Читать книгу Agent-in-Charge - Leigh Riker, Leigh Riker - Страница 11

Total darkness obliterated Graham Warren’s senses. Disoriented, he felt his heartbeat kick into overdrive. The acrid scent of burning ash invaded his nostrils, and in the smoky haze he struggled not to cough, even to breathe hard. Any sound might be his last.

Just like Casey—almost—a few weeks ago.

Pushing his way forward into the bombed-out building, he kept his grip tight around his Uzi. His 9-millimeter Glock, tucked into the back of his waistband, would be his backup. Lose that, and he lost himself. His life.

In the blackness he crept forward, keeping his partner behind him. An advance team had already scouted the old apartment building on the fringes of D.C.

Any nagging fears he felt for Casey would have to wait. He had a job to do.

Focus.

Complete the mission.

Deliver the remnants of the terrorist cell to the proper federal authorities—

“Psst.”

His new partner’s voice at his rear stopped Graham.

“What?” He whipped his head around to mouth the word. They weren’t supposed to communicate, except in hand gestures. Jackie Miles knew that.

“To the right.”

Wishing again that his former partner hadn’t been sent to Afghanistan on another assignment, Graham looked in the direction Jackie had indicated and saw a room that had been blasted by the fire into near oblivion. Still, the walls remained.

So did the enemy.

A sudden burst of ammunition nearly shattered Graham’s eardrums. They were receiving fire! A shot whistled past his temple, and in a fury Graham pulled his trigger.

Seconds later, the hail of bullets had ended. Their Uzis still ready, his heart still pounding, Graham and his partner edged toward the room where the terrorists had hidden.

Graham steadied his aim.

“Freeze. Put your guns down. Hands in the air. Don’t get heroic.”

The blasts had already rattled through every pore in his skin, every cell in his body, every nerve ending, every muscle and bone. Most of all, Graham hated the noise, the sharp spurts of automatic fire, the tracers arcing through the night.

Except it wasn’t night.

Except for the smoke, it wasn’t real.

Tell his heart that, he thought. Tell his lungs.

It would be hours before he unwound.

Graham barged through the barren room. Kicking weapons out of the way, he secured the area. It stunk of creosote and kerosene. Hours before, after some punk had lobbed a Molotov cocktail, the D.C. fire department had issued permission to use the building. The team never knew when an opportunity for such an urban exercise might occur.

Graham barked commands to the mock terrorists. Up against the wall. Feet spread. Between them, he and Jackie Miles cuffed the “traitors” with plastic restraints. Other team members moved in to help.

And Graham inhaled his first deep breath in thirty minutes. He was sweating.

His partner laid a hand on his back. “You all right?”

Graham flinched. “Fine. You?”

“Still here. Still breathing.”

With that, he dragged her aside. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

Looking away, Jackie holstered her sidearm. “We would have been here all day if I hadn’t seen where they were hiding. It’s only training.”

“Yeah? Tell my churning gut. It could have been the real thing. If it were, we’d both be dead.”

Under guard, the “captives” filed past.

Holding his temper in check, Graham finished his duties in record time. Just as he’d raced from Hearthline, leaving the agency’s intense security behind as soon as the alert came in. Not secure enough, he thought, but he’d deal with that later. And with Jackie. What was her problem?

His new partner had a thing or two to learn. Still, they had stayed in one piece—and captured the “bad guys.” When the time came for a real takedown, they’d be ready.

Graham shook his head. Casey considered him to be just a boring civil servant. If she only knew. Which was exactly the point. She couldn’t.

Now that he could breathe again, it wasn’t just Jackie who worried him. Or the exercise. For the two weeks since Casey’s horrible accident, he’d had a nagging feeling of dread. He had to get out of here. Graham couldn’t get it out of his head that she might still be in danger.

He needed to see for himself that she wasn’t.

“TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE.”

The yellow-gray, elusive blur danced just beyond Casey’s wide-open eyes. Innocent and harmless, the light fluttered around the doctor’s examination room like a ballerina doing a tours j’eté under water. Then it spun away as if on satin toe shoes, trailing gossamer ribbons of remembered sun. Like that imaginary dancer’s flowing skirt, the glow was fleeting, graceful…gone.

Casey stared hard at the blank space in front of her. “Nothing,” she said, her heart beating hard.

She clenched the edge of the table with—probably—white-knuckled hands. She saw nothing. Felt nothing, except the terror that seemed to follow her everywhere. Without her sight, she felt vulnerable…afraid. Even the antiseptic smells of the office made her nervous. Oh, how she had hoped for better news.

