“But—” She balked and he whipped his hand up—in character—as if to strike her.
He’d hate himself for it later. Right now he only felt relief when she scurried from the table, one ankle wobbling slightly before she steadied herself. With an aching sense of familiar helplessness, he watched her as she disappeared around the curve of the high-backed bar. Then he turned back to Teso, knowing he’d kill the man at the first opportunity.
“We think, Faust,” his host said, placing the money back in the case, “you have more to offer than a transatlantic drug distribution ring to the rich and famous.”
“We?” Günter asked.
Teeth bared in a vicious approximation of a smile, Teso slung an arm over the back of the empty seat between them and shifted his eyes to look beyond Günter. The seductive punctuation of stilettos on hardwood tapped out a sultry cadence. Günter hesitated before turning around, and Teso let out a deep laugh.
He followed Teso’s gaze until his own lit on a feminine figure crossing the room. Until he caught the glint of red-and-gold beading on her dress, he thought Jenny had returned. The woman continued toward him and his world slowed to stop-motion speed. Fifteen seconds spanned a lifetime.
He’d know that lithe torso, the feel of her hips under his hands, swan-like neck where she’d dab Chanel No. 5 and that cascade of platinum hair anywhere. He stood, his chair crashing to the floor. Without turning his head, Günter saw Teso draw his piece, but barely registered the movement. Time seemed to create a vacuum between him and—
He reached for her at the same time she turned her face to him. Günter staggered backward at the sight of ruined skin that had reknitted itself into plastic-looking ridges and lines, harsh pinks and stark whites that twisted the left side of her face into a permanent macabre frown.
“Alona?” Günter gasped, the last pieces of the awful puzzle falling into place.
She held out her hand and Teso pulled her forward to drape his arm around her waist.
“Lover,” Alona responded.
Günter stared at her, shock numbing his fingers and chilling his limbs.
“You’re dead,” he said, stupidly, his mind refusing to come back online.
Alona’s answering laughter, bright and clear, slid like ice down his spine. Then Teso and Alona kissed. Where jealousy should have existed, Günter knew only revulsion and red-hot anger at being duped. Blood rushed into his hands. He stepped forward, intent on finishing the job Dublin had only half completed.
Teso waved his weapon at Günter’s face with a
tsk
.
“We wouldn’t want to hurt your pretty lady,” he said.
Panic slithered through Günter’s middle. Flicking a glance over Alona’s ruined face, he knew he had very few cards to play. She’d stop at nothing—would even murder Jenny—to exact her revenge for what had been done to her.
Günter righted his chair and sat.
“Where is Ms. Ainsley?” he asked.
His wife—he couldn’t believe he’d married this woman—threw back her head and laughed in delight.
Alona gazed up at Teso, her expression brittle for all its brightness. “Didn’t I tell you he’d help once we had her?”
Resisting the urge to snap her neck, Günter said with all the calm he could muster, “Tell me where she is, or the game stops here.”
“Oh, she’s quite safe,” Alona said. “And I don’t even mind that you love her.”
He didn’t bother to deny his feelings. The woman had seen too much—knew too much about him—for him to hide behind lies now.
“What are your terms?” he asked Teso.
The man leaned against the wall and looked to Alona.
Günter frowned. Who exactly was in charge here?
“Oh, look,” Alona said, delighted at his confusion. “Of course he hasn’t guessed.”
Red talons scurried up his chest. Unable to help himself, he slapped her hand away. It turned his stomach to think he’d ever let this woman touch him.
“Get to the fucking point, Alona,” he snapped.
Brown eyes turned to viper-like slits, showcasing a lucidity of mind and viciousness of temper he’d be well advised to circumvent if he wanted to get Jenny out of London alive. Günter ran a hand down his face and schooled his features.
“I’m sorry,” he said, gentling his voice. “It’s been so long. And,” he tried not to choke on the words, “to find you here… With him.”
