Hot Ice

by Cherry Adair

  “Not government. No ID. Terrorist Force Logistical Command is a privately funded, freelance antiterrorist organization.”

  She shot him a skeptical look. “And I’m supposed to believe this on faith? Exactly who do you ‘freelance’ for?”

  “Anyone with a terrorist problem.”

  She raised a dark brow. “America?”

  “Frequently.”

  “In other words you work for the highest bidder. You guys are mercenaries.”

  “You could say that.”

  “I did. Who decides who the bad guys are?”

  Hunt couldn’t help but reluctantly admire her nerves of steel. Annoying as hell. A liar, and a thief. But she had brass.

  “We do.” She was full of questions, and opened her mouth with another one. “Conversation over,” Hunt told her flatly.

  It pissed him off royally that he could still feel the imprint of her body, supple and yielding against his. Still feel and, God help him, taste her on his lips. Still feel reluctant desire thrum through him as keenly now as it had earlier when they’d been alone. As if he still had her pinned to the bed.

  She clasped her hands and rested them in her lap, not leaning against the seat back. Ready, Hunt thought sardonically, to make a run for it. He was almost curious enough to allow it, just to see what she’d do. Almost.

  “Say I believe you—On faith, mind you. Since you expect me to trust you guys without a shred of proof that you are who you say you are. I’m not a terrorist.”

  “But you stole something from José Morales, who is,” Hunt told her.

  “Cut to the chase. Where the fuck are the disks, lady?” Bishop demanded.

  Like the rest of the team, Hunt knew Neal Bishop wasn’t appreciative of the wild chase she’d led his team on for the last several months. Chasing her had wasted a hell of a lot of time. And everyone on the team was keenly aware of that.

  She turned to give Bishop a hard look. “Two things. One, watch your language. Two, don’t talk to me in that tone of voice. I don’t give a damn who you guys are, I won’t be treated with disrespect because you think you can get away with it. I’m listening, but play nicely.”

  Hunt’s lips twitched. “How well do you know José and Maria Morales?” The woman had more balls than good sense.

  With her pale skin and wild mane of dark hair, and wearing that red scrap of a dress, she looked like some half-wild wood sprite. Without the bravado, she looked softer, more vulnerable than Hunt had ever seen her. Not weaker, by any stretch of the imagination, but less brittle, less on the defensive. “I’ve been to several of their parties.”

  “How did you meet?” Hunt asked her.

  “The Konstantinopouloses’ yacht party a few years ago.”

  “Neo Konstantinopoulos?” Bishop asked.

  She nodded.

  Max’s and Hunt’s eyes met before Hunt said flatly, “Also a known terrorist.”

  “Also?” she asked carefully. She was surrounded, but she didn’t fidget or even look nervous. Because, Hunt suddenly realized, she had a plan to get away from them before the going got rough. At least, she thought she did. She was in for a rude awakening.

  “Are you telling us,” Hunt raised a brow, “that you aren’t aware that José Morales is a terrorist?”

  “It’s not something that has ever come up over cocktails, so the answer is no, of course not.” She examined her manicure before glancing up. “All I know is they’re an interesting couple, and they give fun parties.”

  “And you enjoy stealing from your friends?”

  “Acquaintances.”

  Hunt nodded acquiescence. “Your acquaintance, Morales, had papers, one or more disks, and possibly a small handheld device in that safe. You removed said items. We want them.”

  She gave them a considering look. “I don’t know about the other things. But there was nothing heavy enough to be a handheld anything. And before you feel obliged to repeat yourself, your friend here already asked. I’ll give you the same answer I gave him. Not going to happen. I don’t take the kind of risks I take to hand everything over to a second party. Besides, if I took them—and that’s a big if, boys—I wouldn’t admit it and incriminate myself.”

  “You stole items critical to national security,” Hunt told her, cutting to the chase.

  She turned her head to look from Max back to Hunt. If he didn’t know better, Hunt might’ve been fooled by her fragility too. But he did know better. He had a small, months-old scar over his left eyebrow to prove it.

