JET II - Betrayal (JET #2) (30 page)

Matt’s sat phone continuously rang without response, and she spent the remainder of the day growing increasingly concerned. He didn’t strike her as the type to go dark for no reason, but there was nothing she could do but wait. Jet checked the blind e-mail account he’d had his contact send the blueprints to, and saw three large files sent from an anonymous remailer. She downloaded them to her laptop, opened them, and studied the floor plans and electrical diagrams with interest. As she had suspected, there were a number of weak areas, and she made mental notes as she pictured the layouts in three dimensions.

She tried the sat phone one last time after dinner but still got no response, and as she lay her head on the down pillow for the evening she had a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.

Something was wrong.

She knew it.

Chapter 35

The following morning, Matt answered on the third ring.

“Where have you been? Is everything okay?” Jet demanded.

“No. There was an attack yesterday. We took heavy casualties.”

“Are you okay?”

“For now.”

His voice sounded odd. Tight.

“What happened?”

“Best I can tell the drug lord who provided the men sold me out. That’s the only possibility. They knew where the camp was.”

“Tribesmen?”

“Negative. American, by the looks of them. Four. All dead.”

Her thoughts raced at the implications. “All they understand is retribution. You know that. The drug lord has to go.”

“I know. I’m making plans to take him out tonight, before word gets back to him. But…I don’t know how to tell you this…”

“What? Tell me what?” she asked, her heart sinking.

“It’s Lawan. She was hit by a stray bullet. She didn’t make it. She’s dead.”

Jet couldn’t breathe. It felt like someone was standing on her chest, and Matt’s voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. Then the sensation passed, and she gulped air. Her hand shook almost imperceptibly as she brushed away the beginnings of a tear.

“Those bastards. Saved from a nightmare only to be killed by…this had to be Arthur’s doing.” She fought back the rage, replacing it with a glacial calm. “Did she suffer?”

“No. I don’t think so.” The lie trembled over the line.

“Bury her and say a few words for me, will you, Matt? She deserves at least that.”

“I will. I’m sorry.”

“Just make sure you take care of yourself. You’ve used up all nine of your lives.” She paused. “What are you going to do?”

“Kill the warlord and then move the camp to one of my other sites.”

“All right. This cinches it. I’m going to go in tonight. This will be over soon.”

“Believe me. There’s nothing I want more. But I’ll believe it when I hear you confirm it, not before.”

An uncomfortable stillness hung between them.

“I’m going to get going. Good luck,” Matt said.

“Luck will have nothing to do with it,” Jet responded, then stabbed the cell off.

She brushed her arm against her eyes, blotting tears, and then overcome by fury again, hurled the phone at the wall. It exploded into fragments. Jet buried her head into the pillow and sobbed for Lawan, whose life was over before it began, her brutally short interlude marked by tragedy and abuse. Shuddering rocked her as she screamed her anger and frustration into the bed, and then she quieted, her body growing still as the emotional storm blew over.

She looked up at the mirror on the far wall, face distorted and eyes red, and vowed silently to avenge Lawan, even though it wouldn’t make anything better or bring her back. It didn’t matter.

They would pay.

~ ~ ~

Jet’s tires whirred beneath her as the anthracite mountain bike carved through the moist soil and dirty gray patches of snow that clung to the ground between the tall trees. Her breath steamed out of her mouth as she panted, having ridden two miles from where she’d left the Explorer. The moon peered through the patchwork of heavy clouds, pregnant with snow, as she glided like a silent wraith through the woods.

When she was a hundred yards from the house, she leaned the bike against a tree and adjusted her backpack, then trotted towards the hedges that ringed the palatial rear yard.

The lights were on in the ground-floor living room of Briggs’ house, and she watched as he reposed in a green silk bathrobe, reading the paper, a bottle of expensive cognac on the table beside him. Upstairs, she could see a woman in her fifties sitting at a makeup table brushing her hair, her face a mask of unhappy resignation as she considered her reflection, a glass of wine near her right hand.

A dog barked several homes down the row, and she waited until the animal settled down before edging to the rear dining room door, next to the room where her target sat scratching himself. She reached into her backpack and pulled out plastic bags, which she quickly slipped over her feet, holding them in place with a rubber band on each ankle, then donned a pair of latex gloves. The lock took twenty seconds to open, and then she was creeping into the house, the soft soles of her Doc Martens boots inside the plastic sheathes soundless on the hardwood floor.

