Athena Force 12: Checkmate (20 page)

He gave a sharp shake of his head. “She doesn’t know I’m here. Not yet.” It wasn’t an answer to the question, but it was as much as he’d give her. Of course Selena didn’t need to worry about him. But that’s not why he was going in there. He was going in there to
help.

“And just exactly what do you hope to accomplish?”

“Aside from giving you a heads-up on possible incoming action?” Cole looked over at the capitol building with its stained steps and its stolid facade and thought
good question.
“I’m playing it by ear, Tory. Maybe you’ve heard…it’s what I do best. But at the least I hope to get inside there and make a difference when it counts.”

“Inside,” she said flatly, tipping her head down so her hat caught a sudden gust of wind against the brim.

“Inside.” He tipped his head at Hank. Hank P. STUNTLY, waiting and ready. “I’ve brought along a little diversion. But if you can think of anything that might help…”

She considered him, and a subtle gleam entered her eye. “A couple of minutes from now I can have my crew take a special interest in getting cameras pointed at those steps.”

He smiled, and the mustache tickled like the dickens. “And everyone else will assume you actually see something.”

“Even the Berzhaani soldiers,” she said, her own smile a satisfied one. “They’ve gotten used to reacting to us.” But then she held up a finger. “There’s a catch, of course.”

Damn. Just when he thought he’d navigated around the potential. He waited, as patient as he could be with those steps right there in front of him, giving him a tangible setting over which to superimpose the images of Selena that had been burned into his memory. Bruised. At gunpoint.

Striking back.

He raised his brow at Tory, waiting.

“An interview, of course,” she said. “We’ll black out your face, wobble your voice—”

He gave a sharp shake of his head. “Not possible.”

She capitulated too quickly to have truly expected his agreement. “Then when you leave the Agency. Whenever that is. Until then, a print interview. It’ll be good for
Newsweek.
”

“On one condition.” He looked at her, his expression searching and totally beyond serious. “You have to come up with a really cool code name for me.”

A tiny laugh escaped between her teeth. “I think I can guarantee you that much.”

“All right, then.” He glanced at his watch. “Give me a few minutes.”

She grew more serious. “Do you even know—”

He smiled at her, showing her the same confidence that always put people at ease. “I’ll find a way in.”

And he did. Several of them, in fact.

None of them were ideal. An old fire escape leading to the roof, which might or might not be guarded at this point. A simple climb on decorative brick outcroppings to reach the second floor, where the windows lacked iron bars but would yield to his clothing-protected elbow if the ones within reach happened to be locked. They might be security wired, of course, but Seth had said the security systems had been taken down in the initial invasion. There was also an exit leading from the back corner, but Cole didn’t expect it to be open, or to be easily vulnerable. The SEALs might well use it once the time came.

He decided to try for the roof. It meant running in close to the building, behind the thick shrubs—and then exposing himself to view while he leaped up to catch the raised lower rung of the switchbacking fire escape. But Tory wasn’t his only diversion…just his most subtle one. Cole waited until movement at the front of the building—people pulling inward, toward the center—caught the attention of newscasters and soldiers alike. All except for the two men who watched the back of the building, standing imperturbably at the corners. Cole nodded at STUNTLY, who gave him a cocky little grin and quite casually sauntered toward the back of the building.

Within moments, he’d goaded the soldiers into giving chase, drawing them away. “Good luck,” Cole muttered after him, already in motion—but he knew that Hank also wore layers; all he needed was an instant out of sight to turn himself into someone else. With the discipline of experience, Cole left Hank’s fate in his own hands and ducked behind the shrubs—big, bushy, evergreen, and—as usual—prickly. He hesitated there, assessing the leap to the fire escape, when something caught his eye—and then caught his full attention.

Detonator?

He crouched by it. Yes, an electronic detonator. Meant for use with a remote.

“I’ll bet you weren’t here before the trouble started,” he said to it. “In fact…you’re barely damp. How did you—”

A small hinged door just above the ground, that’s how. A wooden door, still open, set into the concrete blocks of the basement. An opening just barely big enough…

Crouching behind the shrubs, Cole shucked the overcoat and tossed it through the door. The
dishdasha
followed, leaving him in his Kemeni outfit—and in serious trouble if he was spotted that way. He flipped the door up and backed through it, a dignified butt-first entrance that almost left him hanging like Pooh Bear in the honey tree. A little wiggling, a little contortion…a little brute force. He scraped his shoulders through, landing lightly on his feet in the basement of the capitol.

Hang on, Selena. Here I come.

