“I can only see one choice,” John said finally. “We can’t risk Tiberius getting the bug into circulation. We’re going to have to raid the island.”
“Think you can get it sanctioned?” Michael asked.
“More or less,” John answered. “I’ll call in a few favors, collect an insertion team I trust and get permission on the hush-hush. I can’t help thinking if we do this all the way through official channels, Tiberius is going to be a step ahead of us the whole way through.” He paused. “We might even think of filtering some misinformation through a few channels, and see what comes back. It’d give us an idea where the leak is coming from.”
Jimmy nodded. “Drew and I will come up with some suggestions.”
Michael, who was the muscle of the group, and the one with the most combat training, said, “Give me names and I’ll get with the insertion team.” He paused. “Are we using the intel from Sydney?”
John nodded. “Yeah. Use it. Get back to me with any questions.” He paused. “Anything else?”
There were negative head shakes all around.
“Okay.” John stood, body as tense as if he were going into battle. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I owe Sydney an apology.”
AFTER AN HOUR OR SO sitting alone in the drab conference room, Sydney’s tears had dried and she’d stripped out of the heavy, uncomfortable Kevlar vest. She folded it and used it as a pillow as she tried to nap while leaning on the conference table, but the bulletproof vest didn’t rank very high in the comfort department and she couldn’t calm her brain enough for sleep.
Every time she closed her eyes she saw Grace’s face. And when she wasn’t picturing the murder, she was imagining handcuffs and a jail cell, because there was no doubt in her mind that was where she was headed next. If Sharpe believed she’d sent that email, he wouldn’t hesitate to tear up the immunity agreement.
The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that was what was going to happen next. So much so that when the door swung open, she shot to her feet, expecting cops with handcuffs and chains.
It wasn’t the cops. It was Sharpe.
Her first thought was that he looked tired, her second that even tired, he looked incredible. And the latter made her angry, because how dare he look so good when she was miserable, and how dare her body still react to him when he’d just proved he’d always think the worst of her, despite her protests to the contrary.
She lifted her chin and glared at him. “I. Did. Not. Send. That. Email.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you before.”
It took her a second to process the words, longer to comprehend their meaning. When she did, the images of handcuffs and chains vanished and she collapsed into her chair. “You know?” The question came out small and quivery, but on the heels of relief came a flare of anger. She regained her feet. “Well, good. And you should be sorry. You should’ve believed me. You can’t say you’re interested in me one minute, and then think the worst of me in the next. It’s not fair.”
She half expected him to tell her it was all off, that he’d rethought the idea of them being together and decided it was a bad idea, that he didn’t want her enough to deal with the complications. And in a way that might’ve been a relief, because it’d take the decision out of her hands and give her a reason to hate him instead of wishing for things that seemed impossible.
But instead of saying it was over before it’d even begun, he spun one of the chairs so it faced hers, and sat, gesturing for her to do the same.
When she was seated, he said, “You’re absolutely right—I should have listened to you, and I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”
She regarded him warily. “What changed your mind?”
“We—well, Jimmy and Michael, really—stepped back and looked at that email, and finally figured out that the logic doesn’t add up. Someone—most likely Tiberius or someone working for him—was trying to make you look guilty in order to complicate things at this end.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Gee, you think?”
He exhaled. “I should probably explain what happened back there.” He paused. “I was involved a few years ago…with someone who was part of a case.”
That was so not what she’d been expecting, that it took her a moment to reorient. She also had to breathe past a hot knot of something that wasn’t quite anger, wasn’t quite jealousy. When she’d settled the uneasy churn in her gut, she said, “Grace mentioned that you’d been involved with a witness.”
“A witness.” He grimaced. “I guess that’s an accurate term, albeit a kind one. Her name was Rose.” He paused, and for a moment she didn’t think he was going to keep going. Then, as though reaching a decision, he exhaled a long breath. “We’d been working as part of a multi-agency task force trying to bring down a major criminal working out of Boston. His name was Viggo Trehern, and he was seriously bad news. The task force had managed to get three people on the inside pretty early on—a woman who went under as Trehern’s mistress, the doctor who handled his addiction to prescription meds and one of his enforcers. It wasn’t my call, but none of them knew about the others, so when it went bad, it went bad fast. The woman died, the doctor’s cover was broken and the enforcer dropped out of sight for a while. We needed another way in.”
“Rose,” Sydney said. It wasn’t a question.
He nodded. “Rose. It was my job to find the weak link. I did my homework, and picked the most likely candidate for turning. She’d been Tiberius’s lover, but was a good enough cook that when he got tired of her in his bed, he kept her in the kitchen. We watched her for a few weeks, got her patterns down, and I arranged to bump into her at a nightclub near the theater district.”
“You seduced her to get her on your side?” Sydney said, suddenly not liking this story at all.
“No.” He shook his head in an emphatic negative. “We were friends, nothing more. She was a good person stuck in a bad situation, and I gave her a way out. A deal. Immunity for information.”
