Authors: Elizabeth Jennings
Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction
Darkness at Dawn (12 page)
Jomo was too much the king to show.
The royal bed was covered in a scarlet silk bedspread, Jomo’s hands lying on top of the spread. The king shot a glance at his majordomo, who had served the king all his life. The servant, who would never work again after Jomo’s death, sprang to the bedside.
“Your Highness,” he murmured, bowing low. Jomo gestured up at the heavily carved headboard, with the dragon crest on top.
With another deep bow, the manservant gently pulled the king up as a man would a sick child, placing a mountain of damask pillows against the king’s back, holding on to one withered arm so that the king wouldn’t topple over.
Sitting up, Jomo was even more pathetic, his sunken chest lost in the elaborate silk embroidered robes. His hand beckoned Changa forward, a clawlike finger curling up.
General Changa stepped to the bed, hiding his disgust at the smell of human waste surrounding the king.
“General,” the king murmured, “come closer.”
The stench of death hung around Jomo. Changa hid his disgust well. Soon he would inherit an empire. This was a small price to pay.
Jomo beckoned again and Changa bent down, grateful for the incense sticks burning, smoke wafting up to the ceiling fifteen feet overhead.
“Highness.” Changa bowed. “I am yours to command.”
“General,” the king wheezed. His lips had a blue cast. “Take care of my people.” The effort to speak exhausted him. He lay his head back against the pillows and closed his eyes.
“Of course, Your Majesty.” Changa wondered if the king even heard him. No matter.
Changa bowed again, the deep bow everyone expected, in the secure knowledge that soon, very soon, his bowing days would be behind him.
He backed away still bowing and straightened next to the princess. He opened his nostrils to breathe in her scent, fresh and clean, overriding the stench of putrefaction from the miserable creature on the bed.
“Princess,” he said quietly. “May I have a word with you outside? It is a matter of some urgency.”
The princess’s black eyes narrowed as she studied him openly. Changa repressed his impatience.
The princess bowed, the merest dip of her head. “I would love to, General.” Her beautiful eyes were dark and opaque. She waved a graceful hand at the royal bed, where the king had fallen asleep. “But as you can see, a higher duty calls me.”
Insolent bitch.
Every cell in Changa’s body tightened with rage. She was the sister of the king, a royal princess. Under Nhalan law, he had no power at all to bend her to his will. But soon, very soon, he would. And she would bitterly regret her insolence.
For the moment, however, in a room full of courtiers who had been trained from birth to regard the king as a god, he had to curb his anger. Under the new reign he would institute, under the rule of his mercenaries, this absurd veneration for the royal blood would cease. And Princess Paso would rue the day she was born.
So he bowed his head, knowing that his time was coming.
“As you wish, Princess. I merely wished to tell you that Dr. Merritt will be landing soon.”
Changa watched her reaction closely. It was the princess who had put forward Lucy Merritt’s name.
Changa had been delighted. Any testimonial by the daughter of the legendary Merritts, who had saved Nhala from Communist domination, would hold great sway over the people. But did the princess have a hidden agenda? Had she summoned an ally? Would this Merritt woman be his enemy?
The princess’s face showed only boredom and impatience, her usual expressions in his presence. There hadn’t been even a flicker of emotion at the mention of Lucy Merritt’s name. The two girls had been friends, but that had been many years ago.
There was nothing there to worry him.
The princess stood before him, slim and beautiful and as remote as one of the ten thousand statues of Buddha in the Palace.
“Please send a servant to come for me when Dr. Merritt lands, General Changa. In the meantime, I must assist the king.”
And she turned her back to him.
To
him.
him.
Rage suffused his body until he shook with it. Though the room was chilly—it was almost impossible to heat the thousand rooms of the Palace in winter—he could feel sweat running down his back.
The week after Jomo’s death, Paso would be his wife and he would exact his revenge, taking it out on her beautiful body. But for the moment, there was only one possible reaction.
“Of course, Princess,” he murmured, then bowed and walked out the door, knowing he would have his revenge sooner than Paso could possibly imagine.
FLYING OVER THE MEDITERRANEANNothing like gamma hydroxybutyrate to knock you out
, Mike thought, watching Lucy sleep. No breathing exercises in the world would do the trick when you were as stressed as Lucy was. She’d have huffed and puffed for an hour, uselessly.
, Mike thought, watching Lucy sleep. No breathing exercises in the world would do the trick when you were as stressed as Lucy was. She’d have huffed and puffed for an hour, uselessly.
Whiskey and carefully dosed GHB and she was out like a light.
US soldiers lived off the stuff, just as they lived off dextroamphetamines when they had to stay awake. Particularly fighter pilots who had to fly eighteen hours just to get to the battle zone. Your body needed up time and down time, and they were not always attuned to the US government’s needs. The miracle of modern chemistry and the ancient art of distillery kept the two in balance.
He’d gone out like a light himself last night, without benefit of GHB or whiskey. Sheer exhaustion had done the trick. He’d woken up this morning to find that Lucy had put a pillow under his head and covered him with a supersoft blanket that smelled of spring meadows. Maybe that’s why he’d slept so soundly.
Well, time to return the favor.
This was a fancy rich man’s jet. The seats folded down nearly to beds. Light-years away from the cavernous, freezing cold, noisy cabins of the military transport planes he was used to, strapped into an uncomfortable harness and pissing into a bottle.
He pressed a side button on her seat, and with a gentle purr the back went down and the footrest went up, so slowly and smoothly she slept right through it.
The overhead bin had blankets wrapped in cellophane. He opened a package and found a blanket that was worlds better than the standard stiff airline blanket smelling of plastic, though not nearly as nice as the soft scented one she’d spread over him last night.
