SLEEPER (Crossfire Series)

by Gennita Low

  “Training doesn’t make one good, niece.”

  “And practice makes perfect, Auntie,” Talia countered. “But I’m not here to argue about that. You obviously need something from me or you wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble contacting me.”

  “I don’t need anything,” Greta briskly said. “That was Gunther’s idea. However, he invited me here so I could meet my niece. It’s been…enlightening.”

  “In a good way, I hope? You’re my role model, Auntie. An independent woman who makes lots of money. That’s very hard to do back home, you know. I’m enjoying it very much, thanks to you.” Talia toasted her silently and drank from her glass. “Life has certainly been a lot better now that I’m in the business of moving government items about, I must say.”

  “I didn’t do it to make life better,” Greta lied. It had made life better, but it hadn’t been her first reason for being an assassin for the government, and then a double agent. “I did it for love.”

  Talia looked surprised. “Love? You view killing for money as a quest for love?”

  “I mean, you must love your job,” Greta said. So young and so cynical already. No wonder these kids would never rise to her status. “You can’t do what I do without deep love, Talia.”

  “Oh, indeed. Ten years in the bowels of the CIA as a dowdy secretary.” Talia shuddered. “I don’t think even I can do that, but of course, who knows? In ten years…no, no, I don’t even think I can do that in ten years. I don’t have your love, Auntie, for sure. I’m in it for the money, pure and simple.”

  “And that’s why I like you, Talia,” Gunther interrupted smoothly. “The Baroness has a reputation for delivering, and you’ve promised to deliver a certain item to the government for a large sum of money. I have information that might be of help, but I need some of that money too.”

  Talia looked at them both consideringly, a small, secretive smile on her face. “I’m greedy enough to listen but not dumb enough to believe you, Gunther. Now that you’ve trapped my aunt somehow to be used as bait to bring me here, let me really hear what’s on your clever little mind, hmm? And then maybe, maybe, I’ll think about this alliance.”

  Greta couldn’t help smiling back at her niece, feeling just a tinge of pride. The girl had inherited her genes. Ambitious and beautiful. She would go places. But only if she didn’t get in Greta’s way. After all, glory could only belong to one woman. And it was her time, after all her sacrifice.

  * * *

  Reed snapped the GPS unit shut. She was heading toward the hotel. He released a sigh of frustration. Finally. He put his car into gear and took the shortcut back. That woman had the hardest head. He’d been following her the last few days as she’d driven around the city. Yesterday she’d found an old friend.

  Reed hadn’t liked the way that guy had hugged her. And then later she’d gone to the bar. He was still mad about that. Didn’t she remember the last time she was in one, she’d ended up being shot at? He’d thought about it and had finally concluded she must have been meeting her friend. Still, it was a risk he wished she hadn’t taken….

  The fact that he’d been right didn’t make him feel any better either. The woman was in grave danger, and she was wandering around alone.

  Reed shook his head. It couldn’t be helped. She had to decide on her own to come to him. If she’d really found someone to help her, he’d have stayed in the shadows to watch what she was planning. After all, she didn’t have much money left. There was only one way she could raise quick money.

  In the planning stages, one of the scenarios he had pictured Lily handing over the weapon to another dealer. This had actually been the ideal stage, with a cut-and-dried scenario. Target sighted, target shot. Weapon retrieved.

  However, Amber’s stipulation—that GEM had to try to save Lily—made things a little more complicated. Reed liked the fact that GEM was keeping its side of the bargain. Some agencies, he realized, would just have agreed and done it their way. Llallana Noretski would have ended up another statistic, an accident.

  But they’d picked a sharpshooter as the foil, just in case. Reed parked, pocketed the GPS unit, checked the area to make sure it was secure, then went to the elevator. He’d followed Lily long enough to make sure he was the only one tailing her, and then he’d veered off onto a side street. It should take her an extra seven or eight minutes to reach here.

  It wasn’t long before his blue car pulled into the garage. She didn’t stop in front of him, driving by as if she hadn’t seen him. He waited as he watched her park.

  She locked the car, taking her time, then turned and approached him slowly. Reed slipped his hands into his jacket pockets. Damn it, didn’t the woman eat? She looked like a wind could blow her away.

  “I’m back,” she said, uncertainty in her eyes.

  “You should have called me. I might not have been here,” Reed said.

  A small smile appeared. “Where would you be? Besides following a woman around and shooting at people?” She cocked her head. “Why did you do it, Reed?”

  Reed reached out and pulled her against him. She tilted her head back, anticipating his descending mouth. He kissed her roughly, threading his fingers in her hair. He’d thought about doing just that the last few days. How could one woman get into his system so quickly?

  She kissed him back ardently. Her response had always been explosive, but this time he sensed a desperate edge, as if she was very close to falling apart. He gentled his hold, slowing his own raging need.

  “You’re exhausted,” he said, his gaze taking in the dark circles under her eyes. “You don’t take care of yourself, do you know that?”

  “Well, I got spoiled, you see,” she replied. “The cheap hotel bed just won’t do after that decadent luxury up there.”

  Reed turned, inserted the key card, and punched in the code. “Then you should have called earlier. It would have saved me some sleep too.”

