Poison Evidence

by Rachel Grant

But really, what mattered was she lacked the one thing she knew and understood better than anything else. She was—quite literally—adrift. Lost.

  And for her, that was unique. Unprecedented. But even worse, the man who’d stripped her of her power was the same man who’d been inside her body just hours ago.

  “How could you?” she asked, her voice breaking. Dammit. She didn’t want to show him hurt, didn’t want to give him that satisfaction.

  Bile rose in her throat. “You’re one of them? One of Patrick’s terrorist buddies? Was this plan A or plan B?”

  Oh God. She’d fucked one of Patrick’s cronies. A terrorist. A murderer.

  “I’m not a terrorist.”

  She crossed the deck to where he stood by the table and struck him. A hard slap across his cheek that left her hand stinging even as her body began to shake. “Don’t lie to me!”

  He didn’t react to the blow, not even to grab her hands to prevent another one. “I’m not lying. I had nothing to do with the men who attacked you and the party last night.”

  “You want me to believe it’s a coincidence you abducted me just hours after Patrick’s men tried to kidnap me? I’m not stupid. Odds are, my IQ is higher than yours.”

  “At a verified one sixty-six, your IQ is higher than most people’s and a full eighteen points higher than mine.”

  “Am I supposed to be scared that you did your homework on me? Do you know my bra size and birth date too?”

  “I know your bra size.” He gave her a pointed look. “But your birth date escapes me.”

  She flushed at that. Perhaps bra size wasn’t the smartest data point to use. Hard to know when she was freaking out. Fear was draining those precious IQ points. She needed to take control of this conversation. “You’ve screwed up in a big way. CAM is transmitting my location. The Navy knows where I am. And you can bet this odd blip of a location—wherever the hell we are—will be noted.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  His confidence left her cold. “Is your plan to sell me and CAM back to the Navy? You know what the Navy did to the Somali pirates who demanded a ransom for Captain Philips, right?”

  Before he could answer, another thought struck her. He could have unloaded CAM while she slept. Right now it could be in the hands of terrorists, and the Navy would have no more idea of where she was than she did. All the blood in her body raced to her feet. She was going to faint. Or puke. So much for her freaking high IQ.

  She hadn’t seen this coming. She’d never imagined Jack Keaton was the enemy.

  Puking won, and she bolted for the railing and lost the meager contents of her stomach over the side. Jack touched her shoulder, and she slapped his arm away. “Don’t touch me!”

  “Ivy—”

  She bolted down the ladder and ran to the forward stateroom where she’d stored CAM. The room that should have been her bedroom, but she’d spent the night screwing a terrorist instead.

  “Ivy!” Jack shouted as he followed her. “Stop and let me explain.”

  But she didn’t stop until she yanked open the stateroom door and saw all six cases stacked on the bed. She leaned against the sill, faint again, but this time with relief.

  Jack was right behind her. “You didn’t let me finish. I’m counting on the Navy tracking CAM so you’ll feel safe, knowing you can call for help at any time. Odds are there’s a team in Guam tracking your signal right now. I know you won’t believe it, but you’re safe with me. This isn’t an abduction.”

  “Then what the hell is it?”

  “A negotiation.”

  “And what the hell are we negotiating? Whether or not you’re a liar and a terrorist? Because if I get a vote, I’m pretty sure we’re deadlocked one to one. Let’s forgo Robert’s Rules of Order and skip to the part where I call in the Navy and they drop Hellfires on your ass.”

  A corner of his mouth kicked up in a smile. “You have a magnificent brain.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know—like why the hell you kidnapped me.”

  He laughed outright at that, then leaned against one of the shelves that flanked the doorway. “This is a work negotiation. I need you and CAM to help me find something. That’s all. Once we find it, I’ll take you back to Koror.”

  “Right. You’ll take me to Koror. Where a team of SEALs will be waiting to take you out for stealing top-secret high-tech equipment.”

