Close Quarters (14 page)

“And these
information thieves
just now decided to use my security chip to transport the data?”

“No.” Ben looked uncomfortable.

Tanya asked Kadin, “What does he mean,
no
?”

“Your movements have been matched with the information leakage for quite some time.”

“I see.” What weren't they saying? The weight of something no one wanted to say sat heavily in the air around them. What could they consider worse than what had already been revealed?

“You believed
Tanya
was the leak,” Fleur said, her voice filled with angry disbelief.

“The
Army
believes she's the leak,” Kadin corrected. “We thought the evidence was too circumstantial.”

“Did you?” But this time her question wasn't directed at Kadin. She was looking at Roman when she spoke and she didn't miss the tightening of his jaw.

“
You
didn't,” she said, meaning Roman. “You came here to…what? Get my chip one way or another?”

But that didn't make sense either. An important piece of the puzzle was still missing. She just didn't know what it was, or what it was supposed to look like so she could find it.

“We didn't know about the chip,” Kadin offered.

“So, you thought I was carrying the information some other way.” That made more sense, especially if someone had believed she was the information leak. “That's why you stopped the strip search. You didn't want it falling in the wrong hands.”

Again she'd directed her words at Roman, and his very lack of expression confirmed her suspicions.

Another lead rock dropped to the bottom of her still queasy stomach. “Last night was you conducting your own strip search.”

Fleur's gasp of anger fell into the unnatural quiet that came over the room. She swiveled to face Ben. “Did you know about this?”

“Not that, no.”

Fleur glared, but Tanya didn't think her friend's hopes for the future were in serious danger, not with the way Ben was looking at the doctor. As if he would say whatever needed saying, promise whatever needed promising, in order to keep the Tutsi woman's good opinion.

At least someone would find some happiness out of all this. Regardless of her own pain and still reeling psyche, a shard of happiness for her friend, pierced Tanya's soul.

“Okay, so you came here to find whatever is on my chip.”

“Not exactly,” Kadin said.

“What then?”

“They came to eliminate the information leak,” Fleur said in a furious tone, laced with just enough hesitation to imply she'd just worked it all out. “They came to kill you, Tanya.”

Well, wasn't that just one more lollipop in the suck that was becoming her life? Tanya didn't doubt Fleur's deduction for a single second. It made more sense than any other scenario she had tried to work out.

She looked at Roman, the shattered pieces of her heart ground into dust by this new revelation. Not that she would let it show.

On pure principle, she was determined to keep the pain from her expression. “No wonder you didn't tell Beau you were going to be seeing me. It could put a real cramp in family holidays afterward to have him know you'd assassinated his only sibling.”

Roman didn't say anything; she hadn't really expected him to.

“So, something made you decide to look further than me for the information,” she said to Kadin, doing her best to pretend Roman had dropped off the face of the earth.

“Nothing added up. You didn't fit the profile, and for us, taking orders from idiot brass just goes against the grain.”

In other circumstances, she would have smiled at his attitude. “Do you know who put the information on my security chip?”

“We have our suspicions.”

“I'm sure you do,” Fleur said dryly.

“Who?” Tanya asked.

Kadin's gaze skated to his superior and then back to Tanya. “Who else knows about the chip?”

“Sympa-Med, the supplier of the chips, the doctor who inserted it, but probably not many others. We aren't supposed to tell anyone. So, if we're kidnapped for human trafficking, the bad guys don't know to cut the chip out.” She saw what he was driving at though. The list wasn't very long.

“Sympa-Med controls your travel itinerary,” Fleur said.

Tanya nodded, her muscles stiff from holding her emotions in check. “They're very controlling about it too.”

“So, you think they are involved?” Ben asked.

Fleur and Tanya both shrugged, but Fleur was the one who spoke. “It would seem the most obvious conclusion, but the situation with Tanya acts as a warning against accepting the obvious without investigating further.”

Ben nodded. “I agree.” The look he gave Roman said he wasn't impressed with the initial conclusions drawn by the Army.

Kadin asked, “Who else could it be?”

