Defender

Home > Other > Defender > Page 22
Defender Page 22

by Mann, Catherine


  Was she faking the nerves, angling for a deal by playing the sympathy card? “That would be good.”

  “Do you believe I am staying here for another reason?”

  “Are you?”

  Her chest rose and fell with erratic breaths, and she began to rock almost imperceptibly. “I am staying here because she scares me like death.”

  His brain translated her meaning well enough. He’d seen how Chuck Tanaka fared after two weeks with Marta Surac. Anya was right in believing that woman was enough to scare anyone to death.

  He dropped to a crouch in front of her, eye level. “Has she ever hurt you?”

  “Not physically, but I’ve seen what she does to others.” She paused, visibly gathering her nerves until her dark-shadowed eyes met his again. “I want to stay here until you find her, and I’m willing to earn my keep. Ask me questions, anything you want to know about her.” She swept an expansive gesture, opening herself up to his interrogation.

  Okay, she was winning him over. Maybe he should wrangle some deal for her with people who could stay objective. “I can talk to the Turkish police about—”

  “No.” Her breathing hitched again in that near panic attack pattern he’d seen while questioning past suspects. “Aunt Marta pays the police. When we lived in Hungary, I tried to report her, and they simply told her what I had done.”

  Hungary. Nowhere had he found anything to send him searching there. He started to ask her what city, when she gasped.

  Anya reached, her trembling fingers hesitating just short of his arm. “You’re hurt.”

  He glanced at the bandage peeking beneath the edge of his rolled-up shirtsleeve. There hadn’t been time for him to think when the gunman had turned the weapon on him. Thank God for training and reflexes, or the bullet would have hit his heart. “It’s just a flesh wound.”

  “Did my aunt do that?”

  “No.” He stood again.

  “But one of her people did.” She held up a hand. “You don’t need to answer that. I can see the answer in your eyes. Yes, Mr. Secret Agent, you do show things in your expression on occasion.”

  Now, that surprised the crap out of him after an eleven-year career when he should have been past surprising. “Nobody else thinks so.”

  “I guess that makes me different.” Some of her old starch crackled back to life.

  “You’ve been different from the start.”

  A tentative smile eased tension lines around her eyes. “I take that to mean I am no longer on your suspicious persons list.”

  He couldn’t go that far, but he kept most everybody on his suspect list until a case closed. He nodded toward the door. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

  For once, he startled her quiet. Hell, he startled himself quiet at the request he hadn’t planned. But Anya Surac had gotten under his skin, and he would be lying to himself if he thought otherwise. He held the front glass door wide, waiting for her to exit into the parking lot. She strode alongside him, her heels clicking on the way to his car. Again, he opened the passenger door for her.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as he settled behind the wheel of the nondescript blue sedan.

  “Somewhere we can talk.” Where he could learn more about her and figure out who she was underneath all the layers he’d seen in the past week.

  A few winding turns deeper into the base later, he pulled up outside the recreation center baseball field. As he stepped from the car, familiar sounds of home rode the wind. Two teams of airmen played an intramural game: shouted calls, good natured heckling, the crack of a ball against the bat, families cheering from the metal bleachers. Over the years he’d embraced classic American moments to help bring him out of the grip of his undercover persona.

  He took Anya’s elbow and pointed to an empty corner on the first row. “Over here.”

  She followed alongside, picking her way through the patchy grass to their seat, regally ignoring the curious glances from women in jeans checking out her red dress and heels.

  The bleachers felt hot even through his suit pants. “Is this okay with you?”

  “Of course,” she answered without hesitation but with plenty of confusion. She adjusted the drape of silk over her knees.

  “Good.” He shifted his attention front.

  A big dude stepped up to bat with an accent Nunez pegged as Czech. Not exactly a country known for its Little League teams. The guy swung and rocketed the ball into foul territory, all torque, no aim, but having a blast.

  The sun baked away two days of rain and tension. Elbows on his knees, he watched the game, ever aware of Anya beside him, yet still not sure what he felt for her. Ditching his Miguel Carvalho guise should have ended his attraction to her.

  It hadn’t.

  She tugged the band from her hair and shook it free down her back. “Do you play the baseball?”

  He could listen to that accent all day, a realization that reminded him he wasn’t tamping down the attraction by not looking at her. Even her voice tempted him.

  “No, I just like to watch.” He took the opportunity to think about the question and not the woman. He’d wanted to play baseball once upon a time. His parents had signed him up for a team twice as a kid, but they had to move halfway through the season.

  No more avoiding. He needed to get back to business. “You’ve been helpful in rounding up people who work for your aunt when you could have just as easily gotten away with playing dumb.”

  “My aunt’s workers? You still haven’t found her?”

  “We posted an alert bulletin out for her and her bodyguard.” He could safely tell her that much, obvious information anyway.

  “What about Baris and Erol?”

  “Excuse me?” The bearded man who’d participated in Chloe’s kidnapping had been named Baris.

  “She has two bodyguards, Baris and Erol. I am sorry, but I do not know their last names.”

  “Will you work with a sketch artist?”

