Cindy Gerard - Killing Time

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Jane—”

“It’s okay. I… I’ll be okay.” The hot tear of frustration that trickled down her cheek felt like a double dose of defeat. “But I’m not going to be able to fulfill the contract.”

Another silence. “How bad?”

The surgeon had briefed her moments ago, telling her it would be six to eight weeks before she could consider any physical activity other than therapy on her arm. He’d also pleaded with her to accept pain medication to assist with her healing. “Not fatal. Just feels like it.”

“Where are you?”

She told him.

“I’m sending someone for you.”

She couldn’t stop the tears this time. No one had ever cared about her before. They cared about what she could do for them, but never about her.

“Thank you.”

But the line had already gone dead.

She closed her eyes and made herself focus on something other than the pain and this inexplicable flood of gratitude and relief that mixed with a blinding sense of failure.

She had failed him. She had failed herself.

And a man named Brown and a woman whose true name she did not yet know were responsible.

Which meant this was not over.

Halfway across the world the man she knew as Stingray stared morosely at his file on Jane Smith. With a regretful sigh, he closed it, then tossed it aside, rocking back in his desk chair.

He was disappointed in Jane. Very disappointed and, interestingly enough, extremely worried about her.

In the beginning, it was her total lack of conscience that had intrigued him. He’d often wondered what had been done to her as a child that had produced such a twisted, ruthless killer. The term cold-blooded was overused and therefore diminished in its significance, but not when it applied to Jane. She had no remorse. Felt no regret—except in failure.

The humiliation in her voice when she’d called and confessed the unthinkable had been heartbreaking. She’d been in agony, but she was a soldier. She had done her duty and made the difficult call.

He had few rules, and high expectations that those rules would be followed to the letter.

Jane had broken the cardinal rule. She’d compromised herself and therefore compromised his enterprises. Had she been any other contract for hire, he would have had her eliminated.

Instead, he’d dispatched a man to Lima to bring her back to him. He’d broken one of his own rules for her. And he wondered what that said about him. What it said about his feelings for her.

That would sort itself out eventually, he supposed. Right now, he had more pressing matters. He still had to deal with Eva Salinas and Mike Brown.

But first he had to find them.

He picked up the phone, hesitated, then made a call. He had contacts in the CIA. People who owed him. Hackers who could follow up on their leads. If Eva Salinas attempted to access any of her files, he’d soon find out which ones and where she was operating from. Soon after that she’d be dead. Her and Brown.

Their Avianca flight had left Peru at 12:30 a.m. and right on schedule, almost fourteen hours later, it touched down at Dulles at 3:28 p.m. Mike was happy as hell not to have to deal with jet lag, since the time in D.C. was only an hour later than in Lima. He was equally happy to finally be out of that cramped seat where touching Eva Salinas, either accidentally or on purpose, had been unavoidable—even with Ramon’s ghost hovering between them.

“You realize we can’t go to your apartment,” he said. They’d cleared the customs gate and she was stuffing her Emily Bradshaw passport back in her purse as they headed through the terminal at a brisk walk. “Our friend with the MP5K may or may not be alive, and may or may not have reported in to his handler. Either way, whoever ordered the hit either knows by now that it was a bust or is wondering why his man hasn’t surfaced.”

“What do you think the chances are they don’t know we’re back in the States?”

Mike had been doing the math on that one himself. “I think we’re good, for a while. I’d make book that there was no one on that flight interested in either one of us. He’s not going to fly charter—too many records. And I checked—the next commercial flight out of Lima to D.C. lands at least four hours after ours. So, even if the shooter somehow managed to recover enough to follow us and figures out we headed north, we’ve at least got that much time.”

“And if he contacted whoever sent him?”

He touched a hand to the small of her back and steered her around a gaggle of teens who were walking five abreast through the terminal. “Whoever sent him is going to be looking for travel records for Mike Brown and Eva Salinas—not John Mason and Emily Bradshaw. But they’ll find us eventually, so time is also our enemy. We need to get the flash drive and figure this out. Please tell me it’s not at your apartment.”

She shook her head and kept on walking. “Lockbox.”

“Your regular bank?” Whoever was after her had no doubt already tossed her apartment, so they’d be looking for her to have stashed the file someplace safe. A bank made sense.

“No. I opened up an account and a lockbox at Independence Federal on Ninth. Under Emily Bradshaw.”

“And the key to the box?”

“Was in the lockbox with my passports. Now it’s in my purse.”

The longer he was around her, the more she proved how smart she was.

Man. He’d come a long way from thinking of her as a lying, conniving, wack-job.

“I don’t know about you,” she said as they shouldered through the crowd in the busy airport, “but I could use a change of clothes. And a shower.”

Mike looked down at himself. She was right. He didn’t exactly blend in with city dwellers. In his combat boots, camo pants, sweat-stained T-shirt, and five-day whisker grow-out, he looked like he’d stepped out of the pages of Mercenaries R-Us . He needed to lower his profile. And yeah. He needed to clean up, too.

She stopped short beside a women’s restroom, then dug into her purse and came up with a half-full packet of Wet Wipes. “My emergency rations. Never leave home without them.” She peeled off half of the stack of moist towelettes and handed them to him. “Meet you back here in five.”

“Make it three,” he said and headed across the wide walkway to the men’s room.

“Much better,” she said when they met up again and made a beeline for the rental car desk.

After completing the paperwork for a black SUV, which Eva paid for with a credit card that couldn’t be linked back to her real name—the lady had covered her bases—Mike maneuvered the car through the maze of airport parking.

“Next stop—a change of clothes.”

“Fine,” he agreed, knowing it was necessary but anxious to get to the bank.

They’d only traveled a few miles on the freeway before she had him take an exit, then gave him directions to the great American hunting and gathering spot: the mall.

Less than fifteen minutes later, he stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of a Tommy Bahama store, more than a little intimidated.

“What size shirt?” she asked, quickly rummaging through a spinning rack. “Pants, too.”

“Large or maybe extra large for the shirt?” He shot off what he thought was his pants size, trying to remember the American size charts.

It had been a damn long time since he’d bought anything but T-shirts and camo cargo pants, so he was fine deferring to her advice on casual wear for D.C. in July—until she grabbed a shirt and shoved it into his hands. A shirt that felt like silk and looked like a city slicker’s version of a rain forest in shades of moss and gray and white.