Selena crouched in the not-so-secret corridor, ready for instant retreat. She’d come all the way to the end of it to spy on the ballroom, and knew herself to be acutely vulnerable.

And still, already the risk was worth it. Already she’d seen enough to confirm what Jonas White had told her…and to confirm her own suspicions that the Kemenis were getting ready to pull out. Not only had her navigation through the capitol been too easy since her return from the basement, but right there, right now, she saw the fruits of their labors. One after another, gathered hard drives were being tucked away for hard travel in the antistatic, airline- and gorilla-proof cases. A stack of CD jewel cases found less luxurious accommodations, while a handful of USB key chain drives quickly disappeared into special wrapping. Ashurbeyli watched the process with satisfaction…and rightly so. He gave a few quick orders…for Ashurbeyli, he was practically jovial.

They’d come prepared. They had the experts they needed; they had worked under the cover of the hostage crisis. Selena had seen those cases from the start and not realized their true significance. They even had a big wheeled dolly, festooned with bungee cords in waiting.

And there on a table, almost obscured by a stack of jackets and other soon-to-be donned outdoor gear, sat the detonator remotes. Selena’s fingers twitched.
I’ve got to get those remotes…

Sure. If I was invisible and my arms were nine feet long and there wasn’t a table between here and there…

Well, she knew how to distract them all, maybe even enough for an opportunity at the remotes. But probably not enough to gather up both the remotes and the hostages, and right now the hostages came first. She had to get them out of this bloody arena before the building came down on them—or, if she hadn’t found all the charges in the basement, blew up from beneath them. She looked at the remotes with longing—and then realized the importance of Ashurbeyli’s recent words, the orders to bring in refreshments.
Kaliber. Fayrouz.
Non-alcoholic malt drinks—luxuries to terrorists on the move, but trendy items a well-stocked kitchen would provide. And, apparently, a nice treat to buoy the Kemenis before they made their climactic shift to Plan B.

And most importantly, the shortest route to grabbing the drinks was through the servants’ corridor.

Or maybe the most important part was the perfect opening for Selena’s diversions.

Either way, she couldn’t be caught here. She backed swiftly away from the door and moved down the corridor, finding pleasant irony in posting herself outside the entrance closet in the same spot from which she’d been ambushed not so long ago. She found herself a nice stout cast-iron frying pan, and as the Kemeni errand boy exited, his expression distracted and his eyes on the kitchen, she pounced from the side with a sharp knee to his stomach and a solid follow-through
thwak
of frying-pan-meets-skull.

Too hard, probably—he wasn’t dead, but she wouldn’t put eventual dying beyond him; a quick prod to his head revealed a certain unnatural mushiness. “Occupational hazard,” she told him, although she hadn’t meant to hit him so hard and couldn’t help a scowl of self-blame. It didn’t slow her down…she couldn’t afford to let it. She dragged him into the kitchen and tossed him in the open cooler, not bothering to secure him. Within a few moments he’d be a moot point, and she didn’t expect him to be functional within that time.

In quick succession, she found a serving cart and a couple of basins; she rescued one of Atif’s abandoned tablecloths and snapped it out to cover the cart—too big, but that was the point. The bottom shelf was completely obscured, and so was the basin in which she put an inch of warm water and then the dry ice jar. She found a giant plastic canister filled with sugar and dumped the sugar, filling the canister halfway with bleach. It went beside the basin, and next to it, the gallon of ammonia.

She centered the second basin on top of the tablecloth, dumped in several scoops of ice from the machine tucked beside the cooler and went hunting the drinks. Kaliber sported a beer-bottle shape; Fayrouz had more of a wine-cooler look, and Selena grabbed one for herself, taking a moment to gulp down a fizzy, fruity apple-raspberry malt. Until it hit the back of her throat, she hadn’t realized just how thirsty she’d become.
Stupid,
she chided herself. She hadn’t made it this far to go down in a dehydrated faint.

Dropping the can opener beside the ice-filled basin, she checked her presentation—bottles in ice, nasty tricks securely hidden below—and then smiled as she tucked her empty bottle amidst the others. Her subtle but wicked heads-up to Ashurbeyli—likely to be seen, but not soon enough to do anything about it.

After a quick check of the hallway, she took her goody cart back up the servants’ corridor, just as pleased to see that the errand boy had left the diminutive door to the ballroom ajar. She made no particular effort to hide her approach, and she hesitated just before the opening to duck down and screw the lid tight on the dry ice jar and make quick work of dumping the ammonia into the bleach. Holding her breath, she gave the cart a shove and closed the door behind it.
Less than five minutes.
The intensely cold dry ice, sitting in its warm water bath, would sublimate quickly to gas…and the gas took up much more volume than the hard, cold chunk of ice with which she’d started. When the gas volume overcame the integrity of the glass jar, it would do so with a violent explosion of glass shards and brittle decorative glass marbles.

