Medusa’s Master

by Cindy Dees

  Jeff called out sharply, “Shut up, Pete!” To Kat, he muttered, “Sorry. That’s Pirate Pete. He’s a parrot. With a filthy mouth, I might add.”

  “Shut up, Pete!” the bird squawked.

  Kat giggled.

  The sound was incongruous coming from her. Particularly since at the moment, her knees were deeply bent, her hands held shoulder high before her, and everything about her announced her readiness to kill something right here, right now. Apparently, when Pete had opened his big beak, she’d used those lightning-fast reflexes of hers to drop into a defensive stance.

  She straightened to her full height, relaxing from the battle alert Pete’s outburst had thrown her into. Jeff commented, “In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, your reflexes are freaking unbelievable.”

  She shrugged as he opened the storeroom door, using a keypad and a retinal scanner this time.

  “In here.” He led the way into a cluttered storeroom littered with packing boxes, rolls of tape, and garbage bags full of packing peanuts. And dust. Lots of dust.

  Using the tiny penlight on his key ring, he found his way over to what looked like a circuit breaker box in the corner. “If you’ll close the door…” he instructed over his shoulder.

  Throwing him a perplexed look, she did as he asked.

  He pushed on one of the circuit breakers, which was actually an elevator switch, and the room lurched. Kat grabbed at the nearest shelf in surprise to steady herself.

  He grinned. “The entire room is an elevator. Cool, huh?”

  She grinned back. “Very cool.”

  They rode downward for nearly a minute, the silence between them so thick with the memory of the steamy kisses they’d just shared that he could hardly breathe. Work, buddy. Focus on work.

  The storeroom/elevator lurched gently to a stop. “You can open the door now,” he said.

  She did so, and one of the familiar stone tunnels of H.O.T. Watch headquarters stretched away from them. He followed her out of the elevator, unabashedly enjoying the view of her pert little derriere.

  She asked curiously, “How do people navigate around here? All the halls and doors look the same.”

  “They’re supposed to. When you get assigned to work down here, the first job you’re given is to memorize a map of the place. If any intruder were ever to get in, he’d have a hell of a time finding his way around.”

  She nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

  Man, she was quick on the uptake. He’d bet she was hell on wheels when it came to gathering intelligence from live targets. She’d talk circles around ordinary mortals. But then, all she probably had to do was flash those big brown eyes of hers and her targets would sing like Pavarotti.

  “This way.” He headed right.

  “Is this really a hollowed-out volcano?” she asked as they strode down the hall.

  He matched her businesslike tone. If she had the discipline to set aside for the moment what they’d just done together, he could, too. “Yup, this is an extinct volcano. Problem with most natural caves is too much water. And with all the electronics we needed to put in this facility, we had to find a dry cave system. Volcanic remnants are often dry cave networks.”

  “Aren’t they occasionally very hot, lava-filled places, too?” she asked.

  He grinned down at her. Their gazes met and instant sparks leaped between them. Hah. So she hadn’t entirely put their kiss from her mind. His ego was unaccountably gratified. Belatedly, he answered, “We’ve been assured this volcano is extinct. But just in case, we have seismic sensors all over the island to monitor Mount Timbalo.”

  She threw him a skeptical look, but then he stopped in front of another anonymous door, opening it for her. She brushed past him, and yet again, their gazes snapped to one another. Oh, yeah. She was as aware of him as he was of her. Her mouth twitched for the barest instant into a smile, and then she was back to being all business. He followed her into the Ops Center.

  The sheer size of the main control room never failed to daunt him a little. Kat, in front of him, hesitated before striding toward the cluster of people at a console in the middle of the room. They were staring up at one of the Jumbotrons in the far wall.

  He glanced up. Monet’s study for his painting, The Poppies near Argenteuil, shone down at him. Jeff winced. The Ghost was moving up in the world. That had to be a twenty million dollar painting if it was worth a cent. No doubt the pressure to catch the thief was going to ratchet up commensurately. Sighing, he walked over to his boss.

