Keeping track of her over the years would have been easy. He hadn’t done so. Only now did he realize how foolish he’d been to believe that proved anything.
“I freelance,” she said. “I have since Nathan died. Most of my clients are L.A.-based like me. Mostly cyber technology. All civilian. After we married, I never took on government contracts. That was Nathan’s department. He died so soon after that, he never got very far into the contracts he’d signed with them.”
“Is that what has come back to haunt you? One of Nathan’s specialized projects?”
“Yes. You know how good he was. Nathan, the technology wizard. The man who could take the most archaic PC and turn it into a tool of global espionage. You remember the way he ferreted out information. It was mind-boggling. We both knew he’d have no trouble getting civilian work, and he didn’t. He hadn’t been gone from the Blue Circle long, we hadn’t even been married a few weeks, and the offers were already coming in.”
John wasn’t at all surprised. He had worked with Nathan closely for several years, doing highly sensitive work for an adjunct branch of the CIA known as the Blue Circle, the name referring to the global range of their assignments. The Dirty Dozen handled similar, if tougher, assignments. They just weren’t as tightly supervised. Then, as now, John was strategist and lead coordinator of the missions assigned to them. Nathan had been just what Cali had described him, the techno wizard.
“Whatever the assignment,” John said, “I can’t believe that with the technological strides we’ve made in the last ten years, anything he was working on then could be that sensitive now.”
Cali snorted and crossed her arms. “Maybe I shouldn’t feel so appallingly naive. I thought the same thing. Until I came home from work one afternoon about a month ago.”
“Your place had been searched?”
“At some earlier point I’m sure it had been. I never knew it then. But this time they were far more thorough. They simply took it all with them.”
“What?” If the sudden tightness in his voice fazed her, she didn’t show it.
“Emptied it out. Didn’t leave so much as a paper clip or roll of toilet paper behind.”
Tension crawled through his muscles at the same time adrenaline pulsed into his bloodstream. He welcomed both even as he hated the cause.
“All I have is what I stored in my safety-deposit box, which is next to nothing. It was my mother’s. Father set it up years ago. After she died, I just never got around to getting one of my own.” She blew out a long breath and raked her hand through her hair. When she looked at him again, the pain was edging back into her eyes. “They took it all, John. All my pictures, everything that was personal to me. All gone.”
“Start at the beginning.” Think business, McShane. Not haunted green eyes. “Leave nothing out.”
She sighed again, but pulled herself together. “Nathan’s first contract came in right after he left the Blue Circle. The security clearance required was extensive.”
“But he already had top clearance.”
“That’s what I thought. They even went over my background and security clearance. I know, I know,” she said, waving him silent. “Between being Ambassador Stanfield’s daughter and doing some top security clearance work myself, you’d think I was clear too. But they—”
“Who’s ‘they’ in this case, Cali? Which branch hired him?”
She smiled but there was no humor in it. “That’s just it, I didn’t even know. Neither did Nathan. It went through several channels before getting to him. His contact was actually someone high up in the Blue Circle chain of command.”
“What was the contract?”
“To write a computer program, but I have no idea for what. They made it very clear I wasn’t to be told anything. Even after he underwent the clearance they weren’t too keen on Nathan working at home. They offered—if you could call it that—to set him up in an office.”
“Where? D.C.?”
“No, we could have stayed in California.”
“Well funded, whoever they are.”
“Yes, we both realized that. Even with the Circle contact and apparent approval, Nathan was suspicious. But the dollar figure attached to the contract was too good to pass up.”
“He never struck me as the type to have a price.”
Cali bristled. “He didn’t. But the highly mysterious nature of the job intrigued him. The money would allow him to pick and choose what clients he took on as a civilian. There was also an implied offer of other work for this group if they approved of his work on this project. For someone just starting out, even someone with his government contacts, it was too lucrative to pass up. And I’ll admit that both of us wanted to know more about what was really going on, and we knew that the only way to find out was for Nathan to take the job.”
“So he talked to you anyway. About the job.”
She nodded. “Even Nathan understood the rationale for secrecy. And to protect me more than anything, we had decided that he would share with me only what he felt he could.”
“What did he tell you? Did he leave any notes?” John leaned forward. “I want to see everything you have on this.”
She smiled wearily. “You haven’t changed, McShane. Once a bulldog, always a bulldog.”
“It’s why you asked me here, isn’t it?”
She glanced away, her frame looking suddenly frail to him. The image was so at odds with the Cali Ellis he’d known, he felt his nerves string even tighter. Struggling with emotions was something John McShane never had to worry about. He was a champ at tucking them away. Only once in his life had they roiled to the surface and threatened to drown him. The woman across the table had been responsible then too.
He wouldn’t let it happen again.
“It’s been ten years, Cali. Surely talking about Nathan’s death shouldn’t make you fall apart.”
Her gaze swung fiercely to his. “You don’t know everything. And I don’t fall apart.” When he opened his mouth, she braced her palms on the table. “Don’t, McShane,” she warned him. “I didn’t go there. Don’t you either.”
