by Paula Graves
He wondered if they were feeling as tired as he was. He was getting a little too old to run these overnight covert operations without feeling the consequences.
The door to his office opened without a warning knock, and two people entered without hesitation or preamble. One was a sandy-haired man in his early forties, with blue eyes and a golden tan that seemed to have lingered from the years he spent bumming around the Caribbean. The other was a slender, handsome woman in her midforties, with golden-brown skin that showed little of her age, black hair worn in a short, neat cut and sharp brown eyes that missed nothing. They were Maddox Heller and Rebecca Cameron, the closest thing he had to partners.
Over the years, Quinn had learned that he wasn’t really partner material.
“We need to talk, Quinn,” Cameron said.
“About what, Becky?” He was taking his life in his hands, using her nickname without being asked to do so. Only her close friends called her Becky, and along with being a lousy partner, he wasn’t exactly great at being a friend, either.
“What’s this about you going to Cincinnati last night?” Heller asked flatly, pulling up one of the chairs in front of Quinn’s desk.
Quinn arched one eyebrow. “Have a seat.”
“Are you running an op without consulting us?” Cameron asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s not my op.”
“Then whose?” Heller asked.
“Martin Dalrymple’s.”
“The dead spook?”
Quinn slanted a hard look at Heller. “Martin Dalrymple served this country with honor and distinction, at great sacrifice to himself. A little respect for a fallen hero, please.”
Heller looked suitably repentant. “Was he in contact with you?”
“Not exactly.” Quinn unlocked the lap drawer of his desk and withdrew a phone he kept locked away most of the time. It was a burner, a phone not even his partners had the number for. It was for old contacts from his days in the agency. Martin Dalrymple had been one of those contacts. “I got a text message from Martin two days ago. It was a code we’d used years ago on another op. He knew I’d remember it.”
Cameron’s shapely brows lowered, carving a couple of small lines in the smooth skin over her nose. “What kind of message?”
“It said, ‘Get her out.’”
“And you knew he was talking about Risa?”
“I’d contacted Dal when we spotted Risa in that surveillance photo,” Quinn said. “I asked if he was running an op with her.”
“What did he say?”
“He never replied—until that text message.”
“So you have no idea what he was up to?” Cameron asked, her curiosity apparently beginning to overcome her irritation with Quinn.
“I’m hoping Risa McGinnis can fill in some of the blanks,” Quinn answered calmly. “But I imagine she’s skittish at the moment, so we’re going to let her calm down and feel safe again before we approach her.”
“She won’t talk to you,” Heller warned. “She ain’t stupid.”
Quinn looked across the desk at Heller, then turned his gaze to Cameron, taking in her neat-as-a-pin blue business suit, immaculately manicured nails and tasteful, barely-there makeup. Unlike Quinn, the spy, and Heller, the former marine, Rebecca Cameron was all diplomat, which was the role she’d filled for nearly twenty years before a personal loss had driven her out of Foreign Service and into academia. When Quinn had been asked by an old friend to create Campbell Cove Security and the in-house academy as a resource for the government’s war on terrorism, Rebecca Cameron had been one of the first people he’d thought of to bring on board.
She looked like a person who could be trusted. She was a person who could be trusted.
“Did you ever meet Risa McGinnis?” he asked Cameron. “Did your paths ever cross while you were in the Foreign Service?”
“No, though I heard about her later, of course. After the plane crash.”
Quinn nodded. “She’s eight months pregnant. She could probably use another woman to talk to.”
Cameron’s dark eyes narrowed. “What are you up to, Quinn?”
“Dal’s been murdered. Risa may be a target. And meanwhile, we’re hearing sporadic chatter from known and suspected terror groups suggesting there’s something in the works for the US.” Quinn leaned forward, folding his hands in front of him and gazing at his partners across the desk. “If we can stop it, we’ll get more assignments in the future.”
“This is about money?” Heller stared at Quinn with a look of disgusted disbelief, but Cameron, Quinn noted, had a more thoughtful look on her face.
“I have all the money I need,” Quinn said simply. “This is about protecting the people of the United States. That’s what it’s always been about for me. Are we clear?”
Cameron inclined her head in answer. Heller just pressed his lips together and gave a gruff nod.
“Cameron, I want you to make contact with McGinnis after lunch. Use a burner phone, just in case. See if there’s anything they need.” Quinn looked at Heller. “I want you to go to Cincinnati, Mad Dog,” using the former marine’s old service nickname. “Ask about renting a room in the building where Risa was living. And visit The Jewel of Tablis for lunch. Keep your ears open. I want to know if people are talking about her sudden disappearance.”
“Will do.”
Quinn waited until his partners left the office before he picked up his own burner phone and made a call to an old friend. “It’s me.”
On the other end of the line, a smooth baritone answered him with a mixture of pleasure and wariness. “What’s up this time, Quinn?”
“I need to know everything you can tell me about Martin Dalrymple.”
