Maverick

by Lisa Marie Rice

  It had the cold, hard ring of truth. Dan and Stone sat there, chewing on it.

  “Sir?” A tech in paper overalls, latex gloves and booties came out of the back room. “We’re done here. Got a whole mess of fingerprints, take a month to get through them. Coroner’s done, too. Proximate cause of death, internal haemorrhaging from sharp instrument penetrating the heart. Coroner says he think the autopsy will give us a clue as to the type and length of the blade.”

  Everyone turned their heads as two techs carried a body bag out on a stretcher. Claire thought of the young man, with his entire life ahead of him, now zipped up in heavy plastic, dead. And soon a mother, a sister, a girlfriend, perhaps a wife and children, would be mourning his loss.

  As if by an unspoken signal, they didn’t speak until the body had been carried out to the van. A primitive gesture of respect for the dead.

  The lead tech walked back in, turning to the detective. He was young, tall, sandy-haired, with one of those mobile, expressive faces comics had. But he didn’t have the expression of a stand-up comic. He looked sober, older than his years. Claire imagined he’d seen a lot of the worst of human nature. “We’ll go to the hotel room now, sir. Dig out some bullets.”

  “I want to go with you.” Claire surprised herself with the words. They came from the deepest part of her being.

  Dan shifted uncomfortably. “Claire, honey, I’m not too sure…”

  Claire ignored him and turned to Stone. “Detective, I want a look into that room. I never got a chance because the man started shooting immediately. I never got through the door. I want to see. I won’t touch anything, I understand full well it’s a crime scene, but I want to see.” Her voice was firm. She would see it with or without his permission.

  The detective hesitated a beat, then said, “Let’s go.”

  They trooped down the corridor, Dan by her side, so close she could feel his body heat. He was still on hyper alert. He kept his left arm around her and his Glock in his right hand, eyes vigilant.

  They made it to the open doorway. Dan’s arm around her waist braced Claire as she stepped back from her room as sharply as if someone had attacked her.

  She stared at the room, her room. All soft surfaces had been slashed. Couch and chair cushions, the mattress, the pillows. The few clothes she’d had with her, including nightgown and change of underwear, had been slashed to shreds, and the knife had destroyed her other pair of shoes

  The destruction was… cold. And calculated. Things that might have made a noise smashing, such as the pottery body of the lamp, the big bowl of flowers on the desk, a series of decorative plates on the wall, were all intact. The frenzy of destruction mainly affected soft things and her personal effects. Someone had gone out of their way to destroy her personal things. She shivered.

  “Okay,” Dan said abruptly. “That’s it. Marcus, do you need us to be here?”

  “She can’t take anything from the room,” Stone said sharply. “It’s all evidence.”

  “There’s nothing to take anyway,” Claire said, and stepped into the room. She turned her head and saw into the bathroom. Her toiletries had been swept to the floor, where they’d shattered. He’d probably closed the bathroom door for that, so the sound wouldn’t alert anyone. The sharp smells of creams and shampoo and Miss Dior assailed her nostrils.

  They didn’t make her nauseous, though. She was too angry for that.

  She stepped back into the room. There was nothing of hers that could be carried away. Even her small carry-on had been slashed and was unusable.

  “My computer,” Claire said suddenly. “It’s gone.”

  Dan stiffened and looked around.

  “You sure?” the detective asked. “Maybe he destroyed it.”

  The closet door was open. The only other place that she hadn’t checked was under the bed, so she bent to look, taking care not to touch the bedclothes. A smooth expanse of shiny hardwood floor. No computer.

  “It was a small laptop. But if he smashed it to bits, those bits would be here. And he couldn’t have flushed the hard disk down the toilet. So he took it.”

  “What was on your computer? Anything sensitive?”

  Claire knew what the detective was thinking. She was ex-DIA. A spook. Marines instinctively distrusted spooks, and they were quite right. She could have had Homeland Security intel on her computer.

