Twin Targets

by Jessica Andersen

  She hung motionless, utterly disoriented, feeling the thud of her heartbeat in her head, in her bones.

  She was vaguely aware that she was rising toward the surface, and something inside her said that was a bad thing. She couldn’t seem to make her arms or legs obey her commands, though. She could only drift, longing for air as the water around her grew warmer, or maybe she got colder, she wasn’t sure.

  This isn’t good, she thought, but couldn’t seem to get beyond the thought.

  Then the heavy rumble of a boat engine cut through her daze, and her brain came back online with a jolt. Tiberius’s guards had arrived! Panic flared through her, chasing away the lethargy of shock, and she struck out wildly in the direction she thought was “up.” Moments later she breached the surface and sucked in a gasping lungful of air. Then she was swimming, flailing her arms and legs as hard as she could in an effort to get away from the motor noise as her heart hammered in her ears and panic spurred her on.

  There was a splash behind her as at least one of the guards jumped in to grab her.

  “No!” She swam harder, adrenaline propelling her onward when her muscles trembled with fear and fatigue, and the numbing cold of the water around her.

  Her head pounded and there was a sharp pain above her eye, suggesting she’d been cut by waterborne debris. She banged into other pieces of debris as she swam, and the air was tainted with the odor of gasoline and smoke. She wanted to cough but she couldn’t spare the breath as she swam for all she was worth. She had to get away, had to—

  A hand closed on her ankle, gripped hard and dragged her under.

  Panic jolted and she screamed, then inhaled water and choked hard. She thrashed, fighting her captor even as she struggled to the surface and gagged, trying to get the water out of her lungs, the air in. The world spun and closed in on her, and her captor shifted his grip from her leg to her throat, clamping an arm across her upper chest while he struck out, swimming strongly with his free arm and kicks from his powerful legs.

  “Let me go!” Sydney struggled against him, fouling his rhythm and dragging them both below, but he didn’t fight. He simply waited until they broke the surface, then shifted his arm to her throat and squeezed until her world went gray and spun to a pinprick.

  Semiconscious, she went limp against him, barely breathing even after he eased up on the choke hold. Defeat hammered through her, alongside the sure knowledge of what Tiberius would do to her now.

  He wasn’t just going to kill her. He was going to force her to help him sell a terrible opportunity to terrible people. Then he was going to kill her and Celeste both, very slowly. That was what he’d promised he’d do if she betrayed him, and she had every reason to believe the threat. She was going to die, and die horribly.

  The realization spurred her to a last desperate attempt to escape. Knowing she had just one more chance, she waited until her captor reached the slick white side of a tall boat and called for others to reach down and grab her. At the moment he handed her off, she found another burst of energy and exploded, kicking and scratching at the two men who held her. They cursed and fought to hang on to her. They shouted at her, but she was too far gone to process the words.

  She screamed over and over again until her voice went raw and then broke to sobs as they subdued her by grabbing her arms and legs and hanging on despite her furious struggles. When she finally went limp, they dragged her up and over the side, and dumped her onto the rain-slicked deck.

  Moments later, the man who’d jumped in after her landed on the deck nearby, dripping and breathing hard.

  Sydney curled herself into a protective ball, waiting for rough hands to tie her so she couldn’t get away while they hauled her back to her quarters on the island—or worse, directly to Tiberius.

  Instead of rope, though, a heavy wool blanket landed atop her, cutting the sting of the cold air.

  She whimpered and clutched at the blanket, pulling it over her head. After a minute or two, when the warmth started to come and the men hadn’t made another move, she peered out, dragging the blanket around herself as she struggled partway up on the rain-slicked deck.

  Her teeth were chattering and her dark, shoulder-length hair was plastered over her forehead, covering her eyes. She slicked the strands away from her face, and when her vision cleared, she found herself only a few feet away from the man who’d pulled her from the ocean.