* * *
THE WANING COLORS of sunset clung to the western sky as if unwilling to let go of the day, but what heat the sun had offered was long gone, and to ward off the cold, Risa curled up with her laptop in one of the armchairs next to the fireplace, leaving Connor to come up with something for dinner.
Risa had always been an indifferent cook, happy to let him claim the kitchen in exchange for handling the cleaning and laundry duties. She’d already washed a load of clothes earlier that afternoon, returning from the small laundry room off the kitchen to inform him she was in the mood for eggs and toast for dinner.
He scrambled eggs for their evening meal, adding cheese and onions for a little extra flavor, and toasted the bread in the oven so he could melt butter on top while it was browning. He’d found some frozen strawberries in the freezer and thawed them so that she could get a serving of fruit to go with the carbs and protein.
“Tomorrow,” he told her when he brought her plate of food into the living room and set it on the table by her chair, “I need to go into town and find a grocery store. We need better food choices.”
She set aside her laptop and picked up the plate. “Cheesy eggs with onion. Do you know how many times I tried to replicate this dish over the past few months?”
“No. How many times?”
“At least two dozen before I gave up. I’m a complete loss in the kitchen.”
“You’re too impatient,” he said, allowing himself a smile as he remembered her whirlwind style of cooking. “Good food requires patience.”
She scooped up a forkful of eggs and took a bite. Her eyes rolled back and she gave a moan of pleasure that seemed to rumble through Connor’s body like an earthquake, finally settling in a low hum of desire in the pit of his belly. He hadn’t let go of his anger at her, or his frustration and pain, but he was nowhere near to immune from the passion he’d always felt when she was within reach.
He set his plate on the fireplace mantel, moving a short distance away to regain control of his hormones. “What do you want to drink? We have water, milk and orange juice.”
> “Milk, please,” she said around another mouthful of eggs.
He poured milk for her and water for himself, then returned to the living room. As he sat in the chair beside her, resting his plate on his lap, he congratulated himself on recovering his lost equilibrium.
Mostly.
“So, any progress?” He nodded at the laptop computer lying on the floor at her feet.
“I’ve started a timeline of Dal’s emails to me, trying to see if there’s a pattern to them. I was hoping maybe they’ll tell me more specifically what he was actually looking for in Cincinnati.”
He frowned. “Why didn’t he just tell you what he was looking for?”
She cocked her head, her brow furrowed. “You know Dal. That’s not how he worked.”
“Quinn’s the same way.” He poked a fork into his eggs, the corner of his mouth quirking. “You know, that explains so much about the CIA.”
“There was a method to his madness,” she said with a touch of defensiveness. “Sometimes, on an undercover op where there are a lot of unknowns, you try to go in with no preconceptions. Or at least, as few as you can manage. Dal didn’t want me to assume anything about the Kaziris I’d be living with. He wanted me to assess them on my own, make my own judgments about them and then write up my observations.”
“Do you have copies of those written observations?” Connor asked. Maybe some of the things she had observed could add to some of the incomplete findings of their surveillance operation in Cincinnati.
“Of course. I’ll have to decrypt them for you.”
He nodded, uncomfortably aware that if she’d been any other operative, he might not have been willing to leave the decryption to her. Instead, he might have taken advantage of their forced proximity to sneak a copy of her notes to Quinn for Spear to decrypt.
But he couldn’t seem to function as an operative with Risa, no matter how much she’d hurt him by letting him believe she was dead. She was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a traitor to her country.
If she knew anything that could protect the US against a terrorist attack of any sort, she’d share it. He was utterly certain of that.
“Why did your company decide to do surveillance on the Kaziri community in Ohio in the first place?” Having finished off her dinner, she set her plate aside, tucked her legs under her and turned to look at him. Her left hand settled on her belly as if by habit, gently rubbing it the way she might soothe a fussy child. He couldn’t seem to drag his gaze away from her hand and the swell of her abdomen.
His child was in there, growing and getting ready to greet the world. A week ago, he’d been all alone without any real hope of having a family again, and now he was about to be a father.
Emotion rose in his throat, choking him. He forced himself to look away and struggled to remember what she’d just asked. “Quinn and Cameron—she’s the other partner at Campbell Cove Security—both had contacts in the government who believed that there might be al Adar operatives hiding in the migrant community. The only Kaziri groups seeking work visas in the US in any numbers were the non-Muslims being driven out of the southern part of the country by terrorist attacks on their churches and homes, and the Mahalabi tribe from north of Tablis. We didn’t think al Adar spies could easily hide among the Kaziris who settled in the Research Triangle in North Carolina.”
“Which left the Mahalabi Muslims who settled in Cincinnati.”
“Exactly.”
“I think that was probably Dal’s reasoning as well,” she said with a nod. “He told me I would have to behave as a practicing Muslim in order to fit in.”
Her mother’s family were Muslims from the Mahalabi tribe, Connor knew, though Nazina DeVille had converted to Christianity a few years before she met Risa’s father. It had been her change of faith that had put her and her family in danger in the first place. But Nazina had educated her daughter about Islam so that she would understand the world from which her grandparents, aunts and uncles came.
