“Yes?”
“I thought I lost you.”
“You never will. To you, I will always come back.” His arms tightened around her. “Sleep, my Lara, I’m here,” he murmured in her ear, felt her body relax against his as she slipped into exhausted slumber.
He watched her in the fading evening light. She slept on her side, facing away from him, and his hand rested on her hip. He looked down at her, at this remarkable woman sleeping by his side. He was actually sleeping with a woman not in the spoken sense of the words, without having made love to her. It occurred to him that he was thinking about it as making love, not just the casual sex he had always been careful to allow, and was no longer surprised that the thought didn’t bother him, not anymore.
He realized what it would mean for them both to be together. Understood the complications of that life, their life, considering whom they were, the work they did—the past days had accentuated that all too sharply. But he didn’t care. He knew now that he would do all it took to be with her, to have her as his.
He stroke her cheek, caressing soft skin. Her long dark hair framed her face, the light from the fireplace, gradually becoming more dominant in the room over the darkening sky outside, playing with its soft auburn hues. His gaze traced the delicate curve of her neck down to the rise of her breasts under the thin undershirt she was wearing, then down to where the blanket covered her under his hand. He raised his eyes back up to her face, his wonder at the emotions this woman had awakened in him never fading away. He touched his lips to her brow, lay down, and tightened his arms protectively around her, to let her know that he was here, that she was not alone, that he would never leave.
He was still marveling at how it felt, holding her this way, when he fell asleep.
Darkness reigned outside, deep and silent, when Lara woke up, the only light in the room from the fireplace, burning low. Donovan, it was Donovan in bed with her, she realized even before she opened her eyes, had a dim recollection of him carrying her to bed. And getting in with her, this time. His arm was around her and she lay quietly, feeling it, feeling him, his body warm and firm against her back. He was here, in her bedroom. In her bed. She hadn’t allowed that since Brian died, always kept men away. But Donovan was different. With him, everything was different.
Her heart beat hard, and she could do nothing to calm it, nothing to order it to obey her. She turned slowly in Donovan’s arms, her legs brushing against his, and met his eyes, dark blue in the flickering light, hiding nothing. Fully awake now, and close, so close. The blanket was up to his waist, and his chest was bare. He had taken most of his clothes off, she remembered, blushed with this knowledge under his gaze and hoped he would not see this in the dim light of the fire. But then he could read her so well, just as she could read him, knew that he wanted, but knowing what he now did, why she had resisted him, would wait, let her decide if she was ready.
She wondered at this man who loved her no matter what he saw, what he knew about her, and who had somehow managed to get in. Before the thought even crossed her mind, she extended her hand, soft fingers tracing the lines of his face, down to his chest, found that his heart was beating as hard as hers. She raised her eyes back to his. Let him see her, no longer hiding from him.
He shifted slowly, rolling her onto her back. He touched his lips to hers, deepening the kiss as his hand pulled the blanket away and moved up her side, subtly brushing the gentle curve of a breast, felt a soft intake of breath that reverberated through him at his caress. He leaned back, his gaze tracing the slow movement of his hand along her body, the gentle touch of his fingertips awakening in her sensations long forgotten, thought dead and buried together with that part of her she hadn’t imagined anyone would ever again get through to. As his hand moved back up he rounded to the inside of her thigh, up to her panties, stopping short of touching them, touching her. He raised his eyes to hers, saw her watching him, didn’t take his eyes off hers as he moved his hand up on bare skin, under her undershirt, pulling it up as he did. Slow, giving her time, feeling her respond to him as he touched her, wanted her, seeing the glimmer of need in her eyes as he aroused her.
She touched her hand to his, and his heartbeat quickened when she helped him take her undershirt off. Even as his hands were back on her he kissed her, his mouth seeking, craving more. His lips traced the gentle curve of her throat, down to her breast, his tongue teasing soft skin as she bowed back under him, erupting awake, already drowning in the sensations, already lost in him, in them. His hands and mouth explored her body, and this time he did not stop, did not hesitate when he reached her, found her wanting him, his moan mirroring hers, and he rose just enough to slip her panties off, trying hard not to let his wanting her so much control him in this, their first time. Failing.
There is nothing separating us anymore, the fleeting thought crossed her mind as he pulled off his underwear and shifted on top of her, bringing his mouth down on hers as her arms came up around him, pulling him down to her.
“Lara,” he mumbled against her lips, “my Lara,” and, unable to wait any longer, he pushed himself inside her, heard her gasp as he filled her, felt her close tightly around him, moved inside her, his eyes never leaving hers, wanting to see her, let her see herself in them, the intensity in his eyes mirroring the intensity of his movement, their movements as their pace quickened, matching that of urgent need finally unleashed, allowing what was right to be, any remnants of the walls that had been between them dissipating as they finally gave themselves to each other.
