Halfway down the hallway, Ryan stopped abruptly and turned to Mac. “You think Petrović knows we’re here?”
She nodded. “Let’s wait until we get out of here to talk about this.” Her voice wavered at the thought that the man who had stolen any chance of her returning to a normal life might actually be close enough to touch her right now. She couldn’t stop the fear that passed through her.
Silva suddenly appeared with two of his soldiers. “My men will help you load your equipment and see to it that you get back to the hotel safely.”
Something about the way he said the word safely felt like more than casual conversation. Was he warning them somehow? Was he aware of how much the picture had affected her?
When he smiled and grasped her hand, Mac decided her paranoia might be working overtime. Petrović was a solo act, and it was more plausible that the general didn’t even know his buddy was up to his old tricks again.
After Ty and Ryan shook his hand, they helped the soldiers load the cameras into the limousine. The look on Ryan’s normally mischievous face was so serious that Mac would have teased him about it if the situation weren’t so dire.
But it was critical they get back to the hotel and on a plane to the U.S. as fast as possible. Both of Petrović’s covert messages had done exactly what he’d intended they do—put her on edge and knock her off her game. But she had no intention of letting him get to her on his turf—or any, for that matter.
The ride back to the hotel was somber, with only small talk in front of the driver. As soon as they exited the limo, Ryan grabbed Mac’s arm and led her down the sidewalk away from the hotel—away from any listening devices or cameras. Ty fell into step behind them, and they walked several blocks before anyone said a word.
When they were far enough away from the hotel, Mac stopped and sat down on a bench. “He’s here,” she said.
Ty’s eyes widened. “Are you saying Joseph Petrović is here right now?” He did a quick 360 around the area. “Did you see him, Mac?”
Again she shook her head. “He’s playing games with me.”
“What kind of games?” Ryan asked. “Has he hurt you?”
“No, nothing like that, but he was in my hotel room this morning. I’m sure of it.”
“Fuck!” Ryan said. “Is that why you were so upset earlier?” When she nodded, he got right in her face. “You should’ve told me right away, Mac. We would’ve canceled the interview and gotten on the next plane back to D.C.” He threw his hands in the air. “Hell, we don’t even have weapons.”
“I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to expose himself and risk being captured just yet. He likes to think of himself as a cat and me as a mouse. He wants the satisfaction of seeing me squirm.”
“How do you know he was in your room?” Ty asked.
Mac sighed, knowing she’d have to dig back into memories she’d suppressed for so long. She wasn’t sure she could do that.
But she forced herself to say the words. “When I was his prisoner in Morocco, he would put a chocolate kiss and a white orchid on my bed every night. It was part of a mating ritual in his sick mind.” She looked away just in case she couldn’t stop the tears she felt forming behind her eyes from spilling over. The last thing she needed was for her teammates to think of her as a girl. “This morning when I got back from shopping, both the candy and the flower were in the middle of my bed.”
Ty sat down beside her on the bench. “Could someone else have known about his ritual and tried to scare you?”
“I thought about that, then decided it was probably Petrović,” she answered in a monotone. “He’s a loner. Even though I’m sure he’s in the country with General Silva’s knowledge, I’m guessing the relationship is strictly business.” She looked up and met their concerned gazes. “The display was meant to scare me. Even when I was his prisoner and at his mercy, he loved playing mind games with me. Seeing the fear in my eyes turned him on.”
“The sick prick,” Ryan said. “I’d like to turn him off with my bare hands right about now.”
“You and me both,” Ty said, reaching for Mac’s hand. “Come on. Let’s get back to the hotel, pack up, and head out to the airport. You stay in Ryan’s room while I throw your things into a suitcase. We’re not letting you out of our sight.”
Ordinarily, Mac would have balked at the obvious show of male protectiveness, but she felt comforted now, knowing she didn’t have to put on an act in front of them. The truth was that she was more terrified than she wanted to admit, and the sooner she got away from this place, the better.
“Thanks, guys,” she managed as they headed back to the hotel.
Ryan called the airport and found out there was an even earlier flight than the one he’d booked them on. If they hurried, they could be in the air in less than two hours.
It wasn’t until they were in the taxi on the way to the airport that Mac’s breathing returned to normal.
But even then, she still felt Joseph Petrović’s presence close by.
“You thought Dr. Death was in your room and you didn’t get on the horn to me immediately?” Dinorelli huffed and shook his head. “Need I remind you this is exactly what happened two years ago, Mac? You went off the grid when you made contact with Petrović without alerting any of us. We all know how that worked out.”
