“You are aware,” Rhys declared tightly, “that I’m the man and you’re the woman, and this is not how the scenario is supposed to play out.”
“Next time it’s your turn,” I promised and hopped off the bed to rummage around in my suitcase. One, two . . . three foil packets. Why not think ahead? Be optimistic?
I paused to watch Rhys, who was shedding his clothes at warp speed. Come to think of it, except for my shoes, which I’d left lying under the table some time ago, I was still fully clothed. With condom packets clutched in my teeth, I launched into the first deliberate strip tease of my life, swaying, shimmying, getting off on getting rid of my dress, my lacy black bra. Wiggling out of my thigh-highs, whirling them in a circle, flinging them toward the uncovered window with the lights of Lyon sparkling far below.
“Ta-da!” I flung my arms wide, displaying everything I had. What was I doing? This wasn’t Laine Halliday. Or maybe it was, and I’d never before met the man who could reduce my pragmatic soul to idiocy.
I took a long look at Rhys—all of him, though it was hard to tear my eyes from the flag pole between his thighs. He had a few scars and more muscle than I’d noticed until I was working my way over iron abs and admirable pecs. No paper pusher here, but a man of action. Who wasn’t getting any at the moment. He was beginning to look slightly pained.
I ripped open one of the packets and knelt on the bed to apply it. He started to help me, then flung himself back on the pillow with a sound somewhere between abject frustration and resignation. “If you don’t hurry, woman,” he gasped, “this night’s going to end with a whimper instead of a bang.”
I made a great concession. “You want the top?” I asked.
The only answer I got was another great groan as he reared up, flipped me onto my back and loomed over me with bared teeth, one hand thrusting downward, encountering the heavy moisture between my thighs. “Good girl,” he breathed, “any more foreplay and I think I’d be dead.”
I’d like to say it was just another night of great sex, but of course it wasn’t. Neither of us lasted long that first time around, exploding into orgasm with unseemly haste, but we made up for it. By the time we used the third condom, with dawn breaking over the city of Lyon, we’d learned every inch of each other’s bodies and Rhys had proved himself exactly what I feared—the lover of a lifetime. We’d moved from two sweaty, panting almost-strangers to the verge of being soulmates.
For a little while I even forgot, Not yet, not now, I’m not ready for commitment.
Instead of breakfast, I had to rummage through my case, looking for a fourth foil packet.
Perhaps if we hadn’t been so short on sleep and hyped on sex, we might have been more alert, might have noticed the delivery truck behind the Interpol car that was following us. But it was a lovely spring morning, and our minds were afflicted by a dangerous muzzy bliss. We knew better, we both did, but we were scarcely wandering the city alone, and, besides, what could go wrong in the scant few blocks from the Meridien to Interpol?
Rhys’s car was a snappy Peugeot coupé the color of aluminum—our own fairytale coach of silver. We drifted, well insulated from reality, taking the shortest route to Interpol. As we made a right turn onto the road that stretched along the Rhone, I found myself torn between enjoying the broad gray-blue of the river and staring, mesmerized, at Rhys’s profile.
I had it bad, I knew it. At that moment, I didn’t care.
A sound penetrated our bubble. The roar of a truck motor, coming like the proverbial bat out of hell. Defying rush hour traffic. Zooming past our watchdogs. Gaining. On our bumper. Rhys stepped on the gas, swung the wheel hard right, away from the river, but it was too late. Either the driver of the truck was an expert in running cars off the road, knowing exactly where and when to slam into our bumper, or he was just plain lucky. Rhys’s wheel corrections didn’t work because we were airborne, tires spinning uselessly. We plunged off the road, over the grassy bank, and hit the river. Nearly two tons of metal impacting a wall of cold water.
I came back to the world with Rhys shaking my shoulder and calling my name. To a car rapidly filling with water. “Laine, wake up, pay attention!” I blinked, focused. This definitely wasn’t my day to die. No way. It wasn’t going to happen. “Laine, listen to me! Unbuckle your seat belt. We can’t open the doors until the car fills with water. When the pressure is the same inside as out, the doors will open.”
Sure they would.