  Navy Commander Brady Hathaway glanced up at him. “You know the painting?”

  Jeff nodded. “Where was it?”

  “The Valliard estate.”

  Another one of the fabulous estates of the Golden Mile. The Valliard place was not the largest among them, but was touted as one of the most opulent. “Did the Ghost take any other paintings?”

  “Just the one,” Hathaway replied. “There are other valuable pieces in the house. Why only this one?”

  Jeff shrugged. “He may have a specific buyer for this piece, or he may prefer to travel light.”

  Kat added, “The thief may also want to limit his risk and only take time to steal a single piece.”

  Jeff nodded. “Could be.” To Hathaway, he said, “When did the theft happen?”

  “Sometime in the past twenty-four hours. A caretaker reported it stolen about an hour ago. Said he walked through the main house yesterday afternoon and everything was intact. But when he went through tonight, the painting was cut out of its frame.”

  Jeff cursed under his breath. That was an enormous window of opportunity for the thief. He kept hoping for a theft where the Ghost would have to work fast. It would tell them a lot more about the thief’s M.O. But to date, all the thefts had been of unoccupied estates. The winter season didn’t start for a few more months, bringing the residents of the Golden Mile to its tropical shores. Of course, at the rate he was going, the Ghost would have picked the island clean long before then.

  Kat asked him, “What’s the common link between all the paintings?”

  He’d been over that a thousand times from every conceivable angle. “They’ve got no common thread except that they’re excellent, if little-known, pieces by masters.”

  “Any chance I can make a phone call to a colleague about this?” Kat asked.

  Jennifer Blackfoot glanced over at Hathaway. The two exchanged a nod and Jennifer said, “There’s a phone right here. Any help would be appreciated.”

  Jeff listened with interest to Kat’s one-sided conversation.

  “Viper, it’s Cobra. Sorry to call you so late. Did I wake you up? Morning sickness at night? That sucks. Hey, I have a problem. We’re trying to find a link between a half-dozen paintings that have been stolen recently. Can you get a minute or two on the super array to run them and see if there’s some obscure link between them? Great. I’ll send you an e-mail with the information in the next few minutes. You rock.”

  Kat hung up the phone and looked up at him. “Do you have a detailed inventory of the paintings?”

  “I’ll have to add the Monet to it, but that’ll only take a minute. Were you talking about the supercomputer array at the Pentagon, by any chance?”

  Kat nodded.

  “Your friend will have to wait for weeks to get time on that puppy. It’s booked up solid.”

  Kat grinned. “Not for her. Besides the fact that the Medusas can usually get time on the basis of operational necessity, Viper knows a bunch of the computer techs who work on the array. A couple of them owe her favors.”

  Jeff nodded. Ahh. The ubiquitous favor owed. Special Forces types had a tendency to collect long lists of people who owed them one. When it was your job to save the world and help people out of impossible binds, gratitude frequently followed suit—along with offers to repay the favor.

  He sat down at a computer terminal. It was an easy matter to look up an online catalog listing Monet’s works and cut and paste information about the newest t
heft into his existing list of stolen works. He glanced over at Kat. “Where do I send this file?”

  She rattled off an e-mail address, and he hit the send button. He highly doubted this Viper person and her supercomputer would have any success, but he was grateful for any help he could get.

  “Incoming call for Captain Steiger,” Carter Beigneaux announced from the next row of consoles over. “It’s General Wittenauer. I’ll patch it to your station.”

  Great. No doubt the Old Man was calling to breathe fire down his shorts to get cracking on catching the Ghost. Sympathetic glances came his way from the people standing nearby. Wittenauer was a great guy until he didn’t get exactly what he wanted. And then, watch out.

  The phone in front of Jeff buzzed and he picked it up. “Good evening, sir.”

  “Evening. You hear about the latest theft?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m in the Ops Center right now looking at a picture of the stolen piece.”

  “Any idea who did it or how?”

  “I assume it was the Ghost, but that has not been confirmed.”

