The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Boxed Set, page 70
part #1 of Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Series
I scolded myself. My imagination was working overtime. After the way Du-ri had sent the Japanese women to me, I was seeing deception and manipulation in everything.
We found a spot about eight strides up from where we’d parted with Suri and set our suits down. I scanned the woods to get an idea of the binoculars’ effectiveness. It was surprisingly easy finding the little Malaysian, even in the heavy woods. She moved smoothly among the trees, occasionally disappearing completely, then reappearing.
“These must have some sort of software enhancement, something that picks out color and shape—” Something pale blocked my vision.
I set the binoculars down.
Pitsamai had taken her clothes off. “She’ll be a while. And you’ll want to give her some time to change. Unless you want to watch her?”
“Du-ri should know better than to test me like this.”
Pitsamai pulled the binoculars from my hand. “Du-ri has nothing to do with this. All he cares about is his next promotion. And all I care about is my own needs.”
She pressed against me. Wildflowers tickled my nose. She was authentically coming on to me. Sure, maybe there was a hint of spite in her voice, but it wasn’t some complex maneuver by Du-ri. My hand slid down her side to her hip, then without thinking, around to the small of her back and down to her butt.
I pulled away. “I’m…sorry. I didn’t—”
She kissed me, and her hand drifted down my chest to my belt. She began unbuckling it, and I realized how long I had been without Ericka. The difference between the two was jarring—Pitsamai with her narrower frame and paler skin, Ericka with her curves and her pixie-like flirtation. There was no denying Pitsamai’s beauty. She was flawless, not yet touched by life like Ericka was.
My heart was pounding dangerously, and every part of me wanted to toss aside all my worries and lay this woman on the ground.
But I couldn’t. Even if it wasn’t part of some scheme to test me, I couldn’t.
I took Pitsamai’s hand from my belt. “I really, really wish I could do this.”
She pouted. “You’re supposed to be a good lover.”
“I can be. But…I’m attached. And what I’ve been trained to do, it’s part of the job. I’d rather not ever consider someone like you part of the job.”
“I think that was meant to be sweet.”
“Yeah. If I wasn’t attached, and we weren’t working together…”
Her pout slowly transformed into a smile. “Maybe some other time.”
I scolded myself for wondering what would happen if that came about. What mattered was the risk she was exposing the group to.
And exposing me to.
I pulled the binoculars up. Suri was mostly hidden behind a tree. I set the binoculars back down and watched Pitsamai dress.
“You aren’t so shy now,” she said. She paused in pulling her pants up. “Change your mind?”
“Nothing says I can’t appreciate the view.” My radio hissed. I brought the binoculars back up. “Go ahead.”
Suri said, “Ready.”
I spotted her. Waving. “I see you. See if you can—”
She dashed behind the tree. Gone .
“Suri? Are you there?”
There was a hint of a blur. Maybe. I followed it, lost track of it, thought I saw it again.
“Suri?”
Pitsamai brushed her shoulder against mine. “You lost your sneak-thief?”
“These suits. The technology is—”
“Stolen.” She chuckled. “Like everything they do.”
They. Not we . I keyed the radio. “Hold position, Suri. We’re changing into our suits and heading down.”
“Okay.” Suri sounded like she might be giggling. The technology must have been liberating to someone like her.
I was thankful to get my suit on, twice as thankful for Pitsamai to get hers on. It had to be enough to take her mind off flirting. I couldn’t take her up close to the compound without knowing she was fully dialed in. When we hooked up with Suri, Pitsamai seemed calm, maybe even resigned.
Suri took the lead again, and I stayed close to her. Trang sent an encrypted text, a short burst that told us to connect to the drone feed.
Pitsamai set her back against a tree and opened the computing device she’d brought with her. After a minute or so of poking around, the video feed flowed into our tac-net.
