Into the Crossfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Mike gave an imperceptible nod. “Pleased to meet you, sir. I just stopped by to say hello to Nicole.”

  Her father brought the cup to his mouth again with shaking hands, Nicole’s hand under his so he could sip. He loved Manuela’s coffee. She’d asked the doctors what he could eat and drink. His oncologist, a wise and humane man, told her to let him have his pleasures for as long as possible.

  Nicole had understood quite well what the gentle oncologist was saying. It won’t make any difference. He’ll die soon, anyway. Let him enjoy what he can while he can.

  Nicole fixed her father whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, happy if he could enjoy something.

  So she let him have Manuela’s coffee, and the Calvados he’d learned to love in France and his Cuban cigars, as often as he wanted, and was happy that they made him happy.

  The trembling was worse. No surprise there. Everything about him was worse. Day by day. Nicole cupped her father’s jaw, briefly, then blinking back tears, bent to kiss the top of his head. Something she did a thousand times a day. It was a miracle that there wasn’t a shiny spot on the top of his head from all her kisses.

  She straightened and turned to Mike Keillor. He was staring at her with a peculiar intensity that she couldn’t decipher.

  “Would you walk me to the car, Nicole?” he asked. He hadn’t shifted out of his modified parade-rest stance.

  She blinked. “Sure.”

  Outside, at the patrol car, he turned to her. “I’ll need for you to embrace me. Maybe kiss me on the cheeks. I want them to get the message that we’re real good friends.”

  Oh. That made sense.

  Nicole leaned forward and put her arms on his shoulders. Around his shoulders would have been impossible, they were so wide. It seemed to her that there was no difference between the hard unyielding feel of the body armor and the hard unyielding feel of the muscles of his shoulders.

  She’d held a man like this in her arms all night long.

  Nicole kissed Mike’s cheeks and stood for a moment, arms outstretched on his shoulders.

  “I’ll stop by again tomorrow morning. You let me know whether they bother you again. If they so much as look at you, let me know.” Mike’s voice was grim, face drawn tight, deep grooves in his cheeks. “And tomorrow, I’m bringing a can of Mace and a police whistle for you. Burn their eyes out and bust their eardrums if they try anything.”

  He was making a real effort for her. She had a feeling Creepy and Creepier would think twice before bothering her again.

  Nicole smiled. “I really appreciate this, Mike. Thanks so much.”

  His jaws worked. “Like I said, don’t thank me, thank Sam. He’s the one who sent me. He’s worried about you.”

  Nicole froze, feeling another wave of heat wash over her. What could she possibly say? She opened her mouth and closed it, completely incapable of speech. Sam was watching over her and she was avoiding him because she didn’t have the faintest clue how to deal with him.

  With enormous effort, she didn’t wring her hands.

  Mike stood still, silent, watching her.

  “Yes, um,” she said finally. Oh God. “Will you—will you thank Sam for me?”

  “No, ma’am, I think you should thank him yourself.” He dipped his head, touched a finger to his forehead in salute, got into the patrol car and drove off.

  Chapter 8

  Outlaw landed at the General Aviation side of Lindbergh Field Airport at 4 P.M., local time, carrying a small arsenal.

  Oh, the joys of working for the Masters of the Universe, even if they’d been taken down a notch or ten and their plumage was not as bright and as full as before.

  If you were a CEO and earning $170 mil a year instead of $240 mil, it gave you bitching rights down at the club, but it didn’t really make a whole lot of difference.

  Included in the contract was reimbursement for private jets to take him anywhere he wanted to go. And the good thing about private jets was that no one was going to ask any questions at all.

  He was definitely dressed for the part. He’d studied his clients like it was a mission and just as he could camouflage himself for a sniping mission in the desert or a quick infil into the African jungle, he could pass muster among the rich. He’d learned the camouflage well.

  The human eye is overwhelmed by input from the brain. It won’t “see” a sniper in camouflage with mottled, disruptive patterns. It perceives the sniper and his surroundings as a continuum and can’t see the contour around him. A good sniper becomes invisible, whether in mountain terrain or in forests or in the desert.

  The same here. He was dressed in the equivalent of his ghillie suit. A ghillie suit of the rich. He was dressed from the skin out in silk, Egyptian cotton, cashmere and new virgin wool. Look the part, be the part. What was underneath the $8,000 suit, a steel-tough, scarred body, couldn’t be seen.

  The mission called for speed, otherwise Outlaw would have spent the day at a spa, to achieve that ruddy, pampered look. But there’d been no time.

  It had given him enormous pleasure to put his Remington sniper rifle—he would use it only if he had to, to complete the mission—and his Kimber 1911, three magazines, tactical gear, body armor, powerful laser light, lockpick gun, K-bar, karambit knives and vial of acid all in matching Louis Vuitton carry-on hand luggage and briefcase.

  No one would think to question it.

  It was simply a different world, the world of the über-rich.

  They were as invisible in their way as the homeless. Outlaw had been both, under cover. People avert their eyes from the homeless, particularly if you were smart and pissed on yourself. Eau de bum. But they avert their eyes from the super wealthy, too. As if the rich gave off a special glare too bright for the eyes of ordinary people.

