Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)(70)

People passed by without noticing him lurking motionless in the dark. Then a couple came ambling by. The tall, fair-haired man’s face was revealed in a beam of light slicing through the tree boughs. Sean McCloud and his wife, Liv. Sean spotted him and turned off the path. He guided his wife across the frosted grass until they stood before him.

The man’s piercing eyes made Val squirm. The picture he made revealed too much. Him sitting like an * with no coat outside a woman’s closed door. Hands filled with a bristling array of Steele’s deadly hair ornaments. A whining, hungry dog hoping to be let in.

Begging for scraps.

“What are you doing out here in the cold?” McCloud demanded.

Val’s long exhalation made a vaporous cloud in front of his face. “Standing guard,” he said.

His wife, a luscious, buxom brunette, gave him a polite but suspicious look. “If there’s any woman on earth who can look out for herself, it’s Tam,” she said.

Val acknowledged that with a shrug. “Overkill.”

McCloud grunted. “Well, then. You’ve got your work cut out for you.” He hesitated, looking puzzled. “Good luck,” he added. “I think.”

Val inclined his head. The couple turned and walked on. McCloud threw a troubled glance back over his shoulder. The low murmur of their voices faded into the darkness.

He was good at telling lies. The trick was to enter so completely into whatever role he was playing, he practically believed them himself even as he told them. But what he had said to Steele was not a lie. He had blurted out the raw truth to her. More truth than he’d ever told to anyone, even Imre. Braided together with half-truths, yes, but even so.

I’ve never wanted anything the way I want you. The truth of those words reverberated through him, an explosion from within. It blasted his whole relationship to the world out of alignment. A dangerous secret.

Dangerous secrets are beautiful, don’t you agree? He had taken Steele’s words in Shibumi as meaningless banter, but now, they rang in his head, as a fundamental truth. Imre had always been his dangerous secret. A treasure that he had to hide just so it could survive.

Most people had to hide their ugliness, their shame. With him, the situation was inverted. He had to keep the beautiful things secret.

Or else risk finding them dead on the bathroom floor.

Ironic. A man like him compelled by an irrational longing to protect Steele, instead of exploiting her. A dangerous secret, indeed. Like her jewel-studded pendant earring bombs. Her taser necklace. It was an urge he would have to keep secret even from her.

He sensed very strongly that she would not welcome it.



The key rattled in the heavy metal door, jolting Imre out of his deep contemplation. He had been mentally walking through the rooms of the Uffizi Gallery, looking at all the pictures he could call to mind. Which was to say, all of them, though his favorites were the clearest.

The mental construct disintegrated. Waves of faintness and dread washed over him.

Another visit. It pleased Gabor Novak to check upon Imre’s progress, or degeneration, to put it more clearly. The man liked to prod and pry for weaknessess, to inflict all the psychological torment that he was able. He was fiendishly talented at it.

Imre’s defenses were limited to silence, but it was a poor defense. Already, he was cringing as if he was to be beaten or burned.

The metal door swung wide, clanging with an ear-bruising bang against the concrete blocks. Two large men walked in, one training an automatic pistol at Imre, the other carrying a folding chair.

Novak shuffled into the room and seated himself. Beaming.

Imre focused somewhere beyond the man’s shoulder, clasping and unclasping his hands and fighting the urge to sit upon them to hide his frightened fingers.

He’d told himself not to be afraid. He was dying anyway, no? Soon he would lose everything he had to lose. If some parts, like fingers, for instance, died sooner, what of it? The pain would soon be behind him.

His efforts were futile. He could not talk himself out of the fear.

Imre was grateful, at least, that he was not wearing his spectacles. Only one lens was still intact. The other had been shattered in the second beating. Having one corrected eye and the other blurred gave him a blinding headache. Since the last thing he needed was more pain from any quarter, he had given up on the glasses altogether, and hidden them under his mattress. Thus, he could not see the hideous details of Novak’s face, the feverish glow of those jaundiced, bulbous eyes, only a malevolent blur.

Although he smelled the stench of the man’s breath all too well.

“I have been thinking about you a great deal, Imre.” Novak had the air of a man conferring an honor. “I believe you and I have something in common.” The man’s voice was pleasant, chatty.

God forbid, Imre thought, dropping his gaze to his twitching fingers. He willed them to lie still, to not draw attention to themselves.

“I can see by your color, your thinness, that you are being consumed by some wasting disease,” Novak said. “Cancer?”

Surprise betrayed Imre into looking up and meeting Novak’s eyes.

He dropped his gaze just as quickly, but Novak chuckled, pleased.

“I thought so. Liver, stomach, brain? Not long for you now, is it? I can feel it on you, Imre. How ironic for Vajda, is it not? Working so valiantly to save the life of a dying man. How long did they give you?”