  He was leaning back against the side of the gunwale a few feet away from her, wearing a coarse gray blanket like hers. His wet hair was short and dark, his features square and regular, his blue eyes assessing. Even soaking wet, he carried a definite aura of command.

  She didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t mean anything. She’d only seen a few of Tiberius’s guards face-to-face, but had heard the footsteps of many more. What was strange, though, was that he was looking at her with utter calm, laced with an air of speculation. He seemed willing to wait for her to speak first, which didn’t make any sense.

  Then her eyes locked on his blanket, which had something written on it in six-inch-high letters: U.S. Coast Gu—

  It broke off where he’d tucked one side of the blanket beneath the other, but it was enough to have hope blooming viciously in her chest.

  She hadn’t been recaptured after all.

  She’d been rescued!

  She gasped and looked at the other two men standing nearby. They were burly, curly-haired guys with the shared features of brothers and coast guard insignias on their jackets.

  When she looked back at the man who’d saved her, he nodded in greeting, but didn’t smile. “I’m Special Agent John Sharpe of the FBI’s major crimes task force, and you’re on the coast guard cutter Valiant.” He paused, expression assessing. “Whether that’s good or bad news for you is going to depend on what you were doing on Rocky Cliff Island and why Tiberius wants you dead.”

  Chapter Two

  John stood, draping the blanket over his shoulders to stave off the sharp wind, and looked down at the woman who huddled miserably on the deck. The drowned-rat factor did little to hide her high, angular cheekbones or delicately tipped-up nose, or the exotic tilt to her chocolate-brown eyes.

  She was, in a word, gorgeous.

  He had no clue whether she’d been Tiberius’s prisoner or a coconspirator gone bad, but her looks alone made him lean in the latter direction, because he’d seen the file photos of the bastard’s previous women and she certainly fit the type.

  Still, there was no need to head straight for “bad cop” interrogation techniques. For now, he’d let her see him as the rescuer, willing to play along with whatever game she had in mind. With Tiberius and his people it was all about the game, John knew. Move and countermove. A living chess match, played out on a continent-size board, with living people as the pieces and national security the stakes.

  Not yet sure whether she was a pawn or a queen or somewhere in between, he held out a hand to help her up. “Come on. I don’t know about you, but I could use some coffee, a few towels and some dry clothes.”

  She stared at him, her lovely brown eyes stark in her pale face. Her hand trembled when she reached for his, making him think either she was a damn good actress sent to put him off his game, or else she’d truly been running for her life. Maybe she’d double-crossed Tiberius, John mused, or maybe he’d simply grown tired of her and didn’t want any loose ends returning to the mainland.

  Those thoughts died quickly, though, because the moment he and the woman linked hands and he pulled her to her feet, she burst into tears.

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “Please don’t cry.” He didn’t do tears.

  Instead of stopping, she buried her face in her free hand and sobbed harder, her shoulders—her whole body, for that matter—shaking with reaction…or a good approximation of it.

  Reminding himself he was supposed to be playing along with the illusion of a damsel in distress, John grimaced and put an arm around her in a stiff offer of comfort. He patted her shoulder. �
��You’re safe. It’s over.”

  She turned into him, wrapped her arms around his waist and hung on as though she never meant to let go. “Thank you,” she whispered against his neck, her skin warming against his despite the chill. “Thank you.”

  Electricity jolted through him in a surge of reaction that was so unexpected, it literally took his breath away. Heat flared and his heart did a thumpity-thump number that set up a clamor of warning bells.

  Damn, she was good. Lucky for him, he’d had practice with this sort of thing, and he’d learned his lesson the hard way.

  Besides, they didn’t call him Iceman because he was warm and fuzzy.

  “It’s okay,” he said, trying to disengage without making it into a wrestling match. He fleetingly wished he’d brought Grace Mears along on this run, or sharpshooter Michael Pelotti, both of whom were way better than he at comforting victims and witnesses—and suspects—while making it seem natural. Hell, pretty much anyone on his team had him beat at this sort of thing.

