King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13)

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Nah, Kurtis, this is like Kody’s farts meets toxic waste meets rotting elephant. And it’s coming from right... over... here!

  Last thing they needed was to attempt to hide and be discovered by some KKK-loving amateur commando-wanna-be, simply because dude didn’t smoke and had an accurate sense of smell.

  Of course, now Rio smelled like soap and shampoo—but that would wear off fast as soon as they left the SUV and started hiking up the mountain.

  Damn, he was not looking forward to that.

  Although as shitty as that was going to be—the shitty icing on the shitty cake of the past few ultra shitty days—Rio knew it wasn’t going to be half as bad as whatever Thomas and Tasha were enduring right now.

  If they were even alive.

  Dave wasn’t here to say it. It was Rio’s own brain that was responsible for tossing out that pessimistic bullshit, so he gave himself a mental smack on the head.

  Thomas King was smart enough and strong enough and yeah, lucky enough to stay alive. And if he was alive, then Tasha was, too.

  And that was the goddamn truth.

  Thomas had managed to silence Tasha, twice in the course of just a few minutes time.

  Of course the first had been when he’d kissed her. She’d stopped talking, although she had made soft, dizzying sounds of pleasure as she’d clung to him and kissed him back.

  The fact that this was real—his kissing her, Tash kissing him back—made his brain stutter and damn near short out. Mostly in ongoing shock that something he’d believed was impossible—to the degree of never letting himself consider it—could become, in a flash, something he wanted, no, needed so badly.

  Except this was real. He could have this life he’d never dared imagine before.

  But only if he could keep them both alive.

  “Escape hatch...?” Tasha said now, finally finding her voice.

  She’d been the first to get her brain working again, all of the times he’d kissed her, too. He would’ve been standing there, kissing her still, if she hadn’t pulled away and reminded him they had work to do.

  Good thing one of them was taking on the role of responsible adult.

  She was looking at him now in a mix of surprise, disbelief, concern for his sanity, and outrage—no doubt because he hadn’t told her about his search for an escape hatch before this.

  “Escape hatch,” she said again.

  “There’s gotta be one.” As he bagged up the chemicals he’d found under the sink, he explained. “This shelter was built in the early 1960s, Bay of Pigs era, right? And yeah, some of the smaller shelters of that time period didn’t have a back door, but something of this size, at this depth? Built by someone as wealthy as Uncle Prince Tedric’s King Daddy...? There might even be two alternative exits. Nothing fancy like the concrete stairs at the main entrance—I’m thinking it’d be more of a tube, a pipe. Probably large enough in circumference so that we won’t have to crawl through it—more of a walk-in-a-crouch type size. But considering our depth, and assuming it would be designed to be accessible for royalty of a variety of physical conditionings, I doubt it would have more than a moderate slope—” he angled his arm to demonstrate the mildness of the imagined pipe’s incline “—which means it’d have to be fairly long.”

  Tasha had finished transferring the peanuts from jars to baggies, and was now storing them in the daypack he’d grabbed from the utility room. But her eyes lit up as she literally did that math. “And that means the escape hatch’s door to the surface is going to be far away from the pod’s main door.”

  Where the hostiles were hunkered down, waiting for them to emerge.

  “In theory, yeah.” Thomas nodded. With luck and stealth, he and Tasha would be able to sneak out without being detected.

  “Which means they won’t know we’ve left, so they won’t follow us,” Tasha concluded. “Which is great. We’re not trapped anymore. But after we’re out of here...”

  “Then what?” He finished for her, seeing her pensive concern and raising it an acknowledged grim reality as he gestured for her to follow him out of the kitchen, toward the utility room. “It’ll take us days to hike down to the airfield where we flew in, but we don’t want to go there, since someone—helo maintenance crew or car rental agency—is absolutely working with the team who’s hunting us. But okay, there’s a town nearby. If we bypass the airfield and find a warm place to hide—someone’s basement, maybe? Then we find a phone.” Assuming landlines weren’t down.

