Innocent as Sin sk-3

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Rand went stiff. Reed?

  About time, too. I told you to live for both of us. One of us dead is plenty. Kayla is good for you. Don’t fuck it up and blame it on me.

  Before Rand could move, could think, he realized that Kayla’s eyes were open, slowly focusing on him.

  “Who was here?” she asked sleepily.

  “Just me.”

  “No. Someone else.” She yawned. “Like you, but different.” Her eyelashes lowered, stayed down. “’S too early to get up.” She sighed, pulled the covers up over her shoulders.

  “Go back to sleep,” Rand said softly.

  One eye opened. “What about you?”

  “If I get in bed, neither one of us will sleep.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Or are we out of condoms?”

  He smiled in spite of himself as he remembered the hours before they fell asleep. “Getting there.”

  “No wonder they gave you five thousand dollars.” She yawned again. “Condoms aren’t cheap.”

  Rand laughed out loud. It felt so good that he did it again.

  “Are you laughing at me?” she asked around another yawn.

  “No, at me,” he said.

  He took off his shoes and stretched out next to her on top of the bed. She turned toward him. She smelled of bath oil and sex and sleepy woman. He pulled a bundle of covers and her against his body.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said against her forehead. “I kept you up too long last night.”

  “Huh. I thought I was the one keeping you up.”

  “Sleep, Kayla.”

  She tried to, but it didn’t work. She was awake enough to remember all the reasons she shouldn’t be relaxed.

  Bertone.

  Handcuffs.

  Dirty money.

  Her name on the bottom line.

  “Well, damn,” she said against Rand’s chin.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Hungry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll call room service.”

  “Food?” she said, nibbling on his chin, tugging on his beard with her lips.

  “Not many calories in a beard,” he said dryly.

  “Mmmm, the Beard Diet. Works for me. Nibble the pounds away.”

  “You don’t need to lose weight. In fact, some more weight would look good on you.”

  “More? Yowsa. Now I know I’m in love.”

  Rand didn’t fight the laughter crowding his throat. He just let it go and enjoyed.

  She snuggled closer. “Yesterday I felt like I was in a combat zone. Today I feel ten feet tall.”

  “Life is a combat zone. That’s why you have to take love where and when you find it. But I’d forgotten about that until last night. You aren’t sorry, are you? I know you’re not the one-night-stand type.”

  “Couldn’t prove it by me,” she mumbled, flushing.

  “I read your file.”

  “When do I get to read yours?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  Everything. Nothing in particular. “Is this a one-night stand?” she asked.

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing,” he said. “You know, don’t you? You knew last night when you held out your hand to me.”

  “What did I know?”

  “I’m going to kill Andre Bertone.”

  She looked at Rand’s eyes, sage green and clear. Cold.

  “I knew,” she said. “I saw it at the party.”

  “You didn’t let it stop you last night.”

  It wasn’t a question, not quite, but it was close enough that she answered.

  “You haven’t killed him yet,” she said.

  “And when I do?”

  Silence came, grew, and vanished into a sigh. “I don’t know. I’d like to kill Bertone myself. I thought about doing it. A way out of this mess, you know?”

  Rand nodded and watched her like a feral cat.

  “It wasn’t so much a thought,” Kayla said, “as a bone-deep desire to wipe him off the face of the earth. For the first time in my life I understood how someone could be driven to kill.”

  “If you back a mouse into a corner, it will try to rip your throat out. And you’re no mouse.”

  She let out a long breath. “Were you and Reed working for St. Kilda when he died?”

  “Sort of. The Camgerian government was paying, but we were hired through St. Kilda, though we didn’t know it at the time.”

  “You were soldiers?”

  “As in mercenaries?”

  She grimaced. “I guess.”

  “No. We were hired to train Camgerians to use the kind of arms that would give them a chance against the ivory poachers who were destroying the elephant herds. We were also trying to teach Camgerians management techniques for their game preserves. So officially we were members of an international wildlife conservation group helping the locals to protect and manage their valuable resources. Unofficially…” His voice faded.