  She touched his arm. “You still haven’t told me why you followed me around.”

  “To make sure you’re okay.”

  “Why?”

  The elevator door opened. She hesitated a second before following him in. “Because I like to think of you in one piece,” he told her as he pushed the button. “Because I was worried you might end up in a river somewhere in the middle of the night. Because I didn’t think you knew what the hell you were doing out there.”

  Her chin tilted up defensively. “I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time, Reed. I don’t need a babysitter.” The look in her eyes softened. “Not that I’m not grateful for what you did.”

  The door opened. She hesitated again, peering into the semidarkness of the suite.

  He didn’t want to make it easy for her. Why should he, when she’d prefer dealing with that scumbag who’d mugged her? “Afraid?” he asked softly.

  Her chin tilted higher. “No,” she said. She took a deep breath, then stepped out of the elevator. “I came here because I need your help. Just like you said.”

  That made him unreasonably irritated. He didn’t want her to need his help. He wanted her to need him. “I know that,” he said. “We can talk afterward.”

  She stilled. “Afterward?”

  He strode toward the bedroom without turning on any lights. “It’s late, Lily. I can’t help you right now, anyway.”

  “You’re doing this on purpose,” she said, her tone of voice accusing as she stood there in the dark foyer.

  He turned on the bedroom light. “Yes,” he said. “You look about dead on your feet. Eat, then talk. Then sleep. In that order.”

  “Eat?”

  “Lily, I’ve been following you around. You haven’t eaten all day. You had two, maybe three, drinks at the bar.” He pulled out a T-shirt from the drawer. “Like I said, you don’t know how to take care of yourself.”

  “I have things on my mind, if you haven’t noticed,” Lily said wryly.

  “Come here,” he said.

  She finally came into the
room, her fingers unbuttoning her jacket. She paused when she caught sight of the T-shirt. “Was the hotel mad about the way the bathroom was left? There was dirt all over the shower.” She pursed her lips. “I guess I should have brought my stuff from my room.”

  “The hotel hasn’t kicked me out yet. And you’d have your things here if you hadn’t decided to go off the other day,” Reed pointed out. “As it is, those three days you promised to give me were wasted.”

  And nights, he added. He’d spent all of those following her around instead of having her here, safely out of the way, while things were being arranged. But her persistence was a remarkable thing to watch. She simply refused to give up.

  He picked up the phone and ordered food, his gaze following her around the room as she put away the jacket, smoothed her hair in front of the dresser table, sat on the bed to pull off her boots, then went off to check the bathroom. How could a woman’s presence make such a spacious room so small?

  She reappeared. “I want you to contact Nikki Harden,” she blurted out.

  Reed frowned. He hadn’t expected that. “Why?”

  She sighed. “She said someone has a price on my head. I know who it is. It’s the CIA.” She walked toward him with a serious expression. “I want you to go through Nikki and send a message that you want to collect the reward. Tell them if they want me, they’ll guarantee me safe passage for a group of girls, that they’ll give you these passports. As soon as my girls are out of the country, you hand me over to them. The money’s yours, Reed, and you, too, can get out of this place.”

  Reed listened in stunned silence. This was one scenario that hadn’t been brought up during discussions. Lily was going to sacrifice herself.

  CHAPTER 14

  Reed was a trained sharpshooter, able to sit for hours, if necessary, waiting for his target to appear. His job had always required very little more than patience and absolute control of his weapon. He could aim and shoot at a Ping-Pong ball dangling from the end of a dummy positioned hundreds of meters away. He could pick out moving targets among moving objects with a scope and hit them in rapid succession from a distance.

  Some of his targets had shot back. It was part of being in a firefight—when one was shooting at something, be prepared to be shot back at.

  He stared hard at the woman standing in front of him. When had she become his blind spot?

  Part of the reason was he didn’t view her as a target anymore. Instead of sitting quietly and watching, focusing only on that one job of pulling the trigger, he’d let his mind wander off. He’d become emotionally involved. And somehow, in so short a period of time, he’d convinced himself that he needed to save this woman, instead of letting that be only one option open to him.

  Matters of consequence. Of course, the stupid book that had been haunting him lately had to choose this moment to taunt him. Someone up there was messing with his mind, all right.

  Arch was in heaven having a belly laugh over this. Because it was he who’d taught Reed life wasn’t just waves and sun with a hot Betty in his arms. There were matters of consequence, things that were important to people.

  Dude, life’s sweet not because of the things in it, but because of the things that keep you going. Everyone’s got to find what matters to his heart or everything’s just going to wash away like the sand. And boy, are you going to miss it when it’s gone. I ain’t talking about hot sex either, although that’s one very important thing that keeps life going!

  Reed could remember the belly-roll of a laugh Arch had given as he’d slapped him on the back. He’d assumed Arch had been talking about surfing. Everything had revolved around the sea for the older man, all the way back when he’d been the surfing champ in the area, to the travels to the best beaches in the world, to his own untraditional nuptials, standing with his bride in a humongous sand castle he’d built. He’d carried that photo with him wherever he’d gone and Reed had looked at it hundreds of times, though the significance of it had been lost on him until Arch’s last journey into the ocean.

