapons that could defend against almost any attack, they pored over maps and charts of the area, shutting down the base, locking down the gates, and calling in military police with working dogs.
“They can’t have gone far,” Wright said. Soot streaked his left cheek.
“Unless they left the post,” Barrett reminded him. “Katie could have accomplices nearby. They could be on a private plane already.”
But I recalled something. The way she’d studied the canyon’s trails from my window all afternoon. And how interested she was hearing of all that remote territory, miles and miles beyond.
“She didn’t leave the base,” I told them.
Both men turned to look at me.
“She’s hiking through the canyon.”
“After dark?” Wright asked. “With a hostage?”
“Ikaat’s used to desert conditions. And Katie had all afternoon to plan.”
Plus, the fire had bought her some time. But it hadn’t bought her much. Not if Philip’s private army were after them.
“We need air support,” Barrett told Wright. “Now.”
Barrett wouldn’t settle for staying on the ground, though. I was sure of that. And as soon as air support found any sign of Katie, he’d be in the canyon.
“When you go,” I told him, “I’m going, too.”
He wanted to argue. I could see it in the bittersweet shade of his eyes. But when the chopper touched down on the roof of the Hooch, I was by his side.
Two more helicopters had deployed ahead of ours. As I climbed into the belly of the beast behind Barrett, I could see evidence of one. Its searchlight, a shaft of pure, white light, pried into the canyon’s every nook and cranny. But our bird had come equipped with another kind of tool. An infrared camera was mounted on its nose. And inside the craft, its small monitor would make the night as transparent as the day.
The desert, though, comes alive in the dark. So finding human heat signatures was easier said than done. Nested shapes of red-on-orange-on-yellow-on-green moved and morphed across the camera’s screen. The tech sergeant who manned it identified them as a wolf pack and coyotes, a pair of foxes and an owl. Only rodents, he said, were too small for the camera’s sensitive notice.
As one hour passed, and then another, I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. Surely, Katie and Ikaat couldn’t have outstripped us and Philip’s men couldn’t have evaded us. Not at night and not on foot. Yet the other ’copters hadn’t found them. And our infrared camera seemed blind.
We’d crisscrossed the valley in ever-widening circles. In the gleam of the moon, I’d seen the canyon’s river below. It twisted through a landscape of boulders and craggy outcrops cut deep by its course. In crevasses, stunted pines grew. Their canopies were black in the night.
Each crevasse fed into another. On the camera’s screen, the trees read as an intricate pattern of lace. Like Battenberg on a black dress.
That’s when a new notion took me. It felt like lightning in my mind. I touched the button to open the intercom, heard my own question rattle through my headgear.
“Will the camera pick them up if they’re running under the trees?”
When the answer turned out to be not necessarily, even the pilot turned to look at me.
Barrett did some fast math. He pinpointed five wooded areas Katie and Ikaat could’ve reached since the fire. But picking the right one, he warned, would be a crapshoot.
If the two women were moving faster than Barrett surmised, we’d miss them altogether. If they were moving slower, we’d find no trace of their passing, figure we’d chosen the wrong section of scrub forest, and leave, opening the door for Philip to catch them. And no matter where we started, we ran the risk of wasting time on a route they’d never taken in the first place.
But as we circled high overhead, the camera picked up movement near one particular glen.
My headset crackled and the sergeant’s voice came over the intercom. “Coyotes on the move, sir. They’ve scattered from the trees.”
I didn’t know much about Western wildlife. But I knew enough to realize most critters would want to avoid human contact.
“That’s our spot!” I exclaimed.
“Set us down,” Barrett ordered.
The chopper dipped low, into a clearing ahead of the fleeing animals. With one hand, I released my restraints, tightened the strap on the nylon daypack Barrett had lifted from the Hooch’s vault. I had granola bars in there, as well as jerky and water. I had signal flares, too, to call for an airlift. Most important, I had a second clip, fully loaded, for the military-issue M9 nine-millimeter handgun I’d convinced Wright to let me borrow. The weapon was heavy and would be hard for me to hold one-handed. But I wasn’t about to face down a killer as desperate as Katie without some kind of firearm.
