Page 96 of Nightfire

And pedophilia—again, Mike had to suppress the gag reflex. They all hated it. All he had to do was think of his nieces and some fuckhead hurting them and he went a little crazy.

“Aaron’s going to be all over these guys. When are the girls arriving?”

Harry peered into the monitor intently, as if the harder he looked, the better he could understand Russian. He threw up his hands. “I can’t tell,” he growled, frustrated. “Goddamn it. I hope it’s not now. Those girls will be disappeared fast if they get a chance to land.”

“Cut and paste the info into Google Translate,” Mike suggested. “What?” he said when Harry glared at him.

Harry was pouding at the keyboard. “I hate it when you have good computer ideas. That’s my thing. You’re good with weapons, I’m good with computers. That’s the way it should be. Okay, here we go…” He read the translation and sat back, relieved. “Got it. Ship’s due in San Diego harbor two days from now. The Coast Guard can intercept them. Those guys won’t know what hit them. We have to make sure no one warns them, otherwise they’ll throw those poor girls overboard.”

Harry’s cell buzzed. He pulled it out, looked at Mike. “It’s Chloe.”

Mike frowned. Why was Chloe calling Harry and not him? He moved closer to Harry, shamelessly listening in. Did Chloe need something? If she did, by God Mike’d get it for her, not Harry.

“Yeah honey,” Harry said, then stiffened. He shot a glance at Mike and switched to speakerphone.

“—not your sister, Chloe, I’m afraid, Mr. Bolt,” a deep, strongly accented voice said. “Your sister is now in my hands. You have something that belongs to me. I will give you your sister back in exchange for it.”

Every hair on Mike’s body was standing up in panic. A drop of sweat rolled down Harry’s temple.

“Who is this?” he asked, though Harry knew as well as Mike who it was.

Nikitin. The Russian. The man who hadn’t hesitated to waterboard a woman. The man who had Chloe.

Chloe in his hands.

Mike shuddered. His body had a reaction it had never had before. He felt an electric shock throughout his body as he pumped out sweat in one stinking rush. His muscles were weak, he had to stiffen his legs to keep upright. His insides roiled painfully and he barely made it in time to the fancy designer wastebasket Nicole had used and which had just been cleaned by Marisa.

It was absolutely uncontrollable. Mike had had a vision of Chloe being waterboarded and his entire body had rejected the thought so hard his guts turned inside out.

Harry scowled at him, covering the microphone so the fuckhead at the other end of the line wouldn’t hear him puking his guts out.

“—GPS coordinates,” he was saying. “You will follow those coordinates on your own. I will see if anyone follows you, believe me. Come alone and come with the thumb drive and we will all walk away from this and forget about it.”

He disconnected.

“You almost gave yourself away,” Harry complained. He sounded normal but his face was ice white.

“Couldn’t help it,” Mike mumbled, wiping his mouth.

Harry’s scowl deepened. “Get it together, Mike,” he snapped. “You’re not going to help Chloe if you’re out of control. Trust me on this.”

“Does he have Chloe? How could he? My place is secure, goddamnit! How could the fuckhead get in?”

Mike went to the program that controlled the videocams at their condo. The super knew nothing about it. He clicked on to the feed and got nothing but static. “Fuck,” he whispered, punching out a number. He listened as the phone at the ground floor security unit rang and rang. “Security’s not picking up. Josè’s on duty this morning. The guy’s good. If he’s not picking up, he’s either knocked out or dead. Let me try one more thing.” He dialed his own landline and listened as it rang, each ring like a gong that echoed through his body. No way would Chloe not answer.

Mike and Harry looked at each other. “He’s got her,” he said flatly. Harry nodded.

Fuck.

Mike tried to stabilize, tried to get his head back in the game, tried to find his icy calm, that cool, still place inside him that allowed him to function under the most terrible of circumstances.

It wasn’t there.

It was gone.

He stood there, sweat pouring down his body, hands shaking, mind full of static, incapable of thinking, just seeing. Images of Chloe, broken and bleeding, in the hands of violent men.

He couldn’t do it. He simply couldn’t. He didn’t have any mechanism inside him that could cope with this. He moved to the wastebasket and bent over, then reeled back from Harry’s blow, nailing him right on the jaw.