Dan finally reemerged—ten hours later? Twenty? It seemed like an eternity but could have been only a couple of seconds—and his face was ashen, his eyes wild. Steady braced himself for the words he didn’t want to hear. The words he’d never be ready to hear. Oh, sweet heaven! Abby! No!
But what Dan said was, “She’s gone.”
Chapter Five
They were dead…
All her colleagues were dead. And much to Penni DePaul’s eternal sorrow, she now understood what it meant to be the last man…woman…standing. She’d always assumed the phrase had a positive connotation, that it would feel good to be the last woman standing. Boy-oh-boy, had she been wrong.
It felt awful.
“Those who weren’t on duty were killed in their beds. Whoever set the bombs timed them perfectly. They went off thirty minutes after the agents were required to be back in their rooms. Which was just enough time for them to wash their faces, brush their teeth, and snuggle beneath the covers,” Dan grumbled into his phone. “And let me be the first to say, those incendiary devices were very effective.” Mad effective, as people speaking Brooklynese would say, right along with God help those poor souls.
Dan and Steady had stood on the roof of the hotel while Ozzie Sykes was loaded into a medevac helicopter. Afterward, a lengthy back-and-forth with hotel security and the local authorities had ended in a somewhat threatening call from the U.S. State Department to the head of the Kuala Lumpur police. Once the locals were officially…dismissed, Dan and Steady had grabbed her and secluded themselves here, in Steady’s room.
Not for nuttin’, as her dearly departed father would say, but I guess diplomatic immunity has it perks.
Since then, Dan and Steady had made a series of telephone calls while she used Dan’s iPad—hers was blown to Kingdom Come thanks to the fact that she’d left it on her now-destroyed hotel bed. And she totally wasn’t going to think about what might have happened had she not broken protocol, which she’d never done before—to locate the signals emitted by the tracking devices sewn into Abby’s clothes. Abby…Abby… She had to focus on sweet, charming, hilariously funny when it came to colorful curses Abby. Beekeeper. Her charge. Because it was either that or succumb to the mixture of hysteria, remorse, and flat-out disbelief bubbling inside her in an evil witch’s brew. Unfortunately, the iPad’s screen, covered by a digital map of Kuala Lumpur, was lit up like the mother-flippin’ Fourth of July sky above the Statue of Liberty.
What the hell does that mean? she wondered. Then answered her own question a second later when tiny alarm bells started ringing in her head. Most definitely nothing good.
Dan’s next words had her forgetting the task at hand. “The others, the three who were on duty, had their throats slit.”
Christ on the cross, as if the shock of seeing her colleagues blown away wasn’t bad enough, she’d made the additional, and additionally horrific, discovery that Tony, Marcy, and LaVaughn had been summarily executed. Quick and dirty, they’d been left to bleed out at their observation points…
And where was she while all this bed-bombing, throat-slitting was happening, you ask? Forget about it. Because she was across the hall getting her twerk on with the muscle-for-hire hottie who’d reeled her in with his hoohah-igniting eyes and lonely smile.
A sob that was one part shame, two parts regret, and three parts guilt threatened at the back of her throat. But she managed to contain it just like she’d managed to contain the fifty others before it. She couldn’t afford to break down now.
“HQ says there’s a carrier group operating in the South China Sea near Manila,” Steady informed Dan after he signed off on his call, “which will save our asses in two very important ways. The first is that—”
“HQ?” she interrupted. “Where is that? And what…or…who are you guys really?”
And, okay, perhaps that’s a question she should have asked before attempting to do the horizontal mambo with one of them. Because the only information she and the rest of her colleagues—her dead colleagues, her colleagues who were at this very moment being loaded into body bags…but, no, that was another thing she couldn’t think about now—had been given about the three beefy guys accompanying them to Malaysia was that they were all former military men whom the president insisted come along to augment security. She’d assumed they, like so many ex–armed forces types, were simply a glorified private bodyguard service. But the swiftness with which that medevac was summoned and the bizarre and timely call from the State Department—not to mention their “HQ” happened to know the highly classified location of the nearest U.S. Navy carrier group—had her internal gyroscope not only wiggling, but swinging from side to side like a stinkin’ pendulum.