Trisha Telep (ed)

by The Mammoth Book of Special Ops Romance (epub)

  “Management problems,” she said. “How boring. Do you think I care about your discipline problems?”

  “Lucia.” He leaned closer, eyes intent now. Alight with utter sincerity, or a brilliant approximation of it. “Please. Give me what I need and, I swear to you, I will see that you walk out of here, alive and free. My word on it.”

  “Because you’re such a gentleman.” She almost laughed, but she was too tired, too wounded. “Gregory. Don’t bother. I’m not some scared little comrade, and I know how this works. Don’t good cop/bad cop me.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I am employed, my lovely one, and the more I discover of my employers, the less I like the work. The team is subcontracted. I now begin to suspect some work directly for my employers, and not for me. I also begin to suspect that perhaps I am seen as . . . replaceable. I want us both to survive this. That is the truth.”

  It might even actually be the truth, Lucia realized. Which meant she really didn’t understand the full extent of things yet. “What do you know?” she whispered.

  Gregory said, “I know that what they’re seeking are the codes to a lockbox. In the lockbox is something very deadly, which may or may not be this nuclear material that was described to me. Do you have these codes?”

  She shook her head. It was all starting to become surreal now. She knew what Ivanovich was talking about; it was the thing she’d been sent to Prague to stop: Marko Czerny, terrorist and supplier of terrorists, had been rumoured to possess a supply of weaponized haemorrhagic fever. Marburg, possibly. Maybe even Ebola. In any case, deadly dangerous stuff. The prototype for a worldwide epidemic of shocking proportions, intended for the hands of fanatics who believed their faith would protect them.

  She’d disrupted the sale, but the buyers still wanted the merchandise. Desperately.

  “You’re on the wrong side,” she told Gregory. “You know that.”

  A faint twitch of his lips, not quite a smile. “I am on the side of money, as I always am. But you do tempt me to virtue, zolotoi.”

  “I don’t have any codes,” she said. “So let’s get on with it. Bring in the second team again; he was good at his job. All this talking is boring, and I’m cold. A little pain will warm me up.”

  He touched her cheek. Warm, gentle, a lover’s touch. “You’re not a stranger to me, Lucia,” he said. “I’ve studied you for a long time, you know. Such strength and beauty. Such skill. It distresses me that you’ve been caught up in this. We are professionals.”

  “Well, you can always just let me go,” she said. “But wait. You won’t. Because we are professionals.”

  “Exactly. I can’t,” he admitted. “Not unless I intend to put a gun to my own head in the process. And as much as I enjoy you, my dear, I enjoy my own life more.” His voice grew softer. “You’re freezing.”

  Her teeth were chattering again, and Lucia couldn’t stop shivering, even huddled under the blanket. She didn’t answer. Gregory rose, stripped off his black leather jacket, and draped it around her shoulders. It was heavy, animal-warm, and it smelled richly of his skin and cologne.

  “Thanks,” she whispered. She hated herself for it. Every courtesy she accepted, every act of kindness, was another thing she’d regret later when he turned on her. It was how the game was played. She was a fool to think otherwise.

  Lucia tested her bonds, and felt a strand of rope part with a sudden snap. She froze, hoping he hadn’t heard, but Gregory was pacing now, body language tense and agitated.

  “There’s no purpose to this,” he said. “You won’t tell me, even if you know, and to be honest, I doubt you know. And killing you serves no good purpose, either. There must be another way.”

  “Let me go,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Then help me.”

  “I did!” he snapped. “You’re still alive. Still breathing, if not breathing comfortably. Believe me, my Lucia, much worse could have been done to you already.” He paced more, still agitated. She pulled on her bonds again, and distinctly felt the ropes loosen. One more good pull . . .

  Gregory made a decision of some kind. He altered course towards her, reached down and pulled her up to her feet. She staggered, uncertain of her balance; she’d lost feeling in her legs hours before. Gregory held her steady. This is it, she thought, in a moment of cold clarity. He’s going to kill me to save me. Wonderful.

