The Complete Mackenzie Collection

by Linda Howard

  Oh, she hadn’t gone so far as to think he was in love with her, but she had still thought he cared, at least a little. But she had been confusing sexual technique with emotions. He had none, at least none that she could reach. He was always controlled, his inner self firmly locked away from everyone except his immediate family. She was beginning to see the wisdom of that. Right now she would give anything if her own emotions had been that protected, so she wouldn’t be about to collapse and curl up in a fetal knot from the pain of it. She would do so if she thought it would ease the pain, but she knew it wouldn’t. There was no ease.

  Perhaps when he knew the truth he would expect to continue their affair as if nothing had happened. Caroline tried to imagine how she would handle the situation if he did, but she simply couldn’t bring anything to mind.

  Nor could she imagine continuing to work here, seeing him every day. She had always been right, after all, never to become involved with anyone. The first time she had done so had certainly been a disaster. So now she either had to do the unthinkable and somehow manage to survive working with him, or she had to ruin her professional reputation by asking to be taken off the project.

  It looked as if her work would be all she had, so she’d be damned if she would throw that away just because of a man, even if that man was Colonel Joe Mackenzie. If it took every ounce of strength she had, she would finish this damn project. She would talk with him about work. She would even be polite. But there was no way she would ever risk opening her heart to him again. She simply couldn’t afford the pain. This was already costing her almost more than she could bear, and the ordeal had just begun.

  “Cal Gilchrist categorically denies finding her ID card under her desk,” Hodge told Joe later. It was almost midnight, but there was no possibility of sleep in sight. “He says she called him early Friday morning and asked him to walk her to the building because she thought someone had followed her the morning before and it made her nervous. He says he also went inside with her for a quick check of the building, then returned to his quarters to shower and shave.”

  Joe’s face was stony. He hadn’t allowed himself to hope that Gilchrist would verify everything she had said. It would have been asking for too much, when the sensors had plainly placed her there when she shouldn’t have been.

  “Then why use him for an alibi? She must have known he wouldn’t cover for her.”

  “Maybe not. Evidently they’re fairly good friends. Certainly Adrian Pendley wouldn’t have gone a single step out of his way for her. And maybe she and Gilchrist had something going on in the past, for her to feel confident he would protect her if he could.”

  “No.” At least he was certain about that. Caroline had never been intimate with anyone but him. Before Ivan could question him on his certainty Joe asked, “What about Korleski? Did they discuss the possibility that the problem was with the computer program?”

  “Yes. She told the truth right down the line with that. He verified that she’s the one who suggested the program be checked. He was also vehement that she wouldn’t sabotage a project so she could have the credit of saving it. Neither did he believe she would do it for money.”

  “Did he think anyone else on the laser team would do it for either money or prestige?” Joe asked.

  Ivan shook his head.

  “How do the rest of them check out?”

  “It’ll take time to reverify everything, but all of them are spotless. I never would have suspected her if it hadn’t been for the entrance and exit records.”

  Joe could understand that. He never would have suspected her, either, but then, he hadn’t been able to see past his own obsession with her. All he’d been able to think about was getting her in bed and burying himself in that sweet body. Now he had to wonder how much of it had been calculated, if she had indeed been so attracted to him that she’d given up her virginity to him with hardly a thought or if she had done it…God, what possible reason was there for making love with him the way she had, other than desire? No, she hadn’t come on to him in an attempt to find out classified information on Night Wing or to use him for protection if she were caught. She hadn’t needed him to find out anything; she had access to all the information she wanted. And it was simply too iffy to assume he would protect her just because he’d slept with her. Caroline had wanted him. Even if he couldn’t trust anything else about her, he could trust that.

  So what did he do now? He’d never before been so enraged and…hurt. He might as well admit it. This had been like taking a roundhouse to the gut. Nobody had ever gotten to him the way Caroline had, with her uncomplicated fierceness. She had been forthright and brutally honest, without any hidden agenda or stratagems. He wanted to be able to step back from the situation and look at it without emotion, but he couldn’t.

  He’d never felt about any aircraft the way he felt about Night Wing. It was special. It was more than special. It was history in the making, pure magic in the air. He would give his own life unhesitatingly to protect those planes, because they were necessary to protect his country. Simple patriotism, pure love for those birds. They were his.

  And he’d considered Caroline his, too. His woman.

  If the choice had been simply between Caroline and the aircraft, he would have chosen Caroline. He might despise himself for it, but he couldn’t have stood by and let her be harmed. But between Caroline and his country… There was no choice. There couldn’t be. He couldn’t let there be. No matter how fierce and gutsy she was, no matter how she challenged him on a level no one else ever had before and threw herself without restraint into the battle. She hadn’t let him be gentle when he’d taken her for the first time; she had insisted on receiving his full strength and had met him with her own. Caroline met life head-on, without wavering.

