by Cindy Dees
The other woman pursed her lips. “I saw that film of the shooting on TV and it didn’t look quite right. I’ve shot a number of people, and that guy you killed fell down funny. Show me again where you were in relation to him when you shot him?”
What was her game? Eve tried frantically to figure out where Annika was going with this, but she hadn’t a clue. And worse, she didn’t know the first thing about crime scene forensics to fake her way through this conversation. Her best bet was to stick with the truth.
Eve looked around and pointed. “I was over there. I came from that direction. When I spotted that man by himself on the corner, he was the perfect target. Alone, standing in a shadow. Not too prosperous looking.” She glanced around. “And there are about a million exit routes from here. I figured if someone spotted me they’d have a hell of a time following me for long.”
“The bicycle was clever,” Annika allowed. “It gave you speed over anyone pursuing you on foot, and maneuverability over any car that might have chased you.”
Eve nodded, grateful for Brady’s cleverness. Lord knew she would never have thought of such a thing on her own.
“What kind of gun did you use?” Annika demanded.
“A .38 revolver. Smith and Wesson.” Which was about the sum total she could tell Annika of the gun.
“Did you steal it?”
“No. I bought it from a guy I found on the internet.”
“Do you still have it?”
Crap. Was she supposed to dump the thing in the ocean or something? Aloud, Eve snorted. “Of course I do. It’s hard to get a decent gun on an island like this. And why try to get rid of the thing and chance the police finding it and linking it to the murder?”
Annika grinned. Apparently, that had been the right answer. Eve mentally sagged in relief. She listened surreptitiously as Annika’s cell phone rang, and the terrorist spoke in rapid Basque. It was an incredibly old and difficult language to master, and Eve’s father had not been a native speaker of it. But she hadn’t grown up in the Pyrenees for nothing. She picked up enough to know that someone had just told Annika the person being watched had left the building.
“We’re not going to do your assassination right now, are we?” Eve gasped.
“What assassination?” Annika demanded sharply.
“Oh, come now,” she replied. “You want me to watch a swanky resort for an important man, and Curly asks if he still gets to take the shot? You’re planning to kill someone.”
Annika said nothing. She merely took off walking rapidly down the sidewalk, leaving Eve behind. Curly caught up to Eve and took her roughly by the upper arm to hustle her along.
She glared at the big man and shook off his hand. “Touch me again, buddy, and you’ll withdraw a bloody stump.”
Curly scowled and Annika laughed, commenting, “The kitten’s got claws, eh?”
Eve winced. The dirty look Curly was giving her promised retribution later, when the boss lady wasn’t around. She probably should’ve kept her big mouth shut, but guys like him who thought they could push around women made her mad.
Annika stopped without warning and turned to Eve. “How are you at breaking and entering?”
“I beg your pardon?” Eve asked blankly.
Annika snorted. “Some terrorist you are. We’re going to break into this building. Watch and learn.”
Eve looked up sharply. “The criminal justice center? Why? What’s in here?”
“The morgue,” Annika replied.
The—holy mother of God. Annika wanted to have a look at the body of the man Eve had “killed.” Except there was no body. Now what was she supposed to do? She looked left and right. Should she make a run for it? A few cars cruised past, but did she dare stake her life on one of them stopping if she flagged it down? Besides, she’d never outrun Annika’s bullets.
While she frantically tried to come up with options, Annika led the way around the building to what appeared to be an employee parking lot. Pierre and André materialized out of the shadows.
“Simple locks and a number keypad,” Pierre muttered. “André watched with binoculars and got the combination someone used on the number pad. All we have to do is pick the lock and we’re in.”
“Do it,” Annika ordered.
Eve fidgeted. “Do we really have to go into a morgue? I don’t like dead bodies.”
“Don’t be squeamish,” Annika replied scornfully. “If you can put a bullet in someone, you should at least be able to look at him afterward.”
How was she supposed to explain the missing corpse? Eve broke into a steady stream of mental swearing in French. It wasn’t productive, but she didn’t know what else to do. Her only chance was to brazen this out. Play dumb. Suggest that maybe the police had sent the body elsewhere for a more detailed autopsy. What would Brady tell her to do right now? Run for it? Lie? Make up something? But what? If only he could signal her! All too quickly, the heavy door swung open.
“After you,” Annika said silkily.
Great. The crazed terrorist with the gun was now at her back. André led the way down a darkened hall. Eve was so jumpy she could hardly breathe. There was another lock on the stainless steel doors leading to the morgue, but this one André merely smashed through with the butt of a sawed off shotgun he pulled from under his long raincoat. Eve flinched as the crashing noise of splintering plastic and metal echoed through the hall.
André, Pierre and Annika hurried inside, but Eve couldn’t make her feet carry her forward. Her survival instinct simply wouldn’t cooperate with this madness. Curly gave her a hard shove, though, and she had no choice but to stagger into the morgue. She hissed a foul name at him over her shoulder in French.
Annika laughed. “Watch out for him. He likes to teach his women manners the hard way.”
Eve snorted with false bravado to cover how she was shaking from head to foot, “I’ll never be his woman.”
