To the Brink (38 page)

Ethan laughed. "You're fucked,
pal
,"
he said, and, tugging Darcy hard, lunged toward the black-and-white.

"Officer!" he yelled. "Hey ... can you give us a little help here?"

Oakley and company stood frozen on the curb behind them, their firepower mysteriously disappearing.

The uniform looked everyone over before his gaze landed back on Ethan. "What's the problem?"

"Our ride is in the garage," Ethan said, with a jerk of his head over his shoulder, "but my battery seems to be dead. We were just asking these guys who to call for a jump—we're from out of town," he added with an aw shucks grin, "but I can tell they're in a rush. I hate to hold them up.

"Thanks, guys," he added for effect, turning to Mutt and Jeff with a dismissive wave as he walked right up to the cruiser, pulling Darcy close. "Appreciate the help, but we've got it covered now."

The hired guns had little choice but to push out pained smiles and walk on down the street.

Beside him, Darcy was deathly pale.

"Hop in," the officer said. "I'm about to go off-duty. Let me check in with dispatch and then I'll jump you. I've got cables in my trunk."

"That's great." Ethan couldn't open the cruiser's back door fast enough. "You're a lifesaver."

"Yes," Darcy said, her gaze meeting Ethan's. "A real lifesaver."

"Because I knew they weren't going to take a chance of creating a scene in broad daylight," Ethan said when Darcy asked him how he'd known the two men who had jumped them wouldn't just shoot them.

"Gatlin is bound to have given orders to handle this discreetly," Ethan continued as he inserted the key card into the lock on the door of the room he'd rented amid a string of motels along the 1-95 corridor.

The best feature of the motel was that it was six blocks away from the multistory Holiday Inn where his SUV was currently parked in an underground garage. And where he hoped Oakley and his buddy were currently settled in, waiting for them to hop in the SUV and leave.

"Blasting us in front of a cop," he explained, "wouldn't exactly fall under the heading of discretion. And it would still leave them without the tape."

"Why didn't we just tell the cop what was going on?" Darcy walked directly to the bed and flopped down on her back, flinging her arms above her head.

Ethan felt a pang of sympathy. She was beat. And no doubt terrified, although she rarely let it show. Her body had endured one too many adrenaline spikes and letdowns in the past week.

But she was tough, he thought with pride. An hour after their last close call, and she was still hanging in there. And her absolute willingness to follow his cues during their last brush with Gatlin's goons spoke volumes for her self-control.

"We didn't tell the cop for the same reason we haven't told the feds. Because it would play out something like: the local law enforcement would contact the feds, who would contact the State Department, and since we don't know who in the department is involved in this, we can't take the chance. Not until we get a better handle on what's going on with Gatlin and the tape. And not until we hear back from Nolan and Dallas with whatever help they've been able to turn up."

She seemed to think about that as he walked to the drapes, glanced out the window to identify an escape route if they needed to make a fast exit from their second-floor room, then pulled the drapes shut against the summer heat of a sun dropping past six o'clock.

"How did they find us so fast?"

That's the part that pissed Ethan off. "There has to be a secondary GPS attached to my SUV somewhere. I must have missed it when I found the other one. Which was probably the plan."

"They planned for you to find something they planted?"

He nodded and, locating the TV remote, removed the batteries. "It was probably a decoy so I'd figure we were clean and wouldn't look any farther," he said, fishing the tape out of his pocket. It fit perfectly where the batteries had been.

"I'm thinking there's a listening device of some kind somewhere, too," he added, replacing the battery cover. He tossed the remote on the dresser, hiding the tape in plain sight in the event they had uninvited company. "Most likely in an air-conditioning vent. I should have caught that, too."

"And you would have done this when?" She pushed herself wearily to her feet and headed for the bathroom. "We were out of your town house within two minutes of the break-in. I'm amazed you found the first one," she said above the sound of running water.

"They were counting on me not taking time for a thorough search." He set his gun on the bedside table, fished his cell phone out of his pocket, and set it beside his gun. "I played right into their hands." He lay down on the bed, feeling weary to the bone.

"How big is this?" she asked, walking out of the bathroom with a wet washcloth pressed against her forehead.

Her expression was bleak. It hurt him to see the worry in those gorgeous green eyes—yet he had nothing to give her to take it away.

"Soon, babe," was the best he could do. "Now that we've got the tape, we'll find out soon."

He reached for the phone, dialed guest services and finally schmoozed someone into sending up a cassette player. When he hung up the phone she'd disappeared into the bathroom again.

The sound of her retching behind the closed door made his chest knot. Exhaustion and tension and running on the edge were taking their toll on her. He'd been there. He understood fully that nerves had finally gotten the upper hand.

"Better?" he asked gently when she returned to the room a few minutes later.

She lay down beside him. Closed her eyes. Her skin was pale in the shadowed room. "I want this over."

"Hang in there." He rolled to his side, touched a hand to her hair. "We're getting there.

