Kick A** Heroines Box Set: The UltimatumFatal AffairAfter the DarkBulletproof SEAL (The Guardian) Read online

  Should she try to run or—

  “Beth, if you don’t come out right now, you’re going to be in big trouble. You don’t want to be in big trouble, do you?” He was next door, in the bathroom. If she was going to run, she needed to go now. Or was it already too late? She heard him open the closet, pull the shower curtain aside, open the cabinet under the sink. If she moved, if she ran, would he hear her, too?

  The laundry room was next. She was crying full-on now, muffling the sounds with her hands pressed over her mouth. Her chest heaved. Her leg muscles were so tight they ached. She wanted to burst out of the cabinet and run as fast as she could toward the front door as badly as she had ever wanted to do anything.

  She pictured the long, narrow hall, the heavy, black-painted door at the far end of the living room. She would have to reach that door, pull it open, push out through the screen door that sometimes got stuck—

  The Shadow was a grown man. He was faster. He would catch her.

  She could hear him leaving the bathroom, walking toward the laundry room. Butterflies were inside her stomach. She felt freezing cold.

  Mommy, what do I do?

  Beth tried to pray, but the only prayer she could think of was Now I lay me down to sleep and that was no help.

  “Beth.” He was right outside the laundry room door. He sounded mad. The laundry room light came on. Inside, the cabinet was no longer pitch-black. Petrified, she realized that she could see the bucket and the cleaning stuff and the lines of brighter light around the door. When he opened the door, he would be able to see her. “I’m not going to—”

  A cell phone rang. His cell phone, she knew because he answered it. “Yeah.”

  He was close, so close. She’d missed her chance to even try to run. There was only one way out of the laundry room, and he was standing right there in the doorway. When he quit talking on the phone, he would search the laundry room, look in the cabinet. Even though she knew he would see her the instant he opened the door, she pressed back against the metal wall, trying to be as small as possible, trying to disappear. Her heart pounded so loud that it sounded like a drum beating in her ears.

  “I’m wrapping up now,” he said into the phone. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  He was walking again. Beth could hear him. He was heading away from the laundry room, down the hall, toward the living room and the front door.

  “Bye, Beth,” he called as he left.

  He didn’t look in the cabinet. He didn’t find me.

  He’d left the laundry room light on. She could see all the cleaning supplies, the lines of light around the cabinet door.

  She heard the front door open and close.

  She stayed where she was, frozen, listening.

  Was it a trick? It might be a trick. He might still be in the house somewhere waiting for her to come out.

  She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to crawl out of the cabinet and run away just as fast as she could. She also wanted to stay right where she was, still as a rabbit when a dog was nearby.

  Mommy. I have to find Mommy.

  Taking a deep, ragged breath, she crawled to the cabinet door and pushed.

  Boom.

  The sound was so enormous that it knocked her backward, knocked the door closed behind her, shook the cabinet. It swept over and around her, expanding through the air and snatching her breath away and blowing out her ears.

  A split second later the force behind what made the noise smashed into the cabinet, into her, like a giant wave. It grabbed the cabinet up and blew it skyward, higher than the clouds, it felt like, tumbling her around inside it like a sock in a washing machine and tumbling the cabinet end over end, too. There was a blast of scorching heat, an explosion of orange light and a terrible burning smell.

  Screaming, she was knocked against the hard metal walls until at last the cabinet slammed into something solid and fell to earth, crushed like a soda can by the hand of a giant.

  Beth never even knew when she hit the ground. For her, the world had already gone black.

  * * *

  Crouched on the side of a hill overlooking the destroyed house, Kemp surveyed the inferno he’d created with clinical detachment. He was almost finished: the people inside the house were dead. The job had been more trouble than he’d anticipated. The frightened, submissive woman he’d been expecting to encounter had fired at him with a shotgun, and if he hadn’t jumped back, the night might have gone very wrong right there. As it had happened, though, he had jumped in time and she hadn’t been combat savvy enough to take cover immediately after discharging her weapon. He’d been able to take her out with a silenced .44 round to the forehead while she was still holding her gun, so the whole thing had worked out. He wasn’t all that sorry he hadn’t found the kid. Shooting little girls wasn’t really his thing, and blowing the house up with her in it had worked just as well.

  He was facing what was left of the house now from maybe sixty yards away. The fierce orange glow of the leaping flames lit up the whole area, including the wooded hillside he was on. The heat actually felt good on this cold night. He’d been careful to choose a spot in the shadow of some tall pines so that no matter how bright the blaze got he wouldn’t be seen. He took a minute out of the process of setting up to admire the giant bonfire that was hungrily consuming what little remained of the house’s charred frame. He savored the fire’s savage crackling, the sparks shooting upward of fifty feet high, the burnt-plastic smell of the C-4 he’d used.

  Most of all he savored the sight of the headlights on the narrow road out front as they raced toward the destroyed house.

  Just as his caller had advised him, the man of the house was on his way home.

  Mason Thayer’s eyes would be glued to the flames, his thoughts centered on the fate of his sweet little family, his training and instinct and reflexes subordinated to terror and grief.

