Obsession (36 page)

She was all alone with Hendricks and Lutz.

The knowledge made her heart pound like it was trying to beat its way out of her chest.

“We’ll go in her car,” Hendricks said as he shoved her toward it. The gravel dug into her bare feet, but she barely felt it. Her arm felt like it was being wrenched from its socket. And she was deathly, deathly afraid. “Barnes told me to get rid of it, and gave me a set of keys. When we’re done, we can catch a ride back here for ours.”

If Lutz said anything, Katharine missed it because they had reached her car by that time and Hendricks shoved her into the backseat, then climbed in beside her while Lutz got into the driver’s seat.

Muffy greeted her with a
meow
as her carrier was jostled when Katharine slid over. She picked up the plastic crate, cradling it on her lap, with some thought of using it as a weapon or at least protection. Something. Anything.

It was pathetic, she knew, but it was the only thing she had.

“Hi, cat,” Hendricks said, and stuck his fingers through the grate, which was pointed toward him. Muffy hissed.

“Just so you know,” Hendricks said as Lutz started the car and began backing out, tires crunching over the gravel. “If you give me any trouble, if you try to escape, the first thing I’ll do is put out your eyes.”

He smiled at her as he said it. She believed him. Shivers of horror prickled over her skin. Her shoulder ached. The burns on her hand and arm throbbed. Her cheeks felt swollen and numb. But the worst thing, positively the worst thing of all, was the absolute icy fear that coursed through her veins. Unless she could somehow think of a way to save herself, they were going to hurt her horribly. And before the night was over, she was going to die.

Her breath was coming in ragged little pants.

Get calm,
she ordered herself.
Think. Try.

“You know,” she said in the calmest voice she could muster, turning her head and looking Hendricks in the eye, “I have money. A lot of money. How much would it cost for you to just let me go?”

They were on pavement now, passing the rows of for-sale cars, rolling inexorably toward the road. It was dark in the car, but not too dark that she couldn’t see his expression. He was interested, she could tell by the way his eyes flickered. She could feel Lutz looking at her through the rearview mirror as the car paused at the junction between the car lot and the road.

“Where you got it?” Hendricks asked.

She had to take a deep breath before she answered, but she tried not to let him see. “In the bank.”

“Suppose we mosey on by the bank on the way to where we’re going and you withdraw all that money and give it to us? Then we can have the money and still have fun.”

Katharine was just opening her mouth to explain to him how that wouldn’t work for her, when his door and Lutz’s door both flew open unexpectedly and they whipped around with startled cries. Her eyes were still widening in shock, she was still in the process of registering dark-covered arms, and hands gripping pistols, thrusting into the car, when her own door was yanked open and her arm was roughly seized.

She screamed, jumped, tried to yank free of this new threat—then saw Hendricks’s scalp explode into the front seat. To her stupefied horror, he had just been shot in the head.

22

"It’s all right, it’s me, it’s me,” her captor shouted in a rapid-fire burst of words as Katharine was hauled shrieking from the car, which was now slowly rolling forward. “Jesus, quit screaming, would you please?”

But she couldn’t, she was on autopilot, the terror and horror of the last few hours amped up a thousandfold by the new terror and horror of seeing bloody murder committed right in front of her eyes, by the rawness and extremity of her fear for her own life. In the front seat, she saw Lutz slump over out of sight, his blood spraying the dashboard and windshield. Her bare feet hit rough, warm pavement, and the night sky tilted crazily overhead as she stumbled forward, out of the car. Muffy’s crate, which was on her lap, slid toward the ground and would have crashed into it if she hadn’t retained the presence of mind to grab the handle as it fell. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw two black-garbed men push the bodies of her erstwhile tormentors farther inside the car as they, too, jumped into the vehicle. It stopped moving, and she guessed that the man who was now in the driver’s seat had stepped on the brake.