They lay, quiet, wrapped around each other, for a long time after. His breathing was calm, his body relaxed against hers, and she marveled at this, at herself this way, with this man in her bed. She wondered quietly to herself, there in the gently flickering light of the fire, savoring the feel of his strong body. She shifted a little, and his arms tightened around her, holding her close to him. But then she’d known he was awake, his wasn’t the relaxation of sleep. She raised her head from his shoulder and looked at him, at this man who had her . . . who had her, that was just it, the ‘it’ that still perplexed her so.
His eyes were closed. Hers moved on him, followed the tips of her fingers as she caressed softly, exploring him. She skimmed over his shoulders, his chest, lingering, taking her time with him, with his body that lay so naturally against hers, frowned over an old scar just under his ribs and kissed it tenderly. His stomach muscles quivered under her touch, no longer relaxed, nothing about him calm, his eyes open, on her, and he was already hard when her fingers skimmed along him. He caught her hand and reversed their positions in a quick move, easily pinning her under him.
“Hey!” she protested, wriggling under him, which really wasn’t helping his self-control. “I was doing something there!”
“Yeah, I noticed.” He chuckled softly, amazed at how easily this woman could take him to the verge of control, and embarked on some arousing of his own.
Chapter Seven
“This can’t be right.” Dr. Tanner stood up and contemplated the jet beyond the thick divide. It looked forlorn now, standing alone on the inspection floor, with no people inside or around it. Just the aircraft itself, an overwhelming variety of hardware hooked up to its systems, all access doors and panels open. It looks so helpless, she couldn’t help but think. Hard to believe it could be at the center of an ominous plot.
And yet all evidence was pointing to just that.
The crime scene investigators had found nothing useful, or so she heard them say among themselves. That part of the investigation was not hers to deal with. All that mattered to her was this aircraft and its embedded systems. This was what she and her staff did, figured out what made aircraft behave other than they were designed to. Which was why the aviation accident investigators had left, too, sometime during the night, as did the intelligence agents, knowing the best way to getting some answers was to let her and her people do what they did better than most.
And yet they had been unable to reach
any helpful conclusions of their own. They had run all the mandatory checks of the aircraft’s components, all of which were still connected directly to the unrivaled range of machinery in the lab. They had then run a check to look for any systems that shouldn’t be there, something that might have been installed in the aircraft, although they hadn’t expected to find anything. This same check was mandatory in every IDSD and allied airport before any manned aircraft, civilian and military alike, took off, especially now, with the recently discovered signal jammer they knew rogue groups might already have. The fact was that this aircraft had been thoroughly checked each and every time it was used, and nothing unknown had been installed in it.
No matter what they had tried, Dr. Tanner and her people had found nothing to explain what happened to this aircraft. Nothing until she herself had gone through the information provided by the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, which allowed her to hear what had gone on in the cockpit and view control and sensor data logs on the lab’s screens. She had gone through the information twice, in fact, and had then had her techs repeat some of their earlier testing of the aircraft’s systems, hoping she was wrong. But all these tests ultimately did was confirm what the initial checks had shown, that none of the systems in this aircraft had been infected with malicious software, hacked or otherwise interfered with in any way. They all worked perfectly. In fact, the aircraft standing on the other side of the divide could be refueled and sent up again right now.
And yet, as the last words of the pilots attested, this aircraft had been controlled from the outside. No way around concluding that that’s what happened. Something had taken control of it, and, once it had been landed on Cres, whatever had done that had disengaged again. All without making any apparent changes to the aircraft’s avionics.
Anyone else might have been confounded, reaching the conclusion that there was no way this could have been done. But eight months earlier, Tanner had assisted in the testing of a technology just entering the implementation phase, right here, in this hangar, on an IDSD-MIL Technology Demonstrator UAV. And those tests had just about mimicked what seemed to have been done with this aircraft her lab had just finished inspecting. The problem was that she wasn’t part of the development process of that technology and had no ready access to it, and so she couldn’t directly ascertain her assumption. But she did have something that could give her a clue.
Tanner accessed a secure partition in the lab’s mainframe, one only she was cleared for, and went straight to the data she knew was still there, the UAV tests conducted under the project manager’s strict supervision. While she wasn’t privy to the exact structure and operation of the technology in question, she was privy to the test parameters and results and had in fact assisted in their analysis. Which was how she knew what to look for—the detection parameters for a specific signal, residual signal to be exact, generated whenever the technology was used to control an aircraft, and that would never be picked up unless those searching knew specifically what to look for. This signal, an intentional feature built into the technology, was no less confidential than the technology itself, for all the obvious reasons.
She was alone in the lab. Her staff had been working the entire day and most of the night before, and she had sent them to get some rest, knowing the importance of a fresh mind and seeing the signs of frustration in them—they weren’t used to failing. But she had stayed, unable to let the mystery of this aircraft go, had caught a few hours of fitful sleep on the sofa in her office and had then returned here to try to understand what was bothering her, what her mind was telling her she was missing. Which was how she came to be where she was now, about to test the only possibility left.
