by Leon, Judith
The flight engineer grinned. “My name’s Katie Donovan. And I’m a damn good dancer. You guys staying on the ship tonight? We’ve got a party planned.”
He gave Katie Donovan one of his better smiles. Quite a few women had complimented him on that smile. “Sorry,” he yelled. “After I get Nova, it’s back to the Reagan to jet off ASAP.”
“I’m sorry, too.” She paused a moment, then, “Does she know you’re coming?”
Now there was a good question. She didn’t. In fact, he’d been told by Langley that since his last job with her, Nova had twice turned down assignments. In Germany, she’d fallen hard for Jean Paul König, a charismatic German politician with the looks of a movie star, but when the mission was over, she’d decided König wasn’t right for her.
In Joe’s opinion, she’d been seriously let down. Hell. He’d caught her with tears in her eyes after making her parting speech to König, and Nova definitely wasn’t the crying type.
He hadn’t pressed her for details. Nova just might be the most private person he’d ever known. And she owned some very deep and dark secrets, some he knew having to do with the stepfather she refused to discuss. Those secrets must be the explanation for why such a beautiful, intelligent, talented woman undertook the dangerous and sometimes murderous things she did for the Company.
He thought it unlikely that Langley knew about her genuine affection for König. He wasn’t about to break her confidence and tell them; Nova’s private business was her private business. But the Company was clearly aware that the assignment had put her off working for them. “Look, we need her for this assignment,” he’d been told when his controller had awakened him in his D.C. condo at three-twenty this morning, “and we need her now. You’ll be going to Italy. To the Amalfi Coast.”
“If she’s burnt out, maybe you should get someone else,” he’d replied, pleased that she’d quit Company work, a dangerous business mixed up with the scum of the earth.
“You’ll get your briefing in Italy. Time is of the essence here. The bottom line is that fast and accurate translation is the key, and it may have to be done on-site. For that we have to have someone who can translate and speak fluently in Russian, Italian, Chinese and, of course, English, and who is intimately familiar with the lingo involved in virus research. The Italians don’t have any one person like that. We have Nova, and we’ve told them we’d get her for them.”
He’d been surprised. “Nova knows about viruses?”
Now irritated, the Company man had muttered, “You’ll get your briefing in Italy, Cardone. All you need to know now is that Nova is uniquely qualified, that’s she’s needed urgently for this assignment, and a fucking lot of lives are at stake. I’d say, conservatively, millions of lives. Your job is to get her to do it. Get her involved again for the Company or expect to feel big heat from higher up. All the way higher up.”
Joe yelled to Katie over the helicopter’s racket. “No. She doesn’t know I’m coming. And if she’s like most women, she’ll probably be pissed when I show up.”
Grinning, Katie Donovan tilted her head, eager for his explanation.
“The last time I saw her we were about to spend a nice weekend together when I got called away. The usual thing, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And about the last thing I said to her was that I’d call. I didn’t.”
“Oh yes. You are in big trouble.” Katie used his shoulder for support as she pushed to her feet. He liked it. The feel of a woman’s hand. “We should be about there.” She made her way forward.
He gazed out the starboard door over the rolling sea of green, the earthy-smelling warm wind hitting his face, thinking, Why didn’t I call? He had intended to. But his next assignment kept him fully occupied for the first ten days, and when he finally caught his breath, he remembered how Nova, who was five years older, always treated him like a kid brother.
And König was an urbane sophisticate, quite the opposite of a Texas-ranch-raised, ex-Naval aviator jock. Calling Nova had suddenly struck him as stupid. Besides, they led crazy lives. When could they ever realistically get together? So at first he’d put off calling her, and then finally he’d quit even planning to.
Now he was going to have to pay the price.
But then, maybe not. Nova wouldn’t really have expected a call. What a monumental ego you have, Cardone. She would have assumed that his saying he would call was like a Hollywood producer saying, “We’ll do lunch soon.”
