Darkness (38 page)

Then he told him everything.

“We’ve got Detachment 632 here on the base. They can check that flash drive of yours out,” his father said. Detachment 632, Air Force Office of Special Investigations, specialized in counterintelligence investigations, among other things, and their capabilities and reach were absolutely on par with the CIA’s or any other government agency’s. Cal had known that D632 was based at Eielson, which was another reason he’d chosen the base. Along with his father’s clout, which would get the wheels rolling instantly.

“I don’t want to hand the flash drive over to you out here. It’s probably best if as few people as possible are aware of its existence.”

His father was looking thoughtful. “We’ll drop Dr. Sullivan at the hotel here on base—I presume you don’t want to stay in my house”—which was an absolutely correct assumption, especially since Cal was planning to share a room with Gina—“and take that thing over to D632. They’ve got hella good IT specialists.”

Cal wasn’t sure how much his father knew about IT specialists, but as that had been more or less his plan for the flash drive, too, he agreed, with one proviso.

“Gina stays with me.” When the general gave him a look that Cal knew was a prelude to some kind of lecture along the lines of
This is not the time, keep it in your pants
, he added, “She’s a witness. She heard the man who I think might be Whitman talking, and she can identify his voice. If anyone knew, if Whitman knew, he’d pull out all the stops to eliminate her.”

His father frowned and jerked his head in the direction of the motorcade surrounding his limo. “You don’t trust those boys to protect her?”

“I don’t trust anybody to protect her. Not until she listens to Whitman’s voice and identifies it, or not.”

“You think this Whitman will come if you tell him to? Won’t he suspect you’re setting him up?”

Cal shook his head. “I’m going to let him think I’m wounded—which I am, by the way; I took a bullet in the side a couple of days ago, no big deal—and that’s why I came running here to Eielson and my dear old dad. He wants that flash drive, and he’ll come get it. And he doesn’t know Gina heard his voice.”

His father frowned thoughtfully, then nodded. “All right, then. Get in the car and let’s go.”

They were both striding back toward the car when Cal said, “Oh, and a crew ought to be dispatched to Attu. There’s at least ten dead and a hell of a mess out there.”

His father snorted. “Sounds like the story of your life. I’ll pass the word on.”

Then the airman was opening the door for them and Cal slid in beside Gina.

Twenty minutes later, the flash drive was in the hands of IT specialists at D632. And under the supervision of a cadre of fully briefed D632 agents, Cal was dispatching a message to Whitman. Using code and the secure phone connection that he’d told Gina about on Attu, he relayed the information that he was wounded, at Eielson, and had a flash drive given to him by Rudy: the “proof” Whitman had been seeking. Only Whitman was going to have to come and get it, because Cal wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

After that, he and Gina sat down with his father at the cafeteria in the building and had a quick meal. He was starved, and he and his father weren’t exactly chatty at the best of times, so once Cal made a courtesy inquiry about the well-being of his stepmother—his father had been married to his second wife, a very nice former flight attendant named Sharon, for ten years—and learned that she was fine and, at that moment, visiting her mother in Chicago, most of the conversation took place between Gina and his father. By the end of the meal, the old man was calling her Gina (nobody ever called the general anything but “sir” or “General”) and making her smile as he caustically recounted some of Cal’s teenage exploits.

“He always could find trouble,” the general concluded, and gave Cal a censorious look. “Here we are a decade and a half later, and as you can see, he hasn’t changed a bit.”

“He saved my life,” Gina said over her last sip of coffee. “I think he’s pretty great.”

Cal smiled at her, met his father’s gaze—the old man’s look said as plainly as if he’d shouted it,
This one’s too good for you
—and stood up. The agents at the adjacent table, who were tasked with providing security for Gina until she was able to confirm, or not, that Whitman’s was the voice she’d heard, stood up, too.

Having thus ended the meal before his father’s reminiscences could turn acrimonious, as they tended to do, Cal borrowed a couple hundred dollars from him—all he and Gina had were the clothes they were wearing, and he thought he might need some cash—and exchanged surprisingly civil good nights with the old man. Then Cal and Gina were driven to the base hotel, The Gold Rush Inn. As spare and utilitarian as was just about everything Air Force, the inn was a foursquare and solid three-story beige brick building with a small lobby and adequate but far from luxurious rooms. Agents escorted them to their room, waited while a bag of clothing and other necessities from the base shopping center were brought up to them, then stationed themselves in a room across the hall where they would remain to provide security through the night.

When they were alone, Cal looked at Gina, who was glancing around the spartan accommodations with a slight frown as she took off her coat and hung it in the closet just inside the door.

He was familiar with Air Force lodging, but he tried to see it through her eyes. A queen-size bed with the bag from the shopping center on it. A small table beside it with a lamp. A chest across from the bed that held a TV. A couple of narrow windows set high up in the wall. A couple of cheap, framed prints. Brown carpet, brown curtains, brown bedspread, beige walls. Basic, white-tiled bathroom, attached.

She’d had a hell of a trying day, and he could tell how tired she was by the strain around her eyes and mouth and the slight droop to her slender shoulders.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

“Mm-hmm.” She moved over to the bed, rummaged through the shopping bag, and extracted a few items from it. “I think I like your father.”

Cal managed to repress a snort. “He seemed to like you, too.”

Clutching what seemed to be a jumble of toiletries and a nightgown close against her body, she gave him a level look and said, “Are you going to tell me why we have intelligence agents escorting us everywhere we go and spending the night across the hall?”

