Kill Zone (Danger in Arms, Book 2) Page 7

  He retraced his route at a much more sedate pace back toward Toronto, driving toward the orange glow in the sky above the city. An insidious satisfaction crept into his gut. He’d done it. It hadn’t been pretty, but he’d survived his first surveillance job. Amanda would undoubtedly bust his chops over going alone, but he’d proved the point that he could do it. And he’d learned one last bit about his partner: she got a lot of satisfaction out of winning. Even if winning was measured in grim terms like staying alive or pulling one over on the other guy.

  It was nearly 4:30 a.m. when Taylor finally stepped into the hotel’s elevator. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes as he felt the gentle upward lurch. His muscles ached with fatigue and his eyes burned. The elevator doors slid open with a quiet swish and he roused himself. He plodded down the hallway, regretting that their rooms were at the far end of the hall. He finally reached their suite. And looked down.

  He slammed himself sideways against the wall, adrenaline surging. Carefully, he crouched and reached for his ankle knife. The door was ajar.

  Five

  Taylor flattened himself against the wall and, with an outstretched arm, nudged the door open an inch more. No reaction. He eased the door farther open and waited again, heart pounding. Nothing. Still crouching, he eased through the opening, pausing just inside with his back to the wall. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw furniture strewn everywhere but no movement. He sidled around the end of the bar, checked behind it, then peered toward the bedrooms. Both doors were wide open. He paused again, listening. Silence.

  He slithered down the hall on his belly, hugging the wall. Moonlight streamed through Amanda’s window and across the hall into his room. Both were empty. Fear pressed on him like an anvil on his chest. It wasn’t just for himself. Near panic surged in his gut at the thought that something might have happened to Amanda. He cautiously approached the enclosed balcony that held the hot tub. Streetlights illuminated the glassed-in area, and it, too, was empty. Taylor straightened, breathing relief, then gasped, lurching through the open doors to the hot tub.

  “Oh. My. God.” He swallowed thickly and nausea rumbled in his gut. Pale in the moonlight, the face of a man floated below the discolored surface of the water. Taylor plunged his hand into the dark water and grabbed the corpse by the hair. The head tilted back awkwardly, and as he lifted it clear, a dark, kidney-colored gash showed beneath the chin from ear to ear. White tendons, cartilage and the fibrous tube of the dead man’s trachea protruded grotesquely. With a groan, Taylor let go of the body and convulsed beside the hot tub, retching. What had happened here? Where was Amanda?

  He heard a screech of tires and looked up. From the hotel’s parking garage below him, a van careened out into the street. Clearly visible on its white side was a red rocking horse. Then Amanda emerged from the parking garage on foot, pistol in hand. She paused to watch the van speed away. With a quick glance around, she pocketed the weapon and darted into a shadow. Relief flooded him in a surge that nearly brought him to his knees. Thank God she was all right. Her figure melted into the darkness and he strained to make her out. It was impossible. He watched for several minutes, hoping to catch a movement, but saw nothing. She was gone.

  Amanda pulled the trigger quickly, over and over. She ducked flashes of light as they exploded at her from all sides, lunging first one way, then another. She fired back almost continuously as the attack came at her, wave upon wave of death seeking her. A tremendous explosion of light burst at her from one side, and then there was blackness.

  “Drat,” she muttered.

  She popped another token in the slot, and a deep voice intoned, “Use the Force, Luke.”

  Amanda sat in the seat of a Star Wars video game, watching the entrance to the arcade she’d chosen for her rendezvous with Taylor—assuming he thought to check for a message at the hotel. Dim blue light illuminated her surroundings, and a constant blare of computer-generated noises and sound effects intruded upon her senses. An assortment of young people ranged around the arcade, some lounging casually in front of machines, others writhing at the controls in spasms of body English. A video jukebox along one wall projected rock videos on a large screen. She couldn’t hear the music from where she sat, and the frenetic gyrations of the rock stars looked surrealistic and absurd. Another volley of enemy ships sprayed at her from the Death Star, and she methodically picked them off. As her last force shield blew up and her ship was obliterated, she caught sight of Taylor’s tall, unmistakable frame, briefly silhouetted as he entered the arcade. Thank God.

