by Cindy Dees
Alex asked, “How’s the knife wound? No pain or complications from being back out in the field with it?” Was this the fiancé who’d stabbed Mike and left that fresh, red scar on his belly?
There was that weird look again from Mike. “Nah. It’s good. I’m sorry to report that your attempt to gut me has officially failed.”
She’d half-thought Mike was kidding when he’d said his future brother-in-law had stabbed him. Apparently not.
Both men looked over at Katie affectionately. Comprehension burst across Piper’s brain. The two men might not particularly like each other, but they both loved Katie. For her sake, they were willing to put aside their differences and get along.
“I’m so glad you’re here, Mike,” Katie announced. “I wanted to talk with you about the wedding. It’s in October, and I need you to arrange your work schedule to be home for it—”
Alex interrupted gently. “If I’m not mistaken, this isn’t entirely a social call to spoil your niece, is it, Mike?”
Katie sighed and stepped forward to lift the toddler out of her brother’s arms. “C’mon, Dawn. Let’s get you some lunch while the boys go talk business.”
Piper couldn’t blame Katie for assuming that it was just the boys on a job. Alex gestured for Mike to follow him to what turned out to be an office, and Piper trailed along, hating feeling like a third wheel.
Alex closed the office door behind them and Mike surprised her by saying, “Alex, this is Piper Roth, my partner.”
“We’ve never met, but I’ve seen your name on the Doctors Unlimited roster.” He stuck out his hand, and she shook it, a little startled. For a surgeon, he had a hell of a strong grip. And a shooter’s callous at the base of his thumb. How did he get a hold of the D.U. roster, anyway? That was supposed to be confidential.
Mike interrupted her perplexed ruminations with, “We’re tracking a terrorist who appears to have designed a weaponizable virus and disappeared with a lot of it. We need to pick up his trail and were hoping you could help.”
“What can you tell me about this terrorist?”
Piper listened as Mike recited what they knew about Yusef Abahdi and where they’d last seen him.
Alex looked over at her. “Talk to me about the virus.” How did he know about her biomedical background? It wasn’t something that came up in casual conversation.
Suspicious and a little creeped out, she answered, “The virus appears genetically engineered with material gathered from Ebola and Lassa patients. Some or all of the Scientist’s research notes are being analyzed as we speak.”
Alex’s attention swung back to Mike. “You said he had a lot of it. Are we talking samples in petri dishes, or gallons of it ready for dispersion?”
“Gallons. He put three big coolers in the back of his vehicle.”
“He won’t have flown commercially, then. He either drove to a destination in Africa somewhere or he took a private flight to his final destination.”
Mike asked, “Can we track his flight?”
Alex shook his head in the negative. “Huge chunks of African airspace don’t have radar coverage. It’s been rumored for years that commercial-sized aircraft fly back and forth illegally between Africa and South America without ever being spotted on radar.”
“What about tracking his money?” Mike asked.
“It’s the logical way to proceed. Guy like him, though, might be getting paid in cash. Could be way hard to spot.”
“What about the little girl?” Piper added. “I’ll bet he spends money on grid to get stuff for her.”
Alex nodded and typed what seemed about the length of an email message. He leaned back. “This could take a while. I’ve got a few of my best people on it. If there is a trail, they’ll pick it up.”
He had an entire network of his own hackers? Who was this guy? She’d heard rumors that he was some sort of espionage mastermind, but this went way beyond the rumors.
Taking a flyer, she leaned forward and asked, “Do you have someone who might be able to do a little domestic poking for me?”
The intelligence in Alex Peters’ eyes as he studied her was almost frightening. For a moment, she felt a flash of gratitude that she was on the same side of the law as him. “What are we poking at?” he asked.
“I’ve been watching a separatist group out in Idaho. They’re connected somehow to the Scientist. They mostly run off the grid, but two of their leaders went to North Sudan last month. The same two men made a good faith effort to kill Mike and me at the Scientist’s lab two days ago. They may have left a footprint of some kind.”
