The keys were tucked above the driver’s sun flap: second place she looked after under the floor mat. She shut the door, started the engine.
Colin slid onto the other end of the peeling brown vinyl bench seat while she wrestled with the clutch and balky stick shift. Which worked for her, really, because having him on board before she had a chance to drive away at least temporarily solved the problem of whether or not she should take off and leave him. Disappearing into the ether of criminal connections she’d grown up in was tempting. The question to ponder was, could she really disappear?
They’d found her in Macau, they’d found her in Moscow, and now they’d found her in Savannah.
Bumping out onto the gravel road, she reflected that she liked that Colin didn’t give her any macho crap about wanting to drive, until it occurred to her that as long as she was driving he didn’t have to worry about her jumping out of the truck and taking off at, say, the first red light.
She gave him some side-eye, wondering if that was really his motivation.
“Lights?” His tone questioned her choice to turn on the headlights. Given that the truck was the only vehicle on the gravel road, the lights seemed especially conspicuous.
She’d debated it, too. “If anyone spots the truck driving without lights, they’ll know it’s us.”
For the same reason, she was careful not to drive too fast. No squealing tires or spurting gravel for her. Just an ordinary couple out for an ordinary Friday night in their junker of a pickup.
He grunted acceptance of her reasoning.
“Head for I-95 North,” he said when they left the gravel behind for an actual paved street, which happened to be Lathrop Avenue.
She looked at him, raised her brows. They were driving toward the city center, and she made no move to change directions. The street wasn’t particularly busy, but there were enough other vehicles to provide cover. Unless they were really unlucky, no one would be looking for a battered pickup.
“You’re not still going to give me grief about this, are you?” His face tightened with impatience. “I’m going to say this one more time. You have to take the job. They almost succeeded in killing you tonight, and unless we can back them off they won’t quit until they do succeed. And now that they know where you live, they won’t just be coming after you. They’ll be coming after everybody you love. They’ll hurt anybody they have to hurt, and kill anybody they have to kill, to get to you.”
As much as she hated to face it, she knew it was true.
“I’m thinking about it,” she said.
“If I were you, I’d think fast.” His voice was grim. “They could find us again at any time.”
She knew he was right. The prospect made her insides twist. Lightning images of Doc and Evie and Hay spun through her head. She remembered how the CIA had kidnapped Marin and Margery, Mason’s seven-year-old daughter and his wife, and held them captive to force him to reveal himself. They would have killed them, too, along with Mason and Bianca, at that black site in Heiligenblut, Austria, if she and Mason hadn’t managed to turn the tables on them and rescue his family and escape.
She remembered the other Nomads—the dead little babies in the tubes. Twice now she’d barely escaped joining them.
Bottom line was, she really didn’t want to die. She didn’t want anyone she loved to die.
Alexander Groton, the recently deceased former head of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), had wanted her to come and work for them. He’d actually issued the job offer while holding her at gunpoint. The alternative to agreeing was he would shoot her on the spot like a rabid dog.
She’d said no and lived to tell the tale. So far.
But the hard truth was, having a CIA kill team on her trail made her long-term survival unlikely.
One of the reasons she’d so vehemently refused Groton’s offer was that she didn’t trust him or the CIA. She didn’t trust those agents of her own government not to lie to her, not to use her until they had no more use for her and then kill her. She was beyond wary of putting herself within their reach.
But she did, to a certain extent, trust Colin. Call it a working trust. Or trust in progress. Subject to change at any time.
She didn’t know Five Eyes. But Five Eyes was not the CIA. Five Eyes had not killed her mother, had not murdered forty-seven little babies and their gestational mothers. Five Eyes had not initiated the experiment that had made her what she was.
Going to work for them might, in fact, be her best weapon against the CIA, and her best shot at staying alive. Unless and until she could figure something else out.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m on board. For real this time. I’ll take the job.”
“Hallelujah. She sees the light at last.” Glancing around, he pointed at the next intersection. “Take a right up here, and head for I-95.”
Reaching the intersection, she hung the requested right, then cast him a sour look. “And just for the record, you don’t own me. Not in any way, shape or form. Are we clear?”
The merest suspicion of a smile touched the corners of his mouth.
“As glass,” he said.
11
An hour later, the Gulfstream V was wheels up and Colin was accessing the plane’s secure communications channel to brief his employer.
“I’ve acquired the asset,” he said when Jeffrey Bowling, Britain’s Director of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), came on the line. Knowing what he knew—that there were eager would-be listeners out there, and that every communication channel, even one as secure as this, had the potential for being breached—he didn’t want to get more specific.
Bowling had been one of the tight cabal of Five Eye spymasters who had contracted with Cambridge Solutions for this operation, and that had been because none of them wanted to get their or their agency’s hands dirty. Outsourcing possibly problematic missions was a time-honored tradition with intelligence services in general, and British intelligence in particular. In fact, 80 percent of the free world’s intelligence operations were now in the hands of private companies, in part because outsourcing prevented those who were burdened with government accountability from breaking any laws and also furnished them with plausible deniability if anything should go wrong. Picture it as the government version of a kid breaking a lamp, throwing up his hands and saying It wasn’t me. The heads-will-roll mentality of many oversight committees coupled with the ever-present threat of exposure in this new era of WikiLeaks had infected many governments with the same paranoia, and had thus created a vast and lucrative shadow world of spies-for-hire of which Cambridge Solutions was a part.
