Tall, Dark and Lethal (3 page)

He did have time to notice her nice legs. He wasn’t averse to bonuses. That Palmer had likely had her already didn’t detract from her charms—maybe it even added to them. He’d enjoy taking something that was Palmer’s.

But he couldn’t risk her making any noise now, couldn’t afford even a momentary struggle. He pulled back into the cover of his own vehicle. He could wait. He had waited for months already, never knowing where the bastard was, never knowing if he was going to wake to Palmer’s gun pressed to his forehead.

He had the man’s scent now, was on his trail. He would get him in the end. He always got his man. That was how he had stayed alive in parts of the world where violence was an everyday occurrence and respected businessmen and politicians went to dinner with assassins and murderers.

He couldn’t say he liked the life, but he understood it and was good at it, had achieved a measure of success fishing in those murky waters. He wasn’t about to let Cade Palmer take that away from him. And one thing was clear. With the past they shared, it would always come down to kill or be killed between the two of them.

Palmer was good at killing.

But he was better.

C
ADE STUDIED THE POSTED
menu, turning his cell phone over in his hand. He was supposed to meet Abhi in half an hour. Had the man betrayed him? He’d been the SDDU’s trusted man in Jodhpur. But people switched sides all the time. No one knew that better than he did. The name David Smith tasted bitter on his tongue. Cade gripped his phone, irritated that the man at the front of the line was taking forever to order.

Abhi might know that he was alive. He had to consider that possibility. He had contacted the man under an assumed name, but Abhi had connections. He would dig deep before agreeing to a meet. Cade hadn’t thought he could dig deep enough to get to him, but what if he had?

But even if Abhi had discovered his identity, he still wouldn’t know where he lived. Cade couldn’t see any possible way how the man could have found that out. Still, at one point Abhi had worked for BAKIN—Indonesian intelligence—which had since been restructured into BIN, the Badan Intelijen Negara. The man was scary good. A great guy to know as long as he was on your side. And therein lay the gamble.

He couldn’t go to Abhi with Bailey in tow, and he couldn’t leave Bailey behind. The question was whether to call Abhi and set another time for their meeting. If he didn’t show, would Abhi pack up and go back to his Jodhpur hideout, taking his information with him? Probably not, not for a few days, not with the amount of money Cade had put on the table for information on David Smith.

He slipped his phone back into his pocket. He had to get Bailey out of the cross fire and hand her over to the authorities for safekeeping. But first he had to figure out why the FBI wanted them in the first place, and convince the Bureau that she didn’t have anything to do with anything. He needed time, and he needed to find out which of his enemies had orchestrated this morning’s attack—and how they had found him.

P
ERFECT
. N
ICE TO HAVE
some luck for a change.
Bailey relaxed for the first time that morning. She smoothed her T-shirt down, tugged her hair into place and straightened her spine.

The black-and-white rolled into a parking space a few feet to her right. She walked toward it, wincing as the gravel scratched her bare feet. With a little more luck, she’d be given a ride home.

Not that she had shoes at home.

Not that she had a home. The thought took the air out of her lungs. She paused to catch her breath. Cade’s craziness had distracted her from the fact that her house was gone. Why was it so hard to breathe? Her eyes burned.

She couldn’t fall apart. Not yet. Not yet. She had to ask for help.

The nice officer was going to take her someplace safe where she could call her brother. They would let her wait at the police station until he came to pick her up. They would wrap her in a blanket and give her hot coffee. She watched TV—she knew how it went.

She would be told that it had been a gas explosion after all.
Grenade launcher. Right.
Could be that Cade was a crazy maniac who had blown up the house himself and concocted the whole story so she would willingly go with him.

What did she know about him, anyway? He’d lived in the house for only three months. He claimed to be Frank Garey’s nephew, but she’d known Frank for nearly seven years and the retired truck driver had never mentioned any relatives to her.

She glanced toward the diner’s entrance. A young couple came out, hugging and kissing for all they were worth, acting like they were madly in love. Bailey wasn’t sold on the idea of love. Both sets of grandparents had divorced before she’d been born. Her parents’ divorce was a mess she just as soon not think about. And now her brother’s marriage had fallen under the ax.

The lovebirds outside the diner moved on without letting each other go for a second.

She couldn’t see Cade. So far so good.

He would be mad as hell when he found her gone. And she didn’t want to see Cade Palmer mad. She’d seen him annoyed, and that was scary enough. In a few minutes, she would be under the protection of the law, safe from him and whatever was really going on.

