She could feel the pendant’s beveled rim digging into her palm. One thrust of her thumb and the throwing star would be in her hand. A flip of her wrist and it would be streaking toward him. Their eyes met on the thought, and a grim smile just touched the corners of his mouth. It made her uneasy. Maybe something in the way she was holding the pendant, or her expression, or her body language, was a tell?
“I’m not going to have you arrested, I’m not going to try to hijack you, as you put it, and offering you violence is the furthest thing from my mind. And while we’re on the subject of violence, you might as well quit fondling that throwing star because we both know you’re not going to use it on me.” The dry certainty of that last annoyed her almost as much as the realization that he’d made her weapon.
Dropping the pendant like it was hot, she bared her teeth at him. Nice that he was so sure. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Walking to the window to give herself a moment to think, she smoothed her skirt in a kind of reflexive reaction that was the self-comforting equivalent of a child seeking out, say, a beloved blankie. Beneath the fine knit she could feel the outlines of the garter belt she wore. Custom-made, bristling with the tools of her secret criminal life, it was an essential part of the arsenal she now kept on her person at all times.
“And you can bet I’m going to notice if you start lifting your skirt.” His caustic words caused her hand to freeze.
Unfortunately, he knew of her garter belt’s existence—and had firsthand experience with the stun gun that was one of its components.
And, yes, she’d been thinking about hitting him with it—again. Probably now that he’d called her on it, a repeat performance wasn’t in the cards.
Besides, that would merely serve as a temporary solution to a permanent problem. He knew her identity and where she lived. Zapping him into unconsciousness and, say, locking him up somewhere wasn’t going to help, because at some point she would have to let him go or someone else would free him or he would escape and he’d still know what he knew. Bottom line: can’t unring a bell.
Hmm.
A glance down at the river’s churning brown water and what little bit of the rear parking lot she could see told her that, for most people, life was proceeding as usual.
He said, “Why not just face up to it? Short of killing me, there’s nothing you can do to get rid of me. And I think we’ve already established that you’re no killer.”
Except when I have to be, she countered silently as she turned to face him. But what he didn’t know worked in her favor. Although the barely digestible truth was, killing him wasn’t something she was prepared to do if there was any possible way she could avoid it. The trick lay in coming up with some other solution to the threat he posed.
“If you’re not here for Mason, what do you want from me?” she asked. “You didn’t go to all this effort just because you missed me.”
“I’m here to offer you a job.”
Her brows came together. “What kind of job?”
“Top secret. Highly specialized. Government related.”
One of the new rules of her existence was, she was staying as far away from anything government related as she could get. “Not interested. But thanks for thinking of me.”
“I’d reconsider that if I were you. This may be your one chance to save your ass.”
“I wasn’t aware my ass needed saving.”
“Weren’t you?” That grim smile of his returned. “You really think CIA kill teams just give up and go away?”
5
Bianca’s heart stuttered. It was her worst fear put into words. Because of what she was—the living proof of a clandestine program that certain elements of the government wanted to keep hidden forever—the CIA had dispatched a crack squad of assassins to eliminate the evidence, namely her. They’d tried and failed to kill her a number of times already. But she’d been hoping—was hoping, right up until this moment—that at last they’d given up, or that they didn’t know she survived.
The only way to escape them is to die. Mason had told her that. She’d learned for herself that it was true.
Only as far as she was concerned, dying wasn’t on today’s to-do list. Or tomorrow’s, either. And she’d tried fake dying, which clearly wasn’t working for her.
“They’re still hunting me.” Her voice sounded hollow to her own ears. She’d known it all along, of course, however much she’d wanted to pretend it wasn’t true. Probably she was still traumatized by the events of the last few weeks, and it was coloring her reactions. Immersing herself in the day-to-day running of her business, in Christmas shopping and the making of holiday plans and simply doing her best to feel normal, was her way of coping. It was the equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, she knew. She hadn’t wanted to see anything else that was terrible heading her way, and so she hadn’t. Unfortunately, ignorance might be bliss, but it wasn’t smart.
His nod was curt. “Hot on the trail. Probably now would be a good time to fess up to what you did to get them turned loose on you. Because that tale you tried to sell me about Prince Al Khalifa’s missing millions being the reason doesn’t cut it.”
Her mouth twisted. So the Al Khalifa explanation had been a lie. So would anything else she told him, because the one thing she wasn’t going to tell him was the truth. Personal considerations aside, if he ever found out she wasn’t sure whose side he would be on. A genetic abomination couldn’t count on having a whole lot of friends: ask Frankenstein’s monster. Confession might be good for the soul, but she was pretty sure it was bad for the life expectancy.
“About a dozen murders, a few bombings, oh, and I robbed the Fed—”
“You’re going to tell me the truth sooner or later,” he interrupted. “Knowing you, I’m guessing it’s something Thayer got you to do.”
“See, the thing is you don’t know me.”
