Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(33)

“It’s not your fault,” he crooned. “Nothing is your fault.”

Oh, if only that were true…

*

Umar Sungkar was going to kill someone…

Again.

Because it was bad enough he had to suffer the indignity of that stupid American anak haram—the word for bastard in Malay was so much more satisfying to both think and say—finding his jungle hideout and injecting him with his very own serum. But to make matters worse, five minutes ago he’d heard his men firing recklessly into the foliage!

Didn’t they understand the only way to ensure the release of their brethren—of his brother—was to keep the woman alive? Didn’t they realize this time their objective was leverage, not revenge? Was he the only one among them with an ounce of brains?

Stupid, uneducated, blood-hungry imbeciles! They treated this war he waged against the West as children would treat a game of police and thieves. Something fun and distracting that allowed them to carry around assault rifles, act tough, and frighten people.

He cursed his weakened muscles as he pushed open the truck’s passenger-side door and stumbled out. Reaching in behind him, he grabbed the strap of his weapon and dragged it along. What usually felt like an extension of his own arm was suddenly almost too heavy to lift. But lift it he did. After he skirted the vehicle, propping himself against the front bumper, he brought the butt of the Kalashnikov to his shoulder…and waited…

The minutes crept by. And with every one of them, he thought of another reason to put a bullet into the brain of the first of his men to emerge from the bush. He had never suffered fools lightly, evidenced by the fact that, after he regained consciousness, he had been swift to order the execution of Abdullah.

The first slurring words out of his mouth had been a demand to know how their encampment could have been found. He had removed the woman’s clothes himself, seen to their disposal. And her entire security force should be dead, dying, or severely wounded by the incendiary devices he had placed in their hotel rooms. So how had the anak haram found them? How? Had they missed something?

Shuffling feet and shaking heads had been the only responses to his questions. And then Abdullah, the young recruit from the Philippines who had been brought into Umar’s organization solely for his expertise in the chemical alchemy of creating homemade anesthetics—Umar had needed something strong enough to render the American woman unconscious but not strong enough to risk overdose; her death would gain him nothing—had hesitantly stumbled forward. Digging in his pocket, Abdullah produced two pieces of jewelry.

At first glance, the glittering stones appeared to be diamond earrings. But upon closer inspection, it was clear they were something else entirely.

Transmitters…

Transmitters that had not been listed in the file on the president’s daughter that Umar had nearly bankrupted himself and his entire extended family to buy.

“C-crush them,” he instructed one of his men, watching furiously as the devices were pulverized to dust between two stones.

“We have to run,” another of his men had the gall to proclaim. “The Americans must be coming! They must be—”

“Silence!” Umar commanded, thinking, reasoning. “If they were s-sending in their soldiers, we would already be s-surrounded.” Damn that stupid drug and what it has done to my tongue! “My guess is the man who g-gave her the earrings, the man who had the s-s-supreme arrogance to come here”—and insult and threaten me—“was somehow w-w-working alone.” It would also explain why the mysterious American had not been listed as part of her protection team and why those damned earrings had not been indexed in the file. An independent security contractor, perhaps? It was the only thing to make sense. “Now, Abdullah,” he turned to the young recruit. “Tell me wh-what happened.”

Abdullah tearfully admitted to thinking the stones were real and stealing them off the woman at the night market. After he’d been late delivering the additional syringes of the serum. You see, the narcotic took precision equipment—equipment that had been delayed by weeks—to make, as well as hours to mix. Abdullah had only had time to cook up one dose before Umar and a handful of his men were forced to depart on the mission to abduct the woman. But Abdullah had assured him there would be many more doses waiting at the night market.

There hadn’t been. And the woman had nearly regained enough of her functions to cause Umar real trouble when Abdullah finally appeared.

Now, Umar could have forgiven Abdullah one mistake, but two?

It’d been easy enough to order his second-in-command to put a bullet in Abdullah’s brainpan. It would be just as easy to do the same now to those of his men who were threatening to ruin all his careful planning…

Such mind-bendingly careful planning. There had been finding the desperate hotel maid, paying off the hotel security officer and the men at the window-washing company, bribing the scarf seller at the night market, and the precise timing of the executions and explosions. Not to mention the weeks of misinformation he’d leaked across the Internet to throw the Americans off his trail and point the spotlight on the older sister. All this he had managed to do, to coordinate with the utmost precision because the stars had aligned. Because the American president was due to leave office in a few months and his daughter had dared to allow the horticultural convention to post her scheduled appearance on their website. And all this was about to be ruined by his stupid, overzealous soldiers.