The room was roughly ten feet by ten feet wide, with a gleaming vinyl tile floor. To her right was a utility closet, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and a huge temperature-controlled wine cabinet with a glass door that showed the dozens of bottles inside. A row of six empty food and beverage carts were lined up underneath a counter. On top of the counter was a stack of one-inch-deep plastic trays for stocking the carts. Kate took one of the trays and began to do a little grocery shopping. She helped herself to crackers, several bottles of Evian water, and a bunch of Godiva chocolates and Toblerone bars, and she was just about to see if she could find some cheese and cold cuts in the refrigerator when she heard the elevator doors open.
Kate gripped her tray and ducked down, catching a glimpse through the porthole window of the person outside. It was the stunning blond BlackRhino operative who’d been watching her in Palm Beach. This didn’t come as a total shock. There had always been the chance that Carter would discover the theft and put enough pieces together in time to place someone on the plane. Unfortunately it made an already complicated situation even more unwieldy.
Kate’s rule of thumb was Always better to be the attacker than the attackee. So she pushed the door open and whacked the surprised woman in the head with the tray. Alexis went down to one knee, shook her head to clear it, and whirled around, catching Kate with a perfectly placed kick to the rib cage. Kate crouched and blocked a second kick.
The two women were now fully engaged in hand-to-hand combat, executing their attacks and defenses in rapid, dizzying combinations, with a deadly, almost balletic grace. Neither was able to deliver a decisive blow, but Kate felt a satisfying snap when one of her sharp lightning jabs smashed the woman’s nose. The operative stepped back, licked the blood from her lips, and smiled.
It was unnerving. Kate’s father had warned her that BlackRhino operatives liked killing. Now Kate knew that Jake was right, and that only one of two women would be leaving the storage room alive.
Alexis pulled a switchblade from a sheath in her sleeve, flicked it open, and slashed at Kate. Kate leaned away from the blade and tried to kick her attacker’s knee, but Alexis dodged her, swung the blade again, and sliced into Kate’s leg.
With her right hand, Kate grabbed the assassin’s arm as it passed and drove her left elbow into the woman’s bloody nose. Alexis seemed oblivious to the pain and countered with a furious series of devastating jabs into Kate’s side with her free hand, weakening Kate’s hold.
Alexis yanked her arm free and lunged at Kate with the knife again. Kate sidestepped the blade, but not fast enough. She felt the deep sting as the blade sliced her left forearm, which she’d instinctively raised to protect herself.
The parry gave Kate an unexpected opening. The assassin’s body was momentarily exposed and unprotected. Kate punched Alexis in the throat and grabbed her knife arm, yanking it down.
Alexis lost her balance. Kate pinned Alexis’s right arm behind her back, driving the assassin facedown toward the floor, knocking the knife out of her hand. Alexis grabbed Kate’s ankle and yanked.
For an instant, they were both down on one knee, facing each other like two opposing football players along the line of scrimmage. But Alexis was quicker, charging forward and wrapping her right arm around Kate’s neck in a chokehold.
To tighten the vise, Alexis grabbed her own right wrist with her left hand, locking Kate’s neck under her armpit, and then stood up, using Kate’s weight against her to crush her throat. It was a brutally efficient way to kill.
Kate felt herself losing consciousness as her windpipe was crimped like a hose. She knew that in an instant, Alexis would intentionally fall backward, using the momentum to bring Kate down and snap her neck. Kate had a second or two left to live. Her years of combat training kicked in, she stretched her legs out in front of her, and abruptly sat down. The move dramatically shifted the balance between them, hurling Alexis face forward and dropping Kate backward. Kate let the momentum carry her, falling flat onto her back and flipping Alexis over her and headfirst onto the floor.
Kate gasped for air and realized the pantry was deadly quiet. Alexis wasn’t moving. Kate crawled on her hands and knees and looked at Alexis. The would-be assassin’s eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking, and her head was twisted at an unnatural angle. She’d broken her neck when she got flipped over Kate and slammed into the steel door of the fridge. Kate felt for a pulse. None.
