Looking at her dark expression, it was clear. She hated this. All of it.
Brenna stared out the window. She felt Ellsworth’s eyes on her back, felt the anger shimmering off her own body like heat on a desert highway. The hell with you, she thought. The hell with your endless contracts. She wanted to fling them in his face. In Europe, she’d settled deals bigger than this with a telephone call. Whatever she was personally, professionally she was impeccable. She was used to working with people who trusted her, and Ellsworth clearly didn’t. He felt he needed to defend himself from her. He felt she was going to take advantage of him. Why else would he fortify himself like this?
It came down to character, she realized. Her character. Here in the States, she had a bad reputation. Neither her years abroad nor the work she had done since her departure had erased the notoriety she had brought on herself. If she was eventually going to work stateside, she had to rebuild from scratch—less than scratch. And for now, that meant accepting this mountain of paper and the mistrust it represented. Galling as it was, she would do it. Nothing was going to stand between her and this story.
She turned, leaned her bottom against the window frame and crossed her arms, skewering Ellsworth with her gaze. “What do you think?” she finally asked. “Is it worth it? I risk my life, and you pay me if I live to deliver?”
The question obviously shocked Ellsworth. He’d been so busy building paper walls around himself, he’d lost sight of the fact that he might be sending her to her death.
His Adam’s apple rose and fell. “I…I can’t decide that for you.”
Brenna strode across the room and stopped in front of him, forcing him to look up at her. “Alright,” she said. “You’ve given me your terms. Now mine. And you don’t need to put this in writing. No matter what you’ve heard, no matter what you think you know about me, understand this: I am not reckless. I don’t court death. Everything I do—everything—is calculated. I am alive because I am ruthless about my survival. If your inexperience gets in the way of my safety, I will turn my back on you and walk away.”
Daniel stared at her, stunned.
“Now. Do you still want to sign?”
He hesitated, then pushed the contracts forward.
She attacked his documents with angry black signatures and left without another word.
Chapter 5
Brenna sat on the floor of her living space, the second of her two travel bags pinched between her knees, stuffing cartons of Marlboros into the center compartment. She herself didn’t smoke, but in Kavsak, cigarettes were as good as money. Everyone there smoked—it was the national vice. With the shortages brought on by the siege, people rolled whatever poor-quality tobacco they could obtain into any paper they could find, often using the pages of reference books or dictionaries for the purpose. Smoking was educational, they joked. You could learn about the manufacture of metals or European history while you indulged. Smoking was so entrenched, the locals said, if cigarettes became unavailable, the city would surrender. Although a local tobacco company continued to manufacture cigarettes despite the siege, their quality didn’t match the American-made product, so the cartons she was packing would grease a maximum number of palms.
Next, she slid dozens of colorful packets of vegetable seeds—tomatoes, lettuce, beans—into the bag beside the cartons. The average Kavsak lost two pounds every week. During the first winter of the siege, Kavsaks’ pre-war overweight protected them from illness, but as the siege dragged on, the populace became progressively more emaciated. Key dietary deficiencies like Vitamin C, B6, B12, and folate—essential for tissue repair—became so widespread that hospitals saw massive increases in wound infection rates. Easily treatable diseases like diarrhea, dehydration, pneumonia, and ear infections increasingly claimed the lives of infants and the elderly exhausted by malnutrition and the cold. As a result, Kavsaks cultivated every patch of bare ground they could find that wasn’t already planted with land mines. Gardens supplemented the edible weeds and meager U. N. rations that kept the locals marginally fed, often making the difference between starvation and survival.
She cushioned a fresh vial of highly-concentrated morphine, circled with bubble wrap, a few low-dose syringes, and cards of oral antibiotics into her kit between the cigarette cartons. Her brother James, a doctor, had prescribed them for her. They were temporary insurance against injury, and the infection that inevitably accompanied it.
“It’s dangerous to take drugs like this without a doctor’s supervision,” he said, when she first requested the meds.
“And it’s even worse to have your flesh hanging off in strips with nothing for pain,” she retorted acidly. In the hospitals, surgeons carved living flesh without benefit of anesthetics. Wounded patients screamed into their pillows for days. People on this side simply didn’t understand.
Once she got to Italy, she would transfer the morphine and syringes into the secret lining of her custom-made leather jacket. More valuable at some destinations than any currency she could possibly carry, she had only once relinquished her medical supplies—to buy herself out of occupied territory after so-called safe zone lines had shifted behind her.
When she finished with the bags, she would stuff stacks of low-denomination US dollars and Euros she used for bribery into separate, hidden pockets in her jacket and cargo pants. The airport screeners would see them, but nothing said she couldn’t carry money. After 9/11, it had become increasingly difficult to carry vital goods through airport security, so she had begun to rely more and more heavily on smuggling supplies into Kavsak from Italy with the help of Kavsak expatriates there.
Her video camera awaited her at the Kavsak airport with a trusted friend, and the array of accessories and data-transmission devices she used with the basic unit were back in her hotel room.
She wasn’t a big shopper—she had little use for the things that most women coveted. But she knew her technology and her shoulder-mount camcorder was top of the line, the same equipment used to cover the Olympics.
