“Of course. It’s the soldier you tried to help back at the third tomb.”
“There’s too much blood on my hands,” he said, checking his phone when it vibrated. “Taxi’s here. I’m off to the airport.”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
“Are you even allowed to do that?”
Ben turned away. Karin watched his back, stiff and resolute, an answer in itself. She watched him walk past Torsten Dahl and Komodo without so much as a glance. She watched him walk out the front door.
She heard the car pull away. Sadness filled her. Ben was a pain, but he was her brother and still one of the few people alive with whom she had shared the terrors of her past. It was a rare day when Rebecca Westing’s name or face didn’t nudge its way into Karin’s thoughts.
It did now. As Ben left for the airport, Karin found herself remembering that distant day when she had lost her faith in people, and life.
Kinimaka’s eyes grew huge. He stared at Hayden as if she were the Devil. After a second, she raised herself up on tiptoes and brushed her soft lips across his cheek.
“Next time,” she said, with a cheeky smile. “Be ready.”
Next time?
Mano watched as she turned and walked out the door, unable to take his eyes off her body. How did the saying go? Hate to see you go…love to watch you leave. That about covered his thoughts for the next sixty seconds. He had no doubts that he wanted to take her out. That wasn’t the issue. But Mano had been raised by his mother to respect authority, to adhere to the rules and the chain of command.
Was it ethical to ask his boss out? Hayden had been his boss for so long the dynamic was set in stone between them. How would that dynamic then transfer itself to a relationship?
It couldn’t hurt to find out, the hot-blooded side of him whispered.
Oh, but it could, the more conservative side shot back. It could ruin everything. He loved his job. He loved his boss — as a boss. He loved the new team, even Alicia. The hours he’d spent with her and Belmonte in that bar in Vienna opened up a whole new side of her. Alicia was a woman with no agenda, but with a past that was, literally, explosive. Mano had only heard a brief part of it, but his heart had instantly melted.
After a while, he realized he was alone in the bathroom, staring through the open door. The techs were staring at him. With a grunt, he strode back into the main room. Hayden stood by the big window, framed in sunlight, her long, blond hair on fire.
She turned at once, happy. “Drake and Myles will be landing tonight. 8 p.m.”
A tech guy stood up so fast he knocked a kitschy brass table over. The noise didn’t even reach him or make him stop turning a tablet computer around and around in his hands.
Hayden put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”
The man stared at her and then thrust the tablet into her face. “Shaun Kingston,” he said. “Owner of Kingston Firearms. One of the biggest legit arms dealers in the country. If he’s in bed with the Koreans…”
Hayden stared at the picture. “Then we’re up shitstorm creek.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Mai Kitano faced the facility’s commander, disdain twisting her face.
“Those rags you wear,” he said, sadistic glee making him look like an evil circus clown. “They’re torn. Muddy. Maybe we should remove them for you.”
She and Smyth had been tied by the wrists to upended bedsteads, their hands twisted through broken, rusty springs and then secured to the iron side rails.
“You can try.”
The grinning base commander faltered and took a step back, reading the certainty in her eyes. A soldier stepped from behind, clearly not interpreting the situation, and strode forward. Mai instantly took the weight of her body on her wrists and kicked out with both feet. The first strike knocked the soldier to the left, straight into the hard, oncoming right.
The sound of his neck snapping silenced the room.
“No! No! Tie her feet.” The commander’s expression turned from uncertain to livid in a millisecond.
The other soldiers hesitated, not trusting their own skills. Mai smiled viciously.
“Fools!” The commander blustered, but didn’t repeat the order.
One of the soldiers leaned into him. “Should we shoot her?”
“Probably.” The commander let out a deep sigh that made his fat jowls wobble. “But not yet. Wait.” He stalked from the room, shouting at a subordinate to go and fetch him the sat phone.
Smyth regarded her with the utmost respect. “Even tied up.” He laughed. “Even tied up you’re lethal. Maggie, I gotta say — you’re my dream girl.”
Mai shook her head, unable to hide the smile. It soon evaporated though when the sound of Dai Hibiki’s groans filtered through the battle rage. The undercover Japanese agent had so far borne the brunt of the ill treatment. The Koreans had beaten him to the ground, then kicked and stomped on him until he stopped moving. Mai had heard more than one bone break in the onslaught. Her heart and mind wept, but her outward facade remained carved in stone.
“What is this place?” she asked, always digging. “What do you do here?”
The soldiers just stared at her. Then, from the corner of the room, came a clicking noise. A man, as thin, ugly and repugnant as a stick insect, rose, finely knobbed cane in hand. He didn’t stop moving until he could reach out and touch Mai, well within lethal range.
“You still want to know?” His voice cracked, old with pain, old with terrible experience. “Even now before all these weapons. You still want to know? That is why I love you, Miss Kitano. The legend of Shiranu is real! It is real!” He cackled on like a man driven insane. “That is why, even locked away here in this purgatory, I have tried to follow your every move, your every victory even before Tokyo Coscon.” He raised the tip of the cane and shoved it against what he could see of her flat stomach. “It would be a pleasure to die by your hands. Or feet. As you prefer.”
Mai looked momentarily at a loss. A weapon rattled and clicked. “Come away from her, Doctor.”
“Doctor? You run this place, bud?” Smyth rattled his bedstead. “C’mon. What can it hurt? You done life here, man, longer than any prison sentence. What gives?”
The doctor bowed his head. “At first, we outlined a proposal to propagate super assassins. Sleepers. It eventually became a leadership-run People’s Republic program.”
“Assassins?” Smyth almost laughed. “You kiddin’ me, doc?”
Mai watched the end of the cane being pressed into the flesh just below her navel. She let her gaze run along its length and then up until they met the doctor’s eyes. “Is this what you want?”
“Yes, Miss Kitano.”
“Then speak.”
It was one of the oddest situations imaginable. The captive promising death to the captor if they played nice and spilled the beans. Only Mai Kitano could conjure such extreme and fatal adoration. And the inept guards watched partly in fascination, and partly because they had no orders to the contrary.
“These assassins pass no blame on to Korea. It’s what’s known as a ‘sparkling blow’ against the West. Clean. Spotless. Death. It can be attributed to a chance act of ferocity, triggered by a single predetermined phrase.”
“So why use them now?”
The doctor nodded ever so slightly at Mai and dug the end of his cane into her stomach. His next words caused a furor.
“Officially, they are not yet in use. General Kwang Yong has commandeered the program for his own personal means and gains.”