Sydney’s stomach did a nasty little shimmy. “Suddenly this is sounding way too familiar.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He paused. “Her tips were good, and suddenly we were making more progress against Trehern than we’d ever managed before. After a few smaller takedowns, the task force leaders trusted her—I trusted her—and based on her information, we planned to close the net on Trehern for good. There was no way we were letting him wiggle out this time. We had everything sewn up tight. I thought—” He broke off and grimaced. “We had talked about after, about there maybe being a future for us.”
The shimmy edged toward full-on nausea at the parallels. “Go on.”
“It probably doesn’t take a brilliant research scientist to guess she double-crossed me…us. She’d been working for Trehern all along, feeding us whatever tidbits of information he wanted us to have, leading us straight into a trap. If it weren’t for the one remaining guy we had on the inside, the enforcer, William Caine, the whole thing would’ve gone to hell. As it was, I lost two good men and the total casualty count in the task force was in the dozens. We got Trehern, but the cost was high. Too high.”
And he blamed himself for the deaths, Sydney realized. As far as he was concerned, those agents had died because he’d trusted the wrong woman.
The knowledge definitely helped explain his reaction to the phony email. But just as definitely, it set off serious warning bells. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m a little freaked out by the similarities.”
“Trust me, you’re not the only one.”
“Did you…” She paused, trying to figure out what she really wanted to know. “Did you feel the same way about her that you feel about me?”
He took her hands in his. “God help me, I don’t know the answer to that.”
It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear. But one thing she knew about him was that he’d never tell her what she wanted to hear, just for the sake of placating her.
At the moment, his honesty was cold comfort.
“I wasn’t brought up with a whole lot of affection,” he continued, “and this isn’t exactly a job that encourages touchy-feeliness. Rose brought out something in me that I wasn’t used to. Something I liked. And yes, you make me feel some of the same things, but it’s different. You’re different.”
“Right. Because I’m not still working for Tiberius.”
He squeezed her hands in his and moved closer still. “It’s more than that. You’re…more of a whole person than Rose was. You’re out there, making things happen. Not always the right thing, granted, but you’re trying to fix what you did wrong. I admire that, even if I don’t always agree with your methods.”
“Was there a compliment in there somewhere?” Sydney asked. “I couldn’t tell.” But she felt herself softening.
She told herself not to forgive him this easily, but she could already tell it was a losing battle. He believed her. Wasn’t that enough?
“Yeah.” His chuckle sounded tired. “I think so. There should’ve been, anyway.” He crowded closer, still holding her hands. Their knees bumped together and his eyes were very close to hers, and if she’d wanted to—if she’d been ready to after what’d just happened between them—she could’ve leaned in and kissed him.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Not after what had just happened, what she’d just learned.
“Can I trust you not to knee-jerk believe the worst of me again?” she asked quietly. “I don’t want to be involved in…whatever this is, if I’m going to be constantly on the defensive. Is it enough for me to tell you, here and now, that I’m on your side? That I won’t do anything to compromise you or the team?”
“Even if it means destroying your work on the island?” he countered.
She closed her eyes on a flash of pain, but nodded. “Even if that’s what it means.” Opening her eyes, she stared into his, willing him to believe her. “Celeste did okay without me. Better than okay, really. If she has to wait another year or two for me to scrape up the funding and replicate the work, I think she can manage it. If not…” She trailed off, hating the idea of giving up on Celeste’s life, but knowing this was a battle she might not win, after all. “If not, she’d be the first one to tell me I can’t give in to someone like Tiberius in order to save her. The evil he brings to the world is too big for that. We can’t weigh it against one life, no matter how much I want to.”
He’d watched her intently while she spoke, and now nodded. “Okay.”
She paused, waiting for more. “That’s it? Just ‘okay’?”
“You want a marching band?” But he leaned in, and touched his lips to hers. “I’m sorry,” he whispered against her mouth. “I won’t assume the worst of you again.”
She leaned into his warmth and whispered in return, “Thank you.”
They stayed like that for a moment, each drawing strength from the other. Then she drew back. “What happens now?”
He looked her in the eye and said, “Within the next two days, my team and a few handpicked combat veterans are going to raid the island in an effort to prevent Tiberius from selling the bug to four very nasty people who are in the middle of four different trials with pivotal DNA evidence.”
She appreciated that he’d trusted her with the information so soon after their tentative truce. But she frowned when the information didn’t quite line up. “If the trials are already in progress, they’ve already got the DNA evidence. Infecting the defendants won’t change anything.”
“It will if they also arrange to lose, destroy or otherwise taint the existing DNA samples, necessitating the drawing of new samples,” he countered. “And trust me, they will.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “You don’t live in a very nice world, do you?”
He seemed surprised by the question, shrugged it off. “I’m used to the scumbags. They don’t get to me anymore.”
I think they do, she contradicted inwardly. You just try very hard not to show it. Iceman, indeed. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel the emotions, she was coming to realize. It was that he didn’t know what to do with them, so he shoved them deep down inside and pretended they didn’t exist.
