One Chef! E-Book

M. L. Buchman

• Herausgeber: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

-a Dead Chef thriller- When the recipe calls for death, you need secret ingredients. Fast! Kate Stark owns the #1 cooking network on television. When a chef and a guest judge die on the air, all fingers point to her. But Kate faces her own problems: Five years ago, while a Special Agent in the U.S. Secret Service, she busted a major North Korean currency counterfeiting ring. Now the North Koreans want payback. Primetime! From New York TV studios and the Chrysler Building penthouse suite to the Panama Canal and a DPRK smuggling ship, Kate races to stay alive and recruit her team: a geek, a Marine, her con-man twin brother, and a very handsome guest judge. Death toll so far? ONE CHEF!

Leseprobe

a Dead Chef thriller

One Chef!

byM. L. Buchman

Dedication

To my favorite chef to cook with,the lady I share joy with in the kitchen.

The Cloud Club, Office 39, the bulk carrier ship Chong Chon Gang, the counterfeiting, and the fate of Choi Eun-hee are real. The rest? Well, this is a work of fiction.

Chapter 1

Marianne Rimaldi scooped a scant teaspoon of the Gran Marnier chocolate ganache and drizzled it atop the single bite of truffle cheesecake. The perfect final bite for the meal she was creating.

A glance at the competition clock.

Two minutes.

She plated three more desserts for the judges. The television cameras filming Kate’s Kitchen from Hell hovered close by—two on her, two on her competitor as the final seconds ticked away. One glass-eyed lens had an angle that showed the cameraman wasn’t focused only on the food.

Precisely according to plan.

Marianne needed the win on America’s most popular cooking show, which meant winning over at least two judges. More than that, she lusted after that Kate’s Kitchen “Golden Knife” stamp of approval on her career, which required all three judges. For that she wasn’t above applying other…ingredients.

The heat of the competition kitchen—the flaring burners and blinding stage lights—had “forced” her to pull at the cross-shoulder buttons of her confining chef’s jacket which now hung half open. She wore a loose-necked satin blouse beneath, no bra. She’d chosen an emerald green to contrast with the fire-red of the winner’s jacket that she hoped to be awarded at the end of the show. It also stood out well against her unadorned ash-black jacket of a contestant, but she wanted the red.

However, mere party tricks wouldn’t work on the show’s main judge.

Marianne had to capture Kate Stark’s attention. With her, nothing would count except the food itself.

Kate Stark, the blue-eyed goddess of television food on the nation’s most popular cooking network, was also founder and perennial judge of the show. Always front and center on the final panel.

Deep down Marianne didn’t want to just win Stark’s vote, she wanted to impress the hell out of her. She’d sell her soul to the Devil if needs be; it was Kate’s Kitchen from Hell after all.

Don’t think! Focus on the food…but don’t forget the theater.

Marianne was slightly built, so even the least view down her blouse from above was a very revealing one. She bent over her dessert plates and the satin draped away from her body allowing a deliciously cool ripple to course down her front. Her build might be far less substantial than the one that had made her mother such a success on the “wrong” side of Hollywood. But she’d certainly watched her mom and learned what sold. It had been an educational upbringing, if not a typical one.

Three judges.

Two of them were easy.

The guest taster was Zania in the role of the “every person’s” palate so necessary for engaging an audience. Someone for the viewers to identify with, among all those professional chefs. Of course her palate was about the only thing on Zania that wasn’t extraordinary.

Zania was the hottest new Hollywood starlet—who Marianne would bet was a closet butch. It wasn’t too dangerous a bet because Zania’s mother worked the same side of Hollywood as Marianne’s and word got around of what really happened after the bedding was rumpled in erotic film.

During her intro, Tinsel Town’s hot new box-office draw had announced she was centerfolding for Playboy next month in the same sultry breath as promoting her new tight-leather, sci-fi thriller movie. Marianne knew that anyone who pegged Zania as an airhead had a nasty surprise coming; she absolutely knew how to market herself. In all ways.

However, hinting to the actress that there was a chance of some woman-on-woman bonding that would allow Zania to prove just who was the “ultimate female among women” offered real possibilities for leveraging the star’s vote. It definitely looked as if she’d bought into Marianne’s careful seasoning of her performance with hints and suggestions.

Marianne’s own tastes however, were for the second guest judge; the professional chef.

Harold Merritt, with his Michelin-starred Chicago’s Merritt restaurant, was both very handsome and notoriously single. Win or lose, she’d make a point of chatting him up after the show. All that broad chest and short dark crew cut gave him a deliciously tough look; she could find many uses for him outside the kitchen, or in it—a little oil, two bodies, maybe some chocolate sauce…

A careful peek from behind the screen of the jet-black dyed bangs of her blond hair revealed Zania and Harold were staring hard at their monitors of the show’s live feed rather than gazing benignly over the competition kitchen floor. Their attention was right where Marianne wanted it. On her.

The head judge was a different problem.

Kate Stark—the number one slotted television chef on any network, not just the one she owned—also watched the monitor, but with a slightly amused smile that Marianne would pay a lot to understand. Kate with her direct blue eyes and straight brunette hair that brushed her shoulders and framed the well-defined cheekbones, and aquiline nose that made her one of the most attractive faces in television, cooking or not.

