by Paula Graves
“They never told me his name.” Her voice was faint and faraway. Was she reliving that time in captivity? Were his words dragging her back through her memories of captivity?
“I had the night shift. It should have been the easier shift—Dubrov usually slept like a baby, and the guard duty took place during the middle of summer, so nighttime was about the only bearable time of day.”
“Why were you guarding him?”
He slanted a quick look her way. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking not at him but at some invisible point on the far wall. He suspected she was back in Kaziristan in her mind, seeing and smelling and hearing all the things she’d probably spent the past three years running from.
“They never told me. Just said he was valuable to both the good guys and the bad guys, and it was our job to make sure the bad guys didn’t get him.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“Of course. But we were told not to ask questions, and he didn’t seem particularly eager to make friends.”
“What did he look like?”
Rick closed his eyes, trying to conjure the distant memory. “He was medium height—five-seven or -eight? Black, wavy hair. He wore it short, but you could tell that if it grew out, it would be wavy. Maybe even curly.”
“What color eyes?”
“Mismatched,” he remembered with a start, surprised he’d forgotten about that small fact until now. “One brown eye, one hazel-green eye. Very striking.”
He heard a soft puff of air escape her throat. Turning, he found her looking at him.
“Did he have a scar over his left eyebrow?”
“Yes.” He narrowed his eyes. “You know who he was.”
She nodded. “I’m almost certain the man you knew as The Doctor was Abbadi Kurash. Dubiq Kurash’s oldest son.”
Rick considered her theory. Except for the mismatched eyes, the man he knew as Amahl hadn’t looked much like old Dubiq Kurash, the flamboyant and charismatic democratic reformer who had led the Kaziri Democratic Union’s opposition to the corrupt Barvani regime. But as the disparate pieces of the puzzle began to click into place, he realized that Amanda could be right about Amahl Dubrov’s real identity.
At the time of the embassy siege that had set off the country’s democratic uprising, the Kaziri Democratic Union had been al Adar’s primary rival in filling the vacuum left by Barvani’s fall. But Dubiq had died of a stroke just a couple of months before Rick had been tasked with guarding the mysterious Dr. Dubrov. Had both the Kaziri Democratic Union and al Adar seen Abbadi Kurash as his father’s political heir?
“Maybe the KDU hired MacLear to protect Kurash Junior while the uprising was in full swing,” he said aloud.
“That might explain why al Adar was willing to torture me to find out where he was.” Amanda nibbled her lower lip, her expression thoughtful. “But why me? I wasn’t connected to the section at the CIA that was handling the KDU.”
A horrible thought flickered through Rick’s mind. “What if it was because of me?”
“You think they knew you were guarding Dubrov?”
“I had started guarding him less than a week before we ended things between us.” The new assignment was part of the reason he didn’t fight hard to convince her not to walk away. He knew his evenings would be occupied and there would be no time to be with her.
He’d assumed he’d have a second chance with her, once the assignment was over. He could track her down and convince her to forget about the rules. But by the time things with Dubrov went wrong, she had disappeared. He’d thought she’d asked for reassignment.
He’d been wrong.
“And if they’d found out the two of us were involved—” She broke off, her lips flattening to a thin line.
“They might have thought you knew more about my job than you did.” He leaned toward her, putting his hand over hers where they lay clasped tightly in her lap. “I’m so sorry. If they went after you because of me—”
Her gaze lifted to meet his. “Maybe we’re wrong. If they knew we were seeing each other, then clearly they were able to keep tabs on one or both of us. Which means they could have followed you at any time to wherever you were keeping Dubrov.”
He shook his head. “I never really tried to evade detection when I was meeting you. I didn’t care who knew. That was always more important to you than to me.” He shot her a wry smile. “But we had several layers of precautions in dealing with Dubrov. For one thing, we moved him constantly, sometimes as many as two or three times a night if the pressure was on. We had to pass through three or four MacLear perimeter checkpoints to reach him—and if anyone had followed us, those perimeter guards would have spotted them.”
“What happened to Abbadi Kurash?” she asked suddenly. “I don’t keep up with much news out of Kaziristan, but I do know he never ran for office or did anything with the KDU movement.”
Rick’s gut twisted. “Four weeks into our assignment, our perimeter was breached. Massive security failure. When the guards missed a check-in, we thought something had gone wrong. We radioed our unit leader, who told us to stay put.”
“Stay put? In a situation like that?” Amanda looked incredulous. “That’s all sorts of wrong.”
“I knew that at the time, but I’d been given my orders.” The roiling sensation in his midsection grew stronger at the memory. “I should have listened to my own instincts.”
“Who gave the order?”
“A guy named Salvatore Beckett.” He wondered if she’d recognize the name.
Apparently not. “Didn’t you raise the question of his reckless order to stay put?” she asked, sounding indignant.
“Of course I did. I was told Beckett was sacked. But he actually was reassigned to the Special Services Unit.”
Amanda sighed. “Them again.”
“I think the Dubrov ambush may have been his audition,” Rick admitted, voicing the growing conviction that had nagged him ever since he’d learned, along with the rest of the world, that MacLear had built a unit that was nothing more than guns for hire to the highest bidder, ideology be damned.
