She had only to lean a little to her right and she could nestle into his chest. She could reach out with her hand, slide it under the back of his jacket and cup—
The elevator doors bounced open, revealing the noisy gilt and marble foyer, which was thick with hotel guests and other customers using the dining room, the bistro and the snack bar. The piano bar was doing a roaring trade and Sahara remembered it was Friday night.
She was abruptly aware of just how many people were within sight. All of these people would see her leaving. She had never felt more self-conscious. She was dressed to draw attention. Worse, she was getting it. Many men quite blatantly turned their heads to look her over and some even nudged their friends and jerked their heads in her direction.
She swallowed and followed the bellman, keeping her eyes on his back. But the skin over her spine prickled and the hair on the back of her neck tried to stand up.
Logan’s hand slid under her elbow and she felt him step up beside her. She looked up at him.
“You’re safe,” he breathed. “They’re just admiring you.”
She took another wobbling breath.
“Smile,” he told her. “You don’t have a care in the world and you’re lapping up the attention.”
She turned a full smile upon him. “Just as long as you don’t let go of me!” she murmured and laughed as if she had said something incredibly witty.
Logan smiled back and his smile was warm. Intimate. It drew her closer to him. The noise in the foyer receded until it was just a backdrop surrounding them.
“Are you flirting with me?” he asked. His voice low and rumbled pleasantly.
Her smile brightened for a second. “In best Micky fashion,” she assured him. “Is it working?”
He glanced casually around the foyer. “You’re at about fifty percent,” he assured her.
She felt her smile slip a little. “Excuse me?”
He held open the heavy glass door and let her walk through into the dry, still, hot air of a Los Angeles summer evening. “Your dazzle rating. You have about fifty percent of the men back there hating my guts.”
She blinked. “That’s not what I meant at all,” she said.
He opened the limousine door for her. “Watch your head,” he said, stepping back so she could get into the car.
Jacqui slipped into the car through the opposite door, which put Sahara in the middle. It limited what she could say to Logan but she persisted, anyway. “You misunderstood me,” she said softly.
“Really?” Logan lifted his brow and glanced at Jacqui. “Wasn’t putting on a show for anyone who’s watching one of Micky’s favourite games?”
“Logan!” Sahara exclaimed and nodded at the back of the driver’s head.
“He’s one of ours,” Logan said. He lifted his voice. “Aren’t you, Jack?”
“Yes, sir,” the driver returned. “Everyone set?”
The car shivered as the trunk lid was slammed shut.
“We are now,” Logan told the driver.
There was no other opportunity to speak to Logan on his own. They were surrounded by people all the way to the airport, through check-in and boarding procedures. It wasn’t until they were at cruising altitude on the flight to New York that they were separated from Jacqui, Nelson and the others who were inconspicuously travelling with them. Finally, Sahara had her chance to speak to Logan alone. More or less.
He inclined his seat a few inches and rubbed the flesh over the bridge of his nose in a way that spoke of weariness and stress.
“Too much hangover for you, Logan?” she asked sweetly.
He glanced at her. “You seem to be getting a feel for Micky’s persona,” he said. “You treated the airline staff just right.”
“But I—” Barely acknowledged them. She had been so preoccupied with trying to analyze the few hints Logan had given about Micky that she had barely noticed the formalities of check-in. “Thanks, I think,” she said dryly.
He smiled, clearly amused by her tone.
“Logan, why did you marry her?” Then Sahara bit her lip, for she’d had no intention of asking such a personal question.
But his reaction wasn’t what she had anticipated. She had expected anger, or an aloof change of subjects. But he took a deep breath, which made his chest lift and emphasized the width of his shoulders under the luxurious soft silk threads of his sweater. “She wasn’t always this way.”
“You mean the….” Sahara waved her hand around the first-class cabin and pushed at her coiffed hair.
Logan grimaced, then gave a heavy sigh. “When I met Micky, she was a suntanned college girl who giggled and drank beer.”
Sahara held her breath, hoping that Logan would go on speaking. But he looked out the window instead.
“What happened?” she asked softly, afraid to break the spell that had caused Logan to speak at all.
He kept his head averted. “Sometimes I think I have the answer but I guess I’ll never really know for certain.” There was a hidden anguish in his words, even though his tone was steady and matter-of-fact.
“I’m sorry, Logan,” she murmured.
“Agh….” He brushed at invisible lint on the knee of his trousers. “It was all a long time ago.”
She recalled the dates she had memorized from a file Jacqui had made her study while her hair had been changed to platinum blonde. “But you never gave up on her, did you?” she said softly. “She left you six years before the divorce went through.”
He shot her a look that she interpreted as a warning to stay clear of the topic but she chose to ignore it. She had a point to make. “The file didn’t say so but I’m guessing it was Micky who started the divorce proceedings, from her nice cozy nest in Hamburg.”
“Jesus wept,” Logan muttered. He turned to face her. “You’re just supposed to look like her, lady. Not act like her too.”
“How is asking you a question acting like her?” She tried to say it calmly but with Logan turned in his seat like that, he towered over her, making her feel helpless and small. It wasn’t a nice feeling.
