Viper's Kiss (11 page)

He bet the whole background story she’d created about her childhood had about as much fact in it as a supermarket tabloid. He smothered the memory of his reaction to it, the way his heart had opened as she’d fed him lie after lie.

His fingers clenched around the laptop in his hands. He’d risked the whole operation, his colleagues and every American, soldier and citizen, by believing in her. His expression grim, he retrieved a few more items from the car before climbing the stairs to his motel room, more determined than ever to put the woman behind bars and recover the missing Visi-suit prototype. In future, he would remember her code name, her nature.
Viper. All snakes hiss with a forked tongue.
He tried to ignore the gnawing ache in his gut.

“What the hell is going on?” Maggie’s voice was an octave higher than usual as Luke fastened one handcuff about her wrist, and secured the other to the bedrail. His stony expression gave nothing away. What had happened while she’d dressed? Earlier, he was kind and tender. A few minutes in the parking lot and it was like a different person had returned.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, jerking on the chain. Unfortunately, both cuffs were secure. She looked up at him, her forehead wrinkling in confusion.

He met her eyes briefly, and she saw his anger, his pain, before he looked away. “Give it up, Maggie. Those two men…”

Maggie flinched. The comment seared her conscience, as though prodded by a hot brand. So she’d repelled him when she’d spoken of the killings. “I’m sorry.”

Luke’s eyes closed for a moment, and his shoulders sagged a little. He took a deep breath and put his hands on his hips.

“Now, tell me where the Visi-suit is.”

Maggie felt as though she’d been slapped in the face. “What?”

Drew stepped in from the doorway. “Let’s stop playing, Maggie. Give us the suit.”

Maggie blinked. “We’re back to this? I don’t have the suit. I don’t know where it is.” She frowned. “Why would you think that?”

“You know, Viper, I admired your disguise when I first met you. It was the details that got me. Well, it’s the details that have tripped you up this time.” Luke glared at her.

Maggie swallowed. This can’t be happening. She’d just made love with the man, and he was back to accusing her of being a spy. “I don’t understand,” she said hoarsely, unshed tears burning her throat.

“I thought the knitting needle was a nice touch,” Luke said.

“Oh, wait, I like the giant called Tiny,” Drew supplied. Noah remained quiet at the door.

“What are you talking about?” Maggie stared at Luke. She instantly felt the loss of intimacy, the distance in his tone and expression, as though it was a whip flailing her skin. She’d shared so much with this man. Was it all an act on his part?

“You broke their necks, damn it,” Luke bit out, his fists clenched on his hips. “It was professional. It was clean. Not self-defense.”

Maggie took a moment to process that information. “Are you saying the injuries I gave them didn’t kill them, that someone broke their necks?” She felt a fleeting relief at not being responsible for taking two lives.

The muscles in Luke’s jaw clenched, and it looked like he was battling for control. The realization slowly dawned on her that the man she’d fallen in love with believed she was capable of cold-blooded murder. Blood drained from her face.

“No. No, I didn’t do it, Luke. How can you believe that?” she cried. “What about the Trojan horse? I didn’t put that on my computer. You know somebody else used it to access Tek-Intel.”

Luke shrugged. “Or you could have planted it.”

“But what about the safe house? I was inside with you, remember? Not outside trying to blow it up. How did they find your safe house?”

Luke rolled his eyes. “You knew where it was, and you had time to organize something with a cohort. Or maybe they planted a tracking device on your laptop.”

Maggie frowned. “Tracking device?”

“Yeah, a tracking device. They probably had one on the laptop. How do you think I found you at the warehouse?”

“You planted a tracking device on me?” she asked, surprised. “Regardless, I wasn’t attacking us. The real Viper is still out there, and while you’re focusing on me, that manipulative shrew is selling the suit.” Maggie drew in a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She wanted Luke to trust her,
needed
him to trust her.

Luke stared at her for a moment. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

Maggie’s jaw dropped as he and Drew left the room. Noah remained just inside the door. Luke was gone.
Just like that
. She choked back tears. She didn’t understand. They’d shared so much. She’d opened herself up to the man, told him things she’d never breathed to another soul, and he still thought she was Viper, a murderer and a spy. She ducked her head as a tear spilled down her cheek, the wet trail hot against her skin. What did she do now? What
could
she do now? She took a deep shuddering breath.
It hurts. Damn, it hurts
. More tears followed the first, and she raised her hand to wipe at her cheeks. Her progress was halted by the length of the chain on the handcuffs.

