Undeceived (21 page)

Once out of sight, he raced for his BMW. His tires squealed as he made his way out of the parking garage. He flashed his badge at the gate, and sped out into the muggy evening.

I’m back. Back in the New York Groove. Back in Black. The Bitch is Back. Actually, the bitch isn’t back. Where exactly are you hiding her, asshole? Because I know you’re in on it. Somewhere in the Caribbean is my guess. Thought my handler might know, but he was worthless. Wouldn’t tell me a thing. All he did was try to talk me back into the fold. He just doesn’t get it. I’m not his to command anymore. I’ve broken the bonds of my father’s servitude. You were my example. You did that a long time ago, didn’t you? The other side is still after you, but I see it all so clearly now. You aren’t theirs to command either. Good for you. I admire that fortitude, striking out on your own path. It’s a trait we share I think. And part of me regrets what must be done. If Elizabeth weren’t so close to the truth, I might actually spare you the agony of living without her. I’m soft that way. But it’s all in motion now. I overheard the whispers that you were back. Ear to the ground, Darcy. Always. Directional microphones sure do come in handy. And inside headquarters, I don’t even need to hide them.

Annnnddd…Bingo! Technology wins again. Well, guess I’d better pack my sunglasses and my sunscreen. I am the Master of Disguise; you didn’t even know I was there at The Park. No one recognized me. No one. You’re going to her in Barbados. Got you, you son-of-a-bitch. And now I’ll get her too.

Chapter 31

She heard the shot ring out, stopping her heart, trapping air in her chest. She turned her head and saw dead eyes, a lifeless gaze from the man lying beside her. Lights flickered as her own life drained away, and in a desperate attempt at self-preservation, Elizabeth gasped and forced her eyes open. Momentarily frozen, she was surprised at the rampant, almost painful, heartbeat in her chest. Lightning flashed into the absolute dark, followed immediately by another clap of thunder. She sat up and fought back the haze of disorientation. She was not dead; she was breathing. She was not covered in blood; she was clothed in a sweat-soaked tank top and shorts. There was no dead man beside her.

She was most definitely alone.

She hated being cut off from everyone she knew and playing a waiting game of cat and mouse. She would have given anything for some task to occupy her. She’d never experienced the suffocating inactivity she’d endured since leaving Trinidad—this facsimile of imprisonment. She’d tried to distract herself with television and books, but to no avail. Basically, she’d spent long hours walking around the safe house and turning over the last months’ events in her mind, trying to make sense of it all.

She spent the months since Fredericksburg, after parting ways with William Darcy, on various translation projects for the State Department. Boring, tedious work, to be sure, but spiced with the occasional dig into Darcy’s and his colleagues’ pasts. The director agreed to let her meet with Wickham’s potential asset, code-named Viceroy, on Tobago.

She couldn’t help being curious. The asset’s choice of locale, so close to Darcy—was it a coincidence or a plant by the mole to cast more suspicion on the beleaguered station chief? She didn’t know, but that piece of serendipity had changed her life: a chance encounter, a whirlwind romance, and two weeks of paradise with a man so changed from the one she’d known for over a year. Still brooding and introspective at times, just enough to be interesting, but he was also attentive, relaxed, kind, tanned, leanly muscled…

She spent a few minutes in dreamy, love-soaked memories before a crash of thunder jerked her thoughts back to the events at hand. Wickham had tried to contact her while she was with Darcy, then showed up on Tobago, dismissed her objectivity—not without cause, she admitted to herself—and had impulsively taken her place at the drop. Now he was dead. She was aware she let Darcy’s influence sway her; she expected to eventually find out Wickham was the mole as Darcy predicted. The history between the two of them, the conflict over Jirina, and the financial information she and Charlotte had dug up on George, all painted a damning picture of the man. It was no secret how much he despised Darcy. Plus, Wickham owed big time money to banks, credit card companies, casinos, and to various friends and family, including Wickham’s own mother, according to Charlotte’s FBI file. In the final analysis, though, he was not a double agent, only a weak and foolish man.

But if the mole was not Wickham, then who?

It was horrifyingly ridiculous. The traitor, whoever it was, thought she was close enough to the truth to try and kill her for it, yet she knew nothing of his true identity.

