Catch Her If You Can Read online

  “The alarm connects to our central control,” the tech informed me after his contact had reset the device. “We can relay the signal instantly to other local and regional law enforcement agencies and effect a response within minutes, much as we do for an AMBER Alert.”

  I tried to convince myself an electronic leash made sense, especially with Mob bosses and/or Dutchmen out for my blood. Felt kind of odd being hooked into a system designed for kidnapped children, though.

  “The Border Patrol’s plugged into the alert system, too,” Mitch advised. “I’ll make sure the people on our desk keep an eye on you.”

  He checked his watch again.

  “I’ve got to go. Call me when you leave work. I’ll bring a few things over and camp out here at your place till this is over. If that’s good with you?”

  My toes did the curl thing again. “Very good.”

  “I’ll see you after work, then. And for God’s sake, don’t try to be a hero. If anything looks or feels or sounds the least bit suspicious, press the panic button.”

  “Don’t worry, I will.”

  AND I would have. I swear!

  The problem was that the FBI in all their brilliance made their handy-dandy panic device look too much like an ordinary keypad.

  I discovered that when Paul Donati and the two technicians walked me to my car. By then I’d made a quick change into my uniform, clipped up my hair, slapped on some lip gloss, slung my purse over my shoulder, and grabbed my soft-sided briefcase. I kept my car keys in hand as I approached the Sebring but had to look twice to figure out which keypad popped the locks.

  “Yours is square,” Paul pointed out with exaggerated patience. “Ours is oblong.”

  I was tempted to respond with another string of letters from the NATO phonetic alphabet. Something along the lines of Bravo Foxtrot Delta. That’s BFD in non-NATO-ese. Nobly, I refrained.

  Paul and company followed me until I exited I-10 for Patriot Freeway and the short stretch leading to Fort Bliss’s main entrance. With the post in sight, I decided it would be safe to make a quick stop at the donut shop in the strip mall just outside the gate.

  I hit the place between waves of sweet-toothed military and civil service employees. Without the usual long line, I got in and out in mere minutes with a coffee to go and an assorted dozen. Included among the French crullers and cranberry muffins were three of Rocky’s favorite lemon-filled. I’m not ashamed to admit I intended them as a bribe. I hoped they would silence any possible objections to firing up Snoopy’s computers for an unscheduled, unofficial test.

  True, this test had been requested by another government agency. Rocky and I had both taken some hits in the past on just this subject, however. The darts bounced off me but Dr. Balboa tends to internalize criticism. Actually, he internalizes everything and gets his feelings hurt in the process.

  Rumor is he expressed those feelings very forcefully on at least one occasion, which resulted in his assignment to FST-3. I haven’t been able to substantiate the rumor, but I was thinking about a certain eyebrow-less scientist I’d bumped into at DARPA headquarters some months ago as I walked to my car.

  I was halfway there when my cell phone sounded Mitch’s ring tone. I juggled coffee, donuts, and car keys to dig in my uniform pocket.

  “You on base yet?” he wanted to know.

  “Almost. I can see the front gate.”

  “Don’t forget to call me when you leave work.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Good enough. I’ll see you . . .”

  “I know,” I cut in with a smile. “When you see me.”

  I was still smiling when a smoke black SUV with darkened windows cut across the parking lot and pulled up beside me. One glance at the driver sent my heart into my throat.

  “Oh, hell!”

  Pipe Guy was at the wheel. Someone wearing aviator glasses occupied the passenger seat. I tossed the coffee and donut box and fumbled frantically with my key ring, but Pipe Guy’s pal leaped out just as I stabbed the red button. The wrong red button, dammit. The Sebring’s horn started honking at the same instant Aviator Glasses reached over and stabbed me.

  The needle was thin and sharp enough to pierce my supposedly heat-and-cold-resistant ABUs. I barely felt the pinprick, but whatever the bastard pumped into me worked fast. I managed one screech that even I couldn’t hear over the honking horn before my throat started to close.

  My lips went numb. The keys slipped from my suddenly nerveless fingers. My knees buckled.