  “Why do you guys always hide under the umbrella of ‘national security’? If this stuff you’re looking for was so damn important, why didn’t you steal it yourselves?”

  Hunt ground his back teeth together and ignored her little jab. She’d done what Fisk, T-FLAC’s best sticky-fingers operative, couldn’t. Opened the bloody safe. Frank Fisk, on hearing that she’d not only opened the Morales safe, but gotten away with the contents, had been bowled over and impressed by her skill. It took a hell of a lot to impress the taciturn Fisk.

  Hunt, however was merely annoyed. “Are you under the erroneous impression that our questions are multiple choice?” he asked. “If you don’t hand over those items, you’ll go to jail for treason.” He waited a beat for another thin layer of her confidence to erode.

  “Treason is a capital offense. Execution isn’t out of the question. Cooperate and we might be able to convince the U.S. Attorney to take the death penalty off the table.”

  He saw the stark reality sink in. She gave him a level look. “I mailed everything.”

  She wasn’t stupid. Good. That saved time. “To whom?” Hunt asked.

  “Myself.”

  He raised a brow. She’d been arrested in her San Cristóbal hotel room within minutes of arriving back from the party. “Really? And when exactly did you have time to do that?”

  She inhaled sharply, let her gaze wander around the room as if considering whether to tell him. When she finally looked to him again, Hunt knew she’d made her choice. “On the way from the party back to my hotel. I carried an addressed, prepaid mailer with me.”

  “What’s the address?” When she hesitated, he gave her a hard look. “The truth.”

  “I want a lawyer.” She folded her arms across her chest, crossed her legs as if she were a debutante at a tea party, and gave him a look that said she was through talking for a while.

  Twelve

  Hunt accessed something on the laptop, then turned the monitor so Taylor could see it. “Sure you can lawyer-up. No problem,” he told her. “And we’ll send him a copy of this so he can start working on your defense.”

  After a brief hesitation, she glanced down at the monitor. Her real passport photograph was at the top of the page, followed by smaller pictures from each of her alias passports. The text blurred, and her fingers shook as she scrolled down, giving every appearance that she was randomly scrolling, when in fact she was looking for a specific name.

  “It’s all there,” Hunt informed her. “From Reno, where you were born, to the heist this evening at the Houston museum. And everything in between.”

  She dragged her attention from a grainy photograph of the apartment building she’d lived in as a child to Hunt’s face. “How?”

  “You weren’t thinking about fingerprints in the safe house in San Cristóbal.”

  Taylor’s heart stopped beating for a few horrified seconds. Oh God. She always wore thin latex gloves for work. And she always pulled on a second pair as she left the scene, a third pair at the first clothing exchange, a fourth on her way back to wherever she was staying. Right now she wore thin latex gloves beneath the frilly black lace. She felt sick to her stomach.

  She’d thought of none of her usual safety precautions that night when he’d engineered her escape from jail.

  Dread filled her. She put a hand up to her forehead, horrified to notice her fingers shook. Think. Concentrate and think. Men responded better to a faint than a woman throwing up on their shoes.
And although she’d once done it to get out of a sticky situation, it was really, really hard to throw up on command. Not that she wasn’t perfectly prepared to do it now if it became necessary.

  “I—I feel faint,” she said weakly to no one in particular. She didn’t need to see any more. It was all there. “Can I lie down for a few minutes?”

  Hunt turned off the computer and shut it with a loud snap. “No.” Tundra gray eyes met Taylor’s. Her breath shuddered in her lungs, then stopped altogether at Hunt’s expression.

  “Now that you know that we know you aren’t really Ginger Grant who is registered in room 902, or Mary Ann Wells—the name you used for this room—maybe you’ll wise up and cut the crap.”

  “If I give you what you want, I keep the jewelry. That’s the deal.” She spoke only to Huntington St. John. As far as Taylor was concerned, there was no one else in the room.