In the center of an uninterrupted patch of woodlands, the compound was like a giant divot that exposed rich soil. White buildings, gray concrete roads, the faint shadow of the surrounding chain-link fence—the place looked more like a small town than a prison.
The infrared overlay revealed narrow, paved roads that were like black strands of a spider’s web. We were a few hundred feet from one of those roads. There was no traffic, no hum of motor, only birds chirping and bugs buzzing.
The road terminated at a gate, far from the heart of the compound.
I tagged that gate and a point east of our current position, then dictated a text for Trang: Can you keep the road between these points under surveillance? I want to follow this road in. Likelihood of mines is close to zero.
Trang sent back a confirmation.
“Suri, get us to this road.” I highlighted the tag. “We’ll stay close to the woods, but a remote road sounds too good not to check out.”
Once we reached the tagged spot, we turned our suits on and fell into a fast walk. In the bright of day, moving in the suit was like boiling in my own sweat, but the drone’s advanced optics didn’t pick up even a blur. Worth it.
When we reached the point where the road curved toward the gate, I moved back into the woods—slow and cautious.
There was a shack at the gate, with two guards inside. Bored. The road continued on past the shack, eventually forking. It looked like the left branch climbed up to the rest of the compound and the other headed into a lower area.
Residential? Storage?
We had video of the entry from my binoculars, and video of the compound from the drone. It wouldn’t take much to figure out the particulars.
I texted Trang again: Heading back.
She put the drone over the road, and we began the trip back. Pitsamai was dragging, and I was feeling it myself. My back was spasming again. Suri patiently scouted for us.
Red flashed on the tac-net.
Vehicles were heading toward us!
We exited the road at a jog. I had to help Pitsamai the last few feet. We dropped flat and waited.
Seconds passed, then the sound of heavy engines shot down the tunnel created by the trees and their overhanging branches. I risked a look with my binoculars: armored personnel carriers. Three of them. A uniformed security guard—more like a soldier in jungle camouflage—stood in an open hatch on each vehicle, casually leaning against a heavy machine gun mounted on top.
Had Fraley and Jones known about the vehicles? Had Ichi ?
We stayed off the road and stuck to thicker sections of the woods. The APCs had rattled me even more than the network of roads.
The compound would have cost millions to put together. Tens of millions. We weren’t dealing with some delusional idiot who happened to have a few dozen mercenaries at his disposal. This was a small military operation. Du-ri’s confidence wasn’t just misplaced, it was dangerous. We would need helicopters and rocket launchers to pull off the rescue, and even that would be a problem.
I was quickly losing hope that I could rescue Ichi.
Chapter 9
Moonlight poured through open drapes, highlighting the furniture of my room and the delightful curve of Pitsamai’s back. Her dark hair tracked across my chest and abdomen, tickling me, driving me mad with desire. A ceiling fan hummed overhead, but it couldn’t cool the heat coming off of us. My bed creaked softly as she shifted down, tracing her tongue over me, sucking me. She threw her head back and shook out her hair, chuckling as her breasts swayed, inviting, pale as the sheets in the dark of my room. I groaned despite myself. We were being too loud. Someone was sure to hear us, but all I could think of was grabbing her, squeezing her, breathing her scent in, kissing her lips, licking the soft curve of her belly, and tasting her as she moaned.
But my arms wouldn’t move. My legs were dead.
And I remembered that I wasn’t in my room. I was strapped to a surgical table.
Pitsamai brushed her hair back, swaying and rocking like a dancer following a building beat. “Tell me, who are you?”
I gasped. “You know.”
Her dark eyes drilled into me, and she smiled. “Who?”
“Stefan. Stefan Mendoza. ”
She kissed me, and the sound of metal scraping came to me just as something sharp ran over my gums, then sliced through my cheeks. Blood spurted into my eyes, and my jaw fell open. She had sliced through the muscles and flesh. I choked on the dark, thick fluid. Agony shot through the lower half of my face. I tried to turn, to get the blood out of the back of my throat but couldn’t.
