Ready for Anything, Anywhere!

by Beverly Barton

  There she was, backdropped against the stark, modernistic portrait in Madame d’Marchand’s library. Same shoulder-length blond bob. Same wary brown eyes. Same navy blazer. The commentary was in French and muffled by the noise in the terminal but Mallory got the gist of it when the screen split to display Congressman Kent’s image alongside hers. A moment later, both were replaced by a mug shot of Remy Duchette.

  “Didn’t take long for them to get the footage on-air,” she commented, her throat tight.

  “That was the idea,” Cutter reminded her. “The story’s probably been running every half hour since the interview.”

  “Hold this a moment, would you?”

  Passing him the shopping bag, she fumbled in her purse for her sunglasses. She hadn’t hidden behind them in days. Something inside her died a little at having to resort to their shield again.

  The clerk in the American Express kiosk responded with the same efficiency as the airline representative. It was obvious he’d seen the news flash. Curiosity prompted several sidelong glances, but he refrained from comment except to request Mallory’s signature in several places. She walked out of the kiosk fifteen minutes later with money in her purse for the first time since the day she’d arrived.

  “Wonder what happened to the flag on my accounts?” she drawled while she and Cutter once again threaded through the crowds.

  “Beats me.”

  His totally fake innocence scored a huff from Mallory. A moment later, she bumped to a stop.

  “Look.”

  Her pointing finger drew his attention to a display of plastic snow globes in the window of a souvenir shop. Amid the bubble-encased Eiffel Towers and Arc de Triomphes was the cathedral of Mont St. Michel, rising from a blue plastic sea.

  “I have to get one of those.”

  She found a boxed globe easily enough, but the long line at the register moved at a snail’s pace. The business with American Express had eaten a chunk out of her hour prior to boarding. The long lines at security would devour the rest. Disappointed, Mallory put the globe back on the shelf.

  “I’ll pick one up after I see you aboard the plane,” Cutter promised. “Do you need to make a pit stop before we hit security?”

  “I’m okay.”

  She assumed they’d say goodbye at the security checkpoint, since only ticketed passengers were allowed beyond. Cutter, evidently, had other plans.

  When they approached the checkpoint, he produced an ID and an official-looking document and pulled one of the security inspectors aside. That worthy individual skimmed the paperwork, pursed his lips and gestured to a fellow officer. Mallory caught only snatches of the intense conversations that ensued, but picked up several references to Interpol. Cutter finally broke away and strode back to her.

  “Seems to be a problem here with my permit to carry concealed,” he said, his voice low and for her ears only.

  “You’re armed?”

  His hooked brow made her realize how stupid that sounded. Of course, he had his gun strapped to his ankle. This was his job. She was his job.

  “I need to talk to the director of security,” Cutter told her. “Wait for me here. Right here.”

  “It’s getting close to boarding time.”

  “I’ll square this away as quickly as I can. If I’m not back in ten minutes, go on through. I’ll meet you at the gate. If they call your flight, get on board. You know what to do when you deplane.”

  She covered her sudden, sinking sensation with a brisk nod. “Look for Mike Callahan. Big. Ugly. Crossed rifles. Bull’s-eye.”

  “Be sure to tell him about the ugly part.”

  “I will.”

  “Just in case, you’d better take this with you.”

  She assumed he was referring to the tote he’d carried through the terminal with her. Before she could reach for it, however, he wrapped his hands around her upper arms and pulled her forward for a long, hard kiss.

  “Wait here,” he growled, when he released her. “Ten minutes.”

  Cutter stalked back to the two security officials, torn between the need to get Mallory on that plane and the equally fierce need to keep her in his sight until she was aboard.

  It took one call to Interpol and another to OMEGA to untangle the confusion over the permit. By Cutter’s watch, he was back at the security checkpoint in nine and a half minutes. His brows slashing together, he skimmed the entire vicinity. Mallory wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  Spotting the official who’d stopped him in languid conversation with another employee, he thrust through the crowd. “The woman I was with,” he bit out. “The blonde. Did she pass through security?”

