Tessa and Riker talked for a while at the bar, then danced some more, returned to the bar, then danced again. Time meant nothing in here. Only moments mattered. Shared moments.
And so, Tessa had no idea how long they’d been in the club when Riker led her up a wooden staircase located in the belly of the building. She found that she needed to use the railing to keep her balance. It’d only been a couple of drinks, but still, the world seemed to be slowly tilting to the side.
With every step, she could feel the music pulsing through the floor, but more distant now. The top of the stairs was another world.
They arrived at a hallway lined with doors, high above the throbbing club.
Now alone and no longer under the pounding spell of the music, Riker grinned. “It’s quieter up here, huh? This way we can talk.”
For a moment she was afraid he was going to direct her into one of the rooms, but he just sat at the top of the stairs and patted the floor beside him. She joined him.
“So, if you go to school in Denver,” he said, “what are you doing here in Diego, anyway?”
The music. The world. It was all slightly askew. A little off balance. “Um. Just visiting some friends at SDSU.”
“Oh. Well, you should have told me. They could have come too.”
Her heart was beating. Beating.
Pulsing music rising through the air. She was alone with a guy.
An older guy. A cute guy who liked her.
She let her gaze climb his chin, his cheek. Until her eyes found his. “Maybe I didn’t want anyone else around.”
Then she closed her eyes and kissed him deeply, and as she did, in the back of her mind, far beneath the thrill of the moment, a little girl felt the ice cracking underfoot.
I sprinted through the hotel lobby. Too many people waiting by the elevator. I flew up the stairs.
Fifth floor.
Then into the hall. Drew my gun. Room 524.
Key out, I slipped it into the lock. “Lien-hua?” Gun ready.
Door open.
A broken vase on the floor and a scattering of dead flowers on the damp carpet. A Sabre 11 military issue dart beside them.
“Lien-hua!”
I scoured the entire suite. Empty.
They had her and they had the device.
No!
I grabbed the room phone.
Earlier in the day when I was in the evidence room, I hadn’t thought to stick some kind of tracking device in the bag with my contraption. But now, I called Angela Knight to have her track the GPS for my cell phone, which I’d left in the laundry bag.
Let it never be said I don’t learn from my mistakes.
She told me it would only take a few minutes, and then put me on hold before I could tell her I didn’t have a few minutes.
As I waited I had a disturbing thought. I remembered the video Melice had made of Cassandra. What if he made one of Lien-hua?
I flipped open my computer to see if Shade or Melice had emailed me anything. I found nothing except a message from Calvin: Couldn’t reach you on your mobile, my boy, but you mentioned that radioactive isotopes had been found at the arsonist’s apartment. I’ve been wondering if perhaps the fires were never intended to cover up a crime at all, but maybe the smoke was. Call me.
– Calvin.
The smoke?
I thought about the device, the fires, their locations. Why there?
Why then?
What about this: Drake’s men would test the device, emitting trace amounts of cesium-137. And after they’d left, Hunter would arrive. That’s why he didn’t know about the tests… But since Drake’s men had used the device, when Hunter arrived at the arson sites he would be exposed temporarily to the cesium-137, and that’s why MAST found the traces of it at his apartment…
The smoke.
Yes, of course.
The smoke would disperse the radiation so MAST wouldn’t be able to identify the tests during their radiation sweeps of the city.
Yes. I could finally see it. The fires weren’t meant to distract, the smoke was meant to disperse. It made sense. It fit, but in that moment I didn’t care.
All I cared about was Lien-hua.
And Angela was taking too long, way too long to help me.
Lien-hua shook her head. Everything was bleary, dim. The world lay shrouded in a misty dream. Her hotel room. She remembered that. Melice. The dart. And now, she was lying on her side, that much she could tell.
But she wasn’t on a bed. No. Something else. Something stiff and cold.
She took a quick inventory of her body, moving her limbs slightly. Nothing seemed broken. She wasn’t tied up. That was good. But where was she?
She shook her head again, tried to clear her thoughts. Opened one heavy eyelid. Bleary. Bleary.
Blinked twice.
No, not a bed. She wasn’t on a bed; it was concrete.
She slid one tired hand along her leg but didn’t feel the fabric of her jeans. Instead she felt the silky grace of the evening gown.
Both eyes open.
She saw what she was wearing. Elegant and red.
Lien-hua’s head still pounded. Dizzy. So dizzy.
She eased her hands forward, and as she began to sit up she felt a cold ring encircle her left ankle and then heard the sound of a lock snapping shut.
As I waited for word on my cell’s location, I noticed Lien-hua’s notepad on the desk, a bookmark toward the end. I flipped it open and saw that she’d drawn a flower being snipped from its stem.
Below it she’d written “June 17, 1999.”
The date meant nothing to me, and before I could wonder about it any longer, I heard Angela’s urgent voice on the other end of the phone. “We’ve got it, Pat. Your cell’s at the Sherrod Aquarium.”
I was all the way to the door by the time I heard the phone’s receiver hit the desk.
Lien-hua twisted around and saw Creighton Melice kneeling beside her bare feet. And in one terrible instant she realized where she was-the empty shark acclimation pool at the Sherrod Aquarium, her ankle now shackled securely to the drain. The dizziness was fading. Her head began to clear. She pushed herself to her feet.
Melice stood up and smiled. “Drowning will be a terrible way to go, don’t you think, Agent Jiang?” Though Lien-hua was still somewhat disoriented, her instincts took over, and with years of honed quickness, she leapt toward him, using the chain to add a few inches to her leg’s reach. In the air, she angled her right foot at his jaw, reached full extension, and connected, hard, sending him smacking into the glass wall of the pool as the angry chain snapped her back to the ground. Her ankle cried out in pain, but she was on her feet again in seconds. Arms locked, ready to fight. Melice stood and shook his head. His legs were wobbly. It hadn’t been one of her best kicks, but it wasn’t her worst either.
She lowered herself into a ready stance. “Come here, Creighton Melice, and I’ll make you wish you could fight like a girl.”
As Tessa kissed Riker, she felt a warm tingle rising within her, swallowing any uncertainty she might have had about the direction her choices were taking her tonight.
Below her, in another world, the music pounded, thumping like a distant heart.
Exciting. So exciting.
Over the course of the last few minutes, half a dozen couples had stepped past them either on their way to, or from, one of the rooms in the hall.
Finally, Riker pulled away from Tessa’s lips just far enough to speak to her. He held her close, so close. “It looks like we’re a little in the way here by the stairs.” His words held both a promise and an invitation. “No privacy. C’mon. Let’s grab a room.”
Exciting.
So exciting.
The sweetness of his kisses overcame her flicker of hesitation, and she stood, took his hand, and followed him to a room at the far end of the hall.