Freak (16 page)

Her arms full, Gaia kicked open the kitchen door and dumped everything into the trash. She paused in front of the sink to catch her breath and get her pounding heart under control. Through the kitchen
window she could see Oliver, Jake, and her father talking in low tones, going over the game plan as Jake secured his protective gear.

Aside from the vibe of attraction constantly sizzling between her and Jake, there was also an air of determination in the room that affected everyone, not least of all Gaia. This was it. By the end of the day today, it would all be over. She would be free.

Life as she knew it was about to change. For the better. For good.

Gaia took a deep breath and Jake tore his attention away from the elder men, looking over at her. Their eyes met and Gaia froze. As if in slow motion, Jake's eyes softened and he smiled a slight, private smile. It turned Gaia's insides to goo and she had the sudden, almost overwhelming desire to rush right out there, grab him, and kiss him.

Jake's smile widened as if he knew what she was thinking, and Gaia forced herself to look away, closing the little shutters over the opening. She turned around and leaned back against the sink, her hands braced against the counter, her elbows behind her.

Gaia did want to kiss him. More than anything. And she would. Later. After it was over. When they were both safe and sound and victorious.

She would kiss Jake Montone as soon as she had nothing to lose.

Grandpa

“IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG AND
you can't speak into your handheld, just press this button,” Gaia's father explained, holding up his tiny walkie-talkie. “You press this button on the side and the rest of us will be able to track you anywhere within a ten-mile radius.”

Gaia nodded her understanding. Every order, every instruction her father had given that afternoon had been repeated in layman's terms again and again as if he thought he were speaking to a group of kindergartners. She knew he just wanted them to be prepared, but enough was enough. Gaia was more than ready to go.

She looked out past the bushes that concealed her, Jake, Oliver, and Tom, gazing across the wide lawn at the mansion hulking against the twilit sky. At least a quarter mile of open green grass separated the little team from the target. If Yuri had any guards stationed outside, which was an obvious no-brainer, they would spot Gaia and the others before they made it five feet from the brush.

She considered mentioning this, but she was sure her father, Oliver and Jake were all well aware of the situation. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do about it. This was the best route onto the grounds unless they wanted to walk en masse up the driveway out front.

“Remember, we want to head for the basement. If he's got a panic room, that's where it'll be,” Tom added.

Come on. Enough instruction,
Gaia thought, her leg jittering beneath her.
Let's get this over with already.

“This Yuri guy sure knows how to live,” Jake said, scanning the back of the huge house.

“That's all about to change,” Tom told him. “Okay, Jake and Oliver take the west side, Gaia and I will go east.”

Everyone nodded and a thrill of excitement rushed through Gaia. This was it. If they succeeded here today, life as she knew it was over. How totally cool.

“Move out,” Tom said.

Gaia cast Jake what she hoped was an encouraging look before following her father through the woods toward the right side of the house. Every twig and leaf that crunched beneath their feet sounded loud enough to wake the dead. Gaia kept one eye trained on the house, but there was no sign of life. So far, so good.

Her father suddenly paused beside a huge oak and pressed himself back against the trunk. He motioned to Gaia to stay down, but over the top of the brush Gaia could see what had stopped him. A single guntoting guard moved from around the side of the house to the back, patrolling along the perimeter.

“That's not too obvious,” Gaia said sarcastically.

“He has his back turned,” her father said flatly. “Stay low.”

He rushed out of the bushes, legs bent, back down, moving quickly across the lawn. Gaia followed him, wondering if he was scared, if he was worried that they might not pull this off. It was one rare moment in her life that she was actually grateful she was a freak who couldn't feel fear. Yuri seemed like the type of character who could inspire terror in anyone. It was still so hard to imagine Dmitri as a psychopath.

They made it to the wall with no incident and sat back against it, taking shallow breaths. Gaia trained her ears toward the other side of the house, listening for anything out of the ordinary, but was met with silence. Wherever Jake and Oliver were, they were okay. So far.

