An Aria for Nick (Christian Romantic Suspense) (Song of Suspense)

by Bridgeman, Hallee

  Kate pulled her badge out of her jacket's inner pocket. As she predicted, the girl was extremely impressed with the badge and suddenly gave Kate her full attention. She smiled as she held it up and said, "Because the information is of the utmost importance. It's a matter of life and death."

  ¯¯¯¯

  "AS far as I can tell," Aria said, turning off the interior car light and taking off her glasses, "most of this stuff is my work. Some of it is from the last week, new research, but most of it is from the last year."

  She propped her feet up on the dashboard and cracked her window, letting the cool night air blow her hair. She'd been looking through the copies of the paperwork from Peter's office at NWT. She hadn't even begun to delve into the stuff from his home office. There were hundreds of pieces of paper, and even more data stored on a flash drive.

  They seemed to have the road to themselves this late in the evening, seeing a stray car only every so often as they drove the desert highway through California, heading to the Nevada border.

  "We knew he'd been stealing your work. Why do you sound perplexed that this is yours?"

  "This is recent stuff."

  "How recent?"

  "We ran a test last week. It had beautiful results. Look at this," she said, holding a picture of a blueprint up so he could see what she was talking about. "You see these notations here?" He nodded. "That's my writing. I made those notations right after the test, which was less than a week ago."

  "Which means —?"

  "Which means Peter almost has final plans, and he can give his clients a working container that will shield an active and armed nuclear device from detection."

  Nick paused and processed that before asking, "Where did you keep those plans?"

  "In my office, in the safe. The only thing I can think of is that he went in there with a security team to clean out my office when they, quote unquote, terminated me." The words tasted bitter in her mouth. Four years of her life had been spent at that company. She decided to leave the subject alone for now. She looked out the window and saw a sign advertising a restaurant in two miles. "Are you hungry?" she asked.

  Nick shook his head. "Me, either." They passed a diner sitting next to the lonely desert road. The lights inside revealed just a few scattered customers.

  Aria got tired of watching nothing out the window, so she turned the light back on, put her glasses on, and picked up the stack of papers. She steadily worked through the stack, making notes on some of the papers and occasionally in her notebook. An hour later, Nick interrupted her concentration. "You said there was other work there that wasn't yours. Can you tell whose work that is?"

  "I can tell you whose computer it came off of, then I can tell you the names of the team members that person works with." she said, distracted. She made another note in the corner of a page, reminding herself to go back to that one later. "Do you need to know that?"

  "I might. Any information is helpful. Most of the time you gather ten times more information than you end up needing. That's just part of it. Go ahead and label everything. Tell me whose computer and the team members, then create a cross-reference identifying the team members you worked with on anything Harrington stole from your computer. Maybe we'll find a match somewhere."

  Aria's eyes crossed at the thought. "You realize we're talking about over sixty people here."

  Nick shrugged. "Once you have matches, it will be narrowed down some."

  She took off her glasses and looked at him for a long time before saying, "A good bit of your job is incredibly boring, isn't it?"

  "Long periods of intense boredom punctuated by intense seconds of real excitement. Those seconds make up for the boredom, I can assure you," Nick said dryly.

  She twirled her glasses around in her hand, her mind wandering. "Do you ever stop to think about 'what if'?"

  "What do you mean?" he asked. They passed a sign informing them that they would arrive in Nipton in 40 miles.

  "I don't know, just to speculate what might have been." She adjusted her seat belt so she could sit with her back to the door, facing him. "What would have happened to your life if that helicopter hadn't gone down?"

  Nick knew that it would be hard on him to spend this time with Aria. He'd thought, though, that the problem would be this nearly overwhelming physical attraction he felt toward her. He never imagined the emotional turmoil she would put him through. Thoughts about what might have been sent him back more than twenty years.

  He remembered the day his mother left him alone with the man who had fathered him. If she had taken Nick with her, would his life had been better or the same? For there was no worse.

  Then, like pressing fast-forward on a recording, his memory reviewed his life through high school, to all the times he could have asked Aria out on a date. Would she have gone out with him, or would she have laughed in his face?

  Then through the years when he served in the armed forces. Life was a series of endless, hard days. Every waking minute was taken up with orders, rapid reactions to ever changing requirements, harsh conditions, bad food, and loneliness. Every free moment he stared at an old picture of Aria and wondered what she was doing with her life or hopelessly filled pages and pages in the form of heart felt letters to her even though he knew he could never have her. That was his life up until the day he died.

  In an instant, Nick's mind raced through the last ten years. All the time he had spent in one stinking third world country or another where the air always smelled like stale corn chips and dirty feet. He was either killing people or running for his life from people intent on killing him. Any time thoughts of Aria or thoughts of 'what if' surfaced, he plunged them back down. He'd had access to technology that would have given him all the information about her he could have ever wanted, but he chose to never delve into it. That would have been no better than asking 'what if.'

  "There is no 'what if,' Aria. For me there is only 'what is.'"

  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched her jaw tighten in frustration. "Are you married?" she asked out of the blue.

  He whipped his head around to stare at her. "What? Married? No. No, I'm not married."

