by Nora Roberts
"About a week ago, my brother was taken, kidnapped by an organization known as Hammer. You've heard of them?"
It was training that kept his face blank over a mix of fear and rage. His association with that particular organization had nearly killed him.
"I've heard of them."
"All we know is that they took my brother from his home in Ireland, where he had continued, and nearly completed, his work on the Horizon project. They intend to hold him until he has perfected the serum. You understand what the repercussions could be if a group like that possessed the formula?"
Trace tapped the ash of his cigarette onto the wooden floor. "I've been told I have a reasonably developed intelligence."
Driven, she grabbed his wrist. Because she was a woman in a man's field, physical contact was usually reserved for family and loved ones. Now she held on to Trace, and the only hope she had. "Mr. O'Hurley, we can't afford to joke about this."
"Careful how you use we." Trace waited until her fingers uncurled. "Let me ask you, Dr. Fitzpatrick, is your brother a smart man?"
"He's a genius."
"No, no, I mean does he have two grains of common sense to rub together?"
Her shoulders straightened again because she was all too ready to lay her head on the table and weep. "Flynn is a brilliant scientist, and a man who under normal circumstances can take care of himself quite nicely."
"Fine, because only a fool would believe that if he came up with the formula for Hammer, he'd stay alive. They like to call themselves terrorists, liberators, rebels. What they are is a bunch of disorganized fanatics, headed by a rich madman. They kill more people by mistake than they do on purpose." Frowning, he rubbed a hand over his chest. "They've got enough savvy to keep them going, and pots of money, but basically, they're idiots. And there's nothing more dangerous than a bunch of dedicated idiots. My advice to your brother would be to spit in their eye."
Her already pale skin was ghost white. "They have his child." Gillian placed a hand on the table for support as she rose. "They took his six-year-old daughter." With that, she fled the cantina.
Trace sat where he was. Not his business, he reminded himself as he reached for the bottle again. He was on vacation. He'd come back from the dead and intended to enjoy his life. Alone.
Swearing, he slammed the bottle down and went after her.
Her anger had her covering ground quickly. She heard him call her name but didn't stop. She'd been an idiot to believe that a man like him could help. She'd be better off attempting to negotiate with the terrorists. At least with them she wouldn't go in expecting any compassion.
When he grabbed her arm, she swung around. Temper gave her the energy that lack of sleep and food had depleted.
"I told you to wait a damn minute."
"You've already given me your considered opinion, Mr. O'Hurley. There doesn't seem to be any need for further discussion. I don't know what Mr. Forrester saw in you. I don't know why he sent me to look for a man who would rather sit in a seedy little dive swilling whiskey than help save lives. I came looking for a man of courage and compassion and found a tired, dirty drunk who cares about no one and nothing."
It stung, more than he'd expected. His fingers stayed firm on her arm as he waved away a small boy with a cardboard box filled with Chiclets. "Have you finished? You're making a scene."
"My brother and niece are being held by a group of terrorists. Do you think I care whether I embarrass you or not?"
"It takes more than an Irish redhead on a roll to embarrass me," he said easily. "But I have a policy against drawing attention to myself. Old habit. Let's take a walk."
She very nearly yanked her arm away. The part of her that was pride burned to do it. The part that was love triumphed, and she subsided. In silence she walked beside him, down the narrow planks that led to the water.
The sand was white here against a dark sea and a darker sky. A few boats were docked, waiting for tomorrow's fishing or tomorrow's tourists. The night was quiet enough that the music from the cantina carried to them. Trace noted that somebody was singing about love and a woman's infidelity. Somebody always was.
"Look, Dr. Fitzpatrick, you caught me at a bad time. I don't know why Charlie sent you to me."
"Neither do I."
He stopped long enough to cup his hands around a match and a cigarette. "What I mean is, this situation should be handled by the ISS."
She was calm again. Gillian didn't mind losing her temper. It felt good. But she also knew that more was accomplished with control. "The ISS wants the formula as badly as Hammer. Why should I trust my brother's and my niece's lives to them?"
"Because they're the good guys."
Gillian turned toward the sea, and the wind hit her dead on. Though it helped clear her head, she didn't notice the first stars blinking to life. "They are an organization run by many men—some good, some bad, all ambitious, all with their own concept of what is necessary for peace and order. At the moment, my only concern is my family. Do you have family, Mr. O'Hurley?"
He drew hard on the cigarette. "Yeah." Over the border, he thought. He hadn't seen them in seven years, or was it eight? He'd lost track. But he knew Chantel was in L.A. filming a movie, Maddy was in New York starring in a new play. Abby was raising horses and kids in Virginia. His parents were finishing up a week's gig in Buffalo.
