Serious Risks

by Rachel Lee

  At last she lay naked before him, with her eyes still tightly shut. Her hands betrayed her, however. They made restless little movements against the gray bedspread, movements that told him how difficult it was for her to pretend passivity. He started to reach for her, but then snatched his hands back. There was something they had to deal with first, something that had wounded them both.

  “Damn you, Jessie,” he said gruffly for the second time that day. “What kind of man do you take me for? I’m so damn mad at you I can hardly stand it.”

  Her eyes snapped open. “Then why are you doing this?” she demanded hoarsely. “Is this a punishment?” The possibility tore at her, and she thought the pain would kill her.

  “Hell!” he swore fiercely. “Damn it, woman, I want you to admit you know better than that. I want you to admit that I want you. I want you to stop putting us both down by believing that I could, that I would make love to you for any other reason!”

  Standing, he yanked at his own clothes and then stood before her magnificently naked and fully aroused. “I don’t prostitute myself, Jess.”

  She gasped, and the color drained from her face. “I didn’t think… I never meant…” Oh, God, was that what she had made him think? Was that what her fear sounded like?

  Arlen sat down on the bed beside her, facing her, but still refusing to touch her.

  “It may be all I have to give a woman, Jessie, but at least it’s honest. It’s truthful. I want you. Now, damn it, I want to hear you admit it! Admit that I want you!”

  She scrambled onto her knees and flung her arms around him, everything forgotten in the horror of the wound she had given this man. She hadn’t meant it the way it sounded. Such a thought had never occurred to her. And somewhere, dimly, she heard her voice saying exactly that.

  Arlen’s fingers tunneled into her hair and clutched her close to his shoulder. “Say it,” he said hoarsely. “Flat out. Just say it, Jess.”

  “You want me,” she said.

  “Say it again.”

  “You want me.”

  “Why did I spend the night in your bed, Jessie?”

  “Because you want me.”

  He sighed, a heavy sigh, then lowered them both to the bed. “Whatever else is going on here, Jessie—and I don’t pretend to have all the answers—that’s one thing you can damn well be sure of. I want you.”

  She thought she could live with that surety as his hands began to ignite marvelous fires all over her aching body. His job might be the reason he was moving in with her. In fact, it certainly was, since he wasn’t interested in any entanglements. His job might be the reason he spent so much time with her, and the reason he looked after her and watched over her.

  But at least when he climbed into her bed she would believe he was there because he wanted to be. And when the job was over and he at last went away, she would still have that surety to comfort her. He wanted her.

  Chapter 9

  The first thing Arlen did on reaching his office Monday morning was tip his chair back and look out at the sky. An errant patch of blue winked at him through chasing clouds, hinting at the possibility of a sunny day.

  Not that he cared. This morning he felt anything but normal. His mind seemed to have gone off to never-never land. Beneath the top level of his thoughts, whispers from the day before made a background symphony. Jessica had the smoothest, softest skin, the…

  “Hell,” he muttered, and swiveled his chair so that he faced his desk. So what if he had figured he would never know a weekend like that as long as he lived? So what if he had believed himself too old, too staid and too rational to experience anything like that? The fact was, he had experienced it, but that was no excuse for acting like a moonstruck calf.

  Maybe he ought to send some roses to Jessie….

  “Arlen?” Donna walked into the office carrying a large brown envelope. “This came by messenger from the medical examiner.”

  Thoughts of Jessica took a backseat to the realization that the M.E. had found something he considered too important to trust to the telephone. Arlen tore impatiently at the flap and pulled out a manila folder with a typed note paper-clipped to the front of it. Five minutes later he buzzed Donna and told her to ask Lisa and Phil to come to his office.

  “The facility security officer at MTI didn’t commit suicide,” he told the two agents as soon as they were seated across the desk from him. “The M.E. says it’s definitely murder disguised to look like suicide. He included a bunch of photos I’m going to transmit to the National Crime Lab for verification, but that’s pro forma. I don’t expect them to find any differently.”

