Operation: Midnight Tango

by Linda Castillo

  “You can get off me now.”

  He looked down at her, inordinately relieved that she was unhurt. She was lying on her back. Propped on his elbows, he was squarely on top of her. Gazing into her eyes, something powerful and protective stirred deep inside him. Something else that was wholly male shifted low in his gut.

  “Are you all right?” he asked when he found his voice.

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  He rose on legs that weren’t quite steady and extended his hand to her. “You took a hell of a fall.”

  She accepted his hand. “It wasn’t enough to keep me from reaching for my weapon.”

  The subtle accusation stung. But Bo didn’t let himself react. The truth of the matter was he deserved it. The situation had called for him to engage. To remove the rifle from its sheath and open fire at the attacking chopper the moment it was within range. He hadn’t done that. Hadn’t been able to react even though both their lives had been in mortal danger.

  Because he didn’t know how to respond without opening up a can of worms he had no desire to deal with—because the truth was too damn shameful to admit—he turned away and walked toward the horses.

  Evidently, she wasn’t ready to let it go. “You didn’t follow protocol.” Following him, she tapped on his shoulder. “You let them get too damn close. You—”

  His temper reached its flashpoint. He swung around to face her. “I stopped them!” he said, gesturing toward the wreckage.

  She blinked as if his sudden outburst of anger surprised her.

  Bo pulled himself back. But he was thinking that he should have tried harder to evade this assignment when Sean Cutter had asked him to do it. He should have told Cutter the truth. That he was afraid to pick up his gun. Hadn’t been able to do so since he’d shot and killed this woman’s husband. His best friend. Now, she was in danger and he didn’t know how to protect her.

  That was when he noticed the scratch on her cheekbone. He let his gaze drop and skimmed the rest of her. Her jeans were torn at the right knee. He could see blood soaking into the fabric from where she’d been cut by shrapnel back at the house.

  “You’re hurt,” he said.

  “I’ve got a few scratches.”

  He glanced at the horses. His eyes went directly to the blood on her gelding’s shoulder. Concern swept through him as he crossed to the animal.

  “Easy, boy,” he said as he picked up the reins.

  The Appaloosa spooked, but relaxed the instant Bo got close. Speaking softly, he examined the injury. It looked as if a bullet had grazed the animal, leaving a deep cut in the skin.

  “Oh, no,” Rachael said, coming up beside him. “He’s been shot.”

  “It’s a graze, but deep.” Blood dripped down the animal’s shoulder onto the dry earth. “He’s going to need a few stitches.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Not here.” He looked into her eyes. “You know as well as I do Karas’s men will be back. I’ll lay odds there’s GPS onboard that aircraft. He isn’t going to let this stop him. His men are expendable.”

  She looked uneasily around, her hand going to the butt of the pistol in her shoulder holster. “We’re sitting ducks here.”

  “We need to get to the homestead.” Bo glanced at the wreckage where black smoke rose into the air. “I need to check for survivors first. If we’re lucky, Karas will be onboard.”

  He figured they both knew the kingpin wasn’t. Karas didn’t place himself in dangerous situations. He had a whole army of men for that. All Karas did was run the show. A deadly show to be sure.

  Bo didn’t think he would find any survivors. The crash had been too violent. The aircraft itself was barely recognizable. He didn’t want to see what waited for him inside, but he didn’t have a choice.

  “I’ll be right back.” Handing the horses’ reins to Rachael, he started toward the downed craft.

  The fuselage had shattered on impact. The Plexiglas windows had been blown out. The rest of the craft had burned. A small fire crackled beneath a piece of sheet metal. He could smell Jet A fuel.

  But there were darker smells, too. Steeling himself against the carnage, Bo took a deep breath and pulled back a large piece of sheet metal. He closed his eyes at the sight of the pilot’s body. The sniper’s body lay a few feet away. It had been ejected upon impact. He hadn’t survived.

  Bo took a few minutes and looked through the wreckage for anything they could use, but he found nothing.

  “Anything?”

  He faced her. She was staring at some point beyond him, her face pale, her expression grim. The body of the sniper, he realized.

  “Don’t look at it,” he said.

  She blinked as if waking from a nightmare. “I’ve seen death before.”

  “Yeah, but it never gets any easier. Come on.”

  When she didn’t move, Bo took her arm and guided her back toward the horses. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “My God, Bo, that man—”

  “Don’t think about it.” He didn’t let her go until she was standing beside the wounded gelding. “Get on.”

  “We need to call Cutter.”

  “Not out in the open like this.”

  Her eyes went to the wound on the gelding’s shoulder. “But he’s hurt. Can he be ridden?”

  Bo nodded. “It’s not a life-threatening wound. I’ll take care of him once we get where we’re going.”

  EVEN THOUGH THE MEN who’d died in the crash had tried to kill her and Bo, the sight of their broken and burned bodies shook Rachael to her core. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen death; she’d had more than one close encounter with the grim reaper since she’d been with the MIDNIGHT Agency. But to see death up close and personal made her realize just how fragile and precious life was.

