Then again, maybe it was for the best. He had wanted her, that he could not deny, but making love to Billie when their lives were on the line would not have been the brightest idea he had ever had.
Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed every single moment before Andre Sardetsky and his crew came bursting through his door…
That was the one thing that bothered him: How had the Sardetskys found them? Had he really been followed? John reasoned that it was (much as he was loath to admit it) entirely possible that he and Billie had been observed by Andre or a member of his crew sometime after their escape from the Crabana. So that explained the shooting at the Coconut Hut.
But what about the shooting at the bar? No one save for Rex, his boss, and one other person knew he was in St. Thomas. So they hadn’t been there because of him. Andre and his crew had been at the bar to kill Billie or Sergei. Or both.
Well, they’d certainly succeeded in one aspect: Andre’s uncle was dead. Obviously no love lost there, John mused as they stepped into the air-conditioned airport terminal. But then, that was how Grigori Sardetsky operated his business. It didn’t matter if you were in the family by choice or by blood—if you betrayed him, you died. Piotr’s “betrayal” had been to walk away after his wife and daughter had died in a car bomb explosion meant for him.
Once he’d exacted vengeance on the rival family that had planted it, of course.
Billie paused a few feet inside the door and looked up at him. “Which airline? You said it was a chartered flight.”
“This way,” he replied, taking the lead and weaving through the throng. They ended up at the counter for Carter International Air.
The attendants at the counter had no idea that the up-and-coming charter flight airline they worked for was a front company for the CIA, though given the snort Billie tried to hide, she’d made the connection. Certainly it was a commercial business as well—Fortune 500 executives made use of their services every day—but their main purpose was to provide immediate access to a plane for the agency’s operatives in the field.
With a smile, John pulled his and Billie’s tickets from his bag and handed them to the man behind the counter. The nametag on his lapel said “Michael”, and he smiled politely as he accepted them, read the names, and entered the information into his computer. He next asked for their I.D.s, which he checked against the names and addresses on the tickets. When he had finished processing them, he attached the boarding passes and handed everything back to John.
“Thank you for choosing Carter International Air for your return home today, Mr. and Mrs. Tucker. Please enjoy your flight. If you step right through those doors, the plane is already waiting for you.”
“Thank you,” John replied with a nod, placing his hand at the small of Billie’s back as any husband would and guiding her gently toward the door Michael had indicated. When they had exited, Billie snorted again.
“Carter International Air? Kind of obvious, don’t you think?” she said.
“Yes and no,” he replied. “Certainly the initials are the same, but it’s also a legitimate business, not just safe transportation for the likes of us. Company line is that the founder chose the name in honor of President Carter.”
She shook her head. “If you say so. At least we get to keep our guns.”
“You wouldn’t feel safe without that Sig, would you?”
Though she didn’t look at him, out of the corner of his eye he saw her mouth twitch as she resisted a smile. “Sig, Glock, Beretta… I love my guns. They’re the only thing I can trust completely.”
John frowned. “You can trust me, Billie,” he told her.
She turned to him as they reached the steps leading up to the plane. “Can I? I’m not so sure about that,” she replied, then started her climb.
FOUR
Billie was glad they had the plane to themselves—it meant she wouldn’t have to make small talk with strangers.
Unfortunately, it also meant that, excluding the flight crew, she was alone with John. Though she had laid her seat back and closed her eyes, she could feel his gaze on her. Could practically hear the gears of his brain grinding as he was thinking. She had no doubt as to that he was thinking about, either:
That damn kiss.
She tried her damnedest not to think about it herself, but it kept intruding into her thoughts, sneaking up on her much the same as her reaction to the feel of John’s lips on hers. Like the kiss itself, her reaction was a shock. She hadn’t looked at another man twice since she met Travis, and when he’d died she had felt as though the woman in her had died with him. In the first few months, just getting up each day had been a struggle, and as time went on she found she’d had no interest whatsoever in sex or dating.
Then John Courtney came along and upended her entire life. She found herself admiring, somewhat, the arrogance and confidence with which he had gone to St. Thomas expecting she would go back with him. And much to her annoyance, she had found herself appreciating his looks along with those girls at the Coconut Hut. When he had lain on top of her, trapping her against the floor of his hotel room, she found herself liking—feeling excited, even—by the perfect fit of his body to hers. The feel of his muscled chest against her breasts, the hardness that had pressed against her mound. She had reveled in the naked lust she saw in his eyes, knowing it was she who had put it there. And though she had initially resisted responding to the pressure of his mouth on hers, she’d eventually given in.
It had felt so good to be kissed so thoroughly.
Stop it! she chastised herself harshly. Focus on the task at hand, not that stupid kiss.
Sighing internally, she slowly righted the back of her seat, opening her eyes to look at John. He was sitting across from her in an adjacent seat, staring out the window.
“Will we get back in time for the funeral, or do you think they’ve already held the service?” she asked.
