Secret Agent Affair

by Marie Ferrarella

  The difference between the man who’d been here just a minute ago and the one here now was like fire and ice.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  Nothing in his expression or manner gave him away, or gave her the slightest clue. “Just someone I know. There’s a problem,” he added.

  Though she’d tried to hear, she couldn’t discern if the caller had been a man or a woman. She hadn’t been able to pick up a single sound from the other end. All she knew was that someone had called and he was leaving.

  “What kind of a problem?” she asked, fairly certain that, despite the fact that they had made love, that they were going to make love just seconds ago, he wouldn’t answer her question.

  And she was right. “Just a problem,” he responded vaguely, closing his belt buckle.

  “And only you can help?” she pressed in quiet disbelief.

  Was he using this as an excuse to leave? Who had called him? A friend?

  A wife?

  Damn, when had she started having these awful, nagging, distrustful thoughts? No strings meant no strings. For him or her. But if there were no strings, no commitment, why did she feel betrayed, cast off?

  His eyes met hers. “Sounds a little conceited, doesn’t it?”

  He hadn’t said yes, hadn’t said no. Kane Dolan was very good at being evasive, she thought. At any other time, she might have even admired the ability—she’d practiced it herself often enough. But right now she couldn’t, because it meant so much to her that he stay. Stay with her. Stay the night.

  He was right when he’d said that it was just because he wanted to stay so much that he should be going. The sentiment went both ways. She was acutely aware that his being here meant too much to her.

  It was getting too personal and nothing good could come of that.

  Still, she wouldn’t have been human if she didn’t wonder who had him dropping everything to leave. Who meant that much to him? Who had that much power over him?

  She tried again as she took the chain off the door. “Do I get a hint?”

  “No.”

  That took the air out of her lungs again. “Well, at least you don’t beat around the bush with lies.”

  He felt bad. He felt guilty. And most of all, he felt frustrated as hell. Kane paused for a moment, rebuttoning the shirt that he’d almost ripped off himself. “I’ll explain it to you sometime.”

  “But not now.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Not now.”

  Very quickly, Kane brushed his lips against hers and she could have sworn she tasted a trace of reluctance in his kiss, as if he didn’t want to go.

  So why wasn’t he staying?

  And who the hell had called him at this time of night? It was closer to three o’clock than two and everything was pretty much shut down for the night.

  Obviously not.

  Doing her best to appear nonchalant, she flipped the lock and pulled open the door for him. “Thanks for coming to my mother’s grand opening. And for helping with Sasha.” She noticed that the front of his shirt bore traces of both efforts on it. “And I’ll pay for the cleaning bill.”

  Kane looked down at the front of his shirt, then back up at her. He smiled then. Not the cynical smile or the one that seemed to hold so many secrets behind it. This one was guileless and appeared to come from the heart. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And no, you won’t. I’ll just wash it.”

  And then he was gone.

  Marja stood staring at the back of the door long after he’d closed it behind him. The ache in her heart stilled her.

  “But you’re missing this,” she murmured to his absent presence.

  “What are you on, London time?” Kane gruffly asked the man as he slid in across from him at the last booth in the diner.

  There was a cup of coffee—cold—waiting for him. The bagel next to it began to harden. Kane ignored both.

  “How’d you guess?” his handler asked. When Kane made no effort to claim either the coffee or the bagel, Frank confiscated both. “Look, you knew when you volunteered that there were no regular hours. You want regular hours, go punch in as a grocery store clerk.”

  “To what do we owe this glowing good humor?”

  Frank broke off a piece of the bagel and dipped it into the coffee to soften it. “The ambassador’s daughter is coming in tomorrow.”

  Kane was surprised. Nothing he’d overheard had indicated that the surgery was on for tomorrow. “You’re sure?”

  Frank seemed affronted. “I’m sure. Her condition is getting worse,” he said in a conversational tone that could have been used to talk about a street repavement program. “Her father turned the pressure up—” he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, indicating the exchange of money “—and so the surgical team all fell into place. She’s arriving first thing in the morning. First thing,” he elaborated. “The surgery will take place almost immediately.”

  “Tomorrow—today,” he corrected, because it was already “tomorrow,” “is Sunday.” For the most part, other than for emergencies brought in by ambulance, there were few surgeries performed on a Sunday.

  “All the more reason to carry it out,” Frank told him. He dipped more of the bagel into the coffee.

  “Most people won’t be expecting it. The ambassador doesn’t understand that even though terrorists might look like primitive single-celled beings, a lot of them at the top are damn clever. They’re not taking anything at face value.

  “The ambassador doesn’t want to take any chances. This is his only daughter. He has more bodyguards for her than the president of the United States has Secret Service agents.”

  Kane stretched his legs out underneath the table. He was bone weary, but he’d get a second wind soon. “And these bodyguards, they all check out?”

  Frank smiled. “Down to the fourth generation back.”

  Kane took in the information, nodding his head. “No chance of identity theft?”