“Get rid of them and the car,” her captor ordered, his hand still tight on her arm, keeping her on her feet, keeping her knees from collapsing and smacking into the ground, even as he pulled her away from the car. Another scream was tearing out of her throat of its own accord when she recognized the voice, recognized him, saw that it was Dan, no, Nick, yes, yes, Nick.
Thank God for Nick.

Nick dressed all in black, with a black watch cap over his golden head.

He had come for her, and the frantic beating of her heart began to slow by infinitesimal degrees.

The scream died in her throat.

“I’ll take her with me and we’ll all meet up at Gardens Park,” he said, dragging her around behind his Blazer as she heard grunts of agreement and slamming doors and tires gripping pavement as her Lexus and a black SUV peeled out of the car lot, heading away from McLean. In the meantime, Nick had opened the front passenger door and was in the process of thrusting her inside the Blazer when the cat carrier smacked into his legs.

A vicious-sounding hiss came from the carrier.

“What the
hell
?” He took the plastic crate from her while bundling her the rest of the way inside.

"C-cat,” Katharine managed, although she was shaking all over now and breathing so fast that she knew she was in imminent danger of hyperventilating. “Don’t leave it.”

He muttered something—she thought it was probably a curse—as he closed her door, but an instant later the door behind her opened and the carrier landed on the backseat. A glance over her shoulder found Muffy’s eyes, as big and round as hers felt, shining balefully at her through the darkness. It was enough to tell that the cat was unhappy, but all right.

Nick’s door was yanked open and he dropped into the front seat, closing it behind him. It was only then, when she registered that he didn’t have to start the car, that she realized it had been running all along.

“Put on your seat belt,” he said, his eyes raking over her, and when she didn’t move because she just couldn’t, her muscles wouldn’t work, he cursed and leaned over, securing it for her. He pulled the watch cap from his head and tossed it in the back, running his fingers through his hair. She saw the gleam of metal on his chest as he moved, and realized that he was wearing a shoulder holster that was almost invisible amid so much black. His pistol was shoved into it.

Then the Blazer was on the move, peeling rubber as they headed in the opposite direction from the others.

“Wr-wrong way,” she pointed out through chattering teeth as she lay back in the seat and tried to get some kind of equilibrium back.

“We’re not going where they’re going,” he said, slowing down as they passed through the jumble of lights and buildings that was all she managed to absorb of McLean. She was cold, icy cold, freezing to death, so cold that she would have wrapped her arms around herself if she wasn’t absolutely too spent to move, and she knew it wasn’t from the air conditioner because it wasn’t even on. She was shivering, long, tooth-rattling tremors that she knew were caused by shock.

“Why . . . not?”

He cast another glance at her as they turned right at a deserted intersection on the other side of McLean, and she saw from the roadside sign that they were heading for the Beltway.

“Because I don’t want them getting their hands on you again.” His voice was hard.

“Who?”

He shook his head. “That’s something we probably ought to talk about later.”

She looked at him with a frown, but since the only illumination was a reflection from the headlights that were slashing through pine-covered knolls as the road twisted and turned through them, plus the faint light from the dashboard instruments, it was impossible to tell anything about his expression except that it was grim.

Still, his profile was limned against the darkness outside the window, and she recognized the curve of his brow, the line of his nose, the jut of his chin. The hair was wrong, long and wavy where always before it had been cut ruthlessly short, but everything else was right: the breadth of his shoulders, the lean, muscular strength of his torso, the powerful length of his legs. His hands were curled around the steering wheel, and she recognized the broad palms and long fingers, too.

A wave of relief washed over her that was so strong it made her dizzy. She was safe, finally, with Nick.

“What took you so long?” she asked shakily, then to her own surprise burst into tears.

“Shit. Fuck. Damn it to hell and back.” She could feel his gaze on her even though her own eyes were closed as she fought to keep the tears contained. “I know this has been bad for you. Would you please not cry?”

Her eyes popped open. Uncontained now, more tears rolled down her cheeks. “You’d cry too if you’d just been burned with a cigarette and told somebody was going to peel your face off and . . .”

