Page 17 of Dangerous Lover

Jack put the bag behind the money, the Glock and the ammo, then carefully screwed the grate back onto its plate, thinking how crazy people were to be willing to kill and die for a bag full of rocks.

He rose and made his way swiftly down two flights of stairs towards something warm and living and beautiful. Something definitely worth killing and dying for.

Encampment of the United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone near Obuja, Sierra Leone

Christmas Eve

4:58 pm

His name was Axel.He was Finnish, loved computers, American jazz, missed his fiancée Maja back in Helsinki and he hated Africa and everything connected to it. Best of all, he was blond, five ten, weighed about 180 pounds, just like him, and Vince Deaver was his new best friend.

Axel always stopped by to see him in the small detention center of the UNOMSIL when he got off guard duty at seventeenhundred hours. At seventeen oh three, Deaver could count on good old Axel stopping by, regular as clockwork.

The detention center itself was a joke. Deaver could have escaped at any time over the past three days. His grandmother could have escaped using her dentures and a hairpin. The UN peacekeeping force was not in the prisoner business, and it showed.

Deaver needed more than a way to break out of the detention center—he needed to get out of the encampment and out of Sierra Leone if he wanted his diamonds back. Good old Axel was his ticket out.

It was dark inside the detention center. Electricity was intermittent, the air conditioning worked sporadically, so the shutters and the door were kept closed against the blistering heat of the tropical sun, intense even in December.

Deaver made sure the lights were turned off during the day, even when the shutters kept the room in semi-darkness. Axel had to be used to a darkened room.

Deaver checked his watch. The luminescent dial showed seventeen hundred hours, on the dot.

Axel would be punctual. Deaver had studied him the way an entomologist studied bugs. He knew how Axel reacted to stimuli and he had his plan worked out down to the finest detail.

The Army had trained him well.

17:01

Deaver jumped up and down to make sure nothing rattled or clinked. There would be a moment when he would have to move fast andsilently. More than one soldier had died because a knife clinked against a belt buckle and gave away a position.

He checked his pockets, his boots and flexed his arms. He’d been cooped up for three days now and his muscles were stiff. He was used to hard workouts and confinement didn’t suit him.

Neither did the thought of being hauled before the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague or extradited back home for a trial for mass murder.

When Deaver finally caught up with Jack Prescott, he was not only going to get his diamonds back but he’d make the fucker very very sorry he’d interfered, before blasting his fucking head off. Deaver had spent a couple of pleasant hours last night imagining Jack tied to a chair while he used his knife.

Deaver was very good with his knife.

17:02

He checked his plan again, ran through it for the thousandth time. About ninety percent of good soldiering was planning and preparation. The plan was good and he was prepared.

He turned his back to the door.

17:03

The door opened wide and Axel walked in, good Finnish soldier from his head to his toes. His fatigues were clean and freshly pressed. The baby-blue UN helmet that was such an attraction, practically a beacon, to snipers the world over firmly on his head, boots spit-shined.

“Hello, Mr. Deaver,” Axel said. His English was excellent. He’d studied computer science for two years at Stanford and he spoke colloquial American English with only a faint accent. “How are you today?”

The light from the open door filled theroom. Since his back was to the door, Deaver’s eyes were able to accommodate quickly to the light pouring into the room from behind his back. Going from darkness to tropical light could blind a man for minutes.

“Hi, Axel. Close that door, will you?”

“Certainly.” Deaver heard the snick of the door closing and turned around. By now, Axel had become used to what he considered Deaver’s fetish for darkness.

Floor to ceiling bars separated the shack in half. Deaver considered his cell a personal affront. The bars were loosely planted in the wooden planks and fixed by screws to the stucco ceiling. The lock was a joke—it would fall apart if you blew on it too hard. How the fuck did they think a cell like that could hold a man like him?

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