by N. J. Croft
“Thanks.” The food was good, and he could feel the strength flowing through his body.
“We’ve been talking,” Eve said as she sat down again. “Trying to decide what to do. There has to be a way to find her.”
He paused in his eating and glanced at her, a frown tugging his brows together. They had only three days left to the deadline. Somehow in that time, they had to break through the shroud of secrecy surrounding the Descendants, identify who had taken Harper, find her, and come up with a way to get her out.
He finished the food. He already felt stronger, his mind racing over the possibilities. After placing the empty pan on the ground, he took another slug of whiskey and sat staring into the fire, trying to make the pieces fall into place.
“Some maniac has our daughter,” Eve said, grabbing the bottle from him and taking a gulp. “What do you plan to do about it?”
Maybe he should suggest she go slow on the whiskey. He glanced at Zach and found the other man watching him.
Eve jumped to her feet and paced the clearing a couple of times. Then she came back and stood over him. “Please, Noah. You’re supposed to be the best at what you do. You understand these people, how their minds work. Think of a way to save our baby. Please.”
He forced his brain to focus on the problem, to go over the facts one more time. They had to find some link to the kidnappers if there was any hope of tracing them. So what did they know?
“What we need is a way to get to the Descendants. What about the funding organization? The people who paid for the expedition.”
“The account was shut down. There was nothing. A trail through a few dummy corporations and then a dead end. Same with Mr. Tuul, the guy who Eve dealt with when she was hunting the Spear. He was like a ghost. Just vanished.”
He’d already sent that information to Tom but wasn’t expecting to find out any more than Zach already knew—he’d been thorough. Who else did they know? “How about the guy who was following you in Russia?”
“John Chen?” Eve said, with a shake of her head. “He’s a dead end.”
“How do you know?”
“When I first came to Mongolia, John saved my life. I got the feeling he was more than a translator. I asked Peter to look into him for me.”
“Peter?” Noah felt like he was being slow, but that didn’t make sense.
“Yes. I wanted to check Zach out anyway. He said he’d worked with you, so I tried to call. You were obviously undercover at the time, and I got hold of Peter instead. I asked him to check out Zach and also to look into John Chen at the same time. He came back and said that John Chen was exactly who he said he was—a translator employed by the people funding the trip. There were no files on him. He was clean.”
Maybe he had an exceptionally good cover. But still, something didn’t add up. “Wait a moment. Back up. So Peter knew, before your ‘accident,’ that you’d been approached by MI6?”
She nodded. “When I called asking about Zach, I told him I’d been interviewed by an agent from MI6 and that he believed the people funding my expedition had possible ties to terrorists.”
He wanted to shout that that didn’t make sense. Instead, he kept his mouth firmly closed. If she had told Peter about the MI6 connection, then why hadn’t he passed the information on to Noah? Maybe it might be believable that it had slipped his mind after Eve’s accident—except nothing slipped Peter’s mind. Ever. Every little minutiae of information was examined from every possible angle to search for the slightest meaning and significance.
And even if by some strange accident he had forgotten the call, surely when Noah had told him about the anonymous email stating that Eve had been murdered, he would have remembered. Yet he’d said categorically that he’d looked into her death and there was nothing to suggest it was anything other than an accident.
The great big glaring connection to terrorists…and Peter had not thought it worth mentioning to Noah?
“Noah, what is it?” Eve asked.
Instead of answering, Noah pushed himself to his feet. He needed to move. Something was stirring in his mind, pressing against his thoughts, trying to get out. And part of him didn’t want to think this through, take it to the logical conclusion, because if he did that, then his life would change forever. Nothing would be the same.
The facts: Peter knew that Eve was involved with MI6 and yet he had failed to tell Noah.
Peter hadn’t wanted Noah to know the connection.
What motive could his uncle have had for not telling him?
His mind flinched away from the answer, and he had to force himself to concentrate. He glanced over to the fire; they were both watching him, Eve chewing on her fingernails. Zach’s eyes were narrowed.
Peter hadn’t told him that Eve was involved in some shady goings on. Why?
Maybe because he was already aware that Eve’s death was no accident.
Except that didn’t make sense, either. Because Eve wasn’t actually dead. Peter couldn’t have known she was murdered…but he could have suspected. Suspected that people he was involved with had also been responsible for Eve’s death.
Could it be part of some investigation Peter was working on?
Maybe he was going after the Descendants and didn’t want Noah involved? No, that wasn’t possible. If there was an investigation into the Descendants, Noah’s old team would have been right at the center of it, and he’d never even heard the name until a few days ago.
Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to ask the question. Could his uncle be somehow involved with the Descendants of Genghis Khan?
Noah was pretty sure that his father’s family wasn’t descended from Genghis Khan, but what did he really know? If they were, then his uncle had kept very quiet about it.
He was grasping at straws.
