Taken by Surprise (20 page)

Michael forced a smile because he knew she wanted him to. He remembered sitting with her on her sofa so many months ago, talking about whatever came to their minds while Lucas lay on the floor in front of the television watching
Star Wars Episode IV
. Michael had caught sight of Princess Leia in her slave costume and suggested Rhonda find one for Halloween. It was one of the few times he'd let slip aloud how amazingly sexy he found her.

"Did he tell you anything that might help us find him?" Stone asked slowly, softly, pulling her attention from Michael.

Rhonda's shoulders rose and fell in an audible sigh. "Finding him won't be the hard part. He'll be exactly where you expected him to be the first time. It's getting to him that will be the challenge."

"You're saying he'll be at the compound?" Ziegler sounded incredulous. "He would be stupid to go back there. I can come up with a lot of choice names for that bastard, but stupid isn't one of them."

"Are you so sure?" Rhonda lifted a challenging eyebrow. "That he would be stupid to return to the compound, I mean. You think he won't, because he's already been hit there."

"The Royal Cambodian forces have the place under round-the-clock surveillance," Stone interjected. At a muttered curse from one of the SEALs that they should've had the compound under continuous observation all along, the FBI agent nodded. "I agree. However, unless someone has invented a time machine, it's a little impossible to turn back the clock, correct past mistakes. But we can fix them before they are made again."

"The safest place to hide is the one already checked." Rhonda pushed off the doorframe. "You want specific words, Lieutenant? There you go. I'll even put them in quotations if you want." She made air quotes with her fingers. "You sent him underground once. He won't let you do it again. His words. He said you would expect him to go into hiding. You would never expect him to return so soon to the hub of his operation." She laughed sardonically at that. "Damn if he wasn't right."

"Son of a bitch." Stone's whisper added to the many barely audible oaths muttered in the wake of her stunning announcement.

"Xavier said Phay was not in the compound during the raid," Michael reminded her. He could've kicked his own ass when she shivered violently at the name. "If the Cambodian forces have men watching the outside, how would Phay get back in without notice?"

He could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she pondered his question, tossed around the possibilities. She knew ways around that compound, ins and outs that the various agencies and military missed. If not for her, he may not have gotten her out alive in the first raid.

"I don't know," she said after a long moment. "Maybe he never left. Maybe he hid somewhere."

"No way," Kell instantly disputed. "That place was swarming with agents. No way could he hide anywhere in that place and not be found."

Michael ignored the FBI agent and asked Rhonda, "Where would he hide?"

Again, he saw her sink deep into thought as she likely went through every inch of the compound she knew about in her memory banks. Finally, she heaved a heavy sigh and shook her head. The look of defeat on her face nearly broke his heart.

"I don't know. I just don't know."

* * * *

Rhonda sank back against the doorframe, her mind reeling. She wasn't wrong. Phay hadn’t left the compound. She knew it as certain as her own name.

"Think about it," Michael suggested. "Maybe something will click." He rubbed the back of his neck as he turned, shifting his attention from her. "Phay's still in the compound. That's one option. Anyone got any others? Until we figure out where to find him, we don't stand a chance of devising a plan to take him out."

Suggestions started flying, none of them making any sense to Rhonda. Every scenario, from Phay sneaking into the docks at Silver Springs to hooking up with Cambodia's first traveling circus, got tossed around. Even Rhonda found herself smiling at the circus idea despite the frustration in the voice of the man who delivered it. She felt the testosterone thickening in the room again, annoyance causing tempers to rise. Pressure to nail the kingpin put everyone on edge.

"Do we even know where he went underground before?"

Rhonda's ears perked at the question. She wondered the same thing. The answer came in an almost collective shake of heads.

"We didn't find him before," Ziegler said. "He found us. Or rather, he found Ryan Magee in Silver Springs."

"I'm not waiting around for him to resurface again," Michael said with complete conviction. "My office, the feds, and the local blues are working around the clock to neutralize his operation stateside. Everything we're doing there won't do a damn bit of good if we don't cripple the cartel at the base. Phay has got to go down."

"Last reports before the sting two nights ago put Phay safely tucked away inside that compound." Stone sounded contemplative, almost as if he were talking aloud to himself rather than to anyone in particular in the room.

"You want eyewitness testimony of that?" Rhonda asked the agent. "Because I can give it to you. Try eating dinner while sitting across a table from him for over an hour as he entertains you with lies of how he obtained the lavish art that fills his castle. See if you can stomach a prime rib cooked to perfection after he regales you with tales of his rise to the head of the cartel that will make your skin crawl."

"You were in his company that night." Though the SEAL CO made it more statement than question, Rhonda answered anyway.

"Nice choice of words, Commander. I was
in his company
every night he held me there."

"Did you go your separate ways after dinner?"

Another nicely worded question, Rhonda thought, meeting Stone's carefully guarded gaze. "He permitted me to return to my room early that evening. I said I was tired, that I didn't feel well. Both were true. I rarely slept, and any amount of time I spent with the man gave me a terrible stomachache."

"What time was that?" Michael asked. "When you returned to the room?"

"I have no idea, several hours before you dropped out of the ceiling." She shrugged. "That's the best I can tell you." He already knew she'd lost track of time, of days, while in Phay's capture. She didn't bother reiterating that again.

"What I'm getting at," Stone reeled all attention back to him, "is no one saw Phay leave. We didn't follow standard operating procedures and set up surveillance forty-eight hours in advance. The coded message my office received from McIntyre led us to believe we didn't have that much time to get the hostages," he stopped short, glanced at Rhonda, corrected himself, "hostage out."

Rhonda remembered Michael asking if she was alone that night. They hadn't yet known about Nancy's murder.