“I'll check the window,” Gaia's father told her. He stood up and ran a circuitry detector along the bottom of the window above Gaia's head. The green light blinked rapidly and Tom attached it to the glass. He pressed a button, then crouched down again.

“What's that do?” Gaia asked.

There was a sizzle and a pop from above them and her father stood up and opened the window. No alarm.

“It shorts out all the wiring in the vicinity,” he explained, motioning for her to climb inside. “Let's go.”

Impressed, Gaia swung her leg over the window and lowered herself into a vacant room. No furniture, no artwork, no light fixtures. Everything was still.

“Looks like we picked the right room,” Gaia whispered when her father appeared beside her.

He nodded tersely and headed for the door. Gaia pressed her lips together and told herself to remember why they were here. Her father had a reason for being all business. This was a huge mission and if he wanted her to keep her mouth shut—as he seemed to be telling her by his own example—she would do just that.

Her father checked outside the door, then motioned to her to follow. They speed-walked along the wall down a long corridor that appeared to open up onto a large room. The hallway split at one point, but her father stayed the course—heading for the front of the house. Suddenly Gaia heard male voices up ahead and she and her father both froze. He looked around the corner and pulled his head back.

“Two guards, playing poker,” he whispered to her. “Stay here.”

Gaia resisted the urge to protest. Why was she always staying behind him, staying low, staying back? Didn't he trust her to hold her own—to help more?

Her dad stepped out of the hallway, dart gun drawn, and fired. There was a commotion and a gun went off. Gaia's father ducked back into the hallway
and a piece of the wall across from them exploded.

“There are two more,” he told Gaia as the shots and shouts intensified. “They walked in from the other room.” He reloaded his dart gun and looked her in the eye. “I'm gonna hold them here. You go back to that fork in the hallway and see if you can find a way to the basement.”

Gaia's heart thumped as he jumped into the fray again and fired a few more shots from his dart gun.

“Why are you still here?” he hissed when he ducked back again.

“I'm not leaving you here with three guards,” she told him, pulling out her own dart gun.

“Yes you are.” He grabbed her arm and nudged her back in the direction they'd come from. “Go!”

Gaia hesitated.

“We're here for Yuri, Gaia,” he said fiercely. “I know you can take him. I'll be right behind you.”

That was all she needed to hear. Gaia drew herself up straight and ran double time back down the hallway, buoyed by her father's confidence. Every door along the new hall led to another unused salon or bedroom, but at the very end of the hall, Gaia found a reinforced steel door—quite unlike the standard wood doors she'd already tried.

This looks promising,
she thought.

She turned the knob, but it was locked. Gaia had a
loaded gun in an ankle holster, but she had been instructed not to use it unless absolutely necessary. Besides, she didn't want to draw attention to herself by blasting the lock to smithereens. Instead she crouched to the floor and pulled out a lock-picking pin and fork from her utility belt. She hadn't practiced this particular skill since she was in grade school and Loki had secretly trained her behind her parents' backs, but even then she was an expert.

Gaia inserted the tools into the lock, trying not to pay attention to the continued gunshots in another area of the house. She had to focus. Her father would be with her any minute.

Suddenly the mechanism inside the doorknob clicked and Gaia's pulse jumped. “Like riding a bike,” she whispered.

She tried the knob and held her breath as it turned. Standing, Gaia opened the door ever so slowly, waiting for more gunfire, an order to stand down—something. But the door swung open and Gaia stood there, looking down a darkened set of stairs.

Bingo,
she thought, replacing her tools in her belt. She drew out the dart gun again and started down the steps, walking as lightly as humanly possible. The stairs grew narrower toward the bottom and ended at a wall. The only direction Gaia could go was left. She pressed herself back against the wall and checked around the corner.

One guard stood before another metal door at the base of another set of stairs coming in from the right. He spoke rapidly into a wrist mike while more voices crackled through the speaker in his ear, so loud Gaia could hear the distortion all the way down the hall.