Terrific, Kate thought. She was bleeding all over the pantry, she had a dead woman lying on the floor in front of her, and she was a millimeter away from vomiting. Breathe deep and focus, she told herself. Get it together. She reached for a Godiva candy bar that had fallen to the floor, peeled the wrapper away, and ate it while she caught her breath and did a more thorough assessment of her dilemma.
The gash in her arm wasn’t deep. The gash in her leg probably could use a stitch or two … or forty. She picked her shirt up and looked at her side. Already turning purple. She didn’t think she had a broken rib. Been there, done that. Still, it was going to be a monster of a bruise. The good news was that she was in better shape than the blonde. The blonde was dead.
Kate pocketed the switchblade and dragged the blonde over to the far wall where she’d be out of the way. She scanned the shelves for a first aid kit. Found none. She went to the utility closet and hit the jackpot. First aid kit. Paper towels. Garbage bags.
In minutes Kate had her arm Band-Aided and the wound in her leg pulled together with makeshift stitches and bandaged with gauze and surgical tape. She cleaned the floor with a bottle of Evian and a roll of paper towels. She tossed the towels into a big black garbage bag and tied the bag to the blonde’s wrist.
She looked around, thinking she’d done a pretty good job of cleaning up. No blood splatters. No sign of struggle. She gathered up some candy, crackers, and bottled water in another trash bag, looking around one more time to make sure there were no signs of a fight or that an intruder had rummaged through things. She added a couple bottles of wine and a corkscrew to the contents of the trash bag, and satisfied that she’d covered her tracks she headed back to the cargo hold, dragging the blonde and the garbage bags behind her.
Nick was crouched in front of the safe, illuminating it with his Maglite, watching the rig spin the dial. He heard Kate’s footsteps and saw the glow from her light radiating from the narrow space between the four ULDs. He turned to greet her and was momentarily blinded by her light.
“There you are,” he said. “I was beginning to worry about you.”
She shoved one of the garbage bags into the cargo hold. “Tell me the safe is open.”
“Not yet,” he said. “But we still have lots of time left.”
“I’m not so sure,” Kate said. “I had an issue in the pantry.”
“An issue?”
Kate grabbed the blonde by her heels and dragged her through the door, past the ULDs.
Nick jumped to his feet. “Holy crap, what happened?”
“She’s BlackRhino. I don’t know what she was doing on the plane, but we sort of had a tussle.”
“Tussle? She looks dead!”
“Yeah, she sort of killed herself when I flipped her into the refrigerator.”
Nick flashed the light over Kate. “Are you okay?”
“I could use a glass of wine.”
“I don’t think we have glasses.”
“Just open the bottle, and I’ll take it from there.”
“Honey, you’ve got blood all over you. Are you sure you don’t need something more than wine?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“That’s good, because I don’t have a prayer book handy to perform last rites. Do you want me to take a look at your arm or your leg? It looks like you got slashed.”
“Thanks, but I’m okay.”
“Consider yourself lucky that you don’t have a tension pneumothorax.”
“What’s that?”
“I have no idea,” he said, “but I watch a lot of
doctor shows on TV, and you wouldn’t believe the number of patients who come into the ER with it.”
She looked into his eyes. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”
“I don’t see how.”
“I just dragged a dead BlackRhino operative down the hall.”
“I’ll put her body in a storage compartment on the boat.”
“That won’t make what happened go away.”
“It will as far as we’re concerned.”
“It means something that she was here,” Kate said.
“I think Carter took a shot in the dark with her. Someone stole his rooster and he figured the place to start looking for answers was the Smithsonian. So he sent her to D.C. to snoop around. She heard that Fu was taking the Smithsonian’s rooster back to China, so she hitched a ride to stay close to the fake on the off chance that we planned to swap it with the real one. Or maybe she thought the swap had already been made and just wanted to steal the real rooster back.”
