A sigh. “I just wanna be part of the team, you know? If I can’t be a fighter let me be a geek. Like Karin. Drake said it’d be okay.”
“Did he?” Mai wasn’t entirely sure the Yorkshireman would have agreed.
“Well, he didn’t say no. So that’s a yes. Right?”
Mai read the flippant way Grace tossed the situation away and decided to dig a little deeper. The barriers were up. Maybe a little heartfelt admission would help. “Look, I’m grateful all these amazing friends came to help me. I really am. But I’m also really mad at them right now for endangering so many lives, including their own! I’m not a heartless bitch, Grace, I’m a caring one and that’s why I’m furious.”
“Even at Drake?”
“Especially at Drake.”
Grace sniffed. “I like him. I’ll take him off your hands.”
Mai did a quick double take. The girl wasn’t joking. “All right, all right, let’s get real. You’re sixteen going on thirty, I get that. But Grace, you need your own life. The fourteen years between now and then are the years that are going to shape you, make you, and heal you. Believe it — when we get back to the States it’s straight to school for you, young lady.”
Grace pouted. Mai had intended the statement to be part fact, part joke, but the huge implications of it suddenly weighed heavy upon her. Could she ever go back? Could Chika? The Yakuza would hunt them forever. They would have to be in hiding for the rest of their desperate lives.
She studied Grace closely. “Is that it? Nothing else?”
“Whilst Drake was out sorting the bikes and the cash yesterday,” Grace spoke her mind out of the blue. “I got a call from the investigator, Hardy. He told me…” the seventeen-year-old paused, the words caught in her throat.
Mai reached out, sensing her distress.
“He told me that my real parents have been traced and that they’re dead. They blamed themselves for losing me, couldn’t cope, and fell apart. They just… gave up.”
Mai saw tears in Grace’s eyes and grabbed hold of her, hugging her close and cursing silently at the world. It couldn’t even give this girl a break. Grace was trying her heart out, struggling to overcome her past, and Mai wished she could just get one fucking break.
“I’ll train you,” she said abruptly, out of nowhere.
Grace sniffed and pulled away. “Eh? You’ll what?”
“I don’t know.” Mai’s head was mush, full of doubt, uncertainty, anger and even fear.
“You said you’d train me. I heard you.”
Drake heard and came right over. “Mai’s a great teacher,” he said with an idiotic smile that Mai wanted to slap right off. “You couldn’t do better.”
Grace looked even happier. “I’d love that. I really would. I’m already fast, maybe half-trained after… well, you know. See, I remember that. Oh, this is great. Let’s start now!”
Mai could have slapped herself for blurting out such thoughtless words. To train somebody was to consciously place them in harm’s way. It was not a passive act, not even a defensive one — not the way she did it. If she trained Grace it would be to turn her into a weapon.
And, after that, what came next?
Where do we go from here?
CHAPTER THIRTY
Hayden entered the home she shared with Mano, mulling over all the fragmentary pieces that comprised the Pythians’ latest plan. This mastermind, this leader she had already met called Tyler Webb, seemed to have gathered a veritable mental institution together — an institution of like-minded, ultra-wealthy, powerful, repressed and psychopathic individuals. If aerosolizing bubonic plague wasn’t enough, then how about ransoming and threatening the world’s most formidable emerging superpower?
Probably not.
Memories of other Pythian projects filtered through her mind as she closed and locked the door. Galleons and Tesla and what was the big one? Saint Germain? One day she would have to hit serious research mode to see if some clues to the future were already emerging. Maybe it would help to advance Webb’s incarceration date.
For they would get him, dead or alive. Of that she had no doubt.
Kinimaka headed for the kitchen, already rubbing his hands together and no doubt imagining up a grand feast. The couch shuddered as his left hip rammed into it. No matter. The Hawaiian was a substantial amount of incredible things but he was never going to be her dance partner.
Hayden headed for the shower, taking her cellphone with her. They were still very much on call, waiting for developments to emerge from China and Taiwan, but the little side trips like this were what kept them human, and on top of their game. The water was hot and refreshing, pounding down onto her shoulders and spine. She lingered a while and then wrapped the big soft towel around herself and stepped into their bedroom, casting around for fresh clothes.
Her phone rang. It was the hospital calling. Hayden’s antennae rose instantly and then stayed on high alert as the head of security spoke for several minutes.
“Nothing was taken,” he finished. “Nobody was harmed. It all seems whacky to me. Just this letter P drawn on the wall.”
Hayden found her gaze transfixed on something as she listened. “Where was it drawn on the wall?”
“Umm, next to Miss Fox’s head.”
Hayden tried to drag her eyes away from something but couldn’t. “And that’s it? No damage? No… letter or anything? Nothing else that shouldn’t be there?”
“Not that we can make out. Do you know what’s going on here, Agent Jaye?”
“It’s not Agent—” she began and then a hand fell on her shoulder, almost making her scream. Twisting away, letting the towel and the cellphone fall, reaching for her gun, she stared into the eyes of her attacker.
It was Mano, now transfixed and distracted by the sight of her body.
“Put your tongue back in.” She reached down and picked up the phone. “Listen,” she said. “We’re on our way. Don’t touch anything.”
“We’re going now?” Mano’s puppy-dog eyes almost made her smile.
But then she remembered.
She turned, eyes again drawn to the far side of the room where a high chest of drawers sat in the corner. “What do you see, Mano? What do you see?”
“Only the greatest ass in the known universe,” he said. “How did I get so lucky?”
“There!” Hayden jabbed her finger forward, catching his attention. “What do you see over there?”
“A chest of drawers,” he said a little hesitantly. “A cordless phone. An alarm clock, not my favorite since its set so high I have to get out of bed to switch the damn thing off. A spare mag. Whoops.”
Hayden gave up and climbed over the bed, gesturing at the drawers. “I didn’t leave my underwear hanging over the side of this open drawer. I didn’t leave it bunched up inside.” She scooped every item out onto the carpet.
Kinimaka looked over her shoulder. “Crap.”
“And I certainly didn’t write that fucking letter P on the bottom of the drawer.”
Hayden rose fast, suddenly shivering, suddenly feeling exposed. Quickly she grabbed the towel and sent her eyes roving over every corner of the room, searching every nook and cranny and light fitting and lamp.
“We’re being watched, Mano,” she said. “Now I’m sure. The Pythians are watching us.”
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Matt Drake arrived in Hsinchu City, Taiwan, with limited Intel and no genuine idea of what to expect. Hayden had briefed them during the journey, their leader trying to prepare them as best she knew how but, as he knew, mission expectations and subsequent reality were often poles apart. Since the Pythians had discovered the supposed lost kingdom of Mu buried somewhere beneath the silty waters of the Taiwan Strait that separated China and Taiwan, close to the place where the Awa Maru had been torpedoed over half a century ago, very little had leaked out.