Behind the façade that O’Donnell put out to the world—a pleasant, focused ex-soldier who just happened to work undercover for ASIO and the AFP—Cait knew there was a long history of a violent life living on the edge, a life that couldn’t just be dismissed like flicking off a light switch.
Ice was a trained killer, pure and simple. And Cait saw it as her duty to rescue his fractured soul and ease him back into the mainstream.
But first she needed his training and skills to help her get to Tariq. Like a chameleon, Cait intended to leave her outward persona of innocence and naivety behind and add his notch to her list of kills when she finally caught up with him. If only O’Donnell knew the intensity of Cait’s pledge to herself.
Tariq was going to die. And soon. Dec’s injuries demanded payback.
Only then could she return to her normal, virtuous, happy-go-lucky self.
“No, you just miss Mohammed. Four men pick him up from mosque and take him away in big black car one hour ago,” said the imam.
O’Donnell and Cait were having no luck locating Tariq at the address they had cobbled together. Although Tariq may well have been living there, they couldn’t afford for him to escape again. So Ice confronted the imam. His excuse for needing to contact Tariq was that they were not government officials, but rather from a humanitarian organization, and they had word about his family back in Libya.
The story was kept purposefully vague so they couldn’t get caught up on technicalities. The imam must have bought it, as he willingly volunteered the information.
“Can you possibly describe the car in a little more detail?” said Cait. “It may be one of our volunteers.”
Cait lied. She had a premonition that was gelling in her head, and the car was front and center.
“It was big black car, with black windows and shiny wheels.”
“Would you be able to recall the make of the car?” chipped in O’Donnell.
“Yes, of course. Mercedes. Not see any of them around here before. Only in the city. Very expensive car.”
“What about the license plate? And do you know where it was going?” Ice knew he was pushing the boundaries, but he had to extract as much information as he could.
I’ll let the Carabinieri know. Hopefully they can pick up the car. It can’t have gone too far, and I know they’re desperate to find Tariq so they’ll jump at the tip-off . . .
“No, sorry, cannot help,” said the imam.
Time to go.
Cait and O’Donnell had found out what they needed to know. Or at least as much as they could from the imam.
“Stop! Pull over right here!” said Cait urgently.
“Now!”
O’Donnell brought their rental car to a screeching halt on the verge, sending a plume of dry dust into the air as the car skidded on the loose gravel. They had left Sutera about thirty minutes ago heading east back to Catania, and were currently in the middle of nowhere. There were certainly no road signs, the only indication of habitation being a few farmhouses dotted around in the distance down the small road off the left.
This certainly wasn’t tourist heaven, so why here? thought O’Donnell.
Must be Cait having one of her damn visions again. I really don’t understand all this supernatural stuff, but she’s been right so far, so I’ve just got to go along with her.
Cait quickly jumped out of their rental and started pacing deliberately up and down the road.
“There’s something about this place. I can feel it . . .” Cait muttered, as if expecting an answer to miraculously emerge as to why she was here, of all places.
Glancing this way and that, staring into the distance, seemingly sniffing the air but really just concentrating on the magnet in her head that was forcefully dragging her toward the small side road, a vision of Tariq flashed across the screen in her head.
“Yes! That’s it. Tariq . . . he detoured down that road.”
Cait ran back to the car. To O’Donnell’s surprise, she jumped inside, slamming the door as she entered and said—no, commanded—“Let’s go. Now! Down that road off to the left. Tariq’s gone down there! I know it. I can feel that bastard.”
Ice had half expected Cait to come up with something like this. Without uttering a word or comment he gunned it. The car fishtailed on the loose gravel, the deafening machine-gun sound of small stones hitting the inside of the wheel arches obvious as he attempted to gain traction. Ice floored the accelerator all the way, hitting the corner hard and drifting sideways before the out-of-control car snapped back to a straight line with a jolt as the wheels bit into the bitumen.
“Where to?” The uncanny accuracy of Cait’s past visions spoke volumes about her ability to accurately predict events and see what others were blind to, so O’Donnell took her directive as gospel.
And Cait was obviously on a roll.
Driving at breakneck speed down the narrow potholed country road, the car bounced around like a ball on a spring. After slipping and sliding around the off-camber corners, they stopped on the crest of a small hill. A town loomed about four kilometers in the distance: Santa Caterina Villarmosa.
“Tariq’s in that town down there,” said Cait, verbalizing her strengthening vision as she pointed to the cluster of old stone houses encircled by a variety of green and brown farmed fields and stands of olive trees.
“He’s holed up in some type of old building. We’ve got to go there and find him. Trust me on this one, Tony.”
As if O’Donnell had any other option. Cait was calling the shots.
“Easier said than done, Cait,” replied Ice.
“He’s not exactly going to leave a trail of bread crumbs for us to follow. But it’s still worth a look.”
O’Donnell took off at a more reasonable pace and cruised into town as if they were tourists out for a drive in the country.
“There! Over there . . . look, a black Mercedes in that petrol station.”
