by Dakota Banks
“How sure are you of all this?” Maliha said.
“Absolutely sure. Your target’s a killer. Does that make it any easier for you?” Hound said.
“I don’t like being given orders, regardless of how bad the target is.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to do it?” Amaro said.
Maliha knew exactly what he was asking. Was she going to compromise her morals and give them more time to search for Yanmeng?
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Wait!” Hound said. “You asked about routines. This scumbag lives in Alexandria and runs every morning in Potomac Overlook Park. Seven fifteen A.M.”
“Give me his address.” She copied it down. “Every morning? It’s snowing here.”
“Says here he’s a dedicated runner, enters marathons, comes in among the top ten.”
Yes, he’d be out in the snow. The question is, will I?
At 7 A.M. the next morning, Maliha was on the rooftop of a four-story medical building about two blocks from Nathan Presser’s home, with a perfect line of sight to his front door. The snow had stopped. It was the gray, still time right before dawn. She was leaning against an air-conditioning unit, staying in its shadow. Her long-range rifle transit case was at her feet, soft-sided with a backpack sling. She didn’t have a spotter to work with her, but then again she never did. She’d already determined the distance—at 750 yards, not much of a challenge.
The challenge is pulling the trigger.
At about five minutes after seven, she took her place looking through the CheyTac’s sight, her gloves removed for a better feel on the trigger. The sun’s rays were leaking over the horizon, touching a few clouds with gold. A moment later—early—the door opened and Presser stepped out. He was dressed in layers of running clothes. There was a woman in the doorway, wearing a nightgown. He had a lover who’d stayed overnight. She hadn’t expected that. Presser took the woman in his arms and gave her a lingering kiss. Words were spoken, and then the woman crossed her arms over her chest and shivered.
That’s right. It’s cold out here. Close the door, woman.
As if she’d heard Maliha, the woman closed the door. Although Maliha didn’t expect overpenetration of the bullet, she waited a few seconds for the woman to move away from the door. Presser obligingly delayed by bending over to tighten his shoelaces. When he stood up, she held her breath and . . .
For Yanmeng.
. . . pulled the trigger.
The rifle’s suppressor masked much of the noise. She remained in place to see if a second shot was necessary. Through the scope, she could see the man slumped back against the door, a hole in his forehead and a streak of red tracking where his head slid. She picked up the shell casing and obscured her footprints so that no clear impression remained. Repacking her case, she slung it over her shoulder.
A few blocks away, she was gripped with the pain of the scale on her body moving. It seemed that Anu didn’t mind Nathan Presser’s dispatch from the Great Above. She didn’t think Hound or Amaro lost any sleep over it either. To them, it was like any other case. Investigate, determine badness, bang bang—especially in this case with Yanmeng’s life in the balance.
Back in her hotel room, she called Hound.
“It’s done,” she said, and hung up.
Chapter Sixteen
Maliha was back in Chicago. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since she’d shot a man on his front porch, the kiss of his woman warm on his lips. There was no news about Yanmeng.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Hound asked. He sat next to her at the kitchen table. They were having a cup of coffee, her favorite, Kopi Luwak. It was distinctive and rare. The beans were eaten by civets in Sumatra and passed through their digestive system. Afterward, they were hand-collected from the floor of the forest. Amaro was asleep. He’d refused to drink the coffee once he found out where it came from.
“No.” She understood he was talking about her feelings on the killing. If I did, it would be with Yanmeng. Don’t think I’m going to get any answers out of his fingers.
She missed the touch of her friend’s mind as he remote-viewed her. He checked in with her daily, and she hadn’t realized how reassuring that had been.
I can only imagine how Eliu feels. Their bond was so close. Shit. Not was, is.
Hound shrugged, a move that sent one of his shoulders up higher than the other due to his war injuries. “I know you’re unhappy. We’re all unhappy, but we’re each doing our part. Yours happens to be worse.”
“What was the story with your surveillance people?”
“They swear they weren’t asleep, drunk, or drugged, and that nobody with a package got past them. No word on Yanmeng’s location. I’ve been visiting some medical facilities in person, and Amaro has been hacking in, looking for sedation orders. Are we assuming he’s still in the city?”
“In it or close. Those severed fingers were very fresh. They haven’t traveled far from Yanmeng, not hundreds of miles or anything.”
“Within, say, a drive of an hour or two?” Hound said.
“That’s likely. They hadn’t been refrigerated before delivery.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. What about getting a look at who’s bringing the packages to the door? The cameras don’t seem to do any good.”
“Amaro is worked up about that, but it looks like we need eyeball surveillance.”
Maliha nodded. “From the emergency stairs at the end of the hall.”
Jake watched me from there when he figured out how to get into my haven.
That incident, coming home and finding Jake in her secure sanctuary, had rattled Maliha so much that she’d increased security at the doorway. Instead of having a switch on the wall to abort the launch of deadly darts, there was now a number panel to enter an eight-digit code, her fingers moving in a blur. While nearly blinded, after lunging across the vacant space of the entry chamber—tasks with split-second timing piled on top of each other.
