At Any Cost

Cara Ellison

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004
New York, New York 10016

www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 2012 by Catherine Meredith

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email [email protected].

First Diversion Books edition May 2013

ISBN:
978-1-626810-66-2

The law office of Johnson Sloan Pruitt occupied three floors in an elegant steel and glass temple on G Street in the center of the District of Columbia. The sleek décor and furnishings were modern to the point of minimalist, allowing the astonishing view from the massive fan windows speak for itself. A postcard-perfect view of the White House reminded clients—as if they needed reminding—of the firm's literal and metaphorical proximity to power. As old as the Constitution itself, with alumni attorneys who had gone on to the Supreme Court, the Attorney General's office, and various other outposts of power, Johnson Sloan Pruitt was among the most prestigious and best-connected white-shoe law firms in the District of Columbia.

The young, attractive associates who populated the hushed and storied hallways were scions of America's ruling dynasties, endowed with rich family legacies, six-figure educations, and important social connections that guaranteed an effortless rise to the top of whatever field they ultimately chose, whether it was law or something more interesting and inevitable, like politics.

In contrast to her coworkers, Fallon Hughes grew up on a horse ranch in Shelby, Montana and earned her law degree from Pepperdine, an institution her peers thought was roughly equivalent to a second-rate community college. Unlike the other associates who had been selected for their bluest of blue blood, Fallon's family was nouveau riche.

Ranchers and oilmen could not impress the posturing-and-maneuvering snobs at Johnson Sloan Pruitt or the senior partners who ignored her from their massive corner offices, and they never let her forget it.

She blended in like baby powder in oil.

Knowing she was never going to win over her detractors, Fallon rarely discussed herself at work and tried to stay out of office politics entirely. Instead, she attempted to earn the respect of her bosses by producing excellent work. Currently she was tethered to her desk ninety hours a week trying to defend a multi-billionaire hedge fund manager who had been indicted on forty counts of fraud, conspiracy, and obstruction. The Department of Justice alleged that Robert Chandler was operating a ponzi scheme, defrauding wealthy widows to fund his lavish lifestyle, which included a fleet of twenty Ferraris, a yacht the size of a football field, and a French chateau featuring a bubbling fountain of Cristal champagne that flowed twenty-four hours a day, whether he was in residence or not. When he was indicted, he finally shut the spigot on the champers and sought the services of Johnson Sloan Pruitt, desperately attempting to save himself from a life sentence in federal prison.

Though Fallon had only a miniscule aspect of the case, it was a plumy assignment, high profile, with lots of opportunity to impress the partners. Certainly all those billable hours made for happy management committees, especially during bonus season. So with her career in the balance, Fallon swallowed her certainty that her client was
guilty, guilty, guilty
and went about defending him with zeal that was almost religious. For weeks now, Fallon had ignored the grinding fatigue that infiltrated her body like a virus and kept up the pace, living on coffee and grit.

As she deleted two inelegant sentences from the motion she was working on, the phone on her desk warbled discreetly. She shifted her gaze just long enough to see the word UNKNOWN flash on the caller ID.

“Fallon Hughes,” she answered distractedly, her concentration already returning to the motion.

“Hello?” a husky, unfamiliar male voice rasped.

“This is Fallon Hughes. Can I help you?” Dead air hissed for several seconds, then the trembling voice said, “Good, hi. I need to talk to you … to a lawyer.” His breath was labored, as if he were in the middle of some physically demanding activity. “Is this confidential? Like attorney/client confidentiality …?”

“Um … No,” Fallon replied, confused enough to pause her work on the screen and focus on the call. “Attorney/client privilege only extends to actual clients. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I need to talk to you but I can't do it on the phone. This phone is tapped and I don't have much time. They're trying to kill me. They're right behind me …. This is a matter of national security.” He sounded like he was forcing himself to speak clearly and calmly, tightening a tourniquet on his emotions so that he might be taken seriously.

“I'm serious, ma'am,” he added, correctly interpreting her silence as skepticism. “They're gonna kill me.”

