Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

  “We’ll talk about that another day. I’m too tired tonight. I just wanted to give you the number where I am and let you know you shouldn’t worry. Write this down,” she said, and read her the number and room number of the hotel. “I’ll be here for a little while, at least a few days. I’m probably not going back to the apartment.”

  “Come stay here.”

  “Mom. No way. Put you guys all in danger? I don’t think so.” She remembered that she’d promised to bring Scott there for dinner on Sunday, and the thought made her ache. “My partner was badly injured, Mom. Can you tell Nana to put him on her prayer lists? Scott Shepherd.”

  “Sure, baby. So how are you staying safe?”

  “They have guards all over. The man who was in Chicago is here, too, right next door.”

  “Oh, that’s good! Lex, right?”

  How did she remember things like that? “Yeah. Don’t get any ideas. I’m not marrying anybody, all right?”

  “Okay, baby, don’t get all excited. You can have your private life.”

  “Ha! What’s that, a new ploy?”

  Eileen laughed. “Keep me posted, honey, okay?”

  “Will do, Ma. Love you.” She hung up and realized there was one more call she had to make. This was somewhat delicate, but she had to call Marc. She should have called before this, in case he’d seen the news coming in from Chicago yesterday, but it would be unforgivable to leave it now. For a moment, she dithered over what to say to Lex, then finally decided on the truth.

  She walked to the doorway between their rooms. “I had a sort of boyfriend and I have to call him. It’s nothing serious, but it would be rude of me not to let him know I’m okay.”

  Lex half smiled. “Okay.”

  “I just thought I should tell you. In case the sound of the conversation is…well, intimate.”

  His smile broadened. “Okay. Thanks.”

  Kim waited a minute, then didn’t know what she was waiting for, and turned around and went back to the phone. She called Marc’s number and it picked up on the third ring. “Hi, this is Marc Spinuzzi. I’m away on assignment in Peru until October 20. You may leave a message with my agent at 555-0931 if you have urgent material, otherwise, leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  He checked messages when he could, mainly to keep the voice mail from overflowing. When the tone sounded, Kim said, “Hi, Marc. You probably haven’t seen the news, but sooner or later you’ll hear that I’ve been mixed up in some high-profile events. I just wanted to let you know that I’m okay. I lost my cell phone, and my apartment is…um…messed up, so I didn’t want you to worry.”

  She couldn’t think what else to say. He was a good guy, but he wasn’t her guy. Anymore. “Take care,” she said, and hung up.

  When she padded back into the other room, Lex had put his plate aside and was stretched out on the bed, his head propped up on pillows. “Everything okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Why don’t you go to bed, Valenti? You’re dead on your feet.”

  For a long moment, she looked at him. “Can I lie down beside you? Just for…companionship?”

  Without a word, he opened his arm, made a space. Kim fell into it, settled her head on his shoulder and let go of a breath. “Thank you.”

  Beneath her ear, his voice rumbled. “No problem.”

  The round of his shoulder was exactly perfect for her head. Kim rested her palm over his ribs. “Once again, I would really love to make love to you, but my body is too exhausted.”

  “There’s time. Go to sleep.”

  “I just wanted you to know—”

  “I know, Kim. Sleep, sweetheart. You’ve had a long day, and I’ve got your back.”

  Only then did she close her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered. As she drifted off, a television commercial about scrubbing bubbles came on, and the song entered her drifting state. There was something she should be remembering, something important, something to do with those bubbles.

  Whatever it was, was lost as she fell into the ocean of sleep, where nothing hurt and no one was critically injured and no one had died.

  But only a minute into her sleep, she jolted awake, pulling away violently from the warmth and comfort of lying with Lex. “What am I doing?” she said, more to herself than him.

  The sudden movement made her feel dizzy, and she swayed. Lex took her arm. “Hey. You okay? What’s going on?”

  She waved her hand. “I can’t sleep with you. It’s one of my rules.”

  “Rules?”

