All the Queen's Men

by Linda Howard

  “Looks good. Come on.”

  They hurried back up the hall, but instead of going down the stairs they went straight across into the west wing. “I prowled around and found a back way,” John explained.

  “Ronsard’s private quarters are in this direction, too.”

  “I know. The back way is through his rooms.”

  She rolled her eyes, but didn’t bother asking how he’d gotten into Ronsard’s rooms. Locks didn’t mean anything to him.

  This route wasn’t without risk. There were fewer people to see them, but anyone who did would be staff who worked in the private section, and who would know immediately they didn’t belong there. Guests or not, Ronsard wouldn’t allow anyone to disturb his daughter.

  John pulled her to a halt in front of a wooden door burnished to a high gloss. He turned the handle, and they slipped inside the room. It was a bedroom, she saw—a huge, lavish one. “Ronsard’s,” John whispered in unnecessary explanation. “There’s a private elevator going down to the hallway where his office is located.”

  The elevator was small, but then it was meant to carry only one man. It was also surprisingly quiet and arrived without the customary “ding” of a commercial elevator.

  The hallway they stepped into was also empty, which was good because there was no logical excuse for them to be there, especially stepping out of Ronsard’s elevator. John strode to a door, pulled a small recorder out of his pocket and held it to the electronic lock. He pressed a button, and a series of tones sounded. A tiny green light on the lock lit up, there was a faint but audible click, and he opened the door.

  They slipped inside and he silently closed the door behind them, then did something to the lock. “What are you doing?”

  “Disabling the lock. If we’re caught, the fact that the lock isn’t working will at least cloud the issue in our favor a bit, but I’d still have to come up with some reason for our being here.”

  “Boy, you have this planned down to the last detail, don’t you?”

  “I don’t intend to get caught. Come on, move your pretty butt and get to work.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Niema looked around while John sat down at Ronsard’s desk and turned on the computer. Another setup, far more elaborate, was hooked up on a desk on the other side of the room, but he ignored that one. She checked the jacks on what must be Cara Smith’s desk; there were three separate lines coming into the office, but the phones themselves were only two-line phones. The computer was on a line by itself, then. She looked at the phone on Ronsard’s desk; it was identical to the other, with two lines coming in. The first line would be the business line, she guessed; the second, his private number.

  There was a closed-circuit television on Ronsard’s desk, also, showing the hallway outside. She followed the line on it to the wall, making sure where it connected. She liked to have a room’s wiring laid out in her mind, so she knew exactly what she was looking for and at.

  Ronsard’s phone jack wasn’t behind his desk, probably because he didn’t want it in the way. She followed the lines again; the jack was behind a long leather sofa that sat against the wall. Carefully she pulled the sofa out, lifting one end to make certain there were no telltale bangs and thumps.

  Kneeling down on the floor, she unfolded her evening wrap and removed the black velvet pouch that contained her tools. Laying aside the SIG, she quickly unscrewed the jack, then disconnected the wires and stripped the plastic coating to separate the wires.

  The usual wiretap had a receiver or recorder close by. In this instance, that wouldn’t do any good because she had no way of retrieving a tape or listening to the calls. The CIA operative in place here didn’t have access to Ronsard’s office. John had slipped a digital burst receiver to him; he would trigger a signal to retrieve the audio data, which he would then send by his usual route to Langley. Even if he were discovered with the receiver, nothing could be made of it because the information was digitalized. It looked like an ordinary pocket radio; it even worked as a radio.

  Quickly she attached the inductive probe tip to only one of the line terminals, which didn’t make a complete circuit and hence couldn’t be picked up by an electronic sweep. She interfaced the leads to the junction, keeping the leads less than three inches long. The short leads made the phone bridge impossible to pick up by electrical deviations. Next she hooked up two nine-volt batteries as a power source for the receiver/transmitter and began putting everything together in the receptacle.

  “Almost finished,” she said. She estimated she had been working about twenty minutes. “Are you in yet?”

  “Still working,” John murmured absently. “The files are password protected.”

  “Did you try ’Laure’?”

  “It was my first shot.”

  “Nothing in the desk?” She had been aware of him opening and closing drawers, but thought he might be looking for paper files, too.

  “No.” He was swiftly examining everything on top of the desk, looking for anything that might contain the password.

  She screwed the jack plate into place, then repositioned the sofa. “What if it isn’t written down?”

  “Unless he’s a fool, he changes the password on a regular basis. If he changes it, then the current one is written down somewhere. If you’re finished there, look for a wall or floor safe.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a safecracker, too.”

  “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  Swiftly she checked behind all the paintings hanging on the wall, but there was only wallpaper there. A huge, thickly woven rug covered the floor and she threw back the edges, but again found nothing. She got out a screwdriver and, moving around the room, examined all the outlets, because sometimes dummy outlets concealed small hiding places. “Nothing,” she reported. She gathered her tools and the pistol, slipping them back into the folds of her evening wrap.

  John picked up a book and ruffled all the pages, holding it spine up to see if anything fell out. He paused, looking at the well-thumbed book. Niema walked over to look at the book, putting her tools down on top of the desk: A Tale of Two Cities.

