Darkness at Dawn (28 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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Lucy removed her lab coat and handed it to the general, as if he’d asked the most normal thing in the world. “Here. I’d be really grateful if you could have the meal sent soon.” She flashed a flirtatious smile at Mike. “We’d like to retire early, wouldn’t we, Michael?”
The only thing to do was play along in their established roles. Lucy, cute little nerd. Mike, clueless rich guy. “Sure thing, honey.” His voice boomed. “I’m a little tired, too.”
Like the Eye of Mordor, the general’s eye alit on him. “Ah, Mr. Harrington.”
Mike smiled broadly. “General.”
The general’s malevolent attention was like a cold hand passing over him, almost a palpable thing. “Did you have a good day?”
So what the fuck was he supposed to answer to that?
Shit yeah, General. I went out to find the corpse of a murdered countryman of mine you poisoned with one of the most dangerous viruses on earth, which you are planning on releasing into the world. There is nothing remaining of my fellow operative but clothes and bloodstains. Luckily, inside this poor man’s clothes was something that I will sacrifice my life to ensure will bring down the wrath of the entire US military onto you.
Great day, thanks for asking.
“Very enjoyable, General.”
“I understand you appropriated a military vehicle for your . . . sightseeing.”
The temperature in the room dropped about twenty degrees. There was no doubt the general was angry at the thought of Mike running around in a military vehicle. Even back in America, letting a civilian have a military vehicle in a high-security situation would be a court-martial offense. God knew what it would be in a dictatorship. And the vehicle had been made available by a top officer—the Captain of the Royal Guards. There was no way they could betray his name. Mike was running scenarios through his head when Lucy coughed discreetly.
“That was me, General.” She smiled. “We were talking about how Michael could get around Chilongo and where we could hire a car. An older soldier recognized me, said he knew my parents. Said it would be an honor to lend his vehicle for the day. I do hope that was okay? I wouldn’t want him to be in any trouble.”
The general turned to her. “What was his name, this soldier?”
“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I have no idea. We didn’t even think to ask. It was a generous offer and we didn’t want to be churlish—be impolite—and refuse. So Michael accepted the offer.”
There was utter silence in the lab as the general, Lucy’s lab coat in hand, absorbed this. There was absolutely nothing Mike could do. Changa would either accept the explanation or not.
It was a good thing Lucy was able to think so fast on her feet. His admiration for her went up another notch.
The general looked at them both carefully, taking his time, without even trying to dissemble what he was doing. Lucy’s expression remained friendly, turning to slight puzzlement as the silence went on. Perfect reaction.
Mike was having a little more trouble with his reaction because he wanted to tear the general’s balls off and feed them to the dogs, but there were three weapons in the room, in the hands of men who knew how to use them, and he had none.
Right now, Mike’s main weapon was Lucy’s brain.
Finally, the general laid Lucy’s lab coat slowly on the back of a chair and gave a slight bow. Considering the depth of the bows Mike had seen so far, this one was an insult.
“Dr. Merritt. Mr. Harrington. Let me accompany you to your room.”
Where I will post a guard and from which you will not emerge until tomorrow morning
was the unspoken subtext.
Lucy didn’t even try the
oh but we couldn’t possibly impose
gambit. He wanted to make sure they were locked up for the night and she got that.
“Thank you, General,” Lucy said softly. “We’re honored.”
Outside the lab, the general took the lead, Mike and Lucy followed, and the three soldiers took up the rear. It was really hard not to think of themselves as being under arrest.
The general took an entirely different route back to their room, one Mike wasn’t familiar with. He didn’t think much about it until he felt Lucy stiffen at his side.
What?
He looked around for danger, but all he saw was a huge hall with an enormous staircase leading down.
The general stopped in the middle of the hall and looked back at them. “So this is where your parents died, Dr. Merritt.”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
Son of a bitch
. The fucker was trying to throw her off balance, catch her out in a weakness, by using the place her parents had been murdered to upset her. Mike wanted to tear him limb from fucking limb.
General Changa watched her carefully, but Lucy gave no sign of an emotional reaction, so he turned again and walked forward.
Mike glanced down at her. She kept a serene expression, but she had turned pale.
They walked for another fifteen minutes, then Lucy gave an exclamation. She stopped in front of a massive brass statue of Buddha, one of about a billion in the Palace. This one was of the usual fat happy man, one foot raised.
“Oh! Mike, look! This is a famous statue. The Dancing Buddha.” She reached out and touched the tip of his toes. “Touching him brings good luck. Here, you touch him, too.”
He reached out and touched the toes, which were shiny from being rubbed over centuries. Goddamn if she hadn’t palmed a small piece of paper, done perfectly, right under the nose of the general and the three soldiers. If Mike hadn’t known to look out for it, he would never have seen it.
Finally, they were at the door to their quarters. The general gave a brief bow. “Dr. Merritt, Mr. Harrington, I hope you have a pleasant evening. Dr. Merritt, the Feast of the Snow Dragon begins tomorrow at seven in the evening. I trust the manuscript will be ready.”
“Certainly, General.” Lucy smiled up at him, friendly and calm. “I’ll mount it for display. We’re honored to be here for the Feast. Good night.”
Once they were inside the room, Lucy’s face crumpled. She leaned shaking against the door and let out a long, shuddering breath.
Mike grabbed her and pulled her into his arms. He couldn’t wait another second to hold her. She was trembling. He could feel her heart racing when he put the palm of his hand against her back. She was terrified. She hadn’t given any sign of it, but she was terrified.
“That was
awful
,” Lucy gasped.
