Kill Zone (Danger in Arms, Book 2) Read online

  His eyes were extraordinary. They glittered like ice-blue chrome in the light of the street lamps. His jaw was strong, a little on the square side. Nose—straight. Brow—a smooth plane. All in all, a face with character. Handsome as sin.

  She had no more time to observe him because they arrived at Dr. Hammill’s front door. After they rang the glowing doorbell there was a lengthy delay, and her companion began to fidget. “Do people show up on this doctor’s porch often?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I doubt he bothers to operate a practice during daylight hours.” The door cracked open, and she saw the familiar twinkle of bright blue eyes in a wrinkled face. “It’s me, Doc Hammill.”

  The door swung open quickly and they moved inside. Fondly, Amanda inhaled the peppermint smell that always seemed to pervade this house.

  “Bring her in here, young man.”

  Her rescuer followed the doctor’s brisk instructions and set Amanda down on an examining table in a tiny office. She almost missed the feel of his strong arms cradling her close. Whoa. Missing was not authorized. Not in her line of work.

  Dr. Hammill derailed her shocking train of thought. “Hoist that foot on up here, young lady. Let’s see what we’ve got.” He peeled off her shoe and cut off her stocking.

  She sucked in her breath as gentle fingers probed the swollen joint. She actually had to grab the edge of the table when he rotated her foot slowly. God, that hurt.

  The doctor glanced up at her. “Now you move it.”

  She closed her eyes, took several deep breaths and counted backward from ten to one, willing herself to utterly relax and let her mind go blank. In a state of partial self-hypnosis, she separated herself from her lower leg and foot. Observing from a distance, she slowly rotated the ankle, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. She followed the doctor’s vaguely heard instructions to point her toe, flex her foot and wiggle her toes. Dr. Hammill’s voice registered approval, and she opened her eyes. She blinked while the sense of detachment from her body faded and pain replaced it.

  “Well, child, you’ve sprained your ankle, and substantial swelling has developed. But you’ll live,” he pronounced. His blue button eyes twinkled. “You may be inclined to slug me for saying this, but the pain is good. It means you probably haven’t broken anything. If you had, your foot would tend to be numb and immobile.”

  “Great,” she managed to grit out from behind her clenched teeth.

  The doctor stood up. “I’m going to treat your ankle with heat and cold before I wrap it. Let’s see if we can bring that swelling down a little.”

  While her ankle soaked, the doctor looked at her tongue and decreed the cut minor. It would be fine in a couple days. Dr. Hammill kept up a steady stream of small talk the whole time. He’d told her once that he did it so his unorthodox patients wouldn’t feel obliged to explain how they’d come by their injuries. She was grateful for the distraction. It was disconcerting having a tall, gorgeous stranger standing like a dark sentinel in the corner observing her every move and expression with hawklike alertness. She had the uneasy feeling he was reading her in far more detail than she’d like him to. More than once, she almost asked him to leave the room, but then he’d know how uncomfortable he was making her. And that wouldn’t do at all.

  The doctor made her swallow a couple pills he said were painkillers. After a few minutes, she started growing unnaturally drowsy and limp. Painkillers. Right. Through an enchanting, rose-hued haze, she watched the doctor nod at her protector, who swooped down on her like the hawk he resembled and lifted her from the table. Her head came to rest on his shoulder, which was ever so comfortable. With mild interest, she watched as he followed the doctor upstairs, down a hall and into a dark bedroom. She could definitely get used to this business of being carried around like a pampered princess.

  He lowered her onto the bed and she smiled fuzzily. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Her rescuer flashed her a heart-stopping smile. “Anytime. Sweet dreams.”

  It felt sinfully delicious to let her eyelids drift closed. Darkness enveloped her.

  “Come on, come on,” Biryayev groused as the phone rang in his ear. “Pick it up.” He’d dialed the home phone number of the junior agent he’d taken under his wing during the past year. He wasn’t the type to voluntarily take on a protégé, but when the source of his paycheck spoke, Nikko Biryayev jumped. Grudgingly, but he jumped. Max Ebhardt was his assistant’s unfortunate name. Biryayev actually liked him despite his blond good looks. The talented young agent posed no threat to him since a person of German descent would never progress very far in the Russian power structure. Biryayev could afford to like him. Besides, the kid’s expertise with computers could come in handy on this one.