Mac glanced around the room at the other team members, who were all anxiously waiting to hear her reasons. Ryan and Ty, who had lately become her closest allies on the mission, were the only ones who looked like they agreed with her. She opened her mouth to tell her boss she’d been afraid she’d be pulled from the mission if she called him, then quickly closed it. Dino, of all people, should understand why catching Petrović and watching him die once more was so vital to her.
But if she admitted she’d been worried about losing her job, she’d also have to fess up to her screw-up in Cleveland. Griff had kept his word and not mentioned it. If Dino knew how she’d totally come unglued at merely seeing a symbol she remembered from Petrovic’s lab, he’d have yanked her off the mission before she even finished the sentence. Couple that with this new Petrović thing, and her butt would be clinging to a desk chair before the day ended.
“And what would you have done, Dino?” she asked him defiantly. “Swooped in and rescued me?” She slammed her hand on the table. “I told you before. I’m not some fragile doll who needs a wall of testosterone around me. I figured by the time I got back to the hotel room yesterday that Petrović was long gone. Scrapping the mission would have only given him the satisfaction of knowing how deeply his little surprise had affected me.”
Ryan stepped forward to stand beside her. “Cut her some slack, Dino. You hired us because we’re able to think on our feet, which is exactly what she did. She made sure she got out of the room immediately. Even bagged the evidence. Can you imagine how not seeing her panic must’ve pissed the bastard off?”
“Yeah,” Ty said, moving up to stand beside them in an apparent show of solidarity. “You’re always preaching about how an angry man makes stupid mistakes.”
Dinorelli stared at all three of them, his eyebrows in a deep V, before he pointed to Griff, who was seated on the other side of the table. “You haven’t said a word through all this. I’d like to know what’s going on in that head of yours.”
All eyes turned to Griff, who up to this point had been quietly nursing a cup of coffee. He chugged the last of the drink and set the cup on the table, while holding Mac prisoner with his eyes.
She shifted from one foot to the other, determined not to let him see how his stare affected her. Was he about to tell Dino about Cleveland? He’d threatened her job if she made one more mistake. Would he toss her from the team and relegate her to in-house-only duty?
“I agree with Mac on this one.”
Dino’s frown deepened. He’d apparently been expecting his number one guy to side with him, not with the other three. He walked over to the satellite photo on the screen behind his desk. “You got lucky, Mac, and I’ll go along with you this time, but let it be known”—he nailed her with a glare—“if you suspect even for one minute that the sadistic asshole is anywhere near you, I want to know about it before you take your next breath. I’ll be the one to decide how to proceed if that happens. That goes for all of you. Understood?”
All four heads bobbed in agreement. Mac decided now was not the time to remind her boss that she could handle herself. In her heart, she knew Dino was right. Not relaying information to the team was the reason she’d ended up strapped to a bed in Petrović’s fortress in Morocco two years before. You’d think she had learned her lesson.
She vowed to be extra vigilant now that Petrović knew she was looking for him.
“So, we’re concentrating on the area between Caracas and Calabozo, since that’s the only place he could’ve seen you, Mac. That’s if he saw you at all. More than likely some official at the airport is on his payroll and alerted him the minute you stepped off the plane.” He grabbed a handful of sunflower seeds and shoved them into his mouth before pointing back to the picture. “That’s a lot of ground to cover, and frankly, I think the man is too smart to make it easy on us, even if he is pissed off. His lab in Morocco was totally invisible on satellite photos. Ten bucks says this one is, too.” He spat the shells into the trash can and clicked the remote.
A picture of Mac, Ty, and Ryan standing outside the van with guns pointed at their heads filled the screen. “If Petrović did see you, my guess is that he is—or was—somewhere near here.” Dino pointed again at the photo on the screen. “Usually, soldiers aren’t stationed on a deserted stretch of road, and thugs don’t wear government-issue uniforms. I’m thinking the men were sent to protect him and decided to score when the opportunity presented itself.”
“Did the satellite pick up any trace of Petrović ever being there?” Griff asked.
“No, but remember, our man is a master at hiding. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. At any rate, all we can do is to keep looking.”
“So what now?” Ty asked.
Dino shook his head. “If all my calculations are correct, the doctor is getting closer to accomplishing his goal. It’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen, but unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do except wait for his next move and hope he makes a mistake.”