  My last hope—my only hope!—was that the Sebring’s alarm had alerted folks inside the donut place. I couldn’t tell if it had. The SUV blocked my view of the shop windows.

  A second later I couldn’t see anything at all.

  I woke with the world’s worst case of cotton mouth.

  My tongue felt ten times its normal size. My throat was bone dry. My salivary glands had gone on strike. My eyelids weren’t functioning properly, either, as I discovered when I tried to pry them open.

  Nothing wrong with my hearing, however. A roar pierced the fog in my head. It was so loud and steady my confused brain soon identified it. That was an engine bouncing sound waves off my eardrums.

  Correction. Two engines. I verified that when I finally forced my lids up over eyeballs that felt as pitted and rough as an unpaved road.

  At that point I discovered I was flat on my back. In a small, prop aircraft. Minus the usual amenities like rear compartment seats. This one had been stripped and was obviously used primarily to haul cargo. I surmised as much from the tie-down straps dangling from the fuselage struts and the ringbolts welded to the flooring—one of which I was handcuffed to.

  Frowning, I tugged on the cuff. The resulting rattle brought the two occupants of the open cockpit slewing around in their seats.

  “About time you woke up,” a guy with mirrored sunglasses shouted over the engine’s whine. “We’re about to begin our descent.”

  I recognized Pipe Guy’s pal behind the dark glasses. That wasn’t Pipe Guy in the pilot’s seat, though.

  Swallowing in a desperate attempt to kick-start my salivary glands, I unstuck my tongue and forced out a hoarse croak. “Descent to where? Hey! You with the glasses! Where are we landing?”

  He either didn’t hear or chose to ignore me. My money was on the latter. I swallowed once more and tried to clear the last fingers of the fog.

  A weapon. I needed a weapon.

  The cuffs rattled as I scooted around on the corregated decking. My dry throat closed again when I spotted a toolbox strapped down at the rear of the cargo compartment.

  I shot a quick glance forward, saw the two men in the cockpit were otherwise engaged, and slithered across the deck like a python in tiger stripes.

  Steel bit through the skin of my wrist. My elbow and shoulder joints screamed in protest. The toe of my boot angled toward the latch of the strap securing the toolbox. I couldn’t reach it.

  I strained harder, biting my lip until I tasted blood, but couldn’t stretch that final inch. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have had time to get the box open before the aircraft banked sharply and began a steep descent.

  Frustrated and aching and starting to get scared, I pushed into a sitting position. I was braced against the fuselage when we touched down. We taxied only a short distance before the pilot cut the engines.

  Aviator Glasses unlatched his seat harness and came back to the rear compartment. Hunkering down, he slid his glasses to the tip of his nose and let his eyes drift from my bit lip to my bloody wrist. When they lifted and met mine, that wasn’t sympathy I saw in them.

  “I’m going to unlock the cuff. Don’t try anything stupid, Lieutenant. I’ll put you out again at the first sign of trouble. Understood?”

  I wanted to flip him the finger but settled for nodding.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I rasped through my still-dry throat, “what did you inject me with?”

  “The same paralyzing agent used in hospitals and ERs to relax
muscles and put patients out before they insert breathing tubes and stuff. Not a problem unless you’re allergic to it.”

  “How . . . ?” I had to stop and lick my lips again. “How did you know I wasn’t?”

  “I didn’t.”

  The response chilled me almost as much as his careless shrug. It also told me the odds were pretty high that I wouldn’t leave wherever I was alive.

  I tried to shake off the terror that thought generated as Sunglasses released the cuff attached to the ringbolt. Yanking my arm forward, he snapped the cuff on my other wrist, then hooked a hand under my armpit and hauled me to my feet.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” I rasped as he shoved me toward the steps the pilot had let down.

  “You’ll know soon enough.”

  I stumbled down the steps into sunshine so dazzling I had to squeeze my eyes against the glare. It gradually reduced enough for me to spot a Hummer waiting with the engine idling . . . and what looked like a sheer, thousand-foot drop beyond it.

