Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She marked her place and closed the book, setting it down on her desk.

  Max was already talking to her. “. . . introduce you to George Faulkner. I’m going to team him up with you and Jules. The three of you are going to be in charge of making sure that Rose von Hopf is as happy as humanly possible over the next few days or weeks if necessary.”

  He’d brought the new agent into her office. Jules had been right. George Faulkner could’ve stepped out of GQ magazine.

  Alyssa came out from behind her desk to shake his hand. “Nice suit.”

  “Thanks. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

  No kidding. Most agents would sacrifice a vital organ to work under Max Bhagat. Even though this assignment was only temporary, after it was over, George was going to put it at the top of his résumé.

  “Have we verified that the son’s actually been kidnapped?” Alyssa asked Max.

  “Not yet.”

  Poor George. If Alex von Hopf turned up red-faced and sheepish, having gone on some drugging or whoring binge, the extent of George’s “work” with Max’s team would be going to give Rose the good news.

  “I’m still hoping Alex will show up,” George told her. “That this has all been a mistake. Alex is . . . something of a free spirit, so it really is possible.”

  “And then you’ll go back to . . . ?”

  “Philadelphia,” he said, with a smile. “Quite happily.”

  He was either the best liar she’d ever met, or he really was being sincere. Both thoughts were equally disconcerting. He was either Satan or Pollyanna’s big brother. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

  Her intercom beeped. “Is Max in there?” Laronda’s voice squawked over the speaker.

  Alyssa pushed the button. “Yes, he is.”

  “It’s the call you’ve been waiting for, sir.”

  “Excuse me.” Max hurried back to his own office.

  And there she was, alone with the new guy.

  “Have you met Jules?” she asked.

  “Uh, yes, I have.”

  “Any questions?”

  George thought about it. “Just . . . do you and he drink coffee?”

  “I meant about . . .” She shook her head. “Never mind.”

  “I know what you meant,” he said easily. “But I can’t think of a single question about that that’s any of my business. However, since I’m a Starbucks addict, I like to stop and pick up a cup a coupla times a day. If you guys drink coffee, I could pick up something for you, too. I like mine black, half decaf and as large and hot as possible. In case you ever want to return the favor.” He headed toward the door with a smile. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

  “We’re going to get along just fine,” Alyssa told him as he started to close her door behind him.

  He poked his head back in. “So much that you’re going to cry to see me go.”

  “I don’t cry.”

  “How do you like your coffee?” he asked.

  “Black and high octane, although when I have too much in the afternoon, I don’t sleep at night.”

  “What’s your cutoff time? You want a cup right now?”

  “Your job here isn’t to get me coffee, George.”

  “Right now my job is to make everyone around me as happy as possible,” he countered. “I’ll get you some.”

  “George.”

  He came back.

  “When you cut the coffee with decaf—does that help you sleep any better at night?”

  He thought about it. “No.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  Savannah picked up the phone and punched in Ken’s number, her heart securely lodged in her throat. She’d always thought that expression was an exaggeration, but there her heart was. Neatly choking off her air supply.

  She’d spent the past two hours figuring out exactly what she was going to say when he answered the phone. But he didn’t answer. His machine picked up, and her mind went blank.

  “Karmody,” came his recorded voice. “Leave a message.”

  The machine beeped, and it was her turn to talk.

  “Kenny—I mean, Ken, it’s me. Savannah. You know. The anti-Christ?” Oh, that was brilliant. Make it sound as if she were laughing at him—maybe he’d get even angrier.

  She cleared her throat. “I called to tell you how sorry I am, how completely wrong I was, not to be honest with you from the start. It was just . . . there you were, and there I was, and you were acting as if you liked me and . . . I was so afraid you might think I was stalking you or something. I didn’t know what to say. And you know that expression, ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . . ?’ Well, it’s true. It just kept getting worse and worse. And I was going to tell you, I really was, right after dinner, but then all of a sudden, we were . . . you were . . . and it was . . .”

  She closed her eyes. “It was so good, Ken. It felt so right.”

  She had to work to keep her voice from shaking. She would not cry in front of him. Not even on the phone where he couldn’t see. “I just want you to know that I understand why you said the things you said. You were wrong, and you really hurt me, but I know I hurt you, too, so I understand, and I forgive you.

  “Again, I am so, so sorry for not being completely upfront with you about why I came to San Diego. But I’m not sorry I slept with you. I’m not going to apologize for the best—the very best—night of my life.” Her voice wobbled. She tried, but she couldn’t steady it. “I’m going to call you in a few days. I’m going to come back from Jakarta via San Diego. Will you please try to forgive me? Because I really want to see you again.”

  She forgave him.

  She fricking forgave him.