“I need a guard at the back door!” the man said into his mike. “Someone secure the back basement door.”

At that moment, he looked up and saw Gaia emerging from the stairs.

“Too late,” she said with a shrug. Before he could even pull his gun out, she had flattened him with a dart to the chest. Then Gaia raced down the hallway, her adrenaline pumping at a fierce rate.

This door was secured with an electric keypad lock. There was a keycard slot down the side. Gaia crouched to the ground and flipped the comatose guard over. She searched his pockets and found a card with a metallic strip attached by a metal wire to his belt. She yanked as hard as she could and the wire snapped.

“Let this work,” Gaia said under her breath.

She checked over her shoulder for her father or for the guard her downed-man had ordered, but saw nothing. Pulling her gun out for good measure, Gaia stood and slipped the card through the lock box. The red light on the side turned green and a loud clang emitted from the doorway.

Gaia stepped back, held her gun up with both hands, and kicked the door with all her might. It flew open, slamming back against the wall, and Gaia trained her gun straight ahead.

“Don't move!” a voice shouted.

Yuri stood on the other side of a richly decorated room near yet another, even thicker, door. He had a gun trained on Gaia's head. His eyes widened ever so slightly when he saw her.

“I said, don't move!” he told her again.

“You're not going to shoot me,” Gaia said.

She reached back with her foot and slammed the door behind her. Any of the guards would have keycards as well, but the closed door would buy her a few extra seconds if they did come.

“What makes you think that?” Yuri asked as she sidestepped into the room, her gun pointed right at his face. He followed her with his own weapon, circling around a leather couch to stay across from her.

“Because, I'm your only hope now, right? I'm supposed to be groomed to succeed you, aren't I,
Yuri?”
She paused and ground her teeth together. “Or should I call you Grandpa?” she asked with a sneer.

“Do you think I'm going to let
you
kill
me?
” he asked.

“Not planning on it,” Gaia said. “I'd rather see you rot in a federal prison for the rest of your life.”

Yuri chuckled. He ran one hand along his freshly
shaven jaw line and smiled at her. “You can't turn me in,” he told her. “I have video of you stealing files from a CIA office. If I go down, granddaughter, so do you.”

Granddaughter.
Somehow, the word lost its warm and fuzzy feel when spoken by a man pointing a deadly weapon at her face.

Gaia felt sick, but she didn't let it show. He may have been her grandfather, but he was clearly still the enemy.

“Are you actually trying to
threaten
me?” she asked, her elbows locked. “I thought you were supposed to be some kind of sociopathic genius, but you're just another idiot if you think that that matters to me.”

Yuri continued to smile, his eyes glittering. “Careful, now. My sociopathic idiot blood is running through your veins.”

Gaia swallowed back the bile that instantly appeared in her throat. She didn't have an answer for that.

“Just think about it, Gaia,” Yuri said, seeing an opening. “If you join me I can help you reach your full potential in a way your father never can. He's holding you back. He doesn't want you to know what you're capable of, but I do. Gaia, I want the world for you. . . . ”

He lowered his gun and started to pace at a safe distance, relaxing as he talked. Gaia followed him with her gun by her arms, which were starting to shake, by her vision, beginning to blur with tears. Frustrated
that he seemed so calm. He didn't think she would shoot him. He didn't think she had it in her.

“It's what your mother would have wanted, Gaia,” he said, pausing and turning to look into her eyes. “I'm your grandfather. Don't you think Katia would have wanted us to be together?”

“She hated you,” Gaia spat, one tear brimming over. “She fled her country because of you. If she were here right now, she'd tell me to kill you.”

Yuri paled slightly and in that moment Gaia felt truly murderous for the first time in her life. She had never killed anyone in cold blood. She'd never even punched someone who hadn't attacked her first. But right then, she knew she could do it. She could take this evil bastard out right then and probably even feel good about it. No guilt. No remorse.