He slipped one of those airplane pillows under her head, opened the blanket up and tucked it around her. Then he just stood there, looking down at her. Sleep was putting a little color back into her face. Ice had more color than her face when getting out of the SUV.
Even sick with panic and fear she’d been beautiful, but now that her features were relaxed, whoa.
Beautiful, and brave. Because of Kathy he knew the depth of panic flying could induce in some. Lucy had more reason than most to panic. She’d not only crashed but survived a week in the jungle with hostile groups of men searching for her. That would take major courage for anyone, let alone a seven-year-old child.
Anyone watching her wouldn’t have had a clue. Kathy balked every step of the way onto the plane, eyes rolling around in her head like a panicked pony’s. Lucy had been white as ice, but other than that, she gave no signs of the terror she must have been feeling. He’d felt the weight she put on his hand and on his arm, but no one else would have had a clue.
She was used to hiding her feelings from others.
She was entirely alone in the world.
That was another piece to add to the fascinating puzzle that was Lucy Merritt. Mike couldn’t begin to fathom what it must be like to be completely alone in the world, with no family at all. Not even aunts and uncles and cousins. The closest he’d come had been early childhood with only Dad, though two sets of doting grandparents had lived only twenty miles away. His father was one of four brothers and his mother had had three sisters. He had aunts and uncles and cousins up the wazoo. So though for his early years it had been just him and Dad in the house, there’d been tons of family around, and anyway, his father had been the best father in the world, completely dedicated to Mike. And after Dad married Cheryl, and they had Kathy and Ben and Joe, the house was filled with noisy laughing kids.
Mike loved his stepmother. Nothing step about it really. In every way that counted, Cheryl was his mom and Kathy and Ben and Joe his sister and brothers, nothing half there. He loved them all. Even when away for college and during his years in the military, he took every opportunity to come home. When the kids were small and he came home from college, he’d open the door and brace himself as three warm bodies threw themselves at him like small wriggling puppies. And then Cheryl hugged him and his dad would thump him on the back, beaming.
That’s when he knew he was home.
So he returned to the big rambling house in Portland, Oregon, as often as he could manage it and kept in touch with everyone through Skype.
When he’d learned about his dad’s illness, there was no question in his mind that he would step in and take over the family business sooner than expected. Cheryl and the kids needed an income, the two boys still had college ahead of them, and Kathy had her heart set on graduate school. He didn’t even really consider taking over the business his duty. It was as natural to him as breathing. His family needed him and that was that.
Jesus, Lucy was so alone—and she’d been alone since she was fourteen.
Mike didn’t know which idea was more appalling. That a young girl was left orphaned, without any family at all, or that the only thing she had that passed for a family was Edwin Montgomery.
She didn’t have a boyfriend, either. The only rings she had on those pretty fingers were on her right hand. She hadn’t called anyone to say she was going to disappear for an indefinite period of time.
By God, if she were his, he wouldn’t let her walk into danger like this.
The rising sun shot a bolt of bright white light into the cabin, and Mike realized he’d been standing looking at her for over half an hour.
Not good.
Going into a dangerous mission with a beautiful and fascinating woman was . . . well, it was a bad idea. Because you don’t go on an op with two priorities, you go in with one.
Get the mission done.
Now his head was divided, and that made him shit scared. Because right up there with getting the mission done was keeping the beautiful woman sleeping in her chair safe.
He shook himself. Standing here mooning wasn’t helping anyone. They were walking into a volatile situation and he needed all the intel he could get.
Setting up on the other side of the plane, he opened his laptop on another table. It was a perfectly ordinary laptop belonging to Michael Harrington. It contained several years’ worth of financial spreadsheets, and there was a current one, unfinished, dated today. His email address—[email protected]—had 5,547 messages from friends, fellow bankers and financial analysts, going back three years. He had files containing his schedule, personal financial data, bills paid and bank account info.
There were even a couple of emails from lmerritt@
hotmail.com
. He opened a few. Charming emails, a lot of them planning dinner or an evening out at the theater. Always signed,
love, Lucy.
hotmail.com
. He opened a few. Charming emails, a lot of them planning dinner or an evening out at the theater. Always signed,
love, Lucy.
On paper, Michael Harrington was worth more than seven million dollars—which was nice. Yesterday he’d lost $103,567 when the Dow took a sharp dip—which was bad. He did however gain $50,987 back by close of market. Man, he was one smart guy.
His laptop contained the life and times of one Michael Harrington, rich yuppie.
But there was a secret cache, highly encrypted and zipped to within an inch of its life, that was Eyes Only for Captain Mike Shafer of the Tenth Mountain Division, US Army, and that’s the one he opened.
He read through the instructions while the theme music of
Mission: Impossible
danced in his head.
Mission: Impossible
danced in his head.
Try to identify suspected hidden bioweapons lab somewhere in forty-eight thousand square miles of frozen desert on the roof of the world. In winter. Find dessicated body—basically a set of winter clothes and gear and some dust—and search for flash drive in same frozen desert. Locate and contact possible double agent inside the Palace of Chilongo, even though he’d never been to Nhala before, did not speak the language, did not know the customs and could possibly expose himself as a double agent, in a kingdom which was veering toward a military dictatorship.
Piece of cake.
S
IX
IX
LAGOS, NIGERIA
“HERE,” Dr. Imran Mazari said quietly, finger on the giant detailed relief map spread out over General Goodfellow Mitanga’s huge, ornate, highly polished desk. His finger covered a spot far inland from Lagos, in the south of the country, three hundred miles from the border with Cameroon.
General Mitanga nodded wisely, holding on to the edges of his desk. “Animists,” he said with contempt. He spat toward a spittoon in the corner and missed. “Infidels.”
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