  The receiver clicked in Nikko’s ear. An annoyed voice grumbled at the other end of the line, “Hello.”

  “Max. Nikko Biryayev here. I need you at the office right away.”

  “Now? It’s Friday night. It’s…midnight, for God’s sake. Can’t it wait until tomorrow? Or Monday?”

  “No, it can’t,” Biryayev growled. Damned kids. No sense of duty these days. “How soon can you be here?”

  A female voice giggled in the background. “Stop it, Candy,” Max said away from the receiver. “Uh, I guess I can be there in a half hour.”

  Biryayev growled, “Make it fifteen minutes. Screw the bimbo on your own time. Right now I need you.”

  “Fine,” Max bit out.

  The phone slammed down in Biryayev’s ear. He hung up, grinning at the receiver. He took perverse pleasure in messing up Max’s love life. The guy’s penchant for the ladies was an ongoing source of friction between them.

  He was roundly surprised when Max actually did show up in fifteen minutes on the nose. Because he’d been punctual for once, Biryayev cut him some slack and ignored Max’s grumbling about bosses with no life of their own messing up everybody else’s. The blond agent looked tousled and wore a wrinkled New York Yankees T-shirt that smelled like sex. But he was alert and all business when Biryayev told him what was up.

  The two men descended into the bowels of the consulate to the encryption room. Biryayev jerked his head at the lone clerk on duty, who left silently. Biryayev’s ears popped as the door sealed into its airtight, soundproof lock. He watched Ebhardt pry the back off the hairbrush and carefully extract a microchip smaller than his thumbnail. The kid loaded the tiny wafer into a special player plugged into a computer console, and typed a series of commands. The machine hummed to life.

  Several minutes of silence played, and then the room suddenly reverberated with the booming sound of a hoarse voice. Ebhardt snatched at the volume control and turned it down. Tuneless humming came and went for a couple minutes, then there was the sound of a door opening and a person entering. Biryayev and Ebhardt looked at each other and grinned.

  Jackpot.

  They listened to Kriskin greet his visitor. Biryayev’s eyebrows shot up as a female voice responded. There was a bit of conversation, then a thud and the brief sounds of a struggle.

  Several minutes of complete silence followed. The next sounds were faint noises of someone entering the room, then a muffled grunt like a heavy object was being lifted. A door clicked shut and the tape played on in ominous silence.

  “Play it again, Max.”

  This time Biryayev listened for the name Kriskin had uttered. Amanda McClintock. Amanda McClintock?

  Had the daughter taken up where the father left off? The walls abruptly went blood red as his gaze blurred with fury, and his eyeballs ached as if they were going to burst out of his head. Rage pulsed in his veins until it became difficult to breathe. The need to put his fist through a wall, to break something, was almost overpowering. He paced the enclosed space like a caged tiger. Oh, he knew Amanda McClintock, all right. The daughter of his arch nemesis had the temerity to kidnap one of Russia’s most loyal sons? How dare she?

  So. The McClintock legacy continued. Very well, then. So would his vengeance. H
e’d track her down and make her suffer, and then rip her intestines out and wrap them around her eviscerated body. He’d tear her face off. He’d break her neck. He’d…

  “You okay, boss? You look a little overheated.”

  He snarled incoherently, “I’ll kill the bitch.”

  Max’s eyebrows shot up. “Who? This McClintock woman?”

  He whirled around and advanced on Max as if he’d strangle the young Russian. “Find her for me. Tell me where she is so I can obliterate her!”

  Max looked taken aback. “Damn! What’s got your knickers in such a twist?”

  Biryayev stared speculatively at his partner. If Ebhardt was going to help him on this case, he might as well know what he was up against. “Christopher McClintock spied for Mother Russia, and I was his control officer until the bastard turned on me. He stole the whole goddamned Udarsky cache and put a black mark on my flawless record. Russia has a score to settle with the name McClintock.”