  “What?”

  “The poachers were all rebels bent on overthrowing the government. Ivory, oil, coltan, hardwood, whatever would sell, they stole it and got arms in return, AK-47s and RPGs.”

  “Bertone.”

  “Krout, the Siberian, Bertone. All the same man.”

  “So you were training men to fight the rebels.”

  “In a side-door kind of way, yes. Back then Reed and I were young enough to be idealists and smart enough to know that idealism is a young man’s game. We didn’t think of ourselves as starry-eyed virgins, but we were.” Rand’s mouth flattened. “We believed that the good guys always win in the end.”

  Kayla bit her lip and didn’t ask any more.

  Rand kept on talking. “We thought we’d seen it all. We hadn’t. Somebody once described Africa as a place where anything that can be done by a gun has been done there. Faroe knew that.”

  “Joe Faroe was over there, too?”

  “Through St. Kilda, Faroe was working an operation on behalf of an American NGO, trying to discourage the arms trade. Reed thought Faroe was the greatest man he’d ever known, smart, tough, resourceful. I wasn’t quite as charmed. I kept telling Reed that Faroe could get us in trouble.”

  “Did he?”

  “No, hell no. We did it all by ourselves. Our training gig was up, but we both were sick of seeing what the arms trade was doing to Africa. We talked to Faroe. St. Kilda hired us to gather information on Krout/Bertone and his operation. To shut the bastard down.”

  Kayla’s hand touched Rand’s cheek, stroked lightly above the soft beard. “It was a job worth doing.”

  “Intellectually, no argument. But my gut doesn’t think that Reed’s death was worth it, no matter how many others might have survived because of what we did. His death was goddamned real. The lives he saved…” Rand shrugged. “Not real enough.”

  “So you set out to get proof that the Siberian was a gunrunner,” she said, luring Rand away from his bleak thoughts.

  “Reed and I figured out the Siberian’s smuggling network, his cutouts, who took his bribes. We wrote down the tail numbers on all his planes, documented the arms he was delivering. But none of that was quite enough. We needed solid, undeniable proof to nail the Siberian’s ass. Reed got wind of a planeload of arms coming in. We went to the dirt strip, built a blind, and waited.”

  “Did the plane come?”

  “Yeah. The pilot was either certifiable or clanged when he walked. I got it all-the plane, the waiting rebels, the cargo offloaded, the coltan loaded in return. Even the bag of diamonds passed directly to the Siberian. Then it all went from sugar to shit.”

  Kayla waited, not sure she wanted to know, but certain she should.

  “The sun moves real fast in that part of the world. Either my lens caught it, or Reed’s binoculars. The Siberian picked up a sniper’s rifle and drilled Reed. I grabbed Reed and an assault rifle and took off for the Rover. I drove us to the helicopter that was waiting. Before we could
take off, a rebel helicopter strafed us. I brought it down, but it was too late. Too fucking late. I buried Reed in the savanna he loved.” Rand met Kayla’s eyes and said, “I’ll bury Bertone, too.”

  “What if you bury yourself?”

  “Then Reed won’t be alone anymore. Win-win.” At least, it had been until last night.

  “Well, you’re honest,” Kayla said, shoving the covers aside. “One-night stand it is.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You love Reed more than you love your own life.” She began dressing with short, sharp motions. “Sorry if I diverted you from your hair-shirt shrine.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t lie to you. Bertone needs killing.”

  “You aren’t a murderer.”

  “You don’t know me very well.”

  “You don’t know yourself very well,” she retorted, pulling on a T-shirt. “You don’t understand what it will cost you to drop Bertone in cold blood.”

  “Obviously it will cost me you,” Rand said.

  “It will cost you yourself. But then you don’t care about that, do you? You hate yourself for living when Reed didn’t.”

  “Kayla-”

  A shadow showed against the bedroom curtains. Rand shot to his feet and lifted the curtain aside just enough to look out.

