Heart of a Hero (61 page)

She crept forward as quickly as she could, running out of light from the open door after she turned the corner. Feeling her way along, measuring the distance by the protrusion of the studs placed at four-foot intervals. Suddenly, the floor seemed to fall away, but her foot caught on a step as she grabbed one of the timbers. There were stairs! Quince’s control room wasn’t on this floor after all.

Cautiously she descended, the darkness total now, and came to a closed door at the bottom. Dawn felt carefully for a knob or handle. There was none. She took a deep breath, almost coughing at the stuffiness of the air. Then she fished the remote out of her pocket, backed up a few steps and pushed the button. The light almost blinded her.

She bent double and head-butted the figure that had stood to greet her. A loud
oof
resulted. Without a pause, she fell back and kicked upward, catching him just beneath the chin.

Thank God he wasn’t one of the beefy armed guards Quince employed. A computer geek, she guessed, not trained in hand-to-hand.

Before he could recover, she popped his ears with the flat of her palms, then chopped the back of his neck like a cinder block in karate class. He fell and lay motionless at her feet.

The first thing Dawn did was find his weapon, an automatic pistol, loaded. It was cheaply made and showed signs of neglect, but she immediately felt less vulnerable. Next, she felt for a pulse and found one, then looked around the room for something to tie him with. Nothing but computer cords.

Well, she’d just have to hurry and finish before he came to. Then she would have to hide him somewhere until Sextant sent the team in. Or kill him outright, which she wasn’t entirely sure she could do. Defending herself was one thing, but the man was out cold.

All the while, she had been scanning the bank of computer screens set up around the room. There were only eight, which meant there weren’t as many cameras as she had figured. One showed the terrace to keep track of the comings and goings in and out of the house. One pictured the cove where they had landed. The other six were set up in the guest rooms. No movement anywhere at the moment except from the one guard watching the beach.

Dawn systematically disabled all the surveillance equipment.

She noted another door and headed directly for it.
Pay dirt.
This was Quince’s study, lined with bookcases and outfitted with expensive mahogany and what appeared to
be a sophisticated computer system. She hurried to the keyboard, tapped it and watched the screen saver disappear. The idiot! He had files on his desktop.

She clicked the one that announced
Waste.
A list popped up with Jarad Al-Dayal’s name second, beneath Carlotta’s. There were ten names on his guest list, with only the first six recognizable to her. Her name was not included. Neither was Sean McCoy’s.

What did those exclusions mean? She quickly committed the names to memory, closed the file and checked several others. Maintenance stuff. Frantic to finish her search, she checked the desk drawers.

Only one was locked. She forced it with a letter opener. Lo and behold, all by its lonesome, there lay a slender attaché, the portable flash drive, the same size and shape as a disposable cigarette lighter.

Hopefully this was the same thing she had seen stolen by Bergen at the Zelcon lab. No time to check it out. She stuck it in her pocket with the pistol, straightened everything else she had touched and got out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Quince’s man lay where she had left him. Dawn unfastened the tightly woven cord from the attaché and used it to bind his hands behind him. He wasn’t much bigger than she was, but no way could she drag him up those stairs. What could she do with him?

“I’ll take him,” Eric said from the stairway door.

“What are you doing here? You were supposed to—”

“You were gone too long. I was worried, okay?” he snapped.

Thank God he had followed. “Where will we put him?”

“The bathroom for the time being,” he answered. He shouldered the body as if it were a sack of feathers.

It would be a tight squeeze getting back through the passageway carrying the computer tech, but they had little choice.

She closed the doors behind them with the remote and followed Eric’s slow but steady progress back to their rooms.

With the man securely bound and gagged in the enormous marble tub, she and Eric collapsed in the sitting room to rest. No one was monitoring them now. She had fixed that for sure. “It’s safe. No ears, no eyes,” she reported.

“Good girl,” Eric said.

“My boy, you have no idea
how
good,” she replied. For the first time, Dawn allowed herself a self-satisfied grin. “I have the list of names.” She paused to watch his surprise, then presented her next feat, adding, “and a gun, of course.”

