done. He’d love to share a few of his and Garrett’s experiences in Souk’s lab with old Randolph.
The spymaster had to be seventy, if he was a day. He’d had a lot of years to do a lot of damage. More years than Con was likely to get, and that made him think of Jane, of the loss. He’d left her, and he needed to know why.
The image came back to him, of how he’d first seen her on the street tonight—her hair lifting in the breeze, her long legs and big sunglasses, her urban girl attitude in every step she’d taken, and then the surprise, the way she’d stopped and stared.
Geezus. He couldn’t have been such a fool as to walk away from her—and the heat was back, another wave of it rolling through his body and leaving a metallic taste in his mouth.
Shit. The blue pill wasn’t working. He reached up and felt his arm. The tenderness and swelling were gone, but his skin was even hotter to the touch—very hot. He reached into his pocket, then turned to check behind him, the handful of pills only halfway out.
Something had caught his attention, a scuffling noise. He quartered the area with his gaze, listening, and heard it again. Glancing back, he saw the homeless men exactly where they’d been, resting in their makeshift shanty of boxes and tarps, but they were looking in the same direction he’d been looking—due east.
Two sounds came next and had him breaking into a run, the first a cry of pain, guttural and beastly, an anguished howl of distress, the second a cry of fear, utter and absolute and undeniably female.
Undeniably Jane.
* * *
He wanted her.
Scrabbling in his pocket, Monk pulled out three silver gelcaps and popped them in his mouth
He wanted her with every breath he took. He could smell her, almost taste her, the woman from the restaurant, and she was running loose, an easy catch—except for the pain breaking him on every breath.
Strobelike flashes of light were tearing into him, streaking off the police cars with their raucous sirens and cutting straight into his brain. They’d already forced him off his prey, the two easy kills he’d had in the alley.
Two righteous kills.
He knew who the bastards had been, and they had not been worthy of Lancaster’s patronage. They would not be missed. Monk could single-handedly do both their jobs. He certainly wouldn’t have let Farrel and the woman get the drop on him. Banner and Howe had gotten no better or worse than they’d deserved.
Their deaths were another gift from him to Lancaster.
Lancaster.
Lancassstaaa. He cried out the name in his mind, and the bile of hatred rose in his throat, filling him with wretchedness and confusion. He loved Lancaster. It was his mission, the reason he’d been reborn, and yet, in his heart, he hated the man with a passion as profound and full of pain as his longing to be with him. He opened his mouth and released a cry, putting voice to his agony and his shame.
Abandoned.
They’d tried to kill him, the doctors and the lab techs in Bangkok. MNK-1 is a mistake … twisted, wrong, a monster.
Not the soldier he’d been promised he would be, better than the one he’d already been, and he’d been one of the very best.
They could have fixed him, the sodding bastards, but had decided to kill him instead. It was their fault, all of it. They’d brought him to this craven state. They were twisted, not him.
He let out another cry and curled in tighter on himself where he was crouched in the boxes behind Bagger’s Market, hiding from the painful police lights.
Then he heard it, a struggling sound and the edge of a whimper—fear—and the sound was not moving. It was staying in one place, on one pinpoint of space out there in the darkness.
Trapped! The woman was trapped.
He lifted his head, and across fifty yards of flashing light and night shadows, he could see her: a golden waif, her dress shimmering in the starlight, her face contorted with panic. She’d gotten caught in a tangle of wire and trash and couldn’t get out.
Rising to his feet, he felt himself thrill to the chase. Farrel would be easy to track. The man’s wretched scent was everywhere, and Monk would hunt his enemy down and kill him tonight—right after he took care of the woman.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Between the radio and the phones in the office, and the Bazo 700s bolted into