by J. R. Ward
Minions were swarming the back forty, going up against Adrian and— Shit, was that Matthias with a crystal dagger?
Sure as hell looked like it.
And he was holding his own.
The first impulse was to jump in there, but Jim stopped himself. This ambush bullshit was just too obvious. And he didn’t believe that the minions were going to kill Matthias—nope, not with Devina stepping in when she had back at the Marriott.
Narrowing his eyes on the fighting, he whistled once, the shrill sound cutting through the grunting and cursing. When Adrian glanced over, Jim popped up his palms—the universal sign for, You got this?
When Adrian nodded and returned to work, Jim gave Matthias another quick measure. The bastard was on fire, that broken body somehow working with enough deadly coordination to score some serious hits—and not because the minions were giving it to him easy once they engaged with him.
They were, however, focusing on Adrian, none of them singling Matthias out until the guy forced them to.
Devina had definitely given a no-kill order to those shadowy sons of bitches: Jim had squared off with them enough to know that they were capable of far greater offensive strategy—and the shit Adrian was dealing with was proof.
Time to go.
Jim hightailed it around to the front, threw some buffering over the corpse so that in the unlikely event someone got lost and made it all the way down the drive, they wouldn’t find a dead guy as a welcome mat.
Then he was out of there, going Angel Airlines to downtown Caldwell.
The reporter was the one exposed at the moment, and that was where Jim needed to be.
Chapter Thirty-six
As far as Adrian could tell, the final minion showed up shortly after Jim disappeared.
The second that angel was gone, the seemingly endless supply of Devina’s PITAs dried up—proof that keeping the guy on site had been the reason for the attack.
Ten minutes later, the last shadow was dispatched, stabbed through the head by a crystal dagger wielded by Matthias.
As Adrian turned and looked at his wingman, he was breathing hard and steaming from the blood that had splattered on his shoulders.
That crippled SOB had sure as hell pulled it together in the nick of time.
“You okay?” Ad demanded between heaving gasps.
Matthias’s knees buckled and he gave himself over to gravity, letting his ass hit the ground—at least until the black blood that had been spilled on it ate its way through to his BVDs.
The man popped up off that grass like he’d been kicked in the can. “Fuck! This shit is—”
“Don’t rub your ass with your hand, idiot. Then your palm’ll get covered in it.”
Annnnnnd that was how Matthias ended up dropping trou in front of Ad.
The guy all but ripped open the front of those black slacks, and then his flat ass and thin legs let the rest happen.
“Better?” Ad said dryly as he looked around.
“Except for the stiff breeze on my ’nads, yeah.”
Ad’s eyes went back to the man’s lower body…and for some reason, his mind got stuck on the reporter in that hotel room the night before, the two of them all sexed up, but going nowhere.
That must really suck, he thought.
Clearing his throat, he nodded at the garage. “I got a change in there for you.”
“I’m ready for one.”
Matthias bent down, used the crystal dagger to slice open the pant legs, and then stepped free of them, leaving the burned-out remains smoldering on the ground like a car that had been bombed and abandoned at the side of the road.
Looking over, he tossed the dagger in a perfect end-over-end sequence at Adrian. “Thanks for the weapon—that was fun.”
Then the guy turned away and made like he was heading around the garage.
No questions. No demands of, “What the fuck?” Just, Hey, good party, my man.
Adrian hightailed it to catch up, thinking that Jim had been right about his old boss. Even half-naked, with some of his clothes still smoking, the fucker was tight as a bank vault—and Ad’s kind of guy, apparently.
Matthias stopped as he came around the corner. “Looks like we had another kind of company.”
Sure enough.
The dead operative was lying like a doormat on the fringes of the forest, half on/half off the pea gravel of the drive. Talk about bad shape: the body was chest-down, but the head was owl-backward, those dead eyes focused on the skies above.
That musta hurt.
Ad went over and crouched. “You go up and I’ll get rid of him—”
“Not a chance.” As Ad looked up, Matthias planted his feet and got his glare on. “Those things out back? Those are your world. This.” He jabbed a forefinger at the stiff. “Is mine. Get me some fucking pants while I strip him.”
Well, what do you know. Just because his balls didn’t work didn’t mean the guy was a pussy.
“And bring me a belt,” Matthias muttered as he knelt down onto the ground, and started to pick over the carcass like the best kind of vulture. “I’m not your size anymore.”
Adrian wasn’t the type to be dismissed, especially by a mere human. But Jim’s old boss had earned some respect in that forest, and there was no arguing with the way he was handling the postgame wrap-up on a man who’d been sent to kill him.
After Ad did a quick scan of the property to make sure nothing was doing, he flashed up inside the studio—no reason not to, considering the focus Matthias was showing the dearly departed. After a quick check-in with Dog and Eddie, both of whom were right where they needed to be, he grabbed a set of leathers in case the shit hit the fan again, and looked around for something, anything he could leverage as a belt.
Back down on ground level, he dropped the pants by Matthias’s nearly bare ass. “Here.”
