Disclosure
Catch her, period.
He wondered if McDonough’s spycam had captured even one of the hungry, lustful gazes he, Morgan, had thrown Allison’s way when he thought she wasn’t looking. He should have guessed her own boss would be conducting illegal surveillance of her at the office. He wondered if McDonough actually was NSA. He had the codebreaking creds, but on the other hand, CIA employed lots of multilingual codebreakers, too.
“Watch what we’ve got. This was yesterday morning.” McDonough pulled a miniaturized remote control device out of his black suit trousers and clicked it. An image filled Allison’s screen—it was Allison at her desk, fingers racing across her keyboard as she frowned mildly at the monitor. She stopped typing and rested her hand on her chin. Clouds must have passed behind her window, dimming the light. Morgan could practically see the wheels of her brilliant mind analyzing strings of code as they blipped across her monitor.
Then her outside line rang and she picked it up.
“Yes,” Allison-on-the-screen said. Her face changed and she sat up straighter in the chair. The room darkened perceptibly as her eyes widened and her lips parted. She looked…frightened.
“I’ll get the cash,” she said. “Give me time.” Then she hung up, pushed back her chair, turned off the lights and left her office.
“Then she leaves,” McDonough said, as the footage continued, the room cast in an eerie night-vision luminescence. “That was yesterday morning, before she took today off for personal reasons…and has been MIA ever since.”
Morgan thought a moment. “Any corroborating calls come in while she was gone?” He could comb back through the phone log himself to check.
“Nothing on my camera. I listened to all her messages, in-house and her secured outside line. I’d say that woman has no life except she clearly does, maybe working for the same guys who are trying to blow up the United States in time for Thanksgiving.”
Listening to her messages involved some protected speech issues, but Morgan stayed focused. He was intrigued by what he’d seen, but he knew there could be a logical explanation. He simply had no idea what it might be.
McDonough glanced at him. “As far as I’m concerned, that bitch has made her move, and it’s time for the bat signal, Batman.”
Morgan kept his face impassive, and McDonough laughed mirthlessly.
“Yeah, I know about you. You’ve gone deep for the people of these United States. Risked everything. Almost gotten killed a couple of times. I know you want to do this. Go ahead and volunteer. I’ll back you up.”
Morgan doubted McDonough would backup his own mother, but he wasn’t about to say no. He wanted to go after Allison so badly he could taste it.
“If you don’t go get her, I’ll send someone else who doesn’t have a hard-on for her,” McDonough continued.
Morgan nodded once, hopefully out of camera range.
McDonough nodded back. “You have everything you need?”
“I do.”
“Then stop wasting time.” McDonough lifted up his hand, snapped his fingers and pointed at the door. Morgan bristled at the lapdog-style command, but kept his irritation to himself.
Without another word, Morgan left Allison’s office.
McDonough stuck his head into the hall. “Call me. Check in. I don’t want to have to send someone after you next.”
Morgan kept walking.
As he strode past the conference room, Valenti rose from her chair and joined him in the hall.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, catching up.
He turned his head. The door to Allison’s office was closed and McDonough was nowhere to be seen.
“What makes you think I’m going to do anything?” he asked.
She pursed her lips and raised her chin.
“Just tell her to come in,” he said. “It’s not too late. McDonough will back off.”
Her expression never wavered. Morgan gave his head an angry shake.
“You’re wasting my time,” he said, and then he guessed that maybe that was the idea.
He took off.
Chapter 4
Allison flew down the off-ramp, gutterballing it as close to the shoulder as possible, and hit the turbo through a very yellow light. It was red before she was halfway across the intersection. More horns blared and she flicked her vision from the rearview mirror to the crimson taillights crowding her windshield. The grubby white van hadn’t shown yet, but in this day of cell phones and satellites, that didn’t mean a thing. For all she knew, her Infiniti had been painted by Echo herself, who was observing her nemesis via satellite as she flushed her out.
There was a nondescript strip mall up ahead. Allison scanned for entrances and exits where she might dump the car if she needed to.