"You're thinking she's right." Kell spoke up, leveling a look at his boss. "You're thinking Phay never left."

"I'm thinking," Stone answered slowly, "that the possibility holds more weight than any other scenario we've come up with so far."

"It's been two days," Spazetty remarked.

"And we've received no reports of any sign of Phay inside or outside the compound walls," Stone pointed out.

"We took out three of his goons in a laughably easy interception mere hours ago," Spazetty countered. "That alone should've raised some alarms in his organization."

"I'm sure it did." Stone nodded. "But if the raid on the compound didn't send him scurrying underground, how much impact do you really think you made by taking out three more of his men?"

Underground.
Why did that single word cause the fine hairs on Rhonda's flesh to stand on end every time one of the men said it? "He insisted he would not let you send him underground again," she whispered, her mind reeling. She fought to recall more, knew there must be something she had missed. "The safest place to hide is the one already checked." She could hear his vile voice cover her own in her head as he said those very words to her. She could see herself walking alongside him on the picture screen in her mind, scanning the terrace, the grounds they covered, cataloging everything she saw in a desperate attempt to find a way out of her prison.

She saw his calculated smile, heard the laughter in his tone as he told her…

"The art of concealment, of prosperity and longevity, lies in the underground." Rhonda jerked her head up even as, in her mind's eye, she bowed her head. She had been unable to maintain eye contact with him after he said those words to her, unable to stand the mocking in his expression, in his tone.

She shuffled her foot, scratching the toe of the satiny heel she wore with the dress he bid her that night. Absently she thought it odd that the heel hadn’t sunk into the ground where she stood as it had the second she took a step to get them moving again. Now, she realized why.

"The art of concealment, of prosperity and longevity, lies in the underground," she repeated, louder now as that final piece of the puzzle fell into place. "He did go underground. Under the compound. There's a passage, a room, I don't know, something under the main house." She looked at Michael. "The entrance, or exit, I guess, is in the back near where we came out that night. I saw Xavier coming around the corner of the house. That's where the door is. He came out through that underground door, probably after hiding Phay."

Michael nodded once and looked away.

The muscle ticking in his jaw made Rhonda's temper spark. What had she done to make him angry? She hadn't expected him to gush with praise, but a smile would've been nice. Instead, he looked pissed. He sounded it too, she thought, when he spoke to the SEAL CO.

"We still don't have forty-eight hours to observe."

"I'm not sending my men in there half-cocked," Ziegler countered.

"In less than forty-eight hours, we've got agents moving in on the threat stateside. When Phay gets wind that we're closing deeper there, it will make our fight here even more perilous. If I call off the agents in Silver Springs, everything they've accomplished there will go down the tubes."

"If we jump the gun here, we'll find ourselves in a clusterfuck like you did two nights ago," Ziegler responded, calm but unyielding. "FBI and DEA are dishing out the orders here, Cosmos. I'm well aware of that. However, I don't care if the orders are coming from the president himself. I will not risk the lives of my men by rushing into a kingpin's palace without knowledge of his precise whereabouts or what we're up against. You shouldn't either."

Rhonda held her breath, her own temper ebbing in the face of the heat wave she expected to blanket the room any second now. She had never seen Michael look so pissed. She had taken the brunt of his anger in the forest and survived, albeit with the not-so-startling revelation that she really didn't want to ever truly get on his bad side. Ziegler, a man Michael considered a friend, had just pushed him beyond his breaking point.

Movement at Michael's back caught her attention. Baxter shifted ever so slightly, obviously preparing to catch his boss should Michael decide to go after the SEAL commander with all the fury evident in his rigid stance. No one spoke. No one else moved. They scarcely breathed as the moment droned on.

"What is the least amount of time you need, Lieutenant?"

The fact that Michael used the man's rank rather than his last name didn't slide past Rhonda. Michael miraculously kept his temper in check, barely. The man's hold on his control stupefied her.

"Give me twenty-four hours," Ziegler answered and shot a glance at the boarded window. His gaze seemed to follow the stream of sunlight peeking through the knothole. "We'll dress up and move out at o'dark hundred. With any luck we'll get a bead on Phay by nightfall tomorrow, at least enough to know whether or not he's still inside as we're starting to believe he is."

"And if you don't?" Stone questioned.

"As the saying goes, we'll cross that bridge when we get there."

"Then I guess it will have to do." Michael sounded so deadpan it sent a shiver up Rhonda's spine.

"What if you knew for a fact that Phay is in there? What if you knew his exact whereabouts?" Rhonda heard herself ask before she realized her intentions to speak. She had thought a lot about it on the helo, started to formulate a strategy that took a more definitive shape now as the pieces began to fall into place. "If he is inside, and I firmly think he is, he's got to know at least the Royal Cambodian operatives still have him under surveillance. What if he suspects you, too? Your men took out three of his in the forest and confiscated the crate. I bet he's chewing at the bit to get back at you for that."

"He tried to set us up," Spazetty said matter-of-factly and then grinned. "He failed."

"I'm starting to think this whole damned operation has been a setup," Michael admitted, still in that dour tone that made Rhonda feel so unsettled. "Phay always seems to be one step ahead."

"Then it's time to get a step ahead of him. Play on his weakness."

"And that would be?" Stone prompted.

"Me."

Michael looked at her as if horns had started to grow out of her head. "Over my dead body."

In four words, all the venom she sensed him holding back spewed through the room on a direct course at her. She blinked, took a step back as his anger hit her with an almost tangible force. She didn't feel unsettled anymore. Her own anger rose, boiled to a point that matched his. She made sure he would see it in her leveled gaze, in the stiffness of her body, in the purposeful way she spun and stomped down the hall. She didn't turn to see if he followed her. The heavy fall of his footsteps behind her told her he did, giving her exactly what she wanted.