King's Crusade (Seventeen) (4 page)

As it turned out, McIntyre was a creature of habit. He kept the aircraft at a cruising speed of a hundred and twenty-two knots and maintained a steady altitude.

Less than fifteen seconds after she cleared the edge of the cliff, she glided to the rear deck of the Cessna and stabbed the sai daggers into the metal of the fuselage.

The impact jarred her wrists and the wind drag nearly tore her off the aircraft. The plane pitched backward and rolled, offering her a dizzying view of the desert far below when her body tilted with it. The engine roared as the pilot struggled to level the Cessna.

She unclipped the wings of the suit and renewed her grip on the daggers. Moving the blades one at a time, she pulled herself toward the front of the aircraft and dropped down the trailing edge of the left wing. Steadying her feet against the strut and the wheel fairing of the landing gear, she sheathed her left sai and yanked the cabin door open.

The pilot stared at her, goggle-eyed.

‘Abraham McIntyre, in the name of the Crovir First Council, I hereby arrest you on charges of—’ she started to say.

McIntyre blinked and reached for the gun on the seat next to him.

Alexa twisted to the left and narrowly avoided the bullet that whizzed past her chest. Frowning, she gripped the support strut, slipped the right sai in her holster, and pulled a knife from a scabbard on her thigh. McIntyre blanched when she leaned inside the aircraft and cut his seatbelt. She grabbed him by the neck of his shirt. He wriggled desperately in her grip and aimed the gun at her head.

Alexa raised her right knee and hook-kicked the weapon from his hand. A cry of pain left his lips when the gun fell from his fingers. She ignored it and heaved backwards. McIntyre screamed, knuckles whitening on the edge of his seat.

A grim smile crossed her lips. She let go of the wing strut and fell away from the plane.

His shriek of terror was lost in the wind as they dropped like lead weights toward the distant ground. Alexa tightened her arm around the man’s neck and wrapped her legs around his waist before reaching behind her back and pulling the activation handle on her chute. It deployed swiftly behind her.

McIntyre choked at the sudden deceleration.

She reached for the steering toggles and guided them smoothly toward the desert floor. Halfway down, the red-tailed hawk dove past them with a shrill cry, likely on the trail of an unseen prey. She followed the bird with her eyes until it disappeared from view.

Ten feet from the ground, Alexa let go of McIntyre. He hit the dirt with a dull thud and lay there, groaning. She landed a few steps ahead of him, steadied herself, and shrugged the chute harness off her back. She strode back toward the prostrate figure and stopped a couple of inches from his head. She unclipped her GPS device from her hip and studied it.

They had touched down exactly a mile and a half from her rental Jeep.

A minute passed. Alexa stared at the man lying still at her feet. ‘Get up,’ she ordered coldly.

McIntyre’s hand suddenly snaked out and gripped her booted ankle. He yanked on her leg and tried to pull her to the ground. Her weight barely shifted. A sigh left her lips. She removed one of her Sigs from its holster and shot him in the hand.

His howl of agony reverberated against the nearby sand dunes. McIntyre scrambled wildly to his knees and gripped his bleeding appendage. ‘You bitch!’ he growled, glaring at her from under the layer of grime that covered his face.

The gun shifted in her hand. ‘Unless you want to lose your right eye, I suggest you get up and start to walk,’ she said in a dull monotone. He stared into the barrel of the Sig and gritted his teeth before rising unsteadily to his feet.

Ten minutes before they reached the Jeep, Alexa heard the distant boom of an explosion and saw a flare of smoke rise on the horizon. The Cessna had crashed into the desert.

She had parked the vehicle in the shadow of a giant boulder and camouflaged it with netting to reduce its visibility from the sky. She handcuffed a disgruntled McIntyre to the passenger door, changed out of the wing-suit, and climbed behind the wheel.

