By the time he switched off the tap water and turned his head, Alexandre Biassou stood less than ten feet away.
And he was pointing a silenced pistol right at him.
Armand’s mouth went dry. So this is how it will end, he thought grimly. Gunned down by his worst enemy in a Manhattan restroom. It shouldn’t have surprised him. Hadn’t he always known, on some unconscious level, that his own life would end in bloodshed, just as his father and his mentor had died violently?
Slowly, deliberately, he wadded up the used paper towel and dropped it into the trash receptacle built into the counter.
“So we meet again, diable,” he murmured, his voice edged with dark humor.
Biassou’s cold, black eyes gleamed with malicious satisfaction. “Did you think this was over?” he demanded in deep, thickly accented tones. “Did you think you had won?”
“I have,” Armand said with unerring calm. “At this very moment, the members of the Security Council are listening to audio recordings in which you describe how you intended to assassinate the president of the United States. Bill McManus, your co-conspirator, has already been taken into federal custody and has confessed to everything, including the murder of Nancy Janikowski, who had the misfortune of stumbling upon your assassination plot and confronting him. All of your dirty little secrets have been exposed. This hearing is nothing more than a formality. Your fate has been sealed.”
“You insolent little fool!” Biassou spat, a vein throbbing in his temple. “I could have given you anything you wanted. Wealth, prestige, property, an abundance of beautiful women at your disposal. I could have made you prime minister—second-in-command.”
Armand let out a harsh laugh. “I thought I made it perfectly clear to you before that my soul is not for sale, diable. I want nothing to do with you or your corrupt regime.”
Biassou smiled, a slow, sinister smile Armand recognized from his nightmare. “If my fate has been sealed,” the dictator said, raising his gun to eye level, “so has yours.”
A sudden commotion down the hallway made him hesitate for a split second, his head cocked at a listening angle.
Quick as a thought, Armand dove to the tiled floor just as Biassou fired at him. The blast was muffled by the silencer, but the bullet that grazed Armand’s left shoulder was very real.
Ignoring the hot stab of pain, he raised his pant leg, seized the small knife strapped to his ankle and hurled it at his adversary. The knife shot through the air and hit Biassou squarely in the chest.
His eyes bulged in shock, then slowly lowered to the pearl-handled knife protruding from his body. Recognizing Francois Seligny’s weapon, he coughed and then began to laugh, a dark, menacing rumble that sent chills down Armand’s spine and made him wish he could have snuck one of his guns into the building.
Biassou looked up, his malevolent gaze locking with Armand’s. “I appreciate your sense of poetic justice, Magliore,” he rasped. “Killing me with the blade of your slain mentor. Perhaps the three of us will meet again in hell.”
He raised his pistol and Armand calmly closed his eyes, bracing for death, thinking of Lia and what would never be.
The next sound he heard was the bathroom door crashing against the wall and the blast of a single gunshot. He opened his eyes in time to see Alexandre Biassou pitch forward like a felled tree, a bullet hole punched neatly through the center of his forehead. His body landed on the floor with a heavy thud and did not move again.
Lia stood in the doorway gripping a 9mm, her nostrils flared, her dark eyes simmering with controlled rage. When her gaze landed on Armand sprawled a few feet away, wounded but very much alive, tears of relief sprang to her eyes. She holstered her weapon and hurried to his side as a flurry of agents rushed in after her, shouting and barking commands into radios and earpieces.
Kneeling on the floor beside Armand, Lia gathered him into her arms with such stunning force she knocked the air from his lungs. “Oh, my God,” she whispered fiercely. “You gave me the scare of my life, damn it!”
Armand tried to laugh, but the sound was strangled, muffled against her fragrant bosom. He could have stayed there forever.
“How the hell did this happen?” another agent demanded, leaning over the dead body of Alexandre Biassou.
Lia answered in angry, staccato tones, “He hired someone to create a diversion in the lobby, and while everyone was distracted, he killed the guards assigned to him and came after Magliore. He had a silencer for the gun he took. The two agents posted outside the restroom probably never even saw him coming. He should have been handcuffed, damn it!”
She drew back from Armand, running one hand over his face, checking his wounded shoulder with the other.
“It’s just a flesh wound,” he reassured her, pulling himself into a sitting position as pain lanced through his side. “I can hardly even feel it,” he lied.
But Lia was already removing his suit jacket and ripping off his shirt to assess the damage. He mustered a sheepish grin for the agents who hovered nearby, watching him with concerned expressions.
“You all right, Mr. Magliore?”
Armand nodded, gazing dreamily at Lia. His beautiful avenging angel. “I’m fine, gentlemen. Just fine.”
One week later
Washington, D.C.
Lia sat on a downtown park bench, watching as passersby strolled across the manicured green lawn, sharing carefree laughs that made her envious. Although the afternoon sky was overcast, matching her somber mood, she wore a pair of dark sunglasses to reduce the risk of being recognized.
