“Sure. And I’m not—”
“That woman is not Taylor Grant.”
His utter conviction got through to Denise. Adam saw the first flicker of doubt in her eyes as she threw a quick look at Maggie.
“Come on,” McGowan jeered, wincing a little with the effort. “I know you’re new to Taylor’s detail. But even you must have picked up on the dog’s reaction to her last night. She’s good, whoever she is, damn good. But she’s not Taylor Grant.”
The agent’s mouth thinned. “Herrera! Search this man for weapons.”
She kept her gun leveled on the caretaker’s head while the second agent opened the sheepskin and patted him down.
“He’s clean.”
“Keep him covered.”
The agent swiveled on his heels to look up at her. “Shouldn’t I patch that hole first?”
“In a minute.”
“But—”
“He’ll live!”
Her sharp retort wrung a half smile, half grimace from the wounded man. “You’re one hard female, Kowalski.”
“Remember that, the next time you pull a weapon on one of my—” She stopped abruptly. “On one of my charges,” she finished slowly.
Maggie heard the hitch of uncertainty in Denise’s voice. Well, the agent might have her doubts, but Maggie had a few of her own, as well. Hanging on to Adam’s arm with one hand, she casually slipped the other into her pants pocket. Her palm curled around the derringer.
“Did you—?”
She had to stop and drag in a slow breath. Pain rippled through her at even that slight movement of her diaphragm, but Maggie gritted her teeth and finished. “Did you plant a listening device in my bedroom, Denise?”
The agent stiffened.
“Did you?”
Denise didn’t respond for long moments. When she did, her brown eyes were flat and hard. “Yes.”
Maggie felt Adam’s muscles tense under her tight grip. “Why?” she asked sharply.
“Because it was ordered by the vice president,” Denise replied with careful deliberation. “Who isn’t you, apparently.”
A sudden silence descended, broken a moment later by McGowan’s snort of derision.
“Taylor wouldn’t allow any bugs upstairs. She doesn’t even like the cameras downstairs. That cabin is the only place in her whole crazy world she has any privacy. She’d never authorize you to peep into her bedroom.”
“Well, she did.” Denise bit the words out, her eyes on Maggie.
“Did she, Kowalski?” Quiet menace laced Adam’s voice. “Did she personally order it?”
Denise dragged her gaze from Maggie to the man beside her. She frowned, obviously debating whether to reply. “The order came down through channels,” she said at last.
“What channels?” Adam rapped out.
“Secret Service channels. What the hell’s going—?”
“Who issued the order?”
Despite the ache in her middle, Maggie almost smiled at the stubborn, angry look that settled on Denise’s face. She’d had the same reaction herself, on occasion, to being grilled by OMEGA’s director.
“Dammit, what’s—?”
“Who, Kowalski? I want an answer! Now!”
Denise responded through clenched teeth. “The order came from the secretary.”
“The secretary of the treasury?”
“The secretary of the treasury. Personally. Direct to me. He told me…” Her jaw tightened. “He told me the vice president had authorized it.”
“Bingo,” Maggie whispered.
Adam’s eyes met hers. A muscle twitched in one side of his jaw. The president’s friend, he thought. The highest financial officer in the nation. The bastard.
“We may know who,” he said, his jaw tight, “but we still don’t know why.”
“We will,” Maggie swore. “We’ll get the last piece of the puzzle if we have to…”
A coldly furious female intruded on their private exchange. “If one of you doesn’t explain in the next ten seconds what this is all about, I’m going to take action. Very drastic action.”
“Better tell her, Ridgeway,” McGowan drawled. “If you don’t, she’ll shoot to wound, and get her rocks off watching you bleed to death.”
“Oh, for—” Shoving her hood back, Denise raked a hand through her short sandy hair. “Stuff a bandage in his wound or in his mouth, Herrera. I don’t care which. Now tell me—” she glared at Maggie “—just who you are and what the hell’s going on here.”