Bowling himself had subsequently green-lighted Colin’s choice for a female operative to participate in Part B of this mission; Part A had been under the purview of the Americans. And that separation was in place because the name of the game when it came to minimizing the chances of a leak was compartmentalize. If the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, the left hand couldn’t tell anyone about it.
When Colin referred to “the asset,” therefore, Bowling would know whom he meant. Within minutes of the conversation’s conclusion, the information that Beth McAlister/Bianca St. Ives was now one of them would be circulated throughout Five Eyes’ ultra-secret STONEGHOST network, without anyone outside their tight little circle knowing precisely what she had been brought on board to do. The CIA would be forced to back the fuck off her.
“Any difficulty?” Bowling’s plummy voice conjured up a picture of him as Colin had last seen him: a large, rumpled man in his late sixties, ruddy-faced and heavy-jowled, seated with cigar in hand behind his oversize desk in The Doughnut, as the GCHQ building was known due to its distinctive circle-with-a-hole-in-the-middle shape, which was located in the unremarkable suburbs of Cheltenham.
“Our American cousins arrived right after I did. They did their best to take her out.” He’d already briefed Bowling on an edited version of what he knew of her background. For the d
irector’s consumption, he’d attributed the CIA’s lethal interest in her to her long-standing association with Mason Thayer. Now there, they both had agreed, was a target for assassination everybody could get behind.
Bowling said, “I find it extraordinary that a team like that didn’t succeed.”
“I’m sure they do, too. Heartwarming if you think about it.”
“Quite.” Bowling’s voice reflected the smile that the thought of the Americans’ discomfiture must have brought to his face. “You’re sure she’s the right person for this job?”
“I am. As I told you, she’s one of the best I’ve ever seen.” He heard the note of pride in his own voice and hoped Bowling missed it. The last thing he wanted was for Bowling or anyone else in officialdom to start thinking that his interest in their newly acquired asset was personal.
“I defer to your judgment.” Implicit in the words was that Colin would pay a price if things didn’t work out. “You know how important this mission is. I don’t exaggerate when I tell you that the fate of the free world may well hang in the balance.”
“I understand.”
“Then get the job done.”
Bowling rang off.
Leaning back in the contoured leather chair in the partitioned-off work area in the tail section, Colin stared unseeingly at the blinking banks of computer and communication equipment facing him. The round windows had their shades drawn against the night, and looked for all the world like closed eyes. The tan leather walls and the tan carpet were soothing, as were the low-level lighting and the gentle hum of the plane in flight. He should have felt exhausted, but he didn’t: he felt energized.
He’d saved a woman from death at the hands of a CIA kill team, he’d gained the operative he wanted for this job, and, as an added bonus, he’d baited a trap for Thayer, who, if history was a map to the future, would show up in her vicinity again sooner or later. Cambridge Solutions had a contract with Interpol, and he’d made a personal pact with his old friend and mentor Laurent Durand, head of Interpol’s Organized and Emerging Crime Program, to bring Thayer in. Like the Mounties, he prided himself on always getting his man. Sometimes it just took a little longer.
So he had in effect killed three birds with one stone, which meant he could chalk it up as a successful day.
Colin opened a drawer and retrieved the specially configured cell phone he’d left there. It was a state-of-the-art “black” phone meant to be used when the communication made over it absolutely, positively had to be secure. It was, among other unique features, totally untrackable. He’d left it behind on the plane out of an excess of caution, because even the best security measures weren’t 100 percent foolproof. Ironic to think that he hadn’t wanted to risk bringing trouble down on his target’s head, given how much trouble had found her anyway. He’d also had a not totally unreasonable fear that she would do something like insist on patting him down, find the phone and have enough knowledge to get past its encryption to discover who and what it was connected to, which he knew would screw the pooch as far as gaining her cooperation was concerned.
The message he needed to send over it now wasn’t anything he wanted going out over official channels. He didn’t want Bowling or anyone else in the intelligence community picking it up.
I have her, he typed, and hit Send. The message was to Durand, who would know what he meant.
Then he pocketed the phone. Next order of business: bring his new associate up to speed. He’d left her strapped into a forward seat as the plane took off.
He stood up and walked out of the work area. Except for the pilot and copilot, who knew not to leave the cockpit, he and she were alone on the plane. He didn’t want anyone else to know exactly who was on board, or to get a look at her.
The success of the operation hinged on her ability to become someone else.
He saw her the instant he started toward the front of the plane. Once he did, she was all he could see.
She sat on the cream-colored leather couch that filled part of one wall. Her head was bent so that a curtain of silky blond hair hid her face. Her red dress clung with loving attention to every one of her killer curves. Its hem was hiked way—way—up past midthigh.
Her knees were scraped. That wasn’t what he noticed.
