by Leslie North
“Aww.” Angela clicked her tongue for good measure and lowered her weapon.
“Close,” he lied.
She wondered if patronizing women had become part of his flirty, foreplay repertoire. He lifted his rifle and fired. The yellow blob at five hundred yards disappeared.
“What is the true nature of your biochemical weapon?” He went for the jugular then added, “Truth.”
Angela’s chest grew heavy from truths she didn’t want to surrender. “It was never meant to be a weapon. It started out as a geoengineering project to control the atmospheric humidity in certain climates whose patterns locked them into cycles that did nothing but breed famine. We determined a chemical solution that allowed us to dial that moisture the way we turn a knob on a thermostat. Not much different than seeding clouds. Like playing god with the environment. It was only when we tested the outer parameters of what was possible that we realized what we had. A formula capable of one hundred percent dehydration of the land within forty miles of its intended target.”
“And life in that zone?”
“In places of high heat, like equatorial zones? Days, maybe.”
“You said ‘we’. Who else knows the formula?”
“Beer bottle. Far left.”
He blinked away her affront and took aim. His torso stilled; his breathing regulated.
A round went off.
He missed.
“Oooh, sorry. Can’t answer that one.”
Angela raised the rifle, proper stance, sight aligned on the bottle’s yellow and black label. She reduced her breathing to a four-count. Four count inhale. Four count exhale. Her index finger itched. She squeezed, fired, repositioned the lever, squeezed, fired, repeating the cycle until she had cleared the log of every item of junk and spent cartridges littered the grass around her like acorns.
“Jesus Christ!”
“I want names of contacts Rockwell has on the ground in South Africa.”
“You hustled me.”
“I want to know what kind of tracking software you put on my phone, the location of the nearest consulate to my brother’s last known location of Mthatha, the identities of politicians Rockwell has in his back pocket and those he avoids, where—exactly—we are in the state, and a number I can call where Rockwell will pick up.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. How many women have there been?”
“What?”
“I found seventeen bras, all of varying sizes and degrees of …transparency…in the dresser drawers of my room. Forget to remove your trophies?”
“Don’t scramble up on your feminist high horse, McAllister. Those women were here because they chose to be, not because of some conquest. Just because no man can stand you long enough to darken your door doesn’t give you the right to judge those of us who enjoy the finer pleasures of life.”
His words were a .30 caliber cartridge to her abdomen. A blow that stole the sting of pleasure she had found at viewing his body moments earlier and twisted it into something shameful and wrong and not meant for her. Her feet retreated two steps, of their own will. Again, her gaze drifted to the clearing—something safe, something devoid of the pity that now distorted Samson’s near-perfect features.
“Angela…” His voice was contrite, as if his verbal shot had just sucked the life out of something, someone.
“I’d like my phone, please.” She continued to stare a hole in the knot of a random tree. Four inhales, four exhales did nothing to dissipate the buckshot comment that had landed square in her chest.
“Angela…”
“Phone.” Her throat closed around the word that came out, hard, biting.
He slid the phone from the back pocket of his jeans, tossed it a short bump a time or two in his palm then handed it to her.
Without words, she took the phone and headed back up to the safe house with as many answers as she had when she descended the grassy hill.
Less than zero.
Chapter Four
The call came as Samson laid out an apologetic, late-afternoon meal: pasta, zucchini bread, salted tomatoes. Angela had spent much of the day organizing his ammunition and gun collection. She said organizing something—anything—helped gather her thoughts. Beyond that, she said little else.
He wanted to ask her where she learned to handle guns, why she wanted to know so much about Rockwell, and why she had bothered to count underthings that didn’t belong to her when he, himself, had never counted. Sure, there had been women, lots of them since he vowed himself to Riley and she was ripped from his life, sometimes two women at a time, but they meant nothing. They were simply warm bodies to medicate the pain. His existence was largely solitary, not unlike the narrative he had read in Angela’s file. He would trade all his meaningless encounters for one real moment.
A moment he would never have again.
Angela’s obnoxious ringtone tapped out a hip hop beat across the house. Her phone zagged across the granite countertop. In an instant, she was beside him.
“Ready?”
She nodded.
He placed the script in front of her and gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
She pressed the green answer then speaker button. “Hello?”
“Doctor McAllister. I hope I haven’t kept you long.”
Her gaze scanned his handwritten notes. “I can’t help you, and my brother, unless you tell me exactly who you are and what you want.”
Good girl. Samson pressed the scan command on Rockwell’s black market mobile tracking software. Pop up code boxes blanketed red heat islands on a world map, silently crunching data.
“Call me Julian. I believe we have the same goals. I want something you alone can give me. And I’d venture to say you want the same.”
A scuffle sounded in the background, followed by muted, muffled noise and a blast of something before the choked noise died completely.
“I want to speak to him.”
“Not until we occupy the same room, Angie. That cannot happen unless you follow my instructions.”
The digital map reconfigured, the expanding red rings gradually shifting to green between 17 degrees west and fifty-one degrees east. Africa. A minute more until the screen was all green. Samson pointed to three words on his script: Keep him talking.
“I’m ready.”
