"Then I'm a fool and a liability to everyone involved in this," said Lindsay, her voice as pale as her skin. "I'm trying, Catlin. I really am." She shuddered and took a deep breath, fighting for control. "It's just when I saw Wu's face and knew that he was thinking I was a slut and a liar, I " She made a helpless gesture as her voice broke. "And yet I know that I'm not good enough at lying, that I could blow the whole thing to hell and it would all be for nothing and "
Catlin's kiss stopped the tumbling words with a gentleness that made Lindsay want to cry. With an inarticulate sound she clung to him, needing him as he had said she would, needing him in ways she couldn't even name.
"You're doing fine," he said gently, holding her close, reassuring her. "If things go to hell, it won't be because of you. You've done better than anyone could have expected."
As Catlin looked down into the darkness of Lindsay's eyes, he silently raged at what was being asked of her. It was one thing to dress a wolf like a sheep and turn him loose on the world. Politicians and reporters did it all the time. But to dress a lamb like a wolf and throw her into the wilds was to ask a hell of a lot of the lamb.
Stone either had assumed that Lindsay was strong enough to do what he asked of her, or he hadn't cared. Yi had improved his chances of success by using Catlin as a wolf to guard the lamb in drag.
Too bad no one thought of protecting the lamb's mind, as well as her body, Catlin thought bitterly. But it's too late now. There's nothing to do except what I'm doing now holding her.
So little. Words, touches, warmth.
Catlin hoped it would be enough. It never had been enough in the past, though. Susie, Mei and all the nameless others, a feminine cascade rushing through his life. He had drunk from the beautiful, mysterious stream, bathed in its wild pleasures and watched it flow inevitably by, sliding from his present down and down into the dark sea of the past, silver heat and laughter and passion running through his fingers until nothing was left but his empty bands glistening with memories and cold with betrayals.
The chanteuse's song of faithless love ended, only to be replaced by a lament about true love discovered too late. Catlin listened with only a fragment of his attention. With gentle hands he settled Lindsay more comfortably against him, supporting her weight as he looked past her shimmering hair to the room beyond.
There was nothing remarkable about the two men sitting three tables to the right, waiting to be served, but Catlin noted them instantly. The FBI had made a religion out of being unremarkable. To the left there was a table of mixed Anglo and Oriental people who had just entered the piano bar. There were other Chinese scattered throughout the room. Catlin marked the new arrivals, looking for anyone who was overly interested in the couple sitting in the booth.
If he had been alone, he would have walked out into the night and seen who noticed, who followed, who had been able to set up outside surveillance in advance. The FBI, certainly. The PRC, probably, but which side? Yi's men? The thieves' men? Both? Or were Yi and the thieves the same?
Alone, Catlin might have been able to answer a few of those questions. He could have lured a tail into one of Chinatown's midnight alleys and twisted some information from him. But not tonight. Not with Lindsay along.
"More cognac?" he asked, bending his head to her shining hair once more.
She shook her head. Silky strands whispered over his lips. Her hair was cool, haunted by perfume. "Sure?" he whispered. "It will help you to relax."
She made an odd, abrupt sound that could have been laughter. "I'm having enough trouble sorting out truth and lies right now," she said in a tired voice. "Alcohol won't help."
"Can you sleep?" he asked bluntly.
With you two inches away? Not very damn likely, Catlin!
But the words went no farther than Lindsay's mind. Yelling at him wouldn't help. It wasn't his fault that she found him frighteningly attractive.
"Lindsay," whispered Catlin against her hair, feeling her sudden tension, understanding its source. "I'm sorry, but we have to sleep in the same bed. The maid "
"Yes," Lindsay said quickly, her lips all but touching his ear as she spoke. "I understand. Part of the act. That's all. Just an act,"
She tried to sit up but found it impossible. She was trapped between the table and Catlin's body. With the same swift power that had surprised her once before, he lifted her from his lap and returned her to the bench seat beside him.
