Spy to Die For (Assassins Guild) (21 page)

Jack dug into the computer system. He had a sick feeling about that ship, and he tried to ignore it. If he worked off of preconceptions, he might make mistakes.

That was the last thing he needed to do.

He found the ship’s silhouette, and let the
Hawk
plot the ship’s trajectory. Then he continued to dig.

The
Hawk
continually revised the images on the screen, and he didn’t like what he was seeing. The other ship kept getting closer and closer—not in real time, but in the past. Only he was just seeing it now, because the tracking was catching up to the ship, and that wasn’t good. It meant that the ship had probably slowed down.

And if that ship followed the
Hawk
’s trajectory, then that meant it was really close.

Jack sent that data back to Skye but kept working. He needed to find out whose ship this was. If it belonged to the Guild, then Skye would deal with them. She would apologize, explain the situation, and find a resolution.

If the ship belonged to someone he and Skye didn’t know, then Skye’s plan of going straight to Kordita and playing a ground game made sense. They were heading to the Guild, and no strangers got into the Guild. Jack wasn’t even sure he would be able to.

But he worried that the ship belonged to a Rover, and if that were the case, then he and Skye were in deep trouble.

He paused for just a moment as a thought flitted across his brain. Then he realized that he had missed something obvious.

He went back into the information the computer had sent him, and looked for images of the ship before it went into stealth mode.

It took some back-tracing, but he found it.

“Got you, you bastard,” he said softly.

“What?” Skye asked.

“Nothing,” Jack said. He wanted her to be focusing on their trip. “You got the information I sent you, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m trying to speed the recalibration up. I’m worried that this ship is much closer than we think.”

He was worried about that too. He looked at the configuration of the ship before it went into stealth mode, selected the image, and told the computer to find that ship in all the various registries.

The ship was smaller than Jack expected, the kind of ship only one person or two people used, which didn’t reassure him. He wanted to see a larger ship, something owned by a corporation or the Guild. He didn’t want a fast-moving stealth ship that could sneak up on something larger, like the
Hawk
.

While the computer searched registries in various sectors, Jack did one other thing. He hacked into the system of the store where he and Skye had purchased the
Hawk
. He had set up the hack before leaving, figuring they might need more information.

At the time, he had been worried that the
Hawk
was stolen and being resold. He wanted information at his fingertips: if someone trailed them again and tried to attack them for something the
Hawk
’s original owner had done, he wanted to know who the original owner was.

He hadn’t expected to use the same hack to determine if anyone else had looked at the records.

No one outside the store had, but the records were accessed a few days after Jack and Skye left Zaeen. And then someone had dug into Skye’s identity.

“Skye,” Jack said, “did the Guild issue the identity that you used to buy this ship?”

“Why does that matter?” Skye asked.

“Because I want to know how breakable the identity is,” Jack said.

She shrugged. “If you’re good, you might be able to figure out that it came from the Guild. But you won’t be able to go beyond that.”

If you were good, you wouldn’t need to go beyond that. Hell, if you weren’t even marginally good. If someone had looked at Krell’s security feeds, saw Skye and Jack together, realized that they had stolen the
Rapido
together, then that someone could trace both Skye and Jack. They had been a presence on Zaeen, but they hadn’t been there long.

Long enough to be on security, though. Security that could easily be sold to someone with cash and a determination to find them.

Even someone who usually hired spies and investigators to do his dirty work could follow this trail, if he were determined enough.

Jack didn’t like how he was thinking. It was too close to a preconception.

Then the computer pinged at him. The ship following them had been part of a bulk buy from a sector so far away that it took nearly two months to travel from there to here. That wasn’t what caught Jack’s eye, though. What caught his eye was this: The ship was registered to a familiar name.

One Jack had invented. He had created the corporate identity, he had filled out all of the documentation, he had even set up the bank accounts.

That ship was part of a Rover buy from two years ago.

He tapped the screen so that the computer would show him the image of the person who had flown that ship out of its last port.

The man frozen in the two-dimensional image was slight, with scruffy brown hair. He wore the same jacket that he had worn on Krell.

Heller.

“Oh, shit,” Jack said. They were in deep trouble now.

A warning light appeared on the navigation panel. Skye checked it as Jack cursed beside her.

He probably had the same thought she did; they’d been boarded.

