Defender (14 page)

“Does not every young person want to break free from their family and set up independence?”

“That they do.” How damned ironic that he’d resented his parents for the secret childhood they’d forced him to live in the witness protection program, and yet now he spent most of his adulthood pretending to be another person.

“I learned much from my aunt, but the time came for me to leave upper Turkey and Aunt Marta.”

Marta. The name he’d been seeking. Well, hell. Mystery solved. He would run a data search in hopes of confirming Anya was Marta’s niece, but her words rang true.

“You lived with your aunt? What about your parents?” He studied the tiny stain just below her breasts, a tiny red blot that could be cherry juice.

She fidgeted with her keychain, twirling the ballerina monkey with nervous fingers, so he stayed silent rather than risk pressing her too hard. He would take his lead from whatever she said next.

“I lived with her during my teenage years after my mother and father died.”

“I’m sorry about your parents.”

“At least I had someone to look after me.”

“Your aunt, who runs a tavern and nightclubs.”

She eyed him suspiciously before shrugging, her keys rattling an impatient clink. “Yes. She just opened a new one in Istanbul and another up in Stuttgart, Germany . . .” Anya selected a key, looking ready to run. “Well, you get the point.”

“The family business expands.”

“I knew how to tap a keg before I could ride a bicycle.” She dangled her keys in front of him, the tiny monkey in a tutu spinning. “When I was little, I wanted to be a ballerina, not a barmaid.”

He weighed whether to believe everything she’d told him, especially when he could tell by the rapid, visible pulse in her wrist how much his questions bothered her. He watched that blue vein throb and tore apart her words for evidence.

There was still a chance Anya might be as innocent as she appeared—or she could be working for her aunt by broadening the network. Either way, he couldn’t deny his fascination with a woman who hid her real self as effectively as he did, an intriguing quality in an already sexy woman.

A woman he intended to kiss within the next two seconds.

THIRTEEN

Standing on her front stoop, Anya watched the shift in Miguel Carvalho’s eyes and knew he intended to kiss her. And she intended to let him.

For the first time, she had the attention of a man with no ties to Aunt Marta, and that stirred her almost as much as the warmth of his mouth settling against hers.

He grasped a lock of hair that had escaped her clasp. He grazed his fingers along the length until his knuckles rested on her jaw.

Miguel attracted her. She could not deny his good looks.

How often she’d admired his dark hair that rested along his shirt collar, begging her fingers to test the texture. Silky seduction or raspy, coarse temptation? Now she knew.

Pure silken sensuality.

She deepened the kiss, noting every detail to remember later. The give of his mouth against hers. The warm sweep of that first taste of his tongue.

Their bodies barely brushed. Still, she caught a whiff of his musky aftershave, felt the muscles along his chest contract beneath his silk shirt. She sensed his restraint, and that touched her more firmly than any frenzied clench. Her fingers crawled up his arms to his shoulders, and she urged him closer.

The strength of his arms banded around her back, luring her to ignore everything else and follow that feeling of sensuality and safety. What a unique sensation: security. She could grow addicted, and he would be leaving soon.

Anya eased away from Miguel and the urge to take this further. She needed to stop and think. Her actions had serious repercussions. While he didn’t have connections to her aunt, what did she know about this man? He spent too much money and drank. A lot. Not huge testaments to his character.

Except he also worried enough about a simple waitress to see her safely home.

“Thank you for walking with me.” Her heart thrummed an argument with her decision to pull back, her lips still tender from the play of his mouth.

“My pleasure. I would have done so every day.”

Except she had been avoiding him, until in a moment of weakness she accepted his offer of help. Just once she didn’t want to be alone, seeing shadows shift around her, itching with the sense of being followed. She still was not certain letting him into her life was the right decision. She needed time to think, and she certainly could not think with him standing just two steps down from her, which put them at eye level, his gaze entreating her to stay.

His knuckles trailed her arm. “Are you working at the Oasis tomorrow?”

“I am on the late shift.”

“So you go in later.”

This sounded like the start of—

“Would you like to go out for an early supper before work?”

“I think I would,” she spoke before she could reconsider.

“Then I will see you tomorrow.”

She saw the promise in his eyes. She wanted to trust him, but she did not have much experience with people who valued their word. Of course, this whole new start away from Aunt Marta was about leaving the past behind.

