Run Among Thorns

by Anna Louise Lucia

  Passport for Jenny Waring. It is hard to prove kidnapping if you’ve handed in your passport yourself at the airport before getting on a plane for home.

  New clothes for Jenny Waring. Well, she needed clothes. And he didn’t want her getting comfortable in her own stuff.

  Plane tickets to Glasgow, Scotland. Because he wanted to take her to his Galloway longhouse. The two-roomed cottage in the middle of nowhere would give her nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide from him. And no interruptions.

  He dragged his attention back to John again, who was speaking.

  “Er … Mr. McAllister? We’re going to need a more, er, precise location. I can’t just tell my superiors you’re going to Scotland. They’ll want more.”

  “Then tell them not to be greedy.”

  “I don’t think …”

  “I’m not asking you to. I believed I had specified my conditions for involvement clearly. I take the subject to a location of my choice. I debrief the subject there, without interruptions. Revealing the precise location would compromise my privacy and negate the usefulness of solitude.” And he’d just said more than he usually did, anyway.

  “I, er … I see, sir.” John looked back down at the clipboard, pulled a sheaf of papers free, and pulled a pen from his pocket. “Then if you’ll just sign here, sir, I’ll confirm the transfer of funds to your account by phone.”

  McAllister hesitated, then leaned forward and made a large, flamboyant cross on the signatory line. He smiled.

  John blinked at it. “Sir? I…”

  “I don’t sign anything. Ever. Okay, John?” He was impatient to get going, to crack her open and see what was inside, and he was tiring of this polite charade. He tried to keep the temper out of his voice.

  “You make the call. I get a call from my bank. I leave, I do the job, I report back. I maintain contact with daily phone calls. Finite.” He watched the doubts flicker across John’s face and guessed he was going to have to do some more talking. Which, just now, was the last thing he felt like doing.

  He found himself thinking about Bradley’s job offer. His old comrade in arms was one of the few people on this planet who had a vague idea where McAllister was and what he was doing from year to year, although they hadn’t met up for more than eighteen months now.

  Bradley had walked into a gem of a job, handling security deployment and training for an international airline. He had dropped an e-mail into McAllister’s private account a couple of months back, offering him the opportunity to head up the security office in a country of his choice. Kier had had no hesitation in refusing, but Bradley made it clear that the offer was open indefinitely.

  There was nothing in the prospect that attracted him. He liked his job; he was good at it. And if some projects left a bitter taste in his mouth, well there was no such thing as one hundred percent job satisfaction was there? He was satisfied with ninety-five percent.

  And he’d worked for these people before.

  They called themselves the Agency, nothing more, nothing less. Working from this one facility, their headquarters, they seemed to act on their own agenda without external interference. From the work he’d done for them he had pegged them as something in counterterrorism, maybe counterespionage. But, frankly, he wasn’t interested in their aims and objectives. They gave him the sort of work he was best at, the sort of work he thrived on. It was enough.

  John was reshuffling his papers, not quite looking at him. He got up and went to the phone on the wall, began speaking into it quietly. McAllister went back to the window. Waring was still sitting there.

  There was something about this woman that intrigued him, quite apart from her obvious skills. She just didn’t fit the mould, didn’t conform to the usual agent profile, even for deep, deep cover operatives. She seemed too … fresh, too natural.

  He wondered how long those dark curls actually were, when they weren’t scrunched up into an untidy mess at the back of her head. Then he frowned at the thought. Since when had hairstyles come into his job, exactly? He sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. He needed to get going. This whole thing would fall into place once he’d gotten her safely to Galloway and started working on her.

  Behind him, John hung up the phone. “There is one last thing, sir. In light of the fact you won’t sign anything, I will simply have to ask for your assurance.”

  McAllister turned back to him and raised an eyebrow.

  “My superiors would like the subject back in one piece. That means no lasting physical harm.”

  With the cynicism he’d perfected over the years, that one shouldn’t have made him mad, but it did. “Perhaps you’ve hired the wrong man,” he said, smooth as silk. “My work is entirely mental, Mr. Dawson. I won’t say I don’t lay a finger on my subjects, because I do. But I don’t physically abuse them.” Why would he, if the mental approach did the job so much more easily? “If you were wanting bamboo splinters under the fingernails, you called the wrong man.”

  Dawson held up placatory hands. “I had to say it, sir. They insisted.”

  McAllister nodded. Then, “What did she say to you?”

  He hesitated, just a fraction too long to get away with who? or what do you mean? “She said, ‘please.’“

  Was that a trace of condemnation in Dawson’s voice? McAllister stared, but could read nothing in his face. Then the phone rang, and Dawson motioned McAllister towards it. He took the call, listening to the confirmation of a tidy little deposit from his bank. That would see him through the year without having to take another job, if he didn’t get the urge. Problem was, he got the urge far too often.

  He was good at his job, after all.

  McAllister looked over at the woman who was now his charge. He didn’t really anticipate any trouble over this one. There were a few facts that intrigued him, mostly what had triggered her to take action in that office courtyard, why she had broken such a perfect cover.

