On Thin Ice

  On Thin Ice

  By

  Anne Stuart

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Elizabeth Pennington closed the heavy cypress door behind the last of her young students, shut her eyes and leaned her forehead against the thick wood. She had a miserable headache from the incessant South American heat, the children had been gratifyingly noisy after the first few weeks of polite whispers, and what she needed most was a few quiet moments in her small, darkened room and a cool damp cloth on her forehead. Father Pascal would be in the infirmary, dealing with the host of ailments so prevalent among the people in this small village outside the larger city of Puerto Claro – ear infections, dysentery, infected cuts, eyes and stomachs. As soon as Beth had rested she’d head out to help him. Father Pascal’s clinic was understaffed – until she’d volunteered with the Catholic Charities of Callivera he’d had no one but a couple of widows from the village to help. No one good at raising money, no one capable of teaching English. Father Pascal only spoke French and Spanish, which made things tricky, since Beth had only studied French and Latin in school and hadn’t done well with either.

  But her Spanish was coming along, almost as quickly as the children’s grasp of English. The children had stronger motivation – she showed them superhero movies and cartoons without subtitles to encourage them, and music was an even more powerful enticement. They loved hip-hop, though it still struck her as slightly odd when rail-thin, eight-year-old Manuela started singing, “what the bitches want with a …” Only fourteen year old Carlos had remained aloof, treating her with a scarcely veiled contempt that bordered on hostility.

  Beth pushed away from the door. Things were unnaturally still – the sprawling compound of Santa Luz was usually busy with the sound of children, with Father Pascal’s gentle drone, with the quiet chatter of the village women who’d come in to help. But now all was still, which she could only count as a blessing.

  Except that she couldn’t. She had good instincts, even if she’d never had to rely on them. Growing up in the cocooned atmosphere of the Pennington Pharmaceutical dynasty, she’d always had people looking out for her, money to cushion every one of life’s more unpleasant moments. Ever since she’d arrived in the tiny, war-torn country of Callivera seven months ago she’d been alert, listening for a danger that never came. It just went to show that all those years growing up with bodyguards and chauffeurs had been silly precautions.

  She quite desperately needed to lie down to get rid of this blistering headache. And she would. As soon as she checked on Father Pascal and made sure everything was all right.

  She moved through the long corridors of what was once the largest convent and mission on the eastern border of the country of Callivera. The floors were spotless, swept clear every day, though the scent of rotting vegetation was strong in the air. Most of the place was now deserted, and had been for more than twenty years when the Calliveran army had taken over the government, ousting the current dictator and bringing their own brand of military control. When three nuns had been raped and murdered, the convent had been shut down and the current government had only grudgingly allowed the mission to be reopened to help some of the desperately poor people of the neighboring villages. It had taken months for Father Pascal to get permission to come in, and if it weren’t for the Pennington money greasing the wheels, Beth would still be in Philadelphia, waiting.

  She could smell the familiar scent of alcohol and pine-based cleaners that emanated from the infirmary, cutting through the damp smell of the undergrowth that was slowly encroaching on the mission. She listened for Father Pascal’s pleasant, soothing monotone as he dealt with whichever patient had come to him, but no sound came from behind the closed doors. Beth pushed the swinging door open and walked into the deserted room. A room that was never empty.

  There were no children in the metal cribs that lined the far wall. Father Pascal liked to keep the little ones overnight until he was sure the ear infections were under control, and there were always at least two or three babies in residence. Not today.

  No sign of the widows who lived at the compound and took care of Father Pascal, the building, and everything else they could get their capable hands on. Beth had been a constant frustration to them with her insistence on doing her own laundry, her own cooking, her own cleaning. She hadn’t been about to explain that it was the first time in her life she’d been allowed to do so and she was finding it empowering. They wouldn’t understand that the heir to millions of dollars could always feel helpless.

  She walked through the infirmary to the small office. It was late autumn and the sun set early, the shadows long and deep, shrouding the place. She flipped the light switch but nothing happened.

  She let out a sigh of relief. The generator must be down again, and Father Pascal would be out working on it. The generator was a dinosaur – temperamental and ancient, and only Father Pascal could soothe it into behaving. Beth was very good with children, a natural teacher, brave in the face of snakes and scorpions, but her mechanical ability was nil. She’d probably only get in his way if she offered to help him.

  On the other hand, if she was lying down trying to sleep and the lights suddenly blasted on it would make her headache worse. Best to make sure everything was moving in the right direction before she tried to nap.

  The generator was in a separate building around the back of the compound, surrounded by locked gates so that no enterprising band of soldiers would be tempted to liberate it. This part of Callivera had a great deal of unrest, and members of the self-styled liberation army, the Guiding Light, were always causing trouble. Absurd that a group of semi-terrorists had named themselves after an American soap opera, but she’d seen members of the organization in the village, young men barely older than the children she taught, with hollow eyes and the omnipresent tattooed lighthouse on their forearms. Father Pascal had promised her they were basically harmless, but there were times when she wondered just how naïve the sweet old man was.

