Spies, Lies and Lovers

by Sally Tyler Hayes

  Alex grabbed a change of clothes and went into the bathroom. He stripped and climbed under the weak spray of icycold water. He put a hand on either side of the shower fixture and leaned into the water, face first, needing to clear his head. He didn’t know if it was the mind-numbing ride or the residual effects of the drug, but he still couldn’t seem to think straight. Maybe it was his life, he decided. His life was too bizarre to contemplate at this point.

  And Geri... God, Geri.

  He hadn’t let anyone near him in months, hadn’t trusted anyone, hadn’t dropped his guard in the least. Until her.

  Alex took a deep breath, shaking his head. He couldn’t think about her. It made him too angry—at his own stupidity, at her duplicity. And if he was too angry, he couldn’t think about how he was going to get out of this. And he had to get out of this.

  Alex picked up the soap and washed, then shut off the shower and reached for a towel. He dressed quickly, hesitating for only a moment in a twinge of conscience he couldn’t afford, one he fought off as he remembered everything. He didn’t really know her, after all. He might have thought he did, might have thought she cared, but he’d been dead wrong. Nearly dead wrong, he amended. He still might die if he wasn’t very careful and very lucky.

  In his tenuous position, people were either with him or against him. There was no in-between, seldom room for mistakes. He’d already made too damned many with her. Alex pushed aside any stray feelings of guilt he might have and took a minute to do what he had to do. She wouldn’t hesitate, he reminded himself. She wouldn’t have her conscience nagging her.

  He was toweling his hair dry when he stepped out of the bathroom a moment later. He found her standing by the door, checking out one of the wicked-looking weapons she’d taken from the intruders at the cabin.

  “It’s all yours,” he said, nodding toward the bathroom.

  She hesitated.

  He forced a smile across his face, a teasing manner that was hard to come by, and whistled. “You know you want to, Geri. Wash off the grime. Clear your head. We can have a truce for another five minutes, can’t we?”

  “A truce? Like two kids playing some game? That’s all it is to you, isn’t it? A game.”

  He shrugged. “I like games. But I have to say, this one hasn’t been much fun lately. I’m getting tired of it.”

  “You could always turn yourself in,” she suggested. “You and your little bomb recipe.”

  He cursed, already tired of the whole conversation. “I’m hungry, Geri. I’m tired. I’m going to eat.”

  He sat down on one of the beds, gulped down two burgers, some cold fries and a cola, remembering too late her penchant for drugging people. Oh, well. As she’d so sweetly pointed out, if she’d wanted him dead, he’d be dead by now.

  He polished off his meal and looked up into the face of his enemy. She fought off a yawn, her eyelids drooping. If she’d gone to the trouble of drugging him last night, she must have spent the whole time searching his computer and the cabin. She wouldn’t have gotten any sleep at all. She’d have to collapse sooner or later. Sleep was one of those things the human body could do without for only so long. He could have waited, his conscience pointed out, rather than have left that little surprise for her in the bathroom.

  Thinking of that, he had to get her into the bathroom. “Go ahead,” he said. “Hop in the shower. I’ll be good.”

  “I’m not turning my back on you for a minute.”

  “I could come in with you, if that would make you more comfortable,” he offered.

  She blanched.

  “It’s not like you’ve got anything I haven’t already seen,” he said. “Not a lot I haven’t touched, either. So what’s the problem?”

  “I despise you,” she declared.

  “Maybe you do, but your body has some ideas of its own where I’m concerned.”

  Alex grinned, because it was the first time all day she’d looked human. He’d found a weak spot. God knew, she probably didn’t have many of those. He bit back his own fury at the entire situation—especially at her—and took one menacing step toward her. She raised the barrel of the weapon, dead center to his chest.

  “You can’t shoot me,” he said. “You haven’t found what you were looking for, and if I’m dead, you won’t ever find it.”

  “We’ll find it,” she boasted.

  He laughed. “Think about it, Geri. I’m a genius. I’ve had months to plan for the likelihood that someone would find me and take me in. You think I’m not ready for this? You think I haven’t done all I possibly can to save my own neck? You’ve got to have me. Otherwise, you’ll never have those explosives.”

  “How do you live with yourself?” she asked.

  He was in no mood for this, and he let loose, lashing right back at her. “How do you live with yourself? How do you pull that trigger and watch somebody fall? Strip the body of anything of value and then take off? Even if they are scum, how do you do that?”

  She paled a bit, but her chin came up, and she pointed the gun at him again. “Years of practice. What about you?”

  “Me?” He shook his head back and forth. Was it so easy for everyone to believe he was evil? Selfish? Money hungry? That he was a killer? Was it so damned easy for her to believe? That was the worst part of all. That she believed it so easily.

  “I haven’t killed anybody,” he said.

  She scoffed at that

  “I haven’t,” Alex repeated, going with the anger. It was much safer than anything else he might feel at the moment. “Believe me, with you, I’m tempted, too. But so far, I’ve managed to resist.”

  “The guard,” she said. “Remember? The night you disappeared? Surely you remember the guard. You had to step over his body to get out. You left him lying there bleeding to death when you took off.”

