Master No (48 page)

McDonald frowned. “Yes, of course they did. Faith has always been a bit rebellious, shall we say. If you’re worried I’m going to murder my daughter, think again, Mr. Smith. I love both of my children. I’m going to make certain that Faith sees how much you’ve twisted the situation to your own liking.”

Faith started to talk, but Ten quickly put a hand over her mouth and leaned in. He had seconds before the MSS operatives tore them apart. “Keep your mouth shut. Agree with whatever he says. I don’t believe for a second Tag is gone, and he will come for you. You be alive when he gets there. I love you, Faith.”

“Drop the gun now,” a hard voice said. He was surrounded by six MSS agents. He let the gun fall to the ground. There would be more waiting back at their plane. He would have to look for some way, any way to get out.

McDonald got a hand on his daughter’s arm and yanked her to him.

Ten found himself with a gun shoved at the base of his spine. Faith looked so scared, but she kept her head held high as she was walked back to her father’s SUV.

I love you
, she mouthed before she disappeared inside the vehicle.

“Torture the hell out of that motherfucker,” McDonald said, spitting his way. “I swear, I should have killed him myself.”

“We’ll take care of things from here on out.” The MSS operative pulled back the hood of his jacket and shook his head as McDonald’s SUV took off. “Tennessee Smith. Alone at last. Do you know how long I’ve waited for this day?”

Shit. Naturally it was a fucking reunion. “Lei Gan. I can tell you exactly how long you’ve waited for this day. It’s been since I gave you that scar. It’s looking good, by the way. And you really didn’t need your peripheral vision.”

Lei Gan was an operative he’d come up against once. Exactly once, but the man hadn’t forgotten the encounter. Then again it was probably difficult to forget the man who’d nearly gutted him and taken an eye. Lei Gan was the operative who’d spent time with Phoebe Grant when her cover had been blown. Ten and Jamie had taken care of him.

Lei leaned in, letting Ten get a good look at the eye patch he now wore. “When I get through with you, you’re going to wish you’d killed me that day. And I’ve already sent a lovely note to your sister. I’ve promised to send you back to her. In small pieces, of course.”

Nice.

He bit back a groan as one of the operatives pulled his hands behind his back and shoved his wrists into too tight cuffs. Fuckers needed to have to take one of Tag’s classes. These assholes had no idea how to properly bind a human.

His spine bowed when they shoved the rifle in. A sure sign they wanted him walking.

“Ian Taggart’s not dead, you know.” He shuffled along, not wanting to help them out by moving quickly. They forced him into the thicket of trees and shrubs they’d been hiding in, and he could see what he hadn’t before. There was an SUV parked roughly a quarter of a mile away. They’d used the storm and cover of darkness to move into position. How had MSS found him so quickly?

“Keep moving,” the Chinese operative ordered. “We have a plane to catch. I’ll have you in Beijing and under my thumb before the day is through. Not that anyone will care. You’ve been disavowed. So sad for poor Mr. Smith. The Agency was all you had, and they let themselves be conned by a junior handler. I believe you know the man. You kept him out of active fieldwork. He was so easy to turn. Hate can do that to a man. When McDonald needed help getting rid of you, my man inside the Agency was more than willing to comply.”

“Fucking Karriker.” Scotty Karriker had been too weak for fieldwork, but he’d been right on the line testing wise, and Ten had been forced to make the call. He hadn’t liked Karriker’s psych reports, but the kid had friends on the inside, so Ten hadn’t been able to remove him completely.

Someone was getting a visit from an old friend when Ten got back to the States.

“Get him in the vehicle,” Lei ordered. “I think I’ll let some of my agents have fun with you on the way home. Jiang? Would you like to slowly rip the American’s balls off?”

Ten stopped, his whole being sparking with something very much like hope. Tag might have been the mighty warrior, able to take down man after man in battle, but Ten had been the chess player, and if there was one thing he did well, it was recruiting the right people for the right job. Every person who’d ever led a team knew that placing the right operative in the right place, at the right fucking time was essential.

A woman stepped up and she drew back her hood. Jiang Kun was a slight figure, her beauty obvious among the rough men she was surrounded by. She’d become one of China’s most deadly operatives.