  “I hope SEALs will be there to protect you more than CAM. The men we dealt with last night are proof you’re in danger.”

  She took a step back, shocked by his gall. “I’m in danger from you.”

  “No, Ivy. Not from me. I need your help.”

  “You fucked me so you could kidnap me.”

  “I had sex with you because you begged me to. I already had you here. I had what I needed and wouldn’t have touched you except you begged for it. Hell, I even warned you that you would regret it in the morning.”

  “So you’re saying I imagined your lips on my back in the shower—the action that led to the rest?”

  He cocked his head and frowned, then said, “Okay. I fucked you because I wanted to. Better?”

  She slumped down to the floor at the foot of the triangular bed that filled the stateroom. Stupid to argue about who’d initiated sex when the man had abducted her.

  She could lock down CAM. That would signal Mara that something was wrong. SEALs would come. She’d be rescued. Lockdown was simple. Enter the wrong code three times and boom. Locked out forever.

  “I know what you’re thinking. My IQ might not be as high as yours, but I’m no dummy either. If you lock down CAM, I will throw all six cases overboard and hightail it away from the drop site.”

  Dammit. The sonofabitch could read minds. He’d certainly done his homework. He knew about her mangrove swamp study and her freaking IQ. Only one article included her high-genius numbers. She’d been embarrassed, but the journal insisted. It had been published as part of a series on women in science. She and her sisters, Hazel and Laurel, had been interviewed together. The article had to be at least seven years old. Given the number of far more recent articles about her and Patrick, Jack Keaton must’ve dug hard to find that story.

  She did her best to appear unfazed. “So? If they’ve got a team in Guam, they’ll get here fast. They’ll find me. You can’t have moved us that far in the night. We can’t be more than a hundred nautical miles from Palau.”

  Jack shrugged. He could give lessons in appearing unfazed, while her act was unconvincing. She couldn’t even stand; hence she huddled at the foot of the berth and leaned on the built-in cabinets at her back.

  Damn boat. Every surface boasted storage of some sort, and the knob for the cabinet dug into her spine.

  “This boat might look like a simple pleasure yacht, but her previous owner was Russian Bratva, and prior to that, the guy was KGB. He had her built to mirror the design of one of the fastest yachts in the world. Liberty has three gas turbines. Combined with the surface drives, she can generate upward of thirteen thousand horsepower. I’ve clocked her at sixty-five knots. We’ll be far from the drop point by the time a SEAL team could get here. They’ll never find us in the open ocean.”

  Holy hell, what had she done in boarding this yacht last night? Tears slid down her cheeks. “Yet you said you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “I won’t. But that doesn’t mean I won’t drop you off on some remote island in Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines. There are lots of uninhabited islands in the Celebes Sea.”

  No way had they gone all the way to the Celebes Sea. He was screwing with her, rattling her confidence.

  Geography was her freaking superpower.

  But that didn’t mean they weren’t halfway to Celebes. He could make good on his threat. She’d visited her share of remote places for work, but she’d always been well supplied and had a satellite phone. He’d made no such promises. “Who are you?”

  He was silent for a long time. She could hear water splashing against the hull
as they floated, dead in the water. Negotiating.

  Or so he’d said.

  At last, he took a deep breath and said, “My name is Dimitri Veselov, although I haven’t used that name in more than a dozen years.”

  “Russian.” So much for her ear for accents. She hadn’t picked up Russian in his speech at all. Not even in bed, when adopted accents and speech patterns tended to disappear. Laurel, a linguistic anthropologist, would be so disappointed in her utter failure.

  “Da,” he said.

  One simple word in Russian and chills went up her spine. “You’re a spy,” she added as her belly twisted and flipped and pretty much tried to leap from her body via her throat. Holy hell, as if marrying Patrick weren’t bad enough, she’d screwed another spy. Her career would never survive this. She could kiss her top-secret security clearance good-bye. Poof. A lifetime of work decimated by one night in bed with a man she’d believed was helping her.