“Tanya already told you,” Ben replied before she could. “Whoever supplies the chips to Sympa-Med, or the doctor who inserts them.”

“Is it always the same doctor?” Roman asked.

Tanya ignored him.

But Fleur chose to answer. “Yes. His clinic is in Lyon, near Sympa-Med's headquarters. He does all the physicals for new recruits as well before they are assigned to one of Sympa-Med's field offices.”

“You don't happen to know the name of the supplier for the chips, do you?” Ben asked.

“No,” Fleur said. “But the representatives from the head office should be here any day. We can get that information from them.”

“What if they're coming to retrieve the information themselves?”

“There's no reason to believe the entire Sympa-Med board is in on the espionage,” Ben said.

Fleur added, “It could be just one person working for Sympa-Med, or one board member.”

Tanya was glad Fleur was carrying the conversation for both of them because she was too busy trying to rein in the agony of learning Roman had come to Africa to kill her. This was one of those days that made her wish do-overs were possible.

“It would have to be someone fairly high up to influence Tanya's traveling itinerary,” Ben replied.

“What is on the chip in my body?” Tanya asked Kadin, no longer interested in speculation about who was using her since they had no way of knowing the person's identity for sure. And the guessing just added to her pain.

Kadin sent Roman another one of those “Can I tell her?” looks. Whatever he saw in the other man's face must have given the go ahead because he said, “A high-level Army JCAT.”

“What's a JCAT?” she asked, not caring if she sounded stupid.

“Military training software.”

“Highly effective, complex, military-training software that the government paid millions to develop, but the money isn't nearly as important as not allowing our military strategies to get into the wrong hands,” Ben further clarified.

That awful sense of guilt she'd been feeling earlier came back, but Tanya tried to ignore it, reminding herself that she had not done anything. It had all been done to her.

Her conscience wouldn't be fully appeased though. She had been used to betray her country and she wasn't sure she was ever going to fully come to terms with that.

“If Roman”—the rat bastard—“has already downloaded the software, why do you have to remove the chip?” she asked, trying to focus on the issue at hand, not unearned guilt she couldn't do anything about.

“The hand-held scanner is probably a lot less sophisticated than what they usually use. It has no erase function from what Neil could tell,” Kadin replied.

“For all we know whoever is using you as a mule doesn't erase the information at all,” Ben added. “They may simply overwrite it when they put new information on the chip.”

“So, if anyone found out about what Tanya had stored on her security chip, she would be in terrible danger,” Fleur said with obvious disgust and renewed anger.

“Yes.” Ben's flat lack of denial was as chilling as anything Tanya had found out so far.

“You see why it has to come out?” Kadin asked, sounding concerned himself.

And that shocked her. “You're worried about me. Why?”

Kadin looked at her like he didn't understand the question, while Fleur made a sad sound and Ben uttered an ugly curse.

“You remind him of his sister,” Roman drawled. “Can we get to removing the chip now?”

Did he have to be such a jerk?

“What's your hurry? We all know the only thing you're worried about is someone else downloading the data. That's not going to happen in the next ten minutes, so just be quiet. Your input isn't needed for this conversation,” Tanya said.

She ignored his and everyone else's reaction to her words and focused her attention back on Kadin. “If you remove the chip, how are you going to figure out who is behind the information leak?”

“The same way we would if it was left in.”

“How is that?”

“Without compromising your safety.”

“My safety has already been compromised.” She swallowed down the urge to be sick again. “If you don't find out who is behind this, I'm going to continue being at risk.” And she was going to keep feeling this horrible sense of culpability for something she had neither agreed to, nor invited.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she forestalled him. “Look, I know your assignment
isn't
to protect me, but in this situation our objectives are served by the same purpose. You want to eliminate the leak and I want to know someone isn't going to come after me for information stored in my body.”

“Getting rid of the chip would do that.”

“Like you said, they won't know it's gone.”

“So, tell the head office you had to remove it because of a malfunction that was causing you pain, or something.”

“That's a good idea,” Fleur agreed.

