by Kay Hooper
“Hello, Lara.”
She looked up and, after an instant of total surprise, decided that it made perfect sense. “Oh,” she said slowly. She kept her fingers on the keyboard, but didn’t move them. “I should have paid attention to Ching.”
“Yes.” Melanie said gently, coming into the room. “You should have.”
She was holding an automatic equipped with a silencer.
Chapter 9
“And I should have paid more attention to the play,” Lara said. “There were so many similarities. I should have suspected the witch.”
“Who did you suspect?” Melanie asked, halting a couple of feet back from the desk. “Luke? Or was Devon the one you were worried about, especially after he got into your bed?”
“Luke. I never thought of you.”
Melanie studied her, dark eyes as hard as chips of coal. “Why didn’t you have him checked out the way you did Devon?”
“It didn’t matter who it was, as long as it wasn’t Devon. And I didn’t want the bureau getting jumpy because I pushed the panic button twice in one week.” Lara allowed her voice to sound a bit grim on the last statement.
Lifting one delicately arched brow, Melanie said, “Makes sense. So you did want to play a lone hand.”
“You got my message?”
“Certainly. It sounded suspiciously like blackmail.”
“I just want to be left alone,” Lara said.
“Or?” Melanie smiled tauntingly. “Never pick up a big stick unless you’re prepared to use it, sweetie.”
Lara suddenly pressed the return key, and the click was loud in the silence. The computer hummed busily. “I just used it,” she said softly.
The dark woman’s eyes narrowed, and she went very still. Her gun was trained steadily on the center of Lara’s chest. “What have you done?” she snapped.
“Know anything about computers?”
“I know the memory of that one was wiped.”
In a reflective tone, Lara said, “It’s damnably easy to accidentally destroy computer data. Just press a few keys, and it’s gone. Dad was an expert; he always backed up his data. I know you people took the diskettes, but I also know you found nothing of use on them.”
“Get to the point,” Melanie ordered.
“Gladly. Dad developed a special code purely for his own use. Once he had it perfected, it was possible to hide data on the hard drive so completely that even a total crash of the system wouldn’t touch it. The hidden data could be destroyed only if the hard drive was physically destroyed—or with a special code that only he knew. But he gave me the retrieval code.”
Melanie’s gaze flicked briefly to the computer; from her position, she could see only a blank, glowing screen. The screen was set at an angle, but the keyboard was set squarely on the blotter so that Lara was facing forward. “Where is it? Where’s the data?”
“I sent it away,” Lara said.
Stiffening, Melanie glanced quickly over the bare desk. It held the computer, a blotter, and a telephone. Nothing else. “You couldn’t have. There’s no modem.”
Lara let herself smile, but took care not to make it too triumphant. “This machine has an internal modem, hooked directly into the phone line.”
Melanie took half a step and, keeping the gun pointed at Lara, lifted the receiver. She didn’t even have to hold it to her ear; they could both hear the tones of a busy computer coming through the phone line. She slammed the receiver back into place and stared at Lara.
For one awful, endless instant, Lara thought that the woman would just take the chance and shoot her. But then Melanie seemed to relax very slightly.
“Where did you send it?” she asked casually.
“Do you seriously expect me to answer that?”
“Oh, just generally, I mean.” Melanie smiled.
Lara shrugged. “Why not? Dad had friends all over the country, most with computers. A group of them made an agreement years ago that they would each leave at least one system online at all times. To exchange messages and so on.”
Melanie’s eyes narrowed again. “What makes you so sure the system you chose is still active?”
“Well, I didn’t really want to take that chance. But I do believe that at least one of the three I chose will be.” She heard the soft curse from the other woman, and kept her own gaze steady and calm. “It’s almost dawn here; what with the various time zones, I doubt any of the gentlemen are awake right now. But when they check their systems, they’ll find a big, bright message flag, along with a sizable chunk of data. I believe you know the gist of the data. The message is ‘Read immediately, print out a hard copy of all data, and then convey it to the FBI.’ ”
Lara waited for a long moment, then said quietly, “Unless, of course, I alter that message.”
“What do you want?” Melanie asked flatly.
“Who killed my father?”
“You won’t get that answer.”
“I think that depends. I think it depends on how badly the organization you work for wants to avoid its day in court. Are you authorized to make that decision? Or shall we hold this stalemate until the question becomes academic? It’s your move, Melanie.”
“How much time do I have?”
“At a guess, less than an hour before the message is received by at least one of those men. After that, it’s out of my hands.”
“And you’ll be dead.”
Lara didn’t let her surprise show; she hadn’t expected the other woman to admit that. “Maybe,” she said. “But it seems stupid to me. The FBI doesn’t need me to testify once they have the data, and you’d have a hell of a time collecting your pay from employers scrambling to stay out of jail.”
“You could testify against me, though. I really wouldn’t want that.”
