The Defiant Hero (45 page)
“Oh, Jesus.” Starrett sat down on the edge of the tub as if he were as dizzy as she was. “Alyssa, look, if you’re pregnant, I’ll . . .” He took a deep breath. “I’ll marry you.”
He was serious. He was actually serious. As if being chained to him for life would somehow make it all okay.
Yes, she was definitely going to throw up again.
Locke lunged for the toilet, pulling Starrett with her out of the tub. Her stomach should have been empty, but it wasn’t. And she managed to be violently ill all over again.
It was worse than before, because this time she couldn’t block Starrett out.
“Way to go, Roger,” he muttered to himself as he wiped her face with a cool cloth, as he took the sopping T-shirt that was hanging off her arm and wrung it out. “Sex with you makes her hurl. Or maybe it’s the thought of marriage. Either way, isn’t this just perfect?” He raised his voice just a little. “Alyssa, I am so fucking sorry.”
Locke started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. Her misery was so intense, so consuming, and yet his apology was completely heartfelt and so totally Roger Starrett.
But her laughter turned almost instantly to first one sob, and then another, and then, horribly, mortifyingly, she was crying.
“Oh, God, I’ve ruined my life,” she sobbed pathetically, giving in to total self-pity. “I’ve completely destroyed my career.”
Starrett knelt beside her, wrapping a towel around her. “What are you talking about? You’re not really afraid getting pregnant will—”
“I’m not pregnant!” She looked up at him fiercely. “I’m supposed to get my period any day now. Any minute. I’m not pregnant. I can’t be. I won’t be.”
He sat back, rocked onto his heels by her ferocity.
“But I don’t need to get pregnant to completely screw things up for myself.” She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, forcing herself to stop. Crying wasn’t going to help—in fact it was only making this worse. “I didn’t even need to do this—” She lifted her wrist that was handcuffed and raised his arm, too. “—to ruin my life.”
He didn’t get it.
“I only had to spend the night with you, Roger,” she told him. “That’s all I had to do. The really stupid part was that it should have been easy to keep from messing my life up. Staying away from you should have been a cinch. We don’t even like each other.”
He still didn’t understand. “You’re saying that spending the night with me has ruined your career? Get real, Locke—that’s just plain stupid.”
“You want to hear stupid? Stupid is being the best sharpshooter in the entire U.S. military and being assigned to work a desk. Stupid is dealing with goddamned innuendos and thinly veiled sexual comments day in and day out, and getting so that you’re used to it, so that you expect it. Stupid is being recruited for an FBI counterterrorist team because you’re the best person for the job and still having to face comments about quotas and equal opportunity. Stupid is doing a kickass job and having my supervisor congratulate me while he sneaks a look down my shirt. You have no idea what I go up against every single day that I go into work,” she told him. “I cannot, cannot allow my coworkers to see me as a sex object. I cannot have them talking about my sex life. I can’t even have a sex life!”
“You don’t,” Starrett pointed out. “You told me last night this is the first relationship you’ve been in in four years.”
“No.” She shook her head, wiped her eyes. “This is not a relationship. This is an accident. A terrible, terrible accident.”
He sat even farther back from her and laughed. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. Silly me. It was an accident. Of course. Four different times, you accidentally put my dick in your—”
“You’re such a jerk,” Locke interrupted him hotly. “I don’t know what I’m so worried about. No one’s going to believe you—go on, you can brag about this all you want.”
He stared at her, open mouthed with seeming disbelief. “You think I’d brag about . . . ?”
“Cut the insulted act,” Locke said, making sure the towel was secure around her as she leaned wearily back against the bathroom wall. “I know you. You like to talk. You’ll tell someone. WildCard. Or Jenk.” She closed her eyes. She could put in for reassignment. Maybe Chicago. Or San Francisco. No, San Francisco was too near the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado. Maybe Denver . . . “Definitely John Nilsson. I know you’re going to tell Nils.”
And then, forty-five minutes after they got these handcuffs off, the entire Troubleshooters squad would know that Roger Starrett had finally scored with Alyssa Locke. Or at least they would have heard the story. Whether they believed it was a different matter entirely.
“I’m not going to tell anyone, Alyssa,” Starrett said quietly. “Because you’re right. No one would believe me. To be honest, I hardly believe it happened myself.”
It was midmorning by the time Meg pulled into the Seagull Motel. She’d stopped several times at fast-food drive throughs to get coffee for herself and some water for Razeen. She’d managed to give him the last of the sleeping pills, and he was snoring again, and hopefully would be until she could get him inside the motel room.
The Extremist from the parking garage had told her the motel room would be reserved for her under the name Joan Smith. She had been told to check in and wait to be contacted.
Meg parked right outside the office. Leaving the window open only a crack, she locked Razeen in the car and went inside.
The clerk was a tremendously bored, tremendously pregnant girl of maybe sixteen. She gathered the paperwork for the room with infinitesimal slowness. It was all Meg could do not to leap over the counter and do it herself.
As long as she kept moving, she had the strength to keep going. In the car, she’d kept the radio on, distracting herself with music. But standing here, waiting, there was nothing to do but think.
Think about Eve and Amy, who—as John believed—might already be dead. Her precious baby might not have been taken from Meg just for these awful few days, but forever. It was too terrible to think about. Too devastating to consider.
Eve would die protecting Amy, Meg knew that. But even Eve, despite her sometimes seemingly mythic strength and determination, couldn’t protect Amy from terrorists who had a reputation, as John had reminded her, for putting bullets into the heads of their hostages.
