The next thing she knew, he was shaking her gently by the shoulder. “Eve.”
“What!” Her eyes popped open. “I wasn’t sleeping. I was thinking.”
“Yes, I could hear you thinking.”
“If that’s some smart-ass way of saying I was snoring, bite me.”
“I’d be more than happy to bite you later, but I really believe you’ll want to see this.”
She rubbed her eyes, and focused on his face. “Since you’ve got that big I’m-the-cat’s-ass grin on your face, I guess you got into whatever you wanted to get into.”
“Have a look.” He gestured toward the screen.
Reading, Eve got slowly to her feet.
HOMELAND SECURITY ORGANIZATION REDSTAR ACCESS ONLY!
“Jesus Christ, Roarke, you hacked into the HSO?”
“I have.” He toasted himself with a brandy. “By God, I have, and it took considerable doing. You were . . . thinking for over an hour.”
She knew she was goggling, but she couldn’t stop. “You can’t hack into the HSO.”
“Well, I hate to disagree, but as you can plainly see—”
“I don’t mean you can’t. I mean you can’t.”
“Relax, Lieutenant, we’re shielded.” He leaned over and kissed the tip of her nose. “Right and tight.”
“Roarke—”
“Ssh, you haven’t seen it yet. Computer, employ passcode. Now, you’ll see the file I dug for is encrypted, for obvious reasons. You’d think a gang like the HSO would employ more complex encryptions. Then again, I don’t suppose they counted on anyone actually getting through to this point. It was a bloody battle.”
“I think you’ve lost your mind. You may be able to get off on an insanity defense. They’ll still torture you, brainwash you, and lock you in a cage for the rest of your life, but they might not beat you to death if they know you’re insane. This is the HSO. The antiterrorist organization that employs methods every bit as dirty as the terrorists they were initially formed to seek out and destroy. Roarke—”
“Yes, yes.” He waved away her concerns. “Ah, here we are. Take a look.”
She hissed out a breath, turned back to the screen, and stared at the ID photo and the personnel file of Bissel, Blair, level-two operative.
“Goddamn! Goddamn!” She was grinning now, as wildly as Roarke. “We got us a freaking spook!”
7 “YOU HAVE A dead spook,” Roarke pointed out. “I wonder if that’s redundant.”
“It makes sense. Don’t you see?” She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Who gets through security slicker than a spook?”
“Well, foregoing modesty, I must point out that I—”
“You don’t have any modesty to forego. Bissel was HSO, so it jibes for him to have all those blocks on his studio, for him to hook up with a security expert, and for him to be dead.”
“Assassinated by another spook, national or foreign.”
“Exactly. They knew about Bissel and Kade, and when the time was right they let Reva know. Set her up to take the fall.”
“Why? What’s the point in framing an innocent woman?”
Frowning, she studied the screen. He looked like an ordinary man, she thought. Good-looking, if you went for the smooth type, but ordinary. That would, she imagined, be part of the point. Spooks needed to blend in to stay spooks.
“Not sure there has to be a point, but if there is, it could be as simple as not wanting anyone looking too closely at Bissel, taking it on the surface. A philandering husband whacked by his crazed wife in the heat of passion. Homicide comes in, takes a look at the mess, hauls Reva off, and that’s the end of that.”
“That’s simple enough, but it would’ve been simpler yet to stage a burglary gone wrong and leave Reva out of it.”
“Yeah.” She looked back at Roarke. “And that tells me she was already in it.”
“The Code Red.”
“The Code Red, and other things she’s been working on over the past couple of years.” Jamming her hands in her pocket she began to pace. “This current isn’t your only government or sensitive project.”
“Hardly.” Roarke studied Bissel’s ID image. “He married her because of her work. Because of what she was rather than who.”
“Or because of what you are. They’ll have a file on you.”
“Yes, I’m sure they do.” And he intended to take a look at it before he was done.
“What’s level two mean? Level-two operative.”