"You know," he said, propping his head on his palm and watching her face, "my personal experience tells me that sex is a great way to relieve tension."

One corner of her mouth tipped up at his nonsense. "My experience tells me that in
your
experience sex is pretty much the answer to everything."

"You picked up on that, did you?"

Another small smile did strange things to his heartbeat. "Go to sleep, Garrett. I'll get the door when they bring the tape player."

Two deep breaths later, he was relieved to see that she'd fallen sound asleep. And as he lay there, watching the face that he had never stopped loving, the woman with the spirit that had never stopped haunting him, he swore to himself that if they got out of this alive, he wasn't letting her leave him again.

"Jesus," Ethan said twenty minutes later as he sat at the table in the corner of the room and turned off the tape player. "Jesus H. Christ."

Beside him, wide-awake even though her brief nap couldn't have done much to revive her, Darcy looked shell-shocked. "He's trying to broker a deal for enriched uranium? How can this be happening? And why would Gatlin tape something this incriminating?"

Ethan granted, wiped a hand over his lower face. He needed a shave. He needed sleep. He wasn't going to get either any time soon.

"Why tape it? Most likely for insurance against his partners in crime. How can it be happening? You take your basic multibillionaire, give him a God complex and a position of power. Place him in a fairly benign post in a region adjacent to any number of enemies of democracy and dangle the gilt-dipped carrot. Power to assholes like Gatlin is not in political appointment but in the control that money can buy."

And apparently, he was in the process of working a deal with the devil. The tape clearly revealed that Gatlin was in league with at least two minor but determined rogue governments to broker a deal for enriched uranium that, Ethan was certain, wouldn't end up within a country mile of an electrical power plant. No. There was only one use for material of this nature, and the application was more suited to nuclear warheads and dirty bombs than creating an alternate power source.

"I wonder who he was talking to on the tape?"

Ethan shook his head, still mired in the repercussions if this deal actually went down. "If he's on the government's watch list, they should be able to do voiceprints and get a match."

"Christ," he said. "No wonder Gatlin was able to track us down so quickly. He's got to have sources all the hell over the place. I figure that when we finally make the right connection and start the ball rolling on an investigation, this is going to make the oil for food scandal look like chump change."

"About that right connection," Darcy said. "Where can we possibly go with this information? What's to say the path doesn't lead directly to the top? Gatlin must have any number of government officials tucked deep in his pockets if he's managed to have them turn a blind eye to this."

Yeah. That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Where
could
they go with it and not end up dead for their efforts?

On a deep breath, Ethan flipped open his cell phone and dialed Dallas's number.

"It's me," Ethan said, and hung up.

A few seconds later, his cell phone rang. It was Dallas calling back on a line that couldn't be monitored from either end.

"Get Nolan and Eve," Ethan said. "I don't want to have to tell this twice."

While he waited, Ethan set his cell phone to hands free so Darcy could hear both ends of the conversation. A few minutes later, his brothers and sister were assembled and listening on speakerphone.

"For the love of God." Nolan's voice came through loud and clear after Ethan filled them in on the contents of the tape. "The asshole doesn't believe in small-timing, does he?"

"The way I figure it, Gatlin's been working his way up for years," Ethan said. "He probably started with a little exchange of military technology, graduated to illegal arms procurement—whatever. This is by no means a starting place for him."

"But we've got to make it a stopping place," Dallas said with grim determination.

"And keep you two alive in the process," Eve added.

"What have you been able to dig up so far?" Ethan asked. Not quite eighteen hours had passed since he'd called Nolan from the road on the way to D.C. in the middle of the night, so he wasn't hoping for much.

Nolan's voice came back on the line. "The word still isn't out on Darcy's rescue, but my sources in Zamboanga confirm that the military knows but has been ordered by unknown government officials to keep it quiet."

"Okay." Ethan dropped his head into his hand and rubbed his forehead. "Who have we got on the inside that we can trust uncategorically?"

"Eddie," Eve said as if she'd just thought of it. "Eddie Jackson."

"Eddie Jackson?" Darcy's eyes narrowed in puzzlement. "I know Eddie. He's a communication specialist at the embassy."

With his eyes on Darcy, Ethan said, "Someone want to explain things to her?"

"Darcy," Eve said, "Eddie's a spook."

"What? Eddie's CIA? Whoa. I mean, I know the CIA
has operatives undercover in all the embassies, but... Eddie? I never would have guessed it."

"That was the idea," Eve added. "I knew him when I was with the Secret Service. We had to work together a couple of times."

"Okay," Ethan broke in. "You sure you can trust him?"

"With my life," Eve stated without hesitation.

"Good. Because you're going to be trusting him with ours. Reach out and touch him, Eve. Find out what he knows, if anything, about this. More important, find out who, in D.C., we can trust with the tape. We've already dodged several bullets and we've got to make a connection soon. I don't have to tell you our time is running out."