Читать книгу Risky Engagement - Merline Lovelace - Страница 8

Autumn had painted the chestnut trees lining the quiet side street in the heart of Washington D.C.'s embassy district with brilliant color. The blazing reds and oranges and golds lent a festive, almost carnival air to the stately town houses shaded by their branches.

There was nothing festive in the air inside the town house midway down the block, however. A bronze plaque beside the door identified the building as home to the offices of the President’s Special Envoy. Most Washington insiders knew the special envoy was one of those meaningless titles given by various administrations over the years to wealthy campaign contributors who wanted to rub elbows with the country’s movers and shakers.

Only a handful of key presidential advisors knew the special envoy’s real job. The incumbent also doubled as Director of OMEGA, an agency so secret its operatives were activated as a last resort, and then at the personal direction of the president.

One of those operatives was in the field now. And the shot he’d taken just moments ago had sent everyone in the high-tech control center on the third floor of the town house into a frenzy of activity.

Nick Jensen, code name Lightning, had served as OMEGA’s director through three successive administrations. This one, he’d promised his wife and lively twins, would be his last. Until he walked out the door, however, he lived night and day with the knowledge that he put his agents’ lives on the line every time he sent them into the field.

His eyes narrow and intent, Lightning studied the dual images projected onto the control center’s wall-size screen. One was the face of the woman Wolf had captured in his crosshairs, digitized and transmitted back to OMEGA. The second image his people had pulled up after running the first through a highly sophisticated facial recognition program.

“Who is she?” he asked the tense operative standing next to him.

Deke Griffin, code name Ace, didn’t hesitate. He’d acted as Wolf’s controller from the start of this op, and he hadn’t slept in almost forty-eight hours.

“Dr. Nina Nicole Grant,” he replied, with no trace of his usual Texas twang. “Born Farmington, New Mexico. Graduated high school at sixteen. PhD in biology from University of New Mexico at twenty, followed three years later by an MBA from the same university.”

A muscle ticked in the side of Lightning’s jaw. “Smart woman.”

“Very smart. She served as Director of Biomedical Research at Holbrook Laboratories. Left five years ago to start up Grant Medical Data Systems.”

Ace paused, focusing intently on the left image. They’d pulled it from a 60 Minutes segment on the latest crop of women to make the Fortune 500 list. The video still showed a slender businesswoman in a white blouse and neatly tailored black suit. Her light brown hair brushed her shoulders in a smooth, glossy sweep. Her caramel-colored eyes gazed at the camera with cool confidence.

“According to 60 Minutes,” he related tersely, “Grant is well on her way to becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs—male or female—under the age of thirty in this country.”

“Smart and rich.” The muscle in Lightning’s jaw jumped again. “Just like DeWitt.”

United States Senator Janice Dewitt, recently deceased. Victim or accomplice in a deadly, high-stakes game of espionage. It was OMEGA’s job to find out which.

“What’s Grant’s connection to the target?”

“We haven’t found one. We’re still running her through the computers. If she and the target crossed paths anytime in the past, we’ll smoke it out.” Ace’s eyes cut to the screen. “Maybe Wolf will have some luck on his end.”

“He’d better,” Lightning said, grimly. “We’re fast running out of time. Tell him to make contact with Grant and nose out her game.”

“Will do.”

Ace flicked the switch on the console that put him in instant contact with Special Agent Rafe Blackstone, code name Wolf.

Wolf acknowledged Lightning’s instructions, even as he kept the woman lined up in his scope. She’d lowered her oversize sunglasses just long enough for him to capture her image and transmit it instantly to OMEGA. The glasses were in place again, shielding her face, but he had her features imprinted on his brain. What he didn’t have were answers to the questions her presence raised.

What the hell was she doing out here in the middle of nowhere? Alone. On foot. In the blazing sun. He tapped an impatient toe while a Hummer rattled down from the hacienda in answer to her call of a few moments ago.

“Paulo.”

The figure stretched out beside Wolf cocked his head. “Sí?“

“Check the road from town. See if the woman has someone waiting for her.”

With a nod, Special Agent Paulo Mendoza stuffed a pair of miniaturized but very high-powered binoculars into his shirt pocket and scuttled backward until he’d dropped below the line of sight of the hacienda’s high-tech security cameras. Crouched low, he used the cover of prickly creosote and cactus to circle the base of the hill where he and Wolf had set up their surveillance. The only sound to mark his passage was a faint rattle of his boots on loose shale.