Elizabeth tossed the covers aside and shuffled into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. She dug around in the pantry and came up with a stale bake from yesterday’s trip into town. She covered the biscuit-like bread with butter and washed it down with tea. Not sure whether she should explain her presence to Georgina and the Pemberley staff, Elizabeth had made do on her own, avoiding Pemberley and Mrs. Reynolds’ yummy cooking.

She sat as she munched, the claustrophobic feeling of dread creeping over her once again. As a free woman, Elizabeth had loved Barbados, but her present confinement made paradise stifling. While she listened to the heavy rain patter against the windowpane, she brooded. Slowly, the rain slackened off. And that’s when she heard the car door slam.

No one had darkened her door since Barrett dropped her off. She dashed into her bedroom for her revolver, and with her back against the wall, she peered through the curtain. Gray sedan, windows up, trunk open. Elizabeth’s heartbeat ratcheted up another notch. She cocked her pistol and waited.

The trunk door slammed, and her heart leaped into her throat. Darcy stood with a duffle bag over one shoulder and a plastic tub in his hands, surveying the house with a critical eye.

She yanked open the door and called, “William!” Her voice broke, and she dashed across the porch.

“For Christ’s sake, woman, don’t shoot me!” he yelled as he ran toward her.

She gently lowered the hammer and placed the gun on the porch swing. She launched herself at him, jumping into his arms from the last two steps. He barely had time to drop the box and brace himself for the onslaught.

Arms and legs wrapped around him, she covered his mouth with hers. He buried one hand in her hair and held her in place with the other across her rear.

“You’re here!” She was breathless when he put her down.

“Elizabeth.” His arms tightened around her. “Let me look at you. Are you all right, darling?”

She nodded and pulled back. He ran his hands over her hair, her shoulders, her face.

“What were you thinking…
kidnapping
me?” She pushed at his chest, remembering the days of enforced solitude. “You arrogant ass! Leaving me here twiddling my thumbs for days! I thought I’d lose my damn mind! How dare you…
handle
me like some throwaway asset? You… What’s so damn funny?”

He was grinning like a mad man. “God, I’ve missed you, Bennet.” Then he fastened his lips on hers with a feverish intensity that had her blood humming. Her knees buckled.

“I might forgive you. If your story is a good one. And if you kiss me like that again. What took you so long?”

“Information gathering,” he answered between kisses. “I went to Washington straightaway, as soon as I could leave Port of Spain. Took a leave of absence.” He put her away from him. Raindrops ran off his hair and dripped off his lashes. “Let’s get inside.”

“What’s in the box?”

“I’ll show you. Later.” As thunder rolled overhead, he hurried up the steps and tossed the box on the table, rattling her breakfast dishes. She covered his face with kisses. Laughing, he turned and gathered her in, lips roaming her face and neck while she pushed up his shirt, running her hands over the lean, warm torso.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he panted. “I should wait, should wait until—”

“Oh, hell no! We’re not gonna wait!” She pulled him to the bed, the sheets still rumpled from her thrashing through her nightmare.

He pulled his shirt off and let her take care of the pants. Turning him around, she pushed him to the bed and straddled him. Arms crossed, she grabbed the hem of her tank top and flung it to the far side of the room. Wrapping her arms around him, she clasped him to her as his mouth fastened on her breast.

Her fingers combed through the dark waves of his hair. “You cut your hair while you were away.”

“Let me,” he demanded, scooping her ass by delving into the waistband of her running shorts.

“No.” She leaped back. “This time, you let me.”

She drew down her shorts. “First things first.”

“You’re killing me here.”

“I’ll make sure you die a happy man then.”

***

Later, thunder rumbled softly in the distance as they lay tangled in the sheets, entwined with her leg across his and his arms around her. He gentled them both by putting his forehead against hers and closing his eyes.

“My dearest, loveliest Elizabeth.” His voice was reverent, full of emotion.

“Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever see you—or anybody, for that matter—ever again.”

“I wish I could have stayed with you. I wanted to.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I had calls to make, things to do.”

“Vague and mysterious. Meanwhile, I’m in the worst sort of limbo.”

“I can empathize. You don’t like a cage.”

“No. Even if it’s as beautiful as this one.”

“I’m sorry, darling.”

“If only I could do something to find this person…”

He smiled and indicated the box in the other room with a nod of his head. “Go ahead. Look inside.”