  "Just thought I'd ask. You're so closed mouthed about yourself, I figured you must be hiding something." She examined the nails on one hand. "Ever been married?"

  "No." He sighed. "No, I've never been married."

  "Keep your eyes on the road. If we end up in the hospital, they'll definitely find us." She took a sip of her water. "Have any kids?"

  Incredulous, he bit out, "What in the world's wrong with you, Aria?"

  "Annalisse," Aria corrected. "Just trying to have a conversation with you, Carlos. I'm searching for a subject you'd be willing to talk about." Nick opened his mouth then shut it again because he honestly didn't know what to say. "Where's Harvey? He looked like the kind of guy who could sit back and have a normal conversation."

  Nick suddenly braked and whipped the car to the side of the road then put it in park, leaving the engine running. He put his arm along the back of the seat and turned to face her, effectively blocking her in the position where she sat in the passenger seat. "You want to play games? Okay, I'm not married, never been married, and have no children. What else do you want to know? Let's see, I don't do drugs, I rarely drink, and I'm not gay. The weather's usually great wherever I am, unless it's Serbia, then the weather sucks. I enjoy traveling, shooting guns, and working on computers. What else do you want to know?"

  She licked her lips nervously. "I'm sorry. You can consider the subject closed."

  "No, you wanted to know, so ask away."

  She looked at her lap and played with the cuff of her shorts. "What's your favorite country?"

  "Any of them that offer hot showers in the hotel rooms. If the water isn't brown I consider that a bonus."

  "What's your favorite food?"

  "Whatever I didn't cook."

  "What do you do in your spare time?"

  "I don't."

  He
r breath hitched and he saw tears well in her eyes. "Never mind," she said quietly. "Can we go now?"

  Nick turned back in his seat and put the car back in drive. "You need to put on Annalisse's wig," he said, pointing to the back seat and pulling back on the road.

  Aria pulled the bag from the back-seat and looked through it, finding her wig and the makeup bag. She put the long, black wig on, and used the mirror on her visor to adjust it. Then she found the eyebrow pencil that matched the wig, and darkened her eyebrows. He stole a glance at her while she applied the heavy makeup. She transformed perfectly into Annalisse Rivera.

  "When we get to the air strip, let me do the talking. Don't ask any questions. Don't act like you're looking around," Nick commanded.

  "Why not?"

  In Spanish, Nick answered, "Because I don't want anyone with an itchy, nervous trigger finger to think you're something you're not and shoot you in the face." He spared her another glance and caught her staring at him, her mouth partially open. "Understand?"

  She closed her eyes and gave a quick shake of her head as if to clear it. "Uh, sure. I understand."

  He gestured with his head to the back seat. "I bought three kinds of cell phones. Look through them and see which one will work for you to use as a wireless connection for your laptop and make sure it's plugged in and charged."

  ¯¯¯¯

  "YOU have some serious brass coming here, Garcia. Last time I saw you, I almost got arrested." A short, thin man with a pencil thin mustache came out from behind a Cessna. "No way am I going back to Columbia. I don't care how much money you got."

  Nick smiled at the man. With confidence and the ease of familiarity, he slipped his arms over Aria's shoulders. "I don't want to go to Columbia, amigo." His accent was thick. "Just to Florida." He squeezed Aria to him. "Someone wants to party for spring break."

  "Florida?" The man paused then looked around like he expected someone to jump out from behind an oil can and yell, "April Fools!"

  "Si. Florida." Nick reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a stack of money.

  "Not Miami," the man stated.

  Nick whistled with his teeth. "Not Miami. Too hot, in more ways than one. How about the panhandle?" He ran his finger over the bills. "What will it be, Ricardo?"

  The man looked behind him to the office door and shook his head then shot Nick a thumb's up. Aria wondered if he had signaled someone to shoot them or to let them live.

  "When, ah, do you want to leave?" he asked, taking the stack of money from Nick and eyeballing Aria.

  "Now's good." He turned to Aria. "Listo mi amor?"

  Aria smiled and twirled her black hair with her finger. "Preparado."

  Nick gestured to the plane. "Let's be off, then."

  ¯¯¯¯

  NICK put his head close to Aria's. "When we land, I need to you try to get into the hotel's system and get us a reservation."

  "I've never done something like that before," she said. "The security is going to be different. I don't know if I can."

  "It's worth trying. Once we're there and in a room, you need to hack into Harrington's hotel and assign him a room." He looked out the window at the desert around them, lit by the runway lights, then leaned in close again. "You look like you're about to be sick."

  She shrugged. "I'm just concerned about my family. What's going to happen to Adam?"

  With a raised eyebrow, Nick said, "Nothing. You don't need to worry about that. They aren't going to go busting in with guns, Aria. They'll watch them, see if anything's up."

  He squeezed her hand and pulled her as close to him as their seat belts would allow. He could feel the engines of the plane as it accelerated down the runway. "You don't need to spend energy worrying about your brothers. You have enough to worry about here."

  "We left his car back there at the air strip. They'll find it."

  "Assuming Ricardo's buddies don't chop it and shop it, we'll be long gone by then."

  "I didn't realize that was a possibility."