  “No, monsieur. She waits for you, then goes back to the concourse.”

  “Dammit!”

  If Mallory had decided to use the delay to buy that snow globe, Cutter would rip her a new one.

  “She comes back soon,” the inspector added helpfully. “I hear her tell her friend she has not much time.”

  “What friend?”

  “The woman who greets her. She carries a shopping bag, too. The same as mademoiselle’s.”

  Cutter whirled, his mind racing. Who the hell had Mallory hooked up with? A fellow shoe addict? A representative of Y vette d’Marchand, bearing more gifts? Yvette herself, driven by curiosity about the house-guest who’d generated such a spate of publicity?

  Or someone else? Someone who’d tried to use Mallory’s connection to d’Marchand once before to get to her?

  His stomach clenching, Cutter barged around clumps of travelers and swept through the gift shop on the run. Customers scattered. The clerk at the register shouted a protest. A string of muttered curses followed him out again.

  His heart jackhammered against his ribs when he burst onto the cavernous concourse and skidded to a stop. He spun left, searching the crowd, praying for a glimpse of Mallory’s navy blazer or pale gold hair.

  He swung to the right and had started for the Delta reservation counter when he spotted her through the glass windows. She was on the walkway leading to the parking garage, arm-in-arm with a slender brunette in designer jeans and a mink vest. They moved at a good clip but both, he saw with a jolt of disbelief, were laughing.

  Cutter’s step slowed. Ice coated his veins. The noisy terminal faded, replaced in his frozen mind by a dark, silent munitions warehouse.

  Eva had left an urgent message for Cutter to meet her there. Said she’d put the squeeze on one of her sources and learned that the stolen munitions they’d been tracking were in a crate hidden inside the warehouse. He’d slipped over the wall an hour early, intending to reconnoiter. A half dozen yards from the entrance to the warehouse he’d picked up the murmur of voices … accompanied by the unmistakable timbre of Eva’s low, rippling laugh. Then a truck had rumbled up, the warehouse doors opened and she’d walked into the spear of headlights.

  Cutter never knew which of them fired the shot that ignited the munitions stored inside the warehouse. He wasn’t even sure she’d screamed his name before the explosion knocked him on his ass and the flames consumed him.

  Now, with the echo of her laughter ringing in his ears, the agony of those months in the burn ward gripped Cutter like a vise. Needles of pain seemed to shoot through his jaw and neck. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t force any thought through his frozen mind except one. Mallory was walking away from him. Arm in arm with a stranger. Laughing.

  “Keep walking.”

  The woman in the mink vest reinforced the soft command by digging her gun in deeper.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Mallory said desperately. “I don’t have the damned disk.”

  “So you wish me to believe.” The brunette’s smile belied the menace in her eyes. “I saw your performance on TV. It was worthy of the Bolshoi. How fortunate that I was in Paris and could intercept you at the airport.”

  Her English was as flawless as her face, but the reference to the Bolshoi generated the sickening suspicion that she worked for
the nameless, faceless Russian Cutter was after.

  “I wasn’t performing! I did lose my suitcase to the riptide at Mont St. Michel. I am going home.”

  “You’ve caused me considerable inconvenience, Ms. Dawes. Please don’t try my patience further. Walk.” The gun gouged into her ribs. “And smile for these nice people.”

  Mallory stretched her lips at the travelers hurrying in the opposite direction, but inside she screamed with frustration and fear and a fast-growing fury.

  She’d been standing less than a half dozen yards from the security checkpoint when this svelte brunette had sauntered by. Catching sight of the gold-embossed shopping bag, the woman held up a similar one of her own and strolled over. To talk shoes, Mallory assumed. The next thing she knew, she had a gun sticking in her side and was being hustled toward the exit.

  She could guess what Cutter would think when he discovered she’d skipped. He’d believe she knew about the disk all along, that she grabbed this opportunity to escape.

  The brunette must have been reading her mind. “This man you were with. The one you kissed. Does he know about the disk?”

  She was damned if she’d tell the woman anything. “No.”

  “So it is just you and your Congressman Kent who make this deal?”

