by Pamela Clare
An image of her filled his mind—the curves of her body outlined by the thin silk of her bathrobe, her hair damp and tousled, her flawless face free of makeup. She’d looked vulnerable, shaken. She was still suffering from the side effects of the drug he’d given her, and he’d had to fight a nagging sense of guilt to remember that he was not here to help her, but to expose her.
What a waste!
She was beautiful, smart, talented—and well on her way to life in prison.
If someone doesn’t kill her first.
She’d seemed genuinely surprised and a little relieved to hear that Dudaev’s death might have been a CIA hit. Interesting that she still trusted the government—given that she apparently had no problem betraying that same government. Her response might have been an act, or it might mean that she believed she was working for the good guys.
Or maybe she thinks the CIA is run by monkeys and is no threat to her.
He could certainly understand why someone might get that impression—especially lately.
He’d found it interesting that she’d asked for “her” laptop at the hotel—proof she’d been after the same intel as he. At least he’d kept her from getting her hands on that piece of it. She’d covered nicely with the police chief, pretending confusion. She was smooth and quick on her feet.
But Holly Bradshaw wasn’t the only thing Nick needed to think about.
The Batumi op was the focus of the internal investigation.
Derek Tower must have sources high up in the Agency if he could get that kind of information. Nick hadn’t been able to get anyone to tell him about the investigation, not even when he’d asked Bauer directly. Did Bauer not trust him?
As for the threat of a rogue officer, that was something to take seriously. Nick had had a gut feeling that someone from the inside might be responsible for the missing and dead officers. After hearing what Tower’s connections had to say, Nick was certain his gut had been right. But that wasn’t the most interesting thing Tower had shared.
Word is that the hit on Dudaev was an Agency job, possibly carried out by a rogue officer.
Nick had been authorized to take Dudaev’s life, but then the whole SAD had become a clusterfuck of rumors and crossed wires. It was probably nothing more than someone talking out of his ass. But whoever had told Tower this had known more about the internal investigation than Nick. Was it possible that someone in the Agency was getting ready to burn him—and let him take the blame not just for Dudaev’s death, but for the whole damned mess?
He thought about this for a moment, turning the pieces over in his mind. His unanswered questions about that night in Batumi. The disappearances and deaths of the other officers. The way Bauer and Nguyen had drilled him about Kramer’s disappearance. And Nick didn’t like the way the pieces were coming together.
Trust no one.
He’d known Nguyen since his days in Delta Force. They’d fought and bled together, watched friends die, worked together in the Agency. The man had always had his back. Always. As for Bauer, Nick had looked up to him, counted on him, trusted him with his life more times than he could count. He had to be out of his mind even to entertain the idea that either of them could betray him.
You’re getting paranoid, man.
And yet something was terribly wrong, and Nick kept seeing himself—and the lovely Holly Bradshaw—in the middle of it all.
He stood, some thought of letting Bauer know that someone was leaking intel to Derek Tower and Cobra International Solutions half-formed in his mind. He stopped, mid-stride. On second thought . . .
* * *
The shoes arrived first thing Monday morning when Holly was rushing to get to the newspaper on time. This time, the mailing label said it had come from Neiman Marcus. On a surge of relief, she ripped the box open, grabbed the packing slip, retrieved the key from her CO’s Twitter account, and began decoding the ciphertext, barely noticing the Prada platform sandals inside.
Situation critical. Believe you are in danger and under surveillance. Cannot risk meeting. Take package to your office in brown paper bag. At 09:30, drop bag into trash can on west side of paper’s rear entrance. Keep low profile. Recommend you turn to local law enforcement. Will contact you again when possible. I’m sorry.
Holly read her CO’s instructions, her mind on the message as she ran the packing slip through her shredder, then took the bits of paper, flushed the toilet, and sprinkled the remnants into swirling water until they were gone.
She wished he’d taken the time to tell her, oh, maybe why he believed she was in danger. That could be helpful to know. Or maybe he could give her just a teensy hint as to who might be after her. The message was encoded, after all. Why not tell her everything?
That would make too much sense. You know that.
Was he referring to the Georgian Mafia? The rogue officer? Or was there some other threat?
But that wasn’t the part of the message that worried her most. She’d known she might be in danger from the moment she’d woken up in that hotel room. The corpse beside her had been her first clue. No, that wasn’t what scared her.
What scared her was the apology at the end.
I’m sorry.
In the years she’d worked for him, her CO had never gotten personal, never used the word “I” in a message, never talked about feelings—his or hers. What did he mean by “I’m sorry”?
Was he apologizing for what she’d been through? Was he sorry that he couldn’t do more to help her right now? Or was that his way of letting her know that she was on her own?
Mystery was half of the fun of working for the Confused Idiots of America—except that Holly wasn’t finding much fun in this.
As for being under surveillance, she’d come to grips with the fact that working for the Agency meant some loss of privacy. It would do more harm than good to dry clean her apartment and get rid of any listening devices. What entertainment journalist would even think about searching her place for bugs? Whoever was holding eyes on her would realize she’d been tipped off—and that might escalate the situation. No, it was better to leave the devices in place. There was nothing for them to hear anyway. It’s not like she sang about her missions in the shower.
