Fatal Heat

  NO SIGNAL.

  Damn. He really wanted to hear her voice. Tell her about the doctor’s visit, about the cheeky squirrel staring at him from the branch of a tree outside the clinic while the doctor was bent over his leg.

  Shit.

  He tried again fifteen minutes later.

  NO SIGNAL.

  Five minutes later.

  NO SIGNAL.

  Max drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Damn but he wanted to hear her voice. Right now. She had this most amazing voice. Soft but clear, just a little husky in bed.

  Last night she’d whispered, “Now, Max” right into his ear, just as her little cunt started pulling on him, her breath washing over his ear. He’d started moving faster, harder, and it had set her off.

  Oh, Christ. Don’t think about that. Because his entire body had flushed with heat and his cock stirred again at the memory. It had been like that all day, with a real embarrassing moment on the doctor’s cot when he’d remembered her kissing his scars and he’d started getting an erection.

  That earned him a real odd look from Dr. McBride, former college linebacker. Max had had to think of Afghanistan to get his cock back down again.

  Oh God, he missed her. He wanted to be back in her apartment now, on her deck. Petting her dog, sipping a glass of wine with her. Watching this spectacular sunset. Right now. Right . . . fucking . . . now.

  The cell phone’s buzz startled him. The signal was back.

  A text message. He glanced at the display. It was from Paige. Not only was her number memorized on his SIM card, it was emblazed in his head.

  His blood stopped cold when he saw the message.

  SOS - P.

  Fuck. She was in trouble.

  Max stepped hard on the accelerator.

  A loud, angry buzzing filled her head, the ground underneath her thumping up and down. She bounced each time, coming down jarringly hard on a wooden surface that had knobs and lumps on it. It hurt. Her arm hurt. Everything hurt, particularly her head. It felt as if someone were hammering spikes into her skull.

  She tried to cushion the bounces but her hands wouldn’t move. Was she paralyzed? No, her fingers could move, but her hands couldn’t.

  It was impossible to think with this loud buzzing noise, the jarring motions rolling her back and forth and up and down. Sometimes the ground beneath her suddenly dropped and she fell with a painful jolt.

  It was dark, but bright pinpricks of light came through.

  None of this made any sense. Where was she? What—

  And then it all came back in a sickening, painful rush. The two men. Max, shot and bleeding. Silvia, on the run. The file Silvia had sent, with the terrible data.

  She was lying on her side, hooded, her hands in restraints, totally unable to counter the painful jolts.

  Men’s voices over the deep buzzing noise. An engine. A boat engine. The smell of brine penetrating the smelly material of her hood. She was on a boat with those two men. They were taking her to Santo Domingo.

  She surreptitiously tried to see if her cell phone was still in her pants pocket. If it was, she could be C sht b traced through it. A sudden surge of hope pulsed through her as she rolled with the rolling of the boat, trying to bring her wrists around to touch her pockets.

  Nothing. Her cell phone was gone. Whether they’d thrown it away or left it behind in her apartment, it was of no use to her.

  The deep buzzing of the engine changed tone, lowered. The boat swung sideways. They were landing.

  She breathed through the sudden panic. Once she was on that island, she was lost. No one could find her—not even Max, even if he knew where she was. The facility had over fifty thousand square feet of research labs, culture labs, propagation houses, and equipment sheds, plus a huge hangar-like building called the Repository, a bank of varieties for future testing.

  There’d be plenty of privacy. No one would hear her screaming. The two men could do to her what they wanted, with no one the wiser.

  For all anyone knew, she would disappear off the face of the earth.

  She could only hope that Max had found the thumb drive. But even if he did, how could he know where they had taken her?

  The boat’s engine cut and it rocked gently on the water. A strong hand wrapped itself around her upper arm and pulled sharply, taking her by surprise. She’d been planning on pretending to still be unconscious but when he pulled her stumblingly upright, she automatically scrambled to find her footing.

  One of the men was at her back and prodded her roughly onto a plank. At the end, unmistakeably, was solid ground.