  While he was distracted, she tensed the muscles in her arms and shoulders, and pulled.

  The rope around her wrists parted and, in the same motion, she brought the thin shard of glass up, arcing towards Gregory’s eyes. Under normal circumstances, she’d never have missed, but she was cold and slow, aching, and Gregory had felt the muscles tensing and jerked his head back. Not much, just enough.

  The glass dug a bloody furrow along his high cheekbone.

  Gregory slapped the sharp edge out of her hand and shoved her down, off balance; she fell on his black leather jacket and pushed herself up immediately, trying to get up, snatch at whatever advantage she’d gained . . .

  She froze at the sound of a round being chambered, and then Gregory’s gun pressed hard against the side of her head. He was breathing hard, and his hazel eyes were narrow and hot. Blood was sliding down his cheek. She’d stopped trembling. He’d just begun.

  It took him a long moment to master himself enough to say, “Dorogoi, you must still have fight left in you, if you can do that. Good. You will need it.” Then he took the gun away from her head, reached behind his back, and came out with a short-bladed knife – wickedly sharp. He sliced through the bonds on her ankles. “Up. Get up.”

  She stared at him, confused, convinced for a second that this was merely another manoeuvre from a clever opponent. But he held out his hand to her, and there was, in that moment, some connection forged between them, strong as iron.

  She took his fingers and let him lift her to her feet. His arms steadied her and, for a moment, one moment, she let herself collapse against his warm, solid body. His breath left him in a slow, regretful sigh as he combed his fingers gently through her hair. “The lockbox was destroyed,” he whispered, lips close to her ear. “I found it. I put it, and its contents, through a commercial incinerator. It’s a heap of slag that will never be identified, much less found. The codes are meaningless. Tell me where to find them.”

  “I don’t know. I never did.” That was, in fact, the truth. She’d killed Czerny because she knew for a fact that the only place the codes existed was in his head, and that the lockbox – wherever he’d hidden it – couldn’t be opened without the codes or the contents would be destroyed. It had been the best of a set of bad choices. “Kill me or let me go, Gregory.”

  He’d already turned against his employers – a deadly position to be in, with these people. She hoped he’d covered his tracks sufficiently. It was extremely dangerous to tell her what he’d done, and she automatically assumed he was lying. But if he was telling the truth . . . “Why?”

  He knew what she was asking. “Perhaps even I flinch, from time to time,” he said. “Perhaps you do, as well.”

  Gregory Valentin Ivanovich was Russian, through and through – cold, controlled, perfectly professional, but also emotional, when something touched him through that reserve. Somehow, she had touched him. And, to be truthful, he had touched her, too – there was something illogically comforting about being held by him.

  She turned her head, and they were suddenly looking at each other from the distance of mere inches, their faces intimately close.

  He kissed her. She gasped, surprised by the sudden, bright warmth of his mouth seeking hers, surprised by the promise of a connection she didn’t think either of them had looked for, or truly wanted. Complications. There were always complications to seeing each other as merely . . . human.

  He was a very good kisser. Even exhausted, weary and in pain as she was, she felt a whisper of something inside. If things were different . . .

  But they weren’t different.
They were, in fact, just getting more dangerous.

  “You can’t let me go,” she said. She still tasted him on her lips, warm and musky sweet, and she wanted to taste him again, deeply. She could see that same light in his eyes, that need for connection in the cold, hard world that both of them shared. “Gregory, they’ll kill you if you don’t deliver. You said so.”

  “They’ll kill you no matter what I do,” he said. “I am a brilliant liar, zolotoi, but I can’t seem to lie well to you. So when I tell you that I cannot see you hurt any longer, you may take that as the truth. There is no point to it. I’ve walked away many times, but this time – no. I won’t let them have you.”

  She swallowed and nodded. “Then what?”

