by Cindy Gerard
Right now, however, there were still more questions than answers.
“We’re still at square one. We have to figure out who sent me that flash drive,” she said abruptly. There were all kinds of implications that came with it.
When the flight attendant walked by, Mike moved his leg under the seat in front of him and out of the aisle. If he was aware that, in the tight quarters, his thigh now pressed against hers, he didn’t let on.
But she was aware. During the entire flight, she’d been too aware of him too many times to count. So she swiftly moved her leg out of touching distance.
“Gotta be someone who knew about Operation Slam Dunk,” he said, appearing not to notice her sudden discomfort. “Someone with high-enough security clearance to give them access to the database containing the file. Someone who knew your connection to Ramon.”
“You’re right. It has to be someone who was there,” she speculated, feeling a thread of excitement. He was on to something. “Someone stationed at the FOB when this all went down.”
“Makes sense. Still doesn’t answer why. Specifically, why now? What’s their stake in this? And why wait eight years to bring it to light?”
“Maybe they’ve felt guilty for what happened to the team but couldn’t decide what to do about it. Couldn’t do anything about it without implicating themselves. But then… I don’t know. Something changed? Now they suddenly feel free to bring the events of that night forward? Set the record straight? And because they knew I was Ramon’s widow and worked for the CIA, they figured that I’d do something about it?”
“Works for me. It also rules out anyone currently on active duty. You don’t shit in your own nest—not if you want to get ahead.”
“Someone who retired, then? Or separated from service recently?” She wondered what Brewster was doing now. Wondered if she’d been too quick to judge. Maybe Mike was right. Maybe Brewster had stood for Mike the best he could by arranging the plea deal—even if he knew he should have done better. Had a fit of conscience prompted him to bring the file to her attention? She kept those thoughts to herself while a trickle of excitement eddied through her.
Beside her, Brown rolled his head on his shoulders, clearly weary of the long flight. “Seems like a good bet. It also opens up a lot of possibilities. There were a lot of personnel on the ground at the FOB.”
“But how many knew what happened? I’m thinking not that many. I need to get hold of staffing records for that period.”
“You can do that?”
She had access to databases that others didn’t. Still, it wouldn’t be easy. “I can try.” Brewster may be ringing her alarm bell right now, but she was going to ferret out every possibility. Including Slockem, the base commander at Bragg who was so quick to hang Brown out to dry.
“There’s a flip side to this, you know.” He turned his head and looked at her. “Someone else out there doesn’t feel an ounce of remorse. What they feel is threatened. So threatened they want you silenced.”
She looked away. Not merely silenced. Someone wanted her dead.
Like Brown could have been dead, right alongside her.
The realization that she didn’t want him to die hit her like a bullet. A hard punch of guilt delivered a second shot. How could she be thinking about losing Brown, how could she suddenly be so aware of him as a man, when moments ago she’d discovered the truth about her husband’s death?
In her mind’s eye she saw the grisly scene in the village. Felt the heat of the fire. Ramon’s body had been among the charred remains.
She swallowed hard. Had to ask the part he’d left out. “Did they… did they ever recover Ramon’s body?”
His jaw tightened. He didn’t want to tell her.
“Please. I need to know.” Heart hammering, she waited.
“No.” He shook his head, closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. His dog tags were all that was left to ID him.”
Her chest clenched so tight, she couldn’t breathe.
Suddenly she had to move. She had to get some distance—from Brown, from the horror of the image of a beautiful, vital man reduced to ashes—before she did or said something really stupid… like break down and bawl like a baby.
“Excuse me.” She unbuckled her seat belt, scrambled past him, and made a beeline for the lavatory.
• • •
Mike let her go. What could he say? What could he do? She might think she’d hidden her tears, but she was dead wrong.
She’d just heard him confirm, in graphic detail, how her husband had died. Didn’t matter that it was eight years ago. It hadn’t felt like eight years when he’d been telling it. It had felt like it was yesterday.
He breathed deep, tried to force distance between the present and the past. Not that it ever worked.
And yet… inexplicably, he felt less burdened than he had in a very long time.
Because he’d spilled his guts? Lightened his load? Because he’d done a good thing and spared her the pain of knowing her husband had been a liar and a cheat?
Because he was finally doing something other than hiding out?
He gripped the armrests hard when the flight attendant strolled by, asking for drink orders. He thought, instead, of the moment he’d become aware that Eva’s small hand had covered his. Not to steady herself, but to ground him. To keep him from nose-diving off the deep end.
He’d latched on like a drowning man clutching a life raft. Clung like she was a rock in a sea of sifting sand.
Surprises. The woman was full of them. And she didn’t seem quite so crazy anymore.
What she seemed to be—God help him—was the saner of the two of them. And despite the fact that she’d finally shown her vulnerable side, he admired her for her strength and a whole Pandora’s box full of traits he really didn’t have any business contemplating.
So he wouldn’t. He closed his eyes, surprised to find himself beginning to relax and actually drifting off when he sensed her presence beside him in the aisle. He straightened to make room for her to squeeze past him, her flat stomach directly in front of his face.
