All the Queen's Men

by Linda Howard

“I thought pinching was the proven method.”

  “I prefer biting.”

  Color tinged her cheeks, but she didn’t look away. “Your eyes were brown,” she accused. “Now they’re blue.”

  “Colored contacts. Blue is the real color of my eyes.”

  “Or you’re wearing colored contacts now.”

  “Come look,” he invited. As he had expected, though, she didn’t want to get that close to him.

  She gathered her composure and sank back into her chair. She crossed her legs, her posture as relaxed as his. Maybe more so; her movement riveted his attention on her legs, on the few inches of thigh she had revealed. He hadn’t seen her legs before; she had worn pants, and often those had been modestly covered by the chador. They were very nice legs: slender, shapely, lightly tanned. She still looked to be in very good shape, as if she worked out regularly.

  Abruptly aware of the response of his body, John snapped himself back under control. He glanced up and found her watching him, and automatically wondered if she had crossed her legs to distract him. If so, it had worked. He was irritated at himself, because sex was one of the oldest, most hackneyed distractions, and still he had let himself slip.

  Frank opened the door, breaking the silence between them. He carried a tray on which there was a large thermos of coffee and three cups, but no sugar or cream. “Have you two introduced yourselves?” he asked smoothly, glancing at John so he could take the lead in giving Niema whatever name he chose.

  “He says his name is really John Medina,” Niema said. Her voice was cool and calm, and once again John had to admire her poise. “Five years ago I knew him as Darrell Tucker.”

  Frank flashed John another glance, this one full of surprise that he had so quickly revealed his true identity. “He goes by a lot of names; it’s part of his job description.”

  “Then John Medina may be an alias, too.”

  “I can’t give you any comfort there,” Frank said with wry humor. “I’ve known him most of his life, and he’s the real McCoy—or Medina, in this case.”

  John watched her absorb that, saw the quick suspicion in her eyes that Frank might be lying, as well. She wasn’t a naive, trusting little soul, but neither was she experienced at completely hiding her thoughts and emotions.

  “Why am I here?” she asked abruptly, switching her gaze to John.

  Frank drew her attention back to him. “We have a . . . situation.” He poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her.

  “How does that involve me? Could I have some cream and sugar, please?”

  The simple question rattled Frank, unused as he was to domestic duties. He gave the tray a panicked glance, as if he hoped the requested items would materialize.

  “Ah . . . I—”

  “Never mind,” she said, and composedly sipped her black coffee. “I can drink it like this. What’s this situation?”

  John restrained a bark of laughter. As he remembered very well, she always drank her coffee black. This was just Niema needling Frank a little, getting back at him for setting her up for such a shock. She had always been able to hold her own with the team, and the realization was still as surprising now as it had been then, because she looked like such a lady.

  Frank looked at him as if asking for his help. John shrugged. This was Frank’s little show, let him run it. He had no idea why Niema was there, except as Frank’s heavy-handed attempt at a little matchmaking. He probably thought John needed some R and R, and since he had admitted being attracted to Niema—well, why not? Except Frank hadn’t been in Iran, and he hadn’t watched Niema’s face while he ordered her husband to kill himself, or he would have known why not.

  “Ah . . . we’re very interested in the work you’ve been doing. An undetectable surveillance device will be invaluable. As it happens, we have an urgent need for it now. You know more about the device than anyone, since you designed it. You also have some field experience—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “I don’t do fieldwork.” She was pale again, her jaw set. She got to her feet. “If that’s the only reason you wanted to talk to me, I’m sorry you wasted our mutual time. A phone call would have sufficed, and you could have saved yourself the trouble of bringing me here.” She paused, then murmured ironically, “Wherever here is.”

  “You haven’t heard all the details,” Frank said, shooting another quick look at John. “And you are, might I add, an employee of the Agency, not a freelance contract agent.”

  “Are you going to fire her if she turns you down?” John asked interestedly, just to pin Frank down and make him squirm some more.

  “No, of course not—”

  “Then we have nothing more to discuss,” she said firmly. “Please have me taken home.”

  Frank sighed, and gave up. “Of course. I apologize for the inconvenience, Mrs. Burdock.” He wasn’t a man accustomed to apology, but he did it well.

  John let him reach for the phone before he interrupted. “Don’t bother,” he said easily, abandoning his lazy sprawl against the desk. “I’ll drive her home.”

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Niema got into the car and buckled her seat belt. “Shouldn’t I be blindfolded or something?” she asked wryly, and she was only half joking. The garage door in front of them slid up and he pulled out, then turned left onto the street.

  Tucker—no, she had to get used to thinking of him as Medina—actually smiled. “Only if you want. Don’t tell me they blindfolded you to bring you here.”

  “No, but I kept my eyes closed.” She wasn’t kidding. She hadn’t wanted to know where the deputy director of operations lived. She had lost her taste for adventure five years ago, and knowing where Frank Vinay lived came under the heading of information that could be dangerous.

  Medina’s smile turned into a grin. He was really a very good-looking man, she thought, watching his face in the dim green glow of the dash lights. In the past five years when she remembered him it had been in terms of what happened, not in how he looked, and his face had faded from her memory. Still, she had recognized him immediately, even without the heavy stubble of beard.