Maggie opened her mouth, then closed it with a snap. Slicing a hand through the air for quiet, she cocked her head and listened intently.
In the stillness that descended, she heard the echo of a faint, wavering roar. Her fingers dug into Adam’s arm as she whipped around to face Denise.
“Is more—” She gasped as the violent movement wrenched at her middle, then shook her head, as if denying all pain. “Is more of your team on the way?”
Frowning, Denise responded to the urgency in Maggie’s voice. “No. There’s only Herrera and me. The president wouldn’t authorize a full-scale search,” she added stiffly.
“So you came on your own?”
Her chin jutted out. “So we came on our own. You are—you were my responsibility. We tracked McGowan from the moment he left the cabin.”
“Hell,” the caretaker muttered in profound disgust. “I’m getting sloppy. Tracked down and gunned down by a female.”
Denise ignored him, her sharp gaze focused on Maggie’s face. “What do you hear?”
“Snowmobiles,” she murmured, moving closer to the door to listen.
“Do you think it’s the team that hit you this morning and took down my man?”
“Probably.”
“I owe them.”
A ghost of a grin sketched across Maggie’s mouth. “Me too.”
“Listen to me, Kowalski,” Adam cut in. “The vice president is safe. She’s at Camp David, working on some highly sensitive treaty negotiations. But before she left, she received a death threat, a particularly nasty one, which is why my agent is doubling for her.”
“Agent?”
“That’s also why the president wouldn’t authorize you to institute a search,” Adam continued ruthlessly. “We told him not to.”
Denise blinked once or twice at the news that the president apparently took orders from the tall, commanding man in front of her.
“Why no search?” she asked, doubt in her eyes, but still tenacious.
“Because we didn’t want the wrong people walking into the trap we’ve set. We want the team that hit us and your man this morning. Badly. And the individual behind them. Are you with us?” Adam asked in a steely voice. “You have to decide. Now.”
Maggie saw at once that she wasn’t the only one who’d learned to trust her instincts. Denise flicked another look from her to Adam, then back again. Squaring her shoulders, she nodded.
“Tell me about this trap.”
“I’ll tell you as soon as I call in our reinforcements,” Adam said, shoving back his sleeve. “From the sound of it, we’re going to need them.”
At Cowboy’s laconic assurance that he was barely a good spit away and closing fast, the tension in the hut ratcheted up several more notches.
Working silently and swiftly, the small team readied for action. At Denise’s terse order, Herrera divided up their extra weapons and ammunition. While Maggie showed the two agents the placement of their rudimentary defenses, Adam propped a shoulder under McGowan and took him into the shelter of the trees. Radizwell trotted at their heels, rumbling deep in his throat until Adam’s low command stilled him.
“Christ,” McGowan muttered. “He never obeys me like that. Or anyone else, Taylor included. Last time she was home, she threatened to skin him and use him for a throw rug.”
“It’s all in the tone.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
His lips white with pain, McGowan was still for a moment. The distant rise and fa
ll of engines grew louder with each labored breath. “You’d better give me my rifle.”
Without speaking, Adam eased his support from under the caretaker’s shoulder.
“I didn’t mean to pull that trigger,” McGowan stated flatly. “Not when I did, anyway.”
“I know.”
“I would have, though. I would’ve shot you both if I thought you’d harmed Taylor.”
The whine of the engines pulled at Adam. He needed to coordinate a final approach for Cowboy. To check the disposition of his meager forces. To make sure Maggie was secure. But the bleak expression in the caretaker’s eyes held him for another second.
“You love her that much?”
A flicker of pain crossed McGowan’s face, one that had nothing to do with his wound.
“About as much as you love that woman, I reckon,” McGowan said quietly. His gaze drifted to Maggie, a slender shadow against the snow. “They’re a lot alike, aren’t they? Her and Taylor?”
“Many ways. And nothing alike in others.” Adam started back to the hut. “I’ll send Herrera out with your rifle.”
“Ridgeway?”
“Yes?”
“Good luck. Take care of your woman.”