At an unexpected brush of air on her skin, Casey jerked back on the exam table. The doctor had passed a slow hand in front of her face, that was all. She had to get hold of herself.

“Shapes?” he said. “Do you see any shapes?”

She shook her head. “No. Just the flickering light sometimes.” Rarely.

In the hospital that first day, her whole body had hurt but Casey’s vision seemed fine. Then a few days later, it blurred, dimmed. From there, her eyesight had gone downhill. Was this all she could expect, forever?

Fresh anxiety ripped through her.

Her future promised—no, threatened—total darkness, her own terrors locked inside her like a scream. She didn’t know where the next thought came from. Certainly she didn’t want it. I’ll never see Graham’s face again.

She squeezed her eyes tight, turning the darkness into a blood-red sunset behind her lids, and conjured him mentally—dark hair and eyes, that handsome face and beloved smile, broad shoulders and tough, lean body so at odds with his sedentary job pushing papers at Hearthline.

Casey bit back tears. “I should get myself a guide dog, what do you think? A nice big German shepherd….” With teeth like razors.

She loved animals. She’d always wanted a dog, but not under these circumstances. How would she take care of it now? Take care of herself? She couldn’t do this, wouldn’t survive on her own this time.

The doctor patted her shoulder but said nothing more. Which, for Casey, said it all. Poor thing. She hated pity.

“Try to be patient,” he said. “You never know in cases like these. It can take time.”

Casey couldn’t cling to false hope. “I doubt time will help. You said I had some kind of delayed hemorrhage.”

“Yes, that happens sometimes after a frontal head trauma. Edema within the optic nerves leads to—”

“I know what it leads to.” Casey touched a hand to her forehead, where some of the worst bruises had been. They were healed, but her eyes were not. She made herself say the words through tears. “I’m blind.”

Bilateral blindness. Both eyes.

He didn’t try to contradict her. When the doctor slipped out of the room to make her next appointment, he left Casey defenseless in the blackness from which there would be no escape. She was alone inside herself. And still terrified, not only because of her blindness.

In Casey’s mind getting run down in that parking garage had been no accident. To her, that meant only one thing. Someone—the same someone who had blinded her—would try again to kill her. And now she couldn’t protect herself.

Ironic, really, when she had prided herself on not needing anyone, especially Graham.

But it wasn’t Graham she “saw” now. Another face, unsmiling, flashed through her mind. When she’d been in pain, she had suppressed the memory of the man she’d seen in the elevator at Graham’s office building. Pale hair, pale features, she remembered. Why think of him again now? Was he harmless, just an acquaintance she couldn’t quite place—or part of the threat she continued to feel?

The fear raced through her again like another speeding car bent upon her total destruction. When it happened the next time, she wouldn’t be able to see it coming.

IN THE LOBBY of her doctor’s building where he’d been waiting, Graham was relieved to see Casey finally emerge from the elevator. She wasn’t alone.

Graham nodded at the nurse then focused on Casey.

“Hey, babe.” He swallowed. “How’d it go?” He had heard the tap of her white cane before he actually saw her, but he could tell by her face that she’d had bad news. Casey didn’t hide her emotions as well as Graham did these days. She hadn’t walled them up inside.

Startled by his voice so near, Casey missed a step and Graham cursed himself. He hadn’t meant to surprise her. Briefly, her head tilted in his direction. Then she kept walking, the cane that had become an extension of her right hand in the past few weeks rhythmically tapping the Carrara marble floor.

“It’s a miracle,” she murmured in the too-light tone she sometimes used to downplay a problem, as she walked right past him. “I can see, I can see.”

Obviously, she couldn’t, and sudden anger swept through him. Graham glanced again around the busy lobby of the professional building, making sure it remained secure. For the past half hour, after his quick stop at home to shower away the smell of smoke and change clothes, he’d made regular checks of the area from his leaning stance against the marble wall. But, like Jackie Miles’s earlier blunder, he couldn’t quell his own uneasiness about Casey.

Graham peeled himself away from the wall. “I’ll take care of her,” he said to the nurse after introducing himself. When Casey didn’t object, he waited again while she thanked her doctor’s nurse, who gave Graham a crisp goodbye. And another thorough once-over as if to reassure herself that she was leaving Casey in good hands.

Graham watched the woman disappear into the elevator.

Casey wouldn’t welcome him fussing over her, either. Yet she needed someone right now—in this case, him.

