Secret Agent Affair

by Marie Ferrarella

  “I invited you,” she reminded him. “That makes it my treat.”

  Kane always tried to stay out of people’s debts, no matter how minor. He didn’t like feeling as if he owed anyone anything. Besides, he was of the old school. Men didn’t allow women to pay for them.

  “I can pay for coffee,” he growled. “Even if it is overpriced.”

  Though Millie continued to smile, her teeth were slightly clenched as she said, “The nearest diner is—”

  Marja was quick to cut in, forestalling a possible flare-up. “That’s all right,” she told the woman, placing a twenty on the counter. “We don’t need to know that. Keep the change.”

  The twenty was gone in a flash, disappearing into the register and coming to rest in a special slot. The drawer rang melodically as it was closed again. “Thank you. Come again.”

  Picking up his container, he followed Marja back outside. “You always throw your money around like that?”

  “Only when the person I’m with insults the server.” She looked around for a table for them. “Good thing you’re not a doctor,” she told him. “You’d really have to work on your bedside manner.”

  Spotting an empty table, he took the lead. “My bedside manner’s fine, thanks,” he told her, sitting. “I just don’t like seeing people being taken advantage of.”

  She slid into the chair opposite him, tucking her legs to the side. “What people?”

  Prying off the lid, he took a tentative sip of his coffee. “Anyone who pays that ridiculous price for a container of coffee.” And then he narrowed the playing field, looking at her. “You.”

  The answer made her smile. “So, you’re a frustrated knight in shining armor. I’ll keep that in mind.” Following his lead, she took the lid off her container and then raised it in a toast. “To your new job. By the way—”she sipped slowly, careful not to burn her tongue “—what is it?”

  “I’m an orderly.” He watched her face for any sign of disdain, waited for it actually, and almost felt a tinge of disappointment when it didn’t materialize. He decided to push the envelope a bit. “Sure you want to be seen fraternizing with me?”

  Had she missed something here? “Why wouldn’t I?” Marja asked.

  He’d seen people pull rank for far less reasons. “You’re a doctor.”

  She nodded, not sure what that had to do with it. “That’s what the diploma in my office says.”

  He continued watching her expression as he pointed out the obvious. “And I’m a glorified janitor.”

  Is that how he thought of himself? Or was he saying that just to see her reaction? There was nothing simple about this man.

  “No, you’re not,” she told him, “but even if you were—so?”

  “So in the scheme of things at the hospital, I’m beneath you.”

  “Not yet.” Her eyes widened in horror as the sound of her own voice sank in. “Oh God, did I just say that out loud?” The surprised look that melted into a smile on his lips told her that she had. Marja could feel her face reddening. “I did, didn’t I?” She did her best to sweep the comment under the rug. “Sorry about that, just a play on words.” She hid behind her coffee for a second, sipping very slowly as she regrouped. “I don’t know what kind of a caste system you think we have going on here at P.M.,” she said, placing the container back on the table, “but you’re wrong. There is no caste system,” she told him firmly. “Everybody puts their scrubs on one leg at a time around here.”

  He took a deep breath as the image of her doing just that, of putting on her scrubs, or rather, of taking them off, one leg at a time, flickered through his head. Kane allowed himself a moment to savor the image as it drifted through his brain.

  The corners of his mouth curved ever so slightly as he did.

  Chapter 6

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  Kane frowned as he looked down into his coffee cup, the overhead light shimmering across the inky surface. Across from him in the corner booth was Frank Rosetti. Frank was his handler, the man who acted as his conduit, getting him information from the Company. In this case, information that enabled him to block any terrorist attack at the well-known hospital.

  Except that right now, Frank was not providing any information. The forty-something man with the fifty-something face maintained that there was nothing further to report.

  Frank nodded his head, the same light that was caressing the surface of Kane’s coffee was cruelly highlighting the fact that Frank Rosetti had no real need of a comb.