He regarded her intently. “So tell me, Sylvia/Cara/Kangana/Beth/Bianca, whatever your name really is. Tell me your story. I’m listening.”
She hooted. “Thanks, Dr. Phil. You know, I would—if I had a story to tell.”
“Dr. Phil can’t get a CIA kill team called off. I can.”
“How do I know that?”
“Trust me.”
“I think we’ve been down this road before.”
“Are we talking about right before you drugged me, which, by the way, was right after I saved your life from the multiple gunmen who were doing their best to blow multiple holes through you?”
“I saved my own life. The whole diving at the gunman thing and taking him down? That was me.”
“Right, and the whole shooting back at all the other gunmen and dragging you out of the line of fire? I’m pretty sure that was me.”
“Doesn’t mean you saved my life.”
“You’re not dead, are you? Although with the CIA on the hunt for you, all I can say is, give it time.”
She wet her lips. “How do you know they’re still after me, anyway? You alphabet agency types keep in touch much?”
“Some.”
Coupled with his expression, that was as good as an admission.
“What do you know that you’re not telling me? Are they here already? Is that it?” The atmosphere in the room deteriorated in an instant. Open antagonism now crackled in the air, tangible as a low-pressure front before a coming storm. Her body went taut as a bowstring. Her fists clenched. Her eyes were hard on his face.
“Not to my knowledge. But they’re coming. Could be today, could be tomorrow, could be next week. And I guarantee you they won’t stop by your office for a chat first like I did. They’ll just take you out where they find you.”
“So what are you, the canary in the mine? Are they watching to see if you come back dead?” Everything she stood to lose—her home, her friends, the life she’d built for herself, her life—flashed before her eyes. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. To be hunted to the death by her own government beca
use of something they’d done to her in the first place—if she could have made them all fall down dead where they stood, every single one of them who’d had a hand in creating her, in killing her mother, in subjecting her to this nightmare, she would have done it with the snap of her fingers.
But that wasn’t possible. Neither was tracking them down and eliminating them before they could get to her. There were too many of them, and she knew the identities of only a handful.
Her choices boiled down to two: she could run—or she could wait. And hope. And prepare.
Waiting and hoping weren’t really her thing. And she was prepared. Just not, she feared, prepared enough. Given the capabilities of the enemy, she was beginning to think that it was impossible to be prepared enough. And any fight waged on her home turf carried with it the possibility that people she cared about would get hurt.
He said, “I doubt it. I’m sure they’d credit you with enough sense to dispose of my body where nobody could find it. By the way, in addition to getting the CIA kill team called off, I can get you full immunity for anything you’ve ever done. Think of it as the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card.”
It was clear that he actually believed he could do what he promised. Too bad she didn’t. “What part of ‘not interested’ did you miss?”
“I probably should have told you from the beginning that this is one of those offers you can’t refuse.”
“Oh, woo, what are you going to do if I do? Kill me? Get in line.”
He looked at her without answering.
She said, “First of all, give it your best shot, and second, think I don’t know you wouldn’t do it if you could? Which, believe me, you can’t.”
“How about, have your business shut down? For starters.”
“And how would you go about doing that?”
“Well, let’s see, the picture on Bianca St. Ives’s business license application isn’t actually of you. The fingerprints you submitted aren’t yours, either. I think that comes under the heading of fraud. And that’s just the beginning. Do you really want to invite the kind of investigation that would go along with a state agency digging into your past?”
They eyed one another measuringly.
He added, “The job pays fifty million dollars.”
As far as carrots went, that was a big, juicy one. It caught her attention, as he’d no doubt intended.
“For that much money, what do you want me to do? Assassinate the Pope?”
“Impersonate somebody. I’ll give you the details later, when we’re in a more secure environment.”
The thing was, she’d been promised an awful lot of money for the last couple of jobs she’d taken on. How much of the payout had she actually seen? So far, not one skinny silver dime. Although she was working on that.
“Pie in the sky,” she scoffed.
“Half up front,” he countered. “Before you put on your first wig.”
“That’s a real incentive, but—how to put this? No.”
“You save your ass and your business and you get all that money. Plus you’ll be doing vital, important work. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.”
“No,” she said again, and frowned. “How did you find me, anyway?”
He shrugged. “I’m good at what I do.”
Obviously that was true: he’d hunted her, and found her. Three times now.
Third time’s a charm. Or in his case, maybe a death sentence. For him.
She was still making up her mind about that.
“Where’d you put the tracking device this time?” Because the last time he’d found her, that’s what he’d done: planted one in her purse.
“I didn’t need a tracking device. And neither will they. They’ll come across something—a fingerprint, a public record, a snippet in a monitored phone conversation, could be anything—and it’ll lead them here. It’s just a matter of when. You know it as well as I do.” He moved toward her. She watched warily, but he stopped while he was still a good three feet away. “You take this job, you’ll be protected. The kill team will be called off. They’ll leave you alone, because you’ll be one of us—one of them. Safe under the umbrella of officialdom. Spooks don’t hit other spooks, at least not ones playing for the same team.”