Of course, it had to happen. She tripped over his foot—with his size twelves, she hadn’t stood a chance. He reached out reflexively, circled her ribs with his hands, and steadied her.
And Lord, sweet Lord, his thumbs brushed against the underside of her breasts as she fell forward, catching herself with her hands on his shoulders.
It was all about timing. And reflexes. And damn bad luck as he looked up to see if she was all right, and his mouth came within a breath of touching her left breast.
Mother of God.
Heat. Lush softness. Need.
The sensations all registered at once, shooting electricity straight to his groin.
He set her aside as if she was a hot potato.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, not looking at her as she buckled up beside him.
And said nothing.
Holy hell.
He could not be attracted to this woman. A hot enchilada in a seedy cantina, yes. That was allowed. Because he’d been drunk. Because she’d been—hell—she’d really been something in that red bustier, skin-tight pants, and fuck-me stilettos.
But he could not be attracted to this woman. To Ramon Salinas’s widow.
13
“It’s not like you to be so late calling in.”
Eyes closed against the ripping pain in her side and arm, Jane forced herself to concentrate and clear the cobwebs the anesthesia had created in her brain.
She couldn’t allow herself to be so vulnerable again. The nurse hadn’t been happy when she’d refused pain medication after awakening from surgery, but she’d needed to regain lucidity for this conversation. She’d already lost several hours.
“I ran into a problem,” she said, struggling for a breath that didn’t make her sound as though she were dying. Weakness was the last thing she wanted to show him. Just like the last thing she wanted to do was disappoint him. “The targets detected me before I c
ould take them out.”
The silence on the other end of the line was as loud as a jet engine. “Explain.”
As concisely and accurately as she could, she told him what had happened when she’d attempted to eliminate the woman and the man. She was out of breath and weak with pain when she finished.
“Oh, God. You’re injured.” The concern that suddenly darkened his voice almost made her weep.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Jane—”
“It’s okay. I… I’ll be okay.” The hot tear of frustration that trickled down her cheek felt like a double dose of defeat. “But I’m not going to be able to fulfill the contract.”
Another silence. “How bad?”
The surgeon had briefed her moments ago, telling her it would be six to eight weeks before she could consider any physical activity other than therapy on her arm. He’d also pleaded with her to accept pain medication to assist with her healing. “Not fatal. Just feels like it.”
“Where are you?”
She told him.
“I’m sending someone for you.”
She couldn’t stop the tears this time. No one had ever cared about her before. They cared about what she could do for them, but never about her.
“Thank you.”
But the line had already gone dead.
She closed her eyes and made herself focus on something other than the pain and this inexplicable flood of gratitude and relief that mixed with a blinding sense of failure.
She had failed him. She had failed herself.
And a man named Brown and a woman whose true name she did not yet know were responsible.
Which meant this was not over.
• • •
Halfway across the world the man she knew as Stingray stared morosely at his file on Jane Smith. With a regretful sigh, he closed it, then tossed it aside, rocking back in his desk chair.
He was disappointed in Jane. Very disappointed and, interestingly enough, extremely worried about her.
In the beginning, it was her total lack of conscience that had intrigued him. He’d often wondered what had been done to her as a child that had produced such a twisted, ruthless killer. The term cold-blooded was overused and therefore diminished in its significance, but not when it applied to Jane. She had no remorse. Felt no regret—except in failure.
The humiliation in her voice when she’d called and confessed the unthinkable had been heartbreaking. She’d been in agony, but she was a soldier. She had done her duty and made the difficult call.
He had few rules, and high expectations that those rules would be followed to the letter.
Jane had broken the cardinal rule. She’d compromised herself and therefore compromised his enterprises. Had she been any other contract for hire, he would have had her eliminated.
Instead, he’d dispatched a man to Lima to bring her back to him. He’d broken one of his own rules for her. And he wondered what that said about him. What it said about his feelings for her.
That would sort itself out eventually, he supposed. Right now, he had more pressing matters. He still had to deal with Eva Salinas and Mike Brown.
But first he had to find them.
He picked up the phone, hesitated, then made a call. He had contacts in the CIA. People who owed him. Hackers who could follow up on their leads. If Eva Salinas attempted to access any of her files, he’d soon find out which ones and where she was operating from. Soon after that she’d be dead. Her and Brown.
14
Their Avianca flight had left Peru at 12:30 a.m. and right on schedule, almost fourteen hours later, it touched down at Dulles at 3:28 p.m. Mike was happy as hell not to have to deal with jet lag, since the time in D.C. was only an hour later than in Lima. He was equally happy to finally be out of that cramped seat where touching Eva Salinas, either accidentally or on purpose, had been unavoidable—even with Ramon’s ghost hovering between them.
“You realize we can’t go to your apartment,” he said. They’d cleared the customs gate and she was stuffing her Emily Bradshaw passport back in her purse as they headed through the terminal at a brisk walk. “Our friend with the MP5K may or may not be alive, and may or may not have reported in to his handler. Either way, whoever ordered the hit either knows by now that it was a bust or is wondering why his man hasn’t surfaced.”