  Blinking, she nodded. “To keep things from getting too complicated. No sleeping together.”

  “I see.” He sounded amused, and she glared at him.

  “What?”

  “Sweetheart, you are so wiped out, you can’t even see straight. I’m not gonna bother you, but I think considering all you’ve been through the past few days, would it be so bad to just let go and let someone hold you?”

  Kim wasn’t sure. He made it sound so reasonable and obvious. But was there a trick in it? She couldn’t think of one. She continued to peer at him, half-blind with exhaustion.

  He slid down, pulled her arm, and she fell, like a stage hypnotist’s subject, into a slump against his body. His arms went around her, making her feel safe and comfortable, and she really just couldn’t think of a reason not to sleep with him.

  As in sleep-sleep, not sex-sleep.

  His body was lean and he smelled just right, and she put her hand on his flat belly. “You’re kind of skinny, you know.”

  “Yeah. I eat and eat and it never gets better.”

  “It’s all right. It’s not a bad thing. I was just noticing.” She traced the edge of his rib. “Is being skinny for guys like being plump for girls?”

  He covered her hand with his own, spread his fingers over hers. “Pretty much.”

  “That was so awful today,” she said in a hoarse voice. “Being trapped, like a coffin, like dying. I kept telling myself that it would be worse to be at the bottom of a building after an earthquake, and I thought of my brother getting beheaded, which was really a whole lot worse, and it didn’t help.”

  “Your brother was beheaded?”

  “Yeah. In Iraq.”

  “I’m so sorry, Kim.”

  “Thanks.” She nestled closer, taking comfort and relief in the feel of his rib cage, his warmth. “I’m not there now,” she said.

  “No.” His lips pressed warm against her temple. “You’re safe now.”

  In her dream, Kim was kicking something, fighting her way out of a big sack of darkness. She could not breathe. Her voice made no sound. She flailed awake, screaming, sitting straight up.

  Into a disorienting darkness she didn’t recognize.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” said a voice, and a hand was on her back. “You’re safe, honey. You’re safe.”

  Lex. Hotel.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, and got up to get a drink of water.

  In the bathroom, she turned on the light and reached for the water glass, wincing as she caught sight of her face, bruised and battered and swollen and discolored. “Cute, Valenti,” she said, and drank deeply.

  “You all right?” Lex called.

  She stared at herself in the mirror. “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.” She padded out into the bedroom. “I’ll go sleep in the other room.”

  “Kim.”

  “What?”

  “Come here.”

  For a minute, she hesitated. “I still don’t want to make love, Lex.”

  “Will you let your guard down just one tiny bit, darlin’? I am not the bad guy.”

  She took a breath, let it out. Walked silently to the side of the bed. “What?”

  He tugged her hand and she tumbled into the bed. “Lex, I—”

  His mouth covered hers, that full, beautiful mouth. Kim felt something in her let go, and her arms lifted, went around his shoulders. “That’s it,” he whispered, and pressed their bodies together.
She loved the way he felt, long and lean and strong, his big hands sliding down her hips, up again.

  She didn’t object when he tugged upward on her T-shirt and skimmed it over her head, and pressed his naked chest to her breasts. “That feels good,” she whispered.

  “Oh, yeah.” His hands moved on her, smooth and easy. Kim opened her hands and stroked the glossy skin of his back, opening to the thrust of his tongue in her mouth.

  “I changed my mind,” she said, and wrapped her legs around his hips, and rocked against his erection.

  “It’s not necessary,” he said over her lips. “What you need is the touch. It grounds you back here on this planet, in this life.”

  “Really.” There was enough light that she could make out the ghostly edge of his cheekbone. “Is this bomb squad lore?”

  “It is.” He moved against her subtly, clasped her breast in his hand. “You can eat, too.” Bent his head to her nipple and nibbled lightly. “Anything physical.”