She was a notoriously deadpan judge, at least on this show, so that wry smile must mean something.

For good or ill, Marianne would not find the answerma this side of the judge’s table.

The camera that was spying down her jacket still hadn’t wavered, so Marianne “accidentally” dribbled a large dollop of the orange-chocolate ganache onto the back of her hand. She licked it clean as if too hurried to wipe it away, making sure the camera could see the pleasure on her face at the success of her own work without losing the angle on her blouse.

Damn! It really was good. Marianne would win on taste alone. But she’d have to play the meal presentation very carefully, spiking the odds even further in her favor with both of the two guest judges.

The competition buzzer sounded as she shaved the last of the zest of a blood orange using a nutmeg rasp. Even as Marianne held up her hands to show she was done, the camera focused in on the cloud of orange dust still sprinkling down like the first snowflakes.

Her shiny dark green satin blouse made a perfect backdrop, which had “somehow” slipped out of another button. Somehow…because she’d enlarged the buttonhole last night to ensure that the button popped when she raised her arms.

Nailed it.

She had to close her eyes for a moment to steady herself.

Light-headed.

She needed to eat.

Her normal technique of shrugging it off didn’t work. Even lowering her arms and subtly bracing herself against the table didn’t help clear her head.

Her hands were shaking.

Her hands never shook.

Chapter 2

Franco Lamar cursed.

The damned bitch wasn’t supposed to taste her own food, not that big teasing lick off the back of her hand anyway. A small taste and she’d have been fine. For a while. Long enough anyway.

Now he could see Marianne Rimaldi wavering from where he and his men lurked in the shadows of the television studio, far behind the judges’ table and well clear of any camera’s eye.

Bitch was really pissing him off.

He held his breath, keeping his men in place. He had a Plan B, but he hated when that happened. Especially because he didn’t have a Plan C.

Rimaldi made it through the other competitor’s meal service by clutching the edge of her work table, rousing herself to high-five her sous chef, but little else.

The studio emptied. Last shoot of the day. Competitor headed for the bathroom after the judges were done critiquing him. All the main kitchen staff and cameramen drifted out just as he’d planned.

Now he was down to three judges, two cameramen, one floor director, and dumb bitch Rimaldi.

She served the first of her three main dishes. Oohs and ahs and cheerful commentary among the sappy judges.

Franco could feel his fingers digging into his opposite arms where they were crossed. He always hated this part the most.

In Marine Force Recon, they’d parachute down behind enemy lines, observe, assess, and report. They could be weeks on the ground playing cat-and-mouse games with enemy security and military forces. That was fine. Even laying low between the final “Go” and the actual zero-hour start of the operation was easy; you found a willing local female, or an unwilling one, and you laid her low until it began.

It was the time between the actual start of the operation and the launch of his role in it that had always eaten at him.

Full alert and on hold sucked. It sucked when he was still in Recon and it sucked now.

Rimaldi was wavering, but fighting it well through the first three plates of her meal. Her body was shutting down on her and she’d have no idea why. Her brain was going with it so she was probably past caring.

C’mon bitch. Just hold it together long enough to deliver the dessert clean.

She almost dumped the final dessert plates to the studio’s cement floor, earning gasps of surprise from the judges and cameramen.

But she recovered and made it to the table.

Franco held his breath as she stumbled through her presentation. The drug was allowing so little oxygen to her brain that it was amazing she was still standing.

Done.

Now the tasting.

C’mon judges.

The movie star wench did even better than he could have hoped.

She ate the poisoned dessert in two neat bites. Then the stupid whore picked up her plate to lick up the puddled chocolate sauce with a long, sensuous move that sent a shiver up his balls.

Licking that plate clean on top of the dessert was a massive overdose, not just a knockout.

She collapsed forward, face down into the plate.

Shit!

The actress hit the table so hard that one of her awesomely impressive breasts—barely trapped in her sheer top anyway—popped free.

Franco looked at the other two judges as the studio exploded in panic.

Kate Stark’s hand rested on the male judge’s arm to keep him from eating.

The two primary targets both sat there—undrugged.

Rimaldi’s body finally figured out that it was already dead and she collapsed to the floor.

That put paid on the two secondary targets: Rimaldi and Zania were past recovery.

Still Stark and they guy sat there unmoving.

Franco nodded to Jason.

Jason Mann pulled out a dart gun and shot them both in the back of the neck.

They each flinched in turn, then slowly collapsed forward.

Franco signaled his men and they started forward. When the studio lights blacked out, the four of them pulled down the night-vision goggles that had been perched on their foreheads. The studio was now visible in a hundred shadings of green.

They pulled the darts out of Kate Stark and Harold Merritt and dragged them back.

Jason hesitated just long enough to grope Zania’s errant breast. He looked ready to do more until Franco hissed at him to get moving.

Their timing was perfect.

Down the elevator that their inside man had locked in place for them.

Along the corridor.

As the hired truck backed the empty shipping container against the loading dock, Vince used bolt cutters to off the diplomatic-pouch door seal. Manuel held the door open as they dropped the two bodies on the mattress inside and Jason injected them with the antidote.

