Maverick

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Claire knew perfectly well what being a one-man show meant. She’d barely begun dipping her toes into becoming a professional translator, and it was daunting working alone. Your company was as strong as the energy you put into it.

  He didn’t have partners. If he didn’t do a job, it didn’t get done. Running a company like his entailed not just doing the job, but running the business aspects as well, pricing your services so you’d turn a profit, keeping books, client relations, getting out quotes… this was all stuff he had to do, and if he was gone, no one else was going to do it for him. Not even his wonderful secretary, Roxanne.

  Claire felt a sharp pang to her heart every time she thought about Roxanne going home to her mother. For the duration.

  For what duration?

  There was no end point at all, no deadline. They could stay in this limbo forever, while Dan’s business self-destructed and his life’s work went up in smoke.

  Claire simply couldn’t allow that, couldn’t let Dan’s life be ruined because of her. They had to turn the tables somehow, go on the attack. It would be dangerous but she simply didn’t see an alternative.

  A half-formed plan was starting to coalesce in her mind, but first she needed to communicate to Dan how much his offer meant to her.

  She leaned forward and kissed him, a quick buss on the mouth, a little thank-you kiss you could give your favourite uncle.

  She could feel him jolt in surprise—he wasn’t expecting it. He was still all wound up, having thrown down the gauntlet at their shadowy enemy, and his warrior’s blood was up.

  But his warrior’s blood was able to turn on a dime.

  What she’d meant as a gesture of affection, a sign of gratitude, turned almost immediately into pure sex. She was already pulling back when Dan fisted his hand in her hair, bent down to her and opened his mouth over hers.

  Oh God. Instant heat, rising up from her toes throughout her body, as if she’d walked right into an oven. Her muscles instantly let go, so that it almost felt like he was keeping her upright by his fist in her hair. Then his other arm went around her waist and she was plastered against him, chest to chest and groin to groin.

  Oh wow. It wasn’t just his blood that was up. He picked her up and settled her on his lap without breaking the kiss and just like that, they zipped right to Stage Ten Foreplay, the stage just before sex.

  And Claire was up for it, no question. She felt every body part loosen and melt, including her brain. He had placed her so that the vee of her legs was right over his penis and with each strong pulse of blood, making him longer and thicker, there was an answering tug in her own groin. Both their bodies were rushing blood to where, very soon, something important was about to happen.

  This was so… strange. Claire had never been sex-obsessed, not even in college, when hormones were at their peak. She’d had lovers, of course. A few, a very select few, because she was incredibly picky.

  The candidate had to be smart and not embarrass her when he opened his mouth, and above all, not be a creep or a jerk. And after she joined the DIA, it had been clear to her that she should keep her nose clean, otherwise her career would suffer.

  So all in all, sex hadn’t figured too much in her life, other than as a pleasant distraction, a fun activity, to be enjoyed preferably after an elegant meal and a movie or a concert.

  So this flash of white-hot heat in a crude cabin in the woods, after a meal of canned baked beans and canned peaches… whoa. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  Dan held her so tightly she couldn’t move, could barely breathe, and had to breathe through his mouth. Which must be a powerful narcotic because her head began swimming, while her body began this luscious spiral toward a climax…

  Dan pressed upward with his hips and her vagina contracted, hard, readying to have him inside her, preparing for his penetration.

  She had to pull back, right now, or she’d forget everything she wanted to say, but oh, heavens, it was hard. She couldn’t move her head back because he was holding it in his big hand and she couldn’t wiggle out of his embrace. Those steely muscles were too strong. So she did the only thing she could.

  She bit him, hard.

  “Ow!” he complained and pulled his head back. But he was smiling. And he was aroused. Massively. If she hadn’t felt it between her thighs, just looking at his face would have been enough.

  That dark face was tight, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring, lips almost blue with blood and slightly swollen from her own mouth. God only knew what she looked like. Sex on a stick, if he was anything to go by.

