The Heart of a Renegade

“Why did you call him?”

“Because he is—was—a friend, someone I could trust. Giles was the only person who truly believed in what happened to me in Hubei three years ago. He believed the man I call The Chemist exists and is a high-level assassin for a covert faction within the ruling party.” She paused, staring at her coffee. “Before my abduction, Giles had been helping me investigate collusion between the Dragon Heads crime syndicate and top officials in the Chinese Communist Party. We had a deal that he could use whatever information I had once I broke the story.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Giles knew the players. He understood the government and he knew the workings of the Triad intimately. I needed his advice. That’s why I called him. He said he’d find a way to help me and he told me to call back in two days, from that same phone at that time. He told me to find an ATM somewhere on the other side of town, withdraw whatever cash I could and use it to find a cheap hotel.”

Jessica took a sip of her coffee, welcoming the warmth that diffused through her chest. A distant part of her mind noted that while Luke had made coffee for her, his choice for himself was green tea.

“Is that what you did?”

She nodded. “I found a hotel in Gastown where a single woman renting a room by the night is not unusual. I paid cash upfront and I stayed in that room until it was time to make the call.”

“And no one followed you?”

“I don’t see how they could have. If they knew I was there they would have come for me earlier, right?”

Luke lowered his brows, studied her. “What about food?”

“I didn’t eat.”

He nodded slowly, a strange look sifting into his eyes. “You didn’t think it strange that Giles made you call back from the exact same phone?”

“I…I guess I did. But I knew he had to have his reasons. He had contacts and I was clean out of options.”

“He was CIA, Jess.”

She felt her jaw drop. Her whole world tilted and resettled slightly off axis.

“Are you sure?” she asked quietly.

“Dead sure. He wanted a fix on your location while he contacted Langley for direction. He wanted to be sure they could get to you.”

She dropped her face into her hands, rubbed her skin. Then looked up. “I…I don’t understand.”

He opened his mouth to say something, a strange expression in his features. Then he changed his mind, shut his laptop and surged to his feet. “Grab your camera bag, Jess.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.” He reached for a backpack. “If the conversation you had was exclusively between you and Giles and you’re one-hundred percent certain there is no way this information got out from your end, it leaves only one alternative—it got out on Giles’s end in Shanghai. And that means we need to move. Fast.”

He tossed her a down parka and thick woolen hat then shut his laptop and slid it into his pack along with his satellite phone. He crouched down, unscrewed a bolt under his kitchen table and lifted the top, revealing a large compartment under the surface. He scooped up what looked like different passports and ID’s, some license plates, a roll of duct tape, a radio, a scanner, technical field glasses, a knife and rounds of ammunition.

She stared blankly.

“Put the coat on,” he barked as he snagged his wallet off the counter.

“Why? Where are we going?”

He took her arm, helping her into the parka. “If Xiang’s men were tipped off about the rendezvous at the phone booth, they may also have been tipped off about me. They might know you’re here right now, in my house. Until we know what the hell is going on, and how that information got out from Shanghai, we need to go to ground.”

“Wait, I don’t understand! You’re saying Giles sold me out?”

“I’m saying there must have been a leak somewhere in the chain—an informant with a direct line to the Triad here in Vancouver.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably what got Giles killed and, until we find that leak, we’re sitting ducks, too.”

She stood dumbfounded as he grabbed his leather jacket.

“Now, Jess, move! They could be here any second.”

They shot out the door and fled into the darkness, Luke guiding Jessica over the thick snow that now covered the boardwalk.

Chapter 4

Halyards chinked against frozen masts as they raced down the dock. But just as they reached the stairs that would take them from sea level up to the parking lot, headlights cut round a building, illuminating falling snow. Luke jerked Jessica down into shadow behind a set of pilings.

A black SUV cruised slowly into the parking lot and cut the engine. Luke could hear a second vehicle approaching.

“Quick,” he whispered, “back that way.”

They ran back along the boardwalk, ducking below a wall just as the beams of a second vehicle swung over their position. They held dead still as the tires of the second vehicle scrunched through snow and came to a stop.

Silence grew deafening as tension pressed down on them and snow began to accumulate on their clothes.

What in hell were they waiting for?

Luke peered cautiously up over the wall, his snow-covered woolen hat providing camouflage. His vehicle was at the far end of the parking lot, behind the two black SUVs. He and Jessica would have to get past them somehow.

The passenger window in the first SUV was suddenly lowered. A match flashed, glowing orange. The scent of cigarette smoke reached him, pungent in the crisp air.

Then the driver’s door opened and boots squeaked onto snow. Luke heard snatches of what sounded like Chinese.

“It’s a dialect from the south,” Jessica whispered against his ear as she tried to peer over the edge and see what he was looking at.

He pushed her back down. “Stay low,” he hissed.

He reached into his pack, found his night scopes and trained them on the vehicles. He could make out six Asian men getting out of the cars, all packing serious automatic firepower.

Definitely triad. Somehow they’d gotten an ID on him. This bothered Luke. He rented the boathouse under a false name, paid for everything with credit cards backed by funds from FDS front companies and offshore numbered accounts.

Someone with inside information had to have fingered him directly.

And if the Dragon Heads knew exactly who he was, they had to know he’d taken Jessica and killed two of their men. A contract would be put out on him. Luke knew how these men worked.

Anger welled inside him. This pretty much ended his intellience-gathering gig in this city. Jesus, this was beginning to feel personal.

Jessica edged closer to him, and he could smell his shampoo on her wet hair. “What are they doing?” she whispered.

“Don’t know. Stay down,” he growled, suddenly—irrationally—angry with her.