  Assuming they could survive the days and nights it would take to descend the mountain.

  The temperature had dropped considerably since they’d spent their first night together in that hide he’d built. It was no longer in the balmy fifties. And although they now had access to blankets to layer for warmth, the fleece was bulky and would make it harder for them to move undetected through the mountainous terrain.

  Tasha followed him to the back of the little concrete-walled utility room. “FYI, I’ve explored every inch of this place, and I haven’t found anything remotely like an escape hatch.”

  He motioned to the metal shelving unit that held a tool kit and other maintenance supplies. The wall behind it had a small, cast-iron door—like an entrance to an old-time coal room—just big enough for a man of his size to squeeze through.

  “That?” Tash asked as he started clearing off the shelves to make them easier to move. “No, it’s barely even a closet. It’s only about four inches deep.”

  “You already opened it?” he asked.

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “One of the times you were out checking for messages. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a secret passageway to Narnia.”

  “So you moved this shelf?” he asked. “All by yourself?”

  “Yup,” she told him, already starting to help him clear the shelves, carrying a pile of rags to the work counter over by the gun locker. “It’s not that heavy once it’s empty, and it seemed pretty obvious to me that either that little door led to nowhere, or the shelf was in front of it for a capital-R Reason. Like it contained a stash of jewels or burner cell phones or the recipe to the Queen’s Secret Sauce. But it was empty. Although you should definitely look, in case I’m wrong and it’s got—I don’t know—some kind of false back...?”

  “I hope it does.” Thomas nodded as he lugged a heavy tool kit across the room. “A door like that, yet the interior’s only four inches deep...? God, I hope it’s the hatch. If it’s not, we’ll have to spend the next few hours banging on the walls.”

  “Ooh, fun,” she said, grabbing an armload of umbrellas. “Oh, wait, no, you meant actually banging, as in knocking and listening for a covered-up door. Boo.”

  Thomas shot her a look. “Now you’re just being evil.”

  “I don’t get why we need to leave the pod if the power goes out. We have flashlights and plenty of candles. And yeah, the toilet situation will get unhappy, although we can schedule a few pressure flushes.” She held up the ancient metal bucket she was moving across the room. “I bet we have at least a couple of buckets of gin.”

  She was right about that. The pressure from a bucket of water—or gin—would force the contents of the toilet down the sewage pipe. But...

  “Toilet’s the least of my worries,” Thomas told her. “See, if the power goes out, that means the hostiles found the underground power lines. And yeah, that might be due to luck, but it most likely means they’ve dug into public records and found the construction plans for the shelter. And once they have that info, it’s over for us. They’ll know about the escape hatch—and at the least they’ll set up guards at that exit. At worst, they’ll try to use it to breach the shelter. Of course, they won’t really need to do that, because if they have the plans, they can mess with the ventilation system and force us out—or just plain suffocate us, if their goal is to kill you—us.”

  “No, you were right the first time.” As Tasha turned to look at him, all sense of play and teasing was gone from her face. “You’re jus
t the bodyguard—I’m the one they’re after. Without me, this all goes away.”

  “That may have been true at the start,” he said. “But not anymore. They now know better than to keep me alive. So don’t be thinking—”

  “I don’t want you to die because of me,” she said. “I mean, I don’t want you to die, period, but—”

  “I have no intention of dying anytime soon.”

  “Said everyone, always,” Tasha pointed out, “even those who were moments from their unintentional death.” She took a deep breath. “If this is an escape hatch, I want you to use it. Without me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Tasha could tell from the expression on Thomas’s face that he’d misunderstood her. He thought she was making some kind of weird, selfless sacrifice.

  “I mean that you should use it to go get help,” she explained. “Without me slowing you down. You know, you go find a phone. In town. While I wait. Here. For you to come back and save me. I’m not insane.”

  Thomas smiled briefly at that. “I know.”

  “I think you’re still learning that,” she countered, stepping forward to help him move the shelf before he waved her back.

