Harper Allen - Payback

He turned to Dawn, his gray eyes cold. “You’re good. It’s only been hours since your arrival and already you’ve made your move. But I’m good, too. I’ve sent off top-priority queries on you to both Washington and Interpol, complete with your photograph. If you’ve ever gotten so much as a parking ticket anywhere in the world, I’ll know it.”

His smile barely lifted his lips. “If you have, you’d better hope it was under the name of Dawn Swanson. But I doubt it…because I’m beginning to think Dawn Swanson doesn’t exist at all.”

Status: seventeen days and counting

Time: 0145 hours

As the angry whine got louder, Dawn spared a moment to gauge its nearness. She was cutting things a little fine, she judged, but her preparations were nearly in place. All she needed to do now was to splash the road with the volatile chemical she’d liberated from the lab earlier, make sure she had a match handy and then crouch down in the patch of sage that at this hour of night was nothing more than a slightly blacker shadow in the surrounding darkness.

Piece of cake. But she had no intention of telling Aldrich that. She didn’t want him thinking he could set up these last-minute meetings whenever he felt like it.

Her mouth drew to a straight line at the thought. Twisting the metal cap off the small glass container she held, she began sprinkling the gelatinous substance it contained onto the hard-packed dirt of the road. It took only a second to lay the wavering trail of clear jelly. When she’d finished she dropped the bottle into the hole she’d dug earlier in the soft earth by the shoulder of the road and then replaced the earth, taking care that no telltale trace gave away the bottle’s newly filled in grave. The chemical itself would be totally consumed when it burned, Dawn mused as she brushed a few twigs over the settled dirt. If anyone investigated this incident, which was unlikely, they would assume that a leaky gas tank from an earlier vehicle had left just enough gas on the road to be ignited by a stray spark struck by a piece of gravel. She half rose from her burial detail and listened. The whine now sounded like a hornet in a bottle. Her shadow melting in and out of the moonlight, she ran across the road.

This was insanity. Either that or another one of Peters’s tests, but whatever his reasons for insisting on a face-to-face progress report from her, they weren’t good enough—not when they jeopardized her cover and especially not when her phoned-in report had given him all the information she’d been able to provide at this early stage of her mission. Or at least, all the information she was willing to give, she amended with reluctant honesty.

“Of course I did nothing to arouse Asher’s suspicions!” she’d lied emphatically last night when, as arranged, she’d dialed the number that if traced would show as connecting to nothing more sinister than a bookstore specializing in used and out-of-print scientific volumes. She’d converted the anger in her tone to ice. “Maybe when I was just starting out in this game six years ago you might have had some justification in asking me that question, Doctor, but now it’s an insult. I told you, one of his people screwed up my cover name. He couldn’t handle that, so he took it out on me. His attitude only got worse when Sir William overrode him and gave me the supervisor position.”

That last was the mother of all understatements, Dawn thought, extracting a book of matches from her pants pocket before stretching out at the side of the road. She dug the inner edges of her sneakers into the dirt, kept her head down but her focus straight ahead and took her weight on her elbows.

It was the classic sniper position, and one that was second nature to her. She could wait like this for hours if she had to, but from the escalating decibels of the approaching whine the waiting would last only a few more seconds.

She didn’t want to hurt the rider, whoever he was. She couldn’t afford to damage the motorcycle. Precision was going to be key in this operation.

“When isn’t it?” she asked herself in a mutter. “If Mr. SAS hadn’t stormed into my room when he did yesterday morning, I get the feeling his uncle might have declined Dawn Swanson’s eager offer and kept his old chum Roger on in the position of lab supervisor. But if they have nothing else in common, London and his nephew seem to share the same determination to get their own way. It couldn’t have been more obvious that his insistence on giving me the run of his lab was just his way of jerking Ash’s chain. And talking about jerking chains…”

Transportation was one of the pesky little details Peters hadn’t seemed to consider when he’d insisted on this meeting tonight, she thought. Even though their clandestine rendezvous was to take place at a bar just outside the limits of the nearest town to London’s facility, it was still a jaunt of twenty miles. What had he been thinking—that she would simply hop in the hatchback, wave airily at the man who’d already warned her he suspected she was an imposter and drive off into the night before returning again hours later?

She tilted her head and listened. For the past few minutes the unknown motorcyclist had been tearing like a bat out of hell down the ruler-straight road just before the curve where she’d stationed herself. Now she heard him gearing down rapidly in preparation for the hairpin bend, his engine revs red-lining as noisily as they had the previous night when the loyal Roger Poole had been showing her to her quarters.

She’d fixed a Dawn Swanson expression of irritation on her features. “I was under the impression this facility was located miles from anywhere, not right next door to a motorcycle speedway. Half the staff on this floor must be awake with the noise.”

Roger had given an apologetic cough. She’d already learned that an apologetic cough was his one-size-fits-all reaction to most situations, and the thought had crossed her mind that he would be the perfect candidate to give lessons in being a real Englishman to Des Asher.

“I’m afraid we’ve just resigned ourselves to the racket. Really, it would be rude to complain.” He’d raked a hand through thinning brown hair. “After all, the chap riding that infernal machine is one of the military guards protecting our research from falling into the wrong hands. He must be on day duty this week, because he’s been roaring out of here for the past few evenings about eight and returning around now. I believe there’s what you Yanks call a ‘juke joint’ in the next town? Ah, here’s your room. Now, where did I put the blasted key?”

While Roger, coughing madly, had fished around in the pockets of his lab coat, Dawn had mentally filed away the information he’d given her. She hadn’t realized she would be using it so soon, she thought now, but since she’d been put in a position where she had to, she owed it to the hapless biker to do it right.

Stripped down to the essentials, this particular operation was simple physics, as so much of her training had been. Except this time instead of calculating the trajectory and velocity of a bullet, she’d had to figure out the path an experienced motorcyclist would take after swerving his vehicle to avoid a sudden wall of flames. She’d remembered the hairpin bend from her own drive here two nights ago, but until she’d arrived with her rope and looked over the location carefully, she still hadn’t known for sure whether it would do.

She’d been relieved to find the same dry and crumbling soil that had posed such a problem for the hatchback’s tires when she’d run off the road the night she’d arrived. It wouldn’t be like drifting into a feather bed but as a Ranger, the biker would know instinctively how to fall. Hopefully the worst of his injuries would be a bruised ego.