Hot Contract

Copyright 2012 Jodi Henley

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and
characters are products of the author's imagination and not to be
construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

Samoy Independent States, South Pacific

The storm sweeping in off the South China Sea
carried the remnants of the typhoon that had battered Malaysia two
days ago. The barometer was falling. Their window of opportunity
was small.

Keegan threw the kid into the dilapidated
Huey and followed, shoving him toward the far seat. “Sit down and
strap in! Connor—"

His brother kicked at the slide door. “It's
fucking stuck—”

“Then Jesus goddamned leave it! You speak
Mandarin; tell the kid we’re from Daddy.”

The boy skittered back, hit the far wall and
cried out, eyes white all the way around.

Fallon shoved through from the cockpit,
cutting off light from the instrument panel behind him. “Samoy on
our three.”

Connor knotted his fist in a hang-strap and
braced himself, weapon pointed at the trees surrounding their
landing zone. “ETA in five!”

Keegan pounded the wall beside his sister.
“Lift!”

Corlis was a flash of silver hair and
camouflage as she tried to get the chopper started, hands flying
over the switches. The Huey screamed, rotors shrieking out a
high-pitched whine.

“We're at a dead stop! I’m trying—”

“Try harder!” Keegan glanced at his brother
and Fallon on each side of the opening.

A deep bass thump rattled the floor.

“Hold on!” screamed Corlis.

The chopper boiled up in a cloud of debris
and banked. The boy lost his balance and shot across the bare metal
floor, arms flailing.

“
Jiu min
" the boy screamed. Help
me.

Keegan lunged for him. “Connor!”

Connor caught the boy, one arm locked around
his scrawny waist. The ceiling groaned over the thumping wail of
the rotors and burst, rivets flying as the hang strap tore
loose.

Keegan lurched to his feet. “
No!
” A
bullet punched into his shoulder and flipped him ass-backwards,
head cracking against the floor. He staggered to one knee in time
to see Fallon swing his feet out on the skids.

“Liss! Drop this thing—”

A bullet hit the struts and ricocheted into
the night. The left side of the island was lit up like a Christmas
tree and a thick pall of white smoke rose over the distant camp.
The typhoon was on them, spatters of rain hitting the Huey louder
than shrapnel. Light stabbed out of the darkness while the
kidnappers tried to get close enough to take Connor down without
hurting their meal ticket.

Fallon launched into a roll and zigzagged out
into the darkness, only to reappear a minute later with the kid
over one shoulder. He flung the screaming child into the chopper
and turned, one foot up on the skid. The trees rippled, caught in
the Huey's downwash.

Connor charged across the clearing.
“Lift!”

“Do it!” yelled Keegan. “Lift!”

Ten more seconds. Jakarta tomorrow, back in
Seattle by the end of the week. Fallon swung his big body into the
compartment and crouched in the opening, hand out. Shots exploded
from the tree line, punching Connor down as the chopper spiraled
up. Revolutionaries overran the clearing.

And the ground fell away.

Volcano, Hawaii

There was no such thing as fresh air in Jen's
office. Sulfur samples kept it smelling like rotten eggs, and what
little breeze ended up at the bottom of the back alleyway didn't
make it past the louvered windows.

Jen brushed the hair out of her eyes and
wondered if it was worth turning on the air conditioning.
Preliminary reports were due within the hour, and more than half
the files weren't in the queue, including Terri's geotechnical
investigation. In two months, when the geothermal linkage went
on-line, Jen would be free, but for the next eight weeks she was
trapped shuffling paperwork from people who thought a short report
meant reformatting the encyclopedia in small font and chasing prima
donnas.

Pulling out her phone, she punched in Terri's
number. A terse male voice she didn’t recognize told her Terri was
“busy.” The last time their geotechnical engineer had found an
interest outside the job, she’d ended up engaged.

“But—” Jen protested. The phone clicked off.
“Dammit.”

She grabbed her walkie-talkie and pulled on
her official jacket. The bright yellow color made Jen look like a
corpse, but for all her faults, Terri responded well to authority.
And they were friends. Not always a good thing.

Once out of the enclosed tunnel, the air
still smelled like sulfur, but a breeze brought a spatter of rain
moving in off the lower slopes of Volcanoes National Park. The new
annex wasn't so new, but after three years, it had become a
perpetual work in progress. Barricades blocked off the unfinished
elevators. Stairs were the only form of access to the upper levels.
Despite that, people had still moved in. Engineering was on the
ninth floor because Terri—like all prima donnas—loved to intrude on
people but hated intruders. Smart, funny and as friendly as a
tiger, she was like a primal force, moving through the world to
make things work. Jen's obsession with the geothermal linkage was
nothing compared to Terri's utter fascination with the logistics
behind the deep-sea cables.

From the courtyard, Jen could see down the
long slope behind the employee parking lot to where the storm
formed a dark wall on the distant horizon. Wind piled leaves at the
high plastic barricades and roared up through the open stairwell.
Jen took a deep breath, filled her lungs with the lingering stench
of sulfur and straightened her shoulders. She felt like she had a
bulls-eye painted on her back as she crossed the center court. Over
the last six months she'd come out to the Annex so many times, she
had started to identify sulfur with tamping her fear down to a
manageable level.

She suffered from vertigo but no one had to
know if she didn't tell them.