News of the “deadly showdown at the UN,” as the media had dubbed it, had sent shockwaves around the world. One week later, the conspiracy plot involving Alexandre Biassou, President Fordham, the Secret Service and the Muwaitian rebel leader and whistleblower remained the lead story of every news broadcast and newspaper around the globe. Lia, who had hoped to fly beneath the radar, was stunned to wake up one morning and find her photo splashed across the front page of the Washington Post. She began receiving so many calls from reporters that she changed her phone number. When the new number was somehow leaked to the press, she unplugged her phone altogether.
Even if she weren’t bound by protocol not to speak to the media, Lia had no desire to rehash what had happened when she was still struggling to cope with everything.
According to his deposition, Bill McManus had met Alexandre Biassou two years before, when he had accompanied the U.S. secretary of state on a peacekeeping mission to Muwaiti. Although the peace talks had broken down, Biassou had sensed that he had an ally in the assistant director, who, as it had turned out, was opposed to a female president from the beginning. The two men had begun secretly corresponding, and it wasn’t long before the assassination plot was hatched. To ensure that the trail would never lead back to him, McManus had stipulated that his name, identity and the specific nature of his involvement be withheld from members of Biassou’s faction. Biassou was simply to tell his men that he had a powerful American informant, nothing more.
McManus had been so determined to cover his own tracks that he had murdered Nancy Janikowski, whom he had known and worked with for years, when she unwittingly intercepted a communiqué from Biassou. He’d shot her in cold blood, then buried her body in the woods and fabricated the story about a family emergency.
Lia blinked back tears, reliving the sight of her former supervisor lying in a coffin at the funeral, her dark hair neatly combed over the gaping bullet wound in her temple. The likelihood that McManus would be convicted of treason did little to assuage the grief and anger Lia felt. The weight of Janikowski’s death, on top of everything else that had transpired over the past two weeks, pressed down on her like an anvil. She wondered if she would ever recover from the shock, the pain of betrayal, the senseless loss of a good friend and colleague.
Only time would tell.
She didn’t turn her head as Armand walked up the path and joined her on the park bench, deliberately sitting on th
e opposite end.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet me out here,” he said ruefully. “I know it’s probably not a good idea to be seen in public together, but it seemed like the only way to finally get some privacy. Your apartment is crawling with reporters, and even a public park seems more private than the White House.”
Lia smiled softly. “You don’t have to thank me for coming. You didn’t think I would let you leave without saying goodbye, did you?”
Armand stared down at his hands clasped between his legs. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say goodbye at all,” he said in a low voice.
Lia’s heart contracted. She kept her eyes trained ahead. “How’s your family doing? Are they enjoying their stay at the White House?”
“For the first few days. Now that the novelty is wearing off, they’re eager to return home and be reunited with their friends. I am, too.”
Once again Lia felt that painful squeezing in her chest. Forcing herself to ignore it, she said, “That’s understandable. How’s your shoulder?”
“Good as new. How’s your heart?”
She started, caught off guard by the question. She swallowed. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you?”
Lia said nothing.
“Take these off,” Armand murmured, reaching across the bench to remove her sunglasses. “I can’t see your eyes. And you look like a Secret Service agent.”
“I am a Secret Service agent,” Lia said, quietly emphatic.
And I always will be. She let the unspoken words hang between them.
Armand held her gaze for a long, charged moment.
She was the first to look away. “What time does your flight leave tonight?” she asked, although she already knew the answer, had been agonizing over the date and time of his departure for days now.
“Eight,” he replied.
She nodded, her throat tightening.
“Am I the only one,” he said huskily, “who thought we had something special, a rare, powerful connection?”
Lia closed her eyes. “Of course not,” she whispered.
“Then why do you refuse to discuss our future together?”
“What kind of future can we have, Armand?” she cried, opening her eyes and staring at him. “We live thousands of miles apart from each other.”
“It doesn’t have to stay that way!”
“Who’s going to make the sacrifice?” she challenged. “Who’s going to leave behind everything they know to make this work?”
His piercing amber eyes drilled into hers. “I love you, Lia. I want to marry you. I want you to return to Muwaiti with me. Help me rebuild my country. Help me restore my people’s faith and trust in the government. Help me fulfill whatever destiny God has chosen for me. For us.”
Lia stared at him, her heart beating savagely against her rib cage. It was tempting, so very tempting, to accept his offer. She loved him like no other. But what he was asking of her, demanding of her, was too much.
“Damn it, Armand!” she exploded. “You’re forcing me to choose between your life and mine. My mother had to make the same choice, and it’s not fair.”
His expression turned fierce. “Are your parents happy? Have they not been happily married for over thirty years?”
“That’s not the point!”
“Then what is the point?” he snapped.
“The point is that I love my job, and I worked too damn hard to get where I am just to walk away. The fact that you can’t understand that is problematic in and of itself.”
“What I can’t understand,” Armand growled through clenched teeth, “is how you can remain so loyal to an organization that abused and betrayed your trust.”
Lia’s eyes narrowed sharply on his face. “Don’t you dare try to use what happened as leverage. The Secret Service did not abuse and betray my trust—Bill McManus did. There’s a big differ—”
“I love you, damn it. I love you!”
