Femme Fatale (13 page)

One of the men, a lank individual with long hair, took a hit off his evil-smelling cigarette. He shrugged, then nodded. “Yeah. I maybe speak English. A
little
English.”

“Good.” Kylee walked toward them.

Automatically the three men flared out, forming a triangle around her like wolves getting set to take down a lamb that had wandered from the protection of the flock.

“Where you want to go?” the man asked. The cigarette coal glowed orange against the creased, pockmarked face.

“Kampa Island,” Kylee said, slurring her words just a little. “I’m supposed to meet a friend at the John Lennon mural.” She intended to see the murals on the island before she left with the film crew.

“Ah.” The man grinned. “Finding Kampa Island, that is very easy, yes.” He pointed. “Other side of bridge in Mala Strana. You know Mala Strana?”

Pointing toward the west side of the bridge, Kylee said, “I know Mala Strana. It means Lesser City.” She pointed to the east end of the bridge. “Stare Mesto. That’s the Old City.”

The man smiled, but the effort looked like the hungry attention on a wolf gone gaunt with winter. “Yes.”

Kylee hiccuped and covered her mouth. “I just got turned around looking out at the river, that’s all. Thanks for the help.” She started to walk away, knowing she needed to get closer if the men didn’t take advantage of the moment.

“Wait,” the man called.

Kylee looked at him, her body gearing up, getting more ready for the goof.

“Finding Kampa Island,” the man explained, performing the wolf’s smile again. “Very easy, yes. But finding mural…” He spread his hands. “That maybe not so easy.”

“Do you know where the mural is?” Kylee asked.

“I draw you map, yes.”

“All right,” Kylee agreed.

“Come here.” The man took a small pad of paper from his shirt pocket. “I draw. I explain.”

Knowing she was stepping into a trap, actually relishing the amount of danger she was in, and knowing that Barbara Price wouldn’t exactly be happy with the fact that she did or knowing that she enjoyed it, Kylee stood at the man’s side.

He took out a pencil and started to draw, talking about directions to occupy her attention.

From the corner of her eye, Kylee saw the man on her left slip a short-bladed combat knife from his coat pocket. The way that the man on the right moved told her that he had also pulled a weapon.

Spreading her feet slightly, Kylee felt the adrenaline pushing through her. Every movement she made felt oiled, loose and exact. Her brain, working with muscles that had trained for split-second timing for years, choreographed her next moves.

Just as the man on the left started to move forward to place the knife at her back, Kylee blocked the movement with a sweeping left forearm, planted her left foot, twisted her torso, then brought her left arm back around in a whipping motion that slammed her left elbow forward into the man’s face.

The guy’s nose broke with an audible snap. He staggered back, blood streaming down his face. By the time he landed on his butt, Kylee had stepped back and thrown her right arm out, catching the second man under his left arm. Whirling again, she hip-tossed the man and brought him down with smashing force against the stone bridge. A kick to the temple stretched the man out prone.

These days, with all the kick-butt action movies and television action shows featuring women, a stuntwoman wasn’t worth her salt unless she was familiar with martial arts. Kylee’s four brothers had been very involved in sports and had joined her father’s stunt team out in Los Angeles. She’d grown up physical and had gotten into stunt work, despite her mother’s wishes and her father’s chagrin.

The third man tried to break and run. The pad he’d been drawing on fluttered over the side of the bridge.

Kylee grabbed the front of the man’s coat and yelled loudly. “Help! Muggers! Somebody call the police! Help!”

The man tried to get away from her, pushing at her hands. Fiercely she held on. He cursed. Kylee didn’t have much more than rudimentary knowledge of the local language, but she knew most of the words the guy used. None of them were complimentary. She shifted and twisted her wrists, easily breaking his frantic attempts to get away.

“Help!” Kylee screamed again. She stood an athletic five feet nine inches tall and carried more weight than her build would suggest, all of it in toned muscle. From all the fight scenes she’d taken part in, she knew how to hold her own.

But the man she was detaining was driven by sheer terror at the moment. Possibly he was afraid of being picked up by the Czech police for outstanding warrants, but more than likely he feared the madwoman that had grabbed hold of him.

“Help!” Kylee screamed again. She stayed close to the mugger, knowing that the passersby who turned to look would believe the man was assaulting her.

A tugboat passing in the river below shined a spotlight
on the bridge. The ellipse of white light sliced through the night and tracked along the bridge.

The man cursed again and threw a hard right fist at Kylee’s face.

Twisting, Kylee slipped the blow like she’d learned to do when she was eleven and her older brothers had practiced their stunt skills on her. She’d always been a quick study when it came to muscle memory.

