by Linda Howard
Passion and espionage meet in this fan-favorite tale from New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard
Grant Sullivan is the best agent the US government has ever had, and he has one mission: rescue the wealthy socialite Jane Hamilton Greer from captivity. But is Jane just a society girl in over her head, or is she really engaged in espionage that could compromise US interests for years to come? Only one thing is certain: when Grant finds Jane, questions of guilt and innocence begin to fade against the undeniable attraction between this fiery couple…
Praise for New York Times bestselling author
LINDA HOWARD
“You can’t read just one Linda Howard!”
—New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter
“Linda Howard writes with power, stunning sensuality and a storytelling ability unmatched in the romance drama. Every book is a treasure for the reader to savor again and again.”
—New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen
“This master storyteller takes our breath away.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Ms. Howard can wring so much emotion and tension out of her characters that no matter how satisfied you are when you finish a book, you still want more.”
—Rendezvous
“Linda Howard knows what readers want.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“Linda Howard is an extraordinary talent whose unforgettable novels are richly flavored with scintillating sensuality and high-voltage suspense.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Already a legend in her own time, Linda Howard exemplifies the very best of the romance genre. Her strong characterizations and powerful insight into the human heart have made her an author cherished by readers everywhere.”
—RT Book Reviews
LINDA HOWARD
Trouble
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
CHAPTER ONE
HE WAS GETTING too old for this kind of crap, Grant Sullivan thought irritably. What the hell was he doing crouched here, when he’d promised himself he’d never set foot in a jungle again? He was supposed to rescue a bubble-brained society deb, but from what he’d seen in the two days he’d had this jungle fortress under surveillance, he thought she might not want to be rescued. She looked as if she was having the time of her life: laughing, flirting, lying by the pool in the heat of the day. She slept late; she drank champagne on the flagstone patio. Her father was almost out of his mind with worry about her, thinking that she was suffering unspeakable torture at the hands of her captors. Instead, she was lolling around as if she were vacationing on the Riviera. She certainly wasn’t being tortured. If anyone was being tortured, Grant thought with growing ire, it was he himself. Mosquitoes were biting him, flies were stinging him, sweat was running off him in rivers, and his legs were aching from sitting still for so long. He’d been eating field rations again, and he’d forgotten how much he hated field rations. The humidity made all of his old wounds ache, and he had plenty of old wounds to ache. No doubt about it: he was definitely too old.
He was thirty-eight, and he’d spent over half his life involved in some war, somewhere. He was tired, tired enough that he’d opted out the year before, wanting nothing more than to wake up in the same bed every morning. He hadn’t wanted company or advice or anything, except to be left the hell alone. When he had burned out, he’d burned to the core.
He hadn’t quite retreated to the mountains to live in a cave, where he wouldn’t have to see or speak to another human being, but he had definitely considered it. Instead, he’d bought a run-down farm in Tennessee, just in the shadow of the mountains, and let the green mists heal him. He’d dropped out, but apparently he hadn’t dropped far enough: they had still known how to find him. He supposed wearily that his reputation made it necessary for certain people to know his whereabouts at all times. Whenever a job called for jungle experience and expertise, they called for Grant Sullivan.
A movement on the patio caught his attention, and he cautiously moved a broad leaf a fraction of an inch to clear his line of vision. There she was, dressed to the nines in a frothy sundress and heels, with an enormous pair of sunglasses shading her eyes. She carried a book and a tall glass of something that looked deliciously cool; she arranged herself artfully on one of the poolside deck chairs, and prepared to wile away the muggy afternoon. She waved to the guards who patrolled the plantation grounds and flashed them her dimpled smile.
Damn her pretty, useless little hide! Why couldn’t she have stayed under Daddy’s wing, instead of sashaying around the world to prove how “independent” she was? All she’d proved was that she had a remarkable talent for landing herself in hot water.
Poor dumb little twit, he thought. She probably didn’t even realize that she was one of the central characters in a nasty little espionage caper that had at least three government and several other factions, all hostile, scrambling to find a missing microfilm. The only thing that had saved her life so far was that no one was sure how much she knew, or whether she knew anything at all. Had she been involved in George Persall’s espionage activities, he wondered, or had she only been his mistress, his high-class “secretary”? Did she know where the microfilm was, or did Luis Marcel, who had disappeared, have it? The only thing anyone knew for certain was that George Persall had had the microfilm in his possession. But he’d died of a heart attack—in her bedroom—and the microfilm hadn’t been found. Had Persall already passed it to Luis Marcel? Marcel had dropped out of sight two days before Persall died—if he had the microfilm, he certainly wasn’t talking about it. The Americans wanted it, the Russians wanted it, the Sandinistas wanted it, and every rebel group in Central and South America wanted it. Hell, Sullivan thought, as far as he knew, even the Eskimos wanted it.
So where was the microfilm? What had George Persall done with it? If he had indeed passed it to Luis Marcel, who was his normal contact, then where was Luis? Had Luis decided to sell the microfilm to the highest bidder? That seemed unlikely. Grant knew Luis personally; they had been in some tight spots together and he trusted Luis at his back, which said a lot.
