The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3

by Karen Robards

  “Love your sweater,” the guard said.

  “Thanks.” She managed a smile.

  The guard’s gaze moved on to whoever was next in line.

  Pocketing the ChapStick, Lynette all but tottered away.

  Her subsequent walk through the curved concrete dimness of the tunnel felt like something out of The Green Mile. Sweating bullets and praying no one noticed, she chatted with Amy, listened to Dan and a couple of others talking football, and waited for a hand on her shoulder, a guard to confront her, a siren to go off, something, anything, to stop her from leaving, to announce that they knew.

  Nothing happened. She made it into the other building, rode the elevator up, pulled on her coat, wound her knit scarf around her head and neck, and exited onto the sidewalk. The air smelled of snow. The frigid wind slapped her in the face. The cold felt even worse because she was so sweaty. A few fat snowflakes swirled through the light of the pale halogens that illuminated the street. Beyond the lights, the night was black.

  She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. She was cold to her bone marrow. And the weather had nothing to do with it.

  Was she really going to be able to just walk away?

  Or would a cop car come screeching up at any minute? Or maybe it would be the FBI. Or the CIA. Or the NSA. Or—somebody. They would jump out and arrest her, take her away.

  The thought made her insides quake.

  She was breathing way too fast. She did her best to slow that down.

  A group of them headed to the McPherson Square station, where they boarded the Metro. Lynette was the only one to get off at her home stop. She trudged up the steps to street level, glanced nervously around. It was still spitting snow, still night-black beyond the streetlights although it was getting close to 5:00 a.m. One other person was in sight, a man, no more than a dark shape on the sidewalk at a distance of about half a block. He headed down a cross street even as she spotted him. The area was working-class residential, tree-shaded, considered safe. Her building was five blocks away.

  What will happen to me if I get caught?

  The sudden sour taste in her mouth was, she realized, fear.

  Ducking her head against the cold and snow, she started walking, long strides that were nevertheless careful because of the icy patches on the sidewalk. The ChapStick was still in the pocket of her sweater, snug beneath her coat. It felt radioactive. Doubt, regret—a whole host of unpleasant emotions shook her.

  Maybe I’m not cut out to be a hero.

  Cory knew somebody who knew somebody who knew the guy at WikiLeaks. That was the plan—they would get the information she’d stolen from the files to him, and it would be published on the web for everybody to see. There would be an outcry. A media frenzy.

  Edward Snowden had done something similar. Edward Snowden was spending the rest of his life in Russia. If he was lucky.

  It occurred to her that she didn’t have to go through with it. There was still time. She could pull the ChapStick from her pocket right now and drop it down a gutter grate, toss it into a dumpster, throw it away—

  “Hey.” A hand grabbed her arm. It startled her so badly that she jumped and screeched as she yanked free. “Jeez, baby, it’s me.”

  Cory.

  “Oh my God, you scared me.” He was wearing his ancient green army jacket and a knit hat pulled down over his forehead all the way to the edge of his glasses. She was so glad to see him, so relieved to no longer be in this alone—but his presence meant that time was up. She had to decide. She could tell him that she’d been assigned to a different task for the night, or that the system had been down, or—

  “You do it?” Cory wrapped an arm around her shoulders as he guided her toward his beater Chevy Malibu, parked a few yards farther on, at the curb. It was running; exhaust puffed out in small clouds of white smoke. He looked at her, his expression excited, expectant.

  All her doubts, fears, misgivings—they didn’t just vanish. But she couldn’t disappoint him.

  “Yes.” Her teeth chattered.

  “Good job! Any problems?” His arm was snug around her shoulders. She was glad of the support, glad of his body heat. She leaned into him, wrapped an arm around his waist. She felt light-headed, weak-kneed. Frightened. But glad, too. Glad that she’d been brave. Glad that she’d come through for him. For them. For everybody.

  “No,” she said.

  “That’s awesome.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Think I’d let you walk home in the cold?”