  It was an innocent question. So innocent that it had been completely overlooked. Frank’s face turned an intriguing shade of purple. Obviously, he hadn’t taken that little detail into account.

  Instead of answering, Frank whipped out his cell phone, hit several buttons and began talking almost instantly. “Make sure everyone in the ambassador’s employ is exactly who he says he is. Yes, now.” He slapped the phone closed. “By the way, you’re going to be there tomorrow.”

  He was scheduled to go in at nine as far as he knew. “At the hospital?”

  Frank’s eyes met his. Frank’s were small, dark and unfathomable. “In the operating room.”

  This was news. He’d as yet not been allowed into an O.R., not even to clean up afterward. “But how…?”

  Frank waved away the question. Going into details wasn’t productive. “It’s all been taken care of. The orderly scheduled came down with the flu.”

  Yeah, he bet, Kane thought. “Convenient.”

  Frank’s smile was almost chilling. He raised the cup to his lips. “Yes, wasn’t it?”

  Kane sighed, already psyching himself up. Watching skilled surgeons cut open someone’s skull for the purpose of operating on her brain was not his idea of fun, but, like the man said, he’d signed on for this. “Anything else I should know?”

  Frank thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Just stay alert.”

  That, Kane thought, was a given.

  Chapter 13

  The moment she stepped through the hospital’s electronic doors early Sunday morning, Marja noticed the difference. The electricity in the air. The tension.

  As if the hospital had come under siege.

  They had come, not in the dead of night, but very close to it. A small army of men in black suits, interconnected and wired for sound by virtue of the earpieces tucked into their right ears. The earpieces united them, making them a collective entity. They were like the separate cells of a body dedicated to making that body thrive.

  In the case of the ambassador’s
hand-picked security detail, they were dedicated to the single goal of keeping both the ambassador and his beloved daughter alive during their stay at Patience Memorial.

  Bodyguards were posted throughout the first floor, where the operating room was located, as well as throughout the top floor of the tower. Yasmin would be brought to the suite after the operation, when she had made sufficient progress in the recovery room to be moved.

  Rumor had it that if Ambassador Amman and the head of his privately funded security detail had their way, all hospital personnel nonessential to Yasmin’s health—as well as all the patients currently occupying beds within the building—would be sent away until Yasmin was ready to leave the hospital. Barring that, both the ambassador and the head of the security detail, an unsmiling, very Middle Eastern-looking man with the unlikely, all-American first name of “Chuck,” had insisted on infusing this mini-battalion into the network of people who ordinarily populated the building. Neither Patience Memorial’s chief of staff, Sara Anderson, nor its current head administrator, Simon Gibbons, could oppose this invasion and still have Yasmin’s operation take place here.

  “I am sorry for all this,” Amman had told Gibbons,

  “but in these dangerous times, it is necessary.” The pained look on Gibbons’s face bore silent testimony to the hospital administrator’s reaction to the influx of black-suited men. “When your building does not blow up and your people are not taken hostage, you will find an occasion to thank me.”

  The simple statement clearly left the administrator, and everyone around him, wondering just what he had gotten his hospital into.

  Everywhere Marja looked, preparations for the young woman’s surgery got under way. The entire hospital staff seemed involved, in one way or another. She knew for a fact that other things were going on, at least one other surgery that Kady had told her about. But Yasmin’s surgery seemed to take precedence.

  It was like being caught up in a tape where someone had pressed Fast Forward and forgotten where the Play button was. She couldn’t recall ever seeing this many people milling around on the ground floor.

  It wasn’t easy finding Kane amid this throng. But that was why she’d come in before her shift. Last night’s abrupt departure was still on her mind, still bothered her. There was more going on with him than met the eye and she wanted to know what. More than that, she wanted to know what she was getting herself into before it was too late.

  If it wasn’t already, she amended silently.

  She’d gotten very little sleep the remainder of the night, waiting for him to call her, annoyed with him—and herself for caring—when he didn’t.

  Had he used the phone call as a convenient excuse to leave? After all, she had no idea who had been on the other end of the line, or what they had said. For all she knew, it could have been a wrong number and Kane had used it to make good his escape. Had her exuberant family frightened him off?

  She kept telling herself that it didn’t matter, that she didn’t really care, but that was a lie. It did matter and she really did care. Enough so that after giving him the benefit of the doubt over and over again until dawn, she wanted to hear the truth from his own lips.

  They needed to talk.

  She wasn’t expecting a detailed map telling her where she stood with him, but she did want to know if her feet were planted on solid ground or quicksand.

  When Marja finally spotted Kane, he was on his way to the side of the building where the operating rooms were located. He seemed to be in as much of a hurry as everyone else.

  Too bad, she thought. He could spare her five minutes.

  She picked up her pace and hurried after him. It wasn’t easy. He had almost ten inches on her and it seemed to be all leg. She was practically trotting at the end.

  Finally managing to catch up, Marja began, “About last night—” a line that she was well aware had a special place in the Cliché Hall of Fame. She wasn’t allowed to go any further.

