Hot Zone (Major Crimes Unit Book 2) (6 page)

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had been Howard, she was sure of it. He’d been standing there only
twenty-metres away from Sarah, watching while she helped kidnap a man. A man
he, too, had been after. What did the MCU want with Krenshaw? Was she impeding
a government operation by intervening and getting to the doctor first? Did she
even care?

Sarah sat up front with her father in the first of the two
black vans, staring at the back streets as they slunk away from the main roads.

“Did you get a look at that man in the car park,” her father
asked. “He saw your face. You should never got out of the van without a mask.
What the Hell were you doing?”

“I didn’t think. I was just trying to help. Your men were
making a scene, and excuse me if my wits aren’t that sharp. I’ve been locked up
with nothing to do for four months.”

“There are no excuses for mistakes. You’ve compromised this
entire unit. That man looked like a police officer.”

“He’s MCU,” Sarah said. “I know him. He knows me.”

Her father punched the top of the steering wheel. “Damn it,
Sarah. My unit can only exist if it fades in and out of the shadows. If you’ve
been recognised then your MCU boyfriend has something to work with. It’s not
like it would be hard to get a positive ID on a face like yours, even if he
hadn’t known you already.”

Sarah looked away, out of her window, anything to avoid the
burning glare of her father. “He isn’t my boyfriend. I worked with him for a
couple of weeks at most.”

Her father glanced at her for a moment, then stopped the van
at the edge of a side street. Before he spoke he let out a disappointed grunt.
“If you’ve been ID’d then we need to get this mission done quickly and
disappear. There’s no going back for you now, Sarah. You can’t change your mind
because you know too much now about me and my men. If I let you leave, they can
use you to get to me.”

Sarah frowned. “Who exactly would be trying to get to you?
What have you done?”

“My duty,” he said. “A grievous crime in this day and age.
I’m serious, Sarah. You’re in this now. This is your life. The choice has been
taken away from you. Do you understand? You can’t go back to your old life.”

Sarah grunted. “I don’t have an old life to go back to. This
isn’t about my choice being made for me, though, is it? It’s about your choice
being made. You’re stuck with me now. You can’t get rid of me, even if you want
to.”

Major Stone glared at her so hard that she shrank in her
seat. “Sarah, there’s always a way to get rid of someone, even a daughter.
Don’t forget that.”

Sarah opened her mouth to speak but dared not. She felt like
she was sitting beside a great venomous lizard ready to strike at the slightest
movement. Was there any love her father held for her at all?

He pulled away from the curb and headed back out onto the
main road. Twenty-minutes later, they were back at the warehouse’s courtyard,
where they parked up next to the bright red e-type Jaguar. The courtyard was
enclosed and hidden from the roadside, which made the warehouse an excellent
hideout — for that, Sarah realised, was what it was.
Everybody got out of the vans and Dr Krenshaw, clutching a
briefcase tightly to his chest, was bundled into the warehouse. There he was
taken away by her father and a pair of men she had yet to speak to.

“He’s getting your old room,” said Ollie.

“Then I hope he doesn’t fancy watching the telly.”

Ollie didn’t understand her comment — how could he? — so he
just smiled and headed off.

Rat came up to her a minute later, the expression on his
face far less kind. “I hear you’re with us for the duration. Good. Gives me
time to get a little payback.”

Sarah rolled her eyes like he was nothing but a mere
irritation. “You should be thanking me. I was going to kill you.”

“I’m not as easy to kill as you think, sweetheart.”

“All men die the same when you cut their throats. Maybe next
time I won’t aim for your shoulder.”

Rat sneered and walked away.

Sarah milled around the warehouse, glad to be alone for a
while. From all of the oily workbenches, she assumed the warehouse had once
been concerned with some kind of assembly. The odd scrap of metal here and
there further suggested that this place once housed bored employees fitting
things together. Now it was a staging area for a team of ex-SAS. How things
changed. Six months ago, she had almost had her life on track. Now she felt
utterly directionless. Her father’s orders were the only thing steering her,
and that was not necessarily something she was comfortable with. She held no
great love for her father, had not known him well enough to have such depth of
emotion, yet there was a yearning inside of her, a deep desire to gain the
respect — if not love — of Major Stone. It was fantasy, most likely, but the
little girl inside of her couldn’t let it go. After all that had happened, a
hug from her daddy could mend so much, yet the thought of it happening felt
childishly naive. Her father was a brutal killer, not a hugger.

