Masquerade: Her Billionaire - Venice Read online

  The door to the hallway opened. The sounds of panic from downstairs — shouts and cries — flowed in. The light from the torches outside was faint, just enough to see by.

  A tall man slipped into the room, this man dressed in a costume. She couldn’t make out exactly what the costume was. For the first time, Anya realized that the five attackers were dressed as soldiers. Not in uniform, but as commandos.

  So … was the man dressed in a costume an outsider? One of the members of the Accords team who’d heard the sounds of combat? Someone who would help her?

  She opened her mouth to scream, but the man holding her wrapped one arm tightly around her shoulders and put a big hand against her mouth. Then, horribly, his thumb and index finger pinched her nostrils, cutting off her air.

  Her brain blanked as the animal instinct to survive made her writhe, kicking him, scratching at his arms. But her pretty 1920s-style shoes weren’t meant to hurt and his arms were covered in some kind of material that was impervious to her scratches.

  She struggled violently, scrabbling to hurt him in any way she could, writhing in his hold. She was strong, but he was stronger.

  And the physical efforts were using up all her oxygen. Her lungs tried to pull in air, uselessly, and she could feel herself start to lose consciousness. Her struggles stopped.

  “Settle down,” the man dressed in a costume said irritably. “Stop it.”

  As if that were a cue, the hand covering her mouth and nose lifted and she gasped in air greedily in huge gulps, the animal part of her rejoicing in the fact that she wasn’t going to die right now.

  One man was holding up a cellphone with the flashlight function on, studying the bodies on the floor.

  Tears swam in her eyes as she studied Cal slumped on the parquet flooring. Still, she could see that massive chest rising and falling.

  A sob escaped her and she thanked whoever was up there that he’d survived the attack.

  But now that the clouds of adrenaline and oxygen deprivation were clearing, she realized that of course he’d be alive. This was a kidnapping. They’d come for Cal, maybe not realizing that he could fend off attacks. The two men on the floor attested to that fact.

  Cal had gone down fighting.

  Good for him, she thought viciously. She hoped that the two men on the floor were dead, or at least maimed. Whoever they were, they intended Cal harm and she focused her hatred on them, and on the man holding her.

  The light from the cellphone’s flashlight function panned the room and she got a better look at the man who’d slipped in after the fight. Unlike the others, he was dressed in costume, some kind of 17th-century version of a soldier, like a musketeer. He wore thigh high boots and a freaking sword at his side. And he wasn’t here to help her. The body language of the attackers made that clear. He was in on the kidnapping.

  Anya’s eyes narrowed as she tried to memorize his face in the almost impossibly dim light. The others had balaclavas over their faces but this man just had a black masquerade mask around the eyes.

  The light was low, but there was something half familiar about the figure, even with the masquerade mask. She knew she’d seen him somewhere before. If she could, she would identify him, testify against him and take him down.

  The man looked around without a word, taking in the bodies on the floor and Anya, immobilized by the big man behind her. “You know what to do,” he said to the man holding her and slipped back out the door. The voice was American.

  Anya expected the men to pull up Cal’s deadweight body and spirit him away but they just left him there on the ancient parquet floor. Why weren’t they picking him up? They were here to kidnap him, clearly. She hadn’t really thought it through but the owner of Phoenix must be a very rich man.

  The part of the world where she and Cal had been working these past years, kidnapping for ransom was almost a sector of the economy.

  These sons of bitches were going to hold Cal to ransom. No telling what his executives would be willing to pay to get him back. The company was one of the largest in the world. Though Cal had gone to extremes to not appear in the limelight, these guys knew who they were kidnapping.

  Anya stayed as quiet and still as possible. They wouldn’t forget about her — these guys were pros — but maybe she could convince them she was harmless.

  She wasn’t. The instant they were gone with Cal, she’d raise pure hell with the authorities. She had some clout as deputy director for Peace and Jobs and her boss was sure to help her. The kidnapping of the head of Phoenix was a big deal, endangering the Accords themselves. Every single power lever she could invoke would crank into action.

