Dangerous to Hold

by Merline Lovelace

  Chapter 1

  On a quiet side street just off Massachusetts Avenue, in the heart of Washington’s embassy district, hazy September sunlight glinted on the tall windows of an elegant Federal-style town house. Casual passersby who took the time to read the discreet bronze plaque beside the front door would learn that the tree-shaded building housed the offices of the president’s special envoy. That wouldn’t tell them much.

  Most Washington insiders believed the special envoy’s position was another of those meaningless but important-sounding titles established a few administrations ago to reward some wealthy campaign contributor. Only a handful of senior cabinet officials were aware that the special envoy performed a function other than his well-publicized, if mostly ceremonial, duties.

  From a specially shielded high-tech control center on the third floor of the town house, he directed a covert agency. An agency whose initials comprised the last letter of the Greek alphabet, OMEGA. An agency that, as its name implied, was activated as a last resort—when other, more established organizations such as the CIA, the FBI, the State Department or the military couldn’t respond for legal or political reasons.

  OMEGA’s director alone had the authority to send its agents into the field. He was about to do so now.

  “Karistan?”

  Perched on one corner of a mahogany conference table, Special Agent Maggie Sinclair swung a burgundy suede boot back and forth. Brows several shades darker than her glossy, shoulder-length brown hair drew together in a puzzled frown. She threw a questioning glance at the other agent who’d been called in with her.

  Sprawled with his usual loose-limbed ease in a wingback chair, Nate Sloan shrugged. “Never heard of the place, unless it’s where those fancy rugs come from. You know, the thick, fuzzy kind you can’t even walk across without getting your spurs all tangled up in.” His hazel eyes gleamed behind a screen of sun-tipped lashes. “That happened to Wily Willie once, with the most embarrassin’ results.”

  Maggie swallowed the impulse to ask just what those results were. No one at OMEGA had ever met Wily Willie Sloan, but Nate’s irreverent tales about the man who’d raised him had made the old reprobate a living legend.

  She’d have to get the details of this particular incident later, though. The call summoning her and Nate to the director’s office had contained a secret code word that signaled the highest national urgency. She turned her attention back to the dark-haired man seated behind a massive mahogany desk.

  “Karistan is a new nation,” Adam Ridgeway informed them in the cool, precise voice, which carried only a trace of his Boston origins. “Less than two months old, as a matter of fact, although its people have been struggling to regain their independence for centuries.”

  He pressed a hidden button, and the wood panels behind his desk slid apart noiselessly to reveal a floor to ceiling opaque screen. Within seconds, a detailed global map painted across the screen, its land masses and seas depicted in vivid, breathtaking colors. Several more clicks of the button reduced the area depicted to the juncture of Europe and Russia. Adam nodded toward a tiny, irregular shape outlined in brilliant orange.

  “That’s Karistan. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it. Neither the State Department nor the media took any special note when it emerged as a separate entity a few months ago. Part of the country is barren, mountainous terrain, the rest is high, desolate steppe. It’s sparsely populated by a nomadic people, has no industry other than cattle, and possesses no natural resources of any value.”

  “It has something we want, though,” Maggie commented shrewdly.

  “We think it does,” Adam admitted. “The president is hoping it does.”

  She leaned forward, tucking a thick fall of hair behind one ear. The tingling excitement that always gripped her at the start of a mission began to fizz in her veins. Adam’s next words upped that fizz factor considerably.

  “The borders of the new nation run right through a missile field.”

  “Missile?” Maggie asked, frowning. “Like in nukes?”

  Adam nodded. “SS-18s, to be exact.”

  Nate Sloan’s slow drawl broke the ensuing silence.

  “Best I recall, the Soviets scheduled the SS-18s for dismantling under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. They’re pretty ancient.”

  “Ancient and unstable,” Adam confirmed. “Which is why the Soviets offered them up so readily under the treaty. Many of the SS-18 missiles have already been dismantled.”

  “But not the ones in Karistan.”

