Chapter 4
Jordan followed Daisy soundlessly up the hotel stairwell, unreasonably relieved when she carried on past level five, where Tremblay’s room was located, and instead exited the stairs at level seven.
Why did she always take the stairs?
It kept him fit, that and the regular runs he put in in the hotel gym while watching the security cams to make sure Daisy was where she was supposed to be.
He stood outside the fire door leading to the guest hallway. God help him if she came back and caught him standing there like a fool.
For logistical reasons his room was also on this floor. He pulled the hotel’s live security feeds up on his cell’s screen. Frowned when he realized the cameras were all down.
Dammit.
He put his hand on the door handle about to risk a quick peek to check that the corridor was indeed empty. A stairwell door opened with a squeal a couple of floors below.
Fuck.
What if it was Francois headed this way?
If it was, someone was going to pull the fire alarm in approximately two minutes.
Jordan peeked over the edge of the banister. Instead of Tremblay, a bald man wearing a black leather jacket trotted down the stairs. The sight jolted him like an electric prod. Instantly, Jordan flash-backed to another man, another place, but that was impossible.
Konrad Bocharov was dead.
He’d died in a fiery explosion only weeks after he’d arrived back in Mother Russia, only weeks after annihilating Jordan’s entire family. Enough DNA had been pulled from the ashes to confirm it matched the sample Jordan had provided the FBI.
Jordan’s thirst for revenge had had to be satisfied with that. He’d managed to slowly move on from his grief and his pain. Maybe not move past it, but move on.
This wasn’t Bocharov.
It couldn’t be.
Blood poured from a cut on the man’s head which he covered now by pulling on a ball cap. Jordan watched as the man got out a cell phone and then spoke softly in Russian.
His breath jammed in his throat. Memories surged and threatened to swamp him.
The voice was the same.
The accent was the same.
Jordan remained frozen in place.
His eyes were telling him one thing, but the facts another. He was being paranoid. He was wrong.
He had to be wrong.
Didn’t matter. Jordan needed to see this man’s face.
He hesitated as he thought about Daisy.
She should be safely in her room by now.
Compelled to know for certain that this wasn’t the man who’d murdered his family, Jordan moved swiftly and silently down the stairs. He needed to know if he was imagining things, if his mind was playing tricks on him.
He didn’t want to spook the guy—who could be an innocent vacationer who just happened to resemble his old nemesis—so he resisted full-out running. He gained but was still a floor behind when the Russian exited the stairwell into the main lobby.
Jordan legged it then, clearing a flight in one leap, heart drilling, not with exertion, but with dread.
It couldn’t be.
He burst into the lobby, surprised to see a crowd of people, some sobbing into their cupped hands. Something had happened. Something bad.
He scanned the crowd and caught sight of the Russian heading around the corner to leave by the back door on the other side of the hotel.
As Jordan pushed his way through the crowd in pursuit, a man from the conference stumbled into him, looking pale and shaken.
“He fell off his balcony. Francois Tremblay. I’ve known him for twenty years. His brilliant brain is splattered all over the patio.”
Something hit the pit of Jordan’s stomach and bounced back up with the same force.
He pushed through a gap and sprinted after the Russian.
Throwing people out of windows was a favorite pastime of Russia’s SVR, and this seemed like too big a coincidence when Konrad Bocharov had been an agent for that same organization before he’d moved on to trafficking weapons of war.
Jordan saw the door closing and pushed outside as the Russian climbed into the back of a black limo with dark tinted windows, pulling off his black cap and tossing it on the seat as he did so.
“Konrad!” Jordan called out.
The man glanced up, and surprise widened his pale, blue eyes. Then his lips pulled back into a grin. But it wasn’t Konrad Bocharov’s face. The cheekbones were sharper, the jaw less hammer-like. This man was a lot more handsome than the man Jordan had known.
Despite that, recognition flared in those cold depths as he held Jordan’s gaze for a split second before slamming the door, and the car sped off. Jordan dashed forward to get a plate number, but it was too dark, and the car moved too quickly.
His blood rushed through his ears in a deafening cacophony.
The face was wrong, and yet everything else pointed to that person being his old nemesis, Konrad Bocharov.
And faces could be changed.
If it were true that Konrad wasn’t dead the way the FBI had been led to believe, the way he’d been led to believe, then the man who’d murdered his sister, his mother, his grandfather, and grandmother was alive and well. With a new face, but the same dead eyes, the same brutal psychopathy.
As if nothing had ever happened…
And if Jordan had suspected that even for a moment, he’d have hunted him down and killed him years ago. Rage, an all-consuming conflagration, rose up inside him.
He wanted to race after the limo and pull the man from the vehicle and demand answers. Demand blood.
But he needed to think this through. He had no weapon, no jurisdiction.
And what if he was wrong?
What if he was imagining a connection where there was none? Triggered by an accent and a common build?
Flashing lights began to strobe the beach side of the resort and pulled his attention back to the present.
Jordan stood in the middle of the road and stared.
Tremblay was dead.
Jordan had no doubt who’d killed him—that Russian—who instinct screamed at him was Konrad Bocharov reincarnated.
Why?
His hands clenched into fists.
Daisy.
