by Cindy Dees
André led her and Mike around the burning D.U. building and into a throng of fire trucks, police cars and assorted emergency vehicles clogging the street. An ambulance pulled up, and André dragged them toward it.
He turned her brother over to a pair of stone-faced EMTs, who pushed Mike down onto a gurney. One of them pulled out a condomlike thing and stuffed it in her brother’s wound, which made him cuss hard enough to get in trouble from their mother.
Meanwhile, she looked around frantically for who was in charge of this circus. She had to tell someone where Alex was inside so they could bring him out. She just couldn’t wrap her brain around the idea of him being gone. She couldn’t bring herself to even think the D-word.
The EMTs tried to push Mike into their ambulance, but he squawked, “I’m not going anywhere until I talk with you, André. I have critical information for you.”
His urgency penetrated the fog in her brain as Fortinay leaned over her brother and listened grimly. Did Mike know something about Alex? Hope leaped in her breast. A little voice in a far corner of her brain told her hope was irrational, but she didn’t care. Until they showed her Alex’s lifeless, charred body, she refused to believe he was...that D-thing.
Whatever Mike muttered to André put a thunderstruck look on Fortinay’s face. Her hope grew a little more.
A commotion erupted in the entrance to the Doctors Unlimited building as a firefighter was hustled out of the smoking hulk. André’s spine stiffened as he looked over the crowd that closed in around the man.
She couldn’t see a thing and literally tugged on her boss’s sleeve. “What’s happening?” Was it Alex? Had they rescued him?
“Katie, you and Dawn need to come with me. Quickly. Quietly.”
“Where are we going?”
André didn’t answer, but instead plowed into the crowd of uniformed law enforcement types. He led her to a big white van, unmarked and innocuous. It looked like a local delivery vehicle that had mistakenly been swept up in the maelstrom that had overtaken this quiet street. André looked around surreptitiously, opened its back door and helped her inside quickly.
It looked like one of those TV-show vans with a mobile surveillance command center hidden inside it. Computers and monitors lined one side of the interior. A bench backed up against the other. A man slumped on the bench, a bulky blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
He glanced up, and Katie’s knees did collapse out from under her then.
But Alex surged up off the bench and caught her around the waist in a crushing embrace that made Dawn fuss. She threw her arms around Alex’s neck and hung on for dear life.
“You’re not a hallucination?” she whispered.
“Nope. I’m alive.”
“How?” André demanded. “I watched you charge those guys, and they opened up on you!”
“Bastards fired all around me. I think they were trying to get you.”
“Not me,” Fortinay bit out. The two men’s stares met and then both turned to Katie.
“What? Me? Those commandos only wanted to kill me?”
Alex ignored her question and instead said, “I took what felt like a bunch of beanbag rounds in the back.”
Katie was stunned. Beanbag rounds hurt like hell and left big bruises—she’d seen them on her brothers when they were in training. And while beanbags knocked people down when fired out of weapons, they rarely injured a person seriously and never killed them.
André scowled. “You think they had specific orders not to kill you then?”
Her jaw dropped. “Your father must have given that order.” She continued the line of logic. “Why on earth are your father’s men trying to kill me? Heck, I just made a deal with him—”
She broke off but not soon enough.
Alex lifted Dawn out of her arms and passed the baby to André. She felt the van lurch into motion, but none of that mattered. Only the gathering fury in Alex’s eyes was important. She didn’t wait for the storm to break and blurted, “I called your father on André’s crisis phone. I offered him a deal. I’m supposed to leave you—and break your heart in the process—and in return he agreed to leave you completely alone if and until you decide to approach him someday.”
“Why?” Alex rasped the syllable with a horrible gasp of dismay and betrayal.
“Because I love you, Alex!”
“You told my old man you’d break my heart because you love me?”
She reached up and planted her palms on his cheeks, willing understanding through her fingertips and into his brain. “You’re caught between two worlds. Neither of them will let go, and they’re tearing you apart, Alex. Your father and people like my uncle are destroying you inch by inch. And you’re letting them. I care for you too much to stand by and do nothing while you self-destruct.”
He frowned down at her like she was speaking in tongues, her words meaningless gibberish he could not comprehend no matter how hard he tried.
