Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)

Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)

Shannon McKenna




Chapter


1




Find the weak spot. Then exploit it.

The brutally simple directive repeated in Val’s head until it was meaningless babble. Val pushed the white noise to the back of his mind and clicked “play” on the footage he’d collected that day.

For the twentieth time, he watched the woman unload the wriggling toddler from the SUV and head toward the waterfront park playground. He had memorized their every move—the swings, then the slide, the merry-go-round, the jungle gym. Then came a horsie ride on the woman’s shoulders through the trees. And the moment when she held the child up to swipe and grab the brown leaves that clung to the branches. He had memorized every nod, every smile, every hug.

The jeans, hiking boots, and shapeless down jacket the woman wore did nothing to hide the feline grace of her slender body. Her brown hair was twisted into a loose, thick dark braid. She wore no makeup. The child reached higher to grab for the leaves, giggling.

Children were always a weak spot—but not one he could bring himself to exploit. He hated when there was a child involved. It made him tense, anxious. It destroyed the hard-won professional calm that usually rendered him such an effective operative. Had he known about the existence of the child, he would have refused the job, no matter how Hegel blustered and threatened. The worst they could do to him was kill him, no? Let them try. Others had already, several times. Eventually someone would succeed. It wouldn’t matter a damn who had done the deed after he was dead.

The job had seemed straightforward when Hegel presented it to him. Locate this woman who was in hiding—one of Val’s specialties, considering his hacking abilities and his skills at social engineering. Deliver her to Georg Luksch, willingly, if possible, under false pretenses if not. Failing that, by any means necessary. Coercion. Abduction.

He did not like working for Luksch or having any dealings with the mafiya. Too much history, too many ugly memories. But Hegel had pulled rank, yanked strings. And Val had convinced himself that he could stay cool and just get the job done. Wrong.

The first thing he had done was to send out feelers to all of the best sources for fake identities. Using a judicious blend of threats and bribes, he had obtained a list of the passports that Steele had procured for herself and her daughter. A few telephone calls and some discreet hacking into Homeland Security databases had ensured that Steele was never going to be traveling with any of those documents, at least the ones he knew about. Now he wished he had not been so efficient.

He wanted her to escape. Damned unprofessional of him.

The room was cold, growing dark with the onset of the early January sunset. He wore nothing but a pair of baggy sweat pants, but he stayed motionless on the floor in a meditative position in front of the computer monitor, trying in vain to settle his mind down to the stillness necessary to perform his personal technique of data processing.

It was based on the way Imre had taught him to play chess years ago as a boy. Deceptively simple, but requiring profound concentration. He put the information, no matter how irrelevant or superficial, into a floating construct in his mind that Imre had named “the matrix” and held them suspended in a transparent form that he could rotate, turn inside out, dissassemble, reassemble, contemplate from every side. Then he detached from it, floated away, and quietly observed.

Take three steps back and breathe, Imre had said.

That distance was the key element. It kept his mind loose, soft and open, leaving space for insights, solutions, realizations to arise.

Not tonight. He’d sat there motionless for hours while dark fell, and muscles cramped in protest. Solutions and insights were not forthcoming. He could not take three steps back. He was distracted. Angry that there was a child. Anger derailed the process. He had to stay cool.

And God knows, staring at Tamara Steele for days on end was no way to get or stay cool. He had never seen a woman so vividly beautiful. Her beauty was intensified by something burning inside her, a bright light, a driving force. She disturbed his dreams, unsettled his thoughts, stirred his body. And utterly destroyed his concentration.

Imre had earnestly explained that the matrix process worked for solving ethical problems, too, but that sermon had been wasted on the young Vajda, cynical, thieving hoodlum that he’d been.

Hmmph. An irrelevant thought. It had no place. It would not serve. He dismissed it, waving it away in his mind like a stinging insect.

He knew every detail of Steele’s schedule, all centered on the child. Weekly visits to the pediatrician and child psychologist, trips to the Children’s Museum, story hour for toddlers at the library, the Mommy & Me swim class, the playground at the riverside park. No variations to speak of, except for that unwary visit to Conor McCloud’s house that had given him his opening.

She had her groceries delivered. No doubt she did her personal shopping via Internet. She spoke to no one but her daughter’s doctors, visited no one, never went to a coffee shop or restaurant. He did not blame her. The child’s schedule was already a dangerous level of exposure for her. As demonstrated by the amount of data he’d gathered on her in the two weeks since he’d finally pinpointed her residence.

It had taken weeks of data analysis and tedious waiting before the passive surveillance he’d been conducting upon the McClouds had paid off. Steele showed up one day on the long-range telecamera mounted to a tree in the park across the street from Connor and Erin McCloud’s residence. With a toddler on her hip, to his blank astonishment.