He didn’t give a rat’s ass who Alona’d fucked since Dublin. He just wanted to finish the job and watch her swing. So many lives wasted… What had he been thinking? He gave a mental snort. He hadn’t been thinking, of course, because every time he’d tried to use that higher part of his anatomy, she’d made use of her mouth to focus him a good three feet lower.
“What’s the plan?” he asked, bracing his elbows on the table, establishing camaraderie with his body language. “What does the White Tiger want?”
Alona’s eyes narrowed. She placed her palm on his chest again and this time he let her.
“You should know better than anyone, Durbin Garvey is dead. Long, long dead. You’ll have to play with me now.”
“Wait…” What exactly was she saying? “Who’s running this operation?”
“Mr. Faust.” Teso swept his hand, palm up, toward Alona. “Allow me to introduce you to the new White Tiger.”
The man grinned so wide it stretched the scar along his scalp.
Laughter barked from Günter’s throat. “You’re joking.”
A backhanded slap from Teso nearly spun his head into orbit. Günter spat blood onto a napkin before crumpling it into a ball.
When his ears stopped ringing he heard Alona say, “He never could abide a woman in power, Nicky.”
“I thought doctors took an oath not to do any harm,” he said, glaring at Teso.
The man had professed to be Alona’s obstetrician when he’d stopped by their table to congratulate them over a celebratory dinner at one of Dublin’s finest restaurants. The child, Günter intuited, had been Teso’s, not Garvey’s or his.
“Oh, very good. I didn’t think you’d made the connection.”
Teso waved his weapon negligently as he spoke, and Günter wished to hell he knew if they really had Jenny. This arsehole’d be so easy to take.
“Garvey tried to kill you after he found out about your affair with Teso,” Günter traced Alona’s scar with one finger as he spoke. “You and I were part of his plan. Teso wasn’t.”
The smile fell from Alona’s twisted lips.
“You did this to me, you bastard,” she said.
Günter shook his head, feigning a sadness he didn’t feel.
“No, Loni,” he said, using his pet name for her. “But I can make it better for you if you let me. Tell me what you want and I’ll make it happen.”
And he would too—to save Jenny. He knew now that MI-5 had used him in the worst way possible—to draw out Alona. They’d known all along. Even Ian had guessed. The only one who hadn’t seen it coming was him.
Alona’s smile, chilly with false brightness, made his gorge rise. Sitting, she crossed one elegant limb over a twisted, scarred approximation of a leg. Taking out a compact she studied her good side and pulled a tube of lipstick from her beaded clutch and applied it as she spoke.
“Tonight, you’re going to plant some explosives for us beneath Thames House.”
After discovering the .jpg on the laptop in Munson’s hotel room, her plan to blow up MI-5 headquarters didn’t so much as make him blink.
“If I refuse?” he asked, wanting to know his options.
Alona snapped her compact shut and pierced him with her gaze. “The Ainsley bitch dies.”
“Why bother with her at all?” He needed to know the full picture—had to suss out the psychology behind all this if he had any chance of gaining control.
Curling her hand over his arm where it rested on the table, Alona pretended to confide in him. “Besides being very good leverage over you? We owe her brother.”
Ah…so she had seen the stories in the press. Had made the connection between Tallis and Jenny. While she’d not been part of the organization back then, apparently Alona—who had little loyalty for anyone save herself—wanted revenge for a deed that hadn’t even involved her. Saying such, however, would have little effect, so he kept his mouth shut on that score.
“But you’ll let her go if I do as you ask?” He had to be certain.
“You’ll just have to trust me on this, now won’t you?”
“Not good enough.” He withdrew his arm from under her hand. “You make my cell the detonator. I’ll enter the password to set off the bomb as soon as she’s safe.”
“What makes you think we won’t simply shoot you?” Teso asked.
“Because I’ll be the only one who has the password to my phone.”
Delighted laughter fell from Alona’s lips.
“You are so much fun to play with, Günter.” She leaned in and he forced himself not to break her gaze. “This time I might not let you go.”