Anya fumbled with her keys while Miguel kept his post on her steps, seeing her safely inside. A last-minute debate waged within her over the possibility of pulling him inside after all . . . But no. She knew better than to follow passionate impulses.

Closing the door after her, she let the encounter play out in her mind again. Not much time, all told. Probably a total of thirty minutes since she’d left the Oasis.

She wasn’t sure what had brought about his change from distant chivalry to aggressive pursuer, but she didn’t doubt her ability to read men. Miguel wanted her.

Her aunt had instructed her well.
Aunt Marta.
Even a thought of her formidable relative seemed to swell through the room like the woman’s cloying cologne.

Anya hated the pinch of disloyalty but couldn’t ignore it. She owed her aunt for housing and feeding her after she’d been orphaned at eleven. A time of disillusionment seared into her memory. Like the day she had learned her family made their living from something other than serving up drinks.

Her parents had been dead for a month when a boy at school had shoved her into the school bathroom. Other boys had been waiting. They’d taunted her, encircling her, shoving her from one to the other. Each tore at her clothes or stole a grope.

The message? Tell her aunt that a new family ruled the neighborhood. She hadn’t been raped, thanks to the intervention of a teacher who’d heard the noise, but she’d felt violated all the same.

Face still streaked from her tears, she’d informed her aunt. Rather than consolation, she’d received an initiation talk. Time to join the family business. Work for food. Run packages, because who would suspect a kid? Then as a teen, use her femininity to distract men into spilling information.

Her aunt had never explained how she was supposed to feel about that. The focus of discussions had always been on what the man wanted and never what she might want. She had bought into the family indoctrination for years. She had transported drugs and information. She had let men she did not admire into her bed just to have someone hold her. She had done everything Marta Surac asked, even at the expense of her heart.

Right up until the day her aunt had demanded she pull the trigger.

A light from the open door knifed across the dark cell, giving Chuck his first peek at his new “home” since those goons had tossed him in a couple of hours ago. From what his rattled brains could tell, it wasn’t much different from the last cell, or the one before that. They moved him often now.

The cement wall had sure as shit hurt just as much as the others when his back slammed into it. His shoulder still throbbed, probably broken. He could feel blood from the scrape sticking to his shirt.

Right over the tracking device.

He hurt too much to care anymore. Chuck simply sat and waited. He no longer had enough control over his body or mind to do anything more. They’d broken him.

The woman—he’d actually heard someone call her Marta, a tiny nugget of information he couldn’t do a thing with—strode across the room and knelt beside him, her pencil-thin skirt pulled tight around her thighs, her heels eye level from his vantage point sprawled on the floor.

Her perfume swamped his nose. Her round face and soulless eyes swam in and out of focus. She didn’t bring water anymore.

He wanted her knife. To use on her and then himself. But one of her goons stood at the door with fists and gun in clear sight.

“I am beginning to doubt your usefulness, Airman Chuck.”

B.F.D. Like that mattered to him now.

“Help me, and I will make sure your family has a body to bury. Continue on this ridiculous path, and no one will find the pieces of your corpse.”

He didn’t have any family. But he did have friends. His air force buds must have been working their asses off for the past two weeks . . . Had it really only been such a handful of days? He couldn’t be sure, as he lost track of time, never sure how long he’d been unconscious.

How many programs would they have to reevaluate or scrap because they couldn’t be sure if he’d cracked? Would he have a chance to let them know he hadn’t spilled anything?

Would that stay true if Marta kept at him much longer?

“Your shoulder appears painful.”

“No . . . shit . . . Sherlock.”

She laughed, smoothing her hand over his back, along the bloody, torn shirt. “I like men with spirit. Maybe there’s some life in you yet.”

She frowned, pausing. Her fingers glided back to the split in the shirt and skin from where a jagged patch of wall had torn away his flesh. She prodded, gently, but still her touch stung his raw wound.

“What is this?” Her voice lost its phony-ass affectation of friendliness as her finger circled . . . right over his tracking device.

Damn.

Her knife flashed in the stark light of the overhead bulb. She pressed the steel tip into his shoulder and prodded. Fire scored his back. As the bitch continued her search, he bit down a shout to a groan.

