by Tara Janzen
For that she needed him. He had the skills and the resources, and if he decided to make a run for it, there wasn't anybody who was going to catch him. Unbelievably, against every ounce of his better judgment, that's exactly what he was beginning to decide.
“Give me the location of the bomb, and I can use it to cut a deal.” There, it was out in the open. “I'll take you someplace where they'll never find us, not if they look for the next fifty years.” He could guarantee it, but so help him, God, once he crossed that line, if he crossed that line, there'd be no turning back.
She looked up, and he was amazed that such a soft mouth could be set in such a hard line.
“We're having our first fight.” It had just dawned on him. “If you come away with me, we can do this whenever we want.”
From the look on her face, that wasn't the big selling point he'd hoped it would be. “And why would I want to go away someplace and fight with a crazy man?”
“Because I make you hot.”
“Other people make me hot, and you don't see me running away with them.”
“Liar.” He moved in close. “Nobody makes you hot the way I make you hot. Come on, Cody, take the chance. It's the only one you've got.”
He needed a chance, too, and it wasn't just because of the sex. He wasn't that big of a fool, and sex had always been easy for him to find. This was something else. He didn't know what, couldn't put a name to it, but whatever he'd seen in her on that rooftop had been profound. It had compelled him. It still compelled him.
“Please.” He didn't want this to end, not tonight, not with her going into lockdown for the rest of her life, and him going into therapy until his teeth fell out.
“Hashemi,” she finally said after a long pause, looking like she already regretted telling him. “And . . . and Akbar. They were the ones who actually pulled the triggers.”
It wasn't a map to the warhead, but it was a start, the start down a long road of no return. If he saved her, he'd be a fugitive, too. But if he didn't, he had no future at all, because he wouldn't be able to live with himself.
“Who else was there?” He reached over and turned off the computer connecting him to General Grant's office and picked up a pencil and notepad. He'd decide later how much information to disseminate and when, and if that didn't smack of high treason, he didn't know what did.
“Sergei Patrushev, Bruno Walmann, and . . . Reinhard K-Klein were all there, and the Braun twins.” The litany of names came pouring out of her, one after another, each one of them marking a man as an accessory to murder.
“Patrushev,” he said when she finished. “Tell me about him. How you got involved with him. The work you did for him.” He'd get back to the map.
“I never worked for him. I was his prisoner. When I was able to escape, I did.”
“Prisoner?” She'd dumbfounded him again. No one had thought to follow that angle. “How? Why?”
“My father, he, uh, owed Sergei a lot of money.”
Which meant what? he wondered. “He sold you to Sergei?”
Oh, man. This was going to get bad. He felt it in his gut.
“Not sold, exactly. It was more like he used me for collateral.”
Same difference in his book, the bastard.
“If you were a prisoner, how did you end up in the middle of the negotiations for the nuclear deal? We've got photos of you with almost all the buyers, sometimes at a party, but sometimes just entering a building with one or more of them.”
It was what had sealed her fate, her high profile with all the terrorists trying to work a deal with Sergei.
“That's what I was collateral for, not the money my dad owed, but the nuclear warhead he had been responsible for when he'd been a general in the Soviet army. He's the one who took it off the military base in Tbisili and hid it in Tajikistan.”
Tajikistan.
Bingo. Big, huge freaking bingo. That was it, the information they all needed.
“Do you have the exact location?”
And oh, hallelujah, she nodded her head. “It's in a book of poetry my father gave me.”
“And where's the book?”
His question hit a wall of silence, a solid brick wall of silence.
“Cody?” She couldn't clam up now. “Come on. You've got to tell me.”
Or not.
“No,” she said, her voice distressed. “O'Connell was killed for knowing about all this.”
And everything O'Connell had known should have been in the intelligence reports, but a couple of big pieces were missing out of those reports.
“You told him about your father? About the book?”
“Yes.”
Damn CIA. They'd probably considered those two huge facts proprietary information and given them to their own guys, but not to anybody else. It was one way to keep people from trampling all over an investigation, but it made it damn hard on other people who were out there in the field, people like SDF.
It looked like SDF was going to ace them out anyway—maybe. He decided to go back around to the beginning.
“What else can you tell me about Sergei Patrushev?”
“He's rich, obscenely wealthy, but you probably already know that, and he likes to party. There's always a crowd with Sergei.”
“Which included you, most of the time.” It wasn't a question. She'd been seen everywhere these last few months.
“He liked to keep me with him. I was a valuable commodity.”
He'd seen her in the little silver dress. He knew exactly why she'd been so valuable, and it hadn't all been about the warhead. If she hadn't been an asset on the party scene and with the buyers, Sergei would have kept her under wraps.
“As dumb as it sounds, in pretty short order, I was the most famous party girl in the Czech Republic, even made it into a few magazines, quite a few, actually.”
“So does this mean we can look forward to an accidentally released Dominika Starkova video sex tape showing up on the Internet?”
To his amazement, her smile faded and a wash of color came into her cheeks.