"I hate to be unchivalrous," he muttered, "but I'm going to need my jacket back before we leave."
Surprised, Lindsay shrugged out of the soft wool and handed it over to him. She watched as he put it on with the same smooth coordination that he did everything. When his body turned to receive the coat, she saw the dark gleam of metal in the small of his back and realized that he was wearing a gun. The thought shocked her before common sense took over, reminding her that Catlin was always armed, always dangerous, a man fully suited for the hell he was guiding her through.
With a suppressed shudder Lindsay slid out of the booth and stood by herself in the smoky bar. She remained alone only for an instant. Catlin was right behind her, his hand resting lightly just above her waist as he eased her through the press of people surrounding the bar. The men he had pegged as FBI agents stayed at their table. They didn't glance up as Lindsay passed, but Catlin's instincts told him that the men took a good look at his back.
A couple stood in front of the bank of elevators, waiting for a car to arrive. As he and Lindsay approached, doors slid aside. The couple walked in and politely held the doors open until Lindsay and Catlin could enter. He hesitated reflexively, assessing the possibilities of an ambush. Then he mentally shrugged. There was a limit to how many shadows you could check behind, how many conspiracies you could assume. In the end you had to go with the odds or go crazy, and the odds said that Lee Tran hadn't had enough time to plan and execute an assassination in the lobby of one of San Francisco's major hotels.
Catlin waited until the well-dressed couple had pushed the button for the tenth floor. As the man stepped aside, Catlin took the room key out of his pocket and gave it to Lindsay.
"Sixteen, honey," he said, pressing the key into her hand.
Lindsay started to object that their room was on the eighteenth floor. A single look from Catlin's eyes froze the words on her lips. She inserted the key into the slot that activated the upper bank of buttons, the higher floors that were off limits to people without the proper room keys. Silently she pushed the button marked sixteen.
As Lindsay stepped away, the woman took a key from her purse and inserted it into the emergency override lock on the elevator, bringing the car to a halt between floors. Simultaneously her partner's hand went into his suit coat.
Catlin spun, sweeping Lindsay behind him with his left hand even as the blunt, lethal shape of a gun appeared in his right. As he completed the spin, his left elbow rammed into the man's diaphragm. With a grunt, the man slammed against the elevator wall and slumped down to the floor, fighting futilely for breath. Catlin's left hand shot out and closed around the woman's arm just as she reached for her purse. He squeezed the delicate, vulnerable wrist bones. The purse dropped from her numbed fingers as he shoved her against the wall and held her immobile beneath the impact of his body.
"FBI!" she gasped as the gun's barrel sank into the soft skin beneath the jaw.
Catlin smiled. "Probably," he agreed. "That's why you're both still alive."
The woman simply stared at him, unable to speak for the weapon digging into her neck.
"Lindsay," Catlin said calmly, not looking away from the woman's wide brown eyes. "Check this little beauty's purse. If it doesn't have a leather folder and an FBI shield, let me know."
Lindsay looked from Catlin's expressionless face to the frightened eyes of the woman who stood absolutely still within his grasp. The dark barrel of the gun was hard against the woman's throat, leaving her barely enough room to breathe. A thready groan
rose from the floor of the elevator. Startled, Lindsay looked down.
"Don't worry about him," said Catlin. "He won't be doing much but trying to suck in air for a few minutes. The purse, Lindsay."
She stepped forward, realized that she was coming up from Catlin's right side, his gun side, and hastily moved to his left.
He caught the change of direction from the corner of his eye. His smile changed subtly, approving rather than predatory.
"It's a pleasure to work with a fast learner," he said softly, but his eyes never left his captive's face.
The feeling of disbelief that had settled around Lindsay never seemed stronger than when she opened the dazzling gold-mesh evening purse and found a lipstick, a comb and a blue-steel gun. Numbly she searched beneath the gun, fishing out a leather folder. As she opened it, the blue-and-gold shield of the FBI gleamed in the elevator's fluorescent lights.