  While she entered her initials into the machine’s list of all-time high scorers, she surreptitiously watched him pause for his eyes to adjust to the light. He moved away from the door slowly, stopping here and there to look at a game. After a minute or two, he stepped to the vending machine where cash was exchanged for the requisite tokens to feed the games. Armed with a pocketful of tokens, Taylor moved past her to a video shooting gallery near the back of the arcade. She watched him pick up a toy rifle and take up a comfortable stance several yards away from a panoramic movie picture of a Canadian lake. Computer-generated geese began to flush up onto the screen, and he shot them down with unerring accuracy.

  Amanda started as a preadolescent voice spoke abruptly in her ear. “Hey. Are you gonna play or not?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m done.” She climbed out of the seat and moved between the clustered games toward Taylor. She mimicked his progress, stopping here and there to look over a player’s shoulder at alien galaxies and advancing monsters.

  Taylor put down the rifle, turned and saw her. The flare of relief in his eyes was clear. She had to admit she was glad to see him, too. She restrained a rather surprising impulse to give him a hug. “Nice shooting,” she commented.

  “Beginner’s luck.” He shrugged.

  “I’m a trained sniper. I’m not dumb enough to buy that line.” She looked down at the floor, then back at Taylor. “Are you okay?”

  “Me? I’m fine. Are you all right? That was a nasty piece of business back there. If I hadn’t seen you chase after that van, I’d have been crazy with worry.”

  “You saw me?” she exclaimed. She felt a funny surge of…something. He’d actually been worried about her?

  “Yeah. I must’ve just missed the fun. I was on the balcony puking my guts out when you left the garage.”

  She grimaced. The balcony scene hadn’t been pretty. “Let’s get out of here. Then you can tell me where in the bloody hell you went last night.”

  They left the arcade, squinting as they stepped outside into the brilliant sunlight. Taylor said, “This way. The car’s around the corner.”

  “You don’t still have the same car, do you?” she asked sharply.

  “Of course not. I dumped it first thing this morning. Right after I packed up all our stuff and got the hell out of the hotel. Speaking of which, care to tell me why you didn’t give me the gun Devereaux had waiting for me at the hotel?”

  “You found that, huh?”

  “Good thing I did, or we’d have had some tall explaining to do to the authorities.”

  She grinned. “Like we don’t already? There’s a dead man in our hotel room.” She borrowed a page out of his book and changed subjects sharply to distract him. “Have you had any sleep?”

  “Yeah. I snagged a motel room and got a few hours’ rest this morning.”

  “Good. You’re going to need it.”

  He announced as he unlocked her door for her, “I’ve got an errand to run while we decide what to do next.”

  She noted the use of the word we wryly. The only thing worse than an amateur spy was an amateur spy who thought he knew enough to play in the big leagues. Those thugs in the hotel were almost certainly Russian intelligence, and they were known for taking their games very seriously. More than ever, she was convinced that teaming up with Taylor was a terrible mistake. She’d barely escaped with her own life last night. If Taylor hadn’t been lucky enou
gh to be gone when the thugs had broken in, she would not have been able to save his neck. That idea bothered her. And the fact that she was bothered—that bothered her even more.

  They rode in silence until he glanced over at her. “So. How did that guy end up floating in the hot tub?”

  She shuddered as the events of the previous night rolled across her mind’s eye. “Two men broke into our hotel room. They went to your room first, and I heard them there.”

  The spit of silenced bullets riddling his bed was what had woken her up. She barely managed to dive out of bed before her door burst open and her pillow exploded. As she rolled off the bed, she grabbed the silenced Magnum from under her pillow.

  “I made it out of bed before they came to my room and shot it up. I returned fire and they retreated momentarily.”