Whoa. Some of the air went out of him. He'd only been teasing her.
“Cody?” This he had to know.
“No,” she said. “There's no sex tape.”
“But there's something.”
“No. Nothing.” She shifted her gaze to the computer screen and took hold of the mouse.
“You're the worst liar I have ever seen.”
There was something, all right. Something he wasn't going to like. He could tell, because without even knowing, he wanted to hit something, like the desk, or the wall, or probably some guy, because her “nothing” did not sound like a simple ex-lover, sex tape or no sex tape.
“What kind of nothing?” he pressed a little harder.
“How about a none-of-your-business nothing.” She wiggled the mouse around, avoiding his eyes.
“How about an I'm-making-it-my-business nothing. And if you were wondering, this counts as fight number two. Dish it up, babe.”
She met his gaze with a much maligned sigh. “You're being . . . being—”
“Proprietary?” He helped her out. “We made love, Cody. That makes you mine for as long as I can hold you, even if it's only for tonight. Territorial? Damn straight. Ridiculous? No. Vengeful? In a heartbeat, if someone has hurt you.”
“How about nosey?”
“Definitely. I need to know everything about you, for your sake. For mine.”
“Oh. Oh, I see.” Her expression instantly changed.
She'd just had an epiphany. He didn't know what the hell about, but he knew an epiphany when he saw one.
“Of course, well,” she continued. “I haven't . . . well, so I didn't, but, well—”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, watching her, fascinated. He'd said something to make her blush, and he couldn't wait to figure out what exactly that had been. His “getting to know everything about you” line had been pretty straightforward since they'd l
eft the loft.
“Well.” She let out a breath, as if steeling herself. “To begin with, there was this boy, very sweet, but it was his first time, too, and we weren't together that long.”
Oh, wow. She was going to give him her sexual history, literally from the beginning. No one had ever done that before. He sat back in his chair, completely nonplussed. He usually didn't do this scene at all. He was usually careful enough that he didn't have to do this scene. Yeah, he definitely wanted to know what had put that look on her face when he'd joked about the sex tape. Something had happened to her, something sexual that had made her very uncomfortable, and he needed to know what that had been, for her sake, for his sake, just like he'd said—but this litany-of-old-lovers thing. He wasn't going to stop her, because the more she talked, the more he learned, and that was his job, but God, she was actually starting from the beginning.
“And then there was another boy, but again, nothing to worry about there, and then I was engaged to Alex for four years. He was a professor of cultural anthropology.”
Okay. They'd just covered a whole lot of ground without much action, and nothing sounded too freakin' bizarre yet, unless the anthropology thing was going to include the sexual initiation rites of some obscure Bohemian hill tribe in which the professor had forced her to participate. That would be bizarre.
“We broke off just before I went to Prague to visit my father.” She gave him a quick glance.
Okay. Things happened. Guys left, and he couldn't say he was anything but damn glad that the fiancé had split.
“So what about you?” she asked, and he felt a little something shift and quake inside him.
“Seven,” he said, and that was all he was going to say. He'd read somewhere that seven was a workable number of ex-lovers to admit to having—not too wild, not too tame.
Seven, and he was sticking to it.
“Seven?”
“Seven.” He wasn't going to go into this, ever. He was not a kiss-and-tell kind of guy. Problems he'd had with relationships were fair game, but not the sex.
“So what happened after Alex?” Who he was guessing was the dumb guy who didn't like going down on girls.
“I was alone after Alex, and after a few months, I went to Prague.”
And before Prague, had what? Jumped a girlfriend? He could live with that, even if it was going to give him crazy ideas which a smart guy would just keep to himself.
“Of course, in Prague everybody thought I was sleeping with everybody except them. It's just what people think at these parties, and . . . um . . . one guy in particular really had a problem with that, and with me always turning him down.”
Okay. Now they were getting somewhere. This was not going to be one of those stories with a kinky, but basically harmless ending. He took a breath and shifted in his chair.
“Who was it?”
“I don't think the name is important, it's just—”
“It is,” he said. Damned important.
“Creed.” More color washed into her cheeks, which simply fascinated him. She had the softest skin, and if some bastard had hurt her, he was going to have to work damn hard not to hunt him down. He was an operator, not a vigilante—and he needed to keep reminding himself of that. Still, he wanted the name.
“Yes?” he said, when after a few more seconds she didn't go on. What? She thought she could stop now?
“I'm sorry.” She made a small dismissive gesture with her hand. “I shouldn't have brought it up. It doesn't matter.”
Wait a minute. It did matter.
“You didn't bring it up. I did, and you need to tell me what happened.” She could not leave him hanging like this. “If you were hurt, I need to know.” It was a rule somewhere, in the good-guy handbook.
“I wasn't hurt, not like you mean, so it . . . it isn't anything you need to worry about. It wasn't rape.”
The pencil snapped clean in half in his hand.
Well, he was really fucking glad to hear that.
He tossed the broken pieces of the pencil onto the desk and forced himself to take a breath.