“Testify against you for what? Holding a gun on me? My word against yours. I can’t prove you’ve done anything to me at all.” Lara knew her time was running out. She had already kept Melanie talking longer than she’d expected to. But what she was hoping for with everything inside her was that the woman would place a call to her employers. Any call going out from this phone would be immediately traced. Sort of. According to Devon, one of the bureau’s newest gadgets enabled it to pinpoint the location of an outgoing call within twenty seconds flat.
The call would be recorded, of course, even as agents descended on the receiving phone. It was their one slim hope of connecting this paid assassin with those who had hired her. The location could well be a disused storefront, and Melanie’s contact a buffer between her and her employers—but it was a chance.
“All right, what do you want?” Melanie asked briskly. “Reasonable demands, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind. But I’m not a fool. I have only one demand. I want to be left alone, totally and completely.”
“We have to know you’re not bluffing.”
“I assumed that. If your employers can access a computer, I can send them an edited copy of the data.”
“Edited?”
“Certainly. I won’t give up all my aces.”
Melanie grimaced slightly, but there was more respect than annoyance in the expression. She nodded.
Calmly, Lara said, “In case you’re wondering, I’m keeping my fingers on these keys in order to send an end code to the systems holding the data. Notice that I have one finger on the shift.”
“Don’t tell me. A dead man’s switch?”
“Afraid so. If I release the shift without first entering a rather complicated code, my earlier message is locked into the systems that received it. And this system will shut itself down. You wouldn’t have a hope in hell of recovering the data. But if you want to use that phone, I can switch this computer onto a secondary line. Your move.”
“Do it,” Melanie said, somewhat irritably.
Leaving one finger of her left hand on the shift key, Lara used her right fingers to tap out a rapid command. When Melanie lifted the phone’s receiver, they could both hea
r a dial tone.
The dark woman kept the gun on Lara and punched out a number quickly.
Lara felt a wave of weariness wash over her and tried to fight it. Almost over now, she told herself. Twenty seconds or so for the call to be pinpointed, and then everyone would be getting ready. They’d wait as long as possible in the hope that either Melanie or her contact would say something incriminating through a careless statement or two—but they couldn’t afford to wait long. The moment Melanie’s employers demanded that the “evidence” be sent to them, the bluff was lost.
There was a great deal of very carefully selected information on the diskette Lara was using, since it had been especially written for this particular bluff. But there was absolutely nothing that the cartel would have found threatening.
Lara glanced at her watch and waited until thirty seconds had passed, just to be sure. Then she looked at Melanie, although she heard not one word the other woman was saying. There seemed to be a roaring in her ears, and everything was moving so slowly. Even Melanie’s mouth. It was terrifyingly fascinating. Seconds crawled by. And then Melanie took the phone away from her ear and started to say something to Lara.
Lara couldn’t look away from Melanie, even though she was dimly aware of movement behind her. She knew that it should be over, and without fuss, any minute now. Melanie was a pro, after all; she wouldn’t kill somebody in full view of half a dozen federal agents. They were counting on that.
They hadn’t counted on a nervous assassin.
Melanie looked startled—still in slow motion as far as Lara was concerned—and began to turn toward the door. Her gun went off. Lara barely heard the hollow, whistling pop. But she definitely felt the sledgehammer that slammed into her chest, or maybe it was her shoulder, but she was going over backward awfully hard…
—
“Calm down, Devon! She bumped her head, that’s all. Okay, she’ll have a bruise, but nothing was broken! Stop trying to wake her up, she probably needs the sleep. And go let the cat out of his box, will you? The neighbors will think we’re murdering somebody over here…”
Lara was very tired. She thought about waking up, because she knew somebody wanted her to, but it was too much effort. She felt safe and loved and warm. It felt wonderfully good, so she just kept sleeping. At least until a demand she’d been trained not to ignore forced its way into the depths of her peaceful dreams.
“Wauur?”
“No,” she mumbled. “I’m tired.”
“Yah!”
“Tell Devon. He’ll feed you.” She had gotten used to saying that during the short time Devon had been virtually living with her, and enjoyed it. She pulled the covers up over her nose. Then Ching rang his bell right next to her ear—and it sounded as if it were inside her aching head.
She gritted her teeth against the stab of agony. “Oh! Go away, you furry menace.”
Ching muttered.
“I know,” Devon said sympathetically, “she really can be infernally stubborn, can’t she?”
Lara was about to go back to sleep, but when he spoke she suddenly remembered what had happened. At least up to a point. After that, she was blank. She fumbled the covers down, and would have sat up instantly except that she was afraid she’d leave her head behind on the pillow. Instead, she very cautiously opened her eyes.
Aqua eyes in a striped, furry face stared down at her. They looked annoyed. She turned her head carefully to check out the other side of the bed, and found Devon sitting on the edge gazing down at her.
“Hello,” he said.
Lara thought about what her first remark to him should be. She decided to say something wonderfully loving and romantic; this was a moment they should treasure, since she obviously wasn’t dead.
“Bulletproof vest, huh?”
“It did stop the bullet,” he pointed out politely. Then the faint glimmer of amusement left his eyes, and he added in a totally different voice, “Thank God.”