A wry smile tugged at Adam’s lips. “She prefers to take care of herself.”
It was over almost before it began.
Scant moments after the hut’s occupants took position in the trees surrounding the hut, a wave of dim shapes burst into the open meadow. They raced across the snow, throwing up waves of white behind their skis. The first few were halfway across when a Cobra gunship lifted above the dark peaks directly behind them.
Maggie couldn’t see the chopper, since it flew without lights, but she heard it. The steady whump-whump-whump of its rotor blades drowned the sound of the approaching snowmobiles.
When they caught the sound of the chopper behind them, the attackers swerved crazily. Gunfire erupted, and streaming tracers lit the night sky. The cacophony of noise intensified with the appearance of a second gunship, then a third.
The choppers circled the swarming vehicles like heavenly herders trying to corral stampeding mechanized cattle. Blinding searchlights turned night into day. One of the 50 mm cannons bristling from the nose of the lead gunship boomed, and a fountain of snow arched into the sky.
One after another, the buzzing snowmobiles stopped. Their white-suited drivers jumped off, hands held high, while the giant black moths circled overhead.
Only two mounted attackers escaped the roundup. The first dodged across the snow and headed for the trees behind the hut. The second followed in his tracks, almost riding up the other’s rear skis.
From her high perch, Maggie took careful aim. She wasn’t about to let even one of these scum get away. As soon as the second vehicle entered the ring outlined in the snow by the scattered brush, neither one of them was coming out. No one in their right mind would drive a gasoline-powered snowmobile though the flames about to erupt.
Her finger tightened on the trigger just as a white shape flew out of the trees. Maggie’s shot ignited a flash bomb at the same moment Radizwell crashed into the lead driver, knocking him off his churning vehicle.
Flames shot into the sky and raced around the ring of gasoline-soaked brush. Two drivers and one savage, snarling komondor were trapped inside a circle of fire. Horrified, Maggie saw the second driver jump off his snowmobile. Lifting his automatic rifle, he spun toward the dog and his thrashing victim.
In a smooth, lightning-fast movement, Maggie braced her wrist against the limb, took aim and fired. With a sharp crack, the driver’s weapon flew out of his hand. When another warning shot threw up a clump of snow just in front of him, he dropped to his knees. Rocking back and forth, he clutched his injured hand to his chest.
Maggie had shimmied halfway down the tree when she caught sight of a dark figure running toward the wall of flames. Bending his arm in front of his face, he disappeared into the fire.
“Adam!” Her instinctive cry was lost in the fire’s roar.
By the time Maggie leaped through the fiery wall and joined him, Adam had the injured driver covered, and Radizwell had terrorized and almost tenderized the other. Adam held the straining animal with one hand while the man scuttled backward, crab-like.
“I don’t know!” he shouted.
“Talk, or I let him loose!” Adam snarled, as fearsome as the creature at his side.
“I told you, I don’t know who hired us!”
Adam relaxed his grip enough for Radizwell to leap for the man’s boot. Clamping his massive jaws around it, he shook his head. The driver screamed as his whole body lifted with each shake, then thumped back down in the snow.
“Call him off! I swear, I don’t know!”
Maggie skidded to a halt beside Adam. She watched the man’s frantic gyrations with great satisfaction.
“Have him chew on his face for a while,” she suggested, loudly enough to be heard over the growls and cries. “It will improve his looks, if nothing else.”
Evidently Radizwell had reached the same conclusion. He spit out the boot and lunged forward. The man screamed and threw up an arm. At the last moment, Adam buried a fist in the woolly ruff and hauled the dog back.
“You’ve got five seconds. Then I let him go.”
“I don’t know,” the man sobbed. “Our instructions come to a post office box, unsigned. The money’s deposited in an account at the bank.”
Adam stiffened. “Which bank?”
“What?”
“Which bank?”
“First Bank. In Miami.”
The three choppers settled on the snow like hens nesting for the night. In the blinding glare of their powerful searchlights, a heavily armed counterstrike team rounded up the band of attackers and stripped them down to search for weapons.
