Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(116)

It was Anabel. “Bad girl,” she crooned. “Daddy gonna be so mad.”

Anabel looked terrible. Eyes white rimmed and staring, sunken shadows around them, twitching muscles in the tense mask of her face.

“It was like you said,” Blond Dreadlocks remarked from the front seat. “The coercion didn’t work on her. I had to come up with something else, right off the cuff.” He hesitated, then prompted, “No time to plan.”

“Why don’t you just pull over and get out? Get yourself a cab.” Anabel sounded supremely bored. “We’re done here, so get lost. As soon as I tape her up, I can drive. I’ll take it from here.”

“Hey, why the attitude?” Dreadlocks’s voice was aggrieved. “I extracted her for you, twenty-four minutes from the second the facial recog bot identified her, with no pursuit or alarm! It’s f*cking unbelievable!”

“Poor baby,” Anabel mocked. “Had to use your atrophied little brain the old-fashioned way when your psi didn’t work? That must have really hurt, Rockwell. Get out, now. Your B.O. is bugging me.”

“Screw this shit,” Rockwell muttered. He jerked the car to a stop.

He got out into the rain and walked away, leaving the car in a lane of traffic, door hanging wide open.

Anabel wound duct tape around Lara’s arms, making agony flare in her injured wrist, taking her time even as the horns of the cars backed up behind began honking angrily. Lara had sagged down onto the seat onto the other woman’s lap, unable to stay upright.

When she was immobilized, Anabel leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. “I missed you, honey. So did the big boss. You’ve been a bad little girl, but he’ll deal with you. And I hope he lets me watch.”

Lara tried to visualize the computer so she could say something to Miles, but then the needle stung her again.

The impulse vanished, drowned in darkness.





27


yo! wtf? why r u not answering?

Miles forced the panic down. Panic would not help. He crouched in the trees, peering through the scope of the H&K G36 at Greaves’ house.

Calm. Focus. He had to be ready, when his chance presented itself.

But it had been several hours since Lara’s last response, and he was f*cking tense.

If they’d left each other on a harsh note, he could have hypothesized that she was giving him the silent treatment, but Christ, they’d parted ways after exchanging what amounted to holy vows of goddamn undying love and devotion. So what the f*ck . . . ?

She could be sleeping. Right. On a bus, as nervous and scared as she was, surrounded by strangers? Maybe all that accumulated adrenaline had crashed her, and she was snoring on the bus, mouth open. At least, the Lara light in his head was still on. But it was strange, indistinct. Different from before.

Fine, then. Asleep. It was the only possible explanation that didn’t scare him shitless, so he was clinging to it.

It felt like a trap, the lack of security around the Blaine house. The place had been gated, of course, but there was no sign of an alarm system. This was a house Greaves had bought for his family twenty-five years ago. A convenient place for the guy and his entourage to park themselves before the ceremony set for the following afternoon. No massive security like Kolita Springs, or the Spruce Ridge complex, or the chateau in Bordeaux, or the country manor in England, or the South Sea island, or the sixteenth-century Tuscan villa, or the luxury high-rise penthouses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai.

Miles crept through the drenched trees, peering through the scope again. They were up and about, even at this hour. Almost five A.M., though the sky hadn’t started to lighten yet. He’d identified Greaves through the window, plus four others, two men and two women. The guy’s staff seemed somewhat reduced these days.

But then, Miles had killed quite a few of them himself.

He wished he had the materials to blow the place up. If he’d been able to access Aaro’s cache, or the McClouds, or Tam and Val’s, he could have flattened the guy, ka-boom. If wishes were horses. He was lucky he had the stolen H&K and a full magazine.

Looked like the big guy was being served breakfast. There was a breakfast nook off the back porch that overlooked the lake, but as luck would have it, Greaves was seated in a chair that was out of Miles’ line of sight, behind a pillar. He saw a hand occasionally, reaching out to have coffee poured, to take a pat of butter. Minions scurried to do the guy’s bidding. But to get a straight shot at Greaves, he would need a boat to row several meters out into the lake.

It was almost as if the guy knew that Miles was out there, and had positioned himself deliberately. But that was paranoid.

pls pls pls lara talk2me

Okay, stop. Last one. The transcript of unanswered messages was way too long. It would scroll for pages.

He crept up to the position that gave him a clear view through the French doors that led out onto the side porch. That room was dark, but he saw lights filtering from an open doorway, and mapped the house with his augmented senses, as he had done in the forest fight. Greaves glowed hot in the front room, a nasty throb of powerful energy. There were the two who had been with Greaves in the forest fight. A car was coming, and he crouched lower in the foliage and followed the headlights. They slowed and stopped at the gate.

He settled down, positioned his scope, crosshairs over the front door, careful not to let himself get blinded by the oncoming headlights.