Becoming a widower had given him the capital to get started and, of course, the marriage itself had launched him into the appropriately moneyed circles; from there, he had taken only a few short and brutal stepping-stones until guaranteeing himself a slot at the very top of the money web. And if he hadn’t been such a… nice person along the way, then so be it. He’d like to meet the person who could honestly say he’d gained his billions—yes, billions—by being “nice.”
And therein was his trade-off.
DeMarco took a drink of Macallan and couldn’t help wondering how long he would have lived had he chosen a different path in life. What if he and Claudette, that nearly forgotten first wife, had actually gotten along, and what if she hadn’t threatened to leave him if he cheated on her again? In fact, if he was really going to go the morality route, what if he hadn’t done exactly that—cheated on her and gotten caught? Claudette might still be alive, they might even have had a couple of children—ones who actually liked him—and done the whole happily-ever-after thing.
Nah. That just wasn’t him.
“How much longer do I have? Minutes? Hours?”
DeMarco hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud until the head of his security force, a middle-aged man named Warren Bauer, answered him from where he was stationed at a bank of security monitors. The bright green screens showed armed personnel in all the key places around the estate, and all were fit, alert, and ready for trouble. There were no slackers on Bauer’s crew. “You’re gonna be fine, Mr. DeMarco.”
DeMarco glanced over at him and frowned slightly. Bauer was a nice enough–looking guy who took his job very seriously. He even dressed the part, sporting a crewcut above a heavy-duty flak jacket and double holsters crisscrossing his chest, with each side holding a no-screwing-around Llama 9mm Omni. He didn’t know what they were loaded with—he’d always had the money to leave the unpleasant things like that to paid employees—but with circumstances being what they were, DeMarco was sure Bauer had gone for something particularly nasty.
Bauer adjusted the state-of-the-art headset pushed into his ear. “Perimeter, what’s your status?” There was only a one-or two-second delay before the security man received a half dozen crackling reassuring replies. With a slightly self-satisfied smile, Bauer settled back on his stool, then turned to study DeMarco. “You’re gonna be fine,” he repeated. “Just go easy on the sauce, sir.” The way Bauer raised his eyebrow made his boss wonder if he really believed there was going to be a problem at all. Some people, no matter how smart, could be spectacular fools. He himself knew about that. “In case we have to move you,” Bauer added.
DeMarco almost chuckled. Instead of obeying, he lifted the glass and took a long, exaggerated sip of the buttery smooth scotch. He rolled the liquid over his tongue, wishing he could appreciate it, then swallowed. “Why bother?” he grated. “You can’t stop her. Nobody can stop her.”
Bauer sat up a little straighter, all ears. Until now, his wealthy boss hadn’t said a word about why they were here, other than he was afraid he’d become the target of an assassination assignment. Bauer had assumed a corporate hit attempt, probably a couple of well-trained ex-soldiers turned mercenaries like himself. Now Mr. DeMarco’s words opened up a whole new arena of interesting possibilities. “Her?”
DeMarco ground his teeth and stared at his glass for a long moment. What the hell—it was well past confession time. He’d done so many things wrong in his life that he ought to be able to own up on his last night. “I didn’t tell you,” he admitted. “I was afraid you wouldn’t take the job.” He paused, then ran his fingers through his carefully styled hair, leaving it shaggy and out of place. He didn’t care. Bauer almost didn’t catch the rich man’s next mumbled words. “I never should have hired you.”
But Bauer was more interested than afraid. He’d taken a chance with DeMarco—under normal circumstances, he would have never hired on in an information vacuum, but DeMarco was paying damned well. It looked like now he was finally going to get the goods he’d wanted since signing on to this gig a week ago. “Who do you think’s after you?”
DeMarco took so long to answer that Bauer almost gave up. It wouldn’t have been the first time the guy had stonewalled him, and he’d learned a long time ago that there are certain times when you just couldn’t push rich men. But finally…
“I’m told her name is Elektra.”