  Outlaw had the bearing of the super-rich down, too. God knows he’d studied his clients enough and he knew the rules. You could never be too arrogant or act too entitled.

  He drew up in a limo, which he exited without giving the driver a second glance. The pilot was at the top of the stairs and Outlaw passed by him with only a terse nod.

  It was behavior so expected, he was invisible.

  The flight was smooth, the weather excellent all the way into Southern California. He’d spent the entire trip studying the Google Street View of the Morrison Building, hacking into the blueprints on file in the San Diego County office and the building management company’s files. The office of Wordsmith was tiny, 500 square feet, and the rent was $2,200 a month. Nicole Pearce had a two-year lease and had never been late in payment.

  Outlaw then hacked into a Keyhole satellite and checked out the roof of the building. He spent an hour on close-ups of every inch of the roof and had a viable game plan for getting into and out of Nicole Pearce’s ninth-floor office, and a backup emergency plan, by the time they landed.

  He rented a Lexus and drove himself to near the Morrison Building. An hour after landing, he was parking the Lexus on a side street.

  The street view had been astonishingly clear, but the Google cameras hadn’t been able to penetrate the smoked-glass windows of the lobby.

  Outlaw watched the entrance for a quarter of an hour from a trendy café across the street. He monitored the ebb and flow of people, timed it and strode into the expensive glass-and-brushed-steel expanse of the large lobby together with an intake of men. He wore large wraparound sunglasses and walked with his head down. There were security cameras all around the walls, but their angle was such that if you walked straight down the middle of the 11,000-square-foot floor, chances were they’d only catch his feet. He put himself in the middle of a crowd of excited business executives who’d just come back from some seminar.

  Like many Special Ops soldiers, Outlaw wasn’t a big man. He was of medium height and wiry rather than broad. He placed himself between two big, beefy executive types, keeping pace with them across the large lobby, wishing men still wore hats. A wide-brimmed fedora would have been perfect to cover his face
.

  No one paid him any attention at all. He was one more businessman who’d just come from the plane with his carry-on luggage, walking briskly to a meeting in the building.

  The security cameras at the bank of elevators were all tilted at the same angle, calibrated to cover an area about seven feet from the doors. Which just proved to Outlaw all over again how incredibly stupid civilians were. Especially rich civilians. No drug lord or criminal worth their weight in cocaine would have set up security cameras like that. The angles would have been staggered to ensure maximum coverage, to make sure not a fly got past security. But those were hard men, who paid for lapses in security with their lives.

  These rich civilians lived in a soft world, where just the idea of security cameras and guards was cool, and enough. In a glance, Outlaw had seen the guard in the big U-shaped desk made of maplewood and brass. Good haircut, good-looking guy, trim, with an elegant uniform.

  Security as fashion accessory.

  This was going to be a cakewalk.

  Nobody paid him the slightest bit of attention as he rode to the seventh floor. He walked the floor, head down, just another executive deep in thought about an upcoming IPO. It was a matter of vibes. When he wanted to, among men who understood the signals, Outlaw was good at emitting “don’t fuck with me or I’ll cut your balls off” vibes. But here it would be like broadcasting radio waves to a TV station. No, in this kind of environment, the equivalent was I’m too busy and important to worry about worms like you, so don’t bust my balls. With that attitude, he was invisible.

  It was going on 7 P.M. The building was emptying of all the clerical workers, the secretaries and gophers. Offices would have a skeleton crew, and only those busy on a big deal or wanting to show off for the boss would still be working. And most of them would quit by nine.

  Outlaw met no one as he walked the length of the building to the fire stairs at the other end of the hall. Few of the offices had cameras outside their doors, and most of them were turned off.

  Outlaw shook his head as he walked. Jesus Christ. Turning a security camera off? What the hell was wrong with these people?

  In the huge, empty stairwell, he took the stairs two at a time to the ninth floor, pulling out his laser light, holding it in the cup of his hand.

  Office 921 was halfway down. And, he saw at a glance—no security camera outside the door. So Ms. Pearce hadn’t coughed up the extra amount for extra security. Wonderful.

  There was a security company right across the hall, though. Its camera was definitely on, and it covered half the hallway. Outlaw walked close to the wall on the other side, and just to be sure, flashed the laser light into the camera as he walked by. Anyone viewing the tapes afterward would just see a blanked-out section, like a glitch in the tape.

  Okay, he’d reconnoitered; time to go to his hide.

  It was twenty-eight floors to the roof, and Outlaw took them at a run. He’d be sitting immobile for a couple of hours, so the small bite of exercise felt good.

  At the top, on the landing, he changed into his tactical Nomex suit, readied his equipment and hunkered down next to the door leading out onto the roof.

  He checked his watch. Seven twenty. Less than two hours to wait. He wanted to go in at nine. Nine was a perfect time. Almost everyone gone, not so late he’d catch the attention of the night security guards.

  Waiting was never a problem. He was a sniper and patience was a big part of it. He was good at waiting. He could slow his breathing, bring his heart rate down, put himself into a state of vigilant rest, yet remain ready to kill at a moment’s notice.