  “I need your attention for a moment,” she said softly, as he bent his head again, only to stop when she laid a finger across his mouth.

  For just a second, Claire wavered. He was staring at her, those dark eyes circling her face, lingering at her mouth. A lock of his dark brown hair had fallen across his forehead, and she reached out to brush it back. His head followed the curve of her palm, like a big cat asking to be stroked.

  He was temptation incarnate.

  She bent forward until her forehead touched his. “Dan,” she whispered. “I need you to pay attention.”

  He nodded without breaking the connection between them. Though he wasn’t thrusting up at her, his penis was still huge and hard between her legs, big hand against the small of her back holding her against him. It was almost impossible to concentrate.

  But they needed to take proactive steps or they would either die or have to live their lives cooped up in a rustic cabin.

  “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “I’ve been thinking.” Claire pulled her head up and back and watched his eyes. He didn’t even try a joke about how dangerous a thinking woman was. He simply watched her soberly, ready to listen to what she wanted to say.

  “Shoot,” he said quietly.

  Claire tried to gather her thoughts together, though thoughts was perhaps too strong a word, implying rationality and reason. She was going to use reason to sway Dan into doing something he probably didn’t want to, but reason had nothing to do with it.

  Her idea sprang from a feeling, growing ever stronger in ways she couldn’t explain even to herself, that the answer to everything lay in Laka.

  “I—I know you think this might be crazy,” she began slowly—

  He immediately put a finger over her mouth. “Nothing you say can possibly sound crazy. Don’t even go there.”

  Claire let out a long breath and felt the muscles in her chest relax a little. “Okay. I’m not entirely sure why I think this, but I am convinced that these… problems I’m—we’re having originated back in Laka. The thing is, I can’t tell you why, but it’s a gut feeling I have. I think we need to go there, as soon as possible.”

  There was more, but she just shut up and bit her lip, to see what his reaction would be.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, mulling it over.

  He spoke slowly, reasonably. “These days, Laka’s more of a military dictatorship than anything else. And the Embassy is shut up real tight. No one in Mbutu’s government is going to talk to us, and no one in the Embassy will talk. Neither of us work for the government any more, and I think we’d simply be kicked out on our asses. Not to mention the fact that the Embassy staff has almost completely changed.”

  “The FNs would still be there,” Claire said. “And the Marines. You’d know some of the Marine contingent, even though most of the ones who were in Laka last year would have rotated out. You’re still plugged into the Marine network.”

  Dan nodded soberly. “Yeah, I am.”

  “So… there’d be someone there who’d be willing to talk, at least unofficially.”

  “Claire…” Dan sighed. “Even if there are Marines from last year’s posting, they were all in Marine House. I know you don’t remember what happened the day of the bombing, but you do remember that I told you I was the only one on guard duty that day. So there isn’t anything anyone can tell you.”

  She shrugged, uncomf
ortable.

  Claire was an analyst, and she’d been a damned good one. Except for the huge howlers regarding the Red Army in her last report as an analyst, she’d always been absolutely correct in her reading of situations. She had never put in a report an unsubstantiated rumor or conclusion that she couldn’t back up with facts that she had checked herself.

  She was a careful, rational thinker. Every time she wrote something down in a report, it came from her head and was based on her reading and knowledge and experience.

  But it was her body that was talking now, almost violently.

  Whenever she thought of Bowen, her whole body reacted with revulsion. Granted, Bowen was a creep, always had been, always would be, and his recent incarnation as philanthropist filled with the milk of human kindness didn’t convince her one bit. But the mild distaste with which she had thought of him before was now an almost violent, nauseating disgust. It was impossible to describe.

  She looked Dan straight in the eyes and spoke soberly. “I don’t know if you’re going to enjoy hearing this, but… it’s as if the violence these past twenty-four hours has sort of… shaken something loose in my head, Dan. I have this feeling deep in my bones that there is something in Laka we need to know. I wish I could be more specific than that, but I can’t. It’s just—just a gut feeling. But it’s getting stronger. And my feeling is that we need to move fast. I mean like right now.” She looked outside the window at the utter blackness of the night. It was four a.m. “Or rather at first light. I have my passport with me. I always carry it with me, an old habit.”