“How do you know he was in the SSU?”
“Remember what the SSU did to my cousin and his wife?”
She nodded.
“Salvatore Beckett was one of the MacLear agents my cousins captured a year and a half ago. Barton Reid sent them to hunt down Luke’s son, Stevie, to use him to blackmail Luke and Abby into giving them the evidence Abby’s first husband had gathered against them.” Only the grit and determination of his cousins had stopped the unit from achieving its goal.
“You think MacLear set up the ambush in some way?”
“Probably took money to let it happen.”
“What happened to Kurash?”
“We were surrounded. They came in guns blazing. The other agent working with me was killed. I was hit in the back of the head by a bullet, but it hit at a strange angle and glanced off the bone without penetrating. Knocked me out, and I guess they figured me for dead. When I came to, The Doctor was gone.”
Amanda pressed her fingertips to her forehead, as if she was in pain. He scooted his chair closer, touching her knee. She looked up at his touch, her eyes wide and dark. “Too close,” she said softly, one hand dropping away from her head to touch his face.
Her fingers were cold, but somehow they left a trail of fire as they brushed across the curve of his jaw. He felt his whole body quicken, as if he hadn’t felt so exhausted just seconds earlier that he thought he might sleep a week.
Her other hand joined the first, cradling his face between her palms. “What day was it that you woke to find Kurash gone?”
“March eighteenth.” Almost three years ago, he realized. In some ways, it seemed a lifetime ago. And sometimes, it felt as if it had happened only yesterday.
“March eighteenth,” she repeated, her lips curving in a faint smile.
“Does that mean something?”
“That’s the day I escaped al Adar
.” She pressed her forehead to his. “Most of the men disappeared that day, leaving me alone with only a single guard. The perfect guard for my purposes,” she added. “Malid wasn’t hard to outwit, and he was too slow and lumbering to catch me when I got free.”
She’d told him this story before, but he felt the same fresh flood of relief, as if he’d just heard the news of her escape for the first time. Blindly, he reached for her, pulling her into his arms.
She wrapped her arms around him, sliding into his lap. Her lips brushed the side of his jaw, setting off brushfires along his nerve endings.
“I’m sorry for what happened to Abbadi Kurash,” she whispered, “but I’m not sorry I’m still alive.” There was a strange fervor in her voice, an intensity that made him draw back from her so he could see her face.
Her face glowed with life, her eyes blazing with internal fire, and his breath caught in his chest.
This was the woman he’d known in Kaziristan. Full of strength and passion.
He cradled her face between his hands. “There you are,” he murmured.
She didn’t ask what he meant. He supposed she knew even better than he did how different she’d become.
He bent his head to kiss her, but she pulled back from him, just far enough to speak. “I’ve been thinking about something Alicia said.”
He sighed, drawing back to look at her. “What’s that?”
“That I could trust her to keep my secrets. Is that true?”
Rick thought about it for a moment, not wanting to jump into anything that might put her life in greater danger. He’d been working with Alicia for a few months now, and she was conscientious and honorable. If she promised to keep a secret, he believed she would.
“Yes. It is,” he said finally. “And you know who else you can trust? My family. There’s not a single one of them who’d ever do anything to put your life in danger.”
She smiled again. “I don’t remember you having such warm feelings about your brother Jesse a few years ago.”
He grimaced. “Jesse and I didn’t see eye to eye about my working for MacLear. He thought I should have joined the Marine Corps like he did. Like my brother Wade did later.”
“And now he owns a private security company like MacLear,” she said with a wry smile.
He shook his head. “Not like MacLear. Jesse is nothing like Jackson Melville. My brother and I don’t agree on everything, even now. But I would trust him with any of my deepest secrets.” He met her gaze with conviction. “I’d trust him with any of yours.”
She cupped his jaw with her palm. “You’re lucky to have family like that.”
She’d never told him anything about her own family situation, of course. Knowing she was a CIA operative, he’d never expected her to. He wasn’t sure he could expect her to tell him anything now, either. But he couldn’t help wondering why she seemed so utterly alone in the world.
What kind of background must she have had to cut herself off so willingly and completely from her family?
“Let’s do it,” she said.
He leaned toward her, his voice a low growl. “Do it?”
She smiled, pressing her fingertips against his mouth. “Slow down, big boy. I meant, let’s talk to your family.”
He drew back again, studying her face. “Are you sure?”
“Are you?”
He nodded. “You can trust them all.”
JESSE COOPER LEANED BACK in his desk chair, his gaze directed toward the panoramic scene outside the wide plate-glass window of his second-floor office. Waning sunlight cast deepening shadows across the gently sloping landscape leading down to Gossamer Creek. If he followed the meandering waterway to the south, he could reach Gossamer Lake within ten miles. Beyond the creek, there was a steep drop-off, giving him an unimpeded view of Chickasaw Valley. The breathtaking panorama of rolling farmland and wooded wilderness made his office the envy of everyone who worked at Cooper Security.
None of his family had seemed to worry much about how he’d been able to afford the large, modern office space so soon after deciding to open Cooper Security. He supposed his reputation within the family for being the straight shooter had been enough to forestall any questions that might have occurred to them.
