He pulled back and gave her an inscrutable look. “Are you?”
She slid her palm underneath his shirt, trailing her nails up the bare skin of his belly. He sucked in a breath and his muscles tightened underneath her touch.
“No,” she said softly, lifting on her toes to kiss the hollow at the base of his neck. “I’m an airplane sex virgin.”
Satisfaction tinged with something predatory swept across his face. He looped his fingers in her jeans and pulled her pelvis forward so that he could undo the button and zipper. He dragged her panties with the jeans down her thighs, kneeling as he did. She stepped out of the jeans and he tossed them to the side. His head was level with the juncture of her thighs and she felt his breath hot on her lower belly. It was so erotic, having him kneel before her with his big hands parting her legs, that she instantly dampened. She tunneled her fingers into his soft hair and he looked up at her as he planted a kiss just above her mound.
“Ian.” She tried not to writhe in his hands, but that became impossible when his mouth lowered and he gently circled his tongue over her, dragging a moan from her lips. She leaned against the door for support as he lapped at her, sucking and licking, never staying long enough in one place to give her the release she so desperately craved.
He slid a finger into her wet channel and her legs shook with the effort of standing.
His voice was guttural when he said, “I want to hear you say it.”
“Please.”
He curled his finger inside her and a hot flash swept over her body. “Please what?”
On a ragged inhale she said, “Please make me come.”
To reward her, he sucked her into his mouth. She almost climaxed then, but he released her before she could and kissed her inner thigh. He repeated the gesture, alternating between using his mouth and fingers, bringing her to the brink again and again only to retreat until she was almost wild with desperation.
“I can’t. Ian, you have to—”
“When you come, scream my name.”
“Yes,” she gasped. “Yes.”
With two fingers inside of her, he used his mouth to drive her up and over the edge. As promised, she cried out his name.
He caught her liquid body in his arms and carried her to the bed. Her inner muscles were still clenching when he rubbed the head of his erection through her sensitive folds and buried himself inside of her.
The feeling of being stretched as he drove into her already sensitive body was so pleasurable that she almost couldn’t bear it. Their mating turned primal, desperate. Her nails scratched down his back and she wrapped her legs around him as he mercilessly forced her over another peak. Still, he seemed reluctant to end it. As soon as she finished quivering he wrapped his hands around her hips, turned her onto her hands and knees, and took her from behind. She had to grind her face into the covers to smother her cries of pleasure when he palmed her ass and positioned her so that he was fully sheathed inside of her each time he entered.
Climaxing from sex was already such a novelty to her that it caught her by surprise when she felt the familiar tightening begin low in her belly as the head of his penis repeatedly stroked her G-spot. There was no way she was going to orgasm a third time.
She was still convinced of that up to the very moment she burst. Triggered by her pleasure, his entire body tensed and he emptied inside of her.
He wrapped her in his arms, both of them breathing heavily. She knew she should get up and use the bathroom and wash up, especially since she could feel his wetness between her thighs, but she was already drifting in and out of consciousness. Besides, this was her last chance to sleep in Ian’s arms and she wasn’t going to waste a second of it.
Ian stroked a hand down her hair and kissed her forehead before pulling the sheet over them. “Sleep, honey. We have a long day ahead of us when we land.”
Feeling safe and sated from sex, she did just that.
Chapter 43
Before they landed Ian handed Leah a black baseball cap and told her to put it on. She pulled her ponytail through the back and stood in front of him in jeans, black flats, and a ribbed tank top. “How do I look?”
“Adorable.” He seemed reluctant to admit it, and turned to rummage in his pack as soon as he spoke. He’d been distant ever since the flight attendant had awoken them through the intercom twenty minutes ago and alerted them to the plane’s descent. They’d even taken separate showers, although to be fair the airplane shower stall had been a tight fit for one.
Ian pulled an identical black baseball cap low over his eyes, and Leah’s stomach flipped at the sight of him. He did the American look justice.
“Why do I have to wear this?” she asked, flicking the brim of her hat.
“It makes you harder to identify.”
That didn’t help her nerves. “You think the Russians know we’re here?”
He shrugged. “Don’t look up once we hit the tarmac and stick close to me. We shouldn’t have to walk through the terminal if Ashill does his job right. He’s sending a team to pick us up, and if it were me I’d pull rank and drive right onto the runway.”
When the plane touched down Leah thanked the flight attendant and the pilot, who looked as if he were ready for a stiff drink and a nap. The sun was already beating on the runway tarmac and the heat radiated through the soles of her flats when she stepped off the plane stairs. She kept her gaze low, but even so she could see a black SUV parked by the chain link fence entrance. An agent wearing a black suit, black tie, and sunglasses waited by the open passenger side door with one hand clasped around his opposite wrist.
Ian’s face didn’t give anything away, but she knew he was pleased to see the SUV there. He took her elbow and steered her straight to the vehicle. The agent took their bags and she and Ian slid into the back seat. The driver was an African American woman attired in the standard black and white Fed suit, and Agent Ashill sat in the passenger seat. The third agent who’d taken their bags was a man in his late twenties. He got in on the other side of her, sandwiching her between him and Ian. Both were large men and it didn’t leave her a lot of room. As soon as his door latched the vehicle rolled forward.
