At the Merest Glance

by M. L. Buchman

  “Saw it with my own eyes. Didn’t exactly have a camera.”

  He’d found one of the long Senegalese fishing boats, resting on the bottom. Aboard were two fishermen with their necks broken, weighed down. Recently enough that the crabs had only just discovered the bodies. An anonymous tip to the police should recover the bodies for their families, but it wouldn’t prove a thing about how they had died. Anton had concluded that the marks on their necks meant that Chas had done the deed with his bare hands.

  The cool tile flooring and deep shade of the restaurant’s thatched awning had nothing to do with the chill Katie felt prickling her skin. She’d been alone with Chas and the badgers. With a man who casually killed. She was lucky to be alive.

  How close had Anton come to signing both of their death warrants when he’d plucked Chas from the ground to collect her guide’s fee?

  Rubbing her arms didn’t drive away the goosebumps.

  Ricardo’s phone buzzed loudly enough against the wood table to make her jump.

  While he inspected the message, Anton slipped his hand over hers. “It’s okay, Katie. When it gets easier, that’s when you have to be careful.”

  She looked up into his dark eyes. This was a different man. Not Mr. Easygoing. Not worried or amused. Katie felt like she was being offered a rare glimpse under the lid of the man Anton chose to present to the world. Inside was a quiet, thoughtful, intelligent man.

  “What about you?”

  His shrug was eloquent. “I try to compartmentalize. When I rescued Ricardo out of a Honduran hellhole, there wasn’t a whole lot of the man that was intact. Body or…” Anton tapped a big finger against his own temple. “With Michelle’s help,” like he was giving her extra respect by using her full name, “Ricardo found his way back. That’s strong. If I can be even half that…” Again the expressive shrug.

  She rubbed at her arms again, but the chill was fading.

  “You’re smart in ways I’ll never understand, Katie. Like Missy.”

  The comparison surprised Katie. First, Michelle was incredibly smart, something Katie had never particularly felt despite earning good grades. But those grades had been her form of defense, to rise over the constant petty squabbles at boarding school.

  The real surprise was that despite all of their verbal sparring, she could hear how much Anton loved his stepsister.

  “But not like Isobel,” she covered her nerves with the joke.

  Anton understood of course and squeezed her hand to acknowledge it. “Ain’t nobody smart like her.” Then he continued more soberly. “I’m just a good helo pilot. Nothing like Jesse, but good enough. And I’ve got this…weird power. That’s all.” She could hear him shift away from the word “freak” but it felt as if he did it more for her sake than his own.

  “You have one thing way beyond anyone here.”

  “Even Isobel?” he teased.

  “Even Isobel.” Katie shifted her hand so that they were clasped. “You are the kindest person I’ve ever met.”

  When he leaned down to kiss her, she wondered quite where this trail was going to lead her. For the first time in a long while, she was looking forward to finding out.

  After the kiss, and her heartrate dropping enough for her to function, she picked up her fork with her free hand. It was the wrong one, but she didn’t want to let go of Anton’s grasp. She managed to spear a scallop and eat it without too much trouble.

  Chapter 17

  Anton wondered what the hell was happening to him. He liked women. Liked the way it felt to touch them, even when it was just holding hands.

  Holding hands with Katie made him feel like an amateur.

  For the first time, he was aware of everything. The softness and warmth of her skin, the strength of the muscles beneath. And her sweetly soft kiss! Damn but she had a mouth on her that he could spend a long time getting to know.

  Ricardo cleared his throat.

  Anton tried to ignore him as he studied the honey in Katie’s amber eyes. They had darkened as she looked at him. He was just leaning forward to try another kiss when Michelle’s elbow—she had seriously sharp elbows he’d know anywhere—caught him in the ribs.

  She did it hard enough that he klonked foreheads with Katie hard enough to hurt and elicit a yelp of surprise from Katie.

  “What?” Anton spun on Michelle.