Briggs must have sensed her presence a few moments before she looped the wire over his head. He was in the process of turning when she wrenched it tight, the wire biting into his skin as he writhed in an attempt to get free. A line of blood trickled from the gash it had sliced, and then a geyser sprayed forth as the garrote severed his carotid artery.

“Honey? What’s going on down there?”

The woman’s voice sounded worried, but obviously not enough to descend the stairs. Briggs’s blood sprayed the painting that hung lavishly on the wall in front of him; a stern nobleman rendered in ancient oil – now with crimson splatter marring the surface.

Briggs stiffened and then went limp.

“Honey? Answer me.” Annoyed now, the words slightly slurred.

Jet dipped her finger into Briggs’ blood and scrawled Lawan’s name across his forehead, then pulled the wire free and glided quietly back to the dining room door, leaving blood-smeared footprints on the polished hardwood as she went. Once outside, she retrieved a liter water bottle filled with gasoline from her backpack and unscrewed the top, then stuffed a rag into the neck and lit it with a disposable lighter, leaning it next to the home’s wood siding before vanishing into the dark.

A minute later, Jet heard the woman’s scream even through the closed windows, a muffled high-pitched bleat of shock and horror. She slid the bloody shoe bags off her boots and packed them into a third bag along with the gloves and the garrote, and then bolted for her bike as flames licked at the outside of the house, the gasoline having erupted a few seconds before, igniting the shingles in a fiery blaze.

By the time the police arrived, there was no trace of her, a phantom come to exact a terrible retribution before disappearing into the night.

She looked at her watch as she pedaled hard through the woods. She would be at the second target’s home within ten minutes. Jet turned onto the pavement a quarter mile away and pointed the handlebars east.

~ ~ ~

The assistant director of the CIA stirred and turned onto his side, his small frame dwarfed by the ornately-wrought headboard of the king-sized bed. An antique that had been chosen by his third wife, he’d battled her for the bed during a bitter divorce and eventually won. It wasn’t so much that it was important to him as it meant a lot to her. She loved the damned thing. Not that she ever seemed to enjoy being in it with him.

Something caused him to start, and he slowly came awake, opening his eyes to see the shadowy outline of a figure standing at the foot of the bed. A figure dressed entirely in black. He tried hard to focus without his glasses and saw that it was a woman. A beautiful woman.

Pointing a gun at him.

He sat up.

“I…I have some money in my wallet, and my watch is a Piaget,” he stammered.

“That figures. Piagets are crappy watches for rich morons with no taste.”

“It’s…worth a lot of money. Take it. And I have a few thousand dollars here.”

“That’s good to know.”

Confused by her tone, he reached for the bedside lamp.

“Move one more inch and I blow your head off.”

He froze, then slowly resumed his sitting position.

“What do you want?”

“I’m here with a message.”

“A message?”

“Yes. It’s a short one. Either you die by the gun tonight, or you die by the needle. Your choice.”

He swallowed with difficulty, his throat suddenly dry.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m here to kill you. But I’ll give you a choice. Do you want a bullet, or a shot of the heroin you’re responsible for selling to millions of kids all over the world?”

“Look, lady, you’ve got this all wrong…” The pistol didn’t waver. “Do you have any idea who I am? You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” he snarled.

She ignored him.

“What’s it going to be? Bullet or needle? I don’t have all night.”

He lunged for the bedside table, and she shot him in the leg, shattering his kneecap. His scream was cut off by another round directly between his eyes. The back of his head blew onto the coveted headboard. She stepped to the bedroom door and flipped the lock closed, then moved to the window and slid it open. His scream would bring his two bodyguards and his maid within seconds, but by the time they got in, Jet would have vanished.

With a final look at the dead man on the bed, she climbed through the window and lowered herself until her feet were ten feet above the grass, then dropped softly, rolled backwards, and took off at a full run to where she’d left her bike in the dense cover of the park.

Five minutes later, she was in the Explorer, driving the speed limit on her way to Washington.

~ ~ ~

“Yes?”