“Third Street Promenade near Los Angeles. Tomorrow. You’ll find art that resembles a striped flag pole in the plaza. Someone will wait for you there with further instructions. Bring your passport and a viable sample.”
“I don’t carry samples, Julian. Surely, even you can see the foolishness in that.”
Samson winced. Generally not a good idea to insinuate captors are idiots. He supposed someone as intelligent as Angela may lack the stay-alive, common-sense gene. Fortunately, a slight chuckle came across the line.
“High-spirited. We’ll do just fine, Angela. Just fine.”
Samson motioned a circular sweep of his hand to remind Angela to keep Julian engaged.
“I want to hear Mike’s voice.”
“Impossible. He’s… indisposed.”
“I want a live video feed of Mike tomorrow at the meet up location. I talk to him, and he talks to me. Otherwise, I unleash an email blast to every international law enforcement agency and embassy within a thousand miles of the equatorial zone.”
Samson’s laptop map was almost entirely green over the bottom half of Africa.
“Agreed. But Angela, you come alone. If we find out you alerted anyone—especially that Navy SEAL you insist on keeping around you—I’ll be forced to acquaint every single person you care about with my latest neurotoxin.”
Ten seconds.
“Renders a person trapped in the wooden shell of their body until insanity taxes the heart. There is poetic beauty in science, is there not, Doctor McAllister?”
The call ended.
Damn it.
A frigid exhale skated from Angela’s lips. She brought both shaking ha
nds to a steeple over her nose and mouth. “Ohmygod…ohmygod…ohmygod.”
“You did good, Madam Curie.” A few seconds shy of perfect, but good, nevertheless. He pulled her into an embrace because it broke his heart that some fucked-up, psychotic terrorist had the reach to make someone as innocent as Angela believe he could harm her.
Not as long as he still drew breath.
He expected her to turn away, wiggle free. She didn’t. Doctor Angela McAllister, with the wit of a dive-bar comedian and the intelligence to change so much more about the world than he ever could, melted against him like the space was created just for her. Her eyeglasses bumped against the powerful lines of his chest. She backed away long enough to remove them to the counter then burrowed her forehead deeper against him. Slow, soundless sobs wracked her body.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered against her hair. That someone so untainted could get mixed up in something so dark. That he said no man could stand her. That he couldn’t be that one to darken her door, just once, to show her that humans weren’t meant to live exclusively inside their heads and in lab results—that passion and intimacy aren’t meant to be repressed. All he could offer her was his blanket apology and his protection.
He hoped that would be enough.
She pulled away and looked up at him with round, glassy, vulnerable eyes. Without frames cluttering her features, she was cute, the way a sparrow is cute when it lands, unexpectedly, on your windowsill and holds your attention and makes you mourn when it leaves. He knew the instant she leaned in what would happen—she all but scrambled up his body to make it happen. She planted her lips on his in a rigid kiss that spoke of the rushed inexperience he knew her to have. No tongue, no acquiescence. Simply the collision of two fleshy folds of the body. It was like kissing a best friend’s sister at fifteen.
Only not entirely.
A slight awakening shivered through him. The first thought that cleared his awakening libido: Dear God, has it been that long? His second: Why can’t I give her this? Just this?
She broke contact and drifted slowly away as if she believed that was all to the art of a kiss. In that breath, his decision was made. He would give her the breath-stealing, earth-shattering, scaling-a-mountain-peak kind of kiss that blew apart any hidden fantasy those dirty little rap lyrics germinated in her mind.
Samson slid his palm past her neck and threaded her scalp. He pulled her roughly to him, this time a collision of experience, a tutorial on how to let someone know you want them beyond all reason. His mouth angled over hers in a fevered union of hot exhales and this-side-of-insanity gasps for breath. She opened her lips to him and welcomed him inside the searing, probing, devouring place he created for her to explore, sample, test. The hungry thrust of his tongue surpassed altruism. His body responded wholly and completely, as he would have to any woman who unleashed a rare moment when he could put aside worries and preoccupations with others’ safety and focus on that void inside. She let loose an unrestrained moan deep in her throat that drove him to barely-there oblivion where actions clobbered common sense. The moment his hands snaked down her slight frame and hugged her hips against his jean-clad erection, he knew he had to stop the madness.
He pulled away, his mind as slow to recover as if he had swallowed a narcotic. His exhales rushed past her cheeks, fast and hard. Her lips were swollen and ripe and wet, as pretty as any shade of lip gloss. Her hair had fallen in loose tendrils from the invasion of his hand and that flush he had witnessed twice in the bar had made a grand return. He couldn’t think of a fucking thing to say past an appreciative curse that there was, in fact, an untamed spark within her he longed to ignite into a scorching wildfire.
But her eyes clouded dark. Her blinks came more rapid.
His chest ached. He had seen that look before, out on the lawn. Shit.
“Angela…”
“No, I get it. No man would want to darken my door. Least of all, you.”
She took a step back. Then two. Then five.
He should tell her that he hadn’t wanted to stop, that he found her contradictions fascinating and he longed to find out what other secret pleasures opposed her puritanical exterior, but her protection was more to him than an eighteenth discarded item. Rockwell would never be right about that. Duty always, always, came first. Angela believing the worst of him was best.