He returned mere moments later. “I spotted a car pulled over to the side of the road about a mile back. A rental, with the hood up.”

Was it a ploy? A trick to gain entry to the heavily guarded hacienda? If so, it had worked. Wolf’s stomach tightened as Grant climbed into the backseat of the dusty Hummer.

This had to be the rottenest vacation ever!

Forcing a smile, Nina declined her host’s invitation to stay for tea on the tiled terrace overlooking the Sea of Cortez. She was hot and sweaty and in no mood for nice. Even with someone as urbane as the silver-maned expatriate whose men had just radioed in to say they’d reattached the fuel line that had shaken loose in Nina’s rental.

“Thanks,” she said with a smile, “but walking a mile in the sun took all the starch out of me. I’d better head back to town.”

“Are you sure?” Sebastian Cordell’s smile gleamed white against his deep tan. “It’s not often such charming company is stranded almost at the gates of my hacienda.”

“Some other time, perhaps.”

“I shall hold you to that.” Bowing, he kissed her hand with Old World graciousness. “My men will drive you to your car.”

Nina winced as she traded the breeze-cooled shade of the portico for another blast of sun. With a nod to the muscled-up guard holding the Hummer’s door, she climbed into the passenger seat.

Her escort’s all-too-visible shoulder holster had sent her back a step when he’d first climbed out of his vehicle and asked her business. Tough Guy hadn’t appeared the least bit sympathetic to her plight either. He’d checked inside her tote—for hidden weapons, she’d realized belatedly—then demanded to see some ID before he let her get anywhere close to the frigid air blasting from the Hummer interior. Sweat coursing between her breasts, Nina had handed over her wallet.

Not the smartest move, she admitted in retrospect, but this disaster was only the latest in a string of events that had thrown her off stride. The first was getting unengaged from the fiancé she’d discovered had tapped into her computer without her knowledge or consent and tried to milk the business connections she’d worked so hard to establish over the years. Connections that had helped transform her medical data digitization venture into a thriving enterprise with multimillion-dollar contracts.

You would think her employees would understand why she’d put her bruised heart into storage and devoted every waking hour to work. But no! Her entire staff, from her bossy executive assistant to the pimply adolescent who delivered the mail, had threatened to resign en masse if she didn’t get out of the office and decompress, for God’s sake!

So she had to fly down to Baja California. Had to check into an exclusive seaside resort. Had to twiddle her thumbs and force herself to vegetate by the pool for two days until a need to do something—anything—propelled her to jump in a rental car and drive out to view the remote seaside village her guidebook had touted as a “must see.”

Then her rental car had to break down out there among the cactus and sun-baked hills. Where, she discovered, not a single bar popped up on her cell phone. Probably because she’d forgotten to charge the damn thing!

Thank God for the hacienda she’d spotted after a hot, dusty trek—and that the problem with her rental was so easily fixed. All she wanted now was a plunge in the pool at her resort, a frosty margarita, and some of that decompression time her staff insisted she needed.

Bracing herself for another blast of heat, Nina climbed out of the Hummer and thanked the two men who’d been sent to check the car. They sported shoulder holsters, too. Sebastian Cordell took his personal security seriously.

“Muchas gracias.”

She fished a wad of pesos out of her straw tote, but the two men waved away the tip. Stuffing the pesos back in her bag, Nina thanked them again and slid behind the wheel. A dusty half hour later she hit the roundabout on the outskirts of Cabo San Lucas.

By then, a plunge in the pool had dropped well down her list of priorities. Her resort was another twenty minutes away. Her parched throat cried for something cold and wet—now! With that icy margarita in mind, she whipped the wheel and exited the roundabout. A screech of tires had her wincing and offering an apology to the vehicle that had pulled into the circle behind her.

“Sorry.”

Luck was with her. She made only one wrong turn in Cabo’s narrow streets before she found the multistory parking garage that served the inner harbor. The lower floors were full, but she zipped into an empty space on the fourth floor. Locking the rental car, she took the elevator down to the paved walkway leading to the marina.

According to her trusty guidebook, Cabo’s protected inner harbor attracted sailboats and yachts from all over the world. A forest of tall silver masts validated that claim and acted as beacons to the restaurants, shops and bars lining the marina. Happy hour was in full swing Nina noted as she approached the crowded center. Lively salsa and mariachi music filled the air and souvenir hawkers had turned out en masse to capture the lucrative tourist trade.

