The Bodyguard

by Adair, Cherry; Showalter, Gena; O'Clare, Lorie

  “I didn’t sign up for anything.” She took pride in the fact that while angry tears streamed warm and salty down her cheeks, they weren’t evident in her voice. “I took a short flight out of Bozeman to clear my head. The next thing I knew, I was here.”

  “Except the Cessna was discovered on the rocky shores of Diomede in the middle of the fucking Bering Strait just a hop, skip, and jump from here! Explain that.”

  Hurt started pushing aside anger, forming a large, unswallowable lump in her throat. She liked the anger better. “Tongpan,” she answered simply. “Please let me up. I’m running out of time, and I don’t owe you any expla—”

  “Who or what is Tongpan?”

  “What the hell do you mean, who or what is Tongpan? Don’t you know? Doesn’t HQ know? He’s the terrifying and powerful wizard responsible for kidnapping me mid-flight. The guy whose sick mind came up with this insane scheme. The guy that T-FLAC damn well should have known about ages ago. What the hell are they doing at HQ, playing tiddlywinks and taking naps?”

  How was it possible that the organization that was so interconnected with the wizard world was unaware of the existence of the terrifying man who had forced her to participate in this nightmare, who’d not permitted her to take her own life rather than do what he wanted? She refused to dwell on the beatings, the starvation, the threats, and the torture endured to ensure her cooperation.

  She thought grimly that if the light were on, Sebastian would see some of the scars on the skin he’d been stroking just moments before—the external scars, at least. She’d made good use of the self-hypnosis skills that T-FLAC’s instructors had drilled her in so rigorously; otherwise, she’d be at the mercy of night terrors for the rest of her life.

  She’d endured all that and more until she’d figured out a way to reverse everything she and the other nuclear physicists had done in two years. When they’d locked her, freshly beaten and naked, in an empty, cold room filled with harsh light to keep her from sleeping, she’d mentally turned the blank walls into whiteboards. She focused on those walls and drew schematics and formulae for hours on end, until she’d found the perfect solution, an invisible Trojan horse she could drive right through the middle of their plans.

  True, it lacked an exit plan—maybe it wasn’t perfect after all. But she was satisfied that she’d be able to defeat her captors. Then she’d been as docile and compliant as Tongpan and Gangjon wanted. It had been hard to convince them that her breakdown was genuine, and she felt that she deserved an Oscar. It would have to be posthumous, but still . . .

  She felt the blast-furnace heat of his body as he shifted, still blocking her exit. His warmth didn’t in any way mitigate her bone-deep chill. She’d never be warm again.

  “Never heard of this Tongpan.” Sebastian’s tone was dismissive, raising her blood pressure a few more points. Great—T-FLAC didn’t know about Tongpan, so Sebastian was prepared to write him off as insignificant. He deserved to be blown up, dammit. Then he could meet Tongpan in hell.

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t give a flying crap one way or the other.” She couldn’t wrap her brain around the fact that Sebastian had made love to her. Not out of desire but to extract information. No wonder it had been fast. He wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. She suddenly wanted a shower, and for once, she wanted it to be cold. Just as ice-cold as her insides felt at the thought of him using her like any operative would use a tango to get what they wanted.

  Her throat went tight. “Did you—” Come to extract me or neutralize me? was the question she was too damned chicken to ask. She didn’t want to know the answer. No, she knew the answer; she just didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want it to come from that face, in that voice.

  Pressing her fist to the churning acid in her belly, Michaela faced the truth: He wasn’t here as her bodyguard, her rescuer. He’d been sent as her executioner.

  No time to allow the devastating hurt to consume her. As a scientist, she was nothing if not pragmatic. “I have something imperative to attend to before you ki—”

  A crackle preceded an announcement on the PA: “Dr. Giese, report to the mess hall immediately.”

  “I have to go.”

  “They can wait another five minutes. Tell me what happened.”

  “Let me up.”