  “Time to take your theories operational, Maverick. Now that you’ve got Cobra to help, I want the two of you to take direct action to stop this guy. I’m catching all kinds of heat over this.”

  Jeff grimaced. He knew the feeling.

  The general continued. “I want you two to go to Barbados. Catch this guy, dammit.”

  “This is a police matter, sir—”

  “You and Cobra are smarter than the average bear. Use your heads. Be creative. Come up with a way to bag this guy that the police haven’t thought of. And do it fast.”

  Gee. No pressure there. Jeff stared at the receiver as the line went dead. He glanced up at Kat. Her face betrayed not a hint of expression, but he knew without question that she was as surprised at he was to get this order to go operational. How he knew that, he had no idea. Maybe a few of grandmère’s psychic genes had come down to him, after all.

  He commented to the gang in general, “Looks like our research project just turned into a mission. Who’s the lucky dog who gets to control it from this end?”

  Jennifer Blackfoot spoke up. “I’ll take it. Knowing you, Maverick, you’re going to piss off the local authorities and need my special touch to keep your carcass out of hot water—or, in your case, more like boiling oil.” She glanced over at Kat. “If he ticks you off, you have my permission to kick his butt.”

  Kat nodded with an outward serenity he doubted she was actually feeling while everyone else grinned widely. But then Kat startled him by asking Jennifer, “Which one of us is in charge?”

  He started. He’d assumed he’d lead the mission since it had been his baby first. But now that she mentioned it, maybe that wasn’t such a straightforward assumption. He and Kat were both captains by rank. Both experienced field operators. Both capable of leading a combat team. Hathaway and Jennifer exchanged another one of those wordless looks of colleagues who’ve worked together for a long time and know how the other one thinks.

  Hathaway looked over at Kat. “You okay with Maverick spearheading this thing?”

  She shrugged. “Sure. No problem.”

  Jordan Yokum, one of his guys in the gym earlier, snickered. “If you pick it by who can kick whose keester, the chick ought to be running the show.”

  Jeff surged to his feet and had Jordy by the throat all in one move. “You wanna talk about her, you do it with respect, buster. She’s a hell of fighter, and she can rip your head off in a New York second. If you call her a chick again, I’m gonna order her to do it. She’s Captain Kim to you, or you can call her ma’am. Got it?”

  The vignette froze in time as everyone went perfectly still around him. Theirs was a notoriously polite community because their capacity to cause violent harm to one another was so great. A confrontation like this was rare and dangerous.

  Kat spoke quietly from behind him. “Thanks for the knight in shining armor bit, Jeff. But it’s okay. I’ll take care of what your guys call me.”

  He realized in shock that the fury coursing through him was completely out of proportion to the provocation. Why in hell was he already so possessive of her? He’d known her for approximately eight hours. Yeah, they’d kissed, but he’d kissed plenty of women he’d just met and never roared to their defense like this. She was right. He had no business designating himself the official defender of her honor. Especially when she could, indeed, kick her own asses.

  He turned Jordy’s neck loose and took a step back.

  The other man mumbled, “Hey, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to piss you off.”

  Jeff shook his head. “No, I overreacted. My fault.”

  Hathaway said grimly, “My office, Jeff. Now.”

  Crap. He was gonna get a serious butt-chewing, and he deserved it, too. Even Jordy threw him a sympathetic look as he turned to follow his boss.

  Kat said behind him, “If someone will show me to Captain Steiger’s office, I’ll pack my gear. I gather General Wittenauer wants the two of us to leave right away for Barbados. Who around here can arrange for our transportation?”

  Gratitude flooded through him. Her comment, made plenty loud enough for Hathaway to hear, was a clear statement of support, an unequivocal announcement that she still wanted to work with him, despite his Neanderthal outburst of a moment before. It would go a long way toward making the upcoming conversation with his boss easier. She didn’t have to do it. But she had. Publicly.

  Son of a gun.

  Maybe the lady liked him for more than just his magnificent kissing, after all.

  Chapter 6

  Kat was surprised when the guy who’d called her a chick in the Ops Center poked his head into Jeff’s warehouse/office a little while later.