  Max turned around to face a state-of-the-art computer terminal. “Well, uh, okay then. Let’s see what we can find.” He cracked his knuckles and started typing.

  Biryayev hovered restlessly, kibitzing over Max’s shoulder as the agent surfed the Internet, extracting secure credit card information, banking documents, even medical records with impunity. “Where’d you learn to do this stuff?” he asked, put off as always by the technology at Max’s grasp.

  The younger man shrugged. “This is nothing. Just a little garden variety hacking. There’s this guy in St. Petersburg—you can’t believe the systems he can get into. Scares even me.”

  After a pregnant pause, a search engine made a match. The printer began to spit forth information on Amanda McClintock. Biryayev snatched up and scanned the sheets of paper almost as quickly as the printer disgorged them. She was the daughter of an art dealer—Biryayev scowled. A lousy art dealer who only managed to stay in business because of handouts from Russia. And the ungrateful bastard turned out to be a double agent. A traitor. Christopher McClintock had betrayed him.

  The daughter’s current age was twenty-nine, her present location unknown. Her primary schooling took place in Scotland, and there was no record of university education. With her father’s death, she’d inherited a small estate. Biryayev’s gaze narrowed. Really? Or had she, in fact, inherited the fabled Udarsky diamond cache? It was rumored to be worth billions on today’s market. He read on greedily. Several years ago, she started turning up in various world capitals. Her appearances were usually linked to the activities of a Devereaux operative code-named Phoenix. “Run the code name Phoenix through our collection of spy dossiers and see what you get,” Biryayev directed.

  Max did as he was told and a single sheet printed out. Name unknown, location unknown, activities unknown. Physical description unavailable.

  “Unavailable, my ass,” Biryayev growled. “Get it for me.”

  The younger Russian shrugged. “That may take some time. I’ll need to contact my buddy in St. Petersburg.”

  “Do it.”

  Max nodded and turned to the computer screen. He typed out a message and sent it. The electrons flew out into the gargantuan limbo of the Net, waiting to be snatched by Max’s contact at some other exit point in the jumble of the information highway. The kid looked up and asked, “So, is she this Phoenix person?”

  Biryayev shrugged. “Entirely possible. Her father was a trained covert operative. He could’ve taught her the tricks of the trade.” And the bastard had been crazy enough to do it, too.

  Max speculated, “So, she went into the dressing room and took down this Kriskin guy, and then someone else came in and helped her carry him out?”

  Biryayev frowned. Kriskin was a large man, not to mention one of the most dangerous unarmed fighters the KGB had ever trained. Even old and out of shape, he’d have been a formidable opponent for a much smaller, weaker female. “Maybe she went into the room first and distracted Kriskin. Then an accomplice came in and took him down,” Biryayev postulated.

  Max shrugged. “Sounds reasonable.” He referred to the computer. “Assuming she’s not lying on her driver’s license, she’s only five foot five and 115 pounds. A hair over fifty kilos. Not very big to be taking out anyone in hand-to-hand combat.”

  “Print me a picture of her.”

  The younger agent’s fingers clattered on the keyboard. The printer disgorged a black-and-white photo of a quietly beautiful young woman, staring calmly back at the two men. She had the look of her father about her. The refined features that spoke of good breeding, the dreamy tilt to her eyes, the romantic shape of her mouth—full of lies. Just like her father.

  “Hubba, hubba,” Ebhardt commented, grinning.

  Biryayev glared. She was the enemy. Like a bloodhound picking up a scent, he hungrily memorized her features. He would find her and eliminate her soon. Very soon. “Is it possible to check the airline passenger lists to Toronto for the next couple days for her name?” he asked.

  “No sweat.” As Max’s fingers flew, he asked, “Why Toronto, boss?”

  “It’s the next stop on Marina Subova’s concert tour. If Amanda McClintock has business to conduct with her, that’s where she’ll go. If we’re lucky, her accomplice will go along, and we can bag them both. I wouldn’t mind putting a dent in Devereaux while we’re at it.”

  “Who’s he?” Max asked.

