that?” Tock asked Mads.
“No idea, but the sound was irritating the hell out of me.”
With Mads’s magnified hearing, it could have been simply the moving of the watch hands that irritated her, but Max couldn’t help but glance back at the watch and wonder . . .
* * *
Amelia Kamatsu entered the hangar with her team. They had their automatic weapons loaded and ready, moving as a unit as they charged in. But they stopped after a few seconds, freezing in their steps.
“Holy shit,” one of her men muttered behind her.
“Keep your focus,” she ordered. “Clear the hangar.”
“Seriously?”
“Just do it!”
And they did. Moving around and over the bodies that littered the room. The murderous men they had been assigned to take down were lying in pools of their own blood, their weapons beside them or close by. But only a few of them had been killed with a gun. Most had either slit throats, strategically opened veins on inside thighs or, from what she could tell with a quick look, torn-out throats by . . . ? She didn’t know. The wounds were so jagged, maybe someone had used a piece of glass or torn metal.
Despite the evidence, she knew this had not been a sloppy rage killing. It was something else. Something she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen before. At least not with well-trained soldiers who knew how to protect themselves; who lived lives of protective paranoia.
Once the hangar and offices had been cleared, they all returned to the hangar.
“Anything?” she demanded.
One of her team held up a watch. “Just this,” she said.
Amelia let out a pained sigh. That was Zé’s watch, which had a carefully installed GPS system inside it so that they could track him wherever he might be. Now that he was no longer wearing it, she had no idea where her friend and teammate had been taken.
“What do you want us to do?” another teammate asked.
“Find him. I don’t care what hole someone may have stuffed him into; I want Zé Vargas found.”
chapter TWO
Zé woke up and stared at the slightly cracked ceiling. He stared at it because it wasn’t that far from him. At first, he thought someone had shoved him inside a tiny hole to wait until his country’s enemies came in to torture him into telling military secrets. But then he realized that there was way too much light in this “dungeon” for it to actually be a dungeon. Usually torturers didn’t let a guy see the sun.
So he turned away from the slightly cracked ceiling and toward the light, and that’s when he knew. He was in a house. A very boring house, to be honest, but definitely a house. The boring dining room of a boring house, to be specific. The blinds were open on the long windows, letting in all that excessive sunlight, which immediately made Zé feel a little better. He still didn’t know where he was, but he definitely felt better about things.
Lifting his arm, Zé reached for the ceiling to see how far away it was. When he still had a few more feet to go before he could touch it, he sat up. He didn’t move quickly, though. The back of his head hurt too much for any speed, but when he explored his scalp with his fingers, he didn’t feel any wounds or major damage. And that was strange, wasn’t it? Because he was pretty sure he’d gotten hit in the back of the head.
Hadn’t he? He couldn’t remember exactly.
“Fuck,” Zé sighed, glancing down. Not sure what was happening to him. That’s when he saw them. Three pairs of eyes, staring at him. Just staring.
“What?” he asked and the three dogs’ heads tilted to the side. “What are you staring at?”
Not surprisingly they didn’t reply, so Zé focused on how he would get down from where he was—on this china cabinet? How the hell did he get on a china cabinet?—without breaking his neck.
As he studied the distance to the nearest windowsill and the dining room table, debating which could hold his weight, two men appeared from another room. They were both ridiculously large and tall and . . . twins? They had to be. They looked exactly alike. Especially the way they loped by, both eating delicious-looking buns.
As they passed, their heads turned toward him and, as one, they both nodded and kept going. As if a nearly naked man on top of a china cabinet was something one saw every day.
A few