“You’ve done it before,” Connor said. “In Kaziristan, anyway. Was it harder this time?”
“A little.” She shrugged. “It would have been easier if the refugees had come from a different tribe, maybe. The Mahalabis are patriarchal in ways that don’t have much to do with religious beliefs, to be honest.”
“Most of al Adar come from that tribe, don’t they?”
She nodded. “Most. Not all.”
“You were in Cincinnati the whole time I thought you were dead?”
“The first month, I stayed with Dal at his hunting lodge in West Virginia.”
A flicker of jealousy darted through him. “Just the two of you?”
She flashed him a look of disbelief. “Dal? You’re jealous of Dal?”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Right.” Her lips twitched as if she were going to smile, but the expression died away before it ever really started. “Poor Dal.”
“A double tap doesn’t really sound like an al Adar style of murder,” Connor murmured. “Way too businesslike and not nearly symbolic enough.”
“Dal probably had other enemies, as many years as he was in the CIA,” Risa said. “It might not have had anything to do with what I was doing in Cincinnati.”
“Or maybe what you were doing in Cincinnati had nothing to do with al Adar at all.”
Her shapely eyebrows notched upward. “Interesting thought. I suppose it could be a branch of al Qaeda. Or ISIL.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He set his plate on the table on top of hers and turned his chair to face her. “When Quinn recruited me, before I agreed to anything, I did a little research on him and his partners in the company. And something I thought was pretty interesting is that most of his expertise, at least when he was running The Gates, was in domestic terrorism. Specifically, he spent a lot of time and money dismantling a militia group called the Blue Ridge Infantry. Ever heard of them?”
She shook her head. “No, but most of my career has been dealing with foreign threats, not internal ones. It’s one reason I’ve been assuming that whatever I was investigating in Cincinnati had an overseas provenance.”
“I’m not saying the Blue Ridge Infantry or any group like them is behind whatever you were investigating in Cincinnati,” Connor added quickly. “I’m just saying, we can’t assume we’re looking at a foreign threat just because both Dal and Quinn are interested in whatever is going on there. They have—had—their fingers in other pots.”
“Hmm.” Risa leaned toward him, the sweet smell of herbal shampoo wafting toward him, filling his head with potent memories. “Know what I think?”
“What?” he asked, trying to clear his suddenly befuddled mind.
“I think we need to have a long talk with your bosses.”
He smiled. “That’s good. Because while you were taking a shower earlier, I got a call from one of my bosses. She’s coming here to talk to us in the morning.”
Chapter Eight
So this is Parisa McGinnis. Rebecca Cameron entered the small safe house shortly after nine the following morning, her gaze taking in everything—the cozy fire, the way Connor McGinnis stood slightly in front of his back-from-the-dead wife as if to protect her, and the sharp-eyed gaze of the woman herself, who seemed to be studying Cameron with the same animal wariness with which Cameron was assessing her.
Parisa was smaller, somehow, than she had anticipated, even pregnant. She was only average height, several inches shorter than her tall, broad-shouldered husband. She looked almost delicate, though the unclassified information she’d been able to access about the woman’s career suggested she was much tougher than she looked.
“I’ve heard a great deal about you,” she said aloud as she shook the other woman’s hand and nodded a greeting to Connor.
“I’ve heard a few things about you as
well,” Parisa said with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She had a lovely voice, warm and low, with a drawl that was pure South Georgia. It reminded Cameron of a year she’d spent in Savannah, working on a master’s thesis in military history.
She’d met Mitch Cranston there as well, although it had been many more years before she thought of him as anything other than a cocky young marine in town on shore leave who could promise nothing but trouble.
She pushed away the memory of Mitch before it distracted her and took in the look of wary concern in Connor McGinnis’s blue eyes. She let her own Alabama accent make an appearance, sensing it might put Parisa at ease. “I hope everything you heard was, if not good, at least interesting.”
“I was surprised to hear from you last night. I figured we’d be getting another visit from Quinn,” Connor said with his characteristic bluntness.
Unhurriedly, she turned her gaze to him. “Quinn asked me to stand in for him, since he was unable to get away.”
“Are you here to appease us or to answer our questions?” Parisa asked.
“May I call you Parisa?”
“Risa,” the other woman answered shortly.
“Risa,” Cameron said with a smile. “It’s a lovely name. I should tell you we were all very pleased to learn you had not died in the plane crash.”
“Two hundred and twelve other people did,” Risa replied bleakly, waving her hand toward the sitting area of the small living room. There were two armchairs near the fire and a small sofa angled opposite. Risa and Connor took the chairs, leaving her to sit on the sofa alone.
Clearly she was the one in the hot seat.
She sat, crossing her legs casually and folding her hands on her lap, waiting for one of them to speak.
For a moment, they simply looked her over, as if trying to discern her hidden motives. For once, her motives were exactly what she’d told them. She was here to help them, no matter what their dealings with Alexander Quinn might have otherwise suggested. And she was here to find out what they’d learned, pick their brains about what they might be up against, and figure out how Campbell Cove Security could help them.
