Midnight Rainbow
Midnight
Rainbow
by
Linda Howard
Contents
Chapter One
He was getting too old for this kind of crap,
Grant Sullivan thought irritably. What the hell was he doing crouched here,
when he'd promised himself he'd never set foot in a jungle again? He was
supposed to rescue a bubble-brained society
deb
, but
from what he'd seen in the two days he'd had this jungle fortress under
surveillance, he thought she might not
want
to be rescued. She looked as if she was having the time of her life: laughing,
flirting,
lying
by the pool in the heat of the day.
She slept late; she drank champagne on the flagstone patio. Her father was
almost out of his mind with worry about her, thinking that she was suffering
unspeakable torture at the hands of her captors. Instead, she was lolling
around as if she were vacationing on the
Riviera
. She certainly wasn't being tortured. If
anyone was being tortured, Grant thought with growing ire, it was he himself.
Mosquitoes were biting him, flies were stinging him, sweat was running off him
in rivers, and his legs were aching from sitting still for so long. He'd been
eating field rations again, and he'd forgotten how much he hated field rations.
The humidity made
all of his
old wounds ache, and he
had plenty of old wounds to ache. No doubt about it: he was definitely too old.
He was thirty-eight, and he'd spent over half his life involved in some war,
somewhere. He was
tired,
tired enough that he'd opted
out the year before, wanting nothing more than to wake up in the same bed every
morning. He hadn't wanted company or advice or anything, except to be left the
hell alone. When he had burned out, he'd burned to the core.
He hadn't quite retreated to the mountains to
live in a cave, where he wouldn't have to see or speak to another human being,
but he had definitely considered it. Instead, he'd bought a run-down farm in
Tennessee
, just in the shadow of the mountains, and
let the green mists heal him. He'd dropped out, but apparently he hadn't
dropped far enough: they had still known how to find him. He supposed wearily
that his reputation made it necessary for certain people to know his
whereabouts at all times. Whenever a job called for jungle experience and
expertise, they called for Grant Sullivan. A movement on the patio caught his
attention, and he cautiously moved a broad leaf a fraction of an inch to clear
his line of vision. There she was, dressed to the nines in a frothy sundress
and heels, with an enormous pair of sunglasses shading her eyes. She carried a
book and a tall glass of something that looked deliciously cool; she arranged
herself artfully on one of the poolside deck chairs, and prepared to wile away
the muggy afternoon. She waved to the guards who patrolled the plantation
grounds and flashed them her dimpled smile.
Damn her pretty, useless little hide! Why
couldn't she have stayed under Daddy's wing, instead of sashaying around the
world to prove how "independent" she was? All she'd proved was that
she had a remarkable talent for landing herself in hot water.
Poor dumb little twit, he thought. She
probably didn't even realize that she was one of the central characters in a
nasty little espionage caper that had at least three government and several
other factions, all hostile, scrambling to find a missing microfilm. The only
thing that had saved her life so far was that no one was sure how much she
knew, or whether she knew anything at all. Had she been involved in George
Persall's
espionage activities, he wondered, or had she
only been his mistress, his high class "secretary"? Did she know
where the microfilm was, or did Luis Marcel, who had disappeared, have it?
The only thing anyone knew for certain was
that George
Persall
had had the microfilm in his
possession. But he'd died of a heart attack—in
her
bedroom—and the microfilm hadn't been found. Had
Persall
already passed it to Luis Marcel? Marcel had
dropped out of sight two days before
Persall
died—if
he had the microfilm, he certainly-wasn't talking about it. The Americans
wanted it, the Russians wanted it, the Sandinistas wanted it, and every rebel
group in Central and
South
America
wanted it.
Hell, Sullivan thought, as far as he knew, even the Eskimos wanted it.
So where was the microfilm? What had George
Persall
done with it? If he had indeed passed it to Luis
Marcel, who was his normal contact, then where was Luis? Had Luis decided to
sell the microfilm to the highest bidder? That seemed unlikely. Grant knew Luis
personally; they had been in some tight spots together and he trusted Luis at
his back, which said a lot.
Government agents had been chasing this
particular microfilm for about a month now. A high-level executive of a
research firm in California had made a deal to sell the government-classified
laser technology his firm had developed, technology that could place laser
weaponry in space in the near future. The firm's own security people had become
suspicious of the man and alerted the proper government authorities; together
they had apprehended the executive in the middle of the sale. But the two
buyers had escaped, taking the microfilm with them. Then one of the buyers
double-crossed his partner and took himself and the microfilm to
South America
to strike his own deal. Agents all over
Central and
South
America
had been
alerted, and an American agent in
Costa Rica
had made contact with the man, setting up a
"sting" to buy the microfilm. Things became completely confused at
that point. The deal had gone sour, and the agent had been wounded, but he had
gotten away with the microfilm. The film should have been destroyed at that
point, but it hadn't been. Somehow the agent had gotten it to George
Persall
, who could come and go freely in
Costa Rica
because of his business connections. Who
would have suspected George
Persall
of being involved
in espionage? He'd always seemed just a tame businessman, albeit with a passion
for gorgeous "secretaries"—a weakness any Latin man would understand.