  “Of course.” She spun the hair tie around her fingers. “You still did not say whether or not you have crossed me off the suspect list.”

  “I am as sure of you as I can be of anyone.”

  “Trust is a difficult thing. I imagine trusting would be all the more difficult because you spend much time doing your beneath covers work.”

  He choked on a cough, and an image of just how hot sharing a bed with Anya could be. “Pardon? Beneath covers?”

  “Your pretend persona. Miguel.”

  He unbuttoned his suddenly too-tight collar and pulled free his tie. “Uh, that’s called undercover work.”

  “Ah, right. I will remember that.” She stared at the ball field as a lady on the blue team whacked a home run and emptied the bases. Once the roar of the crowd dwindled, she said, “No wonder you do not have a quirk.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Quirk. A character trait. I believe I have the right word this time.” The exotic melody of her accent thickened the air between them.

  “What is your quirk?”

  “I do not have one either. Mostly, I tried not to bring attention to myself. It is safer that way.”

  “Sounds like we have more in common than I thought.” He slid his arm along the bleacher behind her, allowing his thumb to graze her arm in comfort.

  “My aunt is sentimental.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that one, because I’m having a hard time understanding how anyone who tortures other people could be sentimental.”

  Anya blinked fast, her mouth sealing thin.

  Shit. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “You’re only speaking the truth about her actions.” She fought back the tears.

  “Explain to me what you meant about her being sentimental.” He would be a fool not to tap into her insights. And yeah, he wanted to get to know Anya as much as he needed to understand Marta.

  “You have a show in your country about the Mafia. I believe it is called The Sopranos.”

 
“Right, but the series is over now.” He tucked his feet under the stand to make room for a mother passing by with a double stroller.

  “Still, you know what show I am referring to. It centers around one Mafioso in particular, the leader.”

  “Tony Soprano is probably one of the most recognized TV characters ever.”

  “I believe that is because he had a human side with a quirk as well as his evil side. Even bad people are not . . . uh . . .” She wiggled her fingers beside her head as if searching for a word. “Flat?”

  “Correct. Flat. One-dimensional.”

  “Yes, my aunt has many dimensions. One of them, she collects things that remind her of the past. That is why I say she is sentimental.”

  “Vulnerabilities. The downfall of anyone, good or evil. You would have made a damn fine agent, Anya.” He would be wise to stay alert around her.

  She twisted the hair tie around and around her fingers tighter until the tip of her index finger turned blue. “I am not as innocent as I would like to be.”

  Ah shit. Here it came. Her confession would blindside him after he’d convinced himself she really had tried to escape her aunt. He could see how it would unfold and hated what he would have to do, but he was completely helpless to stop the end result. “I’m listening.”

  “I ran packages for my parents as a child without knowing. After they died, I continued, but understood my actions. I transported drugs for my aunt, and I smiled at men to get them to tell me things.” Her tumbling confession began to stutter. “S-s-sometimes I did more.”

  He numbed himself, almost. For some reason his normal defenses weren’t working at optimum levels. Her revelation explained the sadness and regret, and yeah, even shame he saw in her, her sense that she could never be just an ordinary girl on a date to a ball game.

  “I am not proud of what I did, and I will not make excuses.” She studied the shortstop as he fielded a routine ground ball. “I knew what I did was wrong. Plenty of people are scared and still choose to do what is right. I did not stop until she asked me to kill someone. That is a line I could not cross. That is the day I went to the police.”

  “The time you discovered the cops were on the take.”

  “On the take?” Then her face cleared. “Right. That is also when I began saving to leave, to become clean. How silly of me to think I could escape her reach.”

  Relief funneled through him. How damn strange that hearing her confession made him trust her more. Maybe because he was beginning to really grasp what she already knew about quirks and layers to people.

  “What sort of things has your aunt kept?”

  Anya blinked fast, confusion skirting across her eyes. “She has a ring from her mother, and she carries a cigar clipper with her always. She told me once it belonged to her uncle, Radko.”

  Radko. He made a mental note to look up more on the guy.

  “She told me one day that ring would be mine. I do not want anything from her, but still, it seems strange knowing that I will never have that ruby.” Her dark eyes softened with sentimentality. “Just as it makes me sad I will not kiss you again.”

  Her surprise admission cleaned his clock like a ball upside a batter’s helmet—for all of one shouted call from the ump. Nunez tucked a knuckle under her chin and tipped her face to his. He skimmed his mouth over hers once, again, lingering.

  “Get a room, dude,” called a teenage batboy staring up at them from the first base line.

  Anya’s smile stroked his kiss for a final second before they eased apart. “I know your last name is Nunez. What is your first name?”

  “Mike.”

  Her smile widened, reminding him of the feel of her mouth on his. “Thank you, Mike, for taking me to my very first baseball game.”

  And there she went, blindsiding him again with how she forgave him so easily for lying to her. Of course there hadn’t been a choice. He’d only been doing his job, but in the past, some hadn’t been as magnanimous.

  God help him, wise or not, he really believed her. Now he just had to figure out what the hell to do with her.

  To hell with waiting around to be told what to do next. Chloe intended to take charge starting right now.

