He tried to smile, but it came out as a wry twist of his lips. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m really sitting here.”
A host of different emotions flew across her face, but anger won. Her eyes blazed. “Get out.”
“Annie, I had to—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Captain Peterson.” She said his name sarcastically, her teeth clenched in barely controlled rage. “You son of a bitch. You set me up. Get out of my house!”
“I didn’t know about—”
“You really expect me to believe that?” she seethed. “I know damn well you remember coming into the lab with me when I turned off the lights that night. You know that stuff from the English Gallery wasn’t there.”
“Annie—”
She kicked him, hard, her foot against his back, but the bed covers broke the force of the blow, and he didn’t even flinch. “You bastard,” she shouted. “The FBI decided that I was guilty five months ago. But they couldn’t prove it, so they had to frame me. And you’re just going to go along with it, aren’t you? Because you’re one of them, you creep!”
He gave up trying to explain. He sat there, watching her quietly, letting her vent her anger.
“Tell me,” she said, her voice biting, “do you get extra points for sleeping with me, Captain? Four times in one night! You probably got stud points from the other guys for that. Oh, yeah, and once in the morning. A nice touch. Make your buddies wait out in the hall while you make it with the suspect one last time before you arrest her—”
He couldn’t hold it in. “I didn’t know they had a warrant—”
“Do you really expect me to believe anything you say?” she said, as her eyes accused him of terrible crimes.
He looked down at the floor, knowing that he was guilty. He’d kept the truth about his identity from her for all those weeks, even after he knew he was in love with her, even after he knew she couldn’t possibly be involved in any kind of crime. He was guilty. “No,” he said quietly. “No, I don’t.”
“You were so good,” she said, her voice breaking. “All those stories you told about when you were a kid, living out in Colorado, about your Indian grandfather—You probably grew up in the Bronx, right?”
“Not everything I told you was a lie,” he said, meeting her gaze. “Those stories were all true. And I was telling you the truth when I said that I love you.” He looked down at his hands, clenched tightly into fists on his lap. “I know you don’t believe me….”
“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t,” Annie said, watching him close his eyes against the harshness of her words. “What do you want from me? Why are you here?”
Pete stood up and walked across the room. “You’re being framed,” he said, his back to her as he composed himself.
She laughed, a harsh exhale of air. “Tell me something new, Captain America.”
“I want to help you,” he said, turning to look at her.
“Now you want to help me?” she said, tight anger in her voice. “Yesterday, you could have told them that those things weren’t in the lab—”
“Annie, I’m here because you’re not safe,” he interrupted. “Someone on the inside is in on this frame, and I don’t know who it is.”
Annie stared at him.
He smiled, a tight, satisfied smile. “Yeah, I was there that night, Annie. And I do remember. I saw the lab. I know you’re being set up.”
She kept staring at him, the tiniest seed of hope fluttering in her stomach.
“Why didn’t you say something yesterday?” she asked, her voice low. “You could have saved my reputation.”
“I thought it was more important to save your life.” His dark eyes held her captive. “Until I know how many people are in on this thing, you’re safer if they think no one believes you.”
“But the FBI? How—”
“All I know is too many things don’t add up. How did someone get into the house to put those bats in your room? How did they get in to plant that stolen art? Nobody had the codes to the security system except you, me and Cara…and anyone who had access to your case file.”
“But what about all those fringe groups the FBI was going to investigate?”
He shook his head. “There’s no way one of those groups is responsible for bombing and robbing two European art galleries—or disarming a professional alarm system to plant bats in your bedroom and stolen art in your lab.”
Pete was pacing now. “There’s just too much that’s wrong about this.” He stopped in the middle of the room and faced Annie again. “Why would someone want to kill you? Or why would they want you arrested, in jail, out of the picture?”
Annie stared at him and Pete smiled grimly. “There’s a lot of things we don’t know. And it’s about time we started finding out.”
PETE SIFTED THROUGH THE PILE of file folders that were out on Annie’s desk. He ran his fingers through his hair, then leaned back and stretched. Man, they were getting nowhere….
“Here it is,” Annie called from the floor in front of her file cabinet. “June 4, 1989. Back before I started using my computer system. That was the last time I tested anything for the English Gallery. It was a gold ring from ninth-century Wales. Wanna see the file?”
“Sure, why not?” Pete said. He spun in his chair to face her as she brought the folder to the desk. “How come it’s been such a long time? Recession hitting them, too?”
Annie shook her head. “No. Alistair Golden’s pretty much got that gallery locked up for sales coming into the United States. They use him exclusively. If it hadn’t been for Ben Sullivan, I never would have gotten this job.”
Pete frowned. Then reached for the telephone. As Annie watched, he dialed a number. “Yeah,” he said, into the phone. “This is Peterson. I need access to a list of all sales of artwork and other artifacts brought into the U.S. via the English Gallery.”
“But I’ve got that information,” Annie said.
He looked at her in surprise. “Let me call you back,” he said into the phone. He hung up and looked at her questioningly.