She made sure the lab door was locked, just in case, then returned to the workstation and consulted the information in her secure files again, and calibrated a signal receiver accordingly. She then selected specific systems and controls in the aircraft and activated them one by one. She watched not the aircraft, but the signal receiver’s screen. Nothing. She let out a relieved breath and turned away, then stopped, thinking. She wasn’t taking these measurements like she should be. The technology she was thinking of would have been used on the aircraft while it was in flight, operating in its entirety, and after all its systems had been fully active and interacting with one another for a time. Once the technology was activated, the residual signal would appear, its strength depending on the length of time the technology was at work. When the technology relinquished control again, the residual signal would remain for a time, eventually fading.
This aircraft had been under the suspect technology’s presumed control well over a day before—almost two now—but had been shut down since it had landed, and since it had been brought to the hangar had only operated in a controlled environment and in a compartmentalized manner, its systems never active all at once. This meant that a shadow of the residual signal she was looking for might still be there, but it would be detectable only if all systems were simultaneously active. And it would be far less evident by now, requiring more sensitive measurement parameters.
She recalibrated the signal receiver and activated all the aircraft’s systems remotely, from the lab, switching them on in an exact flight simulation sequence. And then she waited, her gaze on the screen, counting the seconds silently in her head. Long minutes passed, and she finally began to relax, to think that she was wrong, when the receiver screen came to life, pulsing with a steady, albeit faint, shadow signal. Tanner closed her eyes. She now knew it was not only possible, it was in fact likely. This aircraft must have been controlled from the outside using technology no one was supposed to even know about, let alone have.
She listened once again to the cockpit voice recorder audio file, to the last words uttered by the dead pilots. Her eyes returned to the silvery aircraft on the other side on the divide, the innocent pawn in the now all too likely ominous plot. Then, deciding, she called the inspection lab’s administrative aide.
“Get me . . .” She struggled with herself, agitated. She would have liked to get to the bottom of this herself, contact the same people she’d assisted eight months before, but her orders were clear. This investigation was not only of the highest priority, the security around it was at a maximum to prevent information leaking out. She was not allowed to talk to anyone other than the person specifically designated to receive any findings that came out of her lab.
She tried to remember the name of the man she had no choice but to call, then waved the attempt away in frustration. “Get me the agent in charge of the ambassador investigation,” she finally said.
The morning after sound, tension-free sleep followed by lovemaking that felt so right, was carefree and relaxed. As Donovan cleared the kitchen counter after breakfast, Lara stood leaning back on it, watching him. A faint blush rose on her cheeks when he turned and saw her eyes on him, when his gaze met hers, unveiled, then flickered down her body. He walked over to her and pulled her into a kiss, not holding back, and she leaned into him, responding.
“How can a day that began so bad end so good?” she asked in wonder, and lost herself in his answer, another kiss to remind her, remind them both, that the events that nearly resulted in both their deaths were over, that they were finally together.
He untied the short robe she was wearing and slipped his hands inside, touched soft skin. He was nuzzling the hollow of her neck when his phone, laying on the counter beside hers, sounded his unit’s priority call-in tone.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he grumbled. “I specifically told them to call me only if the world ends.” But he reached for the phone and frowned at what the caller told him.
“A dead US Air Force major,” he told Lara when he ended the call.
“So why you?”
“It’s at ARPA,” he said. He was the agent in charge of the USFID unit that handled interdepartmental, interagency and intercountry investigations with a potential for sensitive entanglement, the Serious Incident
Response Team, USFID-SIRT. And since whatever this was involved the highly secretive Advanced Research Projects Agency—previously DARPA, renamed and reorganized more than two decades before to reflect a new era of projects and international cooperation—if he was called in, there had to be a good reason.
“I have to change.” He looked down and corrected himself. “I need to put some clothes on.” He touched his lips to Lara’s, then kissed her again, wanting more. “You staying here?” he asked as he considered going upstairs for his clothes, then figured he’d simply cross to his place next door through the back yard. He’d need a fresh change of clothes anyway.
“I’ll go in. I left rather abruptly yesterday, Frank must be worried. Aiden too.”
“I updated Frank yesterday, after you and I came back here. He knows you’re with me. I spoke with Donna, too. I’ll see you as soon as humanly possible, my Lara.” He kissed her again and left her smiling.
In hangar A506IDSD-T at the IDSD-alliance air base at Mons, Belgium, the same aircraft was still standing alone on the otherwise empty inspection floor. But this time its systems were all active, operated from the main inspection lab.
“See?” Dr. Tanner was sitting in one of her lab techs’ chairs. Her own, before the main console, was taken by Brendan Ailee, the aviation engineer who had appeared there a short while before accompanied by the same stern agent who had first appeared in her office early the previous day, closing the door behind him and letting her know of her new priority assignment, giving her just enough time to clear the hangar and prepare her lab and her people.
“That’s impossible. We’re not even using it yet,” the engineer said, staring aghast at the signal receiver’s screen. At the faint, yet clearly visible, proof of how this aircraft had been taken.
“And yet, there it is.”
“Yes. But it’s impossible. I mean, technically it’s possible, the technology is functionally ready, or almost ready. But it’s not fully operational, we’re just in the testing stages. I don’t get it. How could anyone get their hands on it?”
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