"Christo has to go."
"Yes. And I" -She stopped short, unable to even vocalize her understanding of what he meant by that.
He reached out to her. She could feel in his reach, see in his eyes a flicker of recognition, the whisper of attraction to her, the pull of history that hadn't yet dawned on him.
"Kirsten" -- "Don't touch me!"
"Okay. Okay, Kirsten. Take it easy." His tone was both respectful and sympathetic, which only made her feel more threatened. He didn't want a battle with her, and he was trying not to cram any e thing down her throat. He backed off, spreading his hands as if she were aiming a gun at him. She was only vaguely aware of the others.
"Kirsten, we've already got plainclothes cops watching over Gingerbread. We have to assure Christo's safety. We can't afford to make any rash moves or take any chances. You've got to know, Christo is my first concern."
"Oh, God..." Her emotions so nearly over the top, an anguished cry escaped her throat.
"Christo is my concern, and I'm leaving. Loehman will know when I'm gone that I'm not a threat to him. He" -- "What about other people's babies, Kirsten?" Thorne asked, his voice low, demanding, sharp.
"What about that sheriff in Montana? You think he isn't toast? You think he doesn't have kids, family? What about" -- "Thorne," Garrett interrupted, glancing only momentarily away from her.
"Not now, huh? In fact, everyone clear out. All of you. Just leave us alone for a minute."
He exchanged another look with Thorne, who was the last to leave.
Thorne said, "There's a window overlooking the parking lot in the bureau chief's office."
"Fine." Garrett rose, ushered Thorne out and closed the door behind him.
And Kirsten was alone with Garrett Weisz for the first time in five years. She felt trapped on every level, cornered.
"Kirsten, will you sit with me for a minute? Just collect yourself and hear me out?"
"No." But she did sit. She had to draw on every internal resource she had ever in her life called upon to keep herself together. Christo was safe, so far, if Weisz's word was worth anything. In another hour she would take Christo away from here, away from anyone who had ever even heard of Chet Loehman, even if that meant going to Greenland.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I can't help you. I'm responsible for myself and my son, and I'm not going to accept that I'm the only thing standing between Loehman's goons and that sheriff's life."
"Kirsten, listen to me." He managed to say somehow, to close in on her without warning or threat. His voice stilled her, his deep gray eyes commanded hers. He came close enough in his chair to lean forward.
Cupping her icy hands in his, he drew them up till his lips touched her fingertips, and he breathed warmed air to dispel the chill.
"I'm sorry. I'm staring. I can't help feeling like I should know you."
If ever there was to be a right moment to tell him, it was now, while they were alone. But she couldn't get the words to form in her mind, or to come out her lips of their own accord.
"Well." He drew a deep breath and expelled it, dismissing the issue.
"Kirsten, I want to show you something so you'll know we're not exaggerating. We're not trying to scare you. Thorne didn't mean to imply you're the only thing standing between good and evil in the universe." He broke off his gaze, laughing a little, rueful.
"Ask him.
He'll tell you. That's his role, see, so it couldn't be yours. "
She bit her lip.
"I don't feel like smiling, Mr. Weisz."
"Garrett."
"Garrett, then."
"I know. The problem is very real, Kirsten, and it's your problem, and I swear by everything that's sacred that if I could take it out of your life, I would do it. I can't. We have to deal with this. I know it's hard. I know it's a lot to expect. I know they killed your husband, and Loehman isn't known for giving more than one warning. I know Christo is waiting for you. More than the sheriff and his family, right now it's your life I'm concerned with. Yours and your boy's."
He knew everything, but that it was his son waiting for a promised trip to the park. If he knew that, would it make a difference? Would he let her go? But she couldn't tell him that, just spill it out there. The words wouldn't form, so what did it matter?
"Just hang in there with me for another few minutes. Can you do that?"
"Don't patronize me, Mr. Weisz. If I don't walk out of here right now, it won't only be another few minutes, will it?"
"No. It won't. But you don't have a choice--at least, in my opinion.
You have to judge for yourself. Don't believe me. Believe what you see. That's all I'm asking. "
He nodded toward the door, letting her choose her own time. She grabbed her bag and went to the door. Leaning against the wall opposite, Vorees straightened and led the way. Guiliani followed;
Thorne was gone. Kirsten fell into line to the bureau chief's office.
The lights were not on. The blinds were lowered, but open. Looking through the slats to the parking lot below, Garrett requested binoculars, which Guiliani handed him.
Weisz gestured for Kirsten to join him at the window.
"You see that white van, four rows in, about midway down?"
She looked.
"Yes."