When the man drew his fist back to try again, Kylee ducked forward and head-butted him in the nose. He shuddered and would have gone down but Kylee propped him up against the bridge’s low wall.

The conscious mugger with the broken nose got to his feet. He hesitated as if torn between fleeing and helping his comrade. The tugboat’s spotlight flared over the man, causing him to instinctively throw up his hands, then he turned and ran like a vampire avoiding daybreak.

A man’s voice, strong with insistent authority, blared from a PA system aboard the tugboat.

“Let me go, you stupid bitch!” the man demanded, trying English. He pushed at Kylee’s hands but she kept slipping his grip. He didn’t try to hit her again.

When the tugboat’s spotlight fell over her, joined by at least three others almost instantly, Kylee knew she had to close the show and sell the goof. Timing was everything in stunt work.

“Get away from that woman!” someone cried in a British accent. A quartet of tourists, two men and two women, all of them young and obviously scared and half-drunk, halted a safe distance away.

Kylee feinted another head-butt, causing the would-be mugger to lift his hands in immediate defense. Then she kneed him in the crotch, a quick burst of movement that remained hidden in the shadows left by the explosion of
light from the beams pouring over the wall. The man sagged toward her, his legs completely going out from under him now. Instinctively he put his hands on her, trying to get her to stop, trying to find some kind of support.

In the bright light, though, Kylee knew the situation looked like the man was pushing her. She screamed again, then fell back over the low bridge, whirling her arms and kicking her legs to make the dismount more dramatic.

Thankfully, the maneuver caught the spotlight operators by surprise and they weren’t able to track the beams after her as she expertly turned the fall into a headlong dive. She thrust her hands in front of her, fingers outstretched, and reached for the dark river twenty feet below her. The tugboat was less than a dozen feet away. Her peripheral vision revealed at least three crewmen scrambling across the forward deck.

Then she dove deeply into the dark, cold water.
Here I come, Mr. Mystery. Ready or not. I’ve got my game on.

H
elpless frustration filled Mick Stone as he stood in
Guilty Pleasures’
bow and watched the rescue effort taking shape under the Charles Bridge. Everything in him cried out to go to the unfortunate woman’s aid. But that was primitive instinct, and he recognized the impulse for what it was. Tough and seasoned as he might think he was, he wasn’t any more proof against the deathly icy chill of the Vltava River than the woman who had plunged over the bridge’s side.

And, as a sailor, he was aware that the men working the river knew the current and the location better than he did. He would have been in the way even if he’d gotten to one of the outboards tied up astern of the catamaran, and that knowledge rankled him. Mick Stone wasn’t a man accustomed to feeling useless.

“Is there a problem, Stone?” Krystof Scherba’s voice was calm and controlled, the quiet stillness of water sluicing between two rocks tightly jammed together.

Making certain his features were neutral, Mick turned to face his present employer.
Damn, I hate this job. I should have never taken it on.
The thought wasn’t a new one. Mick had experienced similar lines of thinking since he’d entered his present employ. But he hadn’t been able to take one more empty day on the quiet Pacific Ocean. He’d craved excitement and the chance to measure his skills and his ingenuity against others.

And in the end, when the job offer had come to watch over Krystof Scherba, he’d taken the assignment on for those reasons rather than for the money. He had three older sisters in Australia, all of them married to good men, but since their parents had passed away a few years ago, he had always envisioned himself as the family patriarch, always striving to put money away in case they ever needed it. None of them had, but he still felt responsible.

Krystof Scherba stared almost blankly. The dragon tattoo near his left eye glowered malevolently. He sipped his drink. “You’re supposed to be a professional, Stone,” the computer cracker accused. “Yet you find your attention divided between me and the woman who fell into the river.”

A small Prague police car eased down the length of the Charles Bridge. The whirling light ripped away the night’s shadows over the statues of the saints along the bridge as the vehicle passed.

“No,” Mick replied. “I’ve had my eye on you the whole time we’ve been up here. Even during this bit of confusion.”

“Still, as highly recommended as you have come as a bodyguard, I would not have expected you to be so hypnotized by the sight of a woman plunging from a bridge. From what I understood of your background, death was a constant companion.”

“Aye, sir,” Mick said. He caught his response too late to stop it.
Aye.
As though he was a sailor instead of a professional bodyguard.

But that had come from months between jobs when he’d taken his houseboat to the open Indian Ocean and made his way up to Singapore and Macao for extended visits. Those places had netted small security or recovery jobs, violent and nasty bits of business, and he had needed them. Not for the money so much, because he had enough of that tucked away for a while, but because he had craved the action.