“We don’t know if there are more BlackRhino killers on board, or if Carter has people waiting for us at the airport in Shanghai.”
“It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Of course it does.”
“Not for us, not now,” Nick said. “All we can do is continue as we planned. Besides, we’re really no worse off than we were before. In fact, we’re better off. Because if that woman hadn’t been kind enough to reveal herself—”
“Kind?”
“We wouldn’t know that Carter has discovered the theft and has already mobilized his forces. So now, instead of being in the dark about what we’re up against, we can anticipate what’s waiting for us in Shanghai and prepare ourselves for it.”
“So this is a good thing,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“I’d hate to be around when your idea of a bad thing happens.”
It was late afternoon in North Hollywood and 87 degrees in the shade. The smog was so bad that it was probably healthier to smoke a pack of cigarettes than to stand outside, breathing the air on Lankershim Boulevard. But that’s where Boyd Capwell was anyway, milling around with a dozen other men, all of them studying their scripts outside a storefront casting office in a corner strip mall. The other tenants in the mall were a donut shop, a payday loan business, and a photographer who specialized in taking headshots for aspiring actors who would never fulfill their aspirations.
Like the other men, Boyd was waiting to audition for a commercial. The role he was up for was a burly fishing boat captain plagued with bad breath who finally finds relief, and the love of a fine woman, thanks to a new brand of mouthwash. Boyd thought of the commercial as a rich sixty-second character study of a heroically tragic, psychologically complex man and a scathing indictment of our economy. The bad taste in the captain’s mouth was clearly a metaphor for the mistreatment of blue-collar workers. To truly embody the role, Boyd had cleaned a salmon in his sink that morning, getting fish scales all over his shirt, and he hadn’t brushed his teeth since he’d left Palm Beach.
A black Mercedes pulled into a parking spot in front of the casting office. The car’s windows were so dark, they looked as if they’d been painted black. Two muscular, grim-faced men got out of the Mercedes. They were wearing Italian suits as black as the car and sunglasses tinted as dark as the windows. The similarity between the men and the machine they emerged from reminded Boyd of The Terminator, only these guys were better dressed.
But then Boyd thought of another reason The Terminator might have instinctively come to his mind: These guys were killers. At that instant, one of the men faced him and asked: “Are you Boyd Capwell?”
“No,” Boyd said. “I’m Stieg Welkerdorf.”
“Wrong answer,” the man said, and he punched Boyd in the gut.
Boyd curled over the man’s fist, all the air went out of his body, and he got shoved into the backseat of the car. The other man got behind the wheel, started the car, and they drove off. The entire abduction took less than thirty seconds, and not one of the actors on the sidewalk did anything to stop it. If Boyd survived this, he intended to file a complaint with the Screen Actors Guild. It was how he dealt with most of the indignities and outrages in his life, though it rarely did any good.
After a few long, painful seconds, Boyd was finally able to draw a breath. “Why did you hit me?” Boyd asked.
“Why did you lie about your name?” the man beside him responded.
“Because you look like bill collectors.”
“How many bill collectors have you seen dressed as nice as us?” asked the driver, smiling at Boyd in the rearview mirror.
“I try not to see bill collectors.”
“We’re with BlackRhino security,” the man in the backseat said. “I’m Mr. Smith and that’s Mr. Brown.”
Boyd took it as a good sign that they were bothering to use fake names. It meant they intended for him to survive the conversation and didn’t want him to know specifically who’d abducted him.
“Two days ago you hosted a TV show that was filmed in Carter Grove’s home,” Mr. Smith said. “Afterward, Mr. Grove discovered that something very valuable to him was missing.”
Boyd had been warned by Nick and Kate that BlackRhino operatives might come calling, so he had his lines ready and rehearsed. But he hadn’t expected to have to perform his part so soon after the heist. Still, it was comforting to have a script to work from. It gave him confidence, though he was careful not to appear any less fearful to his abductors, who were driving him leisurely up Lankershim Boulevard toward the Ventura Freeway.