Meg knew that John had firsthand experience dealing with terrorists. What he believed was based on a grim reality that Meg herself had come into contact with only very briefly during her stay in Kazbekistan.
But now she didn’t want to think about Amy, and she didn’t want to think about John, either.
Leaving him behind had been the right thing to do. She was probably going to die. She knew that, accepted it. She almost didn’t even care anymore. But she did care about John.
She cared too much.
“Joan Smith, huh?” the girl said. “We’ve been getting about ten phone calls a day, asking if you’ve checked in yet.”
Meg couldn’t breathe. “Really?”
“Is that your car?”
“The white one, yes,” she replied.
“How many people are you going to have in this room? Because we have these rules and . . .” There was a flicker of something—life maybe—in the girl’s eyes and voice that made Meg turn around and look out the window into the parking lot.
Five men in long, dark raincoats surrounded her car. A cargo van, its front door open, stood nearby.
“Oh, my God!” Maybe this was what the Extremist had meant when he’d said she’d be contacted. Maybe these men had Amy and Eve in that van.
“What about the room?” the girl asked plaintively. “And there’s a—”
Meg didn’t bother to answer, didn’t hear the rest of it as she rushed for the door.
The morning sunshine seemed to dance across the surface of her car and make five pairs of mirrored sunglasses shine. One of the men wore a necklace that glistened in the bright light.
It was surreal.
The raincoats seemed oddly out of place under the perfect blue sky, but they hid great, huge guns. The kind of guns John Nilsson and his men had carried when they’d arrived at the Kazbekistani embassy. Assault weapons, John called them. The kind of guns that could cut a person in half with a spray of deadly bullets.
The men kept their guns under their coats as she approached, but they made certain she knew they were there. As if she could possibly miss them.
“Do you have my daughter?” she demanded. “I want to see my daughter, and I want to see her now.”
Two of the men exchanged a glance, and Meg realized with a sharp surge of dread that the flash of sunlight she’d seen was glinting off stylized Kazbekistani symbols that hung from a thick gold chain around the one man’s neck.
Those symbols were the Kazbekistani letters for G, I, and K.
These were not the Extremists. These were Razeen’s own men, come to set him free.
Before Meg could move, before she could reach into her pocket for her gun and—God help her!—shoot Razeen right through the car window, two of the men had taken her swiftly by the arms and a third patted her pockets and took her weapon.
Oh, God! She’d come all this way, only to lose now. She could barely stand, barely breathe, barely think.
“You’ll see your daughter soon enough.” The necklaced man spoke in a heavy accent. “Unlock the car.”
Think. Think, she ordered herself. If she burst into tears, they’d know she knew they weren’t the Extremists. If she just unlocked the car door, they’d take Razeen and be gone, leaving her, probably with a bullet in her head.
Meg could see the motel clerk watching them with unabashed interest through the big plate glass windows.
One of the raincoats glanced warily toward the clerk, too. And Meg knew they didn’t want to create a scene and bring the police into this. They didn’t want to break the windows of her car, they didn’t want to shoot her, they didn’t want screaming or the sound of breaking glass or gunshots.
“We will take him,” the necklaced man told her, “and you will stay here for thirty minutes, doing nothing, talking to no one. After thirty minutes, you will get into your car and drive to the McDonald’s, four blocks west. Your daughter will be there, in the ladies’ room.”
Hope and doubt flooded her simultaneously. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe these were the Extremists, and getting Amy back would be as simple as unlocking her car door and waiting thirty minutes before driving four blocks west.
Think. Think. “What about my grandmother?” Meg asked. “And my . . . my grandfather?”
“Of course,” the man said. “They’ll be there, too. You’ll have them all back, all safely.”
Her hope sputtered and died. All her hope.
No, she refused to accept that the situation was completely hopeless. There had to be another way, another option, another choice.
Escape seemed impossible.
Her only option was to somehow grab one of the big assault guns and blast Razeen into hell. Then she had two choices: to kill Razeen or die herself, trying to kill him.
But wait. She had another gun, the one she’d taken from the FBI guard, still hidden in her boot. She could feel it, hard against her ankle. To get it, she’d have to lean over, pull up her pants leg, reach into her boot . . . Impossible. Hopeless.
Or maybe not.
She’d unlock the door, climb into the back to untie Razeen from where John had tethered him to the floor. And while she was doing that, with her back to the raincoats, she would pull up her pant leg, reach into her boot for her gun.
And she’d fire a bullet into Razeen’s head at close range.
She had to do it. It was Razeen or Amy.
She had to kill Razeen. She didn’t have a choice.
Razeen would forgive her. She knew that.
She would die right now, too, because after killing Razeen, the gunmen would kill her. She knew that, without a doubt.
She reached for the keys, and around her, the world had gone into sharp focus. The motel clerk was still watching them through the window. A maintenance man, baseball cap pulled low over his face, was pushing a cart of dirty sheets and towels across the driveway, the wheels rattling noisily on the cracked pavement. He shouted in rapid-fire Spanish up to the maids who were cleaning a room on the second floor, a vacuum cleaner holding the door open, “Ho, Renetta, there’s a phone call for you in the maintenance room!”
“He’ll need to be untied,” she said to necklace man, her voice amazingly smooth. “I’ll have to go into the back to reach the ropes.”
One of the maids came out of the room and leaned over the railing, shouting back, still in Spanish. “You must be mistaken. There’s no one named Renetta here.”
“Maybe they asked for Rene. How do I know?” The maintenance man was nearly on top of them with the cart, and the raincoats shifted uneasily, looking to Necklace for direction.
Meg took advantage of the distraction to unlock the front door and to push the button that would release the child restraint lock in the back.
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