A tall, lanky figure left the circle of activity and plowed through the snow toward the ring of fire.
“Thunder? Chameleon?”
“Here!” Maggie shouted.
Leaping over dwindling flames, Cowboy came to an abrupt halt. He pushed his Denver Broncos ball cap to the back of his head, surveying the scene.
A white-suited figure with his hands behind his head stumbled forward in front of Maggie, who covered him with the puniest excuse for a weapon Cowboy had ever seen. Adam knelt in the snow to retrieve a semiautomatic. And a mound of shaggy white perched atop the stomach of a downed attacker, fangs bared. A series of spine-tingling growls rolled toward Cowboy, and he didn’t make the mistake of moving any closer.
He shook his head in mingled amusement and relief. “Here I bring the cavalry chargin’ to the rescue, and you didn’t even need us. You’ve got your own…” He jerked his chin toward the still-growling creature. “What is that thing, anyway?”
“A Hungarian dust mop,” Maggie said.
“A Hungarian sheepdog,” Adam corrected.
The Hungarian in question snarled menacingly.
“Not exactly a hospitable sort, is he?”
Maggie shook her head emphatically. “No.”
“Yes,” Adam countered. “Once he gets acquainted with you.”
“Well, we’ll have to get acquainted some other time. My orders are to get you back to Sacramento immediately. Jaguar’s got a plane standing by to fly us to D.C.”
“Why the rush?” Maggie asked.
She was as anxious as he to bring down the final curtain on this mission, but she’d thought—hoped—she and Adam would have at least an hour or two at the cabin to clean up and finish one or more of the several interesting discussions they’d started in the past few days.
“Jaguar radioed just before we landed. The vice president’s completed those treaty negotiations faster than she or anyone else thought possible. She’s flying in from Camp David, and insists on resuming her public persona. Death threat or no death threat, she wants to be at the press conference tomorrow when the president announces the treaty. He’s calling you in.”
Chapt
er 15
As it turned out, the entire ragged band flew back to Sacramento with Maggie and Adam.
A grim-faced Denise Kowalski insisted on accompanying her “charge” back to D.C. Hank McGowan set his jaw and refused to be taken to a hospital. He wanted to see with his own eyes that Taylor was safe. A medic with the counter-strike team packed and patched his wound on the spot.
To Maggie’s disgust, even the dog got into the act. He whined pathetically when Adam climbed aboard the chopper and refused to remove his massive body from a skid. Forced to choose between ordering the pilot to lift off with a hundred pounds of komondor on one track and taking the creature aboard, Adam had opened the side hatch. With a thunderous woof that had half a dozen well-armed counter-strike agents swinging around, weapons leveled, Radizwell leaped into the cabin.
With his odoriferous presence, the air in the helicopter took on a distinct aroma. After a day of strenuous physical activity followed by a night that had raised Maggie’s nervous-tension levels well beyond the stage of a discreet, ladylike dew, she wanted nothing more than a bath, a good meal and Adam, not necessarily in that order. For a few more hours, though, she had to maintain her role.
With unerring skill, the chopper pilot put his craft down a few yards from the gleaming 747 that waited for them, engines whining. The media, alerted to the vice president’s departure by the presence of Air Force Two, crowded at the edge of the ramp. Realizing that this might be her last public appearance as the vice president of the United States, Maggie gave them a grin and a wave as she walked to the aircraft. Luckily, the night was too dark and the photographers were too far away to record the precise details of Taylor Grant’s less-than-immaculate appearance, much less the blackened hole in the front of her ski jacket left by a 44-40 rifle shell.
The diminutive martinet who waited for her inside the 747 saw it at once, however. Lillian’s black eyes rounded as she gaped at Maggie’s middle.
“Good heavens! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Her face folding into lines of tight disapproval, the dresser scowled at Denise, who entered the plane behind Adam. “You told me she’d been attacked down at the lake. But you didn’t tell me she was hit.”
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