  She was about to turn back, head for her room, when she heard a sound, short, sharp, brief. A cry that was cut off abruptly. She’d been in Callivera long enough to recognize most of the bird calls, and this sounded nothing like them. It sounded almost human.

  She was suddenly cold in the sticky heat of the infirmary. She could do the smart thing – head for her room, lock the door, and hide under the bed until morning. That was what Father Pascal had insisted she do in case of trouble, but she’d taken the old man’s cautions with a grain of salt. Now they didn’t seem so ridiculous.

  But she wasn’t going to leave the frail old man alone in a dangerous situation. She wasn’t going to run and hide. She had come down to Callivera for many reasons, and to get over her childhood fears was only a
small part of it. But here was her chance to move past the sometimes crippling paranoia her parents and bodyguards had instilled in her. Despite the international news reports, Callivera was safe. Violence was kept to the big cities, and no one would want to hurt an old priest and a teacher.

  She pushed through the screen door, stepping out into the early evening shadows, and the thick jungle air closed around her like a wet velvet shroud. She took a shallow breath, annoyed that it sounded shaky, and headed for the corner of the building and the path to the generator.

  She saw Tia Maria first, lying face down, the dark pool flowing beneath her and sinking into the damp earth. The other woman, Juana, was a few feet away on her back, her dark eyes staring sightless into the darkening sky, her skirts pulled up to her waist.

  Beth froze for a moment, her stomach lurching, and then she stumbled backwards in a daze, hoping she wasn’t going to throw up, hoping she had enough time to run. She spun around, and saw what was left of Father Pascal lying in the shadows beside the building. He’d been savaged, and one old hand was clutching a crucifix, holding tight as he faced a cruel death. She heard a small sob and knew it had come from her own throat.

  It was too late to help them, too late to help anyone but herself. There would be no reason to hurt the children – with any luck they would have reached home safely, never hearing the sounds of their teachers being hacked to death. Never hearing Senorita Pennington’s cries.

  She heard the noise behind her, the rustle of movement, the smell of sweat and alcohol and anger, and there was no place she could run. She’d foolishly closed the door to the infirmary behind her, and even if she made it that far she’d never get inside. She had no choice but to face them.

  She turned, slowly, knowing death was hovering near her on dark wings, waiting for the bullet to split her skull or her chest.

  They were standing there, the tattooed soldiers from the village. With young Carlos beside them, his own fresh tattoo oozing blood, the look on his face like the others, like a wild animal incapable of mercy or fear.

  She didn’t have time to speak. She saw the rifle from the corner of her eyes, and a moment later everything exploded as she sank into blackness, the walls coming up around her, and she knew she was dying.

  Finn MacGowan stretched his legs in front of him, keeping a lazy smile on his face. They’d stopped putting him in leg shackles, though the chains around his wrists had worn calluses against the bones. He picked up the bottle of home-made beer, carefully, and brought it to his mouth, letting the chains clank against the dark bottle. They’d started giving him beer and mountain brandy a year and a half ago, probably because they hoped it would keep him from trying to escape.

  It hadn’t, but they’d been watching him too closely for him to make a third attempt at getting away. The time would come – he just needed to wait for it.

  He’d been held for more than three years, dragged from one remote camp to another. He’d seen more than half a dozen other people come and go, South American millionaires, British petroleum experts, French nuns and priests, American and German businessmen. Some were ransomed, some were executed, none of them managed to escape. The closest had been the American mercenaries two years ago. He’d made the break with them, but the Guiding Light had caught up with them before they reached the foothills.

  They’d killed the other two and dragged his sorry ass back up into the mountains, and he still couldn’t figure out why. In three years they’d never asked for ransom, but then, who the hell could they have asked? It’s not like they knew anything about the Committee, and the Ice Queen, Isobel Lambert, wasn’t about to spend money extricating an operative who never should have gotten caught in the first place.

  And that was assuming Madame Lambert was even still alive. It was hard to believe – she never would have left him there to rot for close to three years, she would have sent operatives to break him out. Her second-in-command, Peter Madsen, was another matter. There’d never been any love lost between them, and Madsen wouldn’t have given a crap. And if, as MacGowan suspected, it had been up to Madsen, he was going to see the sodding bastard paid for it. He’d find out the truth once he got out of here.

  And the third time was the charm.

