by Rachel Lee
A faint rustle sounded in the undergrowth. The smooth, broad back in front of her stiffened. Sarah could see every ridge in his spine, the delineation of every hard, roped muscle under his skin.
“Señor Creighton?”
The muscles twitched. Jack sent Sarah a disgusted look over his shoulder, then called a response, “Sí, Eduard.”
The boy hurried into view, his young face scrunched into worried lines. He stuttered a few quick sentences in idiomatic Spanish. Sarah caught Eleanora’s name, and Teresa’s. She pushed past Jack and ran across the clearing.
“What is it, Eduard? What’s happening?”
“It is trouble. Eleanora’s man, he hit her face because she didn’t do the rice and the beans for him.”
“What?”
“She bleeds, and Teresa cries. Ricci cries, also. I put them in the hut and came for you.”
Although he spoke to Sarah, his eyes sought approval from the man standing behind her.
“You did good,” Jack told the boy, laying a hand on his thin shoulder before turning to Sarah. “Get your gear.”
She didn’t need his quiet order this time. She was already running to the bush where she’d spread the wet cotton blouse to dry. She snatched it and was back beside the waiting pair within minutes.
“Eduard thinks Eleanora’s nose may be broken,” Jack told her as they hurried toward camp. “If so, you’ll have to pack it until the swelling goes down.”
Sarah threw him a stricken look.
His mouth twisted. “Just how much medical expertise do you have, Sister?”
Her hands fisted on the wet blouse. “I worked in a clinic for two weeks with Sister Maria, the nun whose clothes these are. Were.”
“Two weeks! Christ!”
“She was a good teacher,” Sarah snapped. “I managed well enough yesterday, if you recall, when I treated your so-called soldiers of the revolution.”
Jack shook his head in disgust. “Right. One case of heat exhaustion and another of foot immersion. Good thing they didn’t bring back one of their compadres with a nice bullet wound in the gut for you to test your skills on.” He glanced at the boy ahead. “Could you have sutured Eduard’s arm?”
Sarah hated to admit her own inadequacy, but she was past the point of pretense. “No, not with a needle, or with ants. Nor would I have tried. I wouldn’t have done that to Eduard. I was going to tell you then, but…”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Honestly.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because you handled the situation yourself,” she retorted, “and because I didn’t trust you.”
He slanted her a quick look.
Sarah saw the unspoken question in his eyes, and knew the answer immediately. She still didn’t trust him. Even now, after she’d lost herself in his arms. After the shattering union of their bodies. She wanted him, but she didn’t trust him. The realization stunned her. And shamed her.
Something of what she was feeling must have shown on her face. His eyes narrowed, and the skin across his cheeks seemed to tighten. A bend in the trail brought them within sight of the camp, however, and he bit off whatever he’d intended to say. Instead, his mouth firmed and he said only, “We’ll talk about it later. And about what happened at the pool.”
Sarah swept past him. “No, we won’t. We won’t talk about that. We won’t discuss it. We won’t mention it, ever again.”
She was too confused, too overwhelmed, by what had just happened to talk about it. She needed time to sort through her incredible, explosive response to this man. She needed time and space and privacy. None of which she was likely to get, Sarah thought glumly.
She waited impatiently while he sent Eduard back to the hut to stay with the children. Passing the boy her wet blouse, Sarah gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile, then walked beside Jake to the lean-to Eleanora shared with the man who claimed her.
They saw him first, a short, wiry little bantam with mean eyes, a scraggly brown mustache, and an evil-looking knife strapped to his thigh. He sat on an upturned crate just outside the lean-to, with the disassembled pieces of the automatic rifle he’d been cleaning scattered on a rubber poncho in front of him.
“Let me do the talking,” Jake warned softly.
“All right. Just get him to let me take a look at… Good God!”
Sarah stopped abruptly, her mouth dropping in shock. Eleanora huddled in a corner of the lean-to. Her battered, bloody face was almost unrecognizable.
“I’ll handle…”
Paying no heed to Jake’s murmured words, Sarah stomped forward.