Nova Blair was one woman who wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for some man to call her.
Chapter 3
Nova halted on her traverse line immediately above Robin. The terror-stricken girl was still rotating, but more slowly now. Pale, she was gazing up at Nova.
“You hanging in there?” Nova said, wishing with an aching heart that she could be the scared one, not Robin. “Pun intended,” she said, forcing a reassuring smile.
Robin actually smiled back, but with thin, white lips. “Yep, ha-hanging in there.”
“I’ll attach a rescue pulley to your traverse line. Then I’ll let down a rope. Put the rope under your arms, and together we’ll haul you back up. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Using the unipod, Nova pulled the girl’s carabiner, dangling at the end of Robin’s harness line, across the short space between the two traverse lines. The carabiner was fine, but somehow Robin’s thrashing had been enough to yank the metal ring off her harness.
Nova clamped the rescue pulley onto Robin’s traverse line. She fed one end of the thirty feet of half-inch nylon rope through the rescue pulley and tied a figure-eight knot. Feeding out rope, she said, “Put the loop under both arms and make sure the fit is good and tight.”
In less than a minute, Robin was ready. Nova ran the rope under both of her arms and across her back. “Here’s how we do this. I’ll count to three. When I say three, you pull yourself up on the security line as much as you can. That takes weight off the rope. We’re both dangling. I don’t have any real leverage. But if you pull yourself up on the security line while I’m pulling on the rope, we will hoist you back here. Okay?”
Robin nodded.
Please let this work right! “Okay. One, two, THREE!”
Nova pulled, and took in at least a foot and a half. “Good,” she yelled. “Perfect! Okay. Again. One, two, THREE!”
Nova took in another foot and a half.
“It’s working,” Robin called out.
Charles Scott yelled, “You’re doing it!”
It took maybe ten minutes, but finally Nova had Robin face-to-face. She immediately refastened a thick nylon strap on Robin’s sling harness to the carabiner of the harness line.
“You okay, hon?” Nova asked, squeezing Robin’s hand, elated and relieved.
“I have never been so scared in all my life.”
“You’re going to have a great story to tell your friends.”
Robin grinned. “Yeah.” The smile faded quickly. “I am so sorry to be such a wimp. My dad’s furious. I can never please him. I try, but I just can’t do this stuff.”
“Here’s a guarantee. Trust Bruce and me and yourself, and when you leave here ten days from now, you’ll be amazed. I know you want to please your dad, but the person you most want to please is you. I promise, you will have learned that you can always do more than you first believe. Just don’t give up.”
“If you’d said that an hour ago, I’d have laughed out loud.”
“Right!”
Robin’s brow wrinkled in a frown. “What’s that sound?”
Nova hesitated, listening, as she, too, heard a thrumming. “Helicopter,” she said.
They searched the sky, and within seconds a gray-green military-type helicopter—a Huey, Nova noted—appeared, moving directly toward them.
“Oh, it’s coming our way,” Robin said, her voice again in a quiver.
“It’s not going to shake us out of these slings. We’re fine.”
The blissful
stillness of the jungle, already assaulted by the chopper’s blades, suddenly crackled with the sound of bullhorn being turned on.
Just wonderful, Nova thought. This cannot be good news. Why in the world would anyone come out here in a helicopter?
“I’m from Cosmos Adventure Travel,” rumbled a voice over the loudspeaker. “My name is Joseph Cardone. I need to speak to Nova Blair.”
Joe! My God! If Joe was here for her, whatever was brewing must be serious.
Her tour folks were pointing her way. The helicopter edged overhead. She and Robin swayed.
For a second, Nova was transported to a street in Germany and Joe was kneeling beside her, his face ashen. He’d just saved her from being run over, maybe even killed. She remembered the strength of his hands, the rich chocolate of his brown eyes, that football quarterback body.