She was peeling a torn black stocking down one of her long, slim, impossibly sexy legs.
He was human. He watched. His body responded as male bodies were designed to do.
Damn it.
She pulled the stocking all the way off.
Her skin was tanned and smooth. Like her legs, her feet were long and slim. Her ankles were delicate. Her toenails were painted the same vivid crimson as her fingernails, as her dress.
His pulse kicked it up a notch. Or three.
Damn it.
She wadded her discarded stocking into a ball, tucked it into one of her now-reconstituted high heels that she’d placed side by side near her feet, glanced up and saw him.
“So did you get the word out?” she asked. If he’d just been hit by a sexual thunderbolt, she obviously had not. Her voice was as cool and untroubled as if she took her stockings off in front of him every day.
He realized that he’d paused to watch her and resumed walking, stopping in the aisle a few feet away. To keep his balance against the yawing of the plane, his hand rested on the back of one of the plush leather chairs.
“I did. And by the way, you’ve officially started work for Five Eyes.”
“Oh, yay.” She looked up at him with big blue eyes that seemed guileless and, as he knew from experience, were as deceptive as nearly everything else about her. “If I’m a spy now, I want my decoder ring.”
That made him smile. She made a face at him. Then she reached up under her skirt to unclip the other stocking from her garter belt (speaking of deceptive, discovering the truth behind that provocative scrap of lingerie had been an eye-opener). As he watched her slender fingers work the clasp that attached the narrow black satin strap to the silky black band that circled her thigh, his smile died.
She pushed that stocking down her leg with as much unconcern for his presence as she’d removed the other one.
Damn it.
Flames licked at his skin. He felt his blood flash-heat to boiling point. He had to consciously not clench his jaw. His fingers tightened on the cool smooth leather beneath them before he forced them to relax.
So maybe he did have a personal interest in her.
Maybe he’d gone hunting for her after waking up from her dirty trick in Moscow not just because he was royally pissed, not just because his company had gotten this job and he’d realized that she possessed the precise skills needed to successfully pull it off, but because he was desperate to keep her from being killed by the people who were after her, otherwise known as the CIA.
Whatever his motivation might or might not have been, it didn’t matter. The fact was she was perfect for the job, and as her handler he could be as objective about her as he needed to be.
She rolled that stocking down, tucked it into her shoe just like she’d done with the other one and stood up.
That brought her close enough to touch.
He didn’t. He kept his hands to himself, inhaled the faint flowery fragrance of—what? her shampoo?—only because he couldn’t help it and responded with a nod when she said, “I’m just going to go clean up my knees.”
Then he watched her walk away. Barefoot. A little unsteady as the plane vibrated through a patch of rough air.
And found himself staring at her truly world-class ass.
Damn it.
While they were on the job, his policy toward her had to be strictly hands off. And eyes open. Even after the job was finished he was a fool if he didn’t just walk away. He was fairly confident that she wouldn’t stick a knife in his ribs when he wasn’t paying attention, but other than that all bets were off. How far could he trust her? The answer had to be, about as far as it took her to walk out of his sight. So far in their
acquaintance she’d lied to him just about every time she’d opened her mouth. She’d employed every means in her power to escape him. She’d zapped him with a stun gun, thrown him overboard into a shark-infested bay, had him knocked unconscious by an associate and drugged him into a twenty-four-hour stupor. Among other, lesser, things.
She was a thief, a con artist, a trained, skilled operative.
She was loyal to Mason Thayer.
Enough said.
By the time she returned from the lavatory, he was sitting in one of the pair of chairs across from the couch, thumbing through the file he meant to go over with her.
He looked up as she approached. She’d washed her face, slicked back her hair.
Makeup free, she was beautiful. He caught himself looking at her mouth and glanced back down at the file in his hands.
“Here,” she said, which caused him to look up again. She was holding a Band-Aid and—he squinted—an antiseptic wipe still in its foil packet out to him.
“For your head.” She indicated a spot up near his hairline above his left eyebrow as he took the items. “There was a first-aid kit in the bathroom.”
“Thank you.” Truth was, he’d forgotten all about the cut, which had quit bleeding some time ago and which he knew to be minor. Still, he tore the packet open and swiped the towelette across it. “Youch!”
Stung like a bitch. His eyes watered.
She smiled. He grimaced in wry response. Then he ripped the Band-Aid open, pulled off the plastic tabs that protected the adhesive and realized, as he lifted it toward his head, that placing it by following the stinging sensation and his vague sense of where the cut was could go ridiculously wrong.
“Give it to me.” Her tone was resigned. He silently held the Band-Aid out to her. She took it, brushed his hair back away from the cut and plastered the thing on his forehead.
The feel of her fingers moving in his hair and against his skin had his body reacting all over again.
Damn it.
“We’ve got about an hour and a half of flight time left,” he said. His voice was even, businesslike, which under the circumstances was something he could congratulate himself on. She wasn’t looking at him. She was gathering up the Band-Aid debris from the table beside him and dropping it in the nearest trash receptacle. His eyes slid over her as she moved with what he had come to recognize as her own singular brand of grace.
The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3 Page 11