LITMIR.BIZ

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me and stop with the Q&A.” His voice had sounded strange to Gillen, a quiet menace tinged with fear. Uncharacteristically, he’d avoided looking into her eyes. The memory caused a shiver to travel down her spine. She’d heard Lang angry before. In fact, he often seemed to swing between a boisterous charm that attracted people to him and a righteous anger that made him an unwavering opponent in an argument, even when he was dead wrong.

      But the fear, that was seared into her memory. Lang never, ever, showed fear. Sure, a shrink may have argued that his in-your-face confidence masked a hurt, vulnerable little boy, provided a bandage for his wounded psyche. And Gillen would have told that shrink he was full of it, right up until she’d heard the fear and the distress in Lang’s voice.

      So, yeah, she’d dropped the discussion at the time. Now she regretted it.

      Lang was long gone and this creep had found her. She had no idea who he was, what he was capable of or why he wanted anything to do with her.

      “Thanks, Terry,” she muttered.

      Inside her bedroom, she made her way to the dresser, yanked open the top drawer and rummaged through bras, panties and socks stuffed inside. Where the hell was it? Finally her fingertips grazed smooth, cold steel. She hesitated for a moment, but then used her fingers to rake back the clothing until she could see the gray metal box at the bottom of the drawer. Taking the box from the drawer, she carried it over to her unmade bed, swept aside the wadded sheets to clear herself a spot and sat on the edge of the mattress. Perching the box on her knees, she used her thumb and index finger to work the dial on the combination lock until the final tumbler fell.

      The lid came up and she studied the contents of the box. A small stack of bills—mostly U.S. dollars—secured with a rubber band lay at a forty-five-degree angle on top of her passport. She removed both items and set them next to her thigh on the mattress. A .25-caliber automatic pistol was the next item she took out, along with two clips for the weapon. She balanced the gun in her palm and scowled. It wasn’t much, but it fit her hand well and was easily hidden. Finally she removed a silver key and slipped it into the hip pocket of her snug jeans. Sealing the box, she set it on the bed and stood.

      The cash, gun and passport all were items she’d started keeping years ago, a ritual that began when she’d been a foreign correspondent in Sierra Leone and again while covering clashes between the Israelis and Hezbollah. When she’d been a green reporter, an editor had told her to carry enough cash to bribe public officials or to buy an airline ticket. And if that didn’t work, well, that was why she’d carried the gun, though she’d never used it on anything except tin cans, paper targets and an occasional watermelon.

      She scanned the room. Should she pack her clothes? No time. It was best for her to simply get the hell out of the apartment, get out into the open where people would see if something happened to her. She could take a cab to the Messenger’s office and surround herself with colleagues and friends. It may not make her safer, but it at least would make her feel safer, which was no small thing. And she might be able to dig up some more information. Maybe someone had heard from Terry or they might know something about the key.

      Her cell phone beeped and the sudden, sharp noise in the midst of silence caused her heart to skip a beat. By the third ring, she’d regained her breath and shook her head disgustedly at her edginess.

      “Tammy, it’s Kellogg.”

      It was Mike Kellogg, the Messenger’s bureau chief. The sound of a familiar voice should have relaxed her. But she heard the tension in his voice and it only stoked more fear in her.

      “Mike, what’s going on?”

      “Terry’s gone.”

      She hesitated for a moment and said, “I know.”

      “You knew? What the hell. Why didn’t you say anything?”

      “What’s the big deal? You know Terry. He’s like a cat. He disappears, and you don’t see him for a few days and then he resurfaces.”

      “This is different,” Kellogg said.

      “Different how?”

      “Couple of guys came around looking for him. They asked a lot of questions.”

      “Questions? Like?”

      “Like, had we heard from him? Did we know who he’d been talking to? Where had he gone? They took Bonham into his office for a while and grilled him. He came out of there red-faced and sweating, like he’d run a damn marathon with these bastards.”

      “They didn’t identify themselves?”

      “Not to me they didn’t. I’m sure they told Bonham who they were, but he wasn’t in the mood to talk after they left. He shut his door and turned on the Do Not Disturb light on his phone. But he looked pretty shook up when it was all said and done.”

      “Damn,” she said.

      “What?”

      “I don’t know,” she replied. “Last I saw Terry, it was two days ago. He was acting nervous, almost scared.”

      “Terry? Bullshit. That guy always was on an even keel.”

      “Not this time. Seriously, he was worried. Scared. I never saw anything like it. And now these guys show up looking for him. That worries me.”

      “What had him so scared?” Kellogg asked.

      “I don’t know for sure.”

      “For sure?”

      “I mean, I don’t know,” she lied.

      “Maybe he just overreacted. The guy was working his ass off. Maybe he just got edgy, a little paranoid. Could happen to anyone.”

      “Sure,” Gillen replied, not at all convinced.

      “Look, you sound pretty shook up. You at the apartment? How about I come over? It’s no trouble.”

      She thought about the two men waiting outside the building for her. On the one hand, it seemed an attractive proposition. Maybe if they saw her leave the building with someone instead of by herself, they’d keep their distance from her. Maybe. Or perhaps they’d just come after Kellogg, too. And that assumed that they’d be content to wait outside until Kellogg arrived, which wasn’t a certainty in and of itself. No, she needed to take care of herself and do it right now.

      “I’m fine.”

      “Really, it’s no trouble,” Kellogg stated.

      “I’m fine,” she repeated, this time in a no-nonsense tone.

      “Hey, I can take a hint,” Kellogg said. The good-natured tone of his voice sounded forced. Was he angry or just trying to cover for his wounded ego? At this point, she had no time to worry about such a thing. She needed to act.

      “Look,” she said, “I’ll call later. Is that okay?”

      “So you’re staying put?”

      The question struck her as odd. “Sure,” she said.

      They said their goodbyes and hung up.

      BOLAN ROLLED UP THE SIDEWALK toward Gillen’s apartment building, a glass-and-steel monstrosity that jutted toward Dubai’s clear, blue skies. He’d been watching the place, getting a feel for the property and its surroundings for an hour. Almost from the moment he’d arrived, he’d been struck by the neighborhood’s Western feel. Gleaming apartment and office buildings lined either side of the street. Restaurants and shops, many of them the same fast-food restaurants and department stores found in the United States, lined the streets. If it wasn’t for traffic and other signs written in Arabic or an occasional group of women, their features obscured behind veils, Bolan could just have easily been in any major U.S. city.

      Beneath his black nylon windbreaker, which he wore unzipped, as a small concession to the heat, the soldier carried the Beretta 93-R in a shoulder rig. The Desert Eagle rode on his hip, obscured by the

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