  “Captain Kim? Captain Steiger will meet you at the boat dock in fifteen minutes. I’m supposed to take you down there.”

  She rose easily out of the cross-legged pose she’d been sitting in, meditating in a futile effort to relax and re-center herself. If she were being brutally honest, she’d been trying to erase the memory of Jeff’s kisses and her reaction to them. And frankly…it was not happening.

  In less than a day, one man had undone twenty-five years’ worth of intensive training and self-discipline instilled by one of the great martial arts masters of his time. She didn’t know whether to be intrigued as hell or scared to death of Jeff Steiger. Either way, she was horribly discombobulated and out of balance.

  If she couldn’t actually be calm, at least she could fake it. She spoke smoothly to the nervous man before her. “You can call me Cobra if you like.”

  He smiled gratefully, acknowledging the offer of her field handle as the gesture of forgiveness it was. “I didn’t mean anything by that comment, you know. Maverick can whup all our butts. And the way you took him down today, I figure you can whup all of ours, too.”

  No doubt she could. But she wasn’t about to comment on it. “All’s forgotten,” she murmured. She picked up her gear bag and rifle case. “Lead on…” She left the sentence hanging.

  He obligingly filled in with his field handle. “Chain. Short for Chainsaw.”

  She quirked an eyebrow. “Hmm. An evocative handle.”

  “In BUDS, my trainers accused me of having the subtlety of a chainsaw. The name stuck.”

  “Well, at least it didn’t have anything to do with your massacre weapon of choice.”

  He grinned. “Can I take one of those bags for you?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got them. I didn’t know this place had a boat dock.”

  “It’s left over from a smuggling operation that ran out of these caves briefly a few years back. It’s at the other end of the facility, though. Bit of a hike. Sure you don’t want me to get one of those?”

  “I’ve carried these bags to hell and back. I’ll be all right.”

  “Maverick said you’re a Special Forces type. Did you do the dreaded eighty-mile march, too?”

  She rolled her eyes in recollectio
n of the Special Forces training rite of passage. “Ugh. Did you have to remind me of that?” Normally, she wouldn’t be even remotely this talkative with a stranger, but the guy was trying so hard to make up to her that she felt obliged to throw him the bone.

  “Yup, that was a bitch—” He broke off abruptly and started to stammer an apology.

  She replied gently, “Unlike Maverick, I’m not going to bite your head off for using the B-word in front of me. I’ve been known to use it myself, and I’m sure I qualify to have it applied to me now and then. Captain Steiger seems to have a rather old-fashioned view of how women should be treated. But we Medusas aren’t tense about such things, particularly around our colleagues.”

  From her, that was quite a speech. But the guy seemed sincerely sorry and also seemed badly in need of a little reassurance that he and she were square.

  Chain glanced over at her curiously. “Is there really a whole team of you women operators?”

  “Yes.”

  “I gotta say, I’d like to see you all in action sometime.”

  “Who knows? Maybe you will. We haven’t done much training in this part of the world. We may head down this way someday.”

  “That’d be cool. As long as I didn’t have to spar with you. You moved like lightning in that gym.”

  She suppressed a smile. She’d actually jumped Jeff pretty casually in the gym. Her move-now-or-die speed was quite a bit faster than that. They walked the rest of the way to the dock in silence. Chainsaw seemed satisfied that peace was restored between them, and indeed, in her mind, it was.

  The Medusas had learned to have thick hides when it came to initial skepticism from their male counterparts. They’d also learned long ago to let their actions speak for them and not to rise to verbal baiting. The only thing perplexing to her about the whole “chick” incident was why Jeff had reacted so violently.

  They arrived at the dock, and a burst of heat flooded her at the sight of Jeff waiting beside a sleek powerboat. Lord, he was good-looking. Head-turning handsome. Her hands itched with the memory of that muscular chest and washboard waist sliding beneath her palms. Conversing casually with the boat’s driver, he oozed confidence. Charisma. Ease with command.