Critical Space (Atticus Kodiak, Band 5) - Softcover

Buch 1 von 3: Atticus Kodiak

Rucka, Greg

 
9780553581799: Critical Space (Atticus Kodiak, Band 5)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553581791 ISBN 13: 9780553581799
Verlag: Bantam, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The acclaimed author of Shooting at Midnight has penned a thriller like no other ... the no-holds-barred story of a bodyguard with the ultimate assignment: protecting a woman who also happens to be the most hunted killer in the world...

Code-named Drama, she is a lightning-fast death machine — a hitwoman sought by intelligence agencies around the world. Drama kills as easily as she breathes ... and the last time she and Atticus Kodiak met, they barely escaped each other alive.

Atticus Kodiak has a reputation as one of the toughest bodyguards in the business. He’s used to picking his assignments and calling the shots. But all that changes when he is forced to take on Drama as a client — the last person he ever imagined would need his protection.

This time, Drama is the one who is running from a killer. She needs Atticus’s help, and she won’t take no for an answer. To prove it, she abducts a high-profile member of the royal family whom Atticus has sworn to protect. He will do almost anything to get the woman back. But what Drama needs from him will destroy his reputation — and siding with her means he can never turn back.

From New York’s Russian enclaves to the Swiss Alps and the Caribbean, Atticus becomes Drama’s protector, and her only hope for survival as she tries to outlive and outrun her bloody past. But once immersed in Drama’s high-stakes, covert world, Atticus breaks a cardinal rule: He gets to know Drama as a woman rather than just a client — and it’s a bond that could cost them both their lives.

For the men hunting Drama are capable of unspeakable violence — of sins that make Drama’s own look like the acts of an amateur. And they will stop at nothing to see her dead....

A masterful work by one of the most unique voices in the field, Critical Space combines high-voltage, high-tech action with swift, terrifying brutality. The result is Greg Rucka’s most explosive thriller to date — a powerhouse of a novel destined to become a classic of modern suspense.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Born in San Francisco, Greg Rucka was raised on the Monterey Peninsula. He is the author of Private Wars, A Gentleman’s Game, and six previous thrillers, as well as numerous comic books, including the Eisner Award—winning Whiteout: Melt. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The ashtray didn’t surprise me as much as the quality of the throw behind it.

Perhaps when Skye Van Brandt was still in high school, before she was “discovered” and turned into one of People’s Fifty Most Beautiful Faces for two years running, before she’d netted two Oscar nominations and one Golden Globe award, maybe she’d pitched softball or even hardball at some point in her youth. Not that her youth was over: the woman on the other side of the hotel room was only twenty-two.

At least according to her publicist.

Skye was beautiful. Her hair was long and blond, just a shade too dark to be strawberry, and her large eyes were deep and soulful and tailored for close-ups during love scenes. Her lower lip was just a little pudgy and lopsided, and it gave her a perpetual almost-pout that reviewers described with words like “irresistible” and “wanton.” Her dental work was perfect. She was one of those people who remain stunningly beautiful no matter what they’re doing, be it smiling or screaming.

She was screaming at me right now.

“God dammit, Atticus! Take my bags!”

For the third time, I said, “I can’t do that, Miss Van Brandt.”

Skye dropped the suitcase in question and stormed my way, to where I stood just inside the front door. We were in the sitting room of the Presidential Suite at the El Presidente Hotel in El Paso, Texas, which meant that Skye had a lot of ground to cover, and that I had plenty of time to get out of her way. I didn’t bother. To my mind I was doing the job I’d been paid for, doing more than it, in fact. It was now mid-morning of Day Eight on what was supposed to have been a six-day location shoot. I’d been hired to provide Skye’s personal protection while on location, two thousand dollars a day, plus a stipend from the studio. I was, for the time being, Skye Van Brandt’s bodyguard.

Not her valet.

The job, like so many other things in my professional life, was bullshit, for show and nothing more. But it was still a job, and I took it seriously, and there was no way I was going to pick up Skye Van Brandt’s overpriced Téumi luggage and carry it to the lobby at her command.

She stopped three feet from where I was standing, hands on her hips, that wanton lower lip jutting a little more in her fury. For all her grace and beauty and presence on the screen, she was a tiny woman, nearly a full foot shorter than my six feet.

“I’m paying you! You do what I tell you!”