He stepped in front of her, forcing Casey to halt when she would have struck off on her own.

“Tell me what he said.”

She gazed sightlessly at the floor between them.

“He said, ‘be patient.’”

Her sleek blond bob had slipped like silk around her pale cheeks, creating a heavy curtain that hid her smooth, even features. Her straight little nose. Her beautiful green eyes were hooded by her lids now, and she didn’t try to look at him, which made him all the more angry. With her, with himself. They might not be married any longer but…

“Casey. Don’t. It’s me.”

And he watched her crumple. Just like that.

She didn’t want to, he guessed, but she flowed like warm honey into his waiting arms.

To his surprise, Graham felt a flash of familiar but unwelcome desire run through his body. With their first touch, he had caught fire—like that run-down apartment building for the team exercise. Graham tried to tamp it down, but Casey, slender yet curvy in all the right places, her skin warm and as soft as down, felt like home in his embrace. Hell. What was he doing, lusting over a broken woman? A woman who didn’t belong to him now?

“It’s over,” she said against the front of his dress shirt. He felt wetness seep through the blue cotton. “I’m trapped inside myself. I’ve never liked small, enclosed spaces, but now that’s all I have. I’ll never be able to run an art gallery of my own again. Never see the paintings on the walls. The colors. Never know if something is good, or bad. How could I now?”

Graham shut his eyes, sharing the darkness with her for a moment. “You’ll find a way. You know you will.”

He had to remind himself that they were quits. Over, as she’d said of her gallery.

His remark seemed to stiffen her spine, but he hated seeing her like this, hated knowing what someone else had done to her in that lonely parking garage. To Casey, her career, her life, her future had been snatched away along with her vision.

And her accident still troubled him, too.

That was natural.

She had nearly been killed.

But why in hell had the accident happened in the first place? Mere steps from his own office at Hearthline?

He took another look around the lobby. When he saw nothing suspicious, Graham tipped up her chin so he could look into her eyes, and the pain ripped through him all over again. Her gorgeous green eyes. Hell, he could do this much for her if nothing more.

“Let me take you home. My car’s outside.”

Casey pulled away, then set her shoulders. “I may be blind. I’m not crippled. I am fully capable of leaving this lobby and raising a hand to call a cab.” She stepped back a few inches. “You have no responsibility for me, Graham, remember? Our marriage is over.”

“We’re divorced, not mortal enemies.” Which only made Graham angrier at himself. “Frankly, if you ask me, you could use not only a lift—you could use a friend.”

“You are not my friend.”

Ouch, he thought, but he knew he hadn’t acted like a pal, much less a husband. He couldn’t fault her for not trusting him, for walking out. He’d driven her to it.

Yet Graham would be the first to admit that things weren’t always what they seemed. Including him. Too bad he couldn’t tell Casey anything—for now—but lies.

He double-checked the lobby, finding only the normal flow of passersby intent upon their errands. It didn’t soothe him. He forced his tone to sound lazy, nonthreatening. He wanted to get her out of here.

“Listen, friend or not, I’ve got a great car. Leather seats. Air conditioning. I haven’t had a speeding ticket in, oh, three or four weeks.” Since before Casey was hurt, the last time he’d felt able to unwind. “Take a chance, babe. Sit back and enjoy. I’ll have you home in fifteen minutes. Less, if we hit the lights right.”

Safe, he thought. If only, as he’d planned, he could have kept her safe….

Casey raised her face to his.

“Thank you very much, but I can find my own way home.”

Graham’s mouth tightened. Like hell you will. When she started to tap-tap her way toward the revolving doors, he stood there for a moment, staring, before he went after her. He couldn’t help feeling thwarted—and for some niggling reason he couldn’t define, still afraid for her.

He took one step before he felt the very air around him grow thick, heavy, with an ominous portent that seemed to smother him—and at the same time to shout a warning.

“Casey!”

Too late. Helpless, Graham watched it happen. One second she was making her way to the revolving doors, probably guided to their location by the constant swish of movement she heard as people came and went. In the next instant Casey had been shoved into a moving door. From the sidewalk, a man in dark clothes sent the door spinning, circling, round and round and round with Casey trapped inside.

Breaking into a run, Graham hurdled a woman’s stroller carrying a small child and twisted to avoid a pair of startled businessmen. His heart threatened to burst in his chest. Out of my way, damn it. All he could think was, Trust the feeling. I was right. He had known something bad would happen. He had to get to Casey….