“I love you, Alex,” she whispered. “But I can’t have you. They’ll use me the same way they’re using you to get you to do what they want. And I’m not willing to let them rip me apart limb from limb. I like being alive. I like being emotionally whole. And I have a baby to raise.”
“What makes you think they’ll let you raise that baby in peace?”
She shrugged. “Because I won’t play their game. I’m stepping off their fast train to disaster. You—you seem addicted to the ride. But I’m done with all of this.” She added tiredly, “I quit.”
* * *
THE VAN ROCKED to a stop and André Fortinay threw open the back door. Alex watched Katie jump out numbly. He felt as though he’d fallen into some sort of weird mental catatonia where nothing made sense anymore. He could watch events happening around him, see colors and hear sounds, but none of it computed.
“If you’ll come with us,” André murmured to him. “I need to take tissue samples from Dawn and run them through our lab.”
Dawn. Innocent, abandoned Dawn with whom he shared so very much in common. That tiny stripe of bright hope peeking over a grim and gray horizon. His brain latched on to the imagery of that ray of light as a warm and happy thing. Proof that he’d lived through the perils of night—of memories that came calling in the wee hours, of fears crowding forward, of the brutal honesty that crept over him from time to time and informed him he was a failure at every aspect of being human.
Must. Protect. Dawn.
It was enough. It got him up off the bench. Moving forward. Going through the motions of being alive, for now, at least. He focused on the baby. Fixed an image of her in his mind. She was enough to keep him breathing.
But she was not enough to fill his soul.
For that, he needed...Katie.
Her name burst across his existence, his mind, his heart, his essence. She was that which brought him fully to life. She made him feel. She gave him love. And in so doing, showed him that love existed within him, still. He’d been so sure Peter had burned it all out of him. But the bastard had missed a tiny piece of it hidden somewhere way, way deep down where cold, loveless Peter had not known to look for it to kill it.
But Katie had found it. Nurtured it.
And now he’d lost her. Because, if he understood her correctly, she loved him too much to watch him destroy himself.
In a fog, he sat in a plastic chair in a hallway. White walls. Fluorescent lights. Underground, if he had to guess. Antiseptic. CIA lab, probably.
Dawn shouted for rescue in a room nearby, and Katie came out carrying her in a few minutes, looking haggard.
“Poked her with a needle?” he asked woodenly.
“Poor baby. And they removed her umbilical stump and plucked out a few of her head hairs. Those big meanies,” Katie cooed to the infant.
Dawn settled quickly. Of course it helped that someone had come up with a bottle of formula for the baby and a clean diaper. Simple needs, Dawn had. Sustenance, maintenance and love.
Were his needs that simple, too?
&n
bsp; “Katie, we need to talk—”
A door opened nearby, and André poked his head out. “You two want to step in here for a moment?”
Katie glanced up at Alex in distress.
Tentatively, he put a steadying hand on the small of her back. He exhaled the breath he was holding when she leaned into his arm just a little. Thank God. She didn’t flinch away from him like most women did by the time he was done with them.
He followed Katie into a small examining room. He recognized the equipment around the space and identified it all by rote.
Fortinay spoke briskly. “Preliminary results are back on Dawn’s blood. Radioactive isotopes in it indicate exposure to unrefined uranium. These results in combination with Mike McCloud’s are conclusive. She’s the smoking gun.”
Katie stared. “She’s the...what?”
Alex spoke gently. “All along we thought everyone was trying to kill us. But it was Dawn they were after. She’s the only local survivor of the Karshan Valley massacre. The only remaining proof that Yevgeny Archaki and his crew were paying the natives to mine and crudely smelt small amounts of uranium that he was smuggling into Iran.”
“Uranium? I thought it was samarium.”
Alex nodded. “Samarium always comes linked with other minerals, and one of its base minerals is uranium.”
“Oh, my God. So who were all those guys at the D.U. building?”
“Russian Spetsnaz. Someone within the Russian government was eager to see the uranium smuggling continue and couldn’t let a doctor treat the locals and possibly identify their uranium dust poisoning.”
“Or Heaven forbid,” Katie added, “bring out blood and tissue samples that would prove what Archaki was doing with their secret blessing.”