  She smiled at him as they reached the Malibu. He pulled open the passenger door for her. She climbed in, subsided against the faded cloth seat. It was warm inside the car and smelled faintly of coffee. A downward glance revealed an empty take-out coffee cup in the cup holder. Cory got in, but instead of starting the car, he reached into the back seat and pulled his ancient messenger bag into the front.

  “What are you doing?” She watched him extract his laptop from the bag.

  “Where is it?”

  She knew what he was referring to. Wordlessly she unzipped her coat, pulled the ChapStick from her sweater pocket and held it up for him to see. He took it from her, pulled off the cap and inserted the flash drive into the USB port. She understood: he was checking to see that the spyder had collected what they needed.

  An image appeared on the screen. Her stomach clenched and her heart started pounding a mile a minute as he scrolled down through page after page of text, diagrams, pictures.

  “It’s all here. Everything.” His tone was exultant.

  “What if someone finds out it was me?” Heat blasted from the vents, but she was still bone cold. Once again she found herself wondering if this was her body telling her she was making a terrible mistake.

  “They won’t.” He sounded so sure. Closing the laptop, he tucked the flash drive into the breast pocket of his coat and stowed the laptop away in the messenger bag, which he thrust into the back.

  “But what if they do?” she persisted as he pulled away from the curb. “There weren’t that many of us in that room and—”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m just wondering if maybe we should—”

  “I said, don’t worry about it.”

  His unusual edginess silenced her. She sat there, chewing her lip and staring unseeingly out into the night until he turned a corner onto a side street she didn’t recognize. It was dark, deserted. He pulled over, put the car in Park.

  “Why are we stopping?” She didn’t want him to think she was overly sensitive, didn’t want him to know that his abruptness had hurt her feelings, so she tried to make the question sound casual.

  Turning off the engine without replying, he opened the door and got out. A frigid blast of air complete with swirling snowflakes blew past him into the car.

  “Cory—”

  He leaned down to look in at her. His hand slid into the pocket of his coat, reappeared holding a gun. She blinked at it in surprise.

  He screwed something onto the tip.

  “Sorry, baby,” he said. “Loose lips sink ships.”

  That made no sense, just like the gun in his hand made no sense. Frowning, she was just lifting her eyes to his when his hand jerked up and he aimed at her face.

  She never even felt the impact of the bullet that killed her.

  Dead, she went limp, then slithered down so that most of her body was folded into the foot well. Her eyes stayed open, staring sightlessly up at him in an accusing way that bothered him not at all. There was a dime-sized black hole in her forehead, but very little blood.

  She’d known him as Cory. His actual name was Grant Norton. In the course of his work as a deep cover CIA agent, he’d seen, and done, far worse.

  He felt no guilt: she’d signed her own death warrant by stealing secrets from her country. He might have trolled the ranks of the worker bees for the most vulnerable and chosen her for her obvious isolation. He might have gone to work on her as s
ystematically and ruthlessly as a tiger culling a weak antelope from the herd. He might have put the idea that it was her duty to alert mankind to the looming threat facing it in her head, then petted and persuaded her until she did it, but in the end the choice had been hers.

  She had betrayed her country.

  For which the penalty was death.

  Even if he’d wanted to leave her alive, there was too much at stake to chance it. Lives, maybe millions of them, were on the line.

  Any collateral damage left behind by this operation was a small price to pay for what it could accomplish.

  He shut the door, locked it, walked away. Someone else would be along to drive the car to the junkyard where it would be crushed—the girl crushed with it. Both would then disappear.

  “It’s done,” he said into the burner phone he’d been provided with for precisely this call.

  “Excellent work,” replied the man on the other end. His name was Edward Mulhaney, and he was head of NCS, the National Clandestine Service. Mulhaney’s voice grew faintly muffled as he said to someone who was apparently in the room with him, “Part A is complete. Operation Fifth Doctrine is a go.”

  2

  Friday, December 13th

  3:50 p.m.

  Bianca St. Ives prided herself on her poker face.

  Too bad life wasn’t poker.

