I could feel these two choices weighing heavily on me and neither seemed good, but since we were already here at this airstrip with an awaiting plane, I decided to go with the easier choice.
So I turned to Maks and laid it all out on the table. “There’s something you should know,” I told him to get his attention away from the soldiers.
He seemed to know we’d be asking him for help, and when he turned to look at me, he seemed quite amused. “And that is?”
I reached over and placed a hand on Dutch’s arm. “I’m hoping to marry this man in the next year or so, Maks. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my whole life, and if I leave this earth before I get to say ‘I do,’ my ghost will haunt you to the ends of the earth and I will not rest until I’ve driven you completely insane.”
Maks’s gaze never left mine and there was a mixture of emotions behind those eyes. “I know what it means to lose your true love, Abigail,” he said finally, and I understood that he was referring to his late wife. “You may not trust me, but you need me. Together we can leave here. Apart we’ll never make it out alive.”
I nodded and motioned to Dutch. “Give him back his knife.”
Reluctantly, Dutch handed Grinkov back his weapon.
“Now give him the assault rifle,” I said.
Dutch hesitated.
“Don’t trust him,” I implored. “Trust me.”
With even more reluctance Dutch handed over the big weapon. “Now,” I said, wriggling out of the jacket and lifting Maks’s knife out of his hand, “what we need is a distraction.” I then shucked the boots, removed my stun gun from the inside of my dress, and made a very large tear in the front of the dress with the knife. Handing the dagger back to Maks, I stepped out onto the muddy runway.
“Abby!” I heard Dutch whisper harshly. “Get the hell back here!”
I ignored him and trotted down the length of the field. The soldiers all had their backs to me, so I was able to get quite close to them before one of them spotted me. He shouted an alarm and the guns all swiveled to aim directly at me.
I swayed on my feet dramatically and began to wail, tugging at the tear in the top of my dress to expose as much cleavage as possible. “Help me!” I begged them. “Please! I’ve been attacked and I need help!”
The three of them eyed one another silently, and I knew they were wondering if they should shoot me or come down to investigate.
“I’m hurt!” I told them, and pulled at the dress even more. “Right here!” I added, pointing to one boob. And then I dropped to the ground in what I hoped was a believable faint, curling the stun gun into my left hand just underneath my torso.
The soldiers argued for a moment or two until one of them got down and approached me cautiously. I held perfectly still.
He said something I didn’t understand as he got close, so I moaned and moved a little to show him I wasn’t a threat . . . just hurt and harmless. He came close enough to hover over me and poke my hip with his boot.
The other men called to him, and he turned to reply. I used the moment to roll over and kick him in the nuts as hard as I could.
The soldier sank to his knees, clutching his groin, and I sat straight up and shocked him in the side of his neck while gunfire flew out from the surrounding foliage nearby.
By the time my stun gun ran out of juice, my target was unconscious and twitching.
Someone stepped close. “Good job, Edgar.”
I looked up and grinned like I’d just received a gold star. “Thanks, cowboy.”
The roar of an engine caught my attention, and I saw that Grinkov was behind the wheel of the jeep, moving it and its two dead occupants off the landing strip. Dutch dropped my borrowed jacket next to me with the boots. “Here,” he said, before bending down to drag my guy off the field too.
“Don’t kill him!” I told him firmly. He looked disappointed, but he didn’t argue and he didn’t put a bullet in the guy either, so I relaxed.
Maks got out and waved us to the plane. We ran quickly down the field only to fling ourselves back into the tall grass at the edge when one of the planes came roaring down the runway straight for us.
Dutch helped me to my feet after it’d whizzed by and lifted off. “There’ll be a mad rush outta here now that the runway’s clear.”
We kept to the tall grass and made our way down to Grinkov’s plane, which was third in line to take off.
Eddington opened the door and Dutch lifted me up. I smiled at him. “You made it out!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, helping me while I scrambled through the door. “It was a bit tricky, but Mr. Grinkov managed to bribe a guard who allowed me the use of his jeep.”
