James Rollins - Bloodline

Gray hurried to the steps of the hotel. He found the lobby equally ransacked. A televised soccer game played in the neighboring restaurant. A few men stood idly, sipping tea, amid the carnage of tables and chairs, as if nothing had happened.

Gray touched his throat mike and radioed both Kowalski and Seichan.

No response.

Tucker shared a worried look with him.

Together they mounted the stairs. Their room-a two-bedroom suite-was on the second floor. Gray led the way down a tiled hallway, softened by a threadbare Persian runner. He kept his tread quiet as he approached the door. From inside, the cheers of an audience echoed out, coming from a television, likely broadcasting the same soccer match.

Gray pulled out his pistol and grabbed the door handle.

Tucker held a palm toward Kane, readying his partner.

Gray burst into the room-only to find Kowalski sprawled in his boxers on the sofa in the suite’s common room, a washcloth full of ice held to his right eye.

Kowalski barely acknowledged them, still focused on the game.

Gray searched around the room. Nothing seemed amiss.

“Why didn’t you respond to my radio call?” Gray asked.

Kowalski stared sheepishly toward the table. His radio and earpiece rested there. He ran a hand through his wet hair. “I took a shower and forgot to-”

Gray cut him off. “Never mind. What happened downstairs?”

Kowalski heaved his legs to the floor with a pained groan. “You said to cause a commotion when we got here.”

“I meant a diversion, not World War Three.”

Kowalski shrugged. “So things got a little out of hand. I gotta say, these Muslim guys-no sex, no alcohol-they sure needed to blow off some steam.”

Gray relaxed, holstering his weapon. “Where’s Seichan?”

Kowalski lowered the ice from his face, revealing a swollen bloodred eye. “I thought she was with you guys.”

“Us? Why?” Gray’s chest tightened painfully. Kowalski’s next words only made it worse.

“She left to go find you.”

July 1, 10:22 P.M . East Africa Time

Boosaaso , Somalia

Seichan sat in a windowless cement-block basement. A single bare bulb hung above her head. The space stank of bleach and had a drain in the middle of the floor.

Never a good sign .

Her left hand throbbed from where she’d sliced the meat of her thumb on a piece of broken glass when she was forced to drop on her stomach in the back alley. They’d immediately stripped her of all communications equipment and dragged a hood over her head. Forced at gunpoint, she traveled a few blocks by foot, stumbling along-then by open truck, judging by the wind, the sound of the engine, and the jolting of the suspension. She had to cling to the door frame to keep her seat, her cut hand stinging with every bump. The gun shoved in her rib cage discouraged any attempt at escape. They’d gone no more than ten minutes before stopping, so she couldn’t be far from the hotel, but in the jumbled maze of the city, they might as well have taken her to another planet.

Once here, the hood had been removed, and she’d been ordered to strip down to bra and panties and been thoroughly searched again. Afterward, her wounded hand had been tended to, though blood still seeped down her fingertips and dripped to the floor. They’d allowed her to slip her clothes back on, but she still felt half-naked.

She tugged at the plastic slip ties that bound her to a metal chair. She tried rocking, but her seat was bolted to the concrete floor.

Resigned, she silently cursed her carelessness-placing an equal amount of the blame on Gray.

If the bastard hadn’t gone off so recklessly on his own…

But she knew she bore as much guilt. She had acted no less rashly than Gray. And that troubled her, especially since she knew the cause. She remembered that kiss in the hospital, both needing each other but for very different reasons. Her carelessness this night was born out of that kiss. Fear for his safety, worry that she’d lose him, blinded her and made her sloppy.

She should have known better than to run headlong into a back alley. Hadn’t their premission briefing warned of the rash of kidnappings in the city? The only balm to her ego was that her captors hadn’t been pirates.

The single door to the room finally opened. Two figures stepped inside. One carried a thick file folder; the other, a chair identical to her own. The seat was placed in front of her, and the man who had ambushed her in the alley sat down, resting a file on his knee. He had short sandy-blond hair, balding at the top, ruggedly handsome in his own way.

His companion-a slender Indian woman with mocha skin and smoky eyes-took a post behind the chair, stiff-backed, one hand resting on a holstered sidearm. Like the man, she was dressed in khaki pants and a buttoned blue blouse, all crisply creased, giving the casual clothes the look of a uniform.

Seichan locked eyes with her. “You were one of the three following us this evening, wearing the green sarong.”

The woman gave no reaction.

Seichan glanced between the two. She spotted an older photo of her, grainy but unmistakable, clipped to the folder. “Let me guess, you all have nothing to do with Amur Mahdi at all.”

The man answered, his British accent polite but firm. “I think I’ll be the one asking questions.” He flipped open the folder and glanced through the first few pages. “Considering your number of aliases, I don’t even know what to call you.”

“How about your worst enemy,” she said sourly.

This earned the smallest uptick of the woman’s lip-not out of amusement, but disdain.

The man ignored her comment. “Your employer committed an act of terrorism on our soil, a few years back at the British museum, orchestrated by a terrorist named-” He sifted through some papers. “-Cassandra Sanchez. A nasty piece of work, that one.”

A chill iced over Seichan. Cassandra had been a Guild operative, like herself, planted beside Painter Crowe before he was director of sigma. Seichan knew little else about that operation except the woman was dead.

Since her capture, Seichan had been struggling to determine who had ambushed her, running various possibilities through her head. She was on the watch list of multiple foreign intelligence services for her past activities with the Guild. From the man’s accent, she narrowed down the possibilities. They could be SIS-the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes referred to as MI6-but she caught the whiff of military about them.

“You’re SRR,” Seichan concluded.

The man straightened, staring back at her. “Impressive.”

The Special Reconnaissance Regiment was a newer division of the British Special Forces, established recently to engage in covert surveillance operations, specifically to conduct counterterrorism actions. They were also the most selective and most secretive-and the only British Special Forces unit to recruit women.

She stared at the Indian woman.

Few knew anything substantial about SRR activities. But it made sense they’d employ field operatives in Somalia. Pirates had kidnapped several British nationals over the past decade, and the lawless rural areas of this country were the training grounds for a handful of Islamic terrorist factions.

Unfortunately, she must have been swept up by their surveillance net by accident.

The man confirmed this. “We have facial recognition software hacked into the security cameras at the airport here. You were lucky it was us who found you. As I understand, the Mossad have a shoot-on-sight order regarding you.”

Seichan continued to put the pieces together in her head. “Your tail on us… it had been purposefully sloppy. You wanted us to know we were being followed.”