“Is this about my slot machine winnings?” Boyd said. “Because if it is, I didn’t take a nickel. Ask him.”
“It wasn’t money that was taken,” Mr. Smith said.
“You can’t blame me if some crew member lifted a knickknack. Most of them are Teamsters, and you know about them.” Boyd bent the tip of his nose with his finger. “They’re all mobbed up. But I’m not the one who hired the crew. The producers did. They’re the ones you need to punch and throw into the backseat of a car.”
“We’d love to,” Mr. Smith said. “But they’re in the wind. They don’t exist. Their production company is a phone in an empty office.”
“The TV show you hosted was a fake,” Mr. Brown said, stealing a glance at Boyd in the mirror to gauge his reaction to the news.
“No, no, no. You’re making a big mistake.” Boyd sat up in his seat. “I’ve seen the show on TV. It’s real. You can watch it yourself. It’s on every week.”
“The show exists, but this wasn’t a real episode,” Mr. Smith said. “It was a trick to get into Mr. Grove’s house.”
“Wait a minute,” Boyd said. “Are you saying I’m not the new host of The Most Spectacular Homes on Earth?”
Mr. Smith grabbed Boyd’s hand and bent it backward. Boyd curled up in pain. “Pay attention, Mr. Capwell. This isn’t about you. The important thing here is that something was stolen from Mr. Grove and he wants it back. Your only concern should be helping us locate the object and the people who took it.” Mr. Smith released Boyd’s hand.
“You think I had something to do with it?” Boyd asked.
“You were the host of the show,” Mr. Smith said.
“But you’re telling me it was a fraud. If I was in on it, why would I use my own name? How stupid do you think I am?”
“You’re an actor,” Mr. Brown said, as if that explained everything.
“I’m a victim here, too,” Boyd said. “I thought this was my big break, and now you’re telling me it’s not. I don’t even have the footage to use on my reel.” Boyd saw Mr. Smith glance at his hand again, and he held it up in surrender.
“What can you tell us about the producers?” Mr. Smith asked.
“Lucy Carmichael came to the set of a commercial I was working on and offered me the job. It was the first time I’d met her. A couple days later I was on a plane to Palm Beach.”
Mr. Brown glanced at Boyd in the mirror again. “
Didn’t that strike you as unusual? Wouldn’t you ordinarily have to audition for a job that big?”
“I’ve sent my résumé and tapes to hundreds of casting directors and production companies over the years,” Boyd said. “She said the current host had quit unexpectedly, right in the middle of production, and they had to move fast. They had no time for a lengthy audition process, so they watched some of the tapes that had piled up. They liked mine and that was that. It was a huge break for me, and they paid me SAG scale, and my per diem, up front. Why would I question my good fortune?”
“Where did you meet after that?” Mr. Smith asked.
“We didn’t. The next time we talked was over the phone, and it was to arrange my travel.”
“Did they give you a script or any special instructions?”
“There was no script. They didn’t even give me any background on the house. They wanted everything to be fresh, for me to experience the house for the first time with the audience. The only direction I got was to keep things moving, and to pretend like the camera was a friend on the tour with me.”
“Were you aware ahead of time that the old man was going to land on the roof?”
“He was a fake, too?” Boyd asked.
“Of course he was,” Mr. Brown said. “What are the odds of a guy losing control of his parasail and landing on the roof the same day that a fake TV show is in the house stealing stuff?”
“Whatever they stole must really be special for you to go to so much trouble and expense to retrieve it,” Boyd said. “I wish I could be more help.”
“You haven’t been any help,” Mr. Smith said.
“That’s not fair,” Boyd said. “I know Carter lost something here, but so did I. This is a crushing blow to me. I thought I’d hit the big-time.”
“Really?” Mr. Brown said. “Then why were you auditioning for a mouthwash commercial two days after wrapping your first episode?”
“Maybe it was to get some of that mouthwash,” Mr. Smith said, turning his head away from Boyd. “It smells like an unflushed toilet back here.”