Troubleshooters 02 The Defiant Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “I’m thirty-one.”

  “Six years. Big deal. If you weren’t married, babe, I would’ve been all over you a long time ago. And thanking the Lord that a woman as beautiful and intelligent and wonderful as you would want anything to do with me.”

  Meg opened her eyes. “Then don’t go.” She touched his face. “Please?”

  She could see everything he was thinking as it flashed across his face and in his eyes. He wanted to do the right thing, but he wanted her.

  He wanted her.

  As desperately as she wanted him.

  She leaned forward and gently brushed her lips across his in the merest promise of a kiss.

  “Oh, God,” he said, and he kissed her—really kissed her.

  It was an explosion of passion, an eruption of need. He swept his tongue into her mouth possessively, as if he were reclaiming lost ground, as if he were reminding her that in truth she’d belonged to him since he’d kissed her back in Kazbekistan all those months ago.

  His arms were hard around her as he crushed her to him, as he kissed her longer, deeper, as he pulled her onto his lap and . . .

  Meg sat up as John put on the signal blinker. He was taking the exit, pulling off the highway.

  “What?” she said. “What are you doing?”

  He looked at her and she felt herself blush. That was stupid. Why was she blushing? There was no way he could know that she’d just been thinking about kissing him. Thinking about that night. Except now that she’d blushed, he could probably figure it out.

  “I need some clothes,” he said. “The sun’s going to come up soon. There was a sign for a gas station—it said it had a twenty-four-hour minimart attached. I figured there was a chance that they’d at least have a T-shirt for sale. And while you’re at it, I could use a serious cup of caffeine. I’m starting to hear voices.”

  Meg stared at him. “I’m not leaving you in this car with Razeen.”

  Nils pulled into the lot across the street from the Shell station and turned off the headlights. The attached store was open, gas pumps lit up, but aside from the lone store clerk inside, it was completely deserted.

  There was a repair garage on the other side of the convenience store, and the two big bays were dark. One was shut, but the other was open, as if it were being aired out.

  The rain had let up to a soft drizzle, making the pavement shine.

  Nils looked more closely at the open bay door. Was that . . . ? His vision was excellent, but it was too dark and they were too far away for him to see clearly.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to do this,” Meg said tightly. “Because I’m not leaving you in the car.”

  “Right, and as soon as I go in, you take off without me,” he said. “Unless I take the car keys—except the clerk might notice I don’t have any pockets to put them in.”

  “I’m not going in there without you,” she said.

  Nils chewed on his lower lip. The clothes were starting to be secondary to his need for coffee. He was lightheaded from lack of sleep. They could probably find a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s with a drive through—although he was going to get some looks from the cashier when he approached the pickup window.

  Unless . . .

  He turned to Meg. “How about we compromise? How about I borrow Razeen’s pants, we lock him in the car, and we both go into the store. I get to hold the car keys, you get to hold your gun. In your pocket, of course. We don’t want to get the clerk too upset, and the sight of me wearing Razeen’s pants may be all he can take.”

  Meg laughed. It was a good sound.

  But just as quickly she stopped laughing, and he knew she was trying not to cry. She was remarkably tough. If their roles were reversed, he wasn’t sure he’d have made it even half this far.

  “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “When I asked for you—back in the embassy men’s room—my intention wasn’t to put you into danger or to get you into trouble. I didn’t plan for it to happen this way.”

  Nils nodded. “But you did plan it, didn’t you? When I came in there, you weren’t really asking for help. You were just looking for a way to get Razeen out of the embassy.”

  He wanted her to tell him it was otherwise—that she hadn’t intended to deceive him at all, that she simply seized the chance she was given when she found herself and Razeen in the safe hotel, under relatively lax guard.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You have to understand, I’d do anything to get Amy back. Anything.” She looked at him, and with the headlights off and the dashboard dark it was hard to see her. She was just a shadow. A gleam of eyes.

  “Back at the safe hotel,” she told him, “I was ready to sleep with the guard—and I would have if it hadn’t been so easy to get his gun from him another way. Someday, when you have children, you’ll understand.”

  Nils shifted in his seat. He didn’t want to hear this.

  “I will kill him,” Meg said. “If I have to, I’ll kill Razeen. Don’t think that I won’t.”

  He knew that she would. He’d seen her eyes back in the motel room. She was capable of pulling that trigger if she thought it would save her daughter. “You don’t have to kill him, Meg.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I don’t. I can trade him to the Extremists.”

  “I meant, you can turn him in and let the FBI—”

  “No.”