Bauer’s mouth fell open, then it was all he could do not to bust out laughing. The most he would allow himself was a condescending smile. “She’s an urban legend, sir. That woman died years ago.”
DeMarco cleared his throat, then polished off the last of the Macallan and set his glass aside. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I thought. Until last month.” With DeMarco studying his hands and Bauer studying DeMarco, neither noticed something move on one of the monitors, a sort of flash moving too fast for the eye to follow, the glimpse of something long and red before it was yanked out of sight.
Bauer had heard stories about this Elektra woman, sure—you couldn’t run a high-dollar security business like his without hearing the tales. He still believed they were nothing but urban legends, probably something started on the Internet that had spiraled into the realm of uncontrollability. The guy with the flat tire and the trunk full of torture tools at Wal-Mart, the five-dollar bill being returned by the honest serial killer, the missing child one whose place of origin changed as often as the moon went into a new cycle, and, of course, the incredible Iraq camel spider photo. Still, Bauer found himself listening to DeMarco in spite of himself, in spite of the fact that he knew this couldn’t possibly be true. If he had to justify his attentiveness, he’d have to say it was because of the older man’s fear—DeMarco was so saturated with it that Bauer could practically smell it on him. He could certainly see it in DeMarco’s body language, in the way he went from staring at his own hands to gripping the arms of his chair so firmly that his knuckles were white. DeMarco’s vivid blue eyes were bloodshot, testament not to drinking but to the sleepless nights of the last week or so, and his gaze kept darting around the room as if he expected someone, or something, to simply materialize in front of his eyes at any moment.
DeMarco hauled himself out of his chair and went to the antique sideboard. Ignoring Bauer’s earlier warning, he plucked a clean crystal glass from the silver tray in the center of the sideboard, then snatched up the bottle of Macallan next to it. DeMarco’s hand was shaking badly and Bauer’s pulse jumped when his boss nearly lost his grip on the bottle of sixty-year-old scotch, but the other man caught himself and sloshed a more than generous amount into his glass. He turned and held it toward Bauer invitingly, but Bauer just shook his head. Tempting—when would he ever have the chance to taste scotch like this again?—but saying yes in situations like this had a way of coming back to bite you in the rear end.
DeMarco made his way unsteadily back to his seat, but Bauer didn’t think DeMarco’s legs were shaking because he was drunk. “When you’ve lived the life I have,” DeMarco said as he settled back onto the Italian leather, “you make enemies. My private security detail were ex–Secret Service.” He nodded to himself. “The best money could buy.” He lifted the glass to his face and inhaled, savoring the rich scent of the scotch. “She killed nine of them and crippled two others,” he said flatly. “All of it in less than half an hour. I barely got out of the building.” He paused and tilted his head contemplatively. “In fact, it felt like she let me go.”
Bauer’s eyes narrowed as he took in the information. An impressive tale, but was it really the Elektra of modern legend? Maybe, but it sounded more like the work of a highly trained team than one person.
DeMarco inhaled, then tilted his glass and let a generous part of the liquor slide down his throat. “She found me two days later,” he said in a raspy voice. “In Monte Carlo. And she let me go again. I escaped by helicopter to Monsanto’s estate.” He squinted at Bauer. “You’ve worked for Mr. Monsanto, haven’t you?”
Ba
uer nodded. “A couple of times.”
A corner of DeMarco’s mouth pulled up in an unpleasant grimace. “He won’t be needing you anymore,” he told his security man. “He’s dead, along with a good chunk of his private army.”
Bauer jerked, unable to mask his surprise. Monsanto and the best of his security crew were dead? Monsanto’s private “army,” as DeMarco had put it, was almost as legendary as this fictional Elektra. The couple of times he’d pulled duty for the Japanese tycoon had only been on special occasions when Monsanto had needed to fatten up the ranks, such as during his daughter’s wedding. Even then Bauer and his men had been relegated to the most menial of assignments, such as patrolling the parked vehicles, while Monsanto’s own men had carried out their usual hawk-eyed supervision of the sensitive areas.
