Jet squinted in the dim light and spotted another shooter coming around a truck by the house next door and waited till she had a clear shot, then fired three times. Two of the slugs caught him in the throat as he shot at her, his aim going wide. A second bullet pounded Arthur in the stomach.
Arthur’s legs buckled, and he sank to the ground. She dropped to one knee, sweeping the surroundings with the Beretta, alert for any further threats.
The street was silent.
“You stupid asshole. You triggered an alarm somehow, didn’t you?” she hissed.
Blood spread across Arthur’s shirt, and he moaned. The chest wound was ugly and had punctured a lung – she could hear the air frothing out as he fought for breath.
“They’ll…find you… miserable bitch…”
She studied his mangled face, twisted by pain and hate, and then stood.
“Drowning on your own blood is a lousy way to go. I’ve seen it. There’s nothing worse…except for a stomach wound. At least your last few minutes on the planet will be your most painful. If I could make it last forever for you, I would. I hope there’s a hell. You belong there, you filthy bastard.”
He couldn’t speak, his hands claws, clenching automatically in unspeakable agony.
“Kill me. Please.” The words were a moan, barely audible.
She glanced around at the fallen bodies and shook her head.
“You earned this. Enjoy it.”
She spat on his twitching face and then turned and jogged to the Explorer. Within twenty seconds, she was pulling away, leaving Arthur to expire on the sidewalk, his final moments spent in unimaginable suffering, cold and alone.
~ ~ ~
The hospital service door was locked. Jet worked the picks and had it open in under a minute. She adjusted the black knit cap on her head and listened for any signs of movement. It seemed deserted. After looking around to ensure that the parking area was still clear, she pulled it open. Thankfully, there was no alarm on it. She stepped inside and, glancing through the glass window on the interior door, confirmed that there was nobody nearby. She closed the exit softly and then turned to the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time.
At the third floor she paused, listening. It was quiet.
She swung the steel door wide and stepped into the hall. The lights were on dimmers, set low for the night, and she heard a single nurse at the staff station at the far end of the wing talking on the phone in hushed tones, an occasional giggle punctuating her exchange. Festive decorations of dancing ponies and singing birds decorated the colorfully painted corridor, confirming that she was in the pediatric wing.
Jet moved silently to the doorway of the first room and peered in. It was empty. The second housed a little boy sleeping on the bed, maybe six years old, a heart monitor beeping at a low volume on a stand by his side.
The two adjacent rooms were also empty.
The next one had a small form curled up on its side, covers half off, facing away from her. She stepped into the room and approached. The child rolled over, sensing a presence.
It wasn’t Hannah.
Another titter echoed from the nurse’s station, and she slowly inched back into the hall, pausing to listen again before moving to the room across from her.
Empty.
She heard a rustle from the corridor and turned.
“Hey. What are you doing here? You can’t go in there…” the nurse exclaimed.
Jet started to stammer an explanation and then slammed the side of her neck with an incapacitating strike. The nurse’s eyes rolled into her head, and Jet caught her as she collapsed, pulling her into the room and closing the door. The woman would be out for a few minutes, but time was Jet’s enemy now.
She darted from room to room and, in the one closest to the nurse’s station, came across another slumbering toddler. She sidled to the side of the bed and peered down at the sleeping face.
Hannah.
Jet’s nostrils filled with Hannah’s essence, and a surge of adrenaline coursed through her as the little eyelids opened groggily and regarded her. Jet saw recognition, and Hannah smiled before closing her eyes again and snuffling.
She gently lifted Hannah and held her to her breast, murmuring to her as she vaguely remembered her mother doing when she was a baby. Hannah snuggled closer, and Jet’s heart nearly burst.
A part of her could have stood like that forever, but she forced herself out of the spell and moved back into the hall, then speed-walked back to the stairwell. The exit was empty, so she pushed through the door and crept onto the landing, a draft blowing up from the street level ruffling the tips of her hair. Hannah shifted against her and made a soft sound of sleepy susurration, then resumed her drowsing.
Moments later, Jet was strapping Hannah into the new child’s seat in the Explorer, readying her for the short drive to where the RV sat waiting. A police car rolled by on the street in front of the hospital, and her breath caught in her throat. It hit its brake lights as it neared the intersection, slowing. Jet pulled the Beretta free of her jacket as she eased the driver’s door open.
The squad car picked up speed and continued on its way.
Jet exhaled with a sigh and then climbed behind the wheel. She took another look at Hannah in the child’s seat, her small head cocked to the side, eyes clenched shut as she slept, and then cranked the ignition and put the car in gear.
~ ~ ~
“It’s over,” Jet said into the cell phone as she backed the RV out of the driveway, the headlights off so as not to wake the couple in the house.
“All of them?”
She described her night’s activities in clipped sentences.
“And Hannah?”
“Sleeping next to me.”
“What’s your next move?”
“You’ll be the first to know as soon as I figure it out. First thing I need to do is get as far from Washington as I can. I’ll call you in another couple of days. What about you? What are you going to do?”