  There were five other hostages in their current camp high in the Andes: a German engineer, the spoiled movie star’s son from California, two Guatemalan businessmen and the old nun. He couldn’t take them all when he left. The nun was too old to make it down the mountain; she was barely surviving the high altitudes. The Guatemalan businessmen were on their way to having their ransom paid, so there was no reason for them to risk it. Hans Froelich, the engineer, had offered him a tidy fortune to take him out of there, and Dylan Hamilton would be worth millions to his grieving family in California. Unless they were smart enough to celebrate his disappearance. Dylan was a major pain in the ass, and if he didn’t have the potential to be an asset, MacGowan would have killed him just because he was so damned irritating. But he was pragmatic enough to consider taking them with him, just in case.

  He took another drink of the warm beer. He wasn’t sure whether it tasted more like piss or skunk, and he didn’t particularly care. Two more days and they were out of there, and if the Guiding Light decided to kill the hostages who remained, then so be it. He’d learned long ago that he couldn’t save everyone. He could only save himself.

  They’d been in their current camp for three months now, and they’d be moving them soon. MacGowan couldn’t afford to put it off much longer. They weren’t watching him closely, and he’d done a damned good job of looking whipped. They had no idea.

  The one who called himself Izzy came and sat down beside him, grinning up at MacGowan. “Poker? I can beat you this time.”

  Since Izzy was half stoned on the crap he took, MacGowan doubted it, but he gave him a lazy grin anyway. “You can try,” he replied in the same Spanish dialect. “You need to put your money where your mouth is.”

  Not that money would do him any good, and Izzy and the rest had very little to barter with. American cigarettes, cans of Coke, the occasional bottle of real beer were about it. But what they could barter was small bits of freedom. He’d lost the leg shackles thanks to three queens a few months ago, and a full house had given him private bathroom breaks. He didn’t particularly care whether he was taking a dump in front of an interested crowd, but it gave him a precious few moments of being unobserved and he was going to need that when he took off.

  Today he had every intention of getting rid of the handcuffs, and he wasn’t going to rely on the luck of the draw to do it. The followers of the Guiding Light were young, stupid, and addicted to bazuco, or bazooka, the crap left behind when you made cocaine. It was child’s play to cheat, to take their money. The only problem was the bazooka made them trigger happy and wide-awake, and this time he couldn’t afford any screw-ups. They wouldn’t let him survive another escape attempt, particularly if he took people with him.

  He still couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t put a bullet in his brain years ago. They dragged him from place to place when he had no intrinsic value, and these men were very focused on money. The revolution had left the building years ago – kidnapping was about cold hard cash and the Guiding Light was nothing more than gangsters in camo.

  Porco, Izzy’s friend, and two others squatted down by the fire as Izzy dealt the cards. MacGowan had gotten good at reading the signs, and there was an edginess to all of them that signaled a coming change. He was going to have to move fast.

  By the third hand Porco was unfastening his handcuffs, the fire had burned down low and the chilly night air was seeping in around them, but no one seemed to notice. “What’s up?” MacGowan asked casually as he dealt the next hand. “You guys seem on edge.”

  “They’re bringing someone new,” Porco said, never the brightest. “We’ll have to break camp tomorrow morning so they can’t trace her.”

  “Shut up!” Izzy snapped, grabbing his cards from the pack
ed dirt that served as a table. “He doesn’t need to know anything.”

  “What’s he gonna do?” Porco said defensively. “He knows there’s no way he can escape – he tried it twice already.”

  MacGowan picked up his own hand. Nada. He let a small, satisfied smirk play at the corners of his mouth. Bluffing with a bunch of stoned teenagers was always a challenge – if he overplayed it they’d get suspicious, if he underplayed it they wouldn’t notice. “I like it here,” he said, putting the cards face down in front of him with the demeanor of a man well-pleased with life, or at least with his poker hand.

  “Then you’re loco,” Izzy said. “You sleep on the dirt, there’s no pussy, it’s cold and rainy. Englishmen like their comforts.”

  “I’m not English,” he said pleasantly, steel beneath. “I’m Irish. From Northern Ireland.”

  “What’s the difference?” Porco asked, blinking as he tried to focus on his hand.

  “Trust me, there’s a big one,” MacGowan said in an easy voice. “I’ll explain to you a bit of our history this winter. Assuming you’ll continue to keep me alive that long.” Of course, he wasn’t going to be anywhere around in the coming winter, but they wouldn’t know that.

  “You’ll be alive,” Izzy said. “We’re supposed to keep you that way if we can. We had orders when we took you.”

  Which didn’t make sense. If Madsen was responsible he never would have bothered with the expense of keeping him on ice. So why the hell was he still here, and still alive?

  He simply nodded, dealing new cards to those who asked for them, standing pat on his miserable pair of twos. He could hear them coming from a distance, but his poker buddies were too caught up in the game to notice. He drained his beer, then looked up with all the innocence of a hungry puma. “You want to call?”

  “I want. . .” Izzy began, when the newcomers broke through into the clearing, and everyone jumped, scattering cards and cigarettes and beer bottles in their wake.