Dangerous Games

11

He jumps out of the ambulance, then he and the driver—a swarthy dude with a goatee who’s so hairy he looks like he’s wearing a pelt under his white T-shirt—pull me out on the cot.

“A chop shop?” I look around in disbelief at dozens of expensive cars in various states of dismemberment. “What are you gonna do, trade my organs for engine parts?”

“We’re gonna get you field ready, bro,” says Swarthy Goatee. “I’m Doc, by the way.”

“Doc? Oh, fantastic. That makes me feel one hundred percent better. I’m sure you got your medical degree from Harvard, right?”

He and Killian share a glance. Killian says, “Ignore him. He’s always premenstrual.”

I want to shout something about how sexist that is, but the room begins to spin and red starts to pulse in my vision, so I close my eyes and concentrate on my breathing again.

“I’ll start a saline drip,” says Doc in a conversational tone, “then clean you up and get some X-rays so I can see what we’ve got.”

I give him a quick rundown of the injuries I already noted and the caliber of bullets I think were in Dimitri’s men’s guns. Then I open my eyes and look at Killian, walking beside my cot. “He took her. He walked right f*****g in and took her.”

I have to stop talking because my throat has closed.

Killian knows the real meaning behind my words, how guilty I feel. Instead of blame, he offers support.

“She’s tough. She survived seven years with him. She’ll survive awhile longer. And don’t bother beating yourself up over it, because I counted nine dead men in that apartment. You did your job, mate. Not even I could’ve done better. By all logic, you should be dead, too.”

Thank God I had the high-capacity magazine in my Glock. It’s possible I’m hyperventilating, but at this point I don’t care. “I need to talk to Connor. One of the Germans said he got the license plate of a van—”

“I know. And your friend Connor already traced the plates. They were stolen from an Audi that belonged to a suburban mother of four.”

“f**k. Did they check the traffic cams? Could they follow the van after it left our location? Do we know where they went?”

“Yes to all three.”

Doc parks the cot in a makeshift operating theater, with monitors, bright hanging lights, and various machines bristling with cords and tubes, then goes about setting up the saline drip. I can’t concentrate on anything else other than the sound of my heartbeat thundering in my ears.

I shout, “And?”

Killian regards me warily, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “Take a deep breath.”

“Oh shit.”

“Aye. They lost the van just outside the border of the Czech Republic. They went into a tunnel, and there were no traffic cameras on the other side. Satellite turned up nothing.”

Panic flares like a firework inside my chest. She’s gone.

Eva’s gone.

This time maybe for good.

“However . . .”

Killian’s pause gives me a huge surge of hope. I jerk up onto my elbows and holler, “However what, asshole?”

Doc chuckles, shaking his head.

Killian pulls one of his business cards from an inside pocket of his suit jacket. He holds it up between two fingers.

Exasperated by his unnecessary air of mystery, I demand, “What? Did she call you? What’re you saying?”

“I’m saying that there’s more than black ink embedded in this high-quality cardstock.”

I stare at him, feeling like I’m about to pass out again, only this time from relief. “GPS?”

He nods. “Micro-thin, state of the art. Outside the café we went to after the cathedral, Eva put my card into the back pocket of her jeans, remember?”

What I remember is that I nearly tore the thing in two and threw it in his face because I was furious with him at that time. He’d been poking me with a stick the entire afternoon. Now I’m so grateful I could hug him.

“She was wearing those jeans when Dimitri took her.”

“And I’ve got a blinking green dot on one of my monitors that confirms it.” He nods to a hacker’s setup on the other side of the warehouse, a U-shaped desk surrounded by glowing computer screens and racks of blinking CPUs.

“Oh God. Oh f**k. We haven’t lost her.” Limp with relief, I flop back onto the cot and drag in a few ragged breaths.

“Aye. Bask in that for a minute.”

The tone of his voice alarms me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means they’re in the air.”

That’s bad, but not too bad, considering Tabby will be able to track the plane now that we have a bead on it. But when Killian just stands there looking at me, I know there’s more. “This cloak-and-dagger routine isn’t doing me any favors. Just tell me.”

He slides the business card back into his suit pocket and folds his arms over his chest. “To conserve battery life, the card is off-line until it’s taken beyond a certain geo-fence zone. As you know, GPS is a huge battery hog, and as you can guess, a device sized for concealment in a business card is miniscule. Once the system goes live, the clock starts ticking.”

All the relief I felt a few moments before evaporates. “How long do we have before the battery in Eva’s device runs out?”

He glances at his watch. “Just under three hours.”