She activated a part of the
Hawk
’s exterior usually used only as a ship approached a port, to identify and dislodge anything that might have attached itself to the exterior during flight.

The docking hooks near the cargo bay lit up. Something had attached itself—and space debris usually didn’t use docking hooks.

“We’ve been boarded,” she said.

Jack cursed again. Then he stood so fast that he banged his knees on the console. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Take care of what?” she asked. “There could be a dozen people down there.”

He looked down at her, his face pale. “There isn’t. At most, there are two or three.”

“And you’re going up against two or three people?” she asked. “I’m just going to speed up and get us to Kordita as quickly as possible.”

“No,” he said. “As soon as I go below, you’re going to seal off this level. Separate the environmental system from the rest of the ship. Lock out anyone who tries to access the cockpit.”

He knew something. He wasn’t telling her everything. She felt a wave of anger run through her. Nothing infuriated her more.

“You know what’s going on,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I traced the ship. It’s small, and it belongs to Heller.”

Her breath caught. Heller? On board? How was that possible? And Jack was heading down to greet him? Alone?

“I’m going to separate the
Hawk
’s environmental system now,” she said. “If he put anything into it, I can scrub it. Then I’ll just get us to Kordita.”

“No,” Jack said. “Heller’s not the kind of assassin you’re used to. He doesn’t care who dies. He’s probably attaching some kind of explosive to the interior of the
Hawk
. Then he’s going to leave, and no one will ever know what happened. We certainly won’t. We’ll be dead.”

“He may have already done that,” she said.

“And I’ll disable it,” Jack said.

“You know how to do that?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Do you?”

“We learned how to make bombs, not how to take them apart,” she said. “And it was mostly theory, because bombs rarely take out only one target.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “This ship is the middle of a shipping lane. Heller doesn’t even care if someone else’s ship gets destroyed because of his bomb. I’m going down.”

She caught his arm. “I’ll get the
Hawk
away from everything. I’ll separate us off from the rest of the ship. He’ll leave. And then we can get the bomb together.”

“No,” Jack said. “Because that allows him to go free. He’ll go after your director. He’ll go after all those government contracts. He’ll kill lots of innocent people.”

“Starting with you,” Skye said.

Jack shook her off. “I’ll be all right.”

“It would be better if I went,” she said. “I’m the one with assassin training.”

“You’re the one who
failed
assassin training,” Jack said, his tone harsh. “I’m going. Stop arguing.”

“But you won’t know what to do,” she said.

“That means Heller won’t know what to expect,” Jack said.

He bent down, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her so thoroughly that her toes curled. She grabbed at him, feeling oddly desperate, wondering if she could seduce him into staying.

Then their lips separated, but he didn’t let go of her face.

“Here’s what you don’t know,” he said softly. “I love you. I will always love you, no matter what happens. And I do want something permanent with you. But if this is all we ever have, I’m happy we’ve had it. My life is so much better with you in it. Thank you.”

Then he turned quickly, and let himself out of the cockpit.

She was shaking, his words echoing in her ears.

“Dammit, Jack,” she said, wishing he could hear her. “I love you too.”

As Jack took the ladder down to the lower levels of the ship, he hoped Skye was tracking him. He couldn’t communicate with her—he had to bet that Heller was monitoring the comm system, as well as the ship’s elevator. Which was why Jack had crammed himself into the engineering ladders, designed only for times when the elevator wasn’t working well.

He barely fit in the rounded hole that the designers had carved into the middle of the ship. The rungs of the ladder were set so that it would be easy for someone Skye’s size to go down quickly.

He kept getting tangled up in his own limbs. But he was moving as fast as he could, and as quietly as he could.

Jack hoped Skye switched the environmental system immediately. He wouldn’t put it past Heller to poison the ship’s atmosphere and then leave. That would be the easiest and most efficient way to kill them.

It would also be cowardly.

And somewhat stupid, because eventually someone would find the ship with the bodies on it. The sector government would get involved and figure out that there was no reason to kill Skye and Jack except simple murder. The Assassins Guild might actually seek retribution.

Heller wasn’t dumb. He probably knew all of that, which was why Jack was gambling that Heller wouldn’t do that.

Of course, Heller might change the atmosphere, then set a bomb. That would be smarter, particularly if the bomb had a timer. Heller could get far away, and no one would know exactly what happened.