  John flipped to a page with a down-turned corner. “It’s here. Nobody reads this more than once, unless they have to.”

  “It’s a classic,” she said, amused.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t good, but it isn’t something you read over and over.” He ran his finger down the page, looking for anything that jumped out at him. “Guillotine.”

  Turning back to the keyboard, he typed in the word. ACCESS DENIED flashed on the screen.

  He shrugged and consulted the book again. “Dickens was damn wordy,” he grumbled. “This could take all day.” He tried “monarchs.” ACCESS DENIED.

  “Monsters” was rejected, then “enchanter.”

  The file list opened on “tumbrils.”

  “How about that,” John said softly. “I was just shooting in the dark.”

  “Lucky shot.” Except he wasn’t just lucky, he was so highly trained that instinct and experience put him several jumps ahead of almost everyone else, allowing him to see the significance of a battered copy of a classic lying in the open on Ronsard’s desk.

  He slid a disk into the A drive and began calling up files and copying them onto the disk. He didn’t take time to read any of them, he just copied them as fast as possible, one eye on the closed-circuit monitor the entire time.

  Niema moved around behind the desk. “I’ll watch the monitor,” she said. “You copy.”

  He nodded, and the A drive began whirring almost continuously.

  A moment later, watching the monitor, Niema saw the door at the end of the hallway open.

  “Someone’s coming,” she whispered.

  John glanced at the screen, but didn’t pause in what he was doing. “That’s one of the security team,” he replied.

  “Do they do door checks?”

  “Maybe.” The reply was terse. Since he had disabled the lock
on the door, it would open if anyone tried it.

  Niema put her hand in the folds of the evening wrap. The pistol grip felt cool and heavy under her fingers. The guard began walking down the hallway toward the office. Her heartbeat picked up and her mouth went dry.

  The hallway was a long one; on the small screen, it seemed to stretch out endlessly, with the guard becoming bigger and bigger as he approached. Niema found herself counting his steps. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—

  “Don’t lose your cool,” John cautioned softly but didn’t look up from the list of files. “Almost finished here.”

  The guard strode past, never even pausing outside the door. Watching him on the screen, hearing his footsteps pass by the office, gave her an odd sense of unreality because the sound came from a different direction than the activity she watched on the screen.

  “That’s it.” Quickly he punched the release, and the disk popped out. He slipped it into a protective sleeve and put it in his inside jacket pocket. Then he turned off the computer, restored everything on the desk to its original position, and touched her elbow. “Ready?”

  “I’ll say.”

  She turned to go to the door, but suddenly he grabbed her arm, pulling her to a standstill. “More company.”

  She looked back at the monitor. The hallway door was opening again. Someone had stopped in the doorway, half turned away as if he were speaking to someone on the other side of the door. The tiny figure on the screen had long dark hair.

  “Ronsard,” she whispered, a cold twist of panic tightening her stomach. He wouldn’t be in this long hallway unless he were coming to his office.

  John exploded into motion, literally lifting her off her feet. In two long strides he was beside the sofa. He set her down and began stripping out of his tuxedo jacket, carelessly dropping it on the floor. “Take off your underwear and lie down,” he ordered, his tone low and urgent.

  They had only seconds, seconds before Ronsard would be coming through that door. Her hands shook as she pulled up her skirt and reached under it for the waistband of her panties. Pretending to have sex was such a cliché, trotted out in hundreds of movies, that no one would believe it, especially not someone as sophisticated and savvy as Ronsard. That was precisely why it just might work, because he wouldn’t believe Temple would be so hokey.

  Of course John, being John, wouldn’t depend on a torrid clinch to give the impression he wanted. No, he wanted underwear off, clothes disarrayed, as if they truly were just about to make love.

  Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel her pulse throbbing under her skin. She skimmed her panties down her thighs and let them drop, then hurriedly kicked them away and lay down on the sofa.

  Leaning forward, John tugged her skirt up to her waist and pulled her legs apart, kneeling between them with one knee on the sofa while he tore open his trousers. She went numb with shock. Only the cool air washing over her naked flesh told her this wasn’t a weird dream, but it had to be. This was carrying pretense further than she was prepared to take it. She couldn’t be lying here half-naked with him between her spread legs and witnesses likely to come through the door at any second.

  He bent down and licked her, his hard hands pushing her thighs wider as his tongue probed inside her, depositing moisture. Niema’s entire body jolted and he held her down, his mouth pressed between her legs. She swallowed a shriek, her breath strangling in her throat. Oh God, he was going down on her—Ronsard would . . . She couldn’t let herself think of Ronsard walking in on them now but this must be what John had planned, to be caught in an act so intimate no one would dream it was pretense—

  How could it be pretense when he was actually doing it?

  She whimpered and reached down, her hands sliding through his hair. She wanted to push him away but couldn’t, her hands simply wouldn’t obey. Bolts of sensation shot through her body, arching her in his hands. How long would she have to endure this? How long? Five seconds? Ten?

  Time had become elastic, stretching beyond recognition. She shook her head in wordless protest, helplessly speared under the dual lash of fear and pleasure. Something hot and wild spiraled in her. She couldn’t do this, couldn’t bear it, not with his mouth on her body making every muscle tighten past endurance.