A motorcyclist swerved around her and failed to maintain his speed. She braked hard, keeping her eyes on him in case he was trying to box her in. Her laptop and cell phones crashed to the floor on the passenger side. Sloppy. The motorcycle flipped her off and streaked away in the rain.
Making a command decision, she turned off her lights and shot into the alley behind the strip mall. There were no overhead lights, and the alley was narrow, bordered by two one-story brick buildings on her right and a quartet of oversize aluminum Quonset huts on her left.
She eased the car around an overflowing Dumpster, then glided around the far corner of the building. Leaning forward, she craned her neck and peered through the windshield.
The van was crossing the intersection.
She leaned down and grabbed up her personal phone, a more subdued black than the cheetah print prepaids. Punched in Selena’s number.
“Yes, Allison,” she said.
“I’m being pursued. White van.” She gave her the license plate number.
“Checking. Is there anything I can do?”
“Negative.” “Staying with you.” Selena’s voice was taut with anxiety, but she kept on task.
The van pulled into the strip mall. It did not go into the alley, but advanced slowly down a straggly row of cars parked in the gravel lot, the majority of them clustered near Allison. A quick glance revealed that the building beside her was a bar.
Allison backed up slowly, reluctantly shifting her attention from the white van to check the alley behind her via her side mirror, which she cranked to a sharp angle.
Harsh white headlights blazed at the entrance of the alley. She froze. If she backed up any farther, the lights would brush her car. If the driver was working with the van, they’d have her.
“I’m exiting my vehicle,” she informed Selena, then she grabbed up the spill of her phones and her laptop and crammed them into her briefcase, feeling for her hat and gloves in her pockets in case she didn’t get to come back. She got out, leaving her umbrella; too much to carry. Her Glock was unloaded and locked in the trunk, a precaution required for entry onto NSA property. She sidled around the side of the vehicle, her destination the trunk.
She looked from the headlights to the other side of the alley. Above the buildings, a stand of evergreens rocked in the increasing downpour. Lots of places to hide, if you were on the run…or if you were a sniper.
Parallel with her, the back door to the bar opened. Allison jerked away from her car and melted farther back into the shadows.
A twenty-something man in jeans, a knitted cap and a sweater emerged. Cursing, his head down, he jogged a large wheeled black plastic trash can toward the Dumpster.
Allison slipped into the opened door and found herself in a small hallway, facing another opened door that appeared to lead into a small, dingy kitchen. The braided odors of wet wool, hamburger grease and beer wafted toward her.
On her left, the hallway extended into the bar proper, and she heard someone shout, “Hey, shut that damn door! It’s frickin’ cold out there!”
“Allison, what’s your status?” Selena asked her.
Allison didn’t answer. Dripping, she took a few steps into the hall, and then a few more, jerking when the man with the trash can reentered the door behind her. He was with a young woman carrying a flowered umbrella. She was dressed in a puffy down jacket and skintight jeans.
“I’ll get my stuff,” he told her. “I have to tell Andy they didn’t empty the damn Dumpster again. I swear.”
“Hurry,” she pouted prettily, running a hand through her blond hair. “The movie starts in twenty minutes.”
Had the woman driven that car into the alley? If so, that was excellent news, because she was harmless. Allison turned and walked up to her.
“Did I block you?” she asked her in a friendly, relaxed manner.
“Yeah, but it’s no problem,” the woman said. “We’ll be backing out.” She smiled questioningly at Allison’s coat, then at Allison. “Get caught in the rain?”
“Yeah,” Allison said, arranging the coat over her shoulders. “I probably look like a drowned rat.”
“Kinda,” the woman replied, wrinkling her nose.
“Hey, dude, what is your problem?” the same protesting voice yelled above the noise. “Shut the damn door!”
“What’s going on?” Jeans asked Allison, craning her neck. “It’s not the cops again, is it? Man, Bobby gave one girl with a fake ID a beer, and—”
It might be that. Or “Dude” might be looking for her.
Allison pushed around the woman and flew back out the door like a shot. The light from the door spilled over the alley, against a metal door ten feet away cut into the large Quonset hut. She hurtled herself at it, grabbed the knob and jerked. It opened. She darted inside and shut it after herself, feeling for a locking mechanism, finding none, moving on into the darkness.