Doors closed, an identical seal slapped back into place, and Nicky—who’d been sent to greet the driver—shooed the truck on its way.

They dumped all of their gear into a couple of lawyer’s briefcases and each took a different route to the parking garage.

They were done. The container and its cargo were on their way.

Chapter 3

FBI agent Marcus Reynolds and his partner Leona Edwards were walking along the 50th Street side of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan when a semi-truck burst out of the underground loading dock and almost plowed into them.

“Shit!” New York was like that. Your attention goes sideways for a moment and you’re done.

He automatically noted that it was from Express Truck of the Five Boroughs and had a twenty-foot burnt orange shipping container on its bed. The driver waved them by without too much impatience, then he roared out over the sidewalk.

Marcus’ problem was the same as it had been for the last six weeks: Leona. That’s how long she’d been his partner and he still couldn’t stop looking at her instead of trucks that were trying to kill him.

Leona Edwards’ lustrous skin was the color that only emphasized his pale-guy whiteness and would have sent his white-trash parents stumbling for their shotguns. The way she filled out a white shirt and black suit coat were enough to kill a man; definitely custom-tailored—had to be on her frame. No problem hiding a sidearm in a shoulder holster; she had plenty else filling out the jacket for even her FN Five-seveN semi-auto service issue to be a distraction.

She caught him and quirked one of her eyebrows up; damn woman thought she was Spock. He’d been caught staring so many times that now it was just part of their routine. She had too damn much worth staring at and the woman knew it.

She pulled him out of the way of a midnight blue BMW 760Li sedan with dark-tinted glass all around that shot out of the parking garage and across the sidewalk without even touching its brakes.

He really needed to get his head back in the game.

“What is this ‘hacker signature’ crap again?” Leona was way better at computers than he was. Which didn’t bother him any, as long as he kept outshooting her on the range. It was close, but she hadn’t beat him yet.

“Every computer hacker has a style, a unique way of doing things, as unique as a bomber does for wiring a timer. It’s their fingerprint or signature.”

Damn but he could listen to her rich, mellow voice all day. No wedding ring, no jewelry at all, which didn’t signify squat on a field agent. Six weeks together and he didn’t even know if she was married or had a boyfriend.

He held a door for her then they headed across the busy lobby of Rockefeller Center to the bank of elevators.

“So someone with this hacker signature broke into our FBI databases and no one could stop them?” Cyber warfare creeped him out. He didn’t like things that made him afraid of his own smartphone.

“They didn’t just break in, they strolled in with such a sophisticated set of tools that the guys down in Quantico still aren’t sure how they were hit or what was taken.”

“Then how—”

“You know we’ve been trying to tag Rafe for the last six months?”

The fact that the two of them had been working the case from opposite ends was what finally brought them together. That and his old partner retiring. Marcus would have to remember to thank him someday.

Marcus and Leona somehow got their own elevator and started the climb. He thought of some things that two people could do in an elevator if they were willing. Then he thought about the cameras that were probably watching them and stayed focused on the conversation.

“Sure. I just don’t get why we’re here when we should be closing in on this creep. Damn, we were so close. Then he guns down poor Jake and vanishes.” Jake’s death was the reason Leona needed a new partner.

“Because,” Leona stared unblinking at the floor numbers. Damn but she was a strong woman.

Out of some thin shred of decency, Marcus resisted the urge to look down and see what nice things that shoulders-back position did to her figure.

“That hacker with their very unique signature strolled into our system. Not just some random part of it, they went into DITU.”

“Shit! Really? I thought that thing was bolted down hard, I remember a lecture on it.” The Data Intercept Technology Unit was about the scariest damn thing he’d ever heard of. E-mails, phone calls, Internet browsing history, all of it compiled and cross-indexed covering pretty much everyone in the country, or whose signals crossed American borders.

“Said hacker,” Leona continued, “apparently read every e-mail and grabbed every phone call we had scooped up on Rafe and a number of others. It’s a signature they haven’t seen in almost five years.”

“So we’re going to see Kate Stark the owner of Cooks Network because…” it was finally making sense.

“Kate Stark,” Leona straightened her jacket as the elevator slowed, “was a Secret Service agent at the time, in the counterfeiting division. She is credited with taking down this same hacker who just popped back up inside our network, but there’s no record of who the hacker was.”

The elevator doors slid open on the main floor of Cooks Network to shouts.

A lot of them.

They weren’t shouts of surprise.

They were panic.

Chapter 4

Captain Rang Jin-ho stood on the bridge of the North Korean ship Chong Chon Gang and shifted his weight to keep it off his artificial leg; it itched horribly. The problem was that it itched in a place that was now made of steel.

But he wasn’t going to go below and rest it. They had permission to be in port for three hours and he’d never looked out on American soil before, not once in his twenty years at sea.

I wish you were here to see it with me, Su-jin. His wife would have enjoyed the moment, but even trusted families of Office 39 were not allowed to leave North Korea together, for fear of defection. One or the other always remained behind.

He’d taken command of the hundred-and-fifty meter ship a decade ago. Perhaps he’d done it a little brutally, but it had succeeded with no one the wiser which was all that counted. He and the Chong Chon Gang had been Office 39’s number one cargo and smuggling vessel ever since.