Agent Ashill turned in his seat, nodded politely to Leah, and shook hands with Ian. “You two have a good flight?”
Leah answered, “Yes. I’m thinking I’ll only fly by private jet now.”
Agent Ashill snorted. “Good luck with that.” He made a show of looking at his watch. “We have an hour to prep you before your appointment with Senator Roth.”
Leah had called Senator Roth from Norway to schedule a private meeting first thing that Wednesday morning. Originally she’d been told the senator was out of town, so she’d left a message with his secretary containing the words brothel and Balkhash. By the time she’d called back half an hour later, the Senator had mysteriously returned from his trip. The secretary informed her he would meet with her at nine sharp.
The SUV sailed out of the airport and into traffic. Leah looked across Ian and out the tinted window. Although she’d only been gone for a short period of time, it felt strange to be back home. The streets were dirtier than she remembered and the air shimmered with heat and car fumes. For a second she found herself wishing for the quiet solitude of the Tosbotn fjord, and then shook her head to dislodge the thought. Now more than any other time in her life she needed to focus. She had the next thirty years to long for the days she spent in Norway with Ian—but to do that she had to stay alive today.
“Will I have a wire?” she asked.
Agent Ashill removed a blister pack of nicotine gum from his inside pocket, popped out a square, and flicked it in his mouth. “Not in the way you’re thinking,” he said, returning the pack to his pocket. “The Hart Senate Office Building has a metal detector and x-ray security scanner at its entrance, so the team is going to outfit you with a bug that doesn’t transmit anything until it has been activated. When I tell you it took ten years off my life to find a judge who would
sign a warrant to tap a senator on less than twenty-four hours notice, I mean it.”
She wasn’t sure about the bug, but trusted the FBI knew what it was doing.
“Any signs of Sokolov?” Ian asked.
“None, and we’ve been monitoring all incoming flights.”
Ian’s fingers tapped on his thigh in a rare show of agitation. Leah had thought that was good news, but apparently he wasn’t reassured.
Twenty minutes later the SUV turned onto Constitution Avenue and parked behind a dented mint green van with 1980s wood side paneling. Ian, Leah, and Ashill left the other two agents in the car and Ashill ushered them straight to the junker van. The panel door slid open and Leah was amazed to find that the interior was outfitted with a fortune of high-tech gear. The van was deceptively large and would have been rather spacious if there weren’t five of them crammed into it. Still, as roomy as it was, Ian had to lean forward with his arms on his thighs to be comfortable.
Two additional agents were already inside the van. The differences between the two men inside the van and the agents who’d been assigned to pick them up from the airport were stark. Where the woman and men in the SUV had been fit and alert, the two men in the van were soft around the middle and appeared distracted. Both wore glasses and one of them had a button that had popped open over his belly, allowing for a peek at his soft, doughy skin. The vehicle stank of McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches, and Leah quickly located the crumpled bags stuffed behind a seat. When she also spotted a dented Red Bull can, she whipped her head up and took a closer look at the man with the popped button. It was Walter, the technician who’d discovered the tap on her phone.
“Hey Walter.”
Walter’s chin lifted from the laptop balanced across his knees and he blinked owlishly. “Oh hey, I know you. You’re the chick who had the Russian phone tap.” Sudden understanding flashed across his face. For a brilliant mind, he was a little slow on the uptake. “Ohhhhhhh.”
“Yeah.”
“That sucks. But check out what we have for you.” He reached for a small black bag on the floor by his seat and withdrew a tube of lipstick.
“Er, lipstick?”
“Right? Pretty cool. So anyway, this is the bug. It’s hypersensitive but only when it’s activated.” He twisted the lipstick tube’s gold bottom and it popped off. He held the bottom out to show her the tiny disc nestled inside black foam casing. “When you remove the listening device from the base it’ll activate. Then all you gotta do is drop it somewhere inconspicuous and beat it out of there.”
“Roth’s pen holder, a potted plant, anything like that,” Agent Ashill clarified.
Ian made a noise of disgust. As if just noticing him, Walter looked him up and down and used an index finger to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Who are you? You’re like, giant.”
Ian ignored Walter’s statement of the obvious and addressed Ashill. “The bug is the best you can do?”
“Hey man,” Walter said defensively, “I may not be a ninja assassin, but this bug is the bomb. They don’t call me the Night Possum for nothing.”
“Literally no one calls you that,” the other technician said. “No one.”
“Online they do.”
“Except they don’t.”
Ian spoke to Ashill again. “Does she have cover going into the building?”
“We have two snipers already in position. If Sokolov managed to slip into the country, he won’t be able to get near her without us spotting him first.”
“And who’s protecting her inside?”
The van went silent. “What do you mean?” Ashill finally asked.
“How do we know Senator Roth isn’t going to lose it on her once she confronts him? Your plan is to send her in there and accuse the man of treason, then hope he lets her walk out of there so he can alert his handler to this potentially catastrophic problem. But who’s to say he doesn’t decide to shut her up himself? And without a wire on her we won’t know if she’s in trouble or not.”