  “I should have called,” he told her, simultaneously taking the blame and the air out of her sails. He didn’t even seem surprised to see her and he was talking faster than she’d ever heard him talk before. She wouldn’t have pictured him as someone who could get caught up in what was going on. He didn’t seem like the type to dance to anyone else’s tune. “But right now, I’ve got to get into that operating room.”

  “That” operating room was the one where Yasmin Amman’s operation was to take place. Was he crazy?

  Marja caught his arm, stopping him from going any farther. “You’re liable to get killed. They’re not going to just let you waltz in.”

  Very deliberately, he removed her hand from his arm. He saw concern in her eyes and, against his will, she got to him. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been concerned about his actual well-being, apart from getting the mission accomplished.

  “You don’t understand,” he said patiently. “Ecklund told me to be there.”

  She stared at him, stunned. “The neurosurgeon in charge of organizing the surgical teams told you to be there?” She was obviously missing something. Kane didn’t strike her as someone who would give himself false airs, and yet she didn’t see him and Dr. Aaron Ecklund even remotely moving around in the same circles.

  But Kane merely nodded in response to her question. “And if I don’t hurry, I’m going to be late.” He picked up his pace, leaving her behind.

  Marja’s mouth dropped open as she watched Kane approach one of the two men standing guard outside Operating Room 1, the largest of the five available operating salons.

  Holding up his laminated ID for the guard to view, Kane waited while the burly man went down the list of specified hospital personnel allowed into the operating room. The guard perused the list slowly. Coming to a name that matched the one on the ID, the guard placed a large, black check next to it, looked once more at the ID Kane extended toward him, then finally nodded his approval.

  “Go in,” he said in a voice that seemed to be coming from somewhere deep in the Grand Canyon.

  Kane slipped in between the two doors, leaving her standing out in the corridor. Marja felt as if she were rooted to the spot.

  “Move along, please.”

  The entreaty, directed toward her, was politely worded. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind that if she opposed it, or attempted to resist, the man could and would physically remove her.

  What the hell was going on? she wondered as she retreated, slowly walking back to the E.R.

  Her shift didn’t officially begin for another half hour. Instead of being able to talk to Kane and hopefully resolve what was—or wasn’t—going on between them, she’d been confronted with disjointed pieces of a puzzle.

  Kane had only been with the hospital a little more than three weeks. Most orderlies weren’t allowed into the O.R. for clean-up purposes after a surgery had taken place, until they’d been at P.M. for at least a couple of months.

  Something was definitely out of kilter, she thought, chewing on her lower lip. And she intended to find out what.

  Periodically, whenever she had a break, or there was a lull in human traffic, Marja would venture out into the corridor and quickly make her way toward O.R. 1.

  The scene never varied.

  Thanks to Security, there was a minimum of foot traffic near the area. The same two big, burly sentries she’d seen earlier were standing guard, each with one of the two doors at his back. To the passing eye, they looked like two statues painted in flesh tones to make them appear more human. A measure that just barely succeeded. Had she not seen one of the men checking Kane out before he’d gone in, she would have been convinced the bodyguards were made of marble.

  The surgery was scheduled for six hours. It ran longer, stopping the clock at nearly eight. As each hour passed, the tension around the hospital, especially the first floor, seemed to grow.

  Instead of taking a lunch break, Marja decided to pop in on Sasha on the maternity floor. Although most of the floor wa
s empty, because a large number of mothers had checked out with their little bundles of joy just prior to noon for insurance purposes, the area around Sasha’s bed was incredibly crowded.

  So many people were there, Marja felt as if she should have taken a number.

  “Hey, what about the ‘two to a bed’ rule?” she teased, wiggling into the room designated as a single-care unit rather than “private,” a label that was a health insurance taboo. Between visiting family members, hospital staff and extraneous police detectives, there really wasn’t much space available.

  “Never heard of it,” Tony deadpanned.

  Tony was currently holding the baby. The tiny bundle had quickly learned to accept being handed off from one set of arms to another.

  “She likes all the attention,” Sasha told her proudly when she made eye contact with her older sister. “I think I’ve given birth to a social butterfly.”

  “That she gets from me,” Josef said proudly.

  Mama responded with something very close to, “Ha!”

  Marja burrowed in beside Sasha. Despite the wide smile, Sasha seemed exhausted, although better than last night. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like a truck ran over me,” Sasha confessed. “But it was a nice truck that dropped off a very precious bundle,” she added, beaming at her husband holding their daughter.

  Marja scanned the gathering. With all the people packed into the room, there was hardly any space for a sneeze to fit in. “Well, no failure to bond here,” she quipped.

  Josef picked the same time to examine the faces in the room. He came up one short. “Where is Tania?” he asked. “I would be expecting her to be here.”

  “Tania’s in the operating room,” Marja told him before she could think better of it.

  An alarmed look came into Kady’s eyes as she made contact with Marja. Standing behind her parents, she still had on the scrubs she’d worn while observing another last-minute operation. Kady shook her head. But it was too late for warnings.

  “Which one?” Josef asked, the smile disappearing from his face.