But they were known—you couldn’t hide the purpose of such a large ship forever. So why did the Americans agree to let the premier vessel of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s most secret and powerful government agency arrive in Red Hook terminal in the Port of New York and New Jersey?

Were Westerners really so soft-hearted that they’d allow a spy vessel in their harbor under the pretense of being a U.N. food aid delivery?

Perhaps.

Jin-ho would not be so foolish. No CIA ship would ever be allowed into Wonsan harbor.

He had been granted three hours to take aboard and stow one hundred shipping containers. The big cranes were making quick work of the task. But only ninety-one of the containers were in the stack they were loading.

It had been two hours. He had less than an hour left before the hovering Coast Guard cutters would escort him once more to sea, when he spotted the delivery trucks.

Nine trucks bearing nine containers.

No customs inspections on those.

They were under the seal of the People’s Republic of China diplomatic pouch. Each door lock seal was checked as the trucks arrived, but nothing more.

He knew the contents of five of the containers, all of it forbidden goods specifically against the U.N. sanctions: two containers of RPGs and other ground-fire weapons, two containing the various parts from which a Bell Cobra attack helicopter might be assembled, and a Tesla roadster to assuage the Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.

As long as the vicious bastard had his occasional new toys, he would leave Office 39 alone. And if he didn’t, he would find out exactly who truly ran the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea just as his father Kim Jong-il had before him.

In his first two years of power, Kim Jong-un had executed the four men his father had appointed to train him; every general in the military who had been one of his father’s cronies, and even his uncle. He had his uncle, the man’s family, and most of his relatives machine gunned down, or fed to starved dogs—the reports varied; over a hundred people were rumored to have gone down in a that single purge.

The Supreme Leader had not touched a single family member of Office 39 which proved he was not stupid, just vicious.

Jin-ho kept an eye on the “loading mix-up” that caused one of the containers to be rejected by his First Officer only after it was lowered down into the cargo hold.

P’yo was very smooth.

The lifting tackle was switched in mere moments to a different container which bore the same identifying numbers and seal.

Jin-ho watched from his eagle’s eye perch on the command bridge.

No inspectors were any wiser for the exchange.

A quarter of a billion dollars in supernotes, counterfeit US hundred dollar bills, would be returned via the PRC’s diplomatic pouch to the embassy and be spread out through the gangs of the Chinese Ghee Mun Tong. A very simple payment for the contents of the nine containers.

Office 39’s supernotes were the best on the planet and they distributed billions of dollars per year. Yet one more way that the Office kept the DPRK’s economy afloat. He’d been told that the American gambling casinos’ machines accepted them every time, which was apparently the ultimate test.

Jin-ho watched the replacement container as it was reloaded onto the truck which then departed back out through the gate.

He eased his leg again.

The last four containers’ contents were unknown to him. They were labeled for the Council of Five, the leaders of Office 39. A Council on which he still intended to sit one day.

His wife Su-jin had instructed him at length on how to spot opportunity when it came.

These four unknown containers? he asked his wife’s image in his mind.

He didn’t know. So for now?

Wait and see, Jin-ho. We remain always patient.

But those last containers gave him an ache in his missing knee that he didn’t like at all.

What could possibly be inside them?

Chapter 5

Kate Stark woke slowly with no memory of going to sleep.

And absolutely no memory of taking a man with her.

But the body she lay half across was male. A broad, powerful chest. Very definitely male.

His heartbeat was loud in her ear despite the shirt.

Shirt?

What was the point of dragging a man into her bed if she didn’t remember it and they didn’t get naked?

She tried opening her eyes. No difference. Not even a little. Either she was blind or it was pitch dark. To avoid panic she chose one from Column B, thank you very much.

Kate pushed herself up, using the sleeping man for leverage. He barely grunted.

She was dressed too. A hand to her chest—show clothes. She rubbed her fingers over her left breast—the outline of the Kate’s Kitchen from Hell logo embroidered into her master chef’s jacket.

The show!

Kate’s Kitchen from Hell.

She’d been judging a show. The final show of a two-week filming stint. First two weeks of June. Three shows a day. A whole season plus Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Kate’s birthday holiday specials in the can. The final judging. Two competing chefs. Maxwell and…

The man beside her snorted, not so softly, then shifted and continued his slumber.

And now…? What was she doing?

Her brain was moving through molasses.

She sat on a mattress. A really thin one. Not hers.

They had judged that first contestant. He was an excellent chef and his meal had been splendid. His final dessert of mango sorbet served on a strawberry-wine reduction with a flake of a fresh-made chocolate mint sprinkled with sea salt made a delectable denouement to the meal.

She remembered that clearly enough and rubbed the back of her neck to try to shake loose more. She hissed against the pain. A mosquito bite-sized lump on the back of her neck and a bruised area the size of her palm.

Kate tried but couldn’t connect it to anything.

Guest judge Harold Merritt—with his patrician features, short dark hair, and broad, work-out chest—was clearly taken in by the progression of flavors, totally missing its lack of original thinking.

To Kate, Maxwell’s meal had been most exceptional in not being exceptional.

Zania’s palate had clearly been outstripped, but she’d declared it “wicked tasty” and realigned her sheerly clad and impressively generous profile to best advantage for the nearest camera.