And her real name was Kayla Summers, daughter of Freddy Summers and Jim Gayle, who had adopted her after her mother had her smuggled out of the country. Kayla had been born a twin when China’s birth rules allowed for only one child. Her sister, Kun, had stayed behind with their mother and eventually she’d become an MSS agent. When Ten discovered Jiang Kun’s connection to a brilliant undergrad at Stanford, he’d recruited Kayla. When Kay had found her sister, she’d turned her, making arrangements to bring her back to the States.

And when Jiang Kun had been killed, Ten Smith had killed her assassin before he could verify the job and Kayla Summers had taken on her sister’s life. She was the most brilliant double agent he’d ever had.

The last time he’d seen her in person had been from the top of a cliff in Goa, India. She’d been gathering information on the king of Loa Mali. Unfortunately, so had a rogue CIA agent Big Tag had been hunting. She’d helped them out then, too.

Her lips curled up in a cruel smile. “I think I would love to cut his balls off. Do you remember what you did to me back in Phuket?”

She’d been captured by the police and Ten had risked himself to get her out of there before she could be tortured. He’d offered to let her come home then, but she’d refused.

He’d bumped into her and slipped a gun into her bound hands.

Shit. This was going down now.

“Yes, I remember. I remember every minute of it,” Ten vowed. Sweet, sweet adrenaline started to pump through his veins. It was two against five, but they had the element of surprise in their favor.

She shoved him against the SUV, slamming him hard enough to rattle his teeth. It was also enough sound and motion to cover the fact that she pressed a small semi into his hands.

Too bad she couldn’t have undone the damn cuffs, but a man worked with what he had.

“She’s going to make you pay,” Lei said.

Summers leaned, in whispering. “Two shots forty-five up and at your six.”

The world slowed as his training took over. Calm was needed. The adrenaline was a rush, but if it wasn’t accompanied with an almost Zen-like calm, then he was nothing more than an animal fighting for survival, and he wanted to be more.

He wasn’t an animal. He was an artist.

The minute Summers moved back, he brought his hands up forty-five degrees from his spine and straight back. He didn’t need to see to shoot. He pulled the trigger twice as the world around him exploded in gunfire.

Summers brought up her assault rifle, quickly taking out the two men in front of her.

Ten whirled around, kicking out and catching Lei with his mouth hanging wide. The operative brought his rifle up but stumbled back as Summers took him out.

The jungle was suddenly overbearingly silent.

“I want a fucking hot dog.” Summers put a hand on her hip and her dark eyes narrowed. “I want a hot dog that I know is made of beef and not some weird found-it-in-the-street beef or someone’s kitty cat. More than that, I want some freaking iced tea. Is that too much to ask? A little ice. A little sugar. And a taco. I miss tacos and goddamn margaritas.”

Kayla Summers wanted to come home.

“I will throw you a coming home party you won’t ever forget, Kay. I promise. I’ll spring for some barbecue if you’ll get these cuffs off me.”

She frowned at him. “So you can go after that girl?”

“So I can go after my fiancée.”

“Holy shit. Hang on. This asshole had the keys.” She kicked Lei’s corpse and said something in Cantonese that Ten thought was the equivalent of calling the man a limp dicked penis head who couldn’t find a clitoris with a compass. But he was rusty. It could have been a very nice good-bye. Summers quickly had him out of the handcuffs and then was going through the dead man’s wallet. “So you’re getting married. That’s awesome.”

“What are you doing? We don’t have time to loot.”

She dumped the contents of the wallet on the grass, picking up a single key with a sigh. “We have time to loot this. This is everything Lei had on McDonald. His spirit animal might have been a castrated howler monkey, but the man knew how to dig up dirt. You taught me to keep a burn file. Lei had one, too. This is a key to a safe deposit box in a bank in London. I thought you might like to take a look. I think you’ll find everything you need to burn that fucker Karriker and get your old job back.”

He was so happy he’d hired her. “You are a goddess, but I’m not going back to the Agency. I have a new job.”

“I’m also unemployed and will be needing a reference.”

“Shit,” a dark voice said. “Charlie’s going to freak out if I put you on the payroll. I tried to explain to her that I slept with your twin sister, not you. I don’t think she cares.” Big Tag stepped into the clearing, Case, Erin, and Hutch at his back, and none looking worse for the wear. “Any chance you’ll settle for the London office, Kun?”

