Chapter 14 #2
“Isn’t that always where the chain begins?” Dane held the man’s stare, hardening his face to granite, without any give at all. He didn’t even breathe while Kevin considered his words and made up his mind.
“You have a point. Keep your mouth shut unless I ask you a question. Don’t answer to anyone else, no matter who walks in the room.”
“You expecting Grisk?”
“I’m always expecting the worst.” Dane nodded, his respect meter for Kevin shooting up several skyscrapers.
He followed Kevin to another windowless room, slightly larger than the interrogation room, but set up to overflowing with all kinds of electronic equipment.
There was a long desktop with several computer monitors and a man with a headset tapping a keyboard along one wall.
Shelves filled with old VCR tapes, disks, and miscellaneous audio and video equipment lined the wall behind them.
Two other men crowded behind the man at the controls.
He tapped on a button and the bird’s-eye view of Sejuiced flashed onto two monitors.
“Turn up the sound,” Dane said, well aware he was violating Ivory’s one rule and enjoying it when the man nudged his back. The guy at the keyboard looked skeptical and then looked to his chief over Dane’s shoulder for direction.
“Do it.”
The man took off his headphones and turned up the volume. There wasn’t much to hear for the first minute while Dane waited for Chancy’s arrival.
“Speed it up to the action,” Kevin prompted.
Dane watched and listened to the conversation, critiquing his performance in his head. When the fight started, he felt the blows all over again, the crunching give of flesh and bone. It didn’t feel good.
They were almost to the end of the clip.
Everyone in the room was silent, tense. If he could bottle the energy from all the tight jaws in the small space, Dane figured he could light up the city at Christmas.
He was about to make a remark, a wiseass remark something along the lines of wondering whether or not he would get a reward for cleaning up their mess. But he never got the chance.
The door to the room banged open and Wade Grisk barreled in with two uniformed officers following him.
Dane’s first instinct was to size up his odds of fighting his way out.
They weren’t good. Not even on a good day, one where he wasn’t still aching from a beating the day before, one where he was maybe twenty years younger and quicker.
But at least now he was wiser. He didn’t jump to his feet and he didn’t open his mouth. Not yet.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Grisk thundered. “Why isn’t he in a filthy cell where he belongs?”
“What are you going to do? Rip out my fingernails till I talk?”
“Don’t be a smartass, Blaise. I know your reputation. You and that bitch traitor—”
There wasn’t any amount of Zen or restraint that could overcome that kind of prodding. So even though Dane knew he was feeding Grisk’s plans, giving him what he wanted, he stepped forward, into Grisk’s face.
“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”
Kevin pulled on his arm, shoved him back just as the officers with Grisk moved to take him.
“Hold on, Grisk,” Kevin matched Grisk’s volume and raised the man’s command of the situation as he spoke with seething control. “We’ve been watching a video and it’s telling a very interesting, very different story than yours.”
“You’re trusting him? A video you got from him? It’s garbage. Trash, and that’s where it belongs. Give it to me.” Grisk put out his hand, his face red, his teeth bared, poised to rip the computer apart where the clip was on pause.
Dane watched the man’s eyes dart to the screen and back to Kevin’s face, backing off as if watching the evidence might give it credibility, as if he might turn to stone if he saw the evidence of his own demise.
With his pulse throbbing fast, Dane took a deep, inconspicuous breath to ratchet down his tension, get things under control.
At least now he knew Kevin was telling the truth. He was looking to bring down Grisk, not Shana.
Dane spoke, filling the silent hesitation in the room.
“There is no file, no disk. It’s in the cloud.” He swirled his hand in the air to demonstrate. He smiled the Cheshire cat smile again. He wanted to instigate Grisk, wanted to make him blow his cool. Two could play that game. Only problem was Kevin. The chief wanted to calm things down.
Dane knew Kevin needed to get his boss updated before he could make a move if the Aussie law enforcement hierarchy was anything like it was in the States.
Kevin would need to get the video to his superiors, turn up the dial and fast forward the case they’d been trying to make, move up the planned arrest. To sometime in the next five minutes, if Dane could have his wish.
Because if not, if things calmed down and they talked and started negotiating, exchanging chess pieces, then Dane knew he’d be a pawn and he’d end up in a cell for a while before things got sorted out.
And then they’d be after Shana, but not for an arrest. They’d be out to kill her because that would be the only way Grisk and Peterson could make a case stick against her now. They’d set her up as the aggressor and instead of arresting her they’d claim she was resisting and they’d shoot her dead.
Dane hoped the scenario playing out in his mind wasn’t foresight, he hoped it was plain damn cynicism eating at him.
“We’ll email you a copy of the file, but we’re not erasing it.
” Kevin said to Grisk. Then he leaned over and spoke quietly to his tech guy running the show and because Dane’s adrenaline had turned up the volume on his awareness, he heard Kevin tell the man to send the file to Investigator Wick at ACIC—the Australian Criminal Investigation Commission, and to Pelham at ACLEI—the Australian Commission of Law Enforcement Integrity.
Dane had been right about who Kevin was answering to.
“What are you doing?” Grisk shouted. He waved at his men. “Take this man away.”
“Not yet,’ Kevin said. “I’m not finished questioning him.”
