by Cindy Gerard
“Isn’t it time you found out?” She pressed her point. “Don’t you want to know who was responsible for what happened that night?”
Silence. A slow, methodical shake of his head. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Stone walls, remember? That’s not happening.”
“But what if it could? What if I could make it happen? What if we could make it happen?”
He pushed out a laugh. “What? So… now you want to help me clear my name?”
“I want to clear Ramon’s name,” she said honestly. “I couldn’t care less about clearing yours.”
He laughed again. “You are such a charmer.”
“Don’t you want to read the files?” she hurried on, ignoring his cynicism.
“Sure, fine. So show them to me. Or wait… if I frisk you, will I find them myself?”
His eyes were smug and baiting. And he was enjoying himself far too much at her expense.
“You really think I’d compromise my investigation by traveling with the flash drive? It’s not on me. It’s in a safe place. Back in the States.”
When he looked thoughtful, she pressed her advantage.
“Look. I haven’t added it all up yet—I can’t add it up without hearing your full story. Detail by detail. Call by call. You were there. You know what really happened. Who was there, who called the shots, who had something to gain. But the bits and pieces I have uncovered tell me that if you were set up—”
“We’re back to if again? You should really do something about this little bipolar thing you’ve got going on.”
She couldn’t blame him for doubting her. “If someone set up the team and framed you they could still be active duty. They could still be running bogus reports to cover up other operations that are far from being in the interests of national security.”
He held up a hand. “Whoa. You a big Vince Flynn fan? Into spies and double-agent stories? Talk about a major leap,” he sputtered with a whole lot of cynicism.
Too much cynicism. So much that she knew he was actually thinking the very same thing but didn’t want to admit it. He struggled to hide it but he was interested. Real interested.
She decided to take a huge leap of faith. “Doors didn’t just slam in my face when I started asking questions. I can’t prove it, but I’m fairly certain that I’ve been followed.”
“Bipolar and paranoid. Throw in schizophrenic and you’ve hit the trifecta. They have padded rooms for people like you. Some of them even come with a view.” He touched a finger to his cheek again, winced.
“You think that didn’t cross my mind? That I wondered if I saw things where nothing existed? They were there. I’ve seen one too many cars, one too many times, behind me on the freeway or in my neighborhood. Sensed something out of place in my kitchen or my bedroom once too often.”
Just like she’d gotten that prickly sensation along the nape of her neck and that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that had her sleeping with her gun every single night.
He had that hard look in his eyes again. The one she’d started to recognize as stubborn but intrigued.
“So why not go to the CIA with your speculations? Or the FBI. DHS. Hell, pick the alphabet agency of your choice. Let them investigate.”
Of course she couldn’t do either, because she worked for one and the other would go straight to the very people who could be involved in the cover-up. If there was a cover-up.
“You know that’s not how it works. In the first place, it’s illegal for the CIA to conduct ops inside U.S. borders without special dispensation from the president. In the second, the Carter administration destroyed the CIA’s human-intelligence capabilities and the current administration has continued the war on the CIA. Third, the FBI has bigger fish to fry. Department of Homeland Security? Forget it. Besides, they’d never believe someone was after me.”
He lifted his hands as though she’d just made his point. “Well… yeah… that’s because you’re nuts.”
8
One hundred percent nuts, Mike thought, holding the line against his growing interest. She’d proven that from the get-go, right? She was nuts to take him on. Nuts to drug him.
“So are you going to help me or not?” she asked, more challenge than question.
He laughed. “That would be a not.”
“Not even if it means clearing your name? Not even if it means bringing whoever’s behind this to justice?”
“Not even.” Jaw clenched, he tried to ignore the pounding of his heart and the voice in his head that suggested he was making a mistake.
“Then you’re exactly who I thought you were. A cowardly, selfish bastard.”
He rose to his feet, tossing the syringe onto the table. “I do love living down to your expectations.”
“You know what your problem is?”
“I’m not the one with the problem.” He lifted his chin toward her bound hands as he prowled the room.
“You need to stop thinking about yourself,” she accused, not letting up. “Quit wallowing in your own self-pity and think about the men who died that night. About the men who took the rap with you. Ramon and the others deserve to have the record set straight. Cooper and Taggart deserve their day in court—deserve the trial they never got because you sold them out when you took a deal that steamrolled them along with you.”
“I didn’t sell them out. I saved their lives,” he countered, unable to stop his anger. Instead of rotting in a jail cell or six feet under, Cooper was living the good life in Australia, making money off his pretty-boy face modeling, screwing women, and not giving a shit. And for the past several years, Taggart had been doing what he wanted: working with a private contractor and mixing it up with the bad guys back in Afghanistan. Mike had saved their asses, but she didn’t get that. No one got it.
“Then save their honor,” she shouted back, and damn her, he swore she could see straight through him. See that even though he didn’t want to he still did care about what happened.
He still cared a lot.
“Help me find out who did this. Help me figure out if there’s more going on.”