“I know,” he interrupted, real pain for her in his voice. The Blazer was climbing now, emerging from the darkness into a burst of light, and she saw the big halogen expressway lights at the top of the entrance ramp and realized that they were curving onto the Beltway, heading toward Maryland. “We had eavesdropping devices on, we heard everything. It nearly killed me listening to it, but there was no way to get in. It’s a secured Agency site. You’d practically have to have a nuclear bomb. Anyway, with Hendricks and Lutz there, I knew they were going to bring you out. The kind of dirty work they do, they have a specialized facility.”

“The Plantation.” Katharine drew a deep, gasping breath that wasn’t quite a sob. Tears still spilled down her cheeks, but they were slowing down and she was pretty sure the worst of the onslaught was over. She sucked in more air and tried to will the flow to stop.

“Yeah. What they do there isn’t—wasn’t—pretty.”

“You killed them.” The memory of Hendricks’s scalp sailing into the front seat, of Lutz’s blood spraying the windshield, made her shudder.

“Yeah, well, you gotta do what you gotta do. And sometimes people deserve to die. Those two made a nice living out of torturing people, sometimes to death. The world’s a better place with them gone.”

“If you hadn’t gotten there in time . . .” The thought made her dizzy all over again.

He threw her a quick, frowning glance. “There was no way I wasn’t going to get there in time, so you can just put that thought out of your head. I’ve had somebody with you every step of the way. Since you left the cabin. Listening, watching, looking out for you. We’re real good at clandestine surveillance, you know? You remember that phone call Barnes got, the night he brought you back to that apartment you were staying at after you’d been to your town house? That was us, telling him that one of his informants had just been picked up by the Kremlin. We knew he’d rush out of there, and figured you’d probably be glad.”

Katharine’s eyes widened as she remembered.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, in a massive understatement. “I was glad.”

A rest area was coming up, and she glanced at him in surprise when they pulled off into it. There were trees and big overhead lights and a small brick building with a glass front that housed restrooms. A semi was parked in the first of the two parking areas, and a couple of cars were parked in the second lot, in front of the building. Through the glass, she watched a middle-aged couple disappear into the restrooms inside.

“Is this is a good time for a pit stop?” Katharine asked doubtfully, wiping the last traces of tears from her cheeks with careful fingers. Her cheeks no longer throbbed, but the salt from the tears still made them sting a little.

His quick grin made her dizzy. She remembered—she remembered—another day when he had grinned at her like that. They were in a house, she saw in a flash, in a kitchen, and she was yelling at him to go away and she took off her shoe and threw it at him and he ducked and it missed, slamming into some cabinets—and then he grinned at her, just like that. She blinked, trying to make sense of it, trying to put it into some kind of context, but then her head started to hurt so much that she couldn’t think at all and the memory was lost as quickly as it came.

Pressing a hand to her head, she was trying to ignore the pain while fighting to recapture that elusive memory when he pulled into a shadowy spot well away from the other cars, turned off the engine, and unfastened his seat belt.

“Do you trust me?” he asked, fishing something from his pocket and then turning toward her with it. It was, she saw, a pocket knife.

That redirected her focus in a hurry. Her eyes widened as she looked from the knife to his face. A whole jumble of additional memories burst like flash-bulbs in her brain, too fast for her to make sense of any one of them but leaving her pretty sure about the sum of the whole.

“Are you kidding me, Doctor Dan? No.”

This time his grin was slower dawning but just as disarming. “Fair enough. You need to do what I tell you anyway.”

“What?” Her tone was wary. She eyed the knife.

“Bend over and wrap your arms around your knees and hold on tight.” The grin was gone. His mouth was looking grim again.

She was, she thought, rightfully wary. “Why?”

“Because you’ve got a locator device embedded in your back and I need to dig it out before they find us.”

Her eyes went wide with horror. “Ohmigod.”

“Yeah.”

He didn’t look any happier about it than she felt, and Katharine quashed the whole litany of protests and questions that ran through her brain in favor of taking a deep breath, unfastening her seat belt, and doing what he said.