  Ken keyed the phone and message replayed. Kenny—He’d told her not to call him that. Of course she caught it right away. She corrected herself and called him Ken.

  He knew he was torturing himself by listening to her message again, but he couldn’t make himself hang up the phone.

  It felt so right . . .

  Yeah, it was remarkable just how great meaningless sex could feel. It was one of the biggest jokes in life, as a matter of fact.

  I’m not going to apologize for the best—the very best—night of my life.

  Good try, Savannah. Excellent job, especially with the wiggle in the voice, but it wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t going with her to Indonesia. She was going to have to do this completely on her own.

  How hard could it be to deliver an attaché case of money to her uncle? It wasn’t as if the guy was going to lead her into any serious danger. She’d probably hand off the money at his office, or in a hotel lobby.

  And then she’d turn around and come back to the States. She’d leave another message on Ken’s machine—she said she’d call when she returned. He wouldn’t call her back—he wasn’t that stupid—but at least he’d know she got home safely.

  Ken hung up the phone and turned on the TV, flopping down onto his sofa and putting his feet up on a package of clean laundry. Restlessly, he flipped through the cable channels, but absolutely nothing was on. He stopped on the Weather Channel. They were showing a travelers’ report, a quick twenty-second overview of the weather in the South Pacific.

  The weather patterns looked pretty normal for this time of year. No major tropical storms brewing.

  The weather guy started in on the forecast for the Northeast, and Ken turned off the TV and headed for his computer. Five seconds, and he was on-line, scanning the U.S. Consulate’s Web site for the most recent updates and travel warnings for Americans heading to Indonesia.

  Nothing had changed. Indonesia wasn’t the safest place in the world for an American traveler these days, but it was a far flipping cry from Algeria or Kazbekistan.

  In fact, he’d been to Indonesia several times over the past few years, and had had absolutely no trouble at all.

  Of course, he wasn’t a five-feet-four-inch blonde fairy princess look-a-like. Jesus, Savannah couldn’t be more vulnerable
if she had the words potential victim tattooed on her forehead.

  But God damn, he didn’t want to go with her. He didn’t want to spend all those hours on a plane with her; he didn’t want to spend another second in her company, being reminded of what a total fool he was.

  Absolutely no way was he going. No fricking way.

  Ken pushed his chair back from his computer and rolled across the room to his laptop’s workstation.

  This computer held the prototype software for his programming masterpiece. He’d designed both the software and the hardware for a clandestine tracking system that utilized cell phone satellites that hung in orbit all around the world.

  He’d had something of a techno-nerd fantasy this morning, as he was coming back to shore after the diving exercise. He’d imagined bringing Savannah here into his office, and showing her his tracking system. Explaining how it worked. Showing her the miniaturized signal devices—ball-bearing-sized transmitters, their edges roughened so they could be fastened to someone’s clothing without that person knowing, kind of like a high-tech burr.

  The software worked fast and sweet and was idiot proofed.

  The entire system was hugely sexy in a very James Bond way.

  At least Ken thought so.

  And so did Tele-Kinetics, Corp. A month ago they’d offered him a seven-digit figure for the system—a flat buyout deal. If he signed, this puppy would belong completely to them. And he’d belong to them, too. The take-it-or-leave-it terms of the contract had him finishing up his current tour with SEAL Team Sixteen and going directly to TK’s research and development lab for two years, at another quarter mil per year.

  Not bad for a loser who’d once been told by a high school science teacher that the best he could hope for in life was a part-time job saying, Do you want fries with that?

  Not that he was going to take TK’s deal. In fact, he’d already turned them down once, but they kept calling. He’d told them flat out that he wasn’t ready to quit the SEAL teams. There’d be plenty of time to work in a technolab after he was too old to be a spec warrior. Until that time, he was having too much fun jumping out of airplanes and blowing shit up.

  Still, the fact that he’d built this thing, that he’d taken an idea and made it work—and that strangers wanted to pay him lots of money for it—made him proud.

  But who knows what Savannah would have really thought. She probably would have made all the right noises when he showed it to her—oohed and aahed and stroked his ego.

  Yeah, she would have stroked more than his ego. She would’ve sat on his lap right here in this chair and . . .

  Shit.

  He’d done the right thing by walking away. He knew that he had. What was the point in tormenting himself.

  He activated his tracking software, took one of the transmitters from his drawer, got it up and running and slipped it into the pocket of his shirt.

  That didn’t mean he was going anywhere. It didn’t mean anything. Shit, he didn’t know if his system would even work in Indonesia. All that ocean . . .

  Then again, maybe he should go somewhere. Maybe he should go to Hawaii, spend his two weeks doing some serious surfing.