Customized Selena-bomb.

But the chlorine gas generated by the bleach and ammonia hit first. It didn’t take long for the coughing to start, for the confused exclamations as Kemeni eyes began to sting, irritating noses and throats and eventually lungs. Eventually even damaging eyes and nose and lungs…eventually, perhaps, even turning lethal. Someone made a cranky comment about the man who’d been sent to provide for them even while reaching for the bottle opener and a bottle of Kaliber, but the source of the irritation remained obscure, and the men had no idea they were gathering around it.

In the midst of it all she heard the noise of new arrivals. They burst into the room looking for Ashurbeyli, voices sharp. Within a few words and a few angry gestures and the glimpse of light blue paper, Selena had caught the gist of it: they’d found her notes. The seeds of doubt had been well sown.

Ashurbeyli grasped the situation with his usual stark acumen—and then startled Selena by looking around, examining the room as if he’d suddenly find her there. It was enough to make her move away from her little peephole, although she told herself she’d only done so because it was time. Her eye had felt the first faint sting of gas, and several of the thirsty Kemenis were now doubled over with miserable coughing as the sharp voices rose to true alarm. Ashurbeyli was the one to point at the empty bottle in the bin; Ashurbeyli was the one to shout warnings as he backed swiftly away from the cart.

But Ashurbeyli was too late.

T
he glass jar exploded with a noise as sharp as the deadly shards that arrowed through the room. Selena ducked reflexively, and ducked again as planter marbles thunked against the wall only inches away. Men cried out in surprise and pain; someone cried out in pure fury.

Ashurbeyli.

He knew who to blame.

The noises of fear and surprise rose from the next room, too.
The hostages.
They were her first priority now. She took a final glance into the ballroom and discovered more havoc than she’d even imagined—men with their legs slashed and bleeding, too stricken by the chlorine gas to react quickly to the more visible wounds made from flying glass. At least half of them were down, and the other half fully occupied with the wounded.

Not Ashurbeyli. He glared fiercely at the chaos as he plucked a giant splinter from his chest. He barked a few short orders, but he didn’t look at the men around him reaching for their comrades, reaching to stem the flow of blood, pulling one man from the soaked carpet where the serving cart had overturned. He looked around as though expecting Selena to materialize from thin air…as though he not only expected it, but gladly anticipated it, his fists balled into white-knuckled weapons.

You lose,
she thought at him. Although…not quite yet. Not until she had the hostages. Not until she could at least warn the Berzhaani what he’d really been up to here at the capitol.

She took one last look at the doorway between the ballroom and the hostages, discovering their guard staggered against the doorjamb, bleeding from a rapidly swelling lump just below his eye. Cold flying marble, oh yeah. In another moment he wouldn’t be able to see out of that eye at all.

In the moment it would take her to reach the function room.

She followed the wall to the next peephole, and confirmed what her ears had told her—the hostages were poised on their feet, exclamations loud between them and fear running high—especially as the guard waved his gun at them, shouting at them to shut up and sit down. He must have been more rattled than he realized, for he used Berzhaani words, totally incomprehensible to most of those scared people. So they froze, waiting for the situation to become clear…waiting, to judge by the pale, strained expressions, to die.

They’re just kids.

But Selena saw more than the kids. She saw broken, ruined families; she saw a country plunged into irreparable turmoil. Berzhaan’s prime minister about to die in the rubble of his own capitol.

And the door wouldn’t open.

The table.
The Kemenis had shoved a table in front of the passage, and she’d forgotten it. Adrenaline kicked in, hammering at her; with no room to step back for a kick, Selena threw her good shoulder into the door, feeling the wallboard give way and bulge out. Someone shrieked, startled and too panicked to hide it even if it meant her life, and when Selena looked again the guard was striding forward, blinking wildly from his watering, swollen eye but full of purpose and totally focused on the table-trapped entrance door.

“Stupid ass,” she muttered. “You should have just shot me through the wall.” And she shoved the Luger knockoff up against the wallboard, waited for him to block her view of everyone else and pulled a trigger so stiff it might as well be nonfunctional. There’d have been no maintaining her aim if she hadn’t had the gun jammed up against the wall for support.

The gunfire rang painfully loud in her little enclosed space in spite of the mild silencing effect of the wall, and she couldn’t help but flinch. When she found the peephole again, the guard had fallen out of view, and the hostages were scrambling to the other end of the room.

