Darkness at Dawn (29 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Jennings
Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction
“I imagine I could,” Lucy said slowly. She was a decent draftswoman and she knew the Palace inside out. “But my information would be fifteen years out of date. They might have put a gym where the kitchens are, for all I know.”
“But they won’t have changed the Royal Chambers.”
“No. No, they wouldn’t.” There were hidden rules governing the Royal Family and the Royal Chambers Lucy had never understood. Her parents had told her that they were the precepts of an ancient religion that predated Buddhism.
As youngsters, she and Paso had been exempt from all royal protocol, and Lucy had been able to run wild through the Royal Chambers, which would have been closed to her as an adult.
“Here. I’ll use this.” She pulled out her artists’ sketch pad. It was always with her when she traveled. It pleased her and relaxed her to sketch things—an interesting face, an architectural detail—when away from home.
It took her an hour and ten pages of her sketch pad, but she put what were essentially floor plans to the entire palace in Mike’s hands. “Now what, O Great Leader?”
He slanted a glance at her, amused. He had himself under control. She hadn’t looked up from her furious sketching to see him looking at her as if she were a cream puff he wanted to eat. As a matter of fact, he’d basically ignored her, prowling around their huge quarters, pulling odd objects out of his suitcase and hand luggage. He’d also dressed in a very sexy ninja-like jumpsuit.
“Now I do what I do best,” he replied, finger on the page where she had sketched their floor of the Winter Palace. “I climb.”
“What?”
Mike was placing the sketches all together on the floor, taking in the layout of the Palace as a whole.
“They did us a favor locking us in. We’ll send the tray out and say we’re retiring for the night. I think I can make it over to the south windows of the Royal Chambers without being seen. The rooftops are steeply pitched, but it’s not snowing. Should be okay. Wooden shingles, right?”
Lucy nodded.
“I have essentially a full climber’s kit with me, all the gear I need. I think I can make it there and back in an hour or two.”
She swallowed. “That’s great. When can we leave?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Mike stared at her. “What do you mean ‘we’? Are you crazy?”
Lucy stared at the rope and grapple lying on the bed, knowing the years and years of training required to be able to use them, and nodded. Yes, yes she was crazy. No question.
“I don’t want to do this, Mike. Believe me. I’d rather just stay here and wait for you to do your thing. But Paso’s note . . . well.”
She smoothed out the small crumpled piece of paper, forcing her hands to stillness. The note was very short. Very clear.
Meet me in the Royal Chambers after ten. I need you.
Lucy could almost hear Paso’s voice. She looked at Mike, feeling miserable. “What else can I do? I have to go. Maybe she has information she’ll give me and not you. I’d give anything to be able to stay here. But we can’t afford for me not to go, Mike. Surely you can see this? The choice isn’t mine to make.”
He stared at her, face tight.
There wasn’t anything she could do to convince him, either way. He didn’t want her with him, obviously. She didn’t want her with him, either.
He was an expert mountaineer, he knew what he was doing. She’d be pure ballast. Her presence would make his mission harder, more arduous, possibly even expose them to discovery.
He was an athlete, his very body spoke of years using that gear, going up and down mountains. She wasn’t an athlete in any way. Her idea of a perfect day was a couch, a book and a cup of tea.
But she had to go.
Whether he saw that, understood that, was entirely up to him. He was much bigger and stronger than she was, and she couldn’t force him to take her along.
She waited for his decision.
He nodded.
“Dress in dark clothes. Wear rubber boots or at least shoes with rubber soles if you have them. Put on two pairs of gloves. Tie your hair tight.” He watched her for a second or two, judging her. She knew what he was seeing. A total wimp, someone who knew nothing about climbing. “And you obey me, instantly. You do what I say at all times. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely.”
She went to change her clothes, praying she wouldn’t let him down.
Christ, that’s all he needed. Lucy along. Not because she was a silly or difficult woman, not at all. He could absolutely count on her to stay quiet, keep her head, do what he said.
But
fuck
.
fuck
.
She wasn’t a climber, not in any way. In his head, following Lucy’s clear sketches, he’d mapped out a path to the Royal Chambers. Out their window and over the rooftops. Easy stuff, certainly easier than his usual climbs. No granite cliff faces, no treacherous avalanches, just a quick climb up, crossing the roof, rappelling down into the windows of what Lucy told him were Paso’s quarters. Piece of cake. He just had to avoid detection by Changa’s guards, who presumably wouldn’t be patrolling the sharply pitched roofs.
Lucy added an entirely new factor of danger. He could haul her up and down, no problem. He’d just give her the harness. But she couldn’t walk on those tiles. No one who wasn’t a climber could. The rooftops were cold and icy and steeply pitched.
He’d have to rope her to him, and if she slipped and fell, he’d make a racket trying to save her.
So it was Plan B: a series of under the roof corridors she said were never used.
He hated this. He hated exposing her to danger. The soldiers would shoot on sight. He knew enough of her to know that she would control her fear, which was all that anyone could ask. But she wouldn’t know what to do, instinctively, as he did. Her body would be stiff, unwieldy, slow to react.
She wouldn’t stay behind, though. He was beginning to understand that pale, determined look, and he couldn’t do anything but admire it. Her friend Paso wanted her, and she would literally swing from the rooftops to be with her.
Okay. His job, then, was to get them there and back safely.
She’d finished changing and stood before him, clad in black, short boots with rubber soles, her hair not only tied back but under a black watch cap.
Mike went to the door, listened carefully. From his gear belt he took a tiny, flattened metallic tube and inserted it between the ancient slate floor and the even more ancient wooden door. Even if the two had been an airtight fit originally, over the past thousand years feet had worn the floor down, creating a space.