  She bit her lip and watched him. There wasn’t much more she could say, because she couldn’t reason her way through her feelings. She had no facts to parade before him to convince him. All she could do was baldly state what she felt and see what happened. See whether Dan would take her feelings seriously.

  Dan didn’t say anything, just looked at her intently for a minute, two. Finally, he lifted her off him, reached for the satphone and dialed a number without looking at the keypad.

  Someone answered. She recognized Jesse’s voice with its soft Southern inflection at the other end.

  Dan spoke without taking his eyes off her. “Jess? Who’s your go-to guy for docs?” He stopped and listened to Jesse’s tinny voice reading out a number which Dan didn’t write down. “It looks like we’re going to have to leave the country, and we have to do it soon. I’m going to need a passport card for Claire; we’ll go up into Canada and exit from there. I’ll keep you posted. And Jess—we might need you and Frank and Dave in Laka, Makongo. Do you think you could manage that? Front the tickets and just keep pulling money from the ATMs. Great.”

  Dan closed the connection and punched in another number. He spoke while the phone rang. “If we have to leave as soon as possible, we can’t get you a fake passport. They take about at least a week to produce. But we can—hello? Jesse gave me this number. Sorry to call at this hour. Uh huh.” Dan smiled, his first smile in a while. “Your brother was in the 2nd Battalion? Uh huh. Those guys saw some real action in the ‘Stan. Listen, a friend needs to get out of the country fast, to Canada. Tomorrow if possible. I know you can’t make a passport that quick but could you manage a passport card? Yeah, I can get you a digital photo.” Dan quirked a brow at Claire. She nodded. She had several photos on her flash drive. “I’ll get it to you by secure e-mail. A woman. Uh huh. Yeah. Jesse can get them to me. Yeah? Great. Thanks man. Tell your brother Semper fi.”

  “Okay.” Dan took her hands in his. His hands were warm, tough. Her hands felt so safe in his. “If we leave the country from here, we’re going to light up someone’s map, we need to create a little diversion. Tomorrow afternoon Jesse’ll bring your card, and we’ll leave immediately. We’ll cross the border into Canada with your passport card and my fake passport and find somewhere to sleep once we’re across the border. The next day, we go to the airport in Montreal and buy two tickets to Paris with cash. That should slow them down some. They’ll be checking for credit card payments. From Paris we’ll buy tickets to Lungi with cash, then take a puddle-jumper to Laka. It’s the closest to a shot we’ve got. They won’t know I’m with you. I’m hoping it’ll give us at least a head start. Jess and Dave and Frank will be coming on another flight, maybe from Cairo. No one could link their names to ours. No one will know we’ve got backup.” He looked down at their joined hands. “And honey? You’re going to have to do some quick work in Laka because I don’t think we’ll have much more than twenty-four hours before they figure out where we are and they come after us.”

  Claire nodded. She had no idea if twenty-four hours would be enough. She also had no idea what to do once she was in Laka. All she had was this crazy compulsion to be there.

  She hoped with all her heart she wasn’t dragging Dan and his friends into a wild goose chase. In Laka they’d be exposed—way out there. If their enemy or enemies came from there, she was dragging them straight into the heart of danger.

  She might have signed their death warrant.

  “Dan,” she said, her voice trembling. “Thank you so much. I hope—"

  “Shh.” He grinned wickedly and ran his hand up over her hip. Her panty-less hip. And unleashed a firestorm of feelings.

  “So, then,” he said, pulling her to him. “We have to wait for your card. What are we going to do in the meantime?”

  CHAPTER 16

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, NOVEMBER 29

  “So which is it gonna be?” Wizard asked, sitting back in Bowen’s Louis XV chair that had cost the better part of $6,000. Bowen tried not to wince at the thought of the Dorito crumbs clinging to Wizard’s skinny ass being ground into the original green damask silk.

