Compromised (16 page)

“How much did you get?” she asked, smiling at him encouragingly.

“Three thousand euros for the keys to the warehouse. Another ten thousand to drive some people around.” He just looked sleepy now.

“That's so cool. Where are you driving people to?” she asked.

“Away from the embassy before it goes boom.” He made an explosion noise and gestured a ka-boom with his hands.

Her heart stuttered. “The American embassy?” she asked in horror. This was really not what she was expecting to hear.

“Pffft. No. The Russian embassy, not the 'merican one.” He hiccupped. “No, but they'll be blamed. He said it was a good plan. A big enough distraction.” He was frowning now, as if he didn't quite believe it. “I feel sick,
koukla mou
. I should go home.”

“I thought you said you didn't want to go home?” she said, gesturing for a waiter.

“I don't remember. Did I? This is bad, isn't it? I'm a bad person.” He tried to get up but couldn't balance between the chair and the table, and sat back down heavily.

“Is there someone outside of the city you can stay with tonight?”

He nodded. “S'good ideas. Okay.”

The waiter arrived and helped him out of the café and into a taxi. When he came back, she asked him how much Platon owed him, and paid his tab. Her head was reeling. They were plotting with the Russians to blow up the Russian embassy? That was the most bizarre thing she'd ever heard. But then Simon had shown her photos of Stratigos and the Russian finance minister looking thick as thieves. He had to be right. And it was a distraction? A big enough distraction for what? If leveling the whole embassy was just the distraction, how huge was the real thing going to be?

S
imon and Garrett were sitting in a rental car outside the warehouse.

“This is it, mate,” Garrett said. “The holy grail has to be in here. Sadie's linked here, her boyfriend, the boyfriend's uncle-slash-known terrorist. It all leads to here.”

Simon nodded and checked his phone. His tracker said Sadie was still in her apartment. He still had no idea what to do with her. Let her go? Turn her over to the authorities? Maybe the only good option
was
to call her father to come get her and let him decide what to do with her. Yes. That's what he would do. Assuming Walker took his call.

“Tennant?” Garrett said. “You're miles away. Are you ready to go?”

“Yup.” He reached for the door handle just as Garrett put his hand up to stop him. “Wait,” he whispered.

They both froze. The motion-detector light in front of the warehouse came on as six or seven men approached the door. Simon and Garrett scooched down in their seats and tried to watch. Dusk was making the shadows blue and the sky gray, but still they could see that one of the men was Stratigos.

As the last man entered and the door swung shut behind them, Simon and Garrett jumped out of the car and chambered a round in their guns. As they were crossing to the door, there was some shouting and a shot from inside the warehouse. The men looked at each other and skirted the side of the building. On one side there was a small staircase with a wooden handrail that led to an office where the floor manager could keep his eyes on everything.

They took the steps, pausing to listen with each one. Simon tried the door. It was locked, of course. He took a knife out of his back pocket and slid it between the door and the frame where the handle was. The wood cracked inward just enough to pull the door free. He opened it a fraction to see if anyone had heard the noise of the wood splintering. Nope. It seemed as if they were arguing down in the warehouse. He turned to Garrett and shrugged.

Garrett just smiled and nodded. Simon wondered if anything in the world could faze him.

They crept across a walkway to the office and went in, closing the door softly behind them. And then Simon saw something that couldn't have fazed himself more.

Sadie.

How the hell was she loose? He sat with his back against the office wall and checked his app again. Yup—it was still showing that she was in her apartment. Damn her. Now there was no pretending she wasn't involved; she'd have to appear in his report. Except, something was niggling at a corner of his brain. Something she'd said in her apartment. What had it been? The nugget of something remained just out of reach.
Damn
.

He took a breath and tamped down all the other feelings and thoughts that coursed around. The fact that they could never be together now. That he wouldn't be growing old with her or be able to see their children grow up. Children who already had names.