  Three men with drawn pistols were charging the St. Kilda compound from the direction of the golf course. Brakes shrieked as two cars and a pale green van blocked the driveway and parking areas.

  “Shit! We’ve got to-” Rand said.

  The blare of loudspeakers shut out the rest of his words. “EVERYONE STAY PUT! THIS IS A FEDERAL RAID!”

  Rand went through the bungalow at a run, checking that locks and bolts were in place.

  “What should we do?” Kayla asked.

  “Stay out of sight until we’re told otherwise.”

  39

  Royal Palms

  Sunday

  6:25 A.M. MST

  Get that camera crew awake and shooting now,” Faroe snarled into the telephone.

  “Okay, I’m on it,” Martin said. “You want us in the open?” “Whatever it takes to get sound and action.”

  Faroe hung up and went out the front door, shutting it behind him. He met the raiding party on the front stoop of the bungalow. The lead agent, a heavyset man in a dark green Border Patrol uniform shirt, carried a pistol at high port arms.

  “What the hell is this?” Faroe demanded.

  The next bungalow’s door opened silently. A camera lens poked out the partly open door, as did a directional mike.

  The agent saw only the tall, hard-looking man blocking the door of the bungalow he’d been ordered to search.

  “Out of the way, sir,” the agent said. “We’re conducting an immigration employment verification action of this establishment.”

  Faroe pointed toward the resort’s main building. “Well, shit howdy, cowboy, the kitchen is over there and the groundskeeper headquarters are about a quarter mile back the way you came from.”

  “Stand aside, sir.”

  “This is a private room,” Faroe said distinctly. “Nobody here is undocumented.”

  “Get out of the way, sir,” the agent barked, “or you will be subject to arrest.”

  Behind Faroe the door opened. Grace stood there, tying a red silk robe over the mound of her pregnancy.

  “No, he won’t step aside, Officer.” Her voice had the snap of a judge used to ruling a courtroom-and the cops in it. Her dark eyes went to the officer’s name tag. “Agent Morehouse, you’re very close to overstepping whatever authority you believe you have.”

  “Pardon me, ma’am, but who the hell are you to question my authority?”

  “My name is Grace Silva Faroe,” she said. “I retired six months ago as a federal judge in the Southern District of California. That district includes San Diego, a place where the Border Patrol was and is very active.”

  “I know what the Southern District is,” Morehouse said curtly. “Step aside, both of you. Now.”

  “Not yet,” Grace said, each word distinct. “You need a specific warrant to enter private residences. Under the law, rented hotel rooms have the same privileges and protections as private residences.” She held out her hand. “I’ll see the warrant, please.”

  “We have information that a specific individual may be in this bungalow and that said individual is in the country illegally,” Morehouse said.

  Faroe hadn’t budged from his place at the top of the three steps leading to the bungalow. Morehouse couldn’t go forward unless he went through Faroe and the pregnant lady.

  Agents piled up behind Morehouse.

  “Ma’am-” Morehouse began.

  “If you had specific information,” Grace cut across him calmly, “you should have applied for a warrant. Who is this specific individual, anyway? He must be important.” She flicked a glance at the men behind Morehouse. “And dangerous.”

  With a muttered word, Morehouse pulled a notebook from his hip pocket. Command presence sure wasn’t making a dent in the couple in front of him. Maybe a show of cooperation would get the job done.

  “The name is John Neto,” Morehouse said. “He’s a Camgerian alien who, according to our information, entered the country illegally from Victoria, Canada, on a tourist visa.”

  Faroe and Grace traded looks.

  “That’s specific information, all right,” Grace said. She shut the door and walked two steps to the porch railing, where she looked down at the milling of agents. “And obviously this Neto is an extremely dangerous man. Otherwise the immigration service wouldn’t have sent all these men.” She looked out at the grounds. “I count eight men in five vehicles. That’s a tremendous show of force,” she said, turning back to pin Morehouse with cold black eyes, “particularly here in Phoenix, where I’d guess one person in six entered from Mexico without papers.”