  Watching the road ahead, he reviewed in his mind his likely tactics over the next few days. She was already suffering from sleep deprivation and exhaustion. The Agency’s interrogation at the facility had taken care of that. They were not the most subtle of men there. True, the only marks on her had been there before they got their hands on her, but he’d seen the transcripts. About thirty-six hours of questions.

  She must be a fine actress, this Jenny Waring. Her repertoire evidently included confusion, fear, desperation, and hysteria. And then there was the terror. Reviewing the tapes of the interrogation, he hadn’t been able to help the little shiver that went down his spine when she’d slipped into that perfectly executed catatonic state, rocking backwards and forwards and talking rubbish.

  She was good.

  But he was better.

  In his opinion John had shown an error of judgement in calling medical advice on that one. She had to have been running out of energy; she would have slipped up soon.

  No matter. He had her now. Mentally she might possibly be a match for him, but physically she wasn’t even close, and if necessary he could use that.

  Even the best of them had only lasted four days.

  Slipping another glance at her as they headed north out of Newton Stewart, deep into the Galloway forest, he assessed her again. That generous mass of dark curls almost hid her slight build. It was the thinness and fragility of her wrists that betrayed it the most.

  In exhaustion, her skin was translucent, like porcelain, the blue lace of fine veins showing here and there. Her eyes were closed but he recalled hazel eyes, fringed by thick long lashes that now lay fanned across her cheek. Her lips were pale now, pinched, her mouth slightly open.

  A few locks of her hair had fallen forward over her bare throat, highlighting the whiteness of her skin.

  He wanted to touch it.

  His brows snapped together in a sudden frown. Imperceptibly his assessment had moved off the professional into another realm. He pulled his mind back to the job at hand, aware of a faint distaste about the whole business, w
hich certainly hadn’t been there when he’d worked on others.

  He’d been something of a prodigy. His quick mind and forceful personality put him at the head of his field at a younger age than most. He’d been doing work like this for, what, twelve years? He’d drawn satisfaction from a job well done, had come close to enjoying it once or twice, once too close for comfort, and he’d never had any trouble with his conscience.

  Not once.

  Ranks of pine trees flashed by, dark and tall. The harsh late sunlight broke through them at intervals, slicing across Jenny’s eyes like a hot wire. Light. Dark. Light. Dark.

  After a while her eyesight blurred, and she lifted her head from the door frame and leaned it back against the headrest. The Land Rover Discovery was huge, comfortable, very English. It was right-hand drive and with a stick shift McAllister was using very competently. There was a jolly little pine tree swinging from the rearview mirror.

  Jenny still felt dull, lifeless. The shock that had paralysed her for what seemed like days in the cell and in the interview room was still chilling her limbs and dulling her mind. Distantly, she registered that shock shouldn’t last this long, but nothing shifted this lingering heaviness.

  The last few days just seemed like a bad dream. Insubstantial, unreal. But she knew what reality was, what was waiting for her. And she didn’t really want to wake up at all.

  She refused to think about what had happened, refused to think about the place they had taken her to. Refused to consider the man beside her at the wheel. The man they had called McAllister.

  Dazed and uncaring, she had gone with him when they told her to. Obeyed his terse instructions issued in a deep voice at the airport, on the plane, at the car rental, at the motorway services. And all the time he’d not let her out of his sight. Hardly looked at her, that was true, but never more than a few metres away from her. He’d made her use the disabled toilets so that he could stand guard outside.

  They’d been travelling for ten hours, driving for two, and she was shattered. Deep bone tired, painfully weary. Jenny had slept a little in the car, on the plane, but dreams had kept jerking her awake.

  How had she got to this? Her life had been simple. Dull, but simple. A nice job in a nice place, with nice people. A quiet home where she could just be herself. A car that was probably just a little too exciting for her needs. A cat, a hamster, some plants. A little exchange to America had sounded fun. Not deadly.

  Not the sort of thing that was going to present her with one moment in time, one choice, that was going to change the whole course of her life.

  She wanted to cry, but the skin of her cheeks was sore from the tears she’d shed at the facility. Until she’d worked out that they weren’t going to believe her, or get her a lawyer. Or the embassy. Jenny had learned to stop asking them what was happening. Even to stop asking for a glass of water, or a trip to the bathroom. Then it had been system shutdown, desperately trying to conserve her energy, even her sanity, while they shouted at her and threatened her.

  Leaving had been a relief. Even if it had meant putting herself in this McAllister’s power. He was a big man, dark and intimidating, but that was about as far as her impression went. If someone had asked her to describe his face, she would have had trouble. She was just so tired.

  So tired.

  Suddenly, McAllister was slowing down on the long straight road that sliced between the ranked pines. He turned cautiously off the road onto a rutted track, little more than a firebreak in the planting. The track was littered with old branches and trimmings that snapped and jerked under the wheels as they climbed steadily towards the brow of the hill.

  At the crest of the hill, he turned right onto another track and then left again, climbing another slope until they broke out into open country.

  There in front of them, huddled into a little dip in the slope where a beck flowed by, was a little cottage. It was long and low, squat, built of the dark-grey stone that jutted out of the peat on higher ground, and whitewashed. The roof was slated, very low at the eaves, and there were short chimneys at either end.

