Stolen Vengeance: Slye Temp book 6 (34 page)

Chapter 45

Valene struggled against Smith’s hold as he dragged her past men guarding the building, but it was just the two of them heading to the stairwell she and Dingo had used to escape.

She tried again to stop him. “Why won’t you let me go? You can have the scroll.”

“Because I’m not stupid enough to risk flying this scroll to China without knowing for sure I have the right one.”

China? Did that mean he meant to take her, too? She said in a hurry, “I told you I’ve never seen that scroll before, but I have it on good authority that it’s genuine. I have nothing more to offer.”

“Then it won’t be a problem when our specialists test the paper and compare the scroll with the photos, since the only way there could be a reproduction was if you used the original to make one.”

Her mouth dried up. Not a drop of spit. She didn’t have the original scroll. She’d tucked it away where nothing could get to it but rats.

Could a rat chew through that cylinder?

She’d run out of things to ask. That might be a flaw, but Smith wasn’t going to kill her before the scroll was tested, so anything she said now might slow him down.

“What does someone in China want with the scroll?”

“That’s not your concern.” He started up the stairwell to the roof.

Shooting erupted in the building.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Sounded like cannons were going off inside.

Smith paused to listen.

Shooting was blasting back and forth, a rapid fire of bullets pinging hard surfaces and glass breaking.

At this point, she’d welcome a gang attack. She’d have a better chance of surviving that.

Then silence. Smith smiled. “Let’s go.”

That’s when she heard a helicopter approaching. They stepped onto the roof into sunshine and wind. The helicopter was coming down.

Smith walked her halfway to where the helicopter would land.

“
Let her go, Rikker!
” yelled over all that noise.

Smith was Rikker? She’d never been so happy to hear Dingo’s voice and turned to see him pointing a rifle like the guards had been holding. Dingo repeated, “Let her go and I’ll let you walk.”

Wind buffeted her with the helicopter blades spinning closer.

Rikker yelled back, “Not without the scroll.”

“Give him the scroll, Valene. The real one.”

She stared at Dingo openmouthed. Then she shouted, “Seriously? You know who he is, right?”

“I know,” Dingo assured her. “If he leaves without harming you, he can have it.”

Rikker called out, “I like dealing with reasonable people.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a scroll in a clear plastic holder. The parchment looked as old as time. “Careful, it’s fragile.”

Rikker took it and started backing toward the helicopter, but he still had his hand on her arm.

She had to give Dingo a shot at him. Valene stumbled and let her dead weight fall forward, pulling Rikker.

He must have realized what she was doing and shoved her forward, then leaped up into the helicopter.

Dingo ran forward, shooting at the helicopter, but Rikker was firing back. Dingo yelled, “Run for the stairs, Valene.”  He kept ripping off rounds as the helicopter engine powered up. She ran to where four walls surrounded the stairwell access and dove behind one, turning as one of Dingo’s shots killed the helicopter pilot.

Rikker hung out the side, shooting back, but Dingo was darting right and left, backing up to her.

She turned to run down the stairs and saw a body enter the stairwell. She turned back to grab Dingo when he reached her. “Someone’s coming up the stairs.

The helo wobbled two feet off the roof, tilted and the blades slashed into the stairwell access that stuck up from the top of the building. Metal screeched.

Dingo grabbed Valene’s arm, pulling her away from the stairwell and the helicopter that was chewing up the top floor of the building.

That left them one corner before a four-story drop.

One of the rotor blades caught and stuck into the roof, making a loud grinding noise. The whole helicopter body twisted and burst into flames.

“Is it going to explode?” Valene yelled.

“If it does, we have nowhere to go but down ... ah, shit.”

“What?”

Dingo shoved her down to the rooftop and fell on top of her.

When the blades got jammed, the motor kept turning and sent the tail section flying around. The rear rotor was coming straight for them like a buzz saw turned sideways.

She screamed and Dingo covered her with his body.

Then everything went deathly still.

She peeked out from under his arm.

The blade had stopped inches from her face. Dingo’s heart was beating hard enough for both bodies. He grabbed her to him and kissed her. Nothing would ever get her to let go of him again.

“FBI. Put your hands up. You’re under arrest.”

She dropped her head to his and turned. The moment was over.

Chapter 46

Dingo hunkered on the ground, handcuffed. His arm hurt like a bitch, and he’d lost at least a pint of blood, but the bullet had gone through without hitting anything important. The paramedics had bandaged him up after the FBI cuffed him. He’d have been dragged off to a hospital if Sabrina hadn’t interceded after determining he was stable.

That meant she didn’t trust anyone to take Dingo out of her sight.

Sabrina stood twenty yards away speaking to the FBI SAC, Special Agent in Charge, who looked over at Dingo then nodded his head. She strode over to where Dingo had been placed, near the stage where the pope had almost been killed.

Sabrina’s voice vibrated. “What the hell did you think you were doing coming into this mess and with no backup?”

“Protecting Valene.”

“You could have died.”

“She could have too.”

Irritation lit Sabrina’s eyes. “Does everything come back to her?”