Annika shrugged. “He’s not in the habit of asking per mission.”
Eve’s momentary irritation at Curly pushed back her fight-or-flight panic for just long enough that she didn’t bolt screaming as Annika strode over to the long wall of square metal locker doors and opened the first one. Methodically, the woman opened refrigerated units. Thankfully, most of them were empty. But a few held human forms covered in white sheets.
Eve all but fainted as Annika threw the first sheet back to reveal a dead woman. That was going to be her in a few minutes. Eve announced, “We ought to have a lookout after all that noise André made. I’m going to wait outside.”
Annika whirled so fast Eve barely saw her turn and pull her gun. She jammed it up against Eve’s left cheek as Curly lunged and grabbed her from behind. Eve’s blood ran cold when she saw the glazed look in Annika’s eyes. Monsieur Cantori used to get that exact same look just before he beat the crap out of someone.
“What are you so worried about, little kitten?”
“I t-told you. I don’t l-like dead b-bodies,” Eve stammered. Lord, her legs felt like jelly.
“Time to get over it. You open the next door.”
Eve shook her head, but the pistol barrel jammed even harder into her face. “Do it,” Annika bit out viciously. Then she added in a growl that sent shivers down Eve’s spine, “You don’t think I’d let you die fast, do you? Can you imagine what the boys will do to you if I let them?”
The woman was insane. Completely certifiable. Eve trembled from head to foot. Save me, Brady! A vision of his handsome face swam before her eyes. Dammit, she’d really wanted to get together with him before she died. She was convinced they could have something special if he would just let go of his attitude about women. And Annika was going to cost them that chance.
Deep within her panic, something snapped inside Eve’s head. It was as if she went a little crazy herself. She wasn’t going down without a fight. Brady deserved better from her than that.
“I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you, Annika. This isn’t a game. Do you ha
ve any idea how hard it was to find you? I had to bust my behind and lie to all kinds of government officials to get to you. I don’t need all these stupid tests of yours to prove myself. The fact that I’m here says it all. Now why don’t you put down that gun? Let’s get out of here before that lock André smashed brings the police down on our heads.”
“I’m not leaving until I see this victim of yours,” Annika snarled. But the madness retreated a tiny bit from her eyes.
Curly gave Eve a push toward the remaining refrigerated drawers. She might have bought herself a reprieve, but the cold, hard circle of Annika’s pistol pressed painfully into the middle of her back now. Eve forced herself to open the heavy stainless door.
“Pull out the shelf,” Annika ordered, giving her a good jab with the pistol.
Eve did as she was told and, squeezing her eyes tightly shut, threw back the sheet. She was helping Brady stop this psychopath. She concentrated on picturing him, and renewed strength of purpose flowed through her. Together, they were going to stop this woman for good.
She jolted as Annika’s body pressed sickeningly against her back, the gun moving to the side of her neck. “Look at him,” Annika demanded in Eve’s ear.
Eve pried her eyelids open. Nausea rolled through her at the sight of a dead teen, a boy of maybe sixteen and far too skinny to be mistaken for Brady. “That’s not him,” she choked out.
Annika pushed her to the next row of drawers, crooning, “Show me your kill, little kitten. I’m waiting.”
The woman’s comments grew steadily more erratic and disjointed as Eve opened the next compartment and the next. The wilder the woman got, the more terrified Eve became. If she used the bug in her purse to beg Brady to save her, he would never get here in time. She was on her own to brazen this out and manage Annika’s violent temper as best she could.
She threw the last door open. Empty. Annika pressed the gun against Eve’s temple. The terrorist’s head tilted back slightly and the whites of her eyes showed maniacally. “You lied to me? You lied to me?” Annika’s voice rose to a screech.
She had to get out of here. Away from Annika. An urge to sprint for the door nearly overcame her. Must distract the crazy woman with the gun first. She glanced frantically over Annika’s shoulder. “The tables,” she gasped. “We haven’t checked those.”
Annika strode over to the first operating table. She flung back the sheet and Eve’s knees nearly collapsed out from under her. A man in his thirties, of a similar height and build to Brady, lay stretched out on the table. His neck was propped on a wooden block and part of his skull had been shaved to reveal an ugly red hole in the back of his head behind his left ear.
She was not a particularly religious person, but an abject prayer of thanks came to her mind. “That’s him,” Eve announced in profound relief.
Annika grabbed the corpse’s remaining hair and lifted his head to examine the bullet wound. She let the head drop with a dull thud. “Well, well. The kitten did it, after all. I truly didn’t think you had it in you.”
Eve merely shrugged. She wasn’t about to push her luck and say anything to provoke Annika. She’d obviously been working herself up to killing Eve, and instinct screamed that the woman was still in a dangerous mental state. Annika would attack on a hair trigger provocation right now.
“Let’s get out of here. This place stinks,” Annika announced.
Eve was first out of the room on wobbly knees. The door across the hall rattled as she raced by, startling her badly. She put on a burst of speed and sprinted from the building. A vague sense of triumph registered in her gut. She’d done it. She’d overcome her fear and survived the crisis. But not by much, her more reasonable self whispered.