  She was on the island.

  And she was lost.

  Chapter Seven

  “Paige!” Max pounded on the door with his fist. “Paige, open up!”

  There was no sound. No quick footsteps, no voice, nothing.

  Max raised his fist again, then brought it quietly to rest against the door. He rested his forehe Fting font sad against it, disgusted at himself.

  Shit. He was a SEAL. He’d trained for years. This was not how to stage an infiltration. What the fuck was the matter with him? He knew better than this.

  There was no way of knowing what that SOS message meant, but one thing was certain—Paige needed him. If she was in real trouble, if someone was holding her hostage on the other side of that door, he’d just thrown away every single tactical advantage he had. Just wiped it out.

  If there was someone behind that door, that someone now knew that an angry male was on the other side. He could hurt Paige, kill her.

  Max broke out in sweat. Maxwell Wright, whose heart rate never increased in battle, was sweating like a pig, the sweat of anxiety. Super-cool SEAL, tested and tried in the battlefield. He was good in combat, he had the medals to prove it.

  Now look at him. Sweating, panicky, ready to barge into a dangerous, unknown situation—which ran counter to every single thing he’d ever been taught. Any instructor worth his salt would have kicked his ass.

  He knew better than this. He had to do better than this. Paige needed him. Whatever was wrong, a quiet, controlled response was better than a sweaty, panicked one, hands down.

  If his drill instructor had just seen him, he’d have screamed in his face and told him to drop to the grinder and pump out a hundred push-ups.

  Intel. He needed intel.

  He stood an inch from the door, breathing hard, staving off panic. Think! Goddamn it!

  The bottom rim of the huge, golden red sun was close to touching the surface of the sea. The air was filled with golden light, but in an hour it would be dusk, the light gray and unrevealing. Whatever he learned here, it had to be now, with the light.

  Carefully, he made his way around the perimeter of the house. It had the exact same layout as his own. Living room with adjoining kitchen, hallway with two rooms and a bathroom. When he reached the study window, he heard a whine, looked in.

  Max! Max huddled on the floor in a pool of blood. The dog raised his blood-streaked head when he saw him and gave a half-hearted bark.

  Now he was certain that there was no one in the house—otherwise, even wounded as he was, Max would be barking harder.

  Max went back to the front door and froze. How the fuck had he missed this? He had to get his act together because he’d missed what he should have seen right off, if he hadn’t been crazy with fear for Paige.

  Scratches on the backplate. Paige’s front door lock had been picked.

  Evidence, right there, that someone had come for Paige. Was holding her somewhere, right now. Could be hurting her, right this minute.

  The panic dissolved and icy calm took its place. Years of training steadied him, gave him the right place in his head to go to. A place of discipline and training and determination.

  Once Max entered that place, he was invincible. It would take an RPG to take him down.

  He had the key to Paige’s place. A minute later, he was in the house, bending down to the dog.

  “Good boy,” h
e said soothingly, touching Max’s head. Max whined once when he touched the open wound. A furrow, caused by a bullet. Max licked his hand as he studied the wound. It was only a flesh wound. It had bled a lot, but the bleeding had stopped.

  Max went into the bathroom, got a towel and disinfectant, and carefully cleaned the shallow wound as best he could. The dog licked his hand. “It’s okay, boy. You’ll be okay.” The furry tail thumped once on the floor.

  Max noticed blood on the muzzle, unconnected to the head wound.

  Oh, yeah. Good for him.

  “Bit the fucker, did you, Max? Good boy. You’re the best. I hope you tore his fucking throat out.” But looking around, he saw that, besides a few drops of blood near Paige’s desk, no one’s throat had been ripped out.

  Well, that could be remedied.

  “Where’d they take her, boy? Where’s Paige?”

  Astonishingly, Max rose unsteadily to his feet. He stumbled, fell. Before Max could reach down to pet him, reassure him, the dog rose agai Kdogax n and stood.