  Impossible as it seemed, Colin Rogan stood right there in front of her. In her private office. On the opposite side of the room, but still. To say he was too close was the understatement of the century.

  He swung around to face her as she walked through the door, turning his back to the tall, steel-framed windows that overlooked the muddy Savannah River fifteen stories below. The pale December daylight streamed in around him so that, at first glance, he appeared as little more than a dark silhouette against the gray sky. Not even that was enough to mask his identity. Thirty-two years old, six foot three, leanly muscular in a well-tailored blue suit. Wavy black hair. Hard, handsome face. Eyes narrowed with satisfaction as they collided with hers.

  Not even the slightest chance of a mistake.

  The shock of his presence hit her like a body blow. A spontaneous glad bubble of recognition—she kinda/sorta liked the guy, she was attracted to him, they had a brief but volatile history—was immediately swamped by horror. Fear widened her eyes, parted her lips. Her breath caught. Her heart lurched.

  Her mind screamed, Danger.

  Then her face froze.

  Just that heartbeat too late to—what? Pretend she didn’t know him? That she was somebody else—her own twin? A doppelgänger?

  Like that was going to work.

  Some people had awful, no good, very bad days. She was having an awful, no good, very bad year.

  He said, “Hello, Bianca.”

  And smiled at her. Bianca read all kinds of evil intentions in that smile.

  Her world shook to its foundation.

  Considering that the last time she and the former MI6 agent-turned-mercenary had met she’d drugged him and left him passed out cold on a bed in a hotel room in Moscow, that he might be upset with her was not exactly surprising.

  What was surprising was—how the hell had he found her?

  In sleepy, out-of-the-way Savannah. Her safe place. Her bolt-hole.

  Not anymore.

  He’d called her Bianca. Beth was the last in the string of fake names he’d known her by, the one she’d sworn to him was her real, true name. Beth McAlister.

  Not Bianca. Not ever.

  Bianca St. Ives was her real name. Or at least, the realest name she possessed. The one she used in her real life. The life she’d made for herself here in Savannah, as the owner of Guardian Consulting, the thriving private security firm that she’d founded as a hedge against the dark side of her existence. The life that nobody in the criminal world, or the CIA, or Interpol, or anyone else who might be hunting her, knew about.

  Only now, obviously, he did.

  Finding people is part of what I do: he’d said that to her, once.

  He knows my name. He knows where I live. Oh, God, what else does he know?

  As she met that opaque gaze, the thought that he might have learned her deepest, darkest secret in the course of hunting her down exploded in her head. Lightning bolts of dread blasted through her system. She had only recently discovered the staggering truth herself, and she was still having trouble coming to terms with it. If he now knew what she was—a genetically altered scientific experiment, a high-tech Frankenstein’s monster engineered by a clandestine branch of the US government as part of their top secret, long-abandoned effort to create a strain of supersoldiers, a thing labeled by her creator (and, no, she wasn’t talking God here) as Nomad 44—she didn’t think she could bear it.

  With that giant question mark hanging over their—she wasn’t going to call it a relationship—their acquaintance, she felt suddenly, hideously vulnerable. Exposed.

  Ashamed.

  A shiver slid down her spine.

  Her fingers itched to touch the small ridged scar beneath her jaw, the one that had resulted from the removal of the tattoo she’d been given as a newborn: the number 44. Marking her, they’d thought for life, as one of theirs.

  Good thing she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, or she’d probably start hyperventilating about now.

  It doesn’t matter what he thinks about me.

  But it did. It did.

  “Did you enjoy the boat parade, Mr. Tower?” Evie asked from behind her. Bianca welcomed the question as a chance to get reoriented, to catch her breath. It was a reference to the procession of barges done up like holiday floats that the Westin across the river put on daily at 3:30 p.m. sharp for their guests. Its toot-toot-tooted boat horn version of “Jingle Bells,” audible even at this distance, had just signaled its conclusion. Bianca’s office windows afforded a perfect view of the spectacle. From her tone, it was clear that Evie—Evangeline Talmadge, Bianca’s longtime best friend and recently hired office manager—had advised him to watch while he waited.

