Rogue Commander, Leo Maloney [classic books for 11 year olds TXT] 📗

Lily turned her focus back to General Kung as she tried to control her adrenaline surge. “He seems...pleasant, General,” she said, lying with a smile.

...Kung snorted a short laugh. “The colonel is many things, Miss Stone, but pleasant is not one of them. However, he treats my guests well because I control his budget.”

“Yes, I rather assumed so,” she said as she heard the drama at Zeta HQ playing out in her ear—the recorded sounds of office chatter, keyboards clicking, and Charlotte picking up a line.

“Thales Group, London. How may I be of service?” There was a pause, and then, “Oh, I’m afraid Ms. Stone is overseas, Sir, at CIDEX in Beijing. I can put you through to her extension if you’d care to leave a message.” Another pause. “Yes, perhaps in a week. Thank you, sir.”

The conversation ended, and Lily glanced at Hyo again. He was tucking his cell phone away, but a chill rippled up her spine as one of his officer’s blatantly snapped a photo of her with his own cell. Then Hyo turned around and came back, followed by two of his uniformed men. He stopped and loomed above the tea table.

“When are you free?” he asked.

“Well, I...” Lily looked at General Kung. “The general and I were going to discuss some potential acquisitions...”

Hyo looked at his watch. “Today is good.”

“Yes, of course.” Lily touched the bridge of her glasses and adjusted them on her nose. A trickle of sweat crawled down her armpit. The young officer who’d taken her photo was staring at his cell, and then he whispered something in Hyo’s ear. The colonel nodded, and his face turned to granite.

“The Pentagon has very good surveillance cameras,” he hissed.

General Kung laughed. “Well, of course it does, Colonel.”

“Not that one, General,” Hyo said to him. “A different Pentagon.” And then he reached out, pulled Lily’s glasses from her face, and handed them to his officer.

General Kung jutted his head back, and Lily felt her bowels clenching. Hyo turned to Kung and spoke in clipped, angry Chinese, and Lily felt her palms going hot and slick.

“Damn,” Shepard croaked in her ear. “Get the hell out.”

But she couldn’t. There was nowhere to go, and she was surrounded by a storm of uniforms from every country but her own. General Kung was already recoiling from her, his face going crimson.

Hyo leaned down across the table and stared into her eyes. “Facial recognition is so good these days. And, how do you say...speedy?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.” Her voice trembled.

His smile was like ice. He reached out with his right hand and touched her left temple. And then he cocked his left hand back and slapped the other side of her face so hard that the crack turned the heads of everyone else in the room. She saw a burst of white light as her head snapped around, and then Hyo was looking at his right palm, where her green contact lens sat there like a screaming little mouth.

General Kung jumped up from his seat and snapped his fingers at his bodyguards.

“Arrest this woman!” he snapped to his men. “She is a spy— and an assassin.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Dan Morgan’s gleaming Shelby Cobra roared down a long, straight highway—its snarling mouth eating up ribbons of tarmac and spitting them out from its rumbling tailpipes. He was coming up to his thirteenth hour of driving and felt it. His butt was sore, his trick knee was throbbing, and his eyes were starting to feel like he’d rubbed them with sand.

But none of that mattered. It was all about the mission. He’d been tired before.

Route 64 had started out interesting, winding its way northwest through the scenic lush mountains of West Virginia, where the high forests and looping turns kept him alert and feeling alive—the kind of driving he liked. But then it had straightened out, like a long pull of gray taffy, with barely a wave through the flats of Ohio—the kind of driving that he wasn’t as thrilled with.

Still, the weather had been sunny and warm, and Neika was the perfect road trip companion. With the windows rolled down, she sat there on the passenger seat, pink tongue lolling, toothy smile wide, eyes squinted in pleasure, and the wind pinning her ears back. Even as the day faded, she never asked, “How much longer?”

“You on comms, Cobra?”

Shepard’s voice startled him. He turned down the western drawl of Kenny Chesney singing “Save It for a Rainy Day” on the radio. The song had made him brood about Jenny, so he was glad for the interruption.

“Here,” he said. “You home from Wonderland for the night?”

“Yeah,” Shepard answered. “You’re my dinner date.”

“Then work your magic and beam me up some grub. I’ve been living on sour coffee and stale donuts.”

“Can’t do that,” Shepard scoffed. “At least not yet.”

“So, what’s the big rig’s twenty?”

“Approaching Lexington, Kentucky from the east on Sixty.”

Morgan glanced at his navigator. “We’re about half an hour out.”

“What are you going to do when you see him, Cobra? Run an eighteen-wheeler off the road with a muscle car?”

“Maybe,” said Morgan. “Appreciate the track on this, Shep. Not sure why you’re still in the game, but thanks.”

“I’m your biggest fan—actually, your only fan at the moment.”

Morgan reached over and ruffled Neika’s head. “Hey, my dog still likes me.”

“Okay, so that’s two.”

By the time Morgan and Neika had reached the Shelby in the woods outside Virginia Tobacco, Shepard had already still-framed the video of the truck from the surveillance tapes, enlarged the image, and extracted the license plate. Then he’d tracked the truck down as a lease from a freight hauler in Colorado.

Some sort of front company had leased the truck, so he couldn’t find any shipping manifests or delivery schedules. However, all the big trucking companies were using GPS trackers on their rigs to keep eyes on their drivers, so he’d simply hacked into the main company’s net and pinned the truck