She glanced at her watch, realized she didn’t have much time. She hurried to the kitchen and grabbed a small brown paper bag. She tucked the cell phone inside the paper bag and placed it in her handbag. Making sure she had her real cell phone with her, she took one last sip of green tea, then stepped outside.
Javier was waiting for her. “Ready?”
“Yeah.” She so owed Javier for this. “I can’t thank you enough, Javi—well, you and Derek both, though I don’t think he really wants to help me.”
Javier grinned. “He’s not as much of an asshole as he seems.”
Just then, Nick stepped outside wearing a pair of gym shorts and nothing else. When he saw her, the right side of his mouth curved in a lazy grin. “Morning.”
Holly’s heart gave a thud, and she suddenly felt much more awake, the hit of pheromone stronger than caffeine. “Good morning.”
He was all lean muscle, his shoulders broad, his well-defined pecs sprinkled with dark curls, his abs bisected by a happy trail that disappeared behind his waistband. She caught just a glimpse of a scar on his abdomen before he turned and walked down his sidewalk to fetch his newspaper.
“Check out that dude,” Javier muttered. “He’s out here, working it, making sure you get a good look at what he’s got. Pendejo.”
Holly pulled her gaze away from Nick’s amazing body and followed Javier as he escorted her toward the second of two black, bullet-proof SUVs that waited at the curb. “We’ll take a different route to the office every day. Some days you’ll ride in the first vehicle, other days in the second.”
But Holly wasn’t really listening.
How surreal it all seemed. Dudaev’s murder. The possibility of a rogue operator. An internal investigation. And now her CO’s message.
At least the contents of that USB drive would finally be out of her hands and back in the Agency’s. She’d be done with this mission—and hopefully free to explore her neighbor.
* * *
Holly arrived at the office ten minutes late. Javier and his men had taken her on a route that had snaked through most of downtown Denver, then dropped her off in the underground parking lot, away from any TV cameras and news crews that might be waiting for her near the paper’s front entrance. The security team had staked out the building, and they would remain in place until it was time for her to head home again.
“Hey!” Beth, her boss, came up behind her. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back today. How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Holly answered, turning on her computer, one eye on the clock. “Thanks for the flowers. They’re beautiful.”
“Do the police know who did it?”
Holly shook her head. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Can you at least tell me what it was like waking up like that, seeing that he had been murdered?”
How was Holly supposed to answer that question?
It was a blast. Thanks for asking.
Holly liked Beth, but sometimes she could be irritating.
“It was terrifying,” Holly said at last.
By the time Beth had finished asking questions that Holly really couldn’t answer, it was time. Holly took the brown paper bag from her purse, double checked to make sure the correct cell phone was inside, and slipped out of the newsroom, making her way down the back stairway to the rear entrance. At precisely zero-nine-thirty, she stepped outside and tossed the bag into the trash can. As she went inside again, she caught just a glimpse of a van turning into the alleyway.
She leaned back against the closed door and let out a long exhale, listening as the van stopped to retrieve the package and moved on again.
Feeling a little lighter, she made her way back upstairs in time to see the I-Team staff leave the conference room after their morning meeting. The I-Team reporters were the rock stars of the newspaper, as far as Holly was concerned. Investigative journalism was a disappearing art, but they kept it alive, edition by edition, exposing wrongs that wouldn’t have been exposed otherwise. Though she wasn’t a part of the team, most of her friends were.
She walked to their corner of the newsroom to find Laura Nilsson on the phone and Sophie at her desk, tying her strawberry blond hair back in a ponytail.
Sophie stood when she spotted Holly and gave her a hug. “How are you feeling?”
“I still have a headache off and on. Thanks for everything.”
“Marc says it looks like Dudayev’s death is connected to some pretty serious stuff, but he won’t tell me anything,” Sophie said.
“I can’t talk about it.” Holly hoped Sophie would leave it at that.
“Fine. Keep me in the dark. Just do what Javier says and stay safe, okay?”
“I promise. No more dates with shifty foreign billionaires.”
“Oh, hey, did you hear that Tom is converting to Buddhism?”
From his office came the sound of Tom shouting.
“Kara told me Friday.” It still struck Holly as absurd. “Who’s he yelling at?”
“Alex, I think.”
Matt Harker, the city reporter, walked past them. Holly’s consistent choice for Worst Dressed Journalist, he looked more rumpled than usual, dark circles beneath his eyes, his reddish hair uncombed.
It didn’t take HUMINT training to see that something was wrong.
“Matt?”
He looked up, saw her. “Hey. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“Sorry about Saturday.” He seemed distant. “I would have come to visit you in the hospital, but I spent the day with a divorce lawyer. My wife packed up and left.”
“Oh, Matt, I’m so sorry.” Sophie’s words seemed to slide off him, unnoticed, as he walked to his desk, set down his coffee, and sank into his chair.
Holly lowered her voice to a whisper. “Wait . . . Matt was married?”
