by Cindy Dees
She was half-asleep when Zane slipped under the sheet beside her, gathering her into his warm, slightly damp embrace and murmuring, “I never get tired of how you feel in my arms.”
She noticed he made no effort to keep his voice down. Right. Act married for the people on the other end of the bugs in the walls.
“I never get tired of being in your arms, my love.”
His gaze snapped to hers, and a slow, possessive smile took over his features. He liked the L-word, did he? She’d never been in love, but she was starting to wonder if it didn’t feel pretty close to how she was feeling now.
“You’re so good for me. You ground me in the present,” he said, staring at her significantly. Clearly, he meant more than that. But, leery of any bugs, he wasn’t going to say anything more aloud. She got the message, though. In the midst of running from cover story to cover story, she reminded him of who he really was. She grounded him in his real identity.
“I hope you’ll always do the same for me,” she replied carefully. She wasn’t likely to spend the majority of her career in undercover roles, but she was likely to spend a lot of time away from home in dangerous places doing dangerous missions. She, too, could use the reminder that moments like this were real and waiting for her when she got home.
“Always,” he agreed solemnly.
Had they just agreed to try a long-term relationship with each other? If only she could ask him outright!
Instead, she kissed him passionately, pouring all the feelings she dared not speak aloud into their kiss. She desperately hoped he felt her genuine desire for him, her wish to be with him, her willingness to commit to a full-blown relationship.
She traced her hands across his muscular shoulders and relished the smoothness of his skin sliding under her palms. He was so warm and vital, and he made her feel vibrantly alive.
He smiled at her, a whole host of emotions flitting through his expressive eyes, and she smiled back.
“Don’t let me lose myself,” he breathed.
“Never. I’ll be your anchor as long as you need me to be.”
They made love slowly, tenderly even. When it had shifted from great sex to deeply emotional lovemaking, she wasn’t sure. But this was entirely different than what they’d shared the other times they’d been together—and it had been pretty special then, too.
In the midst of a dangerous foreign land, they created between them an island of safety and belonging. If only she could tell if it was a real promise. Had some sort of deal been sealed between them or not?
Or was she interpreting great sex by a considerate lover to mean more than it really did? Assailed by doubts and bedeviled by her silent hopes and dreams, she made love to him with all the intensity of feeling that she could express. No surprise, she felt tears on her cheeks when they finally fell back on the mattress, side by side, to catch their breaths.
Regardless of what it meant for the long term, it surely had satisfied the curiosity of whoever was listening on the other end of the bugs. If that didn’t sound like a married couple genuinely enjoying each other’s company, she gave up.
They had time for a short nap together before Zane’s alarm clock blared, announcing it was time to dress for dinner.
The supper meeting with government officials responsible for choosing which airplanes to buy was a complete bore to Piper. She was expected to smile politely, look nice and say nothing. At least she got to dust off her rusty Farsi as she listened to the conversation flowing around her. Zane was kept busy through the meal discussing airplane performance parameters and dancing around possible discounts that the aircraft company—ostensibly a Swiss firm and politically neutral—might be willing to slip to the Iranians on the down low.
After the interminable meal with course after course of heavy sauce-laden fare, each spicier than the last, Zane finally escorted her out of the restaurant to the hotel lobby, where Tessa and Rebel were waiting.
“Shall we go, ladies?” Zane asked.
He led them outside, hailed a cab and gave the name of the nightclub, Club Musika Retro. The odds of the dead-dropped message being intercepted were low, but just in case, they needed to follow through with visiting what turned out to be a discotheque, complete with mirror balls, flashing lights and dreadful Persian remakes of Western music from thirty years ago. Piper was totally going to have a headache before they got out of here.
Under the cover of the pounding noise, she leaned over to ask Tessa, “Did Gunnar get the toys okay?”
“No problem. Did you get a nap this afternoon?”
Piper felt her cheeks heating up and hoped her teammate would put her flush down to the mass of hot bodies around them. “Um, yes. A nap. Uh-huh.”
Tessa grinned knowingly. “Makes life easier when you finally work out all that romantic confusion, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not sure it’s all worked out. And it’s not as if we can have heart-to-hearts about it here and now.”
“He’s crazy about you. Never takes his eyes off you. Always looks half enthralled and half ready to leap to your defense at the slightest provocation.”
Piper stared at her teammate. “Really?”
Rebel jumped into the conversation, rolling her eyes. “The poor guy’s completely head over heels for you.”
Piper knew the feeling.
Zane came back from the bar to their booth, juggling four sodas without ice. “We’re in luck,” he announced. “There’s a men-only hookah lounge in the back. I’ll slip through there and head out to pick up the keys to our motorcycles. You three party hard while I’m gone, and don’t forget to flirt with our tails.”
“We were followed?” Piper exclaimed.
“They picked us up leaving the hotel,” Zane retorted.
“You’ll have to teach us how to spot them better,” Tessa interjected. “I didn’t see anyone, and I was looking.”
“Me, neither,” Rebel admitted glumly.
