According to the file Buck had given Ty, her name was Nike Tallent.
Ex-CIA like himself, Buck, and the Alpha team with whom she’d worked. All of whom were now part of their response team. Something Buck hadn’t felt the need to mention when he’d recommended them.
Hair the color of cherry wood flashed sparks of red in the thin, bright sunlight. It swirled and flew as she leaped, tumbled and ran. She wore nothing but a pair of thin leather pants with a matching halter top that was little more than a square of material held in place by ties. Nothing to hamper her movements.
For all of that, she was surprisingly curvy, with full breasts that pressed at the halter and nicely rounded hips.
He was too far away to see her face clearly and the yellow-tinted high-definition sunglasses she wore concealed a fair amount of what he could see, but he could see enough to get the sense she was pretty.
As far as he could tell she was unarmed - where in the world would she hide a weapon in that outfit? - and it wasn’t the best neighborhood for that. Judging by what he read in her file, though, she didn’t need to be armed.
It was thin, that file. They’d given him almost nothing.
The CIA had been typically uninformative. If he’d been just Joe Public on the street he would have expected that kind of secrecy. This was interagency, in the new era of cooperation, and he’d once been one of them.
Why? he wondered. What were they hiding?
According to the file she’d joined the Agency at age twenty-one, when her special skills had brought her to the attention of the higher-ups. She was a traceuse and what he and his team watched was something called Parkour or free running. Unusually, though, for someone of her age and relative experience they’d trained her from the start for covert operations - weapons, survival, combat and capture - and then sent her out into the field. There was nothing in the file to indicate why. By all accounts, until that time she’d been a nice, normal, all-American teenager. It made no sense.
She’d been all over the world, though, judging by the list of mission ops locations. All political hot spots.
“How do you know her, Buck?”
The question had to be asked. His old friend’s silence on the subject was eloquent. Buck was a Texan, a big talker. With Buck, there was no such thing as a short story.
Given Buck’s silence, Ty was fairly certain he wouldn’t like the answer.
Buck glanced at Mitch Palmer, the Alpha team leader for the new agency.
Seeing that look, Ty knew he wouldn’t like the answer. Someone had some explaining to do.
He waited.
Looking at him, at the look in his eyes, Buck sighed. It would come out sooner or later.
“She was part of the team with Mitch and the boys, that went in after you in Qatar, Ty,” Buck said, finally. “Nike Tallent was the one who actually got you out.”
Ty’s gut churned at the reminder.
Qatar. Just the mention of it got to him. He went silent, trying to hold the memories at bay.
They’d been working with officials in Qatar to uncover a branch of al-Qaida, all too well aware that not everyone in the government there could be trusted. Plenty of people in that country sympathized with the idea of an Islamic state. Of the U.S. being afraid of them. There’d been a leak, a man in the government offices, a minor functionary with ties to the insurgents.
Ty hadn’t known until he’d walked into the room. He’d had the sudden awareness that something was very badly wrong. By then it had already been too late. Far too late. They’d been lying in wait for him, overwhelmed him. He’d tried to fight his way out, but there had been too many of them.
He remembered some parts of what followed too well, but the last hours, days of his captivity were hazy. The pain had been all-consuming. Between that and the lack of sleep, forced positions…the beatings…
That part he remembered. Involuntarily, his muscles twitched at the memory. His breath locked in his chest as he remembered being unable to breathe, drowning.
A heavily accented voice had spoken, “Your Geneva Conventions are nothing. Your people have a saying, ‘What is good for the goose is good for the gander.’ So be it.”
So they’d heaped every indignity on him that the prisoners at Guantanamo and other places had suffered. And more.
None of that showed on his face, though, except in the tightening of his jaw.
Deliberately, he forced his mind away from the memories that threatened to swallow him whole.
“So you know her, too?” he asked Mitch.
That was how he’d first met the special ops agent, as they’d gotten him out of Qatar once he was stable enough for the journey.
He didn’t remember a woman. Certainly not this one and he was fairly certain he would have remembered her.
Sitting back in the helicopter, Mitch nodded, looking out the doors rather than at Ty.
“Small world. Our team was designed around Nike’s missions, sort of. When it was necessary. Because of what she is, what she can do. Get into places nobody else can. We all called her Niki.”
Not at first, though. It had taken time to gain that much of her trust. Mitch’s jaw tightened.
“That was later. In the beginning our orders were simply to support her missions.”
He looked at Brad and Andy, the other two members of his team.
To Ty’s surprise, the man sounded strangely protective.
It was the wording and the intensity of the look between them, both freighted with meaning that made Ty look at the three of them more closely.
Brad Tolliver was the team’s explosive expert. Even now, he looked ridiculously young for the job, as if he’d barely started shaving. It might have been his heritage or good genes. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, he was the smallest one of the three, just over average height, but he was ripped. A coin rolled absently over his fingers, magician’s practice, habitual, something he did to relax and to keep his fingers nimble for setting and defusing bombs.
It was clear Brad was uncomfortable with the conversation as was Andy, their communications guy. Fair-haired, quiet for a comm guy, Andy was extraordinarily soft-spoken, rarely raising his voice above a whisper.