The guy took a pause in his peel job and started to get to his feet. When he faltered, Adrian extended his palm.
Matthias looked up as if he wanted to throw a fuck-off out into the airwaves, but as he made a second attempt and didn’t get far, he slid his hand against Ad’s. It took no strength at all to get him off the ground, but the subtle pull made the difference between Matthias’s staying where he was and his being on the vertical.
As the man’s head dropped to take off his Nikes, Ad felt a pang in his chest. To be disabled was a kind of curse. And yet through heart alone, Matthias had done a man’s job out in the back—had even stepped in during a moment when Ad might have gotten hurt.
“Thank you,” Adrian said.
Matthias’s brows twitched—which was apparently his version of OMG. “What for?”
“Stepping in.”
“You could have handled it,” he said gruffly as he yanked up those pants.
The leathers were painfully loose on him, and when Adrian handed over an extension cord, the stare he got back was all about the really?
“Best I could do.”
Matthias did the duty, snaking the stiff black cord through the loops, pulling shit tight, and tying it in a knot. Then he was back to work.
“No cell phone, ID has his picture on it and not much else, ammo, piano wire, good knife—but not as flashy as the ones you have.” Matthias glanced around. “We need to find his car and get him the hell out of here. They’re going to send more, but let’s clean up this mess before things get complicated and the morgue at St. Francis runs the risk of losing another body.”
“I’ll get the keys to the truck. In the meantime, let’s stuff him in the garage.”
“Roger that.”
Ad went for the F-150 that Jim had driven before he’d fallen into the battle between good and evil. By the time he’d backed the thing out, Matthias had tied the operative’s arms and legs together, and was dragging the body toward the bay that had been opened.
The effort was making him limp like someone had hit his bad leg with a Louisville Slugger. And broken the bat in half.
Adrian
stepped in and took the torso. No comment. No fuss.
“Worried he’s going to wake up?” Adrian drawled, nodding at that thin copper wire that had been used to secure things.
“Lately, I’m not taking anything for granted.”
* * *
The truck that Adrian had pulled out was not new, but it was in good condition. Unfortunately, as Matthias grunted and dragged his bones up into the passenger seat with the help of his cane, the same couldn’t be said for himself.
He was old and in bad condition.
The fight he’d had such a blast with hadn’t ended as far as his body was concerned, every sharp jab, quick counter, and bracing blow lingering in his joints and muscles. He felt like he’d been in a car accident.
Again.
But he liked it. Everything…from the killing to the cleanup…felt like a familiar set of clothes or a destination he’d lived at for a long, long time.
After Adrian drove them out past the white farmhouse that appeared to be unoccupied, the man hit the brakes at the main road.
“Preference?” he said.
As with the fighting, the analysis came to Matthias with perfect clarity and confidence: “The operative would have driven by this lane first, coming from the direction of downtown because he’d have taken a car up from Washington, D.C., on the Northway. Then he’d have doubled back and gone past again.”
“So right.”
“No, left. He’d have double-checked a third time before identifying the best place to park. And then after finding it, he would have located another, less obvious solution.” Matthias nodded in that direction. “Left.”
“Do all you guys have the same brain?”
“I had a very specific recruiting strategy and type.”
“And what was that?”
Matthias focused on the man beside him. “You. Without the metal in your face.”
“I do believe I’m blushing.”
As Adrian made the turn, Matthias cracked a smile, and then got to searching the shoulders of the road. They were definitely out in the sticks, overgrown evergreens and early blooming forsythia crowding the asphalt on both sides like fans at a velvet rope.
One mile out. Two miles. Three—
“There,” he said, pointing through the front windshield—but like Adrian hadn’t seen the unmarked buried to its quarter panels at the side of the road?
Adrian eased by the vehicle at five miles an hour under the turtle-like speed limit so they could check things out. Pulled over like it had broken down, the unremarkable unmarked had a bright pink CPD seal on it—like the cops had already been by, assessed the Taurus, and put the owner on notice to get his shit the hell home or have the ride impounded.
Adrian doubled back and drew up close. “Are you sure this is—”
Matthias got out of the truck and peeled the sticker off easy as pie. “If this was real, you’d need a straightedge.”
Tossing the “seal” inside the truck, he stepped back and looked left and right. No one around, and no one down the road in either direction.
Taking the heel of his cane, he—
Shattered the driver’s window.
Reaching in, he popped the locks and opened the door. No alarm—but XOps never put alarms in their cars. The primary directive, aside from getting your target dead, was no attention—ever. That just made for shit to clean up.
Naturally, there had been no keys on the operative, but that was also protocol. XOps left nothing behind, no bodies, no weapons—no cars, either. The key would be attached to the undercarriage so that the recon folks could sweep in and reclaim the Taurus—but he didn’t have the time to go prostrate and screw around in the tall grasses.
Matthias pivoted around. “Can I have one of your daggers?”
When one was presented to him hilt-first, he lowered himself behind the wheel of the sedan and put the tip into a juncture in the plastic casing that covered the steering column. With the heel of his hand, he slammed the blade home and twisted until the section snapped free, exposing the guts.