Eagle-eyed Cait had been scouring the scenery on the way into town, looking for clues.
“That has to be them. How many black Mercedes cars can there be out in this neck of the woods?” said Cait excitedly, a tingle running up her spine like a bolt of electricity.
O’Donnell slowed and glanced over at the service station as he drove past.
Large black Mercedes, dark tinted windows, chrome mag wheels.
“Cait, I don’t know how, but seems like you’ve done it again,” said Ice, flabbergasted but not surprised. He was beginning to expect miracles from her. If Cait said she was Mary Magdalene incarnate he would have almost believed her at present.
O’Donnell quickly pulled over to the side of the road about four hundred meters away.
“They’re moving. Let’s go!” said Cait, instinctively aware that her partner would tail them from the distance.
“So what’s the plan, Tony?”
“Follow them. See where they go. If you’re right, they’ll lead us straight to Tariq.”
Cait was expressionless, but inside she was on fire, her energy rushing at a million miles an hour. She was wired, finally about to get closure. Every pore in her body was electric, switched on, totally aware of her earlier prophecy that Tariq wouldn’t last the week.
And today was day seven.
Death day.
“Tariq has to be in that building,” said O’Donnell, half to himself, half to Cait, psyching himself up for action.
Cait smiled.
“Absolutely. Those two thugs out the front. You’ll have to neutralize them first,” said Cait, sounding like a veteran of a thousand campaigns. She wore the role of advisor and partner like an old shoe. Fieldwork just seemed to come naturally.
As O’Donnell had said in the past, to him Cait was a total enigma. The quiet assassin.
The two of them were sitting in their rental car across the road, two hundred meters down the street from the derelict warehouse where they were sure Tariq was holed up. To Ice it was like hitting the drop zone in a Chinook, abou
t to jump out into the unknown with his troopers: he had absolutely no idea what they were about to face. All he knew was that whatever was behind that tumbledown façade, it would be dangerous.
They had tailed the Mercedes to the outskirts of town. During the trip, Cait noticed Ice’s aura change from soft and inviting to hard, black, edgy. He had morphed into SAS mode: observant, checking out the lay of the land, looking for points of entry and likely escape routes, planning, formulating their next move.
Her partner was no longer Tony O’Donnell, nice guy and ASIO field agent. Instead he was Ice; cold, calculating, a killer.
Two heavy-looking thickset dudes in dark sunglasses were out front of the old warehouse, smoking, chatting between themselves, trying to look nonchalant, but really patrolling. Ice saw through their front in the blink of an eye. And they were packing. He took in the telltale bulge of a handgun sitting in a holster on each of their hips, and one of them appeared to have a larger weapon—a sawn-off shotgun?—concealed inside his coat.
These guys meant business.
But he’d dealt with worse. This would be a walk in the park compared to the Taliban.
“Okay Cait, time for a mission briefing.” Sergeant Tony O’Donnell was speaking.
Ice gave Cait the thumbs-up signal, quickly followed by a repeating forward thrust of his right arm, fingers outstretched.
He was going in. It was time for her to create a diversion.
Cait started the car and drove down the street, looking to the left and right as if lost. She stopped out front of the warehouse, feigning looking at a map on her phone, then slowly turned left into the entrance and drove toward the two Cosa Nostra thugs who were strutting their stuff up and down, pacing and trying to look tough.
Stopping ten meters out from the building, Cait wound down her driver’s side window and asked in a loud voice, “Scusi signore, do you speak English?” using her best I’m just a dumb blonde who’s lost in this godforsaken country tourist voice.
Ever the sucker for a female in distress, both thugs puffed out their chest and sashayed over to the car, testosterone raging, with a machismo attitude that could only be found in Italy.
Cait looked out her window at her new admirers, smiled and batted her baby blues, faking helplessness and innocence, and asked in her most provocative voice, “I think I’m lost. Can you please tell me which is the road to Catania?”
Ice peeked over the low fence to the side of the property. Cait had used her feminine guile and managed to distract the two guards.
“Good girl,” he whispered to himself. As if he expected anything less from his partner.
He made a final check left and right.
All clear.
With the agility of cat, Ice adroitly leapt over the one-and-a-half-meter high stone fence at the front of the property and, hugging the inside of the fence, sprinted the thirty meters of open space toward the abandoned car to the side of the warehouse in a time that would rival Usain Bolt.
Cait glanced at her watch. Ninety seconds since she had entered the warehouse compound. She had to keep the thugs occupied for at least two minutes.
“So down this street to the end, turn left then right, and right again on the main road. Is that right?” She had a captive audience: engaged and totally concentrating on her. It helped that she had undone the top two buttons of her tight-fitting shirt. Two pairs of admiring eyes kept diverting off Cait’s face and down to her generous cleavage that she willingly had on display. She could feel their lust oozing out of every pore of their pathetic, overweight bodies.
Typical middle-aged men, Cait mused. Like, how transparent? There’ve got two brains but only enough blood to go to one at a time, and the one between their legs is currently taking precedence.