He might have lost track of the time, but not of his family.
"Would you trust the lives of any of the members of your family to an organization? One that, if they considered it necessary for the common good, might sacrifice them?" She closed her eyes. The wind felt like heaven, warm, salty and strong. "Mr. Forrester understood and agreed that what was needed to save my brother and his child was a man who would care more about them than the formula. He thought you were that man."
"He was off base." Trace pitched his cigarette into the surf. "Charlie knew I was considering retiring. This was just his way of keeping me in the game."
"Are you as good as he told me?" With a laugh. Trace rubbed a hand over his chin. "Probably better. Charlie was never much for back patting."
Gillian turned again, this time to face him. He didn't look like a hero to her, with the rough beard and the grimy clothes. But there had been strength in his hand when he'd taken her arm, and she'd sensed an undercurrent of violence. He'd be passionate when it was something he wanted, she thought, whether it was a goal, a dream or a woman. Under usual circumstances, she preferred men with cool, analytical minds, who attacked a problem with logic and patience. But it wasn't a scientist she needed now. Trace dipped his hands into his pocket and fought the urge to squirm. She was looking at him as though he were a laboratory rat, and he didn't like it. Maybe it was the hint of Ireland in her voice or the shadows under her eyes, but he couldn't bring himself to walk away.
"Look, I'll contact the ISS. The closest field office is in San Diego. You can feed them whatever information you have. Inside of twenty-four hours, some of the best agents in the world will be looking for your brother."
"I can give you a hundred thousand dollars." Her mind was made up. She had discarded logic for instinct. Forrester had said this man could do it. Her father had agreed. Gillian was throwing her vote with theirs. "The price isn't negotiable, because it's all I have. Find my brother and my niece, and with a hundred thousand dollars you can retire in style."
He stared at her for a moment, and then, biting off an oath, he walked toward the sea. The woman was crazy. He was offering her the skill of the best intelligence organization in the world, and she was tossing money in his face. A tidy sum.
Trace watched the sea roll up and recede. He'd never been able to hang on to more than a few thousand at a time. It just wasn't his nature. But a hundred thousand could mean the difference between retiring or just talking about retiring.
The spray flew over his face as he shook his head. He didn't want to get involved, not with her, not with her family, and not with some nebulous formula that might or
might not save the world from the big blast.
What he wanted was to go back to his hotel, order up a five-star meal and go to bed on a full stomach. God, he wanted some peace. Time to figure out what to do with his life.
"If you're determined to have a free-lancer, I can give you a couple of names."
"I don't want a couple of names. I want you."
Something about the way she said it made his stomach knot. The reaction made him all the more determined to get rid of her. "I just came off nine months of deep cover. I'm burned out, Doc. You need someone young, gung ho and greedy." For the second time he ran his hands over his face. "I'm tired."
"That's a cop-out," she said, and the sudden strength in her voice surprised him enough to have him turning around. She stood straight, loose tendrils of hair flying around her face, pale as marble in the light of the rising moon. It suddenly struck him that in fury and despair she was the most stunning woman he'd ever seen. Then he lost that thought as she advanced on him, her Irish leading the way.
"You don't want to get involved. You don't want to be responsible for the lives of an innocent man and a young child. You don't want to be touched by that. Mr. Forrester saw you as some kind of a knight, a man of principle and compassion, but he was wrong. You're a selfish shell of a man who couldn't have deserved a friend like him. He was a man who cared, who tried to help for nothing more than the asking, and who died because of his own standards."
Trace's head snapped up. "What the hell are you talking about?" His eyes caught the light and glittered dangerously. In one swift, silent move he had Gillian by both arms. "What the hell do you mean? Charlie had a stroke."
Her heart was beating hard in her throat. She'd never seen anyone look more capable of murder than Trace did at that moment. "He was trying to help. They'd followed me. Three men."
"What three men?"
"I don't know. Terrorists, agents, whatever you chose to call them. They broke into the house when I was with him." She tried to even her breathing by concentrating on the pain his fingers were inflicting on her arms. "Mr. Forrester pushed me through some kind of hidden panel in his library. I heard them on the other side. They were looking for me." She could remember even now how hot and airless it had been behind the panel. How dark. "He was putting them off, telling them I'd left. They threatened him, but he stuck by the story. It seemed that they believed him."
Her voice was shaking. Trace watched her dig her teeth into her lower lip to steady herself. "It got very quiet. I was more frightened by the quiet and tried to get out to help him. I couldn't find the mechanism."
"Two inches down from the ceiling."