As far as the average member of the public was concerned, the automotive industry had progressed past the point of manual manipulation, new cars run by their electrical systems and their inner brains—which meant the days of breaking and entering and hot-wiring were over.
Good news for regular drivers. Not so helpful when you were trying to build in flexibility during assassinations. And that was why XOps unmarkeds were all modified for just this kind of infiltration. If you couldn’t find the key, if you didn’t have time to retrieve it, if a hundred thousand other unknowables were in your way? Get in and get gone.
Cross the wires. Hit the gas. On the road.
When they got back to the garage, Matthias drove into the open slot the truck had vacated and dragged himself out. Using the sedan’s hood, sides, and trunk, he steadied himself as he felt around the base of the car—
Aha.
The magnetic box he brought out from down under was four inches long, two inches wide, and thin as a finger.
It was coded, however, with a tiny keypad. He’d forgotten that part—
From a corner of his brain, a four-digit series of numbers trembled on a ledge, just about to fall into his consciousness.
Adrian strode in. “What’s—”
Matthias held up his palm. “One sec…”
Closing his eyes, he changed tactics. Fighting and forcing his memory hadn’t worked; maybe taking a passive approach would.
And hopefully the result wouldn’t be another time-out like the one he’d sported right before they’d been attacked.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe—
The universal code popped into his head, jumping free of the choke hold that had strangled it into inaccessibility—and along with the numeric sequence came friends…lots and lots of friends.
All at once he was flooded by passwords, and alphanumeric combinations, and even color sequences.
Something grabbed his arm. Jim’s roommate.
Good timing, as his legs started to go out, a dizzy twirl in his skull turning his body into a goddamn ballerina, even as he didn’t move.
Overwhelmed, he could only watch what played across the backs of his eyelids, the seemingly endless catalog revealing itself with all the grace of a bull charging through a crowd.
He retained the information, however.
Especially as other things started to come in for a landing. Things like accounts, and Web sites…and personnel files.
Chapter Thirty-seven
“Monty, where are you…you loose-lipped son of a bitch…?”
Glancing at her watch, Mels ducked back into the boathouse at the river’s edge, double-checking that her source hadn’t come in from the opposite end. Nope. Just her and the empty slips and the pissed-off barn swallows and the stacks of rowboats and life preservers.
When Monty had called and wanted to see her, she’d refused to play that follow-the-leader-through-the-park game again, and his lateness made her wonder if maybe he was in a sulk at his spy-guy parade getting rained on—
“Shit!”
All around, swallows burst back into the boathouse, forcing her into a duck and cover as they bitched in circles for a minute and then reescaped out into the open air.
“Monty, where are you?” she said to all the no-one-else around her.
Going over to one of the boat slips, she looked down into the water. Man, there was something inherently creepy about not being able to see the bottom. Made you wonder what was really down there—
A creak brought her head up. “Monty?”
Off in the distance, a child squealed in happiness. A car horn went off.
“Is someone there?”
All of a sudden, the sunlight dimmed as if God had decided to conserve energy, or maybe someone had thrown a tarp over Caldwell.
In the darkness, the interior of the boathouse closed in on her.
Yeah, okay. Time to go.
Mels shoved her
hand into her purse as she headed for the exit, a spike of paranoia making her search out her Mace—
Someone got to the doorway first, blocking the way out.
“Monty?”
“Sorry I’m late.”
She relaxed at the sound of the familiar voice. “I was just about to give up on you.”
“I would never let you down.”
Mels frowned as the man took a step forward. Then another. “What’s that cologne you’re wearing?”
“Do you like it?”
God, no. It smelled like he needed to take a shower. “So you said you’ve got something for me?”
“Oh, yes. I really do.”
As he approached her, he somehow managed to keep his body between her and the exit, and then he was right in front of her, hands in his pockets, head down like he was looking at his feet.
That child, the one probably playing on the swing set in the park, laughed again, the sound filtering in and making her feel the isolation like a draft.
I gotta get out of here, she thought in a rush.
“Listen, Monty, I’ve got to—”
And that was when the man looked up, black eyes glittering with threat. It wasn’t Monty. She didn’t know who the hell it was—
Mels attacked first, cocking her hand back on her wrist and taking the hard heel of her palm and jamming it right up into the guy’s jaw. As his head flew back, she threw a vicious blow to the gut, which curled him forward again, bringing his face right in to range. Locking onto both sides of his head, she brought up her thigh and slammed her knee into his nose; then shoved him out of the way.
With a burst of speed, she gunned for the door—
The man was there. Right in front of her.
Ripping her head to the side, she checked to see if it wasn’t a second attacker. There was no way he could have moved that fast—
Those eyes. Those black eyes.
What would you say if I told you I believe in Hell…because I’d been there….
Mels staggered backward, until one heel hit a wet spot and slipped. Or maybe…the man with the obsidian stare had pushed her without touching her—
Free fall.