Cal couldn’t tell her the truth, and he wasn’t going to lie to her. She knew nothing about the danger she was still potentially in, because neither he nor anyone else had told her that the man she called Heavy Tread might very well be Agent Lon Whitman, CIA. Or that her identification of Whitman’s voice, if identify it she did, would be what brought him down.

All she knew was that Cal was wrapping up the job he’d been carrying out when his plane had gone down, and that she was needed because she was a witness to what had happened on Attu. The agents felt, and he and his father agreed, that telling her anything more might conceivably compromise her ability to be impartial when she heard Whitman’s voice.

Cal said, “No.”

Gina’s lips compressed. “That’s what I thought.” Turning toward the bathroom, she said over her shoulder, “I’m going to take a shower.”

He nodded, and she went into the bathroom and closed the door. He thought about joining her—as tired as he was, the idea of taking a shower with Gina was enough to make him realize that he wasn’t
that
tired—but knowing how tired she had to be dissuaded him. When she emerged, looking sweet and slightly ridiculous and amazingly sexy all at the same time in a long-sleeved, ankle-grazing pink flannel granny gown that he was as sure as it was possible to be was like nothing she ever wore, he allowed himself one look before managing a gruff, “Go to sleep,” and retreating to take his own shower.

When he finished and came back out into the bedroom, he was wearing a towel around his waist, a fresh Band-Aid over his wound—the bullet was coming out in the morning—and nothing else, because the plaid flannel pajamas that had been folded into that shopping bag for him weren’t going to happen.

To his surprise, she was still awake, propped up in bed in a room that was dark except for the blue glow of the TV, flipping through channels.

He stopped beside the bed to look down at her. Her tawny hair was loose and fell in a silken slide over one shoulder. Her fine-boned face was a pale oval in the gloom. The covers were tucked up under her armpits, so basically all he could see of the rest of her was the pink ruffle at the neckline of her gown and the long, full sleeves that ended in more ruffles at her wrists.

He was a sick man, he decided. Pink flannel granny gowns obviously did it for him. One look and he was instantly hard.

“I thought you’d be asleep,” he said.

She shook her head, flicked him a look. “I waited for you.”

“Oh?” He dropped the towel and slid into bed beside her. Taking the remote from her unresisting hand, he turned the TV off, dropped the remote on the table, and leaned over her. “I hear you think I’m pretty great.”

There was just enough light from the halogens in the parking lot filtering in around the edges of the curtains to enable him to see that she was looking at him, to see her slight smile.

“I do.” She put her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers felt delicate and cool.

“I think you’re pretty great, too.” His voice was husky. Coming from her, the faint, clean scent of the same soap he’d showered with that hadn’t done a thing for him at the time now teased his nostrils like the headiest of perfumes. “And beautiful. And sexy as hell.”

“You do?” She snuggled close, and he got treated to some full body contact with a whole lot of Downy-soft flannel. Suddenly he was so consumed with lust that he ached. Jesus God, maybe he had a granny nightgown fetish. Who’d known? His hand closed on a firm round breast with an eager little nipple that he could feel nudging his palm through the cloth.

“Mm-hmm.” He kissed the breast his hand had captured, opening his mouth and teasing her nipple with his teeth and tongue until the flannel was wet and she was gasping and clutching at his shoulders and straining up against him.

Then he kissed her mouth.

By the time the nightgown finally came off—half a dozen confoundingly tiny buttons at the neck made removing the damned thing more of a challenge than he had foreseen—her legs were wrapped tight around his waist and he was thrusting hard inside her. His mouth was on her bare breasts and her hands were buried in his hair and she was moving beneath him and moaning. He couldn’t have been hotter if he’d been set on fire.

His last semilucid thought before he succumbed to the flames was,
I ain’t letting this woman go
.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

W
hitman showed up on schedule, as Cal had been sure he would. The moment Whitman realized that Cal had escaped from Attu, it would have been his top priority to hotfoot it back to his office in Seattle, because as far as he knew, Cal had no inkling that Whitman had been involved, and he would take the greatest precautions to make sure Cal never found out. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Gina and her description of Heavy Tread’s voice, Cal might never have suspected. Also, if it hadn’t been for Gina, he probably wouldn’t have been alive to worry about it.

So he owed her a lot. And as he’d told her that morning when he pulled her into the shower with him, he always paid his debts. In full. With interest.

Whitman arrived at Eielson that afternoon.

They were ready and waiting for him.

CAL IN
a blue hospital gown, stretched out in a semireclining position in a hospital bed, white blanket tucked around him up to the waist, an IV taped to his arm, in a white-walled hospital room complete with beeping monitors, should have looked a lot more helpless and vulnerable than he did, Gina thought.

Watching through a two-way mirror from the room next door, she decided that the man looked about as helpless and vulnerable as a rottweiler.

“Boy doesn’t look sick a bit,” Cal’s father observed with disgust. He was beside her, sitting in a cushioned office chair just as she was. With them were two D632 agents, also seated. All of them were focused on the room next door. When she’d been driven to the hospital some hours after Cal had left early that morning, Gina had thought that she was being taken to visit him in his sickbed. It had been obvious to her from the moment she’d been ushered into this adjoining room and discovered that she could both see Cal and most of his room through the two-way mirror—what kind of hospital room had a two-way mirror?—and hear everything that was going on in said room, that something else was up.

Just what it was she wasn’t quite sure, but she was tense with anticipation.

“He had surgery this morning,” Gina pointed out mildly. “To remove a bullet.”

“Outpatient surgery. Could have popped that thing out with his fingers.” The general shook his head. “Doctor told me that it was right there under the skin. Not much worse than a splinter. Damn it, he’s supposed to look like he’s on his last legs. He never could pretend worth a flip.”