The reasoning was tenuous. Was he reading things in where they didn’t exist? No, he wasn’t. Finding connections was what he did. He took the facts, and they formed patterns in his head. And one was forming now.
He thought about the last undercover job that had gone so wrong. Someone had talked. He’d been getting so close to his spider. Too close maybe.
Then his mind went to other jobs, where they had been on the point of making a breakthrough and everything had inextricably fallen apart. He’d suspected a mole within the group but hadn’t been able to pinpoint anyone suspicious.
It had never occurred to him to examine Peter. Why would he? Peter was the one man he trusted in the whole world. Above suspicion. He had been there when Noah had needed someone.
A little voice whispered in his head and wouldn’t be quieted. What better job for a man involved in a secret terrorist group than overall controller of the country’s top anti-terrorism force?
It was genius.
He’d believed all along that the group he’d been hunting all these years had infiltrated everywhere. Zach was sure they had people high up in MI6. Why not Project Arachnid?
His head was going to explode. He clamped his lips on the scream of fury and betrayal rising in his throat.
Halting in front of a huge tree, he slammed his fist hard into the trunk.
No!
The word screamed inside his head.
He allowed himself one moment of total rage, then he closed it down and cleared his mind.
“Christ, Noah. What the hell is wrong?” He turned around. Eve was on her feet and stalking toward him. “As if you needed any more goddamn injuries. Just talk to us.”
“Yeah, Noah,” Zach said, “talk to us.”
His mind was crystal clear now, processing the information, seeing the patterns solidify in his mind. Eve had come to stand in front of him, hands on her hips, glaring.
“Sit down,” he said.
She blinked then frowned, and he waved a hand toward the fire. He needed to discover just how deep P
eter was in this thing, and he suspected Eve had information—even if she didn’t know it—that would help him untangle the mess.
He waited until Eve was seated and then went and sat down so he could watch her face as she talked.
“Hey, he’s back from the dead,” Zach said.
Noah ignored the comment. “I think Peter may be connected with the Descendants.”
Eve blinked at him a couple of times. He turned his attention to Zach. The other man was frowning, clearly going over the information but not dismissing it out of hand. Of course, he didn’t have the personal connection to Peter, and he’d already suspected that the Descendants had infiltrated most organizations.
“What are you going on?” he asked.
“He knew there was a terrorist connection to Eve, and he never told me.”
“Protecting you?”
“I don’t need protecting. He knows that. After I got the message that Eve’s death was no accident, I asked him to look into it. He said there was nothing suspect. No mention of you,” he said to Zach.
“Anything else?”
“I’d been suspecting there was a mole in the organization for a while. The last mission was compromised. And others before that. I hadn’t been able to flush them out. I never even looked into Peter. It never occurred to me…”
“You’re wrong,” Eve said, but her voice was shaky, unsure. “You have to be wrong. He would never harm Harper.”
“Maybe he didn’t know.” Noah tried to remember back to when he had told Peter. He’d been shocked; he would swear the emotion was genuine. “The way the organization works, I would guess that only whoever is at the very top knows everything. That’s how they would maintain secrecy.” He rubbed a hand over the roughness of his jaw. “I thought I knew him so well. He was always there for me. I just can’t reconcile that with a man who would condone terrorist attacks.”
Then he started thinking back to many of the conversations they’d had about terrorism. How Peter would point out that in some circumstances the end justified the means if the ultimate goal was something good. “How could he be connected to the Descendants? I’ve never even heard him mention Genghis Khan.”
“I have,” Eve said.
Noah turned his attention to her. She was chewing on her nails, frown lines between her eyes. “Go on.”
“It was shortly after I left you,” she said. “I was at a function in London, and Peter was there. He said he wanted to introduce me to someone, that he thought we’d have a lot in common. And he was right.”
“And how the hell did Genghis Khan come up?” Zach asked. “It’s not something that gets mentioned in general conversation.”
“It depends who you’re talking to. The senator told me she’d always been fascinated by Khan. That she’d been following the hunt for the tomb. We talked about that and how I would go about finding it.”
Noah’s mind was still locked on the one word. “Senator?” he asked.
She nodded. “Senator Clayton. She and Peter seemed like good friends. He joined in the conversation. He was very knowledgeable.”
Noah’s mind was whirling. The senator? It didn’t seem possible. But then neither did Peter. And in fact, the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. “You never mentioned this,” he said, and he was sure his tone was accusing.
“Why would I? We weren’t exactly talking much then. And it didn’t seem important. Yet looking back…” Her frown deepened.
“What is it?”
“I was just thinking about the timing. It was just before I got the job at Cambridge and the funding for my research. I’d had an interview at the university, but I didn’t think I would get the position. These things are usually filled internally. Then the day after I met Peter and the senator, I got a call saying the position was mine and they’d already had an offer of funding.”
“So wait,” Zach said. “You’re saying you believe that Senator Clayton was behind your funding?”
