Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

Darkness at Dawn (6 page)

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn

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“The Smithsonian received an official request to have Dr. Lucy Merritt seconded to Nhala for an assessment and possible on-site restoration of a parchment discovered in Darjiba, in the north of the country, several weeks ago. The Smithsonian has already agreed to the secondment.”

A familiar anger burned in her suddenly, dispelling some of the vast chill that had invaded her core. The CIA was once again messing massively with her life.

“Of course, no one thought to actually tell me this.”

“Because it was—”

“Top secret,” she finished bitterly.

“Indeed.” Uncle Edwin didn’t even make a pretense of an apology. “One thing. Princess Paso only joined Skype yesterday, when she opened an account. She opened a Gmail account at the same time. Our understanding is that she was not allowed to have email and certainly not allowed to Skype. Until now. So, Lucy.” Uncle Edwin drummed his fingers once on the shiny teak tabletop. For him it was the equivalent of pacing up and down the room. “What do you make of this?”

She bit her back teeth and tried for a normal tone. “First of all, what I make of that is that I am incredibly resentful that the CIA is reading my email. How long has this been going on? Have you people no shame?”

Her heated words had no effect on him whatsoever. And no, the CIA had no shame at all. They wanted an in to Nhala, and Paso had given it to them. The fact that they’d invaded her privacy was not even a theoretical concern. It was what it was.

She huffed out a breath, feeling suffocated. But . . . her country was in danger, and now it was clear that Paso was, too.

Man up.

She folded her hands on the table, each hand clutching the other to stop the trembling.

“Okay. That message tells me two things. First of all the reference to the fun we had in the days of May means nothing. However, I did teach her the meaning of Mayday as an emergency signal and so she’s asking for help. And choosing Parachutegirl as her Skype name . . . She always said that the one sport that terrified her was parachute jumping. So she’s also signaling danger. But then we know that.”

Suddenly, Uncle Edwin rose. The meeting was at an end.

“Lucy, Captain Shafer, you each have a file in front of you with the information you’ll need. I expect you to study it and master it before you leave. Captain Shafer, you are now Michael Harrington, investment banker. In your file you’ll find a US passport, credit cards in the new name, salient points of your new identity. You are Lucy’s fiancé, and as such you are accompanying her to this new job in Nhala. Your role is to protect Dr. Merritt and to find that flash drive. Both of you will find undetectable receiver/ transmitters and a netbook, which has a hidden, encrypted hard disk for comms. A car is waiting for you two outside to take you to Dr. Merritt’s apartment, where a team of people will come to turn Captain Shafer into Michael Harrington and deliver other equipment. Departure time will be 0400 tomorrow morning, when a car will be waiting to take you both to Andrews Air Force base. A private Learjet 45, belonging to Michael Harrington’s company, EMG Finance, will be waiting to take you to Thimphu, via Rome and Mumbai.”

Oh God
. Lucy closed her eyes in despair. Flying halfway around the world . . . Her heart would give out.

Uncle Edwin continued as if he’d just said the most normal thing in the world.

“The Chilongo International Airport has been closed for a month, ostensibly due to bad weather. Since the closest open airport is Thimphu, the few people visiting Nhala land there and then drive in. It takes three days over very rough terrain. But Ms. Merritt has been given special clearance, and a Nhalan military helicopter will pick you both up in Thimphu to take you to the Palace in Chilongo. You will be in contact with the Stop Cold Committee on a regular basis, and any intel at all on the virus will be relayed to me and to Dr. Samuels as soon as is physically possible. When you find the missing flash drive, send its contents to me immediately.” He skewered both of them with a harsh look. “So. You are engaged to be married and I expect you both to act like it. I will not have this mission compromised because you are squabbling. Do I make myself clear?”

If there was one thing Lucy had learned as the child of CIA operatives, it was to hide her feelings. She could do this. She looked up at Uncle Edwin, then over at the hardassed soldier who didn’t want any part of her. “Perfectly.”

Captain Shafer was having a harder time of it. His jaw worked beneath the bristly beard, the muscles at his temple bunching. He looked like a wild man who’d just been told to put on a tux and tap dance.

“Captain Shafer.” When Uncle Edwin wanted to, he could make his voice drip icicles. “
Did I make myself clear?
”

Jaw muscles bunched. “Yes. Sir.” The words fell like little stones from his mouth. One, then the other.

“Fine. Dismissed.”

AFTER Lucy, the captain and Dr. Samuels filed out, Edwin Montgomery rubbed his chest where it hurt. His cardiologist had been saying for years that he should slow down, have a pacemaker put in. Dr. Metz was now making noises about a possible bypass. Maybe multiple. But how to slow down when there was just one goddamned crisis after another?

This was one of the worst, maybe as bad as the nuclear confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev, when the world was this close to being blown up. Most bad crises involved hundreds, at worst thousands, of Americans dead. This, potentially, could cause millions of deaths. Could, potentially, wipe America out as a viable country.

Whoever was planning this was ruthless beyond imagining. And here he was, tossing Lucy right in front of them.

God, he remembered her coming home from Nhala, a wounded, traumatized, orphaned fourteen-year-old. She didn’t speak for months afterward, and she’d kept her distance from him ever since. In some corner of her heart, he knew, she blamed him for her parents’ deaths.

But he’d looked after her because she was the closest thing he’d ever have in this life to a daughter. To a family, even.

Her parents had left her nothing. They’d even neglected to renew their life insurance policies. Coming back home, she’d been destitute. Edwin scared up some black ops money to pay for her schooling and to set up a generous trust fund for her. Later, through a little manipulation and a little blackmail, he’d found an apartment for her to buy at a tenth of its value. Then he’d twisted the arm of a banker who’d been a very naughty boy and he had the pictures to prove it. The banker had given Lucy a mortgage at three points below the prime rate.