Dutch and Grinkov both made it aboard too and Maks wasted no time hurrying to the front of the plane and shouting through the cabin door, “Take us out of here, Bruce!”
“Get everybody strapped in!” the captain shouted.
I hustled over to a seat and clipped my seat belt. Dutch landed next to me, setting down the small black box that held Intuit while he secured his own belt. Meanwhile, Maks helped a trembling Eddington with the door and then motioned for him to sit down.
The plane jolted forward and my head knocked painfully against the side of the wall. Maks’s poor butler hadn’t yet reached his seat at the back of the plane and went tumbling head over heels right in front of me.
“Mr. Eddington!” I cried, trying to steady him as the plane bumped and jostled along.
He tried to get up and fell right over again, so I latched on to his leg and ordered him to hold still. “Just wait until we’re in the air!” I commanded. “And hold on to anything you can!”
The butler reached for one of the table legs, which was bolted in place, and we bounced and jostled all the way down the rough terrain. “Come on, come on, come on!” I prayed, willing the plane to lift off.
Eddington’s legs were trembling under my hand and I moved my grip to his ankle to hold him steady as we finally, blissfully began to lift into the air. I almost cheered, but something caught my eye and I let go of Eddington’s ankle abruptly, all my senses alert and alarmed.
The butler hardly noticed; he was so busy getting to his feet and struggling to his seat at the back of the plane, limping as he went without his walking stick.
I felt Dutch’s eyes on me. “You okay?”
I turned in my chair away from Eddington. “Look at his shoes!” I told him, discreetly pointing behind me.
Dutch gave me a quizzical look, but when he eyed Eddington’s shoes, he seemed to understand exactly what I was getting at.
“I’ll kill him,” Dutch said, ready to confront the butler about the brand-new shoelace on his right shoe, while the well-worn lace on the other exactly matched the one left next to me on the day I was nearly strangled to death.
Before he had a chance to move, however, the door to the lavatory at the back of the plane flung open, and out came a real, live ghost wielding a most unusual-looking gun.
Chapter Sixteen
“Mandy?” I gasped, disbelieving my own eyes for a moment.
Her face and hands were still tinged in blue around the edges and she smiled wickedly at me. “Hey there!” she sang, pointing the muzzle my way.
I froze. I’d seen that gun in a picture back at the CIA headquarters when it had still been mounted to the drone. “Shit,” Dutch swore.
Mandy’s smile got even bigger. “Surprise!” she said to him. She then reached behind her with her free hand and waved a black strap with a clip attached, and as I looked more closely at her, I could see that she was strapped into a black harness hidden under her dress. The belt she appeared to have been hung by had been a prop. “I got this from the set of a TV show I worked on once. I thought someday I’d use it on Rick; you know, play dead, force him to admit how much he cared about me. But using it for this turned out so much better.”
“You faked your own death?” Maks said, and I knew he was slower on the uptake than we were
.
“She stole the drone,” I said, putting so many of the puzzle pieces together. Looking at Dutch, I said, “That’s the real reason why my radar had first pulled out Des Vries’s photo back at the CIA headquarters! Remember I said he was involved but tangentially?”
Dutch nodded, and Mandy beamed at me; she looked like a woman who couldn’t wait to brag about what she’d done. “Yep. Rick’s a son of a bitch, but he’s smart and he knew his way around weaponry. He never thought I could hold a thought in my head, so he used to let me watch him steal this or that, then resell it to the highest bidder. I learned a lot from that bastard, and when word got out that the U.S. had developed a drone that could detect a specific person’s aura from half a mile up, he started looking into how to steal it. Lucky me, right around then one of Rick’s bank accounts was hacked and he lost fifty thousand, and the hacker made sure to let him know who’d done it. Rick was so pissed about it that he got drunk and confessed to me that ten years ago he’d smacked an old girlfriend one too many times and she’d died, so he’d dumped her body where nobody could find it, then left Holland and never went back. He said the old girlfriend’s family had dogged him for years and the hacker was her cousin, who was looking for some payback.