  Biryayev shrugged. “Nobody knows. References to him started turning up after 9/11. Some sort of rich, reclusive, vigilante type who pokes into delicate situations around the world.”

  “Whose side is he on?”

  Biryayev shrugged. “Hard to tell. He’s been a royal pain in the ass to just about everyone at one time or another.”

  “Criminal?” Max asked.

  “If you would call it criminal to seek justice outside the law by whatever means, then yes, this guy’s a criminal.” As Max started to type into the computer, Biryayev added, “You can check your precious Internet, but he won’t show up on it. Devereaux’s too cagey for that.”

  Max quit typing. He asked, “Why would this McClintock woman kidnap or kill Kriskin?”

  “Good question. Kriskin’s been out of circulation a long time. It’s accepted practice to leave retired intelligence agents to their consciences and old age to find what peace they can. I think it’s highly unlikely that she was actually after Kriskin. I think he got in her way.” Biryayev frowned. “But this Subova girl’s been a problem before. Maybe she’s gotten herself into trouble again.”

  Ebhardt frowned. “What kind of trouble could a concert pianist get into with someone like Devereaux?”

  “That is a good question, Max. A very good question.”

  Taylor awoke to an unpleasant feeling of disorientation. The first thing he saw was an oversize, 1940s-style cabinet radio. Morning sunlight streamed through yellowed Venetian blinds into an old-fashioned sitting room. Motes of dust danced in the zebra streaks of light. For a moment he didn’t know where he was or how he’d come to be here in this room out of time. And then memory of the previous night returned, of carrying a lovely wounded woman here in his arms. With the memory came a vision of her smile and a hot flood of desire.

  A voice murmuring somewhere nearby brought him to his feet. He stretched out the kinks of sleeping on a couch several inches shorter than he was and tracked the voice toward the rear of the house. He met Doc Hammill coming toward him down the narrow hall.

  “You’re awake. Good. Phone’s for you, son. You can take it in the office.”

  Taylor followed the doctor into the same room where the young woman had been treated last night. An ancient rotary telephone sat on the oak desk. He picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Taylor. Harry Trumpman.”

  His Devereaux contact. “What can I do for you, boss?”

  “I’m afraid I have a stupid question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “What did you do with the lady?”

  “You mean from last night?”


  “Is there another one I should know about?”

  Taylor laughed. “No, sir. There was just the one. Last I saw of her, she was tucked into the good doctor’s guest bed and was out cold before her head hit the pillow. She’s still sleeping off whatever Doc Hammill gave her. Why?”

  “We, uh, don’t like to lose track of her. She’s been in a…”

  Taylor waited while his boss searched for a word.

  “…rather delicate frame of mind recently. Well, I’m glad that mystery’s solved.”

  “Glad I could help. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Meet me for lunch. Both of you. Say noon at Shecky’s Deli down near Fifty-seventh and Fifth Avenue?”

  “Just a minute.” Taylor lifted the receiver away from his mouth. “Doc, is the lady going to be awake by noon?”

  Dr. Hammill grinned. “She ought to be waking up any time now.”

  Taylor pulled the receiver back down to his mouth. “We’ll be there at noon.”

  Amanda stopped at the top of the stairs to watch her rescuer as he paced Doc Hammill’s living room. He looked as nervous as an adolescent waiting for his prom date to come downstairs. Like some gorgeous guy had ever waited nervously for her. Between her mad father and the rigid rules of her boarding school, she’d barely spoken to boys in her youth, let alone gone out with them.

  He noticed her just then and rushed to the foot of the stairs in a whirlwind of restless energy. “Stay right there,” he called.

  She blinked in surprise as he bounded up the stairs three at a time. He reached the top, abruptly looming over her. “Dare I ask what you’re doing?”

  “I’m coming to the assistance of a damsel in distress, of course.”

  She lifted one eyebrow and asked, “How’s that?”

  “Your ankle’s still killing you, right?”

  It was, but she certainly wasn’t about to admit it. Her eyebrows came together and she drew breath to deny it, but he cut her off breezily. “You don’t have to impress me with your toughness. You did that last night. ’Fess up, now. It’s hurting, isn’t it?”