Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (160 page)
And this was not even the final painting.
He felt a touch at his sleeve and returned to the world, the noise from the party washing back over him like an ocean tide, not realizing he’d completely tuned it out until it returned.
Standing there was good old Aunt Sophia, wearing one of her opera gowns, dressed, as usual, to deny detractors the pleasure of disparaging comments.
“Ahhh, Charles,
mon cheri,
there you are! I wanted to introduce you to Mademoiselle Millard, who is here with the painting. She travels with it on the tour, and was good enough to grace us with her presence.”
mon cheri,
there you are! I wanted to introduce you to Mademoiselle Millard, who is here with the painting. She travels with it on the tour, and was good enough to grace us with her presence.”
He thought he’d heard his aunt emphasize the woman’s status as single, and made a note to tease her about it later, which he promptly forgot as he turned and saw Millard.
She was tall, and wore a low-cut dress that covered enough to satisfy propriety, but which revealed enough to encourage imagination. She smiled, a graceful movement of her lips. Surely anyone could do such a thing—but if that were so, how come he’d never seen them poised just—
so
?
so
?
Sophia had completed the introduction.
“Michelle Millard, this is my nephew, Charles—also a Seurat.”
He remembered feeling a sudden thrill rush through him as he heard her name.
Michelle. How beautiful.
“Mademoiselle, it is a pleasure to meet you,” he said, thinking how inadequate it was. But somehow she brightened, and when she spoke her words seemed to tell him something deeper, something more.
“The pleasure is mine,” she’d said, and then, “I understand you have some of your ancestor’s works that are not publicly shown?”
He wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d heard Sophia chuckle before she walked off.
Seurat was no schoolboy. He’d been with women—many women. But he had had such chemistry with only a handful.
They had talked until late in the evening, about surface things—paintings, favorite artists, and even the weather. But beneath their words an understanding simmered, cascades of meaning that spoke of a deeper interest, deeper meanings to the nods and smiles.
He had offered to drive her back to Paris, of course.
And when she had asked if they could perhaps stop by his house to see his paintings, he had said, “Of course.”
Truly she was beautiful—and more.
Seurat couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent so much time with anyone without talking about CyberNation. Had he even told her what he did?
“Do you like what you see, Monsieur?”
He started. Had she been awake the whole time?
“If I had any clothes on, your eyes would have burned through them the way you were looking at me!”
He chuckled. “If
I
had any clothes on, they would have been burned off just by looking at you. Does that answer your question, Mademoiselle?”
I
had any clothes on, they would have been burned off just by looking at you. Does that answer your question, Mademoiselle?”
“Oui.”
She reached over and slid her hand down his body, stopping at just the right place.
“As does this.”
He put his hands on her as well, and her breathing increased to match his.
An American,
he thought, as they started to move together, and then,
She is wonderful beyond belief
.
he thought, as they started to move together, and then,
She is wonderful beyond belief
.
It could be that he was going to have to reevaluate his feelings about the United States. Surely a place from which she had come from couldn’t be quite as bad as he had thought. . . .
24
San Francisco, California
Colonel Abe Kent glanced at his watch. It was pushing midnight, and Natadze was buttoned up tight. The motel room he was in had no rear exit, and there was no reason for him to be crawling out through a window—assuming he hadn’t spotted Kent tailing him.
From his rented van, thirty yards away and parked facing Natadze’s door, Kent considered his strategy and tactics. Natadze wasn’t going to step out into the parking lot with his eyes closed—he’d be wary, looking for anything unusual. He knew Kent by sight, so there was no way he could just stroll in the killer’s direction and make it close enough to get the drop on him. He could park his vehicle a bit nearer, but even so, opening a car door would draw Natadze’s attention in a hurry.
Yes, Kent had the advantage, but it wasn’t so great as all that. Taking down an alert and cautious enemy wasn’t as easy as they made it look in the movies.
A smart man would have called in the experts—SWAT, SERT, FBI Tactical—and let them deal with the situation. Kent was a man of war; he knew battlefield tactics, he could shoot and hit his target, and you could call this war on a small scale. Still, there were people better equipped for this particular scenario. He knew it.
He also knew that, smart or not, this was a personal thing. Him against Natadze, however wise that might be. There were some things a man took care of on his own, if he wanted to keep looking at his face in the mirror when he shaved.
Kent was adept at what he did, and his luck was better than average—at least it had been so far—but even so, a plan of action would be a good idea.
Of course, everybody knew it was better to be lucky than good.
Kent smiled. That brought another old memory up. That seemed to be happening to him more and more these days. Maybe it was a product of age. The older you got, the more you had to look at behind you than ahead of you.
This particular echo involved a conversation he’d had with John Howard, as they’d sat in a camper waiting for Natadze at Cox’s estate—when they’d lost him. They’d been yakking about growing up, and about luck, the kind of thing you did when you had time on your hands and nothing pressing to fill it.
Howard had told a story about his first serious girlfriend, and how they had missed by seconds being caught by her father in a compromising position, and how a stuck hook or zipper would have made the difference. Could have short-stopped his entire career.
Kent had laughed, then told his story: He had an older brother he’d spent a summer with when he was twelve. Martin was married, going to school at LSU, down in Baton Rouge, where it was hot, damp, and rained a lot. Must have been around 1965 or ’66. Martin had lived just off campus in an apartment with his wife, a gorgeous redhead with whom Kent had fallen in love at first sight.
Howard had smiled, one old soldier to another. The joy of older women.
“Anyway,” Kent had continued, “my brother gave me the full campus tour. The school’s mascot was a Royal Bengal tiger, traditionally named Mike. The first tiger arrived in the forties, and there have been five or six since. When I visited my brother, they were up to Mike III, I think. The cat lived in a cage just outside the football stadium, next to the parade grounds where the ROTC marched. You could walk right up to it.”