She escaped most of the salesmen, but one particularly persistent youngster glued himself to her side. Flashing a grin, he flipped back a sleeve to display a skinny forearm banded with shiny bangles.

“Hola, senorita! You buy a bracelet from me, yes?”

“No, gracias.”

“These very good quality silver. From Taxco.”

Right. Uh-huh. If those bangles were products of Mexico’s fabled silver mines, she was Angelina Jolie.

“They’re very nice,” she replied diplomatically, “but I don’t wear silver.”

“Very good quality,” he chorused again, twisting off a braided band. “Here, you try.”

“No. Gracias. No.”

“You try! You try!”

He grabbed her arm and shoved the braided band at her clenched fist. Half suspecting a ploy to distract her while one of his cohorts lifted her wallet from the tote slung over her shoulder, she tried to pull her arm back.

“No! I don’t—”

“You heard the lady. Beat it, kid.”

The deep growl spun both Nina and the pint-size vendor around. She looked up—not a common occurrence for someone who measured five eight in her bare feet—and felt her stomach do a flip.

Whoa, momma! Not two minutes ago, she’d been thinking of Angelina Jolie. Now here was James McAvoy, Angelina’s sexy costar in Wanted. Same dark hair, same blue bedroom eyes, same chiseled chin.

Only this version was tougher. Leaner. Definitely not into Hollywood chic. His boots had collected almost as much dust as Nina’s sandals. His wrinkled khaki trousers and the gaudy tropical shirt he wore over a black T-shirt, looked as though he’d just pulled them out of a suitcase. And the man needed a shave. Badly.

Nina was no stickler for protocol. Well, maybe a little. Okay, a lot. She expected her employees to present a neat, businesslike appearance at all times. That applied equally to everyone, from her division heads to the medical data-entry clerks.

She was fair about it, though. She held herself to the same strict standards. She dressed well, if conservatively, and worked out regularly to maintain both her health and her trim figure. She was conservative in her makeup, too. A few swipes of mascara was all she needed to enhance her brown eyes. Peach lip gloss did the trick for her mouth—which she now forced into a polite smile.

“Thanks for the assistance,” she said as the kid who’d dogged her footsteps scampered away. “The boy was nothing, if not persistent.”

“You have to learn how to shake ‘em off. Must be your first time in Cabo.”

It was a statement, not a question, but she answered it anyway. “Yes, it is.”

Those blue eyes made a slow descent from her wide-brimmed straw hat to her designer sunglasses to the lips her ex-fiancé had described as all too kissable.

That was before she’d handed the conniving rat his walking papers, of course. During their last, somewhat less than cordial meeting, Kevin had flung other descriptive phrases at her. “Hard” and “stubborn” and “a real ball-buster” came immediately to mind.

“I was just going to have a beer.” The dark-haired stranger hooked a thumb at the open-air bar behind him. “Care to join me?”

Thirst battled with common sense. If Nina hadn’t been thinking of Kevin, odds were she would have turned down this casual invitation, just as she had that of the silver-maned hacienda owner. She never cruised bars, much less let strange men pick her up. But her parched throat and the remembered sting of Kevin’s insults overcame caution.

“Sure. Why not?”

The Purple Parrot looked much like the dozens of other bars in the harbor area. Square tables topped by chipped formica crowded its railed-in veranda. Red and green-plastic chairs added a colorful air, as did the plastic pennants strung from corner to corner. Inside the bar itself were shelves lined with a staggering array of bottles.

“Over there.”

Grasping Nina’s elbow, the stranger steered her toward a just-vacated table with an unobstructed view of the marina. The sudden and totally unexpected sizzle that radiated up her bare arm flustered her so much she barely took in the sea of gleaming white sailboats.

“I’m Rafe,” he said by way of introduction. “Rafe Blackstone.”

“Nina. Uh, Grant.”

Oh, for pity’s sake! The heat must have gotten to her more than she’d realized. Bad enough she’d given in to the impulse to have a drink with a man who looked like a cross between a movie stud and a hood. One touch, and said stud came close to finishing what the sun had started. She was practically melting under her linen sundress.

It had to be that dark stubble on his cheeks and chin. Or the way his black T-shirt stretched across a taut, flat belly when he leaned back in his chair and unfolded his long legs. Or the slow, considering look he gave her through a screen of ridiculously thick lashes that any woman would have killed for.