  “The chatter stopped,” Kane said incredulously, having trouble wrapping his head around what Frank had just told him.

  “The chatter stopped,” his handler confirmed.

  Kane regarded the man for a long, silent moment. He’d worked with Frank ever since he’d signed on with the Company, although they never socialized outside the job. Not that Frank hadn’t tried once or twice. But they worked well enough together, which was all Kane figured was required.

  Right now, he could feel frustration setting in. This didn’t make sense. “If I wanted to hear my words fed back to me, Frank, I’d be having this conversation with my mirror, not you.”

  Shoulders that were just a little too small for the rest of the man’s five-ten frame rose and fell. “What do you want me to say, make something up? There’s nothing.” Leaning forward, Frank lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “Everything and anything that had to do with the ambassador’s daughter’s pending surgery and the hospital has just stopped. Dried up. Nada. Zip. Nothing,” he repeated.

  Kane’s frown cut right down to the bone. “That just doesn’t sound right.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Frank agreed with a sigh, scratching his bald pate.

  Kane leaned back in his seat, stretching his long legs out before him until the tip of his shoe touched the bottom of the opposite seat. Was the Company pulling the plug on this operation? He didn’t think that was a wise idea, but for now, he kept that to himself.

  “So,” he began, studying Frank’s face, “what do you want me to do?”

  Experience had shown that when there was smoke, there was fire. Which would likely amount to a loss of lives. The price was too steep for them to just walk away.

  “Stick around anyway. Just in case.” It was a judgment call, Kane decided. Frank’s butt would be on the line if he was wrong. “There was too much talk before for there to be nothing now.”

  Kane nodded slowly. After finishing the now cold coffee, he put the cup down. “They could just be messing with our minds. Or trying to throw us off.” It wouldn’t be the first time, either. “There might be a different target altogether and this little shadow-boxing episode was just a diversion.”

  Word had it that before joining the Company, Frank had been an accountant. Kane sensed the man sometimes missed the security of straightforward answers.

  Frank blew out a long, shaky breath. “Yeah, the Company’s thought of that. But you’re in, might as well stay in until the ambassador’s kid is back on a plane, bound for home.”

  Kane only knew the names of three other operatives involved in this. There were more in play, of that he was certain, their identities known only to Frank and the powers-that-be. It took the issue of betrayal off the table. “And Montgomery, Cannova and Sanchez?” Cannova had been installed as a security guard more than a month ago; Sanchez worked in the cafeteria where, with his gregarious personality, he struck up conversations at random, seeking tidbits of information. As for Montgomery, he was an orderly, like him.

  Frank nodded. “They’re staying, too.”

  Maybe all this was for nothing, Kane thought, and they were overreacting. “The ambassador’s going to have a hell of a lot of security in place on his own. They say he’s paranoid.”

  Frank laughed shortly. “Aren’t we all? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” He paused. “You making nice with everyone?” he asked flippantly. Kane said nothing, merely
looked at him. “Yeah, right, what am I thinking, this is you. Just continue doing what you’re doing. Nose around without drawing any attention to yourself.”

  “I’m not a rookie, Frank.”

  “Not even on your first day,” Frank agreed.

  His first day on the job, Kane recalled, had been September 11, 2001. A baptism by fire. Hell of a way to start.

  Frank’s sarcastic question, whether he was “making nice,” made him think of Marja. Lots of things made him think of her. He’d been at the hospital for all of one week and in that time, he’d managed to catch a glimpse of her every day, sometimes without her knowing. To what end, he couldn’t say, other than she was easier on his eyes than she was on his brain. She seemed to be embedding herself there and he didn’t like it.

  He forced himself to think about the Jordanian ambassador’s daughter again. Right now, his general assignment had him on the first floor, where the operating rooms were located. He wanted to be in the general vicinity when the ambassador’s daughter was wheeled in—and out again. But he also was going to need a reason to be in the tower suites. He’d managed to get a look at the preregistration logs when one of the clerks had stepped away. A little quick finger work on the keyboard had him learning that the ambassador had retained the largest suite in the hospital’s tower for his daughter—although no actual date had been entered, just the month.