“I’m tied into a computer network that keeps track of current sales of artwork and artifacts—anything from a Picasso to a Stone Age ax,” Annie said. She came around to his side of the desk and turned on her personal computer and her modem. “It’s useful information for art brokers to have. Using this list, I can track down and access a buyer for just about anything. Take your necklace, for instance. If you wanted to sell it, I could find a buyer simply by calling up the names of all the people who have made multiple purchases of Navaho jewelry over the past several months.”
Pete leaned back in his chair to give her better access to the keyboard. She narrowed her eyes slightly in concentration as she keyed in the commands to sign on to the network.
“All we have to do is request a specific list where the gallery was the English, and point of shipping equals U.S.A….”
She was close enough for him to reach out and touch her, but Pete didn’t dare. Just over twenty-four hours ago, she’d told him that she loved him. But he could still see the look on her face when she found out he was a government agent, sent to investigate her. He remembered her eyes as her love for him died. His heart ached. It was his own damned fault….
“Here we go,” she said.
A list of dates and items scrolled down the computer screen. Pete forced his thoughts back to the task at hand and leaned forward for a closer look.
“It’s chronological,” Annie said, turning toward him. They were nearly nose to nose, and she quickly straightened up. “The most current shipments are at the very bottom.”
She sat on the edge of the desk and watched Pete from a safe distance as he moved the cursor down the long list. His handsome face was lit by the amber light from the computer screen. He looked exhausted, overtired, but there was a glint of determination in his eyes. He glanced up, feeling her watching him.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“Because I know you�
��re not guilty,” he said, looking back at the computer.
“You paid my bail, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you get that kind of money?” Annie asked.
“I borrowed it. If you skip town, I lose everything. My car, my condo…” He looked up at her again, and the familiar glint of humor in his eyes made her heart twist. “Who knows? The guys I borrowed it from would probably even break my legs.”
“Why would you risk all that for me?” she asked.
“I’d risk everything,” he said simply, squinting at the computer screen. “Even my life….”
“Why?”
Pete looked up at her. “It’s not that hard to figure out,” he said. “I’m in love with you, Annie.”
She stared down at him for several long moments, wishing that he hadn’t turned into this stranger sitting before her—a stranger she somehow knew so well. But that was just an illusion. She only thought she knew him. Pete Taylor had been only a cover, a charade. He was gone as absolutely as if he had died. Annie felt a stab of grief so sharp and painful that she almost cried out.
“Is there…” Pete said, then cleared his throat and started again. “Do I have any chance at all? With you?”
He looked like Pete Taylor. He sounded like Pete Taylor. He even acted like Pete Taylor. But he wasn’t Pete Taylor. He wasn’t—
Annie pushed herself off the desk, unable to meet his eyes. “No.”
Pete nodded, as if that were the answer he had been expecting. With the muscle in his jaw working, he turned his attention back to the computer, as though his last hopes hadn’t been dashed to bits.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHEN ANNIE WENT BACK INTO THE office, Pete was on the phone again.
He had printed out a list of names, dates and transactions from the computer, and she glanced over his shoulder, trying to make some sense of it.
He hung up the phone and turned toward her.
“Any luck?” she asked.
“You know this guy Steadman?” he asked, pointing to the list. He was a buyer, and his name appeared repeatedly.
Annie shook her head.
“He buys things from the English Gallery like it’s a K mart end-of-the-season sale,” Pete said. “There are also a couple of other partnerships and corporations whose names come up frequently.”
“But these were all legitimate transactions,” Annie protested, looking at the list again. “Some of these pieces are well-known, and these prices are all fair….”
Pete spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon on the telephone, trying to gather more information.
Annie went upstairs and cleaned the last of the mess the bats had made out of her bedroom and tried not to think about Peterson. But as she scrubbed the floor, she kept hearing his voice as he asked her if he still had a chance with her. No, she told herself over and over. Absolutely not. She didn’t love him. She refused to love him. Sure, she still found him physically attractive….
She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the night they’d spent together, the night they’d made love. Had it been only two nights ago? It seemed as if a million years had passed since he’d held her in his arms….
“Are you all right?”
Startled, Annie opened her eyes to find Pete standing in the doorway. “Yeah,” she said, attacking the floor with renewed vigor. “What did you find out? Anything?”
Pete squatted down next to the bucket, pulling out a second sponge and going to work beside her. “Something,” he said. “I’m waiting for a few more calls that should give me the rest of the information I need. Apparently, Mr. J. J. Steadman is buying most of the stuff that comes out of the English Gallery one way or the other. He’s an owner or a partner in every single one of the companies on that list of buyers.”
Annie stopped scrubbing the floor. “Quite the busy little collector.”
Pete smiled and Annie had to look away. “Quite. And quite the mediocre one, too, it seems. He rarely holds on to the pieces for more than a couple of months after he buys them, and he often sells them at a small loss.”
“Big deal,” Annie said. “There’s no law that says that rich people can’t be stupid.”
