White Heat (29 page)

T-FLAC HQ was a secure underground facility. Operatives didn’t just stroll in covered with the wildlife they picked up on an op. There were procedures and fail-safes to prevent such an event from happening. “Won’t rule it out,” the doctor murmured, out of breath from jogging. “But a bite is unlikely. I’ll know better when I can actually see the mark magnified, and under better light.”

Max rubbed the back of his neck as he battled the helplessness and panic pooling in the pit of his stomach. She looked insubstantial and so pale lying there hooked up to a portable EKG, the ceiling lights illuminating her pale face with a sharp intensity that scared him. She was too white-faced. Too cold. Too unresponsive.

They were moving far too slowly for his liking. “Then what the hell is—”

Bleep, bleep, ble-bleep,
then a long, blaring—terrifying—tone that made Max’s blood run cold. “Christ—”

“She’s going into cardiac arrest. Any history of heart problems?” the doctor demanded, working feverishly right there in the hallway to bring her vitals back to normal.

“Not that I know of.” He didn’t know enough about her. He knew
nothing
about her, Max thought desperately. Nothing that mattered in the grand scheme of things anyway. Jesus—what if they never had a chance to ask and answer the really important questions? And given that chance, did he even know what those important question were?

“Paddles,” the doctor instructed. “Give me two hundred!”

While Max’s own heart seemed to stop in his chest, thick, clear gel was squeezed from a squirt bottle onto the flat, shiny surface of the paddles wired to the crash cart. “Clear!”

He tensed as Emily’s body twitched and stiffened as the shock was delivered. The EKG chirped once before returning to the flat alarm.

“Crank it up to two-fifty,” the doctor instructed, holding the paddles out while the machine recalibrated. “Clear!”

Again Emily’s body jerked as the voltage shot through her.

Bleep, ble-bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep.

“We’ve got cardiac capture,” the doctor said on a relieved breath as he motioned the orderlies to continue down the corridor with her. The elevator doors were open and they wheeled Emily inside. Max slapped a hand on the button for the hospital floor and the doors slid closed. There was no sensation of movement, but the numbers rapidly decreased as they were taken down to the sixth floor.

“I want a complete blood panel. ABGs, CBC, CPK, Chem seven and full tox,” the doctor ordered, as hospital staff came on the run. “Put her on one hundred percent 02 and push ten thousand units of heparin in a nine percent solution. Wait out here,” he instructed Max as they wheeled her into an exam room.

“I’ll keep out of the way. But I’m staying with her,” he told the doctor implacably, accompanying everyone into the room. He was holding Emily’s hand again. And unless they needed to get at her from this side, he wasn’t budging. If this had to have happened, Max couldn’t think of a better place, he told himself. T-FLAC employed the best doctors, and had better, more up-to-the-second equipment, than many top hospitals. Emily was in excellent hands. But would they be good enough to save her?

“Draw the blood and run those labs,” the doctor told a nurse as he accepted a magnifier and bright light from one of the accompanying orderlies. He shone the light on her arm while the nurse said “Excuse me,” and shifted Max out of the way so she could draw blood.

As soon as the nurse was done, Max retrieved Emily’s hand again. “Could she have been injected with some sort of toxin?” he demanded, frowning. “When? How? By fucking
who?”

The doctor shook his head. “Think you called it correctly earlier. Looks more like a bite.”

“From what?”

“Fangs this small? You’re probably looking for a spider.”

“Inside a practically hermetically sealed fucking building?”

The doctor shrugged. “People bring in outside dirt, parasites. Insects on their clothing …

“There
aren’t
any known spiders or other insects in Montana that produce
this
kind of reaction,
this
quickly. I’m not buying it.”

“I don’t buy it either. Someone brought it inside with intent.” He glanced up to make eye contact. “Feeling useless and frustrated, son? Accompany a team, and sweep that room. Whatever bit her is lethal and loose.”

There was a thick knot of dread wedged in Max’s throat. “What’s the prognosis?”

The doctor looked at him with guarded eyes. “I’ll try to keep her alive while you find that spider.”