He inserted the tube carefully, stopping when he gauged that it was just past the barrier of the door. The eye of the snake was a wide-angle-lens camera that transmitted to his cell phone. He watched the display carefully for five minutes.
There were three men stationed outside, all armed, but their body language was relaxed. Two were leaning against the wall, across from the door, talking. The third crossed over to them and lit a cigarette.
In the US Army, they’d be court-martialed, or at least harshly reprimanded and demoted, for this kind of behavior while on guard duty. They were distracted from their primary focus, and as for the guy lighting the cigarette—well, you smoke with your dominant hand. Which is also your gun hand. Crazy-ass dumb.
On the other hand, it meant that he and Lucy were not considered dangerous. To the guards, standing watch over their door was simply a wasted night when they could be in their beds.
Satisfied, Mike put the snake camera back in his webbing and turned to Lucy. “So—you have any music in your computer?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, do you need it?”
“Yeah, turn some on, they’ll think we’re relaxing, and it’ll mask any sounds we make as we go out the window.”
In an instant, the pretty strains of the Peasall Sisters sounded from her laptop speakers.
“Okay,” she said, looking up from her laptop. “I’ve got my music on a loop. It’ll just start over again when it’s played all my MP3 files. The loop lasts about an hour and a half.”
“We should be back by then. Let’s go.”
The windows opened out onto a wooden terrace. Dark, deeply carved wood, heavy wooden plank flooring, big dark wood carved posts dividing the space up into frames. One floor down was a courtyard, hemmed in by high walls. On the far end of the courtyard was a series of brass dragon heads jutting out of the brick wall, water spouting from the open, fanged mouths into a stone trough.
Good. The rustling water would provide more cover if they made noise.
Leaving the doors just slightly ajar, Mike played out the thin rope that had been wound around the perimeter of his Samsonite suitcase and attached a grapple to the carabiner at one end. He leaned out from the balcony, looking up, gauging distance. Right under the eaves was a wooden portico Lucy said ran around the building. It was dark all along this wall. Two stories up. Doable. As long as the balcony itself was strong. Well, it had lasted a thousand years, so it must be.
“Here.” He adjusted the harness around Lucy’s chest. If they were in the mountains and he had to climb with a complete newbie, he’d have insisted on the full harness—chest and upper thighs. But there wasn’t much choice here. He hooked a simple figure eight onto the harness, leaned out, gauged and threw.
The grapple engaged with the wood of the portico balustrade. He tugged, then pulled himself up easily, jumping lightly down into a crouch, listening. There were sounds coming from the Palace, but distant. A soldier’s barked orders, a woman’s laugh, instantly stifled, some kind of light gong. But nothing close. And very few lights on this side of the Palace. They’d been put into a half-empty wing.
Good.
He leaned over the balcony, looking down into Lucy’s pale, anxious, upturned face.
“Stand on the balcony,” he called out in a low voice, and she did. He threaded the end of the cable through an ATC device. It was there to stop the second climber from falling, but in this case it was going to have to be used to pull Lucy up as a deadweight.
He could do it. He and his team sometimes pulled up hundreds of pounds of gear and food when planning on staying in the mountains for weeks. Lucy was easy.
She stayed loose on the way up, which was good. Pulling a wriggling, panicking woman up would have been a nightmare.
Her hands landed on the top of the balcony, and Mike pulled her up and over, into his arms for a quick hug. “Good girl! Now let’s go.”
“Let me go ahead,” Lucy whispered. “I can orient myself better than you.”
Mike’s teeth gnashed. He had a superb sense of direction, thank you very much. But more than anything else, the idea of Lucy taking point went against every single instinct he had. They had no guarantee that they wouldn’t run into patrolling soldiers, even though the portico seemed deserted. And if they ran into trouble, Mike wanted trouble to find him first.
But if there were no soldiers, Lucy should be in the lead because of her superior knowledge of the Palace and its layout.
Mike was an officer. He was used to making decisions and making them fast. In the field, indecision could get you killed. Sometimes even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.
He knew this. He knew it in his bones.
But the rational part of his mind that told him calmly that Lucy should go ahead because she was more familiar with the terrain clashed violently with the crazy part of his head that could only see Lucy lying on the wooden boards in a lake of her own blood, having taken a bullet because she was in the lead.
Yes, no, yes, no . . .
Lucy watched him carefully, the anxiety slowly draining from her face, replaced by exasperation. She huffed out a breath, turned and started walking. Mike followed, right on her heels.
They worked out a system. At corners, Mike sent his worm camera around the edge and studied the long corridors of the portico. Open to the elements, lit only from below. When he saw the corridor was empty, he let her go ahead.
Twice she turned right when he would have turned left. Lucy on point turned out to be a good idea. It didn’t stop him from grinding his teeth, though.
The longest corridor was the entire western face of the Palace. That side overlooked the huge esplanade where they’d been welcomed to Nhala only—God, was it only thirty hours ago?
Mike lightly touched Lucy on the shoulder and she stopped immediately, looking back at him with a question in her eyes. He stepped to the balcony and studied the view below.
There were at least double the soldiers in view than there’d been at their arrival. They carried MP-5s in slings. Everyone had a sidearm. They also looked very fit and alert—elite troops.
A dull roar came from the south. Mike watched as a helicopter appeared out of the mist, hovered, then settled onto the helipad. Twenty soldiers, fully armed, hopped out.
These soldiers—and all the soldiers on the huge plaza—were from some separate force. Their uniforms were completely different from those of the Royal Guard and of the regular troops he’d seen guarding the corridors and their rooms.
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