“I have no idea.”
“Let’s take a look at his dossier. See when he was recruited.” Thumbs hooked in pockets, she read the data on screen. “Nine years ago, so he wasn’t a rookie. Based in Rome a couple of years, and in Paris, in Bonn. Got around. I’d say his artistic profession would make good cover. Spoke four languages—and that’d be a plus. We know he’s good with the ladies, and that couldn’t hurt.”
“Eve, look at his recruiter.”
“Where?”
With a keystroke, he highlighted a name.
“Felicity Kade? Son of a bitch. She brought him in.” She held up her hand for silence and paced out her thoughts. “She’d’ve been a kind of trainer to him, seems to me. A lot of times trainers and trainees develop a close relationship. They worked together, and they were lovers. Probably lovers, on and off, all along. They’re a type.”
“Which type is that?” he wondered.
“Slick, upper-class, social animals. Vain—”
“Why vain?”
“Lots of mirrors, lots of fancy duds, lots of money spent on body and face work, salons.”
Amused, he studied his fingernails. “One could claim those attributes are simply natural elements of a comfortable lifestyle.”
“Yeah, if they add up to you. You’ve got a big trunkful of vanity yourself, but it’s not the same as these two. You don’t throw mirrors onto the walls every damn place so you can check yourself out every time you move, like Bissel.”
Thoughtfully, she glanced back at Roarke and decided if she looked as good as he did, she’d probably spend half the day staring at herself.
Weird.
“All those mirrors, reflective surfaces,” she continued when he just smiled at her, “you could argue that was as much lack of confidence as vanity.”
“That would be my take, but it sounds like a question for Mira.”
“Yeah.” She would get to that, and soon. “Anyway, they’re a type. Like the artsy scene, and showing themselves off. Even if it’s cover, they have to be into it. And on another level, it must take a certain type to go into covert work, on the long haul. You live a lie, you set up an identity, a persona that’s part reality, part fantasy. How else could you make it work?”
“I’ll agree that Bissel and Kade appear to be more suited than Bissel and Reva—at least on the surface.”
“Okay, but they need Reva. They need, want, or have been assigned to infiltrate Securecomp. Felicity approaches Reva first, makes pals. Maybe feels her out. But for whatever reason Reva’s not a good candidate for the HSO.”
“She’s worked for the government,” Roarke pointed out. “Nearly died for it. She’s loyal, and the administration she was attached to had no great affection for the HSO, as I recall.”
“Politics.” Eve blew out a breath. “Makes me screwy. But if we take it down to ‘she’s not a candidate for covert,’ it doesn’t mean she’s not a good resource for the HSO. So they bring in Bissel. Romance, sex. But the marriage, that says they expected her to be of long-term use.”
“And disposable.”
She turned back to him. “It’s tough to see a friend get kicked around this way. I’m sorry.”
“I wonder if it’ll be easier on her, or harder, knowing all this.”
“Whichever, she’ll have to cope. She doesn’t have a lot of options.” She nodded toward the wall screens. “These two were using her as an information source, and it’s probable they planted various devices in the home, in her data unit, her ve
hicles, maybe on her person. She was their plant, an unwitting mole, and odds are they tapped her for plenty. No point in keeping up the charade of marriage and friendship if it wasn’t paying off.”
“Agreed.” And the fact that it must have been paying off was, he imagined, going to cause him considerable annoyance. “But what point is there in eliminating two operatives? If it was an in-house assassination, it seems wasteful. Outside, it seems like overkill. Messy, Eve, either way.”
“Messy, but it had the potential of taking out three key players.” She drummed her fingers on her hips. “There’s more. Has to be more. Maybe Bissel and Kade screwed up. Maybe they tried playing both sides. Maybe they blew their cover. We need to pick our way through their lives. I need all the data you can get me on them. And since we’re playing with spooks, screw the rules.”
“Could you say that again? The screw the rules part. It’s such music to my ears.”