  “No.” Claire shook her head decisively. “I told you. I haven’t been with DIA for over a year, and I had to hand in my agency-issue laptop. This computer was new, anyway. There’s nothing on it besides a few high-end translation programs and glossaries and some translations. The original text and my translation of it. I have started working part time as a translator from French.”

  “Any confidential texts there?”

  Claire smiled at the thought. “No. Absolutely not. I translated two children’s books lately, an article, and a trade fair web site. This was only a laptop I use for travel; I didn’t even have most of my files on it. I brought it along out of habit and to check my e-mail without having to go to an internet café. This hotel had wi-fi. I checked before making the reservation.”

  “Will you be harmed in some way if the laptop is destroyed?”

  She thought. “No, not really. Everything I need for my new job is on my desktop at home. If the man stole the laptop there’s the economic loss. But the text I was working on is also on my thumb drive and on the desktop back in Florida and in the cloud, plus I use a remote backup service.” She frowned. “The laptop was new, but it wasn’t wildly expensive. If he decides to fence it, he won’t get much. That was probably the most expensive thing of mine in the room. But—" She drew a deep breath. It had to be faced. “He wasn’t there to steal.”

  “No.” The detective was writing in his notebook and didn’t look up. “He wasn’t there to steal. We can leave the techs to do their work. Let’s go down to the station house.”

  Claire watched as one of the young techs used a long tweezers-like instrument to gently extract something oblong and metallic from a baseboard. There would be several bullets embedded in the hardwood floor outside that wall. The ones that had narrowly missed being embedded in her flesh.

  Claire swayed, then pulled herself upright.

  “Negative.” Dan’s deep voice was sharp as he narrowed his eyes at his friend. “She’s dead on her feet. She got up really early this morning to catch the first flight up. I’m taking her home.”

  The detective flipped his notebook shut and looked hard at Dan. Dan looked hard at him right back. Claire could almost see the lines of male will surge back and forth.

  Dan won.

  The detective sighed. “Okay. I want both of you at the M street station by eleven at the latest, and we’ll get all this info into the files. Stay within the city precinct.” This to Dan. Dan nodded, then looked at her, one eyebrow raised.

  The question was clear. Was she willing to come home with him?

  The answer to that was clear, too.

  Hell, yes.

  CHAPTER 9

  Room 415 of the Willard Hotel was sumptuous. The Boss always had the finest of everything. Heston walked gingerly into the room.

  The Boss had a thermos of coffee and some fancy sandwiches waiting. Heston could smell them from the door. The Boss thought of everything.

  Heston was coming to report failure, but the Boss knew he’d also been on a mission and if there was one thing soldiers needed after an op, it was fuel. They also needed a woman, stat, but Heston could get his own woman. After.

  No alcohol. The op wasn’t over. It had just switched gears.

  The Boss had been staring out the window at the bright lights of Pennsylvania Avenue below, the White House lit like a birthday cake in the corner of the window. The Boss pulled the drapes shut, in case someone was aiming a laser lens at the window. The room would have been swept twice for electronics.

  The Boss never took chances. It was why he was who he was and why no one could stop him.


  The Boss turned back to the room and gestured with his hand. “Sit down, Heston,” he said, his voice pleasant.

  “Yessir.” Heston scrambled to sit in one of the plush chairs, sinking right in. The material was super soft, like silk. Hell, at the price of these rooms, it probably was silk. The coffee was poured into cups so thin you could see light through them, with little roses curling around the cup. Delicate, fragile.

  Fuck.

  Heston didn’t want to break the frigging cup. His hands were big and hard. Hands meant for shooting and killing, not for holding ultradelicate china.

  But it was one more test. Heston secretly believed that the Boss was watching him, training him… grooming him. For bigger and better things. And shit, he wanted to be by the Boss’s side, every step of the way.