  He tossed half of the stack of photos to Phil and half to Lisa. “Take a look. The key is the ligature mark around the left wrist. Whoever did it tried to avoid leaving a mark by using a broad binding, but Dumberton found the traces anyhow. Dave Barron’s hands were tied behind him when he died.”

  Phil muttered an oath. “Then there’s no powder on his hands, either?”

  “Actually, there is. Our bad guy is no typical dummy. He must have wrapped Barron’s hand around the weapon and fired the second shot, the slug we found in the wall just behind Barron’s chair, the one that looked like Barron might have missed on his first try. There’s definitely powder penetration. But it doesn’t negate the fact that Barron died with his hands tied behind him.”

  Lisa finished thumbing through the photos and reached for a diagram of the bullet’s path through Barron’s skull. “Any other tip-off?”

  “Dumberton thinks the angle of the bullet’s penetration is an unlikely one to result from Barron shooting himself. It’s possible, but doubtful, because he would have had to get into a strained and somewhat unnatural position. There are a dozen easier angles from which he could have shot himself.”

  “But that’s not conclusive,” Lisa observed.

  “No,” Arlen agreed, “but the ligature marks settle that. Dumberton says the blood pooled in the hands behind the restriction in a way that indicates the binding was removed after the heart stopped.”

  “That’s conclusive,” Phil said. He tossed his stack of photos back onto the desk. “And this ties in to the business with the Kilmer woman?”

  “I’m afraid it might.” Arlen was surprised that Phil had drawn the connection so immediately, but then, Phil was nobody’s fool. The Kilmer woman. That was how he ought to think of her while he was working on the case, but he couldn’t manage it. An image of her long, silky hair on the pillow this morning flashed before his mind’s eye, and he felt himself stir in response. Not now!

  “Her phones are bugged, and I’m pretty sure her house was being watched yesterday morning.” He saw Lisa and Phil exchange glances and figured they had speculated on his relationship with Jessie. “I don’t need to tell you this isn’t a typical recruitment scenario. It occurred to me that perhaps Leong’s approach to Jessica triggered this other stuff somehow, although I can’t imagine why. It just seems too damn coincidental, though, that we could have a recruitment attempt on one hand and this other hanky-panky on the other, and not have any link between them. Top that off with the M.E.’s report, and this is beginning to look like a hell of a mess.”

  Leaning forward, he retrieved the photos and slipped them into the envelope. “It also occurs to me,” he said slowly, “that somebody is scared to death. Maybe Barron did something, or threatened to do something, that scared somebody badly enough to kill him. That could be a lot of things, of course, but the thing that leaps forcibly to mind is that Barron was preparing a written report detailing the theft of a classified document, and that he was planning to submit that report to us. His death prevented that. A little too neatly, to my way of thinking.”

  He looked from Lisa to Phil, then back again. They were both listening intently, reserving judgment, so he plunged ahead. “The next coincidence is that the document theft Barron was planning to report happened to involve Jessica Kilmer. What’s more, she refused to accept Barron’s supposition that it w
as mislaid, and she made a lot of noise about it.”

  Phil gave a low whistle. “You’re right. It’s too much coincidence, especially when she’s being watched.”

  “So we can assume somebody’s running scared,” Arlen remarked. He lowered his chin to his chest and stared at his hands. “Damned if I see how Leong might fit in, though. Talk about left field.”

  Leong was till somewhere out in left field twenty minutes later when Lisa and Phil left Arlen’s office. It was easy enough to build a scenario of a spy scared enough to murder Barron to prevent him from calling the FBI. It was easy to suppose Jessica’s phones had been bugged and that her house was being watched for the same reason, to see if she turned to the FBI. Of course, there were little discrepancies, and there were more than a few questions. Like why had Barron been murdered, while a wait-and-see approach had been taken with Jessie? Would Jessie be in danger if the watchers discovered that Arlen was a federal agent?