"Yes. It took me almost an hour before I found it." She didn't add that she'd fought hysteria the entire tune, or that at one point she'd beaten against the panel and shouted, prepared to give herself up rather than stay in the suffocating dark. "When I got out, he was dead. If I'd been quicker, I might have been able to help him—I'll never be sure."
"The ISS said stroke."
"It was diagnosed as one. Such things can be brought on by a simple injection. In any case, they caused the stroke, and they caused it while looking for me. I have to live with that." Trace had dropped his grip, and she'd grabbed his shirtfront without realizing it, her fingers curled tight. "And so do you. If you won't help me for compassion or for money, maybe you'll do it for revenge."
He turned away from her again. He'd accepted Charlie's death once. A stroke, a little time bomb in the brain set to go off at a certain time. Fate had said: Charlie, you've got sixty-three years, five months, on earth. Make the best of it. That he'd accepted.
Now he was being told it wasn't fate, it was three men. Fate was something he was Irish enough to live with. But it was possible to hate men, to pay men back. It was something to think about. Trace decided to get a pot of black coffee and do just that.
"I'll take you back to your hotel."
"But—"
"We'll get some coffee and you can tell me everything Charlie said, everything you know. Then I'll tell you if I'll help you."
If it was all he'd give, she'd take it. "I checked into the same hotel as you. It seemed practical."
"Fine." Trace took her arm and began to walk with her. She wasn't steady, he noted. Whatever fire had pushed her this far was fading fast. She swayed once, and he tightened his grip. "When's the last time you ate?"
"Yesterday."
He gave a snort that might have been a laugh. "What kind of a doctor are you?"
"Physicist."
"Even a physicist should know something about nutrition. It goes like this. You eat, you stay alive. You don't eat, you fall down." He released her arm and slipped his around her waist. She would have protested if she'd had the energy.
"You smell like a horse."
"Thanks. I spent most of the day bumping around the jungle. Great entertainment. What part of Ireland?"
Fatigue was spreading from her legs to her brain. His arm felt so strong, so comforting. Without realizing it, she leaned against him. "What?"
"What part of Ireland are you from?"
"Cork."
"Small world." He steered her into the lobby. "So's my father. What room?"
"Two-twenty-one."
"Right next door to mine."
"I gave the desk clerk a thousand pesos."
Because the elevators were small and heated like ovens, he took the stairs. "You're an enterprising woman, Dr. Fitzpatrick."
"Most women are. It's still a man's world."
He had his doubts about that, but he didn't argue the point. "Key?"
She dug into her pocket, fighting off the weakness. She wouldn't faint. That she promised herself. Trace took the key from her palm and stuck it in the lock. When he opened the door, he shoved her against the wall in the hallway.
"What's wrong with you?" she asked. She swallowed the rest when she saw him draw a hunting knife out of his pocket.
It was all he had. He hadn't considered it necessary to strap on a gun while on vacation. His eyes were narrow as he stepped into the room and kicked aside some of the debris.
"Oh, God." Gillian braced herself in the doorway and looked. They'd done a thorough job. Even someone inexperienced in such matters could see that nothing had been overlooked.
Her suitcase had been cut apart, and the clothes she hadn't unpacked were strewn everywhere. The mattress and the cushions from the single chair had been slit, and hunks of white stuffing littered the floor. The drawers of the bureau had been pulled out and overturned.
Trace checked the bath and the access through the windows. They'd come in the front, he concluded, and a search of a room this size wouldn't have taken more than twenty minutes.
"You've still got your tail, Doc." He turned but didn't sheath the knife. "Pick up what you need. We'll talk next door."
She didn't want to touch the clothes, but she forced herself to be practical. She needed them, and it didn't matter that other hands had touched them. Moving quickly, she gathered up slacks and skirts and blouses. "I have cosmetics and toiletries in the bath."
"Not anymore you don't. They dumped the lot." Trace took her arm again. This time he checked the hall and moved quietly to the room next door. Again he braced Gillian against the wall and opened the door. His fingers relaxed on the handle of the knife, though only slightly. So they hadn't made him. That was good. He signaled to her to come in behind him, double-locked the door, then began a careful search.
It was an old habit to leave a few telltales, one he followed even off duty. The book on his nightstand was still a quarter inch over the edge. The single strand of hair he'd left on the bedspread hadn't been disturbed. He pulled the drapes, then sat on the bed and picked up the phone.
In perfect Spanish that had Gillian's brow lifting, he ordered dinner and two pots of coffee. "I got you a steak," he said when he hung up the phone. "But this is Mexico, so I wouldn't expect it for about an hour. Sit down."
With her clothes still
rolled in her arms, she obeyed. Trace pushed himself back on the bed and crossed his legs.