  “I didn’t kill that guard.”

  She sounded outraged, purely outraged. “We found the gun, Doctor. The one you shot him with. Your prints were all over it.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “So you really are with the government?”

  “I really am.”

  “Forgive me if that doesn’t exactly reassure me.”

  “I don’t give a damn how that makes you feel, but that man you killed? He had a name. Doc. And he happened to be a friend of mine.”

  “Really?” he retorted, telling himself not to believe anything she said.

  “Yes,” she said, murder in her eyes.

  Alex reminded himself that it was indeed a dangerous, deadly game; that he didn’t know her; that he shouldn’t care and still found himself trying to explain. “Look, I’m sorry about what happened to your friend. But I didn’t kill him. He was already dead when I took off.”

  “Fingerprints,” she said. “Yours were on the weapon. The ballistics report said the bullet that killed him came from your gun.”

  “And I suppose you believe everything a ballistics report says? Everything a fingerprint expert says? Everything whatever agency you work for tells you? Do you still believe all that, Geri?”

  “More than anything a crook like you tells me.”

  “I guess I can’t blame you for that,” he said. “I used to think like that, too. I just don’t anymore.”

  “So you’re telling me what? That somebody double-crossed you? That this is all some misunderstanding, and you haven’t done anything wrong?”

  “Would you believe me if I did?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll save my breath,” he said. “You want a shower?”

  “Do you want me to get in the shower? You want me to turn my back on you? Do you think I’m that stupid?”

  “I thought it might help that sour little temper of yours,” he replied, needling her. After all, he had an agenda here. He couldn’t forget that.

  “I could kill you,” she said. “I really could.”

  Alex shook his head, itching for a fight. She hated him, and he’d make it work for him. “You can’t do that,”
he said. “You have orders. I’ll bet you’re somebody who’s followed the rules your whole life. Was Daddy really a general? Was any of that true?”

  She said something vile.

  He grinned back. Quite pleased with himself, he decided he’d never seen a woman this mad. He was ready to press his advantage when her attention shifted from him to the door.

  “What?” he asked. He hadn’t heard a thing.

  She brushed past him, intent on getting to the door, or so he thought. The next second he felt something close around his wrist, heard a click of metal.

  Alex looked down and found himself handcuffed to a metal bar on the wall—the one the TV was bolted to. Well, hell.

  Geri slipped away from him with a smile and said, “You know, I think I will have that shower now.”

  She was still fuming when she got into the shower, although the water was cold enough that she nearly screamed in outrage. He was the most arrogant, insufferable man she’d ever met. The lying, scheming snake had her close to committing out-and-out murder. No, she thought, justifiable homicide. He deserved it.

  She quickly washed off the worst of the grime of the road, soaped her hair, fatigue dogging her. She was tired, and she couldn’t trust those handcuffs she’d taken from the alleged Border Patrol agent. Which meant she had to go back out there and face him. Had to decide what to do.

  She should have stopped somewhere today and called in, had someone come haul Alex away. She could have been back in D.C. by now, debriefed and having the satisfaction of knowing he was behind bars, that he would be there for a long, long time. But something had stopped her. Something about those two men who’d broken into the cabin. Something she’d found on one of the two she’d killed.

  Geri shut off the shower, quickly toweled off and dressed in a pair of shorts and one of Alex’s shirts. She couldn’t take those little, bitty tops a minute longer. A no-nonsense T-shirt was infinitely preferable to that, even if the shirt did belong to him.

  She opened the bathroom door, finding him sitting on the waist-high dresser beside the TV. He smiled and waved, obligingly holding up his hand to show that he was still cuffed, right there where she’d left him.

  Satisfied he wasn’t going anywhere at the moment, Geri closed the door again and pulled from her pocket the tracking device she’d taken from one of the bodies at the cabin. It looked like a beeper, like something thousands of other people wore strapped to their belts or inside a shirt pocket. But it was actually a very sophisticated piece of communications equipment.

  She’d disabled it earlier; she knew exactly how, because she often carried one of these herself. The gadget masters at Division One had designed it two years ago, and it functioned as a pager, a communications unit and a very sophisticated tracking device.

  And as far as she knew, the only people who’d ever used them were Division One agents.

  So how had this one come to be on one of the bodies at the cabin? How had it been set to hone in on the coordinates of the tiny tracking device she carried in her bag? Why would those men be tracking her?

  She didn’t pretend to know that she was acquainted with everyone who worked inside the top-secret agency known as Division One. But they didn’t go around killing each other, and those two men who had slipped into the cabin earlier had been more than willing to kill her. She knew it. She’d seen the look on their faces in that instant before she’d pulled the trigger.

  No one she worked for would have sent them in without a warning to her. If the mission plan was being thrown out and agents were coming in, she would have been warned. Her comm unit would have alerted her.

  It hadn’t, and they’d come charging in, willing and able to kill her.