  "Can't blame them, really. Your brother has good taste in cars."

  "I don't know if I'm cut out for this," she whispered to him.

  "You're holding up fine," he said, then, because Ricardo turned in the pilot's seat to look at them, gave her a lingering kiss on the mouth as the plane left the ground and head east toward Florida.

  ¯¯¯¯

  Chapter 21

  "WELCOME to Panama City's Beachcomber, Ms. Rivera. If you and your companion will just follow Leroy over there, we'll get you settled in," the desk clerk said to Aria with a forced smile as she handed over the key. Aria felt a quick wave of guilt for hacking the system and forcing a reservation on one of the busiest weeks for the hotel, but knew there hadn't been a whole lot of choice.

  Nick had been set on staying in this hotel. When they pulled into the parking lot half an hour ago, Aria saw that the Sandpiper Hotel where Peter had a reservation sat directly across from it and realized why.

  Nick had also been very specific about the room she was to get them. The balcony faced the Sandpiper next door. They followed Leroy as he led them to the elevator and up four stories to their room. Leroy went through all of the motions, adjusting the air conditioner, showing the room to them, then Nick handed him a tip and he left them alone.

  Aria left Nick as he went out on to the balcony, and pulled the wig off her head on her way to the bathroom, where she stripped and practically stumbled into the shower. She washed the makeup off her face and ran her hands through her hair, feeling freer without the tight wig. When she got out of the shower, she wrapped herself in the thick white terry cloth robe provided by the hotel and went back to the room.

  Nick was still on the balcony, and Aria was too tired to go out there with him. With a yawn she fell onto one of the two beds and was instantly asleep.

  ¯¯¯¯

  NICK sat on a chair on the balcony, watching the hotel across from them and the beach to the side of him. He could hear Aria's movements in the room, but remained where he was. She needed to sleep now. The morning traffic sounded like it was coming from far away, and did nothing to disturb the peace of his spot. He stretched his long legs out in front of him and felt his body relax. He hoped they had a day or two of breathing room.

  ¯¯¯¯

  "YOU want me to be her what?" Nick yelled in outrage, pacing Charlie's office. The walls were still bare, and there were boxes in the corner. Charlie had only been in his new position as director for a week, and there was so much involved in his new job that he hadn't had the time to put things up yet.

  "Her partner, son. I want you to be her partner."

  "Since when do I need a partner? I don't like working with anyone, not even you, much less some girl fresh out of some academy."

  "She's not just some girl, Nick, she's the best explosives expert I've ever seen and a better wheel man than I ever was. She needs your help with this one, and you're going to give it to her." Charlie leaned his chair back and propped his feet on his desk. He'd fought this new administrative position, but as far as Nick could tell, he'd adjusted to it rather quickly.

  The door opened and Jennifer Thorne came storming into the room. "For your information, Williams, I can hear every word you're saying." She stood with her hands on her hips in front of him, almost eye to eye with him.

  Nick didn't like her, and didn't care that she knew it. He wasn't here to make friends. "Good. That'll save me from having to repeat myself. I'm not going out in the field with some newbie skirt who's going to get me killed."

  "Look Williams, I don't want to be paired up with you anymore than you want to be paired up with me, but I need your skills. No one can get in and out of a country the way you can, and I need an expert shot."

  "Nick," Charlie said. "This isn't a debate. It's an order."

  He was going to get killed. He knew he was. "How long you been doing this, Thorne?" Nick asked.

  "Three years."

  "Good. I have seniority. You do what I say
when I say it, and when it's time to play with your bombs, I'll stay out of your way."

  "Good. We leave in ten hours," she announced.

  "No. We leave in five." Nick corrected. "Grab your 'go bag' and maybe touch up your lipstick, honey."

  Jennifer Thorne stormed out of the office and slammed the door behind her.

  Nick studied the disapproval on Charlie's face and asked innocently, "What?"

  "Was that really necessary, Nick?"

  Nick shrugged. "I like lipstick."

  NICK opened his eyes and saw the tropical Florida sun high overhead shining nearly directly down on him. He stood and stretched then went into their room.

  Aria lay face down on one of the beds wearing, as far as he could tell, nothing more than a bathrobe and sleeping very deeply. It took actual effort to keep from looking at her for what he would consider one second too long. He went to the phone and called room service, ordering a breakfast big enough to feed four, then went to take a shower.

  As he locked the bathroom door, he gritted his teeth and said to himself, "I hate cold."

  ¯¯¯¯

  ADAM heard the pounding on his door before he saw the blue lights reflecting from every surface in his driveway. He checked the clock and saw that it was not yet five in the morning. He took a deep breath and got out of bed.

  When he answered the door, the uniformed police officers shined their very bright flashlights directly in his eyes, dazzling him. Adam closed the door in their faces.

  "Mr. Suarez. Open up! Open the door, Mr. Suarez!"

  He opened the door and they began to raise their flashlights again. "Don't do it," Adam warned.

  Ignoring his warning, they shone their lights in his eyes again. Adam slammed the door. "Now you'll have to wait for my attorney to get here. He should be here soon, maybe three or four hours, tops."