"FBI," said Lindsay, her voice hoarse. "Special Agent Nancy Conner."
The sound of the safety being clicked into place on Catlin's gun was very loud in the elevator's confined space. He stepped away from the woman and returned the gun to its holster in the same motion.
"Pleased to meet you, Agent Conner," said Catlin. "You have five seconds to pass on your message."
"But " she began. Then she realized that Catlin meant it. "Leave the bugs in place. They're for your safety."
"Bullshit."
Catlin's tone was as cold as the gun he had just held to her throat. She looked from him to her partner, who was struggling to his feet. "You okay, Ted?" she asked.
"The PRC can kill this son of a bitch for all of me," her partner said harshly, rubbing his aching diaphragm.
Catlin turned swiftly. "Listen, cowboy," he said, his voice low and hard. "You want to talk to me, call me up and say that Freddie Black has a bronze for me to look at. I'll walk to the nearest pay phone and call the local office. That way nobody will get hurt. Because the next time I'm ambushed, I'm going to slip the leash and go hunting for real. Hear me?"
The agent stood very still, hearing exactly what was being said. He knew the controlled blow to the diaphragm that had paralyzed him for a few moments could have been much harder. Lethal. Catlin had the skill and the power to kill with no more weapon than his hands. The agent had been told that before he had walked into the elevator, but he hadn't believed it. He believed it now.
"Freddie Black. A bronze to look at," the agent repeated.
"Good. You can bug everything but the bedroom. I find FBI eavesdropping gear in there and the first agent I get my hands on will spend the next week shitting high tech."
The two agents looked at each other. The woman sighed.
"Show him, Ted."
The male agent hesitated, shrugged, and said, "All right if I get something out of my pocket?"
Catlin nodded.
The agent reached into his suit coat and pulled out a flat aluminum box that could have held lures for fishing. He opened the box, revealing matchbook-sized transmitters nestled in specially cut nests in the sponge that filled the box. He pointed to two of the bugs.
"These are for the "
"Phone," interrupted Catlin, recognizing the shapes that both replaced standard parts of the telephone receiver and at the same time rendered conversation in the room anything but private. He took the box, closed it and slipped it into his pocket. "If you aren't getting signals within an hour, have 'Freddie' give me a call. I'll take the bugs with me if we change hotels and install them wherever we go. Got that?"
The agent nodded.
"Remember it," said Catlin. With bleak amber eyes he looked at first one FBI agent and then at the other. "From now on it's open season on uninvited guests. Pass the word."
"You can't just "
"Like hell I can't."
Before anyone could object, Catlin's hand flashed out to the control panel. He jerked out the override key and slipped it into his pocket. The elevator continued on to the tenth floor. Neither agent asked for the override key to be returned, for it was obvious that Catlin intended to keep it. Without a word both agents got off as soon as the doors opened. The doors closed and the elevator went on toward the sixteenth floor.
"You all right?" Catlin asked softly. He knew that the sudden violence had shocked Lindsay, but he didn't know how much.
"All right?" Lindsay stifled an impulse to laugh, knowing that it was hysteria rather than humor tightening her throat. It had happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, a man down and a woman with a gun buried in her throat. Both people could have died so easily. And without Catlin, Lindsay knew that she would have been helpless. She hadn't even known something was wrong until it was over.
"I'm fine. Just fine," she said, her voice empty.
"Bloody wonderful," muttered Catlin. "Can you do two flights of stairs?"
"I can do whatever I have to," she said hollowly.
With the swift grace that could be so unexpected, so lethal, Catlin knelt and removed Lindsay's elegant high heels. He rubbed the red indentations that the leather strap had left on her high arch.
"Hell of a thing to do in the name of style," he said.
Lindsay looked at Catlin's sleek black hair and gentle hands and felt as though she had well and truly fallen down the rabbit hole. "You would have killed that woman," Lindsay said huskily, fighting absurd laughter, "and now you're worried about a welt on my foot!"
