Dreamwalker (25 page)

Reflexively, Damon heaved himself off the sagging mattress, sweeping Rory with him to the floor. He crouched over her, gun in hand, as he sent his mental sense questing for any hint of threat. But he picked up only surprise and annoyance all around, the nearest source being right under him.

When minutes crawled by without any follow-up, he stood up and helped Rory to her feet. “That was close.”

“What’d you do that for?” She eyed him with sleepy disgruntlement, naked and gorgeous despite her tousled hair.

“That was a bomb. Somewhere close by, maybe less than three blocks away.”

Rory blinked up at him, white showing around green irises. “A bomb?”

Ignoring her question, Damon went to the window to look out, still scanning their surroundings. What he could see of the alley below was empty, the streetlight at one end washing the scene in yellow with dawn more than an hour away.

The night was quiet, as though the world held its breath, waiting for another explosion; even the dogs had been startled into silence. Smoke drifted to his nose, acrid with the stench of burning gasoline. Since the smell could be from an accelerant or perhaps a Molotov cocktail, it didn’t tell him much.

His arms prickled with foreboding. In the time since they’d begun their campaign to distract Karadzic’s security, there’d been unrest and violence, but this was the closest they’d been to a bombing. And the situation was still heating up.

Rumors were flying like bats at sunset, pitting Kosovar against Kosovar, against Serb, against KFOR. Stirring the pot had been as easy as waking nightmares. It didn’t hurt that the rumors held a grain of truth, starting with Osum’s murder of a member of his clan.

“Well? Do you see anything?” Rory rose on tiptoes, the upward tracks of her hard nipples along Damon’s spine attesting to her movements. Gripping his arms, she propped her chin on his shoulder and peered out.

“Nothing.” That was what worried him. There should be something. In a normal world, people would be streaming out of the buildings, rubbernecking and swapping speculation. Even here, members of the gang claiming this sector would normally feel confident enough—territorial enough—to check out the disturbance. Yet no one was about. Had the unrest escalated that much already?

Finally, in the distance, Damon heard the wailing approach of a KFOR unit. And still the street remained deserted. Of course, this time the avoidance could simply be a reflection of local sentiments. But the reasoning didn’t reassure him.

Events were getting out of hand. He didn’t like it that his master thief was in the thick of things.

Eyeing the bread for sale in the bakery coming up, Rory clumped beside Damon, ostensibly an old woman with her grown-up son. It still felt strange to be studying a mark with a partner. Accepting information and instructions for planting stuff was one thing; that was similar enough to how she operated with Felix that she could overlook it. But for the third time, she was actually providing camouflage while the Fed used his incubus power to observe her potential target. Today, he’d needed an excuse to linger in one of the markets to identify contacts in the target’s network. Hence, the fiction of old mother and son, made easier by the forthright friendliness of the vendors.

Technically, it was beyond the scope of the job they’d commissioned her for, but she was taking the long view: anything that undermined the auction was a Good Thing.

She had to admit that working this closely with Damon added a different punch to her enjoyment. It wasn’t the usual challenge, but more a sense of . . . fun. She grinned inwardly. It also allowed her to pretend that the Fed was a fellow thief, rather than a government-mandated hit man.

When the bag he carried for her was half-full, Damon signaled that he had what he needed and they could leave. After a final exchange of gossip and pleasantries with the seller, she added to her purchases the cheese freebie she’d been given and moved on.

Having had to eschew the use of the Yugo due to their mother-son fiction, they returned to the hostel on foot, taking a different route back. It was a rare moment of ease. Anonymous behind their mutual disguise, they were free of the leers and sidelong looks directed at whores and their customers. A definite change of pace that Rory savored.

Their desultory conversation was meandering along, touching on nothing of particular import, when Damon’s voice trailed off. His hand tightened around her elbow as he stared at something around the corner.

Curious, Rory turned to follow his gaze, then gaped in disbelief, struck dumb by the sight across the street. Someone had trashed a car. Then she realized: that wasn’t just any car—it was
their
car, the gray Zastava Yugo they’d driven from Skopje.

More than trashed it, whoever had done the deed had blown it up, shattering the windows of surrounding buildings in the process and leaving scorch marks on the fractured pavement. This was beyond all previous experience. Occasionally, she’d used plastic explosives in the course of a job, but she’d never seen this level of damage before.

Something clicked in her mind: their car had been the target of this morning’s bomb. Had Karadzic discovered their purpose? Suddenly, she felt every year of her old woman’s guise. They’d been lucky. What if the bomb had gone off while Damon had been driving?

It also meant they were without wheels.

The Fed viewed the scorched metal skeleton—all that was left of the sedan—with seeming equanimity. “Not to worry. There’s always Plan B.” He murmured the statement so smoothly that Rory had to wonder if he’d expected something like this to happen, maybe even knew who was responsible for stranding them.

“Which is?” She allowed him to steer her away, needing the support of his hand at her elbow as they sidestepped the people going about their business, stoically sweeping up broken glass and other debris.

He hurried her on, walking briskly to put several blocks between them and the wreck. Just another careworn couple trying to survive. They hadn’t stopped that long, only enough to seem like rubberneckers and to see that nothing had survived the explosion intact. “A local asset.”

“You mean our landlord?”