Suddenly numbness came, and he realized that he hadn't felt mission-numb since before Mumbai, when he met Sadie. Before her, he was able to switch off everything and be the soldier machine he'd been trained to be. Calculating, mission focused. While he was with her, there was always a chink in his armor. Always a way to escape the mission in memories. He had nothing now.

Except his need to have this mission
over
.

Sadie had gone to the warehouse to see how easy it might be to get rid of the C-4 explosives. All the way there she was plotting different disposal methods. She hadn't come up with a whole lot. She could call her father, but she didn't want to unless she had no other options. Calling Daddy for help wouldn't win her any points with anyone, and certainly no one in the State Department was going to help.

The port was deserted, so she was able to just walk in. The guard knew her. They all did. Even though the warehouse looked empty, the knowledge of what was inside grated her nerves into shreds. She let herself into the building and, back against the door, rifled in her bag for some items that she then stashed in her belt and pockets.

There were huge overhead lights, but she didn't want to switch them on. The upper part of the building had a small row of windows at the top that looked out over one part of the harbor, and she didn't want to advertise to anyone that she was there by making the place look like a lighthouse.

With her penlight, she ascertained that all the fake construction materials were all still there and in the condition they'd been left in. There was a chance that Stratigos and Platon hadn't discovered that this warehouse wasn't what it seemed.

The pallets of C-4 hadn't moved. They loomed ominously in the center of the room, easily measuring about eight feet by five feet around and maybe seven feet tall, although with the height of the dolly, the cargo was maybe nine feet high. If she could only remember the usual brick size of C-4, she was sure there was some amazing equation that she'd probably never be able to do that would tell her how many bricks there were. She was going to have to look.

With her penlight in her mouth, she carefully slit the plastic covering near the bottom at the corner—a slit that might look accidental, as if it had gotten caught on something. She eased the tightly wrapped sheeting up as far as she could.

Her brain numbed when she saw the mass of bricks. There were easily five hundred or so. And those were just the ones she could count. She looked for the mark on them. Stamped at the end was a US code. Langley could tell her where they came from, but for now it was just bad enough that they were manufactured in the US. She was beginning to understand how deep the desire was to blame whatever they had planned on the Americans. Right down to the origin of the explosives. All they'd wanted from her was the warehouse.

Sadie sat back on her heels for a moment and just stared at the cream-colored blocks, looking for anything like benign pottery clay, waiting to be made into something beautiful. A light sweat erupted on her forehead. She was out of her depth here. Why hadn't she told Simon? He'd know exactly what to do.

You couldn't tell him because that would be breaking the law.

She knew that was true, but she couldn't help thinking that there must be legitimate times when it couldn't be helped. Even as the thought trickled across her mind, she knew there wasn't. Because if she told someone, it wasn't just her she would be outing, but the people she worked with, the entire entity of Devries Construction. It was just too dangerous. Not to mention dangerous to the person she'd have told.

She stood. Okay. There was no real dispute that this was going to be used for something really bad. And that she—

A light appeared from somewhere. She peeked around the pallet and saw that the outside motion-sensor light had flicked on outside the door.
Shit. Shit
.

She took a breath. Maybe it was a cat walking by. Rats, maybe. The sound of the key sliding into the lock echoed around the room.

Well, definitely one kind of rat. Sadie switched off her penlight and looked for somewhere to hide. She opted for the excavator—mainly because it had so many parts jutting out of it; it would be easy to conceal herself in its shadows without drawing attention.

And then the whole warehouse flooded with light, just as she darted behind the driver's cabin. She hoped this was just a look-see visit, a show-and-tell, because if they tried to take that C-4 anywhere, she was going to have to step in and stop them. And God knew she had no idea how to do that.

There seemed to be a bunch of men, judging by the echoing voices, maybe six or seven. She wished the echo weren't distorting their words so much; from where she was, they could just as well be discussing the weather. She inched as close to them as she dared.

From the vantage point of just behind the bucket part of the digger, she could see Stratigos and five other men. The old man slapped the C-4 several times, like he might the rump of a winning racehorse. Pride had puffed up his chest. He was trying to impress these men. And they were speaking English—she caught the odd word or two, but nothing that made sense.

