Ultimate Weapon by Shannon McKenna Read Free Book Online Page A

the past.”
    “Turn my back on you?” Val demanded. “After what happened?”
    The old man gazed from his chair, his face unreadable. The ugly bruises were obscured by deep shadow. “If you must,” he said quietly.
    Anger wrenched him like a cramp. The old bastard cared so little, then. He was promptly shocked at himself. Getting his feelings hurt like a spoiled little child. So much for his cool detachment.
    The phone rang. Imre stared at it, puzzled. Two rings, three, four.
    “Who would call me at this hour?” he murmured. He reached for the phone. “Yes?” He listened. His sharp eyes glinted in the dimness as he looked at Val. “I’m sorry. There is no Valery Janos here. You must have misdialed.”
    Val shifted into high alert as Imre listened to whatever the man was saying. “Perhaps you were mistaken in the person you saw entering the building,” Imre countered stubbornly. “He is not here.”
    There was no point in this charade. Val reached for the phone and pried it out of the old man’s gnarled fingers. “Who is this?”
    “What the fuck are you doing in Budapest, Janos?”
    The rasping voice raised the hairs on Val’s neck. Fuck. Hegel, again. He had been found. “How did you find me here?” Val asked.
    “Don’t start with me, asshole. You had a job to do. You ran away from it,” Hegel said curtly. “The car is waiting outside the door of the building. Come immediately. I need to speak to you. Right now.”
    “I have other plans for the evening—”
    “Shut up and move your ass.” Hegel hung up.
    Val replaced the phone in its cradle. Hegel could have called the dedicated line on Val’s satellite phone more easily. The fact that he had reached Val through Imre’s phone was a message. Not a friendly one.
    Imre was a dangerous weakness. Val had been aware of that since he was a child. He’d done everything he could to keep the man’s existence secret from those who might have a desire to manipulate him.
    Everything had evidently not been enough.
    “So,” Imre said slowly, “you are still with PSS, then?”
    “Off and on,” Val hedged. “I haven’t done anything for them for almost a year. There were disagreements about my last assignment. I thought they were done with me. Then I was called for one more job. I interrupted it to come here when I heard about what happened to you. They aren’t pleased.”
    “It would seem not.” Imre’s voice was uncharacteristically hard. “So you are being called to heel, Vajda? Like a good hound?”
    Val swallowed the anger, with effort. He forced himself to take the three steps back. There was no point in getting his fur ruffled over the flat truth. “Don’t call me Vajda,” he said stiffly.
    Imre’s eyebrow twitched upward. “It is hard for a tired old man to change the habits of a lifetime,” he complained.
    What horseshit. Even at eighty, Imre’s mind was as flexible as a circus contortionist. “Try to remember,” he said. “Vajda is dead. I am Valery.”
    “Are you indeed?” the old man murmured. “And who is this Valery? Do you even know, boy?”
    His anger flashed up again, sharper and incandescent. He clamped down on it grimly. “As well as anyone,” he snapped.
    “I think not,” Imre went on, relentless. “I thought that PSS would be better than Novak, but they are not. Not for you. Novak may have stolen your life and your future, but PSS took away your whole self.”
    Very abruptly, Val was all too aware of why he had come back to Budapest so seldom in recent years. Imre’s tendency to speak the raw, unpalatable truth had always been annoying.
    “I’ll go into hiding,” he said on impulse. “Fuck them all. It’s the only way to be rid of them.”
    Imre blinked and looked politely doubtful. “You told me yourself how vast PSS’s resources are. It would be so easy?”
    “Easy, no. Possible, yes,” Val said. “Expensive, yes, but that is no problem. I have money coming out my ass now.”
    Imre looked pained.