“Okay, grazie. Ciao bella,” said Cait in her best accented Italian as she wound up her window and prepared to leave.
She pulled over around the corner where they had parked previously to plan their strategy of attack. To the best of their ability they had carried out a recon when they first did their drive-by, but they couldn’t afford to arouse suspicion, so it was limited: an abandoned car facing the street at the top of the blind side of the building; black Mercedes parked out back, concealed from the road; dirty windows down the side of the old building; possibly a doorway at the end.
That was it. Ice now had only had minutes to grab the intel.
Cait checked her watch: four minutes and thirty-two seconds. Plenty of time for O’Donnell to sneak down the side of the building unseen and position himself behind the abandoned car that lay between the side fence and the building before moving over to the building itself.
“Right. Stage one done and dusted. Now it’s over to you, Tony,” Cait said to herself, exhaling a deep breath that hissed through her teeth with a quiet whistle.
Accessing O’Donnell’s name from the speed dial on her phone, she sent O’Donnell a one-word text:
Done
This was their prearranged signal for Ice to move in. The plan was for him to get a visual inside the warehouse through one of the broken windows down the blind side of the building, then hightail it out of there. Once he had made a positive ID of Tariq, he would scale the side fence and meet Cait back at the car.
In and out like a ghost, unseen.
Then he’d ring Primo Capitano Angelo Constanzo with the good news, and the Carabinieri Special Forces would raid the building and capture Tariq sometime over the next few hours. After he had sighted Tariq, all Cait and O’Donnell had to do was keep a watch from the distance until the big guns arrived. Then his assignment in Sicily would be complete and he would no doubt be sent on another job somewhere else around the world.
End of story.
And Cait would return to her normal suburban life in Melbourne. Which somehow O’Donnell doubted would really be all that “normal.” From what he had seen of her extraordinary abilities and amazing psychic powers—which he still hadn’t quite got a handle on yet—knowing her, anything could happen.
Well, that was O’Donnell’s plan. Very cut and dried, very black and white. Very precise.
But it certainly didn’t align with Cait’s intentions. She was into revenge . . . and big-time. Cait had her own premeditated plan running around in her head: to confront Tariq face to face, with the distinct option in her plan that she would end up sending him to his Maker.
If not, that bastard was at least going to suffer, just like he’d made Dec suffer.
In Cait’s eyes, the justice system was way too good for him.
Ice checked out the twenty meters of open space between his hiding spot behind the abandoned car and the building directly in front of him.
Or was it really abandoned? There were a set of keys in the ignition, and the tires just didn’t fit in with the pictures of a dumped car. The car looked like a shitheap, but it hung low on a serious set of rubber.
He glanced around a final time. All clear.
O’Donnell seized the opportunity and bolted. Crouching low, senses alert, adrenaline coursing through his veins, he blocked out everything except the immediacy of the moment: to make it across the open space unseen and unheard, then peer through one of the dirty broken windows into the building and make an ID.
Then out of there.
Tariq’s got to be inside. I just know it. I can feel him. The thought dominated his mind.
Ice stood on his toes and peered through the bottom of the first window he came to.
Voices yes, but where are they?
He rushed to the second window five meters further down the wall toward the back of the building.
Nothing! Voices but still no visual.
With the stealth of a wild beast stalking its prey, he crept to the third window at the back of the building and peered through the dirty pane.
Tariq! There he is, pacing up and down like a caged animal.
Strike one for the good guys! A positive ID at long last.
Tariq was so close Ice felt
he could almost reach out and touch him. Kill him. And four other men. Obviously his minders—armed, dangerous, muscled arms covered in prison tattoos. Those guys were professionals. Not like the two soft-cock guards out the front. The ones inside would be harder to take down.
Spinning deftly on his own axis, Ice bolted back toward the cover of the abandoned car. But now he had forty meters of open space to cover, as he was at the far end of the building.
Shit!
As he was in full flight, one of the goons from out the front walked around the corner.
“Hey you, stop!” he tried to yell at the stranger bolting across the open space, but only a muffled sound came out. Instead, a mouthful of half-chewed food sprayed out in front of him, creating a technicolor pattern on the cracked concrete driveway.
Reaching for his handgun, the man dragged it out of the hip holster. But it was locked in place and he couldn’t draw it out fully!
Bad move when you’ve got Sergeant Tony O’Donnell about to whip your arse.
Ice jumped the thug, flying through the air as if he had bounced off a springboard. Landing heavily on his target, he smashed the point of his right elbow hard into the thug’s temple. His assailant’s head ricocheted backward with a snap. In a continuous fluid movement, Ice clenched the fingers of his left hand into a tight lethal weapon and dealt the man a lightning-fast, hard blow to his solar plexus, totally winding him.
The thug let out a forced blast of air from his lungs and collapsed, falling hard and landing on the hard ground with a thump, his head bouncing off the concrete like a kid’s Superball.
One more quick blow to the head and a second to his sternum, immediately over his heart, and he was out cold, lifeless. Most likely dead. Blood started trickling from his ear.
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 71
