“Clear out the fridge before you go,” he said, his voice low.
Mini bar. Shit. “Sorry, yes, of course.” From the duffel bag, she pulled out the plastic shopping bag which held the currency. She opened the fridge and tossed all the beer bottles and wine spritzers into the bag. Then she swept up the little bottles of spirits sitting on the tray on top. She glanced around the room, checking for more.
Cain hadn’t moved. He was shaking.
“Try to relax,” she said, knowing how ridiculous the suggestion was.
He nodded. His eyes were bleak.
Haunted.
Hating that she must leave him alone, knowing she had no choice, she nodded and closed the door.
When the woman had been properly chastised, Zima made himself move across the room to consider the insipid view through the window and consider, while she sobbed and whimpered.
At least she’d had the sense to bring the body with her. It would stop the authorities from tripping Zima up, or worse, finding the girl and her protectee before Zima did.
It would pay to find out more about the man traveling with Kelsey. He had been a supernumerary until now. Killing Reno put him in a different category.
Did this change the rules at all?
The rules were usually clear. There were normal human rules, which were to be abided by at all times. The only exception to that was if the Kobra’s needs superseded those rules.
Had that time come? He wasn’t certain, and couldn’t trust his own instincts, which didn’t mesh with the normal world.
The girl was dogged about protecting the man, though. It was something he could use and still move within the rules…
“Marie,” Zima said.
She moaned.
“Get up. There is some information I need. You must compose the message while I deal with the body.”
Agata dumped the car in a shopping complex, twenty miles north of Romans-sur-Isère. For ninety minutes, she acquired the items on her mental shopping list.
Then she walked for two miles, carrying the heavy bags and swapping hands frequently.
She used the restroom in a lunch bar, where she tore up the Alison Fisher passport and flushed the pieces. She caught a bus outside the lunch bar, and traveled back to La Richonnière, then grabbed a taxi to the gas station two blocks over from the motel. She walked back to the motel from there, carrying the heavy bags. She would be happy to put the load down.
Cain wasn’t asleep, or even lying on the bed. She put the bags on the other bed. The room smelled of steam, soap and shampoo, and Cain’s clothes laid on top of the coat. His boots, too.
Soft sounds came from the bathroom.
Agata went up to the door, intending to call through it to tell him she was back. She halted, frozen.
The door was open. It was why the outer room was steamy. Cain stood at the counter, peering in the mirror at the small cut on his cheek, high up by his eye. His gaze shifted to her in the mirror as he straightened.
He was naked, of course, for the clean clothes he might have put on were in the bags she had just hauled here.
Only, it wasn’t his nakedness which first registered on her shocked brain. It was the tattoos over his back and arms. She’d read about them in the briefing and she had grown used to spotting the gang ink on his forearms, when he allowed his sleeves to reveal them.
This was different. Seeing the tattoos on his back was a reminder of what he had once been. It was a reminder of the dark path he had walked and what he was capable of.
As if this afternoon had not been a good enough reminder of that.
The initial shock was wiped away when she realized, belatedly, that he was naked.
In a heart-squeezing gestalt, she took in the entire rear view—iron thighs, and a high, hard round backside. The indentation of the small of his back, and the muscles there. The line of his spine and the thick muscles of his back and arms, moving under the satiny brown flesh.
He had to be carrying next to no body fat. Each muscle was clearly defined beneath his flesh. His conditioning was superb. A hyper-clean diet and consistent workouts with weights, plus all the walking he did, provided the view she now saw.
He turned to face her, and Agata’s heart leapt and lodged in her throat. She couldn’t move. Her gaze crawled over every lean, hard inch of him. Her body seemed to both tighten and turn into a hopeless puddle of lust.
Cain’s gaze met hers. He reached for the door and closed it.
Reprieved, Agata walked back to the shopping bags, her legs trembling.
When Cain emerged from the bathroom, ten minutes later, he wore a towel around his hips.
Agata made her gaze stay on his chin or his forehead. She couldn’t meet his eyes. That was beyond her for right now. “Clothes on the bed,” she said shortly, and returned her attention to the screen.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Telling Dima what happened. She needs to know.”
Cain reached over and dropped the lid on top of her fingers. Agata whipped her hands out of the way, with a hiss of pain and annoyance.
He sat on the other bed, beside the neat pile of new jeans and sweaters and other items. “Zima knew where we were. There’s only one way it could happen. You said Dima had a mole in the group.”
“Not everyone is roped into this,” Agata said quickly. “Just Quinn and Noah, who are cleared.”
“You said it was a bulletin board.”
“On the dark net.”
“Which everyone in the group can read whenever they want?”
Agata bit her lip.
Cain fished through the new clothes, holding them up. “I know you don’t want to consider this, but Zima turning up here means someone in your group is reading the board and reporting back to him. You can’t tell Dima a thing, Kelsey.”
“I can’t do this alone,” Agata said truthfully. “It’s a risk I have to take.”
“Then we make sure we arrive in Grenoble at the right time to meet her. In the meantime, Kelsey, I’m all you’ve got.” His gaze met hers. “I’ve got skin in the game, now.”