  To make matters worse, the wound on her leg was beginning to hurt. The bruises and lacerations she’d sustained in the fall from the horse were coming to life with a vengeance. At some point her head had begun to pound.

  For the last twenty minutes they’d been riding within the tree line of a dry creek bed. Bo kept the horses at an extended trot. Rachael had noticed right away that her gelding was limping. The horse didn’t seem to mind too much. It was as if the animal knew his job and was determined to do it despite his injury. But she felt badly for the animal.

  “Are you hurting?”

  She looked over to see Bo ride up next to her. Concern laced his expression.

  “I’m okay.” She reached down to pat the gelding’s shoulder. “I’m more worried about him.”

  Bo glanced at the horse. Rachael saw affection in his eyes and knew he would never let anything happen to the animal. “Horses are amazingly tough animals.” One side of his mouth curved. “Besides, he knows I’ll get him patched up once we stop.”

  His gaze went back to her and his eyes narrowed. “You’re favoring your shoulder.”

  Realizing she was, Rachael straightened, but it was no use trying to hide the pain. She’d landed hard on the shoulder when the horse fell. Her EMT training told her she hadn’t dislocated it, but in the last hour the joint had grown stiff. She was pretty sure there was a nasty abrasion beneath her jacket.

  “I landed on it when the horse fell,” she said.

  “You hurt anywhere else?”

  Rachael shook her head, but she ached all over. She didn’t even want to think about what she looked like. Not that she cared, she quickly reminded herself. But several times she’d caught herself brushing dirt from her clothes, wiping blood from the minor cut on her cheek. Silly thing to be thinking about when she’d come within an inch of getting shot down like some prized doe.

  “How far to the old homestead?” she asked.

  He pointed toward a high ridge dead ahead. “Just beyond that ridge, there’s a valley. A creek runs through the valley. It’s mostly dry this time of year. There’s an old house and barn just on the other side.”

  “Hidden?”

  “There are tre
es. Plus it was built into the side of a hill.”

  “The house is underground?”

  “Partially.”

  “So Karas and his thugs won’t be able to detect our presence using infrared.”

  He nodded. “It’s nothing fancy, but it should keep us out of the line of fire for a few hours.”

  “Hopefully until Cutter can get a second rescue chopper out here.”

  Rachael tried not to think about how long that might take. She tried even harder not to think of all the terrible things that could happen in the interim.

  THE LIKENESS was unnerving. Viktor Karas could have been looking into a mirror, into his own eyes, his own face.

  But he wasn’t.

  The makeup artist had taken a little over an hour and cost him close to five thousand American dollars. But it was well worth the time. Viktor Karas now had a body double.

  “All right, Mr. Karas, your turn.”

  They’d met at a small office building on the south side of Moscow in Sasha Ogalov’s studio. Sasha, the makeup artist, was the best in all of Russia and worked the theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Viktor Karas never settled for anything but the best.

  His body double, Andrei Lokov, was a smalltime hoodlum who’d worked for him going on two years. Karas had made the mission clear: fool the American agents who were watching him into thinking Andrei was him so he could travel to the United States.

  He took the chair Sasha offered. “I want to look like a fat American,” he said.

  She laughed, a practiced sound that grated on his nerves. “We’ll have to put some extra padding on you, Mr. Karas. You’re anything but fat.”

  He smiled, but she annoyed him. He’d told her if she did a good job, he would reward her by taking her to the United States with him. To Hollywood where she could work her makeup artistry on the big-screen celebrities. All she had to do was turn him into someone else.

  What Sasha Ogalov did not understand was that Viktor Karas never left loose ends.

  “I want red hair,” he said. “A big belly. And a cowboy hat.”

  Sasha laughed again. “John Wayne with red hair. I can do that.”

  He studied the wall of photos as she draped the sheet over his shoulders and went to work coloring his hair. Once the color was set, she presented him with contact lenses and, finally, the clothes he’d had custom-fitted and tailored just a week before.

  The transformation took just over an hour. When Viktor Karas stood and looked into the full-length mirror, he found himself looking at a fat American stranger. A man who would blend in with American society. A man the CIA would not follow when he walked out of this office building.

  “You do excellent work,” he said to Sasha.

  “Thank you.”

  “My flight is scheduled to leave in an hour.”

  Her face brightened. “I’m already packed.”

  “Excellent.” He smiled at her. “Why don’t you grab your bag and I’ll call a taxi?”

  She brought her hands together. “Thank you, Mr. Karas.”

  Sasha started toward the back room of the small studio. With slow deliberation, Viktor Karas withdrew the tiny chrome pistol from his waistband. With expert precision he pulled back the slide and fired two silenced bullets into her back.

  She made a sound that sounded like a kitten’s mewl. Then she fell with the grace of a fallen figure skater.

  Karas turned to his body double.

  The man stared back at him. Wide blue eyes filled with fear. Karas smiled to put him at ease and handed the man his cell phone. “I want you to walk out of the building and get into my car. Tell my driver to take you to my home. Call my office on the way and tell my secretary to call a meeting for eight a.m. tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, Mr. Karas.”

  Viktor Karas reached out and touched the man’s shoulder. “The American CIA must believe you are me. Give them no indication otherwise. Understood?”