  “Seems like having sex would be the best, then.” She pushed her hands into the back of his sweats, smoothed her hands along his butt. “Nice,” she whispered, and kissed his shoulder, his neck. Lingered along his earlobe. “We can have that longest, best, sweatiest sex another time. Maybe tonight, I’d settle for the regular, ordinary kind.”

  “Regular?” he said with a smile in his voice. “Not with me, Wind Talker.”

  “Show me.”

  He slid her pants from her, and her panties, and Kim spread her legs for his long fingers to glide inside and coax her to ripeness, when she said, “Now, please,” and he came home, the heft and length of him spearing her to the earth, to the physical, to the now. She was grounded in sweat and tongues and tangled legs, centered in the crush of his chest and his beard scraping over her chin, and the slow, fierce thrust of him inside of her, aligned by a violent orgasm that split through her, scalp to toes, and radiated from their joined bodies to her elbows, her knees, made her clasp him hard to her body, biting into his shoulder. He came then, too, rocking hard against her, his voice guttural and deep against her ear, as rich as fertile earth.

  Kim breathed against him for a long time, taking pleasure in the ease of his shoulders, the familiarity of his breathing on her ear. “Not regular,” she said at last. “But lovely.”

  “Mmm,” he said, and she could hear him floating away. His lips moved on her neck. “Mmm.”

  She chuckled. “Get off me before you fall asleep and squash me.”

  “Okay. In a minute.” He moved against her, squeezed her bottom. “You have the sweetest little body. I loved finding out you were so curvy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The pleasure was mine,” he said, and sighed, moving away.

  Kim shifted, started to stand up. He grabbed her arms. “No, you don’t.”

  “I was just going to the bathroom.”

  “No, you’ll go to bed in the other room, and I want you here.”

  Kim felt a pang. “I don’t sleep over,” she said. But she didn’t pull away when he steadily pulled on her body, tugging her down to him, close to his body, tucked in his arms.

  “You are tonight.”

  She thought about moving, but it suddenly seemed too much trouble to disentangle herself from the net of his arms and legs. His body, damp and long, cradled her perfectly and he tucked her close like a stuffed animal. “I guess it won’t hurt just this once.”

  Lex was already asleep.

  She smiled. How like a man. Funny how little she minded this time.

  Chapter 19

  Saturday, October 9

  In spite of the fact that it was Saturday, Kim and Lex arrived at the agency by eight. There were few regular personnel around, but a core group of FBI, CIA and NSA operatives had gathered in the conference room. Their job was to focus on and discuss the current situation with the Berzhaan terrorist cell.

  As they walked down the hall, Lex paused at Scott’s desk. “I’m going to see what he was tracking down yesterday. He seemed pretty sure of some site possibilities.”

  “Sure.” Carrying a latte from Starbucks, Kim popped her head into the conference room. “Do I have time to make a phone call to the hospital? I want to find out how my partner is doing.”

  Agent Rosen from the Washington branch of the FBI, a tall, craggy-faced man in his fifties, nodded gravely. “We’re just getting everyone up to speed. Take your time.”

  “Thanks. I won’t be long.” She dropped her things on the desk, glanced at a small pile of pink reminder notes, most dealing with various e-mail files she needed to examine for the case and picked up the phone to dial the hospital.

  Scott’s condition was critical but stable, the same as the night before. She gritted her teeth, thinking of his missing hand, and wanted to kill someone.

  Which wasn’t the answer, either. Mansour was seeking revenge for his lost family, killing because those he loved had been killed. If she wanted to kill in revenge, too, when would it ever end? Someone had once said, if you keep following an eye for an eye, pretty soon everyone is blind.

  She wanted to stop the violence. Stop the maiming and injury of innocents. Not create more.

  Quickly, she opened the e-mail files that had been flagged and skimmed them. There was a lot of work to be done today. First, she’d go to the meeting, see what the team had come up with, then she would come back and sort through this material.

  Picking up the file she and Scott had assembled yesterday, she went to the conference room and entered quietly, sliding into an open chair that was as far as she could get from Lex. The one thing she didn’t want was a rumor mill churning out gossip about the two of them.