Kent smiled again, picturing the scene. “LSU was a land-grant college, so all male students who were physically able had to do two years of Army or Air Force ROTC. They had classes, even in the summer, and they marched early, before the heat got too oppressive. Bright and early, there would be hundreds, sometimes thousands of male students in their ROTC summer khaki uniforms at attention out there, yelling ‘Good morning, Mike the Tiger, sir!’ ”
Howard smiled, too, and Kent continued. “The tiger used to be pulled in a cage around the stadium before football games. The story was, every time he roared, that meant the team would score one touchdown. They called the stadium Death Valley. Loudest place in the city on a Saturday night during football season. The police would one-way streets heading toward the campus before the game, one-way them in the other direction afterward.”
“A tiger’s hard to keep in a cage,” Howard said.
Kent nodded. “Every now and then, Mike would somehow get out of his cage. Pranksters broke the locks off once, or somebody forgot to shut the cage. Mike got out, and naturally, he went exploring. Imagine how you’d feel if you were walking to the local market for a carton of milk and you looked up to see a four-hundred-pound Bengal tiger padding down the sidewalk toward you.”
Howard laughed. “I’d need new underwear.”
“Me, too. Luckily, nobody ever got eaten when the various Mikes took their strolls. Good thing, because if the cops or animal control people had ever had to shoot the big cat, the city would probably have lynched whoever pulled the trigger. Everybody loved Mike. The first one? After he died of old age, twenty-something, they stuffed and mounted him in the school museum, and you could listen to a tape recording of his roar. My brother took me to see him. Kind of spooky, that old stuffed tiger standing there.”
He paused for a moment, remembering. “The point is, when you have a wild animal, he’s only safe to be around as long as he’s under control. And it’s real easy to lose control of such a creature. One small slip, he gets you. Remember that magician who got attacked onstage in Las Vegas ten or twelve years ago? By a cat he had raised and trained?”
“Yes.”
“So, you always have to be careful.”
Howard said, “I hear that.”
And yet, here was Kent, three thousand miles away from that camper and conversation, being reckless. Waiting for a wild animal—one that could shoot back, no less—to emerge from his lair.
Killing Natadze would be easy: He steps out the door, you line your sights up, don’t say squat, and cook off two .45 auto rounds into the man’s heart, bam, bam, end of story. But that wasn’t how he wanted it to go down. He wanted the man alive and talking. It wasn’t about
killing
him, it was about
defeating
him—
killing
him, it was about
defeating
him—
Natadze’s door opened. There was no light behind him to silhouette him, but enough illumination from the parking lot and outside lamps to get a good view. He had the guitar case in one hand—his left—with his other hand free.
Kent frowned, liking this less and less. He couldn’t let the man get into his car, not and risk losing him. Where was he going at this hour?
Never mind that, Abe
. Go!
. Go!
He pulled his Colt and thumbed the safety off—he was already cocked and locked—put his trigger finger outside the guard, took a deep breath, and opened the van’s door.
Natadze spotted the motion immediately. He had taken several steps toward his car, was almost there, although he hadn’t dug his keys out yet. Kent would have been happier if the man had both hands occupied.
Kent kept his pistol behind his leg as he started toward Natadze. Still far enough away so the man might not make him—
At the back of his car, Natadze set the guitar case down, as if he was going to put it into the trunk, then straightened and suddenly broke into a sprint at a right angle to Kent, heading toward the open hallway to the north where the ice and soda machines were.
Kent snapped his pistol up, but Natadze was already ten feet farther away pumping fast and gaining speed. He hadn’t gone for his gun, and Kent didn’t want to shoot him. Plus a miss would put a round through a motel door or wall, and maybe hit somebody sleeping inside.
“Stop!” Kent yelled.
That was a waste of breath. Natadze sped up.
Kent ran, chasing the fleeing man.
The corridor opened up into another section of parking lot, around which there was a short chain-link fence. Too short a fence to slow Natadze down. He vaulted it, hit on the other side—another parking lot, for a fast-food place—and kept running.
All that training on the obstacle course paid off as Kent sailed over the fence without catching or breaking anything.
Natadze had twenty yards on him and was gaining more. Even full-out, Kent wasn’t as fast. If this kept up, Natadze would run away from him in a few minutes. He might have to shoot the guy anyway.
But Natadze doglegged to his left, into the parking lot of a small strip mall. Thirty yards back, Kent watched his quarry make a mistake. He rounded a corner, and when Kent reached it and glanced after the runner, he realized it was a dead end—windowless buildings on either side and a brick wall of a third building at the end.
Natdaze spun, and came up with a handgun—
Kent dodged to his left and took three steps, out of Natadze’s line of fire, behind the corner of the building. He didn’t want to shoot the man, but neither did he want to get shot himself—
Cover, he needed
cover
—!
cover
—!
Behind him was parked a pickup truck with a florist’s logo on the door. Kent backpedaled toward it, keeping the mouth of the alley covered.
Game over, Natadze. I have you now!
“It doesn’t have to be this way!” Kent yelled.
They were only half a block away from the motel where Natadze had been staying. Kent was behind solid cover, since even the cab of a full-size pickup truck was proof against most handgun rounds, to say nothing of the engine compartment. It was possible that Natadze might skip a round low, off the concrete, but a standard pistol bullet wasn’t going to have much steam—if any—after it ricocheted off the parking lot and went through two steel-belted truck tires, especially if it was a hollow-point, even semi-jacketed. But to try a shot that risky, he’d have to show himself, and Kent was ready for that.
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