  She found the strength to push weakly at his shoulders. He slid upward, his tongue swirling around her clitoris in a quick caress that nearly shot her off the sofa, but he quickly controlled her and shifted into position between her legs.

  “Easy,” he whispered and pressed himself to her opening.

  No. He couldn’t actually be doing this. Not here, not like this. She didn’t want their first time to be like this.

  Everything was happening too fast; her body hadn’t had time to prepare itself, even with the moisture he had given her with his tongue. How could she be prepared, when she couldn’t believe what he was doing, not now, not like this?

  He pushed slowly into her and she wasn’t nearly wet enough, her inner tissues yielding reluctantly to his intrusion. “Scream,” he said, the word almost soundless.

  Scream? That would certainly bring Ronsard—but that was what John wanted. The realization seared through her dazed mind. Anyone up to no good wouldn’t make that kind of noise, which was guaranteed to attract attention, or be doing what they were doing.

  He put no limits on what he would do to get the job done.

  He withdrew a little then thrust again, forcing himself deeper, inch by inch. “Scream,” he repeated, demanding now.

  She couldn’t. She didn’t have enough air, her lungs were paralyzed, her entire body arching under the almost brutal lash of sensation. Every nerve ending felt electrified, her loins clenching as she fought the relentless swell of pleasure. She fought him too, not with her fists but with every muscle inside her, clamping down, trying to hold him, prevent him from going deeper and pushing her beyond control.

  She wasn’t strong enough. He thrust slowly past her resistance, bracing his hands on either side of her rib cage and leaning over her. Quick, shallow breaths panted between his parted lips; his eyes were narrowed, brilliant, the blue more intense than she had ever seen it before. With one swift movement he pulled down the left strap of her gown, baring her breast. Her nipple was already tightly beaded, flushed with color. “Scream,” he insisted, thrusting harder. “Scream!”

  Her head thrashed back and forth on the cushion. She choked back a sob and desperately struck out at him, trying to squirm away. She couldn’t, she didn’t want to, dear God please don’t let her be climaxing as Ronsard walked through that door, she couldn’t bear it. John caught her wrists and pinned them to the sofa, relentlessly probing ever deeper.

  She couldn’t stop it, couldn’t contain it. She convulsed, waves of sensation pulsing through her loins. She sank into the climax, head thrown back and eyes closed, breath halted, everything fading around her until her only focus of existence was the searing pleasure. She did scream then, silently, beyond despair, as she waited for the door to open.

  The door didn’t open. There was nothing but silence in the hallway.

  The sensual paroxysm began to ebb, the tension fading from her trembling flesh until she lay limp and pliant beneath him, her legs still open and her body still penetrated. She couldn’t think, couldn’t move. She felt hollow, emptied out, as if he had taken everything.

  Humiliation crawled through her like lava. She turned her head aside, unable to look at him. How could she have climaxed in such a situation? What kind of person was she? What kind of man was he, to do this? Tears burned her eyes, but she couldn’t wipe them away because he still held her wrists pinned.

  Time stopped.

  Ronsard wasn’t coming into his office. She didn’t know where he had gone, but he wasn’t here. She waited for John to withdraw, waited for a moment that stretched on and on until the tension was more than she could bear and she had to look at him again, had to face him.

  His expression was set in almost savage lines, his ey
es so bright they seemed to burn her. He seemed to have been waiting for her to look at him. “I’m sorry,” he said, and began moving—not away from her but inside her, thrusting, forging a deep, fast rhythm, and pierced her to her very core.

  He came hard, gripping her hips while he plunged and bucked, his head thrown back and his teeth grinding together to hold back the hoarse sounds in his throat. He sank against her, panting, his chest heaving as he gulped in air.

  She didn’t say anything, couldn’t think of anything to say. Her mind was emptied, dazed with shock. Nothing she’d ever read in Miss Manners covered this situation. The bizarreness of that thought almost made her laugh, but the laugh turned into a sob that she choked back.

  Carefully he levered himself away from her; her breath caught at the drag of his flesh leaving hers. He pulled her to a sitting position. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded silently, swinging her feet to the floor and pushing her skirt down to cover her thighs. He neatened himself with brisk movements, tucking in his shirt and fastening his trousers.

  Her panties were lying on the floor in front of the desk. John picked them up and held them out to her. In silence she took them. Her legs felt too wobbly for her to trust them, so she sat on the sofa and worked the panties up her legs until she could lift her hips and tug the flimsy garment into place. She was very wet now, the moisture dampening her underwear and drying stickily on her inner thighs.

  He walked around the desk until he could see the closed-circuit monitor. “The coast is clear,” he said, as calmly as if nothing had happened. “I don’t know where Ronsard went.”

  Shakily she got to her feet and gathered her evening wrap, fumbling with the folds to make certain they still held everything securely. John shrugged into his tuxedo jacket and straightened his tie, then raked his fingers through his hair. He looked cool and controlled.

  “Are you ready?”

  She nodded, and he checked the monitor again. “Here we go,” he said, taking her arm and ushering her to the door.