No. She was okay. But he started to move now. He knew she was okay. She’d hit the seventh floor only seconds before the Russian had exited the fifth.
How close had she come to death? And that’s what Konrad Bocharov was, pure death, risen from the grave.
Jordan wanted to punch himself. Daisy could have been in danger, and he’d hung back like some second-rate rent-a-cop because he was worried she’d see him. Another thought struck him. How many people had seen Francois on the beach with Daisy?
Dammit.
She’d be a suspect in Tremblay’s death.
She’d be detained and questioned by the Mexican authorities—unless she had an alibi.
Jordan slipped back inside, keeping his cap pulled low while checking the security feeds on his cell as he jogged up the seven floors to his and Daisy’s rooms.
Feeds were still down, but at least now he knew why.
He needed access to Daisy’s room because he doubted she’d let him in if he knocked on the door, and he didn’t have the right tools to pick the lock.
He called Florence Cisco back in Quantico.
She worked for the FBI’s TacOps Division and was a genius with electronics.
She was the one who’d hacked the feeds for him.
She didn’t answer.
He headed to his own room, careful to hide his face from the cameras as a precaution. As he got inside, the security feed came back online. Now he couldn’t risk using the corridor to enter Daisy’s room. Because as far as the authorities needed to be concerned, he was already in Daisy’s room.
He threw his cap on the bed and went straight to his window and opened it. He reckoned he had twenty minutes tops before the authorities decided to question her.
He stripped off his T-shirt and quickly changed into a black button-up shirt.
He stuffed his cell in his pocket and climbed onto the balcony, swung over the rail before jumping to the adjacent room.
He worked his way quickly around the side of the hotel, grateful Daisy was on the opposite side as Tremblay because everyone and his dog would be scrutinizing that facade.
A few windows were open, and he had to be careful not to be spotted. He calculated the number of windows to Daisy’s room and didn’t look down. The distance between balconies was only six feet. The drop was much farther, as Tremblay had undoubtedly discovered.
He went to jump, saw a shadow, and faltered—enough that he miscalculated. Suddenly he was dangling one-handed, seventy feet above that same concrete patio.
Thoughts of Tremblay’s fate flashed through his brain as he took a breath. He didn’t have time to die. He heard someone come onto the balcony above, and he changed tactics, dropping to the one below. He heard laughter and then the kind of murmurs that led to sexy times.
“Get a room,” he muttered under his breath.
It took a minute he didn’t have before the couple disappeared inside, and he set off again, hoping this time he didn’t fall.
Daisy tossed her heels onto a chair and went into the bathroom to wash the sand off her feet. Gave up and decided instead to strip and shower. She let out a soft sigh. Going to Francois’s room would have been a colossal mistake, and she was glad it wasn’t one she’d made.
As her dress fell to the floor and she stepped under the warm spray, emotions welled up inside her, making her feel wrung out and exhausted. Feelings were near to the surface tonight and she wasn’t sure why. She was probably still processing everything that had happened with her dad.
She shampooed her hair and then worked in conditioner.
She washed the sand and ocean from her skin and grabbed the cleanser to remove what was left of her makeup.
She was keen to get home now. To get to work.
Dad and Rowena were due back from England in a few days, but they’d been delayed waiting on a visa for Row.
Daisy hadn’t made the impromptu civil ceremony in Shropshire, but the two of them were planning another ceremony in Virginia soon.
A big one. She’d see Jordan Krychek there as he was going to stand up as best man for her dad.
Row wanted her to be Maid of Honor along with her two cousins from Zimbabwe. Her uncle was giving her away.
It was going to be fun—except having to pretend to be nice to Krychek.
She wished she hadn’t kissed him. Gah. It had only been a simple peck, but the fact she’d pecked him was maddening.
She’d flirt with some of the other guys instead. And if the numbskulls from Blue Team had the nerve to show their faces… Well, then she’d humiliate them as often as she could get away with without starting a riot.
At least they hadn’t seen her naked.
She pushed thoughts of Jordan freaking Krychek from her mind. Perhaps she should go to Francois’s room and work the FBI operator out of her system. She doubted the Frenchman would object.
But while Daisy had no qualms with Row and her father’s relationship, the twenty-plus-year age gap between her and Francois was a little much for her.
As was their relative positions in the nuclear physics community.
Or maybe it was simply that she wasn’t interested in Francois and everything else was irrelevant.
Row seemed perfect for her dad.
Daisy hoped they could be friends.
Her mom had been scathing about the whole thing, her bitterness showing. Said, like father, like son, whatever that meant as no one ever spoke about her paternal grandfather.
The kernel of resentment in her mother’s snide comments had surprised Daisy.
She hadn’t expected that from the woman she thought she’d known so well.
It spoke of jealousy even. Probably because, for the first time since her mother had left him, her dad was finally moving on.
Daisy rinsed the conditioner out of her hair and hoped it worked on memories too.
At least since the fiasco with Krychek, she hadn’t been wallowing in sadness about her ex and former best friend.
Obviously, she had lousy taste in men.
It was time to concentrate on more important things in life than men or sex, like thermo-dynamics and nuclear fission. Time to think about clean energy saving the world.
Maybe she had more in common with Francois than she thought.