Government agents had been chasing this particular microfilm for about a month now. A high-level executive of a research firm in California had made a deal to sell the government-classified laser technology his firm had developed, technology that could place laser weaponry in space in the near future. The firm’s own security people had become suspicious of the man and alerted the proper government authorities; together they had apprehended the executive in the middle of the sale. But the two buyers had escaped, taking the microfilm with them. Then one of the buyers double-crossed his partner and took himself and the microfilm to South America to strike his own deal. Agents all over Central and South America had been alerted, and an American agent in Costa Rica had made contact with the man, setting up a “sting” to buy the microfilm. Things became completely confused at that point. The deal had gone sour, and the agent had been wounded, but he had gotten away with the microfilm. The film should have been destroyed at that point, but it hadn’t been. Somehow the agent had gotten it to George Persall, who could come and go freely in Costa Rica because of his business connections. Who would have suspected George Persall of being involved in espionage? He’d always seemed just a tame businessman, albeit with a passion for gorgeous “secretaries”—a weakness any Latin man would unde
rstand. Persall had been known to only a few agents, Luis Marcel among them, and that had made him extraordinarily effective. But in this case, George had been left in the dark; the agent had been feverish from his wound and hadn’t told George to destroy the film.
Luis Marcel had been supposed to contact George, but instead Luis had disappeared. Then George, who had always seemed to be disgustingly healthy, had died of a heart attack…and no one knew where the microfilm was. The Americans wanted to be certain that the technology didn’t fall into anyone else’s hands; the Russians wanted the technology just as badly, and every revolutionary in the hemisphere wanted the microfilm in order to sell it to the highest bidder. An arsenal of weapons could be purchased, revolutions could be staged, with the amount of money that small piece of film would bring on the open market.
Manuel Turego, head of national security in Costa Rica, was a very smart man; he was a bastard, Grant thought, but a smart one. He’d promptly snatched up Ms. Priscilla Jane Hamilton Greer and carried her off to this heavily guarded inland “plantation.” He’d probably told her that she was under protective custody, and she was probably stupid enough that she was very grateful to him for “protecting” her. Turego had played it cool; so far he hadn’t harmed her. Evidently he knew that her father was a very wealthy, very influential man, and that it wasn’t wise to enrage wealthy, influential men unless it was absolutely necessary. Turego was playing a waiting game; he was waiting for Luis Marcel to surface, waiting for the microfilm to surface, as it eventually had to. In the meantime, he had Priscilla; he could afford to wait. Whether she knew anything or not, she was valuable to him as a negotiating tool, if nothing else.
From the moment Priscilla had disappeared, her father had been frantic. He’d been calling in political favors with a heavy hand, but he’d found that none of the favors owed to him could get Priscilla away from Turego. Until Luis was found, the American government wasn’t going to lift a hand to free the young woman. The confusion about whether or not she actually knew anything, the tantalizing possibility that she could know the location of the microfilm, seemed to have blunted the intensity of the search for Luis. Her captivity could give him the edge he needed by attracting attention away from him.
Finally, desperate with worry and enraged by the lack of response he’d been getting from the government, James Hamilton had decided to take matters into his own hands. He’d spent a small fortune ferreting out his daughter’s location, and then had been stymied by the inaccessibility of the well-guarded plantation. If he sent in enough men to take over the plantation, he realized, there was a strong possibility that his daughter would be killed in the fight. Then someone had mentioned Grant Sullivan’s name.
A man as wealthy as James Hamilton could find someone who didn’t want to be found, even a wary, burnt-out ex-government agent who had buried himself in the Tennessee mountains. Within twenty-four hours, Grant had been sitting across from Hamilton, in the library of a huge estate house that shouted of old money. Hamilton had made an offer that would pay off the mortgage on Grant’s farm completely. All the man wanted was to have his daughter back, safe and sound. His face had been lined and taut with worry, and there had been a desperation about him that, even more than the money, made Grant reluctantly accept the job.
The difficulty of rescuing her had seemed enormous, perhaps even insurmountable; if he were able to penetrate the security of the plantation—something he didn’t really doubt—getting her out would be something else entirely. Not only that, but Grant had his own personal experiences to remind him that, even if he found her, the odds were greatly against her being alive or recognizably human. He hadn’t let himself think about what could have happened to her since the day she’d been kidnapped.
But getting to her had been made ridiculously easy; as soon as he left Hamilton’s house, a new wrinkle had developed. Not a mile down the highway from Hamilton’s estate, he’d glanced in the rearview mirror and found a plain blue sedan on his tail. He’d lifted one eyebrow sardonically and pulled over to the shoulder of the road.
He lit a cigarette and inhaled leisurely as he waited for the two men to approach his car. “Hiya, Curtis.”
Ted Curtis leaned down and peered in the open window, grinning. “Guess who wants to see you?”
“Hell,” Grant swore irritably. “All right, lead the way. I don’t have to drive all the way to Virginia, do I?”
