by Diana Palmer
"I hope you're right." She went to the porthole and looked out. There was only miles of ocean to see, but even that was preferable to having to look at her husband's closed face.
Pierce was feeling guilty about what he'd said to her. But it wouldn't have been fair to let her hope that anything was going to change. She'd go to college and he'd go back to work. A child would only...complicate things. His eyes narrowed as he looked at Brianne and had a sudden, shocking picture of her with a nursing baby at her breast. She'd be a perfect mother, he thought irritably, She'd do all the right things for it, cherish and love it. It would be a wanted child, a needed child. He closed his eyes. He couldn't afford to let himself think that way. She was too young to make that sort of commitment to a man, he was certain of it. He wasn't risking his heart on a gamble. He gave her one last, lingering look and went to find Tate.
The shrimp boat pulled into a little marina near the river inlet that led to Washington, D.C. A long black limousine was waiting for the three passengers who came up on deck when the boat docked.
A lean, dark man in a suit got out and approached the boat, flanked by two of Tate's men who'd met them in Savannah.
"Lane," Tate said, shaking hands with the newcomer, who was almost as tall as himself.
"Good to see you, boss," Colby Lane
answered with a brief smile that was more like a grimace in Pierce's direction.
"You can drop the sweet talk," Pierce muttered. "My fist has almost healed."
Colby rubbed his jaw. "So has my jaw," he mused. "I won't make that mistake again!"
"See that you don't," Pierce replied pleasantly. "Have any trouble getting here?"
"A minor skirmish at the Maryland border," he replied. "Two of Brauer's men are now in federal custody/'
"Good for you."
"Let's go," Colby said. "We're still being followed, but I think we can outrun them."
"Everybody inside," Tate said, motioning his companions into the car.
Mufti grimaced as he compared his sweats to the dignified suits of the people with him. "I look not very convincing in such clothing," he murmured uneasily.
"You look quite convincing to me," Tate replied, and smiled at him. "Nobody is going to expect any of us to look bandbox fresh." He wrinkled his nose at the way they all smelled. "Good smelling too. We smell like a cheap shrimp dinner."
"And many days old, too," Brianne murmured with a subdued chuckle.
"We've tracked Senator Holden to his hot tub," Tate told them. "He'll smell better than we do, but he won't be as nicely dressed."
"Is that Brauer's friend?"
Tate shook his head. "We wouldn't risk approaching him, under the circumstances. Brauer's probably got him convinced that we're dangerous subversives. No, Holden is..." He hesitated and averted his eyes. "He's someone I know. Cocky as all hell, and hard to talk to, but he's honest and fair. He'll give us a hearing."
Something was suspicious there, but Pierce didn't push his security chief for information. It was hardly the time. He glanced at Brianne with renewed worry. Nothing was going the way he'd planned, lately, least of all his private life. He'd be glad when this was over and he could make decisions.
Chapter Fourteen
The ride through the capital was one Brianne wasn't likely to forget. Another black limousine picked them up as they headed into D.C., and shots were fired at them from behind. She didn't realize the car was armored and had bulletproof glass until she saw the lack of effect the bullets had.
"Pull into the next lane," Tate told the driver, pulling his automatic weapon from under his jacket. His friend Colby did the same.
"Don't get shot," Pierce muttered.
Tate looked shocked. "I'm bulletproof," he said haughtily.
"Me, too," Colby agreed.
"All right. But be careful."
The car stopped and the two men leaped out of the doors simultaneously, slamming them shut on the way out.
It was like ballet, Brianne mused, spellbound as she watched the action through the tinted windows.
The men in the car that had been following them jumped out of their own stopped vehicle and started firing nonstop. The gunfire was returned, but in short, sharp bursts.
"SAS style," Pierce mused.
"What?" Brianne asked.
"Two shots, pause, two shots."
"What's an SAS?"
"The British special forces."
"Oh, those guys!" she exclaimed. "I've read about them."
"Everybody's read about them, but Tate once served with them on a hush-hush mission in the Middle East in the early nineties."
"Is there anything he hasn't done?" she asked, aghast.
"Not much." He was watching the action, too. Suddenly, Pierce pulled Brianne to him and hid her face in his shirt, holding her even when she tried to draw away. "Stay there," he said curtly.
"Why?" she demanded, her voice muffled by his shirt.
"You don't need to see this."
The gunfire had stopped. Seconds later, Tate was back in the car, leaving Colby behind. Another of the suited men nodded toward Tate and got out, slamming the door behind him.
"They'll phone the appropriate authorities and clear this up," Tate said. "Get going," he told the driver. He didn't say another word for two or three minutes. "You can let her up now. They're out of sight."
Pierce let Brianne lift her head. "I'm no lily," she muttered as she pushed back her disheveled hair.