Fifteen

“I‘M MISSING SOMETHING,” MAX TOLD DARIUS, THE PHONE anchored between his chin and shoulder as he paced outside the infectious disease section of T-FLAC’s well-equipped hospital. “
What
the fuck is it?”

“The demand,” Dare told him. “What in the hell do they want? That’s what’s missing here. The tangos’ demands.”

“They don’t always fucking
make
one, you know that.”

“I know Savage isn’t going to break and give us anything.”

Dare didn’t need to remind him, Max thought, frustrated as hell. Catherine Seymour had cojones of steel. Worse, as a ten-year veteran at T-FLAC, she knew all the tricks and treats operatives had to offer tangos. She was one herself. She had a foot in each camp, and had played T-FLAC for fools for months, if not years. He embraced the slow burn of anger. It was better than the icy fear lying underneath his skin. “Call Daklin and get me that picture of Savage’s tat.”

“Will do.” Dare paused. “I know this is cold comfort, but on the plus side, what happened to Emily couldn’t have happened in a better place. We have the best medical team on the planet, and she’s right there to reap the benefits.”

“Until they know what the fuck the venom is they can’t do dick. Not until the toxin’s identified. Here comes my tech guy.” Max closed the phone, stuffing it into his pocket. “What’cha got?” he demanded as a bald, middle-aged man with thick black-rimmed glasses approached. The young, fairly attractive blonde walking to his right easily kept pace.

Max knew the guy from the encryption department.

“Hey, Max,” Saul Tannenbaum hailed from twenty feet away. Other than the three of them there was no one else in the well-lit corridor, and all the doors were closed. Including the one behind which they were monitoring Emily.

There was a comfortable waiting area at the end of the hail, with good coffee, snacks, TV, even a computer—hell, everything that would make someone’s wait more comfortable. But Max wasn’t leaving until Emily was out of the woods.

“Rebecca Santos, Max Aries. I put Becky here on this Tillman list you gave us, and she’s put two and two together for you and came up with five.” Saul didn’t appear fazed that they were holding a meeting in the hospital corridor at eleven o’clock at night. “Check this out.”

He handed Max the file folder Max had gotten from Norcroft and had turned into the department for analysis. “Here’s a list of all the paintings and other assorted works of art Richard Tillman has purchased in the past ten years. We figured ten years was far enough back for our purposes. And of course we only know about the work he purchased legally, and that’s in the file you gave us.”

Max flipped the single-spaced pages one after the other. There were hundreds of sales line itemed, with the date, seller, dollar amount, and other details. “And?”

“We cross-referenced the anagrams on the drawing you gave us to the titles of the paintings on this list,” Santos told Max, pointing at the list with a short, unpainted nail. “Then compared that to the donations Tillman has made over the same ten years to various religious organizations.”

Max glanced at the door, wishing to hell he had X-ray vision. Or that they’d make his life a thousand times better and open the fucking thing. Two words. That was all he needed. “She’s fine.” That was it. Not a lot to fucking ask was it?

“Sir?”

He forced his attention to the page.
“
Yeah
.
You cross-referenced the name of the work, and the donations to the locations. Got it. What did you find, Santos?”

“There was one more element I brought in.” Max glanced at Saul, wishing the sincere young woman would hurry the hell up and tell him what he needed to know so he could start pacing again. His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he grabbed at it like a lifeline. He glanced at the screen to ID the caller. Not about Emily. “Aries. Hang on, Dare.” He looked at the woman. “Keep going.”

Santos stood up a little straighter, tugging the hem of her jacket down before she spoke again. “Tillman donated two hundred and seventeen paintings to churches, synagogues, and temples. If you turn to page seventy-three B, you’ll see that I’ve indexed each work to its new location.”

Max flipped to the page she indicated, his eyes scanning down the page, then turned to the next and the next. Jesus. He met her eyes. “This has all been authenticated?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good job. Send this in the report to Darius on Paradise ASAP.”

“Yo,” he said into the phone.

“The lab found an empty vial in Emily’s purse,” Dare told him.

“How come I’m right here, and you’re thousands of miles away, and you get this intel before I do?”

“Not a popularity contest, Aries. I’m your Control. It’s my job to collect and assimilate. Nothing in the vial, of course. Manufactured in China by the billion. Which tells us squat. What they did find was a latent print.”