  The woman had cojones, Hunt thought with irritated admiration even as he raised a brow at her audacity. “You’re in no position to make deals, sweetheart.”

  “Actually,” she countered, “I’m in a great position. You want what I’ve got. Who do you think has the power here?”

  “Not the one who’s surrounded.”

  “All in the way you look at things,” she said. “And what’s wrong with giving me an incentive to share?”

  Hunt figured she was buying time. Probably not a good idea to let that incredible mind of hers work unchecked for very long. “How about not going to jail for the rest of your life? How’s that for incentive?”

  “Please. If I was worried about jail would I be a jewel thief?” She shrugged, then quickly added, “That’s alleged jewel thief.”

  “Oh, for fuck sake—” Bishop snarled.

  Hunt put up his hand to stop Neal’s blustering and kept his attention on Taylor. “Now that you’re aware that Morales is a terrorist,” he said, giving her the benefit of the doubt, “do you for a moment believe that he too isn’t looking for you to get back what you stole from him?”

  “He can’t possibly know who I am.”

  “Why not? We do. And what about the woman who approached you in San Cristóbal before the robbery?” Hunt pushed harder. “The one who wanted you to steal the contents of the safe for her? Who do you think she was? A nun looking for a donation to the church? We believe she was a member of the Black Rose.”

  “The Black Rose?”

  “Another deadly terrorist group known for their senseless torture of informants, enemies—hell, pretty much anyone. By design or default—and we don’t really give a damn which it is—you’ve not only compromised national security, you’ve made some powerful and lethal enemies.”

  As if dealing with one terrorist organization wasn’t enough. Jesus bloody Christ.

  Hunt continued, “You’re caught between Scylla and Charybdis.”

  “And you.”

  “And me,” Hunt agreed. “We found you. The Black Rose found you in San Cristóbal. How long do you think it’ll take them, or Morales’s Mano del Dios, to track you down again?”

  She bit her lip, the only sign that they were getting through to her. When she realized what she was doing, she stopped. Her chin came up.

  “Uncomfortable having so many people breathing down your neck when you’re trying to do such a good job keeping that low profile of yours, isn’t it?”

  Hell, yes, Taylor thought, she was more than uncomfortable knowing that so many people had discovered her identity. Up to and including her real name.

  She could see the suave Mr. Huntington St. John out of the corner of her eye. He moved with the sinuous tread of a big cat. No wasted motion, no abrupt movements. It was unnerving. As though he were waiting for his prey to bolt from the tall grass and make a run for it before he streaked after her, all determination and ripping white teeth.

  Her wild imagination was going to trip her up if she wasn’t very, very careful. Get a grip, Taylor warned herself. Just get a grip. No matter who he was, or what he threatened, he was only a man. She reminded herself that she interacted with wealthy, sophisticated men every day of the week.

  The other guys didn’t bother her nearly as much as he did. “I want to make a phone call.”

  “No.”

  No matter who these guys said they were, good guys or bad, she’d die before she led them, or anyone else, to Switzerland and her sister. She hadn’t seen Amanda’s name in their document. But that didn’t mean they didn’t know about her. Did they? She had no reason to believe, as thorough as they’d been, that they’d miss Mandy. She could only pray that somehow they had.

  If she went to jail, if she died, Mandy would be well taken care of for the rest of her life. Taylor had promised herself that no matter how horrible it might be for herself, she’d do whatever it took to protect her sister. Whatever it took.

  All eyes were focused on her, but Hunt’s were the only pair that unnerved her. She paused several beats as she considered her options. “All right,” she told him flatly. “Give me forty-eight hours to retrieve what you’re asking for.” She’d fly to Switzerland, see what she had, and go from there. If she deemed the take to truly be of importance to national security, she’d courier it back to them. If not, seeing as how it was so damn important, she’d sell it to them. For a pretty penny for the inconvenience.

  “Let you out of my sight?” Hunt said blandly. “Not going to happen.”