Zane murmured, “Once we get home, it would be my pleasure to up your field ops games. In the meantime, it’s the two guys on the bar stools right where the bar turns toward that wall.”
“One guy has his back to us and the other is facing us?” Piper responded. “Big, beefy dudes in suits, with the funny bulges under their left arms?”
“Those are the ones,” Zane laughed over his tepid drink.
Piper sipped without relish at the flat, oversweet soda. Zane stood up and dropped a chaste kiss on her forehead. “Don’t have too much fun without me.”
“Ha!” she replied in fake indignation. “Do you know who you’re talking to?”
He looked around at all three women. “Yes. I do. Hence the caution.”
Piper rolled her eyes at him and grabbed Tessa’s and Rebel’s hands. “C’mon, girls. I feel some Saturday Night Fever moves coming on.”
All three women actually danced carefully, not wanting to draw too much attention to themselves. They followed the lead of the local women in how to dance. It wasn’t just that Iranian women moved only a tiny bit. They also looked strange doing it in clothes that would not have been out of place at a Catholic school dance presided over by nuns. Piper and her teammates wore thick leggings underneath calf-length skirts, long-sleeved turtlenecks and sweaters over those.
When traditional, Iranian-flavored music came on, everyone on the dance floor, male and female, shifted to more traditional Middle Eastern dances. The young men twirled cloth handkerchiefs over their heads, while the women mostly clapped and laughed.
Piper and the other Medusas joined in for close to a half hour with no sign of Zane. Then Rebel leaned close to Piper to shout in her ear, “Problem—our tails are looking at their watches and at the entrance to the hookah lounge.”
Crud. A distraction was called for.
“C’mon!” she shouted at her teammates. They made their way across the floor until they were dir
ectly in front of the tails. And this time, when an American dance tune blared, they broke into American-style dance moves, still being careful not to do anything that might be perceived as overly provocative. Zane had warned them that nightclubs were a recent experiment by the government and tightly monitored for obscenity.
Piper hoped that, by ignoring their tails and dancing in a tight triangle facing one another, they wouldn’t get arrested by whatever religious police might be lurking in the corners.
“There’s Rashid,” Rebel called to Piper, just as the song ended.
Thank God. Piper was nearly out of dance moves that wouldn’t get her arrested. The women strolled back to the booth to rejoin Zane, who brought them another round of drinks. This time he set down bottles of water. They all sipped, using the bottles to shield their mouths from any lip readers or cameras.
“Success?” Piper asked him.
“Indeed. Having fun?”
“I’m ready to get out of here. Our tails are enjoying watching our, um, tails, a little too much.”
Tessa added, “We’re supposed to meet the boss in an hour. We’ll need that time to make sure we’re not followed.”
“We’ll split up to leave,” Zane commented lightly from behind his water bottle. “Our minders will be forced to split up, too, and it’s a lot easier to lose a solo tail than a team who can pass you off from one person to the next.”
Piper asked her friends, “Do you girls know how to get to the rendezvous point?”
Rebel grinned. “I speak Arabic. Even if we get lost, I’ll be able to make myself understood enough to get directions. That, and I memorized a map of the city. We’ll be fine.”
Piper lifted her bottle one last time. “All right, then. We’ll see you in an hour or so.” She drained her water and nodded at Zane. Time for the new Medusas to go into action for the first time as a real team on a real mission.
Chapter 18
Zane watched Tessa and Rebel slip out behind a couple that actually looked quite a bit like himself and Piper. He was impressed at how quickly the two women managed to exit the bar without looking like they were in the slightest hurry. It was a departure worthy of an experienced CIA operative.
Even better, one of the two men seated at the bar left moments after they did. The lone tail left behind in the club looked disconcerted. Excellent.
“Time to go,” Zane muttered to Piper. “Before our friend has time to call in reinforcements.”
She gathered her sweater and he ushered her outside, making no secret that they were leaving the club. The moment they stepped out into the cool evening, he and Piper turned left, hurrying away from the noisy disco.
He lengthened his stride to a near run, relieved that Piper could keep up with him. They swerved into the first alley they came to and took off running. She ran lightly on the balls of her feet, making very little noise. Thank God for her excellent training. Or more accurately, thank Torsten.
However, when they dodged out of the far end of the alley, she tugged his sleeve for him to stop. He glanced at her and was shocked to see a pair of black, rubber-soled loafers emerge from somewhere under her coat. She changed shoes quickly, threw a dark scarf over her blond hair and nodded her readiness to proceed.
If he’d thought she was quiet and fast before, she was twice as silent and quick wearing flats instead of high heels. Which was fortunate, because he ran her all over the old city, winding through warrens of narrow streets, narrower alleys and connected courtyards.
He defied anyone to successfully follow the two of them without revealing himself or herself as they darted across the city on foot. The tricky bit was actually going to be circling back to where their motorcycles were waiting for them.