“Yeah.” He just held her against him, absorbing the tremors, one hand holding her head against his chest. He wasn’t trembling, but he wasn’t doing too well himself. If Lucy hadn’t kept her head so well, they could be in the Palace dungeons right now.
“Where the hell did you put the flash drive? I thought we were blown for sure.”
She clung to him for a moment, gave one final shudder and pulled away. “Never underestimate a woman.”
Mike thought of his stepmom and half sister. “No, ma’am,” he said fervently and watched, fascinated, as she pulled the flash drive from between her breasts. She also conjured up a tightly folded slip of paper, the one she’d invisibly palmed at the Dancing Buddha.
She carefully unfurled it, frowning as she read the message.
“What does the princess say?”
“She wants to meet with me. Tonight. In the Royal Chambers. It’s urgent.”
“How can—” Mike began then stopped when he heard a grinding noise from the huge wooden door to their room.
The sound of a key turning in a lock. They were locked in.
F
OURTEEN
 
LUCY sat trembling in a chair while Mike swept the room. When he gave her a thumbs up, she let out a huge breath.
“You were so great,” Mike said, and Lucy rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, right.” Lucy Merritt, Superwoman.
“No, no.” Mike actually looked a little shocked at her reaction. “You were incredibly brave. You didn’t show any fear at all. You were just amazing.”
It seemed impossible to Lucy that the huge freight train of terror that was in her hadn’t shown. “Mike. I was terrified. Every second he was in that room I thought I was going to die of a heart attack. I was scared out of my mind.”
“Well, of course you were,” he said, frowning. “You’d have been crazy not to be frightened.”
“You weren’t.” And he hadn’t been, not at all. The waves of anger and aggression coming off him had almost been palpable, no fear in there at all. Lucy was a connoisseur of fear, knew all its permutations and flavors. There hadn’t been any in Mike. She was surprised the general hadn’t had him shot.
The key ground in the lock again and Mike shot to the door. A Palace servant stood there, surprised to see a very large Westerner right in front of him. Mike took the huge tray from his hands. His voice boomed loudly in the enormous corridor outside.
“That’s great, thanks so much, appreciate it.”
His big, fatuous smile faded as the door locked loudly behind him. He placed the tray on the table.
“Four soldiers stationed outside,” he reported grimly. “Armed.”
Lucy looked at him, dismayed. “How on earth are we going to get out and get to the Royal Chambers? And I’ll bet you anything the Royal Chambers are fully guarded, too. Something is happening, Mike. Something really serious.”
“Well, I’ve got some ideas, but first let’s eat. I didn’t have lunch, either, and we’ve got to fuel up if we’re going to do anything.”
When Mike talked about fueling up, he wasn’t kidding. The amount of food on the tray was enough for a small platoon. When Lucy had eaten her fill, Mike looked a question at her. When she nodded, he finished up everything else. It was true that he’d spent the entire day out in the snow, looking for dead bodies. Or rather, the remains of dead bodies.
Lucy sat back. “Do you want me to try again with the flash drive?”
Mike stilled, fork halfway to his mouth. “You can do that?”
“Maybe. I always carry a mini kit of tools with me. I can certainly try.”
Neither of them needed to be told that the information needed to get into the right hands as fast as possible.
In case they never made it back.
“Go for it.”
Lucy pulled out her little tool kit, a very expensive one that almost exactly replicated her large briefcase-sized one, except all the tools were beautifully engineered miniature ones.
When she sat on a carved wooden chair directly under a wrought-iron lamp, she picked the bent and misshapen flash drive up and was instantly lost to the world.
It never failed. She was constitutionally built for this kind of long-term focus, for intense, exacting, highly detailed work. Sometimes she’d sit down to an ailing manuscript in the morning and come, startled, out of a dream trance in the late afternoon, having worked steadily and without interruption for eight hours.
The pliers were tiny, but powerful and precise. Millimeter by millimeter, Lucy straightened the small bits of alloy metal until finally she sat up straight, pleased. The flash drive looked perfect.
She pushed her glasses to the top of her head and held the drive out to Mike in the palm of her hand. “Here you go. I think it’ll work.”
Then Lucy saw his expression and blinked in surprise. Every single plane of his face was stark, skin tight over high cheekbones, eyes blazing darkly.
“What?”
He swallowed. “You are incredibly sexy when you concentrate.”
She swallowed, too, because it was very clear that he was intensely aroused. Enormously . . . greatly aroused. Oh God.
“Um . . .” Words deserted her, utterly. There was absolutely nothing to say.
“Don’t pay any attention to that.”
He opened his laptop and gently, gently pushed the flash drive into the USB port. It slid home smoothly and he pumped the air with his fist.
“You’re a genius, Lucy.” He was typing away furiously at the keyboard, filing his report. He pressed the enter key and sat back. “There. No matter what happens, the info will get into the right hands. I think we should be planning on getting out of here, pronto.”
“We can’t know whether the information on that flash drive has been compromised or not.” She hated to say it because the idea of staying under General Changa’s rule for even a moment more than necessary made her skin crawl. “We need to get confirmation that the CIA and the Stop Cold committee received it and that it was readable. In the meantime, Paso wants to see me, urgently. I don’t know how to do that, how to get away from the guards outside our door, make our way through the halls and get through security into the Royal Chambers. Did you notice that there were many more soldiers out tonight than last night?”
“Yeah, I noticed.” The muscles in Mike’s jaw were working overtime.
“What do you think has happened?”
“I don’t know, but it’s nothing good. Soldiers stationed in cities and government buildings are never good. I have an idea. We couldn’t find a map of the Palace anywhere on the net. Do you think you could draw me a map of the Palace? Floor by floor? And an especially detailed map of the Royal Chambers?”

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