  He was standing, though he must have been weak from blood loss. He was standing, though in all likelihood he was lightly concussed. He was hurt, but, by God, he was standing.

  He was as brave as any SEAL.

  “Where’s Paige?” Max said again, feeling like an idiot. The dog was smart, but not that smart.

  To his surprise, though, the dog moved slowly, painfully into the living room, stopping at a flower- covered armchair. Max followed.

  Now that he’d calmed down, Max could read the situation in front of him as clearly as if seeing what had happened an hour or so ago. There were two chairs dragged in from the kitchen, one in front of the armchair, one sitting right behind it. Two men, then, flanking Paige. The seat of the armchair was still dented where she’d sat.

  He looked more closely. There was something about the crease on the left hand side of the big seat cushion, corresponding to Paige’s right hand. He dug and came out with something small and metallic.

  A thumb drive.

  Smart, smart Paige. She’d had the presence of mind under threat to leave him something. What? He was distracted by Max. The dog’s coordination was improving by the minute. He was trotting back and forth between where Max sat in front of Paige’s computer and the front door, whining, pointing his nose at the door, clearly exasperated with the human Max who wasn’t getting it.

  Paige went out this door, Max was communicating with every fiber of his doggy being. What’s the matter with you, you moron? Come on, let’s go get her!

  But human Max needed more intel. Going blind into a situation was not good. Max stared at the screen, willing himself to understand what Paige wanted him to know.

  He scrolled briefly through a couple of files randomly. All work related. When he opened them he simply stared, understanding one word in ten. Some were data spreadsheets. Some were graphs. Some lab results. The physics and genetics and biochemistry were way beyond him.

  OK. He’d stand in awe of her education some other time. Right now he needed to know what was in here that could help him find her, and fast.

  When he’d gone over the files three times—fending off Max, who was scrabbling at his leg and whining loudly—he decided to look at them in chronological order, something he should have done immediately.

  The first one—Christ! It had been loaded less than an hour ago. Maybe the last thing she did before the two fucks picked her lock, shot her dog, and spirited her away.

  He finally clicked through and saw a personal message, which he’d missed in his scrolling. From a woman named Silvia, who was apparently a friend. He read through the message and finally reached a grim understanding.

  The company Paige worked for was sitting on a bomb that was about to blow up in its face. A bomb that, at a conservative estimate, was about to cost them millions, maybe billions. Something like this would eventually come out, but from what Max was able to see, right now the only thing standing between the bomb and the world was two super-smart women. One was being chased all over Argentina and the other had been kidnapped.

  He opened his cell, engaged an encryption app designed by the friend he was calling, and waited.

  “Yo. World’s Finest Hacker. Black Hat, White Hat, take your pick. How may I help you?”

  Oh yeah. Cory Mayer, former Delta operator. Max had met him on a cross-training exercise. Cory had been a gifted shooter, but it turned out he was even more gifted with a keyboard, which had turned out handy when an IED had exploded under his badly-armored vehicle outside Nasiriyah seven years ago. He’d left his legs back in Iraq—but not his brains. He’d since recycled to become everyone’s go-to guy for intel.

  “Yo, Hackerman. I’ve got myself a time-sensitive situation here. A possible kidnap victim, works for GenPlant Laboratories. What can you tell me about the company?”

  “Hm. How you been, Maxie boy? You getting over your scratches?”

  Max nearly smiled. Though Cory’s voice was slow and honeyed he could hear wild tapping in the background.

  “Doing fine now, except for this woman. She works for the company, does research work for them. I think she’s come across some information that will hurt the company.”

  “Oh ho!” Cory chortled. “Are we talking babe material, here?”

  “Yeah,” Max said curtly. “And it’s a woman I care about. A lot.”

  There was silence at the other end, but the pounding sounds intensified.

  “Okay.” When he came back online, Cory’s voice was curt and serious. “Here’s what we’ve got. Big company, last year’s profits were half a billion dollars on three billion sales. Has come up with some killer apps—two new types of antibiotics that can overcome resistant e. coli infections and pesticide-resistant fruit trees. And that was just last year. Seems to be humming right along.”