“I'm sorry about forgetting to use a condom with you, but I didn't have one,” she said, coming way out of left field again and pretty much blindsiding him.
“That's my line. All the way.” And he meant it. He should have been more responsible. But they needed to get back to this guy, and this “wasn't rape” thing. What the hell did that mean?
“You don't need to worry. That man used a condom. Actually, he used two, because he was so sure I was sleeping around.”
Geezus.
The color in her cheeks wasn't because of embarrassment about her sexual history. It wasn't embarrassment at all. It was pure distress about this guy and whatever he'd done to her, which she was going to tell him.
“Why wasn't it rape, Cody?” He had a pretty strict interpretation of the crime, and it came down to one thing: If a woman didn't want you, you needed to back off and rethink your plan.
“Because I didn't say no.” She did her best to meet his gaze, but only about half succeeded, which made him feel badly for her. “It was that night, at Karlovy Vary, and it was all so surreal—but I still could have said no, and I didn't.”
The breath went out of him again. Karlovy Vary. He had an all-too-clear picture of what it had been like in the warehouse that night, and surreal probably didn't quite cover it.
“Did he threaten you?”
She shrugged. “With this man, every move he makes is a threat, every word he speaks. It's the way he is.”
“Patrushev?”
She shook her head. “Sergei doesn't feel that way about me, not at all. He likes a different type of woman.”
Okay. He was done. He knew who it was. He could see the whole thing, from start to finish, including the two condoms. It didn't take a genius to figure out how violence turned into sex, or to understand how easy it was to take advantage of a terrified, confused woman who couldn't figure out how to say no while someone was forcing themselves on her—not after what she'd just seen.
And the look on her face when he'd teased her about the sex tape? That had been pure shame.
“Without full consent, you don't have a mortal sin,” he said.
Her gaze lifted to his from where she was perched on the edge of her chair.
“It's a very big deal, the full consent, and without it, you don't have a mortal sin. You can work this one off.”
“But I'm not Catholic.”
He lifted off the leather thong with his saint's medal and crucifix and slipped it over her head. “Now you are.”
“I don't think it's this easy.”
“Sure it is.” He took her hands in his. “Repeat after me: Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee . . .”
C HAPTER
27
S KEETER WAS SO damn close to those earrings, she could almost taste them. Her tracking device had red-lined, and she was standing right in front of a steam pipe that was coming straight out of the ceiling—probably all the way from the fifth floor, if her luck held.
Luck. Right. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. She was sweating. In a basement where there were icicles hanging from the ceiling, she was sweating.
She wasn't running on luck. She'd pushed her luck right over the edge and into a bottomless abyss. Every warning bell she had was clanging so loud in her head, the only way she could hear herself think was to focus on the earrings.
Get them and go—that was the message she was getting, but there was one slight problem. She was standing on tiptoe and holding the tracker as high above her head as she could get it, but there just happened to be an elbow in the pipe just past where she could see through the hole in the ceiling—which meant she had to get up there and take apart the pipe at the elbow. The earrings, if her tracker was as good as she thought it was, would be lying in the bottom of the turn.
She flashed her light around on the floor, until she found a few wooden crates piled up ag
ainst the wall. The first one she moved set loose a flurry of rats. She danced around them a bit, and they scurried over her boots, and thankfully, disappeared back into the shadows. She didn't like rats, but she wasn't going to scream about them. She used to scream for rat encounters, but living on the street, it hadn't taken her long to figure out screaming scared her a whole lot more than it scared the rats.
Taking hold of the first crate, she dragged it over to the pipe, then hauled a second one over to set on top—which should just about do it.
Now all she had to do was get on the crates, shimmy up the pipe a little, find a place to set her flashlight so she could see what she was doing, and somehow take apart a corroded pipe that was probably four times older than she was.
Piece of cake.
That's why she traveled with a tool belt.
It took some doing, and about twenty minutes of banging away and wiring up her flashlight, twenty minutes of bracing herself against the subfloor and hoping her right foot didn't slip off the crate or her left leg come off from around the pipe, but finally, finally, the damn thing was coming apart. She didn't carry a big old pipe wrench on her belt. Who would? So she'd had to make do, but making do was what all gear heads did.
Jerking and tugging, and being damn thankful for every pound of weight she'd ever pressed, she managed to get the pipe to turn enough that she could shine her flashlight down inside.
Ho-lee mo-lee. There they were: two shiny, sparkling, gem-encrusted crosses, each one no bigger than her pinkie fingernail. She reached down inside, caught them up in her hand, and was just giving herself a mental high five, when she felt the cold bore of a gun press against the small of her back.
The next sensation was equally ominous: Someone took her gun. She felt the lift of the weight, the slide of someone's hand, and the cold wave of dread that washed down her spine.
THERE was a bedroom in the office. As a matter of fact, there were three very elegant suites set up to accommodate overnight guests—but Creed wasn't going there. He was manning his post, and kissing Cody Stark, and trying to decide if he really had it in him to do it one more time.