  The man jerked his head so hard his jowls quivered. “Yes, sir.”

  Viktor Karas pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit the tip. “Excellent.”

  His body double left.

  Glancing at the Rolex strapped to his wrist, Karas blew a perfect smoke ring into the air.

  THE OLD HOMESTEAD loomed into view like something out of a western movie. Constructed of rough-cut wood and composite shingles, the house was built into the side of a hill. The front porch sagged like a swaybacked nag. The front door hung at a cockeyed angle, held up by a single hinge. Three multipaned windows dotted the front of the house, but there was no glass to be seen in a single pane.

  Rachael had been hoping for a vacant house with running water and electricity. The house went beyond old, and the only thing running inside it was probably mice.

  “I’ll bet you bring all the girls here,” she said.

  Despite the situation, Bo grinned. “Just the ones I want to impress.”

  He stopped his horse in a small dirt area between the house and the only standing outbuilding. The yard had once been encircled with a picket fence, but the wood had long since rotted, leaving a trail of broken pieces.

  Rachael took it all in with a sense of relief that they would only be there a couple of hours. Turning in the saddle, she scanned the tree line that surrounded the homestead. Because of the huge canopies of the cottonwoods that grew along the creek, the front of the house would not be visible from the air.

  Bo dismounted and stretched. She did the same and followed him to the open door of a ramshackle shed row. The small building had three sides and a roof. But there were holes the size of a man’s finger in the roof, broken boards that let in more sunlight than they kept out. The entire building sloped precariously.

  But someone, a very long time ago, had deemed this place beautiful enough to build here. Rachael had never been unduly interested in old houses or antiques or even history for that matter. But the thought of some young couple starting their lives together here intrigued her.

  “How old is this place, anyway?” she asked.

  “Just over a hundred years old.”

  “I wonder who the original owners were.” She wasn’t really expecting an answer, so it surprised her when he replied.

  “Lucas and Amelia Ruskin built this place back in 1904.”

  Ruskin.

  She smiled at him. “Your great-grandparents?”

  He looked at her over the horse’s saddle, but his eyes were shadowed by the brim of his hat. “Great-great-grandparents.”

  The thought of a family holding on to a piece of land—a piece of their heritage—for more than a century gave her a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach. “How long did they live here?”

  “Until they died. There used to be a dirt road that came out this way, but over the years people stopped using it and the land reclaimed it.”

  “So your family has owned this place for more than a hundred years.”

  “Not exactly.”

  She cocked her head, intrigued.

  “My great-great-grandparents lived here until they died in 1934. My mother had moved to Great Falls and auctioned off the ranch and livestock.” He lifted a shoulder, let it fall.

  Rachael thought about that a moment. “So you bought this place back after sixty years?”

  “Two years ago, it came up on the auction block. I needed a place to live.” He shrugged again.

  The same year her husband had been killed. The same year Bo resigned from the MIDNIGHT Agency. “So you bought the ranch and moved into the house after the shooting.”

  He looked away. “Yeah.”

  She thought of the explosion and felt a quiver of sympathy for him. He’d lost more than a house. He’d lost part of his heritage. “I’m sorry about what happened to your house.”

  He gave her a wry smile. “I have good insurance.”

  “There are a lot of things insurance can’t replace.”

  At that moment she wanted to see his face; she wanted to know what he was
thinking, what he was feeling. But he lowered his head slightly and the brim of his hat cast his face into shadow.

  He led the horse into the dilapidated barn. Removing the bridle, he used the halter and lead to tie the animal to a sturdy beam and proceeded to untack him.

  Rachael led her horse to the beam and did the same. As she worked to unfasten the saddle, her eyes were drawn again and again to the wound on the horse’s shoulder. She stroked the animal. “It’s going to be okay, boy. Bo is going to fix that right up for you.”

  “I think he likes you.”

  She turned to find Bo standing right behind her. He was standing so close she could smell the leather from his jacket. The out-of-doors scent of his clothing. At five feet six inches, she was not a small woman, but he seemed to tower over her and she guessed his height to be at least six feet four.

  Inexplicably, she blushed. “How can you tell?”

  She jolted when he set his hands on her shoulders and nudged her closer to the horse. His hands felt incredibly strong and steady. The horse lowered his head and rubbed his face gently against her.

  “He doesn’t do that to just anyone,” Bo said.

  She looked into his eyes. “He’s selective about who he gives his affections to.”

  His gaze never wavered. “Very.”

  Suddenly all she could think of was the moment back at the house when they’d collided. The seconds when they’d been lying on the floor and his face had been mere inches from hers. In that moment something powerful had occurred between them. Something Rachael didn’t want to acknowledge but could not deny.

  Shaken by the feelings rising in her chest, she turned quickly away. She knew he was wondering about her reaction. Maybe even about his own reaction to her. But she couldn’t explain. Not even to herself. Bo was the first man since Michael who’d made her feel anything. He made her feel alive. Made her feel like a woman.

  But the reawakening was not welcome. Not now. Life was simpler without the complication, and Rachael had no desire to deal with it.