She smelled oil, dust and dirt; her hand brushed against something serrated that felt like a large saw. The building was some kind of storage facility for machinery parts. She crept forward carefully, trying to keep herself moving in a straight line. Most buildings had two doors, an entrance and an exit. If she could find the way out…
“Allison, where are you?” Selena said in her ear.
Allison disconnected her and put the earpiece in her coat pocket. There was nothing Selena could do for her right now except distract her.
She snaked her arms through the coat sleeves as she tiptoed on the balls of her boots through the darkness. Her ears were primed for footfalls, voices, but she heard only the rain and the occasional clink when she ran into something. Dark shadows formed from darker shadows, retinal artifacts of her heightened anxiety and nothing more. Half a dozen times, she grabbed at objects as her knees or elbows or her briefcase collided with them, shutting her eyes tight, holding her breath.
With a pang of regret over her Glock, she tried to remember if she had taken everything else of value out of her car, if she had collected all the prepaids when her briefcase had fallen onto the floor.
It seemed an eternity before the toes of her boots pressed against the opposite wall of the building. She felt with her hands for a door, moving methodically to the right; then a sliver of light drew a line across the tips of her shoes.
Target acquired.
As she found the doorknob, an image of her mother flashed through her head. Allison had never meant to see the morgue photos, but she had by accident, and they’d been gruesome. Marion Hart Gracelyn had not died well. Fear rose inside her. She didn’t want to die like that.
Then Morgan’s face filled her mind, laughing exuberantly when she beat him at tennis. He rarely laughed. She doubted he would be laughing now.
She took a deep breath and turned the knob as soundlessly as she could. The door cracked open, the pressure making a soft puh that reminded her of a silencer. Rain sheeted down ping-ping-ping like spent cartridge casings.
Then she heard a noise behind her. Someone else had just entered the building. If they had a flashlight and a gun, she was in trouble.
She crossed the threshold. Stopped. Took stock, shivering beneath the downpour as she edged past the doorway, preparing to take out whoever walked through the door.
Then she realized she wasn’t alone in the alley.
A stuttering streetlight strobed the scene, allowing Allison to piece together her surroundings.
Damn it.
Drenched by the rain, a tall, husky man loomed at the right end of the alley. He was wearing a bulky coat over a suit. He looked straight at her…and then past her, toward the other end of the alley.
She slid her glance to the left.
Equally tall, the man there was heavier, and bald, and dressed in an overcoat as well.
Bareheaded in the downpour, they began walking toward her. Adrenaline raced through her veins. She stayed light, got ready.
A flashlight flared from the exit of the Quonset hut. The man carrying it was at least six-four and darkskinned, and his eyes were hooded as he saw her and held up a wallet. He must be showing her his ID, but she couldn’t make it out in the dim light.
He said, “Allison Gracelyn, we’d like to speak to you.”
“You are?” she asked steadily, not at all surprised that they knew her name. FBI? CIA? NSA? Echo’s lackeys?
“CIA. We just have a few questions. Come with us, please.”
Her heart jackhammered. No way.
She gazed left and right as the two other men continued striding toward her, blocking her escape routes. She wondered if their heavy coats concealed weapons.
“We can talk here,” she said. Her skin sizzled with anxiety as her body prepared itself for flight or fight. “What would you like to know?”
“We just have a few questions,” he answered smoothly. “It’s nothing unusual.”
The bald man reached her first. His heavy hand clasped her shoulder.
“Please, Ms. Gracelyn, let’s go.”
She kept her bicep loose as she said to the man facing her, “Unless you’re FBI, and you have a warrant, you have no jurisdiction here.” She glared at the bald man. “And I can have you arrested for battery.”
“We only want to talk to you,” the dark-skinned man repeated.
The hand on her shoulder dug in then. Her mind raced through possible moves to take all three of them out as quickly and efficiently as possible. If they were field agents, they had some martial arts training. Given the shape they were in, she probably had more. But her karate master had warned her to never, ever underestimate her opponent.
Then the bald man surprised her. He circled behind her, and the hard pressure of a weapon indented her back.