  He paused in his thoughts, a tiny frown puckering his eyebrows. Caroline didn’t seem the type to sneak around in the dark. Maybe he hadn’t known her as well as he’d thought, but he would have sworn there wasn’t a devious bone in her body.

  He wanted to see her. He wanted to ask her some questions one on one, without anyone else in the room to buffer them. He would get the truth out of her come hell or high water.

  Chapter 11

  He had intended to go straight to her quarters, but he stopped halfway there and detoured to his own quarters in the BOQ instead. He was too angry to face her now, especially in the temporary civilian housing where there would be too many onlookers who didn’t need to know any of what was going on.

  He didn’t think he’d ever been this angry before, but then, he’d never been betrayed like this before. Damn it, why would she do something like that? It had to be money, but he’d never understood the mentality that could view treason as just another financial opportunity.

  Treason. The word reverberated through his consciousness. If she were charged and convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her natural life behind bars, without possibility of parole.

  He would never make love to her again. The thought made him erupt with fury, and he restlessly paced the small confines of his quarters. One weekend hadn’t been enough. He doubted that a thousand weekends would be enough to get her out of his system. Nor could he let himself forget that he had made love to her twice without protection. Despite her assurances that the timing was wrong, she could be pregnant.

  Hell, what a mess! If she was pregnant…There wasn’t any use in borrowing trouble; he’d know soon enough. But what would he do if she was carrying his child? There still wasn’t any way he could keep her out of prison.

  That was assuming she would even tell him. By the time she had left his office that night she had refused to even look at him. He’d been watching her, trying to read her reactions, and all of a sudden she had started withdrawing. He’d seen it happen right in front of his eyes. It was as if a light had been quenched. All the vitality, the responsiveness, the incredible energy of her, had vanished, and all that had been left was a frozen mannequin of a woman who had answere
d in a monotone and whose eyes were as blank as a doll’s.

  It had been infuriating to see her that way. He had wanted to jerk her to her feet and shake her, to make that wonderful, uncomplicated anger come rushing upward to meet him. But he hadn’t. If he gave in to those urges, he would lose his control once and for all, and he never wanted to do that.

  What he did want to do, more than anything else in the world, was storm over to her quarters and make love to her so hard and so long that when it was over she would know she belonged to him. Maybe it wouldn’t solve any of this, but it would sure as hell make him feel better. But he couldn’t do that, either. Seeing her at all would knock down the last critical brick behind which he had dammed up his temper, releasing a flood of emotion that would sweep him away along with everything else.

  Caroline lay on top of the covers on her narrow mattress, too listless to crawl between the sheets and actually go to bed. Such a normal action was beyond her. She had showered and dressed for bed, but she couldn’t even go through the motions of pretending to sleep. All she could do was lie there in the silent darkness and stare at the ceiling. She could feel her heart beating, feel the slow, rhythmic expansions of her rib cage as she breathed. Those actions said that she still lived, but she didn’t feel alive. She felt numb, dead inside.

  By now they would have talked to Cal, who would have verified that she’d been telling the truth. Joe would know that he’d been wrong, but somehow that didn’t give her any satisfaction. Still, she had expected at least a phone call from either him or Captain Hodge, to say “Sorry, we made a mistake.” Surely they wouldn’t be stupid enough to think she was resting and would rather they wait until morning to tell her.

  Or Cal could have lied.

  She couldn’t deny the possibility. The thought had slipped into her consciousness not long after she had lain down on the bed. If she hadn’t been so upset, it might have occurred to her earlier. It was the natural progression of the line of thought she had been following earlier in the hangar, when she had been staring at the laser pod and sorting out the various ways in which what had happened could have happened.

  Cal was a whiz with computers. He was the one who had found that minor glitch on Friday, but only when Caroline had begun nosing around the computer. She hadn’t thought anything of it then, but if he had tampered with the commands, he wouldn’t have wanted her to really concentrate on the program. He knew she had a degree in computer science, because they had talked shop on several occasions. And on both Friday and today—yesterday, now, since it was past midnight—he had really looked exhausted. From being up all night? Cal was normally as bouncy as a rubber ball.

  And Cal was the only other person who had touched her ID tag. Maybe he had picked it up on Thursday when she’d lost it and had left when she had so that the sensors would match the number of warm bodies leaving with the number of ID cards. She hadn’t known the sensors monitored those leaving the buildings, too, but maybe Cal had; after all, he’d been working here from the beginning and noticed things like that, while she tended to pay attention only to what directly concerned her job.

  Even if he had used her ID tag to regain entrance to the building Thursday night, she knew he hadn’t had it on Sunday night.

  But how easily could they be duplicated? He would have had to leave the base to get it done, but she was certain it was possible. After all, the sensors had said she had reentered the work area at midnight, which would have given him several hours to have a copy made.

  Then she had called him on Friday morning asking him to search the office for her tag, which had given him the perfect opportunity to return it to her and keep security from being notified. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to use the card again, because security would have removed that particular code from the computers.