Even taking into consideration the very real possibility that she was talking to a mentally unstable person, the urgency in his voice sounded genuine. She picked up a pen. “What is your name?”

“Antoine Campbell.”

“What's the national security issue?”

“I can't talk about it on the phone. Can we meet somewhere?”

“Tell me what's happening, then if I think it's necessary to meet, we can set up an appointment.”

“Please, they're trying to kill me. If they know I'm talking to you …. Shit! I don't know … I'm really scared, man, these guys are psycho …. Please help me!”

“Who is psycho?” Fallon asked, noting the mounting hysteria in his voice.

“The guys chasing me! I have to talk to you.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“I'm on the Beltway right now, heading to D.C. They are right behind me. They're going to kill me! Richard Mullinax is giving away the map to the keys! You have to help me!”

Fallon did not know what a
map to the keys
was, but the name Richard Mullinax stopped her short. As Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, his was not a name that many people outside the government would just casually know. Fallon's attention sharpened.

“What does Richard have to do with this? How do you know Richard Mullinax?”

“Please, I can't … in person … I will tell you everything.”

“Do you want to come to my office?”

“No. Somewhere public.”

“There's a coffee shop, the Daily Grind, at the corner of 15th and K Street.”

“K?”

“Yes, K. As in
kilo
.”

“I'll be there in about fifteen minutes.” The call abruptly disconnected.

Placing her pen on the yellow sticky note she'd scribbled on, Fallon mentally replayed the conversation. National security? More likely, he was off his medication. The District of Columbia was ground zero for paranoiacs. St. Elizabeth's Hospital was full of poor broken souls who thought they held national security secrets or that the president was beaming secret messages into their dental fillings. On the surface, Antoine Campbell didn't seem so very different from those people.

And yet … Fallon had grown up around actors and had a good ability to intuit when someone was being artificial; she had an ear for the rehearsed, the overdramatized. The terror in Antoine Campbell's voice sounded genuine with an edge not even Meryl Streep could pull off.

Fallon glanced back at the motion on her computer monitor, realizing she'd inadvertently spelled their “there”—a clear sign she was not on her game. Even if Antoine Campbell turned out to be a loon, now was a good time for a coffee break. She pulled on her long cashmere overcoat and scooped up her handbag.

Over her protests, Johnson Sloan Pruitt had accommodated her Secret Service detail with an adjoining office, a concession that irritated her coworkers—and frankly, her too. She always felt like she had to apologize for their presence. But it was better than the alternative: letting the agents loiter in her office. If agents were glued to her, there would be no such thing as attorney/client privilege when she was discussing cases, so this was a good compromise. It kept the agents near but not on top of her. The firm had also supplied a computer, which the agent was using when Fallon rapped her knuckles lightly on his door. The agent looked up from the monitor.

Then Fallon abruptly stopped breathing, struck dumb.

Her eyes laserlocked on the man who was sitting where she expected someone else—anyone else—to be sitting. She regarded him with the uncomprehending stare of a sleepwalking child, transported into another dimension by shock.

That was … Tom Bishop.

Wasn't it?

She saw him in pieces, a Pointillist illusion: his eyes, his smile, his cheekbones, his hair. The pieces came together in one astonishing flash, creating an image of a man she had known once and never thought she would see again. The man who had haunted her dreams for four years. She was staring at a ghost.

He was staring back at her calmly and kindly. If he was experiencing any degree of shock, it didn't show. His expression remained composed and unsurprised, though a private and tentative smile had begun to tease the corners of his mouth.

“Ma'am,” he said, and rose to his feet.

Fallon blinked, trying to focus so that his appearance in her Secret Service detail's office would make some sense.
Was
that Tom Bishop? Quick up and down assessment: jungle-green eyes, light brown hair, killer physique under that crisp business suit so black it looked like a weapon. Devastatingly handsome. Oh yeah, no doubt. Her racing heart was tertiary confirmation.