Not Allori. Allori shouted something to Razidae and the two men rushed forward, flinging the table away from the door in a synchronized effort. Selena all but tumbled out. She tripped over the downed guard and barely had her balance back when the ground rocked profoundly beneath her; her ears recoiled from a sharp basso reverberation of sound. She stared toward the ballroom, aghast—surely they hadn’t triggered their bombs, not when they weren’t anywhere near the exits!—and then realized the explosion had come from outside the building, back near the always-crowded little parking lot, the old carriage barn and the amazing grounds and gardens.

Not the building bombs at all—but whatever diversion the Kemenis had planned. But the timing…

The timing couldn’t be right.

She held up a quick hand to Allori, a silent signal to wait, and it was he who turned on the hostages, his arms held wide to stop the rush they’d been about to make at her. A few steps put her in position to look through the doorway, and still, all she saw was chaos—fervently renewed packing, men festooned with field bandages…one man clearly down for good, a thick puddle by his upper leg.
They’re not ready.
Whatever was going down out there, the Kemenis weren’t ready at all.

Before Ashurbeyli could spot her, she drew back. They had to have heard her pistol shot, as enclosed as it had been. They’d chosen to ignore her. They’d chosen escape over revenge.

That would certainly explain the dark, furious flush she’d seen on Ashurbeyli’s hawkish features.
He knows I’m here somewhere.
He’d chosen to complete his mission rather than to hunt her down…but then, he had probably never guessed that she was just beyond the door.

She turned on her heel, facing the hostages as she pulled her increasingly heavy briefcase off her shoulders—now they were in skirmish, and the thing would be more of a liability than potentially useful.

Two days of threats had trained the hostages well; after their initial noisy reactions, they’d silenced, staring mutely from a wide variety of complexions all turned pale and pasty. She stabbed a finger at the bedraggled events coordinator. “You know the way out,” she said in Berzhaani, not even bothering to make it a question. “You lead them. Take them out through the kitchen and go right around to the front. There are soldiers there, and they’ll protect you.”

More noise stuttered through the shouting in the next room—noise that froze them all, and hushed even the Kemenis in their hasty evacuation.

Gunfire. Automatic weapons fire. The three-burst stutter of a well-trained soldier, not the double-burst of the Abakans.

Rescue.

SEALs or Berzhaani Elite, Selena didn’t know. And she didn’t want to chance it either way, regardless of the extensive training each group underwent in how to not shoot the wrong people. She didn’t want the hostages in the middle of it. She grabbed the nearest student by the arm and sent her at the corridor, pinning the events coordinator with her most commanding gaze. “Go!” she said. “They won’t try to stop you now—just get out of the way!”

A glance at Allori told her he saw her lie—that he, too, knew the Kemenis might well try to stop the hostages, to use them as shields. But she didn’t want them timid, she wanted them running like hell.

Another explosion from the grounds rocked the building and the hostages suddenly moved as one, their silence broken. They rushed the door with their fears released into action—only to get bottled up at the exit, sobs and anxiety and “Hurry up, dammit!” filling the air.

Razidae wasn’t one of them. He stood in the middle of the room—prudently near the wall adjoining the ballroom so as not to be visible to the Kemenis, but he stood there nonetheless—his white dress shirt rumpled, his dignified
thagiya
cap askew and his dignity entirely intact. Selena turned to him in annoyance, suddenly quite certain that he didn’t intend to go anywhere at all. When a Kemeni popped through the door with mayhem on his mind, she reacted almost absently. She scooped up the briefcase, whirled it around once like a sling, and let fly; it hit him with the force of a medicine ball and bounced off to spew decorative planter marbles across the floor. Selena leaped over them to slam into the Kemeni with the same brute force, too tired for finesse when she could slam the fake Luger across the side of his head and fling his weapon away. She couldn’t help but give the gun an appreciative glance. “At last,” she told it. “Something you’re good at.”

“You should give it to Allori,” Razidae said, speaking loudly over the growing pop of gunfire now centered in the lobby area. The Kemenis who weren’t packing or bleeding—and even some of those who were bleeding—had gone out to hold off the rescue. To Selena’s startlement, he held out his hand. “Or to me.”

“You don’t want this,” she assured him. “It’s a piece of crap. And please, don’t tell me you’re going to stay here to greet the cleanup crew. You need to get to safety along with everyone else.
More
than anyone else.”

“I do want it,” Razidae said, and jerked his head at the diminishing number of hostages, all of whom were completely focused on escape. “And you should be the one to go with them.”

