Wildfire

by Anne Stuart

  He didn’t give a damn one way or the other. He could wait to see how things unfolded. If she was still in love with MacDonald then he’d leave her if he could, kill her if he had to. If he found she could help him, if she was willing, then he’d consider getting her off the island. She had a certain skill set—or she had at one point—and those didn’t come easily. She’d hardly be welcomed back into the fold of the Committee, but there was always the possibility that the American branch might be willing to give her a chance.

  “Recover?” Archer echoed absently, and then he quickly plastered a sorrowful expression on his too-handsome face. “Tragically, she won’t. She’ll never walk again. I brought in the best specialists, but they all said it was hopeless.”

  Mal didn’t bother trying to look mournful. “It must be difficult,” he said in a bored voice. “Why don’t you just get rid of her?”

  Archer didn’t pretend to look shocked. They both knew who they were, what they were capable of. “Oh, I couldn’t do that. In sickness and in health and all that.”

  Mal had no trouble hiding the disgust he felt for the lying hypocrite. He was a professional. “Very noble.”

  “Oh, she can be quite entertaining. She does everything I tell her to. She’s quite desperate to please me.” Archer leaned forward. “As a matter of fact, you and she share something in common.”

  “Do we?”

  “My wife was once a member of the same organization you used to belong to,” Archer said casually, his blue eyes guileless as he dropped his bombshell.

  It took all Mal’s skill not to react. “Really? It’s not very many people who leave the Committee and survive. I never heard of her while I was there.”

  “No, you probably didn’t. They sent her to kill me and instead we fell in love.”

  “Are you sure she was Committee? How did you find out?” Mal asked, wary. Everything Archer said to him was probably some sort of test.

  Archer shrugged. “I have my methods.”

  “And how did she get past those methods?” he said casually.

  “We were in love,” Archer said simply, a bright smile on his face. “It makes even a genius stupid. You can’t imagine what it was like to have those gorgeous brown eyes shining up at you, full of love.”

  For a moment Mal pictured it, and he felt an uncomfortable hitch inside. He didn’t want anyone staring up at him with love—he didn’t believe in it. But Sophie’s brown eyes could test even the most stalwart resolution.

  “We were in love.” Mal didn’t miss the past tense. Clearly Archer included himself in the category of genius, and Mal wasn’t about to dispute it. Archer was shallow, venal, obsessed with himself, but it took a fair amount of brains to commit atrocities on an international scale and never get caught.

  He said nothing. Archer was telling him all this for a reason, but he couldn’t be certain why. Maybe he didn’t swallow the story that Malcolm was former Committee. “Interesting,” he said mildly enough. “How long ago did she work for my previous employers?”

  “Three years, give or take.”

  “After my time. I got out long ago,” he said. “So why is she still here?”

  “I told you. I enjoy keeping her around.”

  He wasn’t going to say anything more, so Mal changed the subject. “In the meantime, I’m here to talk about . . .”

  “Not tonight,” Archer protested. “I hate doing business in the evening. Why don’t we just relax, play some pool, enjoy ourselves? I don’t think I have to tell you that Sophie isn’t the only woman in the house, and the others are fully functional.”

  For some reason that pissed him off. First he cripples his wife, and then he mocks her? Mal didn’t have any illusions about what a monster Archer MacDonald was. “Not interested.” Any woman Archer offered would be there to spy on him. “Pool sounds good.”

  He rose, stretching, and Archer rose too. They were about the same height, Mal noticed. Six foot two or thereabouts, though Archer outweighed him by a good thirty pounds, all in his heavily muscled shoulders, none of which would slow Mal down when the time came. He fought dirty.

  Archer probably did as well, but not as dirty as Mal. He had no compunction, and most civilians, even psychos like Archer, were a little squeamish.

  It wasn’t going to come to that unless he made a mistake. He planned to take Archer out with a simple double tap to the back of the head: no muss, no fuss. But first he had to find out exactly who was supplying Archer with his biological weapons, in particular RU48, the ridiculously named Pixiedust. After that, the man would be toast.

