All the Queen's Men

  Cara had already turned back to her computer and was rapidly typing in commands. Computers were something else he didn’t trust, so none of his records were on the one Cara used, which was connected to that invisible electronic world the Americans called the Web. There were encryption programs, of course, but they were constantly being broken. Teenagers hacked into the Pentagon’s most secure files; corporations spent billions in computer security that leaked like a sieve. The only secure computer, in his opinion, was one that wasn’t connected to anything else—like the one on his desk where he kept his records. As an added precaution he regularly changed his password, to a word chosen at random from the dog-eared volume of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities that he always kept on his desk He actually read the thing from time to time, though more to keep Cara from being suspicious about its presence than from any actual interest in the book He would turn down the page from which he had chosen his password and leave the book lying out in the open as if it were of no importance.

  His system wasn’t perfect. He changed the password so often that sometimes he forgot which word he had chosen, hence the turned-down page. He could always recognize the word once he saw it, if he was on the correct page.

  “Where’s Temple from?” Cara asked. “I’m not finding anything on him using a broad search. I need a closer focus.”

  “America, I think, but I’ve heard rumors he had lived in Europe for at least ten years. Try Scotland Yard.”

  She sighed as she tapped keys. “This is going to get me arrested some day,” she grumbled.

  Ronsard smiled. He did enjoy Cara; she knew exactly what his business entailed but managed to maintain the same attitude as if she worked in a corporate office somewhere. Nor was she intimidated by him, and though a certain amount of intimidation was necessary in his chosen field, sometimes it was wearying.

  Nor had she fallen in love with him, which was fortunate. Ronsard knew women, knew the effect he had on them, but Cara had bluntly told him that though she liked him she wasn’t interested in sleeping with him. That, too, had been a relief.

  She slept with other men, most recently his Egyptian bodyguard, Hossam, who had been obsessed with the tall blonde woman from the day he first saw her. Ronsard only hoped Hossam wouldn’t lose control of his Middle-Eastern temperament when his American Norse goddess lost interest in him.

  “Damn,” she muttered and typed furiously. The Scotland Yard computer was giving her problems, he concluded.

  “Damn!” she shouted a minute later and slapped the monitor. “The bastards have added a wrinkle—”

  She began muttering to herself as she tried to electronically wriggle into the Scotland Yard database. Ronsard waited, puffing on his cigar. Cara’s mutterings were only half intelligible, thank God, because as she worked her language deteriorated alarmingly.

  “Shitpissfuck—”

  His eyebrows rose as she got up and stalked around the office, swearing under her breath and waving her hands in the air as she appeared to be having a conversation with herself.

  “Okay, what if I try this,” she finally muttered and resumed her seat to pound out another series of commands.

  Ten minutes later she sat back with a blissful expression on her face. “Outsmarted the sons of bitches,” she crowed. “Okay, let’s see what you have on ’Temple, first name unknown.’”

  A file popped on the screen. Cara hit the print button, and the printer whirred to life, spitting out a single sheet of paper.

  “That isn’t much,” Ronsard murmured as she got up and brought the sheet to him. “Try the FBI; if he’s American, they may have more on him.”

  He began reading. Scotland Yard didn’t have many hard facts on Temple. “Believed” to have worked with Baader-Meinhoff in Germany. “Believed” to have been associated with Basque Fatherland in Spain. “Believed” to have had contact with the IRA. Evidently Scotland Yard “believed” a lot of things about Temple and knew very little.

  Temple was either American or Canadian, believed—that word again—to be between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. No known place of residence.

  As sketchy as the information was, at least it gave him a place to begin, Ronsard thought He had contacts throughout Europe. If anyone in either of the three organizations mentioned had any knowledge of Temple, he—Ronsard—would shortly be in possession of the same.

  Cara was muttering and swearing her way through the process of gaining access to the FBI’s database. When he heard the triumphant “Aha!” he knew she had succeeded.