  The Boss waited until Heston had had his coffee and refused refills, then leaned forward in his chair, face open, without a shred of disappointment or censure. “So, tell me what happened. You said there were problems. What were they?”

  Heston told him, beginning to end, leaving out nothing.

  The Boss sat back and stared at the wall. Face totally expressionless, totally still, except for the slight rise and fall of his chest. Finally he refocused his gaze on Heston. “This was my fault. The mission was to get a computer and eliminate a woman. You couldn’t possibly have known there could be an armed man involved. So… the man knew what he was doing?”

  This was just like the Boss, taking the heat. Heston’s heart broke open, just a little. He’d had a brutal father and he’d served with shit officers. He’d never had anyone like the Boss in his life.

  “Yessir, he sure did. Had a Glock, knew how to use it, too. He was trying to draw fire away from the woman. Like I said, she was lying on the floor outside the hotel room. I’m almost certain I got her three times. She presented, ah, a large profile.”

  The Boss’s eyes sharpened. “What?”

  “Well, I mean she was big. A big woman. The angle wasn’t good but I think I got her.”

  “Big woman, eh?” The Boss stroked his chin. “Well, whatever. We’ll see soon enough. I’ve got my computer expert hacking into the local police stations. As soon as we’ve got the report, we’ll see if it’s for one body or two.” The Boss looked at him, a flash of something hard, like steel, crossed his face. “You’ll be ready, with at least four men, for the next stage. Stay close to here. Use the safehouse. Stay there until I call.”

  “Yessir.” Heston dipped his head. “We’ll be ready. And next time I won’t fail.”

  “No.” The Boss leaned forward and gently touched his knee. He was smiling now. “I know you won’t fail. I’m counting on you.”

  Fucking idiot, he thought when Heston left. A useful idiot, a loyal one, too, but an idiot nonetheless. He was tempted to give one of his men the order to take him out.

  Though… Heston was usually efficient, he would say that for him. And this debacle was not entirely his fault. He’d been told his adversary was a lone woman.

  Who the fuck had been with Claire Day? She’d been a DIA analyst, so she’d know men in the military community. But what had tipped her off that she should come accompanied by a gunman? The response had been so fast, it was as if she’d expected retaliation.

  He sat and thought about it, about Claire Day as he’d known her and what he knew of her today.

  She’d come prepared. He had to factor that in.

  Claire had been super-smart, back in the day, known for the precision of her analyses. A real comer. But he’d been given to believe all that had gone, that she was a shell of a woman now, barely able to function. Had been in a fucking coma, for Christ’s sake!

  She’d completely quit the DIA. There was, as far as he knew, no question of her ever coming back to work in any capacity.

  That was not the Claire Day who’d escaped an assassination attempt by a bloody good soldier. It didn’t matter how she did it, or that an operator had backed her up. The point was, she’d been smart enough to get backup.

  Claire Day was after him, he could feel it. He’d always trusted his instincts and they’d always been good. Now every cell in his body told him to make getting rid of her his top priority. Except she’d gone to ground and he had no idea where.

  If she wasn’t dead—and he had a gut feeling she wasn’t—she was plotting his ruin.

  How to find her to eliminate her? How to get rid of the bitch, once and for all? He had to know where she went to ground. So… how to find out where she was?

  He texted Heston, on his way to the safe house.

  Do u have men near Safety Harbour, Florida?

  The answer came within two minutes.

  Yes. A good man, a quarter of an hour away.

  OK. Have him burn down Claire Day’s House. 427 Laurel Lane. Burn it fast, it can look like arson.

  He waited another five minutes then his cell buzzed.

  On his way.

  He smiled. How to find out where Claire Day was? Why, smoke her out, of course.

  Dan’s home was the most secure place he knew of. He had top-of-the-line everything, at cost, courtesy of a Marine buddy who manufactured industrial security systems. He had the level of security of a bank or a DOD tech company. If a person so much as breathed on his perimeter, he knew about it, whether he was home or not.