  She kept her eyes locked on the door to the briefing room. She’d actually wrangled one of the guards into telling her where to find Jimmy. Apparently he was doing some kind debrief with his crew. Perhaps because of whatever had happened last night after they’d made love under the piano?

  When he’d read that message on his BlackBerry, his face had hardened with an unmistakable mix of fury, determination, and a brief hint of pain. She knew he couldn’t tell her everything about his job, but she wouldn’t let him avoid her.

  She still wasn’t sure where they stood with each other or even where she wanted things to be between them. She couldn’t risk a relationship with someone who couldn’t accept her unconditionally. However, she also couldn’t deny the fact that Jimmy drew her in a way no one else ever had.

  The briefing room door snicked a quick warning, and she straightened. Jimmy’s crew poured out, all somber: the older boss with horn-rimmed glasses, the shaved bald jokester, the flirt who’d helped pull her from the water.

  And finally, Jimmy. His desert-tan flight suit bore more than a few wrinkles attesting to how long he’d worn it.

  He walked straight toward her. “Wanna get a cup of coffee?”

  Jimmy looked like he needed a bed far more than caffeine, the shadows under his eyes attesting to how much of himself he gave to this job.

  “I don’t want to keep you awake. I just wanted to see for myself that you’re okay.”

  “I’ll walk you back to your room then.” He hitched his flight bag and helmet into his grip more securely and started down the hall.

  More framed posters mingled with official photos of airplanes and past commanders. Seeing those scenic shots of Turkey reminded her of Jimmy’s “tour guide” stint in the rec room when they’d talked about the Maiden’s Castle and his Turkish grandmother.

  That mellowed-out, chatty man was nowhere in sight. Even the crabby Jimmy she’d first met, the one who made her feel mad and alive all at once, was MIA.

  “Jimmy? Are you all right?”

  “Sure.”

  He lied. She knew it. Did a week in his life and a night of getting naked under a piano give her the right to press? She wasn’t sure, but she did know that she seemed to be the only one around to try. She scrunched her toes inside her tennis shoes, the purple socks she’d begged off Livia urging Chloe to be bold. “What happened after you got that e-mail?”

  “We flew out last night to get the missing friend I told you about. He’s not in good shape.” Jimmy pushed open the door, the sun blindingly bright.

  “Is he going to be all right?” She shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked up at him.

  “There are a lot of levels to ‘all right.’” His words came out flat, devoid of emotion. “Will he live? Maybe. Will he carry this inside him? Forever.”

  Cars swooshed by, and a crowd cheered in the distance in seeming defiance of the dark mood pulsating from Jimmy. She could feel the ache radiating off him as tangibly as when he’d read that BlackBerry message. Except, damn it, every time she saw him, his pain pricked her a little deeper.

  The whole way to the lodging facility, down the long hall to her room, she stayed quiet, waiting.

  He followed her into her room without asking. He closed the door and sagged back on the wood panel. She gave him his space and sat on the edge of her bed. How strange that she’d never realized how inaction on her part could also be proactive, because she knew without question that he needed her quiet support right now far more than words or fix-it deeds. How many times before had she mistaken his silence for rudeness?

  Jimmy studied his crossed feet with excess concentration, not that his combat boots offered him much to see except for long laces and a dog tag to match the one around his neck. The one on the boot was there to identify him
if he was ever burned beyond recognition in a plane.

  Now wasn’t that a cheery thought? But after seeing Chuck, grief for his friend tangled up with the hell he’d been through himself, all of it boiling up inside him until he couldn’t contain it anymore without exploding. Right or wrong, Chloe was the only person he could bring himself to talk to.

  But he needed to stare at his boots, damn it. Looking at her would only weaken him when he needed everything inside him to open this vein and pour out the destructive lava from his past. She deserved to know.

  “I was a POW in Afghanistan for four months. The hospitality sucked.”

  She gasped, then quickly stifled her shock. And thank God, she didn’t speak. It was hard enough just talking.

  There was so much more he could say, should say about Socrates, his bones out there somewhere. Or about the guy one cell over who’d lost his head just before Army Rangers showed up to rescue them. “That’s when I got the scars. I can’t even begin to explain the twisted shit some so-called humans do to other human beings.”

  “The kind of things that were done to your friend?” She paused, still not touching, but he could feel her eyes on him.

  An image of Chuck’s battered face filled his head. He had a fair idea what had happened, but apparently there were recordings out there as well. In Kutros’s confession, he had explained that they ran a video camera through all torture sessions with their military captives, recording everything a prisoner said. Then they attempted to blackmail that person into going home and stealing additional secrets. If anyone went to the authorities, the video of that person spilling national security secrets would be released on the Internet. The only real choice for those kidnapped? Talk or die. “Yeah, Chloe, they put him through hell.”

  “The way you were put through hell,” she stated rather than questioned.

  Perceptive woman.

  He nodded, memories clogging his throat. Everything was crashing in on him at once, like a hurricane picking up all the garbage in his past from Jenny’s death to Socrates’ murder. Chuck and Chloe and their pain swirled right into the mix.

 

‹ Prev