“That’s when my idea to get rid of Rick and steal the drone really took shape. I sent an e-mail to the hacker; I told him I knew where Rick had dumped the body of his cousin, and I’d tell him where she was if he’d help me with a little mission that would make us both rich and let him get his revenge on Rick. He took the bait and we began to plot it out.”
“So after you recruited Diedrich you talked Oksana into seducing the pilot,” I said, working my way past Diedrich Wyngarden to the other players in her devious plot.
“I did,” she admitted. “Oksana was a pretty girl, but she was super dumb. I met her in Ottawa on a modeling gig and we kept in touch here and there. When she got into trouble with the cops, she called me to see if I could help her, and I was the one that convinced Rick to get her new papers so she could sneak into the U.S. He wanted five thousand dollars for it, but I talked him down to two and told her that she’d owe me a favor someday.
“I snooped into Rick’s surveillance on the pilot, and I saw that he liked to hire an escort every once in a while from the Strip. Oksana was already working for an agency and she played her role perfectly, but she was a loose end who had to be dealt with.”
“Just like the pilot and Diedrich were also loose ends,” I said. “So you killed them all?”
“Why leave a loose thread when it’s so easy to snip it off ?” she replied smartly. She was definitely proud of herself.
“How did you know Rick would get detained in Israel?” I asked her.
She laughed again. “Oh, honey,” she said. “What do you take me for, an amateur?”
“Yes, actually,” I told her, only now noticing the intelligence and cunning in her eyes. Why hadn’t I seen that before?
Mandy seemed even more delighted by my reaction. “My whole life I’ve been underestimated,” she said. “Everybody sees the hair and the boobs and they think dumb bimbo. Well, I learned how to use that to my advantage, didn’t I? Even Rick never suspected. A few days before Rick left Jordan, I made sure to give one of my flight attendant buddies working his flight a special meal to be served to him right after takeoff. I then called ahead to the Israeli authorities and told them to watch for a first-class passenger that might be in need of medical assistance arriving on a jet out of Jordan making an emergency landing in Tel Aviv. I also told them the passenger was flying under an assumed name and that his real name was Richard Des Vries, a wanted weapons dealer.
“I knew my plan had gone off without a hitch when my friend called me in a panic and said that the meal she’d served my boyfriend must have been spoiled, because he’d been taken off the plane in Tel Aviv with a severe case of food poisoning.”
Something else binged off my radar. “You murdered Kozahkov,” I said knowingly.
She nodded. “I did,” she said. “He and Oksana knew each other from the old country, so I used her to call him and arrange a meeting for me and Boklovich.”
“But you killed him before you met with Boklovich. Why?”
Mandy shrugged. “When I walked into the penthouse and found you there, I knew something was up. So while you were in the bathroom talking to Rivers, I snooped around and found a file on Kozahkov lying on the counter. I knew you guys were about to set up a meeting with him to try to get to Boklovich before the drone went to auction, so all I had to do was send him an e-mail from Rick’s laptop, which he hides in a cubby behind the couch, and which you guys obviously didn’t know about, and voilà! The meeting location changed and I was able to take him out.”
“But why?” I pressed. “I mean, you needed him to get to Boklovich, right?”
“I needed him to get me an in to Boklovich a little less than I needed him to lead you guys to me,” she said. “Besides, I discovered that file on Rick you guys hid in the drawer, and in there I found a contact number for a friend of Rick’s that you guys didn’t even know about who had a connection to Vasilii, and he gave me Boklovich’s number; so I called him and after I dropped Kozahkov’s name and told him what I had, he agreed to meet with me and we set up the auction.”
“You made those calls the day you ran away from me at Eaton Centre, right ?”
Mandy smiled ear to ear. “I can’t believe you fell for that. Look who’s a dumb-ass now, huh?”
“Why’d you kill Sheikh Omar?” I asked her. I wanted to keep her talking so that one of us could come up with a plan, ’cause if Mandy stopped talking, I had little doubt she’d start shooting.
