I rubbed my eyes. “Okay. I can catch a plane when the airport starts up—”
“No.” Her voice was solid, iron in the middle of the night, like a wall I was running up against. “I’ve already booked a private jet. It’ll leave as soon as you get to Eden Prairie airport. Pack lightly.”
“Who’s riding shotgun with me?” I asked. Technically, I could pick anyone I wanted, but I guessed that she’d have already called or texted someone else to get them moving, and I had a suspicion who it’d be.
“Angel,” she said flatly, and I rolled my eyes a little, but shrugged. Angel was all right, I guess, but I preferred Jamal, Scott or Augustus to watch my back, mostly because I’d been working with them for years and Angel for about six months. She was a fireball, but I could see the advantage in sending her. She spoke Spanish fluently, which had been useful on more than one occasion in Texas, and she was Miranda’s cousin.
Downside: she liked to drive. Always. And she was dangerously good at it, but it felt like she was always about half a heartbeat from putting whatever rental car we were in through the highway dividers and off the road into the ditch. She was that kind of maniac, the kind that liked to play with the manual gear-switching feature on high-end cars. Personally, I let my car make those sorts of decisions for me, but not Angel.
“Okay,” I said. “You know, I could just fly myself. Grab one of the guys on the way—”
“This will be faster, and, as a side benefit, legal,” she said, and I didn’t feel like arguing. I didn’t really love gliding through the clouds at high altitude without a plane to protect me anyway, not over long distances like Minnesota to Texas. I could do it, but I didn’t love it.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said, and hung up, clicking the lamp next to the bed as I rolled over the side. I rubbed my eyes, the bedroom shown in dim light.
“Where are you going this time?” Isabella asked, turning over in bed to look at me. She was still beautiful in the middle of the night, her makeup all rubbed off before bed and a pair of woolen pajamas with a sky-blue-with-white-polka-dots pattern not at all like the old Victoria’s Secret Collection she’d worn to bed every night when we first started sleeping together.
“Somewhere in Texas,” I said, rubbing at my eyes. I kept a ready bag packed, so that was going to be easy. All I had to do was throw on some clothes and get the hell out of here. Maybe I’d fly myself to the airport—no. No, it’d probably be better if I didn’t, since Governor Shipley had technically cancelled my flight privileges over the state at the same time she’d yanked Sienna’s. She was up for re-election this year, and I was voting for the other guy.
“When will you be back?” That Isabella asked this at all was a measure of how much this Sienna situation had knotted her up without my realizing it. I looked back at her, and for once I could see the concern playing through the coolness she wore like a second skin. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she was worried that I’d worry while on assignment and end up getting myself hurt, or because just the general pervading sense of concern that Sienna had gotten in trouble overseas reminded her of my own mortality. Either way, there was something here that I hadn’t necessarily seen in other departures I’d made.
“As soon as I can,” I said gently, and leaned over to kiss her. “Ever since we took out the supply operations for that cartel that was bringing the meta serums from Revelen, business has been slacking off. We could use this payday.”
“It’s not worth your life,” she said.
“It’s not just my life on the line,” I said. “This crook, whoever it is—they’ve taken hostages.”
She seemed to take this information in, and then she nodded, inscrutable. “Hurry back,” was all she said.
“You know I won’t linger,” I said with a sly smile, and leaned down to kiss her again before I got up, heading for the closet to get dressed. I didn’t have long, after all, and I couldn’t afford to spend my time distracted about Isabella’s worry, or Sienna—whatever was going on with her.
It was time for me to get back to work. And Sienna, wherever she was…she’d be just fine.
12.
Sienna
Things were not just fine.
Having a Bell UH-1 Huey drop down in front of your plane while you’re taxiing for takeoff to reveal lots of men with guns and rocket launchers and the like has a way of causing a great deal of clarity in the mind, very rapidly. Vague concerns get amplified, and they manifest verbally.
Like so: “Holy shit!”
That was the pilot, but I was thinking along similar lines. He’d slammed the throttle to bring the Cessna back to idling, and we were just sitting there, me with my hands up, palms facing inward, toward my head so I couldn’t be interpreted to be aiming a fireball at them or anything. In a situation like this, signaling surrender was the wisest course, and the only one that might save my life.
It was weird, because as far as I knew, the US government had given up on wanting me dead or alive and was now firmly in the camp of, “Dead is fine.” They’d proven that during our last encounter in Montana.
Yet here we were, with a bunch of Spec-Ops-looking dudes, armed for bear—no, scratch that, they were armed for a reprise of James Cameron’s Aliens, but in it to win it, this time—and all my weapons were well out of reach, in the back, zipped up in duffel bags. Not that it would have mattered if I’d had my SCAR H on my lap. There was no way, even with meta reflexes, I was raising that thing up and drilling every single one of these guys before they punched my ticket with a Stinger missile or one of the underslung grenade launchers I saw sticking out of the chopper behind me.
“Come out with your hands up!” the loudspeaker boomed. “Do not make any threatening moves!”
“I am all over that,” I muttered, bumping the door handle with my elbow. It sprang open, and I slid out, feet hitting the ground a heartbeat later. I kept my hands up and bobbed out under the wing, keeping them pointed skyward, and well away from the helos directly in front of and behind the plane.
I tossed a glance at the guys in front of me hanging out the side of the chopper. They had the look of soldiers long in service. I realized, though, that whoever was doing the talking was probably in the cockpit, and I hadn’t heard any of these guys speak. For all I knew, this was a merc team. Hell, it probably was, because the US government likely wouldn’t have wanted to deploy their own forces over a friendly country. Likely. Hardly definite. We’d done worse.
Standing under the plane’s wing, I got my instructions. “Walk out in front of the plane. Slowly.”
I complied, taking my sweet time in order to make sure they didn’t think I was going to do something untoward. Before I’d gotten even with the spinning prop, the loudspeaker boomed again. “Pilot, shut off the engine and get out of the plane.”
My breath stuck in my throat. I hadn’t really consulted with the guy before I’d gotten out, but I threw him a glance now. He was wearing those aviator glasses, and I couldn’t see his eyes, but his mouth was a thin line, and there was sweat beaded on his forehead like he’d been sitting outside in Mexico City in the middle of summer, chowing down on a burrito filled with ghost peppers or worse. I got another little tingle in my belly just looking at him, and I took a long and not subtle sidestep away from the prop, and then another one, keeping my hands up as I edged away from the plane without trying to defy the orders I’d been giving by the men with guns.
“Pilot!” the helo loudspeaker boomed again. “You have three seconds to comply or—”