  It had crossed her mind last night that she was risking her clearance, but she’d discarded the thought with little consideration. He’d been the hero of the night. The man who saved the president of Palau.

  She was such a fool.

  Her security clearance was vital for CAM’s satellite link. Sitting on the berth above her was equipment that could directly access the most advanced and highly encrypted mapping database the US military had developed. CAM was but another data supplier to the massive system.

  But really, it was futile to worry about her job when her very freedom was in jeopardy. People thought she’d been complicit with Patrick, but this…this was the final nail in her coffin. She could be facing prison.

  “I was a spy,” the man she’d slept with mere hours ago said. “I’m freelance now. Sort of.”

  “A mercenary.”

  “Unwilling mercenary.” He slid down the wall, joining her on the floor. “I was trying to get out of the business. I was pulled back in. Not my choice. Hell, being a spy was never my choice. I was selected when I was fourteen by the GRU. Do you know what the GRU is?”

  “Russia’s version of the CIA.”

  “Essentially, yes. And because of my high IQ, I was recruited. They called it that—recruitment—like I had a choice. But with my parents dead and no adult relatives to intervene, they just took me and began my training.”

  “Do you expect me to feel sorry for you?” She put as much bitterness in her tone as she could, and yet…she did feel sympathy for him. She had no reason to believe a word he said, but something about his voice, the pause before he mentioned being orphaned, had sounded like authentic pain.

  But then, what did she know? Nothing. Not even the Universal Transverse Mercator for where she was. She’d take a lat and long if she couldn’t get a UTM, but all she had was the guesstimate that placed her somewhere in the Pacific but not yet in the Celebes Sea.

  “I don’t expect anything from you, Ivy, except your hate.”

  “Well, at least there I won’t disappoint you.”

  His mouth curved in a sad smile, but his voice dropped to a lower, sexy register. “Oh, Poison, you couldn’t disappoint me if you tried.”

  She raised her hand to slap him again, but he caught it, preventing the blow. He held her hand, his thumb caressing her palm. “I hate doing this to you. If there were any other way, I’d have left you out of it. But I can’t work CAM, and I’m worried about the men who attacked the party last night. By taking you out to open sea, I’m protecting you. They won’t find you here.”

  “Bullshit.” She yanked her hand back, angry that her belly had fluttered at his touch. A reaction she couldn’t control, but which shamed her nonetheless.

  “The guys you met last night were probably just the first wave. Scrambled the moment they read the article about you mapping Peleliu with CAM. They were unarmed except for tools they could buy here, meaning they probably flew commercial to get here quickly. But odds are, a boat loaded with Syrian and Iraqi terrorists and a shitload of guns departed from the Philippines at the same time. By my calculations, they’ll be here in a day, maybe two. You’re in danger, Ivy, and I promise, I won’t let those assholes find you.”

  He was probably right about a second wave coming, but that didn’t make the freaking Russian spy her protector. “Somehow, I’d feel safer in Koror, away from the asshole who actually abducted me.”

  “That would be a mistake.” He sighed. “We can go round and round on this all you want, but the facts remain the same. You’re with me. I can let you boot up CAM or not. If I let you, you’ll have a chance to contact your coworkers, who have direct information on your global position. Hardly the predicament of the victim of an abduction. A defining point of abduction: no one knows where the abductee is.”

  She hated that he was right on that point. She might be clueless as to her particular latitude and longitude, but no less than the might and power of the US Navy knew exactly where she and her equipment were.

  So was this an abduction? Or something less nefarious?

  Given that the guy in control was a closet Russian, she was leaning toward the nefarious end of the continuum.

  He nodded toward the aluminum cases. “I assume you have a direct satellite uplink, which means you’ll be able to send and receive emails, no matter where we are on this big blue planet.”

  She nodded. Because of the encryption and layers of security, she could only access a heavily secured email network. It was a closed system; only people on the network could email others on the same network. But Jack—or Dimitri—didn’t need to know the limits of her email access.