He wasn’t thrilled with keeping things from them, in truth, but when he’d taken on this job, he’d agreed to certain terms.
Absolute discretion was one of the biggest.
The phone on his desk rang, the call coming in directly to his phone, bypassing the switchboard. He never worried about the phone ringing while he was away—Heller never called on the landline unless Jesse called first. And Jesse never called unless it was an emergency.
He wondered if Maddox Heller would consider Amanda Caldwell’s arrival an emergency.
He answered on the third ring. “Cooper.”
“Which one?” asked the low Georgia drawl on the other end of the line.
“The sane one,” Jesse answered with a grin.
“I didn’t know there were any,” Maddox Heller zinged him.
“Funny.”
“What you got?”
Jesse told his old friend about Amanda Caldwell’s arrival and what Rick had told him of their ordeal in Tennessee. “Looks like MacLear’s SSU has reconstituted itself on the down low.”
“Damn,” Heller murmured. “I really thought we were shed of those cockroaches.”
“Guess we’ll have to get back to stomping on them one at a time,” Jesse replied. “But the more pressing question is, what do they want from this woman?”
“What do you know about her?”
“She’s someone my brother knew when he was working for MacLear in Kaziristan. Nobody’s said so, but I get the feeling she might have been CIA. I don’t have any contacts with the company, but I figured you might.”
“One or two,” Heller admitted. “Let me do some asking around.”
“Thanks.” Jesse heard the sound of a child’s voice over the line. “Is that your kid?”
“Yeah, Iris is working at the greenhouse today, so I’m watching Daisy. I swear, that baby’s grown an inch since she got out of bed this morning.”
Jesse felt a twinge of envy. He’d had a chance, once, to be a husband and father. He’d chosen the Marine Corps instead. For the most part, he didn’t regret the choice. But once in a while, something like the sound of Maddox Heller’s daughter laughing on the other end of the line brought home the things he’d given up for his service to his country.
“Give me a day. Then call me and I’ll check back in with what I’ve learned,” Heller said.
“Thanks. I owe you one.”
“Cooper, what you’re doin’ for me outweighs anything I can do for you. I know what it cost you when I asked you to do it. I’m not likely to forget that anytime soon.”
“It’s not the big sacrifice I thought it would be,” Jesse admitted, turning away from the window. He was finding his work at Cooper Security more satisfying than he’d imagined he could. It was still service, after all.
Without the government middleman.
AMANDA HAD STIPULATED only a couple of ground rules. First, she would talk only to Coopers. None of the other agents at Cooper Security were invited to the powwow. And second, she wanted to have the meeting at Isabel’s house. For whatever reason, she’d begun to think of the rambling old farmhouse as a sanctuary, the first place she’d felt safe in a long time.
How much of that sense of security was a result of having Rick constantly by her side, she didn’t want to contemplate.
She was relieved that the Cooper siblings began arriving before her jittery hormones could escalate the sexual tension between her and Rick.
She’d like to think she was wise enough to keep her wits about her, especially in the middle of a dangerous situation still developing. But now, as during the time they’d spent together in Kaziristan, she found herself in grave danger of losing control when Rick was around. She’d taken far too many chances when they
were sneaking around Tablis in search of places to be alone and give in to their mutual passion.
She had to be smarter now than she had been then.
Isabel had arrived first, with food, the unmistakable aroma of smoked pork wafting all the way to the bedroom, drawing Amanda to the kitchen. She found Isabel at the counter, pulling takeout boxes out of a huge bag emblazoned with a bright red logo that read Billy’s Pit Stop.
“Hope you’re not a vegetarian,” Isabel said with a grin.
“If I were, the smell coming out of those boxes would convert me,” Amanda replied with an answering smile. “What can I do to help?”
“Sit down and keep me company. You need to be resting.”
“Please, don’t mommy me,” Amanda growled in frustration. “I’m feeling so much better, and I’m ready to pitch in and do my part.” She leveled her gaze with Isabel. “Of everything.”
Isabel nodded slowly, her smile fading. “I know how frustrating it can be when you’re sidelined.”
Amanda caught a glimpse of the sadness she’d seen in Isabel’s eyes earlier. This time, she couldn’t quell her curiosity. “You were sidelined?”
Isabel sighed. “Permanently, I guess. I was put on desk duty at the FBI after my partner was murdered in a bombing a few months ago. I just didn’t have the heart to be micromanaged when I wanted to be out looking for his killer.” Her lips thinned with irritation. “Insubordination doesn’t go over very well in Washington.”
“So you didn’t quit?”
“Oh, I quit,” she said with a nod. “But only because I saw the termination coming.” Isabel was saved from any further explanation by the sound of the front door opening. She shot a wry look at Amanda. “Family never knocks.”
A slim, wiry-looking woman in her late twenties entered the room, carrying a couple of plastic jugs of tea, one in each hand. She had wavy auburn hair, storm cloud–gray eyes and a spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Despite the different coloring, there was enough resemblance between the newcomer and Isabel for Amanda to assume this was another of Rick’s sisters.