“This bunch got a name?”
“The Patrick Henry Patriots. Or just PHP.”
Alex nodded and started typing. He typed for longer this time, and eventually, he sat back, frowning. “Not a red flag kind of outfit at a glance.”
That was what she’d thought, too. Until they sent representatives to Khartoum.
“Interesting group,” Alex commented. “They don’t seem like the types to hook up with a Palestinian biological terrorist.”
“Hence my desire to get a handle on what they’re doing.”
“You think they’ve radicalized?” he asked.
God, that was the big, unanswered question. She sincerely hoped not. In response to Alex, she could only shrug. “No idea.”
A new window opened up on Alex’s computer screen. “Looks like they just bought a helicopter,” he commented.
She stared, shocked. “But they hate technology of all kinds. They think we need to go back to the 1870’s technologically to get back in touch with the values that made us a great nation.”
Alex shrugged. “Well, they bought a helo on the 28th of last month. They used a shell corporation and nested the deal through a couple of tax shelters, but PHP is the final buyer.”
“Has it been delivered?” she asked.
“Yup. To an address in southern Nevada.”
“Nevada? Their compound is in upstate Idaho.”
“Looks like your boys are branching out. Unless they only took delivery in Nevada and are planning to fly the bird up to Idaho. Lemme see if I can track down anything more.”
Alex typed a few minutes longer. All he came up with was a description of a white helicopter with red racing stripes down its sides.
“What about the money trail on the Scientist?” Mike asked. “Any hits? He can’t go too far underground with his eight-year old daughter in tow, can he?”
Alex grimaced. “I wouldn’t want to try it with Dawn. It was bad enough getting her out of Zaghastan as a newborn when all she did was sleep and eat and poop.”
Mike laughed ruefully. “Not to mention having to get Katie out of there, too.”
Piper’s gaze snapped to Mike. Why that comment, and in that tone of voice? Because Katie was a woman? Had Mike always been this big a chauvinist and she just hadn’t noticed?
Alex shrugged. “Katie was great. I don’t know if I’d have made it out without her.”
Piper gifted him with a warm smile for his enlightenment.
“It may take a while for me to get a hit on either of your guys,” Alex said. “Can you stick around for lunch? Warning, though: Katie’s going to bend your ear over wedding stuff.”
Mike laughed. “I’ll pass. Besides, our investigation is time sensitive.”
Alex nodded. “If I hear anything, I’ll pass it on to you.”
Mike waxed sober. “Maybe you could ask your…alternate sources…if they know anything about the Scientist or PHP?”
Alex blinked, looking startled. “It’s that critical?”
“Dude, the guy’s got three coolers full of a virus that apparently is designed to kill everyone who comes into contact with it. You tell me how critical the mission is.”
Frowning, Alex pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed a long number. Piper was startled when he spoke into it in rapid, apparently fluent, Russian.
She leaned over to Mike and whispered, “Our op is classifi
ed to the Moon and back. I know Alex has the clearances for it, but who’s he talking to in freaking Russian? Does that person have clearance for this?”
Mike muttered back, “He’s talking to the number three guy in the FSB. That guy has probably got plenty of clearance to hear about a few terrorists.”
Her jaw dropped. She whispered urgently, “The FSB? The enemy?”
Alex startled her by answering as he disconnected his cell phone. “They’re not technically our enemies. And I do my best to keep it that way.”
Huh?
Mike mouthed, “Later,” at her, and flashed her a hand signal out of Alex’s line of sight to stand down.
“My source will look into it from his end. If anything at all turns up, I’ll pass it on directly to you, Mike.”
“Thanks, man.”
She nodded in minor shock and rose to her feet when the men did. She followed along as Mike tickled Dawn into a squealing fit of laughter and made his apologies to Katie at not being able to stay for lunch. More quickly than she’d expected, he whisked her out the door and into the elevator.
“He called the FSB, Mike,” she challenged. “Is your sister’s fiancé some sort of double agent?”
