Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(97)

A homeless man blocked his path through the crowd, thrusting out a greasy palm in supplication.

“Out of my way,” Pauly said, stepping in just close enough to send an elbow into the fellow’s gut.

To his surprise, the blow failed to land. In a movement Pauly only saw from a corner of his eye, a knife glittered, then plunged forward in three quick strokes.

Trying to bring the Glock around toward this new threat, Pauly stumbled, a scarlet fountain spraying from his throat onto the people crowded around him. As the screaming bystanders scrambled to get away, Pauly felt the wet slipperiness of the floor rise up to kiss him.

The red eyes of the vagabond followed him down.





99


Her face, arms, and legs tanned to a dark brown, Janet stared at her reflection in the mirror, another of the small but regular gifts from Tall Bear. She had dyed her already dark hair black and clothed herself in the manner of modern Navajo women, something she thought of as Avant-Arabic. Plumped out with her advancing pregnancy, she doubted that even Jack would recognize her at first glance.

Now, as she surveyed the hogan that had been her home and office for the last several weeks, Janet double-checked her pack. She had the laptop, her 9mm subcompact, and an assortment of false documents.

Shit. She had been so close to sending her next communiqué to Jack, information he desperately needed to know, that the loss of the link to her mysterious source of Internet access had come as a complete shock. It had been so reliable, she had begun to take the amazing capabilities of the system for granted, hacking her way along progressively more complex links in her search for the people who had betrayed Jonathan Riles and his team. If not for the urgency of her need to contact Jack, she would have waited a few days, just to see if the link restored itself. But that was out of the question.

Although Janet didn’t yet know the name of who was behind their betrayal, she had been able to trace a string of encrypted communications that had originated from within the White House, possibly from someone within the new president’s inner circle. Just as importantly, the messages had been directed to Jorge Esteban Espe?osa, the head of the largest and most violent of the Colombian drug cartels.

Piecing together what she could obtain directly from CIA and FBI files had brought her to a dead end, but early this morning Janet had gotten a break. As she checked one of the Interpol subnets she had been monitoring, she discovered an obscure report from a Caracas field operative assigned to track the movements of the Espe?osa Cartel’s top hit man. Eduardo Montenegro, a.k.a. El Chupacabra, a.k.a. the Colombian. Apparently, the Colombian had dropped out of sight completely just before the string of US killings attributed to Jack, including the assassinations of the FBI director and the president.

Janet had run a complete background check on El Chupacabra. The man had weighty dossiers at the CIA, the FBI, and the ATF, but the French government files had the best information. The hit man had come to the attention of French Interpol because of his interest in all data related to Carlos the Jackal. Following this line of inquiry, the French security services had discovered that the Colombian had a much stronger obsession, the American killer codenamed the Ripper.

Janet stepped out into the gathering twilight, pausing just long enough to fill her twin canteens from the water tank. Looking up at the stars starting to populate the darkening sky, Janet glanced down at her stomach. No use crying over something she couldn’t change. She sure wouldn’t get to the end of her long trail by standing here.

Hitching her pack higher onto her shoulder, Janet began climbing the arroyo that led up to the ridgeline south of the hogan. Fat and pregnant or not, Jack needed her, and Janet was about to reenter the game.





100


The sunlight streaming in the floor-to-ceiling windows caressed her face, bringing Jennifer back from the land of the dead. Her dreams had not been good, images of her mom and dad holding each other in grief contrasted with the joyful laughter of Mark and Heather, as if her brother and best friend were glad that she was gone. It was all the senseless random imagery of dreams, but it left her cold.

A knock on the door brought her bolt upright in bed. What time was it? She had fallen asleep without bothering to undress.

The door in the other room opened.

“Hello? Maid service?”

Jennifer cleared her throat. “No, thank you. Could you come back later?”

“Sí, se?orita.” The click of the door closing once again brought Jennifer’s heart back out of her throat.

Jesus. It was only the cleaning lady. You’d think she’d never stayed in a hotel before.

Jennifer rose from the bed, stretched, and ran her fingers through her hair, surprised by how little of it there was. She had heard of people having lost limbs and still feeling them, but phantom hair? Please.

The window beckoned to her, and she answered the call, moving right up against the pane, looking out and down across the cityscape below. Something about the bright sunlight on the streets of Las Vegas seemed wrong. Like Dracula’s castle in daylight, it was somehow diminished, robbed of the glory that only darkness could bring. She had really been looking forward to the luxury of this penthouse suite, but the opulence of the Bellagio made her feel so small and out of place that she might as well have picked the vampire’s castle as her lair. That would have better fitted her mood.

A shower would help. Maybe the hot steam of the “His” shower would do more to lift her spirits than a jetted bath.