  “Handing him over to the Extremists is the same thing as killing him. You might as well be pulling the trigger of the gun that executes—”

  “I don’t care,” she said fiercely. “He’s a terrorist. He’s a terrible person. It’s not as if he doesn’t deserve whatever bad things happen to him. I’m not going to risk Amy’s life to save his. That’s a no-brainer, John.”

  She was talking to him—that was good. He didn’t like what she was saying, but at least she was talking.

  “There are lots of other options, Meg,” he said, “besides turning Razeen over to the Extremists. If we went back to DC, we could release a story to the news media—we could announce that you lost it, that you started shooting in the men’s room, and that Tuzak what’s-his-name—whoever Razeen was pretending to be—is dead.”

  Meg was already shaking her head. “I already thought of that. I can’t risk it. If the Extremists doubted it at all, they’d kill Amy. There would need to be a body.”

  “So we’ll have a body.”

  “A dead body.”

  “The FBI can make it look real.”

  She wasn’t buying it. “I’m doing it my way. If I deliver Razeen to them, there’s no chance of any mistakes.”

  “And what makes you think they’ll just let you walk out of there?” Nils asked. “Assuming they’re even still alive? Do you honestly think the Extremists will just hand Amy and your grandmother to you and let you all walk away?”

  She shut down. Just like that. And he knew there was something else she was keeping from him.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she finally said. “I don’t know if I trust you to go into that store. What if you signal the clerk somehow? What if—”

  “I won’t.”

  “Oh, I’m just supposed to take your word?”

  “Yes. Trust me, Meg—”

  “Let’s just keep driving. We’ll deal with your clothes later. God, standing still like this is driving me crazy!”

  “Maybe if you’re lucky,” he said loudly, over her, “they’ll kill you first so you don’t have to watch Amy die.”

  Meg flinched as if he’d slapped her.

  “Gee, I’m so glad you came along for the ride,” she whispered. “Without you I wouldn’t have been able to reach my full capacity for misery.”

  Nils closed his eyes and exhaled, hard. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Dealing with terrorists is one of the things I do for a living.” He worked to keep his volume down, his voice calm and gentle. “I know about the GIK and the Extremists, I know the people we’re d
ealing with here, Meg. I’m an expert, okay? I’m part of a team that governments come to when they need expert advice in dealing with terrorist situations like this. Because we’re experts, they trust us to come up with expert solutions. They trust us, trust me. Why can’t you do the same?”

  She didn’t answer, didn’t look at him.

  “I thought we were friends,” he continued. “What happened? The Meg Moore I knew a few years ago would trust me enough to let me help. The Meg I knew would never be able to kill another human being—she’d find another way to save her daughter.”

  The Meg he thought he knew would’ve called him when Daniel died. Or maybe she wouldn’t have called right after. Maybe she would’ve waited a year, and then called.

  Unless that night that had meant so much to him had meant nothing to her.

  “Two weeks,” she said. “We were friends for two weeks, John. A little longer if you count the time in Kazbekistan. What makes you think you even scratched the surface of who I am? You don’t know me. You never did.”

  He couldn’t believe that. She was the most open, honest person he’d ever met. He was the one who’d withheld himself from her.

  “Please trust me,” he said. “Just a little. Just enough to believe that I won’t try to hand signal some night-shift store clerk who’s probably got an IQ of forty and wouldn’t understand me anyway.” He put the car in gear, turned the lights back on. “We’ll drive around to the back of the garage where no one will see us. I’ll get out of the car—with the keys—and put on Ozzie’s pants. Then we’ll drive back around to the front, and we’ll go inside. Together.”

  Meg nodded. Just once.

  That was all he needed.

  Nils pulled across the street, into the Shell station lot. He drove past the garage bays and . . .

  He stopped. Backed up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Look.”

  Meg looked, but he knew she didn’t see it. She wasn’t thinking like a fugitive, but then again, he hadn’t expected that of her.

  “Hanging right inside the garage,” he said. “The easy answer to our prayers.”

  It was a pair of coveralls.

  They were stained with grease and weren’t looking too fresh, but they seemed large enough to cover him.

  Stopped where they were, on this side of the building, the convenience store clerk couldn’t see them. “Why don’t you just hop on out and grab them?” Nils said.

  She looked at him. “I don’t think so.”

  He turned off the engine, took the keys, and held them out to her. “There’s no way I can hot-wire a car in the two and a half seconds it’ll take you to—”

  “You want ’em, you take ’em.”

  Nils stared at her. “You don’t want to steal them,” he said. “You’ll lie to the FBI and even execute a man without a fair trial, but stealing a forty-dollar pair of coveralls, no sir, no thanks, that’s going too far.” He started to laugh.

  Meg grabbed the keys from his hand, opened the car door and was back inside with the coveralls before he could blink.