Head cocked, she cradled her “prize.” No squeamishness on her part. He wished he could say the same for himself as his stomach tumbled over itself in a death spiral.

She thumbed away blood until silver peeked through. “Interesting. I might have thought it just a piece of flak, but there is a symmetry and warmth to the piece.” She lifted her hand. “I don’t suppose you want to save us both some trouble and just tell me what it is?”

“It’s . . . an identification chip.” The lie rasped along his throat, raw from lack of water. He barely recognized his own voice anymore. “It allows my body to be identified if . . . I suffer an injury in combat,” he gasped for air, “that destroys my face or prints.” Would she accept his explanation?

“Very smart. I would press you for more, but you require so much work. My people can analyze this.”

He could only hope whoever her “people” were, they wouldn’t be able to detect the device’s properties, such as broadcasting life support data. Which now had been halted.
His
people would think he’d died, and they didn’t even have a way to search for his body. Resolve seeped from him, exhaustion filling the void.

His journey had finally finished.

FOURTEEN

Marta punched in the security code to the garage attached to the small holding house on the outskirts of Adana and drove inside.

She turned off the engine, slid her arm through a grocery sack, and snagged her purse that held the plastic container with her “find” from the airman’s back. Still she could feel the warmth of the small silver chip between her fingers.

It’s purpose, however, iced her.

Marta swung her legs out and hip-bumped the door closed again. The engineers on her payroll had informed her that the chip was some sort of high-tech tracking device like none they’d ever seen. All her work moving the captive from Istanbul to Adana may have been fruitless.

Of course, if the device worked perfectly, he would have already been found. Apparently its signal was low-power. The technicians she’d worked with in the past assured her they could either disarm it or boost the signal if she wished to lead those on the other end to her. Eventually she hoped this would bring her a pretty penny from a contact she’d cultivated in China.

For the moment, the device had been temporarily disarmed until she could revamp her plans, starting with sending Erol on an “errand.” At least something could be gained from her decision to keep Chuck alive that one more week, a week now nearing its end.

She climbed two steps and tapped in the code for her second layer of security. Baris had his own assignment checking on Anya. How naïve that the girl just thought she could leave. No one left the family business. Anya had been fed and supported for years. She owed loyalty and help.

Marta avoided the wall mirror. Her looks wouldn’t hold out forever. Although thanks to the whole American urban cougar phenom, she could draw younger men in for a while longer.

She entered the kitchen in what looked like an unassuming little haven for an unassuming family. Belowground, however, she kept her latest “guest” in a cellar tricked out for persuading prisoners. Erol sat at the small wooden table, licking chicken from his fingers as he feasted on a carcass.

Marta dumped the sack on the counter and sifted through the fresh fruit and bread to pluck free a new disposable phone. It was imperative she keep up a steady stream of untraceable communication with her people.

She slid the phone across the scarred wood table. “I have a job for you.”

His eyes lit with avarice as he snatched the phone a second before it reached the edge. His frustration over Baris’s preferential treatment in receiving assignments had been ill-disguised. Idiot. He really did not understand how to best wield his assets and power.

She opened her purse. “I need you to transport something.”

His face crumpled with disappointment, quickly followed by anger. “I am being demoted to your delivery boy?”

“You are what I pay you to be,” she snapped. Then she calmed. Men needed their egos stroked more often than their privates. “This little container is extremely valuable, and your mission will be quite dangerous. I will understand if you do not wish to undertake such a risky task.”

His shoulders braced, his chin thrust. Predictable. “What will I be delivering?”

She resisted the urge to snap again. Why could they not simply follow orders? Always the questions, questions, questions. She had people in her operation willing to organize a suicide bombing attack, for heaven’s sake. What she asked of Erol was positively benign in comparison to the irons she already had in the fire.

Marta held up the container and opened the lid to display the silver chip, about the size of an almond sliver. “I discovered this embedded in our captive’s shoulder. My technicians reassure me it can still transmit a low power signal. We will turn it back on again at the right time. I will be moving our captive east, and you will be traveling with this package to the north to lead authorities astray.”

Erol’s first stop would be to meet up with one of her techie wizards who would increase the signal pulse that had apparently been hampered somehow by implantation. She already looked forward to the amount of money she could make from this piece of innovation on the black market. With more information gathered about the device, perhaps she could even launch a bidding war.