No surprise, Katie’s arms tightened convulsively around Dawn.
“Alex, we have to keep her safe.”
“And we will.”
Fortinay piped up. “Once we have the final data from Dawn’s samples, we will present it to the powers that be in the U.S. government, and they will no doubt...discuss the issue with their Russian counterparts. There will be no need to eliminate Dawn and dispose of her body once the cat is out of the bag. She should be perfectly safe from here on out.”
“Did your father send that team in to kill her?” Katie asked him in sudden horror.
“He certainly had something to do with the team or else they wouldn’t have fired beanbags at me instead of live rounds.”
Katie frowned. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but why didn’t he let them kill you?”
“For the same reason he accepted your offer. Hope. He holds out hope that one day I will come back to the fold.”
“Is he right to hang on to that hope?” André interjected.
Alex looked the CIA man in the eye. “You know I can’t answer that question if I want to live to see tomorrow.”
“You’ll always be walking on a tightrope, won’t you?” Katie asked sadly.
He glanced over at André in silent request. The big man nodded and slipped out of the room, lifting Dawn out of Katie’s arms as he went.
Alex was surprised when Katie rounded on him immediately, demanding, “Why in the hell did you run at those guns? Are you crazy?”
“No. Well, maybe yes. You see, I love you.”
She stared blankly at him. “You what?”
“I love you.” The words came out a little more strongly this time. With more conviction.
“Are you serious?”
He frowned at her patent disbelief. “Yes. I am. I promised you I would never lie to you, remember?”
“But...”
He waited for her objections to spill out. Her denial. Her rejection. He braced himself for the blow.
“Oh, Alex.” She launched herself at him like a missile slamming into his chest, leaping into his arms and literally wrapping herself around him.
Gratitude for her forgiving nature wove through his shock as he clutched her tightly against him. Her legs went around his waist, and he backed her up against the wall, kissing her with all the ferocity of his need.
“Screw my father,” he muttered against her mouth.
“I’d rather screw you.” She laughed.
“That can be arranged.”
“What are we going to do about your father? I promised him I would break your heart.”
“Trust me. You did. You just happened to put it back together, too.”
She kissed him again, sweetly this time, exploring this new and fragile thing between them. He closed his eyes, savoring the taste of love on his tongue in delight.
“I don’t think your dad’s going to like it if we stay together.”
“I’m certain he won’t like it.”
“Will he try to kill me?”
“How do you feel about tightrope walking as a hobby?”
She drew back from him a little. “Will you teach me how?”
“Stick with me, kid. I’m the best. I’ll teach you everything I know.”
She snuggled a little closer. “Mmm. Sounds interesting.”
He laughed in spite of himself. “You’re incorrigible.”
“And you love it.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “I can’t promise that this will be easy. But I can promise that it will always be interesting.”
“Deal.”
She looped her arm around his waist as they headed for the hall and to Dawn to make their little family complete. He watched with pride as Katie stepped forward to scoop the infant out of André’s arms.
“We all good?” Fortinay murmured over the girls’ heads.
Alex nodded and couldn’t keep a broad grin from creeping across his face. “We’re good.”
“Great!” the Frenchman said brightly. “I hear they’re in desperate need of doctors on the Syrian border. The civil unrest in the region is still throwing refugees on the international aid network like crazy.”
“Syria?” Katie exclaimed. “Who wants to go someplace you can’t take your blow-dryer?”
Alex grinned down at her. “You mean and have it work?”
She stuck her tongue out at him.
He said more seriously, “Zaghastan didn’t turn out so bad, did it?”
She smiled softly. “No, indeed. Best trip of my life.”
“Ha. You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.”
Her smile widened. “I can’t wait.”
Truth be told, neither could he. For the first time in his life, he had the rest of his life to look forward to. “We’ll do this together, yes?”
He thought her eyes actually filled a little with tears. “Yes, Alex. Together. You and me against the world.”
And they kissed to seal the deal.
* * * * *
Don’t miss Cindy Dees’s next HQN available in August 2014!
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ISBN-13: 9781460327128
CLOSE PURSUIT
Copyright © 2014 by Cynthia Dees
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