She stared at the chain, the steel bracelet. She jerked at it. He thought she needed to be restrained. She yanked the chain again. He believed she was a murderer. Angry hurt welled up inside, so fierce, so fast, she wanted to scream. She wrestled with the chain and let loose a low, ferocious growling sound from the back of her throat as she punched the bedrail over and over, pulling on her handcuffs, tears streaming down her cheeks. Eventually the pain in her fist and the ache of her wrist took priority and she collapsed on the bed, sobbing. Spent. She’d made a mistake. She’d trusted Luke with her heart. And he’d broken it.

A movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. Noah was quietly closing the door behind him. She didn’t know if he was trying to give her privacy, or just didn’t want to sit through more of an exhibition, but finally she was left in the room. Alone.

Luke paced between the two single beds in the room next to Maggie’s.

“C’mon, Fletch. You’re making me dizzy,” Drew said from his sprawled position on one of the beds.

“I’m trying to think.” Luke turned and paced back down to the foot of the beds.

“Are you thinking about recovering the prototype and catching the rest of the bad guys, or are you thinking about the woman next door?” Luke halted.
Maggie
. She was the focus of his thoughts. Had been since the first time he’d laid eyes on her. But he had a job to do. It was vitally important to get that damn prototype back in the right hands, and despite his misgivings, he had to complete the mission he’d been assigned. He wasn’t there to decide on Maggie’s innocence or lack thereof. He wasn’t there to listen to her arguments and risk everyone’s lives on a gut feeling.

“We have her on CCTV shooting a security guard,” Drew said. “Her colleagues killed two cops, and now she’s killed two of her co-conspirators. You could’ve been next on her list, bud.”

Luke’s fist clenched against his thigh. His gut told him to trust the woman, his head told him to lock her up and throw away the key. And he still didn’t have the suit. He glanced at his colleague, his friend. Drew was right. He had to focus on his job.

“Let’s get to work.” He opened the laptop he’d grabbed from the car and turned it on.

“She’s still denying her part in all of this. Her mother’s just died, so we’ve lost leverage there. How are you going to get her to help?”

Luke shook his head. “I’m taking her out of the equation. She was going to sell the suit to Jafari and Tzin Shu. She doesn’t have the suit on her, so maybe she’s stashed it somewhere near the meeting.”

Drew frowned. “But where are they meeting?”

Luke keyed in several commands. “She mentioned a four-star hotel in the Downtown District.”

“Yeah, but was she telling you the truth?”

Luke hesitated. “Everything she’s told me has a fact buried in it somewhere. I’m going to assume this is one of them.”

“But how are you going to find the right hotel? It’ll be like looking for a blush in a brothel.”

“Well, I could run a program that compares all names and aliases of our buyers against passenger manifests and customs databases to track them coming into the country,” Luke suggested.

“But that would only work if they’re coming in legitimately.”

Luke nodded. “Exactly. Or I can do something similar with the hotel reservations databases.”

Drew whistled. “I knew there was a reason Reese hired you.”

Maggie tried to get comfortable on the bed. The skin on her wrist had reddened where it came in contact with the cuff. She could feel a bruise coming on. She glanced at the bedside table, at the phone, the scrappy notepad and the cheap pen bearing the motel’s name. Her gaze returned to the phone. It was a link to the outside world—not that it would do her any good. She’d always prided herself on being independent, always sorted her own problems out and rarely asked for outside help. Well, now she was in a pickle, and she couldn’t think of one person to turn to for help. Actually, that was a lie. She could think of two people. One had just died, though, and the other was in the room next door. Luke was more likely to help her into a jail cell than out of this situation.

Luke’s lack of faith burned her like a laser on skin. She tried to lift her chin, but she just wanted to crawl inside herself. This was a first for her, in more ways than the obvious. She’d felt so close to him, so connected. Normally she didn’t get past the first date, so her experience with this kind of fallout was nil. Now she didn’t know what to think, what to feel. It was easier to push all that pain and insecurity off to the side, to ignore it. She had something else to worry about.

