DeliciousDanger (8 page)

He brushed off his shears and walked away, toward his van in
the driveway. Mike watched him go, sensing something a little off. As the door
to the van slammed, he realized what it was. There was no other landscaping
equipment. No lawn mower. No edger. No sprayer. And every gardener he’d ever
seen drove a pickup with an open bed and hauled an open trailer. This guy had
nothing but his hedge trimmers.

Mike started toward the van. “Hey, hold on a minute.”

But the van backed up in a hurry and tires squealed as it pulled
out into the street.

“Damn.” Mike gritted his teeth.“I blew that one. Must be
tired. Damn, damn, damn.”

He jogged back across the street to tell Rick, the
skittering on his back even stronger.

* * * * *

“I tell you, he suspects.”

As soon as he was out of sight and away from the street he’d
been on, Malik had opened his cell phone and called Gabir.

“What makes you think that?” the other man demanded.

“I saw the man who brought Latrobe looking at me strangely
when he came back from an errand,” Malik said.

“You are imagining things,” Gabir told him. “Just act
normal, keep an eye on things and you’ll be fine.”

“No, no, no,” Malik protested. “You don’t understand.”

“Understand what?” Gabir’s voice sharpened. “Did something
happen?”

“The man came across the street to talk to me.”Malik was so
nervous he was nearly stuttering. “He talked to me, Gabir.”

“About what?”

“He asked me how long I’d been working at that house? Did I
want to take on more work? Said his friend was watching me and wanted to hire
me.”

“All you had to tell him was you were substituting for a
friend and Latrobe would have to talk to him.” There was a pause. “But you
didn’t do that, did you? You did something very stupid. I can tell.”

Malik’s hands were sweating so badly they were slipping on the
steering wheel. “I told him I couldn’t take on any more work and then I left.”

“Left?” The word was a roar across the connection. “You just
left? How stupid can you possibly be?”

“But—”

“But nothing. Now you’ve gotten their attention because you
did something out of the ordinary. Shit. This means a change in plans. We’ll
have to find some other way to set him up and we won’t be able to watch him as
carefully while we make plans. Get back here at once. If you pray hard enough
to Allah perhaps I won’t kill you.”

* * * * *

“There’s definitely something up with that gardener,” Mike
said, closing the front door and rearming the security system. “If he’s even a
gardener at all.” He gave Rick a brief recap of what happened. “I’d say he was
there to keep an eye on you. But wouldn’t your neighbors have wondered when a
strange man showed up to clip their hedges.”

Rick frowned. “Maybe not. All he had to do was tell them he
was a new man on the crew, or substituting for the regular.”

“Someone’s painting a target on you and you know it has to
do with what’s going on in Iraq. Weapons missing, all that.” He gave Rick a
careful look. “I keep coming back to Greg Jordan, although I really don’t want
to.”

Rick sat up, stifling a moan as his muscles and ribs
protested. “Me too. I could have sworn he was clean as far as dirty contacts
over there. But now I’m willing to look at anybody and everybody. Any word yet
on the van from the so-called accident?”

“Not a thing. I talked to Jennings this morning. Someone’s
made it just disappear.”

“Great.” Rick ran his hand over the stubble on his jaw.
“That definitely means we’re not playing with amateurs here.”

“We’ll need to go over the plans for delivery in the
minutest detail before we ever lift off,” Mike pointed out. “There’s no margin
for error here.”

“Don’t I know it. I just—”

Whatever else he might have said was cut off by the ringing
of his cell phone. He dug it out of his shirt pocket where he’d stuck it in the
hospital.

“Latrobe.”

“Rick? It’s Harry.”

“Hey, Harry, thanks for the call.”

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah, it’ll take a lot more than a little wreck to knock me
out of commission.”

“Listen.”There was the sound of discomfort in Harry’s
voice.“I’m not sure I should even be making this call.”

There was such a long pause Rick frowned. “Is everything
okay? Trouble at the field? Do you have a problem?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s my granddaughter.”

Instantly the image of the striking redhead popped into his
mind and the memory of how her body had felt against his. “Does
she
have
a problem? Something we can help with?”