“But it won't help catch whoever is selling my country's secrets. And frankly, it won't undo the damage I did, even if I didn't know I was doing it. I want these monsters caught before they compromise my country's defenses any more than they already have. They used me and I want to fight back.” Tanya might not be a poster child for patriotism, but she loved her country and wasn't going to stand by while its military secrets were being sold to the highest bidder.

Fleur gasped. “You are not at fault for any of this.”

“I know, I do, but I carried the information.”

“If you hadn't, they would have had someone else do it.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“We can't risk your being captured with the JCAT information on the chip,” Roman said, his expression set.

She'd like to keep ignoring him, but his point was a valid one. She wanted to help, not make the situation worse. “So, run a magnet over the chip. That'll erase it, right?” Even she knew that.

“That's not a bad idea,” Ben said.

“No.” Roman looked about as movable as a stone monolith.

She glared at him.

“The transceiver would still be active. Anyone with information on its signal could track you.”

“So?”

“So, the chip is coming out.”

“Y
ou don't think the magnet will work.”

He didn't reply, just gave her this immovable expression that she would smack if she was a violent person. Which she wasn't, she reminded herself.

“I don't like the idea of using you as bait,” Fleur said. “Please let me take that thing out of your back.”

Tanya sighed and shook her head. “You never liked the security chips.”

“Does that mean you don't have one?” Ben asked.

“I refused.” Fleur's austere expression showed only the tiniest flicker of the disgust she felt toward the chips. “I do not trust anyone having that kind of control of my movements.”

“No one controls where I go with the chip,” Tanya denied. Though they had certainly used the presence of the chip to control what she did without knowing it. So, maybe Fleur's argument had more going for it than Tanya had ever supposed.

“But they always knew where you were. The head office called, complaining you'd gone off course hours before you made it back to the compound without visiting Tikikima.”

Knowing what she'd been carrying in her body at the time, this reminder that she had always been under some level of surveillance was really creepy and more than a little scary. “Okay, so we take the chip out, but I think we should do it in secret.”

“You still want to set yourself up as bait?” Fleur demanded.

“It makes sense.” Right now the prospect didn't even scare her. Much. There was too much pain inside her for fear to find room. “I need to do this.”

Fleur finally nodded. “We can do it in our chalet. If we do it here in the medical chalet, there are too many people who might figure it out, or who would at least wonder why you were having a procedure.”

“I agree.”

“I will be there,” Roman declared.

“You suspect Fleur of being in league with the spies? What do you think she's going to do, keep the chip or something?”

Roman didn't answer.

Typical.

“If I were him, I would doubt me.” Fleur shrugged. “If I were you, I would doubt me.”

“I did,” Tanya admitted in a small, shame-filled voice.

But Fleur did not look hurt or offended. “You don't any longer.”

“No, I don't.” She just could not make herself believe Fleur would use someone else like that. It wasn't in her nature.

“Good.” Fleur turned to Roman. “As much as you no doubt want me to remove the chip this very minute, it is better to wait until later when Tanya and I would normally return to our chalet. We should go on as if nothing has happened. While I am not involved in this espionage, we can't be certain no one else in the compound is.”

Roman nodded. “Kadin, you stay with Tanya. No one gets near her.”

“I'm on it.”

“Ben, you and Neil need to find out what you can about the doctor Fleur mentioned. Do we know exactly who from the head office is coming here?” Roman asked Fleur.

“There are three people coming, the Director of Operations for Africa, his assistant and one of the men who is on the team that determines the routes our traveling clinics take in Africa and Asia.” She grabbed a sheet of paper from Tanya's desk and wrote on it, before handing the paper to Ben. “These are their names and titles, as well as how long they've worked for Sympa-Med.”

He smiled. “Thank you, Fleur.”

“I also wrote down the name of the French doctor and his clinic.”

The door opened and Neil peeked his head in. “Geronimo? You've got a sat-phone call. It's Headquarters.”

Roman pushed away from the wall and turned to leave.

“I thought you might want to know that we had to discourage the security man assigned to the clinic from coming back here, not once but three times,” she heard him say to Roman as they walked away.