He and Piper slowed down, moving stealthily as they backtracked into the old city. At this time of night the walls and tall iron gates, so abundant in Tehran, were mostly closed. It turned the streets into long tunnels with a single entrance and one exit. Their only option was to sprint down each street, slowing only to slip around corners into a new tunnel and then sprinting down it.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for. A gate stood open into a courtyard bordered by several old apartment buildings only four or five stories high. Tehran sat on two major fault lines, and these old buildings were squat and built of heavy stone to survive earthquakes.
As they darted across the deserted courtyard, Piper snatched a woman’s chador off a clothesline. The traditional garment was made of a large semicircle of black cloth. Piper wrapped it loosely about her head and upper body, letting it fall nearly to her knees.
Following her lead, Zane stripped off his blazer and exchanged it for a sweater drying on the same line. It was still damp and smelled like lye, but it changed his physical appearance and made him look even closer to native.
They darted to a gate on the opposite side of the courtyard, at the end of a dark tunnel through one of the buildings. He paused to peer out before stepping into the street with Piper.
They continued to peer around corners and randomly pause in dark doorways to check behind them for the next several minutes. Even he didn’t spot anyone following them. They were in the clear.
He approached a row of motorcycles, chained together and parked in front of a small storefront with its metal grate pulled down and locked. Using the key he’d collected earlier, he unlocked the motorcycle on the end and relocked the chain looped through rest of them.
He threw his leg across the seat, and Piper climbed on behind him, clasping her arms around his waist. He picked up the ratty baseball cap hanging from the handlebar and tugged it down low on his head. The street was rather quieter than he would like, but there was no help for it. He started the engine, and it roared to life, sounding shockingly loud in his ears.
He pulled away from the curb and turned the corner.
“Hide your face,” he ordered Piper tersely.
She instantly buried her nose against his back, letting the flapping chador do the rest. Her entire torso pressed against his back, and she felt warm and feminine and sexy. Memories of their afternoon in bed flooded through his mind’s eye, and he nearly drove over the curb in his distraction.
Dammit. Focus on driving.
“Good thing you’re my wife,” he muttered as he drove past a man in a dark suit standing on a street corner and looking around suspiciously. Maybe the guy was a state security agent, maybe not. But either way, Zane wasn’t taking any chances with Piper’s safety. “Otherwise you’d go to jail for holding me like this.”
“I’d happily go to jail to keep holding you like this,” she muttered back. He wasn’t sure if she’d meant for him to hear her or not, but her comment caused a burst of warmth in his gut nonetheless.
The strangeness of having a partner, and of worrying about that person’s safety more than his own, struck him. It wasn’t that he minded working with her; it was just weird not being a lone wolf.
Truth be told, he could get used to this business of working in a pack of wolves.
“Okay. You can sit up,” he announced, when the guy on the corner disappeared from view behind them.
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “I kinda like it right here.”
“Don’t distract me,” he half laughed.
She lifted her face, but her hands slipped lower, sliding below his belt buckle and coming perilously close to parts of him that were all too ready to perk up with interest.
Thankfully, they came into a more lit area soon, and she moved her hands back up to a more decorous position. He turned onto the Besat Expressway, then headed southeast out of Tehran on Highway 44. The idea was for the other team members to meet up and make their way out of the city center, where police and security forces would be thickest. The rendezvous point was in a small city called Mamazand, about forty-five minutes outside Tehran.
The Center for Materi
als Research, where Mark Black should be making an appearance in the morning, was just beyond Mamazand.
The trip out of Tehran and into the barren desert was uneventful. He guided the motorcycle to the house where their rendezvous had been arranged, and the tall iron-paneled gate, painted light blue, opened for him as he approached it. He drove into the courtyard and cut the engine.
Torsten locked the gate behind them as Piper climbed off the motorcycle, and Zane followed suit.
“Everyone’s here now,” the major said quietly. “We’ll head out as soon as you gear up.”
Piper had already moved over to the weapons and body armor laid out on the ground, stripped off her chador and was arming herself efficiently, stowing flashbang grenades, spare ammo magazines, det cord and other gadgets and tidbits in the utility belt she’d strapped to her waist.
Zane joined her, familiarizing himself with the equipment before stowing it on his person. “You look pretty comfortable with all this stuff.”
“Tools of the trade,” she commented with a shrug.
“This is the first time I’ve seen you in full commando mode,” he commented back.
“Welcome to the Medusas in combat mode.”
“You ladies really are full-blown warriors, aren’t you?”
Piper stopped what she was doing to stare at him. “After everything you’ve seen me do, it’s just now dawning on you that I’m a real soldier?”
He frowned. “It’s one thing to know you can do all this stuff. It’s another thing to actually see you do it.”
“You saw me engage in a firefight with Mahmoud’s guys. I killed Hassan, for crying out loud.”
“I know. I know. But this...” He spread his hand over the tarp filled with weapons. “This is an imposing array of killing power.”
“And that’s why the Medusas are successful in general. People, particularly in places like this, can’t compute that women can use all this gear effectively. Heck, you’re American and have seen me in action, and you’re still having trouble buying it. Imagine some Iranian dude who’s never seen a woman say boo to a mouse.”