Agata didn’t point out that his life had been on the line all along, surely the most skin anyone could have in any game. She understood instinctively what he was saying. He was an active participant now.
“Then you’ll carry a gun?” she asked.
He considered. “Everything but that,” he said. “It’s not me being ornery. You understand that, right?”
She thought of the nausea which had flooded his face when she held the backup gun out to him in Paris. “I get it,” she said. “I don’t like it, but I get it.”
He spread out the clothes, considering them, then lifted his chin and straightened his back so he could see into the tops of the shopping bags sitting on the bed beside her. “Backpacks, hiking boots, outdoor gear. You plan on hiking somewhere, Kelsey?”
“Yes.”
Cain’s eyes narrowed. “Off trail…” he breathed.
“He can find us too easily, if we stick to civilization,” she began.
“Oh, I agree,” Cain said quickly. “Only, you know what lies between us and Grenoble, right?”
“Mountains. I know. There’re maps, and you probably know more about crossing mountain passes than most.” She hesitated. “Do you know this area at all? Did you ever compete here?”
“Once,” he said, his tone remote. “Only, Biathlon trails are well marked and there’s a million people along the route.”
Agata bit her lip. “Well, we’ll just have to muddle through. I don’t know what else we can do. We have to survive another two days, Cain. Then we reach Dima. And Dima, I trust. She’ll have our backs after that.”
“I’m curious to meet this Dima,” Cain said. “She sounds…capable.”
“She is.” Agata got to her feet and reached into the bag on the other side of the island of bags. She pulled out the six pack of cans and tore one out of the cardboard sleeve and held it out to Cain. “Her
e. You need the calories. It’ll help.”
He turned the can over. “Whey protein, no sucrose…” He looked up at her. “I’m impressed, Kelsey.” He popped the can open and drank quickly.
Agata watched him drink, wondering how calm and centered he really was. If there was one thing she knew for certain about Cain Warren, it was that what met the eye was only ever a surface thing. Way more swirled beneath, stuff which could catch even him by surprise.
Her gaze dropped to his bare chest and the powerful deltoids and pecs, which his clothes normally hid.
There were aspects to Cain which caught her by surprise, too.
He picked out jeans and a new black tee shirt and went into the bathroom to change. Agata didn’t know if she was pleased about that, or not.
It was past seven when Agata finished stuffing the backpacks with the supplies she had bought, trying to distribute the weight evenly. Cain put a stop to it. “I’m male and stronger than you. Accept it, Kelsey and put more weight in my pack. Don’t be a mug. You’ll just get yourself dead.”
She transferred the heavier items to his. Her pack still felt ridiculously heavy, although she had hiked enough to know that if the pack was worn properly and the straps adjusted correctly, the weight wouldn’t slow her down too much.
Cain wanted to leave straight away. Agata refused. “Shock has physical effects. You can shrug it off mentally, but you still have to work through the physical side effects, Warren. Even a few hours of sleep. Go on.”
“Physical exertion disperses adrenaline just as well as sleep.”
“Just shut up and sleep, will you? I’m tired, too.”
He considered her, his eyes narrowing. “You won’t sleep, though. You’ll sit over me with a gun, because it’s your job.”
She kept her stare steady.
He shook his head, as if she was beyond redemption, and laid down, his hands behind his head.
Agata turned off all the lights. Floodlights in the parking lot glowed around the edges of the curtains. She nudged one back by an inch and used the gap to monitor the narrow rectangle of bitumen running along the front of the motel, and the road beyond.
Farther on, she could see the pin pricks of light from vehicles on the A49 running across the inky black night.
Cain turned over, his back to her.
Agata settled cross-legged on the bottom corner of the other bed, where she could see through the gap in the curtain.
In the next twenty minutes, Cain shifted positions just as many times. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. When she peered over her shoulder, she saw sweat sheening his temples. The rise and fall of his chest, which was too fast for a man settling to sleep.
When he drew in a sharp breath, she looked again. He was staring up at the ceiling, his eyes glittering in the dark. His throat worked as he swallowed.
Agata turned to look out the window once more, her heart thudding. She had expected something like this to happen. She wasn’t Cain, although it didn’t take much imagination to guess what he was going through right now.
She had to take his mind off today. If he could let himself relax even for a few moments, sleep would come. Above all else, Cain needed to sleep.
“What you said today, in the restaurant, about saving your life.” She didn’t lift her voice. He would listen, or he wouldn’t. “You gotta know, Warren, that of the two of us, you’re the only one who has done any saving. It’s my job to protect you and it’s not over yet. I’m terrified I’ll fuck this up. Only if I make a mistake, it isn’t a Mars rover which gets bogged in a sand dune. It’s people who pay the price.”
He didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said softly, “Flip it around, Kelsey. If you get it right, you do help people. You have already saved people, even if you couldn’t bring yourself to fire a shot. You hauled me out of the temple and got me out of the parking lot today.”
Because she wasn’t looking at him, she could speak the truth. “I’m out of my league, Cain. That’s why I want to go back to NASA. Hell, I’d even go back to Circe de Soleil, if they’d take me again. At least there, I’d be useful, building their rigging.”
