Three-Part Harmony (29 page)

A tickle, deep in his gut. That made him want to puke.

“Shit.” He stalked across the patio, into the grass where one of the chaises had been dragged. “Calm down. Calm the fuck
down.”
It’s not like someone can waltz past the security system, get past the billion cameras between the perimeter and the house, then just wait for Dasha to stroll by and—

A weird smell teased. It was the faintest thing, but he knew it didn’t belong here. Sweet but not floral. His toe hit an overturned can of green tea. He picked it up and sniffed the opening. Nope, not the smell. He continued on, following the tracks in the lawn leading to the chaise, noticing they looked fresh. So did the nick in the lounger’s armrest, which he stooped to look at now. Something had to have rammed the wood hard, he thought, to break the finish like that. He found himself frowning at the chaise’s cushion too. It was knocked askew, the bottom part hanging over the side of the chaise, like whoever had been here had slid off the thing.

Or been dragged off.

Calm. Down.

But then his stare caught on something else. Something in the ferns and flowers surrounding the fountain. Yeah, the fountain right next to the stone bench he’d envisioned in his little I’m-in-love-with-you-D fantasy. It couldn’t be.
You’re just seeing things.

His legs, now disembodied from the corkscrew in his chest, somehow carried him across the grass. He didn’t want to look. He had to look.

Just get it the hell over with, you stupid shit. You do know it’s not what you think, right? Seriously, who puts a guitar in a flower bed?

“Fuck!”

The trouble was, Dasha’s prized Taylor acoustic wasn’t placed carefully in the foliage. It had been thrown there. In haste. As in, ditching-the-dead-weight haste.

He barely fought back the need to rip up the bushes. Instead, scraping a hand across his skull and forcing himself to breathe, he wheeled back toward the house. The whole time, he prayed the conclusion to which he’d leaped was mercifully wrong.

* * * *

He was more right than he’d wanted to be.

He stood next to Kress in the mansion’s security room, watching the man’s rage climb to match his as they watched the footage they’d prayed not to find from the perimeter cameras. The video, pulled straight from his nightmares, showed a rag-doll-limp Dasha being carried past the pool, through the orchard, and out the front gate. Seconds later, an Escalade pulled up, black as the ninja outfit of the bastard who dumped her into the backseat. He hopped into the front; then the car took off.

“Son of a
bitch
.” Moridian let out a guttural snarl. Then he bellowed, loud enough to shake the windows, “Stratham! Parker! You got here five minutes ago. Why aren’t you on the line to Atlanta PD yet? I also want all traffic-light footage within a five-mile radius taken between oh-four-hundred and now. I want it
now
!”

David wished for his own excuse to tear off the roof, verbally or otherwise. Looking at that bastard’s hands on Dasha, grabbing her ass to secure her better on his shoulder, handling her like a fucking
commodity,
made him long to wrench the monitor off the wall and hurl it out the window. Instead, he funneled his energy into trying to determine what had happened. Where the hell had a mistake been made? More importantly, who’d made it?

“He knew the code,” he stated. “Am I right about that? If the guy forced the gate—”

“This place would’ve lit up like the Fourth of July.”

“So he found a way to get the code.”

“Yeah.”

“The code we changed yesterday morning?”

The agent’s whole stature seethed a silent
yes
. “The only people who had it except us were key players from the CNN crew and the senator’s entourage.”

“So he found a way to get onto one of those teams.” Frustration chewed its way through his gut. “But we checked every single credential.
Everyone
on those lists was cleared. No psychological blips; not even a goddamn therapy session on their records.”

Kress went suddenly still. His brow furrowed. He scrubbed his unshaven jaw and gazed harder at the monitor. Then punched the Back key. “This behavior,” he muttered. “It doesn’t add up.”

David forced himself to peer at the same image. It was the shot of their ninja friend about to slip out the mansion’s service gate with Dasha. “What do you mean?”

“He’s carrying her like a tackle dummy.”

He snorted. “Thanks for the four-one-one.”

“No, no. Don’t you see? It doesn’t fit. If this was our demented fanboy, he’d be pulling a Romeo Montague. He’d be cradling her like a lover.”