  Seeing him was a bigger shock than she had ever thought it would be, but then again, she’d never imagined she would see him again, so there was no way she could have prepared for it. Tucker—no, Medina—was such an integral part of the worst thing that had ever happened to her that just hearing his voice had thrown her five years into the past.

  “I should have known you were regular CIA, instead of a contract agent.” In retrospect she felt like a gullible idiot, but then things were always clearer in the mind’s rearview mirror.

  “Why would you?” He sounded interested. “My cover was as a contract agent.”

  Looking back, she realized that Dallas had known, which was why he had urged Medina to stay behind rather than risk capture. And Dallas, an ex-SEAL accustomed to top security clearances and need-to-know, had kept the information to himself, not even telling her, his wife. But she worked for the Agency now, and she knew that was how things were. You kept things to yourself, you didn’t tell friends or neighbors what you did for a living; discretion became second nature.

  “Dallas knew, didn’t he?” she asked, just for affirmation.

  “He knew I wasn’t a contract agent. He didn’t know my real name, though. When I worked with him before, he knew me as Tucker.”

  “Why did you tell me? It wasn’t necessary.” She wished he hadn’t. If even half the rumors she had heard whispered about the elusive, shadowy John Medina were true, then she didn’t want to know who he really was. Ignorance, in this case, was safer than discretion.

  “Perhaps it was.”

  His voice was reflective, and he didn’t explain further.

  “Why did you have a cover with us? We were a team. None of us were out to get you.”

  “If you didn’t know my real name, then, if any of you were captured, you couldn’t reveal it.”

  “And if you were captured?” />
  “I wouldn’t be.”

  “Oh? How would you prevent it?”

  “Poison,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Niema recoiled. She knew that some operatives, back in the tense Cold War days, had carried a suicide pill, usually cyanide, that they were to swallow rather than allow themselves to be captured. To know that John Medina did the same made her feel sick to her stomach.

  “But—”

  “It’s better than being tortured to death.” He shrugged. “Over the years, I’ve pissed off a lot of people. They would all like to have a turn removing my body parts.”

  From what she had heard about his exploits, he was understating the case. It was even rumored he had killed his own wife, because he discovered she was a double agent and was about to expose a highly placed mole. Niema didn’t believe that particular rumor, but then neither had she believed John Medina was a real man. Not one of the people who talked about him had ever met him, seen him, or knew anyone who had. She had thought him a kind of . . . urban myth, though one restricted to intelligence circles.

  She couldn’t quite take in that not only was he real, but she knew him. And even more astounding was how accepting he was of everything entailed in being who he was, as if his notoriety was simply the price he had to pay to do what he wanted.

  “Given your circumstances,” she said with asperity, “you shouldn’t have told me now, either.” The fact that he had made her suspicious.

  “Actually, I was so surprised to see you that I blurted it out without thinking.”

  The idea of him being taken off guard was so out of character that she snorted, and stretched out her left leg. “Here, pull this one, too.”

  “It’s true,” he murmured. “I didn’t know you were going to be there.”

  “You had no idea Mr. Vinay wanted me to . . . whatever it was he wanted me to do? And you just happened to show up? How likely is that?”

  “Not very, but unlikely things happen every day.”

  “Does he expect you to talk me into taking the job?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know what he was thinking.” Irritation colored his voice now. “I suspect, though, that he’s working two angles. You’ll have to ask him what those angles are.”

  “Since I’m not taking the job, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter what the angles are, does it?”

  He grinned suddenly. “I don’t think he was expecting to be turned down, especially not so fast. Not many people can tell him no.”

  “Then he needed the experience.”

  He said admiringly, “No wonder Dallas was so crazy about you. Not many people stood up to him, either. He looked as tough as he was.”

  Yes, he had. Dallas had been almost six-four and weighed two hundred and thirty-five hard-muscled pounds. His biggest strength hadn’t been his body, though, as superbly conditioned as it was; his mind, his determination and focus, were what had made him . . . extraordinary.

  She had never been able to talk about Dallas to anyone. For the past five years her memories of him had stayed bottled up inside; they hadn’t been married very long, hadn’t known each other very long, so they hadn’t had time to develop a circle of friends. Because of their jobs they had traveled a lot; they had gotten married in a hurry in Reno, had that wonderful honeymoon in Aruba, then Dallas had been gone for six weeks and she had been in Seattle working on surveillance for Customs. With one thing or another, they hadn’t even met each other’s families.

  After Dallas’s death she had gone to Indiana and met his folks, held hands, and cried with them, but they had been too shocked, still too involved in the whys and hows to reminisce. She had written to them occasionally, but they hadn’t had time to develop a relationship before Dallas’s death, and after he was gone neither party seemed to have the spirit to develop one now.

  Her own family, her nice, normal suburban family in Council Bluffs, Iowa, had been sympathetic and caring, but neither were they completely able to hide their disapproval of her and Dallas being in Iran in the first place. Her entire family, parents, brothers Mason and Sam, sister Kiara, wanted nothing more than the familiar routine of nine-to-five, marriage, kids, living in the same town from cradle to grave, knowing everyone in the neighborhood, shopping at the same grocery store every week. They hadn’t known what to do with the cuckoo in their nest, hadn’t had any idea of the restlessness to see more, the urge to do more, that had driven Niema to leave her hometown and seek out adventure.

