by Dianna Love
She’d said that in a hopeful tone. Tanner shrugged. “That’s a possibility.”
“More than just possible.” She returned her gaze to meet his. “Orion Hunters do not allow anyone who betrays them to live.”
That would mean her, too.
She definitely couldn’t have stayed or gone back, but the State Department might ship her home to North Korea if they didn’t allow her asylum.
This was going nowhere and any minute now Dingo would—
There was Dingo’s quick double rap.
Tanner stepped over, checked the peephole and opened the door with his body blocking view of the room.
Dingo was saying to Blade, “That head nurse was an earbasher all right.”
“Your room’s two doors down,” Tanner said, offering each of them a keycard.
Blade snatched his. “Stick a fork in me. I’m done.” He walked down two doors and disappeared into his and Dingo’s room.
That was one person out of the way.
Tanner would rather make this decision with just Dingo. He stepped back from the door.
“We need to—” Dingo had stepped into the room and stopped. “She’s back?”
Tanner shut the door. “Yep. I found her in the Suburban when I drove it here.”
If Dingo had any thought on that, he didn’t share it. “You told Sabrina yet?”
“Not yet.”
Dingo was rarely pissed, but the perception of leaving Sabrina’s ass in the wind with the government did it. “Call her. Now.”
Tanner held up his hands. “I’m just as concerned about getting Sabrina out of a jam as you. We’ll call her if you still think that’s a good idea in the next few minutes.”
Dingo considered that and nodded. “Explain.”
Tanner filled him in on what Jin had told him about Pang and Har.
The only reaction Dingo had was a sharp lift of his eyebrow at learning their team had smuggled terrorists into the country, then a glint of surprise at hearing about the Orion Hunters. He muttered, “I’ll be gobsmacked.”
If that means blown away, call me gobsmacked, too. “Jin claims she’s the best chance we have at finding—and stopping—Pang and Har.”
“Why?” Dingo asked in Jin’s direction.
Pushing a few stray hairs off her face with both hands, she said, “The first thing you must do is find the doctor who would treated Har, or is still treating him. The Hunters would not risk losing one of the physicists.”
Tanner asked, “Do you have any idea what might be wrong with him? He wasn’t responding to nausea medicine.”
“No, I do not know, but I would not be surprised to find that Pang had poisoned him at some point once we arrived in Seoul. He may have been told that one of them needed to pretend to be ill so that they would not leave Los Angeles before the Hunters found them.”
“Pang was searched.”
“All cavities? Did you notice the ring on his right hand? A simple ring but if it was hollow there would have been room to hide something.”
She had a point.
Shit. Even Har’s illness was part of the damn plan. Tanner asked, “No one could pretend to be as sick as Har was. So you think Pang poisoned him. Why?”
“Because Pang’s ego would not allow him to share his glory with anyone. He believes the Hunters will reward him greatly for this. He is too full of himself to realized they will not allow him to live any more than they will allow my sister to live once she has completed her part of this.”
“Her sister’s a terrorist, too?” Dingo said to Tanner as if he’d conjured these women up.
“No, she is not!” Jin answered. “She does not know what they are planning. She is a—”
Dingo and Tanner both said, “What?”
Jin’s face lost its animation and she softly reminded him, “We do not have a deal yet.”
“What deal, mate?” Dingo was giving Tanner a hard stare again.
“Jin says she’ll help us if we don’t hand her over to the State Department while we look for Pang and Har.”
“Bullshit.”
Jin crossed her arms. “Then you will not find them or stop them in time.”
“We can call in Homeland Security, the FBI and law enforcement everywhere to find Pang and Har,” Dingo said, echoing Tanner’s words from last night.
“You will only succeed in the Orion Hunters using their resources to create diversions that will divide as many forces as you call up. And you will have to go public about having kidnapped two North Korean physicists. I doubt your government will want to admit to that.”
Did she know that was a hot button right now or was she just doing a damn good job of guessing? Tanner let Dingo have a go at this to see just what Tanner had been up against since last night. Maybe Dingo could figure out an angle that Tanner had missed.
“You don’t want to play hardball with us,” Dingo warned.
“Are all American men fools?” she asked the room at large then swung that riled gaze at Dingo. “I am offering to help you, if you help me. I want to find my sister before she has to do something she will not live long enough to regret. I do not trust any of you to care about what happens to her. If you want my assistance, all you have to do is allow me to remain free to search with you until we find her and stop the attack. Is that so unreasonable?”
When Dingo glanced his way, Tanner gave him a raised eyebrow look to say, “She makes a sound argument.”
Not ready to agree so easily, Dingo argued, “You know your way around North Korea, but over here we are in familiar territory. What can you do here that we can’t?”
Straightening her back, she calmly dusted nonexistent crumbs from her shirt and looked up at both of them, and Tanner knew she’d been waiting patiently to lay down her bargaining chips.