  She counted seven agents altogether, two women, five men. Kim had worked with three of them before. She didn’t recognize the others. Agent Rosen had tacked a giant map of the United States on the wall and was busy sticking bubble-head pins in various locations.

  When he turned around, he spied Kim and said, “Good, we’re all here now. I’ll introduce you all. This is Kim Valenti, who originally broke the code and tracked the terrorist cell to Chicago.”

  A ripple of interest and respect went around the table. Kim lifted a hand. “My partner, Scott Shepherd, also broke the code—though I do wish I hadn’t said so publicly.”

  “We’re all very sorry to hear of his injuries. How is he this morning?”

  She shrugged. “About the same. Not good. Let’s get these guys, huh?”

  Rosen introduced the rest of the group, assembled for their expertise in various areas. Lex was the explosives expert, Kim the cryptographer and linguist. Others on the team included a structural engineer, a security officer and an expert on the culture and religion of the country of Berzhaan.

  Rosen was reviewing the information collected thus far—the same material Scott, Lex and Kim had been reviewing the day before. He was reviewing the possible targets, and sticking pins in them. “There are any number of large parades taking place on Monday, which is Columbus Day, and we don’t really know exactly what this cell might do, or if there are multiple targets. Thanks to Agent Ramirez—” a small dark man nodded “—we’ve pinpointed the most dramatic parades in various cities. We’re particularly interested in those where the clash between Italian and Native American communities is pretty fierce, year after year, because security will be focused on keeping the peace with that, and a suicide bomber can do a lot of damage in a big crowd.” He pushed pins into the map, narrating aloud the spots: “Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis.”

  Kim scribbled notes.

  Rosen continued, sticking pins into cities where there were important military or transportation bridges: Coronado Bay in San Diego, Houston Ship Channel Bridge, Bay and Golden Gate Bridges, George Washington. “Any others you can think of?”

  “How about the Lenny Zakim Bridge in Boston?” said the structural engineer. “It’s pretty dramatic, and well-known.”

  “Right.” He stuck a pin in.

  There was more discuss
ion about the various possibilities, until the map was bristling like a porcupine. “Obviously, we’re going to have to narrow this down some. Let’s go back through the materials we have and see what stands out.”

  Kim glanced at Lex to see if he would share anything from the thick file in front of him. He shook his head minutely and shifted his eyes toward the door. She understood the message: they would discuss it alone.

  “I have a giant pile of e-mails that came in over the past twenty-four hours,” Kim said. “I’m wondering if it might be better to see if we can track down the headquarters of this group before they make their move.”

  Rosen nodded, as did several others. “We know they were in Chicago. Any indications of other locales?”

  Dee Hazzard, the cultural anthropologist said, “We’ve been tracking a man out of Portland, John Hallam. He spent much of his youth in the Middle East with his father and has known ties to a rebel sect connected to the Keminis. He was arrested twice in connection with various criminal activities both in the U.S. and abroad. He resurfaced unexpectedly three days ago, in the hostage situation at UBS.” She pulled out his picture and held it up.

  Kim recognized the manager of the station the night Mansour took over. “He escaped that night, with Mansour and Dunst, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. But we think he’s taken an Islamic name, Afzal Abd-Al-Aziz.”

  Kim wrote the name down. “Hmm. He thinks well of himself—the name means superior and servant of the powerful. ”

  “One of our agents thinks he might be living with a woman in Brooklyn.”

  “Can’t we just go in there, then?”

  “Not just yet. The woman is the daughter of a highly placed Saudi businessman who is easily offended, and the feds don’t want to cross him unless we have to.”

  “Even if a bridge gets blown up?”

  The woman shrugged a little.

  Lex spoke up. “Shepherd had gone through a lot of material over the past week. He felt the terrorists were going to hit in several spots, but the main one will be the George Washington Bridge, on Columbus Day.”