Kick A** Heroines Box Set: The UltimatumFatal AffairAfter the DarkBulletproof SEAL (The Guardian)

by Karen Robards

  She killed the engine, too, and got off the bike. Pushing it close to the nearest wall, she leaned it on its kickstand. The smell of exhaust and the sea combined with the heat was doing her stomach no favors. She felt nauseous.

  “Is this where we, like, have to go shoot somebody?” Doc asked.

  “Since neither of us has a gun, probably not.” Richard and the others had insisted that Doc have some firearms training. Occasionally looking in on their efforts, Bianca had formed the firm opinion that, armed, Doc would be far more of a danger to himself than he would be to anyone else. And she, personally, did not like guns. Guns tended to get people killed.

  “Oh, yeah. Good point.” Doc sounded relieved.

  Removing her helmet, Bianca hung it from the end of the handlebar and flipped her hood over her head. Blonde in a world that was largely brunette, a woman out alone at night where that was unusual: those things would attract attention. She’d chosen the concealing hoodie with that in mind.

  “I’m going to go check this out. You’re going to wait here. I’ll be back.”

  Careful to stay in the shadows, she jogged to the end of the alley, hugged a wall, looked cautiously around it.

  The garbage truck was stopped in the middle of the road in front of Pier 16. Its headlights were still on and its motor was still running, but it wasn’t moving. The boat was there, tied up at the dock, but what looked like a military vessel was idling behind it, preventing it from leaving. It was obvious at a glance that nobody was going anywhere.

  What she’d suspected was true: the vehicles that had sped past the mouth of the alley were indeed a military convoy. She was just in time to watch as they surrounded the stopped garbage truck and the two jeeps filled with armed soldiers that were parked in front of it, holding it at gunpoint. Two more newly arriving jeeps boxed the truck in on the side facing the plaza. The rippling black waters of the gulf, the miscellany of freighters, scows and fishing boats that were tied up at this section of the wharf and the dock itself formed a barrier on the other side of the garbage truck. With two more jeeps and four covered trucks outfitted with what looked like heavy artillery bringing up the rear, Richard and the others were well and truly caught.

  From the way the soldiers were behaving, Bianca thought the trio must still be in the truck, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Wetting her dry lips, she stepped out into the plaza. The open-air souk, or market, to her left was closed. The space out front where some of the merchants displayed their wares on wheeled carts was empty, the carts taken home for safekeeping until the market opened again in the morning. Iron gates fronted by canvas curtains protected the contents of the shops.

  Careful to stay in the shadow of the wall, Bianca moved closer to where the garbage truck was being held. She wasn’t alone. People craned their necks from the decks of some of the boats, and a small but growing crowd was gathering on the plaza to watch developments. Soldiers jumped out of the newly arrived trucks to form a barrier, ordering onlookers to move back.

  “Atti alaolwyeh! Atti alaolwyeh!” The soldiers’ shouts were in Arabic, confirming that this was almost certainly the Bahraini military.

  Don’t be a hero: the rule pounded in Bianca’s head with the same staccato rhythm as her pulse.

  Keeping her face down as she edged around the periphery of the crowd, she stopped in front of what she thought, from the smell, must be a fishmonger. She was now directly across from the garbage truck, doing her best to see inside the dark cab while her stomach twisted itself into a pretzel.

  “What do we do?” Sidling up beside her, Doc almost made her jump. His voice was low, but he was speaking English. A wary glance around told her that nobody was likely to overhear. There was so much noise—the chattering crowd, the shouting soldiers, the throbbing engines of the stopped vehicles, the rush of the tide—that anything short of a screech was probably safe. And with his dark coloring and black suit, Doc blended in well enough visually.

  “I told you to wait by the bike.”

  “I thought you might need help.”

  That was actually kind of sweet. Doc’s particular skill set wasn’t really suited to the occasion, but she appreciated his loyalty and willingness to put his own safety on the line for the team. As the newest member of the group and the only one she and the others had never worked with before, Doc was still a largely unknown quantity. At this point, with no payout forthcoming and a whole boatload full of trouble crashing down on their heads, he could have just cut and run.

  Before she could reply, another truck roared up, passing the convoy at speed. Once on the other side of the garbage truck and the jeeps holding it at bay, it executed a neat one-eighty and positioned itself so that it was in front of and facing the garbage truck. Maybe a dozen armed soldiers jumped out of the back and advanced on the garbage truck, rifles pointed threateningly at the windshield.

  “Holy shit.” Doc’s voice went high-pitched.

  Two uniformed officers got out of the newly arrived truck’s cab and walked toward the garbage truck in the wake of the advancing men. One of them yelled through a bullhorn, “You in the truck! Put up your hands and step out!”

  She registered that he was speaking English. Her heartbeat quickened as she realized what that had to mean: the soldiers, and thus the prince, knew exactly who was in that truck.

  Don’t panic, Bianca told herself as she felt the prickle of cold sweat breaking out around her hairline. It was possible that her father was even at that point working some kind of angle that would lead to the trio’s deliverance. A con man to his bone marrow, Richard wouldn’t submit to capture without at least attempting to save himself.

