Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(34)

Lara’s long silence filled him with creeping dread. It occurred to him to check the pink camera analog. It took form in his inner vision. It had cables attached to the computer.

He imagined the screen inviting him to download.

One, two, three, four . . . ten . . . thirteen. A flood of JPGs were popping up on the screen. His unease grew. She’d done exactly as he had asked, but she hadn’t been allowed to finish the job. Not good.

He looked at the photos. Corridor, elevator. A carefully visualized floor plan, drawn in pencil. A photo of that dickhead Thaddeus Greaves. Cataloging each piece kept him too busy to freak out. The images she generated sort of . . . shone. They seemed deeper. Three dimensional. The photos of Hu and Anabel had been, too.

Then it hit him. Of course. They were art pieces. Images generated by Lara had a sort of poetry to them. Even the ugly ones.

The photo of Hu made Miles uncomfortable. He had no business feeling sorry for the guy, since he might or might not have to kill him. But Jesus, what kind of * employer wouldn’t let a man stay at his wife’s side during a dangerous operation?

The same * who would lock a girl in a dark cell for months and do sick, sadistic experiments on her. Duh.

No, Hu was a bully and a dickhead. He had chosen the wrong side, and he was ripe for an ass-kicking. That gave him the first useful idea he’d had so far, and he was elaborating on it when Lara’s presence exploded into his head, with a blast of terrified energy.

He almost skidded into a guardrail. He righted the car, set himself to multitask. wtf?

cant stay was her reply. greaves. got loose but not 4 long he uses electroshock to pull me back

He was aghast. coming 4 u stay sharp

no no dont risk urslf. pls ur the only thing that keeps me alive dont come pls dont let them take u from me

He corrected a swerve. Hu’s turn signal winked, far ahead.

Electroshock? Fuck that! He grabbed the phone, called Connor.

“Goddamnit, Miles!” was Con’s greeting. “Why haven’t you—”

“I’m going in,” he announced.

“No! We’re still forty miles behind you, and you can’t—”

“They’re hurting her, Con. Right now, in real time. I’ll talk to you when I can. If you see my truck, bring it along with you. I’ll leave the keys under the seat. Listen up, these are the coordinates of the complex.” He recited them swiftly. “Point two miles before the bridge, offroading through the woods will get you to the river bank, or close to it. A couple hundred meters downstream, and you can see the building, up on the hill. That’s where she is. I’ll tell you more when I can.”

He hung up on Con’s sputtering. He was driving through Mary Creek Canyon, a subdivision of Kolita Springs that petered out into scattered orchards, and beyond that, dry, scrubby hills. Lara? Lara!

She was still gone, but her desperation lingered in his body, tightening it into knots. Fine, then. Fuck it. Show time.

Headlights off. He speeded up, closing the distance between himself and Hu, his eyes fixed on the guy’s taillights. Five hundred meters, Tam had said.

He stabbed the detonator on Tam’s ring.





Not possible. Jason Hu hung onto the wheel. “Fuck, f*ck, f*ck,” he shrieked, as the car bounced off the guardrail, spun, and ended up nose down in the ditch on the opposite side of the road.

Of all times to blow a tire. As wrong as the date of Leah’s surgery, but the doctors had terrified her, and she hadn’t wanted to wait. No way could he slip into Karstow unobserved now. Not that he’d held up much hope to begin with.

He got out and peered at the damage. He was not a man who prided himself on being capable of changing a tire. He’d put in thousands of hours studying chemistry and pharmacology so that he could pay some hairy-knuckled schmuck to change tires for him.

He wrestled the jack out. Fought with lug nuts, wrenches, grease, and dirt in the darkness, the flashlight on his keychain clamped between his teeth for light. He got the bastard on, somehow, more or less. Now to see if his life was still worth something, or if he should just swallow bleach and be done with it.

It only took ten minutes to drive the rest of the way to the Karstow facility. Ten minutes too long. The guard at the gatehouse gave him a bleary-eyed once-over, scanned Hu’s card and waved him through. He accelerated up the hill to the car-park, pulling into his designated slot.

He shoved open the door, and yelped when the door slammed back on him, trapping him against the frame of the car like jaws snapping closed. A cold circle of metal jammed itself under his ear.

“Don’t move,” a low voice rasped.

He gasped for air. “Who . . . who are—”

“Shut up,” the voice growled. “Give me your cell phone.”

Hu struggled to breathe against those squeezing fingers, and pulled out his phone. His assailant took it. His larynx could barely move. “Who are—”

“None of your business. What’s more important is what I can do to Leah.”

Fresh, acid fear made his stomach lurch. “What do you know about Leah?”

“Shhh.” The gun barrel jabbed harder. “Dr. Prateek Singh, Dr. Giuseppe Bonelli. Good team you have there.”

That was Leah’s surgical team. Hu’s legs wobbled. “Who are you?”

“In a few minutes, Dr. Paige Sereno, the anesthesiologist, will come in to do her thing. Quite a tumor Leah’s got. Gonna be touch and go. Lots of chemo in her future. Fucking drag.”