  He shifted to allow her to get by him. She clambered ungracefully past him and stood beside the bed, shivering, fumbling for the lamp so she could get dressed. “I was kidnapped. I’ve been a prisoner here for two years. I may be a mental wizard, but I don’t have the luxury of just teleporting myself out of danger; I had no choice. I had to stay and deal with it.” She bent down to grab her panties from the floor. “I consider myself deep undercover, and you’re an asshole—”

  The door handle jiggled seconds before the door burst open, spilling in a cone of light to illuminate her standing there bare-ass naked. “This day just gets frigging better and better,” she muttered.

  “Dr. Giese? Are you all ri—Oh Lord. Sorry. Sorry.”

  For several beats they stared at each other, before Ackart collected himself and shut the door with a thud, leaving her once again in the stygian darkness.

  Oh my God. He’d seen Sebastian. Ackart couldn’t have missed him lying on the bed illuminated by the hallway lights. Larger than life and naked.

  “Dr. Gangjon came through on the videoconference—he says you have five minutes to present yourself.” Ackart’s voice sounded muffled through the heavy door.

  “Be right there.” Michaela raised her voice as she fumbled with her clothes. Not for the first time, she wished to hell she had a gun.

  Hurry hurry hurry. If she ran like the hounds of hell were on her ass she could catch up with Ackart before he reached the others. Try to convince him not to tell anyone else about Sebastian. Using what method of persuasion? The man was afraid of his own shadow. He sure as hell wouldn’t want to piss off Tongpan or Gangjon. No. Ackart wouldn’t keep Sebastian’s presence a secret. Especially now when all they’d been working for was about to be unleashed on the world.

  Damn it. “What did you do with the lightb—” It was placed in her hand. “About time.” She fumbled for the lamp.

  “What’s that guy’s threat level?”

  “Dr. Ackart was also kidnapped. He’s no threat. Unless he tells someone he saw you.”

  “You’d better stop him before he does so.”

  “Yeah. I’ll be right on it as soon as I’m dressed. Are you armed?” she demanded, trying to slide her legs into her jeans at the same time she was trying to find the threads for the bulb in the ancient lamp base.

  “Right now? Just my penis and my good looks.”

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, Michaela caught herself huffing out a laugh. “Funny.” She refused to be charmed by him. The misguided moron. “Hurry up and get dressed; I have to stall Ackart before he—” She clicked the light switch, flooding the tiny room with brilliance. She heard his sharp intake of breath, then glanced at the bed for a lingering look at Sebastian Tremayne naked. The bed was rumpled but empty.

  Michaela did a double take, then turned 360 to search the entire room. “. . . tells . . . Where the hell did you go?”

  “Right here.” Sebastian’s voice indicated he was a few feet in front of her. Seconds later, his warm breath ruffled the fine hair around her face. The smell of his skin made her dizzy with lust.

  Wait a minute. . . . Frowning, she put out a hand and encountered a warm, hairy chest and satiny skin. “You can’t turn—”

  “Invisible? No, I can only take a wizard’s imprint. Imprinted Cohen. As long as I can touch him I can chameleon his powers for a whi—What the hell is this?”

  He grabbed her upper arm; his thumb traced the row of scars on her biceps. “And this?” A finger followed the raised marks left by Gangjon’s scoring a warning around her rib cage with his nails.

  “Old news,” Michaela snapped.

  “Who,” he demanded, his eyes feral, “did
this to you?”

  Just about anyone who felt the need for a punching bag. Just about anyone who tried to molest her or wanted to force her to work on something she abhorred. That about covered every man on base. She shook off Sebastian’s hand. “I have to get out there.”

  “Here.” She felt movement, then saw black fabric seemingly floating mid-air. “Put this on.”

  “Your LockOut? Won’t this make it harder for you to kill me later?” The fabric was impervious to bullets, knives, and other weapons. It was not, Michaela was sure, impervious to Tremayne’s accusations and erroneous suppositions.

  He drew in a breath.

  Frustrated, buddy? Aren’t we all?

  “We need to talk.”