  She poked her head up and listened carefully. Silence. Probably still right outside her room. In the moonlight, she saw the doorknob begin to turn slowly. She took careful aim at the wall where she judged the intruder would be standing aside to throw the door open. She exhaled her breath slowly and squeezed the trigger.

  “They came back to my room and I shot one of them, in the arm, I think. Then they ran and I heard them ejecting clips from their guns, so I took the opportunity to get out of the room. I headed for the living room first, but they were waiting for me there, so I retreated and came around through the balcony to the living room. Unfortunately, one of them had the same idea.”

  The plate glass door beside her began to ease open. She shifted slightly to give herself a clear shot, and afoot came flying around the doorjamb at her with killing speed. She dodged, but not soon enough. She was struck in the left shoulder and thrown backward. Her left arm went completely numb and fell useless to her side. The pistol was jarred loose from her other hand and went clattering away in the darkness.

  “One of them joined me on the balcony and we, er, tangled on the porch.”

  Not wasting time to search for the gun, Amanda lunged forward, slamming into her assailant’s thighs with her good shoulder, knocking him off his feet and sending his pistol skittering away, as well. They leaped to their feet to face each other. The area was narrow and dimly lit, leaving little room to maneuver. They each settled into a fighting stance, eyeing their opponent alertly.

  Amanda faced the larger man squarely, her right hand held before her. The feeling was only just beginning to return to her left hand. He smiled—a macabre grimace in the halogen-tinted moonlight—anticipating an easy kill of this weak woman.

  A student of the art of aikido, Amanda’s strength in battle lay in blinding speed and fluid grace. She didn’t defeat opponents by overpowering them; rather, she prevailed by bending under attack and snapping back quickly. Opponents had equated sparring with her to wrestling with water. Her assailant lunged, and she slid to the side as the heavier man crashed past her. He slashed her loose nightshirt with a blade he’d held hidden in his left hand.

  Taylor interrupted her thoughts. “You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

  His concern sent a warm rush through her. “No. But it was close. He had a knife.”

  By her reckoning, this was an even fight now. She had his inevitable underestimation of her on her side, but he had a knife on his. The guy lunged and she sidestepped as he went by, jamming her tingling left elbow in his back to push him forward. At the same time, she hooked afoot in front of his left ankle.

  His momentum and her shove sent him heavily against the side of the hot tub. The knife fell from his fingers, and she scooped it up in an instant.

  “I suppose he didn’t expect me to know how to fight, or perhaps he thought because I was a woman I’d be an easy kill.”

  The intruder’s wind was knocked out of him, and as he pushed away from the side of the spa, he drew a gasping breath. It was his last. She leaped onto his back, grabbing his hair with her left hand and cut his throat. She lurched away from him. She bent down, grabbed his legs and heaved. The body slid into the water.

  “At any rate, I managed to get a hold of his knife and use it on him. The other guy ran out into the hallway and I chased him down to the parking garage.”

  She rounded a large concrete abutment at the bottom of the stairwell just in time to see a white van careen out of the garage. She chased it, straining for a glimpse of the license, but she was only able to make out a red blur on the side of the van as it sped away.

  She willed her subconscious to see the red logo clearly, but it remained a frustrating smudge.

  “Earth to Amanda, come in, please.”

  “What? Oh. Where are we going?”

  “We’re picking up some pictures I took last night. Where were you just then?”

  “I was thinking about our visitors. They made one fatal mistake. They burst into your room first and shot up your bed together, then they broke into mine. Next rule, Taylor. Take out all the bad guys at once. If the intruders had split up, each taken one room, and burst in on us simultaneously, we’d both be dead. Assuming you were in your bed where you belonged.” She shook her head reprovingly. “Sloppy. The Russians aren’t nearly as good as they used to be.”

  He grimaced wryly. “So. Is last night the first time you’ve killed a man?”

  She whipped her head his way, shocked by the bald question. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a dead person, and it was pretty upsetting to me. I was wondering if you’re feeling the same way.”