  Jenny looked at the two small, square windows on the side they approached, and thought about how dark it would be inside. A few yards away from the cottage, there was a rickety wooden shack, which spoke doom-laden volumes about the facilities the place offered.

  McAllister pulled the Rover to a halt before they reached the beck. Craning her neck to see, Jenny could just make out a tiny plank bridge crossing the beck, but the track ended here.

  She cast a glance at McAllister and found him looking at her.

  “Honey,” he said, sarcasm built into every syllable, “we’re home.”

  Chapter

  TWO

  Jenny stood on the stone floor of the kitchen, and wondered what she was supposed to do. McAllister was moving about the place, unpacking groceries that had been in the car when they picked it up, and generally moving in.

  She supposed she should be taking stock of her surroundings, looking for something that might help her, but she was so tired her legs were physically aching just keeping her up. She sat down on one of the two wooden chairs that were on either side of a round table with a plain blue tablecloth.

  “I didn’t say you could sit down.”

  She blinked, trying to take in his words. He didn’t stop stacking cans into an overhead cupboard, keeping his back to her.

  He turned around. “Okay. I guess I should tell you the rules. It works like this, Jenny. I make the rules. You keep them. I change the rules. You keep them.” He moved closer, bracing his fists on the table opposite her, leaning in. Jenny could feel his breath on her face, see the detail of the stubble on his chin.

  She put all her energy into not leaning back.

  “Rule one: do what I tell you,” he said, menacing her with the tone of his voice, too. “Rule two: don’t try to escape. Rule three: the quicker you tell me what I want to know, the quicker you can get out of here.”

  Or else? Jenny didn’t have to think very hard about that one. They were alone, miles from anywhere, and he … he was built like a fighter, all muscle and whipcord. He pushed himself back off the table and went back to unpacking.

  She took several deep, slow breaths, determined that her voice wouldn’t shake when she spoke. “What is it you want to know?”

  He walked round behind her, to get to the boxes there, she supposed.

  Suddenly his big hand fisted in the back of her T-shirt, hauling her to her feet, knocking the chair aside, so that it fell with a crack on the stone-flagged floor. He all but threw her away from him, towards the middle of the room. When she staggered, limbs liquid with shock, she saw him coming at her with a gun.

  She froze, stood there, desperately fighting the urge to run, knowing in some still-functional part of her brain that would be stupid and pointless. Her heart beat in slow, painful strokes.

  “I want to know how you turned a situation like this,” he stopped a bare pace away, and levelled the nasty little automatic at her, “into a situation in which three men lay dead and you were still standing.

  “Well, what about it?” he said. “Are you going to give me a demonstration of how you do that, little Jenny Waring?”

  So they had come all the way across the Atlantic just for him to ask the same questions they had shouted at her until she was numb. It didn’t make any sense.

  Nothing made any sense.

  She stared at the gleaming metal of the gun. There was something attractive about the sheen on the barrel, something seductive about it. It was death and drama, poisoned chocolate, delicious and deadly. Alan would know what it was, she thought, with an odd detachment.

  Jenny saw a tiny tendon in Kier’s hand leap as he tightened his finger on the trigger. She closed her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” he taunted. “You handled the others perfectly well. Charlie, and Craig, and little Barry. Can’t you do the same to me?”

  Jenny said nothing, tried to blank her mind, t
ried to go inside herself to get away. But every time she relaxed her rigid hold on her thoughts, the images of that day flashed across the inside of her eyes like a series of freeze-frame shots, making her whole body jerk, making her gasp and struggle to think of something else.

  She could hear, feel him move closer, felt the cold whisper of the gun against her forehead. At the touch of it, a racking sob escaped her, and she clamped her jaw tight until it hurt.

  “What’s the matter, Jenny? Don’t you want to kill me like the others?”

  She opened her eyes, stared straight ahead of her. “I don’t ever want to do that again, Mr. McAllister,” she said.

  He was standing up against her left shoulder, leaning in to her, trying to menace her. Succeeding, she thought, bleakly. She was just so tired her fear didn’t show. She felt empty, drained. Vulnerable. She was aware of the warmth of his body at her side, the breath that stirred her hair. She could just see the jut of his shoulder at the periphery of her vision.

  He backed off, snapping the safety on, slipping the gun in the back of his waistband. He eyed her up and down. “Seeing as we are going to be living in each other’s pockets for as long as it takes, sweetheart, you’d better call me Kier.”

  The endearment on his lips was a travesty, taunting her. Jenny felt it like a slap to the face. His voice, his manner, even the way he moved was a sneer, and she wondered dazedly why it upset her so much.

  She took a breath, tried to sound reasonable. “Please, will you leave me alone?” she saw the derision in his eyes, and rushed on. “I haven’t had a moment’s peace since … since it happened. I need to think. Please.” She hated herself for sounding so weak, but her head was spinning, aching. She just needed time to work out how she felt, what had happened. Who she was.

  He snorted. It wasn’t an attractive sound. “It’s exactly my job to make sure you don’t get any time alone to think. The answer’s no.”