  “Drive,” she said.

  He drove.

  Locke had lost Starrett.

  Again.

  She’d been right on him when he’d left the hotel in the early afternoon. She’d dressed in sneakers and jeans and a baggy T-shirt, and she’d felt herself become invisible in the crowd of tourists that swarmed the streets.

  He’d gotten a sandwich from a sub shop and had eaten while he walked. Strolled, really.

  And then he was gone.

  One minute he was casually throwing his sandwich wrapper into a trash can, and the next he was nowhere to be found.

  It was completely her fault. She’d been lulled into thinking he was going to stroll the entire afternoon away. She’d let her thoughts stray, she’d been checking her cell phone to make sure Tyra could reach her if she needed her and . . .

  Poof.

  Gone.

  She’d searched the area for hours, expecting Starrett to turn up. Expecting him to call.

  What good was losing her if he wasn’t going to taunt her afterward?

  But it wasn’t until much, much later that her cell phone rang. She was in her car, driving the area she’d walked earlier, cursing herself and hoping he’d just magically show up.

  She answered breathlessly, her heart racing, thinking it was finally Tyra. “Locke.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Starrett’s voice. “It’s only me. Sorry.”

  Somehow he knew she was waiting on a phone call. “What do you want?”

  “No luck finding Nils yet, huh? He still hasn’t checked back in?”

  She didn’t say a word. There was no way she was going to give him any information that he didn’t already know. For all she knew, he was with John Nilsson and Meg Moore right this very moment.

  “I guess not. You on duty?” he asked.

  “No.” She was off until late tomorrow morning.

  “I’m at a pool hall,” he said, “bored to tears. You know how to play?”

  “No.”

  “Want to learn?”

  “No.”

  He laughed. “Want to know where I am?” He didn’t let her answer. He just rattled off the address.

  “This is going to be really funny, right, Roger?” Locke said, flipping through her map book until she’d found the street he’d named. “When I come all the way down to that shitty part of town, and walk into some biker bar, and you’re not there. That’s going to be some joke when it’s just me and five three-hundred-pound white supremacists, huh? As a person of color, I don’t appreciate being walked into a potentially dangerous and volatile situation.”

  “Whoa, wait—I would never do that.”

  “Then you be there,” she said. “You be there when I show up.”

  She hung up the phone, feeling like a fool for rushing over at Starrett’s beck and call. But she didn’t have anything else to do, and she was going to feel really stupid when she called Jules and had to tell him that she’d spent the entire afternoon with her thumb up her butt.

  Her cell phone rang again and she tensed. “Locke.”

  “Hey, it’s me,” her partner said, as if she’d conjured him just by thinking about him. “Lookit, I can’t help you out with Cowboy Sam tonight. I’m sorry, I know I promised to set up camp outside his hotel room from midnight to six, but I’m being sent south.”

  Locke ran a stale yellow light. “Anything I should know?”

  “Nilsson’s rental car just turned up at a roadside motel. Apparently someone fitting Meg Moore’s description checked in earlier. They’re both gone now, but the car’s still there. I’m going to go check it out, see if the local boys missed any vital clues.”

  “They’re sending you without me?”

  “I actually talked Bhagat into letting you stay back here,” Jules told her. “It’s a nothing assignment and you know it—checking something that’s already been checked? The car was broken into. There was nothing inside it. And just a muddy pair of jeans and a T-shirt in the parking lot. An old pair of sneakers and socks. Nilsson must’ve thrown a change of clothes into the backseat, and when some local thief broke into the car, they grabbed everything. When they realized it was just some clothes, they must’ve just dropped ’em where they stood. Still, I’m going to go down there, look at the car and go, hmmmm. Then fly back to DC and tell the boss everything that the local guys already told me.”

  “Call me when you get back.”

  “You bet. Sorry about tonight.”

  “No problem,” Locke said. “I’ll cover it. Hey, did you hear I nearly keeled over this morning? It’s getting hot out there. I’m telling everyone—we all need to be careful. Summer’s here. Push fluids.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, it was nothing. I’m just . . . letting folks know.” It was a preemptive strike, to steal Starrett’s thunder. If everyone already knew she’d gotten a little overheated this mornin
g, Starrett couldn’t make it sound worse than it really was when he told his version of the story. Which she had no doubt he would do.

  “Take care of yourself,” Jules ordered. “Get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, maybe I will tonight.” But probably not.

  Locke hung up the phone as she pulled into a parking space just past a building that bore a sign saying POOL HALL. Well, there was an original name. She checked her map again, checked the numbers on the other buildings. This was definitely the address Starrett had given her. She locked her car behind her.