“It’s not the blessed question, it’s the damn hot poker to the gut. Leave it alone, Sahara. Just leave it alone.” His words were low, intended for her ears alone but there was an intensity in them that made her heart shudder and her stomach clench.
“You don’t have to know all this to be like Micky,” he continued. “Just verbally slap around everyone you’ve employed, turn on the charm for every man within spitting distance and ignore any woman who doesn’t hold more power than you and you’ll have her down perfectly.” He took a breath and another and Sahara saw from the corner of her eye that he had clenched the hand that had been holding the back of his seat into a tight fist. “You don’t have to know anything else about her and you certainly don’t have to know anything more about me.”
It took all her control to speak calmly. “What if I want to know more about you?”
He grew very still, his gaze taking in her face, her expression. “You don’t want to know more about me,” he said at last. “Believe me.”
“This time, no, I don’t believe you.”
He shook his head. “I intend to do everything in my power to keep you from physical harm, but if you follow this…path, then you will get hurt. I won’t be able to stop it, because I’m the one who will hurt you. I’m not the man you seem to think I am.”
It was a dismissal. A rejection.
Sahara swallowed hard, blinking away the sting of tears building up in the back of her eyes. “You think too little of yourself, Logan.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, his head dropping so that the heavy fringe of hair fell forward over the tanned, clear skin of his forehead. He took a breath and looked up at her, his piercing blue eyes pinning her to the seat. “You were right, back at the hotel, Sahara. I did kiss you because you looked like Micky. That’s all I could think about—that Micky was back in my life. I was kissing Micky and when I remembered it was you I could ba
rely breathe, I hated you so much. I had to get away from you. I couldn’t stand to look at you.”
Her heart clenched as he spoke the terrible words. A sharp pain settled in her chest, making each breath a labour to draw in. She clutched at her chest with a trembling hand. “How can you say such a thing?” she whispered, unable to prevent the tremble in her voice.
He shrugged, not looking at her. “I said I’d hurt you if you persisted.”
* * * * *
There was a two hour wait in New York for the flight to Heathrow and Elias’ people had arranged for a private lounge where a breakfast buffet waited for them. Sahara walked into the lounge in the same state of lethargy and icy calm that had locked her senses since Logan’s pronouncement.
When she realized there were a half-dozen others filing into the room with her, Logan and Jacqui, she felt her first degree of interest in anything. “All these people are with us?” she asked Jacqui in an undertone.
Jacqui looked around, her gaze jumping from one face to the next, to the next.
Logan, Sahara noted, picked up one of the carafes of red wine at the end of the buffet and sat in a chair far from where she stood. He poured himself a large glassful and stared out the floor-to-ceiling observation window at the blinking lights on the tails and wings of planes as they taxied across the tarmac below.
After a moment, he pushed the glass away and went back to staring.
“Not everyone on the point team is here,” Jacqui said, pulling Sahara’s attention back to the other people in the room. Most of them were serving themselves food but some were gathered around the small but efficient office communications centre at the end of the room. “But everyone here is part of the team.” Jacqui closed her notebook. “Will you be getting something to eat? They’re not likely to be serving more than snacks on the flight to London.”
“No but you should get something.”
The tall black man that Sahara thought she’d heard called Elias came over to where she stood. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to bring you in on operations,” he told her.
“What does that mean?”
“You’re going to have to know something about the background specifics of the operation we have going. Please follow me.”
Puzzled, Sahara followed him across the room. He was heading for Logan, who was the only one sitting on that side of the big lounge.
Elias pulled up another of the semicircular shaped lounge chairs, right up next to Logan’s. He dropped into it, sat forward and clasped his hands between his knees, looking at Logan.
Then he looked back over his shoulder at Sahara, where she had stopped about ten paces away. “Please,” he said and beckoned with his hand. “You need to hear this too.”
Nelson brushed past her and pulled up another chair in a roughly triangular placement between Logan and Elias and threw himself into it.
She moved stiffly forward to stand between the backs of Elias’ chair and Logan’s.
“She doesn’t need to be here,” Logan said.
“Yes, she does,” Elias shot back. “Smooth down your hackles, Logan, and listen up. Y’hear?”
Logan stared at Elias a moment, then gave a short nod. It was a reluctant movement.
“They’ve been working on Seoc since he was discharged—psychological stuff. Nothing physical—he didn’t have the stamina. Around about eighty minutes ago, he cracked and started producing.”
Sahara remembered Logan calling the man who had held up her store “Seoc”, which meant they had been interrogating him for the last three days. Now he was talking.
She shivered. No, she didn’t want to be here listening to this, either.
Logan glanced at her when she shuddered and his eyes narrowed but he looked back at Elias without speaking.
“Seoc has been doing regular delivery runs to Greece for about eight years,” Elias continued. “Always the same courier run—a locked pouch to a private hotel on Samos, one of the Eastern Aegean Sea Islands. He saw the agent who picked it up, once. He was late, the agent early.”
“He knew him,” Nelson said, his tone flat and sure.
Elias nodded but his gaze was on Logan.
Logan grimaced. “Adar,” he said and his voice was as flat as Nelson’s.
“I don’t understand,” Sahara said. “Any of it.”