She wrapped the sheet around her and stepped out into the great room. “Darcy?” Puzzled, she lifted the box top. Her gaze shot up to his in wonder. “My files!”

“Yep.” He pulled on his khakis, leaving them unbuttoned as he crossed over to her.

“How did you ever?”

“Spy craft, with a little help from technology and good, old-fashioned B and E. I broke into your apartment.”

“You what?”

“Well, yes. I had to break the code numbers in the files. Good thinking, by the way, keeping that at home.”

“I learned from the best.”

“Then you don’t mind the burglary?”

“Absolutely not!”

“I also read through and photographed some of your office files with this.” He pulled a contraption that looked like a pen and pencil set out of the box. “Ina’s invention—some kind of computerized camera. I had the images developed, although that probably isn’t the right term, by a man in Alexandria just beginning to dabble in the technology. That’s why it took me so long to get here. I didn’t want to come to you empty-handed, and flowers just didn’t seem to fit the bill.”

“I’d rather have my papers than flowers any day.” She grinned and threw herself at him. “You’re my hero!”

He embraced her again, but then he pulled away, his expression turning solemn. “Elizabeth, I do have some bad news from DC as well.”

“Bad news?”

“A woman named Charlotte Lucas was found unconscious day before yesterday down by the Potomac.”

Elizabeth paled and sat down on the couch, suddenly nauseous and dizzy. Darcy sat down and took her hands in his.

“She’s your friend, isn’t she? I put two and two together—your phone call to the FBI and Charles’s information about your office files. She was helping you?”

“Oh, God! Charlotte! Is she…?” She looked straight at him, shocked, but dry-eyed, ready to face whatever he told her.

“She’s alive, but the FBI is keeping that on the down-low, for her own safety. She was beaten to make it look like she was mugged. Whoever did this left her for dead, and it’s a miracle she isn’t. He must have been interrupted before he could finish the job.”

“How do they know it wasn’t some random mugging?”

“Her apartment’s been searched.”

“So our mole’s a sloppy bastard.”

“Seems to be getting progressively sloppier.”

“I asked Charlotte to run some financials a while back, get background on some…people.”

“Including me. I found my information in your stash.”

“Yes, you were the nexus of all the trouble until the shooting on Tobago. We looked at others connected to you: George Wickham for one, and other officers and assets—in Prague, Budapest, East Berlin.”

“Was there intel stored at her place? Like you had in yours?”

“Just the key to the code numbers. We each kept one, in case…”

“More smart thinking.”

“Any leads on who ransacked her apartment?”

“Not yet. No prints—looks professional.”

“My office. My apartment. My files.” She took a fortifying breath. “Jesus H Christ. He’ll come after me next because he thinks I can make him.” Terrifying certainty flooded through her. “That’s what the set-up in Tobago was all about—getting to me because of those files. He wasn’t a bona fide asset; he was a dangle.” She looked at Darcy, wide-eyed. “I can’t pinpoint him, Darcy. I don’t know who he is.”

“Correction—you don’t know
yet
. That’s why I’m here with your papers. The mole thinks the answer is in here somewhere, so I’ll bet it is. Together we’ll find it.”

“If he searched Charlotte’s apartment, why not search mine?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I got there first.”

“I wish I could see her.”

“She’s in a coma.”

“I want to sit with her, do something.”

“You can’t.”

“This is my fault. Wickham, Charlotte, all of it.”

He turned her shoulders so she faced him, tilted her chin up. The old Darcy scowl was back. “You are
not
to blame! This is the job, Elizabeth. You know it; you’ve dealt with it before. Everyone in this business knows the risks.”

“Espionage is gruesome except when it’s boring,” she whispered and swallowed the lump in her throat.

“What?”

“Something Charlotte used to say.”

“Well, she’s right. Sometimes our job is dangerous. Sometimes it’s deadly.”

“But it’s for the greater good? Isn’t that Spy Rule Number Three?”

He turned to the box and began lifting out files. “I no longer live by rules.” He glanced up and brushed her cheek with a finger. “I live by moments, thanks to you.”

“All my life, I believed what the agency did
was
for the greater good. Sometimes, though, I wonder.”

“Wonder all you want. I have—many times. Walk away if you want after this is over. But until you find this son-of-a-bitch, you’ll have no peace of mind, no safe place to run. So let’s settle it, Elizabeth, and then if you decide to walk, you can walk away a free woman.”