Less than an hour after she had jumped off the side of the cliff, Alexa guided the Jeep onto Interstate Fifteen and drove toward Las Vegas. As the vehicle quickly ate the distance that separated them from the city, she glanced at the man next to her.

McIntyre slouched in his seat and alternated between scowling at her and staring worriedly at the landscape outside the window. An occasional wince crossed his face when he moved his injured hand.

She had wrapped a bandage around it; she did not want him bleeding all over the rental.

‘Who the hell are you anyway?’ he finally asked when they were thirty miles out from the city.

Alexa stared at the road ahead. ‘That’s on a need-to-know basis.’

‘Look, if this is about money, I can—’ McIntyre started. He stopped abruptly at her expression.

‘Don’t insult my intelligence,’ she said.

He lapsed into silence and gnawed at his lips.

She studied him for several seconds before turning her attention to the highway.

Abraham McIntyre was a thief and a fool. A clever thief, granted, but still a fool. He had to be if he thought he could pull a fast one on the Crovir First Council.

McIntyre was an engineer for one of the most lucrative oil companies in the world. It was owned by a Crovir noble who also happened to be a member of the First Council. Not content with his generous salary, McIntyre started embezzling money from the company. When an accountant finally picked up an irregularity in the balance sheets a year ago, it became apparent that someone had been siphoning cash from one of the corporation’s subsidiary funds. The trail eventually led to McIntyre through a series of anonymous postal box companies.

It turned out the immortal was even greedier than originally thought. In an attempt to make his ill-earned fortune grow, he set up business with a drug cartel in South America, where he was based for his job. Twice a week, he would fly from Vegas to Palm Springs to make a drop to one of the cartel’s principal cocaine distributors in California. The money he earned was then wired to one of his many foreign bank accounts.

At that stage, the oil company should have notified the FBI’s Financial Crimes Section and the DEA.

But that was not the way immortals carried out their affairs. Although they adhered to most of the rules and regulations of human society in order to preserve the secrets of their race, they had a whole set of their own laws to abide by, most of which stemmed from the very inception of the immortal societies. In cases like these, immortal decrees overrode those made by humans. And immortals firmly believed in obtaining their pound of flesh. Or, in this case, a life for a sin.

In the two weeks that she had been watching him, Alexa had come up with six ways to capture and dispose of McIntyre. Five of them would have involved injuring or killing the bodyguards from the security firm he had hired to protect him; although he was an immortal, McIntyre was no fool when it came to investing in his personal protection. However discreet she was, the death of humans would have brought attention from the Federal police, something she was keen to avoid. After all, it was the reason she had been assigned this task.

Dealing with an immortal embezzler was a job that would ordinarily have been handled by the Order of Crovir Hunters. But the Hunters, while excellent at what they did, sometimes left traces. McIntyre needed to disappear off the face of the Earth, as if he had never existed.

That was her area of expertise.

The sixth method was the one she had finally chosen. The only time the immortal was truly alone was when he made the flight to Palm Springs; he never took a bodyguard with him on his trips.

By the time the authorities and McIntyre’s business partners realized his body was not in the remains of the burnt-out Cessna, he would be long gone.

She exited the freeway at Junction 27 and took the St. Rose Parkway. Two miles later, she turned right and headed for the Henderson Executive airport. She drove past the main terminal and administrative buildings and parked the Jeep by one of the private corporate hangars.

McIntyre tensed when he saw the Learjet next to it. The color drained from his face as four Crovir Hunters stepped out of the shadow of the plane. Alexa pulled the cursing immortal from the vehicle and dragged him toward the group of silent men.

Frank Schmidt, the Crovir team leader, was tall and broad-shouldered, with a chiseled face lifted straight from a Roman bust. Alexa knew him from the brief time she had spent in the Order. He was one of a handful of Hunters who did not fear her.

A breeze ruffled Schmidt’s suit and revealed the faint outline of the holster under his arm as he walked toward them. ‘You’re dead on time,’ he said with a faint grin. He glanced at McIntyre’s hand. ‘What happened?’