  “You escape,” he said. “But you will need to be fast, and ruthless. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded. She put her arms through the sleeves of his jacket, and wrapped the blanket around her waist as best she could.

  He handed her his gun. She gripped the warm weight of it reflexively, startled, and looked into his eyes again.

  He pulled her hand forwards, positioned the gun where he wanted it, and said, “Shoot.” His voice was soft, husky and gentle.

  She didn’t hesitate.

  The noise of the shot was deafening in the empty room, and the kick of the pistol rocked through Lucia’s body and woke agony in damaged muscles.

  Gregory was still standing. His eyes remained open, but they were vague, unfocused, and he put a hand over the small hole in his side. Blood was starting to show on his expensive white shirt.

  He reached behind his back and pulled out another handgun – a match for the one she had in her hand. He didn’t raise it. Instead, he leaned forwards, put his lips close to her ear, and whispered, “Very good. Now, run for your life.”

  He staggered and collapsed to his knees.

  She didn’t have time to say she was sorry; it was illogical to even think about it. She slammed her shoulders against the wall to one side of the door just as it opened. She fired, not waiting to see who was on the other side; no one here, beyond Gregory, had been her friend or ally. It was the plain woman, the one who’d brought the tea about a century ago. Lucia shot, killing her in a messy red spray. The woman stayed standing for a moment, staring blankly, and then her eyes turned up, whites showing, and she went down.

  Lucia jumped over the woman’s body and kept running. Bullets followed her, from a guard station down the hall; she engaged in broken-field running – or, more accurately, stumbling, considering the devastatingly numb conditions of her legs and feet. She was trying to avoid presenting a clear target, and as she passed doorways she yanked them open behind her to cover her trail. It worked. The air was shattering from the noise of the guns barking behind her, but she got nothing worse than a graze.

  She hit the end of the hall, and an exit door, and stumbled out into the ice-cold Prague night – into a chill that took away what little breath she had left in a ragged plume of white. Stars glittered overhead. Beyond the door was a shattered landscape of wreckage – a building that had either been brought down, or fallen of its own accord. Bricks and metal and timber, all tangled and heaped. Lucia looked around quickly, but the other options were worse – open ground, bright lights, no traffic or streets within sight. No other standing buildings close enough to serve as cover.

  It was the best cover she could hope for, but as she ran forwards she lost the blanket on a ragged edge of rebar, and her feet began to bleed from the sharp bite of masonry and metal.

  None of that mattered. It was her only hope, and small wounds could be endured. Had to be endured. Her breath came fast and broken as she clambered over the piles of bricks and twisted metal, and there was only one thought left to her: survive.

  Bullets flew over her head, and sparked on concrete near her body. She risked a glance back. A man had come out of the door with a rifle, and he was sighting down on her back.

  She heard the flat snap of a shot and waited for the end.

  Instead, she clearly saw the sniper’s body fall.

  Gregory. He came out of the door, put another bullet in the back of the sniper’s head, and looked up towards her, where she was silhouetted by the starlight, staring back.

  It seemed to last a long time, that stare, although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds at most. He wouldn’t have risked it.

  Gregory lifted his gun and began firing methodically, carefully, bullets ringing off the metal and stone around her.

  Missing her.

  She wished she could have said something to him. Something like thank you. She could see that half his shirt was soaked with blood now, black in the moonlight.

  She didn’t know how he would survive this night. He’d broken so many rules, and was still breaking them.

  She didn’t know how she would survive, either. Only that she would.

  She saved her breath, turned, and ran as the rest of his team boiled out of the warehouse behind him. The last she saw, as she crested the rubble and began to descend the other side, was Gregory holding up his hand to halt their progress, and then collapsing. Some gathered around him.

  Others came after her.

  She ran hard, for her life.