As if reading her mind, Hound said, “Jake phoned while you were in D.C. Again. He’s back from his assignment. What about involving him? He has a lot of resources . . .”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet? You planning to wait until Yanmeng’s nothing but a stubby torso?” He narrowed his eyes. “What’s the deal with you two? Trouble in Happy Town?”
“I have new information about him. I don’t know if I can trust him.”
“Tell me . . .”
Maliha held up her hand to stop him.
“So now you don’t trust me, either,” he said. “What do you think I’m doing on those missions we go on? Looking to shoot you in the back?”
It stung to hear Hound talk like that. She trusted him with her life, and knew the feeling was mutual.
“Hound, it’s all too much right now. I’ll talk to you soon, I promise. I love you, you know that.”
“I love you, too. Always have, since you carried my sorry ass out of that killing field in Nam.” He put his hand over hers on the table.
“You know about that?” Maliha thought his rescue was a secret.
Maliha sped into the firefight and crouched over Hound to make sure he was still alive. To her astonishment, the man was conscious enough to react to her, and lifted his arm to her face, touching her tenderly. His fingers left a trail of blood across her cheek.
He must think I am the angel of death come to claim him, yet he reaches out for me.
Then his head lolled to the side. She gathered him up and took him to his platoon, leaving him on the ground so that one of the men tripped over him. She went back to the clearing, but the man Hound had been working on was dead.
“Damn straight. You were my angel.”
“I . . .”
“You don’t have to say anything. It’s between us.”
“Let me decompress a little. I’ll take a shift watching in the stairwell. I’ll tell you about Jake when I’m done.”
“Fine.
I have something I need to do anyway. I need to have a talk with Chick.”
“You think he’s involved?”
“With the timing of his coming on board as doorman, maybe.”
Maliha picked out two knives for close-up work and her current choice of pistols, a Sig Sauer P266 in a waist holster. Full sized, with a reassuring heft and fifteen rounds, it was usually her last-ditch weapon. She was trained early in her life with edged weapons and usually turned to them for both attack and defense. There were times, though, when blowing someone away was the best move. Mr. X fell into that category.
Hound woke up Amaro so that someone in the condo was awake and staying with Eliu.
“What’s building security going to think when their stairway cams get a look at me?” Maliha said.
Hound waved his hand in dismissal. “Nothing. Those guys have selective blindness if the bribe is high enough.”
“That’s nice to know. I feel so much more secure.”
Hound headed down the hall toward the elevators. Maliha went in the opposite direction. On the landing of the staircase, she was pleased to find Hound’s viewer exactly as he’d described it: a small hole in the wall a little below waist height. Inside was a wide-angle lens that gave her a view of the corridor. She couldn’t miss anyone coming to her door. She settled down on her knees, blanked out all thoughts about Jake and being a puppet killer again long after she’d left Rabishu’s control, and looked through the lens. She knew that a few people in her building took the stairs for exercise. If she heard one of them coming, she’d step into the hall for a moment.
Six hours later, she stood up and stretched. She’d seen nothing.
Back in the condo, Eliu was fixing dinner. She’d insisted—it gave her something to do. Amaro was ready to take his turn in the stairwell, but Eliu put down a steaming bowl of rice and stir-fried vegetables in front of him.
“You have to eat sometime, and you might as well eat while it’s hot,” Eliu said.
They all sat at the table as she served the food. Maliha was pleased to see her active and contributing in her way. Amaro shoveled in the food with his chopsticks, the bowl held in one hand. He was hungry, but rushed.
“Nothing to report,” Maliha said. “Three people came into the hallway. I know them as neighbors and they each went into their condos.”
“I talked to Chick,” Hound said. “After a little persuasion, he admitted that he receives illegal packages of prescription pills from a car that pulls up in the cab zone outside the building. Three different people in the building pick them up from him. They have pain-pill addictions. He told me the names and I broke into their condos on the off chance that the pain pills are for Yanmeng, but I couldn’t find any evidence of that. I’m not interested in a little personal medication abuse.”
“I’m surprised Chick only has three customers,” Amaro said.
“Told me he’s just getting started. Give him a few more months and he’ll have an extensive client list.”
Eliu said, “When will we hear something about Yanmeng? Shouldn’t he be released now?”
“That’s what we’re hoping, but we can’t count on it,” Amaro said. “Once a blackmailer gets started, there’s no way to compel him to stick to his terms.”
My thoughts exactly.
Amaro stood up. “Sorry to eat and run, but I have an appointment with a spyhole.”
He opened the door and nearly tripped over the box at his feet.
Chapter Seventeen
Fred Smith’s lovemaking was not to her liking, but it didn’t matter. After a few centuries, it was all insert tab A into slot B, unless Elizabeth was free to indulge her whims. That wasn’t possible with Fred—she needed him among the living to be useful.
Elizabeth arrived early at the hotel he’d picked out for their late-night delight and installed a video camera with a view of the room. The security guard who came with Fred was on her payroll, so the place was declared bug-free in spite of the presence of the camera. Recording sex with each new man was standard until she had at least three recordings to establish a pattern. Then she didn’t bother with it anymore.