  Don’t be a hero. Don’t be a hero. Don’t be a hero.

  To hell with it. She couldn’t just do nothing.

  “I’m going to create a distraction,” she said under her breath. “You go back and wait by the bike. I’ll meet you there in a few.”

  Doc gave her a worried look. “What kind of distraction?”

  “Go back to the bike.” Bianca was already on the move. Her plan was to steal the truck that had just arrived. She’d watched the soldiers jump out of the back and the two officers exit the cab, one through the passenger’s door and the other through the driver’s door. Chances were high that the truck, and more to the point the cab, was empty. The engine was still running. She would jump in, slam the transmission into Reverse, make a one-eighty of her own and floor it out of there. That should create enough of a diversion to give her father and the others a little bit of time when the focus was not on them. Time to do what? That was up to them. Bottom line was, escape.

  “Hands up! Get out of the truck!” The officer in charge—Bianca assumed he was the officer in charge because he was the guy giving the orders—boomed through the bullhorn.

  The garbage truck was angled in such a way that until that point she hadn’t been able to see anything inside the cab. A spotlight switched on—it was mounted on the hood of one of the jeeps—and by its blinding glare Bianca was finally able to make out the three men inside: Findley, dark and compact, was behind the wheel; wide-shouldered, bald Grangier was in the middle; and her tall, silver-haired father was on the far side.

  She couldn’t see their expressions, but she knew they had to be grim. She was feeling pretty grim herself.

  “Turn off the engine! Get out of the truck!” The commands thundered over the bullhorn. “You have until the count of five! One—”

  She didn’t dare run. She didn’t dare make a beeline for her target. Keeping her head down and sticking to the fringe of the crowd, she moved toward the truck she meant to steal as fast as she could without giving herself away.

  “Two!”

  She could almost hear her father saying, as he did before every job, that if the situation went south, it was every man for himself and they’d meet back at b
ase.

  “Three!”

  Wait, this was going down too fast. Maybe forty feet of open space separated her from the truck. Bianca looked around to make sure no soldiers stood between her and it, gave up on being careful and sprinted toward it. No time for anything else. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her, thank God. Everyone was focused on the drama playing out with the soldiers and the garbage truck. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the driver’s-side door of the garbage truck open. No, wait, stay where you are, she wanted to scream at Findley as he started to emerge. Then she thought, Maybe this is Dad making his play. The inside of the cab was completely illuminated now as the interior light came on. She could see her father saying something to Grangier—

  A weird whistling sound sliced through the air.

  Boom!

  The explosion almost knocked her off her feet. A blast of heat, a burst of blinding light, the concussive force of a wave of intense energy slammed into her. Thrown backward, she fetched up against the truck she’d planned to steal, caught herself with both hands against the grille—and then flung herself forward again, desperately.

  Only to stop, swaying, because there was nothing she could do.

  Except stare in horror at the raging fireball that the garbage truck had turned into.

  Dad.

  She screamed it internally, but not a sound emerged from between her shock-parted lips. The truck was totally consumed in flames. They shot skyward, reaching at least three stories high. Their brightness lit up the night, painted the street and the sky and the gulf and the surrounding buildings and the faces of the shouting, shoving, running onlookers orange. The soldiers who’d been surrounding the truck were on the ground now, blown back by the explosion. They were bathed in the hellish orange light, too.

  “Aidhyn ’atlaquu alnnar alty?” the officer with the bullhorn bellowed. She automatically translated the Arabic: Who fired that shot?

  If there was an answer, she missed it.

  Some of the soldiers on the ground staggered to their feet. Two more raced from the convoy toward the burning truck with fire extinguishers. Futile, she could tell even before they tried shooting foam at the flames. Even from where she stood, she could feel the heat, intense as sunlamps turned on high. The roar of the fire was punctuated by a sharp crackling. The horrible smell of burning rubber—of burning something—was everywhere.

  Screams. Through the roaring and shouting and all the other sounds—sirens wailing in the distance, coming closer fast; the incessant blare of a boat horn; pounding feet—Bianca thought she could hear screams.

  From the men in the truck.

  Her father.

  Oh, God, please.

  Her blood turned to ice in her veins. Her pounding heart seemed to freeze. It was as if she were watching everything happen in slow motion, as if she were trapped in a nightmare, as if—

  A wave of dizziness hit her, stronger almost than the concussion from the blast. Inside her head, a burst of memory detonating through the fog that shrouded her early childhood nearly dropped her to her knees: another explosion, another fireball, other horrific sounds, smells, screams.

  The long-ago screams she was hearing were hers.

  Mommy.

  For the first time in her conscious recollection, she remembered how her mother had died. It spun through her head in a lightning flash of terrible illumination.

  No, no, no.

  Her legs buckled. Pain twisted her insides, skewered her heart. She dropped to her knees on the uneven, baking-hot cobblestones and with a tremendous effort of will managed to thrust the hideous memories aside.

  While she watched with tortured disbelief as her father died before her eyes.

  It was, she realized as pain turned to soul-wrenching agony, the first time in a long time that she had been sure she loved him.

  Mentor, teacher, taskmaster. Ruthless disciplinarian. Despot. Her constant in an uncertain world. Con man. Thief. Dad.

