Medusa’s Master

“I just hit it.”

Thank God. He didn’t need Kat taking endless ribbing from his guys. They wouldn’t bug him too much because he’d take them out on the practice floor and break them in half. Although, now that he thought about it, Kat might do the very same thing to them.

“Ready to face the lions in their den?” he sighed.

A pause. “Oh, yeah-work.”

He swung open the concealed panel beside the front door to reveal a palm telemetry reader. He laid his hand on the pliable gel surface, which squished up between his fingers slightly. A click in the door lock indicated he’d been recognized. He turned the knob and stepped inside.

“Thanks,” he commented to the dark interior of the store, or more precisely, to whatever duty controller downstairs at the other end of the security cameras had let them in. “This way,” he said, leading Kat quickly toward the storeroom behind the counter.

A loud voice erupted without warning from the large birdcage in the corner. “Baawk! Pirate Pete is a dirty old bird. Repeats everything that he’s heard. Especially the bits about asses and tits-”

Jeff called out sharply, “Shut up, Pete!” To Kat, he muttered, “Sorry. That’s Pirate Pete. He’s a parrot. With a filthy mouth, I might add.”

“Shut up, Pete!” the bird squawked.

Kat giggled.

The sound was incongruous coming from her. Particularly since at the moment, her knees were deeply bent, her hands held shoulder high before her, and everything about her announced her readiness to kill something right here, right now. Apparently, when Pete had opened his big beak, she’d used those lightning-fast reflexes of hers to drop into a defensive stance.

She straightened to her full height, relaxing from the battle alert Pete’s outburst had thrown her into. Jeff commented, “In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, your reflexes are freaking unbelievable.”

She shrugged as he opened the storeroom door, using a keypad and a retinal scanner this time.

“In here.” He led the way into a cluttered storeroom littered with packing boxes, rolls of tape, and garbage bags full of packing peanuts. And dust. Lots of dust.

Using the tiny penlight on his key ring, he found his way over to what looked like a circuit breaker box in the corner. “If you’ll close the door…” he instructed over his shoulder.

Throwing him a perplexed look, she did as he asked.

He pushed on one of the circuit breakers, which was actually an elevator switch, and the room lurched. Kat grabbed at the nearest shelf in surprise to steady herself.

He grinned. “The entire room is an elevator. Cool, huh?”

She grinned back. “Very cool.”

They rode downward for nearly a minute, the silence between them so thick with the memory of the steamy kisses they’d just shared that he could hardly breathe. Work, buddy. Focus on work.

The storeroom/elevator lurched gently to a stop. “You can open the door now,” he said.

She did so, and one of the familiar stone tunnels of H.O.T. Watch headquarters stretched away from them. He followed her out of the elevator, unabashedly enjoying the view of her pert little derriere.

She asked curiously, “How do people navigate around here? All the halls and doors look the same.”

“They’re supposed to. When you get assigned to work down here, the first job you’re given is to memorize a map of the place. If any intruder were ever to get in, he’d have a hell of a time finding his way around.”

She nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

Man, she was quick on the uptake. He’d bet she was hell on wheels when it came to gathering intelligence from live targets. She’d talk circles around ordinary mortals. But then, all she probably had to do was flash those big brown eyes of hers and her targets would sing like Pavarotti.

“This way.” He headed right.

“Is this really a hollowed-out volcano?” she asked as they strode down the hall.

He matched her businesslike tone. If she had the discipline to set aside for the moment what they’d just done together, he could, too. “Yup, this is an extinct volcano. Problem with most natural caves is too much water. And with all the electronics we needed to put in this facility, we had to find a dry cave system. Volcanic remnants are often dry cave networks.”

“Aren’t they occasionally very hot, lava-filled places, too?” she asked.

He grinned down at her. Their gazes met and instant sparks leaped between them. Hah. So she hadn’t entirely put their kiss from her mind. His ego was unaccountably gratified. Belatedly, he answered, “We’ve been assured this volcano is extinct. But just in case, we have seismic sensors all over the island to monitor Mount Timbalo.”

She threw him a skeptical look, but then he stopped in front of another anonymous door, opening it for her. She brushed past him, and yet again, their gazes snapped to one another. Oh, yeah. She was as aware of him as he was of her. Her mouth twitched for the barest instant into a smile, and then she was back to being all business. He followed her into the Ops Center.

The sheer size of the main control room never failed to daunt him a little. Kat, in front of him, hesitated before striding toward the cluster of people at a console in the middle of the room. They were staring up at one of the Jumbotrons in the far wall.

He glanced up. Monet’s study for his painting, The Poppies near Argenteuil, shone down at him. Jeff winced. The Ghost was moving up in the world. That had to be a twenty million dollar painting if it was worth a cent. No doubt the pressure to catch the thief was going to ratchet up commensurately. Sighing, he walked over to his boss.

Navy Commander Brady Hathaway glanced up at him. “You know the painting?”

Jeff nodded. “Where was it?”

“The Valliard estate.”

Another one of the fabulous estates of the Golden Mile. The Valliard place was not the largest among them, but was touted as one of the most opulent. “Did the Ghost take any other paintings?”

“Just the one,” Hathaway replied. “There are other valuable pieces in the house. Why only this one?”

Jeff shrugged. “He may have a specific buyer for this piece, or he may prefer to travel light.”

Kat added, “The thief may also want to limit his risk and only take time to steal a single piece.”

Jeff nodded. “Could be.” To Hathaway, he said, “When did the theft happen?”

“Sometime in the past twenty-four hours. A caretaker reported it stolen about an hour ago. Said he walked through the main house yesterday afternoon and everything was intact. But when he went through tonight, the painting was cut out of its frame.”

Jeff cursed under his breath. That was an enormous window of opportunity for the thief. He kept hoping for a theft where the Ghost would have to work fast. It would tell them a lot more about the thief’s M.O. But to date, all the thefts had been of unoccupied estates. The winter season didn’t start for a few more months, bringing the residents of the Golden Mile to its tropical shores. Of course, at the rate he was going, the Ghost would have picked the island clean long before then.

Kat asked him, “What’s the common link between all the paintings?”

He’d been over that a thousand times from every conceivable angle. “They’ve got no common thread except that they’re excellent, if little-known, pieces by masters.”

“Any chance I can make a phone call to a colleague about this?” Kat asked.

Jennifer Blackfoot glanced over at Hathaway. The two exchanged a nod and Jennifer said, “There’s a phone right here. Any help would be appreciated.”

Jeff listened with interest to Kat’s one-sided conversation.

“Viper, it’s Cobra. Sorry to call you so late. Did I wake you up? Morning sickness at night? That sucks. Hey, I have a problem. We’re trying to find a link between a half-dozen paintings that have been stolen recently. Can you get a minute or two on the super array to run them and see if there’s some obscure link between them? Great. I’ll send you an e-mail with the information in the next few minutes. You rock.”

Kat hung up the phone and looked up at him. “Do you have a detailed inventory of the paintings?”

“I’ll have to add the Monet to it, but that’ll only take a minute. Were you talking about the supercomputer array at the Pentagon, by any chance?”