She briskly hand-signaled the helicopter to back off, afraid the downdraft might break branches or topple nests. The pilot responded, lifting the craft higher but still keeping it above them. Joe, holding the bullhorn, stood inside the starboard door.
“Hey, Nova!”
She recognized his voice and her heart—which was already pumping from the adrenalin rush of the rescue so hard she could feel it in her throat—sped up still more. The goddamn idiot never called.
She gave him a thumbs-up of recognition.
“CAT needs you to do something. Urgent. No time to get a Jeep out here. You should turn over the tour to Bruce, collect your stuff, and then we’ll pick you up from the hotel’s deck. Say, ten minutes?”
How about, say, never! How dare they assume she’d jump when they called! She couldn’t have made it clearer that she no longer intended to work Company jobs. She gave a thumbs-down.
“Bruce,” she called out. “You can pull Robin across now.”
Robin started moving away toward the far side of the canopy.
From the sky, “We’ll pick you up. Ten minutes. Okay?”
She looked up at him, happy to see him and furious at the same time. She wanted to climb up there and ask him what he’d been doing lately. Again, she gave him the thumbs-down.
“Are you saying you aren’t going to come?”
She nodded and simultaneously gave a thumbs-up.
She began to pull back to where Padgett, Charles and the others waited. The helicopter followed, hovering high over her at first, and then slid swiftly to hover over the hotel. She wondered what havoc the blades were stirring up with anything loose on the deck. A rope ladder dropped down from the starboard door.
No is no, she thought.
By the time she reached her group, Joe was halfway down the ladder. She unhooked her carabiner and stepped out of the sling.
“Sorry, folks. This shouldn’t take long, but I’ve got to deal with it before we can go out today. Clearly CAT has some special problem they think I can solve. Everyone wait here, until I get back. Or you can come back with me to the hotel.”
“I’ll wait here since Robin is already across,” Charles said.
“I’ll wait here, too,” Padgett added.
“Don’t leave us in the lurch,” said a teacher from Ohio.
“I’ll be back in no time,” she assured everyone. No is no!
Chapter 4
Her feet felt light, as though her tennis shoes had the power of levitation. Nova closed the space between herself and Joe, who had just dropped a couple of feet from the helicopter’s ladder onto the broad Treetops deck.
The khaki, lightweight military jumpsuit showed off his dark brown wavy hair and deeply tanned skin in a way that triggered a too damn familiar sexual fantasy she had of being swept off her feet by Joe, and more. Lots more. Across the narrowing distance between them, he sent her one of those goddamn fantastic smiles.
Her pulse beat a tattoo at her throat. She didn’t even try to suppress the smile she sent in return. How wonderful to see him again. How amazingly good it felt.
He grabbed her hand for a handshake. She embraced him in a bear hug. He smelled wonderfully like fresh air and Texas sage—soap or shampoo, she thought. She’d never known him to wear cologne. Then she pushed him away. “You are a typical male jerk.”
“You’re pissed.”
“You betcha.”
He tilted his head, gave her a sheepish half grin.
“As I recall you uttered something about keeping in contact, and I haven’t heard word one from you. How many months now? Since I know you’re a man of your word, I decided you must surely be dead.”
They were yelling over the sound of the chopper. Joe waved the pilot to back off farther, noting as he did that Nova had a bit of tan on that extraordinarily fair skin, something she’d not had the last time he’d seen her.
He also wondered whether her greeting was the kind she’d use with a kid brother—or a friend—or one she used with a man she was attracted to. So far, he couldn’t tell.
She’d braided her glossy, long black hair into a twist at the back of her head. He checked her earlobes and found a plain pair of silver studs—not the dangly silver doves that he’d given her as a parting gift. He suddenly realized he’d been hoping she’d be wearing those. She always wore earrings, acted as though she was somehow naked without them, but it certainly made more sense out in the middle of the jungle to be wearing simple studs.
She might not be wearing his earrings, but she clearly had remembered his promise. And she was right that promises should be kept. “My humble apology.” He added a little bow at the waist.