Off the edge of the thin mattress, a platform extended. Kate tapped a short-trimmed fingernail—a metal platform. Reaching out into the smothering darkness a foot or so—more metal. Not smooth like a knife’s blade or a stainless steel counter, instead rough and covered with a patina of rust corrosion. And the smell of…fish. Not television-show fresh fish either. When she rested her palm against the platform, or maybe it was the floor, she could feel a deep vibration rumbling through the steel. Diesel engines, big ones, running at cruise—not flat out but not idling either.

She eased the collar of her show jacket, the air was tepid—thick and surprisingly difficult to draw into her lungs—and…tepid was all her sluggish mind could unearth for an adjective. Like tea water with no remaining warmth to comfort or coolness to soothe.

The man beside her grunted and thrashed about a moment before settling. His noises echoed strangely. She snapped her fingers, though it took a couple of tries to make it a clear, sharp sound; her nerves were functioning no better than her thinking. Once achieved, the snap made a bright sound, as if— She didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

Then Marianne Rimaldi had served. That was the second chef! Harold and Zania had come to life. Somehow Marianne was managing to work both sides of the aisle with her flair for showmanship.

The food was also fascinating. Her first dish was exquisite, though her second rated as a bit of a miss—the chocolate HalibutMole. She’d either needed a stronger fish to mitigate the contrast of the protein and the sauce or a sharper mole for the contrast to be a statement of flavor—but the first and third dishes were so exceptional and the mole itself so rich that Kate decided the contestants were neck and neck going into the dessert course.

Kate rubbed at her sore neck, still unclear what had happened. But the other memories were coming back, perhaps this one would as well. It was hard to be patient while breathing tepid, fish-flavored air in total darkness.

If Marianne nailed the dessert, Kate would invite her onto Two Chefs Chat. It was a new show she was developing to help chefs take that next step to stardom—a one-on-one master class filmed for the public.

Rising to her feet, Kate wobbled on the unstable mattress and braced one foot lightly on the sleeping man’s chest. She also discovered a headache that cried in alarm.

She ignored it.

Cries. There’d been cries of surprise, each sharply halted on a gasp. Marianne Rimaldi stumbling and nearly dumping her dessert service onto the studio floor as she’d climbed to the steps to the judge’s stage.

At five-foot-nine, Kate’s reach was seven-six. Mattress thickness plus standing up on her tip-toes told her exactly what she didn’t want to know. At seven-foot-ten above the steel floor was a corrugated metal roof.

Screams.

On the verge of toeing her uninvited companion awake—because Kate always remembered when she invited someone into her bed—she became aware of a new sound.

They hadn’t been screams of surprise. They’d been screams of…

Chapter 6

A clank, a thump, and light poured into the darkness on level with Kate’s knees; proof that thankfully she wasn’t blind. A one-foot square inspection port had been opened in a sidewall of their prison, for Kate had no doubt that’s what this was.

The flash of light confirmed her suspicions as well.

They were the sole occupants inside an eight by eight by twenty-foot cargo shipping container. The rumble through the steel-plate floor probably belonged to a ship’s engines. That meant they were at sea.

She watched mesmerized as a couple of water bottles and what appeared to be a bag lunch were dropped through the opening.

“Hunh? Hey? What’s going—” Harold Merritt. As she’d have guessed if she’d been ready to think about it; her guest judge belonged to the very nice chest she’d been unconscious on.

In half a second he was going to spook their unidentified provider. There wasn’t time to shush him. Therefore, as he sat up, she spear-handed him in the sternum. He collapsed back onto the mattress with a pained but relatively quiet whoosh.

She’d spotted something.

Two things: one past, one present.

Her brain had processed them both even if she hadn’t caught up with either yet. Kate held herself frozen for a long instant.

Then the memory fought its way through her miasma.

There wasn’t merely a threat now or in the past, there was immediate danger.

Mortal danger.

Marianne Rimaldi managed to get the desserts distributed, but her hands were shaking.

She was blinking hard.

Kate felt a sharp knot in the pit of her stomach. Marianne’s sudden change of mannerism was ringing a bell somewhere.

Not as a cook.

But from Kate’s life before that.

Marianne rallied to distribute the plates, but there was no finesse, no flirting that her earlier manners had promised—not with Harold, not with the bombshell Zania. Her explanation of the dish rambled so badly that Kate very tactfully cut her off.

The connections finally surfaced.

Training videos from the five years Kate had been a Secret Service agent.

Videos of poisonings!

The hand that had delivered the food and water reached into the cargo container.

It was far steadier than Marianne’s had been.

He was reaching for the other something that Kate’s brain had cataloged, even if her conscious mind had not.

A covered bucket stood close by the opening. Their toilet.

Just as the arm stretched through the small opening to check the bucket, Kate dove, grabbed his wrist—no question of gender by the thickness of the fingers—and bent his elbow backwards against the edge of the opening.

She managed to stop Harold before he bit into the tiny dessert.

She turned, but far too slowly, as if she was moving in a dream.

The world slowed to an impossible crawl.

Twice in her life, Kate’s perceptions had slowed. Neither time had it saved her life, instead it had cost others theirs.

The first time was when the newly elected Vice President had been executed.