Elias looked up at her. “The people who we believe want to stop the…er…exchange. One of them is known to us. His name is Adar.”
Logan gave an impatient-sounding growl. “Stop pussyfooting with her,” he told Elias. “You wanted her in on this, so give it to her straight.” He looked up at her. “It’s not just Iranians who want to prevent the western world from having fusion power. It’s all sorts of committed fanatics and fringe groups. One of them is a small group led by a man called Zaram. He’s insanity itself. One of his best lieutenants is a Syrian known to us as Adar.”
He turned back to Elias. “That’s how Zaram recruited Seoc, right? Once Seoc had seen Adar at these drops, then he’d have known that the drops were for Zaram himself. Zaram’s choices were either to kill him or recruit him. So he recruited him.”
Nelson shook his head in wonder. “Seoc’s been neutral for nearly ten years. Zaram must have applied a shitload of pressure to get the guy to buy in.”
“It doesn’t matter what leverage he used. The fact is, Seoc caved,” Logan said. He glanced at her quickly and looked away and Sahara realized that despite his animosity toward her, he was trying to bring her up to speed, notwithstanding Elias’ obvious discomfort. “We found out in LA that Seoc had been working for Zaram, which meant Zaram probably knows what we were hoping to get from Malik. We took Seoc off the street the moment he set up the communications channel, so he wasn’t able to get back to Zaram to tell him how we were to get the notebook.”
“Then I don’t understand. Why did we go to LA, if we’re now going to London?”
“Malik wanted your—Micky’s—face to appear in the LA Times. It was meant to be a show of faith on our behalf and a way for Malik to verify at a distance that Micky was on her way to pick up the notebook.”
“But if he’s not in LA, how does he know I was in the paper?”
“The Times is online,” Nelson said. “Including the entertainment section.”
Sahara frowned. “Doesn’t that mean, though, that anyone, anywhere, will get to see me and Logan together? Couldn’t Zaram see it too? Does it matter if he does?”
There was a profound little silence, while they absorbed her words. Then Logan began to laugh. It was a silent, shoulder-shaking expression of ironic mirth.
Elias scowled. “Shut up, Logan.”
“It’s just the expressions on your faces. You keep forgetting Sahara has a functional brain.”
“I still don’t see why I need to know all this,” she said, mostly for Elias’ sake. “We knew going in that there were people who didn’t want the exchange to take place.”
Elias’ hands were threaded together again and from her angle at the back of his chair, she could see that behind the fists, his thumbs were tugging at the ends of his fingers in compulsive little jerks. “Seoc also saw Micky on the island, once,” Elias said, watching Logan.
Logan’s eyes narrowed but he shrugged. “It’s a pretty small island if you’re staying in the civilized sections. Micky had a villa there.”
Elias nodded. “Even if it had been simply coincidence, I’d still be stepping up security—”
“Had been?” Logan said sharply, straightening up.
His alarm made her pulse jump. Sahara wrapped her arms around her middle, suddenly frightened, even though she had no idea why she should be.
Elias licked his lips. “We ran a check on her trips to Greece. They match, Logan. They’re all within a week of Seoc’s courier runs.”
Logan shook his head. “No.” It was the same flat tone. But Sahara knew it had nothing to do with certainty. This time, the flatness was pure denial.
Elias was gripping h
is twined fingers hard. “It checks, Logan.”
“No,” Logan repeated.
“Sorry, man,” Nelson murmured. He put his hand out but didn’t actually touch Logan. He rested it on the arm of Logan’s chair.
Logan launched himself from the chair, raw energy pulsing from him in almost visible waves. His fists were clenched and the tendons on the sides of his neck were visible. The two white lines bracketing his mouth had reappeared, along with the scar.
He was staring down at Elias, who looked calmly back up at him. But instead of venting his fury upon Elias, Logan kicked his own chair out of the way and stalked to the observation window, close enough to touch it. He stood with his back to everyone in the room, a tense and silent figure radiating rage. Oozing hurt.
Sahara bit her lip, looking at Elias and Nelson in turn. They were studying their hands, their feet, looking anywhere but at her or Logan.
Only Logan had been willing to explain things to her without holding back details. Reluctantly, she moved to his side. She knew he would see her approach via the reflections in the glass, so she said simply, “Are they saying what I think they’re saying? That Micky was….” A double agent was the only term she could think of to describe it but that seemed hopelessly melodramatic.
Logan didn’t move. “She was playing both sides,” he said stiffly. “Which means that she was really Zaram’s player all along.”
“All along?” Sahara repeated. “From the beginning? From before you married her?”
“That’s the problem with traitors,” Logan said bitterly. “You just don’t know how deep the treachery runs.” He turned so his back was facing the window and shoved his hands in his pockets. “We’re calling this off,” he told Elias. “Now.”
“No! You can’t do that!” Sahara stepped toward Elias, who had simply sighed and dropped his shoulders. “For heaven’s sake, after all this effort it would be ridiculous to call it off now.”
She felt Logan’s hand on her elbow and turned to face him. “You can’t call it off,” she said. “Besides, how does this make any difference? I’m not a traitor.”
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