CASEY’S CRIES echoed through the vaulted lobby. By now, she didn’t know up from down, in from out. Her world of darkness whirled. Played havoc with her sense of balance.

She tried to brace herself but felt like a rag doll being flung by a furious child from one side of the constantly circling space in which she was caught to the other. Over and over. Her head spun. Her own voice shrieked, and sound shattered. First she heard the swish of the revolving door, then a wedge of traffic noise. Blaring horns. Screeching brakes. A few footsteps passing by. Then that pressured silence again, like being shut inside a vacuum.

Casey couldn’t tell where she was. In the spinning section of the door her shoulder hit one glass partition then another, hard, her bones and muscles throbbing on impact.

The whole terrifying incident happened in less than a minute, but all the while she could sense the man who stood outside, preventing her escape. She could imagine the Grim Reaper smile on his lips. Her blood rushed through her veins, the memory of her “accident” roared through her mind again. Was it the man from the elevator? She tried to fight back, to push against the glass, but without effort he only shoved the door. Harder.

GRAHAM’S PULSE hammered. He raced across the lobby in seconds that seemed like a lifetime. Charging out onto the sidewalk, he stopped the man’s arm on the upswing before he could push the revolving door again. Then Graham lowered his shoulder and charged, trying to butt him. The guy sidestepped him and Graham missed. Bastard.

He was solid, well-muscled. So was Graham, but before he could recover his own balance, the guy was gone. Graham hadn’t even seen his face. Casey, who had been flung out of the revolving door when Graham’s arrival slowed its motion, was lying on the sidewalk. By that time a crowd had gathered.

“Somebody help her!” he shouted then took off to prevent the guy’s escape. Graham did his best imitation of a linebacker, snaking his way through the puzzled crowd, breathing in sharp hisses like a set of air brakes. Heads turned, necks craned at him and the man he was chasing down the busy Washington street, but Graham’s hours in the Hearthline gym were no match for his heart-pounding terror.

He was still ten yards away when the man, a blur of black pants and shirt, knocked a male pedestrian aside. He vaulted into a dark car at the curb, then tore off, literally. On his way out of the space he bashed the left rear fender of the SUV parked in front of him. Metal crunched. A taillight splintered. A passing taxi horn blew, the cab narrowly missing the car that peeled off into traffic. Then there was silence. Eerie silence.

Graham no longer heard the rush of passing vehicles, the growing buzz of conversation. He bent over, hands braced on his thighs, and gulped in the smoggy, humid air until he could breathe. Then he jogged back to Casey, now sitting on the pavement looking dazed.

Several people hovered over her, offering handkerchiefs and sanitary hand cleaner. Graham bent down to her. Casey’s palms and knees were scraped raw, oozing blood, and fresh anger spurted through him.

“Damn. Come on, babe, let’s get out of here.”

With thanks for the small group of passersby who had come to her aid, he gently helped Casey to her feet. Graham should have trusted his instincts. Divorced or not, whether or not she trusted him, he needed to see her safe at home. Then he needed to start asking hard questions. He hadn’t wanted to think the hit-and-run was deliberate, but now he would learn the truth—all of it.

Maybe then he could tell her the truth about himself.

“YOU SURE YOU’RE OKAY?” he asked Casey.

They had reached her apartment near Dupont Circle, but Casey was still shaking. Hadn’t she known someone would try again to hurt her?

“I’m okay,” she tried to assure Graham when he could see that she was not. He could see.

Digging in her bag for her key, she held it out to him. She wouldn’t be able to fumble it into position herself. Let him do it. Just this once.

Casey even allowed herself a brief, familiar fantasy. Less than a year ago they might have come home like this from a rare evening out, probably at some government function. Still in his tux, his dark hair glossy, his eyes hot, his sensual mouth curved in an always surprising smile, Graham would curl up beside her on the sofa for a nightcap. One thing would lead to another… They’d make lazy love then fall asleep in each other’s arms, warm, sated, only to wake the next morning with their clothes strewn all around the room. And they’d make love all over again.

Casey shook herself. That was all in the past. Graham was the last man she could be intimate with now, even if he was the only one who made her feel safe.

These familiar surroundings didn’t quell her anxiety. The smells of cooking that drifted from other apartments, the blast of someone’s television, the feel of the floor beneath her feet in the hallway could lead to fresh terror in a heartbeat.

As panic engulfed her, she had to suppress the impulse to throw herself into Graham’s arms again. That would create a danger of a different kind. She couldn’t get near Graham without noticing his scent, his body heat, the deep timbre of his voice that heated her blood.