It was a while before the others began filtering back to the
main floor of the warehouse. Sarah took the opportunity to make the
acquaintance of the rest of the group. The black man she’d beaten up upon her
escape was named Rupert, of all things. He was embarrassed about the incident
more than angry and admitted that her ruse of insanity had utterly bewildered
him. For a hired killer, he was friendly, but there was an air of regimentally
to him that suggested he was an institutionalised military man. Men like Rupert
could not go back to ordinary life. There were two other men. Graves, a man who
was older than her father by at least a decade, but his wiry frame and leather
skin only added to his aura of lethality – like a wizened cobra. Spots was a
much younger man, with the worst acne Sarah had ever seen. He smiled more than
Graves did but not by much. Both men oozed with the coiled menace of
warriors-on-standby, ready to strike out and kill at a moment’s notice, just
waiting for their next order. They were brutal soldiers; elite grunts.

Sarah made her way over to Ollie, who she deemed the least
likely to suddenly attack her. The man seemed out of place amongst the others,
less a soldier and less a killer. He smiled at her warmly when she approached
him. “Hey, Sarah. You doing okay?”

“Just a bit Alice in Wonderland, you know?”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” he replied.

“Exactly. So what are we going to do with the doctor now
that we have him?”

“Ask your father. He tells us what to do when he needs us to
do it. We don’t ask questions.”

Sarah frowned. “You don’t ask questions? Why would you not
want to know what you’re fighting for?”

“I know what I’m fighting for,” he said. “Your father. I’m
not ex-SAS like the other guys, never even served, but I’m just as willing to
jump into the flames for what I believe in.”

“If you never served, then how do you know my father?”

Ollie smiled at her as if he admired her questioning nature.
“I’m an old friend of his, but I was never in the forces. I was a teacher.”

Sarah almost barked at him, so unexpected were his words.
“You were a teacher?”

Ollie chuckled. “Yes, I was a teacher. I went to teach in
Sri Lanka in my early twenties, married a local woman, Darla. She was a
teacher, too. There was a long civil war going on in Sri Lanka, back then. The
insurgents were the Tamil Tigers. One day they decided to take our school
hostage in order to make demands of the Government. The government refused to
even negotiate and a firefight ensued. The Tamil Tigers, used the children as
human shields and barricaded the windows. We were trapped there as hostages for
three days. Even when they cut of the water and electricity, turning the
building into a sweating furnace, the Tigers did not submit. They were prepared
to die before giving themselves up. Eventually the school burned. My wife
didn’t make it out of her classroom. I was trapped in another part of the
building but managed to get out. When I finally got to her, she was already
dead.”

Sarah felt her left eye twitched, setting off a flare of
pain in her scared eyelid. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “Seems like
everywhere you turn these days there are terrorists wrecking lives.”

“It wasn’t the Tamil Tigers who killed my wife,” Ollie told
her. “It was the government retaliation. They firebombed the entire school and
let it burn. They wanted to kill the rebels more than they valued the life of
their children. About half of us made it out alive, but the rest were left to
burn. Nowadays, the Sri Lankan government boasts about how they are the only
modern nation to entirely oust its terrorists. But the truth is, the terrorists
are the ones in charge.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sarah.

“Anyway,” Ollie continued cheerily, despite the sadness in
my eyes. “I moved back home and resumed contact with your father. He gave me
purpose; a chance to eliminate the types of men who killed my lovely Darla. I’m
not a born killer, Sarah, but I’ve turned my hand to it pretty well. In fact, I
quite enjoy it. I don’t know what that means for my soul.”

Sarah understood the quenching pleasure of revenge and
patted him on the shoulder. “Our soul isn’t in jeopardy when we kill bad
people. It’s in jeopardy when we stop protecting the good ones.”