Again, the long silence.
Agata let him mull that over. If he was building up arguments to toss back at her, then he wasn’t thinking about today.
“From where I sit…lie…” he said, at last, “to me, you’re already a hero. No matter what happens. You do good things, Kelsey. You try. While I…I’m the complete opposite.”
“Not true,” she said instantly.
“Problem is, I don’t know if it’s true or not.” He rolled over on the bed once more. This time, she saw out of the corner of her eye that he had settled to face her. His eyes were open, although all he must see of her was a vague outline. “After the Olympics thing, I didn’t head off to New York straight away.”
“I read the file,” she reminded him, recalling the sex scandals and petty arrests, the drug charges which melted away.
“Yeah, but you just get the facts from that.”
“You lived life in high gear.”
“High in every way possible,” he said, his voice harsh. “I can remember those couple of years pretty well, only I wish I couldn’t. I look back at them and…cringe. I was a cliché.”
“Then you went to New York and became a bigger cliché?”
“From what others have told me, I have to agree with you,” Cain said, his voice even softer and calmer. “I can’t remember much of it at all. That’s the problem.”
“The thing which happened,” Agata said. “The thing which made you reach out to your father.”
“Yeah.”
She looked over at him. A swift glance. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“After today, I do.”
Cool fingers walked up her spine.
“I don’t remember much about this, either,” he said. “What I do remember has come back to me in flashes. It’s just the bit at the end which has stayed with me…like a tether around my neck.” His tone was bitter.
“What is the bit at the end?” Agata asked, although she dreaded the answer.
His silence stretched. Was he girding himself to tell her? Regretting he had brought up the subject?
“I woke up one night…very late. I wasn’t asleep. I didn’t sleep much then. I came around. I found myself sprawled on the back seat of a car abandoned in a demolition site. The car was junked, so I don’t know how I got there. Only, I wasn’t alone.”
She heard him breathing. In and out. The calming ritual he used. She waited.
“A woman. I didn’t know her. She laid on top of me. She was quite dead.” His tone was clinical. “She had bled out from her severed neck. The blood was…everywhere.” He spoke the last word with quiet abhorrence.
Agata made herself not look at him. He wouldn’t want her to, not at this moment. “That was part of the world you lived in, wasn’t it? Murders, bodies, pay back, protecting the turf.”
She heard the bed bounce as he sat up. “Did I kill her? I don’t know, Kelsey. Because you’re right. That’s the world I was in.”
“Did you murder anyone…before?” She kept her tone as even and non-judgmental as she could.
“I don’t know.” His voice was hoarse. “I get flashes, bits of memory. They make me sick. They make me want to put an iron spike through my temple to make them stop, so I don’t feel like less than an earth worm. Yet nothing I’ve ever glimpsed involved anything like…that. If I did do it, if I killed her, or others, what sort of monster does that make me?” The horror was thick in his voice. Disgust, and all the judgment she had smothered in herself.
Agata’s throat hurt. Her heart hurried. What could she say? Nothing could spare him from this but a truth which he would never learn. Only, she had to try.
She cleared her throat. “I’ve heard that even when you’re high, when you’re operating on pure sub-conscious, you don’t lose all your moral judgment, even then.”
“Pop psychology.” O
nly, there was hope in his voice. He wanted her to hold out a life preserver.
Agata looked at him. “Maybe. You’re one of the most centered and thoughtful men I know, Cain. No one ever really changes, not in the bone-deep way you would have to change to become what you are now, if you had been the monster you think you might have been. It’s just not possible.”
“So every murderer who finds God is lying?” The hope was still in his voice.
“Maybe. Or maybe their capacity for evil is just buried deep, covered over and a flower bed planted on top.”
“That could be me, too,” Cain pointed out.
Agata shook her head. “You throw up at the thought of handling a gun. You have nightmares, and what I’m pretty sure is a latent, long-term type of PTSD, and some repressed memories which scare the shit out of you. No one hiding a lack of conscience puts themselves through that, Warren, not even to look good to others.”
He considered her for a long moment. Then he settled himself back on the pillow. “Anyway, I thought you should know.”
“Why?”
“So I can tell you that you were right not to count me as a genuine life saved. I don’t qualify, anymore.”
When she looked at him next, his eyes were closed, and he was breathing slow and deep.
Agata was grateful it was not her job to sleep right then. It would have eluded her.
Only, despite the horror Cain had painted in her mind, Agata did sleep, and it was unintentional. She only realized she had succumbed when Cain woke her with a shake of her shoulder. His fingers pressed against her lips.
She nodded and sat up stiffly. She had fallen on her side, her legs hanging over the end of the bed and her hips were on fire from the sharp angle they were at.
Cain pointed to the window and put his finger to his lips again.
Agata stepped closer to the window and put her eye to the gap between the curtain and the frame.
Zima stood in front of the unit at the far end of the motel, which was at a ninety-degree angle from the one they were in. He peered in the window, his hand shading the glass so the light from the parking lot floodlights was repressed, allowing him to see inside.
Two units up from him, the woman with the rosebud mouth was doing the same. The big Luger with the silencer was in her right hand.
Inside Man Page 14