John looked at her. “What funeral?”
“Eddie’s of course.”
His hesitation in answering set her already frayed nerves even more on edge. “What is it?” she demanded.
Drawing a hand over his face, John groaned, then said, “From that I was told, a service for Eddie is indefinitely on hold.”
Billie frowned. “What the fuck for?!” she cried.
“Because he killed two people and paralyzed a third,” John said.
She pushed to her feet and stalked away from him, then swung back. “This is bullshit. Eddie deserves a proper burial. He deserves to be laid to rest with full honors.”
“How do you figure, Billie?” he asked, leaning forward in his seat to brace his elbows on his knees. “Your pal Eddie took two lives before he could be taken down.”
Billie felt her expression drop into a scowl. “You are so fucking lucky we’re on a plane right now, because I want so badly to put a fucking bullet through your head. Don’t you dare talk about Eddie like he got what he deserved.”
John joined her in standing. “And you don’t think taking lives warrants losing your own?”
Billie pointed a finger in his direction. “This is not about that, or neither of us would be standing here right now.”
“Well then what is it about?” he asked, clearly frustrated.
“It’s not about the fact that Eddie killed those people, it’s about why he killed them,” Billie said. “You said last night that he ‘flipped the fuck out’—think about when that happened. He was never a violent man before this so-called ‘training program’, unless we were on assignment. It wasn’t until after he started taking those damn experimental drugs that he ‘flipped the fuck out’ and killed someone. I don’t know shit about that program and I already know that the drug or drugs they used are responsible for the change in Eddie.
“He was a good man, Agent Courtney. Eddie was a friend to everyone he met unless they gave him reason to feel otherwise. He even treated the assholes we went after with respect, unless they gave him shit. When on leave he volunteer
ed at soup kitchens and youth centers and VA hospitals. He was a good man and one of the best damn Marines I ever served with. He was one of the very few people I trusted with my life.”
Billie paused and took a breath. She found that John was looking at her with concern, sympathy emanating from his very posture. And she frowned. She didn’t want his damn pity—she didn’t want anything from him.
“Who was in charge of this experiment?” she asked.
John blinked. “What do you mean?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s a simple question, Agent Courtney: Who was in charge? The doctor or the general or whoever the fuck put this shit together, who was it?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t have all the details—”
Billie threw her hands up in the air. “Well that’s fuckin’ helpful! How the hell am I supposed to help the CIA do whatever the fuck it is you need my help with if I don’t have all the information?!”
John held his hands out. “Billie, calm down. I said I didn’t know all the details, I didn’t say I didn’t know who you’d want to talk to. I was told—”
She snorted derisively. “You were told just enough to get me to come back with you—that’s what you were told. Fucking asshole bureaucrats know there’re very few people in this hell-in-a-hand basket world I would come back for, my team among them, as well as my father and brothers.”
Standing back, he mimicked her earlier gesture, crossing his arms and giving her a pointed stare. “Do you want to know who to talk to or not?”
Scowling, Billie fisted her hands on her hips. “Please, enlighten me Agent Courtney with your piss-poor excuse for information.”
He lowered his arms. “The man you want to talk to first, I’m sure, is Brigadier General Sterling Wainright. He’s the one who recruited your team into the project.”
“Why them? Why this particular group of soldiers?”
John shrugged. “I’ve got no idea, except to think maybe he wanted the best guys in the service to be a part of the project.”
Billie couldn’t fight the corner of her mouth raising just a little. “Well, he certainly got that,” she said, then suddenly feeling her adrenaline ebb, she brushed past John to drop back into her seat. He followed suit and she found herself staring at him again.
“Why is the CIA involved?” she asked.
John grinned briefly. “The CIA is involved because you are. Wainright wants your help, but he didn’t know where to find you. So he turned to us. Rex and I were given the task of locating you and bringing you home.”
“And just how did you find me, Agent Courtney? I’ve worked the job, so I know how to cover my tracks. Georgia Ross isn’t even one of my recorded identities.”
“When your own name turned up nothing—which we expected—Rex and I studied some of your old mission files,” he began. “I came across a mutual connection between you and I—the Sardetskys. Since as you said you’d covered your tracks well and have been off the grid for the last year, I followed that lead. Whoever created the Sergei Pomarov identity for Piotr three years ago was good, but nowhere near as good as you. We found him easily enough.”
“But how did you know I was with him?” Billie pressed.
“We didn’t, at first. It was only speculation that you had something to do with his disappearance from St. Petersburg, so the plan was to ask him if he’d had any contact with you in the last year.”
She had to laugh. “You were planning to ask a known mafia hitman if he happened to know the whereabouts of a former CIA agent he crossed paths with three years ago?” She laughed again. “Did you really think that would get you anywhere?”