“What do you think the chances are they don’t know we’re back in the States?”
Mike had been doing the math on that one himself. “I think we’re good, for a while. I’d make book that there was no one on that flight interested in either one of us. He’s not going to fly charter—too many records. And I checked—the next commercial flight out of Lima to D.C. lands at least four hours after ours. So, even if the shooter somehow managed to recover enough to follow us and figures out we headed north, we’ve at least got that much time.”
“And if he contacted whoever sent him?”
He touched a hand to the small of her back and steered her around a gaggle of teens who were walking five abreast through the terminal. “Whoever sent him is going to be looking for travel records for Mike Brown and Eva Salinas—not John Mason and Emily Bradshaw. But they’ll find us eventually, so time is also our enemy. We need to get the flash drive and figure this out. Please tell me it’s not at your apartment.”
She shook her head and kept on walking. “Lockbox.”
“Your regular bank?” Whoever was after her had no doubt already tossed her apartment, so they’d be looking for her to have stashed the file someplace safe. A bank made sense.
“No. I opened up an account and a lockbox at Independence Federal on Ninth. Under Emily Bradshaw.”
“And the key to the box?”
“Was in the lockbox with my passports. Now it’s in my purse.”
The longer he was around her, the more she proved how smart she was.
Man. He’d come a long way from thinking of her as a lying, conniving, wack-job.
“I don’t know about you,” she said as they shouldered through the crowd in the busy airport, “but I could use a change of clothes. And a shower.”
Mike looked down at himself. She was right. He didn’t exactly blend in with city dwellers. In his combat boots, camo pants, sweat-stained T-shirt, and five-day whisker grow-out, he looked like he’d stepped out of the pages of Mercenaries R-Us. He needed to lower his profile. And yeah. He needed to clean up, too.
She stopped short beside a women’s restroom, then dug into her purse and came up with a half-full packet of Wet Wipes. “My emergency rations. Never leave home without them.” She peeled off half of the stack of moist towelettes and handed them to him. “Meet you back here in five.”
“Make it three,” he said and headed across the wide walkway to the men’s room.
“Much better,” she said when they met up again and made a beeline for the rental car desk.
After completing the paperwork for a black SUV, which Eva paid for with a credit card that couldn’t be linked back to her real name—the lady had covered her bases—Mike maneuvered the car through the maze of airport parking.
“Next stop—a change of clothes.”
“Fine,” he agreed, knowing it was necessary but anxious to get to the bank.
They’d only traveled a few miles on the freeway before she had him take an exit, then gave him directions to the great American hunting and gathering spot: the mall.
Less than fifteen minutes later, he stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of a Tommy Bahama store, more than a little intimidated.
“What size shirt?” she asked, quickly rummaging through a spinning rack. “Pants, too.”
“Large or maybe extra large for the shirt?” He shot off what he thought was his pants size, trying to remember the American size charts.
It had been a damn long time since he’d bought anything but T-shirts and camo cargo pants, so he was fine deferring to her advice on casual wear for D.C. in July—until she grabbed a shirt and shoved it in
to his hands. A shirt that felt like silk and looked like a city slicker’s version of a rain forest in shades of moss and gray and white.
“No,” he said and shoved it back at her.
She gave him a look. “Seriously? You want to waste time arguing about clothes?” She thrust the shirt back at him. “Don’t be such a diva. Go try it on. These, too.” She handed him a pair of tan chinos that at least had a few pockets, but still made him think of white sand, hammocks, and fruity rum punch.
Jaw tight, he took both pieces and headed for the dressing room. She added a pair of brown sandals to the stack of clothes as he went by. And a package of boxer shorts.
“What are you, my mother?”
“What are you, five?”
Because she was right—he was acting like a spoiled adolescent—and because they didn’t have time to argue, he bit the bullet and tried them all on. Unfortunately, everything fit, so he kept the clothes on, then paid for them and a pair of aviator-style shades he snagged off a rack on the counter. The clerk—a girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen—gave him a blatantly flirtatious smile when he asked for a shopping bag and stuffed his old clothes inside. Biting back the urge to ask her if her mother knew she acted like that, he slipped on the dark glasses and walked to the front of the store to wait for Eva.
He’d never admit it to her, but he was surprised how comfortable the clothes were—and how much he liked what he saw when she walked toward him looking fine. Glad he was wearing the shades, he took his time checking her out. Her dress was formfitting, V-necked and sleeveless, and gathered like a fan beneath her left breast. The skirt hit her above the knee. Her bronze sandals had fancy straps covered with beading and bling.
Chic, understated, and so damn sexy he almost swallowed his tongue. Superimposed over all that cosmopolitan cool was the memory of her breasts spilling out of that red bustier and her hips swaying on the dance floor at El Tocón Sangriento.
“What color do you call that?” he asked to diffuse the image, the memory of the taste of the pisco, and to keep from thinking about the way her breasts bounced beneath the soft, stretchy fabric.