"You're no rock, either," Pierce told her firmly. He caught her small hand in his and held it warmly. He was going to miss her, he mused sadly. She was the only reason he'd had to smile in recent months. The smile faded as he tried to picture his life when she wasn't in it. He didn't like what he saw.
She drew her hand away with a mock glare. "You don't have to hold my hand. I wouldn't hit you," she said innocently. "Well, not very hard." She glanced toward Tate, who looked unapproachable and taciturn as the car turned into a long driveway that led to a Georgian mansion hidden behind some trees.
"I thought we were going into D.C.," Pierce remarked.
"We are, when we get through here. The senator's had the flu and he's confined here for another day or two. Colby spoke to him. He thinks, considering what we've just sustained, this is the safest way to proceed." He checked his watch. "Right on time, too."
If Brianne was puzzled, so was Pierce. His security chief was one of the best in the business, but the man was irritatingly taciturn sometimes about his objectives and how he accomplished them.
"You're sure Holden won't turn us in?" Pierce asked.
"Oh, I'm sure," Tate said. He didn't smile. If anything, he looked tense and uneasy.
They got out of the car at the front door, and with wary glances all around, they rushed into the house that a butler was holding open for them.
"Senator Holden is in the library, sir," the man told Tate, as if he knew him. "He's expecting all of you."
"Thanks." Tate-avoided the man's searching gaze and strode ahead of the others into the walnut-paneled library, full of floor-to-ceiling bookcases and leather-covered furniture.
The man sitting in a thick bathrobe and pajamas before them came as a shock. He couldn't be Native American, Brianne surmised, but he certainly looked it. He had black eyes and straight black hair with more than a trace of silver threading through it. He was big and burly, more like a wrestler than a politician.
"Well, don't just stand there, sit down," he said in a gruff, husky voice, reminiscent of a soldier's commanding tones. He scowled at Tate. "Are these the people you had your cohort tell me about? You couldn't have spoken to me yourself, of course."
Tate seemed to grow taller. His black eyes flashed. When he scowled, he looked amazingly like their host. "There wasn't time, Senator," he said, fighting down his hostility. "My boss, Pierce Hutton, his wife, Brianne, and Mufti our star witness against Brauer."
"I'm glad to meet you," the old man said sharply. "This thing is very disturbing, ver
y disturbing," he repeated. "I simply can't believe that any rational human being would bend so low. Starting a war and blaming it on an innocent nation it's obscene!"
"Yes, it is," Pierce said. "But he thinks he can get away with it. He's tried every way he could think of to stop us, right down to attempted assassination."
"You made it. I knew you would," the senator replied, with a hostile glance toward Tate. '.'He's good. In fact, he's the very best at what he does professionally."
It was a dig, and Pierce was surprised to see it register on his security chief’s impassive face. Tate rarely showed deep emotion. He was feeling it now and Pierce wondered why.
"I want the whole story," the senator continued. He stared at Mufti. "Let's start with you."
Mufti was nervous at first, but the senator, despite his gruffness, quickly put the man at ease. After a few minutes, Mufti felt like an old and trusted friend. He told the man everything, from his attempts at spying on Sabon, to the sudden appearance of the mercenaries, to Sabon' s flight.
"This man Sabon, he was in on it?" the senator asked.
"Only at first," Brianne said quickly, knowing that nobody else would defend Philippe. She explained who the man was and why he'd enticed Brauer to his country and used him to approach the oil cartel.
"Brauer's told his friend in the Senate that Sabon is the culprit," he replied. "That Sabon used the excuse for a military coup to take over his country, because he's really working for the revolutionaries in Salid."
"Philippe Sabon is the son of the ruling sheikh of Qawi," Brianne said. "Something that my stepfather doesn't know. Yet It doesn't make sense that after going to so much trouble to attract investors and oilmen to his country, Philippe would sabotage the whole thing by staging a military coup that he doesn't need in order to gain power. He already has power."
"He wanted American intervention."
"Only to save his oil fields from Mufti's employers," Brianne said with an apologetic glance at Mufti, who was looking uncomfortable. "They're even poorer than Philippe's countrymen, and they were looking toward an assault on those oil fields, hoping to capture some of them. I'm sorry, Mufti, but he has to know the whole truth. A war will serve no one."
He seemed to slump. "Yes, I understand that."
"Third World nations," the senator said-with a heavy sigh. "Most of them have economies that amount to less than my annual grocery bill. Starving people, starving economies, and the industrial nations just go right on letting it happen. Millions for arms and research to make better weapons, pennies to feed the hungry." He smiled ruefully as the others stared at him. "I'm a liberal," he said shortly. "You can't eat money."
Pierce chuckled. "No, but you can feed a lot of people if you can convince those who have it to use it wisely."
"You don't have to paint me any pictures, Button, I know how you use yours," he returned with a look of admiration. “You've done more for relief efforts than any other businessman I know."
