Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel(68)

“This is boring,” I said.

“Boring is good,” Ranger said into my earbud.

People began drifting in from the convention center at 11:30. A few here. A few there. They gathered in clumps. They conducted business on their smartphones. They looked at their watches and looked at the closed ballroom doors. Hungry.

I watched a man come up the escalator. He didn’t nod or wave, but he exchanged a silent communication with the Rangeman guy. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt, tan slacks, scuffed brown shoes. FBI, I thought. He looked pleasant. I could see a slight gun bulge under his sport coat, and an earbud attached by a curly wire to a battery pack. Not high-tech like mine. FBI. He’d be jealous of my earbud.

“Hello,” I said. “Anybody home?”

“Babe?” Ranger said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m waiting at the service elevator for Semov.”

“On my floor?”

“Yes. And then I’ll stay with Semov.”

“Okay. Over and out.”

The man in the blue shirt ambled past me. He went to the end of the hall and used a key to open the door to the mechanical room.

“A guy in a blue shirt just went into the mechanical room,” I said.

“I’ve got him,” Tank said. “He’s FBI going in to check on the air handler.”

“Just saying.”

“Hang tight,” Tank told me.

People poured out of the convention center and filled the corridor. The noise level rose. Men pushed against the ballroom doors and tested the doorknobs. Everyone looked happy. Lots of laughing. I figured there was vodka tasting going on this morning in the convention center. Probably they had a vodka fountain at the breakfast buffet.

“Moving out,” Ranger said into my earbud.

The door to the service pantry opened and Semov’s six aides strode out, followed by Semov, followed by Ranger, followed by two men with the old-school earbuds who I figured were FBI. They cut a path through the crowd, a door opened at the far end of the ballroom, and they disappeared inside.

Moments later the remaining doors to the ballroom opened and everyone stampeded in. I looked down the hall at the mechanical room.

“Did the FBI guy come out of the mechanical room?” I asked Tank.

“I didn’t see him come out. He might have been told to stay there until the banquet is over. I can’t talk to him. He’s not on my frequency.”

I walked down the hall and knocked on the door. “Hello,” I said. “Are you okay in there?”

The door opened, an arm reached out and grabbed me, and I was yanked inside.

“Oh shit!” Tank said into my earbud.





TWENTY-NINE


I CAUGHT A glimpse of someone in a ball cap, and I was hit in the face and knocked off my feet. It was Vlatko. He looked down at me. His hair was dark brown under the ball cap, and he had sunglasses stuck over the brim. His injured eye was horrible, stitched together in a ragged, bunched-up scar that sliced through his eyebrow and ran into his cheek. He was wearing a lightweight gray hoodie and jeans. I could see the odd tattoo on his neck.

I tasted blood, and I didn’t know if it was from my nose or my mouth. I was on my hands and knees, still fuzzy from being hit.

“What?” I said.

The earbud was on the floor. Vlatko picked it up and smiled. “Are you listening?” he said into the earbud. “I have your girlfriend, and she’s going to be my ticket out. If anyone comes near me, I’ll gut her. You know I can. She’s already bleeding. It wouldn’t take much to finish her off.”

Vlatko dropped the earbud onto the floor and crushed it under his heel. He grabbed me and dragged me to my feet. I looked past him and saw the FBI guy on the floor in a pool of blood. His neck had been slashed so that his head was almost completely severed from his neck.

“That could easily be you,” Vlatko said.

“You killed him.”

“He came in at the wrong time. I was placing the polonium.”

I looked over at the air handler. “You’re going to poison everyone in the ballroom?”

“Clever, don’t you think? An act of terrorism. A political statement rather than a planned assassination of a single political figure. I admit it hasn’t gone as smooth as I’d hoped, but the job is done. And I have you. You’ll get me out of here, and then I’ll skin you alive and leave you for, what’s his name now, Ranger?”

The dead agent, the blood, the skinning alive, were mind-numbingly terrifying. I was telling myself to focus, to be alert, not to be overwhelmed by the fear and the horror. When the opportunity came, I had to be ready to run. Yeah, right. My legs were shaky, and my heart was beating so hard my vision was blurred. Running wasn’t currently an option.

“It won’t work,” I said. “They know we’re in here. Someone will burst in any second and stop you.”

“It’s too late. The polonium’s in the system. In fifteen minutes it will reach the ballroom.”

“All those people …”

“Dead,” Vlatko said.

Acting more from instinct than coherent thought I staggered back, flung my arm out, and pulled the fire alarm that hung on the wall. Vlatko yanked me away, but the alarm was already wailing, red ceiling lights flashing in the mechanical room. He put his knife to my neck and shoved me into the storage cabinet in the corner, and I realized how he’d managed to get into the room undetected. There was a hole punched into the wall between the mechanical room and the service pantry.