  What was going to happen to the woman upstairs was another matter. Once she’d thrown over her mission, she lost all hope of protection. She deserved everything she got.

  He glanced at Archer. He had to be careful not to beat him at pool—that would put him in a bad mood, and Mal needed him feeling unthreatened for the time being. He grabbed his whiskey glass. “You in the mood for a little wager?”

  Archer’s eyes lit up. “My kind of man. I knew we’d get along the moment I saw you.”

  Mal said nothing, just smiled. Being chosen for this particular mission was no accident—Archer MacDonald was an Anglophile, a gambler, someone who had a bad habit of taking people at face value. All Mal had to do was show up, well dressed and suave, use a British accent, and Archer would be drawn to him. Not that the accent was entirely fake—Mal’s father was British, and after his parents separated, he’d gone to school in England, spending his vacations in the U.S. with his mother. He could slip between accents easily; he was fluent in French, Italian, and Spanish; he could be anyone he needed to be. Malcolm Gunnison was a convenient creation, close enough to who he really was to make the performance almost automatic. He’d used him a couple of times during the past few years when he’d been in the employ of the Committee—it was probably time to retire him. It was never a good idea to become too comfortable with an identity, particularly one that was so close to his real name.

  He didn’t make it to his bed until after three in the morning. Archer had been too drunk to notice that Mal wasn’t keeping up with him, though Mal did his best to slur his words slightly, just in case Archer cared. Archer’s performance as a devoted husband vanished as several beautiful young women joined them in the pool room: Rachel, Amy, and he forgot the other one’s name. Archer had seen to his own comfort quite nicely.

  Rachel had been the one to show Mal to the bedroom on the second floor, and she made it clear she would be more than happy to demonstrate the use of the heavy linen sheets, but he ignored the offer. “Where does Archer sleep?”

  Rachel lifted her brows. “Archer’s not usually into men,” she said cautiously.

  He controlled his instinctive irritation. It was little wonder she’d jump to that conclusion after his rejection of her truly spectacular body. She looked like a Barbie doll—tall, endless legs, big tits. He could say she wasn’t his type, but hell, she was anyone’s type. He didn’t bother to deny her suggestion. “I don’t want to wake anyone up. I don’t need much sleep—I tend to get up early, and I wouldn’t want to be a bother.”

  She gave him a long, measuring look. “Archer’s rooms are on the first floor. This floor is only half-renovated—be careful not to wander off from this area. There’s another bedroom that’s been redone, but the rest of the place is still under construction. It’s dangerous.”

  “So I’m alone up here?” That would be excellent—the last thing he needed was someone watching him, listening to him as he moved around the room, setting up his equipment.

  “Sophie’s rooms are next door. She sleeps very heavily, though—she takes enough Vicodin to knock out a horse,” Rachel said with a laugh.

  Good to know. “Why is she up here when she’s in a wheelchair? Is there an elevator?”

  “Why do you think Archer put her up here? This way she can’t show up where she’s not wanted. Months go by without Archer seeing her—out of sight, out of mind.”

 
“Must be hard on her,” he said in a noncommittal voice.

  Rachel shrugged. “She knows better than to complain. There’s not much she can do about it. As long as she gets her Vicodin she’s happy.”

  So Sophie Jordan was hooked on pain pills. No wonder he hadn’t heard anything about her—she’d simply disappeared into a cloudy world of drugs. It was good news. As he’d suspected, she wasn’t going to be any problem; she wouldn’t even guess why he was there. She wouldn’t interfere, and he wouldn’t have to kill her. He’d be more than ready to do so if necessary—he didn’t let anything get in the way of a job—but he preferred to keep the body count as low as possible. He could just leave her behind and someone else could clean up the mess.

  Rachel was lingering by the door, clearly wanting to stay, so he yawned extravagantly. She took the hint. “Good night, then. Maybe you’ll have more energy tomorrow.”