“You’re going to enjoy this one, aren’t you?”
“I believe I am.” But he didn’t look pleased when he said it. He looked dangerous. “Someone has to pay for what’s been done to Reva. I’ll enjoy being part of that payment.”
“There’s an advantage to having a friend as scary as you.”
“Come sit on my lap and say that.”
“Get the data, pal. I need to call in, check with the men on Reva’s house. I don’t want anybody sliding in there before we sweep it for devices in the morning.”
“If there were bugs, they’d have had an exterminator of their own.”
“They had to move fast between the time Reva received the package and the hit, then her arrival.” She combed a hand through her hair as she went over the time line. “If they moved right in maybe they swept it out. But somebody was at the Flatiron. Seems to me that an op like this, double murder, would require a small, tight team. Don’t want too many in the know.”
“It’s Homeland,” Roarke reminded her. “Orders to sweep out a private residence wouldn’t require the exterminators being apprised of the reason.”
“Just following orders,” she mumbled and envisoned the bloody mess in Felicity Kade’s bed. What kind of person gave orders for that kind of brutality? Not assassination, she thought. No way to clean up vicious, bloody murder.
“Yeah, you’ve got a point. Still, if orders did come down, they could’ve missed something.”
They worked another two hours before he convinced her it was all he could do for the night. He talked her into bed, and when he was certain she slept, he got up, went back. And did more.
It wasn’t difficult to access his file as he was already into the main. They had less hard data on him than he’d anticipated. Hardly more, he noted, than was public knowledge—or that he’d adjusted, personally, for public knowledge.
There were a number of suspecteds, allegeds, probables running through his somewhat checkered career. Most of them were true enough, but there were a few sins ascribed to him that weren’t on his actual plate.
That hardly mattered.
It amused more than annoyed him to find that twice he’d been romantically involved with an operative assigned to him in the hopes of eliciting information.
He lit a cigarette, tipped back in his chair as he remembered the two women with some fondness. He supposed he couldn’t complain. He’d enjoyed their company, and was confident enough that though their primary mission had failed, they’d enjoyed his.
They didn’t know about his mother, and that was a tremendous relief. Officially, Meg Roarke was listed as his mother, and that was fine by him. What did it matter to the HSO who had birthed him? A young girl foolish enough to love and believe in a man like Patrick Roarke wasn’t of any interest.
Especially since she was long dead.
Since they hadn’t bothered to go back that far, or dig that deep, they didn’t know about Siobhan Brody, or his aunt and the rest of the family he’d discovered in the west of Ireland. His newfound relations wouldn’t be watched or approached or have their privacy invaded by the HSO.
But there was a fat file on his father. Patrick Roarke had been of considerable interest to the HSO, as well as Interpol, the Global Intelligence Council, and other covert organizations the HSO had pooled for data. He discovered that they’d considered recruiting him at one point, but had judged him too volatile.
Volatile, Roarke mused with a dark chuckle. Well, he could hardly argue with that.
They’d tied him to Max Ricker, and that was no surprise. Ricker had been a clever man, and his network spread all over the planet, and off, with rich pockets of weapons and illegals running among other business ventures. But he’d been entirely too vain to cover all of his tracks.
Patrick Roarke was considered one of Ricker’s occasional tools, and not a particularly deft one. Too fond of the drink and other chemicals. And not discreet enough to warrant a higher position, much less a permanent one on Ricker’s payroll.
But seeing the association in black-and-white made the fact that Eve had been the one to lock Ricker in a cage all the more gratifying.
He’d nearly closed the file again when he caught a notation about travel to Dallas. The time, the place made his blood run cold.
Patrick Roarke traveled from Dublin to Dallas, Texas, on circular route and under the name Roarke O’Hara. Arrived Dallas 5-12-2036 at seventeen-thirty. Was met at airport by subject known as Richard Troy aka Richie Williams aka William Bounty aka Rick Marco. Subjects traveled by car to Casa Diablo Hotel where Troy was registered as Rick Marco. Roarke rented a room under O’Hara.