“More like a liaison between us and them. A back channel for information flow that needs to stay off book.”
She sagged against the wall of the elevator, stunned. “And Doctors Unlimited knows about this?”
“Hell. They set it up.”
Shut the front door. No wonder McCloud felt free to waltz into her hotel room and steal her damned evidence at will. He was connected like crazy in the intelligence community. She had never felt like more of an outsider in that moment. She’d known the good ole’ boy network would be hard to break into. But she’d had no idea a person had to be born into the bloody club.
“Have you got any other famous spy relatives I should know about?” she asked sourly.
“Well, my uncle’s the deputy director of Plans for the CIA. Does that count?”
“Charles—” Jesus. “—Charles McCloud. Of course. You McClouds are everywhere, aren’t you?” The family must be some sort of intelligence royalty.
“Fertile bunch, us McClouds.”
He certainly had the smoking hot sex portion of that proposition down pat. Her belly clenched in momentary hunger for more of the McCloud magic before her brain overruled it. “Now what?” she asked.
He was silent for a moment, then, “Until we have some idea of where to look for the Scientist, how do you feel about getting eyes on the Patrick Henry Patriots?”
Not great. But she couldn’t tell him that. After all, the PHP gang was her turf. Her mission. If they could nail down the PHP’s goals, it would be a win for her. Right? Knowledge was always better than ignorance. But she wasn’t so sure that was true in this case. Still, Mike would expect her to jump on the idea.
“Let’s do it,” she answered firmly.
He glanced over at her, a lopsided grin making him look boyish. “Girls as hot as you need to be careful about saying things like that to the boys.”
Dammit, there went her gut again. And this time her brain had a much harder time stuffing her Pandora-like reaction back into its horny little box.
Ten
Piper hopped out of Mike’s truck in front of her apartment building and didn’t invite him in. He undoubtedly had a much nicer place in a much fancier zip code, and she had no desire to parade her general poverty in front of him.
He’d offered to walk her up to her door like he had in Khartoum, but this was America and she would be fine. She turned him down firmly. Such a chauvinist at heart, he was. And he didn’t seem to realize it was a problem. Mike seemed to think she would like being hovered over like a helpless, wilting lily of a female.
She knew all too well what it felt like to be helpless, and she’d long ago vowed to herself never to feel like that again. She’d been helpless to evade her father’s unreasoning rage whenever she reminded him too much of her mother, helpless to escape his brand of crazy, helpless to stop the man for forcing her to learn skills she’d never wanted to master. She’d made a lifelong project of making sure nobody could ever make her feel that way again, in fact.
She reached for her front door and noticed a sliver of wood had been knocked off the door jamb at knob height. It wasn’t anything big, just a millimeter wide strip of missing paint and bare pine. But still. It made her frown.
She cast a furtive glance around the basement landing and pulled her pistol from its holster in the small of her back. Quietly, she unlocked her door, stepped to one side, and eased the latch open. No violent reaction exploded. She spun through her door, crouching low, back pressed against the wall beside the door.
Holy crap. Her place was destroyed. Tossed didn’t begin to describe the mayhem. Everything had been overturned, emptied, and smashed to smithereens. It was hard to pick her way through the debris, but she raced to her tiny kitchen, cleared it, and then headed down the short hall to her bedroom, bathroom, and closet. It took about sixty seconds to determine that whoever’d robbed her was gone.
She headed for the front door, turned the corner out of her bedroom and lurched as a big silhouette spun into the doorway brandishing a handgun. Her own weapon whipped up into firing position.
“Stand down!” Mike barked at her. “It’s me. Mike.”
Jeez. She sagged against the wall in the hallway, her heart pounding. She’d almost shot him. Not that she’d have cared all that much, of course. It just would have been messy. Blood everywhere, and oy vey, the paperwork.
“What the hell are you doing here, Mike?”
“I had an instinct that something wasn’t right. Had to come check on you.”
Dang. Good instincts. “As you can see, I’m fine. But my apartment is not.”