Maybe they would never see each other again. That would be good. Bailey was pretty convinced that he was running from the law—otherwise he would have called the police after his house blew up. If fortune smiled on her, he would just keep running and never look back.

She stepped gingerly on the hot, sharp blacktop, running on nerves as she approached the cop car. The officer inside was shutting off the engine and fiddling with the laptop on the dashboard. Computer technology had entered every aspect of life these days. Even she had experimented with some digital garden-art designs, and thanks to her nephew’s tips, had actually gotten better at it.

Deep breath. She needed a moment to collect her thoughts so she could explain her situation coherently and the policeman wouldn’t think her a raving lunatic. She finger-combed her tangled hair one more time.
Hi. My house exploded this morning.
She bit her lip. How about
Hi. I was kidnapped?
Would that be putting it too strongly? Cade had said he only wanted to protect her. He’d done nothing to harm her so far—but he did have a gun. She filled her lungs with air again.

She could see the screen and the scrolling images on the officer’s laptop. As she tried to figure out what she would say to him once he stepped out of the car, Cade’s picture flashed on, with a single line of text on top. She moved closer to read it, but the picture changed too quickly.

She stared, rooted to the spot, as her own image scrolled onto the screen.

Where did they get
that?

Her attention was quickly drawn from last year’s much-regretted experimental perm to the bolded message above her photo.

WANTED BY THE FBI. And below that, another line: CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS.

Damn. She was going for the cop. Couldn’t be left alone for a minute. Cade had looked back through the windows just in the nick of time.

“Excuse me.” He pushed through the people in line behind him, stepped outside and walked toward her as fast as he could without drawing attention. She seemed to be hesitating.

“How many bagels did you say you wanted, babe?”

She startled and whipped around, with a stunned look on her face, and hesitated for another beat as she glanced back at the black-and-white—hesitated too long.

“You better look at their choices.” He grabbed her by the elbow in what looked like an intimate gesture but would have been impossible to shake off had she tried, and steered her toward the diner, growling only two short words under his breath. “Get inside.”

A waitress hurried by just as they stepped in. “Good morning. Would you like a table?” Her smile didn’t reach her tired eyes, her mind clearly someplace else. She was in her fifties but her shoulders sloped like someone decades older. She did not, thank God, notice Bailey’s bare feet and point to the No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service sign on the door.

“Just picking up. Thanks.” Cade headed to the take-out station once again, where a high-school kid was manning the counter. The line had disappeared while he’d gone to stop Bailey from making his life even more complicated than it already was.

“Hi. One cup of coffee with all the fixings.” He’d seen the syrupy stuff Bailey carried around all day long in her “Gardens are Art” oversize mug.

The kid grabbed a purple DeDe’s plastic coffee cup. “Anything else?”

Cade let go of Bailey’s elbow and draped an arm casually around her slim waist, ignoring the kaleidoscope of donuts with their colored frosting in the antique display case in front of him. “Two breakfast sandwiches on whole-wheat bagels. Two bottles of orange juice.” His body was a weapon—he didn’t put junk into it any more than he would have shoved sand down his rifle barrel.

“Fifteen sixty-five.”

He put a twenty on the counter. “Keep the change.”

“Thank you, sir.” The kid’s smile widened, and he put some spring in his step as he went to get their food.

He was handing Cade the bag when the cop came in. Cade watched the man for a moment from the corner of his eye. The officer sat at a corner table and buried his head in the breakfast menu.

“Thanks.” Cade grabbed their food while Bailey reached for her coffee.

“Thank you for stopping in. Have a great day. Good morning. What can I get you today, sir?” The kid was already serving the next customer.

Cade didn’t have a free hand to hang on to Bailey, so he did his best to herd her in front of him before she got another brilliant idea. Especially since the cop was done making his selection and was scanning the place for the nearest waitress.

Cade watched Bailey for signs that she was ready to bolt, but she’d been uncharacteristically quiet since he’d brought her into the diner. He moved between her and the cop to block his view, turning his back.

Once they were at the door, he checked out the parking lot before stepping out, scanning the cars and the man who had just pulled in before walking to the Escalade.

“Don’t do that again.” He didn’t raise his voice but made sure his tone conveyed his message sufficiently.

She bit her lip and tightened her grip on her coffee.

Was he scaring her yet? He sure as hell hoped so. He hoped he could scare her enough to stop her from doing something colossally stupid. She looked subdued, if not scared. That was something.