She wavered, hot tears filling her eyes. “I know—”
“No, you don’t understand.” Moving closer, Armand grabbed her face between his hands. The searing intensity of his gaze made her tremble. “This wasn’t an overnight thing for me. I’ve loved you for eight years, Lia. Eight years.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“I saw you that day, outside the clinic in Port le Duc. I was passing by, on my way to another military base, and I saw you! You were making the children laugh so they wouldn’t be afraid of the vaccination needles, and I thought you were the most beautiful, bewitching woman I had ever seen. I went back the next day, but you had already left the island.” His voice softened, deepening with emotion. “I never forgot you, Lia. I dreamed about you for years, wondering if I would ever see you again. In a strange way, dreaming about you helped me get through those dark, endless days and nights of fighting. You know how soldiers carry around photographs of their wives and girlfriends, their newborn babies? Well, I carried a picture of you in my mind, in my heart. You gave me something to hope for, something to believe in, even though I knew I would probably never see you again. And then, suddenly, you were there.”
Incredulous, Lia traced his features with her eyes. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Why did you wait this long to tell me?” she whispered, her throat constricted.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It wasn’t a conscious decision. When I saw you that night in the jungle, I was so shocked that you were actually there, I could hardly speak. After that night there just never seemed to be the right time to tell you. After a while I was afraid I might scare you off by coming across as an obsessed weirdo.”
Lia chuckled softly. “I wouldn’t have thought that about you.”
“I wasn’t taking any chances.” His eyes probed hers. “Anyway, would it have made a difference if I’d told you earlier? Would we be having a different conversation right now if you’d known how long I’ve been in love with you?”
Averting her gaze, Lia pushed out a long, shaky breath. “I…I don’t even know what to say. What you’ve just shared with me…I’m humbled beyond words.”
“I don’t want your humility, Lia.” His voice was strained.
She turned back to him, realizing she’d unintentionally hurt him. “I love you. After everything we’ve been through, you must know that. I love you so much. When I realized that Biassou was missing, and I couldn’t reach anyone on the radio, I was so scared. My God, I’ve never been so scared in my life! I—I thought I might be too late. I thought he’d already killed you, and it…it tore me apart!”
“Don’t think about it,” Armand murmured soothingly. “It’s over now. You got there in time, and you saved me, sweetheart. Let’s put all that behind us and look ahead to the future. Come home with me, Lia. Be my wife.”
Her heart thudded hard in her throat as he stared into her eyes, ensnaring her, compelling her, bending her to his will as easily as he had seduced her.
She forced herself to break eye contact. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think straight when he was looking at her like that. “Why can’t we reach some sort of compromise? Maybe we could—”
“I can’t leave Muwaiti.” His tone was flat. Final.
Lia looked at him. “But I have to leave my family, my job, my home,” she said bitterly. “Is that it?”
He just stared at her, awaiting her decision.
Her insides began to tremble. “I—I need more time. I can’t just make a life-altering decision like this on a spur of the moment.”
“How much time do you need?”
“I don’t know!”
After a lengthy silence, Armand rose to his feet. When he spoke, his voice was cool and detached. “I think you’ve already made your decision. Goodbye, Lia.”
She stared up at him, stunned and angry that he could close the door between them so neatly. As if he were merely adjourning a business meeting that had not gone according to plan. She half expected him to reach out and politely
shake her hand.
Her chin lifted proudly. “Goodbye, Armand.” How she got those words out past the tightness in her throat was beyond her.
He inclined his head, then turned and walked away.
Lia sat there, watching as he climbed into the nondescript town car that would take him back to the White House. Back to the airport.
Out of her life.
This time for good.
Chapter 19
Six months later
Early March
Somehow she made it through the bleak days and weeks and months that followed. She returned to work after taking just a week off and was informed that she’d been transferred to the president’s protection detail—a request made by Grace Fordham herself. Two weeks later Lia received another honor, the Presidential Award of Valor, for the courage and resourcefulness she had demonstrated in protecting Armand Magliore. With her parents, friends and colleagues beaming proudly and cheering her on, Lia had accepted the prestigious award, smiling through her heartache and despair.
It had been several weeks before the media maelstrom resulting from the thwarted assassination plot died down, and the November election once again had dominated the news. As expected, Grace Fordham had defeated her Republican opponent to become reelected, but it was the outcome of another election that soon captured the world’s attention. In January Armand Magliore had been elected president of Muwaiti by an overwhelming majority, the largest landslide victory in the country’s political history. Lia had watched, with tears in her eyes and her chest bursting with pride, as he addressed a jubilant crowd of supporters, thousands of whom had traveled from around the country to usher in their new leader. She had been riveted by the sight of liberated Muwaitians cheering, waving banners and chanting Armand’s name with tears of joy streaming down their faces. By the time he had finished his rousing speech, in which he thanked his fellow countrymen for their resilience under Alexandre Biassou and exhorted them to help him rebuild their great nation, Lia was weeping, as well.
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