If Jack were a betting man, that plan was what he would have put money on. Heller would do his best to kill them, and then dispose of the evidence.

But Heller thought he had time. He figured neither Jack nor Skye knew that Heller was after Jack.

Jack hoped the information would give him an advantage.

Because he wasn’t sure what the hell kind of advantage it would give them. He was an untrained guy, going up against a trained assassin. If he got too close, Heller could just break his neck.

Jack paused on the lower level. Skye had brought a laser pistol on board. She kept all of her things in the main master suite one level down from the cockpit. He eased off the ladder onto that level.

He had to hurry. He slipped down the hall, listening hard for unusual sounds, hoping that Heller hadn’t somehow made his way here.

The master suite was at the far end of the corridor—better views from the portholes on the edge of the ship—and he cursed that. He wanted to get in and out as rapidly as possible.

Each second seemed to take an hour. He reached the door to the suite, opened it, and dashed inside.

The pistol wasn’t near Skye’s research area. She kept everything neat, which he usually appreciated. Right now, though, he wanted a messy desk with her clothes strewn on the floor, and the laser pistol on top of everything.

Instead, he had to search drawers and closets until he found it.

It was inside one of her coats, as safe as it could be in this haphazard collection of clothing and stuff she had accumulated on Zaeen.

He grabbed the pistol, examined it to make sure he knew how to use it, then set the safety and jammed the entire thing in his belt. He didn’t have time to finesse anything.

He had to find Heller, and he had to do it fast.

For the first time in her life, Skye hated being alone. She paced the cockpit, wishing it were bigger just so that she had more area to walk in. She had all of the screens up as holograms, and she monitored everything.

Monitoring was all that she could do.

She had sped up the
Hawk
as fast as it could go, hoping that she might get to Kordita before anything bad happened. Jack would probably tell her not to do this, but she had hopes that Kordita’s space cops would be able to help her before the
Hawk
exploded and took other ships with it.

As she had sped up the
Hawk
, she had also separated the environmental system of the cockpit from the rest of the
Hawk
. She had realigned all of the
Hawk
’s navigational and engineering controls to the cockpit and sealed that realignment with DNA identification and a living hand confirmation. She had locked down this level.

No one, not even Jack, was going to get up here without her help.

She tried to watch what was happening on the video security system, but apparently Heller had shut that down the moment he crawled into the cargo bay. He had entered alone—she saw his scrawny form ease the bay doors open—and then the video went off, as did the heat signature monitoring.

Somehow he had done that without tripping any alarms up here. If this ended well—when this ended well—she would figure out how he did that.

Right now, she kept an eye on the only monitors she had—the heat signatures on the lower decks outside of the cargo bay. The video security got shut off everywhere, but the heat signatures remained everywhere except the cargo bay.

So she could keep an eye on Jack—at least at the moment.

The security system had registered him as a little red dot, which she would have found amusing if it weren’t so stressful. Nothing about Jack was little—not his body, not his brain, and certainly not his courage.

Damn him for that courage.

It was going to get him killed.

And then she really would be alone.

She watched the red dot hesitate near the next lower level, and for a moment, she worried that Heller had found Jack. Then she realized that she would see Heller as a heat signature if he were outside the cargo bay.

Jack was clearly contemplating something else.

And then she realized what it was. He had stopped one floor down and run toward the master suite.

She knew what he had gone for.

Her laser pistol.

And that broke her heart.

He hadn’t had the lessons she had, the training she had. He probably didn’t know that superior firepower meant nothing when facing off with a good assassin, or even with a better trained opponent.

When she’d been training, she’d gone into several simulations with a laser pistol—as the only person armed in the room—and she had been disarmed and fake-killed within seconds. Once she’d actually sprained her arm trying to wrench the pistol away from her opponent. Her trainer had later told her that had that been a real fight, the opponent would have broken her arm, and then broken her neck.

“Jack,” she whispered.

He was going to leave her. Only unlike her parents, unlike everyone else in her life, he wouldn’t leave intentionally. He would leave because Heller would kill him.

And then everything that Skye had done these last few weeks, everything she had tried just so that she would know that Jack existed somewhere in the universe, all of that would be for nothing.

He would be dead, and she would be alone.

If she survived whatever else Heller managed to do.

And right now, she was out of options. She had done all that Jack had asked and more.

All she could do was wait.