“Help yourself.” He put the food between them once they got into the car, but he didn’t touch his. He wanted to be a little farther down the road—and in a different car—first.

He glanced into the rearview mirror before backing out of his spot and saw the cop at the diner’s door, looking at the cars in the parking lot. Time to haul ass.

He pulled out onto Route 1 but veered off almost immediately onto a side street. He snaked through a labyrinth of housing developments. Maybe the cop was looking for the Escalade. Whoever owned it could easily have called it in by now.

Bailey sipped her coffee, set it in the cup holder and looked at him, anxiety in her eyes. “I understand that you think you are saving me, but I’m asking you to let me go. Please.”

She still didn’t get it. “No.”

Her jaw muscles tightened and her fists clenched. “I’m not going to quit trying to get away from you. You can’t watch me every second. You are going to have to sleep at some point.”

That was what she thought. He could go without rest for days when on a mission. But it would help both of them if she stopped struggling every step of the way.

“This is for your own good.” That sounded lame—she wasn’t going to go for that.

And she didn’t.

“I can decide what’s for my own good!” she shouted, clearly at the end of her rope. “Why does the FBI want us?”

The what? He lifted an eyebrow. He hadn’t told her about the FBI—there was no sense in getting her all worked up. He figured the shock of her house blowing up was enough for one day, considering she was a civilian.

She drew a deep breath, which pushed her breasts against the T-shirt of his that she’d borrowed. “Our picture was on that officer’s computer in his car.”

So that was why she’d stopped in her tracks when she’d reached the black-and-white. Could be the cop had recognized them in the diner.

He hesitated only a moment before reaching his decision. It would be easier to tell her the truth and gain her cooperation than watch her every second of every day until he figured out what was going on. “We’ve been implicated in domestic terrorism. Both of us,” he added for emphasis.

She went white and stared at him. “Why?” Her mouth closed and then opened again, but nothing else came out.

“You tell me.”

She was slack jawed for another minute before speaking again. “But they’re wrong. We can explain that it’s a mistake, can’t we? We just have to tell them that it’s crazy. They can’t have any proof. We have to go back and talk to someone.”

She seemed determined to rush into disaster. A real babe in the woods.

Her eyes pleaded with him. “Listen to me. We can’t run. This is probably the worst thing we could be doing.”

The fact that she still didn’t trust him after he’d spent his entire morning saving her curvaceous behind frustrated him beyond words. “How keen are you on a surfing holiday?”

“
What
are you talking about?”

“Think water and a board.”

Her eyes widened. She swallowed. “They wouldn’t do that to us. We are U.S. citizens. They can’t interrogate us like that.” But she sounded less than certain.

“You’d be surprised what gets done behind closed doors these days. At the very least, we’ll be taken in for serious interrogation. We’re talking days, at the minimum. They are not going to let us go until they figure out what’s going on. I’d prefer to figure things out on my own, then go in once we’re cleared.”

“But we didn’t do anything.”

“And eventually they would figure that out. My worry is what would happen in the meantime.”

“They can’t have any evidence.”

“They might now. Our house blew up.”

“You said those were terrorists.”

“There’s a chance there won’t be any witnesses to testify to that. But the Feds will be finding pieces of guns and traces of C4 all over the ruins.”

Again, no words came out of her mouth, which was still opening and closing as if she were a fish out of water. Which she was.

He shrugged. “Don’t make a big deal out of this. They were left over from my old job.”

“You had guns and explosives in the house?” she squeaked.

He glanced at her to make sure she was okay. “For self-protection.”

She buried her face in her hands, leaning forward as far as the seat belt would allow. A full minute passed before she looked at him again, and it was clear from the set of her jaw how much effort it took for her to keep herself under control. “I could go back and tell them all that stuff was yours. You could hide until you clear yourself. I have nothing to do with any of this.”

“Probably true. But do you think they’ll take your word for it?”

That gave her something to think about for another minute or two. “Okay. But if we have to hide out while whatever this is gets resolved, I’d prefer to hide out on my own. That’s my bottom line.” She drew herself straight and tried to look very tough and businesslike. All five feet five inches of her. In silk pajama shorts, with no shoes, pink toenails wiggling furiously under the dashboard.

He bit back a grin. Gotta give the girl points for trying. “Where?”

“With my brother. Or a trusted friend.”

He didn’t miss the emphasis on
trusted.
“They’ll have that covered.”

