Double Agent (7 page)

Doug led her up a wide staircase with rich red carpet, wood paneling and portraits on the walls. The whole place was permeated with the musk of old money, while the bulk of her childhood consisted of mediocre foster homes, some not as nice as others. Sabine liked nice things, but this place made her want to take her shoes off at the door.

They passed a ballroom filled with glitzy people. When Doug cleared his throat, Sabine blinked and hurried to catch up. “Did you grow up here?”

He shook his head as they climbed. “We moved around a lot—you know, military family and all. When my dad got promoted and assigned to the Pentagon, we stayed. I was sixteen.”

His voice had cracked. She waited until he was ready to say more.

“That was the summer my mom died.” Their eyes met. “Her cancer snuck up on all of us, and it was over almost as fast as it had come.”

“I’m sorry.” What else could she say?

At least he had a mom for that long. Sabine had neither parent and barely remembered more than the last day they’d all been together, though she’d been nine. That day was still etched into her brain, never to be erased.

Doug left her in a room that was feminine but not over-the-top, with floor-to-ceiling drapes and a four-poster bed. He walked away muttering about simpering crowds and being choked by his own collar.

She smiled. Too antsy to rest, despite being exhausted, Sabine decided Doug might need some moral support downstairs. After all, there was a formal dress in her bag.

She headed for the bathroom.

* * *

Fresh from his four-minute shower, Doug walked downstairs still tying the bow tie of his tuxedo. It was an instrument of torture. He really should burn the thing. If his uniform hadn’t been in his closet in Texas where he lived on base, he’d have worn that.

He smoothed down the front of the jacket, took a deep breath and pushed open the double doors. The place was loud and bright, full of senators, businesspeople and high-ranking military personnel. His father held court at the far end of the room, surrounded by eager ears and fat wallets.

Doug would rather be upstairs with Sabine. They could have watched a ball game or a movie. He could have taken his dad for a round of golf in the morning. He wasn’t going to tell the old man that, if it hadn’t been for Sabine, Doug probably wouldn’t even be here.

People turned to look as he crossed the room. Doug refused champagne from more than one waiter with a silver tray, but, despite his size, what probably struck them was the resemblance between father and son. With his dad being a well-known general, it was a wonder Doug didn’t get in more trouble on covert missions. The only difference between them, other than age, was the lighter brown of Doug’s skin from his Caucasian mother.

He liked that she was still with him, in that way, but he’d rather have her.

The general looked up as he approached. His father’s dark green jacket gleamed with buttons and medals. His face crinkled and laugh lines emerged on his chocolate-colored skin. “Douglas!”

The cigar smoke was strong and made his eyes water. Doug smiled while his dad pounded him on the back. “So where is this mystery woman you chased all the way across the country?”

People around them stopped to look at something.

“She’s upstairs resting.”

The music also stopped, and the general’s bushy white eyebrows rose. “Resting, huh?”

Doug turned around. Sabine was in the doorway, and the room grew still and quiet as people turned to get a look at her in a floor-length dark green dress. Her hair cascaded around her shoulders in a riot of waves and curls. She was beautiful.

The general clapped him on the back. “Does she know she’s the one?”

SEVEN

I
t was too late for second thoughts. Sabine pasted on a smile and crossed the room. The music started up again, and she waved off a waiter’s offer of champagne. Rarely did she find herself out of her depth, but she felt it here in a roomful of—
Was that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
Sabine was pretty sure she’d seen him on CNN last week.

With a polite nod she made her way to where Doug stood with a bald older African-American man who was a few inches shorter than Doug, but no less wide. General Richardson was a formidable sight with all those medals pinned to his jacket. Sabine raised her chin as he met her eyes and said something to Doug that she was too far away to hear.

Someone grabbed her arm. Before the threat even fully registered, instinct and training made her react with a spin, ready to strike back at her attacker.

“Whoa, take it easy.... Elena Sanders?”

The name brought with it a rush of memory and emotion, and Sabine lowered her hands. An attack in front of a bunch of armed military servicemen and servicewomen wasn’t likely.

She blinked at the man in front of her. “Mr. Adams?”

It had been years since she’d seen anyone from the days when she had trained with the CIA, and here she was, face-to-face with the man who’d given her a fail on her weapons proficiency test. She’d retaken it twice. The years had turned Steve Adams’s dark hair to silver at the temples and had deepened the lines around his eyes.

A new wariness was there, emphasized when he scanned the area around them and leaned closer. “What are you doing here? You have a lot of explaining to do.”

Sabine made a point to glance at his grip on her arm. There would probably be a bruise tomorrow. When he let her go, she backed up, ready to rip into him for manhandling her for no reason. “It’s a party. What do you think I’m doing here?”

Doug stepped up beside her. “Everything okay, Sabine?”

“Sabine?” Steve asked.

She ignored the question. “This is Steve Adams, one of my training officers at the CIA.”

Doug shook Steve Adams’s hand. The quick tightening around Steve’s eyes before Doug let go would have been a wince of pain in anyone else.