  One of the men rushed past her and stirred the air. There was a faint sickly sweet odor she recognized immediately. Chloroform. She’d been in a refugee camp that had been attacked by terrorists who felt threatened by the Accords and they’d run out of morphine and had had to use chloroform until medics could arrive. She’d never forget the smell.

  That was how they had subdued Cal. She knew him, knew his expertise. She remembered with a rush of warmth the depth of the strength of the muscles she’d caressed not half an hour ago. Only putting him out allowed them to take him.

  The fucking cowards. Without thinking, she made to move toward Cal and was stopped by a punch to the stomach. Anya doubled over, all the breath in her body gone. For a horrible second she thought she’d suffocate but finally she was able to wheeze in a breath, two.

  The man who’d punched her turned her around and Anya stiffened. The light was behind him, his face in dark shadow, ski mask in place. He took a step forward as her heart plummeted.

  She was a witness. Were they going to kill her?

  Anya opened her mouth to say that she hadn’t seen anyone’s face, they could rest assured she couldn’t identify them, when the man said, “Anya Voronova.”

  She blinked, stunned.

  The balaclava covered his features, disguising them. Only the eyes, cold, dark and unfeeling, were visible.

  “Do you have your phone?” he asked.

  She couldn’t answer, merely staring at him.

  “Do you have your phone?” he repeated impatiently. His English was almost perfect, but he was foreign.

  Anya reached out, grabbed her phone on the top of the piano. “Y-yes.”

  “Put this on.” Crazily, he held out a Venetian porcelain mask, only it didn’t have holes for eyes. The eyes were painted on, but so realistically that you had to look closely to see that.

  She felt numb. “What?”

  The eyes grew colder. “You heard me. Don’t make me say it twice.”

  She fit the mask onto her face with trembling fingers, tying the tapes behind her head, effectively blinding herself. They didn’t want her to see anything while they abducted Cal. But if they left her alive, she’d sound the alarm immediately.

  Then she felt something like a rod against her side.

  “That’s a gun,” the voice said coldly. “And it’s got hollow point ammo. It will expand inside you until your insides are pulped. Do you understand me?”

  Anya froze. “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes I understand you.” And she did.

  “We’re going to walk out of here. I’m going to have my arm around you as if we were lovers, so follow my lead. If you try to say anything to anyone, I’ll shoot. Are we clear?”

  She nodded jerkily.

  “Then let’s go.” An arm fell around her shoulders but the rod at her side — the gun — was still there. He directed her toward the door. She didn’t hear the door open but she knew it had by the burst of sounds of panic from downstairs coming up the stairwell.

  Apparently the lights were still out.

  The noise was so loud that even if she could scream for help, no one would hear her. And she was blind, had no idea if there was anyone on this floor who could help her.

  The man who could save her was behind her, lying unconscious.

  She stumbled b
lindly forward under the impetus of her captor’s arm.

  How could she have been so wrong? They weren’t here to kidnap Cal.

  They were here for her.

  His head hurt. His chest hurt. His legs hurt. His fucking toenails hurt. But most of all his head. The pain intensified with every beat of his heart.

  What the fuck?

  Cal lifted his head, was instantly sorry and let it thunk back to the ground when the world whirled around him in jerky spasms. Massive pain and nausea. It was even more horrible because he was in the dark. If he’d been able to see, he knew he’d have seen the ceiling spinning around sickeningly. It was even more awful in the darkness.

  He lay still, trying to understand what was happening. He’d once fallen unconscious out in the desert, so engrossed in solving a pipeline problem he hadn’t noticed that he was badly dehydrated. But when he regained consciousness, he knew exactly where he was and what he needed. Water.

  This time he didn’t have a clue where he was, what he was doing on the floor in pitch blackness.