She picked up a plate of cold pasta and a fork off the table and padded through the kitchen toward her room. “Thanks for dinner.”
Her voice captured the same, lonely note he had perfected, graveside, for six long years.
He shoved the companion plate aside, a very different kind of hunger much harder to temper.
Chapter Five
Boredom until nightfall, and escape, set in quickly.
Angela had already found an empty combat pack in the closet and stuffed it with clothes and outer-gear and medical supplies she found under the bathroom sink. She wrapped the zucchini bread from dinner in a face towel and packed it beside three bottles of water she had lifted from the fridge when she heard Samson’s shower running.
In a drawer beneath the conquest bras, Angela discovered a stash of Samson’s history—photos of a beautiful brunette in crystal frames and a Polaroid of a young African boy against red, dusty clay, gap-tooth grin, his arm around a crouched Samson in stripped-down military gear. Had Angela not just humiliated herself into a pity kiss, she wouldn’t have thought it possible Samson had as many perfectly-arranged, white teeth as he displayed in the photographs.
She tried not to dissect the kiss but her analytical mind had broken the moment down into three very distinct phases: the phase where she might have cut the embrace short but, instead, studied the sculpted lines of his features and allowed her gaze to trickle down to his firm, sensual lips; the phase where he schooled her on how not to kiss like her only other experience—a prof’s assistant at Cal-Tech, all cocker spaniel and leftover hamburger; and the final phase where she hoped for a magnitude-ten earthquake to take California, once and for all.
Then again, that might have been the kiss.
The litany of things wrong with kissing Samson Caine, not to mention the man, himself, would overflow an entire pad of sticky notes. He functioned on instinct, danger, life lived from the neck down. Angela functioned best around cerebral men who didn’t underestimate women and couldn’t find their Latissimus dorsai muscle if they tried. Safe, predictable men. Which is why Samson’s overpowering testosterone and the appealingly symmetrical bone structure of his face had disarmed her judgment faster than it took her to clip off every last target on the tree log.
Never again.
Angela vowed to steer clear of him until the house quieted. She would stuff the bed with pillows, exit the patio door because the front door squeaked, sprint to the main road, and, well, she had more letters after her name than alphabet soup. Getting to Los Angeles by midday wasn’t Goldbach’s Conjecture.
She reached the bottom of the drawer and a handful of elaborately-carved Jiu-Jitsu metals on colorful neck ribbons when a knock sounded on the door. Immediately, her gaze flashed to the backpack.
“Angela?”
She mustered her best sleepy, innocent tone. “Yes?”
“Can I come in?”
“I’m tired.”
“I’m not apologizing to a door.”
She had five seconds, tops, before she aroused his suspicion. The backpack or the personal items she had pilfered? She scrambled to her feet, slid the heavy pack behind the bathroom door and plopped back to a seated position.
“Come in.”
Samson entered the room all special-ops—head on a swivel, eyes cagey, focused on things like windows and doors until his gaze swept the floor. In the quiet, her labored exhales made it sound as if she had done a hundred jumping jacks or had a good ten minutes on full speed with…
“You okay?”
“Sure.”
He lowered himself on the corner of the bed as if he expected the click-set of a wei
ght-displacement bomb. For the first time, he seemed out of his skin.
“I see your nosy nature carried you past the bras.”
“Seventeen of them, varying sizes, but only one woman in all these photos. Who is she?” The question was impulsive, rude perhaps, but it stemmed organically from an unquenchable thirst to know every challenge, from all angles.
Samson's expression softened. He surveyed the collateral damage of Angela’s curiosity. His eyes darkened, from twilight on the mountain or twilight inside, she couldn’t say.
"She was my wife."
The gravity of was caused Angela’s stomach to shift. The word held the finality of something far more than a split. Silence settled over the room.
Angela reached for her favorite photo—a wind-whipped day on a pristine beach, long tussles of the woman’s latte-brown hair scattered in all directions but tamed by the grip of her long fingers at the crown of her head, a coy smile over her shoulder that said she had found the secret to happiness and she would share it with all who followed.
“She’s stunning.”
“She jogged every dawn. One morning, three days after our honeymoon, she went for her morning run and never came back. Most days I went with her, but Rockwell had me on a late night surveillance. She left me to sleep in without waking me."
"What happened?”
"Smacked-out parolee mugged and murdered her. She fought back like I’d trained her. If she had just handed her things over to the guy and got out of his way…" His voice trailed to nothing.
Angela didn’t know what to say or do. She wasn’t good at things beyond beakers and equations, but he seemed adrift, like maybe he had lost his gravity, too, so she stood and picked her way through the invasion of his privacy she now regretted and sat beside him on the bed. Her hands didn’t have a place, so she straightened her glasses that really didn’t need straightening and sat on her hands to warm them from the room’s sudden chill.
“I can’t imagine that kind of courage. I’m afraid of everything. All the time. I know it’s irrational. Like what could possibly go wrong when you spend eighteen hours a day in a security-clearance laboratory?”