Jin said, “To begin with, I know where they would have taken Har last night and I also know about your country. You have several Chinatowns in different states. The first one was here in Los Angeles. That is where the Hunters would find a doctor for Har, but it will not be just any Asian doctor. It will be one who is loyal to the Orion Hunters.”
Tanner silently agreed that she had a point there. He gave her a tiny move of his head to encourage her to continue.
“Even if you have a translator, they will not know if they are speaking to a doctor who belongs to the Hunters or not. In addition to English, I can speak Korean and four more Asian languages, plus six ancient languages. If you allow me to be locked up now, I can promise you will not find Pang or Har in time.”
And that was the reason Tanner had misgivings about handing her off to the State Department.
Dingo showed no reaction other than to say to Tanner, “Step outside with me, mate.”
Once they were out in the hallway with the door closed, Dingo asked, “The Orion Hunters? That’s who is behind this and not the DPRK?”
Tanner nodded. “If she’s telling us the truth, Pang and Har are key to the attack being planned, and we don’t have much time.”
“We can’t bring in Homeland Security until we have a specific threat and an idea of a location for it.”
“That’s what I figure.”
Dingo scratched at a beard that had grown longer over the past three days. “This is why you haven’t told Sabrina about her.”
“Right. Sabrina’s butt is in a sling already. If we tell her that we have Jin, she’ll have to hand her over. I’m betting, in our shoes, she’d leave Jin free to give us a chance at finding Pang and Har. But if she did that and things go bad, Sabrina would fall on the sword before she’d let either of us take the blame for it. I’m not putting her at any further risk even if it means she cuts me loose when this is done.”
Tanner hadn’t considered that until the words were out of his mouth, but he’d put her in this spot. If someone landed in jail when the dust cleared, it wasn’t going to be Sabrina.
Nodding, Dingo said, “Right you are, mate. I don’t want her in that position either. W
hat’s your plan?”
“We have to find the doctor who treated Har or still has Har as a patient. Once we give Jin our agreement to let her stay with us, we’ll start with locating that doctor.”
“Think she’s just going to take our word?”
Tanner didn’t want to make it sound like more was going on than should be in this situation, but they were on a short time frame and Dingo needed to know that this would work. “She’ll accept my word.”
That met with stony silence, which Tanner expected so he explained, “I told her on the boat that I’d take her with us and, because I did bring her, she’s decided to believe what I tell her if I give her my word.”
Dingo’s white-blond hair glowed against his tanned skin. He didn’t look like anyone Tanner would normally hang out with back in Texas, but Dingo could change like a chameleon and wear a Stetson in Amarillo with the same confidence he sported punk hair in New York.
In fact, that blond wasn’t his natural color. Tanner had seen the roots a few times.
Dingo said, “I believe in givin’ a bloke a fair go if it makes sense, and what this Jin says does. But, if she does anything suspicious that gets me thinking she’s gamin’ us, I’ll be the first one to cuff and stuff her in a ride to Atlanta.”
“Agreed.” Tanner wished that had a confident ring to it, because he knew as sure as he was standing here that Jin was hiding something.
Dingo asked, “Has she given any specifics about the terrorist attack?”
“No. Refuses to share anything until we have a deal. But she did confirm that Pang and Har were the two leading physicists on Project Jigu-X. She did say it’s not a nuclear weapon, but she also says it’s far worse.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“Yep. I have nothing more to go on than a gut check, but I think most of what she’s telling us is the truth.”
“Most is something to start with.” Dingo shifted his gaze down, thinking. “They were trying to grab her at the safe house, too.”
“Right.” Tanner watched a family from the other end of the hall, but they got on the elevator. He scratched his chin and thought out loud. “Why were they after Jin?”
“I don’t know. She may play a bigger role in all this than we realize.”
Tanner had considered the same thing more than once since meeting her, but his judgment was tainted by another female scientist who’d colored the truth according to the picture she needed to paint.
If Dingo was having the same thought, though, maybe Tanner wasn’t as jaded in his thinking after all.
Tanner checked his watch. “O-seven-twenty. I’ll make the deal with her and we can start searching for the doctor in Chinatown in another hour.”
“I may have someone who can narrow that down quickly.”
“You mentioned a woman earlier. She some kind of private eye for the rich?” Tanner asked, hoping Dingo would offer more.
“No. She’s a little more skilled than that. Someone who could be a field agent for the CIA.”
“No shit. How well do you know her?”
Dingo did that thousand yard stare and said, “We have history.”
“You need to shower and shave before you tap that resource?” Tanner chuckled.
“More like I need to wear body armor to meet with her.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dingo didn’t hurry his steps as he walked into the park where Valene Eklund waited near an oak that had stood in that spot for many decades.
Her five-foot-four height looked taller in black boots that were snug around her calves. She wore jeans made to hug the slope of her hips and a blousy white shirt buttoned up just far enough to shield breasts he could still see in his mind. Perfect alabaster mounds beneath his dark fingers.
Large areolas that were dark pink and sweet.