Keeping her on the defensive helped. He should be ashamed. He was, but he didn’t back down. He was too busy keeping his head above the tide to worry about the life preserver he’d chosen. “You’re the one who wanted to talk about it. It was a tough time, Cali. Worse than anyone should have to deal with. No one blamed you for falling apart.”
“You did.”
She’d caught him off guard with that one, and he was certain his expression reflected it. “What in the hell gave you that idea?”
“Gee, I don’t know, McShane. Maybe it was the hostile way you treated me. I lost a baby and a husband in the span of one week, and you patted me on the head, told me how sorry you were, then all but ordered me to get over it and on with my life. You didn’t nudge, you shoved.”
“Someone had to.” His tone was no more gentle now than it had been then.
She pushed from her chair and paced the small room. Her skin shone with perspiration, her T-shirt clung to her breasts and stuck against her stomach. The same stomach she’d clutched in agony as blood and a life had ebbed from her body. He’d never felt so incredibly, horribly helpless. He’d never been so angry. At the senseless injustice. At himself for feeling sorry for himself when she was the only one who deserved sympathy.
He hardened his mind to the memories of what had followed that awful night. And later … in the hospital. What had happened between them had been a fight for survival. Only he knew his methods had been every bit as much for himself as for her.
“You needed to deal with what happened and get on with your life, to function in the present,” he said to her retreating back. His gaze dropped to her shorts and the long legs that showed beneath the ragged hem. Swearing silently, he looked back to his empty bottle. “You weren’t exactly the type to take a pat on the hand and soft words of comfort.”
“I think that was understandable.”
Understandable. Yes, John thought, excruciatingly understandable. “No one else was getting through to you,” he said, persisting even as he questioned the wisdom of not just letting it go. “I did the only thing I knew to do. If you were mad at me, at least you had a focus and a vent for all your anger.”
She just snorted. That stung. Even though he knew he’d had the bedside manner of a tiger with a thorn in its paw.
Cali paced the length of the room twice, then suddenly halted in mid-stride. With a brief sigh, she slumped back against the counter, arms folded. She looked at John, her expression tired but not defeated. “I know why you did what you did,” she said quietly. “I knew it then. And you were right. I wasn’t any good to anyone the way I was, least of all myself. If you recall, I did finally thank you for it.”
Yes, she had. John heard her last words to him as clearly as if she’d just repeated them. The doctors had wanted to send her home for several days after they’d finally stopped the hemorrhaging and stabilized her. But she’d lingered with one complaint or another, so unlike herself that her own family had been at a loss as to how to handle her. He’d been with her during the worst of it, and he knew she was beginning to regret his having seen that side of her. Defeated and embarrassed, despite the understanding though somewhat claustrophobia-inducing support of her father, she’d sunk into a depression.
John had known that someone needed to shake her up a bit and get her focused on something other than the trauma she’d just endured. He’d elected himself for the job. Making her angry, and focusing that anger at him, had helped him deal with the guilt of his unwanted feelings for her too.
He’d gone into her hospital room that day and bullied her, pushed her, hating the pain and betrayal he’d seen in her eyes. She’d finally lost her temper, coming out of the numb, almost trancelike shell she’d lapsed into, yelling at him.
“You tell me you miss him, too, that you understand, but you don’t,” she’d yelled. “You never have. Underneath all your nice, sympathetic words you’re just a coldhearted son-of-a-bitch. You say you feel things, but there is no evidence of them on your face. Not once have I seen even a glimmer of feeling in your eyes. The ultimate super-spy, Nathan called you. He admired the hell out of you. I have no idea why. I still don’t. You’re hard and emotionless. It seems to me to be good at your job you have to feel something, anything. You don’t feel, you don’t react. You just act.
“Nathan told me I just didn’t understand you. Well, he was right, I don’t. I don’t know why you’re here now when you’d obviously rather be anywhere else. But I’ll be damned if I’ll lie here and take any more of this abuse from you.” She’d eventually wound down, but anger still flashed in her brilliant green eyes when she’d said, “Now go find me a nurse and get me the hell out of here.”
He’d willingly taken her flaying, silently begging her to give him her worst. He deserved it even as he felt shame for the relief of guilt her well-earned outburst had delivered to him. He’d left her room, arranged her release, and contacted her father to come for her. Then he’d left. Gone back to work. He’d seen it as his only choice.
Only now it seemed a whole lot more like running away.
“Did you ever get the letter I sent you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I got it.” And would go to his grave before admitting he still had it. He started to explain why he’d never written back, even though the note hadn’t required a response, but she spoke first.
“I meant what I said, John.”
“Which time? In the letter or in the hospital room?”
She smiled. It made his chest ache.
“Both, actually. I resented that I needed someone to push me so hard, to make me do what I knew I needed to do. But I also meant what I said to you in that letter. You were Nathan’s friend. You honored that by taking care of me through some very rough stuff you didn’t have to stick around for. I may not have liked your methods, but I never forgot what you did for me.”
