Ready for Anything, Anywhere!

by Beverly Barton

  She sucked in her gut, trying to work up the courage to propel her body through the air while he tore open the purse and viewed its meager contents.

  She waited a fraction too long.

  “Pah!” Pocketing her one credit card, he threw the purse into the weeds again. “There is more, yes?”

  “No! Nothing! I swear.”

  “You come from the château. You are the guest of Madame d’Marchand. You have the suitcase. The furs. The jewels.”

  “I’m staying at the château, but I don’t have any jewels or furs. You’ve got the wrong girl.”

  “I think not. Move away.”

  She took one step to the side. One slightly forward. Another …

  Gilbért’s groan was hardly more than a whimper, but the small animal sound provided the only distraction Mallory knew she would get. When the kid threw a swift glance over his shoulder, she sprang.

  She knocked into his shoulder, threw him off balance, lunged again. This time she hit him from behind.

  Locking one arm around his neck, she clung to his back like a monkey and made a desperate grab with her free hand. She caught only a corner of his jacket sleeve, but it was enough to keep him from angling his gun in her direction.

  Cursing, he bucked and humped like an enraged bull. Mallory bounced on his back like a rag doll, but wouldn’t loosen her stranglehold or release his sleeve. Knowing she had to bring him to his knees before he shook her off, she tightened her arm around his throat and squeezed for all she was worth.

  “Mademoiselle!”

  From the corner of one eye, she saw Gilbért stagger to his feet.

  “He’s got a gun!” she shouted.

  The possibility Gilbért might join the fray spurred the kid to renewed fury. Choking, he spun in a circle and pumped off wild shots.

  The first went into the air. The second plowed into the Rolls’ shiny chrome grill. Cordite stung Mallory’s eyes. Percussive shock waves hammered at her eardrums, so loud and painful she almost missed the roar of a car tearing down the road at top speed.

  The kid picked up on it the same moment she did. Every bit as desperate as Mallory now, he staggered toward the Rolls and spun her into its side. Her hip slammed into the tank-like fender. Pain screamed up her spine.

  Still she hung on. Or tried to. A second ramming jarred every bone in her body. Her chokehold loosened. His sleeve tore free of her grasp, but it took a vicious elbow to her ribs to knock her off the bastard’s back.

  She fell to the pavement. Heard Gilbért shout something in French. Then another shot cracked through the air.

  “No!”

  Mallory rolled onto all fours, prepared to see the butler stretched out on the pavement, fully expecting she would be next. Instead she heard an unbroken stream of curses from Gilbért, punctuated by the thud of running feet. Her head whipped toward the sound.

  Cutter raced toward her from the car skidded sideways across the road some yards back. Mallory’s dazed mind registered the pistol gripped in his hand. Gulping, she cranked her head around and spotted the baker’s son sprawled face-down in a slowly spreading pool of blood. Her joints turning to jelly, she plopped down.

  “Are you hurt?” Cutter crouched beside her, his grim glance raking her from head to toe. “Mallory! Sweetheart! Were you hit?”

  “No.” She raised a shaking hand to shove back her tangled hair and winced. “Not by a bullet, anyway. Bastard got me with an elbow.”

  “An elbow?”

  “Right in the ribs.”

  Cutter sat back on his heels. His blood still thundered in his ears. His lungs hadn’t pulled in a breath since he’d spotted the humpback figure gyrating wildly beside the Rolls. He’d aged a good ten years when he’d identified Mallory as the hump. Another ten in the two or three seconds it had taken him to jam on the brakes, leap out of the car and yank his Glock from its ankle holster.

  “Stay here,” he bit out.

  Glock in hand, he joined Gilbért. The majordomo was on one knee beside the shooter, feeling for a pulse. Cutter didn’t expect him to find one. He hadn’t had time for a precision take-down.

  “He’s dead,” Gilbért confirmed.