Blond hair that reached her collar sprung in different wavy directions. If she had on a bathing suit and sandals, she could pull off surf bum chic, especially since she could ride a curl with the best of them. The hair and clear skin came from her Nordic father. The velvet brown eyes and thick dark brown lashes had probably come from the mother Valene wouldn’t talk about.
One look at her and a man couldn’t think past his dick. She was pure sex on wheels. Or on heels. His damn mind chose that moment to recall her wearing four-inch stilettos one night.
Not another shred of clothing. Just those midnight-blue shoes.
He was one sick bastard to torture himself with that image.
Seven years was a long time.
It was forty-nine years in a dog’s life and even longer when it came to missing a woman.
Hard to feel bad for himself when he was the one who’d walked away. Stomped away. To say he was surprised when she’d returned his call today was an understatement of ginormous proportions. Not that she’d spent much time on the message she’d left.
Just a terse order for what time to meet her and the GPS coordinates.
“Val.” He stopped six feet away. Close enough to talk.
Far enough to protect his balls.
“Does that punk haircut get you laid?”
Maybe not far enough away after all.
She had proud cheeks and the keen eyes of a raptor observing a prey and trying to decide if it was worth the flight down to kill it. Her agreeing to meet him made sense now.
She wanted to hash out their history.
Not that he didn’t owe her a chance to shred him with that tongue of hers, and maybe a round of kickboxing, but that would have to wait for another time. “This is serious, Val. National security at stake.”
“How’s this any different than last time?”
Last time, Dingo had stirred up a mafia hornet’s nest when he figured out a group from Chicago was running arms for a connection in Los Angeles.
The difference was that he had no intention of allowing Val to become a target again. Not that he ever let her know she’d been one before. She would have stormed into the middle of it and gotten herself killed.
He’d had one way to keep her safe after that.
Walk away.
The mafia group was no longer a threat or he wouldn’t be back now. “I need some help finding people fast.”
She looked up, tapping her chin. “If I recall correctly, and I’m sure I do, the last time I helped you find someone I was told to ‘stay the fuck out of your business and away from you’.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.” That was the day he’d walked to draw the dogs off her trail.
She dropped her chin along with her voice. “You didn’t have to, Dingo. There was a time when we didn’t need to spell everything out to each other.”
I guess we are going to get into this now. “There were reasons, Val.”
She lifted a hand. “I am not here to give you a chance to relieve your guilty conscience at treating me like some weekend bang.”
“I never treated you that way,” he growled, feeling the phantom ache from a blade slicing up his heart.
She ignored him, taking a step forward as she continued. “My skills are worth far more than they were before. I’ve had seven years to groom resources that your international intelligence people would envy, if one particular agency could operate on US soil. Not that any of you spooks care about things like rules.”
Good to see her ego was as healthy as ever. “I’m not a spook.”
She paused and cocked her head to one side. “Oh? What are you then? You appear and disappear like a smoke ring puffed in the wind. You’re trained and armed better than a CIA agent, and here you are back again looking for intel. What do I call you ... other than a heartbreaker?”
Her eyes had lost the arrogance they’d taken on with her little speech. Her walls slipped and the pain climbed up to peek out.
Just twist that blade a little more.
He wanted to cup her face and feel her skin again, tell her how much he’d missed her. But this was not the time and the last thing he wanted to do was r
econcile then walk away again.
Because he would leave the minute he had what he needed, to avoid any chance of drawing attention to her. Once had been frightening enough. He hadn’t been sure he could keep her safe.
Still, he owed her the words. “I’m sorry, Val.”
Pain hovered in her gaze for only a second then her walls snapped back into place. Locks slammed shut. The doors were barred. “What do you want? The clock is running and my fee is higher than last time.”
He tried to breathe past the invisible dagger in his chest. Lives were at stake. He could do this again. “I have to find a doctor in Chinatown. He treated a Korean male last night who had severe nausea.”
“That’s it?”
Trust was something Dingo had pieced out in tiny bits over the years to anyone other than Sabrina and Josh. But at one time, he’d trusted Val more than anyone. He hoped he still could. “The sick guy was smuggled in from North Korea yesterday because he was believed to be trying to defect and give up details on their nuclear program.”
“So someone finally realized the Norks are ahead of schedule.” She huffed out a disgusted little sound.
“Anyhow, he was grabbed when he arrived, but as it turns out he’s part of a terrorist op.”
“Oh, gawd. Who the hell was stupid enough to allow that to happen?”
When Dingo didn’t reply, Val’s eyes bugged out. “You are kidding. You did this?”
“Not by myself,” he defended.
“Of course not. It takes a village to do something idiotic.”
“There’s more to it than that.” He raised his hand to stop her before she got rolling good. “Don’t ask me things I can’t tell you.”
She leveled a look full of disgust at him. “Let’s not go there.”
“Do you think you can find the doctor?”
“I’m sure I can, but let me guess. You need to find him today not in a week or two, right?”
“I need him yesterday.”
“Then you’re going to have to give me more information. Something beyond one person was sick and the other is a doctor. Why would he have to go to Chinatown?”