"Do you recognize it?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Not... I mean, I don't know. I may have seen it or one like it." She wanted to help, or rather, to be helpful so this could all conclude and she would know what she had to do next to protect Christo and herself.
"You'll see your car, almost straight ahead of the van, two rows over." He handed her the binoculars.
"Focus on the driver of the van."
She nodded slightly.
"He's holding a folded piece of newspaper up against the steering wheel. It's... a crossword puzzle."
"Okay. Keep watching." He picked up the phone on the chief's desk, punched in a number.
"I just called Thorne's pager. He's about to set off a radio signal that's going to trip an alarm inside that van."
Kirsten watched through the binoculars as the driver sat studying his crossword puzzle, then for no apparent reason, jerked his head up. He tossed a pencil and the folded news page aside, rolled down the window and craned his neck to look dead ahead--where there was nothing to look at, particularly, but her car.
She lowered the binoculars as the driver of the van jerked open his door and got out. He lit a cigarette and flicked the match on the pavement, always watching her car, casting an angry glance at something inside the van.
"He could be waiting for anyone."
Garrett's look was--almost--a caress of her cheek.
"He could," he agreed.
A kind of cold went through her, and took hold. The kind of cold that doesn't abate, only wends deeper. Her expertise was in video technology but it didn't take genius to figure out what had just happened before her eyes.
Her car was bugged, and Thorne's transmitter had only duplicated the electronic signal that turning the key in her own ignition would trigger.
garrett watched Kirsten McCourt dealing with the probability that neither she nor her son, Christo, had been safe in months. He believed now that he had himself back in hand. He could admit he was attracted to her. Who cared?
It happened. Now he was working to understand her. She was just an ordinary woman with extraordinary problems. That's what he told himself, but he despised the fear Loehman evoked in her. The fear had nothing to do with a flaw in her character. She'd begged John Grenallo for another chance to go up against Loehman. Not the behavior of a fearful woman, but of one who knew the dangers Loehman presented.
Clearly, motherhood had reordered her priorities. Little Christo had changed everything for her. She no longer wanted a part of any operation intended to bring Loehman to justice.
He understood, but there wasn't any other way to exploit this opening.
; Sitting at the head of the conference table with Kirsten to his left and the rest of the team around the table. Garrett made the case that whatever happened, Kirsten had to remain in her house. But he was also locking horns with Guiliani and Thorne, who before today, wouldn't have been caught dead on the same side of an argument.
Both of them wanted Kirsten taken out of the picture altogether. So maybe he was wrong. Maybe he wasn't thinking straight.
She sat numb for nearly half an hour, saying nothing. Garrett couldn't tell if she was lost in her own thoughts, or listening to the three of them wrangling. Her honey-colored hair, pulled back, seemed to him to sparkle, evoking memories or. dreams he'd had but never quite remembered.
Her eyes were the color of a small medallion he'd long since misplaced. One that had belonged to his Gypsy great-great-grandmother, bronze with a patina so dark and mysterious most people would simply call it brown and be done with it.
Compared to his, her hands were childlike; his attention riveted time and again on her wrists. The delicate bone structure, the fair skin.
The perfume he'd inhaled when he blew warm air over her hands.
Something inside him had stirred, something deeply imbedded in his senses, something so thick with desire he could scarcely breathe.
He didn't know where it came from, or why, or why now, and he believed it must be a fluke. He rarely had such desires, and if a stray lusty thought came along, he ignored it to a quiet death. He'd cut desire off cold with Margo's death--but he could see in Thorne's eyes the speculation he'd half expected. That Garrett was over his head with the hots for Kirsten McCourt, silently questioning Garrett's motives in insisting Kirsten must stay in her house.
Of course, J. D. wouldn't be so crass as to say so in the same room with her, but they were all so committed to truth, and they understood each other well enough that Garrett knew exactly what J. D. was thinking.
"Look," J. D. argued.
"We're closing in on Loehman from half a dozen different angles. You're busy with that construction superintendent.
Guili's thick as thieves with that Tri-Cities splinter group. I can sit on the baby monitor until we arrange a tap. Or Vorees can do it.
If anything busts loose, we'll take it from there. But I don't think"-- " An hour ago," Garrett interrupted, " you were in Kirsten's face about the sheriff in Montana. "
"A couple of hours ago," J. D. retorted, "you were seeming more objective."
His jaw tightened. Whatever it was he felt for Kirsten McCourt was never going to get in the way of doing what had to be done.
"You're wrong."
"Ami?"
Guiliani stuck himself in the middle of it like a fight referee separating the combatants.