He stalked toward the terrace doors, braced his palms on the frame above his head, and stared outside while she pecked away at him like a vulture on fresh meat.
“If we can get Cooper and Taggart on board, we can find whoever was responsible and expose them.”
“Get them on board?” He spun back around. The fire of conviction brightened her eyes; a flush of color stained her cheeks. A slice of smooth caramel skin peeked between the waistband of her jeans and the T-shirt that had ridden up her ribs. The generous swell of her breasts rose and fell with her agitated breaths.
And as angry as he was, as crazy as she was, damn if the sight of her didn’t turn him on like a flashlight.
Talk about fucked up.
“What alternate universe do you live in?” he snapped. “The boys and I aren’t exactly buddies anymore. They hate my guts. They’re not going to help me with anything.”
“And if they would?” She dangled the possibility like a carrot.
Damn his hide, he was tempted. So tempted to do something other than run from his past for a change. But it was pointless. “You’re dreaming if you think you can get either one of them to work with me again.”
Her coffee-dark eyes snapped with fire. “I don’t dream. I plan. I execute. And I make things happen.”
“Said the woman cuffed to the bed.”
“We can get Taggart and Cooper to help us,” she insisted.
He snorted. “When pigs wear tutus.”
“Look, Brown, before you tell me if you’re in or out, you think about this. Think about slinking back to your own little alternate universe, where you try to convince yourself every single day that what happened to you, what happened to all those people, doesn’t matter. You try to convince yourself that you’re going to spend the next eight years and all the years after that hiding out from your demons, pretending you don’t care, pretending you
don’t have an obligation to Taggart and Cooper. Pretending that you don’t have an obligation to yourself, for God’s sake! And what about to your country?”
She cut way too close to the quick with that one. “Are you fucking kidding me? You seriously played the patriot card?” He’d been sold down the river by the very people he’d pledged to protect and serve and almost died for. “I’ve paid that debt. One hundred times over. Try a new tactic, chica, ’cause that dog ain’t gonna hunt.”
“Fine. Then let’s try something you can relate to,” she said acidly. “I’ll pay you to help me.”
He considered how badly she hated him in this moment. It was never more evident than now as she lay there, tied up and helpless, yet making her best play to kill him with her disgust.
He thought about all the reasons he should tell her to fuck off, stay out of his life and out of his head. But the words that came out sealed his fate.
“Well, now. You’re finally talking my language.” She’d barely had a chance to register surprise, when he reached into his boot and retrieved his jackknife.
And he’d barely sliced the blade through the plastic cuffs, freeing her, when he heard a sound outside on the terrace that shot all his defenses to red alert.
• • •
Eva heard it, too. Someone was out there.
Her heart went crazy but she held it together and nodded that she understood when Brown pressed his fingers to his lips, signaling her to be quiet. When he pointed to the floor behind the bed, she didn’t hesitate. She rolled off the bed and dropped to her knees, using the mattress as the only available shield as Brown rushed back across the room to the table where their guns lay side by side.
He grabbed both and tossed her the Glock. She caught it and checked to make certain there was still a round in the chamber as, two-handing his Beretta, Brown moved like a big cat toward the wall beside the terrace door. He’d no sooner gotten into position, his back flattened against the wall, when the doors flew open and a masked figure burst into the room wielding an MP5K.
Eva scrambled toward the foot of the bed as the gunman fired a three-round burst at the pillow where her head had been.
She slid to her back and started firing at the same time she heard Brown’s Beretta pop off several rounds in quick succession.
The barrel of the MP5K jerked toward the ceiling as the gunman stumbled backward out of the room and fell against the iron rail on the terrace. Brown shot outside after him as Eva scrambled to her feet and raced across the room to the terrace.
Brown was leaning over the railing when she reached his side. Her stomach rolled when she saw the scene down on the street. Their would-be assassin had fallen backward onto the roof of a cab. His prostrate body lay motionless in the dim light from the streetlamp as the startled driver scrambled out from behind the wheel.
“You okay?” Brown turned to her.
Her ears rang like church bells. Other than that, she was fine. “Yeah. I think so. You?”
His answer was a grunt, which pretty much told her that other than his attitude, he was fine. “Friend of yours?”
“I told you I was being followed.”
He sprinted past her toward the door that led to the hallway. “Shut those balcony doors. Keep your Glock close and don’t let anyone in this room but me.”
She didn’t have to ask where he was going. He was heading down to check the body. As he left, she ran inside and locked the doors to the terrace. Then she wedged herself into the corner facing the hall door, sank down to her butt, and propped the Glock on her updrawn knees. And she waited. Heart going hay-wire, her breath tight and strained. She’d trained for such a scenario all of her career—but this was the first real encounter she’d had with someone shooting at her. The blowback of the adrenaline rush shot off the charts. It took everything she had to keep her teeth from rattling and the gun from shaking out of her hands.
When a knock finally sounded, she jumped to her feet like she was on springs and pointed the business end of the Glock dead center in the middle of the door.