  With a grunt of pain, the older man pushed to his feet. Cutter hooked his arm to help him up.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes.” Disgust riddled his voice. “Like the fool, I turn my back and he hits me from behind.”

  Cutter kept a steadying hand on Gilbért’s arm. His face was ashen and his cap had slipped down over one ear, but otherwise he appeared whole.

  “Madame Picard and I feared it would come, sooner or late, with that one.”

  “You know him?”

  “He is Remy Duchette, the son of the baker in town. He’s had trouble with the police, you understand, but nothing that makes me think he carries a gun. I would not have stopped if I thought him dangerous.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Remy comes out of the woods just there and waves to us. I think he wants a ride. Too late it becomes clear he waits for us.”

  Cutter slewed toward the treeline. The kid had picked a good spot for an ambush. A bend in the road, where the Rolls had to slow to make the turn. Plenty of cover to hide behind until his prey appeared.

  “Remy knows this car,” Gilbért continued, his disgust mounting with every word. “He knows madame entertains guests of great wealth. He has probably heard in the village that you and mademoiselle stay at the château and decides to wait in hope of robbing you.”

  “So that’s what you think this was? An attempted robbery?”

  “Oui. I hear him tell mademoiselle he wants her purse and the furs and jewels from her suitcase.”

  Cutter said nothing, but the warning lights already blipping inside his head flashed a sharper red.

  “He said he wanted her suitcase?”

  “He wants what is in it. Mademoiselle tells him she has only her purse with her, but he does not believe her and orders her to move away from the car.”

  “He acted all jumpy and twitchy,” Mallory chimed in as she joined them. She gave the sprawled body a quick glance and looked away. “I think he was on drugs. My guess is he needed money for a hit.”

  “We must call the gendarmes.” His face grim, Gilbért extracted a cell phone from his pocket. “Then I must go into town to explain to my friend the baker how his son dies.”

  Cutter nodded. The sooner they got the police on the scene, the sooner he could get Mallory back within the walls of the château.

  “I’ll cover the body. Is there a blanket or a tarp in the car?”

  “A tarp, in the trunk.”

  With the ease of long practice, Cutter reached down, hiked his pants’ leg, and slid the Glock into its ankle holster. Mallory followed the movement with a crease between her brows.

  Cutter knew he’d blown what little remained of his cover. Before he explained the Glock, though, Ms. Dawes needed to do a little explaining of her own.

  “You’re still green around the gills.” With a firm hand on her elbow, he steered her back to the Rolls. “You’d better sit. It’ll take a while for the police to get here.”

  She eased onto the seat with an awkward movement that told him her ribs were still hurting and sat sideways, shoulders hunched, while he searched the Rolls’ cavernous trunk. It yielded both a neatly folded tarp and a supply of emergency road beacons. Cutter set several as a warning to any approaching vehicles to slow down.

  He itched to search the woods for evidence that would either support or disprove Mallory’s theory that this was a drug heist gone bad, but he could wait for the police on that. Right now he was more interested in her reasons for departing the château so abruptly.

  Hooking an elbow on the open back door, he conducted a swift assessment. Her face had lost its pasty hue, but the crease was still there, pulling at her brows. Cutter knew the questions were piling up behind her frown and decided to slip his in first.

  “Madame Picard said you got a ph
one call and asked Gilbért to take you to the train station. Why didn’t you wait for me, tell me where you were going?”

  “You were out jogging. I was in a hurry.” Her glance dropped to his ankle. “Do you always carry a gun?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “You weren’t wearing it last night.”

  “It wasn’t necessary inside the château.” Doggedly, he steered the conversation back to her abrupt departure. “Why did you just up and leave this morning, Mallory? Where were you going?”

  “I told you. Into town.”

  “Why?”

  “The stationmaster called. He said a package had come for me on the overnight express train from Paris, and that I had to sign for it personally. I thought it had to be either my passport or replacement traveler’s checks, so I asked Gilbért to drive me to town.” If Cutter had any doubts about this roadside attack, she’d just resolved them.