Barrett checked his gear, caught my hand, gave it a squeeze. And I understood what he wasn’t saying out loud. We’d be vulnerable when we jumped from the chopper. We didn’t know what weapons Katie carried, didn’t know what condition Ikaat was in. Katie had already killed a federal agent, and for her sister’s sake, she might be desperate enough to kill again.
Barrett and I hit the ground running, scurried toward the cover of a stack of sandstone piled at the edge of the dusty clearing. The helicopter rose through the night like smoke. Its shadow blotted out the stars.
The whoop of its rotors faded. Only the roar of the nearby river remained. But it wasn’t enough to blot out the sounds of our footsteps—or enough to disguise the sounds of others.
For the longest time we didn’t move. We didn’t even breathe. We listened to the pine woods and studied the narrow strip of trees for movement.
The sky paled to a lighter shade of gray. Birds heralded the approaching dawn. When they fell silent, I thought my heart would stop.
“Jamie?”
My name echoed through the woods.
“Jamie, where are you?”
Katie’s question quivered in the morning air.
“Jamie, I know you’re here. I saw the helicopter dip below the tree line.”
I glanced at Barrett, crouched beside me in the growing light. If Katie didn’t know he was with me, we had the advantage. He hooked a thumb toward the east, indicating he’d circle around and approach Katie from the rising sun. I nodded. And, silently, he was on his way.
“I love an early morning hike as much as the next girl,” I shouted, hoping to keep Katie focused on me. “But let’s go back to the Hooch and get some coffee.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Ask Ikaat. She’ll say you can.”
“Jamie, please,” Katie shouted. “Don’t make this harder than it is!”
From the sound of her voice, she was on the move, too, circling through the trees. I still couldn’t see her. I ducked lower among the rocks, prayed she couldn’t see me.
The first rays of the sun crept over the horizon. They speared the far rim of the clearing. Beneath the pines there, in the deep shade of that side, I saw them. Two shadows, making their way toward the river. One, bent and bowed, stumbled ahead of the other while the stronger one brought up the rear.
“It’s going to ge
t a lot harder anyway,” I yelled. “There’s a pack of British-led mercenaries behind me. They won’t be as nice to you as I am.”
Katie didn’t reply.
But she picked up the pace as she drove Ikaat through the forest.
Keeping the outcrop between us, I faded into the woods behind me. Barrett had gone this way, too, though I saw no sign of him. On my side of the glen, I plotted a parallel course to Katie’s, and like her, stuck to the cover of the trees.
But the trees became few and far between. Rocky terrain took over. The ground sloped to the river.
In the bend of an oxbow, where the force of the water had cut a serpentine swerve, a slab of sandstone jutted over the river. Scored with grooves, wide cracks, and crevices that could swallow me up, it was as big as a moving van and as angled as a loading ramp. The near end was buried in the rocky shore. Below its far tip, the river ran fast in a rush of white water. Katie stood on this point, high atop the stone, and Ikaat, with eyes wide, a gagged mouth, and hands bound behind her, knelt at Katie’s side.
With a deep breath to strengthen me, I stepped from the scrub and walked onto the pebbled beach.
“That’s far enough,” Katie shouted over the roar of the river. “Throw down your weapon.”
“I don’t have one,” I lied. “You took my twenty-two.”
“That’s right. I’ll use it if you don’t get back.”
She pulled my Bobcat from some pocket—and opened fire on me. The rounds slammed into the gravel in front of me and made the stones jump. But I was too far away to get shot.
When she ran out of ammunition, and I heard the click of dry fire, I yelled, “You don’t really want to hurt me. You don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“No, I don’t.” Katie’s reply quivered, close to a sob. “But if I don’t give Ikaat to them, they’ll kill Annie.”
“They’ll kill Annie regardless,” Philip called, emerging from the tree line. “In fact, I’d say she’s already dead.”
Katie whipped a .45 from the small of her back, pointed it at Philip’s head. She must’ve stolen it from the agent she’d murdered. With its stopping power, she could kill Philip where he stood and still have time to punch half a dozen holes into me.
The Kill Shot Page 25