“This is a Magnum .357,” he said. “You know what it can do.”
“Christ, Wilcox.” It was the third man, the husky one, who had been silent until now. “What the hell are you doing?”
“She has to come in. She’s in some deep shit,” the bald gunman—Wilcox—informed him.
“Hey, I don’t know anything about that. Beck just said to pick her up,” the husky man argued. She could hear the anger in his tone. “This isn’t what we were told to do.”
She noticed that the dark-skinned man wasn’t talking. Was he in on it, then?
“It wasn’t what you two were told to do,” Wilcox declared. “I have orders to bring her in or shoot to kill.”
“From Beck? No way,” the dark-skinned man insisted, siding with the husky man. So he wasn’t in on it. “You must be doing this for someone else.”
She tried to remember whom she was supposed to be blackmailing at CIA. Wrobleski? She ran through the implications of dropping his name to see what happened.
The dark-skinned man reached inside his coat pocket.
“Raise your hands above your head,” Wilcox growled, “or I’ll bust your ass for obstructing justice.”
Infuriated but impotent, the man did as Wilcox ordered.
“Wilcox is going to kill me,” Allison said, as calmly as she could. “He used you to track me, and he can’t let you survive.”
“Shut up,” Wilcox said, grabbing her and pressing the barrel against the back of her skull.
“I’ve drawn my weapon,” the husky man announced.
“It’s not loaded,” Wilcox said derisively. “Check it.”
The millisecond of distraction was the best she was going to get. If she died, she died two seconds sooner, that was all. She rammed sideways into Wilcox with an elbow strike hard to his chest, then immediately whirled around with her right hand around the gun. With a grunt she pushed back hard on his wrist. At the same time, she executed a very high jump-front kick, her toes leveraging beneath Wilcox’s chin and snapping back his head.
Incredibly the weapon hadn’t discharged. As Wilcox tumbled backward, his head smacked the cement in the alley with a loud crunch.
Not completely to her surprise, the dark-skinned man charged her from behind. She executed a backhand chop into his face with the gun as he began to wrap his arms around her torso. Then she whipped back around to face him, pushing forward with a knife hand strike between his ribs as she kneed him hard enough to drop him. With a grunt, she slammed her foot against his windpipe. Three times in the last two seconds, she could have killed him. But she didn’t. He was only unconscious as his eyes rolled back in his head.
Aware that the husky man still presented a potential threat, she aimed the gun at him, left hand under the palm of her right as she distributed the weight of the weapon in a tripod formation. As he raised his hands over his head, she took a few steps away from both the supine men, in case they tried to sweep out an arm or a leg and take her down.
“Tell me who sent you,” she said.
“I swear, I don’t know what’s going on,” he insisted, staring down the barrel. “We were told to bring you in for questioning.”
“By running me off the road?” she demanded.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her lips parted at his genuine confusion. She was in bigger trouble than she realized. “You aren’t driving a white van?”
“No.”
Damn it. “Who is Beck?”
“Our boss, CIA. I have to tell you, we’re wired,” he added.
“I’m betting your buddy had you disconnected,” she observed. “So he could have a little more privacy when he killed you. Someone forced me here,” she continued.
“Not us,” he insisted.
“Then how did you know where to find me?”
“We were sent,” he replied. “That’s all I know.”
Then something swooped off the roof and drove her to the ground, slamming her facedown in a puddle. She heard a snap as excruciating pain roared through her head to the backs of her eyes, and she tasted blood.
It was a fourth man, landing so hard on her back that she expected her spine to crack in two. A haze of gray dotted with red swam in front of her eyes. She forced herself to stay conscious.
“Who the hell are you?” Husky shouted.
The .357. Allison realized she had landed on top of it. Then she heard footfalls as the husky man charged the jumper.
Her attacker’s weight shifted and she took immediate advantage, contracting her torso, quickly snaking her hand into the space and gripping the gun. She rocked, attempting to leverage herself onto her side so she could get a knee under herself and lift her body off the ground.
She heard a snick snick snick: Husky, still trying to make lemons out of lemonade with his unloaded gun. She wondered if he really was CIA. He didn’t seem smart enough.