  The thinking, Kane assumed, was that they needed the extra space for her bodyguard detail. He had yet to discover if the suites on either side would be occupied, and if so, by whom. But he was working on it. In general, the hospital tower suites were reserved for VIPs and the family members of VIPs. The price tag on one of them was high. But not all terrorists were poor.

  And not all terrorists looked alike. They didn’t come neatly labeled, either. It was his firm belief that to pull anything off, inside people were going to be required. He needed to ascertain who before it was too late. Which was where being assigned to the E.R. came in handy. Hospital staffers talked to relieve the tension. And he listened.

  He hadn’t made up his mind whether Marja putting in hours in the E.R. was a plus or a minus. The one thing he did know was that she distracted him.

  Kane glanced at his watch and abruptly straightened his torso. “Anything else you want to share with me?” he asked Frank. “My break’s almost over.”

  The handler looked a little surprised, then smiled. He picked up the baseball cap from the seat beside him and put it on. “Nice to see you following rules for a change.”

  “I always follow rules,” Kane told him, rising. “They just don’t happen to always be yours.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Frank sighed. Sliding out of the seat, he looked at Kane. “I figure, since you’re collecting two paychecks these days, you’ll pick this up.” He nodded toward the coffees.

  Kane said nothing as he took out a five and two singles from his pocket, leaving them on the table. He left before Frank.

  The second he entered the hospital’s side doors, the ones that admitted paramedics and their passengers directly into the E.R., Kane found himself engulfed in pandemonium. People ran in one direction or another.

  Instantly alert, he focused, scanning the immediate area, anticipating the worst.

  But there was no need to remove the small handgun that he kept strapped to his left ankle beneath the green scrubs. A couple of tersely worded questions told him that the commotion seemed to be revolving around the passengers three separate ambulances had brought in. All were victims of a rival gang shoot-out that had spilled out onto a different turf.

  “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die!” the person on the gurney closest to him was screaming. The gang member, soaked in blood, grabbed at a nurse. “I want a priest. Get me a damn priest,” he demanded. “I gotta make it right.”

  Before Kane could do anything to disengage the nurse from the wounded gang member’s grasp, Marja came on the scene. Separating the frightened-looking young nurse from the gang member, she took her place beside the gurney and hurried with it to the first available trauma room.

  “You’re going to be fine,” she assured the hysterical gang member.

  “I’m holding you to that,” he cried, for a moment sounding more like a lost child than the owner of a long rap sheet.

  “Show some respect,” Kane warned the youth, his voice low but lethal.

  Marja looked at Kane in surprise, as if she hadn’t already noticed that he was there.

  “Not to worry, he will,” she assured Kane with a quick flash of a smile, then added, “C’mon, I’m going to need those muscular arms of yours.”

  She summoned a nurse, an intern and another orderly to come into the small room with them. The others all arranged themselves either on one side of the gurney or the examination table they needed to pull the extremely vocal patient onto.

  Kane moved beside her.

  “On my count,” Marja announced. “One, two, three!” Six pairs of hands lifted the corners of the sheet the wounded gang member was on, transferring him onto the examination table.

  The second they began moving him, a barrage of expletives exploded from his mouth. Kane lowered his side of the makeshift transport little faster than the others did, jarring the gang member as he came down on the flat surface.

  “Hey!” he cried angrily.

  Kane gave him a steely, unreadable look. “Sorry, my bad.”

  Marja slanted a glance in Kane’s direction as she reached for a needle to numb the area she needed to probe. “You don’t look very sorry,” she commented, barely moving her lips.