Pitsamai sat back and arched her back. Moonlight flashed bright, and blood dripped blackly from an intricate array of curved razors that worked like mandibles inside the stretched flesh of her mouth. She sucked the blades back in and licked some of the blood from her lips, but plenty had already dripped onto her breasts.
“Who are you?” she cooed.
I couldn’t give her the answer she wanted, even if I knew it.
She pursed her dark lips, pouting. “So brave. So fearless. You won’t break, no matter what. Is that it? Nothing can make you scream?”
She slid her tongue over me again, down my shaft, over my balls.
Then I heard the whispering scrape of the razors again.
Just before the pain. A pain like nothing I’d ever known.
I lurched up in my bed, gasping, touching what was left of me to be sure it was still there. I threw the sheets back, half expecting to see Pitsamai’s blood-covered body beside me.
I was alone.
Ghostly moonlight traced outlines of furniture.
The fan hummed.
The bed was damp where I had broken into a sweat.
I had no idea how long I’d been dreaming, but it was intense enough for me to feel it still. My tongue ran along the inside of my mouth, checking again, just to be sure.
It was the stress, the realization that the compound Ichi was being held prisoner inside was more than even Du-ri had expected. We were vastly outnumbered, and the advantage we had in tech wasn’t going to be enough, not unless we found some vulnerability that hadn’t jumped out so far.
I checked the clock: a little after midnight .
There were places not too far away where the night had just begun, the haunts of the young and the beautiful. I remembered Pitsamai—the dream and the reality—and felt so out of place.
I showered, dressed, and called for a car. With a human driver. There was already enough poverty in the area that I didn’t feel right denying someone a chance at some money.
The cab was an old American sedan, the few metal parts rusting, the mostly plastic parts cracking. I guessed it might have been red once. The driver was a skinny man with dark, curly hair and a square face. His accent was almost too thick to understand. I flashed him a wad of local currency and told him to take me someplace that would be open for a while, someplace where I could get a drink, someplace full of pretty people. He nodded vigorously, and the car’s engine gurgled and spat before we finally accelerated out of the parking lot.
It was cool out, and the air was sweet, turning smoky as we approached a section of the city that was brightly lit and filled with music, restaurants, nightclubs, and who knew what else. If I wanted to spend the money, I could probably go as low as a human could want in a place like this.
The driver let me out in front of an establishment that was set off from the rest. It had an actual parking lot full of actual cars. Expensive and sporty cars. Two beefy men in muscle shirts stood in front of tinted glass doors that hid the goings-on inside from the short line of people waiting to gain admission, but my attention was drawn to the deck attached to the side—probably twenty feet extended beyond the building, and apparently overlooking part of the valley. Cables ran from the roof to the deck end posts, dangling gold lights that swayed in the cool night breeze.
I gave the driver the wad and started toward the entry, stopping when I caught the flutter of long, dark hair in my peripheral vision.
Some instinct directed me to veer off from the front entry. I casually strolled to a black iron lamppost and leaned against it so that it was between me and whatever it was I’d seen .
Then I turned just enough to see what one part of my brain had registered before the rest had seen.
Pitsamai brushed her hair back as she walked across the parking lot toward a polished vehicle—a make and model I hadn’t seen before yesterday. She wore a strapless, frilly top that was black, with some sort of bright flower pattern scrolling over her left breast, and a pair of black shorts. Her smile was radiant, and I was sure that no matter how many young and beautiful women were in the nightclub, Pitsamai had turned heads all night. Woo-young was at her side, chuckling. He scanned the parking lot before opening the door.
They climbed inside, now hidden from the outside world.
But not from me. I scratched my cheek casually and switched to infrared, smiling as they kissed, and his hand slid inside her top and up to her breasts.
I turned away.