The toe wiggling stopped. Her face went pale again. “You think they’ll investigate my family?”

“Family, friends, coworkers. Consider it already done.”

“But this is insane. This is so unfair.”

Was it? He’d invaded people’s privacy without a second thought if he’d determined that the information he could gain would move his mission forward. He hadn’t given much thought to what it felt like from the other end. Didn’t care much, truthfully. The kind of people who’d made it on to his radar screen were the kind of people who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a grenade through his house. “Welcome to the real world.”

“Surreal world.” She looked out the window at the peaceful community he was driving through, carefully obeying the speed limit. “What are we doing here?”

“Looking for another ride.”

“You can’t keep stealing. That
is
a crime. I don’t want to get involved in things like this.” There was a new edge of desperation in her voice.

He said nothing as he drove by house after house.

“Are you looking for something specific?” she snapped, shoving her cinnamon hair out of her face, giving him that furious fairy look.

He’d been developing a fascination with furious fairies in the past three months.

“A way out of here. This is a residential area. As soon as someone looks out their window, they’ll notice if their car is gone. I need a business where people won’t go out into the parking lot again at least until their lunch break.” He turned onto a bigger road at the end of the street and saw some office buildings not far off. He headed that way.

“Do you do this a lot?”

He thought back to other cars he’d borrowed on various undercover missions. And that one plane, an older model Cessna, in Colombia. “When necessary.”

She groaned.

“Drink your coffee.” Those full lips needed an occupation other than nagging. He could have suggested a number of activities for them that would have made him happy. Damn, if he looked at her long enough, he could almost feel her lips on him. But based on the killer look she was shooting him at the moment, it probably wasn’t the right time to suggest anything…personal.

“I’m fully awake. Thanks,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and blocking his view of her nipples as they pushed against the fabric of his T-shirt. He sure did love air-conditioning.

He navigated over to the corporate park and stopped. “Okay, let’s go.”

“This is a bus stop.”

“They’ll find the car and get it back to the owner faster if we leave it here.” He waited until she got out and then swung his bag over his shoulder, picked up her pajama top from the back and wiped the interior and the door handles to remove fingerprints. “Hey, that’s mine,” she protested, grabbing at the top.

“It can be washed. You just said you didn’t want to be linked to things like grand theft auto.” He gave her a pointed look. “Let’s not leave a calling card.”

“You’re so good at this, it’s scary.” She watched him through narrowed eyes. “I suppose if you weren’t, you’d be in jail,” she added.

If he weren’t, he’d be dead.

A quick scan of the parking lot turned up exactly what he wanted: a Land Rover with four-wheel drive. The doors were locked, but he had his bag of tricks with him. He reached in and pulled out a small tool kit.

In minutes, they were on the road, heading south. He didn’t stop until they crossed the Maryland border, and then only long enough to run into Wal-Mart for a few changes of clothes, plus shoes for her, food and another canvas bag to stash everything in.

“When are you going to tell me where we’re heading?” she asked when they were back on the road again, her fine legs covered by new, tan capri pants.

“A friend of mine has a fishing camp at one of the smaller lakes around here.”

“We can’t live at a fishing camp for the rest of our lives. We have to talk to someone. I really think you’re making a mistake here.”

Oddly, staying at the camp with her for a prolonged time didn’t seem all that unappealing, despite her endless questioning of his judgment. He would just have to find another occupation for that smart mouth of hers.

“We’re staying until we can figure out who is after me. Or you,” he added, voicing a thought that had been idling in his mind since the Colonel had told him she was on the FBI’s list, too. “Any enemies?”

She gave him her signature glare—annoyance fused with impatience and suffering—and turned her pixie nose way up in the air. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

He didn’t think it likely that the tangos had anything to do with her, but until he had proof positive who the bastards were and what they wanted, he couldn’t dismiss any possibility. And he couldn’t let her go. Couldn’t let her go, anyway, as long as the FBI was looking for her. If they had a bone to pick with him, he didn’t want them to find her and drag her into his mess.

He recognized the turnoff and took it. Ten miles later, he found himself in a maze of small, unpaved roads, gravel crunching under the tires. He’d only been to Joey’s camp once, ten years ago. The area had changed since—it was built up, with hardly any open land left. New drives and lanes had been put in.

“Lost?” she asked when he rolled down the same street the second time around.

“Canvassing the neighborhood before approaching the target.”

The look on her face told him he wasn’t fooling her. “Too bad we don’t have GPS.”