Mac felt Griff’s eyes on her and turned to him. “Thanks for the support” was all she managed to get out under the scrutiny.
He stood up and walked around to the other side of the table before leaning in and whispering, “Don’t thank me yet, shortcake. I happen to agree with you on this one. That’s all. I’m still watching you, though.” He straightened up and walked to the door. “I’ll be in my office for the rest of the afternoon if anyone needs me.”
Well, there it is. She’d hoped his agreeing with her meant he was softening a bit toward her, but his whispered words destroyed that theory. She was convinced the man would never forgive her, and frankly, she didn’t blame him.
She resigned herself that she and Griff could never be more than team members, but at times like this, she’d settle for that.
Joseph Petrović walked through the slum area on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte. It was just after dusk, and a swarm of children, most of them under fifteen, were congregating around a fire in a barrel, even though the weather was only mildly chilly.
He stopped to watch, noticing one group of kids inhaling from a can of spray paint. A glance at another group showed them passing around a cigarette, probably coca paste. He knew that coca paste was the drug of choice for these street kids because of its easy availability, and although it was made from coca leaves and was a precursor to cocaine, it was actually more harmful to the kids. It contained dangerous levels of toxic processing chemicals such as kerosene, sulfur, and methanol, which were normally removed from regular cocaine.
Even if he did feel a touch of remorse for what he was about to do to these kids—which he didn’t—they would be dead in a few years anyway.
And if the drugs didn’t kill them, the death squads would. It was a known fact that the problems created by the increasing number of street children were so numerous that vigilante squads earned as much as fifty dollars for every child they killed. No one would miss the ones he’d use for his experiment. Hell, no one would even notice they were missing.
He’d been planning exactly how he would do this ever since he saw Mac and the phony news crew in Venezuela. Almost immediately, he’d begun making inquiries about all of them and discovered she had just recently rejoined the group that operated in a remote town in Virginia, according to his highly paid sources. He opened his phone and stared at the photos his inside man had obtained of Mac and her compadres, some from even before he’d met her in Morocco. One man, in particular, had piqued his interest. His sources identified him as Griffin Bradley, the leader of the present unit. When a photo popped onto the screen of Bradley with his arm around a smiling Mac, the green-eyed monster resurfaced, just like the first time Petrović had viewed it. It was obvious there was more than a coworker relationship between the two, which infuriated him. Mac was his, and the sooner she accepted that, the better.
But he’d figure out how to deal with that later. Right now, he needed to focus on the job at hand. With the CIA on to him, it was only a matter of time before he slipped up, even though he was more cautious now than ever. He was so close to walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he had no intentions of watching all his hard work go up in flames like the last time.
He glanced at his watch. Seven thirty. If all went well, he’d be on a plane back to Caracas by ten—before anybody discovered what he’d done. He’d arrived in Brazil at Tancredo Neves/Confins International Airport yesterday afternoon and had driven directly to the small, abandoned building about a half-mile away from where he was standing right now. After setting up his equipment, he’d slept on a cot in the back room, unwilling to leave his work in the hands of the flunkies he’d hired to make the arrangements.
His attention was diverted when he heard someone holler and saw one of his hired helpers rounding up the group of boys who had just inhaled the paint fumes. The other four adult assistants were gathering up clusters of kids. Knowing these children usually formed peer support groups, known as terminus, he figured this one numbered about seventy.
Perfect.
He turned and walked toward the building to make the final preparations as the street kids followed the men who’d lured them with the promise of a free meal and drugs.
Entering the building, Petrović made sure every window had been tightly sealed, as he’d instructed, before he went to the back office and watched the boys marching into the building like lambs to the slaughter. The pathetic wretches were probably wondering where the free food was. When they were all in, one of the helpers closed and locked the door.
After reaching for his gas mask and pulling it over his face, Petrović grabbed a small canister from the corner and opened it up at one end. Immediately, a stream of gas gushed out. Quickly, he opened the door and walked into the room, clicking his stopwatch at the same time. He counted off the seconds out loud as the lethal gas flowed into the small room. One by one, the children dropped to the floor, screaming when they saw their friends dying. The five adult men, who had no idea what would happen after they brought the street children to the building, began running to the door, but it was too late.
In less than twenty seconds, everyone in the room except Petrović was dead.
He stepped around the bodies on his way to the door, satisfied that his product was ready to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Right before he exited, he pulled a single white orchid from his coat pocket and dropped it on the body of one of the dead children.
She would know it was his private message to her.