It was the least he could do.

“Uncle Edwin” she’d always called him. She’d been a beautiful baby, a beautiful little girl, and now she was a beautiful woman. Sweet-natured, too, though a hard life had forced her to toughen up. She’d deserved better than two neglectful parents who dragged her all over the world. Because what better cover could two covert operatives posing as cultural anthropologists have than a little girl?

Ah. Brad and Marie Merritt. Smart, good-looking, courageous. Adventurous. Two of the best operatives the CIA had ever had, certainly the best within his lifetime. They were legends. Almost reckless in their bravery; smart and efficient and ruthless. They’d almost single-handedly held off proxies of the Red Army in Nhala until reinforcements could arrive, giving government troops breathing room. It was entirely possible that Nhala would now be part of Communist China if they hadn’t acted so swiftly and courageously. They’d given their lives for their job and their country.

It was a pity that in their dedication to the job, little Lucy always managed to slip between the cracks. They’d been so busy saving the world that they didn’t notice the lonely little girl right under their noses.

She’d barely escaped with her life the last time she’d been in Nhala and had fled from a Palace in flames. And now he was tossing her back into the lion’s pit.

Couldn’t be helped. The nation’s security required it. General Changa had closed the country up tight, but Princess Paso had done an end run around that and brilliantly arranged for an invitation.

Lucy had to go. She and nobody else.

Couldn’t be helped.

He just hoped to God he wouldn’t have to meet the third and last member of the Merritt family at Andrews Air Force Base as they offloaded the casket.

Another sharp twinge in his chest.

Goddammit,
he told his chest irritably.
Not now. You can have a heart attack when this is all over.

T
HREE

WHAT
did the damned woman use as perfume
? Mike thought, gritting his teeth. Pheromones?

He had to stiffen his neck muscles so he wouldn’t turn his head to stare at her. He’d been in the mountains way
way
too long and had spent way too much time with his men. There was nothing good to look at with his men. In fact, a lot of them were butt-ugly.

Lucy Merritt was the opposite. Everything about her fascinated him, as if he’d never seen a woman before.

Every time he looked at her he just gulped up details. Like how long and thick her eyelashes were. How the hell did she keep her eyes open?

And her neck, long and white and slender. How come he’d never really noticed women’s necks before? They were so great. So utterly and completely different from his neck and his men’s necks, hairy and rough. No, hers was as smooth as a swan’s, rising from delicate collarbones. When the hell had he ever noticed collarbones before? Been fucking
fascinated
by collarbones?

Okay, stop. He was on Op Time right now, no time for anything but the mission. But once it was over, man, he was going to go to some bar and he was going to get
so
laid. Just stay in bed for a week.

Mooning over collarbones was a sign of something serious.

They were sitting in the back of one of the CIA’s armored SUVs with a barrier between the backseat and the driver. It was raining and the windows were as smoked as those in a mafioso’s limo. The outside world was barely visible. Staring out the window was not an option, unless he wanted to watch a smoked reflection of himself.

Ordinarily he could sink right into himself, no problem. Just before a mission there was a lot to think about, a lot to plan. He was a good strategist, and he often used the staging period before an op to try to think of all the ways Mr. Murphy could fuck with him and all the ways he could fuck with Mr. Murphy right back.

That wasn’t working now. He didn’t have men to command, and the plans had already been drawn up without any input from him. His entire team consisted of one girly girl who didn’t look the type to follow the chain of command. She’d nearly said no to Edwin Montgomery, something that perhaps only a Medal of Honor winner would ever think of doing. And, maybe, the President of the United States, the day after a landslide election.

Mike had no idea even what equipment he was going to be assigned. All that would be handed over later, at Lucy Merritt’s house. There was no mission plan other than to get back the damned flash drive and discover who the Palace mole was, which was too vague to flesh out in his thoughts when he had no idea of the terrain or the actors.

He never went into battle or on a mission without thoroughly studying the terrain, but he hadn’t been assigned maps, he hadn’t even been given a fucking Lonely Planet guide to the damned country. He knew exactly zip about Nhala. He’d only been once to the Himalayas, on a climbing expedition to Tibet while in college. Tibet wasn’t Nhala, that much he knew.

He could, of course, ask Lucy Merritt—who apparently was some kind of expert on the country—for more intel, but she was looking blindly out the window at nothing, clearly brooding.

One thing was worrying him, and he needed to get it out in the open. The grimace she’d made when Montgomery talked about the long flight over had jolted him. Was she scared of flying? He had to know.

He himself wasn’t scared of flying, not in any way. Good thing, too, because he’d flown into a lot of hellholes in a lot of rust buckets, often under fire. He’d been the only passenger to sleep through the twisting, turning, looping landing route the pilots had to take to avoid RPGs at Baghdad International.

But he knew what devastating fear of flying was. His sister, Kathy, had an irrational fear of flying—terror, in the truest sense of the word. When she could be coaxed onto a flight, she descended an utter wreck and had to go to bed for two days.

For someone terrified of flying, a long flight like the one they were going to take tomorrow would be devastating. Mike couldn’t afford to have a comatose partner or one who’d expended so much adrenaline during the flight she’d have the shakes at the other end.

So he had to ask.

He cleared his throat, expecting her to turn. She didn’t. O-kay. We were playing the Ignoring Game, were we? He touched her arm and was astonished when she jumped.

“Hey, sorry.” He held his hands up, palms out. Universal sign of harmlessness since humans were protohominids.

No weapons. I come in peace.

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn

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