Wealth and power—she would never be without them again. Luckily for her, she’d discovered that brokering information internationally proved far more profitable than the small-time neighborhood power ploys her family had used for generations.

Meanwhile, leading military personnel around on a wild-goose chase as she tested their strengths and weaknesses would be quite fun. Not many things in her life brought entertainment. She would savor this.

Marta patted Erol’s cheek, flashing him a glimpse of her breasts in her low-cut satin jacket. He licked his lips in a disgusting display of his tongue. Why did men think that gesture was a turn-on?

Uncle Radko had done the same as the drunken fool lurched toward her, grabbed her, plastered his wet mouth against hers. Once he died, she had wanted to cut his tongue from his head. Instead, she’d stolen his cigar clipper to remind herself of the importance of power, of control.

“Soon, Erol. Soon.” She held still and let him stare his fill while believing his turn with her would come after the mission.

In reality, he merely neared his turn to die.

He’d outlived his usefulness and proven to be an unreliable, weak employee. She preferred Baris, anyway. Odd, because she couldn’t remember a time when she wanted one man over another, but these past few days had been different, somehow. A flicker of worry flamed through her, one she quickly snuffed. She could manage a simple case of hormones with the same efficiency she handled everything else.

First, she needed to move Baris as well before he spent too much time in close contact with the pretty Anya. Her charms were better used elsewhere. The girl thought she’d been so crafty in staging her escape. Little did she know, Marta had made sure that particular job opened with the best pay in order to lure Anya exactly where she needed to be: in place for Marta to investigate the security around a USO community. She already had a top bidder in Iran interested in attaining that information before the popular entertainment group left Turkey.

The time had come to launch her ultimate test.

“Damn it, I want to be on that flight.” Jimmy restrained the urge to pound the mission planning table. Losing control wouldn’t help make his case with Lieutenant Colonel Scanlon.

They’d finally gotten a solid lock on Chuck’s tracking device, finally had a concrete mission to fly with a chance of rescue. Rescue, not just a body recovery.

He chose to believe the vital signs detector had merely shorted out, which channeled more power to the signal when it resumed. He filed the possibility away for future testing.

Right now, however, he could only think of locating Chuck.

Lieutenant Colonel Scanlon folded the mission chart in front of him. “We have enough pilots. Vapor and I can handle the stick. You’re already tapped elsewhere, Captain.”

“But if Chuck isn’t even around here—”

“Nunez still thinks part of the network responsible for taking Chuck works out of the Oasis. That’s the reason we started here in the first place.”

Vapor snagged his helmet bag from the ground. “Hey, be grateful you’re getting out of this place for a while. Maybe you can grab a shower. You’re really getting ripe, pal.”

Jimmy ignored Vince and stayed focused on the colonel. “Are you ordering me to stay, sir?”

“If that’s what it takes, but I suspect that won’t be necessary.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Jimmy”—the colonel rarely used first names, usually opting for the rank or call sign—“you’re a hell of an officer, focused and talented, but you can’t be everywhere at once. Push that drive too far, and you’ll burn out before you become a general. And make no mistake, I predict a star in your future.”

That was one fat-ass bone to wave under a guy’s nose, but stars weren’t going to keep his friend breathing.

“I just want Chuck found alive.”

Scanlon clapped him on the shoulder. “You need to accept it may be too late. But damn it all, we
will
bring him home.”

He wanted to believe that, except the thought of Socrates’ empty grave told him the fallen didn’t always make it home. Jimmy resigned himself to the inevitable. He wouldn’t be on this flight. He had another mission to perform.

Still, his slacks and bogus silk shirt he had to wear itched a reminder of his more comfortable flight suit.

Jimmy powered down the corridor toward the glowing Exit sign. Outside he would hook up with a small contingent of Nunez’s CIA paramilitary dudes wearing civvies and looking like airmen out on the town, too. They would watch his back and gather intel around him.

He cleared the doorway near the small lot of official buses. At the end of the row waited two rental cars, one for him and one for Nunez’s men. He picked up his pace toward the cars. Heat enfolded him in an oppressive blanket.