Persall
had been known to only a few agents, Luis
Marcel among them, and that had made him extraordinarily effective. But in this
case, George had been left in the dark; the agent had been feverish from his
wound and hadn't told George to destroy the film. Luis Marcel had been supposed
to contact George, but instead Luis had disappeared. Then George, who had
always seemed to be disgustingly healthy, had died of a heart attack… and no
one knew where the microfilm was. The Americans wanted to be certain that the
technology didn't fall into anyone else's hands; the Russians wanted the
technology just as badly, and every revolutionary in the hemisphere wanted the
microfilm in order to sell it to the highest bidder. An arsenal of weapons
could be purchased, revolutions could be staged,
with
the amount of money that small piece of film would bring on the open market.
Manuel
Turego
, head
of national security in
Costa Rica
, was a very smart man; he was a bastard,
Grant thought, but a smart one. He'd promptly snatched up Ms. Priscilla Jane
Hamilton Greer and carried her off to this heavily guarded inland
"plantation." He'd probably told her that she was under protective
custody, and she was probably stupid enough that she was very grateful to him
for "protecting" her.
Turego
had played it
cool; so far he hadn't harmed her. Evidently he knew that her father was a very
wealthy, very influential man, and that it wasn't wise to enrage wealthy,
influential men unless it was absolutely necessary.
Turego
was playing a waiting game; he was waiting for Luis Marcel to surface, waiting
for the microfilm to surface, as it eventually had to. In the meantime, he had
Priscilla; he could afford to wait. Whether she knew anything or not, she was
valuable to him as a negotiating tool, if nothing else.
From the moment Priscilla had disappeared, her
father had been frantic. He'd been calling in political favors with a heavy
hand, but he'd found that none of the favors owed to him could get Priscilla
away from
Turego
. Until Luis was found, the American
government wasn't going to lift a hand to free the young woman. The confusion
about whether or not she actually knew anything, the tantalizing possibility
that she
could
know the location of
the microfilm, seemed to have blunted the intensity of the search for Luis. Her
captivity could give him the edge he needed by attracting attention away from
him. Finally, desperate with worry and enraged by the lack of response he'd
been getting from the government, James Hamilton had decided to take matters
into his own hands. He'd spent a small fortune ferreting out his daughter's
location, and then had been stymied by the inaccessibility of the well-guarded
plantation. If he sent in enough men to take over the plantation, he realized,
there was a strong possibility that his daughter would be killed in the fight.
Then someone had mentioned Grant Sullivan's name. A man as wealthy as James
Hamilton could find someone who didn't want to be found, even a wary, burnt-out
ex-government agent who had buried himself in the Tennessee mountains. Within
twenty-four hours, Grant had been sitting across from
Hamilton
, in the library of a huge estate house that
shouted of old money.
Hamilton
had made an offer that would pay off the mortgage on Grant's farm
completely. All the man wanted was to have his daughter back, safe and sound.
His face had been lined and taut with worry, and there had been
a desperation
about him that, even more than the money, made
Grant reluctantly accept the job.
The difficulty of rescuing her had seemed
enormous, perhaps even insurmountable; if he were able to penetrate the
security of the plantation—something he didn't really doubt—getting her out
would be something else entirely. Not only that, but Grant had his own personal
experiences to remind him that, even if he found her, the odds were greatly
against her being alive or recognizably human. He hadn't let himself think
about what could have happened to her since the day she'd been kidnapped. But
getting to her had been made ridiculously easy; as soon as he left
Hamilton
's house, a new wrinkle had developed. Not a
mile down the highway from
Hamilton
's estate, he'd glanced in the rearview mirror and found a plain blue
sedan on his tail. He'd lifted one eyebrow sardonically and pulled over to the
shoulder of the road.
He lit a cigarette and inhaled leisurely as he
waited for the two men to approach his car. "
Hiya
,
Curtis." Ted Curtis leaned down and peered in the open window, grinning.
"Guess who wants to see you?"
"Hell," Grant swore irritably.
"All right, lead the way. I don't have to drive all the way to
Virginia
, do I?"
"
Naw
,
just to the next town.
He's waiting in a motel."
The fact that
Sabin
had felt it necessary to leave headquarters at all told Grant a lot. He knew
Kell
Sabin
from the old days; the
man didn't have a nerve in his body, and ice water ran in his veins. He wasn't
a comfortable man to be around, but Grant knew that the same had been said
about
himself
. They were both men to whom no rules
applied, men who had intimate knowledge of hell, who had lived and hunted in
that gray jungle where no laws existed. The difference between them was that
Sabin
was comfortable in that cold grayness; it was his
life—but Grant wanted no more of it. Things had gone too far; he had felt
himself becoming less than human. He had begun to lose his sense of who he was
and why he was there. Nothing seemed to matter any longer. The only time he'd
felt alive was during the chase, when adrenaline pumped through his veins and
fired all his senses into acute awareness. The bullet that had almost killed
him had instead saved him, because it had stopped him long enough to let him
begin thinking again. That was when he'd decided to get out.
Twenty-five minutes later, with his hand
curled around a mug of strong, hot coffee, his booted feet propped comfortably
on the genuine, wood-grained plastic coffee table that was standard issue for
motels, Grant had murmured, "Well, I'm here.
Talk."