  “Not the ones in Karistan. When the U.S.S.R. fell apart, the resulting instability in that area derailed all efforts to implement the treaty. Only recently did things settle down enough for a UN inspection team to visit the site.”

  Adam paused, then glanced at each of them in turn. “A U.S. scientist was on the team. What he saw worried him enough for him to pay a personal and very secret visit to the Security Council as soon as he got home.”

  Here it comes, Maggie thought, her every sense sharpening. She hunched forward, unconsciously digging her nails into the edge of the conference table.

  “According to this scientist, the device that cycles the warhead’s arming codes is missing.”

  Nate whistled, low and long.

  “Exactly,” Adam responded, his voice even. “Whoever holds this decoder can arm the warheads. Supposedly, the missiles can’t be launched without central verification, but with the former Soviet missile command in shambles, no one knows for sure.”

  For a few moments, a strange silence snaked through the director’s office, like a finger of damp fog creeping and curling its way across the room. Maggie felt goose bumps prickle along her arms. It was as though some insidious presence from the fifties had drifted in—a nebulous ghost of the doomsday era, when the massive buildup of nuclear weapons had dominated international politics and school children had practiced crouching under their desks during nuclear-survival drills. She swallowed, recalling how she’d recently chuckled her way through a replay of the old movie Dr. Strangelove, starring Peter Sellers. She didn’t find it quite so amusing now.

  Crossing her arms, Maggie rubbed her hands up and down her silky sleeves. “So the agent you’re sending into the field is supposed to find this missing device? This decoder?”

  “As quickly as possible. Intelligence believes it’s in the possession of either the Karistanis or their neighbors in Balminsk. The two peoples have been feuding for centuries. They’re currently holding to a shaky cease-fire, but it could shatter at any moment. There’s no telling what might happen if either side felt threatened by the other.”

  “Great,” Maggie muttered, her gaze drawn to the postage-stamp-size nation outlined in orange.

  “Which is why OMEGA’s going in. Immediately.”

  Her attention snapped back to the director. Since both she and Nate had been called in, Maggie knew one of them would man the control center at the headquarters while the other was in the field. Although the controller’s position was vital during an operation, she, like the dozen or so other handpicked OMEGA agents, far preferred being in the middle of the action.

  Nibbling on her lower lip, she rapidly assessed her strengths and weaknesses for this particular mission. On the minus side, her technical knowledge of nuclear missiles was limited to the fact that they were long and pointy. She’d be the first to admit she didn’t know plutonium from Pluto.

  But she enjoyed an advantage in the field that none of the other OMEGA agents could lay claim to—an incredible gift for languages. Having traveled with her Oklahoma “tool pusher” father to oil-rich sites all over the world, she could chatter away in any one of four languages before she learned to read or write.

  With formal study, that number had grown considerably, and her natural ability had become her profession. Until two years ago, she’d chaired the foreign language department of a small midwestern college. A broken engagement, a growing restlessness and a late-night phone call from a strange litt
le man her father had once helped escape from a Middle Eastern sheikhdom had culminated in her recruitment by OMEGA.

  Given Karistan’s location, Maggie suspected its dialect was a mixture of Russian, Ukrainian and possibly Romanian. She could communicate at the basic level in any of those languages. With a day of intensive audio-lingual immersion, she could do better than just communicate. Her speech patterns, idioms and intonation would let her pass for a native.

  Adam’s deep voice interrupted her swift catalog of her skills. “The mission is a bit more complex than just finding the decoder. The old Karistani headman, the one who allowed in the UN team, died a few weeks ago. The president wants us to deliver a gift to the new ruler, something he hopes will cement relations and get the nuclear-reduction efforts back on track.”

  “What kind of gift?” Nate asked. “Something along the lines of a blank check written on the U.S. Treasury?”

  “Not exactly. The Karistanis are descendants of the Cossacks who used to roam the steppes. They’re fiercely proud, and stubbornly independent. They fought a bitter war for their country, and now guard it fiercely. The new ruler flatly refused the economic aid package the State Department put together, saying it had too many strings attached. Which it did,” Adam added dryly.