“Yeah,” Pete said. The muscles in his back and arms rippled as he rubbed the sponge across the dirty floor. “But get a load of this.” He smiled at her as he rinsed the sponge in the bucket. “Guess who else owns a piece of J. J. Steadman’s companies. Give you a hint. Funny green eyes, gold bracelet, kind of like a rattlesnake in a tux?”
Annie had to smile at him. “Let’s see…Could it be Alistair Golden?”
They smiled into each other’s eyes; then Annie looked away, her expression suddenly guarded, distant.
They scrubbed for several minutes in silence; then she leaned back on her heels. “You know, Peterson, I don’t even know your first name.”
Pete looked up. “Kendall,” he said. “But nobody calls me that. Everyone calls me Pete.”
“Even your mother?” Annie asked.
“She calls me Hastin Naat’aanni.”
Man Speaking Peace, his Navaho name.
“That really happened?” Annie said. “It was true, that story you told me, about your cousins, when your aunt died?”
Pete threw his sponge in the bucket and sat cross-legged on the floor, his elbows around his knees. “With the exception of my name, my career and my college, I lied to you only by omission,” he said. “Everything else I told you was the truth. I just didn’t tell you enough.”
Annie was quiet for a moment. “Why did you lie to me about going to New York University? Where did you go to school?”
“I didn’t,” Pete said. “I went to Vietnam. I was drafted when I turned eighteen.”
“That’s where your grandfather didn’t want you to go,” Annie said, sudden comprehension lighting her eyes.
Pete nodded, looking into the bucket of soapy water. “He didn’t understand why a kid named Man Speaking Peace had to go fight a war on the other side of the ocean. He didn’t like war,” he said. “I didn’t, either.” But he smiled, and Annie was chilled by the hardness in his eyes. “I was good at it, though. I was good at staying alive, too. And I was good at search-and-rescue raids. I spent most of my time in enemy territory, finding the guys who’d been shot down and bringing them out of the jungle. In ’75, after they pulled the troops out, I was asked to stay behind.”
“Stay behind,” Annie repeated, horror in her voice. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“I didn’t want to. But they asked me to become part of an agency team that was working to locate and free POWs and MIAs,” Pete said quietly.
“So you stayed.”
“I stayed. I spent about four more years in southeast Asia, doing what I did best,” he said. “Making war.”
“You were saving lives,” Annie protested. “How many men did you help set free?”
Pete looked at her in surprise. She was actually defending him. His heart skipped a beat and he tried to control it. It didn’t mean a thing…. “I never knew the exact figures,” he said. “But it was in the hundreds.”
“After that you joined the CIA?” she asked.
She wanted to know about him. Was it mere curiosity, or…Pete couldn’t dare to hope. He nodded. “As a field operative.”
“So you’ve spent most of the past two decades risking your life,” she said, shaking her head.
“Not all the time—”
“Oh, I suppose you get a weekend off every few years or so,” she said. “How can you live that way, with your life always in danger…?”
“Look at it from my perspective,” Pete said. “If I’d stayed in Colorado, I would never have met you.”
Annie’s eyes narrowed. “Then you definitely should have stayed in Colorado,” she said sharply. She stood up suddenly and carried the bucket into the bathroom, flushing the dirty water down the toilet, watching it swirl away.
Pete follow
ed her. “In my life, with my job, I have to get things right the first time around,” he said, his voice low and intense. “If I don’t, I’m dead. Every now and then I’ll blow it, though. I’ll make a really bad decision, make a major mistake. After I get over the surprise that I’m still alive, I grab that second chance and I don’t let go. And I’m damn sure I don’t mess up the second time around.”
She was looking at him, her eyes so wide, so blue. He couldn’t help himself—he took a step toward her, and then another and another. Before he could stop himself, he’d taken her into his arms. She was shaking, but at least she didn’t pull away. “Annie, give me a second chance,” he whispered. “I love you—God, please, I need you in my life….”
And still she didn’t pull away. Her breasts were rising and falling with each breath she took, as if she had just run a mile. Pete felt his own pulse pounding as his fear of driving her away wrestled with his need. Need won, and he kissed her.
Her mouth was soft, warm and as sweet as he remembered. He felt her arms tighten around him as she responded to him, and he prayed—hell, he begged the gods for that second chance.
She opened her mouth under his, and he nearly wept—until she struggled to break free. He released her immediately, and she stared at him, her eyes accusing.
“No,” she breathed. “I can’t.”
Annie ran from the room, leaving Pete alone.
THE PHONE RANG SHRILLY, QUICKLY pulling Annie out of a restless, uneasy sleep. The clock on her bedside table said it was after 2:00 a.m., but there was a light on in the kitchen, shining in through her bedroom door. She could hear Pete talking on the phone, his voice lowered so as not to disturb her.
He was on the phone, sitting at the kitchen table, writing in his little notebook. His T-shirt was off and his hair was rumpled. His eyes were rimmed with red, as if he still hadn’t gotten any sleep.
“Yeah, I got it all,” he said into the telephone, looking up at Annie. She stood in the doorway, squinting at him, letting her eyes adjust to the bright light. “Thanks, I owe you one.”
Hero Under Cover Page 19