“I don’t give a damn about your investigation, Ivory. Last time I looked I outranked you.”
“I don’t work for you. I don’t answer to you,” the two men stood toe-to-toe and Dane felt less and less comfortable about playing the role of pawn between these two men.
He slipped the phone from the corner of the desk behind him and tapped in the emergency number the governor had given him. Grisk spotted him.
“Who are you calling—you can’t make a call. Get that phone from him.”
“Where the hell did you get that phone?” Kevin said.
Dane backed away and held up his hand as if it held a grenade instead of the phone. He put it to his ear as if it were a detonator. Then he spoke loud and clear before anyone made another step toward him.
“This is Dane Blaise. Thank you for taking my call, Ambassador.”
“Cut this shit,” Grisk lunged for the phone but he didn’t get it. Dane took him by the wrist and bent it at an unnatural angle.
The man’s scream of pain mobilized everyone else in the room and while Dane gave his location to the man on the other end, three men were on him and wrestled the phone from his grasp. Kevin was one of the three men who had him, he was the one who Dane let the phone go to.
Chairs were knocked over and one man went down.
Two mugs of coffee and a ream of paper hit the floor in the struggle.
Dane had no idea if he could still count on Kevin as an ally, but he would bet his ass that he could count on the ambassador, whom the governor would alert—to send someone over.
As this ran through his mind, one of Grisk’s men punched him in the gut then wound up to punch him in the head in spite of the shouts to back off from Kevin.
That was the moment the door banged open again, nearly coming off its hinges. As the fist hit Dane in the cheek and eye he saw stars and heard a gunshot.
The shot was fired at the overhead lighting, plunging the place into semi-darkness, lit only by the various monitors. But before the lights had gone out, he’d seen who fired the shot.
It wasn’t the contingent from the embassy, who couldn’t have gotten here so quickly.
It was Shana. He’d bet every last hair on his balls on it.
Thinking fast in spite of the pain splintering through his temple, he figured no one else had seen her since they were all watching him. He’d been the only one facing the door.
As much as he loved seeing her, as much as it lifted his heart, gave him a pure rush of pleasure, he knew they were in deep shit now.
Using the split-second distraction to lurch away from the loosened grasp of his assaulters, Dane shoved his way from the corner and dove for the doorway as if he were diving for a life preserver. They’d need to get out of there fast.
Joe was in the hall and as soon as he and Shana cleared the door, they ran like hell.
“Stop them. Don’t just stand there.”
Everyone was after them now. The bad guys and the good guys. He didn’t know how much the ambassador owed his friend Peter, but he hoped it was life and limb, because they’d need a very big favor.
“Head for the back door,” Shana said.
He didn’t bother arguing with her. They’d need to swing around front on the outside to meet the embassy people who would be on their way now.
They reached the end of the hall and he shoved Joe and Shana ahead of him around the corner.
That was when he saw Grisk charging toward him, gun raised.
Dane dove again. At the same time the gunshot rang through the closed space.
The sting in his leg felt like an alarm sounding in his ear, blocking all other senses with blinding shrill pain.
Damn f—ck. H couldn’t stop. He didn’t stop.
They followed Shana. She knew the complex from her past life working here.
Dane saw her and Joe ahead of him as they made it to the back door, but it felt like he was looking through a pinprick of light, his vision getting hazy, his head dizzy.
They got out back to the parking lot, but with the alarms sounding and a building filled with police officers, Dane knew they weren’t going to get far.
“Head for the front,” He shouted through gritted teeth and they kept down, rounding the corner. Up ahead he saw police pouring from the building. He was losing ground. He tried shouting again.
“The embassy is sending someone.” His voice sounded far away to him and he wasn’t sure anyone heard him.
It felt like an ice pick stabbed his leg with every excruciating step, no matter how much he favored it, no matter how much he slowed.
He saw Shana run back to him. He could see the moment she realized he was hurt.
He looked down at his bloody pants, tried to keep moving.
He wanted to shout and tell her to keep going, but his voice didn’t come out, his head spun.
Hanging on to consciousness, he gritted his teeth and as she closed in he saw the devastation on her face even through the dark glasses and baseball cap pulled over her hair.
She reached him and huddled with him against the building as men shouted at them to halt and rushed in their direction. She took his face in her hands and penetrated his eyes with hers as if she could find all the answers there, see everything that was going on.
“They’re here.” He ground out the words and stood on one leg, tearing his eyes from hers, holding a hand over his leg.
The blood loss was winning against his strength of will, he felt the life flowing from him, couldn’t make it stop, couldn’t make himself stand as he leaned back against the wall.
That lucky bastard Grisk might have hit an artery.
Dane pulled at his belt with clumsy hands, then she helped him, ripping it from his waist band and wrapping it around his leg in a swift smooth move to stanch the blood flow. The police, looking like a SWAT team, surrounded them, guns aimed shouting at them to put their hands on their head.
“He’s hurt. Are you blind?” Shana shouted back at them. “I’m stopping the bleeding. Help me or shut the hell up.”
One of the men was about to hit her with his M16 when Dane shouted at the top of his lungs to stop, or he thought he did. The blood loss made him too dizzy to see, made him o weak to stay upright as he sank into a dark swirling oblivion.