But they did hit illegal government experiments that, alive, constituted evidence of their crimes. The fact that she was an illegal government experiment was a small but vital piece of information that, as it turned out, he didn’t seem to know. On a personal level, she was glad. Not that it made a difference to the realities of her situation.
“What team is that? You’re not even American.”
“Five Eyes. Ever hear of it?”
It was a spy pact between the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Founded in the aftermath of World War II, the once top secret organization had evolved into one of the most complex and far-reaching intelligence and espionage alliances of all time.
“I have. So they’re the ones paying you now?”
“That’s right.”
“Let’s see, what does that make you? A mercenary?”
“Yep. Just like stealing makes you a thief. At least if you come to work for me you’ll be doing bad things for a good cause.”
“Now, that is tempting,” she allowed, and smiled at him. Mockingly. “The answer’s still no.”
“They found you in Macau,” he reminded her. “They found you in Moscow.”
Bianca stared at him as a fragment of thought that had been twisting around the edges of her mind took form and shape and center stage.
“Or maybe what they found was you.” He’d been there, in Macau and Moscow, when the CIA kill team had done its best to take her out. She’d accused him of being with them, he’d sworn it wasn’t true, and she’d believed him. Maybe she still believed him. Maybe he was even legitimately offering her a job with Five Eyes. Maybe he really did think that taking it was the best way out for her.
But even if all that was true, maybe he didn’t know the full story of what was going down. She was all but certain now that he didn’t know what she was. Maybe something else he didn’t know was that the CIA was using him to find her.
Her stomach dropped clear to her toes. As answers went, that one hit it out of the park.
If they were tracking him, they could show up at any moment. She’d considered the possibility before, even if briefly and less than seriously, when he and the CIA kill team had both turned up in Moscow. Now she had a horrible, gut-wrenching feeling that it was true.
You never see the bullet that takes you down.
“Maybe they’re watching you to find me.” Her tone was stark.
“Not a chance in hell.”
“It makes sense.” The possibility unnerved her. If that was the case, they were here. She was already moving, already on the way out the door, on the thought. Her coat and purse were in the closet behind Evie’s desk. She would grab them and head for the safe house she’d set up in another part of the city in case something like this ever happened and she couldn’t go home. She would gather up the weapons and the bug-out bag she kept there, and get gone.
He who turns and runs away …
She would figure out how to combat the threat from somewhere else.
He said, “My company’s countersurveillance capabilities are some of the best in the business. I’d know if I was being watched, or tailed, or monitored. I don’t even carry a phone on me to keep anyone from tracking me through that. And nobody’s leaking my whereabouts, because nobody knows where I am. Nobody.”
That would have been interesting to hear—a few minutes ago. Now she didn’t trust it.
“How long have you been in Savannah?” She threw the question over her shoulder as she retrieved her coat and purse. The big silver letters of the Guardian Consulting sign that filled the wall behind Evie’s desk caught her eye. Her business was dear to her: she’d worked hard to found and build it. But if something happened to her, or if something fake-happened to
her, as it might have to if she was forced to disappear forever, the business would go to Hay, who would run it well and capably. The possibility that when she walked out the door she might never be coming back, might never be returning to Savannah, might never again see Hay or Evie or Doc or anyone else who mattered to Bianca St. Ives, brought a lump to her throat.
Get over it.
Never look back. It was one of the rules.
Hay’s Christmas-gift baseball bat was once again tucked into a corner of the closet. Seeing it, Bianca had a brilliant flash of inspiration and snatched it up.
“About two and a half hours, give or take. Where are you going?” He followed her as she headed for the door.
“Home. Didn’t you hear? I have a dinner party to go to tonight. I have to change.” She wasn’t about to share her real intentions with him. She hadn’t quite labeled him an enemy, but her coalescing plan was strictly need to know, and he didn’t. Besides, the first phase of her plan involved ditching him.
“You need to trust me on this. You need to take the job.”
“Beautiful, where you’re concerned I’ve learned not to trust anything.” She threw his words back at him. Shrugging into her coat, a sleek black rainproof trench, she tied the belt, hoisted her purse over her shoulder and tucked Hay’s bat under one arm.
“Your life is on the line here.”
She knew how serious he was by the fact that he ignored that provocative “beautiful.” “There’s a news flash.”
“Bianca—is that even your name?—this is your only path forward. I’m begging you. Take it.”
“Begging? Really? I like a man who begs.” Pausing by the keypad next to the door, she threw a mock-flirtatious look back at him before punching in the code to turn off the alarm and unlock the door. “Fine. I’ll do it. But you need to keep your promise and pony up half the money. Before I leave Savannah.” Now, that sounded believable.
The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3 Page 5