She laughed, and the deep, throaty sound made the small hairs at the back of his neck stand up. He enjoyed looking at the curve of her breasts beneath the tight, gray tank top, and then at the long legs exposed below her gray shorts. He forced his eyes to her lips. He sure wasn’t thinking about business and why he’d been sent here. He was thinking of sex.
Gazing at those moist, luscious lips didn’t solve his thought problem, so he turned sideways and, staring out at the expanse of green foliage, said, “Look, I know you’ve turned down a couple of Company assignments. But this one, I promise you, is critical.”
A man and woman approached from the other end of the deck. Nova said, “Joe Cardone, this is Hans Licht and his wife, Jennie. They pretty much make Treetops happen. Joe works with me at CAT.”
He shook hands with them, and Hans Licht said, “Is there anything wrong? What is happening?”
“It’s okay, Hans,” Nova said. “CAT has hit a snag and they think they need me. I’m quite sure they don’t, but Joe and I need to chat about it.”
Sensitive hosts that they obviously had to be, given their exclusive clientele, the Lichts made a swift departure. Joe was again alone with a reluctant Dove.
“I’m stunned they would send you all the way out here,” she said at once. “I’m finished with CIA business.”
The irony of this scene struck him, momentarily interrupting the argument he’d prepared for her. Here he was, tasked to get Nova to work for the Company again on pain of professional discomfort, or worse, if he didn’t succeed. Yet during the last conversation he’d had with her, he’d asked why in the world she ever worked for the Company. He’d even said something to the effect that he didn’t understand why someone with her many gifts would spend any time dealing with the lowlifes of the world, even for her country.
He shook his head. A smile must have accompanied the headshake because Nova said, “What’s funny?”
“Sorry.” He leaned back against the sturdy deck rail—one guaranteed to keep distracted or tipsy guests from tumbling a hundred or more feet to the ground. He crossed his arms. “Not funny. Just ironic. I should be glad you want to quit, but here I am, and I’ve got to convince you to take just one more job. Just one more.”
“No.”
He waited. He’d let her wonder a bit just what they might need her for.
“Look,” she said.
She leaned against the rail beside him, close enough so that he felt the skin of her arm brush his forearm.
Would she stand so close to a man she thought of as a kid brother?
“I’m burnt out. I lost a man I loved. I had to kill people again. I hate it. I’m out of the game.”
“Okay. You don’t need to convince me. I’m not someone who wants you…well, I’d just as soon you quit. But we’ve got a megaproblem, and we need you.”
“That’s ridiculous. They can always find someone else.”
“Someone else who speaks and reads, fluently, English, Italian, Chinese and Russian?”
She snorted in disbelief. “Why in the world would they need…?” She studied his face. “You’re not authorized to explain unless I agree to take the job, are you?”
“Correct.”
“Does it really have to be one person with all of those languages?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“I don’t want to do it, Joe.”
She frowned in a way he’d never seen before. A look of true hurt. She wanted to be free to take her beautiful photos and spend her days in magnificent and exciting places with interesting and nice people. And why not?
“When we were in Virginia training for the German mission,” he said, “someone told me that you never took jobs for the Company unless people had been killed. Not agents, and not bad guys, but ordinary people. I can tell you one thing. No one has died yet, but if we don’t succeed in this mission, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people will die.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
He said nothing. He waited a moment more to let that sink in, and then, “You’re unique, Nova. You are fluent in all the languages we need.” Another pause. “Just one more job.”
“Why do they need me? Us? Why not use local talent? Use several of their own break-in specialists and translators?”
“I wasn’t told that, but you can be sure they have their reasons. If I had to guess, I’d say maybe they need someone on-site to translate, for whatever reason, and to avoid leaks or generating suspicion by the target, they don’t want to have more people on location than is absolutely necessary. They require one person with heavy-duty language skills. And who knows about viruses. He definitely mentioned viruses. You know about viruses?”