Ashill vigorously chewed his gum. “He wouldn’t take a risk like that inside his own office.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. He’s been playing a shrewd game for a long time, but he’s started making mistakes: first with the assault on his wife, then with the stupidity of calling the brothel from his own phone. That tells me he’s become over-confident and rash. When Leah corners him he might react without thinking through the consequences. The stakes are too high for him to go down meekly, and I won’t let her walk into that kind of danger.”
Leah bristled. He wouldn’t let her? She appreciated that he was watching her back, but she was a grown woman. No man told her what she could or could not do. “I’ll make that decision,” she said in a tone that could have chiseled diamonds.
Under the bill of his hat Ian’s eyes were so cold the temperature in the van dipped a few degrees. Leah met his gaze head on, refusing to be intimidated.
“What’s happening?” Walter whispered loudly.
The other technician dropped his head in his hands. “Night Possum,” he muttered. “More like Blind Owl.”
“I’m going,” Leah said flatly. “I can take care of myself.”
If possible, Ian’s expression grew fiercer. “You won’t be a match for him; a man who feels as if he’s losing everything is a desperate man. Remember what he did to his wife?”
The photographs of Mrs. Roth’s swollen and bruised eye socket flashed in her mind’s eye, and the truth of what Ian said was like a bucket of cold water to her optimism. He was right about the possibility of Roth feeling cornered and reacting poorly, but she couldn’t see any other way around it. Not if they wanted to end this once and for all.
“So plant the bug as soon as you get into his office,” Walter suggested. “Then we’ll hear everything while you’re still in there.”
The other technician lifted his head from his hands. “That’s not half bad.”
“Not bad at all,” Agent Ashill agreed.
Ian’s lips thinned. “Activate it riding up the elevator.”
“I can do that.”
Leah could tell Ian was still unhappy with situation in general, with her part in it and with the fact that he wasn’t heading the op, but he gave her a short nod and turned to grill Ashill about the team assigned to tail Roth once he left the building to meet with his handler—assuming he did.
Before Leah knew it it was 8:45 and a yellow taxi pulled to a halt beside the van. “It’s FBI,” Agent Ashill explained. “No need to pay him. He’s going to drop you off right outside the building. Dollars to donuts Roth will be watching for your arrival.”
“Okay.” Leah pulled the baseball cap off and handed it to Ian. When she did he grabbed her wrist and held on until her gaze met his.
“If you feel unsafe at any time or for any reason, and I mean any reason: he looks at you sideways, he says something that makes you feel uneasy, the fucking air shifts, I don’t care what it is, you say the word yellow and I’m coming in after you. You got it? Listen to your gut; it won’t ever let you down.”
“And neither will you,” she said softly.
His expression eased a fraction. “Neither will I.”
He released her wrist. She took a deep breath, slipped the lipstick tube into her purse, and looked at Ashill, who was pretending not to pay attention to the exchange between her and Ian. “I’m ready.”
Chapter 44
The FBI cabbie dropped Leah off directly in front of the Hart Senate Office Building. It was a weekday morning and the sidewalk was choked with important-looking people dressed in suits and staring vacantly at cellphones. A man bumped into her and glared before Leah managed to angle out of the stream of foot traffic. She was acutely aware there were two snipers somewhere with eyes on her, and she was damned glad for it. Still, she didn’t want to linger in the open too long no matter how covered she was. If Sokolov was determined to kill her, she didn’t doubt he’d find a way, snipers or not.
Sh
e took a deep breath, and as she always did when she needed a boost of confidence, channeled her inner Olivia Pope. With her shoulders thrown back she walked confidently to the entrance of the blocky gray building.
Once through the double doors she set her purse on the security belt and moved through the metal detector. She tried not to be nervous, but it was hard when the uniformed woman behind the computer screen stopped the belt and leaned closer to the monitor. When the belt started again she motioned for another officer to search Leah’s purse. Leah’s heart crawled into her mouth as she watched him pull out her wallet, passport, manicure kit, water bottle, and the lipstick.
“Ma’am,” he said, holding up the nail file and scissors from the manicure kit. “You can’t take these in with you.”
Her knees went weak with relief. She nodded that he could toss them and he handed her the purse. She tucked it under her arm and strode across the gleaming marble floors of the interior atrium.
The atrium stretched all the way to the roof where panels of glass allowed for a flood of light. At the center towered a black modern art sculpture, and for the life of her Leah couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be. A mountain with a slide? A deformed spider? Spaceships floating over a dragon? She walked to the north bank of elevators and pressed the up button, trying not to fidget while she waited for the ding and the pair of metal doors to slide open.
Once in the elevator she hit the button for the eighth floor where Senator Roth’s suite was located. Just as the doors began to close a hand shot inside, blocking them. The doors re-opened and a man of Japanese descent and a white woman wearing berry lipstick stepped into the elevator with her.
Leah shifted behind the couple, who pressed buttons for different floors. The woman’s perfume was cloying and filled the elevator like an expanding cloud. The man turned his head and said to the woman, “Thanks for breakfast.”
“No problem, Al. I hope this means we can see eye to eye on future pieces of legislation.”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
Finding Lies Page 22