  “I got this. Just...” Give him space.

  She did as he swung one end of the metal shelving unit away from the wall that held the funny little cast-iron door.

  “If you really believed I’m not insane,” Tasha said, “you wouldn’t have made that face.”

  The belt of his robe had become loosened, and Thomas refastened it as he made another face at her. “What face?”

  “The face you made,” she said. “The uh-oh face.”

  “I’m... pretty sure that’s just my face.”

  “Then you must be thinking uh-oh a lot when you’re with me.”

  He laughed at that. “That is not entirely incorrect.”

  “I think you thought I was offering to... What? Surrender myself to the goon squad out there, in a selflessly dramatic If only one of us can live let it be you-type deal? And yeah, okay, gun to my head, I will definitely beg for your life: I’ll go willingly if you spare him, you know, because I would go willingly if they... but I wouldn’t... I mean, that’s absolute final-option thinking. That’s plan Z-squared.”

  Thomas nodded as he opened the little door, crouching down to look inside. “Good to know.”

  “And I know I’ve been loudly repetitive about you not English Patient-ing me,” Tash told him, leaning in over his shoulder to get another look at the weird half-closet as he ran his hands across and around its narrow little dull-metal insides, “and the idea of you leaving me here alone scares me. Badly. But if there really is an escape hatch, we need to use it to escape in a way that actually allows us to escape this entire situation. Not just get out of here, but then get caught a mile down the mountain. So I have to grit my teeth and let you save us. And I’m pretty sure that means me waiting here while you do things that’ll be much harder for you to do successfully if you’re dragging me down a mountainside in the freezing cold.”

  He glanced at her as he straightened up and moved across the room to jam his feet into his pair of too-small doctored boots that he’d set neatly beneath his still-drying raincoat. “I’m not going to English Patient you.”

  Except that was more of those best intentions they’d been discussing earlier. It was exactly what the actual English patient—Ralph Fiennes’s character—had promised before leaving Kristin Scott Thomas’s character to die alone in a cave, in the dark, while he went to get help. He was certain he’d return and save her, and yet...

  Tash must’ve been giving Thomas her own version of an uh-oh face, because he laughed a little then added, “I appreciate your courage and your willingness to stay here, I really do. But we’ve gone past the point of no return in terms of that option. We’re working with a different scenario now. They know where you are, Tash, and I’m not leaving you in a position of undeniable vulnerability. If they cut the air to the pod...? Nah, there’s no viable plan B if you’re alone when that happens. When we go, we’re going together.”

  Tasha’s relief was mixed with a sinking feeling. This was her fault. “If I hadn’t panicked and left the pod...”

  He pulled her in for an embrace, his arms warm and solid around her as he tucked her head beneath his chin. “It’s not your fault. I should’ve realized you’d freak out when the lights went off but then I didn’t appear. And then when you saw the rifle and thought...? What? I was dead or dying or...?”

  She nodded as she held onto him even more tightly, as he held her even closer to his heart in return.

  “I could’ve taken the extra minute to tell you what I was doing.” His rich voice rumbled in his chest. “Yeah, the men following me would’ve lost me, but I could’ve caught up to them, led them away from the pod. So don’t beat yourself up, because I messed up, too. This isn’t just on you. I wasn’t thinking about your feelings—only about protecting you. Taking care of you—without your input, which is all kinds of wrong. I also... miscalculated... just how... intensely you care for me.”

  Tasha couldn’t help but laugh even as her heart did incredible somersaults at his quiet words. She lifted her head to look up at him. “That was the most Spock-inspired way of saying I didn’t realize how much you love me.”

  He smiled down at her, but his amusement didn’t hide the vulnerability in his eyes. “I spent years talking myself out of you and... discounting your feelings. I’m afraid it’s gonna take me a while to catch up to reality. This still feels surreal. Yeah, like, Spock’s-got-a-beard surreal.”