  Morehouse sighed. He’d known the minute he picked up his orders-and enough men for a baseball team-that this assignment stank. Now he had a hard-case male and a pregnant woman in his face before he’d even had two cups of coffee.

  “Ma’am, I have my orders. Just stand aside and we’ll be in and out real quick.”

  “Where did these orders come from?” Grace asked.

  “The district director,” Morehouse said. “Ma’am-”

  “At seven o’clock on a Sunday morning?” Grace interrupted.

  “He said it was a top Homeland Security priority. Now, if you’d just-”

  “Orders? From Washington?” she asked, pitching her voice to carry to the mike next door.

  “I don’t know,” Morehouse said impatiently. “I just take orders.”

  Faroe made certain that none of his amusement showed. He’d worked with men like Morehouse-decent, steady, unimaginative.

  Grace would make pâté out of him.

  “I understand, Officer,” she said sympathetically. “And we certainly don’t want to impede a legitimate federal investigation. If you’d give me a telephone number for the district director, I’ll discuss paperwork with him.”

  Morehouse said something under his breath. “Tell you what, ma’am. We’ll come in and check, and you can talk to the director later. It’ll be a lot easier that way.”

  “It might be a lot easier if I signed a permanent waiver of my Fifth Amendment rights,” Grace said. “That would hardly be good for America, would it? But never mind about the number. Senator Miller’s chief legislative aide is a good friend. I’m sure Jerry will have your director’s number.”

  Morehouse looked at her and knew it was going to be a bad day.

  “You aren’t getting inside without paperwork,” Faroe said. “Court order, warrant, or the phone number. Your choice.”

  The line of Morehouse’s mouth said he wasn’t happy.

  “Take it from me,” Faroe said, “this woman eats badges every day and spits out itty-bitty staples.”

  Morehouse knew a political impasse when it was s
hoved down his throat. He told Faroe the phone number. Grace went inside, closing the door behind her.

  Faroe peered into the morning sunlight and almost winced. Summer was more than a promise in that Phoenix sun. It was a threat.

  “I’m getting a cup of coffee,” Faroe said, turning away from Morehouse.

  Morehouse grabbed Faroe’s arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I just told you. You want a cup?” He looked at the agent’s belly. “Double cream and sugar, right?”

  The agent’s fingers dug into Faroe’s arm. “You and your lady are impeding federal officers, and I’m getting sick of it. We’ll have a little respect around here or somebody’s going to jail. Now break out some ID.”

  “I don’t need any.”

  “You need ID if I say you do,” Morehouse snarled. Over his shoulder, he said to one of his men, “Cuff this clown. Sack him up.”

  “What’s the charge?” Faroe asked.

  “No ID,” Morehouse shot back. “I think you look illegal, and I’m taking you in until I’m sure you’re a citizen in good standing.”

  Faroe’s smile was a knife sliding out of a sheath. “I once carried a badge pretty much like yours. Like you, I tried to bootstrap a disagreement with a suspect into an immigration violation.”

  Unwillingly, Morehouse eased his grip. “So?”

  “I knew the guy was a citizen,” Faroe said, “just like you know I’m a citizen. I even knew that a citizen is under no affirmative obligation to prove his status, so long as he is already here on U.S. soil. But I went ahead and sacked him up anyway.”

  “Hooray for you,” Morehouse muttered.

  “I did a year in federal prison for a civil rights violation,” Faroe said pleasantly. “Back off, or you’ll do the same.”

  Morehouse stared at Faroe for a long five-count, then released his arm.

  “Friggin’ lawyers all over the place,” Morehouse said under his breath.

  Grace emerged from the bungalow, carrying a cell phone. She held it out to Morehouse.

  “It’s your boss,” she said.

  Morehouse looked at the phone like it was a snake, then took it and held it to his ear.

  “Yeah, this is Morehouse.” He listened, grunted, listened some more, grunted, and sighed. Then he handed the phone back to Grace. “He wants to talk to you again.”