Her lips firmed.
This is so damned frustrating.
She’d attended college on a full scholarship. She coordinated a department full of computer programmers, librarians and engineering students, so why couldn’t she figure her way out of this mess? Everything she did just made the situation worse. Now Luke thought she was responsible for this nightmare, and while he had his sights focused on her, the real spy was out there, selling the suit to a party who had the money to pay for it and the lack of conscience to use it.

She thought about the Visi-suit, her lips pulling down at one corner. When she was first introduced to the concept, she’d laughed. Until she realized everybody else in the room was dead serious, particularly Richard Bates. When she’d learned the full extent of the research project, she’d expressed her qualms. This kind of technology would only be used in one context. War. Whether it was spying, or on the front line, it was still war. Bates and the Department of Defense had argued that the technology was out there, and sooner or later, some party would create the perfect weapon. An invisible one. They’d prefer it was the United States that won that particular race.

Well, now it was done. And it was out there. Luke, and many men like him, were risking their lives to recover it.
But that’s not going to happen while they think I’m the spy
, she mused. It seemed she was the only person in the free world who knew the truth.
Margaret Elizabeth Kincaid is no spy
. She straightened her shoulders. She knew what she had to do. It was up to her to prove her innocence. Nobody else was going to do it for her. She had to track down Viper herself. Maybe then Luke and his team could refocus their energy on something more productive. She glanced at the door. Noah stood outside, and from the smell wafting in through the open crack of the door, he’d invested in a pack of cigarettes.
He might be a little longer
.

Maggie eyed the phone again. The dog-eared phone book underneath looked well used. Rupert’s words sprang to mind. Viper had arranged to meet two buyers at a four-star hotel at ten in the morning. Her brow wrinkled.
Why choose an expensive hotel?
There was always security, cameras, lots of staff. Rupert had been right. It didn’t seem a discreet choice for a meeting. Unless you were planning to use that to your advantage. The only other time Viper had been caught on film was when she masqueraded as Maggie. Was she going to do it again? It would be a good way to lay even more suspicion at Maggie’s door.
Well, this time she isn’t getting away with it
.

Using her free hand, she lifted the phone down onto the bed, and then hauled the phone book closer. She sighed. What was that slogan? Let your fingers do the walking. She flicked through the pages until she got to hotel listings, and one by one, she rang them, keeping her voice low as she asked them several questions.

Frustration mounted with each call. She kept darting looks at the door, waiting for Noah to come in and call a halt to her efforts. Her belly ached. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything, and it felt like the contents of her stomach was pure, roiling acid. Her eyes felt dry from lack of sleep, and she needed another shower.

She said a polite thank you to the receptionist and hung up, crossing the last hotel off the list with a trembling hand. Her shoulders hunched as frustration ate at her. It was just so damn discouraging. Call after call, and no luck. She took a deep breath to calm herself. Otherwise she’d throw the damn phone across the room. Perspiration broke out on her upper lip. If Viper was booked into a hotel, she wasn’t using Maggie’s name.
Damn
. Maggie was so sure Viper would use something connected to her to further implicate her in this mess. The woman had done her homework. She’d managed to crack her password and hack into her laptop, after all. Maggie straightened, her eyes wide. With a massive manhunt underway for Margaret Kincaid, perhaps Viper had used another link to Maggie, but one not quite so obvious? She quickly dialed the hotels again, and this time asked a different question. At each denial, her heart sped up. Until she reached a hotel two thirds down the list.

“Yes, do you have any reservations under the name Diana Prince?” Maggie held her breath, and closed her eyes in relief when she received an affirmative answer. Oh, Viper was clever. She’d used Maggie’s comic book heroine as an alias. She slowly hung up the phone and took a deep, shuddering breath.
Step one, check
. She’d located Viper. She pulled the pad off the table and scribbled a note before tearing off the sheet and tucking it into her pocket. She frowned at the handcuffed wrist.
Step two, get out of here
.

She glanced at the door. “Uh, Noah? I need to use the bathroom.”

Luke tapped the keyboard a little more forcefully. Why couldn’t Maggie just tell them what they needed to know? He wasn’t getting anywhere with his search of the reservations databases, and the clock was ticking.

When he’d confronted her with her lies, she’d initially acted hurt and confused. And he’d almost believed her.
Again
. Then she’d
apologized
. The pain that had speared his heart had been breathtaking. Quickly followed by the slow burn of anger, both at her and at himself.