He smiled up at her crookedly, relieved that she was responding with something more than the dead voice and lifeless eyes she had shown him a few minutes ago. "Such a pretty foot," he murmured, rubbing out the red mark with his fingers.
"You spent too long in China."
It took an instant for Catlin to understand what Lindsay was implying. When he did, he laughed aloud and released her foot, standing again in a surge of power.
"Not that long. I'm not a foot fetishist," he said, holding her shoes in his hand.
Lindsay laughed. She couldn't help it. She didn't even want to.
Catlin listened to her clear, beautiful laughter and smiled, knowing that she was getting herself under control again. It had been a hard night for her. Too hard. Despite his efforts to shield her when he could, tonight she had been pushed to the point that she had to either give up and withdraw or accept the new reality and go forward.
Not only had she accepted, she was still able to laugh.
"You're quite a woman, Lindsay Danner," Catlin said, leading her out of the elevator. "Was your mother like you?"
"Like me?" Lindsay repeated, thinking of the small, tenacious, lavender-scented woman who had walked through ha childhood and still glided through her dreams.
"Gutsy," explained Catlin.
"Dad used to say that mother would charge hell with a bucket of water."
Reflexively Catlin checked that the stairwell was empty before he allowed Lindsay to enter it.
"Like I said. Gutsy," murmured Catlin.
"Crazy," Lindsay amended, shaking her head. "It wasn't that mother didn't believe in evil. It was just that she believed so passionately in good."
"And you think that's crazy?" asked Catlin, knowing that Lindsay believed in good in exactly the same way, whether she realized it or not. It was the only possible explanation for why she was here with him now, walking down into hell with a man she didn't know and yet followed with such shattering trust.
"Don't you?"
"I think your mother was frighteningly sane," Catlin said, automatically listening for the sound of other footsteps, doors opening or closing, the click-click of a gun being cocked. "To believe only in evil is to give yourself to it."
Lindsay heard the flat certainty in Catlin's voice and felt a chill sweep down her spine. "Is that what happened to you?" she whispered.
For several moments there was no sound but that of Lindsay's nylon-sheathed feet meeting the stairs. Catlin made no noise at all. The movements of his body were utterly controlled. There was
no careless slap of leather soles against concrete as he climbed the stairs. It was like walking next to a wolf, except that there weren't even the tiny sounds of claws being drawn over stone. Such a small thing, silence, yet it drove deeply into Lindsay, telling her just how long and how deeply Catlin had lived as both predator and prey. It was in his every motion, his every breath, his eyes constantly searching roof lines and shadows, doorways and passing cars, every sense alert for the first threatening movement.
"It was close," Catlin said finally, answering Lindsay's questions as he took the room key from her. A single glance told him that the nearly invisible sliver of transparent tape he had placed across the top of the door hadn't been disturbed. "I realized what was happening in time," he added, pulling her into the room, locking and bolting the door behind. "That's why I got out."
"Out?" she whispered. "You call this 'out'?"
"No. Why don't you shower while I set up the bugs?"
Lindsay opened her mouth. After a moment she turned away without saying anything. There was nothing to say except the obvious: Then why are you here, back in the hell you know all too well and so obviously hate?
But that was the question Catlin had refused to answer, even for the FBI. There was no reason to think he would answer it for her.
Catlin watched Lindsay walk into the bedroom and begin pulling things from her suitcase. He knew what she had wanted to ask, and he knew why she had kept silent. She needed to trust someone. Him. It was vital to her. Without it she could become irretrievably lost in the maze of lies, no signposts to guide her, no enduring truth shining in the darkness to comfort her.
It would have been different if she had been drawn to undercover work by some aspect of her own personality, her own psychic needs; then the lure of the adrenaline would have been reward enough for the demands of the game. But that wasn't the case with her. She had been drawn by innocence and idealism into a game that had no room for either. What she was doing now went against her grain in ways that abraded her psyche until she was raw.
Tell Me No Lies Page 24