A beautiful HPX500 capable of shooting in both high- and standard-def, and in NTSC or PAL signal systems, it equally accommodated the European and North American markets she served. Equipped with Canon lenses, four P2 card slots that allowed hot swaps and extended HD recording times, and lithium-ion batteries developed for military use, she could crank out cinema-quality images with excellent 16-bit, 4-channel digital audio.
She loved the camera’s features, but most of all, she loved its indestructibility, its resistance to impact, vibration, and temperature changes. Truth was, she didn’t need a camera that could think for her.
She needed one that could survive her.
Though she felt naked without her camera and she was itchy to get her hands on it again, it had made no sense to lug the gear back and forth across the Atlantic, exposing it to damage during transport, using up a luggage quota she could use to bring back critical supplies.
Once she arrived at Kavsak’s airport, she would collect the camera and never put it down. It was as essential to her as a rifle was to a front-line soldier.
She slid the zipper around the perimeter of the bag, scooted it toward the front door beside its mate.
Every item, personal or professional, was accounted for—checked off a list she knew by heart. Every inch of every pocket in her travel bags was packed according to an established pattern, with contents always in the same place so she could reach them without looking. Personal comforts were sacrificed for professional gear, which had been modified to its smallest, hardiest, form. The bags would never leave her possession. One would go on her back, the other in her hand or over her shoulder. They fit in overhead compartments and underneath airplane seats. Nothing would be checked, nothing left to chance.
Everything was accounted for except the random nature of brutality.
She stood up and stretched out the kinks in her shoulders.
During the past three days, she had begun to move like an athlete toward the main event
. She ate protein, as much as she could stand, and carbohydrates. She ran as much as she could, meticulously replacing her electrolytes each time. She would not embark at a physical deficit. She was heading into a week of stress and uncertainty. Enervating days of travel would be followed by three days when she might feast or famine, drink or be parched, freeze or roast. She would be constantly on the move. Sleep would be intermittent and disturbing, if she got any at all.
She might live or die.
Balancing herself against the mantel, her fingers brushed an old Olympus SLR camera. Her first real camera, that her mother gave her as a young girl when her talent first became evident. At one time, she wouldn’t leave the house without it. She used to feel she hadn’t experienced life if she didn’t see it through that viewfinder. It was a simple model. No bells. No whistles. Nothing automatic. All you needed was a good eye and impeccable timing. With a fingertip, she sadly traced the dent on the rim of the lens. This old camera took her Pulitzer Prize winner. After she’d cleaned the blood off it, she’d never used it again.
Shaking herself from her reverie, she looked for the next task. The house was easy. There were no plants to water. No pets to board. No newspapers to cancel. No food in the fridge. Even the cupboards were bare. At a time when most kids were learning to cook, Brenna’s mother lay dying. The kitchen was a mystery to Brenna, food something bought ready-to-eat.
When she left, she would slip the house key into the rosemary bush and be gone.
She led a life designed for departure.
The boarding gate at Reagan National Airport was crowded when Daniel arrived. He was late, delayed by the last minute arrangements to close his house and settle things at work. He wasn’t looking forward to the lengthy trip, which promised to be exhausting.
The first leg, between Washington and Rome—via Logan in Boston—would take fifteen hours. After landing in Rome, they had a three-hour layover, then an hour-long flight to the Adriatic seaport city of Ancona. There, they would take a taxi to the cargo terminal where the multi-force United Nations humanitarian airlift operation was based, and use their UN Protection Force international press cards to board an hour-and-twenty-minute-long flight into Kavsak.
If it had space for passengers.
The layover time in Ancona was unpredictable. It could be hours, or days, depending on the severity of the ground fighting in Kavsak. Once, after one of the flights had been shot down and the entire crew killed, the airlift had been cancelled for four months.
He scanned the waiting area, looking for Brenna Rease.
She stood apart from the rest of the travelers, leaning against a far wall, wearing a black turtleneck, wool cargo pants, and boots. Two bruised travel bags sat on the floor at her feet with a black leather jacket draped over them. She was surveying the lounge with what he could only describe as detached intensity.
A swift dart of lust pricked him as he walked toward her. She was a woman who would look good in a sack, and his hormones were revisiting adolescence.
Her eyes shifted to him. She didn’t so much as nod.
“Hey,” he said, letting his bag slide off his shoulder onto the floor in front of her. Up close she looked taut. “Sorry I’m late. It took longer than expected to get my house in order.” He smiled at his small play on words. She didn’t respond in kind.
Her eyes slid critically over him.
He was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, and a tweed jacket. It was an uneasy compromise. He hadn’t known what to wear, so he’d split the difference, opting for part practical, part presentable. Just in case, he had a couple ties in his bag, and nicer slacks. Also, some hardier woolens. Unsettled by her inspection, he smoothed his hair self-consciously. Was it sticking up? It had a tendency to.
“How about you?” he continued, though she hadn’t actually replied. “Been waiting long?” He aimed for cordiality. If they were obligated to work together, at least they could be civil.