‘He got frisky,’ said Alexa. McIntyre glowered at her.

Schmidt raised his eyebrows. His expression indicated that a man would have to be mad to attempt any such thing around her. His gaze ran over her figure briefly. ‘You look good,’ he said quietly.

‘Thanks,’ said Alexa.

The Hunters behind Schmidt shifted slightly. She glanced impassively at their troubled expressions.

She had long been aware of the rumors that circulated about her in the upper echelons of the Crovir Councils and the Order. She was a cold and calculating bitch without feelings. She would just as soon kill you as look at you. She wasn’t a team player. She ate raw meat and drank the blood of her lovers.
The gossip was wild and fanciful. Some of it was true.

Alexa knew she had bruised many egos over the centuries. She was faster, stronger, and deadlier than any Hunter working for the Order today, and was without a doubt the best covert agent the First Council had had access to in the last three hundred years. She thought this without pride or pleasure. It was a simple fact. She was also the only Crovir operative who had yet to suffer a death.

Fifteen minutes later, she watched the Learjet taxi along the runway. She turned and walked back to the Jeep. McIntyre would be taken to Europe to face the charges against him in a Crovir court. The evidence was damning. She knew what the outcome would be; she had carried out enough executions for the Crovir First Council to know they did not forgive easily.

She had just made it onto Interstate Fifteen when her cell phone rang.

Alexa looked at the display with narrowed eyes. She knew the number well. She took the call.

‘Hi, Alexa? We need to talk,’ said Dimitri Reznak without preamble.

She was silent for several seconds. ‘Where are you?’ she finally said.

‘I’m in Europe,’ said Reznak. ‘I’ll be in LA tonight.’

She frowned at the underlying tension in his voice. ‘Where do you want to meet?’

Four hours later, she drove into a parking lot at Los Angeles International Airport. After returning the Jeep to the rental company’s local office, she made her way to one of the terminal’s executive lounges. She settled down with a cup of coffee and a paper while she waited for Reznak.

A shadow soon fell across her. Alexa looked up.

‘Hello,’ said the tall, trim man before her. Her gaze flickered over the stranger’s expensive suit, manicured hands, and Rolex watch. A second man, undoubtedly his business associate, stood next to him.

‘Would you like some company?’ asked the first man with an easy, confident smile.

‘No,’ she replied.

He inhaled sharply at her blunt tone.

His friend stiffened. ‘Hey, I’m sure we can—’ started the stranger with an amicable expression.

Alexa placed her cup down carefully on the table and glanced around the lounge. Shy of taking a Sig out and shooting the two men, she was going to have to make it inherently clear why it would be a bad idea to associate with her.

‘The tan line on the fourth finger of your left hand indicates that you were on a holiday with your wife in the last month,’ she said, staring steadily at the first man. ‘Your wedding ring is in the right breast pocket of your suit.’

She ignored his startled gasp and turned to his business partner. ‘As for you, I’m sure your friend here would like to know why you’re sleeping with his wife.’

The second man’s jaw sagged open. ‘How the hell did you—’

‘Barry?’ said the first man in a stunned voice, turning to look at his associate.

Alexa picked up her cup and leaned back in her seat. ‘You have the same scratch marks on your overnight cases from her diamond ring,’ she said, her gaze scanning the paper once more. ‘And you both smell like her.’

She tuned out the heated voices of the two men as they walked off in the midst of an argument. Not for the first time, she cursed her face and physique. Despite the nondescript way she dressed, her dark hair, silver eyes, sculpted cheekbones, and pale skin made her stand out in a crowd.

Reznak landed in LA nine hours later. Alexa watched him cross the lounge toward her and experienced the same mixture of irritating emotions his presence always engendered. Officially, Reznak was one of her employers. Unofficially, he was her godfather, her mentor, and the closest thing to a family she had in this world.