  He looked at the coast guarders. “Can one of you help me out here?”

  Dick and Doug Renfrew, the boat handlers he’d borrowed for the night’s surveillance, shook their heads in unison. “Not unless you want to hang around and wait for the chopper to make another pass,” Doug said. He was the talker of the two.

  “Good point,” John said, glancing at the gray-black sky. “You should probably get us the hell out of here.”

  Granted, Tiberius’s helicopter had peeled off into the fog when it saw the U.S.C.G. ship approaching the scene of the explosion, and he’d heard the other motorboats cut and head back to the island, but they could swing back around for a second look at any moment.

  Tiberius and his crew had probably assumed the Valiant was fully manned and ready to act, but the reality was that the cutter was carrying its minimum crew of two, along with one senior FBI agent—John—who was acting on a hunch that hadn’t even been strong enough to justify bringing along the rest of his team.

  His gut told him Tiberius was gearing up for something big, something that was focused on his private island off the New England coast. Based on that, he’d called in a few favors and gone on a semiofficial fishing expedition off the fertile ledges of George’s Bank.

  The good news was that he’d caught something. The bad news was that he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d caught.

  Tiberius was smart enough—and devious enough—to have seen the Valiant on his surveillance systems, identified it through its transponder code and sent one of his people out to get herself “captured” as a diversion. It would be just like him to feed the FBI a decoy intended to distract them away from his main intent.

  The question was: had he?

  John looked down at the woman, who was quieting some, though she stayed leaning against him as though she found the contact as comforting as he found it disturbing.

  “Come on,” he said, voice unaccountably rough.

  “Let’s get you warmed up, Ms….” He let the sentence trail off in a prompt.

  “Sydney,” she said against his chest. “Just Sydney.” Which could either mean she figured they should be on a first-name basis after what they’d just been through together, or that she didn’t intend to voluntarily give him enough to figure out who she was for real.

  He didn’t recognize her name or face from the extensive files Grace and Jimmy Oliverra—the two computer jocks on his team—had amassed on Tiberius and his dealings, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t part of his world. Just that she hadn’t said “cheese” yet and gotten her picture taken for the FBI’s scrapbook.

  “Okay, just Sydney,” he said, playing the game. “Let’s get you belowdecks, out of this wind.” He disengaged and gestured her across the rain-slicked deck to the ladder that led to the cramped galley and sitting area downstairs.

  She fumbled slightly when the boat sliced deeper into the storm and the chop increased. But she looked steady enough overall, as if she wasn’t going to collapse again. Was it part of an act or was it reality?

  John didn’t know, but he sure as hell intended to find out, ASAP.

  “You can go straight on through,” he said when she paused in a short hallway. “The head is to your right. There’s no shower, but if you want to get out of those wet clothes and towel yourself off, I’ll scrounge something for you to wear. There’s a first-aid kit under the sink. When you’re changed, I’ll meet you in the galley. I’ll fix us some coffee.” With a side of interrogation.

  She was pretty out of it, between shock and the gash on her forehead, but he didn’t feel the slightest bit of remorse about questioning her. Experience had taught him that the things people in her condition said were usually more truthful than what came out of their mouths after they’d had a chance to think about their answers. And if that made him the cold, cynical SOB his teammates claimed, then so be it. His suspicious nature had kept him alive when plenty of others around him—good men and women—had died in their efforts to take down the kingpins of modern organized crime.

  These days, the major crimes unit wasn’t about territories or ethnicity, it was all about technology. The modern godfathers controlled pieces of science and sold them to the highest bidders…and Tiberius was king among the black market tech dealers.

  Tiberius didn’t have a last name that any intelligence service worldwide had been able to find, never mind a history prior to ten years ago, when he’d appeared on the scene almost overnight. He was the worst among the worst, dealing almost exclusively in microscopic weaponry of the germ warfare variety. He’d been variously blamed for bioweapons attacks on five of the seven continents, including targeted viral assassinations in Europe and the U.S., and a series of flulike epidemic outbreaks along the conflict fronts in the Middle East.