  She had paid penance for the last five years and lived alone with memories that no one else shared. She might whisper Dallas’s name in her thoughts, or sometimes when she was alone the grief would well up and she would say his name aloud, an aching, unanswered cry, but she hadn’t been able to talk about him with anyone.

  But Medina had known him, had been there. He would understand. He was, of all people, the only one who would fully understand.

  She hadn’t resisted letting him drive her home; her guilt wasn’t his fault. Maybe she needed to talk to him, to put this part of the past behind her. She might have already done it, had she known how to contact him, but after they reached Paris he had vanished.

  Lacing her hands in her lap, she stared out the windshield as the dark streets wound by. She wondered if Dallas would love her now, if he would even recognize the woman she had become. He had fallen in love with a gutsy young woman who’d had a taste for adventure. Those days were over, though. She was through taking risks.

  “I never thanked you,” she murmured. “For what you did.”

  His eyebrows lifted in surprise, and he slanted a quick look at her. “Thank me?”

  She got the impression he wasn’t just surprised, but astounded. “For getting me out of Iran,” she explained and wondered why she needed to. “I know I was a liability coming out.” Basket case was actually a better description. Long patches of those days were lost from her memory; she couldn’t remember leaving the hut at all. She did remember walking through the cold, dark mountains, her emotional misery so intense that she hadn’t felt any physical pain.

  “I promised Dallas.”

  The words were simple, and ironclad.

  It hurt to hear Dallas’s name spoken aloud. In five years, not a day had gone by that she hadn’t thought about her husband. The terrible pain was gone, replaced sometimes by an ache, a loneliness, but mostly she remembered the good times she’d had with him. She regretted that they hadn’t had more time together, that they hadn’t had the chance to learn all the little things about each other. Hearing his name brought back the ache, but it was softened now, gentled into something bearable, and she could hear the regret in Medina’s voice. What time hadn’t softened was her own guilt, the knowledge that Dallas wouldn’t have been on that job if she hadn’t wanted to take it.

  And perhaps she wasn’t the only one who felt guilty. Medina, under whatever guise, struck her as a man who would do what was expedient and then forget about it, but he hadn’t. He had taken care of her, just as he had promised Dallas, when leaving her to freeze to death in the mountains would have been much easier. She couldn’t imagine what had motivated him, but she was deeply grateful all the same. “Do you think I blamed you?” she asked softly. “No. I never did.”

  Again she had surprised him. Looking at him, she saw the way his jaw tightened. “Maybe you should have,” he replied.

  “Why? What could you have done?” She had relived that night a thousand times on the hard journey to accepting reality. “We never could have gotten him out of the plant alive, much less out of Iran. You knew it. He knew it too. He chose to complete the mission and chose a quick death over a slow, terrible one.” She managed a crooked smile. “Like you with your cyanide pill.”

  “I’m the one who told him to push the button.”

  “He would have done it no matter what you said. He was my husband, and I knew when I married him that he was a damn hero.” She had known the type of man Dallas was, known that he would feel he had to complete the job at al
l costs, and that cost had included his life.

  Medina fell silent, concentrating on his driving. She gave him directions on the next turn; she lived in McLean, on the same side of the river as Langley, so the commute was easy.

  Once before she had sat beside him as he drove through the night, and he had been silent then, too. It was after Hadi had “liberated” a 1968 Ford Fairlane from the Iranian village, and they had driven into Tehran together. Then Hadi had split off, and she and Medina had gone on alone. She had been feverish and aching, battered by grief and guilt, barely functional.

  Medina had taken care of her. When the nail wound in her arm became infected, from somewhere he procured a vial of antibiotic and gave her an injection. He made certain she ate and slept, and he got her across the border into Turkey. He had been there during the first awful paroxysm of grief and hadn’t tried to comfort her, knowing that weeping was better than holding it in.

  All in all, she owed this man her life.

  Blaming Medina would have been easy, much easier than blaming herself. But the inner steel that had attracted Dallas to her in the first place made it impossible, after his death, for her to do anything but face the truth: When Medina approached her and Dallas about the job, Dallas wanted to decline. She was the one who wanted to take it. She could tell herself that the job had been important, and it had been, but there had been others Medina could have recruited if she and Dallas had turned him down.

  Yes, Dallas had been very good at explosives. She was very good with electronics, whether it was putting together a functional radio or detonator or bugging a phone line. But other people were also good at those things, and they would have done the job just as well. She had wanted to go, not because she was indispensable, but because she craved the adventure.

  As a child she had always been the one to climb highest in the tree, to tie bed sheets together and use them to slide down from a second-story window She loved roller coasters and white-water rafting and had even toyed with the idea, during high school, of working on a bomb squad. To her parents’ relief she had instead begun studying electronics and languages, only to find that her expertise took her farther away from home and into more danger than she ever would have gone with the local bomb squad.