But she didn’t think he needed—or wanted—to hear that right now, so she said instead, “Be careful on the island. It’s not a very nice place.”
In fact, the thought of him going to Rocky Cliff chilled her to her very marrow. She wanted to tell him not to go, but she didn’t have the right. It was his job. His duty.
And he wouldn’t have had to go if it hadn’t been for her stupidly arrogant decisions a year ago, she knew.
“I need you,” he said unexpectedly, and for a moment she thought he was finished, that he was talking about the two of them. But then he said, “The team needs you. Anything else you can tell us about Rocky Cliff, we need to know it. Anything at all.” When she didn’t answer right away, he squeezed her hands. “Please, Sydney.”
“Don’t make me go back there.” A whisper was all she could manage.
“No!” He nearly shouted the word. “Hell, no. You’re strictly behind-the-scenes on this one. Intel only. Okay?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Okay. When do we start?”
He stood, drawing her to her feet. “We just did.”
CHAPTER NINE
TWENTY HOURS LATER, Sydney was back on the north shore of Massachusetts, where it all began.
The team stayed in a large chain hotel farther down the coast rather than the quaint Gloucester B and B she’d used the last night before she’d departed for Rocky Cliff Island a year earlier, but that difference hardly mattered.
She leaned on the railing of the small, beach-facing deck that opened off her room and sighed, feeling as though she was right back where she’d started.
The ocean stretched to the horizon, where gray water met gray sky. It was chilly and faintly damp, and the beach was deserted save for a young man throwing a tennis ball for a wet, sand-covered black dog. In the adjoining rooms on either side of hers, Sharpe and his teammates were nailing down last-minute details. Knowing it, she should’ve felt surrounded and protected.
Instead, she felt very alone, just as she’d felt the last time she’d been here.
Then, as now, she wasn’t sure what the future was going to hold for her. Then, as now, she was making decisions she wasn’t sure were right.
A year ago, she’d been working to convince herself that the ends justified the means, that it was okay to work for a man like Tiberius if the final results would benefit the greater good. Boy, she’d been seriously wrong about that one. And that made her question whether she was doing things wrong again this time.
Sure, it was Sharpe’s plan, and it would be his decision to pull the trigger and launch the raid on the island the following day, but the entire strategy was based on her inside knowledge of the compound and the guards.
What if she’d gotten it wrong? What if she’d forgotten something or remembered something wrong?
What if Tiberius captured them?
The past few days hadn’t been the best of times by any means, but she’d grown fond of each member of Sharpe’s team. Jimmy might be a self-proclaimed computer nerd, but he had a wickedly quirky sense of humor and a girlfriend named Sue. Drew, who’d worked with her on the maps and schematics, had made her feel like part of the team rather than an outsider. Megan, new and slightly shy, brought in to cover Grace’s spot, had a dolphin’s smile that tipped up at the corners and made Sydney want to smile in return. Sydney had spent the least amount of time with Michael, but he made her think of military recruiting posters, America and apple pie. She had a feeling it would be tough to feel unsafe around him. And Sharpe…
Well, Sharpe was Sharpe. On the upside, he smiled at her in passing. On the downside, she had no idea what that meant.
His mistrust was so deeply ingrained, she wasn’t sure she could rely on him to believe her when it truly mattered. So why did her bod
y come to life when he walked into the room, even though they hadn’t kissed—hadn’t so much as touched—since that night at his place?
And why, in the deepest darkness of the night, when she awoke from terrible, torturous dreams so vivid she could hear Jenny Marie’s screams ringing in her ears, did she find herself holding his face in the forefront of her mind as she tried to soothe herself back to sleep?
The “why” is obvious, she told herself as she stood on the hotel deck and stared out over the ocean, which was darkening with the early-spring dusk and the threat of an incoming storm. The question is, what are you going to do about it?
The smart answer was “nothing.”
Then again, she was one of the dumbest smart people she knew.
“See something out there?” a deep, masculine voice said from behind her. She didn’t need the fine shimmer of nerves and heat to tell her it was Sharpe.
She shook her head, not looking at him. “Just thinking.”
“Must not be very good thoughts. You were frowning.” He moved up beside her, leaned his forearms on the deck railing in a position that mirrored her own and stared out across the water.
Their forearms barely brushed, but the light contact sent liquid fire through her veins.
“Do you blame me?” She figured that was a neutral enough response. Let him interpret it however he wanted.
“Of the two of us, I’d say I have more of a reason to be uneasy. I’m the one going to the island tomorrow.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I wish you weren’t.”
“It’s part of the job.”
“I’ll worry.”
He slanted her a look. “I should tell you not to.”
“Are you?”
“No.” He shifted closer, so they were touching at hip and shoulder as they both leaned on the railing, staring off across the sea, which was growing choppy with the turbulence of an incoming spring squall. “Partly because you’ll do what you want regardless of what I say, and partly because I think I like the idea of you being back here, thinking about me.”
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