"Can we stick to the point here? We've got one best choice, and that's to get Kirsten and her little kid into protective custody now. Then out of Loehman's reach. I think it's fairly clear she wouldn't be involved again at all if it weren't for the contacts from Burton
Rawlings. He's where we should concentrate our efforts. "
"That might have been true before I came here today," Kirsten interrupted softly, the only feminine voice in the room full of men.
Ann Calder had gone off after any information out there on Burton Rawlings.
Garrett realized then that Kirsten had followed the whole grueling debate. His regard for her climbed another notch.
"What are you thinking, Kirsten?"
"That if I'd never come here at all today, I would be safer."
"I agree." None of the other three argued the point.
"I won't ever hear from Burton again. If the people across the street from my house are watching me, it's because Loehman knew Burton was phoning me over the past few months. Now he knows Burton was there last night--but..." She broke off.
"Oh, God. Burton has to be the 'worm' they want killed!" She shook her head as if, through all this trauma, she should have thought of that much sooner.
Garrett fell back in his chair. How long could she keep getting smacked in the face with another ugly realization before she came apart?
"It's a lot to take in, Kirsten."
"Yes, well, I know that." She spoke now as if she was the objective observer and not the target.
"The point I'm trying to make is that if I hadn't overheard that call and come here to report it, this would all have been moot. Burton wouldn't be back, and he won't call me again. Loehman is too smart to squander his resources. He would have stopped any surveillance on me very quickly."
"That's all well and good, Kirsten," Vorees said, "but you did come.
What's the bottom line here? "
"It goes back to what Loehman knows," Garrett answered.
"Right?" When she nodded, he went on.
"They don't know Kirsten heard that call on Christo's monitor last night. Suppose she'd never heard it, or that she was in the shower when it happened? No one's the wiser. Kirsten knows nothing, and sooner or later they figure that out. Now, though, they have to assume she is involved. They can't afford not to assume anything but the worst. So we need a plan and we need it now."
Aware at every minute of Kirsten seated beside him, he set out his criteria so they could throw out ideas.
"One. Kirsten has to get into her car, pick up Christo and go feed the ducks as if she has no idea she's being followed. Two. Christo needs to be removed from the situation altogether--tonight. Three. Kirsten stays, so she needs twenty-four-houra-day protection. Four. We have to find out why Loehman wanted her watched closely enough to set up a stakeout. And we have to do all that without spooking the spooks across the street.
When we know what's at stake for Loehman, we'll know how to proceed.
And maybe we'll nail the bastard once and for all. "
He sat back. He was asking a lot. He knew it.
"Ideas?"
Guili was shaking his head.
"There's no way, Weisz! You think the spooks across the street are not going to notice Christo isn't there? How suspicious is that?"
"By itself, you bet," Garrett agreed.
"Think big picture."
"How about a fake-kidnapping scenario?" Vorees suggested.
"It gets Christo out, keeps Kirsten at home, cops legitimately in the house for her protection. Best of all, the spooks won't know what the hell is going on, but they sure won't leave."
"A random kidnapping?" J. D. asked.
"That's not going to create suspicion?"
"Does it matter?" Garrett wondered aloud.
"Vorees has got a point.
They won't know if it's real or not. "
"If it's me in their shoes, Garrett," Guili argued, "it stinks to the high heavens. Whatever their agenda, they are not going to pursue it with cops swarming all over her place, finding bugs."
"Agreed," Garrett said.
J. D. tossed his pencil on the table.
"Don't forget you've then got to keep the press under wraps. And advise the FBI that the kidnapping is phony. The more people you keep apprised of what's going on..." J. D. shrugged. He didn't have to elaborate on what happened when there were too many need-to- knows in the mix. Sooner or later there was one too many, and the whole ruse collapsed.
"Not to mention, where do you take Christo?"
"Nowhere," Kirsten said, leaving no quarter for other consideration.
The terror in her heart for Christo was not something hot or spontaneous or ill considered, but coldly logical. Factual. Perfectly clear. Their life on Queen Anne Hill was over, and these men had no idea, none, of what she was prepared to do to safeguard her baby's life.
"There is no other way than that Christo and I both just get out." She drew her purse up onto her shoulder and stood.
Weisz got up, too, and then the others. She straightened.
"Make what arrangements you like, but my son is not going anywhere without me."
Chapter Four
Garrett let her walk out. The sight of her back, of her opening the do
or and slipping out, gave him the sensation of having been kicked where it counted. He gritted his teeth, clamped down on whatever the hell urge it was inside him that wanted to go after her.
J. D. had the frequency of the device tied into her ignition. She wasn't going anywhere they couldn't find her inside of two seconds.
Loehman's tail wasn't going to lose her, either. They had the white van marked now, as well, with a device a lot more sophisticated than the one on Kirsten's car.
Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine Page 5