She was in. Annika believed her. She’d successfully infiltrated a dangerous terrorist cell. Now all she had to do was take it down from the inside. No sweat, right?
Brady mopped the sweat off his forehead with one hand and painfully unclenched his fingers from the hard case of his cell phone. Good Lord, that had been close.
He’d wanted desperately to tell Eve to play out the scenario, that H.O.T. Watch had matched his clothing and physical description to a corpse they’d shipped in from Jamaica precisely because it had been similar in size and build to Brady. But he’d had no way to communicate with her.
The unidentified man in the morgue had been dead a few weeks, but Annika wasn’t likely to realize that at a glance. The experts at H.O.T. Watch had even set up Brady’s fake shooting—the direction and angle Eve approached him from—to mimic John Doe’s head wound.
Brady’d thought it had been overkill, but Jennifer Blackfoot had insisted on the extra precautions. She’d been worried about leaks to the press or something exactly like Annika’s break-in to the morgue. God bless his colleague’s paranoia. It had just saved Eve’s life. Not to mention, it might have ensured the success of the entire operation.
“Thanks, Jenn,” he muttered into his cell phone.
“You’re welcome. This Annika chick is some piece of work, huh?”
“Don’t remind me,” he retorted sourly. He was more tempted than he cared to admit to pull Eve out of the whole thing. He’d take her back to that island for a couple of weeks and keep her all to himself. Funny how, as her handler, he was supposed to talk her out of chickening out, but she was the one barreling full steam ahead, and he was the one having to talk himself out of bailing on the mission.
His alarm didn’t lessen when Annika took Eve back to the cell’s bungalow across town. Now that Eve was officially part of the group, apparently Annika wanted to keep her close by at all times.
He didn’t care what Jennifer Blackfoot said. He wasn’t sitting around this hotel room miles away from Eve, twiddling his thumbs while she sank or swam alone. He had to get close to her. Close enough to rescue her himself if she needed it.
Jennifer wasn’t going to like it. In effect, he would become a field operative as well, doubling the size of the mission and invoking all the attendant dangers of it upon himself. She would just have to get over it because the matter wasn’t open for discussion. He was moving in close to Eve come hell or high water.
Chapter 10
The hotel’s elevator door closed behind Eve and she pulled out her cell phone quickly. She had only a few moments to contact Brady. Pierre was waiting for her in the lobby, and he would expect her back downstairs with her luggage soon.
In an effort to buy herself a little more time, she’d told him she still had to pack her things. He’d grumbled about amateurs not staying ready to move on short notice and she’d laughed, assuring him that she was definitely an amateur at this gig.
She desperately needed to see Brady, if only to reassure herself that she was all right, that he didn’t hear anything in Annika’s voice to indicate she still planned to kill Eve.
“Go ahead,” Brady said tersely as he answered his phone.
“Hi. It’s me.”
“Where are you? Is it safe for you to talk?”
“I’m in the hotel. In an elevator. I’m on my way up to my room to collect my things and check out. Annika wants me to move in with her.”
“You’re alone?”
“Yes. I convinced Pierre to wait for me in the lobby.”
“I’ll be in your room in sixty seconds,” he replied immediately.
Thank God.
True to his word, he burst into her room about ten seconds after she got there. He was breathing hard. Must have sprinted down the four flights of floors separating their rooms. Without saying a word, he strode forward and wrapped her in a crushing bear hug.
She inhaled the smell of his aftershave, letting it wash over her and through her, masculine, spicy and infinitely comforting. Her leftover terror from the encounter with Annika in the morgue faded before the immediacy of his embrace. She’d survived. It had turned out all right. Everything would be fine.
He seemed to know she needed to absorb some of his strength, and he gave it to her freely. She let
his confidence and calm infuse her. He had her back. An entire team of experts was observing and listening to her every move. They and Brady wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her.
But she still had to ask, “How close did I come to dying in the morgue?”
His arms tightened around her. “A SWAT team was in the hallway outside. A sniper had his gun trained on Annika. He’d have shot her through the wall with a single word from me.
“You mean I was scared out of my mind for nothing?”
“Just because the shooter was there didn’t mean he could necessarily have taken her out before she shot.” He added reluctantly, “You were in plenty of danger.”
She shuddered against the solid, warm wall of his body.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured. “You’re safe. You shouldn’t ever be in that kind of danger again as long as you don’t do something to send Annika into orbit.”
She burrowed closer to him. And then a random thought made her lift her head. “How did the SWAT team get out of that hallway when we ran out of the morgue?”
Brady chuckled. “It was a close thing. They had to scramble into the room across the hall. Barely got the door closed before you all came flying out of there. It would have been funny as hell if we weren’t all holding our breaths that Annika might have spotted them.”
She laughed. “I thought I saw that door move.”
“The guys will be annoyed to hear you saw that.”
“Will there be someone close by Annika’s house to rescue me if she goes nuts?”
“Absolutely,” Brady declared. “Me, for one. There’ll probably be an audio/visual technician or two, as well. If things look like they’re starting to get dicey, I’ll call the local police and make sure they’re close, too. From here on out, we’ll have a safety net around you at all times.”
“Won’t you have to sleep now and then?”