She found the strength to respond when he leaned over and kissed her, but tried to keep what was left of her mind on business. When she could, she asked, “Where’s Melanie?”
“In custody.”
“And the man she called?”
“Also in custody, and screaming for his lawyer. He was in a nice, respectable broker’s office in New York. Early hours to keep for a job like that, but—”
“Dead end?”
“It looks like it. Unless he breaks, we don’t have a tie to the cartel.”
Lara wasn’t really surprised; it had been a slim chance at best. A twinge from her head was echoed by one considerably lower down, and she felt under the covers until she located an extremely sore spot over the center of her rib cage. “Ouch. I feel like I’ve been kicked by a mule. And what did I hit my head on?”
“The shelf behind the desk.”
She probed a bit more, then said, “What am I wearing?”
“A nightgown. I put you into it.” Answering the rest of her questions before she could ask them, he said, “It’s your nightgown. You’re in your own bedroom here at the house, with a couple of agents downstairs. You’ve been asleep about four hours. One of the men went out for groceries a little while ago, so you’ll probably smell burning bacon any minute now. And I love you.”
Lara blinked, sifted through the information warily, and found that she still distinctly recalled hearing that last statement. But it seemed odd in the same company as burning bacon. She looked cautiously at Devon, and found him grave and unsmiling.
“Before I make an utter fool of myself,” she said slowly, “let me ask you if I just heard what I think I heard.”
“I love you,” he said.
She felt the pain in her head retreat. It didn’t stand a chance. “You love me? Really?”
Devon’s grave mask cracked suddenly, and those wonderful eyes glowed with an unshadowed brightness she’d never seen before. “God, yes, I love you,” he said thickly, gathering her into his arms and holding her.
Lara didn’t have to ask if he believed in her own love. She could feel it in him. The affinity between them had never been stronger, and she knew that no tower or prison, with real bars or symbolic ones, would ever isolate either of them again.
“I’m taking a desk job,” he announced a few minutes later.
“Do you want that?” she asked, snuggling up to his side in blissful contentment.
“Yes. Make use of that law degree. You are going to marry me, aren’t you, Rapunzel?”
“Certainly I am. You don’t think I carry on like this with just any prince who happens to climb in my window, do you?”
“Well, not if your cat doesn’t like him.”
“An excellent judge of character, my cat. Do you smell something burning?”
“Bacon. I warned you.”
“So you did. I suppose we’d better go rescue it?”
“If we want to eat.”
—
Lara was naturally disappointed that they hadn’t managed to get anything on the cartel. She still wanted justice for her father—and she still wanted her own roots back. She had told Devon the truth in saying that she could live in a prison with him and never notice the bars, but it was also undoubtedly true that living with an assumed identity and being aware that a group of powerful people considered you a threat and were actively searching for you did not offer a very good base for a peaceful life.
So when Devon suggested, early that afternoon, that they make one final attempt to find some knowledge about the missing evidence in her memories, Lara agreed. And this time, Devon wanted her physically to walk through the night her father had been killed.
“We’ll never have a better chance,” he pointed out. “In a few hours, we’ll be leaving here, and you can’t come back until we can move against the cartel.”
Lara understood that, and even though she didn’t believe that the key lay in her memories, she was willing to try a last time for Devon’s peace of mind.
The two agents who had
remained were sent out of sight, and then Devon called Ching, carried him to the top of the stairs, and told him to stay there.
“I wondered why you brought him along,” Lara commented, standing by the front door.
“He was here that night,” Devon said, coming back down the stairs and moving to a position to the left of the front door. “Now, face the door with your hand on the switch. We can’t make the place dark in the afternoon, but I want you to remember how it was that night.”
“All right. It was dark. I was reaching for the light switch when Ching howled—”
“Yarrr!”
Lara hadn’t noticed Devon send a brief hand signal to her cat, who had rapidly learned stage cues for the play, and the sudden howl sent a chill through her.
“Good Lord,” she muttered. “How did you—”
“Shhh. I rehearsed with him while you were in the shower. Now concentrate, honey. You’re reaching for the light switch, and then—” He signaled the cat again.
“Yarrr!”
Lara’s fingers hesitated, then quickly flicked the light switch. She turned around, uneasy.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Devon ordered softly.
“I’ve never heard him sound like that before,” she murmured. Her eyes lifted to the top of the stairs and found the cat sitting on the first tread. “He doesn’t want to come down.” A frown flitted across her face. “That’s odd.” Her gaze left the cat and went to a table in the foyer. “Everything’s such a mess, newspapers on the floor—”
“Lara,” Devon said.
She was still remembering that night. “Hmmm?”
“Look back at Ching.”
She returned her gaze to the cat, and again a faint frown flitted across her expression.
“What is it?” Devon kept his voice very soft.
In a vague but conversational tone, Lara said, “Well, I just don’t see why, that’s all. The one he had was just fine, and almost new. Why change it?”
“What’s different, Lara?”
“His collar,” she answered obediently.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“He’s wearing a new one. It’s darker against his fur, I can see that. Why would Dad get him a new collar when there was nothing wrong with his old one?”