The weight on top of her shifted again. She scooted out and got to her feet, to discover Husky using standard martial arts techniques against the jumper, a skinny Caucasian in a catsuit, who was employing a variant of Krav Maga, favored by Israel’s Special Forces.
Allison leaped to her feet, charging forward at the two grappling men, and brought the .357 down on top of the jumper’s head. He went slack and collapsed against the cement. His face was gaunt. By his cheekbones and haircut, she judged him to be Eastern European—possibly Kestonian.
Husky stared at her. She stared at him. Blood and rain gunneled down his face.
She showed him the gun, aiming straight at him. He looked scared as he panted and kept his hands where she could see them.
“Start over,” she said.
“Our manager is Jack Beck,” he replied. “Swear to God, I didn’t know it was a setup. I don’t think Jack does, either.” He stared at the gun through a curtain of rain. “But you’re right,” he said. “They should have heard this. They should be coming for us.” He grimaced. “Wilcox played us.”
“I think he’s working for someone in CIA,” she said. “I think you’ve got someone real dirty close to you.” She was willing to bet Wrobleski outranked Beck, probably was his superior, and he was doing bad deeds on company time, with company equipment, funds and personnel.
“Come in and talk to us about it,” he ventured.
She shook her head. “Another time, maybe. What does your vehicle look like?”
“Black Town Car,” he replied.
Then she spied her briefcase, her gut clenching as she realized she hadn’t closed it properly. The laptop was poking halfway out, and there was a cell phone lying in a puddle beside it.
He looked down at them, too.
“You tell them I’m clean. I’m being set up. When you wake up,” she said to Husky, as she executed a side spinkick and clocked him hard against the temple.
As she whirled around, she watched her own blood spatter the corrugated aluminum siding in the weirdly strobing overhead light. It was from her nose.
She dropped down to her haunches; threw the phone and the laptop back into the briefcase; and soaked up blood with the arm of her coat as she sprinted around the building into the next alley.
Her car was where she’d left it, and she saw no one else in the alley. Most importantly, no black Town Car. She unlocked the door of her Infiniti, fingers crossed that no one had pressed a bomb or tracking device to the undercarriage, slid in and gunned it.
Grabbing tissues from a box in the glove compartment, she mopped up her face, grimacing when she touched her nose. She was pretty sure it was broken. She was panting and shaking as she crashed back down from the extreme high of her adrenaline rush.
The white van was gone. It would have blocked her getaway from her end of the alley if it was still here. Maybe the wheelman figured the leaper was gone too long and abandoned him. Maybe Husky had lied and CIA decided to wait until she left the parking lot before they attempted another interception.
The better scenario had the white van freaked and gone, and the CIA arriving to see what was going on and staying to do a mop-up, giving her time to put some distance between her and them. Maybe they’d ID the roof jumper, trace him back and discover…what? That a genetically enhanced woman named Echo was after a memory stick?
A memory stick the CIA would love to possess themselves? Did Oracle really want them to know that?
I can’t trust anyone.
She grabbed the nearest phone out of her briefcase— cheetah print—and dialed Selena.
“Allison,” she said, “God, are you all right?”
“The van,” Allison replied. Her voice was ragged and muffled, as if she had a head cold. She pulled around the corner of the bar and straightened out, glancing in the rearview mirror to see if her luck was still holding.
“Nothing on the plates. Allison, you sound—”
Without warning, a red pickup truck backed out of a parking space in front of Jade’s Bar. Allison hit the brakes but it was too late. Metal squealed on metal as she hit the rear wheel well. Her air bag did not deploy, but she was jerked, hard. Pain shot from the center of her nose and radiated like electric wires all over her face.
“Damn it, damn!” she yelled.
She backed up and swerved around it, flooring it out of there. She looked in her rearview mirror, to see a man run out of the bar. He was joined by another man, taller, wearing a ball cap, racing toward her in the rain, waving his arms over his head.
“Allison?” Selena shouted.
Allison gritted her teeth and kept driving straight, noting no fishtailing, no swerving. That meant she was still in alignment. Despite the impact, her car was in better shape than she was.