  Michelle tipped her head toward Ricardo at the other end of the table.

  “What?”

  “Now that I have your attention.” To her other side, Ricardo offered one of his rare smiles, which was the height of a tease for a Delta operator.

  “Should have left your ass in the jungle where I found it,” Anton grumbled at him.

  “Are you planning to hold that over my head for the rest of my life?”

  “I figure it’s got to be good for something. So, yeah.”

  They traded friendly scowls. There was a reason he liked Ricardo like a brother, even before he’d married Michelle.

  “What have you got?” Anton decided to give him this round.

  “The colonel scared up footage of a trawler Kura in the vicinity of where you found the fishing boat. We have no record of it, but it looks like it could be Russian.”

  “Means Chas is gone.” At least they were done with that.

  “No,” Ricardo tapped his finger against his phone. “The Kura is still in the area. And she’s got a crane big enough for launching a remote-controlled submersible. Wouldn’t be hard for them to tap or sabotage the cable.”

  Anton took another bite of meatball and chewed on that for a moment. “If I was the Russians, I’d go for tapping it. This 2Africa cable is supposed to connect like twenty-something countries to the UK and a couple of the other Europeans. Bet Russia resents not being a part of that. If I was them, I’d mess with it.”

  “Why not do it in Cornwall?”

  Anton didn’t have a good answer to that one.

  Michelle toyed with her spaghetti carbonara. “You said that the UK sites were really well protected.”

  “Except for Ricardo and Hannah messing with their heads at Skewjack, sure.”

  “What kind of protection do they have here?”

  Anton didn’t have the answer to that, but he knew where to look.

  He ducked back to where he’d been holding Katie on the beach. The memory of holding her body close was very distracting, but he shook it off. Instead of walking into the ocean, he turned inland. Somewhere ahead of him was the cable landing point, but where?

  At Sennen Cove it had been a farmhouse that wasn’t actually in use. In Porthcurno, he’d found it on the lower floor of an unusually robust lifeguard hut. The four heavy manhole covers with secure locks, arranged in a line fifty meters from the hut, had been the giveaway there.

  He started toward the cliffs when Katie whispered to him back in the restaurant. “His trail is fading.”

  He veered toward the wider resort beach to the south.

  “That’s better.”

  He upped to a jog, and with only a few corrections, he was soon standing by a brand-new one-story concrete-block house…with tinted windows. In the First World, it was easy to imagine some rich idiot installing one-way windows between themselves and the view. A glance to the side showed that not even the slightly sad excuse for a beach resort had any tinted glass.

  He stepped through a wall into the dim interior.

  Several heavy sea cables came up through the floor from the east—not much thicker than Katie’s wrist. On the other side of the room, much lighter land cables, without all the protective layers and wrappings required to survive under the ocean, headed out through the floor to the west. The two sets of cables were joined together in a big equipment rack. It was the only furnishing in the entire house other than a large backup generator.

  And in the midst of it all, was something that his Army training had been all too clear about.

  “Shit!” Anton let the feel of Katie’s hand slide him back into his own body. Sh
e made it effortless.

  Ricardo raised his eyebrows in question.

  “I was wrong about the tapping. How are you at disarming IEDs? This one looks nastier than any roadside box I ever saw in the Dustbowl.”

  “This is getting way too real,” Katie whispered to Michelle as they sat on the beach, supposedly looking out to sea. A few hundred meters out, fisherman were pulling nets out of the water along a low headland. Pleasure boats didn’t seem to really happen here.

  “Are you talking about the Russians or my dram-brother?”

  “I was talking about the Russians.”

  “Too bad,” Michelle sighed. “I was hoping for a distraction.”

  Katie couldn’t blame her. At this moment, Ricardo and Hannah were breaking into the cable hut to disarm the IED.

  Anton had spotted two booby traps. A simple one on the door and a not so simple one that probably listened for radios and cellphone signals.