  The thought disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. He almost wished he hadn’t thought of fear as a motive. A man after money was fairly predictable as to how he would handle events. A terrified man was a loose cannon capable of unpredictable devastation.

  Standing, he looked out the window at the street far below. He wouldn’t, he realized, feel comfortable again until he had Jessie close, within sight and within reach. Where he could protect her and be certain of her safety. In his arms, her satin thighs against his…

  A short, muffled laugh escaped him. Damn, he thought, there he went again. And just what the hell did that say about him?

  Jessica arrived for her lunch date with Greg Leong feeling a more than ordinary amount of edginess. It wasn’t so much that she feared this meeting—Arlen had been insistent that absolutely nothing would happen except a possible introduction to someone else—but it had been a bad morning from the outset, and she had no hope that lunch would go any more smoothly.

  Lisa Gonzales and Phil Harrigan were already in the Pub, seated at a central table and facing one another in a way that Jessica imagined gave them a full view of everything in the restaurant. Arlen had shown her file photos of them last night so she would recognize them, and she supposed they had seen photos of her, too. She wondered what photos the FBI had of her and shifted a little uneasily as she wondered how they had come by them. MTI had a photo in her personnel file, of course. Maybe that was it.

  A glance at her watch told her that Leong was ten minutes late; her lunch hour was dwindling away. Deciding not to wait any longer, she ordered the house salad and iced tea, and tried not to look at Phil and Lisa again. Somebody else might be watching her, too; Arlen had warned her of that earlier as they stood in the chilly morning air beside her car. He’d looked so businesslike, so reserved and controlled in his gray suit. Every inch the federal agent. Every seam and button and hair in place. Unapproachable. Unreachable.

  And then he’d robbed her of her breath by bending from his great height, wrapping his arms around her and cupping her bottom in his large hands. His own breath had had a ragged, tattered sound as he pulled her slowly, snugly, deliciously against him for a long moment.

  “Hold that thought, Jessie,” he’d whispered into her ear, sending a delectable shiver of anticipation shooting right to her core.

  She was holding that thought now as she stared down at a limp-looking house salad and felt everything inside her go into a tailspin of longing.

  “Miss Kilmer?”

  Greg Leong’s British-accented voice reached through her pleasurable haze and jolted her unpleasantly. Her stomach gave an anxious lurch. Somehow she managed to invite him to sit and brushed aside his apology for his tardiness.

  “Dr. Kostermeyer asked me to say hello for him,” Leong said after he’d placed his own order. “He wants to know if you might be able to come by the university next week sometime. He has that reference on nonlinear response you asked about.”

  “I’ll give him a call,” Jessica promised. “I’m surprised he found it. I sure didn’t give him much to go on.”

  The conversation continued in a desultory fashion. With half an ear Jessica listened to Leong’s description of his graduate research. It wasn’t long before she developed the conviction that he had no more interest in this meeting than she had. He, too, was marking time until he could do whatever it was he’d been sent to do. That realization made her even edgier, because it confirmed that Arlen hadn’t been mistaken in his impression that this was a recruitment approach.

  And, frankly, she didn’t know if she could handle that right now. It had been scary enough when she thought it was the only thing going on, but added to the fact that her phones were bugged and someone had been watching her house—well, it was just too much. She struggled with an overwhelming urge to throw down her napkin and tell Leong to get lost. She had promised Arlen she would do this, but she wasn’t at all sure she could make it through this one lunch.

  And just when she was sure her nerves would force her to take some kind of action, a large, dark hand clapped down on Leong’s shoulder.

  “Greg! How have you been?”

  Jessica was never sure afterward what she had expected, but it certainly hadn’t been a government-clone type with an Eastern European accent.

  That evening, over dinner at a quiet restaurant, Arlen laughed as she described her reaction. “You expected a short, squat, ugly Neanderthal,” he told her. “Something out of a B movie.”