  Tiberius was bad news, there was no doubt about it. Unfortunately, he’d proved all but untouchable over the decade he’d been in business. There was no solid evidence connecting him directly to any crime and nobody would testify against him—at least not anyone who’d managed to stay alive long enough to take the witness stand. The calculating bastard lived sequestered on his private island off the Massachusetts coast when he could’ve been someplace warm and inviting and outside of U.S. soil. John was convinced he’d chosen Rocky Cliff Island for spite, so he could laugh at the agents who’d dedicated—and given—their lives in a series of unsuccessful efforts to put him behind bars.

  Unsuccessful until now, that is, he thought as he dug through a spare clothes locker, changed into jeans, a U.S.C.G. sweatshirt and thick socks, and grabbed a slightly smaller set of the same for his mysterious guest.

  Sydney—if that was really her name at all—might just be the answer to his prayers. Though his gut told him she’d probably been Tiberius’s lover, he’d just tried to kill her. That might be all the leverage John and his people would need to get inside information.

  Then again, she could be a clever plant. The possibility meant he’d have to be very, very careful in what he said and did around her.

  He knocked on the door to the head. “There’s a set of clothes for you outside the door. I’ll be in the galley when you’re ready.”

  A couple of minutes later, right about when the small kitchen space had started to take on the aroma of hot coffee, the door to the washroom opened and Sydney stepped out.

  Her towel-dried brunette hair stuck up in tufts here and there, suggesting it would curl later. The borrowed clothes hung off her slight frame, and she’d cuffed the jeans so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. She should’ve looked ridiculous in the too-large pants and sweatshirt. The fact that she didn’t, that she somehow looked as though a fashion designer had chosen the outfit and told her to make it work on the runway, had those warning buzzers going off again in the back of John’s brain, loud and clear.

  He stared at her, seeing a drop-dead gorgeous woman beneath shock and saltwater, and thought, Were you his lover? A customer in a deal gone bad? Are you a victim, a perp, or somewhere i
n between?

  As if he’d said the question aloud, she locked eyes with him. “So, Special Agent John Sharpe of the FBI…are you authorized to make a deal?”

  SYDNEY SAW THE mental shields come crashing down. One minute he’d been looking at her as though trying to make up his mind about her, and in the next she’d made it for him, because innocent people don’t need deals.

  His gorgeous blue eyes blanked and a small, sardonic smile touched the corners of his lips, which were bracketed with small creases that drew her eyes and made her wonder what he’d look like if he smiled—really smiled—at her.

  “It depends on what you’re offering,” he said, expression giving away nothing.

  She wanted to tell him that she intended to give him everything she knew, that she couldn’t live with herself if Tiberius got away with what he was planning. But she had to be realistic. All she knew about this guy was that he was an FBI agent—she figured she could believe that much, because she highly doubted the coast guard loaned their boats and crew to just anyone. Well, she also knew he’d dried off even handsomer than she’d expected. That wasn’t exactly relevant, but it was certainly a fact.

  His hair was a rich, dark brown, thick and wavy. From his square-jawed features and the stress lines carved beside his mouth, she guessed he was in his mid-thirties, a few years older than she. Wearing a gray coast guard sweatshirt, borrowed jeans and thick socks—as she was—he should’ve looked casual. Instead, he exuded that same leadership she’d noticed out on the deck, that same “don’t mess with me” attitude.

  On one level she found it comforting. On another, disturbing.

  She’d known men like him before, men who would do—and say—anything necessary to achieve their goals if they thought the ends justified the means. Hell, she’d dated one of them—almost been engaged to him—and look where that had gotten her: unemployed and forced to seek an alternative source of funding that had turned out to be far less legitimate than she’d hoped.