  “Kent?” Mallory stumbled, numb with shock. “Are you saying Kent burned that data to disk?”

  “Do you think you’re the only woman he pawed?” Amusement laced the reply. “He is a pig, that one, and easily led by his dick. And now he pays dearly for his pleasure.” Satisfaction thrummed through her voice. “The data he pulled off your computer is worth millions. My best haul to date.”

  Reeling, Mallory realized she wasn’t dealing with an underling. This was the big kahuna. Struggling to overcome her shock, she swiped her tongue over dry lips.

  “How … ? How did Kent get the disk into my suitcase?”

  “I neither know nor care. You’ll have to ask him when next you see him.”

  Yeah, right.

  The woman’s mocking reply more than convinced Mallory she wouldn’t live to put the question to Kent—or to tip authorities to the fact that the shadowy figure they’d labeled the Russian was a woman. It also fueled her simmering fury into a fast, furious boil.

  Enough was enough! She’d been groped by a man she’d admired. Seen her allegations of sexual harassment turned against her. Endured the humiliation of being publicly branded a whore. Been tailed across France by an undercover agent. She was damned if she’d let this bitch hustle her into a car at gunpoint.

  Digging in her heels, she dragged the woman to an abrupt halt. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Yes, you are.” The gun barrel bruised her ribs. “Keep walking, Ms. Dawes.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t make me hurt you. Walk.”

  Mallory’s reply was to twist violently. At the same instant she let swing with the shopping bag gripped in her free hand. The shoebox whipped across her body in a vicious arc and smacked the brunette square in the face.

  The woman stumbled, recovered, whirled, caught the thud of pounding feet. Mallory heard it, too. Her heart stuttering, she saw the Russian’s gun jerk a few inches to the left.

  Cutter! That had to be Cutter the woman had in her sights!

  Terror leaping through her veins, Mallory put every ounce of strength she possessed into another swing.

  Chapter 15

  Mike Callahan was waiting when Mallory and Cutter deplaned at Dulles an exhausting thirty-six hours later.

  They’d spent most of those hours holed up at Interpol. While Mallory watched through a one-way mirror, Cutter and several very skilled interrogators grilled the woman they soon identified as Catherine Halston, aka Fatima Allende, aka Irina Petrov.

  Cool and unruffled, Petrov had admitted to a half dozen other aliases. In exchange for the promise of a reduced sentence, she also offered to provide video of her afternoon trysts with Ashton Kent in a posh D.C. hotel—including segments detailing his reluctant agreement to provide identity data as the price for keeping silent about his illicit liaison.

  After the session at Interpol, Mallory had contrived a quick visit to Yvette d’Marchand’s Paris boutique to thank the designer in person for the shoes now adorning her feet. Brilliant aquamarine crystals studded the thick wedge soles and decorated the straps that crisscrossed over her feet, wrapped around her ankles, and tied midway up her calf.

  The glittering three-inch platforms gave her the necessary boost to meet Mike Callahan eye to eye. Almost. He was as tall and tough-looking as Cutter had indicated, but nowhere near as ugly. When she told him so, he shot his fellow agent a dry look.

  “Thanks, Slash.”

  “I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em, Hawk.”

  Cutter used the drive in from Dulles to provide an update on the results of the interrogation. Callahan, in turn, shared the dossier he’d compiled on each of the Russian’s various aliases.

  “The woman got around. Remember the op that came apart on us in Hong Kong?”

  Cutter let out a low whistle. “That was her?”

  “That was her.”

  The thick file Callahan passed over his shoulder prompted a question from Mallory.

  “Do you have a copy of the dossier you compiled on me?”

  “I don’t know.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Do I?”

  “You might as well show her,” Cutter said. “I’ve already taken a ration of grief over it.”

  Mallory had to admit this OMEGA gang was nothing if not thorough. The file she thumbed through contained everything from her taste in music to her preference for cookie dough and chocolate chip ice cream, as extracted from records of her credit card purchases. She was still poring through the file when they drove into an underground parking garage.