“I didn’t at the time. To be honest, it never even occurred to me. Now, thinking back, it was such a coincidence. And she certainly has the money.” She glanced between the two of them. “What am I missing?”
Zach looked at Noah. “You think the senator is with the Descendants?”
Noah didn’t answer immediately. He was putting the pieces in place. Why would Senator Clayton not have mentioned that she had met Eve when they had talked at the cemetery at Eve’s funeral? It was the sort of thing you said on those occasions. She was Peter’s good friend. He’d known they were acquaintances, but that was all. A woman in a position of power, with the ear of the president. A woman with an information-gathering service that rivaled the American government’s.
Had she given him the job so she could keep an eye on him?
Maybe she wanted him to go after Eve’s killers. It would have been easy enough to send those emails from inside Clayton Industries’ system.
She hadn’t killed Eve, though, because Eve wasn’t dead.
But maybe she had killed Star.
And she’d employed and coerced Eve into searching for the spear and the tomb. Then, when she was so close to finding the location, Eve had been killed. It must have driven the senator crazy. So they’d gone after the real Star, looking for the source of the image, but she had died under interrogation and given them nothing. Except that the image had been sent.
Noah had been under surveillance back in London. He was betting by the senator’s people.
And then when the senator ran out of options, had been unable to locate the image, as a last resort she had set Noah off. Given him the motivation and the tools to go and follow in Eve’s footsteps and maybe find the answers.
All this time, he’d been pretty much telling Tom his every move. And believing every piece of information sent back. They’d fed him what they wanted him to hear—Jesus, they’d played him for a fool.
There was something else. “I asked Tom, my assistant at Clayton, about Zach and John Chen. He’d said John was a nobody, but he actually pointed the finger at Zach as a potential suspect for Eve’s murder.” Which was a complete misdirection and meant that Tom had known all along what was going on. Noah had been fooled by them all. Tom, the senator, Peter. How had he not seen it? How could he have been so fucking blind?
Zach snorted. “They were probably hoping you would take me out. They’ve been trying for long enough. Jesus. Senator Clayton? You really think she could be at the center of all this?”
Noah had seen the vastness of Clayton Industries. The power and infrastructure. He could well believe they had the resources to infiltrate terrorist groups and twist the attacks to their own benefit. He remembered back to that face-to-face meeting. He’d thought her beautiful, charismatic, that they had similar goals. Certainly there had been nothing to suggest she was a ruthless megalomaniac with plans to take over the world.
At least they now had somewhere to focus. Someone to go after. They just needed to work out a strategy.
Something else occurred to him. The summit was only three days away. They’d been relying on Peter to put a stop to it or at least ensure that security was increased.
“What I really think is that we’re well and truly fucked.”
Chapter Thirty-One
General Peter Blakeley passed through the various security checks without hardly noticing. He was so used to it now. The security guard led him through into the private quarters and left him alone. As the door clicked shut behind him, he relaxed, allowing his shoulders to slump. He was exhausted. He’d taken a private plane back from Russia, but he hadn’t been able to sleep, and his eyes felt gritty.
He crossed to the drinks cabinet and opened it, found the bottle of his favorite scotch, and poured a stiff measure. Closing his eyes, he savored the first sip, feeling the warmth slide down his throat and spread heat in his belly.
; He had to be careful, now more than ever. His loyalty couldn’t be questioned. Hell, he was loyal. He would always be loyal. As he was pouring his second drink, the door to the bedroom opened, and she stood there.
A frisson of excitement shivered over his skin as she walked toward him. Her eyes were half-closed, and she swayed as though to some music only she could hear. She was the most sensuous woman he had ever met, though she usually kept that side of her nature under ruthless control.
He was honored he was the one who got to see it.
She stopped in front of him and smiled. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too.”
She took the glass from him, swallowed the contents in one gulp, placed the glass on the table, and took his hand. She led him to the bedroom, with its huge bed, then turned to face him once more. “Take off your clothes,” she ordered.
Heat shot through him at her words. All the same, for a moment, he resisted—they needed to talk. Except he wanted this, and talking could wait, and maybe she’d be a little more…receptive to what he had to say afterward.
So he held her gaze as he started to undress.
An hour later, he lay back in the bed, the pillows bunched behind his head. He’d gotten them both drinks, and they sipped the scotch in companionable silence. It wouldn’t last long. She hardly ever stopped moving, but for now she seemed relaxed. He figured she’d needed this as much as he had. Maybe more.
It had been good. Hell, it was always good between them. They’d been doing this for over twenty-five years. She’d been nineteen when he’d met her at a political rally. He’d been twenty-one and trying to decide whether to go into the Army or to study law like his brother. He’d gone to a military school and loved it but had still wavered about making the army his life. She’d persuaded him he should. By then, he would have done anything she asked because she was the most charismatic woman he had ever met.
Beside him, she shifted restlessly. He knew the signs; their time was nearly up. Now or never. She spoke before he could get the words out.