  Neat, he thought grimly. Very neat. Dangle the bait. Lure the prey out of her protected lair. Arrange an ambush on a deserted stretch of road. The only question in his mind was how the hell the hunter could be sure she would bring her suitcase with her.

  “Your turn,” Mallory snapped, breaking into his thoughts. “Why do you have a gun strapped to your ankle? Is the wine business so dangerous and cutthroat? Or was that all a lie, too?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Her breath left on a long, slow hiss. “You’re starting to really torque me off, Smith.”

  “Brace yourself, Dawes. It gets worse. I work for the U.S. government. An obscure agency you’ve never heard of. We’ve had you under close surveillance since Dulles.”

  Chapter 11

  Mallory sat in the passenger seat of the Rolls. Stunned by Cutter’s revelations, she nursed her aching ribs with slow, dazed strokes while he and Gilbért briefed the officer who’d arrived on the scene.

  He’d followed her from the Paris airport.

  He’d orchestrated every move, from their initial meeting to the passport delays to this romantic getaway at a French château.

  He and this shadowy agency he worked for suspected her of stealing personal data on millions of government employees!

  Every word, every touch had been a lie.

  Last night he’d asked her to trust him, to give him time to make some calls before he filled in the blanks. Fool that she was, she’d tried to talk herself into doing just that.

  “Mademoiselle Dawes?”

  The police officer’s sympathetic face loomed in the window of the Rolls. She and the French gendarmerie were becoming well acquainted, Mallory thought on a bubble of quickly suppressed hysteria.

  “I understand this has been a shock, but I must ask you some questions.”

  The police officer seemed to ascribe her disjointed answers to nerves and the language barrier. Using great patience, he took her statement before speaking once again with Gilbért and Cutter.

  Their colloquy resulted in more phone calls and a search of the woods. In the ensuing wait, Mallory’s shock gave way to a slow burn as more and more personnel arrived on the scene. The local mortician, who evidently doubled as coroner’s assistant, drove up in his hearse. A Crime Scene Unit appeared shortly after that, followed some time later by two men in civilian clothes.

  They conducted a lengthy dialogue with Cutter and cast several pointed looks in Mallory’s direction but didn’t speak to her directly. Accepting the business cards they gave him, Cutter passed them one of his own before striding back to the Rolls.

  “Let’s go. We’ll take my car.”

  When he reached down to help her, Mallory sent him a look that froze his hand in midair. The message was lethally clear. Touch her and he died.

  Ice on the outside, smoldering at her core, she didn’t say a word during the short drive. Neither did Cutter. They both knew the thin veneer of silence would shatter once they reached the château. Too many furious questions, too many outraged emotions roiled around inside the confines of the car to keep them bottled up for long.

  First, however, they had to get through Madame Picard’s barrage of shocked exclamations. Her husband had called and related the gist of the attack, but she needed the assurances of both Mallory and Cutter that Gilbért had sustained no injuries other than a slight dent to his head. After much hand-wringing and head-shaking, the apple-cheeked cook retreated to her domain with promises to deliver a pot of coffee and fresh pastries to the library.

  Her footsteps were still ringing on the parquet floor when Cutter braced his hips against the gilttrimmed desk that dominated the library and eyed Mallory’s angry expression.

  “You’ve had time to digest what I told you. I can see it didn’t go down well.”

  “How very astute of you, Mr. Smith. If that’s your real name,” she added on a scathing note.

  “It is. Where do you want to start?”

  Arms folded, she faced him across the width of the oriental carpet. “How about this disk you say was in my suitcase.”

  He nodded, his stance as relaxed as hers was rigid. A framed portrait by an artist Mallory didn’t recognize hung in a lighted alcove behind him. All sharp angles and glaring colors, the painting was probably a masterpiece, but she was in no mood to appreciate art right now.