Given the amount of C-4 plastic explosives lying in the bag at his feet, Günter assumed Alona intended to take down all of Thames House. She’d let him come down here alone, secure in the knowledge that Jenny’s capture would keep him in line.
He’d insisted they let him see her beforehand. If they’d hurt her—or planned to do so—he made it clear the deal was off. They’d taken him to a level of their underground network much closer to the street than the subterranean culvert where he now stood. When he’d seen her through a window cut into her prison door his mind had gone blank with rage. Tied to a support pole in the center of a cinderblock holding cell, her cheek bruised and lip bloodied, she looked smaller, and, paradoxically, more fierce than ever.
“Why have me do this?” he’d asked when Teso’d handed him the bag of C-4 along with blasting caps and a roll of wire and an electronic controller. “Why not do it yourselves?”
Alona’s reply—
revenge
—came as no surprise.
While he’d known all along the events as they’d unfolded were revenge-driven, he’d had no idea how many layers deep it ran. MI-5, out for Alona’s head, didn’t care if his rolled along with it. Alona, still crazy over her disfigurement and the demise of the organization’s figurehead—Durbin Garvey—wanted nothing more than to take Günter down along with MI-5. He knew they planned for him to die in the blast—saw it in Alona’s eyes when she and Teso had coerced him into the plan. If she managed to kill Jenny in the bargain, that retribution would include David Tallis, government informer, as well.
He’d do his best by Jenny. Heartsick over the situation his past decisions had created, he couldn’t find the emotional wherewithal to plan for his own salvation.
Palming his cell phone, he checked for service on reflex. This deep underground, he wasn’t surprised not to see any bars. He’d have to increase the communication signal with the detonator somehow unless he wanted to be in the room when it went off. A sewer grate outside the room where he knew they held Jenny might get him service if he could get close enough without being seen, but it was too risky to call for help. He couldn’t count on Alona not shooting Jenny if he were caught.
He focused on the task at hand and reprogrammed his phone to act as a countdown device and buy him time to get out of the building if he were so lucky to live that long. As he did so, brown eyes full of intelligence and sparkling with amusement lingered in his mind’s eye. This woman knew him so well—had used her capable mind to crack him in so many ways. If there was one regret he’d carry with him to his death it would be not having more time to spend with her.
Finished with his cell, he set about packing the blocks of white C-4 at strategic points along the underground bunker. A long-forgotten World War I bunker, it had been bricked up until Alona’s people had discovered maps of disused cable tunnels leading to its walls. What had begun as a way to ferry drugs up the Thames and into smuggler’s passages had turned into a vehicle for revenge-driven terrorism as Alona’s network of tunnels grew and she’d realized her nearness to her target.
The .jpgs Jenny had discovered in Munson’s hotel room diagrammed the way to his present location. Alona and Teso waited for him with Jenny—would check his work after he emerged through a crawl space and traversed a cramped parallel tunnel upward into the wider and newer structures they’d created.
How they’d managed to tap into and expand this underground network without 5 noticing was anyone’s guess. Too busy working on catching terrorists on buses and in tube stations, Günter guessed, the spooks hadn’t bothered to sniff around their own subterranean backyard in far too long.
Collapsing the barrel ceiling of this chamber and bringing the entirety of Thames House crashing downward would take a much wider area of explosion than Alona believed. At least he could count on her job only going half-well…as long as the resulting fire didn’t rage out of control in the chaos.
Still, more lives than his own would be lost when he set off the charges at 9:00 a.m.—mere hours away. If only Simon had gotten the thumb drive to 5 in time… But if he had, they’d have been here by now. He shook his head and delved deep into denial. They had to come through, somehow, because the alternative remained unthinkable.
Günter inserted the pointed wire into the last charge and jammed the explosive material into a space between the brickwork where it stuck too nicely. Wires crisscrossed the ceiling, reminding him of a macabre imitation of Christmas lights twinkling in shop windows only blocks away. He swallowed hard and tried not to hate himself for once again choosing one life over many. This time, at least he knew that life to be worthy.