  He glanced at the Patek Philippe that was part of his cover. In fact, it was his own watch—it had been a very small part of his first sanctioned assignment for the Committee, and Peter Madsen, the current head, had told him to keep it. He seldom wore it—it would be too easy to identify him if he had some signature piece of clothing or jewelry—but for Malcolm Gunnison, so close to his own persona, it had felt right. “It already is tomorrow,” he pointed out easily.

  “You’ll find out that hours mean nothing here on the island. The day is when you get up, whether it’s six a.m. or six p.m., and it goes until you’re in bed.” She rose up and kissed him on his cheek, and she smelled like Poison. It was an excellent choice in perfume for her. “Maybe you’ll feel more welcoming tomorrow.”

  He said nothing, watching her go. She closed the door behind her, and the first thing he noticed was the lack of a key. What the hell did I expect? he thought. The only kind of lock Archer MacDonald would have was one that locked him in.

  He turned around and surveyed his room. It was cold from the air-conditioning—the faint hum would cover his movements if anyone happened to be listening, but he preferred fresh air, even tropical air. He turned it off, then pushed open the French doors to the inky dark night.

  There was a covered balcony running the entire side of the house, and the walkway was littered with boxes and wood scraps and the detritus of carpentry work. To the right there was one set of doors before the end of the building, and he looked at it through narrowed eyes. He hadn’t expected them to give him such unfettered access to a former Committee agent. They must know she was harmless—there was nothing she could do or say that would get in the way of Archer’s agenda. That, or all this was another test.

  He looked out into the night sky. There was a soft breeze, and he could smell the salt of the ocean not far away, the rich scent of the tropical foliage. He glanced down to the grounds, just in time to see someone with a gun turn the corner of the building. At least one outside guard then, possibly more. He turned back, his eye catching a quick glimpse of a nearly unnoticeable camera in the roof of the balcony. He didn’t pause or focus on it but strode back into his room, leaving the doors open to the night air.

  He was going to have to rethink his plans, he thought, pulling off his already-loosened tie. If there was a camera outside his room, then he could be damned sure there were some inside, and while the thought was tempting, he didn’t think it would be a good idea to train his own surveillance device on Archer’s. Not that he’d worry if he were caught—a man in his position, the position Archer believed was his, wouldn’t take any chances. Without moving he could see three cameras in the room, as well as two bugging devices, and there were doubtless more. He went to his case, slid his hands under his perfectly packed clothes, and released the latch on the false bottom. He found the bug detector by feel alone and drew it out, turning it on. Archer, or a minion, would be following his every move, and he had a part to play. The handheld machine began to screech, and he traced the noise to the bugs, each one in turn, yanking out the tiny cameras, pulling the microphones from the leads and crushing them beneath his foot. The cameras joined them, and he scooped up the shattered electronics, opened his door, and left them in a little pile outside, a message for Archer MacDonald. If Malcolm was who he was pretending to be, then he wouldn’t put up with being spied on. If Archer wasn’t smart enough to realize it before, he would now.

  According to the state-of-the-art bug zapper, there was no more surveillance, and so Mal undressed lazily, tossing his clothes on the nearby chair before pulling on some sleep pants. He was tired and he was restless. It was a good thing he didn’t need much sleep at night—he had trained himself to go for days without any sleep at all, and he’d had a positively decadent six hours the night before, tuning out the New Orleans street noise as well as the creaks and groans of the refurbished nineteenth-century mansion that was now the headquarters of the American branch of the Committee. Archer would sleep late, and Mal could make do with an hour or two after he finished a little reconnaissance. What better place to start than Sophie MacDonald, wife, operative, gullible traitor, drug addict? She’d be so out of it she wouldn’t even notice that she had a nighttime intruder.