Kate had been close enough to feel the heat of the gunfire and the stinging impact and hot burn of the sprayed blood.

She’d taken down the shooter hard enough to break four of the woman’s ribs and both arms—a mistress with a grudge about not being Mrs. Vice President. Being a familiar fixture had gotten her past the first several layers of security; Kate was supposed to have been the final guarantee.

She’d quit the Service the day the investigations were done. Even though they’d exonerated her, she hadn’t forgiven herself.

The second slow-down had been watching the unfolding disaster in her television studio.

Zania made a show of popping Marianne’s dessert into her mouth before Kate could act to warn her. The actress gave the dessert one clean bite with those perfect white teeth, then swallowed the whole thing down. She licked her bright lips with an impossibly long tongue promising immense delights to whoever could conquer her. Clearly she was “ramping up” to re-engage Marianne’s wandering attention.

The bombshell picked up her plate, licked it once where Marianne had pooled the ganache, then slowly tipped forward to land the plate back on the table—with her face planted directly on it. She hit the edge of the table hard enough for one of her breasts to break free of its sheer confinement adding disgrace to…death.

Kate didn’t need to reach for Zania’s pulse to know she no longer had one.

Hollywood was going to need a new super-hot starlet.

It had been too little and too late then…

But not now!

She torqued harder on the jailor’s elbow, could feel it would only take the least little pressure for it to give and break backwards.

Well and truly trapped, his scream now echoed the others in the studio.

Kate turned back to Marianne.

The chef settled to sit cross-legged on the studio floor, tipped to the side, and hit the concrete like a sack of flour. Her eyes popping open to remain fixed and dilated.

Dead. Murdered.

The chocolate ganache.

Kate’s last though then had been that death by chocolate was no kinder than death any other way.

Her first thought now was how pissed she’d be if she’d died over a bite of chocolate cheesecake back in the studio. Almost as pissed as she was at being made prisoner in a damned cargo container going god knew where.

She eased off the pressure on their jailor’s elbow, then yanked inward on his arm hard enough for him to slam his head on the outside of the container. That changed his screams to whimpers.

Chapter 7

Paul Stark couldn’t watch the Evening News with Vanessa one moment longer. He leapt out of his Follot armchair to pace the living room of the apartment atop the Chrysler Building that he shared with his sister Kate.

He’d tried killing the television’s audio and filling the cavernous silence with Bach.

And then The Boss.

Neither helped.

So he turned the news anchor back on.

From behind her little desk she radiated that perfect mixture of holier-than-thou and barely contained sex.

“Police are looking for heiress and network executive Kate Stark, twin sister of international jetsetter Paul Stark.”

“Did you enjoy saying that, Vanessa?” he talked back to the screen. “You sure looked like you did.” But all of Vanessa’s delivery was verbal. Lead anchor or not, she’d been boring as hell in bed.

“The brother and sister are co-owners of the highly successful Cooks Network television station as well as several others and currently reside in what is considered the ultimate bachelor pad in downtown Manhattan—”

“Blah, blah, blah, Vanessa. You’re just all bent out of shape because you didn’t get to stay here more than a few nights.” She was also clingy as hell.

The police had been all bent this afternoon when they’d found Paul home rather than Kate. The FBI who’d followed close behind had been far more serious and far more thorough, the woman definitely hadn’t taken his word on anything no matter how charming he was being.

That’s when he’d turned on the news and really started to worry.

He paced away from the TV.

The curved arc of narrow triangular windows that were the art-deco signature of the uppermost stories of the Chrysler Building had the midday sun marching across the polished heart-of-pine flooring. The fitted circular cross-sections of pine trees offered him their rings of history to pace on. He used them as an excuse for a wandering mind as he “contemplated the ages.” At least that’s what he told Kate whenever she asked him about it.

Bored out of his skull and daydreaming about women would be a more accurate assessment, but you couldn’t say shit like that to Kate without her tossing it right back at you like a curve ball in a game of fast pitch.

The flooring didn’t distract him this time any more than it usually did. He considered going downstairs but they didn’t use the sixty-sixth floor much except for entertaining; he’d fixed it up when they’d bought the place, but it was mostly a party space for other tenants of the building. The three thousand square feet of the sixty-eighth were his and Kate’s personal apartments. The five thousand of sixty-seven had been left open except for a couple of home offices. It served as their living room, dining room, and kitchen.

The Old World elegance of the former Cloud Club couldn’t eradicate either the news or Vanessa’s look-at-me, I’m-so-damned-cute voice.

Paul crossed to one of those triangular windows and looked down on Manhattan. But he didn’t see one of the most spectacular views in the city—it was hard to beat having an apartment on the top three floors of the Chrysler Building.

Instead he looked down and saw the city that was hunting down his little sister. He could get away with calling her that, since she wasn’t here. After all, Kate was thirteen minutes younger and three inches shorter than his six feet.

If she were here, she could pound the snot out of him, so he normally had to exercise a little discretion.

“Master Chef Kate Stark and Harold Merritt, a guest judge in Kate’s Kitchen from Hell studio…” Vanessa restarted the story again behind him as if they were doing a breaking exclusive of the next World War.

