Carleton shook his head. “If you hadn’t warned me about Baldy…You saved my life again, thanks.”
“What’s going on up there?” Roarke asked, his throat a little raspy from the abuse he’d taken.
Carleton trod water and gave his report as if standing in his office. “We finally got some interdepartmental cooperation. At the FBI’s request, the CIA traced the phone calls from that phone booth to a man who was running an unauthorized and highly illegal covert operation within the CIA.”
“You identified Top Dog?” Roarke asked.
“Yep. Your Mr. Baldy was in charge of the men you killed in the warehouse and also the sniper back at the construction site.”
“He’s dead,” Roarke muttered darkly.
Carleton tilted his head. “I believe he was driving the blue sedan that was tailing you.”
“But why?” Alexandra asked, proving to Roarke that her muscles might be a little waterlogged, but her brain was firing on all cylinders.
“Once we decode your—”
“The papers!” Alexandra shook her head back and forth and let out a sob of frustration. “I lost them when I jumped into the water. Do you think the cardboard tube might float?”
They searched, but didn’t find a thing. And when the chopper lowered a line, Roarke insisted that she climb inside the chopper to safety. The papers didn’t matter. She could get another copy from her brother. Besides, everyone in the coverup was dead. According to Carleton, the entire cell was wiped out.
ALEXANDRA WRAPPED a blanket around herself, but what she really wanted were Roarke’s arms to keep her warm. Carleton came up out of the water and into the chopper next, then finally Roarke. Ten minutes later, the chopper landed at the hospital where all of them declined medical treatment.
A joint FBI-CIA debriefing team met them, and they had to tell their story repeatedly. The worst part for Alexandra was being separated from Roarke. She had something to tell him. Something much more important than figuring out a twenty-something-year-old secret from her past.
Finally, hours and hours later, at Roarke’s insistence, the debriefing team released her. He claimed there was no longer a rush to solve the mystery. The copy given away on her apartment doorstep had been destroyed by a rogue agent before he killed himself. Everyone involved seemed to be dead and the secret lost in the water and buried with them—except for the original her brother Jake had.
She didn’t want to think about her brother or the past. She wanted to concentrate on her future. Especially one that included Roarke. He’d saved her life again today, but she’d learned something very important about herself, and she couldn’t wait to tell him.
She wanted to be alone with him. Carleton offered to take them home. But she didn’t want to face the mess of her apartment just yet.
“Can we go camping?” she asked with a mischievous glance at Roarke. She had her own man to love, and she intended to do everything in her power to keep him.
Even now, his handsome features stole her breath away—the arrogant chin, those piercing blue eyes that challenged her, dared her to take a flying leap at love.
And she did love him.
“Take us to Green Cove Springs,” Roarke agreed, his lips curling upward into a smile of anticipation.
While Alexandra fully intended to track down her brother Jake, he should be safe with Top Dog dead. She’d waited years to meet her brother—another few days wouldn’t matter. Days that she and Roarke could spend together, camping and sunning and loving under the stars.
But he couldn’t be as impatient to be alone as she was, not when she was bursting to tell him about her epiphany. Finally Carleton dropped them off, promising to have a vehicle delivered tomorrow. Alexandra wasn’t in any rush to leave the private playground. Her building had a few days before the inspectors would allow her crews to begin fixing the destruction.
In the meantime, she had her own fixing to do. With Roarke.
As soon as Carleton spun away, she turned into his arms and kissed him, hungry for the taste of him, knowing she’d never tire of his touch, his taste or the toughness that had seen her through the most trying time of her life.
“I love you,” she admitted without the slightest doubt or the slightest hesitation.
Pain and passion battled in his eyes. “And I love you…”
It should have been an exhilarating moment, yet her excitement was tempered by the surety that a “but” would follow his declaration of love.
“…but you don’t trust me.”
“Yes, I do.” And then she explained what she’d been waiting all day to say. “I jumped off that bridge when you asked me to.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I jumped without second-guessing you. Without question. And since then I’ve finally realized that if I could blindly put my life in your hands, surely I can trust you with my heart.”
He held his hands along both her cheeks, tipping her head back to look into her eyes. “You’re sure?”
“Oh, yes. Now stop wasting time and kiss me.”
Epilogue
Above the streets of Washington, on the fifteenth floor of the CIA building, an official frowned at the message he’d anxiously awaited.
Files destroyed. Agents dead.
All of them? All dead? Reeling at the bad news, the official worked on automatic pilot, dropping the document into an ashtray and setting a match to it, watching it burn, knowing his plans were going up in flames as well. While the mission had been successful, the cost had been high.
Thirty years the team had been together, watching one another’s backs, keeping their vows of secrecy. And even while the agent mourned, he took pride that no one had talked. No one had ever betrayed the cell.
But the cost…
After the flames did their work, the agent poured acid from a vase on his desk over the ashes to ensure no one could ever read the message.
Too many old colleagues had died, but the man who looked out over Washington shrugged. Everyone was expendable. Even loyal men could be replaced.
With both the original and the copy destroyed, he’d bought himself a margin of safety. But he couldn’t rest. Not until the very last copy was found and destroyed.
This last sister was proving as resourceful as her difficult siblings. But she couldn’t compete with his resources, his technology. All the siblings would be found, the final copies destroyed.
If anyone dared stand in his way, he’d destroy them. Just like all the others….
ISBN: 978-1-4603-5084-3
HIDDEN HEARTS
Copyright © 2001 by Susan Hope Kearney
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*The Sutton Babies
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Hidden Hearts Page 19