“What if they’re stuck?” I demanded. My seat belt wasn’t, thank God. Although I had to fumble underwater to find it, it popped open, just as it was designed to do.
“Women,” Rhys muttered, and leaned over to place a fast kiss on my forehead, which was about the only place I had feeling left, as the rising water felt as if it had come straight off the Alps. Which it had. “Two doors, Laine,” Rhys intoned with exaggerated patience. “One is bound to open. Just take a good breath before we go under. Don’t worry, we’ll make it.”
Lovely. Coupé doors were big. Theoretically, I understood the pressure thing, but I didn’t have Rhys’s confidence that the door was just going to swing open, as if it were safely parked at the local mall. Oh, Lord, where was the handle? Unfamiliar car, handle lost beneath the water. “Rhys, the handle?” I tried to sound calm and steady. I don’t think I managed it, because Rhys, giving me a wry grin, leaned over, grabbed my right hand, and guided it into position.
“I’ll signal when it’s time. Don’t try too soon, Laine. It won’t work.”
Miserable man. The water was up to our chins and he’s saying, Don’t try too soon, Laine. Go ahead and drown.
Keeping my hand on the door handle, I rose with the water, following the last pocket of air.
“See you topside,” Rhys said. “Big breath. Now!”
The murky water swallowed us up. Dear God, but it was cold! My fingers were locked around the handle. My mind screamed my hands would be too numb to work, the door would never open.
Rhys gave me a nudge, his dark wavy hair standing on end like some exotic seaweed. He pointed toward my door, turned back toward his own. I squeezed the handle, gave a good hard push, and, miraculously, the door swung open. Rhys may have had confidence in the laws of physics. I didn’t.
But I was out. Pushing my toes against the seat cushion, I sprang straight up toward the promise of light not so far above my head. I broke through the surface and was almost instantly seized in a pair of strong hands. One of our Interpol shadows, apologizing in rapid French that he had missed our car on his first dive down.
Teeth chattering, I looked around for Rhys. He should have been out. Five seconds . . . eight. No Rhys.
Something was wrong.
I drew a deep breath, surface-dived, and was instantly surrounded by murk, the silt stirred up by our plunge into the river. Oh, God, what if I, too, couldn’t find the car? Surely I’d come almost straight up. If I just kept going down . . . but no dark car-shaped shadow loomed out of the cloud of silt. It had to be here! Had to be.
And then I saw Rhys’s white face. Still in the car, behind the glass. The Peugeot had slid farther down the underwater bank, tilting on its side, making the driver’s door impossible to open. And swinging the passenger door shut behind me, where it must have jammed. I grabbed the door handle and tugged. Nothing. Rhys reversed, braced his hands on the steering wheel, signaled me to try again. As I did, he slammed his feet against the door. It didn’t budge. We tried again, as I shot off a pretty desperate plea to God, who I hoped was feeling more New Testament than Old today because Rhys must be down to the last of the air in his lungs.
The door swung open. I seized Rhys by the arm and hauled him straight up. Held him tight while he gasped for breath in Lyon’s weak spring sunlight. Just before we were swarmed by Emergency Services, he managed to pant, “One of these days, woman . . . I’m going to save your neck.”
And then we were being rushed to the emergency room, stripped and wrapped in blankets. There are great advantages, I soon discovere
d, to having an in with Interpol. By the time we’d dried off, consumed a couple of cups of hot coffee, and had our cuts and scrapes treated, someone produced a set of our own dry clothes for each of us. It was still morning when we were transported to Interpol under a formidable police escort.
Interpol has the kind of security where earrings, underwired bras, and probably nasty thoughts set off alarms. But my earrings were on the bottom of the Rhone, my second-best bra wasn’t wired, and I was thinking nothing but good thoughts about Interpol, whose prestige was becoming more apparent with each passing hour, so we soon found ourselves in an elevator, heading up to what Rhys described as a conference room. Conference. Strange faces. All Interpol. I suffered a sudden attack of guilt. Not as the possible catalyst for the attacks on Rhys, but I could almost feel a scarlet letter forming on my forehead. Not that Interpol cared how we’d spent the night . . .