“Nice to meet you, Steve.”

“I’d like to say it’s a pleasure.”

Sabine didn’t want to feel comfort from the touch of Doug’s tuxedo sleeve against her bare arm, but she did. It wouldn’t take much for one of them to reach out and take the other’s hand.

Focus.

“So, Steve...” Sabine cut through the tension between the two men. “What are you up to these days?”

Steve’s eyes flickered again, a trace of confusion he allowed her to see. “I’m a director at Langley now. I have been for the past four years. You?”

“Same old, same old. You know how it goes.” She smiled. He would know that she had spent the last few years doing what she did best: gathering intelligence on some of the world’s biggest crooks.

“Unfortunately, no, I don’t know.” Again Steve glanced around the room. He was no doubt as aware as Sabine of the eyes watching them, the ears peeled. “Is there somewhere we can talk in private?”

“I can show you to my father’s library.”

Sabine trailed behind Doug across the ballroom with Steve beside her. What did this man, a man she at one time considered a mentor, want to talk about? He’d been so surprised to run into her that something strange must be going on. And why did it seem like Doug already knew what Steve was going to tell her? Probably it was CIA business. How had they even known she would be here tonight, at this party? The CIA kept track of its assets, but this was crazy.

Doug opened the door to a room lined with bookshelves. There wasn’t a spare space that she could see. It was full, and yet the room didn’t feel closed in to her, just warm and open. Sabine would have loved to spend hours in here, lost to worlds of adventure.

The door closed with Doug still in the room. He caught her look and shook his head, like she should’ve known he would include himself, and turned to Steve. “This room is secure. You don’t have to worry about listening devices. You can speak freely.”

Steve’s eyebrow peaked. “Except that you’re here.”

If the look on Steve’s face was anything to go by, Sabine was going to want Doug to be here for whatever was about to be said. Not that she would tell Steve that Doug was anything more than a regular soldier. “It is okay, Mr. Adams. I trust Sergeant Major Richardson.”

Steve’s face was blank, a mask of indifference that said enough without saying anything at all. This man felt the need to hide behind nonchalance, which told Sabine of the gravity of the situation.

She chose a dark wood gondola chair that had a green-suede-covered seat. “What is it?”

Steve scanned a bookshelf beside him, then finally came and sat across the cherrywood coffee table in a chair that matched hers. “You have some kind of nerve showing up here, Ms. Sanders. After what you did six years ago, I would think you’d have the good sense to stay away from this part of the country. Either you’re incredibly brave or completely reckless.”

Doug’s mouth opened, and she shot him a look, cutting off whatever he’d been about to say. “I’d love to know what you’re talking about, Mr. Adams, but I’m afraid I have no idea. Six years ago, when the Tamaris mission went wrong—”

“Went wrong?” Steve’s face flushed. “Three agents, your team, your friends, were all left for dead on that mission. You disappeared. The company spent a considerable amount of time and manpower searching for you to determine if you’d been killed or captured.”

“Captured?” Sabine couldn’t believe it. “I was left for dead, just like the others. I woke up two days later in a French hospital with three bullet wounds. After I recovered, my new handler told me I had to disappear. He gave me everything I needed to start a new life. It was only after I rebuilt everything from the ground up that I started taking on missions again.”

Steve looked her over, as though assessing the truth of her words. “Who is your handler?”

“His name is Neil. That’s all I know.”

“It would be worth your while to find out more about him.” He paused for a beat. “Ms. Sanders, this situation is very serious. For the past six years, everyone at the CIA has wondered who killed the other members of your team on the Tamaris mission. Some even speculated that you killed them yourself and then disappeared.”

“I’ve given my whole life to the CIA. How can they even say that?”

“Because if what you say is true, then those who speculated that you have gone rogue are, in fact, correct.”

“Rogue?”

Steve nodded. “Several times over the last few years, agents out on missions claim to have seen you. There was never any hard evidence to prove it. You’re quite adept at that which we trained you for.”

“This is the most contrived story I’ve ever heard.” Sabine tamped down the urge to rage at the man before her. Instead she tried to remember the respect she once had for him. “You’re saying I was duped into being a rogue agent by someone pretending to be a CIA handler?”

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility, if you think about it. They convince you the situation was so bad it was necessary for you to go dark, part of some super-secret department. They provide you with a new identity...
Sabine.
Now you work for them, a fully trained CIA operative at their beck and call. It’s clever.”

“I am not a pawn. I would know if I wasn’t working for the CIA anymore.”

Steve didn’t seem convinced. “Not if they didn’t want you to. Whoever you’re working for now convinced you that you’re still a CIA agent when you’ve been number one on our list of rogues since the Tamaris mission. They’re evidently very good at what they do.”

“This whole thing is crazy.”

Doug squeezed her shoulder. “You should listen to him.”

She turned her frown on him. “Why? How do you know anything about this?”

“After we saw each other in the Dominican Republic, I gave your information to my commanding officer. He said the same thing. I told you the CIA denied all knowledge of you. They’ve been looking for you. Though how you managed to change your name and Ben’s—and stay hidden this whole time—is beyond me.”