  How much should I give them to back off? Everything, she realized. Hunt would settle for nothing less. “It’s in a secure safety-deposit box in Switzerland. I’ll have it couriered to wherever you like.”

  “Contact the airport,” Hunt told the elevator man flatly. “And what?” Hunt turned to ask her. “I’m supposed to ask you for the location and a password again?”

  “The password isn’t the problem.” Oh, God. She hated this. Hated giving up this much information. Hate, hated, hated, letting anyone get this close to Amanda. But she was short on options. At least for now. “It requires a retinal scan.”

  “Look around you, sweetheart. Do we seem like amateurs to you?”

  She swallowed and shook her head.

  “High-powered plasma lasers are a problem. Retinal scans are child’s play.”

  “So, I give you the password and you handle it from there?” she asked, feeling a tad relieved knowing this ordeal was almost over. “Great. I’m glad we could reach a mutually satisfying agreement. I’ll jot down the password and be on my merry way.”

  His expression lingered somewhere between a scowl and what she was sure, for him, passed as a smile. That look made the hair on the back of her neck lift.

  “That’s one option,” he agreed.

  Too easy, she thought.

  “But that would mean I’d have to remove one of your eyes in order to get past the retinal scan.”

  She should have known. Taylor felt and tasted revulsion and pulled a face.

  “Didn’t think you’d be too keen on that option.” His fingertip reached out and gently grazed the side of her face. “And I didn’t have any desire to disfigure you for life. So we’ll go with the less . . . invasive option.”

  “Which is?”

  “We’re all going to Switzerland.”

  Thirteen

  LONDON

  “I have ascertained nothing about this man,” Andreas Constantine told Morales over the scrambled private line in José’s London office. “This thief has never been caught, never so much as been seen. He is a ghost. A chimera.”

  “Unacceptable.” José Morales sat down heavily in his chair. His empire was crumbling, and no one was helping him shore it up. “Someone must know the name of this offal who has robbed the Mano del Dios of their future.” The San Cristóbal policía originally claimed to have captured a female member of the gang. But that information had proven erroneous.

  God showed his impatience by sending an excruciating pain through José’s belly. He clenched his teeth and rode out the pain, refusing to take his medication in
front of his people. No sign of weakness was permitted. “One million American dollars to whoever delivers the person stupid enough to steal from me, José Morales. The man will first pay with his fear, then with his life.”

  “The word is out there. Everyone is trying to find out who he is. We’ll find him soon, I assure you.” Constantine said flatly. “But we have another serious problem, José. There is speculation that T-FLAC is involved.”

  “Madre de Dios, Andreas. T-FLAC?” José crossed himself. “T-FLAC is aware of the theft? Now? So close—?” His mind raced with the ramifications of this new piece of information.

  If the counterterrorist organization was responsible for the robbery, then they had access to the mine. He prayed that this was not so. “They sent this person to rob me?”

  Constantine paused. “Either T-FLAC or Black Rose.”

  “I will call upon God, and the Lord shall save me.” Morales crossed himself, and shut his eyes. “Evenings and mornings and at noon I will pray and cry aloud and He shall hear my voice.” The men bowed their heads until he finished speaking, then said in unison, “Amen.”

  Fourteen

  HOUSTON

  Taylor didn’t say a word, sarcastic or otherwise, on the drive from the downtown hotel to the airport. But Hunt read something in her eyes. Fear? Apprehension? Nope, mutiny most likely. Knowing Taylor, she was probably already plotting her next great escape. He wasn’t about to let that happen. Again.

  His men accompanied them, and all waited, much to her obvious amusement, while she retrieved a suitcase from a locker in the busy concourse at George Bush Intercontinental.

  She’d escaped him once, and if it entertained her knowing it took seven men to watch her every move in a crowded public airport, so be it. Hunt curtly refused her request to go into the restroom to change out of the outrageous red dress. Time enough for that once they were in flight.

  Then, if she wanted to get away, her only option would be a free fall at thirty thousand feet. She was a lot of things, but he didn’t think stupid or suicidal were among them.