“No way. I want American food and I want to be on the same continent as my dads. And the name’s Summers. Kayla Summers.” She gave Tag a smirk. “Got my text, huh, big guy? Do you have any idea how hard it was to find your phone number?”

Tag nodded. “I did indeed get your text and I salute your superior skills. I let Hutch explode the mine they left for us.”

“It was cool,” Hutch said with a grin. “I’m used to blowing things up in a virtual fashion. There’s something to be said for real life explosives.”

“Summers, how close is the plane to the compound?” He needed to start thinking about how to get Faith out of that house without her father putting a bullet in her or using her as a shield.

“We used a commercial airstrip, but we’re supposed to swing by and pick up the two men we left behind. They set up the mine and we’re supposed to meet at 1600 hours, which is very soon,” Summers explained. “I can drive us in. If you look in the back, there’s a nice weapons stash, including some C-4 and grenades if we need them. The person sitting next to me has to wear one of these jackets though. The girl could manage it. She’s small enough to be one of our guys.”

Erin started pulling a jacket off one of the dead men. “Hey, if it gets me close to McDonald, I’d wear a chicken suit.”

Ten looked over at Tag, glad to not be alone. “Thanks for coming back for me.”

“Always. And Case is keeping an eye on Erin. He won’t let her do anything dangerous.”

“Who’s keeping an eye on Case?” Ten asked.

Tag shook his head. “Case is a good kid. He knows what his brother would want and that’s for Erin to be safe. If she wasn’t here, I might worry.”

Ten looked back and Case was watching over Erin with a grim resolve.

“I’ve got Sean, Brody, and the Russian moving ahead on foot to the compound. They’ll relay anything they see. This is your girl and your op. So do we move?”

Ten picked one of the assault rifles left by the fallen MSS agents and recovered his SIG from Lei. “We move.”

One way or another, he was getting his girl back.

* * * *

Faith looked around the building she’d been sure was a storage facility for gardening equipment and wondered exactly how stupid she could possibly be. It was some kind of hospital/torture chamber, and she had to wonder what had been going on down here and for how long.

She shivered as she looked over and saw the blood-stained sheets poking out of the trash receptacle.

“Your sister does like to play,” her father said as he entered the room.

She could barely look at him. When she was a kid, he’d been larger than life. He’d been that man who would come home from long times away, bringing her toys and candy. He’d left her and Hope with nannies and then placed them in boarding schools. Later in life, he’d been the man who wrote the checks and called her when he needed her to show up for some event.

She’d been a prop to him. She’d loved him in a distant way.

“How long has she been experimenting on the locals?” It made Faith want to puke.

Her dad crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. “I don’t ask her about her experiments very often. For a while, I suppose. The nanny found her cutting up animals at the age of nine. She was a curious child. So very interested in the way things worked.”

“She’s psychotic.”

“She’s a visionary,” her father insisted. “Do you even understand what she’s managed to do?”

At least she could find out how far Hope’s experiments had gone. “Time dilation. She’s experimenting with screwing around with people’s perception of time.”

“She’s not experimenting. She’s making it happen. Imagine how it will reform prison systems. We won’t have overcrowding problems anymore. And pesky things like human rights won’t matter because the actual punishment is virtual. You can really teach a man a lesson he’ll never forget and not truly harm an inch of his skin. Your sister made it possible for your little boyfriend to keep his cock on his body. Well, until the Chinese cut it off. I’ve been told they have plans to bronze it and put it on the head of MSS’s desk.”

“I’m sure Ten will look back on what seemed like weeks of torture kindly.” She nodded to the bloody sheets. “Someone got the real thing.”

Her father shrugged. “Sometimes your sister doesn’t listen to sound advice. Anyway, she’s off the island now and gone to greener pastures, as they say. She’s got new toys to play with, but I have to stay here for a while and deal with you. You’ve been a very naughty girl, young lady.”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“It’s not. I’ve been remiss in bringing you in line, Faith. I made a mistake with your mother, and I’m not making the same one with you.” He stopped in front of her. “You know I love you. You look just like her. Hope took after my side of the family in looks and demeanor. But you, oh, you are as sweet and kind as your mother was. I loved her, too. So much I haven’t taken another woman since.”