  She stopped her thoughts and rubbed her forehead, trying to force everything into making sense. If her call for help had been pure chance, then there wouldn’t have been any reason for him to have had the card duplicated. Had he played the odds that she would call him? They were good odds, she had to admit. She wouldn’t have called Yates, and she certainly wouldn’t have wasted her time calling Adrian. It was also a good bet that she wouldn’t have wanted to call security. Not a certainty, but good enough that it wasn’t much of a risk, either.

  So what had happened then? The sensors showed both her and Cal entering the building, then both leaving. He must have had her card on him where the sensor could read it, thereby establishing proof that he hadn’t had the opportunity to tamper with the computer program because he hadn’t been in there alone. But why hadn’t the sensor noticed that there were two cards but only one body?

  Maybe the sensors weren’t as good as Captain Hodge obviously liked to believe they were. Maybe they were programmed to catch people without cards, but no one had thought to program it to catch cards without people. Maybe Cal had figured out a way to fool it. There were a lot of maybes, all of them possible. As good as he was with computers, maybe he had somehow gotten into the base computers and logged her both in and out of the building that morning. She didn’t know and might never find out.

  But what would Cal do now, if he were guilty? If the programs had been tampered with, he would know that analysis would discover it. Would he try to get back into the program and cover his tracks by undoing what he had done, hoping that the analysis wouldn’t go any further than a simple comparison? Or would he try to plant more evidence against her?

  She had to go with the second option. It was so much more feasible. Why would Cal go to so much trouble only to undo it? No, as long as the finger was pointing toward her, he would be smart to try to make certain it remained pointing in that direction.

  Her heart suddenly began thundering in her chest. If Cal were guilty, if he were going to do anything else, he would have to do it tonight, while things were still in an upheaval. Given enough time, the security net would settle down so tightly that nothing would be able to escape, but there were still windows of opportunity when things first started happening.

  She knew the entire laser team was being restricted from the work area, but had their bar codes already been deleted from the computers? The military worked a lot like big business when it came to office work: most of it was done during the day. Since the restriction order had only been issued that night, had Captain Hodge called in someone to enter it into the computer or left it to be done first thing in the morning? Knowing human nature, she would bet on the latter. After all, she was the only one under suspicion, and she was probably under surveillance in the interim.

  On a hunch she rolled out of bed and silently walked to the small, old-fashioned crank-out window set high in the wall in the kitchen area. She had to stand on a chair to see out of it. Sure enough, a security police car was parked on the opposite side of the street. In the glow of the streetlight she could plainly see two men in the front seat. They were making no effort to disguise their purpose, but then, why should they? This wasn’t clandestine surveillance, but plain old guard duty.

  There was no other door.

  There was, however, another high, narrow window in the bedroom. In the almost total darkness she carefully made her way back to the bedroom and stared at the small oblong of light in the wall. A man certainly couldn’t get through there, and she had doubts that she could, either. Nevertheless, she stood on the bed and peeped out. That side of the street was empty.

  Well, there was no point in putting herself to a lot of trouble if Cal was peacefully sleeping in bed. She mustn’t let herself forget that he might be totally innocent, that he had indeed verified her story. Innocent until proven guilty was the law of the land, though Captain Hodge could use a little refresher course in the concept.

  She didn’t want to turn on any lights, alerting those two out front that she was awake, so she dialed Cal’s number by feel. What better way to find out if he was in his quarters than to call him? If he answered, she might even chat awhile.

&n
bsp; By the fifth ring she began to have serious doubts that he was there. She let it ring longer, just in case he was sleeping very soundly, but on the twentieth ring she replaced the receiver. Twenty rings, especially since the phones were installed right beside the beds to make certain the occupants would be awakened by any middle-of-the-night phone calls, would wake even the soundest of sleepers. Cal wasn’t in his quarters.

  She clenched her teeth in anger. Damn him! She had thought he was her friend; she had liked him, trusted him. First Joe, now Cal. Her mind immediately shied away from Joe, because that hurt was too powerful to linger over. It was much safer to focus her anger on Cal.

  She stared up at that little window again. Two long, narrow louvered panes that cranked out to let the built-up heat of the day escape. She would have to dismantle the entire mechanism in the dark, and even then, she wasn’t certain she would fit through the slot.

  Well, she would never know if she didn’t try.

  Working on lasers and computers had made her familiar with tools, and she never traveled anywhere without a small pouch containing a selection of screwdrivers and pliers, because she never knew when she would need them. She fetched the pouch from the closet and dumped the tools out on the bed. Problem was, in the dark she couldn’t tell which tool she needed.

  She did have a pencil flashlight and decided she would have to take the risk of the small beam being detected through the window, but it wasn’t likely to throw a lighted patch on the ground outside and alert the guards. She climbed up on the bed and switched the flashlight on for only the smallest of intervals, just long enough for her to see that the screws holding the mechanism in place needed a Phillips head screwdriver. Five minutes later the two window slats and the cranking mechanism, in pieces, were lying on her bed.