 

Roman took the sat-phone into an empty exam room before lifting it to his ear and saying, “Chernichenko.”

“Roman, the reception on this call is sketchy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good man.” A beat of silence and then. “Orders for Tanya Ruston's elimination have come from the highest level.”

“I'm not sure I heard you. The connection isn't good.”

“Right.”

“Did you get my report?”

“I did.”

“It wasn't enough?” Roman asked.

“No.”

Which meant it had gotten political. In his experience, it was usually politicians (both civilian and military), who got so stubborn they ignored evidence in favor of action. “Has another team been called in?” he asked.

“Affirmative.”

Damn it. “When?”

“Officially, today.”

“Unofficially?”

“It wouldn't surprise me if they were already in Zimbabwe.”

The watchers. “Special Forces?” Not that it mattered; his team was the best of the best, but Special Forces would make it more difficult to make a clean extraction.

“Probable.”

“Understood.” They had to get Tanya out of the compound. He and his team could protect her, but the potential for collateral damage here was too great. “Sir, the call is about to drop. I'm not sure I got your message.”

“See that you don't.”

That was more than he'd expected Corbin to say. The man had to be livid with the powers that be to undermine orders so blatantly. Roman was pretty pissed himself. He hung up without another word, evidence, if anyone needed it, that the call had dropped.

This assignment had been garbage since the beginning, but now it was starting to stink.

Tanya was so pissed at him that she wasn't going to take the news they had to leave with her very well. Especially, when she found out that they were leaving her friend Fleur behind.

 

Tanya ignored Roman's orders not to get near anyone and joined the interns at the open clinic. She worked the rest of the afternoon, giving children vaccinations and instructing parents on nutrition and how to avoid illness outside the parameters of calling on their ancestors for protection.

She never belittled traditional beliefs, but she encouraged patients to seek medical care beyond a visit from the local medium.

When she finally returned to her and Fleur's hut, Roman and Ben were already there. At least the other two had made themselves scarce. The communal room of their hut still felt crowded.

“Where do you want to do this?” she asked Fleur.

“It would be easiest here at the table.” Fleur had already set up for a field-medic-style procedure.

Tanya nodded, but looked around the small but fully open communal living area and frowned at the soldiers. “I'm not taking my top off in front of all of you.”

“They will turn their backs,” Roman said.

“I'm especially not removing my clothing in front of you,” she said, ignoring his wholly inadequate suggestion.

“Why not?”

“You did not really just ask me that.”

“I did. I have seen you naked, Tanya. There is no need for modesty.” Both his tone and expression indicated he seriously believed what he was saying.

Could he really be that clueless?

Apparently, he could.

She grudgingly offered, “If you want someone to watch and make sure Fleur doesn't do anything suspicious with the chip, Ben can do it.”

“No.” Roman's steel-gray gaze flared with something that looked like anger and his hands crossed over his chest, while his stance said he wasn't going anywhere, even to turn around.

She could be stubborn too and she so wasn't giving space in her thoughts to whatever anger he had going on. She crossed her own arms and glared. “Yes.”

“Not happening,
liúba
.”

“Don't call me that, you rat bastard.”

Instead of being offended, he laughed. “Interesting term of endearment.”

“It's not, but I'm sure you've heard it before anyway.”

“Ben is not watching you undress.”

“Seriously? You're going to play jealous Neanderthal here?”

“I'm not jealous and I'm not playing anything. This is my operation and I'm watching that chip.”

And her.

“It's my operation too,” Ben said in what should have been a mild voice, but the thread of steel behind his quietly spoken words could not be missed.

“Your job was to discover the source of the leak,” Roman said to him.

“My job is to protect our country's proprietary technology.”

Fleur shook her head. “Tanya, go put on a tank top with spaghetti straps. Leave off your bra. I can work with that and maintain your modesty.”

Tanya nodded and headed to her bedroom. Kadin went to follow her, only to get stopped short by a barked order from Roman, who walked into her room right behind her.

“Turn your back while I change,” she ordered, wanting to limit her contact with him.

