Troubleshooters 02 The Defiant Hero Read online

  The Defiant Hero

  A Troubleshooters, Inc. Novel

  by

  Suzanne Brockmann

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  For the brave men and women who fought for

  freedom during the Second World War.

  My most sincere and humble thanks.

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  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Mike Freeman for pages and pages of notes and hours of reading and email time, to Gwen Freeman for going above and beyond the call of duty in providing Welsh translations, to Lyssa Davis who sent me a hard to find, out of print copy of We Remember Dunkirk (all the way from Australia!), to Frances Stepp for too many things to list, and to Joyce Mullan and Cris Martins and all the other wonderful people on my email newsletter list for providing me with contacts and/or information on England in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

  Thanks as always to Deede Bergeron, Lee Brockmann, and Patricia McMahon—my personal support staff and early draft readers. More thanks than is humanly possible to Ed, whose patience and love are limitless and desperately appreciated.

  Any mistakes that I’ve made or liberties that I’ve taken are completely my own.

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  One

  MEG DIDN’T UNDERSTAND at first.

  The man was smiling, and his pleasant expression and tone of voice didn’t match his words. “We’ve taken your daughter hostage.”

  She was in the parking garage beneath her condo, hauling a box of files from the back of her car, when he approached her. She wasn’t even a hundred feet away from Ramon, the building’s security guard.

  The smiling man must’ve seen the confusion in her eyes, because he said it again. In a Kazbekistani dialect. “We have your daughter, and if you don’t follow our orders, we’ll kill her.”

  And this time, Meg understood. Amy. She dropped the box.

  “Everything okay over there, Ms. Moore?” Ramon was down off his stool, starting toward them. There’d recently been a rape in another parking garage in this part of Washington, DC.

  “Tell him yes,” the smiling man murmured, opening his baseball jacket, giving her a flash of a very deadly looking gun.

  Oh, God. “Where is she?”

  “If I don’t make a phone call to my associates within the next hour, she’s dead,” he told her as he bent down to pick up the box. “My associates are Kazbekistani Extremists.”

  Terrorists. But not just regular terrorists. The Extremists were religious zealots, capable of terrible violence and cruelty, all in the name of their god. And they had Amy.

  Oh, God.

  “Everything’s fine,” Meg called to the guard, her voice shaking only slightly.

  “We’re old college friends.” The man turned his friendly smile on Ramon. “I thought I recognized Meggie. I didn’t mean to appear before her like the ghost of Christmas past, though, and scare her half to death.”

  Ramon’s hand was on the gun holstered at his waist. He smiled politely, but his dark brown gaze was on Meg. “Ms. Moore?”

  Help.

  She’d prepared for situations like this, back when she was working at the American embassy in Kazbekistan, an Eastern European country also know as K-stan or “the Pit” to the Americans who served time there. During her stay, she was reminded regularly that the United States didn’t negotiate with terrorists. The best solution was preventive—stay safe, stay secure, stay away from dangerous persons and situations.

  It was a little late for that now—although who would have thought a K-stani terrorist would show up here in Washington, all these years later?

  Meg knew what she should do in this situation. She should enlist Ramon’s help while this man held her box of files, while his hands were full and he couldn’t easily reach for his gun. She should be a strong American and refuse to negotiate with terrorists. She should seek help from the FBI.

  Who, no matter how good they were, wouldn’t be able to find her ten-year-old daughter within the next sixty minutes.

  After which time Amy would be killed.

  Meg forced a smile. American be damned. She was playing this one out as Amy’s very frightened mother. “It’s all right, Ramon,” she lied. “We’re . . . old friends.”

  “How about I carry this upstairs for you?” The man continued the charade. His English was remarkably good—he had only the faintest of accents. “We could talk about old times over a cup of coffee.”

  “Great.” She smiled again at Ramon, who watched them all the way over to the elevators.

  “Where is she?” Meg hissed from behind her frozen smile. “Where’s Amy? And what about my grandmother?” Amy had planned to take her great-grandmother, Eve, to the Smithsonian while Meg picked up these files she’d been hired to translate. Meg hadn’t been sure exactly who was the baby-sitter—the ten-year-old or the seventy-five-year-old.

  “The old lady’s your grandmother.” He nodded as he pressed the elevator’s call button. “I thought she was too old to be your mother. We’ve got her, too.”

  Meg felt a rush of relief. At least Eve was with Amy. At least Amy wasn’t alone and terrified and . . . “I don’t understand. I’m not rich, and—”

  “We don’t want your money.” The elevator doors opened and he stood back, politely letting her on first—the perfect terrorist gentleman. “We want you to do us a little favor.”

  Oh, God.