Tom Bishop stepped from behind the desk. His tall, solid-looking frame was clothed in a beautifully cut suit that emphasized his broad shoulders and narrow hips. She noticed the glint of the badge on his hip, then his gun in the holster, and she belatedly made the connection that he was her Secret Service detail.

A rush of questions bubbled to her consciousness, but she could articulate none of them. She felt thrown, upended. She could not think … except … except the last time she saw him was on the island of Paxos, in their hot little room above the quay. He was holding her in a vast white bed, languid after lovemaking. Face to face, breathing in each other's breath. Her leg was slung possessively over his hip, his warm chest burned against hers; they couldn't get close enough. His eyes, brimming with intensity, bore into hers in the shadowed darkness of the bedroom, as if he were trying to convince her of something important, something she must remember.

“I love you,” he whispered, his low, smooth voice roughened by emotion.

Then his lips found hers, brushing against hers with such tender softness that it took her breath away.

In the morning, he was gone.

And now he was here, as if summoned by a wish or a dare. Haplessly she stared at him, so utterly unprepared for his appearance that she didn't actually know what she felt other than pure shock.

“What are you doing here?” she finally blurted.

“Dan Rizzuto's wife gave birth this morning so he is at the hospital with her. I've been temped over.”

Fallon's mouth dropped open like a carp. She made an effort to shut it but ended up saying, for clarification, to make sure she understood correctly, “So you're … you are … my … detail leader?”

“Special Agent in Charge. Temporarily.”

She struggled to iron her face into bland impassiveness, but her physical response was impossible to control. Her cheeks were stinging though she didn't know why; she'd done nothing to be ashamed of, yet she felt weirdly embarrassed and caught
way
,
way
off guard. Her body was trembling uncontrollably; her knees had turned weak as water.

Oh this was bad. She looked away, unable to hold his gaze. She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, to try and keep herself grounded.

“Are you okay?”

Was that a real question? She couldn't even fathom where
okay
was on a map. Through the confusion, she heard Sam Cahill's voice carry from down the hall. Her boss was generally friendly and supportive, but she didn't think it wise to attract his attention at the moment, not when her whole reality was suddenly warped. She had to get out of here.

Struggling to effect a neutral expression, she murmured, as calmly as she could, “It's time for a coffee run.”

Tom spoke into the tiny mic in his cuff to notify the control room and the limos outside: “Avalon is en route.”

Fallon sleepwalked through the office to the bank of elevators in a small alcove that provided a smidge of privacy. At least she could die of shock without all her coworkers observing. She pressed the elevator button and forced herself to breathe calmly. Deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Pranayama yoga: the art of breathing control. She'd practiced yoga for years, but that calm feeling that came over her when she was in the corpse pose in a peaceful sunlit studio was as far away as Mars.

Stupid yoga.

Shock was doing weird things to her body, but it was doing even worse things to her brain. She perceived a weird giddy happiness starting to blaze through the murk and that weird thigh-tingling attraction that was so familiar when he was around. She mentally tried to ward that off before it took hold. So inappropriate. One should not greet marauding pirates with joy. That was what he had been—a pirate, plundering all she had. Leaving her utterly pillaged.

She didn't lift her eyes until the elevator doors slid closed, sealing them inside together. Tom's big, hard body dominated the small space. He was still dangerous-looking, with strong features and the physical presence of a man who was accustomed to wielding authority. He looked almost the same. Not older, exactly, but somehow harder. Like he'd become refined in some unidentifiable way. She realized with a start that it was possible he saw changes in her too.

She felt unspeakably vulnerable. Scared of his power to jilt her, to leave her a heartbroken fool. And scared of herself when she was around him, because she let him.

The elevator doors slid open in the bright atrium lobby. On the street beyond the glass walls, two enormous black Chevy Suburbans idled at the curb. The armored SUVs that comprised her motorcade were immediately recognizable as official vehicles on the streets of Washington D.C., conspicuous by the light bars on the roofs and the multiple antennae. Plus, there were always two of them: a primary and a follow-up.