  “You’re quiet. Are you going to help me?” Lily interrupted his reverie. She rubbed her bare arms, worry in her eyes.

  The thing was, he knew the worry wasn’t for herself. She was afraid he was going to refuse.

  It humbled Reed. Lily was someone who knew what mattered to her heart, and, like Arch, she would do anything to protect what was important.

  He understood the importance of his mission, that he couldn’t allow the weapon she had in her possession to fall into the wrong hands. At the same time, the lofty ideal of protecting the world and fending off the forces of evil was nebulous, childish even, when compared to the simple human level of Lily’s goal, which was something he should be doing—protecting the lives of innocent kids. In spite of all that psychological mumbo jumbo about embedded hypnotic commands, in spite of what she’d done to her friends, Lily was intrinsically a good person, someone who understood she had to right a wrong.

  Hadn’t that always been something that was missing in his life? Someone who would admit to a wrong and correct it?

  “You’re angry,” Lily said.

  Reed shook his head. “I’m just thinking. You’ve left a lot of your background out. That part about the CIA being the one behind this reward explains why people might be after you left and right, but it doesn’t tell me the reason that they’re so eager to get you.”

  “I told you I betrayed a bunch of people. Well, the CIA is one of them,” she said dismissively. “Now they’re after me.”

  She wasn’t going to tell him. He had to get her to admit about the weapon. “Did you work for them then? Is that why you said you betrayed them? Most of us on the outside prefer to put that another way, sweetheart. Like, our side won one against them, for instance. Betraying…how’re you involved with them?”

  “I wasn’t willing.” Lily turned away. “It’s a long and complicated story.”

  “I have time. Are they also after these girls you’re helping out?”

  She swerved back, her expression fierce and protective. “No, they’re my girls,” she said angrily, “and if they offer any help to take them in, you can tell them the deal’s off.”

  He wanted to take away the pain she was desperately hiding. Betrayal. It was Lily who’d been betrayed initially.

  But first, he needed the truth. “Why? The CIA has plenty of resources to help those girls out. They have easier ways to move them than what you or I could do with fake passports.”

  “I know them and you don’t. Are you going to help me or not?” She looked away again, blinking hard. He suddenly realized she didn’t want him to see the tears filling her eyes. “Trust me, Reed, they’re going to use them like they used me.”

  Trust. That was what stood between him and this woman. More than anything else right now, he wished he could tell her the truth about who he was, to make it clear he didn’t want to hurt her or those girls. But in the end, wasn’t that what he was going to do? He suddenly felt a deep loss inside, like helplessly watching a precious keepsake fall to the ground and break into irreparable pieces.

  “If I let them have you, what do you think they’ll do once they get whatever it is you have taken from them? Set you free?” The double meaning of his words mocked him. Even though GEM wanted to have her extracted in the least painful way, it was as an agreement to Amber Hutchens. What about afterward? He put a finger under her chin and tilted it back to him. “I’ll have to think about this.”

  Her dark, expressive eyes were sad. “There’s no other way. Don’t you think I haven’t thought about every possible way out? Tonight you saw how it was with someone who knew me—he wanted the reward money for himself.” She smiled. “I figure I’ll give the money to someone I like, which, lucky person, happens to be you.”

  “You can come away with me,” Reed said, surprising himself. Where had that come from?

  Lily shook her head. “And leave the girls? No way. I’ve betrayed enough people as it is, and they are wh
at matters right now. Besides, it’s time I get a little comeuppance for what I’ve done in the past.” Her voice turned into a husky whisper. “This way I know a bunch of young girls will have new lives ahead of them. I’m going to give them a chance to turn out differently from the way I did.”

  He wanted to shake her. Those bastards had really done a good job at giving her low self-esteem. With her usual resources gone, she was as alone as one could get, with not even a friend to whom she could turn.

  But she turned to you.

  Suddenly it was important to make sure he didn’t fail her with what mattered to her heart. He wanted her happy. And safe. He wanted to take her away from this and make it better.

  The intercom buzzed. That was dinner on the way up. “Let’s eat first,” Reed said.

  He kissed her softly, wanting to reassure her that everything would be all right. But he couldn’t say that. He had to find another way. It mattered to him that Lily complete this thing that was so important to her heart.

  He glanced at her as he turned on the lights in the dining room. She was beginning to matter a lot.

  * * *

  “I can tell you don’t like your niece.”

  Greta looked at the weapon in the display case in Gunther’s study. The man, it appeared, collected everything. Last night she’d checked out his tropical and semitropical flowers, which he’d specially ordered or imported from overseas. The night before, she’d seen a whole shelf full of his movie video collection.

  She moved to the next display case. “Why do you say that?” she asked, tracing the glass top with her finger. The whole wall in front of her was a cornucopia of a thug’s dream, but she doubted Gunther actually knew how to operate half the weapons here. But she’d underestimated him already. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Gunther reminded her of that movie that constantly irritated her in the States because it was always being rerun on TV—Revenge of the Nerds. He was a geek who wanted to be a bad boy. And like all geeks, he went overboard with the security stuff and the weaponry collection.