“You pig!” she snarled at the little man who stood and blocked her entry. “You stupid, sniveling, slimy pig.”
Stifling a curse, Jake considered his options.
He could let the guerrilla handle his adversary, or vice versa.
He could haul Sarah away before she attracted a crowd and gave every man in camp a glimpse of her magnificent fury.
Or he could… Oh, hell. He couldn’t. Jake knew there was no way he could walk away from Eleanora’s wounded face. Or from Sarah.
She threw an imperious look over her shoulder, summoning him to her side. “You tell this little bastard that I’m taking Eleanora back to our hut. He’s not to touch her or speak to her or even come near her without my permission.”
Jake’s translation was far more succinct. “The religiosa will see to your woman’s hurts.”
The man’s eyes shifted from him to the bristling figure in black. “The woman has no need of this one’s attentions.”
“She’s of no use to you like that. Nor to anyone else,” Jake added casually. “No one will want her, looking like that. You’ll make no money off her until she’s healed.”
As he’d anticipated, an appeal to the little man’s greed had more effect than any appeal to his nonexistent humanity could have. A speculative gleam entered his black eyes.
“You think so, gringo?”
Jake knew this was going to cost him. Big-time. He gave a small nod, signaling his acceptance of the deal. “I think so.”
The guerrilla didn’t bother to turn around. “Go with the religiosa, woman,” he called over his shoulder. “Maybe if she works on you long enough she can make you pretty, eh?”
Eleanora rose slowly, like an old woman, using one hand to pull herself up. Jake’s stomach knotted at the sight of the red, swelling bruises that were already starting to discolor, but he’d been in enough brawls to see that she had no smashed or broken bones.
Sarah ran forward and wrapped an arm around the older woman’s waist. Without a word to either man, she led Eleanora back to the storage hut. Jake watched them make their way across the clearing, then turned back to face the wiry, mustached little man.
The rebel reached behind the crate and pulled out a half-full bottle. “So, gringo, sit down, sit down. Have some tequila.”
The bottle’s contents sloshed as he gestured toward the automatic rifle lying in pieces on the poncho. “You must give me your expert opinion on this weapon of mine. It’s a Russian model, shipped to Cuba before the capitalists undermined the Soviet economy and they stopped producing altogether. It’s ancient, eh? Not fast and efficient, like the one you carry.”
Jake stifled a sigh and hooked a boot around another crate to drag it forward. He suspected it was going to be a long afternoon.
And an even longer night.
Listening with half an ear as Eleanora’s “husband” began bartering for her, Jake knew that the cramped little hut was about to acquire another occupant. Sarah would no doubt bed the injured woman down next to her, leaving Jake to make room for himself somewhere else. A sharp disappointment lanced through him. He didn’t like the prospect of sleeping where he couldn’t see the outline of Sarah’s pale, high-cheek-boned face in the dim light or hear the breathy little smacking noise she made when she settled into sleep or fold her soft body into his. After his one taste of her body’s honeyed sweetness, Jake
found himself craving it, like a man given a thimbleful of water to slack a raging thirst.
Frowning, Jake reached for the tequila bottle. He suddenly realized that he’d crossed some invisible line in the past few hours, a line he’d never allowed himself to step over before. Always before, he’d been able to resist any personal involvement while in the field. Not that it had been easy.
During any operation, OMEGA’s agents lived on the edge. Every emotion was magnified, every reaction could lead to either success or quick death—if they were lucky. Jake knew from textbook studies and from long experience that danger was debilitating in some instances, a powerful aphrodisiac in others. People clung to each other in desperate situations, seeking to affirm life in the face of death. Sometimes that transitory need solidified into a stronger emotion.
One of his fellow agents had almost compromised his mission and his life by falling hard for a laboratory researcher suspected of selling the latest information on genetic engineering to a well-armed and particularly vicious neo-Nazi group. As it turned out, the woman had stumbled onto her lab’s suspicious research accidentally, but the agent had gone through twenty stages of hell before he discovered that.