“It’s me. Open up.”
Brown.
She hadn’t realized until that point how happy she would be to see him.
“Anything?” she asked after she’d let him in and quickly shut the door behind him.
“Nada. Whoever it was, is gone.”
“Gone?” Her eyes widened in disbelief. “How can that be? I swear I hit him.”
“Well, somebody hit him or he wouldn’t have taken a header off the balcony.” He shook his head. “The cab’s gone, too. I’m thinking wrong place, wrong time, for the cabbie.”
Fear obliterated filters. She couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Still think I’m crazy?”
He expelled a heavy breath. “What I think is that we’ve got to get out of here.” He glanced around the room. “I don’t want to stick around for the second act. If he’s got reinforcements waiting in the wings, they might have better aim.”
He didn’t have to tell her twice. Eva grabbed her bag and followed him.
And she didn’t ask a single question until they were in a cab and a good twenty blocks away from the hotel on Calle San Ramon where both of them were supposed to have died.
• • •
“I don’t know where we’re going, okay?” Mike said when she finally popped the question he’d expected long before.
Whether it was from shock or disbelief that she’d almost died, relief that she hadn’t, or because she had finally realized she was into something beyond her pay grade, he didn’t know. But she hadn’t asked one question until they were well away from the hotel.
What he did know was that Pamela Diaz, or whatever her name was, had landed herself—and now him by proxy—into some very deep doo-doo.
“Are you ready to fly back to the States with me?”
He grunted. “All I’m ready to commit to at the moment is getting out of Dodge.”
He looked at her then. At her coffee-brown eyes, showgirl breasts, and anxiety-stricken expression, and man oh man, all he could think about was how gorgeous she was.
Hot, sultry air rushed through the cab’s open window, whipping strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail into her eyes. Her effort to smooth it back was a bust. The wind grabbed it again, plus did a fine job of plastering her damp T-shirt to those amazing breasts.
Seriously, you stupid wing nut? After what she’s done to you, you’re still wondering what it would be like to get her in bed?
He shook his head to clear it. He could not get sidetracked by her sex appeal. Thinking with his little head had gotten him in this mess to begin with.
Drugged, flex cuffs, shanghaied, crazy. That’s what he needed to think about.
He drilled her with his best pissed-off glare. “You do realize the significance of what happened back there, don’t you?”
“It means I’m probably right about a conspiracy.”
He wasn’t ready to go quite that far. “For certain, someone wants you silent, chica. Someone wants you dead. Someone, apparently, had you followed here from the States, put out a contract on you, and gave the order to pull the trigger.”
“Yeah. I got that part.” She shuddered, and damn if he didn’t have to resist the urge to put his arm around her and pull her against him.
Little head, big trouble.
He ramped up his glare. “So did you also get the part that, thanks to you, they want me dead, too?”
“All the more reason for you to help me figure out who’s behind it.”
His jaw dropped before he could check it, but she never missed a beat.
“What? You expect me to tell you I’m sorry for dragging you into this? Well, that’s not happening. You’ve been in it from the beginning.”
“I’ve been out of it for eight years, thank you very much.”
“No, you’ve been hiding out. Big difference. Grow a pair, Brown. It’s past time.”
He opened his mouth. Shut it. Whipped his
head toward the opposite window and clamped his fingers around his thighs to keep from clamping them around her throat. Talk about tossing a glass of ice water on a lit match. He wasn’t thinking about sex anymore. Oh, no. He was thinking about murder. If she’d been a man, he’d have dropped her.
And if she’d been wrong, he admitted as a flood of self-disgust washed over him, he’d have stopped the cab, gotten out, and told her to go preach to another choir.
Can I get a hallelujah?
He stared blindly out at the shadowed urban landscape scrolling by in the dark. But she wasn’t wrong, was she? She was so not wrong.
In fact, she was so flat-out, dead-on right, it shamed him. Kicked him in the head, punched him in the gut, and shamed him into finally admitting the truth.
For eight years he’d been running. For eight years he’d been telling himself it didn’t matter, he couldn’t change it, couldn’t make it right. He’d only been partly right. He couldn’t change what had happened, couldn’t bring those men back.
But it did matter. On that he’d been head-up-his-ass wrong. It had always mattered. Every second, every minute, every hour of every freaking day. Mattered to the point where he’d run and denied and become so mired in the game of avoiding the truth, that he’d totally lost sight of it.
Here, now, was the truth. He was an innocent man. Taggart and Cooper were innocent men. And just because his balls had been nailed to the proverbial wall all those years ago didn’t mean he had to be held hostage by lies now.
An even sadder truth? Nothing but his own stubborn determination stopped him from breaking free.
He glanced at the woman responsible for upsetting his cart full of rotten apples. Gave her her due. She was wrong about a lot of things, but she was right about the one thing that counted.
He was a coward.
Had been for eight long years.
He set his jaw, breathed deep, and made that final leap from resistance to resolution.