Meet Me at Midnight. Jessica Andersen

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СКАЧАТЬ of an antique doorstop cast in the shape of a sailing ship.

      A prickle of fear shimmied in her stomach.

      The ship was one of a half-dozen iron doorstops she had carefully placed around the apartment. Perhaps they were a strange collector’s item for a legally blind person, but she knew where each one was, just as she knew the placement of every wall, every piece of furniture and all the other odds and ends in her space. Everything in her world had its place.

      This ship belonged beside the kitchen door, not in the middle of the living room.

      Heart pounding, Gabby searched the room by touching each object with trembling fingers. The sofa and coffee table were exactly where they belonged, and nothing else seemed wrong until she levered herself to her feet and felt for the desk. Out-of-place papers crunched underfoot, and there was a blank space where her computer should have been.

      “Oh, God.” Her throat closed on panic, on denial. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Please no.” Her specially outfitted computer, her lifeline to the rest of the world, was gone. Worse, she realized, as she felt frantically along the tabletop, the jumble of half-assembled electronic components was missing, too. She’d been working on a new prototype, a device that could reproduce Web site graphics in three dimensions, allowing blind people to “see” them.

      Someone wanted the design, she thought, her mind leaping ahead to seemingly impossible possibilities. Someone who knew what I was working on, who—

      She spun when she heard the noise. It might have been a quiet cough, or the shift of a shoe on her kitchen tile, she wasn’t sure, but she suddenly knew she wasn’t alone in the apartment. “Ty?”

      “Not exactly,” an unfamiliar masculine voice said from the kitchen. She heard footsteps, sensed him move to block the front hallway. “And you can’t see me, can you? That’ll make this easier than I thought.”

      The next thing she knew, he was coming straight for her.

      Chapter Two

      Dear TyJ:

      You know how you said the other day that honesty is very important to you? Well then, I’d better be honest with you. I’m not exactly the hotshot computer jockey I made it sound like in my profile, or even in some of our earlier private messages. I teach programming at a small college in the northeast, which is about as exciting as it sounds. As in ‘not.’ So trust me, the bodyguard gig has me beat by a mile in the ‘cool jobs’ department, even if you do spend most of your time standing around waiting for something to happen.

      [Sent by CyberGabby; April 3, 11:32:32 p.m.]

      10:21 p.m., August 2 7 Hours and 17 Minutes until Dawn

      Ty stumbled to a halt in the middle of the dark, deserted street and let his flashlight sag, hopelessly lost in the mazelike passageways, courtyards and narrow streets of the North End.

      Gabby had outdistanced him easily, moving ghostlike in the darkness. Without backup and an earpiece or, hell, even a functional handheld, he lacked access to the maps and information he normally had at his fingertips.

      Which had no doubt been part of Liam’s plan.

      They’d all learned the theory during Special Forces training—isolate the target and then make the kill. Liam had used the blackout to isolate his former teammates, then he’d moved in for the kill.

      He’d sent his sons after those former teammates—Frederick LeBron, Grant Davis, Chase Vickers, Shane Peters and Ethan Matalon. The only unaffected teammate had been Commander Tom Bradley, who’d escaped revenge by dying; the heart attack had taken him before Liam could get to him. LeBron had been in his alpine kingdom in Beau Pays, but the Sheas had gone after his precious daughter, Princess Ariana, and the LeBrons’ priceless sapphire. Thanks to Shane, the Sheas hadn’t been successful. They’d been equally unsuccessful with Ethan and Chase, whose families had been threatened but returned safely. Still. Liam remained at large, in control of the hostage, Grant Davis, and the bomb.

      Ty scrubbed his hand over his face, trying to ignore the feeling that he was running out of time, that he was letting himself get sidetracked. But he couldn’t stop flashing back on the look in Gabriella’s eyes when she realized why he’d hooked up with her on Webmatch.com.

      It wasn’t what you think, he’d wanted to say, but he hadn’t, because it would have been a lie, and he didn’t want to lie to her anymore.

      “At least, not if she’s telling the truth about Liam,” he muttered to himself.

      From behind him, a woman’s voice said, “You’re damned right she’s telling the truth.”

      Even before he turned and shone his flashlight toward the approaching figure, he knew it wasn’t Gabby. The voice was too high, and it rolled with strains of Italy.

      Maria scowled and crossed her arms over her chest. “She doesn’t know anything about your kidnapper, Mr. Secret Service. If she did, she would’ve told you right up-front. That’s the sort of woman she is.”

      “I need to speak with her,” he said. “Please.”

      She stared at him for a long minute, as though trying to interpret a motivation he couldn’t even name. Then finally she gestured with her chin, “Over there. First floor, door’s around the side.”

      “Thanks.” He loped across the street, pushed through the wrought iron gate and followed a cobblestone pathway around to the side of a neat, narrow, brick-walled three-family.

      His gut tightened when he touched her door and it swung inward. Adrenaline spiked alongside a jolt of concern. Then both were lost as training kicked in and he clicked over to soldier mode. Quiet. Efficient.

      Deadly.

      He left his revolver holstered and pulled the semiautomatic, then flicked off the flashlight. Muscles tense, senses almost painfully alert, he eased through the door, then paused and listened, not sure whether he was walking into an ambush or something else.

      The pitch-black inside the apartment made him wish for a pair of night-vision goggles as he eased along, carefully testing each step. Finally he cursed and clicked on the flashlight, using his fingers to muffle the glow and let only a small beam shine through.

      He uttered a low curse when he saw the condition of her apartment, and the scale tipped away from ambush ever so slightly.

      A doorway to his left opened onto a small kitchen, where the refrigerator door hung open, its contents in disarray. A head of lettuce had rolled beneath a small butcher-block table; most of the cabinet doors and drawers were open; and the single counter held a jumbled mess of papers and canned goods.

      The kitchen wasn’t just messy, Ty thought on a bite of rage. It’d been tossed, and by someone with a temper.

      The back door off the kitchen hung open. Was it a sign that the intruder had gone, or was it set up for a quick getaway? He didn’t know, and that worried him more than it should have, making him wonder about a woman who’d hacked into a murderer’s Web site but claimed it was on a lark, a woman who just happened to live in the same city where the kidnapping had gone down, yet professed innocence. It just didn’t play, he told himself yet again. There were too many coincidences for her to be innocent.

      Problem СКАЧАТЬ