by Pamela Clare
He’d said it, and it was true. He was unlike any man she’d known.
The scary truth was she didn’t want this to end. Okay, she wanted the whole run-from-the-bad-guys part to end yesterday. But she didn’t want to say good-bye to Nick.
* * *
Nick climbed into the vehicle. “I got us a room with a kitchenette on the ground floor. Parking is around back. The proprietor doesn’t speak much English.”
“That’s a bonus.”
He started the minivan and drove it around to the back, parking it out of view of the road. Unless someone called in the plates they would have no idea they were stolen, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.
He handed her the key card. “You take your stuff and get to the room as quickly as possible. I don’t want to risk anyone seeing you. I’ll carry everything else in.”
He grabbed his gear bag and followed her down a long hallway to Room 134.
“The carpet looks like it’s made from recycled circus tents,” she whispered, swiping the key card.
“Is that your assessment as an Agency officer or an entertainment reporter?”
Her lips curved into a smile. “Both.”
The air inside their room was stuffy and warm and smelled of cleaning products, but it would do. There was a small bathroom with a tub and shower to their left, a little kitchen with a small refrigerator, a sink, a hotplate, and microwave to their right. Two full-sized beds took up most of the space, a small table with two chairs sitting in one corner, a television mounted on the wall.
“It looks like the 1970s died in here,” she said.
He could see what she meant. Goldenrod drapes. Royal blue carpeting with yellow and red swirls. Orange-and-green-striped bedspreads.
“As long as we don’t do the same.” He set his gear bag down and headed back out for the rest of it.
By the time he was finished carrying in their gear and supplies, she had the AC running and the food put away. He walked over to the window and checked to make sure it would open. Other than the door, it was the only way out.
“I think I’ll wait till tomorrow to set up the computers. Might as well . . .” He turned around, and his heart gave a thud, whatever he’d been saying forgotten.
Holy. Hell.
Holly was on the bed on all fours, her thighs parted, the short denim skirt that had driven Nick crazy all day pulled up to reveal that she’d taken off her panties. She’d taken off her bra, too, the rounded bottoms of her breasts visible beneath the belly shirt. She smiled at him over her shoulder, wiggled her bare ass.
“Cat got your tongue?” she said in that sweet Kentucky accent.
Nick got hard so fast he was surprised he didn’t split his jeans. He walked over to the bed, cupped her, then slid a finger along her cleft. “Does the cat want my tongue? Or does she want my cock?”
He unzipped himself and freed his erection to give her a visual.
She squirmed. “Can’t I have both?”
“Not without some serious rearranging of my anatomy.”
“Your cock. Now.” She forgot the accent that time, but Nick didn’t care.
He got up onto his knees on the bed behind her and nudged himself slowly inside her, a sensation of pure bliss shooting from his dick to his brain. She was already wet, her slick inner muscles gripping him hard as he began to move.
“Jesus.” He bent over her, reaching with one hand to tease her nipples, putting the other to work between her legs.
“Nick.” Her eyes were closed, her mouth open.
He kept up the pace, willing himself to take it easy, to make this last. But the tension inside her was already rising, her breath now coming in soft little moans. God, he loved this, loved being inside her, loved being with her. Was this nothing more than the excitement of being on the run, or was this just how they were together—the need, the urgency, this constant hunger?
Her breath broke, and she arched her back, her inner muscles contracting around him as she came. He stayed with her until her peak had passed. Then he grasped her hips and drove into her again and again and again until climax carried him home.
***
* * *
Bauer jogged through Langley Fork Park, one of the few places he could talk without being overheard or recorded. He slipped the earpiece in his ear and dialed the number. “It’s time to flush Andris out of hiding.”
“Yeah, I’ll say it is. You said he’d surface, that he would make contact with the Agency. He’s too smart for that, isn’t he? I told you he was too smart. We haven’t seen a sign of either of them, and neither have those assholes from that private security firm.”
“Have you always been this impatient?” The real question, Bauer realized, was whether he’d always been this stupid. “How did you ever make it through all those years of surveillance in the Middle East?”
“I’m hanging out here with these Georgian assholes in this shitty hotel while you’re cozy at home. Don’t talk to me about patience. I could leave, you know. I could dump this entire thing on you, let you handle it. I could get on a plane and be home free. I got what I wanted out of this. I’m only hanging here to try to help save your ass.”
Heat rushed into Bauer’s face. “If I thought you were truly threatening me, I’d have to pay your daughter a visit. How old is she now? In her late twenties, early thirties? She got married about a year ago, didn’t she?”
“Listen to me, you son of a bitch! You stay away from my kid. She doesn’t even know me. She didn’t even grow up with me. She’s not part of this.”
“She won’t be a part of this unless you make her a part of this. You know what happens to those who betray me. This isn’t over until Andris and Bradshaw are dead.”
“Hey, I was just mouthing off. I’m bored as fuck and sick of hanging with these bastards. I just want to be done with this so I can move on.”
“That’s what we both want.”