  I staggered back, glancing wildly from right to left. My stunned mind took several seconds to grasp the fact that we’d touched down atop a massive plateau jutting out of the empty desert. Pen would object to that characterization, I thought, gulping back a bubble of near hysteria. As she reminds us ad nauseam, the desert is anything but empty.

  This one showed no signs of human habitation, though. No baked adobe-brick farmhouse. No fence lines. No slowly twisting windmill pumping precious water into tin cattle troughs.

  Where the hell was I? New Mexico? Arizona? Somewhere south of the border? Nothing in the austerely magnificent landscape gave me a clue. The driver of the Hummer, the two pilots, and I could have been alone in the universe.

  My eerie sense of isolation lasted only until Aviator Glasses manhandled me into the backseat of the Hummer and climbed in beside me. The driver gave me a curious glance in the rearview mirror, but I didn’t see anything remotely resembling sympathy in his dark eyes as he put the heavy wheeler in gear and pulled away from the dirt airstrip. Only after we’d bumped and humped for a good half mile across the top of the mesa did I see the walled compound.

  It was flat-roofed and two-tiered, with the ends of massive lodgepole pines butting through the walls at regular intervals. The construction reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the ancient Anasazi pueblos. But the security cameras and sensors that monitored our approach were ultra high-tech and very twenty-first century. So was the Uzi cradled in the arm of the guard who waved us through a wrought-iron gate.

  Who owned this high desert dwelling? I ran through all the possibilities, from Charlie’s nemesis Richie to some greedy bastard wanting in on the reward to the slime who’d hired Duarte and now wanted revenge.

  None of those possibilities, however, came anywhere close to the bone-chilling reality.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE Hummer passed through a wooden gate and pulled up under a low portico. When Aviator Glasses hustled me out of the vehicle, I picked up the steady hum off to the side of the main building. Generators, I guessed. Anyone who lived on the top of an isolated mesa like this had to supply his own water and power.

  “Inside.”

  Sunglasses gave me an impatient shove. I stumbled over a raised threshold into a two-story foyer dominated by a larger-than-life-sized metal sculpture of an eagle dancer. If my wrists hadn’t been handcuffed and my stomach twisted in knots, I might have appreciated the scupltor’s incredible artistry. I didn’t give the piece a second glance, however. My entire being was focused on the woman who emerged from the cool, dim interior.

  The slender brunette clicked toward us on red stilettos with four-inch heels and a black powder puff on each ankle strap. My first, completely irrelevant thought was that the slut shoes didn’t go with her slim skirt, belted white blouse, and the half glasses perched on the end of her nose. Those gave her an almost professional look . . . and made me feel like a total grunge by comparison. I resisted the ridiculous urge to raise my cuffed hands and brush back the hair hanging in rattails around my face. I straightened my shoulders, though, and lifted my chin.

  It shot up another notch when the brunette treated me to a look of utter disdain before firing a stream of Spanish at my escort. I’ve picked up a basic working vocabulary during my assignment to El Paso but her dialogue came too fast. All I caught were “this one” and “el patron” and “tonight.”

  Whatever she said put Aviator Glasses on the defensive. He fired back but Slut Shoes cut him off with a rapier look and terse order.

  “Espera aqui!”

  That I got. She wanted us to wait there in the foyer. Whoever this bitch was, she wielded considerable power. The knowledge didn’t give me a warm fuzzy.

  But when the woman returned some moments later, her attitude had done a one-eighty. Subdued and almost obsequious, she trailed a half step behind a tall, dark-haired male in pleated white slacks and a blue and gold Versace shirt. I recognized the designer—I should, given the variety of glamour mags I subscribe to—but not the wearer. Deciding offense was the best defense, I looked him square in the eye.

  “You’re aware kidnapping a United States Air Force officer is a federal offense, aren’t you?”

  “Kidnapping is a federal offense regardless of race, creed, religion, or military affiliation,” he replied in perfect and clearly amused English. “In your country, that is. In mine, it’s more of a political necessity.”

  I don’t like being laughed at any more than I like being injected, cuffed, and manhandled.

  “You think this is funny? You’d better enjoy it while you can.”

  “I will. I most certainly will.”