He thought on it and nodded. “Yeah, it does. She’s the one thing in this world that makes life worth living. She’s the only woman I’ll ever want.”

“Really?” That took the fuel out of Sabrina’s rage. She sat down next to him.

“Yeah, but I’ve screwed that with this.” He raised his wrists that jangled. “Valene was only trying to keep her dad alive and they targeted her because she helped us with that last mission.”

Sabrina stared down at the ground then nodded. “Nick told me everything and I had planned to discuss it with you.”  She gave him a severe look. “If I could have found you.”

“Staying away from you and Josh was the best thing I could do for you two. Staying with Valene was my only hope of keeping her alive.”

“I’ve been thinking on things and I wasn’t being objective either. I saw Valene as the reason I could have lost you and she was a convenient target the minute I saw the picture of her with Rikker. I’m sorry we didn’t shield her. We will from now on.”

Dingo believed her. That was as close as Sabrina ever came to admitting feelings. He said, “I’m going to hold you to that commitment to protect Valene if I end up in prison.”

“I’m not letting anyone take you away.”

If only it were that easy, but he wouldn’t argue with her when this might be the last chance they had to talk.

Nick walked up, silent and listening.

Dingo said, “I know Rikker did a fine job framing me for the gang killing down here. I was here. My fingerprints are in the building. Going to be hard to get me out of that.”

Nick crossed his arms. “You want the scoop?”

Sabrina cocked her head. “How can you have information already?”

“Friends in low places, and three hours is not that quick.”  Nick grinned. “It so happens that they found the head of Satan’s Garden Club, Maxx Navarro, unconscious in the building next to where the shindig was going on. Valene told the Feds she knocked him out and said she heard a conversation between Perdido and Navarro.”

Dingo leaned over to look at where Valene was being interrogated by the feds. She saw him and held his gaze for a long moment before the FBI agent snapped something at her.

She gave him her can-we-move-this-along cocked eyebrow.

Dingo smiled. That was his girl.
His
. He’d found the one woman for him and ... better not to think any harder on that.
Live in the moment.
That was going to be his future from now on because it would probably be spent inside a ten-foot square space.

Nick kept talking. “Valene also said from what she heard around Navarro that FEP might mean For Eva Perdido and, when the feds hit Navarro with that, he started spilling his guts on Perdido and Smith, aka Rikker. P.G.C. originally stood for Perdido’s Gubernatorial Challenger, but that changed today to Pope Goffredo of Castiglione.”

Dingo said, “Valene was right. She called it and said the third one was the pope.”

“But the pope’s hit wasn’t ordered until today, based on what Navarro said,” Nick clarified. “Perdido owed Smith for not delivering the scroll. I’ll get to that in a minute. Smith gave her Navarro’s number and said she had to work out her debt with Navarro, who was calling for blood after his assassin was killed. Everyone believes now that Rikker killed him. Navarro told Perdido that he had to make the hit on the pope look like an accident and that if she did her part to get close so that when the pope was shot everyone would think it was another hit on her life, he’d kill her opponent for a discount.”

Sabrina said, “Are you sure? Perdido was behind all this?”

“Yes, but not entirely. From everything that Valene has shared, Dingo has said, that we found out, and that Perdido and Navarro have said, it sounds like Smith, aka Rikker, was coordinating everything. If Valene hadn’t been grabbed by Navarro who was trying to snake the scroll from Rikker, the pope would have died today.”

“That’s why Valene yelled when Perdido moved toward the Pope.”

Dingo hadn’t been close enough to see all that. “What did Valene yell?”

“Gun. Get the pope down,” Sabrina explained. “Perdido got hit in the shoulder.”

Nick picked up the thread. “Perdido was screaming ‘he missed, oh my God, he missed, he hit me, the son of a bitch swore he wouldn’t miss,’ which coincides with what Valene has told authorities. Detectives are at the hospital now talking to Perdido.”

“Why would they kill the pope?” Dingo asked.

Nick thought a moment then continued. “The minute Navarro heard that Perdido was fingering him, Navarro rolled big time. Navarro said the killings were all for Perdido. He was to make Fontana look like an accident. The FBI had actually been working with Fontana, who came to them with evidence that Perdido was accepting illegal funds from outside the country.”

Sabrina lifted her eyebrows. “She got him out of her way and picked up the sympathy vote.”

“Right,” Nick said. “Perdido claims she was supposed to get to Daddy Warbucks during the charity event, to get help finding an artifact Smith wanted that was part of the payment for her two kills, but right after the attack, Tinker went into seclusion again. Perdido is claiming Smith set her up in all this. Rikker contracted with Navarro for the kills and qualified that he wouldn’t pay unless Navarro used Orion Hunter assassins.”

“Why is Perdido giving up so much?” Dingo asked. “I get that she wants to cut a deal but she’s running off at the mouth.”

Nick grinned. “Not all of this information came from the feds and LAPD. No one realized Perdido was guilty of anything at first, so they rushed her into an ambulance and I climbed in as an FBI agent.”

