then sat with unhurried grace, crossed one leg over the other, and folded his hands into his lap. “Weren’t you curious how, in a seventy-thousand-square-meter museum as you so helpfully pointed out, I knew exactly where to find an invisible woman?”
She didn’t answer. A cold trickle of sweat rolled down the back of her neck.
“So I’ll ask you again.” Still smiling, he regarded her with those green, glittering eyes. “And I’ll ask you nicely, one more time, before I hand you over to
He emphasized carefully each next word he spoke. “What. Are. You?”
Horror tightened its sharp, freezing claws around her throat. She sat there like a statue, frozen, unable to answer, unable even to blink.
The doctor. Interrogation. Experiments.
Oh God.
8
Lock and Load
D made the thirteen-hour drive from Rome to Paris in under ten.
He’d have been even faster on the Ducati, but his plan involved heavy explosives and those took up a lot of room, especially with what he had in mind. So the motorcycle was out, left behind in its usual spot in a parking garage not too far from the sunken church and the entrance to the catacombs where he and the other members of the Roman colony lived.
Where Eliana also used to live, until everything got so turned around his eyes would cross just thinking about it.
The Range Rover he drove—pitch black and growly, like his mood—belonged to a disbanded group of
Because you had to have paid killers to round up and dispose of the inevitable deserters who couldn’t live by the most inviolable rule of
And his Eliana—in addition to being the daughter of the dead leader of the Expurgari, the
And making him desperate with a capital D.
If The Hunt reached her before he did…
He gripped the steering wheel tighter and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. The SUV lurched forward, roaring over the empty, predawn Paris streets.
At the same moment, six men dressed exactly alike in tailored dark suits and mirrored aviators stepped off the high-speed Eurostar train at the Gare du Nord station in central Paris and without speaking to one another walked swiftly across the crowded platform and through the automatic glass doors to the pair of sleek black Audis awaiting them at the curb.
The six split into two groups of three. Two sat in the backseat of each car, one rode shotgun. The driver of each sedan said the identical thing to the new arrivals:
“Seventeen minutes. Lock and load.” And jerked his head to the stainless steel case in the middle of the backseat.
Both cars had government plates and so were allowed to idle in a no-stopping zone. If any of the railway police who prowled the station had run the plates, they would have found the cars registered to one Pierre Nettoyeur, senior medical practitioner with the French Defense Health Service and personal physician to the minister of defense.
Monsieur Nettoyeur was, of course, a fiction. Like others engineered by the Council of Alphas, he existed in digital form purely for the purpose of convenience. The leadership of the
Largely ignorant, that is. There had been an incident a few years back involving a disco, a territory dispute, and an eyewitness with a cell phone, but though that particular video made it to the evening news, it was roundly dismissed as fake. And all those witnesses in the club were dismissed as fame-seeking drunks.
At least publicly. There were those who did not dismiss things like that so easily.
Nettoyeur was a bit of whimsy—it meant “cleaner” in French, and “cleaner” in certain circles like the ones the eight gentlemen in the Audis moved in referred to an assassin, specifically one hired to manage a bad situation with a very permanent solution—but for this mission the fabricated profession had a much more practical purpose.
If stopped by the police, the driver would easily be able to explain why he carried such dangerous tranquilizers and weapons, and in such quantity. Monsieur Nettoyeur reported directly to the man who ran France’s entire military and had all the required paperwork to prove it.
So the paperwork was in order, fake identities had been assumed, travel had been arranged, and all the plans quite carefully made. And now The Hunt had arrived in Paris.
In less than one hour, Eliana Cardinalis would be captured—or dead.
9
Gotcha
There was a rat inside her skull.
An angry, hungry rat, intent on devouring all the gray matter it could before she clawed her own eyes out to get at it. Eliana needed to kill it and she needed to kill it soon because the agony, oh gods, the
“One hundred fifty thousand, Edoard,” said a calm male voice, strongly accented with German. The voice drifted to her from somewhere very close but also far, far away. She heard movement, fabric rustling, shoes clicking on tile, smelled the cool tang of rain in the air from a storm that was still hours off. Somewhere in the building a window was cracked and sweet, dew-tinged air leaked in.
But not in here, wherever here was. In here the air sweltered and smelled of death.
The rat really hated it. It chewed her brain more viciously than before. Tearing, squealing, clawing, eyes small and blood-red bright.
“Canine?” said another voice, almost hopefully.
The rat lifted its head and hissed. It liked this new speaker as much as she did. Edoard, she remembered past the pain, Edoard was his name. Beautiful hair, beautiful eyes…heart like a shard of obsidian.
“Bat, actually,” murmured the first voice, surprised. “Top of the auditory range. Extraordinary.”
“All right, record it and shut it down. We’ll do the UV next and see what we come up with. We’ve got to move her down the hall for that, though. And where the hell is the transfer paperwork? I needed that an hour ago.” Edoard muttered the last bit, irritated.
“Patience,” his friend answered calmly. “She’s not going anywhere.”
Then there was a small click, and all at once the rabid rat vanished, the pain in her skull subsided, and the room, spinning and white, swam into focus as she blinked open her eyes.
“Are you,