  He was smart enough not to try the hallway—there would be more surveillance out there, and dismantling it might be considered overkill. No, he’d use the balcony—if he kept to the wall he could avoid the camera. Chances were she couldn’t lock her doors either, at least not from the inside, and he was more than adept at picking any lock he’d come across so far.

  He paid no attention to the cold tile beneath his bare feet. The noise of the air-conditioning would drown out any sound he might make, and Archer’s wife would be too doped up to hear him. He reached out and turned the handle on the door. Locked, but it only took a moment to fix that.

  The door opened silently, and the still body in the bed didn’t move. Stepping inside, he closed the door behind him, plunging the room into darkness again. He could see the pinpricks of a blinking red light in the vase of fresh flowers, see another in one corner of the room, a third beside the huge television screen. At least Archer had given her that much to fill her empty days, though he hoped to hell he’d let Sophie choose what she wanted to watch rather than stick her with football highlights. Those cameras wouldn’t pick up his movement in the midnight-dark room—there hadn’t been a camera invented that would pick up on him, not with the jammer clipped onto his sleep pants. He moved closer to Sleeping Beauty, looking down at her.

  No, she wasn’t conventionally pretty. Asleep, her muscles relaxed, her face scrubbed clean of makeup, she looked surprisingly ordinary, just a young American woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had shoulder-length brownish-blond hair in need of shaping, dark eyebrows, and he remembered her eyes as a deep chocolate brown. He looked for signs of pain marking her face, but it was smooth. Either Archer had paid for plastic surgery or Sophie was relatively pain-free.

  In his experience Vicodin didn’t do shit, but he was usually bleeding to death from some attack or another before he tried it, and there wasn’t much that would help that. Someone half his weight would be much more susceptible—maybe her liberal use of the drug kept the pain at bay. If so, he couldn’t blame her. If she took it simply to forget she was married to Archer MacDonald, he wouldn’t blame her either. She’d screwed the pooch when she’d ditched the Committee for a psychopath. She even seemed to believe the man still loved her. Maybe she just zoned out because being bound to a wheelchair was too depressing.

  Whatever the cause, it was his good luck, and he leaned over her, looking at her exposed arms for track marks. She looked in better shape than he would have thought, given her circumstances. Then again, she had to convey herself in a wheelchair—it would be logical for her arm muscles to start building. At this point she could give Michelle Obama a run for her money.

  He reached for the covers, ready to pull them down and finish his inspection when he changed his mind. He could do that later—for now he needed to check out the lay of the land, look for an easy
escape. There was a phone beside her bed, but he was willing to bet it wouldn’t ring anywhere but on this island. At least it meant help was only a phone call away. So was disaster for him.

  He stared at her closely, leaning down. She was breathing easily, deep and solid, and if she wasn’t sound asleep, then she was a better operative than he was, and that was a stone-cold impossibility. He stepped back, moving around the room, cataloging its contents. There wasn’t much that could end up helping him. Not that he’d expected she’d have a handgun beside the bed, and besides, he was well armed beneath that secret panel in his suitcase. She wasn’t going to provide any particular help for him during this job, but she probably wasn’t going to be a hindrance either. He’d get away with ignoring her just the way her husband did, unless the bastard came by for his occasional conjugal visit.

  That bothered the hell out of him, and he wasn’t sure why. If she was still in love with Archer, she was probably pathetically grateful for any attention he gave her.

  He backed away from her slowly, his eyes running over her. She looked just the slightest bit fragile, vulnerable, exactly the kind of woman he found annoying. He had no savior complex—he liked women who could take care of themselves and didn’t need rescuing.

  Still, there was something about her, something sensual in her smooth, pain-free face, her soft, generous mouth, her tousled hair as it spread out over the pillow behind her, and for a moment he fantasized about having her beneath him, that tawny hair spread out on his pillow. And then he made an almost silent sound of disgust. What the hell was wrong with him? He never had sex when he was on assignment, not unless it was part of his cover, part of his job. Fucking Archer’s crippled wife was in no way part of the plan.