“We didn’t change Ben’s name. I never told the CIA that I had a brother. We went our separate ways for a while after he had graduated from high school, and then he joined the army. We had different last names, anyway, so when I needed a new identity, I borrowed his. It wasn’t too hard for the government to find they had accidentally lost a few key records of Ben’s. The ones that linked us.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t anyone else’s business but mine that I have—had a half brother.”

Sabine looked back at Steve and dread settled over her like a storm cloud. “Are you going to have me arrested?”

He worked his mouth. “You should at least come in to Langley so we can get this whole thing sorted out. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack, if we’re going to figure out what happened and who this handler of yours is...who he works for.”

“Not before I figure out what happened to Ben.”

Steve frowned. Sabine filled him in on what had happened since her brother’s death and her investigation into who was responsible. She left out the part about her intruder and the exploding hard drive.

Steve sighed. “I understand you want justice for your brother, but the army is no doubt conducting an investigation.” Steve looked at Doug, who nodded. “While I’m not unsympathetic to your situation, it’s of the utmost importance that you yield yourself to us for questioning. We have to get to the bottom of this.”

Sabine strode to the far end of the room and stared at a shelf of historical novels. Her eyes refused to focus on the titles printed on the spines. Her brain was far too full, trying to process what Steve had told her. Could she really be a rogue agent?

She picked through her memories and tried to find some indication that her handler, Neil, was anything other than the CIA agent he had claimed to be. Before seeing Christophe Parelli killed by someone who looked exactly like her, she would have said for certain Neil was who he had said he was. Now she couldn’t be sure.

There was just no way to predict the outcome. Sabine could end up in prison, disgraced or most likely the victim of an
accident
that brought about her untimely demise. If she really had been duped into working as an agent against the CIA, then she doubted whoever it was would let her live long enough to provide the actual CIA with enough evidence to discover their identity.

Sabine had been a victim once, long ago. After that she had vowed never to return to such a helpless state. The truth about Ben’s death would stay hidden unless she was able to help Doug figure out who had killed her brother and why. There was no way she could turn herself in to the CIA for questioning when they would most likely detain her indefinitely.

She turned back and found both men watching her. “I will help you find out who it is I’ve been working for.”

“Good—”

Sabine cut him off. “But not until after Doug and I find the person who killed my brother. You need to keep this to yourself, Mr. Adams. Do not tell anyone you’ve seen or spoken to me. In return for your promise, as soon as this is over, I’ll turn myself in to the CIA. You can do whatever you want with me.”

“Sabine...” Doug’s voice was guarded. He was probably right to be worried.

“I’ll even work out a meeting with my handler. You can set up surveillance. I’ll wear a wire. You can use me however you want to find out who it is I’ve been working for. But I do what I need to do first.”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t know about this.”

“I don’t need you to agree, Mr. Adams. I can walk away right now. I can disappear again, and you’ll never find me. I’ll still get what I want—time enough to hunt for Ben’s killer—while you get nothing.”

A thought occurred to her. “If my handler really is working against you, they’re no doubt keeping tabs on their asset...me. If they think I’ve given you anything, they’re going to close up shop as fast as possible and go so far underground that you’ll never figure it out. It’s what I would do.”

Doug nodded slowly. “Not before they get rid of all the evidence.”

Sabine caught his gaze and knew he’d reached the same conclusion as her. “They’ll kill me. Which is not part of my five-year plan.”

Steve rubbed a hand down his face. “You want me to pretend I never saw you when a roomful of government staffers just witnessed the two of us meet and leave the room together?”

“There’s no reason to believe they’ll say anything. Or that they won’t. It’s a risk, but a calculated one that I can live with. I think I can trust General Richardson’s taste in friends.”

Doug folded his arms. “You can.”

“You want me to sit on this until you decide to turn yourself in? You’ve been gone for six years as far as anyone at the Agency is concerned.” Steve blew out a breath. “You want me to let you leave on good faith?”

“You know me, Mr. Adams. Or at least you did. If what you say is true, I was duped. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been nothing but an upright agent of the intelligence community my whole working life. That means, despite being deceived, I’m still as trustworthy as I ever was.”

Steve studied her for a moment and then nodded. “Give me some insurance, and I’ll trust you.”

Sabine snorted. “Typical. You’ll trust me, but not without something to hold over me? That’s hardly trust, but I don’t suppose I expected differently from a CIA agent.”

“I could detain you right now.”

Doug put himself between her and Steve. “You could try it, but you wouldn’t get two feet from my father’s house with her.”

Steve’s eyes widened. “I see. It’s like that, is it? You’re willing to go to bat for a loose cannon?”

Sabine was as surprised as Steve that Doug put himself between her and the complete destruction of her career and her reputation. Any way she looked at it, this was bad. Was he really willing to jeopardize his life, as well? She stared at Doug’s back. In most ways, they were polar opposites. Not to mention that he didn’t even trust her. Why was he doing this?