Silence greeted Arthur’s interrogative. He held the handset out and stared at it, then clenched it to his ear again.

“Who is this?” The line was unlisted.
Perhaps a wrong number?

“Wake up, Arthur,” Jet finally said.

“Who…where are you? I haven’t heard from you for a week,” Arthur demanded into the phone.

A sound rattled from downstairs, and then the line went dead.

Arthur rose from his bed and wrapped a robe around his pajamas, then slid his nightstand open and removed a small pistol – a Ruger LCP 380. He lifted the handset again to call for help, but there was no dial tone. And he’d left his cell phone downstairs to charge overnight, as was his custom.

Mitzi, his pug, whined and stretched, peering up at him in confusion. Was it time to wake up and go for a walk?

He crept cautiously down the steps and turned the corner at the base, entering the living room, where Jet sat in the dark in one of his colonial-era chairs, a briefcase in her lap, one foot swinging lazy circles. He flipped on the light and regarded her, the pistol trained on her head. Mitzi yelped happily and ran to her. Jet reached down and scratched her furry little head. Mitzi pushed her face into Jet’s hand and then lay by her side with a plop.

“You won’t need the peashooter,” she said with a smile.

Arthur looked worse than she remembered, the mottled skin puckered around his neck, which had thankfully been covered by his shirt and tie before.

“Perhaps. But this is highly irregular.” He appeared to consider the situation and then dropped the pistol into his robe pocket – but kept his hand in it, she noted.

“I suppose. So is having your baby kidnapped and being blackmailed. I guess we live in an irregular world…”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I lost the number.”

He studied her calm face, and then took a seat across from her with a sigh.

“And?”

She lifted the briefcase and put it on the coffee table between them, and then lifted the lid, turning it towards him.

The freezer bag of diamonds twinkled in the ornate chandelier’s glow.

“There are your diamonds. Next to them, you’ll find snapshots of Hawker. He’s been neutralized. Now, where’s my daughter?”

Arthur leaned forward and picked up the photos, taking his time to scrutinize them suspiciously before dropping them into the briefcase and lifting the diamonds out.

“What is this? Some kind of joke?”

“What do you mean? Those are your diamonds. Now it’s time to end this charade. I’ve done as you asked. Time for your end of the deal. Where’s my daughter?”

“That’s only…maybe a quarter of them. Do you take me for a fool?”

“That’s what he had. I looked online and calculated the number and carats. It’s over fifty million, wholesale. It’s all there. Now, where’s Hannah?”

He stood and pulled the pistol from his pocket. “This is all he had?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it? Now put the gun down, tell me where my daughter is, and get ready to hand me a million dollars.”

“Not so fast. I need to verify they’re real.”

He hadn’t dropped the gun.

“Fine. They are. That’s what he had. You can pay me once you check them. But for the last time, tell me where my daughter is.”

His skin tightened as he grimaced, and she realized he was smiling. He raised the Ruger and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

His eyes widened as he tried to chamber a round, but the gun was empty.

“Now that definitely wasn’t the deal,” she said, pulling her silenced Beretta from behind her and leveling it at him. “I didn’t think you’d honor your part of the bargain, but I figured I’d at least give you the chance. More than you gave me.”

Arthur flung the Ruger at her and sprang for the hall. The impact of Jet’s feet slamming into his side sent him reeling into the wall with a crash. He dropped to the floor, groaning.

Jet got up, brushed herself off and then walked to the table and closed the briefcase, locking the latch with a soft snap. She eyed Arthur’s quivering form and approached him.

“Now we’ll do this the hard way. I actually hope you don’t tell me where Hannah is until I’ve had a real opportunity to convince you. I’m usually ambivalent about torture, but in your case, I’m looking forward to it. I suppose all that expensive surgery on your face will get destroyed by the acid, but before it does, you’ll wish for death a hundred times over.” She kicked him, hard, in the stomach. “I even went shopping for items to use. You know, I once kept a subject alive for six hours before his heart gave out? I mean, he was unrecognizable as anything human by then, but still. It’s an art, really. I’m sure you’ll appreciate it. By the time I’m done, you’ll have not only told me where Hannah is, but you’ll have told me anything and everything you can think of just to get me to stop.”