Excerpt of Deadly Games by Cate Noble

Arlington, VA

October 3, 11:50 P.M.

Rocco Taylor eyed the tiny digital clock on the video player, the only source of light in the town house’s shadowy living room. Ten more minutes? No way.

He checked his watch. Way. His Tag Heuer was never wrong.

Damn Sam. It felt like it had been ten more minutes an hour ago. The couch springs groaned as he rocked forward and raked fingers through his hair.

God, he hated waiting, doing nothing. Let him belly crawl across a minefield into an enemy stronghold. Or give him an MP5 and a load of clips and let him shoot his way in. Hell, hand-to-hand combat was better. Anything was better than this: playing along while being fucked with.

Oh, like you’re really suffering. Compared to what Maddy was enduring right now—Jesus. Maddy. The gravity of her situation mingled with the molten guilt in his stomach. After three days of nada in the search for missing CIA analyst Madison Kohlmeyer, the Agency had scored deuces today, even if they only knew half of it.

Earlier that afternoon, while busting his ass to get to Dulles airport, he’d gotten word that Maddy’s BMW convertible had been pulled from the backwaters of Chesapeake Bay, a two-by-four still jammed against the gas pedal.

Hearing this from a friend who’d picked the story up off a newswire had infuriated Rocco. After being shut out of the Agency’s official investigation into Maddy’s disappearance on grounds of “emotional involvement,” Rocco had been promised that every stone would be turned, every angle examined, and that he would be notified personally of any big breaks. That he wasn’t should have been clue one.

An illegal U-turn on the interstate had Rocco racing back to the CIA complex that housed his office, dreading the word that would come once they pried open the BMW’s trunk. The relief he’d felt upon learning that the vehicle was empty eroded as the truth of how little else had been done to locate Maddy surfaced.

The Agency genius heading up the investigation had decided to let the police complete their missing person investigation first. Except the locals had backburnered the case as a low-priority after an interview with Maddy’s roommate revealed that Maddy had seemed preoccupied.

Rocco would have jumped all over that. Preoccupied could mean scared, nervous. Upset. Had she been bullied? Threatened?

But to the jaded Virginia police detective, who claimed he’d worked “dozens of cases just like this,” Maddy’s failure to show for an all-girl weekend at Virginia Beach three days ago meant she had something better planned.

To the detective, “preoccupied” was code for “she’d met someone.” “I figured she’d turn up for work on Monday, embarrassed to find people worried,” the detective had told Rocco by phone. “Happens all the time.”

Yeah, well, as Rocco’s grandfather used to say, the road to hell was paved with bad assumptions. In the end, Rocco had stormed out of his office in disgust after picking a fight with one of the supervisors. The official excuse offered, that Armageddon had broken loose at the Agency, was a crock. When was it normal these days, given the ever-expanding war on terror? The war on drugs? The war on wars? “Hard choices call for tough sacrifices,” the supervisor had parroted.

“You’re saying Maddy was sacrificed?” Rocco had been livid. Did they really think that sounded better than the truth? That Maddy’s case had slipped between the cracks as everyone assumed someone else was handling it?

And even though recovering Maddy’s drowned car had escalated her case to “foul play suspected,” it made little difference in light of the e-mail Rocco had opened just two hours ago. A game-changing e-mail that had languished in his spam folder—for an entire bleeping day—before he’d found it.

The message included a high-res photograph of Maddy, bound hand and foot, wearing nothing but bra and panties. She was curled in a fetal position in a nest of soiled straw at the bottom of what appeared to be a nondescript wooden shipping crate. Foul play confirmed.

In the photographs, Maddy’s eyes were closed tightly, as if she was wincing. Her upper arms bore bruises from a cruel grip. Someone would pay for hurting her, Rocco had vowed as he’d noted the slender, bloody cut that creased Maddy’s rib cage. While a knife blade had likely scored her skin when her clothes were cut away, the inferred subtext of the wound was clear. Future snapshots would be more horrific.

But it was the tears on Maddy’s cheeks, visible in the enlarged photograph, that haunted Rocco. The good news was corpses didn’t cry. She’d been alive when the picture was taken.

Unfortunately, bad news was also visible. Blowing up the photograph exposed a symbol branded into the plank of wood just above her head. The telltale revealed the sender’s identity more succinctly than any signature line. A triple-headed dragon. The symbol of Southeast Asia’s most notorious drug lord and Rocco’s archenemy, Minh Tran.

That Maddy had been targeted because of her association with Rocco was clear. I’m sorry, Maddy.