You never know when the leverage will come in handy.
She was on her side on the bed, her face away from the camera, but giving the lens a nice view of her curvaceous ass. Fred was still flopped on the pillow beside her. She pulled him toward her, and he began sucking on her breast. She tilted her body and he followed, so his profile was on camera.
Left side—not his better one.
She pushed his shoulder away. “I’d like to get cleaned up. Would you like to join me in the shower?”
A half hour later, Elizabeth needed another shower. But she was satisfied that she could lead Fred around by his dick.
Of course, I have to make him think he’s going where he wants.
On his way out, she slammed him against the door, rubbed her body against his, kissed him insistently, and gave him a blow job. To her surprise, little Freddie was up to it. She’d figured it was about a 30 percent chance.
“Let’s do this again,” he said.
Uh-huh.
When Elizabeth got home, she went into the basement to check on the hub of her intelligence network. Although her home was a traditional redbrick on the outside, the basement was bright, ultramodern, and packed with computers and other communication equipment. She had a staff of hundreds, twelve of whom worked in this room keeping track of items around the world that might be of interest to her. The rest of her staff were field operatives. All of them were highly skilled and highly paid, and knew that quitting their jobs wasn’t an option. They signed on for life. Their lifetimes—not hers. When they weren’t able to work anymore, they retired in luxury, and in the meantime, they enjoyed the finer things. Intense loyalty to her, protection by her, and generous rewards. Betrayal was punished by a gruesome death, but that was rarely necessary. It had been a couple of hundred years since the last punishment, and the details of that one were enough to keep modern recruits in line. The system worked for her long before computers.
She sat down at a desk on a dais that overlooked the room. That extra height had cost her. The basement ceiling wasn’t high enough, so she had the concrete floor and all the substructure lowered. But she thought it was important that she sit on a higher level than her staff. She flipped through some routine reports, with some items highlighted. She took note of them but didn’t see anything worth following up. Nevertheless, she remained in the room for another two hours, keeping her staff on edge and liking it.
Chapter Eighteen
Amaro picked up the box at the door and brought it in. Eliu saw him first. Her shoulders fell, but she said nothing.
“Christ, how can this be happening?” Hound said. He jumped up so quickly that his chair fell over backward. “That door was unguarded for all of fifteen minutes. We think we’re watching him, fuck, he’s watching us!”
He flung open the door, angrily pumped his fist, and yelled, “I’ll get you, you bastard!”
Maliha felt her stomach ball up into a hard knot. “Does he have his own cameras in the hallway?”
Hound closed the door. “Probably watched me install the damn spyhole,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“Why can’t we get in front of this? We’ve tackled some of the worst problems in the world and now we’re being jerked around,” Amaro said. “What are we up against?”
Learn humility, Master Liu said. All right, I’m humble already. Yanmeng!
“We need to stop moping around and think like an Ageless. At least I do. If I wanted to deliver that box and knew no one was surveilling the door, I could easily dash in here from miles away, plant the box, and be gone without being seen,” Maliha said.
“With some kind of device that’s jamming our cameras,” Amaro said.
“Sure. The Ageless have plenty of resources at hand. There might be a secret lab somewhere churning out jammers and other useful things,” Maliha said.
“You mean like Q in the James Bond movies?” Amaro said.
“Why not?”
“Then why the hell don’t we have our own secret lab?” Hound said. He hadn’t simmered down yet.
None of them wanted to open the box.
“Because I’ve always handled my needs individually, by finding talented people and paying them gobs of money.”
Hound’s mind tracked in a different direction. “You mean Ageless like Jake?”
Maliha shook her head. “This isn’t a good time.”
“You said you’d tell me everything after your surveillance shift,” Hound said.
“What’s this about Jake? Something I should know?” Amaro said.
“Wait,” Maliha said. She nodded toward Eliu, who was sitting at the table listening to their Ping-Pong conversation. “Let’s open the box. Then we’ll talk.”
“I got it,” Hound said. He went over to the box, slit the packing tape, and lifted the lid. After unwrapping the contents, he said, “He’s not dead.”
Eliu appeared at his elbow. She looked, and her hand flew to her mouth. “It’s skin,” she said. “Skin from his arm. I know that tattoo.”
Maliha checked the box. In it was a strip of skin, rolled like a belt. She gently unrolled it and found it to be about two inches wide and a foot long. “Are you certain this is his?” she said.
“Yes,” Eliu said. “Oh, my God. They are skinning my husband alive.”
“We’ll put a stop to it. We’ll get him back,” Maliha said. We have to. It’s killing all of us.
Maliha and Hound went off to pack the skin in ice. They were keeping the ice for the other body parts refreshed. Once out of Eliu’s hearing, Hound gestured at the two other Styrofoam coolers.
“You know it’s too late for replantation,” he said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Maliha said. “It doesn’t matter. We’re keeping them here for Eliu, too. What do you want us to do, put the parts down the garbage disposal in front of her?”
“I see your point.”