  The expression in his eyes told her he heard. As a doctor, she was honor-bound to treat anyone who needed her. As a person, she could understand Kane’s reaction to the gang member and his vicious mouth.

  The doors to the trauma room burst open. Two patrolmen made their way in, decreasing an already small space. Harried and very obviously seasoned in the ranks, they gave the impression that they weren’t about to go anywhere anytime soon, nor were they about to mollycoddle the wounded gang member.

  “We need to ask him some questions,” the taller, older of the two said, addressing the statement to the intern rather than Marja.

  He attempted to elbow her to the side as he tried to get in closer to the examination table and the patient. It was clear that he would have rather seen the man behind bars than in a hospital.

  The patient responded with yet another hail of less than friendly words, some of which had to do with the officer’s parentage.

  Marja had every respect in the world for law-enforcement officers. As a kid, she’d hung around her father’s precinct and two of her brothers-in-law had taken the vow to serve and protect. Still, this was her territory and she intended to call the shots.

  “After I’m done, gentlemen,” Marja told them firmly, coating her words with a smile.

  The gray-haired policeman refused to back off. “Sorry, we have to ask now, little lady. There might not be a later.”

  “Then I am gonna die!” the wounded man sobbed angrily.

  “Someday,” Marja agreed, raising her voice above the din. “But not today.” She looked from one officer to the other. “Please, wait outside,” she requested again.

  The shorter, heavier set of the two intervened. “Look, Doc—” his small brown eyes swept over her frame “—we’ve got a job to do—”

  “And so does she.” Marja wasn’t sure how he did it, but Kane had managed to put himself between her and the two policemen, like a human shield. “You let her do hers and then she’ll let you do yours.” He looked over his shoulder, nodding at the less-than-cooperative patient. “He’s not going anywhere,” he added with finality. “I give you my word.” With that, he began to slowly usher the two away from the exam table.

  The patrolmen exchanged glances, looking far from happy about the situation.

  “C’mon, Eddie,” the heavy-set policeman urged his taller partner, “maybe we can catch a break with one of the
other two lowlifes. It’s not like there’s a shortage of people to talk to.”

  “Good idea,” Kane agreed. He had the two at the doors and he pushed one open.

  Eddie quite clearly didn’t care for his attitude. “Watch it, pal,” he warned. Holding up his hand, he created a tiny space between his thumb and forefinger. “You’re this close to being written up for impeding an investigation.”

  “Just doing my job, guys, trying to let the doc do hers,” Kane replied innocently. He didn’t, however, budge from where he was standing, which in turn blocked the policemen’s access to the suspect.

  Eddie bit off an oath under his breath and left with his partner. As the doors closed behind them, Kane turned to Marja. The patient was growing progressively less cooperative, thrashing around like a newly captured salmon on the deck of a fishing boat. “Need anything else?”

  “Another set of hands to hold him down would be nice,” she responded, raising her voice above the wounded man’s ripe curses.

  “You don’t come near me with that,” the man shrieked when he saw the needle. He did his best to bolt off the table.

  She stood back, needle raised. The last thing she needed was to have it break off in his arm. “It’ll numb the area,” she promised.

  But the wounded gang member had other ideas. Again he tried to get off the table. “You’re not putting nothin’ into me. How do I know what that garbage is?” he demanded. The next moment he’d knocked out the orderly closest to him and shoved one of the nurses into the intern. They went down like bowling pins.

  Kane reached him, grabbing the side of the man’s neck.

  The next moment the wounded man slumped back on the table, out cold.

  Marja meanwhile had grabbed a sedative, thinking to knock the patient out in her own way. Her eyes went from the patient to Kane in open wonder. She didn’t quite understand what had just happened here. “Who are you, Mr. Spock?”

  “Just a little something I picked up in the air force,” he lied. It wasn’t the air force that had taught him how to render a man unconscious by using pressure applied to just the right neurological spot, it had been the Company. “I didn’t take you for a Star Trek geek,” he said, amused.