At twenty-fifteen, subjects exited hotel and traveled by foot to the Black Saddle Bar, where they remained until oh two hundred. Transcription of conversation attached.
There was more—standard surveillance reports that covered three days with the two men coming and going, having meetings with others of their kind in bars, in dives.
A great deal of drinking and posturing, and bits and pieces discussed about movement of munitions from a base in Atlanta.
Max Ricker. Roarke didn’t need the transcript to tell him both his father and Eve’s had been on the fringes, at least, of Ricker’s network. They knew the men had met, in Dallas.
Days before, he thought, only days before Eve had been found, battered and broken, in an alley.
They’d known all that, he thought, and so had the HSO.
Subject Roarke checked out of hotel at ten thirty-five the following morning. He was driven by Troy to the airport where he took a shuttle to Atlanta.
Troy returned to hotel room shared with female minor. Surveillance on Roarke passed to Operative Clark.
“Female minor,” Roarke repeated. “You bastards. You bloody bastards, you had to know.”
And with a rage so strong it sickened him, he brought up Richard Troy’s HSO file.
It wasn’t yet dawn when she stirred, and felt his arms go around her. So gently around her. Half dreaming, she turned to him, turned into him and found the warmth of his body, then the warmth of his lips on her lips.
The kiss was so tender, so fragile somehow, that she could let herself drift into it even as she floated on that twilight sleep.
In the dark, she could always find him in the dark and know he’d be there to soothe her or arouse her. Or to ask those things of her.
She threaded her fingers through his hair, cradling his head as she urged him to deepen the kiss. Deeper, a mating of lips and tongues, and still soft as a dream she was already forgetting.
For now there was only Roarke, the smooth glide of his skin over hers, the lines of him, the scent and taste. She was already filled with him as she murmured his name.
His mouth trailed over her like a benediction. Cheeks, throat, shoulders, then pressed delicately on the slope of her breast to linger where her heart beat.
“I love you.” His lips formed the words against her breast. “I’m lost in love with you.”
Not lost, she thought, and smiled in the dark even as her pulse thicke
ned. Found. We’re both found.
He cradled his head there a moment—cheek to heart—and closed his eyes until he could be sure he had his fiercer emotions in check, until he could be sure his hands would be gentle on her.
He had a searing need to be gentle.
She sighed, soft and sleepy, and was content, he knew, to be wakened like this. No matter what had been done to her, her heart was open for him, and that open heart lifted him beyond anything he’d expected to become.
So he was gentle when he touched her, and when he roused her to peak it was lovely and sweet.
When he slipped inside her, they were one shadow moving in the dark.
She held him there, close in the big bed under the sky window where the light was going pearl gray with dawn. She could stay like this for an hour, she thought. Stay quiet and joined and happy before it was time to face the world, the job, the blood.
“Eve.” He pressed his lips to her shoulder. “We need to talk.”
“Mmm. Don’t wanna talk. Sleeping.”
“It’s important.” He drew away, though she groaned a protest. “I’m sorry. Lights on, twenty percent.”
“Oh, man.” She clapped a hand over her eyes. “What is it? Five? Nobody has to have a conversation at five in the morning.”
“It’s nearly half-five, and you’ll have your team here at seven. We need the time for this.”
She spread her fingers, squinted through. “For what?”
“I went back last night and accessed more files.”
And through those spread fingers, he saw the annoyance. “I thought you said that was all you could do.”
“For you, it was. I did this for me. I wanted a look at my own dossier, in case . . . Just in case.”
She sat up quickly. “Are you in trouble? Christ, are you in trouble with the fucking HSO?”
“No.” He put his hands on her shoulders, ran them up and down her arms. And suffered, knowing she would suffer. “It’s not that. While I was at it, I had a look at my father’s files.”
“Your mother.” She reached for his hand, squeezed.