  It was a long, terrible night, a surreal blur of pain, cold, confusion, and – when she was finally spotted by the local police – embarrassment, because she’d completely forgotten her state of nakedness. Gregory’s leather coat was all that saved her from being completely nude. The police – not unreasonably – assumed she had been attacked, and took her to the hospital, where her injuries were treated. She half expected Gregory to pop out of the shadows at any turn, for the nightmare to begin again, but there was no sign of him, or any of his team. No doubt they’d be monitoring the hospitals and police frequencies, though. She knew she didn’t have much time.

  She called her section chief from the emergency room before she allowed them to start treating her.

  Ten minutes later, two black sedans pulled up outside the hospital’s entrance, and six men got out – two she knew, including her section chief, Danny Miller. He was young for his position, not much older than her, but Danny had a streak of useful ruthlessness that made her seem tame.

  He looked her over in her hospital gown for the space of about two seconds. “Clothes are in the car. Can you walk?”

  Shock had set in, and she wasn’t sure she could, really, but pride made her stand. She took Gregory’s black leather jacket and draped it over her shoulders, and walked under her own power out of the hospital, in the tight company of the other agents. Danny stayed to talk to the doctors and police. It only took a few seconds.

  She slid into the back seat of the sedan. Danny Miller got in next to her, and two of the others took the front. The rest went to the second car.

  “How bad are you?” Danny asked.

  “I’ll live,” she said. “Some of the cuts are pretty deep. I’ll need stitches.”

  He turned and looked her in the face. His brown eyes were bleak and unreadable. “No,” he said. “How bad are you, Lucia?”

  She was still shaking. Couldn’t stop shaking. She thought about Gregory, collapsed on the open ground, left behind, left to be pulled apart by either his own team, or his employers.

  His choice. She felt sick.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think I’m pretty bad.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I thought.” He leaned forwards and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Airport.”

  “Danny—”

  “You’re going home,” he said. “You’re of no use to me right now. Get your head together. Get healed. Then we’ll see.”

  Going home. That seemed . . . unreal. Like someone else’s fantasy, not her own. She couldn’t remember what home was. What it was like.

  She was so cold.

  She wondered if she would ever seen Gregory Valentin Ivanovich again, and if so, if they would kiss, or kill each other. Or both.

  On board th
e agency’s private jet, Lucia wrapped his black leather jacket more firmly around her shoulders and closed her eyes against the throb of the engines. She buried her hands in the pockets, and for the first time felt the crisp rustle of paper against her fingers.

  She pulled out a blank white card, on which was written a phone number. No name. Nothing to indicate what it was, or why it was there. She smiled

  He’d called her zolotoi. Russians didn’t use the same endearments as Americans; it wasn’t my sweet or honey. It meant gold.

  He’d been calling her my treasure.

  “Until later, my enemy,” she whispered, in Russian. “Until later.”

  She hoped that was true.

  VeriSEAL

  Marliss Melton

  One

  Dr Libby Granger, Professor of English Literature, moved down the dark, echoing hallway towards her office, grateful for the quiet. Winter break had begun three hours ago when the last student in Victorian Lit. relinquished her exam. The corridor, usually jammed with college students, stood dim and empty, as someone had extinguished the lights in anticipation of the holiday.

  Libby was the last professor to leave. Why hurry home when her older brother Daren was out at sea this Christmas? As executive officer of the USS Monterey, he had obligations that his only living relative had to live with.

  As she turned the corner to her office, her breath caught to see a dark shape standing by her door. “Who’s there?” she called, hoping wildly that her brother had come ashore earlier than expected.

  But then the silhouette detached itself from the wall and, with disappointment, she recognized her visitor as the graduate assistant from the history department. “Mr Kimball,” she said, reaching for her keys. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  The unexpected answer had her searching his face for a motive, but in the gloomy hallway, she couldn’t read his expression. She knew that he was young and handsome, a favourite among the coeds, who discussed him with giggles and rolling eyes. According to his introduction to the staff that fall, he had been a Navy SEAL.