Both looked to their team leader, uncertain.
Mitch took a breath. “Every mission Niki went on was a suicide mission. For her. We all knew that. They made it clear from the get go. They only called her in when there wasn’t any other way, when everything else had failed and a full frontal assault wasn’t in the cards. We were to provide covering fire if necessary or a diversion. If she wasn’t back by a specified time, we were under strict orders to leave, return to base.”
Ty looked at him, stunned and angry, but Mitch looked every bit as pissed off as he was at the idea.
Looking back evenly, Mitch nodded. “It meant exactly what you think. Then, suddenly, she quit. No explanation. She’s ‘exploring her options’ right now.”
What that meant precisely, no one seemed to know.
Including Mitch.
He’d hated to see her go, the whole team having become defensive of someone who seemed as if she couldn’t need that protection less, she was so extraordinarily self-sufficient. Most of the time he, Brad and Andy just kept other people away from her, knowing her impassivity made them uncomfortable.
How did he explain that?
“Niki’s a hard person to know,” Mitch said. “For a woman, nothing shows on her face that she doesn’t want anyone to see.”
Whatever she thought or felt behind those yellow glasses stayed there.
“I don’t know what had made her the way she is,” he continued. “What I do know is that she’s fanatically loyal to those she cares about, and behind that impassive face she does care. I saw her turn on a dime once, take one of those incredible leaps off a wall to go back to provide cover for Andy when the return mission went wrong, at the risk of her own life.”
He knew Brad and Andy would back him up.
Now it was up
to Ty Connor. He looked at the other man and could almost see the wheels turning.
Watching what she did right now, Ty thought she might be one of the few people who could get past that cordon of guards in New York. Suddenly he realized there was a chance.
“Will she do it?” he asked.
Mitch laughed harshly. “It’s Niki. Hell yes she’ll do it. If only because if she’s out here. She’s restless. At loose ends. I know that much about her.”
“Find a place to put her down, Ed,” Ty told the chopper pilot. “Why did she quit, Mitch? Do you know?”
His face going grim, for a minute Mitch looked away out of the helicopter doors.
Mitch was a big man, a little taller than Ty himself, honed and trained.
Keeping his eyes on the far horizon, Mitch said, “At the end they tried to have her do renditions, but she refused. So they pulled a fast one and lied to her. She caught them at it. And walked.”
Buck winced at the comment, grateful Ty wasn’t looking at him.
The terrorists who’d taken Ty had used the renditions as an excuse for what they’d done to him. It had been ironic knowing that Ty was one of those who’d opposed them from the get go. A staunch constitutionalist, Ty had been a maverick in the Agency, complaining that what they were doing endangered every agent and soldier in the field. He’d been right. If they hadn’t been doing that shit, a lot of people wouldn’t be dead.
The ultimate irony was that Ty was one of those who’d suffered for it.
“It was one of the final straws,” Mitch added, looking from Ty to Buck. “A betrayal of trust… I don’t know what the last one was. No one does, although there are rumors. We didn’t always work with her. A lot of the time she worked alone.”
Trust was everything in their business. You had to trust that you were being used, that your life was put at risk, for the right reasons.
Remembering his own brush with the renditions and what had come after, Ty could understand.
With an eye for power lines and telephone wires, Ed found them a place to set down.
“Just wait,” Mitch said. “She knows we’re here. She’ll come to us. A helicopter is hard to miss.”
Suddenly from the low roof of the nearest building, a slender form leaped into the air. Like a diver she arched above them, arms spread similar to a swan dive, then tucked and rolled in mid-air to land in the dirt-filled remains of a large stone flower planter. Her knees flexed to diminish some of the force as she dove forward to dissipate the rest, rolling on her hands and shoulders to come to her feet.
Bending neatly in half, she freed her hair, tossed the cherry-wood colored mass back over her head, flipping it over her shoulders where it bounced and curled over them. The yellow-tinted high definition glasses she wore never moved, held in place by earpieces that curled around her ears.
Clearly knowing her ways, Mitch pitched a bottle of water to her underhand. She caught it neatly, flipped the top to take a long swallow even as she brushed her hair back from her flushed and sweaty face. She eyed all of them curiously and a little cautiously.
Her skin glowed from the exercise, glistened, as sweat trickled between her breasts.
Ty found himself suddenly speechless, his mouth dry.
She was beautiful, striking really, her eyes large, long-lashed and lovely behind the glasses. The color was indeterminate concealed as they were by the yellow lenses. Like busts of ancient Greek Goddesses, Athena or Aphrodite perhaps, hers was a face of classic features, with high cheekbones, a firm chin, slightly square jaw and a perfectly shaped mouth, firm, but not lush.
Then there was her body.
It was toned, but not ripped, as evidenced by all those lovely curves. That rounded fullness beneath the halter pressed firmly against the thin leather. Rocket science wasn’t required to know she wore no bra beneath the halter-top and it was clear that as yet she didn’t need one. Between the bottom of the halter and the low-riding pants was an expanse of taut, tanned abs.
Just above her right hip was a scar, neat and round. A bullet hole.