Bauer had devoted his life to the Agency. He’d done his best to live up to his father’s expectations, to make a name for himself, to get out from beneath his father’s shadow. He’d pulled off a dozen schemes—drugs, intel, guns—and he’d never been caught. Now, when he was at the peak of his career and only a handful of years away from retirement, he was on the brink of losing everything because that dick-faced son of a bitch Dudaev had gone and whispered in the director’s ear.
Well, Dudaev had gotten what he’d deserved.
Bauer jogged past a group of kids playing lacrosse. “I’m going to extend an olive branch to Andris, see if I can get him to come out of his hidey-hole.”
Bauer filled him in on the details of the plan and the role each of them would play. “It’s important to keep Andris alive until we’ve got everything we need from him. Don’t terminate him if Bradshaw isn’t with him. If you kill him, we’ll have a damned hard time finding her. Got it?”
“Yeah, though I don’t know if I can control our Georgian friends. They’ve got their own agenda.”
“You tell them that if any one of them steps out of line or fires a shot without authorization, they’ll end up just like their former boss.”
“Any luck decrypting that hard drive?”
“Not yet. The bastard’s password could be in Georgian, Russian, English. I’ve got a team working on it.” It wasn’t Bauer’s main concern. “Now that we know the USB drive contained only Agency files, it no longer matters what’s on his computer. Andris at least kept Bradshaw from getting her hands on that. All we need to do to wrap this up is get rid of the two of them. The rest is just cleanup.”
“What do you have against Andris?”
“I don’t have anything against him.” No, he didn’t have anything against Nick Andris. In fact, he liked him. But he wasn’t about to spend his retirement in prison. He’d brought Andris into the Agency, and now Andris would repay that favor—with his life.
He thought about that for a moment, about the fairness of it. “When you do kill him, make it quick and clean. He
deserves that much. You can do whatever you want with the girl.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Something skittered past Holly’s feet.
“There’s another one.” Damned roaches. “That’s the fifth one so far.”
“You’re keeping count? What is it with you and bugs?” Nick laughed. “How do you know it’s not the same one? I haven’t seen any.”
“That’s because your face is buried in naked women.”
She had finished going through the Agency files and was now organizing documents using the bed they hadn’t slept in as her surface. Nick, on the other hand, was looking through Dudaev’s porn stash.
“If you think all of these crotch shots turn me on, you’re wrong. Most of these women are probably underage, and I’ll bet a lot of them didn’t choose this.”
A sickening thought.
He cocked his head sideways. “Hell, I don’t even know what I’m looking at half the time. When you get that close up on the human body . . .”
Holly went to stand beside him and bent down to look at the screen. They both leaned their heads to the left and then the right, trying to make it out.
She pointed. “That has to be his—”
“No, that must be some other guy’s. Different skin tone.”
“You’re right.”
“I’m counting two sets of nuts—there and there.”
“Oh, I see now. They’re both . . .” The image began to make sense, and the moment it did, Holly wished it hadn’t. “Ew! Good grief! Poor woman.”
Where was the eye bleach?
Holly tapped a stack of documents on the table to straighten them, then set them down on the bed. “We might make faster progress if I looked through the porn and you went back to looking through his other files. I can’t read Georgian, but I can see the photos just fine.”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t want you seeing this garbage.”
“You don’t want me looking at pictures of naked women having sex?” That was very protective of him. “You know, I live with a naked woman. In fact, I see her every day. I even sleep with her. Have I mentioned that I have sex with her, too?”
“Now that turns me on.” Nick turned toward her, a grin on his handsome face. “Can I watch next time you two get together?”
She slid her hands into his thick, dark curls, gave them a playful tug. “That’s fine with me, but I think she prefers having sex with you.”
He chuckled, then turned back toward his computer screen. “Seriously, though, the bastard kept murder trophies—photos of people he and his goons killed. They’re mixed in here. You don’t need to see that.”
An image of Dudaev lying dead on the bed, bullet holes in his forehead, flashed through her mind. Her stomach did a sick flip. “Okay. Have it your way.”
She spoke the words in a light tone, but it touched her that he was trying to shelter her. How often in her life had that happened?
She glanced at the clock. It was almost one in the afternoon. It would be time for lunch soon. Day three of peanut butter sandwiches. Still, she supposed she shouldn’t complain. Despite the roaches, the little room was much more comfortable than the farmhouse had been. The AC kept the place reasonably cool, and it had been heaven to sleep in a real bed last night and not on an air mattress on the floor.
“I think I found something.”
Holly turned to see an image of a document on Nick’s screen. She went to stand beside him and looked closely at the screen. It was some kind of receipt. “Cayman National Bank.”
“He transferred almost a million bucks from an account in Switzerland to the Cayman Islands. Look at the date.” Nick touched his finger to the monitor. “This is less than a month after the Batumi op.”
“Is there a name on the receipt?”
“No, but both account numbers are there. What do you want to bet that this money comes from selling the weapons Dudaev and his men stole?”
Holly’s pulse picked up. “Dudaev probably had accounts all over the world. How can you be sure this has anything at all to do with our situation?”
“I guess I can’t, but I found it in a folder that contains other things he didn’t want people to see—dead bodies, for starters. He was trying to hide this. Given the date, it’s hard for me to think it could be anything else. Why else would he hold on to a two-year-old receipt?”
