The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller Read online

  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.

  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 been, 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.

  Durand was there, and the money was not.

  It can’t be a coincidence.

  She could only conclude that Durand had somehow become aware of tonight’s intended robbery and was there to oversee what he was expecting to be the takedown of his career. His men might very well be closing in on her now.

  The thought made Bianca’s palms sweat. Her breathing quickened. Her skin prickled, as if predatory eyes were suddenly boring into her from everywhere. It was all she could do to prevent herself from casting spooked glances all around.

  Chill out, she ordered herself. Durand wasn’t going to catch them with the money for the simple reason that they didn’t have it.

  Didn’t matter, she realized grimly a couple of long strides later. The money was gone, the team of thieves of which she was a part was on the premises and Durand could pin the crime on her father and the rest of them while whoever really had the cash made off with it scot-free.

  It was the perfect crime. Only, it was someone else’s perfect crime.

  Go. Go. Go.

  For all of their sakes, she couldn’t
allow herself to be caught.

  Battling equal parts fear and fury, she called on every ounce of experience she’d acquired over a lifetime’s worth of dealing with dicey situations to help her remain outwardly composed as she reached one set of the tall French doors that led from the ballroom to the terrace and pushed them open. Four dozen yards and a flight of twenty-three descending steps were now all that stood between her and escape.

  After the air-conditioned chill of the ballroom, the wall of baking heat that she burst out into was welcome. Flames from the scented flambeaux set into sconces on the terrace’s stone balustrade lit up the night. The bittersweet smell of frankincense-infused smoke blew toward her on the hot breeze, which was a mild precursor to the strong, sand-bearing shamal winds that were a feature of the months that would immediately follow this date in late May. Beyond the palace gates, traffic was still heavy on Bani Otbah Avenue. Lights, from cars, from offices, from the windows of the blocky apartment buildings that housed most of the city’s residents, from the King Fahd Causeway bridge that linked Bahrain to its closest neighbor, Saudi Arabia, testified to the fact that the prosperous, well-populated city of Manama continued to bustle even as midnight approached. Ultramodern skyscrapers towered above the spires of ancient minarets against the star-studded night sky. The murmur of the sea could be heard beneath sounds of traffic.

  Rushing across the terrace without, she hoped, giving the slightest appearance of rushing, she barely noticed any of it. For once, the exotic beauty of her surroundings was lost on her. Her focus was all on the enormous stone lions that crouched with their backs to her, guarding the head of the stairs: her immediate goal.

  We’ve got to get gone. Her pulse thundered with the urgency of it even as she silently counted down the remaining distance. Thirty-two yards, thirty-one...

  Whoever was behind this could have found out about their plans, tipped off Durand to his old enemy’s intentions and taken the money themselves.

  Or maybe the whole thing had been a setup from the beginning. Maybe Durand had arranged it. Maybe the money had been bait, designed to lure her father and their team in and then moved for safekeeping before they could steal it. Maybe the only reason law enforcement hadn’t been downstairs waiting in the vault when she’d reached it was because at the last minute Richard had shifted the entire operation forward by exactly one hour so that he could get back to England in time to see his other daughter—Bianca’s seven-year-old half sister, Marin, who had no idea Bianca even existed and whom Bianca had never officially met—perform in some ridiculously cheesy little-girl dance recital and Durand had somehow missed the time-change memo.