Must be a really slow news day for Kate to be stuck all evening as the lead story. And once more, the typically crappy photos—clearly Photoshopped to make them look even more like criminals—were plastered across the screen. Kate had never looked that rough even after the time Paul led her on a curative all-night bender through Manhattan’s seediest dives the night she’d quit the Secret Service.

“…are being sought by authorities in the double murder of another chef,” who apparently wasn’t popular enough to deserve a name, “and the hot Hollywood rising-star Zania.”

“Not rising anymore, Vanessa, unless she’s planning on rising from the dead.” Paul half-waited for his sister’s scathing comeback that usually made the tagline on his jokes. Perhaps: And it’s not Hollywood that is hot, you airhead.

Of course Kate’s response never came. Nor the follow-up comment about him actually stooping low enough to bed such a pea brain.

The film of the victims’ last moments had predictably been posted anonymously to YouTube and gone instantly viral. The film was chaotic: deaths, Zania’s clothing failure revealing a truly impressive errant breast, power failure in the studio, then lights back on. Somewhere in those few seconds of darkness, the two surviving judges had scampered, though Zania’s breast had remained.

Then they plastered the screen with a shot of the hurriedly-edited cover of the next Playboy featuring Zania; the publisher had added a black wreath and “In Memoriam” to the cover. With the free advertising they were getting, this was going to be a record issue.

Paul did take a moment to appreciate the barely clad woman in the magazine’s cover image splashed across the screen. Her cover-shot halter top required significantly less leather than it took to make the one on the horse she rode on. The girl really did know how to sell it.

But was she that hot in real life? Unlike Vanessa. Rather, had she been that hot in real life?

He’d ask Kate, but…

Damn it! When she hadn’t come back to their pad last night, he’d assumed that she’d shacked up with some cute guy. She did that on rare occasion, well, almost never. And she’d always let him know before. Disappearing for days at a time was more his style than hers.

But now, a morning of silence—and then this.

“What did you get into this time, Katydid?” She hated that nickname, but she hated it less than her middle name so she let him get away with it. Even with that caveat, he made sure never to use it when she had a chef’s knife in her hand. While she might have been dangerous as a Secret Service agent, she was lethal as a chef.

Okay, bad analogy considering the current news for Starlet Zania and the former chef competitor Miss Nameless. They’d flashed her picture once—blond with black bangs, slim, and a knowing smile that Paul rather liked—making her much cuter than the overstated Zania. But she didn’t have the fame to claim any more screen time than that.

Still there was no answer from Kate.

Unable to stop himself, he glanced over at her bent-wood IKEA chair. The woman had no sense of history. If they were going to lease the top three floors of the Chrysler Building—truly the ultimate bachelor-twins’ pad—why had the woman bought herself a Swedish box-store chair that she’d had to put together herself? With disposable tools, no less.

“Well, guess I’m going to have to track you down to find the answer to that question, too.” He’d better find her before the police did. They’d clearly just been gearing up to create a world of hurt for Katydid.

That meant tracking down Erika Albert.

Crap!

Chapter 8

“What’s going on? What are you doing?” the dim outline of Harold Merritt came up to Kate as she held their jailor’s arm hard against the edge of the inspection port.

A Shakespeare line about a poor player strutting the stage came to mind but she was still too drugged to place it. They must have been drugged for her not to be able to place the speech…Hamlet? Lear? She was reasonably sure it wasn’t Julius Caesar.

Harold was bending down to look out the open inspection door, mostly filled with the still whimpering man’s arm.

Kate spotted the appearance of a gun barrel, protruding several inches through the inspection port into the shipping container.

The Macbeth line about “then was heard no more,” slammed into her consciousness.

She kicked Harold in the gut none too gently to knock him clear just as the gun fired. Mere inches kept his curiosity from killing the cat.

The muzzle flash and the cannon-roar inside the dim metal container was such a brutal shock to the senses that she almost lost her grip.

Wild shot.

Next one wouldn’t be.

The idiot outside was screaming about the powder burns all up the arm she still had pinned.

Thankfully, he’d been dumb enough to reach the weapon through the opening. Despite being momentarily blinded by the muzzle flash, she estimated that the kick of the shot had probably slammed the gun up against the top of the opening. Kate grabbed for the barrel, got it by chance on her first try and wrested it free.

Harold was cowering face-down on the mattress, covering his ears and cursing. She didn’t have that luxury. Keeping the pressure on the man’s arm, she reversed the gun and stuck it in the man’s face.

She knew the revolver by feel, even though her vision was slow to re-adapt from the bright muzzle flash in the container’s dim interior. A long-barrel Smith & Wesson 29, Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum. What was it with little men and big guns? At least the VP’s mistress had understood the proper use of power with a neatly concealable 9mm Colt Defender.

“First, empty your pockets through the door,” she ordered the man. She didn’t wait for him to complain or refuse, just torqued his arm a bit more and he started right in on her command rather than risking dislocation of his elbow.

He whimpered. There might be others nearby enough to hear, but that couldn’t be helped at the moment. At least most of the report of the gunshot had been confined inside the container, as testified by the ringing in her ears.

With the barrel boring into his ear, he started working through his pockets. His hisses of pain said she’d probably hurt his other hand when she’d taken the gun. But under the threat of imminent death, he started on the task.