  “You frequently do business at the Kazbekistani embassy across town, right?”

  Oh, mighty God. The doors slid closed, but she kept her smile in place. Ramon would be watching through the security cameras.

  “I only work as a consultant, a translator. It’s never, I never . . .”

  He pushed the button for twelve. Somehow this man she’d never seen before knew she and Amy lived on the twelfth floor.

  Meg took a deep breath and tried again. “Look, I’m not allowed into any areas inside the embassy that contain confidential information or—”

  “We don’t want you to spy for us. We already have an agent in place inside the embassy for that purpose.” He laughed and it wasn’t purely for the cameras. This man was enjoying himself, amused by her fear.

  A fear that morphed hotly into anger as she turned her back to the security camera. “Then what do you want, damn it? How do I even know you’ve got Amy and Eve?”

  The elevator doors opened at the twelfth floor. He stepped back, again to let her go first. “If you like, we’ll send you the old lady’s head in a box—”

  “No!” Oh, God.

  He laughed again. “Then I guess you’ve just got to trust me, don’t you, Meggie?”

  Meg’s hands were shaking so badly, she couldn’t get her key into the lock.

  He shifted the box to one arm and a hip as he gently took her key ring from her, opened the door, and pushed her inside, following her into her living room. “I’m afraid I can’t be as trusting,” he continued, setting her box next to the couch. “After we discuss strategy and negotiate terms, I’m going to drive with you over to the embassy. I know it’s after five, but there’s a function tonight. Nothing formal. You can wear jeans. In fact, I want you to wear jeans. With those boots you have. What are they called? Cowboy boots. Or should it be cowgirl boots?”

  “Negotiate terms?” Meg didn’t give a damn what she wore. “What terms?”

  “Well, it’s actually a pretty simple negotiation with only one or two minor points. But the bottom line is that if you want to see your daughter and g
randmother again, you’ll do what we tell you to do. If you don’t . . .”

  “I do.”

  “Good.” He crossed to the windows, pulled the curtains. “Once you’re in the embassy, our inside agent will keep an eye on you. If you make any attempt to get help or to contact the authorities at any time, we will kill your daughter. Have absolutely no doubt about that.”

  His smile was gone.

  Meg nodded. She didn’t doubt him. After living and working in Kazbekistan for years, she knew quite well what the Extremists were capable of.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Eve was certainly old enough to recognize real trouble when she found herself in it up to her hips.

  And regaining consciousness on the hard metal floor in the back of a moving cargo van with her hands and feet tied was something of a clue that this day had taken a real turn for the worse.

  It hadn’t started out as a real swell day anyway, considering it was her seventy-fifth birthday and she’d long since given up celebrating the fact that she was continuing to get older. A faceful of wrinkles, sagging breasts, thin gray hair, loose skin, brittle bones, failing memory—wah-hoo! Let’s have a party!

  She hadn’t minded so much while her husband was alive. He’d always managed to make her feel twenty years old and impossibly beautiful. But he’d been gone for two years now, and for two years, all she’d felt was old.

  She could smell cigarette smoke, hear the hum of low voices drifting back from up front.

  When she’d first awakened, she’d thrashed about a bit, searching desperately in the dimness for her great-granddaughter. She’d found the little girl right away. Amy was still unconscious—knocked out from whatever drug they’d been given, there on the sidewalk outside the Smithsonian.

  Eve had made sure the girl was breathing, made certain her pulse was clear and strong, then had sunk back onto the floor, the rope digging into her wrists and ankles, the cold metal biting into her tender hips.

  They were moving steadily forward, without any radical turns. The van was on the highway, Eve decided. Lifting her head slightly, she caught the final glow of the sunset out the front windows, to the right. They were heading south, probably on Route 95.

  How had this happened?

  Eve closed her eyes, struggling to remember.

  She and Amy had been headed to the Smithsonian, ready to spend the day taking it all in. They’d packed a picnic lunch as Meg had rushed out the door, promising a birthday that Eve would never forget.

  Eve doubted that this was what her favorite granddaughter had meant.

  She and Amy had just gotten out of a cab and were there on the sidewalk in front of the museum when a man had approached them, hopelessly lost, asking for directions.

  He had a map, and as Eve had leaned over it, trying to read the tiny street names, she hadn’t noticed someone else coming up behind them until it was too late. Until they’d grabbed her, grabbed Amy.

  She could remember Amy screaming. She could remember her own struggles to reach the little girl, and the sharp stab of a needle that made the world wobble and waver and finally just plain disappear.

  There was no doubt about it. She and Amy had been kidnapped.

  She had to find Osman Razeen.