  His reply conveyed such silky menace that even Slut Shoes blinked. It made an impression on me, too, but I refused to let him see it. Chin angled, I telegraphed an unmistakable up-yours.

  The message missed its mark since Versace had already turned to my escort. “You may remove the lieutenant’s cuffs.”

  “Are you sure, patron?”

  “I’m sure. Even if she manages to get past security and escape, she has nowhere to go but into the desert. She would not get far in this heat.”

  Aviator Glasses complied but kept a wary eye on me as his boss addressed the brunette.

  “Teresa, please show Lieutenant Spade to the room we’re prepared for her. I’m sure she would like to refresh herself and change into something more comfortable before lunch.”

  I already knew this was no ordinary snatch-and-grab. Still, the idea these characters had anticipated my arrival made my stomach cramp.

  “What the lieutenant would like,” I said, rubbing my bruised and lacerated wrists, “is to know what the hell is going on.”

  “I’ll explain at lunch.”

  Obviously used to being obeyed, he turned to leave. That pissed me off almost as much as his amusement.

  “Hey! You!”

  Aviator Glasses let out a hiss. Slut Shoes sucked one in. Versace turned slowly. Very slowly. His eyes showed dead black above the blue and gold of his shirt.

  “I’ll allow you that one, Lieutenant. But only that one. For the rest of our association, you will address me with respect.”

  Okay, now I was officially intimidated. This guy was scary. Don’t ask me where I got the guts—or the stupidity—to force my lips into a sugary smile.

  “Kind of hard to address you at all when I don’t know your name.”

  “Mendoza. Rafael Mendoza.”

  Shock knocked the smart-mouthiness out of me. I stood there, my breath stuck like a broken glass in my throat, and stared at the bastard who’d forced Mitch to distance himself from his wife and daughter for their own protection.

  “Ah, I see you recognize my name. Good. Then you know I’m not a man to be crossed. I’ll speak with you at lunch, Lieutenant.”

  I didn’t try to stop him this time. I watched him disappear in to the cool, dim interior while Aviator Glasses let himself out the front door. That left
me face-to-face with the brunette. She and I measured each other for several long seconds.

  I could take her, I decided. She had several inches on me but those were all heel. And odds were she’d never done a push-up in her life.

  Not that I’ve done all that many. The recently implemented Air Force aerobics program requires a minimum of a mile-and-a-half run, eighteen push-ups, and thirty-eight sit-ups for women in my age group. I’m still working my way up to the minimum. But I could put a heavy-soled combat boot to her gut and knock her flat on her behind.

  Then what?

  I still didn’t know where I was, although I was pretty certain now it wasn’t Arizona or New Mexico. My guess was that I was well south of the border.

  Nor did I know what Mendoza wanted with me, but I guessed with sick certainty that it involved Mitch. I needed to find out what the rat bastard was up to before deciding on a plan of action.

  “All right, Teresa. You heard the man.” I flicked a careless hand. “Lead the way.”

  Despite the powder puff shoes, she was no dummy. She wasn’t about to let me walk behind her, get her in a stranglehold, and snap her neck. With an abrupt gesture, she indicated I should precede her.

  “Go through the salons.”

  Her English wasn’t as polished as Mendoza’s but still light years ahead of my Spanish.

  “What do you do here?” I asked as I took the lead.

  “I am the patron’s executive assistant.”

  Suuure she was.

  “I noticed he wears a wedding ring.” And you don’t. “Is his wife here, too?”

  “No.”

  The single syllable cracked like a whip. Obviously, I’d struck a nerve.

  “So this place is, what?” I said, digging the spur in deeper. “Mendoza’s hideaway when he wants to get away from the missus?”

  “Take the hall to your right,” she said, ignoring my question.

  I tried to memorize the function and layout of the rooms we passed. The two salons, one with a sunken conversation pit; a high-tech office bristling with electronics; a home theater; a dining room with sliding glass doors that looked out over the mesa; an inner atrium that appeared to have no other purpose than to show off another bronze sculpture. This one had to be at least fifteen or twenty feet tall. I’m not as familiar with kachinas as I should be after so many months in the southwest, but I thought it was the lizard god.