Now David held back from tossing his friend out the window. “The bastard left a dead bird in her luggage, Moridian. He’s not sane. He wants to
kill
her.”

“Because he thinks he’s worshipping her by doing so. ‘Dasha dies and saves us all.’ That’s the kind of statement you give to a martyr or a lover.” He stabbed a finger at the monitor. “
This
bastard…he’s delivering a product, not stealing away with a woman he’s obsessed with.”

“Which means…what? The real lunatic is still out there, and this guy is
another
crazy cocksucker?”

If it was possible, Kress’s face contorted harder. It looked like the agent’s tickle had turned to bile. “It means we might have been looking in the wrong direction the entire time.”

“Shit.” Nausea took the wheel in his own stomach now. “You mean…maybe there never really was a lunatic. That the note and the dove in Miami—”

“And maybe even our friend Mr. Smith in Atlanta,” Moridian finished. “All part of something else. Something clearly designed to make us look at the loony-tunes fans and the fringe society elements, instead of—” He interrupted himself with his own confused frown. “Instead of
what
? Damn it, that’s the piece we’re missing.”

The nausea turned into dread now. “Fuck,” David spat.

The meaning in his voice wasn’t lost on his friend. “What?”

He forced his jaw to unclench so he could get out the words. “The senator… He’s been heading up this development task force in Iraq. It was designed to open up the commerce possibilities between us and them.
They
apparently love us for it, but—”

“Not everyone else in the region would,” Kress filled in once again. “Or anyone over here who shares those world views.” As long as they were voicing their worst fears, David went on. “And if one of them got onto the senator’s team and had access to all his
daughter’s
information—”

“Stratham!” Moridian cut him off with another shout. “Let Parker continue the light checks. I want you to check the location of every member from Senator Moore’s team who was here yesterday. Where are they right now, what are they doing, when they last took a shit. Everything!”

“Agent Moridian.” Another agent stepped up, apparently out of the wall itself. But David recognized him at once. It was Phelps, the peon who’d first grilled Dasha back in Miami. Same scuffed loafers. Same by-the-book gaze. Which in this case, was the virtue that redeemed the guy for his asshole act in Miami. “I’ve already started the job. As soon as you and Mr. Pennington linked the breach back to yesterday’s visitors, I got on the line and began cell location on all the senator’s staffers.”

Kress expelled an audible breath. “Great job, Phelps. Good thinking.”

Phelps shook his head. “Only by half. The numbers we’re able to trace all show up at the Four Seasons, where the senator is staying. But there’s at least a half-dozen numbers we
can’t
trace. They’re secured lines, invisible to us.”

Before Phelps finished the sentence, Kress started bolting out the door. “Not anymore they’re not.”

The library was just down the hall. In less than a minute, Kress tore into the room that had been serving as their temporary command center. As David arrived, the agent had already opened Skype on his laptop. “I’m damn glad I told Corso I needed to have at least one way of accessing her,” he clarified.

They watched, both barely containing their tension, as the call started ringing through. When Corso didn’t pick up the summons after four rings, David backed toward the door. “That’s it. I’m gonna go find D’s phone. The senator’s private line has to be on—”

On the sixth ring, the call got picked up. But Corso’s features didn’t fill the screen. Instead, a young, sleep-tousled brunette squinted into the camera. “Hello?” she mumbled. Then her eyes opened wider. “Oh! Kress! Hey.” She scraped chunks of hair into her face. “Crap. I look like a toad right now. I didn’t think it would be you. Shit.”

For a second, David wondered about the woman’s familiar tone. Then he recognized her from dinner last night. Petite. Glasses. Eyes behind those glasses that had clear plans for Moridian.

“Natalie.” Kress’s response was cordial but complete business. “Where’s Corso?”

“Uh—who?” The woman’s fuzzy stammer confirmed her flirtations with Kress last night had been given some liquid courage.

“Crystal Corso.” Moridian stressed every syllable to the breaking point. “Your boss, remember? Isn’t this her Skype line?”

“Uh…yeah. Um, not here. She told me she’d be getting up early to handle some business with her company in Buenos Aires. She took her right-hand guy, Zack, to help. So, I’m on Skype-line monitor duty.” A sultry little smile crept across her lips. “You maybe wanna come over and—”

“Buenos Aires?”