A body rammed into his chest, someone short and curvy, with a whiff of baby powder.

“Chloe.”

She stared up at him, squinting in the late afternoon sun. “You’ve been tough to locate lately.”

He wouldn’t exactly say he’d been hiding since their discussion about her transplant, because that would be wrong. He’d just been slammed with work. Right? “Why aren’t you with the rest of your group?”

“I’ve been trying to find you for the past hour.” She flattened her palm to stop him from forging past. “What’s going on around here?”

“What do you mean?” he hedged, eying the parking lot where he expected his “drinking buddies” to show up soon.

“Everyone’s in a frenzy. Plowing through the halls. Extra cops everywhere I turn.” She waved her hand toward the military personnel weaving in an out, security high due to the threat and the impending flight. “Just look around.”

Time to divert her attention. “They must have heard there’s been a new shipment of baby wipes at the Base Exchange.”

“Not amused.” Her lips pulled tight. “I thought we reached an understanding last night that we would be honest with each other. I’ve held up my end of the deal telling you huge and private pieces of my life. Answer me this one question, please.”

The last thing he needed now was to worry about her, too. Analysis of the navy speedboat wreckage indicated a bomb had been planted, making the military or the USO the target. While Nunez’s time was being devoted to finding Chuck, the base security had a whole other mission looking into who might want to disrupt a peaceful group of entertainers.

Why didn’t the higher-ups just cancel this ill-fated USO tour and send the people home? “People are busy with repairs. Water lines should be running again within a couple of hours.”

“So I hear, but I’m not worried about my next bath. Damn it, Jimmy, I know you’re avoiding my question. I’m worried about—”

The rest of her sentence played out in his mind and kicked him in the gut. “Me? Don’t be. This is what I do, and I’m good at it.”

“Crying shame you have such self-esteem issues.” Her green eyes snapped with anger, and she had a right.

He was dodging her questions. He’d been dodging
her
rather than risk hurting her by saying the wrong thing.

“You have to realize I can’t talk to a civilian about military business.” He gripped her shoulders, her soft flesh giving beneath his hands.

Soft and vulnerable.

He stole a look over his shoulder at the fence separating the base from the threats in the outside world. How many pipe bombers or car bombers or suicide bombers waited for their shot at the U.S. stronghold on foreign soil?

Nunez’s people were scrambling to discover any possible connection between the bomb in the marketplace and the stepped up violence against servicemen and service-women. In Jimmy’s head the events had to be tied. Clearly, the suicide bombers had targeted the military in choosing a watering hole well known for its service member patronage, followed by an explosion outside Incirlik’s front gate. Given that all the supposedly AWOL personnel had disappeared in this corner of the world—

Chloe snapped her fingers in front of his face until he looked down at her again. “Is there going to be another attack on the front gate? Is the power going to be blown next? Or the whole base? I believe I have a right to know that much.”

“I don’t have any reason to think so.” He tightened his hold. “But I want to stress how important it is for you and your USO friends to stay on this side of the fence.”

She met his eyes dead-on. “You’re going to tell me to leave, aren’t you?”

His fingers flexed on her shoulders, and before he could think, he pulled her in for a kiss. Yeah, he needed to feel her softness against him.

She tasted like toothpaste and something more, something unmistakably
her
. He knew intellectually that the upcoming mission had him pumped with adrenaline, which spiked his sex drive. But it was more than that. His arms tightened around her, wanting her, needing to keep her safe.

He suddenly remembered her scar and what it meant. He backed off. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

His gaze dropped to her side, the place where he’d seen her transplant scar after the marketplace explosion.

She took his hand from her shoulder and drew it to her side, sliding it under her shirt to rest on a thin, puckered line of scar tissue.

He fought the urge to tug away. He hated himself for being a lowlife bastard and letting his own screwed-up business show around Chloe. For some reason he still didn’t understand, he couldn’t walk away from her.

“Jimmy, I know that some folks get freaked out by this. I don’t agree with people who think that way, and I’m not even sure I can respect their feelings. However, I do accept it’s a reality I have to live with, since this is the only way I
can
live.”

Jimmy angled closer to her, dodging her eyes by resting his cheek against hers. “My sister had leukemia as a teenager.” He swallowed hard. “She died while waiting for a bone marrow donor.”