  “You’re going to let me email Mara and tell her you’ve abducted me?”

  “No. You’re going to tell her I’m protecting you and making it possible for you to finish your survey.”

  She swiped at tears that had started to fall again as he quibbled over the definition of abduction. “You’re unbelievable. She’s going to notice when I’m not uploading data from Peleliu.”

  And that was where he grinned, a full-on gotcha that she would have found charming mere hours ago. “But you see, that’s the beauty of it. The item I’m looking for is in the Rock Islands. You can map the site and help me.”

  “So we’re going to return to Peleliu and the Rock Islands and pretend everything is hunky-dory? You can’t tie me up and leave me aboard. You can’t fly the mapping drone. I need to go into the jungle to ground-truth the data. You can’t keep me prisoner.”

  “I have no intention of keeping you prisoner. We’re going to work together. Listen, I’d have wined and dined you to win your trust and weasel my way into your project, but the attack last night forced my hand. I really am protecting you. And frankly, I’m worried about Ulai.”

  Her emotions had been in a tumble from the moment she discovered they were at sea and not in port, and now horror kicked her in the gut. How low was she that she hadn’t given a thought to her pilot? He’d be the first person the terrorists would go after, and she hadn’t stopped to warn him.

  “We’ll check on Ulai, Ivy. All you need to do is initiate CAM, email your boss and tell her you’re fine, and I’m protecting you. No mention of Dimitri Veselov. They can do a background check on Major Jack Keaton. I’ll pass with flying colors.”

  “Why did you tell me your name is Dimitri, then?”

  “Because I wanted to give you power over me, something to hold on to. The name will mean nothing to the US, but there are others who might be searching for Dimitri Veselov, and if they find me, we’ll have problems.”

  “Meaning anyone who is with you will be in danger too.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s a shitty token of power. I can’t use it without it being suicidal.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t choose the parameters of my life. They were forced on me.”

  “And now they’re forced on me.”

  “Boot up CAM. We’ve been in this location for too long without word.”

  She was neatly blocked in. She was out of options, bu
t at least this would buy her some time. They would be working together for days. He’d make a mistake. She could escape. She’d be spending hours on the computer as she processed the mapping data. Surely she’d be able to get one email out without him reading it. Or she could find a way to embed an SOS in the upload. He wasn’t a techie. He’d never know.

  Chapter Eight

  Dimitri didn’t think he’d taken a deep breath from the moment Ivy had emerged at the top of the ladder. She’d been so beautiful with the morning sun glinting on her thick honey-brown hair as she held the erotic flower he’d picked on impulse the night before.

  Her face had been alight, eager, but he’d known it would take only seconds for her to take in the situation. Then fear, anger, and pain would take over.

  He’d had several tough missions in his life, but never before had he so thoroughly embroiled an innocent. And one thing he’d come to believe in the hours since they’d met was that Ivy MacLeod hadn’t been part of her ex-husband’s treason. She might not be as pure as the driven snow, but she was damn close.

  And he’d tainted her with a second treason by association.

  He hated his fucking job.

  He helped her carry four of the cases to the upper deck. The other two contained the drone, which she would assemble later.

  First she set up the satellite uplink. He watched her carefully as she positioned the mushroom-shaped external antenna and hooked it up to the transceiver. The transceiver had a phone port, and there was a landline phone in the case. He plucked the phone out of the box. “Anything special about this phone?”

  Her focus was on the power pack, which had a different plug from the boat’s outlets. “Not particularly, no. Do you have an adapter for the power cord, or do I need to set up the solar array?”

  “I’ve got an adapter, but if it draws a lot, we should use the array. No shortage of sunlight.” He then stepped to the side of the boat and dropped the phone overboard.

  Her eyes flattened with anger. “Dammit, Jack! I don’t have a stand-alone satellite phone because I had that. Now I won’t be able to call my tech team with the specs.”