As Jake had with Sarah. He’d desired her, and he’d been so disgusted with himself because of that desire that he tied himself into knots. When he found out she wasn’t really a nun, he’d allowed his tight control to slip. Slipped, hell. It had shredded completely. Which wasn’t exactly smart for a man who wanted not only to walk out of this jungle alive, but to make sure one woman and three children made it out, as well. Two women, he corrected with an inner grimace. Somehow he suspected Sarah wouldn’t leave the compound without Eleanora.
Jake took another swig of the tequila as the little weasel across from him shook his head despairingly over the much-dented stock of his aged weapon. Jake grunted noncommittally, making a mental note to inform Maggie that she might have an additional neutral to extract when she led the team in.
Thank God Sinclair was in the field! She wouldn’t blink an eye if she learned she had to extract the entire Cartozan World Cup soccer team from this little camp perched halfway up a mountain. Jake would have to find a few moments to slip away and contact Maggie tomorrow. He didn’t dare leave the women alone in camp, though. Maybe he’d take them back to the pool. Have another damn picnic!
Despite his disgust at the way he’d lost control, Jake couldn’t prevent the sudden tightening in his groin as he thought of Sarah beside the pool. Her shining hair bright against the green ferns. Her small, delicate body open and welcoming. His hand clenched around the neck of the bottle.
It was going to be a long afternoon.
And an even longer night.
For the first time, Jake began to think beyond this mission. Beyond the moment Maggie plucked Sarah and the children from this little compound.
“You will be back before the evening meal, Sister?”
Maggie smiled to herself. If the evening meal was anything like the noon one, she would certainly not be back. She needed more than a small bowl of rice and beans to sustain her high energy levels.
“No, Sister,” she told the earnest young postulant who’d escorted her to the gate. “If I’m to travel into the interior tomorrow or the next day, I have many arrangements to make and people to see.”
That much was true, anyway.
“I’m surprised the mother house sent you to make these arrangements yourself. Usually such matters are taken care of before a new sister arrives to take over a mission.”
“This is a rather special mission.”
“Oh. I see.”
A sudden boom made Maggie jump.
The young sister didn’t even blink. “There’s the call to afternoon meditation. Go with God.”
Maggie returned the benediction, shut the wooden gate behind her and set off down the dirt road. She sighed with relief as the echoes of the thundering bell died away. It still amazed her that a community of women didn’t choose a more melodious sound to mark their hours. A bell that chimed, perhaps, or tinkled, or pinged. Not one that shook the rafters with its booming clamor every thirty minutes. The realization that she had to endure the sound for two more days was enough to put a momentary dent in Maggie’s soaring spirits.
As she plodded along, however, her hands tucked in her sleeve and her black skirts swishing, Maggie soon put all thoughts of the bell behind her. The excitement that had bubbled in her veins ever since Jake had made contact with her an hour ago brought a gleam to her coffee-brown eyes.
The operation was still viable. Jaguar had confirmed that a new shipment of heat-seeking missiles would be delivered to an unspecified location on the twenty-seventh, two days from now. He would accompany the party that went to the drop site, while Maggie herself hit the camp. Jake had briefed her on the precise layout of all buildings and where he’d have the woman and the children positioned.
The gleam in Maggie’s eyes deepened as she remembered Jake’s terse rundown of the situation in the camp. He’d confirmed that Sarah Chandler was safe, that she’d donned the dead nun’s robes as cover the night of the raid to protect herself and the three children. According to Jake, the disguise had kept her from being molested. So far. At that moment, however, he’d sounded as though he wanted to strangle the woman himself.
He probably did. After five days in Sarah Chandler’s company, Jake no doubt couldn’t wait to see the last of the socialite. Maggie grinned, wondering just what the other woman made of the terse, hard-eyed mercenary. Jake wasn’t exactly sociable, even when he wasn’t in the field. In this undercover role, he must terrify the poor woman.