Maybe she shouldn’t have taken Graham up on his offer of a ride home. But her nerves were shot. She kept remembering those frightening seconds in the revolving door, being spun out of control. Every sound, even the scrape of the key in the lock, set her heart racing again. Who might be lurking around the nearest corner? Ready to attack her again? To kill.

Graham couldn’t slip the key into the lock fast enough for Casey. Then he said, “Wait. Don’t go in.”

And in the entryway, she could feel it, too, that sixth sense that they weren’t quite alone. Then suddenly, they weren’t.

The door across the hall flew open and footsteps pounded toward her. Casey felt a heavy hand settle on her shoulder. “What’s wrong here?”

The dark voice belonged to her neighbor, but not to her elderly and sometimes forgetful neighbor. It was Anton’s son, big Rafe Valera. Wide-shouldered, thick-muscled, a bull of a man with dark hair and hard gray eyes. To Casey he’d always been as gentle as a kitten without claws.

Graham disagreed. Without warning he slammed Rafe up against the doorframe. “Drop it.”

“Damn it,” Rafe bellowed, “you almost broke my arm!”

Casey heard a brief scuffle, some kind of karate throw, then a few grunts before something heavy, like metal, thudded to the floor.

Graham’s voice was a low-pitched snarl. “This jerk was carrying a gun.”

A gun? Rafe owned a gun?

“I heard noise,” he said. “I was worried about Casey.”

The two men knew each other slightly but Casey felt their usual instant dislike in the air. Once, that would have meant jealousy on Graham’s part. She thought of Rafe’s dangerous good looks, his usual black clothes.

“You remember Rafe,” she said, which didn’t lighten Graham’s mood.

“Does he always flash a .357 Magnum when he sees you?” Clearly disapproving, Graham disappeared inside to check the apartment. Then he was back, prowling the living room while she and Rafe hovered in the open door, silent with tension.

When Casey heard her answering machine click on not ten feet away, she jumped. “Listen to this,” Graham muttered.

She frowned, puzzled. It was only her doctor’s receptionist with a reminder message from yesterday about her appointment today. “What is it?”

“Someone was here.”

She’d been right and Casey sounded braver than she felt. “The man who pushed me into the revolving door?” She could feel Rafe’s sharp eyes on her but didn’t stop to explain her latest mishap. “You mean, he heard the message. Then he knew where to find me.”

“And followed you there,” Graham agreed. “There are no visible signs of forced entry. There isn’t a chair out of place, nothing disturbed.” This only seemed to make him more suspicious. “Valera, did you see or hear anything?”

“I was about to wake my father from his afternoon rest before Casey got home. I didn’t hear or see a thing until you came.”

Graham returned his attention to Casey. “When you weren’t here at the apartment earlier—thank God, you weren’t—your visitor must have split. Apparently he got exactly the information he needed.”

The other apartment door opened again. Casey heard Anton’s carpet slippers shuffle across the hall. The older man sounded frantic. His European accent had deepened.

“What is happening? I wake up from my nap and Rafe is gone.” She envisioned Anton’s graying hair, standing on end, his blue eyes fierce. “You are not hurt again, Casey?”

“No.” Not too much. “I’m fine.” She reached out a reassuring hand, and heard Rafe bend down to retrieve his gun. Graham didn’t stop him, but his tone stayed grim.

“I’ll talk to you later, Valera. You too, Anton.” He waited until they went back across the hall. Then he ushered Casey inside and locked the door.

“If I had any doubts before about your hit-and-run being deliberate, Casey, I don’t now. Ever since the revolving-door incident, I’ve been wondering if the guy saw me with you in that lobby. If he did, then why risk going after you?” Graham paused. “Now I wonder if he did see me—and wanted us to know that you aren’t safe, even with someone else around. That you’re a target even in a crowd.”

Casey shivered. “Because I’m…blind.”

“I think he wants us to know you’re always alone in that way, always vulnerable. And he can get to you. No matter where you are.”

Us? “Then earlier he didn’t mean to kill me.”

“It was a warning,” Graham suggested. “But why?”

Without thinking, Casey took a step forward. Graham moved, too. Then she was in his strong, hard arms, held tight to his broad chest. Graham pressed his cheek to her hair.

“What the hell is going on?” he muttered.

Casey didn’t know. Yet even here, in her own home, she wasn’t safe. Until she learned why, she wouldn’t forget those terrifying moments caught in the whirling doors.

Just as she couldn’t forget the man in the elevator.

Or being run down like some hunted prey.