YOUR EYES ONLY, the photo’s caption had read. CALL THIS NUMBER OR YOUR GIRLFRIEND DIES.

That Tran mistakenly thought Maddy and Rocco were still a couple was a moot point. She was a colleague and a friend. And she was in trouble because of Rocco.

A quick search revealed that the publicly listed, international phone number belonged to a popular commercial messaging service based out of Latvia.

For two euros, typically paid with untraceable gift or stolen credit cards, a forty-five-second message could be left. With layers of high-tech-scrambling security, across multiple servers, the system was virtually impenetrable, making it popular with illicit lovers and criminals alike.

The access PIN provided allowed Rocco to retrieve the recording and then punch in a callback number. The succinct voice message, playable only once, had been left by one of Minh Tran’s English-speaking minions.

“We will trade this female for you and one other.” The message went on to outline the two-for-one swap.

In recompense for the death of Tran’s youngest son, a trigger-happy punk Rocco had killed during a recent mission in Bangkok, Minh Tran demanded Rocco’s surrender. No surprise there. Rocco and Minh Tran had been stepping on each other’s toes for years.

But it was the second part of Minh Tran’s demand that was the kicker. In order to secure Maddy’s release, Rocco had to bring along Dr. Rufin, the scientist Tran’s dead son had shot during that same mission.

As the developer of the designer drug SugarCane, Dr. Rufin was key toMinh Tran’s financial future. The sole distributor of SugarCane, Tran’s empire threatened to crumble as his supply of ’Cane dwindled.

That Tran fed a growing segment of the illicit drug market in the U.S. typically fell under the domain of the Drug Enforcement Agency. The C.I.A. had gotten involved when Tran started wholesaling dope to terrorist groups who used the drug profits to fund their attacks on allied troops in the Middle East.

Rocco couldn’t have dreamt up a more hopeless situation. If he honestly believed that Maddy’s safety could be secured with such a swap, he’d have had Rufin hog-tied on the couch and been awaiting further instructions. Except it was never that neat, that easy.

The truth was, Rufin was recuperating on Uncle Sam’s dime at a top-secret location, unknown even to Rocco.

As the perceived repository of the works of the late Russian scientist Viktor Zadovsky, Dr. Rufin was wanted by every country on the planet. His value was off the charts.

Though Rufin had been covertly granted asylum in the U.S., the Agency denied the fact and employed countermeasures ranging from offering rewards for Rufin’s capture to planting rumors of his demise. While those tactics were fooling others, Minh Tran seemed to know better. Precisely how Tran had linked Rocco to Rufin, and Maddy to Rocco, was to be debated another time.

Within minutes of his retrieving the voice message and leaving a callback number, Rocco’s cell phone had rung. The conversation had lasted less than twenty seconds. Rocco had demanded to speak with Maddy, proof of life as well as an opportunity to buy time.

The reply, “She is not available,” had rattled him. Please let her be alive. As difficult as it had been, Rocco had stuck to his guns, refusing to negotiate until he spoke with Maddy. The caller had promptly disconnected, only to call back a few seconds later with a promise to have Maddy available at 11:30.

But at 11:25, a different man had called, changing the time to midnight. Rocco looked at the clock again. Seven more minutes. Would someone call at 11:55 and blow him off again?

Needing to move, dying to take action, Rocco pushed to his feet. Two steps brought him to the front window. The blinds were drawn, but the slight gaps at either edge allowed him to peer out. Beneath themoth-surrounded streetlights, the night appeared normal. Which didn’t mean squat.

Living in a so-called gated community might give most residents a sense of security but Rocco had exploited that same blind trust more than once. Simply giving the gate attendant a name and an address earned you a visitor’s permit.

Turning away from the window, Rocco let his eyes readjust to the town house’s darkened interior. Then he began to pace.

Like a leopard prowling, he moved by instinct, focused. He had the layout of the sparsely furnished town house memorized. Five steps put the coffee table to his left, the pole lamp to the right. A ninety degree turn brought him to the hulking shape that was a recliner. The one Maddy had openly mocked, calling it “too awful for the junkyard.” And she had felt terrible later, after learning the recliner had belonged to Rocco’s grandfather.

On the end table beside the chair was the now long-dead cactus Maddy had brought over during the I’m-gonna-put-my-mark-here phase of their relationship. Neither the plant nor the phase had lasted long. The two-year course of their on-again, off-again relationship had been mostly off. The fact that deep down Rocco still cared for someone else had been the death knell.