The action was the only thing that staved the periods of melancholy and loneliness that caught up with him. He’d needed the sea, needed to feel the harsh pull of her beneath him and to be kissed by the wind and warmed by the sun to remember that he preferred being alone in his life. Time in the boat allowed him to get away from the seemingly endless procession of prospective dates his three older sisters threw at him.

At first the job Mick had taken with Krystof Scherba had seemed like the answer to a lot of prayers. Scherba had a lot of enemies, and most of them did not wear badges. Authorities in several countries—and Scherba had given Mick a list of those countries—still had warrants out for his arrest regarding some infraction of cybernetic espionage.

Even more than that, though, were the wheelers and dealers of the shadow world, born of greed and savagery, that wanted information Scherba had or could get for them with his skills. Terrorists and criminals alike wanted Krystof Scherba. If the man had possessed any common sense at all, he would have gone into hiding in that fortress of a castle he had outside Prague. Instead, Scherba seemed determined to flaunt himself at his potential enemies.

In the five weeks he had been on the job, Mick had foiled three attempts to kidnap or kill Scherba. The attempt just before Mick had taken over had resulted in the death of his chief of security. Despite that, Scherba still didn’t see fit to heed Mick’s advice and warnings, or even consider giving him an agenda.

Within the past few days, something had happened in South Africa, perhaps in Cape Town if one overheard fevered whisper was to be believed. Mick still didn’t know what that event was, but he knew it was big and people had been killed.

Scherba’s eyes were cold as ice. “The people I got your name from said you were resourceful, dedicated and brutally rash. Even to the point of jeopardizing your job.”

Mick felt a wave of shame course through him. He had been told all those things before. Sometimes the principals he had been bodyguarding had meant the observations in a kind way, and other times the statements were inflammatory accusations. Those qualities were what had helped him find work before the CIA had also added
intractable
to his dossier and work—at least, work he would agree to—dried up. A year ago, he would never have taken the job with Krystof Scherba.

Out on the river, one of the fishing boats unfurled a net and dragged it through the water. With the slow, lazy movement of the river through the heart of the city, the net would probably come up with the body in a short amount of time.

A police boat was in the water downriver. The lights whirled as it sped through the river traffic. Pleasure crafts, offering drinks and a late-night buffet, crawled slowly out of the way.

“Krystof,” a cultured voice said.

Mick was aware of the man making his way toward
Scherba. Instinctively, he placed himself between Scherba and the new arrival.

Suave and urbane, Shane Dellamer stepped from the crowd. He wore a long black leather coat against the chill. Below his high, broad forehead, his gray eyes stood out starkly in the ruddy darkness of his face. He had a wide, generous mouth and was known in the media for being an entrancing orator. His face was blunt and squared-off as a trenching tool, and looked a good ten or fifteen years younger than the fifty-one his file had him clocked at. At an inch or two over six feet, his height didn’t really make him stand out in the crowd, but he carried himself like a lion, regal and apart.

As CEO of Dellamer Enterprises, Dellamer was fantastically rich. With those enterprises lodged firmly in electronics, pharmaceuticals and munitions, Dellamer’s interests were also spread across the globe. The multi-millionaire industrialist also worked at his rebel image, which was—Mick assumed—one of the reasons he’d come to Scherba’s party tonight. Dellamer had been in the news a lot lately as he prepared for a bid at a political position in his home state of New York.

“Yes, Shane,” Scherba responded. “Stone, please.”

Only somewhat chagrined, Mick stepped back. His gaze raked the river as the fishing boat trawled along. A second police boat had joined the first. Lights aboard the second boat showed divers hastily pulling their gear on.

Seeing the divers bothered Mick. He had witnessed the battle aboard the bridge. At the time he’d been caught up in the drama of the moment, but now that the presence of the divers made him think back, he realized the woman had dispatched two of her attackers rather handily.

Like a pro. The thought burst into Mick’s brain like a direct napalm hit.
Three guys. She disables two of them.
And the third manages to put her into the water? He glanced around at the crowd thronging the railing as the feeling of unease soaked through him.
Not exactly shrimp on the barbie, eh, mate?

Dellamer and Scherba were in deep discussion regarding background checks the computer cracker had finessed regarding some of the recent pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions the industrialist had his eye on in the European theater.

A silent alarm jangled the handset inside Mick’s jacket. He felt the vibration and reached into his pocket. Intimate knowledge with the device and the way the security zones had been set up aboard
Guilty Pleasures
told him the alarm had been set off in Krystof Scherba’s private berth aboard the vessel.

But it was the
secondary
alarm, not the primary. Whoever had penetrated the secondary alarm was good. But he or she was also in a hurry.