He nodded, pulling a face. “Of course.”

She put the pistol away. “And the plans, I think.” She drew the little flash drive out of her pocket and dangled it between her thumb and forefinger.

He laughed. “I’ll be damned. You really think that’s it?”

“It stands to reason. The one thing in the only locked drawer.” At that moment, Dawn wanted to rush into his arms and do a little victory dance. She could see he felt the same way.

His excitement dimmed a little as she watched. “Now how do we keep Quince in the dark about your discovery until I can get the team in here to clean up?”

“Better call them in now. According to the list, there are only four who haven’t arrived yet. Maybe they can be picked up on the mainland.”

He rubbed his brow, frowning now. “If we can take them here, it would be better.” He looked up at her. “Want to risk another day or two?”

Dawn shrugged. “I’m game, but Quince is gonna know
something’s up. His guy is missing from the control room and somebody sabotaged his surveillance toys.”

“We play dumb. Maybe Sean will take the heat for that since he’s still out there running around,” Eric reminded her.

Suddenly Dawn remembered. “Hey, I’d better get rid of this remote before Quince gets back. We can’t lay
that
on McCoy.”

“Downstairs,” Eric suggested, getting up. “You can stick it between the cushions where he was sitting before we went on the house tour.”

They hurried down to the lounge. Voices wafted up, alerting them that Quince and his other guests had already returned.

Eric stopped her on the stairs, tousled her hair and kissed her soundly on the mouth, smearing her lipstick. He grinned playfully when she tried to wipe it off and catch her breath at the same time. “We’ve been busy in bed, okay?”

“Don’t you wish,” she murmured.

“Absolutely, even if it is almost as nerve-racking as what we were really up to,” he replied under his breath.

“Nerve-racking?” She couldn’t help but smile.

Quince raised his eyebrows when they came in. “I trust you two have been entertaining yourselves while we were out.”

Eric marched across the room to the bar without answering and helped himself to a glass of juice. “I tire of this incessant touring of yours, Quince. Shoot me if you will, but cease pretending this is some…” he windmilled one hand and scoffed “…house party.”

“Ah, but that’s precisely what it is, my friend,” Quince said, turning away from Dawn, who moved surreptitiously toward the chair where she intended to drop the remote.

“Where is the American?” Eric demanded, looking around as if Cal Markham might appear out of nowhere.

“What do you have there, woman?” Boris demanded as soon as Dawn drew the remote from her pocket.

Dawn froze as all eyes turned to her, Eric’s question about Cal Markham’s absence forgotten.

She raised her chin and pinned the Russian with a haughty look. “You think I have a weapon?” She laughed mirthlessly. “I merely intend to watch television while you men argue.” She pointed the remote at the big-screen TV housed in the entertainment center. “I will place it on mute.”

“Wait!” Quince moved hurriedly and snatched the remote from her hand. “Where did you get this?”

Dawn pointed to the chair. “There.”

“No television,” he barked. “All of you, retire to your rooms immediately.” He was suddenly sweating profusely.

He gave no explanation for his dismissal, nor did he have to. No one in residence was under the impression that they really were Quince’s guests. They were captive here until he decided to hold the auction of the information and allowed them to leave.

The armed guards were just outside the door. As for Dawn and Eric, they both knew why Quince wanted everyone out of his way. He was going to check out his control room.

“Now you have angered our host, Aurora!” Eric accused Dawn as they marched up the stairs with the others. “I shall have to punish you.”

Dawn hung her head, as if shamed and afraid. Boris grunted his approval and the African laughed. Men of a feather, she thought to herself, glad Eric didn’t really fit that mold. If Quince wasn’t careful, these jerks might actually bond into a new group instead of offing each other the way he planned.

She wondered where the other guy was. How would a
big, bad white supremacist have reacted to a Muslim man berating an uppity wife?

Eric herded her straight into the bathroom as soon as they reached their quarters. The computer weenie they had tied up in the bathtub was still there, wriggling uncomfortably, still secure. Dawn ignored him and addressed Eric. “What now?”