She found herself speechless and glanced at Allori to confirm what she suddenly thought she understood. Razidae didn’t want her there when the Berzhaani Elite crashed the scene. He didn’t want a woman holding the only captured weapon, and he didn’t want her there at all.

Allori gave her the slightest of nods.

Selena stabbed a finger at the Abakan she’d tossed across the room, and at the pathetic Luger knockoff not far from it, by the side of the first man she’d taken down. Acquiring either meant entering the potential line of fire from the doorway. “You want one? You’ve got your choice. I hope you know how to use them.”

Razidae stiffened. “Now is not the time—”

“No,” she snapped. “It’s not. You can’t help pull this country back together if you’re not alive.”

“Nor can I do so if I cannot command the respect of my people.”

She couldn’t believe this argument, this moment. She didn’t
want
to believe this argument. She gave Razidae a cold look and said, “It’s a good thing I was really risking my neck for those kids, or I might be seriously peeved that you’re throwing away all my work. As it is, I don’t have any problem with the notion of working with—let’s see, who’s next in line now that bin Kuwaji is dead?” She didn’t expect an answer. She said it only to buy thinking time, hovering over the decision to end this argument with a good stout blow to Razidae’s head. With Allori’s help, she could drag Razidae out of this place before it came down on them all. “Weren’t you paying any attention to the conversation in there?” she asked, indicating the ballroom. “They’re going to take this whole building down. If you wait here, you’re going to go down with it.”

“The Elite are here,” he said, as calmly as though gunfire didn’t blot out half his words. “They’ll deal with the situation.”

Selena took a chance, glanced through to the ballroom, and hesitated at the surprise of seeing the last limping Kemeni heading out the exit opposite her, hauling one of the equipment cases and leaving in his wake the detritus of apparent defeat—furniture overturned, several bodies on the floor, the scent of blood in the air.

There was no sign of the remote detonator triggers. The table where they’d been was conspicuously bare. A forlorn chunk of dry ice steamed on the floor beside it, showing no signs of the havoc it had wreaked. In the background, the firefight surged in ferocity; Selena could well imagine the first line of fleeing Kemenis laying down cover for those who escaped with the computer drives and data.

Another Kemeni ran up to the room, stopping just short of entering to stare at Selena as though stunned. She raised her gun in a knee-jerk reaction, but froze in midmotion, taken back.
That looks like—

But it didn’t. Black mustache, piercing brown eyes, olive skin…he wore the most modest of green turbans and Kemeni colors, but he stood there on the balls of his feet, every bit as frozen as she, compact and graceful and so
familiar—

“Cole?” She hadn’t intended to speak at all, and yet there somehow it was. Cole was in D.C. She’d left him behind, never intending to put herself in a situation where she wouldn’t see him again—or where her last message to him was a voice mail message in which she never even told him they might have managed to start a family after all. And yet there was her one-word question, hanging between them with a longing she hadn’t known she could feel, never mind express.

I must be going crazy.
Cole was blue-eyed and fair-haired and his nose not quite so—

“Cole?”
she asked again, this time barely a whisper. Nothing loud enough to carry over the noise of the firefight raging in the lobby and beyond, but somehow he gave the slightest of nods anyway. He pulled off the turban to reveal bright, sun-streaked hair; he yanked at his shirt. Underneath the apparent buttons of the military-like blouse, Velcro quickly gave way, leaving him in a tight black T-shirt with U.S.A. printed in bright yellow. Selena’s instinct gave way to sudden, overwhelming recognition—she
knew
those shoulders, had watched those muscles flex with weight work, had seen that chest sheen with sweat as he pulled her close.

The mustache and brown eyes and olive skin tone remained, at wild odds with his hair. He took a step toward her, apparently and suddenly oblivious of the turmoil around them, and Selena held up a sudden hand. One more step and she’d lose perspective and control; she’d run to him and she might even do it with the slow-motion effects of a love story in full play. So instead she stiffened, and she restricted all her longing to her eyes. “The Kemenis have Razidae’s hard drives. And they have remote detonators—this building’s rigged.”

He understood. He reversed that step, a precise movement so typical of a man who always knew exactly how to put his body where he wanted it. His gaze stayed locked on hers as he gave the smallest of nods, and as he turned to go—chasing after the Kemenis, leaving her to play her own part—he lifted a fist to his chest with thumb, forefinger, and pinky extended, their own simple addition to the covert ops signals they both knew.

Selena returned it.
I love you, too.

Now live through this, dammit, so I can prove it.