  Meg could feel a bead of perspiration trickle down her back as she tried to move purposefully up the stairs toward the new Kazbekistani ambassador’s office. She tried to look as if she had a real reason to be here, tried to look as if she couldn’t feel the gun in her boot, hard and cold against her leg. She tried to look as if her insides weren’t tied in a knot of fear for Amy. Please God, don’t let them hurt her . . .

  This was impossible.

  Ridiculous.

  Although it had been absurdly easy getting into the embassy with a loaded gun. The decorative chains on her cowboy boots had set off the metal detector at the front entrance—the way they’d done many times in the past. She knew the guard on duty—Baltabek was his name—and he just rolled his eyes, laughed, and waved her through.

  Obviously the Extremists had been watching her for a while. Obviously they’d targeted her specifically for this because they knew she could get into the embassy unquestioned.

  What else did they know about her?

  They knew that she’d do anything—anything—including give her life to keep Amy safe.

  Including smuggle weapons into the Kazbekistani embassy, intending to kidnap or—if it looked as if she couldn’t get her target out—to kill.

  That target was a man named Osman Razeen, the leader of a rival terrorist group known as the GIK—the Islamic Guard of Kazbekistan. The Extremists hated the GIK and thought Razeen disloyal to their cause and deserving of death. They wanted to bring him back to K-stan for a public execution. But they’d settle for his assassination right here, right now.

  And the Extremists seemed confident that Meg, in order to protect her daughter, would be capable—if she had to—of pulling that trigger and ending his life.

  Meg didn’t know for sure that this Osman Razeen was really here, inside the embassy. But the thought that he could be here, that the leader of the GIK might have worked his way so thoroughly into the political trappings of his country’s government, was mind-boggling.

  Still, at this moment, she didn’t give a damn if the K-stani government had been penetrated by spies or terrorists or even the Easter Bunny himself.

  At this moment, she wanted only to save Amy and Eve.

  And to do that, she had to find Osman Razeen.

  She couldn’t get help without the Extremists finding out. There was no one inside the embassy that she could speak to, no one she could trust.

  She couldn’t even dare to approach the Americans that were here at the embassy on business. One of them could just as well be the Extremists’ inside man.

  Meg looked back at the K-stani guards standing at the foot of the stairs in their ornate formal uniforms. Despite the bright colors and the flash of gold braids, those uniforms weren’t half as resplendent as the U.S. Navy’s dress whites.

  No, there was no one and nothing that could compare to an officer of the U.S. Navy when he was dressed to shine. . . .

  Meg gripped the banister, stopping short at the top of the stairs. She needed help—there was no doubt about that. There was no way in hell she could do this alone. And in a flash of clarity, she realized exactly whose help she needed, and how she just might be able to get it.

  But first she had to find Osman Razeen.

  He was believed to be a tall man, about six-one or -two, dark hair, brown eyes, about forty years old. The Happy Terrorist from the parking garage had shown Meg a blurred and faded photograph taken a good fifteen years ago. It was apparently the only picture in existence of the elusive Razeen.

  She’d studied the photo, memorizing his chin, his nose, his light brown eyes and his rather unremarkable face, praying that she’d recognize this man when she saw him.

  In the picture, he didn’t glare the way a terrorist was supposed to glare. He didn’t have a heavy, furrowed brow or thin, cruel lips. In fact, his lips were rather full, and he smiled crookedly, charmingly, at whomever was taking the photograph.

  And now he was fifteen years older. His hair might be gray. It might be gone. He might’ve gained fifty pounds, might’ve aged into someone unrecognizable.

  And to add to her problem, Razeen could be virtually anywhere. He could be in the kitchen, disguised as part of the serving staff, cutting lamb into cubes for shish kebab for tonight’s dinner. He could be the aide to the ambassador. God, he could be the new ambassador. . . .

  Then Meg saw him. It had to be him, didn’t it? Osman Razeen, only slightly heavier than the man in the photo, dressed in a dark business suit, deep in conversation with three other men as they headed together down the hall. But she wasn’t sure. How could she possibly be one hundred percent certain it was him?

  He was about the right age, the right height, the right coloring.

&nb
sp; His companions were speaking in Russian as they passed, one of the men, heavyset and balding, making a cruel joke about Putin.

  All four men laughed, and it was the smile, that same slightly crooked smile that was in that photo, that convinced Meg.

  She’d found Razeen.

  As she watched, he went into the men’s room with the other three men. And she knew. It was now or never. She couldn’t have asked for a better location.

  Meg crossed the hall, heading directly for the ladies’ room, right next to the men’s. She pushed open the door and went into a stall, where she pulled up her pant leg and reached into her boot for the gun.