Whatever it was, Nina responded in a way she’d never responded before to any male, Kevin included. A delicious spark of heat licked at her veins, and she could feel the muscles low in her belly tighten. Surprised and not a little flustered by her reaction, she removed her sunglasses and tipped the man seated across from her another polite smile.

“Where’s home, Rafe?”

“Here and there. Mostly San Diego these days.

You?”

“Albuquerque.”

“What do you do there?”

Before she could answer, a waiter materialized at their table. She ordered a margarita on the rocks, her companion a Dos Equis.

“I own and operate a company that digitizes medical data,” she said when the waiter retreated.

“That so?” He arched a brow. “Given the president’s push to computerize the medical profession, your business must be thriving.”

“It is … now. We had some lean years when we first started out,” she admitted wryly. “Hospitals weren’t exactly anxious to share patient data. Plus, we had to make sure we didn’t violate privacy laws. We got our foot in the door by trending data from local sources and providing it to medical facilities and research facilities across the state.” A touch of pride crept into her voice. “We now harvest information from more than three thousand sources, analyze the input, and supply trends to a host of private and governmental medical research centers across the U.S.”

“Only the U.S.?”

His slouch was the epitome of lazy relaxation, but his obvious interest reassured Nina. She always worried about boring folks with her passion for what she did. Or worse, lapsing into so much technical jargon that she lost her listeners completely.

“We still have to work within privacy laws,” she said, “but I’m hoping to go international soon.”

The seemingly casual comment put a sudden kink in Wolf’s gut. The woman wanted to go international, did she? With the help of Sebastian Cordell, aka Stephen Caulder, aka a half-dozen other aliases?

Or was she after the sensitive, top-secret information Cordell had stolen and intended to auction to the highest bidder? Had she staged her vehicle’s breakdown? Used it as an entree into Cordell’s heavily guarded compound? Was she that good?

Wolf was still trying to decide when the waiter delivered their drinks. The man placed two frosted glasses in front of Grant and earned a surprised look.

“I didn’t order two drinks.”

“This is happy hour, señorita. You order one, I bring two.”

“But …”

“Same price. No problem.”

She gave in with a shrug and a smile.

Wolf had to give her credit. She had that polite half smile down pat. Friendly, but with just enough reserve in it to keep a man at a proper distance.

Nina Grant didn’t know it yet, he thought grimly, but the two of them were about to get up close and very personal.

The muscles low in his belly tightened at the prospect. This is what he did. What he’d done now for almost ten years. Why he kept to himself and trusted no one outside his immediate circle of friends and fellow agents. Over the years, he’d locked horns with too many men and women who’d crossed the line. In more than one instance, it was kill or be killed.

In this one…

He didn’t have a fix on Nina Grant yet, and the uncertainty scraped on his nerves. Extracting the lime wedge from the neck of his beer, he tipped the bottle in her direction.

“Here’s to international cooperation.”

She clinked her frosted glass against the bottle. “I’ll drink to that.”

He let the lager slide down his throat, watching while she licked some salt from the rim before taking a sip of her drink. The small act was completely natural, the way most people tasted a margarita—and disturbingly provocative. Wolf’s belly tightened another notch as he followed the movement of her tongue.

Come on, he urged silently. Drink the damn thing.

He knew from experience that two-for-one happy hour drinks at most Cabo San Lucas dives were usually so watered down you couldn’t even taste the booze in them. The Purple Parrot, however, had a reputation to maintain. That’s why he’d chosen it. Another double round, and he’d have Nina Grant singing like a tanked-up canary.

“How long have you lived in Albuquerque?” he asked to get the ball rolling.

“I got a job there after grad school and decided to stay. I love the climate. The people. The mountains. The incredible sunsets. Seems I’ve spent almost as much time traveling recently as I have at home, though. I almost cringe when I have to get on a plane these days.”

Wolf pumped her for information, subtly, smoothly, and hid a smile of satisfaction when she took another taste of her drink.

“Whew! This is potent.”

“Not that potent. It goes down easier after the first few sips.”

“I’ll bet.” Her nose wrinkling, she set the glass aside. “It’s hitting my empty stomach like a sledgehammer. I’d better stop with this one and head to my hotel.”

So much for his plan to get her sloshed. No matter. He wasn’t about to let her wiggle out of his net now.

“So let me buy you dinner.”