  The car reached the house and braked so hard it fishtailed. Kemp felt a surge of satisfaction. He’d come up with a way to take out the man everyone said was too dangerous to take on.

  The wages of sin, he mentally taunted his target. Dropping down on one knee, he raised the sniper rifle to his shoulder, trained its sight on a spot about two feet above the top of the driver’s door and waited.

  The wait was only a few seconds. The door shot open and a man, tall and lean against the flames, leaped out.

  Kemp smiled as he blew Thayer’s head off.

  Mission accomplished: he’d killed everyone who lived in the house.

  CHAPTER 2

  Twenty-two years later

  There’s a saying among grifters: if you’re playing cards and you don’t know who the sucker at the table is, it’s you.

  Bianca St. Ives was struck too late by those wise words as she fled up the ancient stone steps in the dark, dank, crooked stairwell as though her life depended on it—which it did. Her heart galloped from her headlong race to escape before what gave every sign of being a trap snapped shut around her. Her head spun from the horrifying discovery, made exactly two minutes, twenty-six seconds before, that she and the quartet of world-class criminals she was attempting to commit the robbery of a lifetime with were quite possibly the suckers at this particular table.

  I’m not going down like this. The mere thought of it sent what felt like an icy finger sliding along her spine. Shimmying open the lock on the heavy metal security door at the top of Bahrain’s Gudaibiya Palace’s cellar stairs with a practiced jiggle of the pick she carried, she reached through the deliberately provocative slit in her tulle-over-silk skirt to clip the pick back into place high on her thigh. Then she pulled the door open, cast a quick look around and stepped out of the gray gloom of the stairwell into the dimly lit hallway.

  The musty smell was replaced by the scents of roasting meat and heavy spice. Of course. The
large industrial kitchen was located directly to her left, on the other side of the wall.

  No one around. Twitching the nuisance-y train of her shoulder-baring black evening gown out of the way, she carefully eased the door shut. Then she started walking, fast, but not so fast that it would raise suspicions if somebody happened to catch a glimpse of her. Given the high-profile nature of the black-tie event she was attempting to rejoin, and the proliferation of security guards as well as nearly undetectable surveillance cameras, it was impossible to be completely certain that there were no watchers in this staff-only area no matter how careful she was. The rapid click click of her elegant stilettos on the marble floor made her wince. The sound seemed preternaturally loud in the high-ceilinged, narrow space, but what could she do? Tiptoeing was a nonstarter.

  As in everything in life, projecting confidence was the key to success.

  Even while running for her life. No, especially while running for her life.

  She was still finding it almost impossible to wrap her head around what had happened: the two hundred million in cash their crackerjack gang had joined forces to steal was already gone when she got the vault open. One disbelieving glance inside the steel-walled underground chamber and it had become staggeringly obvious that they had a disaster on their hands: the vault was empty. The mountain of bright orange money bags, each of which held one hundred thousand dollars in untraceable US dollars, that had been inside it as recently as six hours prior, was simply not there anymore.

  Could anybody say holy freaking screwup?

  Thump. The sound heralded the sudden opening of a swinging door a few yards in front of her. It was all she could do not to jump with alarm as a man unexpectedly emerged from the kitchen. He checked at the sight of her.

  “Kya main aapki madat kar sakta hun?” he said as the door swung shut behind him.

  Bianca just managed to keep walking toward him as her brain automatically adjusted to the language, which was one she was semifluent in. Can I help you? was what he’d asked her, in Urdu. Okay, not exactly threatening despite the frowning look he was giving her. Short and compact, he wore traditional Arab garb. His long, grizzled beard was bound into a neat spike with rubber bands. From his language, which was not that of the Bahraini upper class, and the fact that he was there in the restricted area where outsiders were absolutely not permitted, she concluded that he was most probably part of the regular palace security staff.

  Thank God he didn’t catch me coming through the door from the cellars, she thought even as she shook her head as though she didn’t understand. Urdu was not a language that her alter ego would be expected to know. Doing her best to look both apologetic and clueless, she said in English, “I’m looking for the ladies’ room.”

  Fortunately for her, men rarely suspected attractive young women of anything nefarious. His eyes slid over her once more, this time with barely veiled appreciation. Then he gestured toward the gilded, arched double doors that had been her goal all along. “Go back into the ballroom. There is a ladies’ restroom along this wall to the right.”

  This time he spoke in English, too.

  “Thank you.”

  Giving him a drippingly sweet smile, she glided past him and slipped back into the packed ballroom, trying not to look as agitated as she felt.

  They must have known we were coming. That terrifying thought snaked through her head as she inserted herself into the crowd of laughing, chatting partygoers and started making her way toward her chosen exit at the far end of the room. Her stomach churned with the force of it. It opened up so many harrowing possibilities that her blood ran cold.

