Medusa’s Master

Chapter 17

Kat was still awake when Jeff came back to the cottage as dawn broke outside. She’d given up on sleeping soon thereafter and gotten up. He made no effort to speak to her all day. He participated professionally enough in the planning of the night’s mission, but when she tried to talk to him in private, she got exactly nowhere with him.

Each time he gave her a closed, stony look-the classic thousand-yard stare of a hardened soldier-her heart broke a little more. By suppertime, she was a complete mess. So much for being able to hold it together no matter what life threw at her.

She went out to the beach where she swayed and stepped through the slow motion dance of an ancient gigong ritual designed to calm and center the chi. Twice. It didn’t work. She resorted to the more violent Shaolin kung fu forms next. Better. At least working up a good sweat burned off a little of her urge to burst into tears. But she still felt like crap.

“You okay?” Aleesha murmured for at least the tenth time that day as Kat let herself back into the cottage at dusk.

“No, I’m not,” she snapped, her fragile calm already wrecked.

Aleesha laughed quietly. “Welcome to the world of wallowing in emotions like the rest of us.”

Kat threw her a bitter look. “Yeah, well, it sucks.”

“Ahh, but when it’s good, it’s great, isn’t it?”

Kat squeezed her eyes tightly shut. That was just sweat making them burn like that. Just sweat, dammit.

Aleesha sighed. “I really ought to pull you from this mission.”

Alarmed, Kat blurted, “You can’t. I’m the only one who can do it.”

A reluctant nod. “True. But we can postpone it a few days until you’re feeling more like yourself.”

Kat winced. She was starting to be genuinely afraid that from here on out this was herself. How was she supposed to close the floodgates and re-contain all that emotion that Jeff had let out? It would be like trying to empty a lake with a teaspoon.

“I’ll be okay, Aleesha. I promise. Once I get into the flow of the mission, my training will take over.”

Aleesha looked at her hard. “Make me a promise. If you get in that house and your concentration isn’t perfect, you’ll call it off and back out.”

“But-”

“No buts. Either you promise, or I’m pulling the plug. We’ll find some other way to draw these guys out. The way I hear it, those folks in the H.O.T. Watch can do surveillance on the entire island of Barbados at once.”

Having seen the Ops center, Kat could believe it. She glanced up to see Aleesha staring at her expectantly.

Kat sighed. “Fine. I promise.”

“On your honor?”

“Yes, mother.”

Aleesha nodded firmly. “All right, then. Now go take a little rest and we’ll wake you up when it’s time to go.”

Kat crouched in the bushes outside the mansion that was her target. It was a massive lump of brick and stone, generically Caribbean colonial. And a hell of a tough nut to crack. The place had banklike security, and in the guise of being built hurricane-proof, had also been built practically burglarproof as well.

To the credit of the home’s designers, it had taken most of the staff of the H.O.T. Watch, a team at the Pentagon, and several high-powered civilian electronics and security consultants to come up with a way to breach the place. And were it not for the H.O.T. Watch’s high-tech satellite systems and an orbiting electronic counterwarfare chopper nearby, she wouldn’t have had a prayer of getting inside undetected.

Wherever he was right now, hidden in the trees, was Jeff worried about her? Or was he just mad? Or maybe he felt nothing at all. He certainly seemed to have shut down his emotions earlier. And how ironic was that? She was the one with the legendary self-control while he wore his feelings on his sleeve, and now she was a blithering idiot and he was a rock.

She checked her thoughts sharply. She ought to be reviewing the plan, running it one last time in her head, not to mention keeping an eye out for movement that didn’t belong out here. Good thing Aleesha wasn’t beside her right now, or this mission would already be over.

Jeff’s voice crackled over her earpiece, crisp and emotionless. “H.O.T. Watch and Bravo 51, report when ready.” Bravo 51 was the helicopter with the equipment that would jam several electronic portions of the mansion’s security system. She didn’t hear the chopper yet, but it would move in close when she started her run at the house.

Did he have to sound so cold and uncaring? Stop that. He was transmitting on a frequency that close to a hundred people were listening to. How else should he sound?

“You ready, Cobra?” Aleesha prompted.

Kat started. Crud. She was supposed to report when she was ready, and then Jeff would give the green light, and she’d forgotten to do it. Aleesha’s transmission had been a subtle kick in the pants to get her head in the game. And Aleesha was right.

Kat slid the switch on her waist pack to hot mike. Everything she said now would broadcast live without her having to press a microphone button. She’d need both hands to do her job pretty soon. “Cobra ready to proceed.”

“You are cleared to proceed,” Jeff said. “Give us a time hack.”

Kat pushed up her sleeve and opened her mouth. The pair of two-inch-long Cyalume sticks she’d tucked into her cheeks emitted a faint glow from between her teeth-enough to see her watch face. “On my mark, it will be 1:30 a.m. Three, two, one, mark.”

And with the last syllable, she took off running toward the house. The pressure sensors in the lawn reported wirelessly to the security computer inside, but Bravo 51 had that covered.

On cue, an electronic warfare specialist came up on frequency and announced, “The pressure sensors are jammed. You are clear to cross the grass.”

She reached the expanse of green a few seconds later. In her mind, this was the most dangerous part of the mission. She was to run across the lawn in plain view of anyone who might be lurking nearby. After all, the idea was to let the hostiles know she was here. Once she gained the cover of the house, there’d be much less chance to take her out. The working theory was that the commandos would want to capture the Ghost to ask him where the disk was now, and that they wouldn’t want to kill him. At least not right away. But if that calculation were wrong, now was the moment they would find out-when bullets slammed into her exposed self.

And then she was across the lawn, crouching in the shadows of an oleander bush. One of its narrow leaves tickled her nose, and she pushed it aside absently. She had about thirty seconds to wait while Bravo 51 did its magic on the house’s outside phone lines. They were going to do something having to do with setting up a feedback loop that blocked a dial tone. The end result would be that when the house’s automated alarm system tried to summon the police, no call would get out. At least, that was the plan.

She recognized Jennifer Blackfoot’s voice in her ear. “We show no hostile heat signatures on satellite imagery at this time. You are clear to proceed.”

“Phones are down,” Bravo 51 reported.

That was her signal. She stood up and went to work on the window above her. It was an easy enough matter to cut a foot-wide circle out of the glass and lift it aside. Trickier was the maneuver to use a thin steel rod to manipulate the window latch without breaking the grid of laser beams an inch beyond the window’s surface. But with patience and concentration, she got it. After sliding a flat metal strip under the window to maintain contact on the pressure sensors there, she slid the window up gingerly. The house alarms remained silent. Gripping the window frame, she leaped up lightly until she was poised on the narrow sill, balancing on her toes. Carefully, she slipped mirrors into the laser grid until she’d created a gap about ten inches high and eighteen inches wide. It would be a tight squeeze, but that’s why she was doing this and not a hulk like Jeff.

The thought of him momentarily broke her breathing rhythm, and she had to pause to remind herself to breathe lightly and evenly. Her calm restored for the moment, she eased through the narrow gap, reaching across a three-