Ultimate Weapon Read Free Page A

to finesse his dislike of hurting children, and still obtain successful outcomes. He’d relied on luck and cleverness, but his luck had run out last year in Bogotá.
    The problem had been glaringly evident to the powers that be at PSS. Which explained the long vacation they’d given him. Aside from the small matter of the bullet wounds he’d sustained.
    He’d been out of favor ever since, expecting them to put him down like a rabid dog at any moment. Vaguely surprised every morning that he woke to find himself still alive. They hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
    He’d begun to hope that they would simply ignore him for the rest of his life, but no. They had called him to locate Steele—and behold, she had a baby daughter. It was a test he could not afford to fail.
    He clicked automatically on the shower footage, thinking to distract himself with that dance of wet female flesh. It did not help, to watch her play with the toddler. It made him squirm, it made him sweat. He could not think straight, could not detach, could not take the three steps. Nothing had ever shaken his self-control to this extent.
    Find the weak point. Then exploit it. The rule droned in his head.
    Vaffanculo, he responded mentally, banishing it.
    The beeper attached to his pants chirped at him. He took a look, and his gut clenched. It was a numeric code, sent by Imre’s housecleaning service in Budapest. They were supposed to inform him of any change in Imre’s health and welfare. They had never beeped him before.
    The code informed him that he had an urgent message to retrieve from the computer bulletin board. Something had happened to Imre.
    His heart accelerated without his permission. There was a tremor in his hand as he entered passwords, clicked the message, decoded it.
    A few terse lines informed him that the woman who was paid to cook, clean, and do Imre’s shopping had come in that day and found the door forced, the apartment ransacked, and Imre unconscious on the floor, badly beaten. He was in the hospital, his condition grave.
    Val stared at the text on the screen for approximately three seconds and sprang to his feet, overturning the cup of tea. He groped for his phone, splashed and slipped clumsily in his bare feet through the steaming puddle in his haste to dress, pack, go, go, go .
    He was breathless, dizzy. Panicking. Calm down. Three steps. Panic was another luxury that he could not afford.
    Find the weak spot. Then exploit it.
    His gut churned nastily. It seemed someone had just found his.

Chapter
2
    A drenaline kicked her right across the barrier of sleep.
    Tam jerked up in bed, every nerve screaming, and instantly put every mental trick she had into action to block the dream that had provoked it. If the images didn’t sink their claws into her conscious mind, the feelings faded more quickly. Though never quickly enough.
    Tonight, she couldn’t block it. The crackle of rifle fire. Hard, clutching hands holding her down under a bruised white sky. Dark silhouettes, mouths screaming, but she could not hear what they said. She was deafened by those rifles popping.
    She squeezed her eyes shut and saw their stiff white faces, blank eyes staring up from the trench. Dirt showering into their open eyes. She had tried to close their eyes. Tried, and tried, but she’d had no coins to weigh their eyelids down. They would stay open forever. She could not hide what she’d become from those staring eyes.
    And the fear, the shame. Burning, corrosive hatred for that evil leering monster. For what he’d done to them, to her. Stengl.
    Her hands itched to kill him, even after sixteen years.
    She pressed her hands against her face, and tried to breathe deep, but her lungs seized up halfway through each breath in a painful hiccup that jolted her whole body. Ah, God. She hadn’t dreamed about Stengl and his secret police squad, or the horrors of Sremska Mitrovica for years. She’d deep frozen it, buried it, rolled huge rocks over it.
    But