So the other men were obviously not Greek. She just hoped they weren't American. The Glock her brother had given her was nestled in the small of her back, under her black shirt. She knew better than to reach for it, though. She was hoping they'd just leave, but when she caught Stratigos looking at his watch a couple of times, she realized they were waiting for someone.

A click echoed around the warehouse, and something metallic pressed against the back of her head. Her stomach dropped and her heart raced. Was this it? She showed her hands immediately and took a second to figure out what attitude to take. All she'd done was hide.

“What do you think you're doing?” she said loudly and in an aggravated voice.

The voices stopped and several other guns were cocked. Great. Let's hope she could pull it off.

“Who is it?” Stratigos spat out.

“Platon's girl.” The man with the gun to her head pushed her toward the men.

“How
dare
you? Put that away. This isn't the Wild West, you know,” she said.

“And you would know, being American. Strange to find one who is scared of a gun,” Stratigos said with a smile that didn't translate into anything reassuring. He'd been trying to impress the other men before, was showing the C-4 off like it was his own personal creation. Maybe she needed to change tack.

“Canadian. I'm Canadian,” she said. “I'm so sorry to bust in on you like that, sir. I'd forgotten something in the office this week, and I wanted to come get it. But before I could get up there, you came in and I was scared. So I hid. If you don't mind, I can just go get my day planner and be out of here.”

He paused and regarded her for a moment. For that solitary moment, she thought she'd nailed it.

“No,” he said with finality. He nodded to the man with the gun behind her, who pushed her to her knees.

“This is the perfect way to assure that we are all in this together,” he said slowly to the other men. “There is no backing out. No reneging. Are we in accord, comrades?”

Fuck. He didn't even care if she was telling the truth or not. She'd been so sure that he was just a string puller—an old anarchist planning to disrupt the G20 talks. Even when Platon told her about the C-4, she'd only concentrated on the explosives and not the man with the willingness to use them. Rookie.
Rookie
.

She'd been so intent on proving herself to her father, the trainers at The Farm, her loser boss, and even Sebastian that she'd ignored the signs. She hadn't shifted her opinions as the facts had changed. A lesson learned. Except now she'd had no time to learn from it. Simon had been right about Stratigos. A simple terrorist.

Simon. How could she just die, or more likely—as far as he would be concerned—just disappear, leaving him thinking she was a traitor? He'd never know that she was shielding him from the truth. He'd live out his life thinking her love for him had been a lie. He'd move on, try to erase her from his mind. She'd just disappear.

The men nodded at what Stratigos said. He pointed at each one, insisting they spoke.

“Da.”

“Da.”

“Da.”

Nyet. She wasn't going to stick around for the other yeses. No way. She
was
going to see Simon again. She was going to get out of this or die trying. She placed both hands on the floor in front of her and kicked up one leg, making contact with the gunman's knee. He grunted in pain as something in his kneecap snapped audibly. His gun went off as he staggered backward, but the bullet ricocheted off the floor and made the other men jump away and take cover.

She rolled under the excavator and popped up on the other side, reaching for her gun. She pulled the slide back to chamber a round. Bullets pinged off the digger, one perilously close to her ear. She crouched behind the huge wheel and pondered her options. One down, six to go.

The gunfire stopped when they realized that shooting at a huge metal vehicle wasn't a successful strategy. She heard someone barking orders. If they came around the digger from both sides, she was done for.

Of course, that was exactly what they did. She tried to steady her breathing as she contemplated running. But there was nowhere to run to. Damn the CIA for not equipping the warehouse with more things she could hide behind.

Her mind racing on pure adrenaline, she crouched and looked at the floor directly ahead of her. She'd just have to watch for the first man to breach the corner of the vehicle in her peripheral vision and then take a shot. It was the only way she even had a chance.

A shot rang out in the silence, and then another. Two different guns. Who the hell were they shooting at if it wasn't her?