  “Well, kiss my ass, we got us a photo!” she said in astonishment. “Not a good one, his face is half-hidden, but it’s something.”

  Ronsard left his desk to cross the room and lean over Cara’s chair, peering at the computer screen. “Can you enhance it?” he asked, studying the grainy, blurred picture that showed a dark-haired man about to get into a car.

  “I can enhance what we have, but nothing will show what the camera didn’t get, which is half his face.”

  “He’s wearing a ring on his left hand. A wedding band?” Interesting, Ronsard thought. Not that Temple might be married; things like that happened, even in the terrorists’ world. But for him to wear such a conventional symbol as a wedding band was amusing.

  The photo showed a dark-haired man, fairly tall, given the scale of the car beside him. His face was turned partially away from the camera, giving a good view of his left ear. The photograph could have been taken anywhere; no license plates were visible on any of the cars; even the make of the car was impossible to tell. The red brick building in the background was equally anonymous, without any helpful lettering or a convenient sign to give a hint of the location.

  “I’ll print out the information for you to read while I work on enhancing this,” Cara said and set the printer to working.

  The FBI had more information than Scotland Yard, which illustrated exactly how closely the two bureaus worked. What information the FBI had on an international terrorist, Interpol was supposed to have. What Interpol had, Scotland Yard should have. That was the whole purpose of Interpol. The FBI had been holding back, and he wondered why.

  “Temple,” he silently read. “First name Josef, or Joseph. Birthplace unknown. First identified in Tucson, Arizona, in 1987. Disappeared, resurfaced in 1992 in Berlin. Brown hair, blue eyes. Identifying marks or scars: left scapula, a diagonal scar approximately four inches long, believed to have been made by a knife or other sharp object.”

  Knifed in the back, Ronsard thought. Mr. Temple had indeed lived an interesting life.

  “Subject wanted for questioning regarding 1987 bombing of courthouse in Tucson, Arizona; 1992 hijacking of NATO munitions truck in Italy—” Ronsard’s eyebrows rose. He thought he had a sure finger on the pulse of his chosen world, but he hadn’t heard anything about the NATO hijacking. The list went on. In all, the FBI wanted Temple for questioning in fifteen separate incidents.

  Temple was thought to be an independent, with no known affiliation with any one organization. He was a hired weapon, Ronsard thought; he didn’t kill for pleasure or for himself, but for whoever bought his services, which would not be cheap. From the list of incidents for which he was the main suspect, none of the targets were “soft.” All of them were difficult, and the more difficult, the more expensive.

  Who was paying him this time? Who had heard of RDX-a and hired Temple to procure it? Why hadn’t he—or they—simply approached him themselves, instead of using Temple as a go-between? It had to be someone with a lot to lose if they became known.

  “It isn’t a wedding ring,” Cara announced, printing out the photo.

  Ronsard picked up the sheet as soon as the printer spat it out. She was correct; the ring seemed to have a peculiar braided design, like a dozen tiny entwined gold ropes. No, not ropes—snakes. That looked like a snake head on the ring.

  And Mr. Temple’s left ear was pierced. The gold hoop in it was discreet, but the photo enhancement plainly revealed it.


  The people or person behind Mr. Temple were careful, sending him out to do their work while they remained safely in the background.

  But Ronsard was just as wary, just as cautious. He didn’t deal with anyone he didn’t know.

  “I think I want to meet the elusive Mr. Temple,” he murmured.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  McLean, Virginia

  Niema hit the alarm on the clock before it could go off, got up, and dressed in her running outfit, did her usual routine in the bathroom, and sauntered into the kitchen. As she expected, Medina was sitting at his usual place at the island bar, sipping coffee.

  “Very funny,” he growled, and she laughed.

  “Don’t pout. You got in anyway, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I had to climb in through the laundry-room window. Very undignified.”