  To bypass the latter one, Ricardo and Michelle were using their telepathic link to communicate. Jesse was outside the hut on lookout, to make sure they weren’t interrupted, and hopefully to clear the immediate area if anything went wrong.

  Out on the beach, Isobel had their team leader, Colonel Gibson, and a specialist in Russian munitions on the phone. Michelle was the relay between Isobel and the team infiltrating the hut. And Katie was the useless third wheel.

  Katie held Anton’s hand, not because she could help but because she needed to. They already knew that Chas, or whatever his actual Russian name was, had been there.

  Anton kept his vision inside the house as a third set of eyes.

  She hurt for Michelle. If the bomb went off, it would kill Ricardo and Hannah, but Anton would still be safe.

  Michelle was methodically sifting the coarse sand through her fingers and slowly sorting the light grains and the dark into tiny piles.

  As a test, Katie squeezed Anton’s hand lightly. When he didn’t squeeze back, she hoped that he was too focused to overhear.

  “You have a weird relationship with your stepbrother.”

  Michelle sighed. “I have a weird relationship with everybody. My best friend is an international movie star. I married her brother, which is definitely a little strange. My husband, who I love to death—oh shit, I didn’t just say that—can’t put more than three words together in a row, even telepathically. His best friend is my stupid stepbrother, making the whole circle practically incestuous. If he and Isobel had gotten together, I was going to totally lose it. It’s actually a relief that he’s fallen in love with you.”

  Between one breath and the next, Michelle began relaying questions and instructions between Ricardo telepathically and the experts that Isobel had on the phone. They must have gotten safely past the booby traps. That at least was a relief.

  But it was the only thing that was.

  Katie was now the one having trouble breathing.

  She liked Anton. A great deal. A whopping great deal.

  And there was no questioning the electric charge that sizzled at the lightest contact between their bodies. She’d never so wanted to take a man to bed.

  Falling in love with?

  No, he wasn’t doing that. And neither was she. Not a chance. This would be done and he’d be gone. No matter what they said, she’d only be part of their Shadow Force team as long as she was useful. If life had taught her anything, it was that she could only rely on herself. Others always—

  “Where was I?” Michelle seemed to be done. Her expression looked even more stressed.

  “How are they doing?”

  “How would I know? I was in dress sales for most of my career. The whole paramedic, married-to-a-Delta-Force-soldier, Shadow Force: Psi thing is completely recent. I’m so lost.”

  Katie couldn’t believe that the supremely confident Michelle was anything other than that. With her free hand, Katie took Michelle’s gritty, fine-fingered hand. Michelle’s grip crushed down on hers in desperate relief.

  Katie held on tight. “You were telling me how relieved you were that anyone would want your stepbrother.”

  “What?” Michelle shook her head as if shedding some layer of the fear that threatened to overwhelm her.

  “You teased me about your brother falling in love, even with someone like me.”

  “No. Fallen in love. He’s already there but doesn’t know it yet. I want to tell him just to, you know, freak him out, but I don’t want to spoil his fun. You haven’t decided yet, but you’re close.”

  “Not bloody likely. What, are you suddenly an empath like Isobel now?”

  “No,” Isobel joined the conversation, “but it is rather obvious. And Michelle’s right. It’s lovely to watch you two. It gives me hope that I’ll find the right man someday.”

  “But… but…” Katie knew she was spluttering. “You’re Isobel Manella. You could have anybody you wanted.”

  “Show me a man who doesn’t see me as that ‘film babe,’ and maybe I’ll have a chance. And another actor,” she shuddered. “That’s a world of trouble I want no part of. Add to that, between acting and Shadow Force, my life is itinerant at best. Even nomadic. I’m never in one place more than few weeks, sometimes just for a few days. How am I supposed to have a family like that? Have a life? I sometimes wish I didn’t love the acting so much. But my career is in a place where I keep getting offered better and better roles. The money has gotten so big that it’s meaningless now, but I love the acting.”