  Tasha laughed again. But it was important that she tell him: “When I grabbed the rifle—when I cowboyed up and left the pod, I don’t really know exactly what I thought I was going to do. And when you weren’t bleeding out, outside the pod, I just stood there in the cold, clueless and... and useless—”

  “Not useless.” He jumped all over that, cutting her off. “Nuh-uh. Just in possession of a vastly different skillset.”

  Her heart really couldn’t get any bigger in her chest, and yet somehow it did.

  Thomas kissed her then—swiftly, sweetly—before he released her and essentially set her off to the side. “Let’s see where this door goes.”

  He sat down on the concrete floor in front of the open cast-iron door, and using the force of his powerful legs, he kicked the shallow metal back of the little closet. His boots hit with a crash that turned into a clatter as, sure enough, the piece of metal was dislodged into a larger, darker, shadow-filled space.

  “Hoo-yah!”

  Tasha moved closer to look at what was, undeniably, the entrance to the original bomb shelter’s escape route.

  “We need a flashlight,” Thomas said, in near unison with Tasha’s “I’ll get a flashlight.”

  “Grab a candle while you’re at it, and your lighter or some matches,” Thomas added.

  “Don’t you dare go in there without me,” Tasha called as she hurried into the pod’s living room to grab their jackets, too.

  Tasha came back wearing her winter jacket, with her towel hat securely over her head, fastened by the clip under her chin.

  “I really don’t think it’ll be that cold in there,” Thomas pointed out as she held out the blue raincoat, the rifle—smart woman—the flashlight, the candle, and Ted’s lighter. He took everything, but put down the raincoat, “at least not until we get closer to the surface. And we’re not going that far. No point in hiking it twice.”

  “Bats freak me out,” she said, and when he blinked at the seeming non sequitur, she pointed to the towel. “Bat protection.”

  “Ah.” He hadn’t considered that the tunnel might be home to bats, but then again, he didn’t have hair for them to get entangled in. He slipped the rifle over his shoulder, its weight familiar against his back.

  Tash pointed to the candle and Ted’s lighter. “Is this because you want to conserve the batteries in the other flashlights?”

  “Nah,” he said.
“Your freaky thing is bats, mine is hypoxia.”

  It was her turn to laugh her lack of understanding. “Oh-kay...?”

  “See, anytime you travel through a cave or a mine or an underground passage that hasn’t been used in a while, you want to test for bad air,” he explained. “Easiest way is the Bic test.”

  Although Ted’s lighter wasn’t even close to a cheap, plastic Bic. It was heavy and well-made—a twenty-four-karat piece of jewelry with an inscription in what looked like French and, yeah. Those were definitely large diamonds studding the sides and top.

  Thomas flipped it open and lit the candle, then stretched out his arm to put the brightly burning flame into the shadowy room beyond the open cast iron doorway, testing the air. The candle didn’t go out, so he squeezed himself through the little door, too, turning on the flashlight to get an even better look around. The space was smaller than he’d first thought—closet-sized, about two meters square—with another of those solid blast-proof doors, like the one at the bottom of the stairs at the pod’s main entrance. This door, however, was tightly shut. Sealed.

  “Whoa,” Tasha said, joining him. “It’s a bomb shelter mudroom.”

  She was right.

  “There are hooks on the wall,” she realized. “To... hang your hazmat suit, after going out to survey the atomic wasteland?”

  Thomas laughed. “Probably.” It was entirely possible that had been part of the original early 1960s sales package. Like there’d be an imminent return to normal after nuclear annihilation.

  He handed her the candle and the lighter as he turned his attention to that sealed door. It was identical to the one in the main pod, only this one likely hadn’t been opened in years. Possibly not since Prince Ted the First renovated the place.

  Nah, he was wrong about that. It opened easily, as if it had been kept well-oiled and maintained. Which made sense. The only thing better than a private sex-pod—for someone who regularly made use of a private sex-pod—was a private sex-pod with a super-secret backdoor.