  And very silent, she thought; she was a light sleeper, but she hadn’t heard a thing. “I suppose you bypassed the alarm on the window, too.”

  “No, I disabled the entire thing. Get one that works off infrared or motion, not contact.”

  She scowled at him. The alarm system had set her back over a thousand bucks, and now he was proposing she spend another two thousand. “Why don’t I just do the same thing to all my windows and doors that I did to the back door? Low tech seems to work where high tech doesn’t.”

  “Both would be good.” He grinned and lifted his cup in salute. “That was a good idea.”

  “Low tech” was a good description of what she had done to her back door. She bought two ordinary hook and latch sets at a hardware store, installed the first one in the usual manner with the eye screwed into the frame while the hook was mounted on the door. Then she had turned the second one upside down, butted it up against the first one, and installed it with the eye screwed into the door and the hook mounted on the frame.

  With only a single hook latched, anyone with a credit card, knife, or any other thin object could slip it in the crack and force the hook up, freeing it from the eye. With two hooks, one upside down, that method wouldn’t work. If you slid the credit card up from the bottom, you hit the upside down latch and pushed the hook into the eye, instead of out of it. If you came down from the top, you were pushing down on the upper latch, with the same results.

  Of course, someone who was very strong or who had a battering ram could knock the door off its hinges, but that wasn’t a very quiet way of breaking and entering. She was inordinately pleased that her simple solution had stymied him.

  When they left the house, instead of turning right, toward the park, Medina turned left.

  “The park’s in the other direction,” Niema said as she caught up and fell into step beside him.

  “We ran there yesterday.”

  “Does this mean you never run the same route twice, or just that you’re easily bored?”

  “Bored,” he said easily. “I have the attention span of a gnat”

  “Liar.”

  His only response was a grin, and they ran in silence then, down the deserted street. There were no stars visible overhead, and the weather felt damp, as if it might rain. Her forearms were a little sore from all that shooting the day before, but other than that she felt great. Her thigh muscles stretched as they ran, and she felt her blood begin to zing through her veins as her heartbeat increased.

  They had been running for half an hour when a car turned a corner onto their street, heading straight for them. It was rolling slow, as if looking for something.

  John looped his right arm around her waist and whirled her behind a tree. She bit back her instinctive cry and barely got her hands out to brace herself before he crushed her against the tree trunk, holding her there with the hard pressure of his body. She saw the dull glint of metal in his left hand. She held her breath and pressed her cheek even harder into the rough bark of the tree.

  “Two men,” he said in an almost inaudible whisper, his breath stirring the hair at her temple. “They’re probably from the private agency Frank hired.”

  “Probably? Don’t you know?”

  “No, I don’t know your surveillance schedule, and they don’t know I’m here. They’re probably looking for you since you aren’t on your usual route.”

  The thought of having a “surveillance schedule” was annoying. Equally annoying was the realization of how many times over the past few years cars had passed by her in the early morning hours and she hadn’t thought anything of it, except to watch, with a woman’s natural wariness, until the cars had turned the corner and disappeared. She had been so oblivious she was embarrassed. She should have been more alert.

  The bark was scratching her cheek, and her breasts were being crushed. “Ease up,” she panted. “You’re squashing me.”

  He moved about an inch, but it helped. He remained behind the tree until the car was a block away, then lifted himself away from her. She grunted as she pushed away from the tree. “If they’re ours, why don’t we just let them see us?”

  He resumed his steady stride, and she took up her place beside him. “Because I’m not positive they’re ours, for one thing. For another, I don’t want them to see me, much less see me with you.”

  “Some bodyguards they are anyway,” she grumbled, “letting you break into my house two mornings in a row.”

  “They weren’t there when I arrived. They must be on a drive-by.”

  “Why don’t you just tell Mr. Vinay to call off the surveillance for now? That would be the most logical thing to do. Then, if anyone drove by, we’d know they aren’t ours.”

  “I may do that.”