  Lights flickered, just long enough for him to see where he was. In a fancy historic room. As the lights flickered again memory flickered too. He was in … Venice. Venice? That felt right. In Palazzo … Maltese.

  The insides of his stomach threatened to come right up and he swallowed heavily, pushing the bitter bile back down. He breathed the nausea and dizziness away.

  The lights came on and he opened his eyes. He was on a beautiful honey-colored parquet floor, the tiles so small it was almost a mosaic. The room was elaborate, the ceiling frescoed. Casting his eyes to the ceiling almost made him throw up. God, what was this nausea about? Did he have food poisoning? Like that time in Yemen when he’d puked his guts out for four days?

  He consulted his stomach. There wasn’t anything there. He hurt everywhere else but not his stomach.

  So what was going on?

  He was at eye level with the floor and saw something nearby. Something small and shiny and black. He reached out, scrabbled on the shiny wooden floor for an instant and brought it back to scrutinize it.

  A bead. A black bead. He frowned. There were several of them just like it scattered over the floor. What the —

  And it all came rushing back. Lights going out. Men rushing through the door, fighting them. Some liquid sprayed in his face as Anya was being brutally manhandled.

  Anya!

  Cal put a hand on the floor and lifted his torso, waiting impatiently, eyes closed, for the extreme dizziness to die down. He hated waiting, but he had to, otherwise he’d fall down. He couldn’t afford to fall down — he needed to get to Anya as fast as humanly possible.

  Another hand on the floor.

  One leg under him. Other leg. Everything trembling. The world spinning.

  Fuck this.

  He stood up, shooting out a hand to clutch the edge of the large table for balance. The table where he and Anya had made love.

  Anya.

  She’d been taken.

  That thought was part of the world spinning because he couldn’t seem to make it work in his head. If anything, they should have come for him. Cal had survived two kidnapping attempts. He was worth a lot of money and not only would his company pay, but the organizing body of the Mediterranean Accords would pay. He travelled with a security entourage except for right now, this evening, in the heart of the West, celebrating the future.

  Shit.

  There were two men on the floor and he could just barely recall the fight to put them down. They’d been good but he’d been better and he was fighting with Anya in the room, in danger. He’d have faced an army if he’d had to.

  The two men were breathing, which he was sorry about. Had they somehow gotten the better of him, knocked him out? No. His head hurt but not from a blow. His head hurt from the inside. He’d been … gassed? Cal sniffed the air, a sickeningly sweetish scent barely perceptible. Chloroform. Fuckers had put him out, gassed him, with chloroform.

  Cal knelt slowly next to one of the bodies, hoping he wouldn’t pass out. He didn’t, but it was touch and go and he felt a billion years old as he put a knee to the floor.

  Both men were dressed tactically in black, the material Nomex, he discovered when he touched it. He rapped his knuckles against the chest of the closest man. His knuckles made a pocking sound. Body armor. Balaclavas and tiny goggles, which he recognized as the very latest iteration of night vision. Only special forces had them, or so he thought. Or maybe these were special forces, which was a terrifying thought.

  Specops soldiers out for Anya. Specops in any country trained ruthlessly for years to kill and maim. And they had Anya. He breathed down the horror of that thought.

  Who were these men? He pulled off the goggles and balaclava of both men. They had an Asian cast to their features. Cal didn’t know what they were — Chinese, Japanese. Maybe something else. There were no identifying marks on the combat gear and even if they were, he wouldn’t have been able to tell Chinese script from Japanese script. Anya could — she knew Chinese well.

  He checked their pockets — nothing. They were unarmed, or at least had no firearms on them. Italy was a country where firearms weren’t permitted. No weapons at all, not even a knife. That meant something. Probably that they didn’t want blood stains to show that violence had been done.

  Cal looked around the room. Somehow no furniture had been broken. One mirror had shattered, but with the lights out, that could have been an accident.

  Digging through the pockets of one of the men, Cal brought out something that made his blood boil. A length of rope. They intended to tie Anya up? Those motherfuckers wanted to tie her?