  Outlaw rested his head against the wall and shut down.

  The whole afternoon was a washout. Nicole got exactly zero work done. This was terrible. She had the bank deadline, ten texts to distribute to her network of collaborators and new texts to look at and quote prices for. She couldn’t afford to take a day off, staring into space, thinking of Sam Reston.

  However hard she tried to concentrate, though, his strong features swam into her monitor, crowding out the description of a new French manufacturing technology of airplane components, which was the text after the Luxembourg bank board meeting.

  Every cell in her body squeezed tight as his image blossomed in her mind—dark face intent inches above her, focused on her so tightly she felt the lines of attraction between them could become visible.

  Her body tingled with remembered sexual desire, but with a little time and distance, something else impinged on her consciousness. Something important about last night. There’d been something elusive, something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

  She’d been…happy.

  It had been so long since she’d felt that way, it had taken her a whole day to recognize it. Her entire being had been bathed in joy and, well, sexual delight. The sex had had a lot to do with it, but something about Sam himself, beyond his formidable power as a lover, was involved.

  She was drowning in problems, up to her neck in them, sinking fast. Her father was dying, day by day. Piece by piece. When working, Nicole tried to wipe that thought from her mind but it was there, constantly, this huge dark hole that sucked everything down into the black pool at the bottom. It was her first thought on waking up and her last thought at night.

  Helping him die was eating her alive. And eating up all her financial resources. She didn’t know which would finish first—her father or her money.

  She didn’t care at all for herself, but she was terrified at the thought of her father spending the last months of his life without the comforts she killed herself to provide for him.

  She’d already been to the bank to see about taking out a mortgage on the house and they’d laughed at her. Whatever resources she could use to ease her father’s life had to come from Wordsmith, the company she was struggling to keep afloat.

  The terror that her father would be less than comfortable at the end of his life was like a sharp nail hammering into her head, hour by hour, minute by minute. Each time she saw a medical bill a vise tightened around her heart, squeezing hard.

  Except for last night.

  All of that had been utterly wiped from her mind during the hours she’d spent in Sam’s arms, all that worry and darkness replaced by heat so intense it scorched her. Part of her was ashamed that she’d been able to simply toss her problems overboard for a couple of hours while drowning in sensuality, and part of her had reveled in it. She hadn’t thought of any of it—sick father, money problems, trying to get Wordsmith off the ground—all the constant overload of worry that ate at her every waking moment.

  Gone, like smoke. While she had a godzillion orgasms.

  Nicole watched the cursor blinking on the screen. She’d translated a sentence and a half in the past hour. It was eight in the evening and the translation should have been finished.

  This was crazy.

  With a sigh, she closed the computer down, extracted the portable hard disk and went to the dining room that had been converted into a hospital room for her father.

  The night nurse looked up from the magazine she was reading and stood. Nicole waved her back in her chair.

  “How’s he doing?” Nicole asked softly, walking to his bedside, avoiding the IV tree pumping God only knew how many chemicals into him.

  “Blood pressure normal, heart rate normal. He’s mildly sedated. He’ll sleep through the night.” The nurse’s voice was low, brisk, objective. Nicole appreciated that. She was efficient and unemotional, which Nicole needed. Manuela sometimes broke out in tears at unexpected moments and it didn’t help. The nurse’s quiet calm was soothing.

  “Good.” Nicole gently laid her hand over her father’s. The IV line was in the other hand, where they’d finally found a vein. The backs of both hands were darkly mottled where the thin veins broke. It was increasingly difficult to find a strong vein for the IV fluids and medicines that were keeping him alive.

  Nicole knew that the next step was a minor operation to open up a subclavian IV c
atheter line, which would create its own problems of bloodstream infection.

  Her father’s hand was cold and still. He was always cold, no matter what she did to keep him warm. His body simply no longer had the energy to warm itself.

  She looked down at him, her last living relative on this earth, the person she loved more than anyone in the world.

  He was leaving her, a little each day, and there was nothing she could do about it. Not all her tears, not all her care could halt the disease’s progress. In the beginning, she’d read up ferociously on brain cancer, joined internet forums, talked endlessly online with patients, with the doctors. Read everything about brain cancer until the words blurred and until finally, she could read no more.

  They were past all that. There was nothing science could do for her father, and the only thing she could do for him was to love him with all her heart and make sure he was as comfortable as she could possibly make him.

  Often, if she held him long enough, she was able to transfer some of her young warmth to him. It pleased them both. She’d been holding his hand for ten minutes, but his hand wasn’t warming up. So that had been taken from them, too.

  “I’m going out,” she told the nurse. “I’ll be gone a couple of hours, maybe more.”

  “That’s fine.” The nurse settled back in the chair with her magazine. Nicole knew that she would spring instantly into action at the first sign of distress from her father. She was a good nurse and had passed many a sleepless night with Dad.

  He was in good hands.

  Nicole grabbed her briefcase, quietly closed the front door behind her and headed for her car. She stopped for a moment, breathing in the late evening air. The extreme heat of the day had dissipated but it was still pleasantly warm. It felt good to be outside after spending the day working. Trying to work.