“I guess I need to think about that some. Can’t see any reason to hide out in the jungle if the bad guys with the grudge are history. Can you?”
“Not really. Unless you’re a nature nut or something.”
“I’m really not.”
“Then you thinking maybe you’ll buy yourself an island and hang out a hammock?” she asked.
“You make it sound like a pretty attractive proposition.”
“Right now, it sounds great. I envy you.”
“I’ll let you know what happens. You got the fifty in stones?”
“Of course.”
“Then you have a good reason to come back.”
She glanced at Hannah in the seat next to her, still asleep.
“I suppose I do.”
Chapter 37
Jet sat at a weathered table across from a heavyset Latino man, Hannah by her side, watching as he took a photo with the elaborate digital camera and then inspected it on his computer.
“Perfect. I can have the passport finished within two more days. It’ll pass cursory inspections, but you don’t want to use it anywhere they have an automated scanner. Those are typically linked to a central computer, and it will come up as an unrecognized number,” he advised.
“I need a few of those photos myself. Can you send them to this e-mail?” She handed him a piece of paper with a cutout e-mail account on it.
“You betcha. I’ll do it right now.” He moved his mouse around and typed in the address with excruciating slowness, then hit return. “Still not completely comfortable with these damned things. Technology. Although it’s made the business easier. Used to be a passport would take two weeks, not three days. But now you just press print and the machine does the work for you.” He shook his head. “But why a Mexican passport? Most of my customers want a U.S. one. If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I like Mexico.” She smiled sweetly.
“And the name on the passport?”
She’d thought about it a l
ong time.
“Lawan Nguyen.”
“Spell it.”
She did.
“Good Mexican name. You sure you don’t want something like Maria Perez? Just saying…” He spread his hands wide, palms up.
“Nope.”
“Fine. Now to the mundane part of our transaction…” He looked at Jet expectantly.
She removed three thousand dollars from her purse and counted it, then sat back, studying the display cases on the walls filled with stamps and obscure currencies.
“And the balance when it’s done. Any problem with that?” he asked.
“No. I’ll be back in three days.”
She pushed back from the desk and stood, then held out her hand for Hannah, who joyfully grabbed it and slid off the chair. Hannah had decided that she hated strollers and was hell-bent on walking everywhere, her fierce determination to be independent reminiscent of her mother.
“What do you want to do now that your photo session is done, Hannah?” Jet asked.
Hannah pointed at the two-year-old Toyota Highlander she’d recently bought from a private party, parked twenty yards away in the Santa Ana sunshine. Hannah loved riding in the Highlander more than anything in the world, which was a good thing, because soon they would be doing a lot of driving.
The trip from Washington, D.C., had taken a week, and they’d slept at rest stops and campgrounds every night, avoiding the formalities of hotels. Once they’d made it to southern California, she’d put out feelers among the immigrant community and quickly found someone who could create good quality papers for her. If all went well, by the end of the week they would be in Mexico, where she planned to travel down the coast while she decided what to do next.
She placed Hannah into the child’s seat and buckled her in, then retrieved a cell phone from her purse and made a call.
“How’s it going?” Matt’s voice was slightly distorted from the sat phone.
“Good. I got the photos and will send them on within an hour. How long to get another passport for Hannah?”
“They said a week. Only a hundred grand, seeing as we’re return customers.”
“And that will be another genuine one – not one that could come back and bite us later?”
“Correct. Full citizenship. But no diplomatic immunity for a two-year-old, so keep her out of trouble.”
“Isn’t she covered under mine?” Jet asked.
“Of course. That was a joke.”
“Can you FedEx it whenever you have it?”
“Sure. Where?”
“I don’t know yet. Probably somewhere in Mexico.”
“Ah, Mexico. Make sure you stay away from the cartel hotspots.”
“Good thinking.” She paused. “What’s the latest?”
“From what my sources tell me, the heroin business is up for grabs now – there’s been no communication with the drug lords for a week, and the Russians and now the Yakuza are putting pressure on them to do a deal. I think it’s safe to say the CIA lost that round. My contact tells me that internally it’s a disaster – the associate director ran the day-to-day of the agency. So with him gone and Arthur gone missing, there’s a real vacuum. And it looks like they covered up Arthur’s death. Kind of figured they would. Hard to explain four dead agency gunmen and a high-ranking staffer bleeding out on the streets of Georgetown. My hunch is they had a cleanup team sanitizing the place within minutes of getting word.”
“Then the group still has some game.”
“Oh, sure, but only at the response level. Their top operational guys are now dead, so it’s going to cause complete mayhem with their members. Everyone will be jockeying for position, and while the infighting is going on, they’re losing the suppliers. That’s a death blow. Literally. They’ve got their hands full. Maybe now, they’ll have to return to doing their jobs instead of operating a global drug syndicate.”
“What about you?”