  Wizard had asked for the one-on-one meeting, saying he’d been trolling the ‘dark web’ and had something of interest.

  Wizard was crazy but no one else could search the underbelly of the web and come up with such big game. The biggest—a sitting US Senator.

  They both studied the stills laid out on the long table in his study. The stills were taken from videocams that had obviously been placed in various upscale hotel rooms. He had no idea how Wizard had found them and he had no intention of asking. It was enough that they were there.

  This went way beyond accepting skyboxes from corporate lobbyists. This was Major League Scandal. The kind where voters spat on your grave.

  He studied the photographs with deep pleasure, feeling again that strong wind of destiny blowing over him. He’d needed for Senator Neff to disappear, and had even been contemplating calling in Heston because the corruption scandal was going fairly slowly. But no need—like the hooked end of a cane yanking a bad comic off stage, these would more than do the trick.

  The stills were almost an extravaganza of riches, an orgy of ruin. Any one of them was a career-stopper, guaranteed to get the Senator resigning and beating a trail back to his hometown with his tail between his legs. Wizard had turned over his darknet rocks and found at least a hundred of them, plus the videos.

  Ah, the videos. Better than the stills, of course. More convincing. But in the delicate art of blackmail and ruin, you start slow and then escalate.

  He ran his fingers over the table, walking up and down, studying the photographs. This one—too grainy. That one—a back view of the Senator, could be any horny man in a corset, wielding a whip.

  Finally he decided, tapping four of the twenty photographs, marvels of lighting and form, almost as if they had been staged for his benefit, the better to ruin the Senator with.

  And, in a way, they had been staged, only not for a voyeuristic public. You do like your drama, don’t you Senator? he thought, looking at one notable composition.

  The Senator, in bra, panties, and garters, holding up black fishnet stockings and with killer size 14 stiletto heels, on hands and knees, face turned completely to the hidden camera.

  Such an unmistakeable face, too. Handsome, ruddy, with a shock of thick white hair. A face that had graced hundreds of front pages of
the WaPo and the Times. A face that was a regular on political talk shows. A face that was the very epitome of strong and successful American manhood.

  Except, of course, for the outsized Victoria’s Secret underwear the Senator was wearing and the lines of white powder on a coffee table in the foreground of the picture. There were photographs of the Senator hoovering the white powder up his nose with a hundred-dollar bill, too.

  But the kicker was the Senator’s sex partner, standing in front of the Senator, who was crouching like a dog at her feet.

  Only—it wasn’t a her.

  It took a second to get the full import of the photo because the person wielding the riding crop looked so much like a woman—and a beautiful one, at that. Long, black hair that brushed smooth shoulders, beautiful breasts barely contained by a black lace bra and black garters holding up black silk stockings. No panties.

  An image to goose any man into instant horniness except for the prominent Adam’s apple on that long, smooth throat, and the big, erect penis jutting out from between the legs.

  Christ, this photo was going to become a classic, and would stay up on the net till the end of time.

  He tapped that photo and turned to Wizard. “We’ll start with this one. Sent in jpeg, a thumbnail. Say that more is forthcoming. Caption—an American Senator. Send it to Sarkan and Richards.” The two top bloggers on politics, both of whom hated the Senator, both of them fully willing to release the photo after a day of teasing updates on the blog. The dailies would pick the teasers up soon enough. They wouldn’t publish the photos, oh no. But in a few days, this still, together with the others Wizard would leak in a slow and devastating sequence, would be all over the internet.

  Wizard shrugged his skinny shoulders. “OK, man, but it’ll cost you.”

  He smiled. Wizard was such an easy man to read, for someone so smart. “Check your bank account,” he suggested gently.

  Wizard pulled out his iPhon. e and his eyes rounded when he checked his account in Aruba. The amount was guaranteed to make him work especially well.