  That didn’t make any sense. Unless someone had decided her life was expendable. That things had gotten so completely out of control, the man in the next room had to be taken at any cost, including her life. She didn’t pretend to believe that people’s lives weren’t sacrificed along the way, but she had a little trouble swallowing the fact that she’d almost lost hers. That after all she’d been through, all she’d done for her country, she’d be discarded like this.

  Something was wrong, she decided. And until she was satisfied that she knew exactly what it was, she and the mad scientist in the next room weren’t going anywhere.

  She was stuck with him.

  He waited as innocent as a lamb while she came out of the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, eyeing him warily.

  “We’re going to have to come to an agreement,” she said.

  “Mmm.” He nodded. “Where’d you get the cuffs?”

  “From our friends with the Border Patrol.”

  Alex just smiled, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. She was starting to wonder if he did, if there could be some mental imbalance that let him live a guilt-free, worry-free existence.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s that? You almost smiled. What were you thinking?”

  “I was wondering about your mental state, actually. Are you on any medication, Doctor?”

  “Just an occasional antihistamine,” he quipped.

  She glared at him.

  “That’s where it was, right? You had some in your bag. In those little foil medical packets labeled Antihistamine.”

  Geri didn’t acknowledge that in any way.

  “That was good,” he said admiringly. “I never suspected a thing.”

  Geri’s mouth twitched. She couldn’t help it

  “What?” he asked. “Tell me. I could use a laugh.”

  “I was thinking that handcuffs probably aren’t sufficient,” she admitted. “A gag might be in order.”

  Alex laughed, long and loud, not one of those short, cynical bursts from before. He really didn’t give a damn about anything, she decided. Not if he could laugh like that in a predicament like this.

  “Geri?” he said.

  “Hmm?”

  “I didn’t shoot your friend. And until three and a half months ago, the only gun I’d ever held in my hand came from a man who took me target practicing and gave me my first lesson in handguns. Know where we were?”

  “Don’t know, and I don’t care.”

  He named an air-force base near D.C., where he’d been held for a month or so before being taken to the safe house inside a seemingly deserted warehouse she and Dan had been guarding the night he’d disappeared.

  “It was a .45,” Alex said. “Would have had my prints all over it.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “What was your friend shot with?”

  “A .45,” she replied. “Which anyone who’s read the newspapers would know.”

  “Know who put that gun into my hands? Who decided I needed to know something about defending myself, just in case something happened?”

  “No,” she said, offhandedly. “Who?”

  “A military guy. Or maybe FBL I can’t be sure. He wasn’t too specific. Said the name of the agency he worked for wouldn’t mean anything to me, anyway, even if he said it. But I know what he looked like.”

  “I guess you want to tell me, right? You think it’s going to mean something to me?”

  He shrugged. “A guy can hope, can’t he?”

  Losing her patience with him once again, she said, “Go ahead. Tell me. What did he look like?”

  Alex wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked deadly serious as he replied, “Mid-forties, five-eleven, one-eighty, short brown hair, military cut, green eyes, wire-frame glasses—the little oval-shaped ones. He said I could call him Marty.”

  Geri’s expression carefully gave nothing away. She even managed a shrug. “Could be any of thousands of guys in the military.”

  “I didn’t keep that .45,” Alex declared. “I’ve never been comfortable around guns, and I’ve seen the stats. Somebody with a gun in their home is more likely to be shot with it themselves than to ever use it successfully to defend themselves. I decided I didn’t want it But I did fire that weapon that day, and I�
�m sure my fingerprints are on it. I didn’t fire it at your friend. I didn’t kill him.”

  “And...what? I’m supposed to believe you?”

  He shrugged. “I thought you might. Geri?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The man who gave me the gun, the one who left with it that day? After my shooting lesson, we collected my computer and the rest of my things and we got into his car. He drove me to that safe house and told me not to worry about a thing, because his own people were going to take care of me, and everything was going to be just fine. Lucky for me, I didn’t take his word for that.”

  Chapter 9

  “You’re trying to tell me that the man whose agency was given the job of keeping you alive double-crossed you and set you up for the murder of one of his own agents?”

  He shrugged—that maddening, careless shrug. “Well, if you were me, what would you think? Somebody turns up dead outside my lab, from a bullet fired from a gun with my fingerprints on it? And the only gun I’d touched in my life before that happened to be one of the same caliber, given to me earlier by the same man? And all hell just happened to break loose in my lab on his people’s watch? What would a reasonable person assume, Geri?”

  “You’re not a reasonable person,” she complained.

  “Are you? What would you say happened?”

  “I’d say you’re a liar. A damned good one.”

  “So why haven’t you taken me in? To whoever you work for?”

  Geri turned her head and swore, absolutely hating the way his mind worked.

  “Are you an agent, Geri? Do you work for him?”

  She said nothing. There was nothing to say. He was terribly clever, and she didn’t believe him. Not for a second.

  “What’s the matter?” Alex continued. “Don’t you trust him? Is that why you haven’t taken me in? Because you’re just not sure anymore that you can trust him?”

  “I’ve worked with that man for four years,” she said

  Alex shrugged. “People change. They can fool you. Look at you. You did a bang-up job of making me believe you were some scared, needy little woman trying to get away from a man who beat her.”