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about this,” he grumbled.
To his further chagrin, her smile widened, reaching her eyes this time. God, she was beautiful. Inside and out.
“I think it was better to get it out of the way,” she said. “I know it’s awkward. But you’re right, it’s been long enough now. It shouldn’t be so hard to talk about. I couldn’t go on, asking for your help again, without at least talking about how we parted last time.”
“You said I didn’t know everything. Tell me the rest.”
Her smile turned a bit sad, acknowledging that he’d just closed the subject.
“I think the meeting Nathan was on his way to the day he died involved this project.” She crossed back to the table and sat down, bracing her forearms on the table.
“Meaning what?”
“What I’m saying is that ten years ago Nathan was working on this project and he died. Now the project surfaces, falling into my hands. And now someone wants me dead too.”
TWO
Cali looked across the table at the man she’d asked to save her life. What had she been thinking with anyway? Certainly not with what was left of her brain.
Ten years spent building a rock-solid, independent life should have inured her to the overwhelming effect of one John McShane. He was just a man.
Right. And she was just a hacker.
She’d told herself she’d exaggerated the power of his steely reserve, of his rigid, unemotional control. That she’d no longer suffer the irritation of discovering that despite his obvious faults, she’d found herself intrigued by those same traits more than once.
As her father’s hostess, she’d held court for princes and rebels with equal ease. Surely one United States super-spy shouldn’t throw her. Surely it had been her youth and the circumstances of their initial meeting that had caused her reaction.
A decade later she had to face the truth. She was still intrigued by him.
Had he always been so impossibly rugged? Had his eyes always been that cold, steely gray?
To her further dismay, his intense return scrutiny had her averting her gaze. She watched the condensation trickle down the side of her bottle. The direction of her life seemed as random as the beads of water on the glass. She hated the loss of control more than anything else. Hated that she was about to hand over what little control she had left to anyone, but in particular to this man. Once in a lifetime was enough. Never mind that she’d asked him to take control both times.
And for whatever reason, he’d come. Again. She looked up. Beating herself up with the whys of their past, with guilt over dragging him into her messy life once again, helped no one. She was desperate. She’d figure out how to pay him back later.
“You think his death wasn’t an accident,” he stated. “You think it’s related to what’s happening to you now?”
“I have no concrete proof of the connection. But yes, I do,” she said. “When you came to our apartment and told me that Nathan had been killed in a car crash, it never occurred to me that it was anything other than an accident. I know you and the Blue Circle investigated it anyway and concurred with that conclusion. But someone in the Blue Circle was also part of the chain of command on the project. So the fact that they found nothing proves nothing.”
“He died in a car accident on the way to a meeting, Cali. There was absolutely no evidence of foul play. There was nothing else to investigate. We questioned you on his current projects, and you had no specific information about what he’d been working on. No one we talked to in the Circle knew anything about it. His contact never stepped forward.”
“Mighty convenient, don’t you think? And neither driver survived. Hard to get a confession from a dead man.” She leaned back and crossed her arms, holding his gaze intently.
He stared at her. She waited for the argument. Instead, he asked, “How did the project surface again?”
“It was literally handed back to me. By an insurance company.” A fresh rush of frustration
pushed at her. “Nathan apparently understood better than he let on just how sensitive the project was. We’d already decided not to discuss particulars for my protection, but he must have felt the need for more insurance. So that was exactly what he did. He insured it.”
“The project? Or himself?”
“Himself. But I know it was the project that made him do it.”
“Explain.”
“He’d received the first payment, an advance based on some preliminary work he’d delivered to them the day before his accident. I didn’t know about that. The deal hadn’t originally been set up that way. Anyway, as it turns out, he took the money, a substantial sum, and set up a convoluted funding system to pay against a policy he bought to cover himself.”
“Sounds like something Nathan would do.”
She nodded, surprised at how much comfort there was, even now, in being able to share her past, to share what she had with Nathan, with someone who knew him as she had. She smiled softly. “I’m sure he relished the challenge, despite the concerns that drove him to do it.” She sobered. “He died that same day. I was the sole beneficiary. I never saw the policy or got any paperwork on it, so the bank and the insurance company weren’t notified of his death. The bank account paid into the policy automatically on a regular basis. It was set up as a ten-year note.”
“Which just paid out.”
“Exactly.”
“And the paperwork generated by all of this?”
“Stored in a safety-deposit box in the same bank, filed automatically by some arrangement he worked out. I was only to be notified of all of this if anything happened to him.” She stopped, sighing. “I guess he didn’t want to worry me.”
If she expected any compassion, she was waiting on the wrong man to deliver it. In a way, that relieved her. It had been many years. And though all of this had dredged up a lot of old, buried emotions, grief wasn’t one of them. She’d long since come to terms with her losses. What she couldn’t deal with was the idea that Nathan’s death might not have been accidental.
Silent Warrior: A Loveswept Classic Romance Page 2