  Okay. “It’s got research facilities in Argentina. What can you tell me about that?”

  Another minute as Cory worked his magic. “Yep. A big research facility four hundred miles south of Buenos Aires.”

  “Anything wonky there?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  Max knew there was but it was clearly still hidden. Not even Cory, brilliant as he was, could see things that weren’t there yet.

  “How about their security?”

  After a minute, Cory said, “Oh.”

  “What? What?”

  “Not good. Someone’s been hiring from Magnum Secure lately. Hiring heavily. I’d say now a good 70 percent of their security staff comes from there. Bad juju, Max.”

  Very bad juju. Magnum Secure was a notoriously corrupt private contractor that had operated extensively in the Sandbox. He’d come across MS operators a lot, and they were aggressive and greedy. The owner seemed to recruit men who cared for nothing but the bottom line. If someone in Paige’s company had been filling its security department with ex-MS contractors, Paige was in trouble.

  None of the operators would draw the line at hurting a woman.

  “The woman in question’s name is Paige Waring, Cory. Like I said, she’s a researcher there. I’m at her house now and there are signs of a struggle. I think she’s been kidnapped because she holds some information about something that went wrong a K we" aligt their lab in Argentina. Where do you think they’d take her? To headquarters? It’s about twenty miles from here.”

  “Pulling up satellite images now . . . no. I don’t think so. It’s a busy facility. There’s a huge parking lot with cars going in and out constantly. My images are from fifteen minutes ago and there’s a lot of movement. Dunno, Max, just seems too public for a kidnapping. I can’t even see any outbuildings where someone could be held.”

  The dog’s whining was stronger now, with a note of urgency in it. He was pawing Max’s leg. The dog went back to the front door, looking over his shoulder at Max, and barked.

  Was Paige being held nearby? Is that what Max was trying to tell him?
>
  “Listen,” he told Cory. “I gotta see about something. Can you send those images to my Gmail account and we’ll talk in five? And see if you can find any databases with other property the corporation might own nearby.”

  “Sure thing,” Cory said. “A woman, huh?”

  “Yeah. Smart and kind and pretty. Exactly the kind of woman fuckheads like to hurt.”

  Max could almost hear Cory’s teeth grinding. His mom had been beaten to death by his dad. He was guaranteed to give Max his best.

  Max opened the front door and the dog flowed out, nose to the ground. To Max’s astonishment, instead of making a grid back and forth to try to pick up Paige’s scent, the dog ran around the house and headed straight for the beach.

  What the fuck?

  He’d been prepared for Max to lose the scent right away. They’d have driven her away in a car. When Max headed for the beach, nose still to the ground, his heart sank. Sweat broke out in every pore.

  Had they killed Paige and buried her on the beach? Their stretch of beach was usually deserted. The beach narrowed along their stretch and the bed was rocky. The popular beach was two miles down—long wide stretches of sand and no rocks underfoot.

  Oh God, now he could see it, as plain as day. Three sets of footprints, two on either side of deeply furrowed tracks. Two men holding up an unconscious woman. Then halfway down the beach, two sets of footprints, one much deeper than the other. The depth of a man carrying an adult woman.

  Max had followed his nose straight to the water, so at least he wasn’t going to find Paige’s body in a shallow grave. The dog was at the water’s edge, moving back and forth anxiously, unable to follow the scent into the sea. The sea that might contain Paige’s body.

  Max rejected that idea violently. Shook it right the hell off. He’d just found her, he wasn’t going to lose her. Not an option.

  Coming closer to the water the footprints were muddled. And there was a long indentation in the sand, with a heavy furrow in the middle. The kind of print a boat with a hull would make.

  He refused to even think that they were putting Paige on the boat to dump her overboard. It was still daylight. Would they risk someone seeing them on open water when there were other, easier options available? Why put Paige in a boat? Ten miles east and you could get onto the largest freeway system in the world and disappear.