Jen put her foot on the first riser, one hand
locked the handrail. Her stomach roiled. The sooner she got this
over with, the faster she’d be back on solid ground. On the second
landing she paused to stare out at the rain. Perforated orange
safety mesh kept visitors from the non-existent viewing platform.
The clouds were closer, sweeping over the ohia scrub.

She made it to the ninth floor and couldn't
go any further. Her knees gave out and dumped her on the landing
where she sat with her head between her knees and took deep,
cleansing breaths, just like in the phobia video she'd bought to
help with her problem. The Project would just have to wait while
she stiffened her backbone.

“No!” shouted Terri.

Jen looked up. Terri stood in front of her
office, big Texas hair lacquered up against the elements with
hairspray and fancy clips. A small crescent of people surrounded
her, anonymous in bright red shirts. Terri shoved at the man next
to her and he pushed back hard enough to make her stumble. From the
set of his shoulders, it was obvious he was coiled up and ready to
explode.

Jen was too far away to make out what Terri
said, but whatever it was didn’t help. A flash of green and part of
an athletic shoe showed in the door to the office suite, and Terri
went from mad to terrified, eyes white-rimmed all the way
around.

Jen inched back into the stairwell, and
fumbled through the channels on her walkie-talkie, hands shaking.
“Chandler,” she whispered. “Please pick up, Chandler?” Where the
hell was their head of security?

She glanced back to where Terri stood, right
up against the mesh, arms gesturing wildly. Her mouth was moving,
but words weren’t coming out and no one smiled.

She got out another, “No!” and lurched
forward, only to be carried back on a rush of bodies and flung over
the temporary railing.

She screamed all the way down.

The walkie-talkie spewed out crackles of
static, “This is Chandler, Ms. Stalling.”

Jen shoved the receiver in her jacket but it
was too late. Faces turned in her direction.

Terrified out of her skull, she stood and
ran, stumble-sprinting down the stairs, one hand on the guardrail.
Faster going down. Voices shouting. She heard her name, but the
sound was all tangled up in the rising wind and the pounding of her
heart as her feet slammed against the slats.

She was out of shape. She wasn't going to
make it. The stairwell shook with the thud of heavy footsteps
behind her. Hair stuck to her rapidly drying lips. They were
running, she was running—she had to get out! Jen grabbed a handrail
and jumped, adrenaline pushing her up, over and down half a floor,
into the courtyard, out past the construction piles in the
courtyard.

A flash of metal caught her attention with a
ricochet of sunlight. It looked like Terri had tried to fly, arms
outstretched and pleading. Her long blonde hair had spilled across
the barricades with her brains, and there was blood everywhere,
exploded from her shattered white bones.

Jen fell to her knees, hands over her eyes
and screamed.

****

Corlis dropped a water bottle on the hard
plastic seat next to Keegan. “Take one.”

Kai’s gratitude had stopped just short of a
private jet, and trading their tickets in on an earlier flight had
put them in Hong Kong on a six hour layover. Despite the stench of
old joss and durian, the terminals at Chek Lap Kok were high-tech,
and the primitive smell of Keegan’s blood had triggered an
olfactory isolation zone at the crowded gate.

He opened the bottle, stared up at the
ceiling as near to horizontal as he was going to get, and chugged a
couple of aspirin.

“We’re wasting time,” said Corlis, still
angry with him if the total lack of emotion in her voice was
anything to go by.

Frustration soured Keegan's stomach and
boiled the pills in his gut. “Money,” he said tightly. “Lack of.
What don’t you understand?”

Her foot tapped. Stopped, and started again.
“I want Conner back.”

Keegan rolled to his feet and crowded her,
right up in her face. “And you think I don’t? I've spent every
minute we weren't on that plane calling in favors.”

Fallon shoved him back. “She's upset. Back
off.”

“
I'm
fucking upset.”

“We're all fucking upset. Have they sent
proof of life?”

Keegan pushed a hand over his eyes and rubbed
his face, mouth tight. “Not yet.”

Fallon turned to look back over his shoulder
at Corlis. “There's a tea shop down the concourse.”

At five ten, Corlis stood head and shoulders
taller than the people around her. Her pale skin and white-blonde
hair were a rarity in Hong Kong. Despite her dirty tank top and
ACUs she attracted admiring looks. “Bubble tea,” she said.

“I don’t give a hot damn what kind of tea it
is. We on for that tea shop?” Fallon ran a hand down his cheek,
scratching at the dirty stubble.

Which wasn’t the end of it, but as much as
Keegan wanted to hear. He put his feet up on his duffle and slipped
a hand up under his shirt, smoothing the tape down around his
bandage. Damned black market penicillin wasn’t working. He wasn’t
going to do anyone much good flat on his back.

His phone vibrated. Another picture. This
time of Conner next to a copy of today's Manila Times. Dark hair,
green eyes—cold, murderous anger. Blood caked the left side of his
face, black in the storm-washed light. No longer the boy Keegan had
promised to protect, but a dangerous man in his own right.

I want to talk to him,
texted
Keegan.

Two million, eleven days
, repeated the
Samoy.

Keegan swore under his breath, fingers flying
over the keypad.
What apartment did we live in as
children?

A long pause.
C-3. Cash or bearer bond.
We'll be in touch.

A chubby toddler goggled at Keegan from over
a row of distant chairs. The kid’s mouth fell open as a group of
men passed—too edgy and buttoned down to be anything but a security
detail.