“So,” DeMarco continued, “I’m here. No one else would have me. Thanks to her, this is as far as I’m going.”
The screen at the far right on the bank of monitors behind Bauer flickered, but neither man noticed as a hand reached into view and plucked the headset from the body of a downed guard. A second later the guard’s limp body was dragged offscreen, leaving nothing visible but his empty post.
DeMarco gestured to the impressive room around him. “You know what’s funny? I forgot I owned this place. It was a ski chalet for my second wife—I always had a fondness for skiing—and a good place to store liquor.”
Bauer stared at DeMarco, feeling his own features work their way into a frown. In spite of his disbelief, DeMarco’s story was getting to him, working its way into his head and starting that damnable tickle of doubt. That was bad—a man in his position not only needed to show confidence, he needed to be confident, absolutely sure of himself and that his men could handle anything that might be thrown at them. He couldn’t let himself start to think that just one woman might be able to undermine all that. DeMarco’s next words didn’t help.
The rich man leaned forward. “Listen, Bauer, why don’t you…?” DeMarco’s voice faded for a moment and he swallowed, as if he had to force himself to say the words. “Why don’t you take your men and go.” It was a statement rather than a question. “Save yourselves.”
Bauer blinked, then set his jaw. He’d be damned if some feminine fairy tale was going to run him or his men off the job, especially when there wasn’t anything supporting the story past one semidrunk billionaire. Forget it. “Relax, Mr. DeMarco,” he said with a joviality he didn’t really feel. “I don’t know about those other guys, but we’re going to protect you until you—”
An alarm sounded on one of the monitors behind him.
Bauer whirled and stalked back to the console, then flipped a set of switches below a monitor that was showing nothing but an empty stretch of landscaping at the outside southeast corner of the estate. “How’s it going out there on the perimeter?” he asked crisply. He glanced at the other screens and scowled when he realized that he couldn’t see any of his men. It seemed his team of bad-ass professionals had virtually vanished. His voice sharpened. “Delta, what’s your status?” he demanded.
Nothing.
Before he could ask again, Bauer jerked as the computer monitors began blanking out, one by one. Within three seconds, all that was left was a nearly complete line of downed screens. They looked like black, oversized ghostly eyes staring at him.
“The better the assassin,” DeMarco said softly, “the closer he—or she—can get before you even know they’re there.”
Only the last one still showed a man on patrol at the front door, and even as Bauer grabbed for the switch to warn him over the intercom, the guy—his best one— was jerked out of view. An instant later that screen went as dark as the others, and a split second after that, Bauer gasped as he heard a gunshot.
“Alpha team!” Bauer’s voice rose to a shout into his headphones. “Bravo, report!”
DeMarco’s voice came from behind him as the man spoke around the lip of his glass of scotch. “They say Elektra whispers in your ear before she kills you.”
Bauer resisted the urge to snarl at his boss as he heard more gunfire echo from somewhere else in the ski lodge, then shouts and screams—those were his men out there being hurt, maybe even dying. Before he could decide what to do next, the monitors suddenly flickered back to life… but all they showed was static.
With his lips drawn back into a slash of fury, Bauer pulled one of his guns free, then the other one.
“Do you have children, Bauer?” DeMarco asked.
Before Bauer could answer, the lights went out.
For an unnerving three seconds, there was nothing but darkness and the harsh sound of the two men’s panicked breathing. Then there was an industrial-sounding hum and a clank, and the formerly warm sitting room was bathed in the cold, blue light of the backup battery-generated lamps.
Bauer eyed the door to the room, then flicked his gaze nervously toward the overabundance of windows. “Children?” he replied dutifully. “Yes, sir. Two girls, eight and five. What about you?”
DeMarco shrugged as if he didn’t have a problem in the world and this was a time for nothing more than idle conversation. “None who still talk to me.” He paused, then wobbled to his feet and once again headed for the sideboard and his scotch. “Listen, go home to them, Bauer. I don’t want any more orphans on my account.”
Bauer turned and gaped at him, not believing that the guy was just walking nonchalantly in front of all that glass. Was he inviting a gunshot? “No offense, sir, but could you just shut up and stay down?”