Oh, yes, they did. Rhys Tarrant was one of their own, and I was the femme fatale who was leading him astray. The agency that dealt with the international criminals of one hundred ninety member nations on a daily basis could not afford to be careless.
And now they were going to deal with me.
The conference room was rather bigger than I’d hoped, and, as I feared, populated with altogether too many men from Interpol. But my qualms faded while sipping strong hot coffee, far superior to the hospital brew, and sampling an assortment of exquisite pastries, all the while being the object of genuine solicitude and a superabundance of international charm.
Unfortunately, my sense of well-being didn’t last long. Here on European turf, Interpol officers were treated like gods, and it had definitely gone to their heads. Even the presence of the Secretary General, an American who combined a suave mix of Ivy League and mid-western cop, didn’t make me feel much better. As charming as he was, it was plain he was Interpol Boss first, a fellow countryman second. The simple fact was, I was in a room full of cops—from the German head of Human Trafficking to the English Rhys and the French Alain Bedard—all of them convinced I was the source of Rhys’s problems. And that the assassin or assassins were now desperate enough to take me out too.
All in all, not a great way to start the day.
“Now that the bad guys have failed,” I said, glaring at Klaus Peiper, who was chairing the meeting, with the big boss, Secretary General Robert Nichols, mostly sitting back, taking it all in, “surely they’ll see it’s too late. Rhys and I have obviously compared notes, the damage is done. Why should they want to make Interpol any angrier than it already is?”
“This is not a chance we wish to take, Miss Halliday,” Inspector Peiper stated firmly. “I do not put my men out to slaughter, nor innocent civilians such as yourself.”
“Your daddy and brothers wouldn’t like it,” Robert Nichols deadpanned. Damn and blast! That’s all I needed. The boss of Interpol knew my dad.
“I have to go home,” I insisted. “The Kirichenko wedding is my responsibility. It’s my job, my family’s livelihood.” I swept a glance over a sea of set, stubborn faces. “It’s a wedding,” I told them. “Two people getting married. Strangers, yes, but Viktor is spending a fortune to make it spectacular. The eggs are gorgeous,” I added, desperation setting in as the cop faces remained implacable.
“You don’t have dick,” I ground out, not caring if the expression sailed over foreign heads. “There’s no crime in two Russians getting married, even if they’ve never met. And what’s so menacing about four paper maché eggs?”
“As far as we can tell, nothing,” Klaus Peiper admitted, “but there has to be something we’re missing. Perhaps if you can identify this Viktor Kirichenko in our files, we will be better able to determine where the problem lies.”
“Of course,” I murmured, “I’ll be happy to try.” What else could I say?
“And now, Miss Halliday,” said the Secretary General, “if you and Tarrant would be kind enough to start at the beginning. I came to this situation late and would like to hear the story as each of you sees it.”
Rhys began our tale with his interest in recruiting me as an informant, his sneaky plotting to get me to Peru, chasing after me by train when I gave him the slip by joining the Arendsens on the Inca Trail. He recalled following the trail out of Machu Picchu but after that, for a period of about twenty hours, he still remembered nothing.
I took up the story, with Rhys inserting remarks here and there. How I found his battered body, blank of mind, the series of attacks that followed. The visit by Lieutenant Manko, the dead body found at Phuyupatamarca. The shooting on the train. Being whisked off to our respective embassies and onto planes for home. Rhys recapped this morning’s adventure of finding ourselves trapped beneath the icy waters of the Rhone.
“Guess I’m just a black widow,” I added quietly. “I can’t really blame you all for finding me a very great pain in the–ah–neck.”
Nobody denied it. The atmosphere in the conference room with its shiny boardroom table and comfortable chairs, the homey remains of coffee cups and pastry crumbs, was crushing. These people wished they’d never heard of me. (Well, maybe not Rhys.) Nothing to do but keep my mouth shut and hope for the best.
The Secretary General shook his head. “A genuine mystery,” he said. “Well, Klaus, from what little we can guess, this seems to be your mess. How do you want to handle it?”
The blunt, solid German, who was Rhys’s direct boss, scowled in my direction. “If Miss Halliday will be good enough to look through photos, make an effort to identify this Viktor Kirichenko, perhaps we will gain some clue as to what element we have missed. Why someone wishes Tarrant dead, and now Miss Halliday as well.”
