Free WAR: Disruption by Vanessa Kier Page B

suite. Compared to the outside of the house, the bedroom was simple. A gleaming wooden armoire for clothes. A plain wooden headboard for the bed and a matching bedside table.
    What really proclaimed the wealth of the owner, aside from the quality of the wood, was the attached bathroom. Max dumped his pack on the bed, removed his spare set of clothes, then headed into the bathroom. Okay, truth? He could have used some help with the shirt if he didn’t want to aggravate his ribs, but goddammit, he was sick of being helpless. He managed to wrestle his shirt off without causing too much pain.
    Max groaned as he stood under hot, steady water for the first time since his capture. Most of his cuts and scrapes had started to scab over, but a few had been irritated raw by his backpack. Yet it felt so good to be clean, he barely noticed the small stings. He was free. And alive.
    Tremors wracked his body and he steadied himself against the wall. Damn. He’d come too close to dying. He’d been completely helpless against Ziegler. Known that Ziegler was going to kill him. How ironic that Dietrich’s arrival had saved him, because the arms dealer wanted Max dead by his own hand.
    Yet if he hadn’t escaped, Emily’s friends would be alive.
    The memory of the women’s deaths brought Max’s guilt bubbling up in a scalding froth that threatened to send him to his knees.
    It should have been me that died. Not those innocent women.
    Max leaned his head on his folded arms and let the wall hold him up. For a long while he stood like that with his eyes closed, letting the water sluice over him and carry his tears away. Letting the heat ease the tension in his muscles as he shoved the guilt back into its cage. He couldn’t go back and save them. All he could do was make certain Emily got safely out of the country, then make damn sure that Ziegler went down with Dietrich.

CHAPTER FIVE

    AN HOUR LATER, Max sat alone at the safe house’s dining room table, staring into space. His hands were clasped around an empty bowl, trying to absorb the lingering warmth from the tomato and onion stew over rice that Rene had prepared for him. Without the mechanical motions of eating to distract him, and with Rene down the hall in the office, Max couldn’t stop his mind from replaying the moment when Ziegler shot that girl.
    “Max?” Rene asked from the doorway. “Is everything okay?”
    Max startled, then shrugged. “Ah. Yeah. Just thinking.”
    “Hmm.” Rene gathered Max’s dishes and carried them over to the sink.
    Max pushed to his feet. “Hey, I got that, man.”
    Rene waved him down. “No. Sit. It is my pleasure. Once I have tended to your wounds and you have had a decent night’s rest, then I will allow you to help.” He quickly washed the dishes and stacked them on the drying rack. Then he nodded toward the hallway. “Come, let me—”
    Max’s satellite phone vibrated, then the networked house phone rang as the incoming call was transferred. Max glared at it before answering. “Yeah.”
    “You at the safe house yet?” Kristoff said without preamble.
    Max sighed. “Yeah.”
    “Good. Is Rene there?”
    “Yes.”
    “Put me on speaker phone.”
    Max hit the button. “All right, Kris, Rene can hear you now. What’s up?”
    Rene leaned back against the sink and crossed his arms.
    “Rene already knows some of this, but I want him to be aware of the latest developments. Long story short, on the twenty-seventh—that’s nine days from now—Dietrich has an unknown buyer coming in to take possession of a highly lethal, experimental weapon gone missing from a South African military research facility.”
    “I knew Dietrich had a deal coming up,” Max acknowledged, “but I haven’t been able to find out where.”
    “We don’t know where either, only when it’s taking place. Unfortunately for Dietrich, the plane containing the briefcase with the weapon’s plans and a prototype went down in the north of the country. Our source