  Oh, God. This was why she was always so cautious about letting herself love anyone, anything. It always went wrong, and when it did, it hurt too damned much.

  Her breath rasped in her throat. She felt like her lungs were being crushed, like a heavy stone had been dropped on her chest.

  “Jennifer. Jesus.” Doc was there, hunkering down beside her, dropping an arm across her shoulders. He called her Jennifer because that was the only name for her he knew. His voice, his presence, the solid bulk of him, steadied her. It broke through the pall of horror that held her rooted to the spot. It reminded her of reality, of her own danger and his.

  “We have to go,” she said and stood up. It took every ounce of strength and determination she possessed. Fire trucks raced up the street, screaming to a stop beside the flaming truck. Firefighters jumped down, ran to connect their hoses to hydrants along the plaza.

  Useless. Everyone in the truck was dead. There was no possibility of saving them.

  The scene shimmied before her eyes.

  Doc rose, too. “But we can’t just—”

  “Yes, we can. We have to go,” she repeated more strongly and grabbed his arm. Her tone turned fierce as Doc stared at her without moving. “We can’t help them. We can stay here and die with them, or we can save ourselves.”

  People were coming from everywhere now, bursting from their buildings, running up the street, spilling from the alleys. More leaned out of windows and gawked from the decks of boats. They were yelling, calling out to each other. The officer with the bullhorn was still shouting, still giving commands, but she was no longer capable of translating anything.

  Every moment that they stayed increased their risk of discovery.

  “Move,” Bianca ordered, giving Doc’s arm a hard yank as she started to walk and he didn’t. “Now. We’ve got to get out of here while we can.”

  As he moved off with her, finally, she was relieved to discover that her brain was regaining its ability to function. If she and Doc were to survive, she needed to make cold, clear, careful plans, and to hell with her bleeding, crying wimp of a heart.

  CHAPTER 9

  Twenty-four hours later

  The Four Seasons Seareinersma Bay Hotel was one of Manama’s newest, and its finest. Built on a man-made private island in the most exclusive section of north Manama, it was a high-rise tower overlooking the lush gardens and swimming pools of the hotel grounds as well as the beautiful calm waters of the bay in which it stood. The city of Manama filled the skyline on all sides. At night, which it currently was, the garish neon lights of the newest skyscrapers lit up the sky and the smooth black surface of the bay with a kaleidoscope of colors: Vegas by way of the Middle East.

  Driving from the city across the causeway to the hotel for this meeting a short time earlier, Colin Rogan had looked at the steel-and-glass column thrusting sixty-eight stories straight up from the tiny island toward the sky and been struck by the imagery. It was as if the hotel itself was giving the finger to the investigators who had worked long and hard to bring the man Interpol called Traveler to justice.

  He personally was suffering from two burn marks on the back of his neck, the mother of all headaches and a bad case of the I-can’t-believe-you-were-that-stupid’s for letting himself get taken down by a babe in sexy underwear with a hot line in kisses. Especially since said babe was his ticket to Traveler and the multimillion-dollar reward being offered to anyone who brought him in.

  The only saving grace was that no one besides himself and the girl knew. By the time he’d regained consciousness and staggered out of the restroom, Traveler had been cornered down by the docks and the rush had been on to take him into custody.

  An endeavor that had failed spectacularly.

  Rogan turned away from the window of the top floor conference room as the last member of the quartet who had been summoned
to this meeting knocked briskly before being admitted by one of the support staff, which consisted of security officers and a pair of administrative assistants.

  “Kemp.” Interpol’s Laurent Durand greeted the newcomer, John Kemp, deputy head of covert operations for the American CIA, with a handshake. In his early sixties, average height and weight, Kemp was solid and still muscular, a gray-haired, granite-jawed bureaucrat in a suit.

  “Durand.” Kemp looked past Durand at Rogan and then at the young, dark-bearded man in the Bahraini military uniform already seated at the far end of the conference table that was the centerpiece of the room. The table had a smooth wood top and chrome legs, and half a dozen black leather chairs were pulled up to it. Except for a credenza holding bottles of water, a coffeemaker and a selection of snacks, it was the only furnishing.

  “This is Brigadier General Hamad bin Sequer Al Amiri of the Bahraini Royal Guard.” Durand made the introductions. He then nodded at Rogan. “Colin Rogan. At present he is working for me.”

  As a private contractor recruited to help bring Traveler in, Rogan finished Durand’s introduction silently. Kemp shook hands, then flung himself into a seat.

  “Why am I here?” Kemp addressed the question to Durand. He looked tired and harassed, and his tone reflected that.

  “If you will all excuse us,” Durand said to the support staff. As they filed out, his gaze singled out a slender, black-haired young woman in a skirted suit. “Samira, all I do is push the button?”

  “The touch pad,” Samira corrected, giving him a small smile. “Tap the touch pad. The image will come up.”

  “The touch pad.” Durand sighed. “Don’t go far, would you, please?”

  “I’ll be right outside,” Samira promised and followed the rest of the support staff from the room, closing the door as she exited. The four principals to the meeting were left alone.