She jabbed in the direction of her bags with an index finger as if gouging at someone’s eye. There were three bags — one garment, one small duffel, and one larger duffel with a shoulder strap. All were black leather, all bulging with clothes, scripts, cosmetics, and the witch’s brew of new-age elixirs and homeopathic medicines Skye used to keep herself fueled.

“Take them downstairs to the car,” she ordered.

“You know I can’t do that,” I said. “I have to keep my hands free. Wait until the bellman — ”

“God dammit! What fucking word don’t you fucking understand? Pick up my fucking bags!”

I waited until she was done and catching her breath. Then I said: “No.”

Skye Van Brandt raised her right hand and I figured she was going to slap me, but then she spun off and stomped away, swearing louder. The way she swore reminded me of my Army days, and I wondered how People might’ve altered their rankings if they heard Skye Van Brandt shrieking things like “shit-eating goatfucker” and “fart-breathed ass-miner.”

When she passed the executive desk with its fax machine and multi-line telephone and leather-bound hotel directory, she grabbed the ashtray on its corner and flung it at me without pause or warning. The ashtray was small, cut glass, and surprisingly aerodynamic. I had just enough time to turn my head, and then it hit and bumped me out of the world for a moment. For an instant I felt like I had been knocked down a well, and I was surrendering to gravity when somehow I managed to arrest myself, leaning back against the wall until I was sure I wouldn’t collapse.

Blood was coming off my forehead as I straightened, blinding my left eye. I felt thick and sluggish, and it took a while to get my hand up and my glasses off to clear my vision. Each time I swiped, more blood came to replace it. I put my glasses back on and tried to focus on my principal.

Skye Van Brandt stood behind the couch, her hands at her sides. There was no repentance or apology in her expression.

“Now,” she said sweetly, “pick up my bags, motherfucker.”

“I quit,” I said.

The doorman hailed me a cab to the airport, and I spent the entire ride with my handkerchief to my forehead. Facial cuts, as any guy can tell you, bleed a lot. I caught a glance of myself in the rearview mirror during the drive and, over the reflection of the hack’s curious gaze, saw the gash above my left eyebrow. It wasn’t deep, but the skin had split and I was probably going to need stitches.

When I hit the terminal I gave the cabbie an extra twenty for a tip — expense money — and then made straight for the monitors inside, trying to find the next departure to any of the New York area airports. There was a flight to Newark that was boarding, another to Kennedy that was leaving in thirty minutes. I got into line and weathered a storm of stares. I couldn’t tell if the stares were because of the wound or because I’d been recognized, and frankly didn’t care.

“You ought to do something about that cut,” the customer rep said in a gentle Texas drawl. He looked sincerely concerned.

“I am doing something about it,” I said. “I’m going home.”

I checked my bag with my weapon inside, and as he was swiping my credit card, my cell phone started ringing. I shut it off, took my boarding pass, and then stopped at the first gift shop I could find on the concourse, where I paid too much for a package of Band-Aids. Then I found a men’s room and examined myself in the mirror. The appraisal didn’t help my mood. Blood had speckled my cheek and the collar of my shirt, though the wound was now content only to ooze. I looked tired and sallow and generally unpleasant, though maybe that was the lighting.

I ran some warm water, cleaned myself off carefully, then used my pocket knife to slice the bandages into makeshift butterfly sutures. It hurt when I applied them, but the wound appeared closed and I guessed I’d earned myself a companion scar to the one on my cheek from when I’d been pistol-whipped a couple years back. I tried to remember a time when I hadn’t had any scars on my face, realized I really was thirty years old, and then ran some more water and cleaned my glasses. I pushed a couple fingers through my hair, straightened the two hoops in my left ear, and made it to the gate as they were closing the door.

My seatmate was white and in his mid-thirties, wearing a blue suit with a green-and-gray-striped tie. A leather laptop case lay by his penny loafers, stowed under the seat in front of him. He had all the marks of a business traveler, and I prayed that meant he’d leave me alone. With some squeezing I made it past him and then folded myself into the window seat, and with additional contorting, managed to assume a position that was merely uncomfortably cramped rather than genuinely painful. We were another forty-three minutes on the tarmac before actually lifting into the air, during which time the headache from the...

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Verlag
Bantam
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553581791
ISBN 13 
9780553581799
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
528
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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