  The car must have just circled the block. It turned onto the street again. “Pretend to chase me and let’s see if they’ll shoot you,” Niema said, and put on a burst of speed, knowing the car’s headlights couldn’t yet pick her out. She barely contained a giggle at Medina’s soft curse behind her. She had taken three steps when a heavy weight hit her in the back and two arms wrapped around her, dragging her down. They landed on the soft grass beside the sidewalk, with her on her stomach and him on top of her. In the pre-dawn darkness, no one was likely to see them unless they were moving.

  He held her down, despite her wriggles and erupting giggles, until the car had passed by again. “You little witch,” he said breathlessly, as if he were trying to hold back his own laughter. “Are you trying to get me killed?”

  “Just keeping you on your toes, Medina.”

  “On my belly is more like it,” he grumbled, climbing to his feet and hauling her upright. “What if someone looked out their window and called the cops?”

  “We’d be long gone. And if we weren’t, I’d just say I stumbled and you tried to catch me. No problem.”

  “I hope you’re having fun,” he growled.

  A little startled, she realized she was having fun. For the first time in a long while she felt as if there was some purpose to her life, as if she had something important to do. No matter how interesting her work with surveillance devices was, benchtesting circuits didn’t give her a kick.

  But she felt alive now, rejuvenated, as if she had been existing in some sort of half-life for the past five years. She had kept up her running all this time, but until yesterday she hadn’t been aware of the workings of her muscles, the pumping of her blood. She enjoyed sparring with Medina, both verbally and physically. She wasn’t a gun fanatic, but she had also enjoyed learning about the different handguns, learning how they felt in her hand, learning her own limits and then stretching those limits. She wanted to know more, do more, be more.

  This was the danger of fieldwork. She had known the lure, resisted it for five years, but now the excitement was flowing through her veins like a potent drug. She didn’t know whether to hate Medina or thank him for dragging her back into this.

  Was five years’ penance enough? Would a hundred years be enough to empty the guilt and anguish she felt over Dallas? Her stride faltered as she thought of the times they had jogged together; afterward they h
ad showered together, then fallen into bed and made love.

  Would Dallas have been attracted to the woman she had been for those five years, the woman she had made herself become? Or would he have been bored by the insistence on structure and security, the lack of risk? She was afraid she knew the answer. Dallas had been a risk taker; for all his low-key persona, he’d been a man who thrived on challenge and danger. Why else would he have become a SEAL, then a contract agent? What had attracted him most to her, and she to him, was the instinctive knowledge that they were alike.

  Medina was the same type of man, only more so. Alarm bells, suddenly loud and clear, shrilled in her head. It was one thing to allow herself to be sucked back into the heady world of espionage and contract work, but letting herself develop feelings for another man in that same world was something else entirely.

  She would have to keep her guard up, because emotions could boil over in such high-stress situations. And Medina was an attractive man; more than attractive, really. If he ever let his guard down, he’d be devastating. He seemed relaxed with her, but not once had he let any personal details slip. She knew nothing about him.

  She had already felt warning twinges of physical attraction during the close contact required by training. A woman would have to be dead not to notice that lean, rock-hard body, especially when he was pressed against her.

  Was that why she had teased him about making the surveillance team think he was chasing her, so he would catch her and hold her? In a flash of self-awareness, she realized she had been flirting with him. Uh-oh, she thought. She’d have to be more careful in the future.

  What future? This was a one-time thing, wasn’t it? They would work together briefly just this once, then she would return to her safe, familiar job and he would disappear again.

  “Are you ready to pack it in?”

  She glanced at the luminous dial of her wristwatch; they had already been running for over an hour. Luckily they hadn’t gone in a straight line, or it would have taken them another hour to get back to her house; they had circled blocks and backtracked several times, so they were no more than half a mile from home. Dawn was close, so close that details were clearly visible now. “What if the surveillance team is still looking for me?”