Damon snorted. “He’d probably sell us out. No, someone else.” He didn’t volunteer any details and she didn’t press him since they were in public. He left her a short while later to return to the hostel on her own.

Damon returned to their room rather too quickly for Rory’s peace of mind. He’d shed his earlier disguise—as had she—and resumed his Jamil Abdou persona at some point after he’d left her, but that wasn’t what niggled at her gut. The almost imperceptible tightness of his shoulders said that his visit to Someone Else hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped.

“What is it?” Emerging from behind the bathroom door, she narrowed her eyes at him, trying to read his poker face and failing.

“There’s a problem.” He turned to the window, facing smoke rising in the distance. His stance was easy, concealing whatever tension he felt. “Petrovic’s house burned down in yesterday’s riots.”

The Someone Else he’d mentioned? “And?”

“He’s nowhere to be found. I don’t know if he’s lying low, gone, or dead.”

Rory stared at him while she worked through the ramifications of his statement: Plan B was out. “Does that mean we’re stuck here?”

“No.” Damon shook his head. “It’ll just make bailing out that much more difficult, without his support.” He shot her a thin smile over his shoulder. “Consider it a challenge.”

“Slipping something out from under the noses of gangsters is a challenge,” she corrected him drily, spearing her fingers through her long, brown curls. “Traversing three hundred or so miles, cross-country, through unfamiliar terrain and tall mountains, without any support . . . Talk about interesting times.” And that was on top of stealing the nuke, which wouldn’t exactly be a walk in the park.

“Not necessarily that far,” he demurred. “Just to the border.”

Rory rolled her eyes at the correction, already wondering where they could steal a car. Hopefully, Damon knew how to hot-wire one; she’d never had to do it, so her knowledge was all theoretical—and rusty in the extreme. Grand theft auto had always been something she avoided, and driving had never been her passion.

One thing was certain: she had no intention of traveling on foot, not when Karadzic’s goons would be searching for them.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The clock had run down for the mission. Tonight, they had to steal the nuke—or fail. With the auction set for tomorrow, they had no more time to whittle down Karadzic’s security. Brooding over what the night held for them, Damon stared sightlessly at the sparse afternoon traffic below, ignoring the whiff of smoke in the air. So many random variables beyond his control could result in disaster. True, the number of men the arms dealer had on-site was down to what Rory deemed workable, but that was still suboptimal. Worse, his master thief insisted on going in without him for backup—against his every instinct.

A whimper from behind him broke through his reverie. Ignoring the sound of automatic fire at a distance, he returned to the narrow bed.

Rory tossed in her sleep, horror and revulsion radiating from her in equal measure, prickling at Damon’s mental sense. Her roiling emotions scraped his mind like jagged shards, leaving rawness.

He bared his teeth against the pain, reminded once again why he preferred to work alone and to keep emotional entanglements at a distance.

But he couldn’t ignore his partner’s distress. Rory might put on a show of strength while awake, but sleep stripped all masks. Despite her work, she’d been sheltered by her success—or her mysterious contacts—never experiencing the desperation of women forced into prostitution.

Small wonder she was having nightmares. A pang of regret pricked him at the reminder that he was responsible for exposing her to such brutality. And yet she’d continued to brave those horrors after what she’d witnessed that first night. Knowing something of what she must have seen, he had to admire her persistence, which only raised his already high estimation of her. She had heart.

Damon reached over to rouse her, but common sense made him stay his hand. No, they didn’t have time for sex. And as sure as his name was Venizélos, that’s what would happen if he woke her now. Sex was an excellent outlet for tension, but they needed to be rested for later.

Instead, he carefully took Rory into his arms, immeasurably touched when she snuggled against him with a sigh of relief. When her hands glided over his ribs repeatedly, he had to fight down a shiver, his arms breaking out in goose bumps; she seemed to take some reassurance from the contact, though. Just that little bit had been enough to reduce the horror she radiated. Her trust humbled him.

Taking a deep breath, Damon spiraled down toward sleep and entered her dreams.

Dreams were the mind’s way of dealing with psychological stresses, so direct interference with her nightmare might not be the wisest course. That knowledge made him hesitate.

What if it wasn’t a dream?

On returning to himself, her nightmare continued to trouble Damon. Why had she dreamed of such? In all their time together, he hadn’t pegged his master thief as one for such fears. Too, he hadn’t seen any signs that she’d been raped since they arrived in Kosovo. She might have been attacked, but he didn’t think that was it. Something else was going on with her, though there’d been no change in her professional—and unprofessional—demeanor.

Should he confront her about it?

This was the first time Damon had to face such a situation, never having worked with a partner before. He was entering terra incognita and was loath to raise the issue if she was handling the problem. Rory could be touchy about implied criticism.

In the end he decided to just note the potential for trouble. So long as whatever was going on with her didn’t present any difficulties, he didn’t have to interfere.

The muscular arms that cradled her flexed gently, pressing her breasts to a broad chest and her belly against hard buttons. One large hand draped across the small of her back to rest on her butt cheek; the other spanned her shoulders, warming her back. The posture felt inexplicably protective.
Damon.

Rory blinked at the black cotton in front of her nose, sleep still weighing down her limbs. When had her Adonis joined her in bed?

The orangey yellow of streetlights filtered through the curtains. Night had fallen while she slept. It was almost time. This was it. The final phase. Strangely enough, the thought didn’t evoke the usual surge of excitement.