Although… Maggie had to admit Sarah Chandler had shown real courage and ingenuity in carrying off her disguise this long. The media had painted her as weak-willed and shallow, but Maggie knew that no one was that one dimensional. Maybe, just maybe, there was more to Sarah Chandler than anyone realized. After all, she was Senator Chandler’s daughter.
Maggie’s grin deepened as she pictured Adam Ridgeway facing down the big, bluff senator, who never appeared in public without an unlit cigar clamped in one corner of his mouth. That would be a confrontation worth seeing. Unleashed, unrestrained energy versus absolute control. Raw power colliding with unshakable authority. Maggie put her money on Adam, hands down.
Still, she thought, if she had to choose between witnessing a spectacular demonstration of two civilized, sophisticated males locking horns like bull elks or walking down a dusty road in a colorful, sweltering tropical city, she’d choose to be here. Cartoza’s capital—called confusingly enough, Cartoza City—teemed with life.
City dwellers shouted as they alternately zoomed their vehicles for a few yards, then braked to a screeching halt a few inches from the pedestrians clogging the streets. People, taxis, buses, trucks, donkeys and one or two pigs streamed in or out of the city. Traffic was snarled hopelessly around the plaza that housed the colorful open-air market, Cartoza’s center of commerce.
Concentrating on her role, Maggie settled her face into calm, quiet lines and shrank within herself. Someone with her height would stand out in a crowd unless she made herself inconspicuous. Head bowed, shoulders slightly slumped, hands folded over the .22 tucked into her sleeve, she entered the throng of people swarming through the market. She had a couple of days before the drop. She intended to use them.
By the time she joined the women who invited her to share their evening meal at a rickety table set in a patch of shade cast by a market stall, Maggie had gathered a cache of informational nuggets. Cartoza was a small country, barely a hundred miles from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. Everyone was related to everyone else in some remote way. And everyone knew what happened in the interior, although few talked about it openly to outsiders.
Of course, the sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows weren’t really outsiders. The nuns understood how difficult it was for a woman to stretch a little bit of milk among five children. Their work brought them into contact with t
he grinding poverty of the working people.
“One does what one must, Sister,” a tired, once-pretty young woman said, scrupulously dividing her dish of paella to give Maggie half.
Maggie ate slowly, listening while the women described the hardships since the guerrillas had begun battling government troops, with the peasants caught between.
“The federales, they make it so hard on us,” another woman said with a sigh. “They set up roadblocks. They stop our trucks. They search everything for chemicals. We were four hours getting home from market last week.”
The mention of chemicals set Maggie’s pulse tripping. She knew that cocaine-processing plants needed a steady supply of hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid and ether to leach the coca leaves and extract a paste that could be shaped into bricks for shipping to refineries. She also knew that a good percentage of the population in many Latin American countries had become economically dependent on coca production. There weren’t any programs like welfare or unemployment or food stamps in these countries. People starved to death every day. As a result, many peasants worked the coca fields or tried desperately to make a living by smuggling chemicals to the plants hidden deep in the interior. It wasn’t a matter of right or wrong. It was a matter of survival.
Jake’s initial reports had confirmed the report that a drug lord had set up a processing plant in Cartoza’s interior. The same lord supplied the funds to arm the rebels, thus keeping the government too busy to mount a major search for his plant. Although this part of the operation was outside OMEGA’s area of responsibility, Maggie couldn’t let slip the chance to gather any useful information. Washing down the paella that had suddenly lodged in her throat with tepid orangeade, she turned a gentle, inquiring look on the woman who’d just spoken.
“It took you four hours to get home, señora? You must have traveled far.”
“No, Sister, it was those pesky federales, I tell you. They set up a checkpoint on the only road into the mountains. Traffic was backed up for two or three miles. They searched everyone, everything. Everyone had to get off the bus in front of us and open every bundle. Then the searchers found some gallon containers under a load of manure on the truck ahead of us.” She shook her head. “As soon as the police would unload a container, the husband would flap his arms and argue while the wife snatched it up, ran around to the other side and shoved it back on the truck.”