Sabrina groaned as if she had severe indigestion.

Nick tended to give that to everyone when ops went FUBAR, but Dingo grinned back at him. “She get some happy drugs?”

“Oh yes. She babbled about Smith being her contact to someone high up in government. Someone she’d known since she was a kid. A general in the Pentagon.”

Sabrina and Dingo both sat up and said, “Who?”

“I pressed her for a name and she mumbled that it wasn’t a real general, just what he liked to be called. Then we reached the hospital and there were FBI agents waiting to intercept her.”

“Real ones,” Sabrina clarified.

Nick shrugged. “Their badge looked like mine.”

“Tell me they didn’t see you flash that?”

“No one knows. I convinced the EMTs that I was on a high-level clearance case, and that the local feds weren’t privy, so they needed to keep anything they heard to themselves or I’d come visit them.”

Dingo shook his head. Nick could be a scary mother when he needed to be.

“Something’s strange here,” Sabrina mused.

“Just something?” Dingo asked. “Not the whole crazy deal?”

“Who is Rikker working for?”

Nick looked at Dingo then at her. “Rikker contracted the hits. Perdido owes someone in the government for the hits. Rikker came out of CIA. He could be working for the same person.”

Dingo held up a hand. “Valene said Rikker was trying to take her with him because he didn’t want to risk showing up with something less than satisfactory. They were going to China.”

“China?” Nick and Sabrina said at the same time.

“Yeah.”  Dingo considered everything. “What if he’s a double agent working for two groups?”

“If he is, he’s not playing for
our
team.”

Dingo agreed with Sabrina. “Doesn’t look that way.”

She said, “Gage would know if Rikker was still with the CIA.”

Silence struck like a stray lightning bolt and Nick started back stepping. “I’ll go see what else I can find out.”

Dingo asked, “You really trust Gage?”

“It’s no longer an issue. I told Gage I had to put a stop to us. It’s too confusing with so much on the line.”

“I haven’t helped. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Dingo, and it’s not Josh’s fault. I’ve let Gage ease back into my world and I have to either be all in or not at all.” She shook her head as if brushing away a thought and stood up.

“Any idea how Rikker got away? I’m sick over that.”

She put her hand on his arm. “I don’t really care as long as you’re alive. I wanted him so badly, then I saw how close you came to dying again, because we weren’t there to back you up.”  She shook her head. “It hit me that I can’t live my life for Rikker and that’s what I’ve been doing. We’ll still hunt him, but we aren’t putting me, you or Josh in the jaws of death to catch him. To answer your question, he’s got nine lives. The best we can tell, he made it down the side of the building with some jury-rigged rope.”

“Shit. I left that rope there.”

“We’ll get him, Dingo.”  She stood up. “I need to go talk to some more people and make some calls. If they do lock you up, I’ll have to squeeze heavy hitters to get you out.”

“Just like old times when we were kids.”

She put a smile on her face, but her eyes were too sad to sell it. “Sure.”

“Think you can pull a string and get Valene sent over here?”

“See what I can do.”  

Sabrina went back to the SAC and waited while he went over to where Valene had been left sitting alone. The SAC said something to Valene that must have had a time limit because she jumped up and followed him over to where Dingo waited.

When she sat down, Dingo wanted to put his arm around her, but that would be tricky while he was wearing cuffs, so he just leaned over and kissed her cheek, whispering,  “I’m sorry I had you give him the real scroll.”

“It’s okay. If I still had the scroll, these agencies would confiscate it from me. I’m just as glad not to have it if I can’t give it back to the pope. I wouldn’t trust anyone else to return the scroll to the Vatican. It might just turn up missing.”

He let it go. “There’ll be an investigation. I convinced my people that you really thought Smith was a client, but now we have to convince the world.”

She looked guilty as hell, which was going to make his job of convincing everyone that she was innocent in all this even tougher. Sure, she’d been working with the bad guys, but she hadn’t known it.

After chewing on her lip for a moment, she started to say something to Dingo when the SAC walked up to her. “Ms. Eklund, I need you to come with me.”

Valene asked, “Why?”

“I don’t have to answer that.”

Dingo asked, “Where are you taking her?”

The FBI agent said, “I don’t have to answer any of your questions.”

Valene got up. “No problem. Just point me in the right direction.”  She looked at Dingo. “I’m okay.”

Then she walked across the fifty feet separating him from where the Feds had set up their area. Nick walked up holding her purse. Valene reached for it, but the SAC snagged it, then Nick walked off.

The SAC said something to one of his men who stepped up with handcuffs.

Valene stood through all that with an open-mouthed look. Then she held her hands out and they clamped handcuffs on her.

Dingo fought his way to his knees and shouted, “What the fuck?”

Three LAPD officers stepped in front of him.

“Get out of my fucking way.”

Valene called out, “I’ll be okay. Don’t leave me.”

His heart was ripping to shreds. “Where are they taking her?”

“Dingo, please wait for me.” Then she was gone.

He’d wait for the rest of his life if she went to prison, but he was not letting anyone lock her away.