Pierce shrugged, ignoring Brianne's surprise. "I do what I can." His eyes narrowed. "Brauer has to be stopped. We think if he knows how badly he's being*beaten, he may order his mercenaries to set fire to the oil fields."
"What would be the point?"
"Revenge, plain and simple. He can throw suspicion on Sabon and even on Mufti's people. If he manages to start a war that way, couldn't the threat of an ecological disaster in the region provoke U.S. intervention?"
"It could," the senator said grimly. He ran a hand through his thick, straight hair. "Damn!"
"Can you get us in to see the under secretary of state?" Pierce asked.
Senator Holden was thinking. He didn't reply for a minute. "Brauer will have spiked your guns by the time you get there. I imagine he's got government agents looking for you right now."
"Then what can we do?" Brianne asked.
The senator studied the four people intensely. He pursed his lips and smiled. "I have a friend at the news station INN," he murmured.
He did, indeed, have several friends at the International News Network, and they came to his home, complete with reporter, cameras and sound equipment. In the senator's study, the whole terrifying plan that Kurt Brauer had evolved was laid out for the world community to hear. Mufti was eloquent in defense of his people and the way they were being used in Brauer's attempt to overthrow Sabon's little country. By the time they finished and the camera crew was on its way back to D.C., there were many busy people in the capital looking for Kurt Brauer.
He wasn't hard to find, once the breaking news story hit the airwaves. He was arrested right in the office of his friend the senator and taken away by federal officials. Some of his mercenaries were picked up in Florida, others in Georgia and near the coast of Virginia.
International police officers caught another batch in St. Martin just as they closed in on a dark European who'd just exited a local bank there, on the French side of the island.
Troops from a nation friendly to the United States, and working unofficially, went to support a contingent of Sabon's military over the border as they returned to launch a counterrevolution against Brauer's hired mercenaries. Many of Brauer's cohorts were killed in the firefight, many others were taken away to jail. In a matter of days, the ruling sheikh, returned from exile, was back in his seat of office. The oil fields were under guard now, and the oil consortium's officials and workers were free to return to their jobs there.
Kurt Brauer was held under a federal warrant because the mercenaries he'd used were American nationals. He was accused of multiple crimes, one of which found him coming to the attention of the KGB under a warrant issued by the Russian government. His attempt to destroy an oil rig in the Caspian Sea was documented in a sworn and notarized statement by a man named Philippe Sabon. The Russians, it was said, were demanding Kurt's extradition to Moscow for trial. Tate seemed to think that the Americans might be relieved to have Brauer off their hands.
"Your mother is safe in Jamaica," Tate told Brianne, when all of them, including Mufti, had gathered in Pierce's Washington town house to discuss the future. "She can come home now. She'll be safe."
"Thank you," Brianne said with heartfelt gratitude.
He shrugged. "Thank Pierce," he mused, with a smile at his boss. "He gives the orders."
She turned to her husband. She noticed that he'd had a chance to shower and shave, because he looked fresh. She'd showered, too, but the days of uncertainty had left their mark on her. She was pale and she'd lost a little weight, even in the brief space of days since they'd been in the States, telling their story to one subcommittee after another.
"Thank you for saving my mother and the baby," she told him.
Pierce only smiled. "No problem. She'll have anything she wants when she returns. I've made arrangements for her to have a house on the ocean in Jacksonville. She'll like it."
"You don't have to do that," she began.
"I'm afraid I do. Brauer invested everything he had in the oil scheme. He didn't leave a penny unaccounted for." His dark eyes narrowed. "I can afford her, Brianne. She won't be able to live as extravagantly as she has, but she'll get by, she and the child."
Brianne still felt uncomfortable letting him keep her family, especially since she was shortly to be his ex-wife.
"Putting me through college is going to be expense enough," she said tightly.
"Pocket change," he said flatly. "Or didn't you realize that when people said I was rich, they weren't kidding?"
She averted her eyes. "Your money was never of much interest to me."
"I know that."
She turned away. "I'd better pack."
Pierce felt his heart kick hard against his ribs. "Pack?"
"Pack."
She kept going.
Tate studied his boss curiously. "Is she going somewhere?"
Pierce rammed his hands hard into his pockets. "To Las Vegas to get a divorce," he said through his teeth.
Tate pursed his lips. "Smart girl."
Th
e look on the older man's face surprised his security chief. It wavered between homicide and shock.
Tate wasn't intimidated. He went to the piano and picked up a framed photo of Margo that still stood there. The glance he gave Pierce was eloquent.
Pierce's expression hardened. He knew what the other man was saying, even without words.
Tate put the photo down. "She must have been a unique and very special woman, to deserve such loyalty from you." His dark eyes narrowed. "But Brianne is unique and special herself."
"The years are wrong," Pierce said shortly.