David fired it in unison with Moridian. They exchanged knowing glowers.

“What company in Buenos Aires?” Kress demanded. Thankfully, the woman was too bleary to notice their uptick of urgency or that she’d just spilled the biggest heap of incriminating shit of the morning. Hell, of the entire investigation.

“Her dad left it to her when he died a couple years ago, but she’s a silent partner, because it’s not great for her political rep to have an off-shore business. It’s all boring stuff like shipments and commodities and exports and imports. She calls them a couple of times a month and—”

“Natalie!”

The woman actually jumped as Kress shouted it. “Jeez! What?”

“Listen to me. I need Corso’s cell phone number. Now.”

It looked like his order penetrated her hangover haze. Until she stuttered, “Kress. I—”

“
Now,
damn it! Dasha Moore’s been abducted. Does that part register? The only way we can find her is through that number!”

The woman blinked. Then her face crumpled, and her lips wobbled. “Oh, Kress. God, I’m sorry. I don’t have it. She changed it yesterday.”

“
What?
”

“She said it was for security reasons, and she’d give me the new number when she got back today.”

David kicked a dent into the wall while Kress shoved a stack of files to the floor, then disconnected the Skype line without saying anything else to the now distraught Natalie. The guy lurched to his feet, clawing back his hair again, looking as haggard as the woman he’d just switched off. His gray T-shirt looked like a trash bag; the fly of his jeans was barely zipped.

But when he spoke again, the agent was completely confident of every syllable. Most importantly, he knew Kress was willing to put his life behind each word.

“All right. We’re gonna have to do this the hard way. Which means we have to do it right,
every second of it, the first time
.
”

“I’m in,” David told him.

“Damn straight you are,” the agent answered. “Now go find D’s phone. It’s time to tell the senator the truth about his adorable little Crystal.”

Sweet little Dasha. Sweet little Dasha.

She moaned, fighting her way back to the dream. Mom was singing to her, making the tune a little half whisper so she’d fall asleep, but she giggled, trying to stay awake.

Sweet little Dasha.

The dream grew fainter. And she couldn’t see Mom anymore. And her head felt like a gigantic, pain-filled boulder. “Don’t go,” Dasha begged the dream, only to wonder why her tongue wouldn’t cooperate. Cotton lined the inside of her mouth. Dirty cotton. She just wanted to go back to sleep…

“You’re awake.”

Definitely not Mom. It was more like a school nurse with a thermometer caught up her butt, crossed with Crystal “I’m-Too-Perfect-For-My-Pants” Corso.

“Well. I was hoping you’d stay a good little pseudocorpse, but so be it. Soon enough for the real thing.”

Dasha forced an invisible crowbar beneath her eyelids. It took a couple of seconds more for her eyes to fully focus.

When she did, she wished she hadn’t.

It
was
Crystal. The woman wore a silky ivory turtleneck and matching cashmere pants, which seemed a ridiculous outfit, given the surroundings. The place looked like a man-cave designed by Davy Crockett, with dark wood walls crossed by heavy timber support beams, a stacked stone fireplace and accents of iron and steel everywhere. A real bearskin rug lay underfoot; the animal’s head had been mounted on the wall just before the entrance to the black granite kitchen. Sure, because
that
was appetizing.

All of those observations faded when Dasha’s gaze fell to the pine dining table in front of her. Red candles, yet to be lit, rimmed three sides of it. They surrounded a surface upon which thousands of pictures and photos had been dumped.

Thousands of images…of her.

“What…the…?” Even her whisper sledgehammered her brain. Surely, she imagined the sight. Time to rub away the sleep completely.

Not happening. She couldn’t
raise her hand. Or any part of her arm. She looked down to discover all four of her limbs bound to the dining chair by tight rope gauntlets. Her torso was also secured, the ropes wrapped just below her breasts. They dug in so tightly, breathing felt like pushing on a wall.

She repeated, with deepening outrage, “What…the…?”

“Relax,” Crystal crooned. She added with a slick smirk, “
Darling.
”

The utterance put an icy edge on Dasha’s fury. The woman’s voice was a verbal scalpel, slicing with deep deliberation.
I’m in control now,
it said.
And there’s nothing you can do about it.