After snatching the key fob from the retractable bungee cord clipped to the front pocket of the maintenance man’s coveralls, Dagan tapped it against the security pad. A loudbuzzwas followed by a softclickas the door unlocked.
“Ready?” He glanced over his shoulder.
“Let’s do this thing and blow this bloody island,” Christian grumbled. Given what had happened to Christian before he left the SAS, Dagan couldn’t blame the guy for having no love for the country of his birth.
“Yes. Let’s go get our girl,” Ace added.
Our girl…
Dagan figured that was as good a description of Chelsea as anything. With her clever mind, sharp tongue, and soft heart, she had become a favorite of the Black Knights. But if he was honest with himself, he knew he would like to exchange the wordourformy.
“My girl…” That old song by the Temptations spun through his head, giving him an earworm as they pushed into the building. A long hall stretched in front of them. “There!” he hissed, pointing to the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling at the end of the hallway. Its red light was a beacon in the gloom of the corridor.
Ace aimed a laser pointer at the lens of the camera, overloading its light-sensitive chip. Funny, people thought security cameras provided just that…security. But disabling them was cheaper and easier than getting a hand job from a masseuse at one of Bangkok’s famous rub-n-tugs.
In a matter of seconds, they were piled into the staff elevator. Everydingof the passing floors going up all twenty stories corresponded with a dozen beats of Dagan’s heart.
Come on. Come on.
It had taken fifteen minutes from the time they received Chelsea’s Mayday to the time they got to Morrison’s condominium building—five minutes gearing up and five minutes getting there. Another five minutes had been wasted waiting on the maintenance man to appear. And now more seconds ticked by as the elevator made its maddeningly slow journey toward the top floor.
A red haze crept into Dagan’s vision. If Morrison or one of his goons had dared to lay a finger on Chels, so help the assface.
The elevator announced their arrival at the penthouse with a cheerily discordantbing-bong!But it took a couple of seconds longer—seconds during which Dagan bit his tongue to keep from screaming his impatience—before the silver doors slid open.
The three of them were out of the claustrophobic little box in a flash, creeping along the wall toward Morrison’s front door. Once again, Ace made quick work of the surveillance cameras at each end of the hall by hitting them with the laser light. It took Christian only slightly longer to pick the lock. Then…
We’re in!
The CIA had trained Dagan to control the speed of his pulse. But when it came to Chelsea, the usual tricks didn’t work. His heart slammed against his rib cage like his little brother had slammed his shoulder against the locked passenger door of Dagan’s truck the morning Dagan had forcefully admitted him to rehab. The memory of Avan that dreadful day was as unwelcome as it was crystal clear, and the only way Dagan could ignore it was to concentrate on the sound of his own blood thudding in his ears.
He led the silent charge into the penthouse, the dart gun up and at the ready. They weren’t alone in the space. He picked up on that right away. Not because he could hear anything over the soft hum of electricity and his own racing pulse, but because the hair twanged on the back of his neck and his palms prickled.
Thanks to the software Ozzie had installed on their phones, they could easily see that Chelsea’s iPhone was still inside the building. Of course, that didn’t meanChelseawas. It could be anyone making Dagan’s instincts sit up and bark. A maid. A secretary. One of Morrison’s many girls-of-the-month.
The possibility that Chelsea might have been removed to another location while her cell phone remained in residence was enough to have Dagan’s stomach threatening a revolt. And since there was nothing stealthy about blowing chunks, he pushed the possibility aside. Then his toe caught on something. When he glanced down, he saw it was Chelsea’s favorite trench coat, and he was suddenly thrown back in time, his mind ripped to a place of dust and danger and blood.
“Sonofa—” Dagan didn’t finish the curse as he pulled his car to the side of the road, putting it in park and glancing toward the café where the meeting was supposed to occur. All the players were in place, seated at tables on the gritty sidewalk.
All the players except him.Hewas late, thanks to having gotten stuck behind a vegetable merchant twenty blocks back. The man’s horse-drawn wagon had tipped over, sending produce tumbling all over the street. An entire crowd had rushed to help the merchant right his cart and reload his cargo, effectively stopping traffic in all directions and keeping Dagan hemmed in for a full fifteen minutes.
Kabul was strange that way. On the one hand, it was a throwback to a gentler time. A time when people used animals for transportation and didn’t hesitate to jump in and help each other out of a jam. On the other hand, it was the harshest place Dagan had ever known, filled with flinty-eyed zealots who didn’t hesitate to “honor” kill their women for any perceived slight, or slit the throats of those they considered infidels.
Dagan had been in the country for four years, and if he hadn’t needed to return home to help his little brother, he imagined he would have remained for at least a few more. He spoke the language, knew the customs, and had a nice network of assets who supplied him with Intel. But his brother came before flag and country. Since their parents had died—their mother of breast cancer and their father three years later of an aneurysm—Avan was all the family Dagan had left. Which brought him here, to this moment, handing off one of his assets, Abdul Waleed, to Agent Innes McShane, a black-bearded Boston boy with big shoulders and an even bigger smile.
McShane and Waleed looked uncomfortable sitting at the little iron table, neither truly trusting the other without Dagan there to act as a bridge between them. Agent Terrence Walker was a few tables over, pretending to read a newspaper, but actually keeping an eye on McShane and Waleed. In a chair pushed up against the wall of the cafe sat Jordy Moore, another agent on hand for the encounter. The CIA did nothing by half-measures. Even the simple passing off of an asset from one handler to another required backup and more backup, and both men were dressed in the local style, blending in seamlessly with the population.
When Moore took a sip of chai, a popular drink among the denizens of Kabul, and then blatantly looked at his watch, Dagan hastened his step. He had gone no more than half a dozen paces when Waleed suddenly reached beneath the front of hisperahan tunban, the wide, knee-length billowy shirt worn by so many men in Afghanistan’s capital city. The move struck Dagan as odd.
Then Waleed pushed to a stand, raised his face to the sun that turned the dust in the air to shiny specks of fairy powder, and yelled, “God is the greatest!” in Pashto.
“No, Abdul!” Dagan bellowed just as he was blinded by a flash of bright, white light and deafened by the roar of the bomb Waleed had strapped to his chest.
The percussive effects of the explosion knocked Dagan back two steps, but he remained on his feet. For a moment he was too stunned to do anything but stand in the middle of the street, blinking against the smoke and chaos around him, the screaming that seemed miles away, and the flurry of people that scattered and ran in all different directions. Then, reality set in and he sprinted to the smoldering ruin that was once the café, trying to find anything familiar, anyonefamiliar.
There was nothing but smoke and destruction and the smell of melted flesh.
The toe of his boot bumped something, and when he looked down, he saw it was McShane’s baby-blueperahan tunban.The shirt was deep crimson in spots and completely missing Agent McShane.