  Fifteen minutes later, Cutter and his partner whisked her onto an elevator that appeared out of nowhere. After a short, swift ride, it opened in an elegant anteroom. The woman who rose and came around her desk to greet them had coal-black hair, blue eyes and a smile that lit up the room.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Dawes. I’m Gillian Ridgeway, filling in as executive assistant to the Special Envoy. He’s expecting you. Before I buzz you in, I have to know … ”

  Her eager gaze dropped to Mallory’s feet.

  “Are those the Yvette d’Marchand’s? The ones you used to deck the Russian?”

  “They are.”

  Hiking up her jeans, Mallory displayed the lethal weapons. The aquamarine crystals caught the slanting sunbeam and threw it back in a zillion points of light.

  “Oooh! I want a pair of those.”

  “There was a catalog in the box. They come in every color. You should get sapphire, to match your eyes.”

  Mike Callahan made an inarticulate sound that could have been a grunt or a mere clearing of his throat. Whatever it was, the small noise recalled the woman to her duties.

  “I’ll tell Uncle Nick you’re here. Mac is with him, by the way.”

  Escorted by Cutter and Mike, Mallory entered a sunlit office redolent with the scent of polished mahogany and well-soaped leather. When the President’s Special Envoy came from behind his desk, she felt her brows soar. Cutter had warned her to expect smooth and sophisticated. He’d left out the drop-dead gorgeous part.

  Nick Jensen was as tall as his two operatives, but the similarities stopped there. Cutter and Mike were both dark-haired and more rugged than handsome. With his tanned skin, blue eyes and tawny hair, Jensen looked like an older and more polished Brad Pitt.

  “Sorry we put you through the wringer in Normandy,” he said with a smile Mallory suspected had raised goose bumps on more females than he could count. “I hope you understand the necessity.”

  “I do now. If you’d asked me a few days ago, I might not be so ready to forgive or forget.”

  “The situation got a little rougher than expected.”

  “It always does.”

&nbs
p; That came from a long-legged brunette in a severely tailored gray pantsuit with a gigantic pink peony pinned to the lapel. Pushing off her perch on the conference table, she came forward. Lightning made the introductions.

  “This is my wife, Mackenzie Blair-Jensen. She was working some communications issues upstairs when Hawk—Mike—called to say you were en route, and she decided to hang around.”

  The vivacious brunette took Mallory’s hand in a firm, no-nonsense grip. “I had to meet the woman who took down an international thug with a thousand-dollar pair of shoes. Way to go, Ms. Dawes.”

  Her glance, too, zinged south.

  “Is that them?”

  “It is.”

  An obliging Mallory once again showed off her trophies. The sparkling platforms infected the other woman with instant greed.

  “Guess what I want for Christmas, husband of mine.”

  “Duly noted. Now if you ladies don’t mind, we should talk business instead of shoes.”

  The mood in the sunny office immediately sobered. Suggesting everyone take a seat at the mahogany conference table, Nick Jensen laid out his plan of attack.

  “I’ve set up an appointment with Congressman Kent a little more than an hour from now. Cutter and Mike will accompany me. Kent thinks I want to discuss the President’s new counter-terrorism initiative. He isn’t expecting me to show up with you two. Or with the House of Representatives Master at Arms, two detectives and a U.S. district attorney.”

  That should get Kent’s attention, Mallory thought with unrestrained glee.

  “We’ll show him the airport surveillance tapes,” Jensen continued, “and ask if he recognizes the woman accompanying Ms. Dawes. Only then will we produce sworn statements by Irina Petrov.”

  Jensen’s glance swept the table.

  “That’s when we ask him what he knows about the disk containing the stolen data pulled off a computer in his office.”

  Mallory saw only one problem with the proposed plan and voiced it in no uncertain terms. “I want to be present when you do.”

  “We’ve discussed that,” Cutter said evenly.

  They had, she acknowledged with a curt nod. In Paris and on the long flight home. His argument that Mallory’s presence would alert the reporters who prowled the halls of Congress held weight. Just not enough to convince her to sit on her hands while they confronted the man who’d made her life a living hell.