Come As You Are. Amy J. Fetzer

be damned if he’d let this man see him fall. “I was reading and they appeared from there.” He pointed across the room to a set of doors he knew led to the roof. He assumed they came in that direction. It was the least patrolled. “No, I did not speak to them, and the moment I saw them, I hit the alarm.”

      “Wise, wise,” Salazar said, rocking back on his heels. “They gave you that?” He indicated his swollen nose.

      “Obviously.”

      Salazar wasn’t ruffled and moved to the window, brushing back the curtains, then peering out to the grounds below. He studied it at length, and Ramos frowned. Salazar couldn’t have seen her.

      “Find out how they got in here, Commander. Now.”

      Salazar glanced from under a lock of black hair, his smile almost fiendish as he straightened to attention. He did it slowly enough to be insubordinate and Ramos met his gaze, warning in every fiber. He wouldn’t mince words with this man. He meant nothing to him and for a breath of time, Ramos thought, Is that what I’ve become?

      “You have your orders.”

      “Yes, sir. I’ll leave you to your…recuperation.”

      Ramos sat at the desk, shuffling papers, effectively dismissing him. He didn’t look up as the man exited the room. All his hope lay in Tessa getting cleanly away with the map. If Salazar had seen her, he’d hunt her, and the results wouldn’t be pretty.

      Eloisa threw off her suit jacket, tossing it to a servant as she hurried toward her rooms, cornering the halls. At her bedroom, she threw open the doors, striding briskly to the nightstand. She lifted the inlaid wooden box, then sitting on the bed, she drew it to her lap.

      Gold and pearl dragons sprawled across the box and for an instant, she admired the puzzle within a picture, then glanced around at her own collection before coming back to her most prized. She pressed the eyes of the dragon, then swept her finger against the grain of the scales carved from mother-of-pearl. The head popped up, the claws springing from the sides of the box. She flicked them upward, then turned the box counterclockwise twice. She pulled the head and the box opened.

      She stared down at the empty silk lining, her heartbeat increasing as a wash of heat swept her skin. She looked up, searching the room for anything disturbed. Everything was as she’d left it. Her maid wouldn’t have attempted this, too stupid to understand the mechanisms. The only person who’d been in this room was her husband and he hated her puzzles. Enough that he’d banned them from the rest of the house. Anger boiled in her. It had been safe, under her control. Was this box a replica? she wondered briefly. She had the only one in existence that could have been copied.

      She reversed her moves to close the box, then set it carefully back. Her hands shook as she realized what this meant. For her, for Venezuela.

      There was a total news blackout on the assault, everything wiped away. For an attack on the private residence, the buzz was pretty low-key. Good that the world didn’t need to know about it, and bad if no one pried, because then Logan and the others would just cease to exist. Tessa knew this was foolish, but she couldn’t let them go to some prison. For hours, she’d sat in her car and watched the residence. A few of the reporters had remained, and she’d camped out with them on the lawn across the street, using her NGS credentials to chum up.

      When figures finally appeared, being led to a black van, she’d had to get two sleeping men off her car to follow. The van was moving slowly and she pushed on the gas to catch up. The little VW screamed up the road, and she drove two streets over and parallel, thinking if she could get ahead of them, she’d have a great plan by the time she got there.

      Man, she really missed the cannibals.

      “Who are you?” Joe McGill held a cleaned-up photo of the woman that had been fed into the computers for a match. It wouldn’t take long. She had a bewitching face and wouldn’t be hard to spot. But the only people he could send after her, for the moment, didn’t exist.

      He glanced at the link to Dragon One. Dead air. They had intelligence only from the outside, from above. Satellite and thermal imaging. A cluster of thermal images put the team in the basement level of the estate next to the boiler room. That told McGill the area wasn’t normally used as a prison. No one would put felons next to the one spot where they could blow the building back to the Incas.

      He tossed the photo aside and watched the satellite reposition itself as another picked up the feed. There was a minute span where alignment gave them garbage between two screens, yet he watched it just the same. He asked for refreshed thermal, then was forced to wait till it narrowed the focus.

      “Sir,” Lorimer said, twisting in his chair. “They’re no longer there.”

      McGill’s features tightened. “Then where?” He looked at the screen as the satellite imagery peeled back layers, narrowing to the ground.

      “Heading toward the jungle.”

      For no other reason than execution.

      Tessa stopped the car on the side of the road, and let traffic pass by her. It shouldn’t be this crowded, she thought, and left the car, moving to the front of the VW. She slipped her pack-turned-bag on her shoulder, then popped the hood, glancing up the road before she pulled out the tire and propped it against the car. She left the hood up and peered around it as the van came into view, a black earthworm on the long, sandy road. This was one of her dumber moves, but she had to help. It wasn’t her fault they were caught and she escaped, but when the van started to head toward the Amazon, it scared her. There were undiscovered ruins all over this country. They could be executed in the jungle and never found.

      Bending, she rolled the tire on the shoulder, away from the road. She was banking a lot on Logan because she could get the truck to stop, but overtaking soldiers with guns? Not up her alley. She didn’t want to fight anyone. Logan was the strategy-first kind of guy. Tessa just did it. Right now, she felt stupid being out on the road this time of night and, despite the late hour, the air didn’t move, the heat cloying. A cloud of gnats hovered under the single streetlight a good hundred yards away.

      She tugged at the hem of her shorts, and damn if the little—preshrunk, my ass—things wouldn’t get longer. She held the jack, prayed this worked and waited for the van.

      She didn’t get a chance to scream, the jack flying from her grasp when a gloved palm closed over her mouth.

      The small jolts over the road made the ride painful. Woken after midnight and forced into the van, Logan had found small pleasure in just being still. There was some payback coming, he thought, and studied his surroundings. Three rows of seats in the van were separated by a narrow corridor between the chairs. Iron leg shackles were anchored to the floor, the chains jingling with the ride. The windows were painted black, and beyond the prisoner seats was a metal screen separating them from the driver and his backup.

      Logan looked over at Max, who had an odd expression on his face, almost peaceful. A total lie, since he was concentrating. Logan didn’t know if he was counting tire revolutions or if it had something to do with that quick glance at the sky before they climbed in, but there were times when Logan thought Max had memorized the Earth. He just waited.

      “We’re going away from the city.”

      “That can’t be good.”

      Max stared up at the ceiling as if stargazing. “Orinoco,” he said under his breath, then nudged the air with his chin. “Toward the river.”

      A soldier whipped around, and from the passenger seat aimed a gun and warned them to shut up. Logan nodded and shifted, using one toe to push the knife deeper into his boot. He tried not to rattle the shackles, bristling in the cuffs that were chained to his waist. The knife was useless if he couldn’t wield it.

      A fracture of light glinted off something and he glanced. Max held a pen and he quickly broke it apart.

      Now we were getting somewhere.

      Salazar