He did, surprisingly, and without argument.

Tanya made quick work of removing the top of her scrubs and her bra, and then donned a dark green tank that would not show the shadow of her nipples through the thin fabric. She scooted around Roman and left the room without a word.

He tried to stop her, putting a gentle hand on her arm and saying her name, but she shook him off and went back into the communal room.

Whatever he had to say, she was positive she did not want to hear it.

Fleur nodded her approval of the tank top before indicating Tanya should sit down at the table. “Johari will be here soon. I want to be done before she arrives.”

Definitely.

Fleur pushed one strap of Tanya's top down her arm until the fabric was well away from where she had to make the incision. Fleur took more time numbing the area than extracting the chip. A few pokes and tugs and Tanya knew the stitches were in place. Fleur cleansed and then bandaged the area before sliding the strap back into place. “Done.”

Tanya turned around in time to see Roman take the small dish with the bloody mess. He held something over the dish.

“What are you doing?” Fleur asked what Tanya wanted to ask.

Only she'd decided somewhere between her bedroom and getting her back sliced into that dealing with Roman on any level right now was more than she could handle.

“Erasing the chip.”

Fleur looked confused. “I thought you were going to destroy it.”

“The plan has changed.”

That did not sound good.

Tanya looked at Kadin. “What changed?”

He shrugged and gave Roman a look with raised brows.

“A kill order came in for Tanya.”

Tanya didn't understand. “I thought you were already under orders to kill me.”

Saying it didn't feel any less horrible than hearing it the first time, and she'd spoken to him, darn it. She snapped her mouth shut and looked at Kadin, hoping he would answer.

Roman made a sound that in an animal she would have called a warning. “We were under orders to plug the leak. Someone went over my boss's head to get a directed kill order.”

“That's not good.” Tanya looked around the room, feeling as if everything should have gone black and white or something.

Life couldn't just go on as normal. Dust motes danced on the sun's rays as they came in through the window.

“Didn't he get your report?” Kadin asked.

“He did.”

“And he couldn't squash the kill order?”

“No.”

“Well, shit.”

“Exactly.”

“We've got to get Tanya out of here.”

“What?” Tanya demanded. “You want me to leave,
with you
?” The “with you,” she directed at Roman with as much sarcasm as she could infuse into two words.

He didn't hesitate. “Yes.”

“You figure the watchers are another kill team,” Kadin said.

Roman just nodded.

What were they talking about? Who was watching? Who were they watching? Her? Her emotions were so overloaded right now, she couldn't even work up a good sense of alarm.

Kadin scowled. “We should have moved already.”

“We'll leave the compound at full dark—I won't risk a sniper attack.”

“Snipers have night-vision goggles.” Tanya watched movies when she got the chance.

“They have their limits and full dark will give us some cover.”

Roman had answered, even though Tanya had been talking to Kadin, which was probably taking the avoid-Roman effort into the realm of ridiculousness. She didn't want to be silly; she was just really, really, really angry.

“But—”

“No kill team is going to see you as a high risk for flight. They have no reason to believe you are aware of the danger you are in, so while they might be watching at night, the risk of leaving the compound during the day is much higher. We'll take you out through a hole in the fence.”

“There is no hole.”

He just looked at her.

Okay, they were going to make a hole.

“Drew will cover all signs of our exit.”

“So, he's not coming?” she asked, realizing there was no real chance she was going to refuse to leave.

Roman shook his head.

“Drew and Ben will stay here with the chip. The only people who should be able to track it are Sympa-Med folks and whoever has made her their information mule.”

“So, you
are
setting a trap.” She was relieved that even if she could not play a part, at least the chip that had caused so much trouble would be useful in identifying the culprits.

“And buying some time to get you out of here safely.”

“I've contacted my agency and they're sending in a team of independents, as well as another TGP agent,” Ben added. “She'll pretend to be you and carry the chip with her.”

“No one in the compound is going to believe she's me.”

“She'll keep her distance from the locals. Fleur will tell everyone you've come down with something. Your time in the washroom will give credence to the story.”