A pen knife, a flashlight, his wallet, a walkie talkie, and, ka-ching, a cell phone.

“Now, open the door.”

“I can no reach,” his accent was thick, barely understandable. One of the Asian languages; she still hadn’t seen more of him than his arm and his gun. The Asian languages were never her specialty.

“Who else knows?”

“Cook. I pay him extra to food. Him think for stowaway girlfriend.”

“If I let you go, can you open the door?”

“Maybe. Maybe. Yes.”

She shoved the barrel harder against his ear, “Open it.”

Chapter 9

“You open the door now!” Kate spoke harshly and drilled the barrel of the massive revolver into their jailor’s ear. She knelt in front of the cargo container’s inspection hatch.

He nodded fiercely, at least she assumed that’s what caused the gun to move up and down. Most of the small opening was taken by his arm and shoulder which was making communication difficult on top of his marginal English. She considered telling him to bathe more often as well, but kept her thoughts about his stale reek to herself even though it was overpowering the lingering cordite.

She released him slowly, pulling the gun back into the container so that only the tip of the barrel protruded. She shifted both hands to the weapon so that he wouldn’t be able to tear it from her grasp; he’d eat a bullet if he tried.

The man could be in no doubt that his life depended upon his obeying.

As their jailor moved away, she ducked down to look out the inspection hatch, cautiously in case he was planning to land a punch and recover his weapon through the small opening.

She was facing another stack of containers just five feet away, enough space to open the container doors in an emergency, but no more. The light, now that her eyes had adapted, was actually quite dim. They were deep in a steel canyon of stacked containers facing one another.

Apparently, bravery was nowhere in the jailor’s job description. He actually moved to comply with her order under the threat of the massive weapon. He didn’t even think to slam the inspection hatch closed, not that she would have let him.

It was all stevedore thinking.

No Special Ops-trained soldier would have missed such an opportunity.

She heard the metallic clank of one of the handle’s safeties. Standard Conex shipping containers had two doors on one end, like window shutters. Each door stood four feet wide, eight tall, and was stout enough to survive the impact of shifting internal cargo in rough seas. On the outside of each door were two locking bars that pinned the door in place. Their handles had to be freed from a small keeper latch, then swung outward. Two releases, two raised and turned handles, and the left door would be open. That’s all she needed.

Altering her position to keep both the gun and her gaze on the man, he appeared to be reaching for the door handles. It was awkward to follow him as the small inspection door was low enough that it meant she was lying on what she assumed was the bag lunch and had to knock the piss pot out of the way with her head. Thankfully, it was still dry and empty.

The jailor’s problem was that it really took two hands to unlatch a door and even that was awkward when the container wasn’t resting on the ground in front of you. A quick peek out the tiny hatch revealed they were high up in the cliff of stacked containers and he would need one of his hands to hold on.

After an inordinate amount of thumping sounds, probably multiplied by his scraped up and burned arm on one side and wrenched fingers on the other—neither of which Kate had not the least sympathy for—he managed to release one of the handles.

But the handle had also been his support and now it swung free. With a brief cry, he lost his grip and fell. His head—probably Korean from the brief glimpse she had of his terrified features—banged hard against one of the containers on the opposite side of the narrow steel canyon.

After that, he fell silently.

Chapter 10

“Hey, Rikka.”

“Go to hell, Paul!”

Erika “Rikka” Albert hung up the phone wishing it was one of those old style things you could slam back into the cradle. She’d have to write an app that did that—crashing down cradle sound then disconnect.

For Paul she’d make it ear-splitting loud.

Add some cathedral bells, crashing semis, and howitzer fire. Maybe do a subliminal layer of the T-Rex roar from Jurassic Park just to make it scary, too.

She returned to the order she’d been preparing in her catering production kitchen. There were still fifty more pieces of baby abalone sashimi and a hundred of tuna belly to cut. A couple dozen quick rolls of her spiced salmon and avocado sushi and she’d be done—the avocados all so perfectly ripe that she could smell the dusky warmth even though they were still in their nubbled dark-green skin.

Paul Stark’s call had cost her almost thirty seconds: five for shock—it had been two goddamn years, five seconds to tell him where he could go, and twenty more resisting the urge to heave a perfectly good phone into the trash because it now was infested with Paul Stark cooties.

She rammed the phone into the back pocket of her jeans. Could feel its outline there. But putting it in the front pocket of her apron would be even worse.

It rang again, vibrated her butt as harshly as a slap.

She whirled just as Paul cracked open the door to her kitchen. Just like Lara Croft in the movie Tomb Raiders, she heaved three-hundred millimeters of yanagi sashimi blade into the door frame to leave it quiveringinches from his nose.

Ignoring the blade, he opened the door the rest of the way as he arched a knowing eyebrow at her. A slow smile quirked those strong lips. His sun-tipped blond hair as light as his sister’s was dark. He was at least as handsome as his sister Kate was striking. Where her features were precise and elegant, his were an enchanting cross of rugged yet refined.

Rikka stalked over and jerked the blade out of the wood, returned to the chopping block and calmly began to re-hone the edge. After all, dulling seven hundred dollars worth of knife over Paul Stark would be a total waste of good steel.