DeMarco didn’t answer… but someone else did, whispering silkily over the earpiece of Bauer’s headset.
“Listen to your boss, Bauer. Go home to your family.”
“Christ!” Bauer cried and instinctively ripped off the headset and threw it aside.
DeMarco looked up from the task of pouring himself another outrageously expensive glass of scotch. He nodded, almost in approval. “She likes messing with your head.” He made his way gingerly back to his chair, sat, then reached over to the end table and picked up a folded newspaper. As if there were nothing else in the world to worry about, he unfolded it on his lap and stared at the front page.
Bauer turned away, not letting himself get sidetracked by Bauer’s strange sense of acceptance. Nearly crouching, he cat-walked halfway across the room and leveled his gun on the door, the only way into the room. For a long moment there was nothing but silence, inside the room and out. Then—
Creeeeeak.
With his expression pulled into a snarl, Bauer unloaded the full thirteen shots of first one Llama, then the other, all over the surface of the door. The gunshots were nearly deafening, and they left his ears ringing and his vision full of blue flashes of light; after that, anything on the other side couldn’t be anything but Swiss cheese. That the entrance was still upright was a testament to the thickness of the fancy hardwood door; his eyes were quickly recovering from the muzzle flashes, but gun smoke was still clogging Bauer’s vision; even so, there was no doubt that the surface of the extra-wide door was covered with smoking holes. Bauer wasn’t taking any chances; as he moved toward what was left of it, he was already dropping out both spent clips and slamming new ones into place.
In one spot, several bullet holes had made an opening large enough for the security man to see light through, that same bluish glow of backup lights in the hallway. Nothing was evident there, so he cautiously pushed the door open. With every sense on high alert, Bauer leaned out and glanced first left, then right— again, nothing. With two full clips at the ready and nothing in the hallway, he felt pretty confident as he turned back to address DeMarco.
Something sharp and cold stung as it pressed ever so lightly against the prickling flesh on the back of his neck.
“You can’t fight a ghost, Bauer.”
The security manager swallowed when he heard the feminine voice. Was this really the fabled Elektra? He wondered where the hell she’d been hiding and how she knew his name—now that he thou
ght about it, this was the second time she’d used it. Had she been within earshot this entire time, reveling in DeMarco’s fear and laughing at Bauer’s own misplaced self-confidence?
The point of whatever was digging into his skin pressed harder, and it didn’t take a genius to know she wanted him to put down his guns. There was a decorative table to each side of the entrance door, and he carefully set down both Llamas, directing the barrels toward the wall—if he got the chance to grab at them, he didn’t want to idiotically shoot himself. As he gave the weapons a little push away from his body, he felt the metal ease away from his neck. A little more, and—
Bauer spun, chambering his right leg close to his body and bringing it up in a high spinning crescent kick.
There was nothing behind him but empty air.
He hissed as his foot reached the apex of his kick, then he felt a hand grab his ankle and yank straight up. His body went airborne as his other leg followed the momentum of the first, and Bauer had just a moment to glimpse red—some kind of costume—before he crashed back to the floor and sank into darkness.
DeMarco watched the whole scene play out without moving, or running, or even wincing. Maybe he was too terrified to move, or maybe he was past the point of caring, numb and surrendering like a baby antelope that goes limp as it feels the jaws of a lioness close around its neck. As the woman sent to kill him moved smoothly across the room, DeMarco let his gaze drop to his glass. He didn’t want to look into her eyes, not yet—God knows what he would see there. And yes, there was still a little Macallan left in his glass. Good. A man shouldn’t have to die without a decent drink in his hand.
DeMarco could just make out Elektra’s distorted, ghostly reflection in the side of the crystal. “So,” he said softly. “Here we are at last.” She didn’t respond, so he kept talking. “That red outfit—I love it. And the knives, very fancy. What do you call them?” She still didn’t answer and this time he risked a glance in her direction. She was just standing there, staring at him.
Elektra Page 3