  He paused, glancing down at the notepad beside his phone. “This time the president is sending something more personal. We’re to deliver a horse called Three Bars Red. He’s a—”

  “Whooo-eee!”

  Nate’s exultant whoop made Maggie jump.

  Adam gave a small smile, as if he’d expected just such a reaction from a man whose background had earned him the OMEGA code name Cowboy. A former air force test pilot with skin weathered to a deep and seemingly permanent bronze by his native Wyoming’s sun, Nate had won a rodeo scholarship to UW at seventeen, and still worked a small spread north of Cheyenne when he wasn’t in the field for OMEGA.

  “Three Bars Red’s a short-backed, deep-barreled chestnut who happens to possess some of the greatest genes in American quarter horse history,” Nate exclaimed, no trace of a drawl in his voice now. “He’s a ’dogger right off the range. Only did fair to middling on the money circuit but darned if he didn’t surprise himself and everyone else by siring two triple As and eight Superiors.”

  As Cowboy rattled off more incomprehensible details about this creature named Three Bars Red, Maggie realized that her extensive repertoire of languages had one or two serious gaps. Somehow, she’d missed acquiring horsese, at least the version Nate was speaking.

  “I’m not sure of the exact count,” he continued, raking a hand through his short, sun-streaked blond hair, “but I know over two hundred of Ole Red’s offspring have won racing and performance Register of Merits.”

  Maggie’s mouth sagged. “Two hundred?”

  “It may be closer to three hundred by now. I haven’t read up on him in a while.”

  “Three hundred?” she echoed weakly. “This horse has sired three hundred offspring?”

  “He’s produced three hundred winners,” Nate said with a grin. “And a whole bunch more who haven’t placed that high in the money.”

  “Which is why the president convinced his owner to part with him in the interests of national defense,” Adam interjected, his blue eyes gleaming at Maggie’s stunned expression. “Our chief executive is as enthusiastic about the animal as Nate appears to be.”

  Cowboy’s grin took on a lopsided curve. “Well, hell! If I’d known he was so horse-savvy, I might have voted for the guy. Sending Ole Red to Karistan is one smart move. A quarter horse is the perfect complement to the tough little mounts they have in that part of the world. He’ll breed some size and speed into their lines. I hope the new headman appreciates the gift he’s getting.”

  “I’m sure she does.”

  Nate arched a brow. “She?”

  “She. The granddaughter of the old headman, and now leader of the tribe, or host, as they call it. Alexandra Jordan. Interestingly enough, she carries dual citizenship. Her mother was Russian, her father a U.S. citizen who—”

  This time it was Maggie who gave a startled yelp. “That Alexandra Jordan?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “I know of her. She’s one of the hottest fashion designers on either side of the Atlantic right now. As a matter of fact, this belt is one of her designs.”

  Planting the toe of one of her suede boots in the plush carpet, Maggie performed a graceful pirouette. The movement showed off the exotic combination of tassels, colored yarn and gold-toned bits of metal encircling the waist of her matching calf-length suede skirt.

  “These are genuine horsetail,” she explained, fingering one of the tassels. “They’re Alexandra Jordan’s signature. She uses them in most of her designs. Now that I know about her Cossack heritage, I can understand why. Isn’t this belt gorgeous? It’s the only item I could afford from her fall collection.”

  The two men exchanged a quick glance. Suave, diplomatic Adam merely smiled, but Nate snorted.

  Maggie pursed her lips, debating whether to ignore these two fashion Philistines or set them straight about the Russian-born designer’s impact on the international scene.

  Nate gave her a placating grin. “Maggie, sweetheart, you can’t expect a cowhand to appreciate the subtleties of a fashion statement made by something that rightfully belongs on the back end of a horse. Besides, that little doodad could be dangerous.”