  “Yeah?” She quickly kicked aside the jeans she’d been struggling one-handed to pull on and pulled the slightly loose material up over her freezing-cold legs and hips, immediately enveloped in the specially developed temperature-controlling material. It was made to be skintight and automatically contracted around her body; the difference in their sizes was a total nonissue. She muttered a quick blessing for the genius who’d pulled this one out of the hat. She finished dressing, wearing jeans and a sweater over the black LockOut. Scooping her hair back in an untidy ponytail, she secured it with one of the office-type rubber bands she kept in a tuna can by the door. “We’ll take a meeting,” she said sarcastically. “Have your girl call my girl and make an appointment.”

  “Michaela—”

  “No. You don’t get to say anything. We’re done here. I have to disable the nuke. I’ve done half the process; now I have to complete what I started. You can do whatever the hell you want to me when I’m done.”

  “Would it help if I said—”

  “No.”

  “Better go after your weasel-faced friend before he tells everyone he saw you naked.”

  “The salient point is that he didn’t see you. Naked or otherwise. Thank God.”

  Sebastian took her wrist, startling her a little since she couldn’t see him. Tilting her watch so he could see it, he cursed under his breath. “Need to make physical contact with Cohen in the next sixteen minutes or I’ll materialize.”

  He’d be hard to explain. “Great. Unlikely a communications device will function down here. I presume you took that into account and set up a rendezvous point and ETA? This place is twenty-five miles of crisscrossed tunnels carved into bedrock. Should take you six hours or so to search every room if you—”

  Talking to the Invisible Man was damn irritating, and extremely disconcerting.

  “Materialize. I want to see you.”

  One minute he wasn’t there; then he was.

  Michaela’s foolish, foolish heart went into joyous overdrive seeing his beloved face. Oh, God. It was amazing seeing him here, in the flesh. His dark, shaggy hair was too long. His face was more craggy. But his pale blue eyes were just as piercing, just as alive and filled with mystery, and the dimple was just as she remembered it. A tidal wave of emotion filled her chest to capacity. It hurt to look at him.

  He unexpectedly took her face in his warm hands, and she jumped; her heart raced like a rabbit. “I really haven’t—”

  “I couldn’t have killed you,” he whispered, kissing her temple, her cheek, brushing her mouth with his. “I would never hurt you.”

  Too late.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Being locked under ice for almost two years had taught Michaela the value of patience. If she’d been in his position, presented with the same cold, hard facts, she would have assumed the same thing.

  Pissed her off, but she got it.

  Life, especially hers, was too short to waste on anger. “You could’ve at least asked me before getting naked in my bed,” she whispered as they hurried down the empty passageway to catch up with Ackart before heading to the communications room.

  She had no idea what Sebastian was thinking as he walked with her. Two years of honing her listening skills allowed her to hear his small intake of breath. Being aware of nuances had saved, if not her skin, then her life on more occasions than she could count.

  “This requires a longer conversation than we have time for right now,” he whispered back. He was practically on top of her. She shivered as a surge of warmth flooded her body.

  You think? “Convenient.”

  “Not so much,” he muttered dryly.

  “I have to go in here.” Michaela indicated the door to the comm room. “Wait out here for me. I don’t want them to see or sense you.”

  He grabbed her upper arm. “I don’t want you going anywhere alone.”

  “What you want is of no interest to me, Tremayne. They’re expecting me. Let go.”

  His look spoke volumes. Braver people than herself had quailed at that dark, narrow-eyed glare. Clearly he didn’t like her going in without him. Too bad. They’d both trained for situations where one had to watch a partner walk into danger.

  “Time’s of the essence,” she said in a low, urgent whisper when his fingers tightened on her arm as if sheer brute force would prevent her from doing her job. “The longer I spend chatting out here, the less time I’ll have to do what has to be done so we can get the hell out of Dodge.”

  After a second or two, he released her, leaving the brand of his fingers on her skin. “Watch your six.” He reached out and tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear in a gesture at odds with his hard expression.

  Even though she’d have liked nothing more than to fall into his arms and forget this whole mess, Michaela stepped out of reach. “Stop thinking of me as a woman, Tremayne. I’m an operative with an urgent directive. One I cannot fail. Step aside.”