“Alistair Norcroft,” Max said grimly not waiting for Dare to tell him. “Son of a bitch. He made a big fucking production of helping Emily after her purse spilled all over Tillman’s floor the other day.”

“I’ve saved you some time,” Darius told him calmly. “Having the lab run matches between the symptoms of Brill, the other restorers, and Emily.”

“They better fucking be doing it
fast,”
Max told the other man flatly. “They’re fighting like hell to keep her alive.”

“Everyone is on this, Max. Emily will make it. In the meantime I’ve dispatched Daklin and Navarro to pick up Norcroft.”

“Yeah, well pick up Tillman’s son, too, while they’re at it.” Max paused, still scanning the long list of donations and locations. “See what one or both of them have done with Tillman senior while they’re at it.”

“You think the assistant and the son were working together?”

“I think one or both of them is a Black Rose asset,” Max said grimly. “Here’s the deal with Tillman’s paintings. The encryption people have linked the paintings to recent bombings. Every church, synagogue, and temple that has been bombed in the past ninety days received a painting donated by Richard Tillman.” Sibilant voices behind the door. That was fucking
it.
Max paused to listen in the hope someone was on their way out of Emily’s room to remove the garrote from around his heart.
Mind.

“Tillman senior?” Dare’s loud exhale signified his disbelief.

“I doubt old Tillman wired up those bombs himself, if he even knew what was happening. But what the hell, for all we know, the old bastard could be the head of Black Rose.” Max started walking at a fast clip down the long corridor to get rid of some of the excess energy building up like a pressure cooker inside him. What the hell was taking so damn long?

He never should have taken the phone call out to the hallway; the wily doc had locked the door behind him and wouldn’t let him back in.

“And maybe
Auntie’s
the head of Black Rose,” Dare said sarcastically in his ear. “Auntie” ran the Paradise Island hotel where Dare was currently living.

“Thanks for that visual;’ Max said, amused at the image of the large Polynesian woman as the head of one of the most lethal tango groups in the world. “That woman probably could run a small kingdom from right there in her master suite. But I think we can rule her out.” Black Rose assets tended to stay away from the deep-fried plantains. He turned at the end of the corridor and started back.

Saul and Santos were long gone. The only things left in the long corridor aside from him were a red molded plastic chair and an empty Styrofoam cup on the floor near Emily’s door.

He picked up speed, his soft soled shoes soundless on the linoleum floor. “According to this list, we have over a hundred otherwise unconnected bombings, linked directly to Tillman’s donations. Most of the explosions went unnoticed because the various religious leaders didn’t want to report them. Afraid of the repercussions within the community.”

“So whoever is behind this escalated the bombings.”

“Yeah. Black Rose throwing us a red herring? I don’t get why they didn’t just claim the damage they did—hell, they still aren’t raising their hands. Now a pretty freaking chilly pattern is emerging.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Christ, Max thought, feeling the familiar rush of adrenaline as all the previously unrelated pieces started falling into place like tumblers in a safe. “Here’s a fact—with each bombing, real estate and collateral damage have grown exponentially.” He and Dare were on the same page here.

“The most spectacular being this latest bombing. La Mezquita,’ Darius finished. “How many paintings are unaccounted for?”

“Nine.”

“And the final body count?”

Max stared at the closed door. “Too fucking high.”

MAX SCANNED THE REPORT FOR A SECOND TIME. SPIDERS. HE HAD A new respect for the lethal arachnid. The fact that the spider’s dead body had been found squashed within the rumpled sheets of the bed where he and Emily had made love didn’t give him any satisfaction. Nor had the fact that the room had been swept and fumigated, and they hadn’t found any more spiders. One eight-legged killer had been enough.

Leaning against the wall, Max pulled out his cell and used his thumb to speed dial Dare.

“Darius.”

“They found a Sydney Funnel-web spider in our bed,” he said without greeting.

“Funnel-web?” Darius repeated, surprise in his voice. “Shiny dark brown buggers with a dark purple abdomen?”

There were several color pictures of the damned thing in the folder. “That’s the one.” Max ran a hand around the back of his neck where the muscles had locked an hour ago. This particular spider’s bite was lethal.