“Alright, men,” Major Stone barked, marching onto the
warehouse floor. “Gather up.”

Everyone stopped talking and assembled.

“Well done on another successful mission,” he said. “We have
the doctor safe and secure and I’ve just gotten the clearances we need to get
him — and us — out of the country.”

“We’re leaving?” said Rat unhappily, now favouring his
shoulder again and letting the pain show in his voice. “We only just came back
home.”

Major Stone shot him a stony glance. “Your home is this
unit, Rat. You gave up any entitlement to a home when you defected, as did I.
Unfortunately, my daughter has been ID’d, which means we need to disappear for
a while. Once we complete our mission and get out of the country, the heat will
die off and we will come back.”

Sarah looked down at the floor as angry glances shot her
way.

“So, where are we going, Major?” asked Ollie in a tone that
suggested he had little problem with having to leave.

“We’re heading to Libya. We’ll land in Tripoli and head
along the coast to Tunisia where we can pose as tourists and soak up the sun
for a while.”

There was a quick cheer and suddenly Sarah didn’t feel so
bad anymore. In fact, a bit of sunbathing sounded pretty good to her, although
she wasn’t so sure her face and gender would make life easy in the more rural
parts of the country. There was one other thing on her mind. “I thought Dr
Krenshaw was wanted by the South African government. So why are we heading to
Tripoli?”

Her father turned his glare to her and once again made her
feel tiny. “Which is why they are having their people collect the doctor in
Libya. South Africa doesn’t want to advertise their involvement in an
unsanctioned manhunt. It’s a lot easier to conduct ourselves quietly in a place
like Libya.”

Sarah was quiet.

Her father straightened up and lifted his chin. “Right,
clear off, you lot. Our flights are at 0600 from Heathrow, so get your socks on
by 0400.”

Everyone dispersed.

Her father marched away and Sarah went after him, asking, “What
do we do once we get to Libya?”

Major Stone turned on her and bore into her with his emerald
eyes. “I need for you to understand something for me, Sarah. You do not ask
questions. I give orders and you follow them. You are a soldier now, not my
daughter, so when I dismiss you, do not chase after me and start demanding to
know things I have elected not to tell you.”

Sarah growled. “Are you capable of being anything other than
an arsehole?”

“I’ll let you have that one, because you’re new. You don’t
want to see what happens next time. Now get out of my sight.”

Sarah clenched her fists as her father — her superior —
marched away into one of the offices. When she finally calmed down enough to
walk away, Rat was laughing at her. He was too far away to have made out the
words, but he could obviously tell she had just received a dressing down.

“You won’t get any special treatment around here,” he said.

“I don’t need any,” she said.

“I would’ve been the first to help you settle in if you’d
been a little nicer to me. Then you went and stabbed me, you bitch.”

Sarah marched up to Rat and stood right in his face. He
wasn’t afraid of her. In fact, he was snickering with delight.

“Say that word again,” she said.

“You think you’re something really hot, don’t you? Don’t forget
I watched you rot in a cell for four months. I know you’re nothing but a weak,
ordinary woman. You won’t last with us. We’re men.”

Sarah grinned, repressing a sudden urge to bite the man’s
face and listen to him squeal. “And don’t forget I saw how weak and stupid you
are. You were the guard who let me escape. I played you like a fucking flute.”

“Shut up, you ugly bitch.”

Sarah smashed her elbow into Rat’s collarbone, right where
she had stabbed him earlier. He hit the floor, bellowing as she kicked him in
the stomach.

“I did warn you,” she said, looking down at him. “I always
warn you.”

Ollie came up beside and moved her away. “You’re not making
any friends,” he said to her privately. “Rat doesn’t look like much, but he
holds grudges and follows them through. Be careful.”

Sarah shrugged. “What’s the worst he can do?”

Ollie wasn’t joking when he spoke. “He can put a bullet in
your back the next time he’s supposed to be watching it, and I would hate to
see that.”

Sarah looked over at Rat, who had gotten back to his feet
and was glaring at her. If he wasn’t an enemy before, he was now.