Never have relations with your teammates. The complications…
When the LoDu vehicle pulled out of the parking lot, I strode to one of the beefy guys, held up another wad of bills, and pointed to the deck. “Puedo obtener un poco de privacidad?” I normally hated using my father’s language, and it probably showed, but I really needed the privacy.
Maybe it was my windbreaker, jeans, and T-shirt that convinced the muscle that I wasn’t interested in going inside, or maybe it was the first few gray hairs that had started cropping up in my sideburns. Whichever, thick fingers wrapped around the bills, and the guy waved me past with a muttered, “Adelante.”
I settled at the table where I could put my back to the valley below. There was a sliding glass door in the middle of the wall facing the deck, and I could see inside.
A waitress came out to check on me. She was cute, full-bodied, and probably far too young for the sort of work she was doing, but she wore a stylish black dress that spoke of a fearlessness that had to be admired and had her hair styled in graceful waves that captured my attention. She brought me tequila and hung around a little longer than she needed to, which felt nice. The wind teased at her hair as we talked about the weather and other nonsense, and she ran her fingers through the waves slowly, teasingly. She made a point of dropping her name—Taliana—and mentioning in broken English that she was going to be leaving when the place shut down for the night.
She put a lot of salsa in her walk as she strutted back in, enough to distract me from my task for a minute.
I sighed and pulled my data device out.
Trang’s drone imagery had been merged with the video we’d captured and some readily available data on road, water, and electrical infrastructure for the area. The isolated gate we’d spotted protected a back road that split off to a road that rose up to the main compound, just as I’d expected, and also dropped down into what appeared to be a motor pool. Attached to that was a large building that was almost certainly the security facility. We had agreed on an estimate of five APCs. The three we’d seen were already too much for us to deal with, but we needed to be accurate, and five seemed a realistic number.
I drilled down into the video, remembering the compound we’d attacked in the VR tower. That section was the southernmost part of the place, and the sunken area was there.
Mining that spot began to make sense. There were so few vulnerabilities. The most appealing potential attack point was a quadrangle, a living area attached to the side of the compound opposite the remote gate and looking down on the motor pool.
I flipped to the resources Du-ri had available to him on short notice. We could get two military surplus helicopters flown in from Honduras, but that would take a couple weeks, assuming they weren’t discovered and destroyed.
How long had Ichi been there, and how long would they keep a prisoner like her alive? When would they turn to torture and…worse?
We needed proof of life to invest any further resources.
Or I could go in on my own.
The thought gnawed at me. The odds of success weren’t great, but with the chameleon suit, the right weapons mix, and the right approach, I had a chance, especially if Pitsamai could give me some Gridhound payloads to drop on their systems once I got inside the perimeter.
I thought back to her flesh, the razors slicing through my gums, my…
What if I survived the engagement at the compound and was captured? Could I go through torture again? Of course I wouldn’t break. That was the curse the Agency had inflicted upon me, a conditioning I would give up without a second thought. But would my sanity hold a second time?
Who do you work for?
What do you want?
Who are you?
I rubbed my temples, then took another sip of the drink, no longer so sure my sanity had survived my captivity in Seoul.
Lights flashed across the building and deck. A sports car—a BMW—sped to the far corner of the parking lot and stopped. Two black SUVs immediately parked on either side, and hard-looking people in black suits hopped out—five men and a woman. They were a mix of locals and people with a more distinctly European look—lighter hair, paler skin, taller.
A man and woman climbed out of the sports car. He was middle-aged, probably a bit past fifty, with graying hair slicked back, wrinkles on tanned pink skin that said he spent time outdoors, and a prominent chin that ruined an otherwise good-looking face.
The woman wore a sleeveless dress that revealed plenty of bronze flesh. A light sweater was thrown over a toned arm. Blond-streaked brown hair was pulled back into a bun, emphasizing a face with a button nose and soft, shapely lips. Her stride was graceful, confident, and she gave off the sort of air only the most confident woman could. Long legs, high heels—it was hard not to stare, even though she was clearly older than any of the women in the club.