“Naw, just to the next town. He’s waiting in a motel.”
The fact that Sabin had felt it necessary to leave headquarters at all told Grant a lot. He knew Kell Sabin from the old days; the man didn’t have a nerve in his body, and ice water ran in his veins. He wasn’t a comfortable man to be around, but Grant knew that the same had been said about himself. They were both men to whom no rules applied, men who had intimate knowledge of hell, who had lived and hunted in that gray jungle where no laws existed. The difference between them was that Sabin was comfortable in that cold grayness; it was his life—but Grant wanted no more of it. Things had gone too far; he had felt himself becoming less than human. He had begun to lose his sense of who he was and why he was there. Nothing seemed to matter any longer. The only time he’d felt alive was during the chase, when adrenaline pumped through his veins and fired all his senses into acute awareness. The bullet that had almost killed him had instead saved him, because it had stopped him long enough to let him begin thinking again. That was when he’d decided to get out.
Twenty-five minutes later, with his hand curled around a mug of strong, hot coffee, his booted feet propped comfortably on the genuine, wood-grained plastic coffee table that was standard issue for motels, Grant had murmured, “Well, I’m here. Talk.”
Kell Sabin was an even six feet tall, an inch shorter than Grant, and the hard musculature of his frame revealed that he made it a point to stay in shape, even though he was no longer in the field. He was dark—black-haired, black-eyed, with an olive complexion—and the cold fire of his energy generated a force field around him. He was impossible to read, and was as canny as a stalking panther, but Grant trusted him. He couldn’t say that he liked Sabin; Sabin wasn’t a man to be friendly. Yet for twenty years their lives had been intertwined until they were virtually a part of each other. In his mind, Grant saw a red-orange flash of gunfire, and abruptly he felt the thick, moist heat of the jungle, smelled the rotting vegetation, saw the flash of weapons being discharged…and felt, at his back, so close that each had braced his shoulders against the other, the same man who sat across from him now. Things like that stayed in a man’s memory.
A dangerous man, Kell Sabin. Hostile governments would gladly have paid a fortune to get to him, but Sabin was nothing more than a shadow slipping away from the sunshine, as he directed his troops from the gray mists.
Without a flicker of expression in his black eyes, Sabin studied the man who sat across from him in a lazy sprawl—a deceptively lazy sprawl, he knew. Grant was, if anything, even leaner and harder than he had been in the field. Hibernating for a year hadn’t made him go soft. There was still something wild about Grant Sullivan, something dangerous and untamed. It was in the wary, restless glitter of his amber eyes, eyes that glowed as fierce and golden as an eagle’s under the dark, level brows. His dark blond hair was shaggy, curling down over his collar in back, emphasizing that he wasn’t quite civilized. He was darkly tanned; the small scar on his chin wasn’t very noticeable, but the thin line that slashed across his left cheekbone was silver against his bronzed skin. They weren’t disfiguring scars, but reminders of battles.
If Sabin had had to pick anyone to go after Hamilton’s daughter, he’d have picked this man. In the jungle Sullivan was as stealthy as a cat; he could become part of the jungle, blending into it, using it. He’d been useful in the concrete jungles, too, but it was in the green hells of the world that no one could equal him.
“Are you going after her?” Sabin finally asked in a quiet tone.
“Yeah.”
“Then let
me fill you in.” Totally disregarding the fact that Grant no longer had security clearance, Sabin told him about the missing microfilm. He told him about George Persall, Luis Marcel, the whole deadly cat-and-mouse game, and dumb little Priscilla sitting in the middle of it. She was being used as a smokescreen for Luis, but Kell was more than a little worried about Luis. It wasn’t like the man to disappear, and Costa Rica wasn’t the most tranquil place on earth. Anything could have happened to him. Yet, wherever he was, he wasn’t in the hands of any government or political faction, because everyone was still searching for him, and everyone except Manuel Turego and the American government was searching for Priscilla. Not even the Costa Rican government knew that Turego had the woman; he was operating on his own.
“Persall was a dark horse,” Kell admitted irritably. “He wasn’t a professional. I don’t even have a file on him.”
If Sabin didn’t have a file on him, Persall had been more than a dark horse; he’d been totally invisible. “How did this thing blow open?” Grant drawled, closing his eyes until they were little more than slits. He looked as if he were going to fall asleep, but Sabin knew differently.
“Our man was being followed. They were closing in on him. He was out of his mind with fever. He couldn’t find Luis, but he remembered how to contact Persall. No one knew Persall’s name, until then, or how to find him if they needed him. Our man just barely got the film to Persall before all hell broke loose. Persall got away.”
“What about our man?”
“He’s alive. We got him out, but not before Turego got his hands on him.”
Grant grunted. “So Turego knows our guy didn’t tell Persall to destroy the film.”
Kell looked completely disgusted. “Everyone knows. There’s no security down there. Too many people will sell any scrap of information they can find. Turego has a leak in his organization, so by morning it was common knowledge. Also by morning, Persall had died of a heart attack, in Priscilla’s room. Before we could move in, Turego took the girl.”