  He rolled back across to his internet computer, intending to check the times of the military flights heading south. Somehow he found himself checking the commercial airlines, looking to see which carrier had a 2145 flight that would eventually get to Jakarta.

  He told himself that this way he’d know if something happened, like if Savannah’s flight crashed. Yeah, that was definitely why he wanted that information.

  No way was he going to do something really asinine, like go to the airport and get on a plane to Jakarta with a friend of Adele’s.

  No way. He wasn’t that freaking stupid.

  Ken went into his bedroom to look for his passport.

  Molly found Jones easily enough at the Parwati airport.

  He was running the checklist, getting ready to take off.

  “I got your phone message at the church,” Molly said as a greeting. “Thank you so much for taking the time to call.”

  “The part came in,” he told her, “and it actually fit. I figured if you could get here by the time I was ready to leave, I might as well take you back with me.”

  As far as she could tell, he’d taken advantage of the shower at the hotel, but like her, he’d had to put his same dirty clothes back on. He hadn’t managed to locate a razor, and he’d gotten a brand new layer of grease on himself while fixing the plane.

  “The guy I spoke to in the terminal said you’ve been ready to go for about four hours.”

  Busted. He didn’t know what to say, so he glared at her. “So what?”

  “So thank you,” she said. “For waiting for me.”

  The glare became a glower. “Just get in the plane.”

  She climbed in, and he started taxiing to the runway before she even got the door closed and her seatbelt fastened.

  He still hadn’t gotten his radio fixed, and the tower—if you could call it that—signaled him with a flag when it was time for him to go.

  Molly managed to hold her tongue until they were in the air. Until they were almost home. “I really do appreciate this,” she finally said. “You’ve given a full eight days of my life back to me.”

  While she’d been prepared to return without complaining to the village with the mule train up the mountain, she was exceedingly grateful not to have to endure that camping nightmare. Not to mention the fact that the five-day trip wasn’t scheduled to leave for another three days.

  “How much?” Jones asked.

  “How much what?”

  “How much do you appreciate it?”

  Molly laughed, rolling her eyes. “Must we have this particular conversation?”

  “See, I figure if you appreciate it enough, I might be willing to give you a ride into town just about whenever you want to go.”

  She knew exactly what he was getting at, but she wanted to see just how low he would go.

  “Are we talking one-way or round-trip flights?” she asked.

  “One way.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “It doesn’t have to be you on the plane.” He was warming to the idea. “Say some other kid gets sick. He and his mother need a ride to the hospital. I’m there.”

  Molly nodded. “All I have to do is . . . Four times, and they get there and back.”

  “Guaranteed.”

  She sighed dramatically. “I don’t know, Mr. Jones. That’s an awful lot of time I’d spend on my knees—praying. Because that’s what you meant, didn’t you? That I should show my appreciation by praying for you?”

  He looked at her. “What did you think I was talking about? Blow jobs? No way. A blow job’ll only get you part of the way to town. I was talking full penetration sex. Me inside of you as far as I can possibly go. And then some.”

  Molly laughed. “Wow,” she said. “Last night really scared the hell out of you, didn’t it? I really scare you, too, don’t I? Well, guess what. It didn’t work. I’m not going to be insulted by your outrageously crude proposition. I think . . . yes, I’m going to be flattered instead. So thank you very much for being so terrified of me, but we’ll stick with my list of requirements before you get inside of me as far as you can possibly go—and then some.”

  “Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “Except that little list’s going to keep growing and growing. I’ve got to start going to church, right? And before I know it, I’ll be shuttling every kid with sniffles to the doctor in town with no end in sight. I’ll have to help you train the villagers in animal husbandry—getting animals to get it on, that’s lots of fun. And oh, yeah, after I do all that? When I’m all showered and shaved and saying please every other smiling word?

  “That’s when you sweetly let me know that church ladies like you believe that extramarital sex is a sin. I’ve got to marry you if I want you, right?” He laughed in disgust. “Thanks but no thanks.”

 
Molly laughed, too. She just laughed and laughed. “You’re afraid you want me enough to marry me. Oh, my! Mr. Jones, I’m flattered, but really. I’m not looking for a lifetime commitment.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said flatly. “Because that’s not what I just said.”

  “It’s not what you think you said,” she countered. “But you did say it. You know, it really is your lucky day. I like you, despite your attempt to pretend to be the lowest scum-sucking, slime-eating, godforsaken worm on the face of the earth. And I have to confess, I find you physically attractive, too—despite the Han Solo outer crust. I’m dying to be friends with you. Intimate friends who have—as you so eloquently called it—full penetration sex as often as discreetly possible. No wedding ring, no promises, no stupid games with changing rules.