  Her defensiveness evaporated. “I try to put it out of my mind and not think about it.”

  He commented, “If you ever do want to think about it, I’ll be here.”

  Surely he didn’t fail to notice that she’d dodged the issue of whether or not she’d killed before. She stared out the window for several moments and then turned all of a sudden to glare at him. “Here’s one for you. Why aren’t you dead right now? Where were you?”

  “I did a little reconnoitering of the Fortesque estate last night. It was an interesting outing.” Quickly, he recounted the previous night’s discoveries. He’d just finished when they pulled up at a drugstore and Taylor jumped out of the car. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  Fleeing her lecture about working alone, no doubt, she thought sourly. He returned shortly with a couple envelopes of pictures. The photos were surprisingly clear, in spite of being taken in the dead of night from a distance. She pored over the photos of the house and grounds, memorizing each salient feature of architecture, terrain and possible escape.

  When she opened the second envelope, she drew a quick breath. One of the thugs from the pictures was floating dead in the hot tub of their hotel room right now. Bile rose in her throat and she passed the photo to Taylor. “That’s the guy I killed. I’m not positive, but I think this is the other one who broke into our room,” she said, pointing at the other thug flanking the bespectacled man. “I only caught a glimpse of his face as he drove off. He was in a white van.”

  “Like this?” asked Taylor, passing her a side shot of a white van bearing a red rocking horse and GFX logo.

  “Yeah,” she breathed, “like that.”

  They looked at each other, the same question in their eyes. What did Gilles Fortesque have to do with an attempt on their lives? They’d only met the guy last night. Taylor pointed to the bespectacled man frozen by the camera as he stepped out of the van. “Our thugs from the hotel were sticking close to this guy. Like bodyguards. Maybe he’s the one who fingered us and not Fortesque.”

  Amanda examined the face, and after a moment, shook her head. “I don’t know him. What business do you suppose he had with Fortesque in the middle of the night? Was he setting us up in case his men didn’t get us?”

  Taylor thumbed toward the bottom of the pile of pictures. “Take a look at this. I don’t think we were the primary reason for his visit to Fortesque.” He passed her a picture of the bespectacled man and Fortesque peering at the satchel on the desk.

  “What was in the briefcase?
” she asked.

  “These.” Taylor handed her picture after picture of Fortesque examining diamonds.

  She sucked in her breath and dug in her purse. And pulled out a tiny velvet pouch. “Did they look like this?” She dumped a diamond the size of the end of her thumb into his hand.

  Taylor scrutinized the stone carefully, then picked up a couple photos to compare them to it. “Your rock’s in the ten-carat range. But the ones in the pictures are much smaller. Three or four carats at most. But I’d say we’ve found our connection between Subova’s diamonds and Fortesque. And this bespectacled guy.”

  “And you know about diamond sizing how?”

  “Uncle in the jewelry business.”

  Well, wasn’t he just full of surprises? Aloud, she said merely, “Ah. How many diamonds were there?”

  “I saw about a half dozen before a pair of guard dogs decided to cut my visit short. There’s no telling how many stones were in that satchel. It could have held hundreds.”

  She quirked an eyebrow at Taylor’s reference to the dogs, but he declined to elaborate.

  He mused, “Maybe the guy’s delivering a batch of diamonds to the smuggler in Subova’s entourage by way of Fortesque. At least they’re getting smart and using smaller stones.”

  “Getting smart?” she queried.

  “Look what happened when they were passing off twenty-carat diamonds. They attracted a lot of attention, most notably that of our employer. Three-carat diamonds are a dime a dozen, relative to the really big stones. If they’d stuck to passing off smaller stones, nobody would’ve noticed a thing. Eventually, we’ll be able to trace those big stones back to their source. A really beautiful diamond doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. It’s a work of art, and someone will be unable to resist taking credit for it. Ego always prevails over anonymity in the diamond trade.”