“That’s not it. I just…”

“Harry, maybe you just better spit it out.”

“It’s just that it sounds so crazy. And I don’t want you to
think she’s nuts.”

Rick chuckled. “There are too many people standing in line
ahead of her for that. Lay it out.”

“Well, see, you met her dog, right? Xena?”

“Yes. I seem to remember her being startled that she jumped
out of the truck and sat down by me. I guess she doesn’t take to strangers.
Harry, you’re not calling about that, are you? It’s okay. Dogs sometimes do
funny things.”

“That’s not even the half of it.” As briefly as he could,
Harry explained to him about Xena, the relationship between woman and dog and
repeated the gist of Kelly’s phone call. “So you see, it’s just nuts, right? I
try to tell her that all the time but—”

Rick shifted the phone to his other ear. “Now you’ll think
I’m
crazy but I don’t think it’s off the wall at all. Start from the beginning and
tell me everything about the dog. And Kelly.”

Maybe he could take care of two things at once—add another
weapon to the agency’s Psi arsenal and at the same time learn more about the
woman who kept haunting his dreams.

When he hung up he was sure Harry was more puzzled than he’d
been when the conversation started but that warning itch that had been burning
his neck for days suddenly grew stronger.

“What’s up?” Mike asked, wiping his hands on a paper towel.

“Let’s eat and I’ll tell you. Then we need to make some
phone calls.”

* * * * *

Zarife al-Dulami was not at all pleased with the phone call
from Gabir.

“I give you a simple task to perform and you cannot seem to
get it right. Perhaps I need to make you disappear completely. Erase my
mistake.”

“No, no, no.” It was hard to miss the fear in Gabir’s voice.
“This is just a little glitch. I am working on another plan as we speak.”

“That man cannot be allowed to be on the plane with those
weapons.”Zarife was having difficulty controlling his anger. “Are you so stupid
you cannot find a way to get rid of him without creating a major incident?”

“Believe me, it’s not so easy,” Gabir cried. “The man is
like a shadow. Here, then gone. With eyes in the back of his head and lethal
men always around him.”

“I don’t care if he has the whole damn armed forces of the
country protecting him. We have to find a way to eliminate him. Now.”

He slammed down the telephone. His orders from the unknown
man had been very clear—make sure Rick Latrobe was dead. So far he was batting
zero. He had a disastrous premonition that this was going to turn out to be one
huge clusterfuck.

Chapter Four

It was an unusual sequence of events and circumstances that
found Faith and Mark Halloran and Mia and Dan Romeo living in San Antonio
rather than Maryland where the Phoenix Agency headquarters was located.

When Mark Halloran had been captured by al-Qaeda terrorists
in Peru, his long-time ability to communicate telepathically with Faith Wilding
was his only means of getting messages out. Like a bulldog with a bone in her
teeth, Faith had blown down doors and knocked over people, finally stumbling
over Rick Latrobe and Phoenix in her desperation to mount a rescue. After Mark
left Delta Force, he’d joined the agency and married Faith. They had decided to
make San Antonio their home base as he and Faith had both grown up there and had
family there. Often it meant flying back and forth to Maryland for meetings
when a mission was in process but it was something they both were comfortable
with. And Faith, a best-selling author, was often immersed in her latest
thriller anyway.

Dan and Mia had met when her precognitive visions had helped
Phoenix retrieve a top-secret new robot designed by a friend of Dan’s. Mia
Fleming had been living in San Antonio for some time then, in a house left to
her by her grandmother and working as an art historian. They’d also decided to
make that city their home base, even though Dan, as the agency’s senior
partner, would need to make even more frequent trips back and forth to Maryland
than Mark.

“That’s why we have our own planes,” he joked to his wife.

The one adjustment they had made was to convert a room in
the Romeo household into a high-tech electronics studio, so Dan and Mark could
teleconference with the others and receive whatever information they needed by
secure email or fax. Often they could avoid leaving home that way.

The fact that the two couples lived barely ten minutes apart
in upscale Alamo Heights made it easy for both business and socializing.
Tonight, the men having returned only the night before from Maryland, they were
having dinner at the Romeos’ graceful two-story house. The topic of discussion
centered not just around Rick Latrobe and the sudden danger to him but on the
wonder dog, Xena.