She pinned him with her striking green eyes. “I don’t chitchat, Ellsworth. You want to stand there, fine. You want to sit down—go sit. But don’t bloody chat me up.” She unhooked the pair of dark glasses on her collar and slid them on, edict issued.
Her bluntness shook him. He debated whether to address it. It certainly wasn’t a tone he wanted to set for the trip. But there was an indefinable brittleness in the way she held herself that made him think he should leave it alone.
The speaker crackled overhead and called their flight.
He shouldered his bag and reached for the closest of hers. “Here, let me.”
“I handle my own bags,” she said curtly.
He stopped in mid-motion, willing his features into neutrality.
“Don’t organize me, Ellsworth. I know how to get on a plane.”
He turned toward the growing line without another word. God help me, he thought. Three days—plus travel time—with this woman.
Brenna boarded at the last call, after all the coach passengers were settled, and took the seat adjoining his. Daniel had taken the window. If he was saddled with a sullen traveling companion, the least he could get was the view.
He said nothing when she arrived, but his eyes were drawn involuntarily away from the in-flight magazine to watch her breasts float above him as she stuffed her jacket and her bags into the overhead compartment. He swallowed dryly, and looked out the window at the ground crew. The day she had come back to his office to sign the contracts, his eyes had been all over her. He’d tried to keep them in neutral places, but more than once, he’d caught himself looking at her in a decidedly unprofessional manner.
Worse. She had caught him doing it.
She settled wordlessly into her seat and buckled the belt.
The jet lifted off. Soon, he was suspended 30,000 feet in the air next to a beautiful, cold-hearted stranger who promised to abandon him if he got in her way.
When they arrived at the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport in Rome at one a.m., Brenna was bleary-eyed and exhausted from long hours of confinement and machine noise. Only eight more hours to go—assuming the connector to Ancona left Rome on time, and the C-130 Hercules cargo plane had space for passengers.
Though a free twenty-four hour shuttle service was available to transport passengers between international arrivals and the domestic departures terminal where they would later board the flight to Ancona, Brenna couldn’t bear the idea of sitting in a moving machine again. “There’s a shuttle,” she told Ellsworth. “But I’m walking over.”
“God, yes,” he said, mistaking her declaration as an invitation to accompany her.
She walked without speaking, stretching her cramped legs, glad of the solid ground beneath her feet. The airport had a middle-of-the-night echoing silence that pleased her.
They reached the domestic departure terminal. She and Ellsworth checked through security but didn’t go to the gate. It was still too early. Wandering down the broad concourse, they passed Hermés, Bulgari, and Ferragamo boutiques. The shops were closed, but even if they had been open, they would not have interested her. They seemed frivolous—sinful, even, in a world where people were starving.
Ellsworth stopped, arrested by the contents of a jewelry-store window.
She walked ahead a few yards, then waited. He was peering at something, a wistful look on his face. Intrigued, she returned and tilted her head close to his to look into the display imbedded in the wall.
“What?” she asked.
He gave a small, dismissive shrug.
“No, really.”
He pressed his index finger against the glass, pointing at a pendant with two diamond-encrusted five-pointed flowers in the center, each trailing sparkly-yellow diamonds like a fireworks burst.
Handed over to the right people, she thought, it could buy a whole family safe passage out of Kavsak.
“Just…my wife would have admired it.”
Through the press corps grapevine, Brenna had heard about his wife—how a couple of years ago she was killed o
n the Beltway, eight months pregnant at the time. The baby had been crushed against the steering wheel and couldn’t be saved. Brenna shifted her gaze from the jewels to Ellsworth’s somber face. She understood how sorrow unexpectedly ambushed a surviving spouse.
She tipped her head in acknowledgement and walked away.
At the departure gate, Brenna took a seat across from Ellsworth’s.
There was a quality about him that appealed to her. He had the face of a man with a clear conscience, of a man who did the decent thing no matter the discipline it required. She liked the kindness in his eyes, and the fine tracery of lines that crinkled occasionally at their corners.
He probably laughed when he wasn’t with her.
She also liked the way he carried himself. His shoulders were broad, hips narrow, and legs long in his snug jeans. He hadn’t been short-changed in the manhood department—and she hadn’t had anything to do with a manhood department in a long time.
Those strong, well-shaped hands of his would feel wonderful, roving over her hips and the small of her back. They looked strong enough to pull her against him and hold her without effort, irrespective of the countering force in his hips. She loved the moment when naked bodies met, and imagined his warmth, nude.
All that man, pressed against her. Oh, Lord.
She wanted to tangle her limbs with his, feel the contours of his body, the heft and length of him. Her breath caught, just thinking of sensual trespass, erotic enfoldment.
At another time in her life, she would have suggested sex, blatantly asked if he’d like to. Heaven knew, she’d done it too often during her college days.
But no more. Sex became complicated after Ari. He was the first—the only—man who had made love to her. He’d shown her what it meant to be cherished instead of used. Now, much as she yearned for sexual release, she couldn’t bring herself to the intimacy of intercourse. The act had become inextricably entwined with her emotions. And she exposed those to no one.
Day Three Page 5