“It’s clear?” he bit out.
“Yes, of course.” She wasn’t a total amateur. She knew to clear the scene and make sure the bad guys weren’t lurking in a closet before she got around to assessing the damage.
He stepped gingerly into the war zone and closed the hallway door behind him. “What’s missing?”
“At a glance, nothing.” Which was weird. Why would a thief come in and trash her place and not at least preserve and carry out the portable electronics?
Mike righted the couch in an impressive display of casual strength that made her grit her teeth a little. The one way in which she couldn’t ever be one of the boys was that raw, physical power he’d just unconsciously demonstrated.
He piled the torn and gutted cushions on the sofa frame, making a path through the worst of the mess. Her flat screen TV was a shattered wreck, as was her desktop computer. Its tower looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to it.
Her books were intact, however, still sitting on the shelves as if nothing had ever happened. Their calm unconcern was wildly out of place in the midst of the chaos. She moved into her kitchen. Total destruction was the name of the game in here. Her coffee maker, microwave, and the high-end blender she made smoothies with were smashed into spare parts and wires.
Even her stove was trashed, the electric burners torn out, handles ripped off, the oven door torn free of its hinges. Her refrigerator door hung askew and both her freezer and refrigerator had been emptied on the floor into a spectacular, drippy mess. Thankfully, she’d only been home a day and had yet to fully restock on food. She’d stopped by a convenience store yesterday and grabbed only a few items to tide herself over. She grabbed a trash bag from under the sink and quickly scooped the thawing vegetables and TV dinners into it.
“You got a wrench?” Mike called from the vicinity of the bathroom.
She fetched her toolbox from the front closet and carried it back to him. She’d registered hissing in her first pass through the apartment but hadn’t stopped to investigate.
As she rounded the corner into her bathroom, she stopped cold. “Oh, for crying out loud.”
The intruder had smashed her sink and ba
thtub fixtures. A fine spray of water was the source of the hiss, and Mike was quickly getting soaked as he wrestled with the main water cut-off valve. She passed him a wrench and backed out of the impromptu water park. In a few seconds, silence fell, punctuated only by occasional dripping sounds.
“Let me get you a towel,” she said, “assuming I’ve got any left intact.”
“I’ll take a pile of rags if that’s all you’ve got.”
She headed for her walk-in closet to fetch an armful of towels. Okay, so it was nice having a big, strong, capable man here with her, right now. She felt a lot safer with him at her place. The sense of violation was lessened somewhat by knowing nobody else would mess with her as long as he was around.
It struck her wryly that she was being a hypocrite to gripe about him intervening to save her in Africa but being grateful he was here, now. Fine. It hadn’t been that awful having Mike looking out for her in Khartoum, dammit. She still didn’t like the idea of needing his protection, but maybe it had been a good thing he’d been there.
She found her towels wadded on the floor and sliced to ribbons, but she doubted Mike would care at this point. He was drenched. She stepped back into her bedroom and gulped as Mike stripped his sodden shirt over his head to reveal that gorgeous man-hunk body of his.
He took the shredded towels she handed him and dried himself off. He used another handful of former towel to vigorously dry his hair. And then, oh God, he unbuckled his pants and let his dripping slacks fall to the floor. Eyes averted from his muscular legs and clinging briefs, she passed him the rest of the towel remnants.
She scooped up his clothes, mumbled something about throwing them in a dryer, and flat fled the apartment and nearly naked man inside. It took her until she slammed the round, glass dryer door shut to realize she was hyperventilating. Must be delayed reaction to the shock of her place being vandalized—
—Oh, who was she trying to kid? It was a reaction to seeing Mike strip down in her freaking bedroom. Never mind that her place had taken a tactical nuclear strike. She was not in lust with him, dammit! Okay, so she was. But it was only lust. The man had rocked her world in Khartoum. This was purely a physical reaction to the sex they’d had. Past tense. There would be no more sex between them, future tense, thank you very much.