“Rick sold me to the sheikh for a week. After two nights I managed to escape. But I was alone in Dubai without money or ID, so I had to go back to Rick and beg him to get me out of there. If Omar hadn’t been such a cheapass when Rick tried to sell him some arms, he probably would have left me there, but he used me as an excuse to drop out of the deal. That was the night I vowed to get even with Rick, and I also vowed to kill Sheikh Omar.”
I eyed Maks nervously; he was staring incredulously at Mandy, like he couldn’t believe she was actually capable of carrying out such an intelligent plan. “Why’d you try to kill Maks?” I asked.
“I wasn’t aiming at Maks,” she said, looking steadily at me.
Gulp.
“Okay,” I said, still trying to keep her talking. “Then why me?”
“I don’t like you,” she said icily. “You were mean to me.”
Double gulp.
“So what happens now, Mandy?” Dutch asked.
Mandy’s eyes were exactly the kind you’d expect from a criminal genius, filled with satisfaction. “Now that I’ve gotten my revenge?” she asked snidely. When no one answered, she said, “Well, Agent Rivers, I guess Maks orders his pilot to fly to Hong Kong. I’m meeting with a few interested clients there, and since I’ll be offering them both the prototype on the seat next to you and the disk you’re carrying in your pocket, I’m pretty sure I’ll be a very wealthy woman.”
“The software on Intuit is bogus,” I told her quickly, trying to bargain for our lives. “And Dutch’s disk is protected by a password. It’ll be useless to you, Mandy.”
The gun in Mandy’s hand came back to point directly at my chest. “I only need the program to work past one more demonstration,” she said, “which I’m pretty sure it will do, and I’ll give your fiancé exactly five seconds to give me that password, honey, or I’ll pump every dart in this gun right into you, and no antidote will save you. What do you think the chances are that he’ll cough it up?”
Dutch reached into his pocket and pulled out the disk, waving it at her. “Here!” he said, his voice a bit unsteady, and that broke my heart. “I’ll give you the password! Just don’t hurt her, okay?”
Mandy took a step toward Dutch to grab the disk, and as she did, Eddington launched himself out of his chair and tackled her to the g
round. We were all so stunned that, for a moment, no one moved to help him, but Dutch finally managed to free himself from his seat belt and hurried to grab Mandy by the shoulders while Eddington pulled the gun out of her hands.
The butler then stepped back, pointed the gun at Mandy, and fired.
Something red flew right into her chest and Mandy’s fingers were quick to tug out the dart and throw it on the floor.
Dutch let go of her and backed away. Looking angrily at Maks’s butler, he shouted, “You jackass! I had her restrained!”
Meanwhile Mandy began shrieking. “Where’s the antidote? Someone give me the antidote!”
Dutch looked at me and I shook my head. He shook his too. Neither of us had our kits.
We were so distracted by Mandy that we didn’t immediately notice Eddington reach down and pick up the disk. I saw too late that he was now pointing the gun at us. “William!” Maks said, getting out of his seat and stepping angrily toward his butler. “Lower your weapon!”
Eddington pocketed the CD calmly. “No.”
I stood up too, absolutely furious with him. “I protected you!” I shouted at him. “When Maks was suspicious of you, I protected you!”
Eddington’s eyebrows lowered dangerously. “You ratted me out,” he growled, swiveling the gun to point right at my chest. “You told him all about my plans and then you attempted to blackmail me!”
My jaw dropped. “What plans? What blackmail?”
Eddington wasn’t buying that I knew nothing of what he was talking about; I could see it in his eyes, which were seething with anger. “I’d been working on copying his paintings for years!” he yelled at me. “Quietly painting away in my room to re-create the artwork and replace it all in one night just before I left him . . . until you came along and told him exactly what I was plotting!”
I shook my head in disbelief. “I made all that up!” I shouted, thinking back to what I’d said, and how I’d been inspired by the creativity vibe I’d read in William’s aura. “Jesus, that’s what you were really up to?”