  Isobel huffed out a hard breath.

  “Sorry, it just catches up with me sometimes. Truly, it is so perfect watching you two find each other.”

  Michelle bumped a sympathetic shoulder against Isobel’s before turning back to Katie. “Ma and Pa will love you, too. You’re so…exotic.”

  “Exotic? I’m English. The English are never exotic.”

  “Your accent is so lovely that it will be, especially to a couple of North Carolina farmers. But if you love their son, they’ll love you to death just for that. They think the world of Anton. Me? They love me, but I confuse them.”

  Katie got all set to protest but another round of questions arrived telepathically and Michelle and Isobel were focused on that.

  She carefully glanced up at Anton.

  His gaze was fixed out to sea. His stillness was absolute. Total focus.

  Falling in love with a psi-powered American soldier who was a head taller than she was?

  Why didn’t the idea sound as unlikely as it was?

  Chapter 18

  “They got it.” Anton heard Michelle’s pronouncement echo his own.

  Michelle’s sob of relief snapped his attention back to the beach.

  He kept his vision in the house just long enough to see Ricardo and Hannah gather up the explosives and their toolkit, and slip safely out of the building. Once they joined up with Jesse and were headed to the beach, he let his vision go.

  He sagged against Katie as if he’d just run a marathon. He’d never watched a bomb being disarmed before. Watching it be disarmed by two friends who would be killed instantly if anything went wrong was terrifying.

  When they arrived, Michelle leapt to her feet, raced to Ricardo, and wrapped herself around him.

  “Shit! I should have thought about how hard this would be on her.”

  “Isobel and I were here for her.”

  He kissed her on top of the head and wrapped an arm around her shoulders to hold her tight. “You okay?”

  “I was lucky. I knew you couldn’t be hurt if it…went wrong. So it was only incredibly stressful instead of impossible. Your stepsister’s an amazing woman.”

  “Yeah, I know.” And he loved that Katie got that. Michelle needed friends like Katie in her life. “She was always a train wreck as a kid. Trying to be someone different every time you turned around.”

  “She said she was confusing to your parents as a child.”

  “Not half as confusing as she was to herself. But she’s good with Ricardo. Really good.”
<
br />   “And who are you good with?” Katie suddenly blushed almost as red as Michelle occasionally did.

  “You.” It came out as if it was the truth. Then he realized that it was. He was already better just for being with Katie. He no longer felt like such a freak. She didn’t mind that he could send his vision lookabout, didn’t find him creepy or repulsive.

  For just a moment he stepped back and looked at the two of them. That couple over there. Sitting on an exotic African beach. He had his arm around her shoulders and her arm had slipped around his waist without him noticing, because it felt so natural.

  “Definitely you.”

  He slipped back into his body so that he’d be fully there when he kissed her.

  Before he could, a heavy pack dropped to the ground at his feet.

  He didn’t need to look inside to know that it was filled with Russian explosives.

  “Shit, Ricardo. Busy here.”

  “Get busy later. According to the timer we disarmed, in two hours, Chas is going to know that his sabotage didn’t work. He’ll either try again, or he’ll tackle some other section of the cable and we won’t know where. If he’s determined to destroy it, we need to find a way to stop him sooner rather than later. And find out who’s behind him.”

  “Shit, man. When does a dude get a break?”

  “Back side of never,” he echoed Ricardo’s answer. He’d heard it often enough. During Ricardo’s recovery from his torture in the Honduran jungle, he’d shut out Michelle and his own sister, Isobel.

  Anton had figured since he’d flown in and hauled Ricardo’s sorry ass out of the trees that such rules didn’t apply to him. Besides, he’d been in the hospital with the hole in his leg that the rescue had earned him. So, he’d made sure to stay in Ricardo’s face for all nine months of his recovery and physical therapy. There were some levels of trust that civilians could never understand…and the two of them had that.