  He shifted out of the line of sight. “Be c—”

  Michaela sliced a hand across her throat indicating he shut up, then reached for the door handle. Nothing and no one could be allowed to distract her.

  She turned her back on him and opened the heavy door, firmly closing it behind her.

  “You’re late,” Gangjon informed her, clearly annoyed. Hollywood handsome, with ash-blonde hair combed back off an impossibly perfect face, his dark eyes were soulless as he looked out from the monitor. “Sit.”

  Even though he was only present on-screen, she sat, Pavlovian-style, immediately, as if he were in the room.

  Michaela had slipped into the vacant seat beside a red-faced Ackart and turned her attention to the flat screen on the far wall.

  Sergei Gromyko gave her a distracted glance. He, too, had been kidnapped and brought on board for the project. In his late eighties, with thin gray hair and a prominent strawberry-like red nose, he’d admitted a week ago that he knew they were going to be killed as soon as their jobs here were done. He hadn’t seemed that bothered by it.

  Gangjon looked down on the three of them, sitting there on their uncomfortable, metal, straight-backed chairs. Michaela hated the man with every fiber of her being. He was completely amoral, soulless, and ruthless. As he walked them through the last hours of what was expected of them, Michaela listened for any hint of what Kang Gangjon had planned.

  As far as he and his cohorts knew, there was nothing anyone could do to disarm or disrupt the nuclear bomb they’d all spent two years building. None of them knew that Michaela had programmed a new default code into the fission-bomb triggers months ago.

  Inputting a fifteen-part, alphanumeric password that only she knew would compromise the nuclear bomb. Even if she were to be prevented from going back in to finish the second half of the disabling process, it would prevent the apocalyptic explosion that would destroy the modern world. The resulting explosion fissle would still create a radioactive mess of slightly activated plutonium, which would then disrupt the surroundings made of lithium tritide and uranium. Disrupt them into little bitty radioactive pieces. But buried under miles of ice, they would have less impact.

  And even less than that if she managed to finish what she’d started.

  It was no surprise when she came to the conclusion that the
vile-tempered, sadistic megalomaniac up on the video monitor had no plans for them at all. At least none that involved any of them being alive twenty-four hours from now.

  “Sir,” Ackart murmured deferentially. “The sequence codes have almost all been programmed. Once the last code has been launched—How do we leave?”

  “Let me worry about that, Doctor,” Gangjon told him. “Let me worry about that. Complete your jobs in the prescribed time, and as promised, you will be free to go back to your lives.” Yeah, as radioactive, cremated remains.

  The monitor went black.

  So this was it. Michaela’s heart raced, and her palms felt sweaty. Less than three hours to go.

  “Lying sack of shit,” Ackart muttered as they filed out of the room. It was the most rebellious she’d ever seen him. “Let’s go up to the dock to see if they left us a submarine.”

  They hadn’t, but Michaela was happy for him to go in the opposite direction of where she was going. “Excellent idea. Why don’t you go with him, Dr. Gromyko? I’ll go to the lab, then meet you out there.”

  “If there is a submarine, it’ll only seat two,” Ackart said practically.

  “Then don’t wait for me.” When Gromyko tried to argue, Michaela reached over to squeeze his frail arm covered in layer upon layer of clothing. “I’ll find a way out too; I promise.”

  Ackart held out his hand. His fingers were shaking. “It’s been an honor working beside you, Dr. Giese—Michaela. Godspeed to you.”

  Michaela watched the two men walk away. Anger made her cheeks hot. Sebastian stepped from the doorway that had concealed him when they were out of earshot.

  Michaela indicated the direction of the lab and they fell into step. “Gangjon knew from the start they were going to leave us here to die.”

  “There’s only that wreck of a sub out there. Doesn’t run. We checked.”

  “I know. I’ve jogged on that damned dock twice a day for the past year to monitor security and watched the comings and goings of the principals. They use tadpole subs. Come on. Let’s do this. Think your pal, Cohen, will be capable of teleporting all of us?”