He was ripping off his shirt. “I need to contact Mercier. We can’t wait. It’s time for the showdown.”

“For that you need to be naked? Somehow I expected you to close your eyes, go all woo-woo for a minute and that’d be it.”

His lips quirked in a mirthless smile. “Better use something more concrete than a mind link. I don’t seem to be functioning too well in that capacity, thanks to you.”

“Me! What do I have to do with it?”

“Inadvertent interference. Not your fault.” He tossed his shirt aside and reached for the back of his left shoulder with his right hand, feeling the skin there as if looking for something.

“What
are
you doing?” she demanded, moving around to see what was wrong with his shoulder.

“Get something sharp and remove this, will you?”

Dawn squinted at the mosquito bite he was touching with his forefinger. “What is it? Oh, the transmitter you mentioned?”

“It will be when I get it out and activate it. Right now, it’s only emitting an infrequent pulse to give our location. Quince’s scanner would have picked it up when he searched me if it emitted constantly. Not squeamish, are you?”

“No.” She shrugged and went to search her makeup bag. She came up with a pair of nail scissors. “These should do.”

He patiently sat on the lid of the commode while she
performed minor surgery, quickly slitting the skin that covered the tiny device. She noted the scattering of tiny freckles that lay beneath his fake tan, readily visible to anyone who looked closely. They reminded her how vulnerable he was, disguised this way. With one slipup, she could have punctured his plan as neatly as she had his skin and gotten them both killed. And yet, he had trusted her to become Aurora, who was the total opposite of her real self. How did anyone come by such trust, especially in someone they knew so little about?

“There,” she muttered, handing him the instrument that proved to be about the size of a hearing-aid battery. She pressed a folded wad of toilet tissue over the incision and bore down on it to halt the bleeding.

He rolled off more tissue, cleaned the transmitter and took the nail scissors to it. She watched him poke it, then tap it lightly, using what was obviously a code. Not Morse, she realized. He repeated a pattern five times, then stopped. “That should do it.”

“Are they near? Sextant, I mean?”

He nodded. “They should be just beyond the horizon, waiting for the signal.”

Dawn bit her lips together, then suggested, “Could you maybe try that other method of contact, too, just to be on the safe side?”

He grinned up at her. “But you don’t really buy into that. You said so.”

She backed up a step, placing her free hand on her hips. “Any minute now, Quince is likely to come storming in here demanding what I took from his office. He has that bevy of trigger-happy guards with him and all we’ve got is a cheap pistol with four rounds in it. Anything you can do to hurry our backup along, I really want you to try.” She
frowned at the tiny transmitter. “That thing could be gunked up or something.”

“All right. Then go in the other room. You distract me,” he ordered.

“I want to watch,” she argued.

His look turned serious as he placed a hand on her arm and squeezed it reassuringly. “Please.”

She took his hand and placed it over the makeshift bandage. “Well, hold this while you
communicate
so you won’t bleed to death.”

“Thanks,” he replied simply, then added, “I mean it. You’ve done a great job here, Dawn, however the mission ends. You remember that.”

Dawn didn’t reply. She might have asked him what he expected to go down now, why he looked so worried. He might have told her that their chances of surviving this had dropped to near zero because she had gotten caught with that remote control. The less said, the better, she guessed.

Eric was getting nothing back from Mercier. No confirming vibrations from the transmitter, none mindwise, either. Nada.

Okay, they would have to play this out as if backup was stuck out there with no wind for the sails. He checked the pistol again, as if that would help. Four rounds, not enough to take out the guards, much less the two terrorists left and Quince himself. Then there was the wild card, Sean McCoy.

Eric had tried to summon Clay. No response there, either. Maybe he was dead.

Dawn’s yelp from the next room catapulted him into action. He cast a warning look at the man in the bathtub, then burst into the sitting room ready to fire.

Quince held up one hand. “Wait!”

Eric held his stance, the gun aimed directly at Quince’s head. “I should shoot you,” he rasped. “You came in here thinking my wife was alone.”