“You didn’t tell anyone where you were going, Billie,” John countered. “Hell, you didn’t even tell anyone you were leaving the continental U.S. Rex and I spoke to your father, your brothers—anybody with whom you were associated or had worked with in the past—and got nowhere. We knew we were going to have to think outside the box. Travis Mulcahy’s report on your interactions with Piotr Sardetsky indicated you had developed an unlikely rapport with the man. He responded to you like no one else.”
Billie had felt her heart stop at the mention of Travis’ name. His absence still felt like someone had reached into her chest and ripped out that heart, leaving a wide, gaping hole in its place. The psych profiles were right—she didn’t trust men easily. But Travis hadn’t been like any other man she had met. Instead of thrusting himself on her and into her life by brute force, he had slowly, painstakingly, wormed his way into her heart—into her very soul. He had been her partner before he was her friend. Her friend before he was her lover. Travis had become as important to her as her father and brothers, as important to her as the men on her old Force Recon team.
And then he had been taken away from her in an instant by a bullet meant for someone else.
Billie looked away from John to gaze out a window on the opposite side of the plane. She blinked rapidly to dispel the tears that threatened, surprised to find herself even able to produce any. She’d cried rivers for Travis, had resigned from the CIA and just walked away from her life, from the gut-wrenching pain his death had left in its wake. It was pure chance that she had ended up on the same plane as the former Piotr Sardetsky, assigned the seat next to his. They had recognized each other instantly, even though both of them had lost weight and Piotr had colored his light brown hair to black.
But more than that, she had recognized the haunted look in his eyes, the one that said you were missing a piece of who you were. She had come to know it all too well in the aftermath of her loss, having seen it in the mirror every time she made the effort to look into one.
After a long moment, she had simply taken her seat and introduced herself to him as Georgia Ross. He had introduced himself as Sergei Pomarov. And they had built their new lives together as friends.
“Sergei and I connected because I reminded him of his daughter,” she said after a while, her voice low and barely audible even to her own ears. “And we became friends later because we had something in common.”
John cleared his throat. “We, uh, once we’d found Piotr, we made contact with the local LEOs, ran a background check on his new identity. That’s how we found out he’d bought a bar on the beach of Flamingo Bay with his new business partner, a woman named Georgia Ross. When the locals faxed us a copy of Georgia’s driver’s license, that’s when we knew we’d found you.”
Billie turned back to John then, careful to keep her expression neutral. “And now for the big fish: Why does General Wainright need my help?”
John met her gaze squarely. “Because your friends Peck, Scofield, and Lincoln have all disappeared.”
He could see the wheels turning in her head from the moment he’d told her why having her back was so important. John watched her carefully, imagining that she was mentally reviewing every interaction she’d ever had with her crew. He wondered if she had any clue as to where they might have gone, and suspected the answer to that was a definite yes. But she’d never tell him. He was as certain of that as he was that her initial instinct would be to go to them.
He also knew she wouldn’t do that, either. He’d come to her with admittedly limited information, and Billie wanted answers. She would also want to see that Eddie Lamacek got the funeral service she believed he deserved, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she refused to help find the others until her demands were met.
Tenacity was another of her admirable qualities.
Eventually Billie had fallen asleep. He surmised that like he, she had gotten little to none after escaping the bar. And though he had tried to follow her example, John found himself unable to rest, and so he’d made a quiet call to Rex to report that he and Billie were on their way to Miami. He let his friend and partner know about the two attempts on Billie’s life and the death of Piotr Sardetsky, making sure to inform him that the hitman’s own nephew had led the crew sent to carry out the task.
“How in the hell did the Sardetskys find out where he was?” Rex had asked.
“I got no clue. I can only assume they found him the same way we did,” John had replied. “But they knew who she was, man, right down to her nickname.”
Rex had scoffed on the other end of the line. “Guess we can call that confirmation she helped Piotr get out of Russia.”
“At the very least, it proves she had a hand in talking him into giving up the life,” John said then. “Which is admirable, save for the fact that he was a man who killed for a living.”
“So did she, at one time,” Rex pointed out. “Don’t forget that, brother. Chick is hair-trigger dangerous.”
Reflexively he had rubbed his forehead, where more than once the business end of Billie’s Sig had met his skin and put him within moments of meeting his own death. “I’m well aware of that, believe me.”
Rex had then said that in case Andre Sardetsky was still tracking their movements—which was likely to be the case—he was going to arrange for a changeover to a commercial flight for their trip to D.C. John had thanked him and they’d hung up. Once more he’d tried to relax, as a glance at his watch showed there was still another hour to go before they reached Miami.
It seemed as though he had just drifted off when suddenly the pilot of their plane announced they were approaching Miami airspace. Billie had woken up as he spoke, rolling her neck from side to side and refusing to meet his gaze.
It was just as well. If he looked too long at her face, his eyes might drift to that mouth of hers. He didn’t need any reminders that she had perfect lips—not thin, but not Angelina plump—lips he wanted to taste again despite the dangers of doing so.
Two Evils Page 5