“Even if the receipt is tied to this, we don’t have investigative authority. We can’t call the bank and ask them to give us the name on the account.”
“No, we can’t, but the Agency can.” Nick looked up at her. “This could be the proof we need to tie Dudaev to Bauer and to expose Bauer’s accomplice.”
Holly knew he believed that person was Lee Nguyen. “I can contact my CO and update him, let him know what we—what you—found. Maybe you could offer to give him Dudaev’s emails about the heroin shipments as a show of good faith.”
“Not a bad idea. Ask if he’s open to a phone call.”
“I’ll get started on the ciphertext.” She sat at the table and wrote out a plaintext message, then held it out for Nick to see.
He took the piece of paper, caught her hand, kissed it. “I trust you.”
She quickly encoded the message, wrote out the key, then sat at her computer and logged on to the hotel’s Wi-Fi. It took her less than a minute to launch her IP-blocking program and log in to her Twitter account. She planned to post a Tweet to let her friends know she was still alive, but she saw she had a couple of messages. She clicked to view them and stared, adrenaline hitting her system in a rush.
“You’re going to want to see this.”
In her in-box was a message from Lee Nguyen.
* * *
Nick and Holly left the hotel just after lunch and drove north to Colorado Springs, Holly behind the wheel this time. “I don’t like this. My CO told me not to have contact with anyone at the Agency but him.”
They had argued about this all afternoon.
Nick stuck to his decision. “You’re not the one doing the contacting. If anything goes wrong, it’s my head that will roll.”
“But I like your head. I want it to stay where it is.”
He reached over, ran his thumb down her cheek. “So do I.”
“Remember to keep it short. Don’t let Nguyen provoke you. He’s going to want to draw this out so they can get a ping on our location.”
Nick dug the burner phone out of his jeans pocket and activated it. “If I start to say anything stupid, stop me.”
“During this call, or in general?” She smiled, but there was worry in her eyes.
“You’re sweet.” He dialed the number Nguyen had given them, surprised at how on edge he felt.
Nguyen answered on the first ring. “Andris, are you all right?”
The sound of his friend’s familiar voice sent a surge of tangled emotions through Nick—hurt, doubt, rage. “I’m fine—no thanks to Bauer.”
“Is Bradshaw safe?”
“Yes. She’s in no danger from me.”
“You know she’s with the Agency, correct?”
“I wish you’d told me that a month ago. Bauer sent me to terminate her. Did you know that, buddy?”
Nguyen didn’t answer him. “We need to meet in person, talk this through. There are things you need to know, and we need to work out the details of your surrender. It’s time you turned yourself in.”
“I’m happy where I am. Besides, I’m not sure I’d last long in custody. Bauer intends to kill both me and Bradshaw. Are you helping him?”
“No. Nick, listen to me. There’s more to this than I can explain now, but it’s very important that we limit the Agency’s potential exposure here. You need—”
“Fuck the Agency!” The rage Nick had carried inside him these past two weeks exploded. “Where was the Agency when Daly, Carver, and McGowen were murdered? Where was the Agency when Kramer was killed? Where was the Agency when Bauer sent me in to pop Dudaev without authorization?”
Trust no one.
Kramer’s words came back to him.
“Do I? I trusted Bauer. He betrayed me. He was my fucking supervisor, and he set me up. He wants me to take the fall for what happened that night in Batumi. He’s trying to save his own ass. Were you his man on the ground, Lee? Were you the one who turned us all over to Dudaev and got Dani killed?”
“No! Damn it, Nick, listen. I had nothing to do with any of that. We can’t talk about this now. I’m going to text you the place where I’ll be staying in Colorado Springs. You and Bradshaw meet me there tomorrow afternoon at three. I want this to be over as much as you do.”
Holly tapped the time display on the dashboard.
But then it hit Nick. “Colorado Springs?”
Why was Nguyen coming to Colorado Springs instead of Denver?
“We just got a call from the Ríos County sheriff. He says he ran in to the two of you in a farmhouse outside of Los Ríos. He didn’t realize it was you until he caught the BOLO this morning. If you’re still there, you’re going to want to get the hell out.”
“Thanks for the tip, buddy.”
“You’re like a brother to me, Nick. I’ve always had your back. Before this is over, you’ll know I still do.” Nguyen ended the call.
Nick waited for the text message, trying to rein in his temper. “He wants us to meet with him tomorrow afternoon at a hotel in Colorado Springs.”
Holly glanced over at him. “I’m pretty sure they got a ping off that.”
The phone buzzed, Nguyen’s text message coming through.
“That’s not our only problem.” Nick memorized the contents of the message, then deactivated the phone and threw it out the window. “Nguyen said the sheriff made us.”
“Are you sure we should go back to the hotel?”
It was a good couple of hours from the farmhouse to the hotel, but if the media announced they were in the area, no place in southeastern Colorado would be safe. Still, they had no choice but to go back.
“All the documents are there and the computers. Without those, I’ve got no leverage, no proof.”
She turned the minivan around. “You know, everyone wants what we have—the intel on Dudaev’s computer.”