Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

There was little Jana would change about her body. She was pleased with the swell of breast and hip. She wished her nose were shorter, a touch more retroussé . More than that, she wished she did not sweat. The movie girl always looked glossy and cool in bed, during and after the most passionate of exertions. A Bond girl shimmered and glowed. Jana sweated; it interfered with her close-ups, making them uncomfortably real.

Crane snorted. Jana tightened her hand at the base of his spine, murmuring in his ear, rotating her hips slowly, encouraging him to stay longer. Film directors, she found, concentrated on the man’s pleasure. Jana, the director, concentrated on her own. Why not? she thought. She had time to kill.

Crane considered himself so clever, so subtle with his veiled questions about the Scorpion, about Ian Barrett-Bone. As if they were important, as if they were the movers and shakers, the planners and undertakers of the mission. It was like the Buddha said, in the ancient Sanskrit motto engraved on the copper bracelet: The irrigators direct the water, fletchers fashion the shaft, carpenters bend the wood. The wise control themselves.

Perhaps Archer had been right to alter the last phrase, the wise control themselves , making it the wise control the world . Already he had altered the second phrase: no longer the fletchers fashion the shaft , but the archer shoots the arrow .

Jana smiled at the conceit. Then her thoughts of Archer faded and an image of Devras Sikari soon followed.

Her mood changed instantly. She faked a second, more theatrical, orgasm. When she squirmed her discomfort, he dismounted and lay beside her, one ungainly arm draped across her belly.

He seemed entirely pleased with himself, a schoolboy who’d passed his final exam with flying colors. When he caught his breath, he said, “Now, don’t you think I deserve the answer to a question or two?”

“Certainly, Pierre.” That’s what any pliant Bond girl would reply. “But I must use the bathroom, darling.”

If he had any doubt that he’d won her over, this was the danger point, this was when the man would protest, try to grab her, or flee. Jana, the director, watched the action on the overhead screen.

“Hurry back,” was all Crane said.

Clanging bells announced the elevator. Turning her head to the side, Carson read a sign warning hospital staff against discussing patient care in public places. Langer had his SIG Sauer P226 under the top sheet where he could retrieve it quickly. Carson wondered whether she’d be able to reach it-Langer had convinced her she might need to.

She watched the white light as the elevator descended. Each time they passed a landing without interruption, Langer said, “Steady, Connie. We’re closer. Closer.”

At the basement level, Langer pushed the gurney out of the elevator, his eyes searching left and right. “This corridor leads to a loading dock,” he said.

Carson stared helplessly at the ceiling.

“Ready?” Langer asked.

Her throat dry, Carson nodded.

Suddenly, Langer began to run, speeding the gurney along the endless corridor. The whoosh of automatic doors preceded warmer air, the scent of ocean, sunlight.

As they rolled down a ramp, Carson saw a black Chevrolet Express waiting at the end of the path.

She heard the squeal of tires in the near distance.

Langer raced her toward the van where Jimmy Chang, the man Jean-Marc Lespasse had christened “Wiki,” waited near the open hatch. He called to her, waving his hand frantically, his eyes wide.

A black town car bounded toward the loading dock.

She knew it was someone connected to Sindhu Power. The company might be defunct but the people who wished to keep its secrets were alive and well.

The detective said, “Here’s where we say goodbye, Connie.”

“What?”

“Don’t think my jurisdiction includes wherever you and your people are going to follow up leads in this case. The best thing I can do is play defense here. Now get moving!”

He pulled out his SIG and turned to face the oncoming Lincoln.

The car slowed.

“Langer… ”

“Go!”

“Thank you.”

Chang jumped out and lifted Carson from the gurney, her injured body stiffening in his arms. He bundled her inside and the van took off, roaring toward the exit.

“Hey, you look great,” Chang said as he settled into a seat.

Carson could only imagine how she looked standing there with no makeup, a huge bathrobe, bare feet. She felt a tingling in her right arm.

“I mean, you’re just like your picture. I mean, you’re pale but otherwise…”

The van’s bay was converted to a cross between an ambulance and a computer lab, a workspace for Wiki that came complete with a cot. Along one side, three glaring widescreen LCD monitors and a couple of gooseneck work lamps nested on a long shelf twined with cables. Small green lights pulsed.

Chang said, “Do you want to get into bed? Dammit, that sure didn’t come out right. What I mean… I mean, there’s a cot… Because of your operation. Your arm must hurt like hell.”

“I’m glad to see you, Wiki.” He looked like his photo, too, not at all like his glamorous well-muscled Second Life avatar. In person, Chang was like an elongated twelve year old, with a round face, oversized spectacles and a bad haircut. “Whatever you did to that cop, you turned him into a pussy-cat. I thought he was gonna arrest me as soon as I revived.”

“Langer’s not bad. His people were keeping an eye on the industrial park, the one-”

That blew up. The one where Jean-Marc died.

Chang seemed to hear her thought. “Yeah, Tampa PD had information that one of the outfits in the park was a front for a bunch of Mexican narco-traffickers from the Juarez cartel. They had it under surveillance. The department even put someone on the front desk.”

An image of Jean-Marc danced before Carson’s eyes. “Too bad the man didn’t-”

“The operation was shut down months ago, before Sindhu Power and Electric cleared out. The Tampa cops say Sindhu seemed like an ordinary business.”

“But if they had someone on the front desk, they must have noticed something.”

“Better than that; they kept copies of everything, shipping manifests, stuff like that. They searched through the Dumpsters, you know, looking for stuff on the drug runners, but pretty much going through all the garbage. Folks at Sindhu were avid shredders, Langer told me, but one day the surveillance team found a disk. Musta fallen under a desk or something and the cleaning crew tossed it.”

“And you’ve got it?”

The van sped toward 275. “Langer tried to read the thing, said it was encrypted all to hell and back, figured with a name like ‘Sindhu’ and them clearing out, somebody ought to check it. So he notified a pal in Homeland Security. Guy might have gotten back to him in four or five years.”

“But you’ve got the disk?”

“I sure do. Yeah, you bet.”

Her arm throbbed; she was thirsty and exhausted, but Carson had to smile at his enthusiasm. Then she remembered Jean-Marc and a lump rose in her throat. Chang was so young. Though she was only a few years older, she felt ancient by comparison.

She said, “Fill me in. What’s our next move? Who’s driving this rig?” “A friend. He’s cool. He was an army medic, too, in case you-”

“You thought of everything.”

His grin was infectious. “If you’re up for it, we’re heading to a military airbase.”

“MacDill? Middleton’s orders?”

The young man’s face grew grave. “Not exactly… Connie, Colonel Middleton’s gone missing.”

“What?”

“No phone to trace, nothing. Headed to Russia and then vanished.”