  “The disk is a standard, seventy-megabyte CD,” Cutter said crisply, “the kind available to every government employee. A baggage inspector at Dulles found it in a side pocket of your suitcase, tucked inside a case for a CD by blues singer Corinne Bailey Rae.”

  His steady gaze never left her face. Hers lanced into him like a pointed stake aimed at his heart.

  “Go on.”

  “The baggage inspector recognized the General Services Administration logo on the disk and showed it to his supervisor, who popped it into a computer. It contained only one file. I told you what was in it.”

  “Yes,” she ground out, “you did.”

  She was still struggling with that. After a VA employee admitted he’d loaded millions of personnel files onto a home computer that was stolen in a burglary a few years back, every federal agency had tightened controls over personnel data. Yet someone had used her pass code to access her computer and collect the names, social security numbers, and financial information on twenty million of her fellow government employees.

  “What I didn’t tell you,” Cutter continued evenly, “was that our lab techs found only your prints on the disk.”

  If she’d opened a new box of CDs and handled the contents before walking out of Congressman Kent’s offices for the last time, Mallory didn’t remember it.

  “All that proves,” she countered, “is the person who put it in my suitcase was very careful.”

  “Agreed. What we need to do now is determine who that person was.”

  She supposed she should be grateful for the we and for his calm deliberation. Then again, why the hell shouldn’t he be calm? She was the one tagged with identity theft on a massive scale.

  The possibility she might land in the middle of another media blitz, this time as a suspected traitor, was so demoralizing Mallory had to bite down on the soft inner tissue of her lip to hold back an anguished groan.

  The pain helped, but her voice still came out thick and heavy. “I’m not sure I should talk to you about any of this until I consult with a lawyer.”

  “That’s your call, Mallory. We’ll work it any way you want.”

  There it was again, that seductive, sympathetic we. As if they were on the same team. Partners. Friends. Lovers.

  “But we have to work it,” he insisted with maddening deliberation. “I don’t have any proof at this point, but I suspect this morning’s attempted robbery was an attempt to retrieve the disk.”

  Mallory had pretty much come to the same conclusion. Nothing else made sense, as Cutter proceeded to point out.

  “Duchette wasn’t there by chance. Someone alerted him to the possibility that you would drive into town this morning to pick up the package waiting for you at the sta
tion and, presumably, resume your interrupted vacation. Someone who doesn’t know your suitcase floated away with your rental car and is currently resting at the bottom of the Bay of St. Malo.”

  “The same someone you hoped I would lead you to.”

  “That’s right.”

  The blunt, unapologetic response ripped a hole in Mallory’s heart. She’d convinced herself Cutter was different. Worse, she’d fallen a little bit in love with him. Maybe more than a little.

  Even after last night, after he’d dropped that bomb about the dossier, she’d granted him the grace period he’d asked for. Still hoping, still clinging to the ridiculous notion that he hadn’t played her for a complete fool, she’d decided to hang around for the explanation he’d promised.

  Well, now she had it. She was the bait he wanted to dangle in front of a shadowy, international thug. Hugging her arms to hold in the hurt, Mallory lifted her chin and waited for him to continue.

  “We know him only as the Russian. We believe he’s responsible for previous coordinated identity thefts, but nothing on quite this scale.”

  Cutter watched her face and knew he slashed into her with every word. Shoving his hands in his pants’ pockets, he balled his fists and carved the next slice.

  “We want him, Mallory. I want him. He and his kind have caused untold misery to hundreds of thousands of people. This gig would have been bigger, caused even more damage. If he’d gotten his hands on that data, the bastard could have brought our government to a temporary standstill.”

  “This is all so unreal. And so ironic. Congressman Kent took the floor of the House just a few months ago and gave a speech stressing the urgent need for additional safeguards on personal financial data.” Her lips twisted in a mocking smile. “I wrote most of it.”

  “Which makes you the perfect sacrificial goat if anything went wrong. You possessed an insider’s knowledge of the weak links in data protection. You could access restricted systems in your official capacity. You had damned good reason to want to get even with Kent.”