For a moment, Ty’s throat locked, his body responding in a way he hadn’t reacted to a woman in years.
“Thanks, Mitch,” Nike Tallent said, her voice in a register lower than Ty expected, a husky, sexy contralto that sent a shiver down his spine and made part of his anatomy stiffen even more. “Funny meeting you here. And you brought friends.”
She didn’t mean the team.
“Nike,” Mitch said and grinned.
With a nod, Nike looked back at him, but didn’t grin. Mitch was a known quantity, safe. She trusted him. He was one of the few she did.
Tall and broad-shouldered with close-cut brown hair and brown eyes, he was a good-looking man with a square jaw, a moustache over a full bottom lip. He also boasted a chest that strained every shirt he owned. More than once the guys on the team had teased that he had a better chest than she did.
Few knew he was addicted to Sudoku.
Finally she steeled herself to look at Ty Conner, keeping her expression still, her eyes empty. He’d changed and he hadn’t. Not at the core.
The first thing that struck her was his hair. Had he always been so fair? she wondered. His hair seemed closer to white now. Then she remembered Qatar and flinched away from the images that leaped to mind.
She’d thought that whatever feelings she’d had for him, whatever attraction there once had been would have died with everything else, but apparently they hadn’t. Something she couldn’t name moved inside her.
The brilliant blue eyes were the same as she remembered, his cheekbones still high with the same hollows underneath them, and the firm mouth she remembered so well. He was as handsome as she remembered. More so. To her surprise, she felt her lips twitch a little as she remembered thinking then that he’d been hot.
He still was, lean and sexy in a dark turtleneck and tan slacks.
To her astonishment and dismay, her heart twisted. Some part of her was still alive in there.
Beside him, Buck was Buck. She remembered him better from those hours in Qatar than she did from that night in the jungle.
His skepticism when he’d seen her had been obvious. He hadn’t recognized her then, but she’d changed even more than he and Ty. There were times when she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize herself, the person she’d become.
Suddenly she wasn’t certain she could do this.
“We brought your gear.”
Mitch’s words were a welcome diversion.
Her eyebrows flickered. So Mitch, too, like Evan, anticipated there would be action and that she would accept what they offered.
That twitch of her eyebrows was one of the few expressions Niki allowed herself, Mitch knew.
He watched the other two men cautiously.
Some people looked at her as if she were some kind of alien species, instantly sensing that she was different and at times she could seem that way. Not that she appeared to care, but for some reason he did. It was just something about her. Or him. He had three younger sisters and had protected all of them. It disturbed him on some intrinsic level that no one had done the same for Niki.
Turning Nike bent to reach beneath a nearby picnic table - the wood scarred with graffiti and rotting after years of neglect - to draw out a small backpack.
Only then did Ty notice the tattoos that spanned her back, a pair of great wings etched in gloriously intricate detail on each side of her spine. They were surprisingly attractive and impossible to miss, stretching as they did from the tops of her shoulders only to disappear beneath the waistband of the low, tight leather pants. Subtle, oddly and dramatically beautiful, each feather of those wings was inscribed in clear detail, depth and shading. It must have taken days and been excruciatingly painful. Even so he found himself wishing he could run his fingers over the delicate tracery of those wings. The punch of lust, desire, caught him off guard. He hadn’t thought anyone could affect him that way anymore.
“Wingéd
Nike,” he said and didn’t realize he’d spoken out loud until she answered.
Nike, the Greek Goddess of victory. Nike of Samothrace. He nodded to himself. This is what that ancient goddess would have looked like. He’d picked the wrong one when he’d mentally compared her to Aphrodite. Winged Nike was definitely more appropriate, too, given her history and what he’d just seen.
Clearly surprised she turned to look at him. A small smile curved her lips.
“Exactly,” she said.
Somehow Nike knew she should have guessed Ty would know, would understand. No one else had or did.
His voice hadn’t changed either, it was still surprisingly deep and sexier than ever.
Evan had hated the tattoos. Victor Torrance had been furious when he’d seen them. They made her remarkable, noticeable. Not that many people saw them beneath her clothing, although it was easier once she had them than before, there were fewer explanations to be made for them than for the scars.
Not that she dated much. Flying around the world at the drop of a hat hadn’t allowed her to get to know many people. Then there was the problem of trying to explain what she did for living. Hello, I’m an assassin didn’t seem to be a great opening line.
The surprise and the small smile were the first unguarded expressions Ty caught on that lovely impassive face, softening it, somehow making it more humanly beautiful.
He looked at her, studied her.
He didn’t remember her from the night of the rescue, but then those days had been nothing but a blur of pain. Now that he thought about it, though, a series of impressions ghosted through his mind, a soft cry of dismay, of horror, a whisper encouraging him as the ropes had given way. That same voice had urged him on. A surprisingly small, but strong, shoulder had been there for him to lean on. He’d been too beat up to consider what he must have looked like, naked, bloody and battered.
The thought made him wince internally at the thought of the risk she’d taken. If she’d been captured, a non-Moslem woman in a radically Muslim city? What they’d done to him would have been nothing compared to what they would have done to her. She was just as likely to have been stoned to death once they were through with her. If she survived that long.
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