When Rick had called Dan that afternoon to tell him about
Kelly and Xena and the peculiar situation, that conversation prompted the
current dinner table conversation. The newest area that Phoenix was exploring
was parapsychology. With two of the partners married to women with psychic
gifts—those gifts having been instrumental in resolving situations—the men had
decided to open a Psi department. Mia Romeo, who now worked only part-time,
headed up the unit. Faith Halloran, when she wasn’t on deadline, backed her up.

“I’ve been reading a lot about animal Psi,” Mia told them as
she carried a fresh basket of rolls to the table. “It’s an area that hasn’t
received a lot of attention. People have enough trouble understanding that
humans have psychic gifts. Animals are just more than they can handle.”

“Tell me about it,” Mark laughed.

“Is there much documentation?” Faith asked, sipping at her
wine.

“Not as much as I’d like and I’ve really been digging into
it. The psychic connection between animals—especially dogs—and humans is such a
raw field. People are sort of floundering around in it. The word psi, as you
know, refers to the ability to become directly aware of past, present and/or
future events outside the body. There are people who swear dogs have had this
ability for centuries. Those who know when their owners are about to arrive
home, or are in danger. Any number of situations have been written about and
discounted by skeptics.” She looked at Dan and grinned. “We know about that,
don’t we, honey?”

“I used to know someone who had a Caucasian Ovcharka,” Dan
put in. “I can believe they have psychic abilities. I’ve seen it myself. But
they’re one-person dogs, so the link with Rick is very unusual.”

“I should call Aunt Vivi,” Faith interjected. “She can talk
to her Lotus Circle friends and ask them to help her check any instances of
this with other members. They can tap into the website and see if anything’s
been posted.”

“Don’t forget Andy’s friend,” Mia added. “The one whose aunt
lives in Wisconsin and is a Lotus Circle member. She helped me a lot when I was
trying to control my visions, remember?”

“The Lotus Circle also helped me discipline my telepathic
abilities when Mark was held prisoner and I was getting his messages.” She took
a sip of wine. “I wonder how many people know an ancient society has been
resurrected and spread throughout the world via the internet, that its members
are people with special abilities, like mine and Mia’s, people always ready to
help each other and provide assistance and comfort when necessary.”

“Not as many as we’d like,” Mia mused, “but it’s growing
more every day. If more people knew about it, I wouldn’t have had such a hard
time getting the police to let me work with them when Chase Carpenter’s robot
was about to be stolen.”

Dan chuckled. “It was their loss. In the end, you were the
one who had the answers.”

“Considering what’s happening with Rick right now,” Mark
interjected, “we might do well to explore the situation with the dog further.
Do we have a phone number for Kelly? And do we know what kind of person she
is?”

“I’ll get Andy to run a complete check on her,” Dan said.
“What’s on your mind, if you’ll pardon the pun? I can almost see the wheels
turning.”

“I’d like to talk to her first. She’s not part of the agency
and we rarely use outsiders for a job. But Rick could certainly use a danger
sensor.”

Faith’s jaw dropped. “Surely you aren’t thinking of asking
her to go to Iraq, are you? My god, Mark. Throwing her into a situation like
that? We don’t even know anything about her. What kind of person she is. And if
there really is this connection between the dog and Rick.”

“I think it’s worth finding out. Why don’t you go ahead and
call Aunt Vivi and see what The Lotus Circle take on this business with the dog
is.”

“Good idea.” She pushed her chair back from the table. “I’ll
call her right now.”

“Good.” Mark turned his attention to Mia. “Then I think you
might give Kelly a call and kind of sound her out about everything. The Psi
connection,” he added hastily. “Not Iraq. We’re not there yet.”

“I wish Rick hadn’t insisted on still taking the shipment
over himself,” Dan said. “He’s banged up and someone’s after his hide. Not a
good combination.”

“I’ve seriously considered delaying delivery,” Dan said
thoughtfully, “but Rick’s got security at Grainger Caldwell trained and ready
for the goods in this shipment and champing at the bit. He also was very
emphatic that they can’t survive much longer without them.”