  They both had a piece of rope in their gear. Okay. Cal was more than willing to use that against them. He tied the men’s hands behind their backs, pulling the rope extra tight, and tied each man to a leg of the heavy table in the center of the room. When they gained consciousness, they weren’t going anywhere.

  When he stood up, he had to put a hand out to steady himself while the room twirled crazily.

  He stood for another minute, living with the extreme dizziness, and despaired at the thought of Anya somehow gone. Somehow captured. Anya, in the hands of enemies.

  Did someone figure out what Anya meant to him? She’d been kidnapped to extort money from him, was that it? Well, it worked, that was for damned sure. He’d pay anything, anything at all, to keep her safe, get her back. He’d gut Phoenix. A company could be refounded, but he would never find another Anya. He knew, because he’d already tried.

  However, Anya was important in her own right, not just important to him. Was she kidnapped because of something she knew? Kidnapping her at this late date wouldn’t do anything to slow the Accords, though. They were in hand, there wasn’t much that could stop the juggernaut. And though Peace and Jobs was an important organization, it was important morally, not financially or even politically.

  Cal straightened. He still felt dizzy but not so dizzy he couldn’t see straight. His head hurt but pain was nothing. He could ignore pain, he’d done it before.

  They’d taken Anya, the thought nearly brought him to his knees again. He couldn’t afford that. He needed to find her, fast, and he needed help.

  Cal picked up his cell and prepared to press his index finger to the screen to unlock it and punch in his code — Anya’s birthday. But the screensaver wasn’t his. His screensaver was a photo he’d taken one day at dawn of the great palace in Petra known as the Treasury, the colors pale pink and light blue. This cell’s screensaver was a photo of Petra, and even of the Treasury, but taken at midday, the colors molten gold and bright blue, and taken from a slightly different angle from his.

  They’d both been fascinated by Petra as students and had talked of visiting one day. Well, they both had. That they both had a photo of Petra as a cellphone screensaver showed that the city in ruins meant as much to her as it did to him.

  This was Anya’s cellphone. His cell was nowhere to be seen.
/>   And she didn’t have any security at all. No fingerprint, no password. Just her unsecured phone. He was going to bawl her out just as soon as this was over. She couldn’t have an unsecured phone. But he tucked that away in the back of his mind. Right now, he needed to contact Joe Farris, his best friend and head of security.

  He punched in Farris’s cell and listened to the ringing. One, two, three … then it went to voicemail. What the fuck? That was Farris’s work number and he always answered.

  Cal punched the number in again, impatiently listening to the rings then the switch to voicemail. “Yo, you know who this is and you know what to do.”

  Frustrated, he punched the numbers in with violence, as if that would make Farris pick up faster.

  Waiting for the connection and the rings, he saw something on the floor and bent to pick it up, ignoring his swimming head.

  A scrap of very pretty black lace. Oh God. Anya’s panties. A pang of fear shot through him so strong it almost brought him to his knees. She was gone. Someone had her, maybe someone was hurting her right this minute.

  Listening to the rings, Cal stuffed the small piece of Anya he had in his hand into his tux jacket pocket. His hand encountered something small and hard and he pulled it out just as he heard the voicemail message again.

  Well, fuck. His head wasn’t working right.

  Farris had been working as hard as Cal had. Today was his first day off in four months and he said he was going out on a date with a pretty aid worker he’d met in Jordan. He was going to check out a five star restaurant he’d heard about in Chioggia, about forty clicks from Venice.

  Farris wasn’t answering not because he didn’t want to — day off or no day off, Farris would always answer Cal’s calls — but because he didn’t recognize the number.

  What was wrong with him?

  He punched out a text. Answer your fucking phone. C

  He studied what he had in his hand and which had definitely not been in his tux jacket pocket when he’d put the jacket on. It was small, black, featureless. Suddenly, with a rush of recognition, he realized what it was. A tracker. A fucking tracking device.