  “I guess,” she admitted. “I was surprised that he seemed so normal. Fashionable. Even his haircut was the latest style.”

  “These guys are simply foreign editions of your average government agent, Jessie. Like I told you, no difference between them and us except ideology. The last thing they want is to stand out like a sore thumb.”

  “Well, he would have passed for a banker or a life insurance salesman.”

  Arlen’s laughter faded, and he reached across the table to cover her hand with his. Dinner out had been as much a necessity as a romantic invitation. As a precautionary measure, they couldn’t discuss any of this once they returned to her house. “Phil and Lisa got a picture of him. Who did he say he was?”

  “Jan Dobrocek. He said he’s from Czechoslovakia, and that he’s studying mechanical engineering at the university. He certainly knows enough about engineering school to substantiate that.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me.” He’d ordered a white wine, and now he paused to refill Jessica’s glass. He knew she didn’t really care for it, but she was wound up as tight as a top, and she was drinking it without even realizing it. For all that her meeting had been boring, she had invested a lot of what Arlen called adrenaline time into it. It was hard to come down from that kind of high. “A surprising number of Eastern bloc students also have intelligence missions. And some students are also members of intelligence organizations like the KGB and GRU.”

  “GRU?”

  “Russian army intelligence.”

  Jessica gave him a faint, embarrassed smile. “I don’t mean to be naive, Arlen, but with all the easing of tensions lately, and with things happening like the Berlin Wall coming down, all this cloak-and-dagger stuff sounds even harder to believe.”

  “Since perestroika and glasnost, Russian intelligence activities in this country have increased tenfold. Spying isn’t a matter of hostility, it’s a matter of common sense. No nation wants to deal from a position of blindness or weakness. Plus, we’ve got a lot of technology, both military and otherwise, that makes spying a worthwhile activity no matter how friendly we get. In fact, some of our best friends spy on us all the time. Want me to name a few?”

  Jessica felt her smile broadening, softening. She liked it when Arlen got wound up on his hobbyhorse like this. She wondered if he even knew it was his hobbyhorse, or that all his earnestness made something inside her feel warm. It was nice to know that some people didn’t become cynical and uncaring, that some people still believed in the old-fashioned ideals. She caught herself trying to store up ever
y nuance of his expression, as if she were taking a mental snapshot for posterity. But then, posterity was all she would have. Deliberately, she took another mental snapshot.

  Gray eyes suddenly twinkled at her. “Are you even listening, Jessie? Spying is supposed to be fun and exciting.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “If lunch was a taste of it, it’s going to be the most boring thing I’ve ever done.”

  “I hope it stays that way.” Honest to God, he did. But he was afraid, with neck-prickling certainty, that this time the game was following no known rules. Foreign intelligence operatives weren’t above homicide, but they invariably reserved it for their own people who strayed or defected. Arlen honestly couldn’t think of a single instance where an American on American soil had been injured by a foreign intelligence operative.

  Until Dave Barron. He was inclined to believe Barron had been killed by a fellow traitor, but regardless, something truly unusual was going on. For the moment, however, he didn’t want Jessica worrying about such things. He just wanted her to be cautious. Extraordinarily cautious. So how did he casually persuade a brainy lady to act as if her life was in danger without admitting to her that it actually might be?

  “Arlen?”

  Jessie’s soft voice roused him from his preoccupation, and he looked across the table at her perplexed face.

  “You’re lovely, Jessie,” he said abruptly, from the heart. Her hair was caught up in that ridiculous knot he had wanted to take down almost from the minute he laid eyes on it, but suddenly he didn’t mind that. In fact, it was just fine with him if nobody but him ever saw that shiny, thick, brown glory tumbling down around her hips. He liked knowing it was there, knowing he could reach out and pull the pins free anytime he chose. He liked the pink flush on her silken cheeks and the small dent in her upper lip, her tiny nose and her long, thick eyelashes. He liked the fact that she wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t beautiful. She was lovely, and that was infinitely more precious.