“A reasonable first step,” Nichols approved. “And have someone contact the U. S. Marshals. Miss Halliday will need an escort back to Florida.”
Inwardly, I winced. I was being thrown out. Again. Removed as far from Rhys Tarrant as Interpol could justify.
The meeting broke up soon after. Rhys took me down to the cheerful Interpol restaurant with sun pouring through the windows, flowers on the table, and genuine French cooking. After that, I was in a more mellow mood when we went back upstairs to his portion of the spacious, well-lit room devoted to Human Trafficking. I shoved the icy waters of the Rhone and the fish-eyed stares of Interpol’s top cops to the back of my mind as Rhys set me up in a rolling chair next to his computer, then sat beside me, his fingers running lightly over the keyboard.
“Interpol was late coming to computers,” he told me as he punched the keys. “There’s always a budget crunch—lots of member nations but only a few with the big bucks, as you Yanks say. We were trying to build a new building and transfer the largest number of criminal records in the world to computer at almost the same time.” Rhys highlighted a line on a long menu, clicked his mouse, then continued his background on Interpol’s computer system.
“It’s not all that long since we depended on card files, radio—Morse code, believe it or not—telex and snail mail.” He tossed me a quizzical glance. “Derisive noises are not allowed, Ms. Halliday. It wasn’t all lack of funds—some of our member nations had barely learned how to use a telex machine, let alone a computer. Some still haven’t. Anyway, there we were, faced with organizing the data from four and a half million cards. We had files cross-indexed by alias, phonetic files to account for errors in spelling all those strange names, particularly from Asian and Arab countries. We had MO files and files that could be searched by odd physical or mental characteristics. On top of that, we had to cull out all the really old stuff where the criminals surely had to be geriatric, if not dead. All in all, it took more than twice as long to convert to computer as we’d hoped. Meanwhile, our file geniuses struggled along finding things the old way—sliding their chairs along metal rails in front of banks of file cabinets.”
I made suitable noises to indicate I was sympathetic to the obstacles that had delayed Interpol’s full conversion to Bill Gates’s Information Highway, but inwardly I was shaking my he
ad. No wonder the brothers called Interpol paper pushers.
Rhys nodded at the program now on the screen. “Needless to say, finding someone is a lot faster now. All right, give me the stats on Viktor.”
“I don’t care what your fancy friends say,” I protested once again. “I still don’t see why you’re all so fixated on Viktor.”
Rhys looked pained. Obviously, he’d thought the matter settled at this morning’s meeting. “Laine”—he sucked in his breath—“it’s the only connection between you and me that makes sense. The Russians are heavily into female trafficking. Your Viktor is actually marrying a mail-order bride. And no matter how fine a point he puts on it, that’s what she is. It’s highly likely he’s marrying a woman he’s bought.”
“Even if Viktor’s a bad guy, how can he be a connection? You’ve never met him, have you?”
“How do you know I don’t know him? A name means nothing. We can’t be sure until you find a photo.”
“This is absurd,” I muttered stubbornly. “There’s nothing to recognize but his eyes.”
“Hair, height, weight. We even have personality records. Come on, Laine, just do it.”
I wasn’t sure why I was dragging my feet, except I really, really didn’t like Fantascapes being cast in the role of aiding and abetting a villain, which seemed to be where all this was going.
“Okay,” I sighed, “Viktor is a bear of a man. Taller than any of my brothers, maybe six-four. Beefy, big-boned. I’m sure he’s never weighed less than two-twenty in his adult life. Now . . . at least two-fifty, two-sixty. Hair, warm brown, lighter than yours. Curly. I don’t think it’s dyed because the beard looks perfectly natural. Big and bushy. Covers everything but his forehead and his eyes. Eyes . . .” I hesitated, struggling to remember. I’m trained to be a good observer, but a woman didn’t look directly into Viktor Kirichenko’s eyes in case he might mistake the contact for a signal to something more. He was a man a sensible woman did not encourage. Eyes, eyes . . .?
Orange Blossoms & Mayhem (Fantascapes) Page 17
