Payback. Harper Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ a sneaker into a shallow line of mortar, she disengaged the fingertips of her left hand from the similar mortar depression they’d been gripping. Her body began to unpeel from the wall, but before the gap between her and the cinderblock could widen past the point of no return, her fingers were curling deftly into another hold. Without allowing herself to pause, she kept climbing.

      She needed a gun. Soldiers carried guns. Ergo, she thought with determination as she felt her knuckles scrape against the slight overhang of the building’s flat roof, it was only logical to go gun shopping in the one place where she could be sure of finding soldiers.

      “A girl wants Manolos, she hits the designer shoe stores…” she muttered, suddenly pushing off from the wall with her feet. Her lower half swung out. As her legs reached the top of their arc she abruptly pulled her upper body as close as she could to the roofline before jackknifing her arms out and thrusting herself straight up into the air. Immediately she folded into a ball, her head tucked and her arms wrapping around her drawn-in legs. The cool night air rushed past her as she tumbled once in midair, then twice, and as she completed the second tumble she quickly unfolded.

      She landed lightly on the top of the roof in a half-crouch, her feet a few inches apart and all her senses on full alert.

      “…and if a girl wants a gun, she hits a barracks—preferably at a time when she figures everyone’s still asleep,” she continued, rising from her crouch and briskly dusting mortar powder from her hands. “No matter how suspicious Captain Asher is, even he won’t be expecting Dawn Swanson to go nosing around so soon.”

      After finally getting past the gate and being handed over to the lab’s staff supervisor by an embarrassed Keifer, she’d barely taken time to unpack her suitcase in the room that had been assigned to her before putting her plan into effect. Aldrich Peters’s Lab 33 was undoubtedly malevolent, she’d mused as she’d climbed onto the toilet tank in the small attached bathroom, but she couldn’t fault its efficiency. Along with her fictitious bio, Carter had provided her with a thick sheaf of blue-prints—the complete schematics for the research complex, which she’d committed to memory before destroying as she’d done the bio.

      The bad news had been that the air ducts that served the combined lab section and civilian employees’ living quarters didn’t connect with those snaking through the ceilings of the military barracks and guardrooms. The good news was that the duct she’d wriggled into after sliding aside a metal grate in the ceiling of her washroom eventually joined up with a main artery that led to the roof. The barrack’s ducts did the same.

      Unfortunately, Dawn thought dryly as she saw the bulky silhouette of the second vent rising from the tar-and-gravel roof ahead of her in the dark, the reason the two didn’t intersect at some point was that they were in different buildings. And although the buildings were only a couple of yards apart, the roof she’d needed to get to had been a good twenty-five feet higher than that of the civilian building—which was why she’d had to do her human-fly imitation.

      “All the more reason no one would think to look for me in the military part, though,” she told herself in a murmur as she lifted the screened cover and boosted herself onto its edge. “If they discover I’m not in my room, which they won’t.”

      The journey through this duct was as hot and tedious as her maneuverings through the first, but whereas the one servicing the lab building had been spotlessly dust-free, that wasn’t the case here. For the third time in as many minutes she found herself freezing to a halt as a sneeze threatened. Part of the problem was the baggy sweatshirt she was wearing, she thought in frustration as her nose stopped twitching and she allowed herself to breathe again. For a job of this type, normally she would wear something that hugged her like a second skin and didn’t get in her way. But it would have been too dangerously out of character for the Swanson chick, as Carter had referred to her alter ego, to have packed a catsuit or even a tight yoga top and pants.

      “Oh, no, Swanson wouldn’t be comfortable unless she had something four sizes too large stirring up all the freakin’ dust in here,” Dawn muttered, her patience at an end as yet another sneeze tickled the back of her nose. As soon as it passed she wrenched the sweatshirt she was wearing up and over her head. A moment later the bunchy drawstring-waisted pants she’d had on were stripped off as well, leaving her clad only in a sports bra and formfitting boy-leg undies.

      She could retrieve the Swanson duds on the way back, she thought as she continued at a decidedly speedier pace through the duct. Up ahead it branched into two sections, and without hesitation she took the left branch, which according to the schematics led directly to the enlisted men’s sleeping quarters.

      Maybe she was being sexist, but no way was she about to risk dropping in on a roomful of female soldiers, she told herself as she inched her way cautiously across the ceiling tiles, making sure she distributed her weight equally over several at a time, instead of putting undue stress on one and chancing the possibility that it might give way and fall into the room below. In her experience, women weren’t only lighter sleepers but once awake, they came to total alertness a heartbeat faster than their male counterparts.

      “Nice theory, O’Shaughnessy,” she breathed, gingerly sliding aside a tile. “Guess you’re about to find out if it holds water.”

      According to Carter’s information, Asher had fourteen men and six women under his command—a far cry from the fifty battle-experienced soldiers he would have had in the SAS, she reflected, wondering again just how the man had blotted his copybook badly enough to end up here pulling down guard duty. But Des Asher’s past foul-ups weren’t her main concern at the moment, she reminded herself as she quickly scanned the double row of military-issue iron beds in the room below. Checking out how many of these beds were currently occupied and whether any of the occupants were awake was all she had to worry about right now.

      The tight Dawn Swanson-type bun at the nape of her neck was secured with enough bobby pins to set off a dozen metal detectors. Sliding one free, she stealthily tossed it through the opening she was peering through.

      The bobby pin bounced with a tiny ping! off a steel footlocker at the end of one of the beds. She held her breath.

      Five of the beds were made up with military preciseness and were obviously empty. From the remaining nine came a muted chorus of snores. None of the blanket-covered lumps shot bolt upright, no one’s breathing abruptly changed tempo, no opened eyes suddenly gleamed in the faint glow coming from the red-lit fire-exit sign by the door.

      With an acrobat’s agility, she dropped to the floor, immediately turning her landing into a head-over-heels roll that brought her to the shadowed side of one of the occupied beds.

      At sixteen, she’d been as rebellious as any other teenager, Dawn remembered with a faint smile, although her acting-out against authority had taken a different form from a normal girl’s. Once during a working trip to London that had left her sitting alone, bored and sullen, in a hotel room for too many hours while Uncle Lee had carried out a mission, she’d defiantly presented him with a Polaroid of herself standing in a vault at the Tower of London with a penlight clamped between her teeth and one gloved hand resting on the crown jewels of England. As if to make the point that she wasn’t that different, a furious Lee Craig had punished her like any ordinary teen who’d come home late after a date.

      He’d grounded her for two whole weeks. But after his death and before she’d come in contact with the Cassandras, she’d found he’d secreted the Polaroid as a memento in the hidden safe where he kept his emergency passports and contingency cash.

      Past history, Dawn thought as she jammed the sidearm she’d retrieved from the footlocker—a Beretta M9 pistol, standard issue for a U.S. Ranger as she’d noted Keifer and the American СКАЧАТЬ