  “I did,” he answered.

  Evie had alerted her to the presence of a client waiting in her office as Bianca had returned, laden with just-purchased Christmas gifts, from a long and late lunch. Mildly intrigued—she’d had no scheduled appointments for that time and in any case it was unusual for a client to be shown into her private office without her—she’d still missed what was, in retrospect, an obvious red flag and blindly walked in to the life-destroying catastrophe that was Colin, here.

  Evie wasn’t to blame. She knew nothing about any of it. Who Colin was. Who Bianca was, for that matter. What she did when she wasn’t being Bianca St. Ives.

  Evie didn’t have the slightest clue about the existence of the deadly forces that Colin represented, much less that his presence meant that they had somehow managed to run her to earth here, where she’d thought, hoped, prayed, no one could ever find her.

  Evie had no clue that Bianca’s life—maybe all their lives—now trembled in the balance.

  Bianca only then realized that she’d come to a dead stop a few strides inside the room. That her eyes were glued to Colin. Luckily, Evie couldn’t see her face.

  Get it together, Bianca ordered herself. Managing to take a breath—at last!—she said, “Mr. Tower.” Her tone might be wooden, but it was the best she could manage by way of the kind of polite greeting that Evie would be expecting to hear from her.

  The only substitute for good manners was fast reflexes, and since she’d already blown the hell out of the fast reflexes thing, she had to fall back on what was left.

  She resumed walking, carefully putting one sleek black high heel in front of the other as she headed toward her desk. Her legs, slim in sheer black stockings, felt unsteady as she stepped from the smooth white marble that floored the entire building onto the blue-and-gray contemporary carpet that covered the center of the room and lay beneath her desk. Walking, talking, hanging on to her packages, functioning in general, al
l required an icy dichotomy, her body going through the motions while her mind reeled.

  To cross her office toward Colin like he was nothing more than another client, like he was welcome, like having him show up here in the city where she had gone to ground wasn’t a cataclysmic disaster, was one of the hardest things she had ever done.

  But she did it.

  The obvious Step One in the plan she was scrambling to pull together was to jettison the packages that filled her arms.

  “I would have called, but I wanted to surprise you.” He sounded remorseful, a sentiment she knew was about as real as his name.

  Mr. Tower—Evie had said that the man waiting for her in her office was from Tower Consulting, so in that context the name made sense—was clearly a pseudonym. Unless Colin Rogan, the name he’d given her during their last fraught encounter, was the pseudonym. Or maybe they both were. After all, every other name he’d ever given her was fake. Just because there was a wealth of information about Colin Rogan and his spy-for-hire company, Cambridge Solutions, Ltd., available in the public arena didn’t mean that any of it was true.

  Lies upon lies: her stock-in-trade, and apparently his, too.

  “You succeeded,” she said. Brittle had replaced wooden, but at least she was managing to string coherent words together. He was armed, of course. She was familiar with the pistol he carried in an ankle holster. Her eyes slid over him. No sign of a shoulder holster under his sleek suit, but that didn’t mean it, or multiple other concealed weapons, wasn’t present.

  Colin’s gaze was fixed on her now, just as her gaze had been riveted to him from the moment she’d stepped into the room. As their eyes met and held, an invisible current surged between them, tangible as an electrical charge. There was chemistry, of course—they’d struck sexual sparks off each other since their first encounter. Add in anger, wariness, distrust, and the volatile mixture all but crackled in the air.

  She knew what he saw: a twenty-six-year-old, five-foot-six-inch blonde (five-nine in her custom-made shoes) wearing a long-sleeved, high-necked, knee-length, snugly belted crimson dress that relied for its knock-’em-dead quotient on the way its knit fabric hugged her slender figure. Her shoulder-length hair was brushed back from a delicately featured, high-cheekboned face that was dominated by a pair of large crystalline blue eyes. Her mouth was lipsticked the same vibrant shade as her dress.