  At her skeptical look, he raised a palm. “It’s true. Wily Willie once got bucked backward off an ornery, stiff-legged buckskin. He took a hunk of the bronc’s tail with him when he went flying, then decided to weave it into a hatband. As sort of a trophy, you understand, since he was out of the money on that ride.”

  Despite herself, Maggie couldn’t resist asking. “And?”

  “And the other horses got wind of it whenever Willie strolled by. After being kicked halfway across Saturday by a mare in season who, ah…mistook him for an uninvited suitor, Willie was forced to burn that hatband. And his best black Resistol with it.”

  “I’ll try to avoid mares in season when I’m wearing this belt,” Maggie promised dryly.

  Nate winked at her, then turned his attention to the director again. “So who’s going in, Adam?”

  “And when?” she added.

  “You both are. Immediately. Because of the remoteness of the area and the lack of any organized host-country resources to draw on, you’ll back each other up in the field. Nate will deliver the president’s gift to the new Karistani ruler, and Maggie…” Adam’s blue eyes rested on her face for a moment. “You’ll go into neighboring Balminsk.”

  Maggie was still trying to understand exactly why that brief glance should make her skin tingle when the director rose, tucking the end of his crimson-and-blue-striped Harvard tie into his navy blazer.

  “David Jensen’s flying in from San Diego to act as controller. He should be here in a couple of hours.”

  “Doc?”

  Maggie felt a spear of relief that the cool, methodical engineer would be calling the shots at HQ during this operation. His steady head and brilliant analytical capabilities had proved perfect complements to her own gut-level instincts in the past.

  “Your mission briefings start immediately, and will run around the clock. An air force transport is en route to pick up Three Bars Red, and will touch down here at 0600 tomorrow to take Nate on board. Maggie, you have an extra day before you join the team.”

  “Team?”

  “The UN is pulling together another group of experts to continue the inspections. You’ll go into Balminsk undercover with them. Experts from the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and the Pentagon are standing by to brief you.”

  Maggie swallowed an involuntary groan. She understood the urgency of the mission, and was far too dedicated to protest. But she couldn’t help feeling a flicker of regret that she’d be spending her time in the field with a clutch of scientists instead of the brilliant international designer whose work she
so admired.

  The next ten hours passed in a blur of mission briefings and intense planning sessions.

  The initial area familiarization that Maggie and Nate received focused on topography, climate, the turbulent history of the nomadic peoples who inhabited the target area, and the disorder that had resulted from the disintegration of the Soviet political system.

  Maggie hunched forward, chin propped in one hand, brown eyes intent on the flashing screen. Her pointed questions sent the briefer digging through his stack of classified documents more than once. Nate sprawled in his leather chair, his hands linked across his stomach, saying little, but Maggie knew he absorbed every word. The only time he stirred was when a head-and-shoulders shot of Karistan’s new ruler flashed up on the briefing screen.

  “This is a blowup of Alexandra Jordan’s latest passport photo,” the briefer intoned. “We’ve computer-imaged the photo to match her coloring, but it doesn’t really do her justice.”

  “Looks damn good to me,” Nate murmured.

  “They all look good to you,” Maggie replied, laughing.

  Not taking his eyes from the screen, he slanted her an unrepentant grin. “True.”

  With his easy smile, rangy body and weathered Marlboro-man handsomeness, Nate never lacked for feminine companionship. Despite the very attractive and very determined women who pursued him, however, Cowboy made it a point to keep his relationships light and unencumbered. As he reminded Maggie whenever she teased him about his slipperiness, in his line of business a man had to keep his saddlebags packed and his pistol primed.

  Once or twice Maggie had caught herself wondering if his refusal to allow any serious relationship to develop had something to do with the disastrous mission a few years ago that had left a beautiful Irish terrorist dead and Nate with a bullet through his right lung. No one except Adam Ridgeway knew the full details of what had happened that cold, foggy morning in Belfast, but ever since, no woman had seemed to spark more than a passing interest in Cowboy’s eyes.

  Which made his intense scrutiny of the face on the screen all the more interesting.