Sophie glowered at her. “For more than ten years. I’ve never met her. She never came to newspaper functions.”
The door to Tom’s office opened, and Alex stepped out.
His gaze fixed on Holly. “Hey. Glad to see you back. Do you have a few minutes?”
He flipped to a clean page in his reporter’s notebook.
Holly shook her head. “I can’t answer any questions, Alex. The investigation—”
“The cops aren’t talking, but my sources say it’s been taken over by federals.” He stood there, pen to paper, as if waiting for an answer.
“I can’t talk about it.”
“I saw the crime-scene photos, including the photos of you from the ER—the blood spatter on your skin.”
Heat rushed into Holly’s face. “How did you get those?”
She’d been nude in those photos, pictures meant to show the pattern of blood spatter on her body should a suspect be arrested and the case come to trial. She hadn’t worried about being photographed because she knew there would be no case. It wasn’t the fact that she was naked in the images that bothered her. It was the possibility of the photos one day being used to expose her.
If they’d been leaked to Alex, who else might have them?
“That’s confidential,” Alex said. “Word is your date was a lot more than just an art dealer and maybe had some underworld connections. Do you know anything about that? Did you ever hear anything that made you suspicious?”
“I can’t answer your questions.”
“Here’s one you can answer: Your date was murdered while you were drugged and unconscious. How did you feel when—”
“You deaf, man? She already said she doesn’t want to talk.”
Joaquin.
He came up to stand beside her.
Alex glanced from Joaquin to Holly, then turned toward Tom, who now stood in his office doorway. “I joined the I-Team because I thought it would give me the chance to do some hard-hitting investigative work. But this team you have here—it’s compromised. One reporter hooked up with the SWAT captain. Rather than giving us the inside scoop, she protects her husband’s interests. Same thing with Laura and her husband. He lands in the middle of a murder investigation, and we can’t get a word out of either of them. To make it worse, they’re all friends. When something happens, they circle the wagons.”
The newsroom had gone silent.
Alex looked around, pointed at Holly. “What’s the problem with me doing my job and asking her questions? What kind of ethical standard do we have if our staff get the kid-glove treatment?”
Laura stood. “It’s not the fact that you ask questions, Alex. It’s the complete lack of compassion and tact you demonstrate when you do.”
Tom clapped his hands together. “We’ve got a paper to make and six hours till deadline, people. Carmichael, you asked your questions and got your answers. Bradshaw, I think your desk is in the entertainment department.”
As Holly turned to go, Sophie whispered, “The Zen of journalism.”
Holly realized as she made her way across the newsroom that she’d completely forgotten to tell Sophie and Laura that Mr. Creeper had turned out to be Mr. Sexy.
Chapter Eight
“He said he was writing a book about his time in Delta Force.” Holly took a sip of her coffee, watched the lack of reaction on her friends’ faces.
They’d surprised her by showing up on her doorstep with brunch. Among them, Sophie, Kara, Tessa, Laura, and Kat had brought a breakfast quiche, shrimp and cocktail sauce, lots of fresh cut fruit, home-squeezed orange juice, amazing Puerto Rican coffee, and champagne for mimosas. Natalie had brought beignets, evil little French pastries that Holly was finding impossible to resist.
Now, the seven of them sat on Holly’s deck in the back, sharing a feast, shielded from the morning sun by a tall umbrella.
A week had already gone by since that
terrible morning when she’d woken up next to Dudaev’s corpse, and life was beginning to feel normal again—apart from the CIS security team that still sat out front, keeping watch on her place.
“He claims to be ex-military?” Kara asked. “He could be lying.”
Holly didn’t think so. “He’s got a scar on his abdomen that looks like a gunshot wound. Is he lying about that?”
She shouldn’t have said that. How would she know what a bullet scar looked like?
“He’s not lying.” Laura took a sip of her mimosa. “Javi ran a basic background check on him a few days ago. He served in Delta Force and saw combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq, just like he said, but parts of his service record were vague or missing. Javier wasn’t able to find anything about the nature of his discharge, but he had no arrests, no FBI file.”
Holly let out an exasperated breath. “Your husbands—they’re sweet and sexy and I love them, and they’ve done so much for me this past week. But they can be so overprotective. It’s like having a bunch of aggressive, armed big brothers.”
Sophie dabbed powdered sugar off her lips with her napkin. “They just worry about you. They want to see you with someone who cares about you.”
“I know, and I’m grateful. I get it. I really do. It’s been a week since the date that almost got me killed, and you all think it’s too soon for me to be thinking about another man.” Of course, Dudaev didn’t really count, but she couldn’t say that. “If you all could just see him . . .”
Holly let their advice roll off her. They didn’t know—and she couldn’t tell them—that a long-term relationship was impossible at this point in her life. What was wrong with having a little fun in the meantime? It had been a long time since she’d spent more than a weekend with someone of her own choosing. She would take all the happiness she could steal for herself, even if it lasted just a few weeks.
“Hot men are a dime a dozen,” Tessa said over the rim of her coffee mug. “It’s not about appearance, anyway. It’s about what’s inside.”