  The plan had been to take the money, replace it with identical bags filled with counterfeit bills and close up the vault again so no one was aware that a robbery had occurred. Her role had been to get herself invited to the ball that was taking place in this, the palace above the hidden vault, obtain by whatever means worked (she’d used a combination of charm, sex appeal, carefully researched knowledge of the mark, sleight of hand and good old-fashioned double-sided tape) the key, the code and the fingerprint necessary to access the vault, and open it. She had done so, and would have returned to the ballroom at that point to deflect any possible suspicion from herself while the others carried off the cash, but the entire carefully thought-out plan had crashed and burned as soon as she’d beheld the empty vault.

  For a terrible moment she’d been immobilized. Then every instinct she possessed started screaming, Get out. One of the rules that had been relentlessly drilled into her head over the course of years of training was Don’t be a hero. Which, as she had learned the hard way, meant save yourself first, and at the expense of everybody else if necessary.

  She was now on her way to safety. She had the cover of the conversation and noise and activity in the ballroom to mask what she was doing. It wouldn’t slow her down; it posed no additional risk. That being the case, she seized the opportunity to alert her confederates that the night had just gone horribly wrong.

  “They’re out of shrimp.” It was all she could do not to scream that prearranged signal to abort the robbery into the burner phone that was her emergency means of communicating with her father, Richard St. Ives. Though right now, as head of their team and the operation’s mastermind, he was using the false identity of Kenneth Rapp. What he’d been expecting to hear, what she would have said once she’d gotten the vault open if everything had gone according to plan, was “The champagne’s Krug, and it’s divine.” The code was necessary because surveillance was unpredictable. Even in the absence of cameras, remote scanners or other types of listening devices were often able to pick up conversations at a considerable distance. Thus once an operation started, they communicated only when absolutely necessary, and they never, ever said anything during a job that could alert authorities or anyone else who might be listening to what was going down.

  “What did you say?” Richard’s deep, cultured voice was sharp with shock.

  “They’re out of shrimp,” she repeated. Clouds of expensive perfume, released as she nudged her way past pockets of chatting guests, made the air seem thick. She was having trouble finding enough breath to get the words out. “They are out of shrimp.”

  “I understand.” Richard disconnected abruptly: message received.

  The specially configured burner phone now became a liability. Bianca felt like a kid playing hot potato as she looked down at it clutched in her hand. She pushed a button to wipe its memory. Unfortunately, there was no convenient trash can or other place in which to dispose of it in sight. Dropping it back into her evening bag to be dealt with later occurred to her, but that created a loose end that might come back to bite her. It was always possible that, even turned off and wiped, the thing could still be emitting a signal that might allow someone to track her.

  Next order of business: find somewhere to ditch the damned phone.

  Turned out that under the circumstances the best place to dispose of it was in the pocket of a tux, she concluded as she threaded her way through more layers of densely packed guests. Brushing past the elderly gentleman whose jacket she’d targeted, Bianca neatly deposited the phone in his pocket. The man kept right on talking without feeling a thing. No surprise. She was really good at—She nearly stopped dead. She nearly gasped.

  He was there.

  Her father’s sworn enemy stood almost directly in front of her, his head turned a little away as he said something to a beautifully dressed woman on his left. Bianca’s throat went tight as her eyes fixed on the hawk-like nose, the heavy bone structure of the face, the thin mouth and narrow dark eyes beneath bushy gray brows, the thinning dark hair, the swarthy, pockmarked skin. It was Laurent Durand—there was no mistake. He was close to her father’s age of sixty-four, but while Richard was tall and elegant, the ultimate silver fox, Durand with his burly body and dour expression looked like the gendarme he’d once b
een, even in a tux.

  Her heart stuttered before ramping up to a thick, slamming rhythm. That she managed to keep moving and let her gaze slide past him as if he was of no more consequence to her than any other guest was solely due to a lifetime’s worth of practice in keeping her cool. The sight of the French Interpol agent, champagne flute in hand as he made himself at home among the black-tie crowd, was a blow almost as stunning as the empty vault had been.

  Careful not to look at him again, she altered her path to give him a wide berth while at the same time picking up her pace. On autopilot now as she hurried toward the exit, Bianca was still in the process of officially if silently freaking out at Durand’s presence when it hit her with all the force of a baseball bat to the head. Holy hell, we’ve been played.

  Whatever had happened to the money, whoever had it now, she and her team had been set up to take the fall.

  It was the only thing that made sense.

  Durand had been trying to catch her master-thief father in the act for as long as she could remember. Under the nom de guerre Traveler, apparently bestowed on him because no one in authority was quite sure of exactly who he really was, Richard was a legend in the circles of those elite criminal and law enforcement entities who knew he existed, who followed his crimes, who admired and/or hunted him. He was on every major most-wanted list in the world, including several that ordinary people had no idea even existed. He assumed a different identity for each job, and the list of his aliases was long. He was credited with some of the biggest robberies, cons, swindles, etc., of the past twenty years, many of which he’d actually been responsible for. He’d never been formally charged with a crime, never even been arrested, yet his reputation was such that he was automatically a suspect in any big, well-planned, successful operation that went down.

  Exactly when and how he’d become Durand’s Holy Grail Bianca didn’t know, but that was what he was. She’d been taught to fear him like a mouse does a cat.