Mick raised his left arm and exposed the pencil mike secured on the inside of his wrist. “Josef. Radu.”

“Yes,” Josef Szekeres replied. From Hungary, he was a bodyguard known for his nerve and methodical nature. Ten years older than Mick’s thirty-two years, Szekeres was an accomplished mountain climber and often worked security on high-profile extreme sports figures. He was compact, five feet eight and one hundred sixty pounds, a man who was often overlooked because he appeared so commonplace.

Mick had worked with Szekeres three times before, all of those times with the American Central Intelligence Agency. When he’d been given the present gig, Mick had brought Szekeres into the assignment.

Radu Galca was the local Romanian bodyguard Scherba had worked with for three years. Radu was a
mountain of moving muscle, a steroid freak who lived in a gym and hunted bar fights when he wasn’t at post on a security detail. Galca and Scherba went back to the cracker’s beginnings of international attention. At twenty-seven, he was the same age as Scherba. But where nature had bestowed a keen intellect on Scherba, Galca was, as Josef put it, dumb as a box of hammers.

“I am here,” Radu said, mimicking the voice pattern of Arnold Schwarzenegger in
The Terminator.
He was smooth-shaven and in the habit of always wearing sunglasses, fitting in with the grunge crowd that Scherba hung with.

“Stay with the principal,” Mick ordered. “I’ll be back as soon as I check out this alarm.” Seeing that Josef and Radu both moved immediately to Scherba, Mick got into motion.

“Trouble?” Josef asked.

“Don’t know if we have trouble, Josef.” Mick shoved through the crowd, trying to be as polite as possible. He drew a multitude of curses but didn’t leave any broken bones and only a few bruises behind him. “Got an alarm tripped, mate. Think I’ll nip down and have a look-see.”

“An alarm?” Radu repeated. “You shouldn’t go by yourself.”

“Probably just one of our
guests.
” Mick said the word like a curse. He stepped through the foyer of the main doorway and stepped into the empty room.

Light glinted across a bright trail on the carpet. The carpet was a tight Berber weave that held up to heavy traffic and repelled water. Diamond-bright droplets captured Mick’s eye and created a trail across the floor. Most people would not have noticed them, and if he hadn’t been looking for something out of the ordinary, he knew he wouldn’t have noticed them either.

Kneeling, he put a hand to the wet carpet. He dragged his palm across the nap of the Berber weave. The water was cold to the touch, colder than it should have been if it had been there for a while. The trail was evident. For a moment, a scene from one of the old black-and-white monster movies he’d watched as a kid came to mind. One of his favorite scary movies had been
The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
If the creature had been real, it would have left a trail like this.

Or, Mick thought, remembering how the woman had plunged over the side of the bridge, someone who has dragged himself or herself from the river just a few minutes ago. There were no guarantees that the “woman” on the bridge had really been female.

He reached inside his jacket and curled the fingers of his right hand around the butt of the Colt .45 M1911A semiautomatic pistol he’d carried for years. Accurate to fifty yards and more, the pistol fired a big, slow-moving round that could be easily silenced and carried a tremendous amount of knockdown power.

Reaching into his inside jacket pocket, he removed a custom-made silencer and threaded it onto the pistol barrel. If someone had broken aboard
Guilty Pleasures
with killing on his or her mind, he intended to put that person down quickly.

Pistol in hand, Mick followed the carpet trail to the stairwell and went below. He stopped at the door to Scherba’s room and listened intently while he examined the locks. Nothing seemed to be amiss, but he thought he heard movement inside the room.

He tried the door and found it unlocked.

Now that, mate,
he told himself,
that definitely ain’t right.
He took a firmer grip on the pistol and let the weapon lead him into the room.

Shadows cloaked the berth.

Mick moved immediately, stepping to the right so he wouldn’t be skylined against the doorway. His heart rate slowed slightly, the way it always did when he was under stress, like a shark gliding through the ocean just before a lightning-fast strike.

He noticed the prone figure swaddled in bedclothes first. Remaining in profile, the pistol gripped in a modified Weaver stance the way he’d been taught in the military, taking small comfort in the bulletproof vest he wore, he held his position.

Remember, mate,
he told himself,
a vest doesn’t cover your head.

“Hey,” he said.

The sheet-covered figure didn’t move. Lying on her side as she was—and Mick was definitely sure it was a
she
he was looking at because the hips, though slim and compact, held definite womanly curves—she was turned away from him. One naked shoulder and an arm showed outside the bedclothes. The light from the open doorway turned the skin alabaster, milky smooth and sleek.

Asleep, passed out or dead,
Mick thought. After weeks of seeing Scherba at work, he knew any of those was possible.