  And he’d made damned sure, driving back, that he wasn’t being tailed.

  He disengaged security at the gate, reengaged it and drove into his garage. When he killed the engine, he turned to Claire.

  She was the color of ice again, shivering, though she tried to hide it. He’d turned the heat in his SUV on full blast, so much that he was sweating as he drove over the icy streets to Alexandria, but she was still trembling when he killed the engine.

  It wasn’t the cold, anyway, it was the shock. She’d seen a dead body and been attacked, in one night. It would be almost too much to bear for the strongest woman, let alone a woman who’d been grievously wounded and was barely back on her feet.

  Dan watched her in the silence. He had a neon garage light that cast no shadows and was always on, even though the two security cameras had infrared capability. He was a strong believer in overkill. It was the old military slogan—two is one. One is none.

  “How you doing?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet. The only sound in the garage was the ticking of the engine cooling.

  “F-fine.” She sketched a smile.

  She wasn’t fine. She was paler than when she’d had the panic attack.

  She looked so lost and alone.

  She wasn’t alone, goddammit. As far as he was concerned, she’d never be alone again. He had her six covered now, and he was going to do his damndest to make sure nothing bad ever happened to her again. Or at least nothing bad that he could prevent.

  He had no idea why someone tried to kill her, which was truly scary shit, because sure as anything, that guy was going to come back to finish the job.

  Fine. Bring it on. Fucker’d have to go over Dan’s dead body, and he was a hard man to kill.

  They needed to find out the source of the danger to Claire and neutralize it. But first, he needed to get her safely in the house and some color back in her cheeks.

  He put a finger under her chin and turned her face to his, trying not to wince at her expression.

  Still, God, she was so fucking beautiful. Shocked and pale and scared, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And by some miracle, she was here with him, where she was going to stay.

  She was in his care now and he had to do this right.

  First things first. “How about a shower, hot milk with a couple of fingers of whiskey, and about ten hours of sleep?”

  “Oh, man,” she sighed and sketched a smile that nearly broke his heart. “Sounds wonderful. Are we safe here?”

  “Yeah, we are. You can let down your guard.” He hesitated a second, weighing the appearance of paranoia against putting her mind at rest. Reassuring Claire won. �
�I believe strongly in home security. I’ve got motion sensors, cameras around the property and the house, steel-reinforced doors, bullet-resistant windows.” And, well, voice recognition software, automatic sensor polling, and a steel-toothed strip that would rise from the ground at the gate on command. She didn’t have to know all of that. All she had to know was that he was going to keep her safe.

  He went around to the passenger side, opened the door, and held out his hands. Claire looked at his hands, then into his eyes.

  The world stilled. Everything in Dan stopped—breath, thoughts, heart.

  Slowly, Claire leaned forward, placing her hands on his arms. It was like being in a dream, all in slow motion, just the two of them in all the world. He lifted her out slowly, jaws clenched. She was feather-light between his hands, more like cloud and smoke than a woman.

  But her face—that was all woman. Clear, porcelain skin, silver-blue eyes, luscious mouth that didn’t need lipstick to make a man think of sinking right in to her. She was finally out of the vehicle but Dan didn’t move, and neither did she. She stood, her hands still on his arms, that gorgeous face tilted up to his.

  What was a man to do? Dan did the only thing he could do, what he’d been aching to do since 11:30 this morning when she showed up on his office doorstep, this woman he thought was dead, and was instead alive, a fucking miracle.

  He lowered his head, slowly, knowing that this was going to be momentous. It would divide his life into a before and an after. So he took it slow and easy. Just a touch of their lips at first. He felt an electric charge down to his toes.

  Both of them drew in a breath that sounded loud in the hush of the garage.

  The one thing Dan wanted to do right now, more than anything in the world, was to pull Claire right down to his hard, cold cement floor, sliding her pants down those long, slender legs, and follow her down, unzipping.