“Everything’s quiet. My bet is this ended with Arthur. There probably weren’t many in the group that were even told about the diamond theft. Arthur would have kept a tight lid on that while he tried to recover them so the others didn’t flip out and question his judgment. And anyone remaining will be scrambling to do damage control to salvage what they can of the network.” Something crackled on the line, then he continued. “Besides which, they have billions in hundred-dollar bills in cargo containers – so it was never really about the money. I think it was mostly a personal thing with Arthur because I put a crimp in his plans by taking the diamonds out of play, and because I worked for him.”
“I made a tape of Arthur admitting everything,” Jet said.
“Hold onto it. At some point, we may want to leak it to the press.”
“Think they’d use it?”
“Fifty-fifty. But I’m conflicted. I don’t want to hurt the country, and this would forever tarnish its standing in the eyes of the world. But on the flip side, I don’t want anything like it to ever happen again,” he reflected.
“Sounds like you’ve got some thinking to do.”
“About a lot of things.”
The pause stretched to an uncomfortable length.
“You keeping my diamonds safe?” he asked.
“You bet. The bag goes everywhere with me. Got a larger purse just to accommodate it. Heavy, though.”
“Got a gun?”
“Of course.”
“So you’re set,” Matt said.
“For the time being. I figure I’ll hit the road in a couple of days and never look back. And you?”
“I’ve been thinking about the island. I’m probably going to get a little surgery in Korea so I look different and then poke around on Ko Samui to see what property values are like.”
“Get something on the beach.”
“My thinking, exactly. Someplace big, so I can accommodate guests. Even if they have a kid.”
Another silence.
“She’s beautiful, Matt. Gorgeous.”
“I would expect nothing less, based on her DNA. You know, you’re a genuine Thai citizen now. Hannah soon will be, too. Maybe you should download some Thai MP3s and learn the language while you’re roaming through Mexico. And then come visit. Soon.”
“That’s not a bad idea, Matt. It occurred to me.”
They both hesitated. This wasn’t the right way to talk about what was on their minds.
“All right, then. I’ll call in another couple of days, before I head out. You think you’ll be in Korea?”
“Probably. If you’re not in any rush for the passport, I’d rather get my mug taken care of before I do anything else.”
“I can understand that. I can wait a week or two. Hey – don’t have them change too much.”
“I’m going to shoot for younger, richer and thinner.”
“I’d say you already have the rich part dialed.”
“Good point.”
Hannah squealed from the back seat, her way of complaining because they weren’t underway yet, and Jet started the car and pulled into traffic. She had some shopping to do before they headed south, and didn’t want to leave anything to the last minute.
She took side streets until she saw the distinctive outline of South Coast Plaza ahead, then pulled into the massive parking complex and found a slot near the main entrance. Hannah’s favorite coffee shop was on the second level, and she delighted in people-watching while Jet used the wireless internet.
The sun warmed their skin as they strolled in the balmy spring air, mother and daughter out for a day of consumerism. Jet caught a glimpse of herself in the glass-fronted doors and saw that for the first time in forever she had an unfamiliar look on her face. She peered at her reflection for a few seconds before she realized what it was.
She was happy.
Chapter 38
Once the 747 had arrived in Bangkok and they had sauntered through customs with hardly a glance, Jet flagged down a taxi and took a cab to the smaller airport, where a chartered plane was w
aiting for the short hop to Ko Samui island.
As the King Air turbo prop taxied to the end of the runway, Hannah pointed at all the surrounding planes, laughing at some joke known only to her. Jet smiled and turned to gaze at her, never tiring of her joy at discovering something new each passing moment.
The engines increased their revs, and soon they were pulling up into the sky, Jet putting her hands up into the air and Hannah mimicking her before they both exploded with peals of glee. Once they were at altitude, Hannah seemed fascinated by the water below them and proceeded to name everything she saw.
Mexico had been a relaxed three months, drifting from town to town with no particular agenda. Hannah hadn’t seemed to mind. She was a little trouper. But eventually, Jet tired of the gypsy lifestyle, and Matt’s regular invitation to visit his beach house, where he’d settled into an easy-going island lifestyle, had taken on an increasing allure.
She still had his diamonds safe in her purse and had become almost used to having fifty million dollars on her arm. How many times had she walked down the waterfront streets in Mazatlan or Puerto Vallarta, Hannah in tow, wondering what any of the locals would have thought if they’d known…
Being on the move constantly made her feel like she was living in a completely different world than those around her. Which was fine – but reality exerted a strong pull, and she now longed for something more intrinsic than what she’d grown used to.
Her frequent discussions with Matt had convinced Jet that, besides her obligation to return the stones to him, she was interested in exploring the spark that had ignited during their kiss. She’d thought about it many times and always came back to the same place – it was crazy, she hardly knew him, none of it made any sense. Which was all true. But she also knew how she felt, and she wanted to give that feeling a chance, and see if it was fleeting or something more substantial.
So she’d agreed to stop in over the next week and had booked flights that avoided the U.S. system, and had left the Highlander in a parking lot in Zihuatanejo and flown to Mexico City on their first leg to Bangkok – oddly enough, through Frankfurt on Lufthansa.
JET II - Betrayal (JET #2) Page 25
