a huge profit in good reliable information.
Kel had worked with the local DEA while they’d tracked the chemist to his laboratory—too late. He’d been long dead when they got there, his place trashed, every particle wiped clean of any evidence linking it to the drug, particularly his notes.
Not one of the team had argued that it hadn’t been a fitting end for the psychotic inventor of the formula. But it was obvious the same thought lurked at the back of their minds. For instance, his exit could have been better planned. Say three months after they’d caught up with him.
Kel put his car in gear and pulled into the stream of traffic, cruising Darlinghurst Road for fresh meat.
He pulled over just through the lights giving way to a fire engine, its siren screeching as it left the dark gray sandstone station on the opposite side of the Cross. He’d have been better pleased to see an ambulance. The noise tugged at his conscience as he sorted through his memory, trying to remember if more than one type of siren had sounded as the cops pulled up in the alley. Damn, he needed Gordie to be saved, by someone. Anyone.
Was there ever a good time to die?
It bugged him that a month down the time chain, even with new information, the researchers were no closer to finding an antidote to the drug. It only took one dose, just one, and users had to keep on buying or be prepared to die. Not only did the drug induce instantaneous addiction, less than five days without supplies and addicts were dead meat.
Kiss-and-tell was a real little money-spinner in the wrong hands, but whose hands? Now the drug, either product or formula, was on the move, and he’d be doing his damnedest to follow its courier from Papeete, across the South Pacific to New Zealand, the only place he could call home.
Chapter 1
Kel bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. But it didn’t diminish the pain in his gut just thinking of Gordie. His buddy’s life had ended up as a crapshoot. Gordie had played craps with opponents who thought themselves above the law, and when his turn came to roll the dice they’d come up snake eyes.
Goddammit!
His shoulder ached as though his right arm had been brutally wrenched from its socket. He sucked in a long drag of a cigarette in concert with about a dozen others hovering outside the air-conditioned terminal. It burned all the way down.
Hell, he didn’t even smoke. But as part of his cover, it gave him a reason for standing outside Papeete’s Faa’a International Airport building where No Smoking signs threatened at every turn. It was all part of the fresh skin he’d donned, like the white-on-black tropical shirt he’d been buying when the news came through about Gordie dying. Its cotton still retained the creases his fist had scrunched in it while Garnet Chaly’s cool voice had come over his cell phone.
As special agent in charge of Southeast Asian Ops, a huge territory including the South Pacific, he supposed it behooved Chaly to remain calm. The guy hadn’t lost a partner, only an operative.
Kel knew the drill. Agents weren’t allowed the closure of a funeral. They might be spotted among the mourners. No dragging their asses in sorrow; they picked themselves up and got on with the job. Changing his appearance hadn’t changed that, or relieved the guilt-induced nausea roiling under his ribs. Or the knowledge there’d be no time for grief.
Heat struck at him from the concrete pavement. It caught him a glancing blow from a midday sun filling the Tahitian sky with a wide, mean streak of brass, taking its spite out on the palms till their leaves drooped. Not a solitary cloud challenged its dominance, yet inside him the rain came down in sheets.
With one last drag of his smoke, he assumed an outward calm. To maintain the pretence he daren’t blink. Sure his eyes felt raw as a day-old recruit, but it was better than the image inside his lids of Gordie, like a broken china doll someone had tossed aside.
His latest info on the courier put the guy on a ferry from the neighboring island of Moorea, where the mountains rose high and dark and ancient, like castle turrets in a fairy tale. Not one like Rapunzel, but a dark, blood-filled tale to fit his mood.
The connection keeping him out in the heat was an airport bus that, by his watch, should have arrived five minutes ago even on island time. Part of his problem was the lack of a photo to help recognize his target. Though going by the name, and life’s conditioning, he’d concluded Two Feathers to be of Native American extraction. That’s unless the feathers in his name belonged to a wild goose.
Kel lit another cigarette.
“Monsieur.” A stranger’s rough accent infiltrated the roar of a jumbo jet rising through the fine suspension of kerosene vapors hanging in the air, waiting for a breeze to come along.
“Yeah?” Kel grated at a bulky islander whose four spare chins overlapped a red shirt that reminded Kel of an old sofa cover his grandmother once had.
Flashing a grateful grin, the man said, “Whoa man! You speak English. Great. Could I bum a light off of you?”
Kel let his thoughts race through the Filofax in his head, the place he kept everything too important to write down. The accent had none of the French flavors he’d tuned into since his arrival yesterday; instead it reminded him of home.
“No problem, mate.” Kel handed over a matchbook, picked up the night before in a downtown bar where the drums kept time with the dancers’ hips.
The guy sweated noticeably as he tapped his Marlboro on the cigarette packet, then clamped it between his fleshy lips, drawing hard as the match flared. “Thanks, mate, you’ve no idea how I needed that.” He tossed the matchbook over.
Kel caught it and nodded toward the other smokers, saying, “You, me and about ten others. Wouldn’t say no to a cold one to accompany it.”
“A beer wouldn’t touch the sides. This heat bites.”
He looked like a guy who should be used to hotter climates, but appearances could be deceiving. Kel should know.
Slipping the matches into his shirt pocket, he hefted his suit carrier, gave the guy a brief salute and moved over a few feet, following the shade. He traveled light. No waiting for the carousel to disgorge his stuff while Mr. N. Two Feathers McKay, like Elvis, left the building. Having nothing to hide, after a mandatory inspection, both his carrier and laptop would be allowed on board.
Of course, this meant nixing all weapons, other than the skills he’d learned in the SAS and a few dirty moves Gordie had taught him that had helped keep him alive more than once. They were all part of the game. Part of being an agent who might be in Sydney one day and Tahiti the next.
Five days of sun at Club Med had painted Ngaire pale bronze, her skin’s natural inclination. And she’d enjoyed the soft rush of cooling air as the ferry skimmed the waves between islands.
By contrast, the current bus ride sucked. Small, packed tight, with no air-conditioning to speak of, it made her long to be winging her way toward New Zealand in the relative luxury of economy class.
For the first time since she’d left San Francisco, she almost felt homesick for the cool mist that had crowded the Golden Gate Bridge as she flew out of the good old U.S. of A.
Heaven knows, she wasn’t the only one with problems. The legs of the lanky guy behind her stretched into the passage.