"What are they after?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"They've got your brother. Why do they want you?"
"I occasionally work with Flynn. About six months ago I spent some time with him in Ireland on Horizon. We had a breakthrough." She let her head tilt back against the cushion. "We believed we'd found a way to immunize the individual cell. You see, in ionizing radiation injury the main structure affected is the single cell. Energy rays enter the tissue like bullets and cause localized injury in the cells. We were working on a formula that prevented molecular changes within the affected cells. In that way we could—"
"That's just fascinating, Doc. But what I want to know is why they're after you."
She realized she'd nearly been reciting the information in her sleep and tried to straighten in the chair. "I took the notes on this part of the project with me, back to the institute, to work on them more intensely. Without them it could take Flynn another year, maybe more, to reconstruct the experiment."
"So you're the missing piece of the puzzle, so to speak?"
"I have the information." The words began to slur as her eyes closed.
"You're telling me you carry that stuff with you?" God save him from amateurs. "Did they get it?"
"No, they didn't get it, and yes, I have it with me. Excuse me," she murmured, and went to sleep.
Trace sat where he was for a moment and studied her. Under other circumstances he would have been amused to have a woman he'd known for only a few hours fall asleep in the chair of his hotel room in the middle of a conversation. At the moment, his sense of humor wasn't what it might have been.
She was deathly pale from exhaustion. Her hair was a fiery halo that spoke of strength and passion. Clothes lay balled in her lap. Her bag was crushed between her hip and the side of the chair. Without hesitation, Trace got up and eased it out. Gillian didn't move a muscle as he dumped the contents on the bed.
He pushed aside a hairbrush and an antique hammered-silver compact. There was a small paperback phrase book—which told him she didn't speak the language—and the stub of a ticket for a flight from O'Hare. Her checkbook had been neatly balanced in a precise hand. Six hundred and twenty-eight dollars and eighty-three cents. Her passport picture was better than most, but it didn't capture the stubbornness he'd already been witness to. She'd worn her hair loose for it, he noted, frowning a bit at the thick riot of curls that fell beyond her shoulders.
He'd always had a weakness for long, luxuriant, feminine hair.
She'd been born in Cork twenty-seven years before, in May, and had kept her Irish citizenship, though her address was listed as New York.
Trace pushed the passport aside and reached for her wallet. She could use a new one, he decided as he opened it. The leather had been worn smooth at the creases. Her driver's license was nearly up for renewal, and the picture on it carried the same serious expression as the passport. She had three hundred and change in cash, and another two thousand in traveler's checks. He found a shopping list folded into the corner of the billfold along with a parking ticket. A long-overdue parking ticket.
A flip through the pictures she carried showed him a black-and-white snapshot of a man and a woman. From the clothes he judged that it had been taken in the late fifties. The woman's hair was as neat as the collar and cuffs on the blouse she wore, but she was smiling as though she meant it. The man, husky and full-faced, had his arm around the woman, but he looked a bit uncomfortable.
Trace flipped to the next and found a picture of Gillian in overalls and a T-shirt, her head thrown back, laughing, her arms around the same man. He was older by perhaps twenty years. She looked happy, delighted with herself, and nothing like a physicist. Trace flipped quickly to the next snapshot.
This was the brother. The resemblance to Gillian was stronger than with the people Trace assumed were her parents. His hair was a tamer red, almost a mahogany, but he had the same wide-set green eyes and full mouth. In his arms he held a pixie of a girl. She would have been around three, he concluded, with that telltale mane of wildly curling red hair. Her face was round and pleased, showing a dimple near the corner of her mouth.
Before he realized it, Trace was grinning and holding the photo closer to the light. If a picture told a story, he'd bet his last nickel the kid was a handful. He had a weakness for cute kids who had the devil's gleam in their eyes. Swearing under his breath, he closed the billfold.
The contents of her bag might have told him a few things about her, but there hadn't been any notes. A few phone calls would fill in the blanks as far as Dr. Gillian Fitzpatrick was concerned. He glanced at her again as she sat sleeping, then, sighing, dumped everything back in her purse. He might have to wait until morning to get anything else out of her.
When the knock came at the door, she didn't budge. Trace let the room-service waiter set up the table. After giving Gillian three hefty shakes and getting no more than a murmur in response, he gave up. Muttering to himself, he slipped off her sandals, then gathered her up in his arms. She sighed, cuddled and caused him an uncomfortable pressure just under the ribs. She smelled like a meadow with the wildflowers just opening. By the time he'd gotten her into bed, he'd given up on the idea of sleeping himself.
Trace poured his first cup of coffee and settled down to eat his dinner—and hers.
Chapter Two
