Hot Intent (Hqn) (25 page)

“You sound like an advertisement for a horror movie.”

He shrugged. “My world is the real one. It’s where life and death live.” He gestured to the suburban sprawl speeding by outside the train. “This happy, shiny world of strip malls and middle-class America is the movie. It’s carefully crafted by the media, big business and the government.”

“Well, that’s...cynical.”

He lifted an eyebrow as if to say,
When have I ever been anything else?

“So my whole life to date has been what? A lie? A dream?”

He shrugged. “You’ve asked me more than once to strip away your innocence. That’s what I’m doing now. If you want to run in my world, you have to grow up and let go of childish ideas, Katie.”

In other words, agree with him that the world was a deadly place populated with unseen threats, or walk away from him and never look back. She looked up at him, and he was staring at her expectantly.

“I need to think about this,” she mumbled, staggered. She didn’t know whether to be overjoyed that he was opening a tiny window for her to stay with him or horrified that he wanted her to step into the shadows with him and his madness.

“Think fast, Katie. My world will come calling soon. And then your time will be up.”

Or more likely, he would reconsider his offer and withdraw it. She subsided against the worn seat cushions, terrified like she’d never been terrified before. She was less worried about him when he doubted himself and his view of the world. But when he was like this, so sure that his perceptions were absolute fact, she had to believe he was slipping into some sort of delusional insanity. It probably had a fancy Latin name—that he would know, of course. Did she love him enough to abandon reality and live in his delusion with him?

God, how had he messed with her head enough for her to even consider that?

His paranoia was getting the best of him. She was losing him.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
HE
TRAIN
STOPPED
somewhere in northern New Jersey, and Alex startled Katie by murmuring, “Let’s go.”

“We’re not going into New York City?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Way too much surveillance and security there. We’re more anonymous here.”

Alarmed, she slid out of her seat and followed him off the train. In short order, he’d obtained a crappy motel room for them using a fake ID and its matching credit card. And then he announced, “I need to find a computer. Do you want to stay here or come with me?”

“You seriously have to ask?” she retorted.

He smiled a little, sardonically. “I’m not going to disappear until I figure this out. I don’t want it pursuing me into my new life.”

His
new life. The exclusion of her from that future hurt bad enough to steal her breath away. What had happened to him? He’d acknowledged that he’d been drugged into chemically induced paranoia and that she hadn’t betrayed him like he originally thought. Why was he still thinking in terms of leaving her behind?

“You know I would never force myself upon you, right, Alex?”

“I beg your pardon?” He stared at her blankly.

“And you do know that no matter how much I hate you, I still love you, right?”

“How am I supposed to respond to that?”

His coldness in response to her bald honesty was a blade straight to her heart. Although her heart felt so shredded by now that one more cut shouldn’t matter. And yet, it did.

Along with pain, she felt sorrow. Sorrow for the lost little boy, sorrow for the lonely, isolated man. Sorrow for what they could’ve had but which he’d thrown away.

He’d completely withdrawn from her emotionally. He was firmly entrenched in being the icy, analytical spy in his fantasy high-threat scenario.

Oh, sure, she accepted that they were in a certain amount of actual danger. After all, the wound in her shoulder was entirely real. But she was equally convinced it was all a big misunderstanding. If Alex would just hand over that flash drive and the evidence of chemical weapons in Cuba, the CIA would be happy and leave them alone.

She’d planned to tell him that she loved him enough to place his happiness before hers and that she would seriously consider his implied offer to go with him. But he was obviously in no mood to hear anything she had to say right now. Instead, she sighed. “Now what?” she asked in resignation.

“I’m going to the library. Are you coming?”

“Sure. Why not?” Maybe she could check out a book on abnormal psychology and gain some tiny insight into Alex and his thoroughly screwed-up head.

The anonymous, slightly decaying urban landscape around her was oddly comforting. She was rapidly picking up Alex’s aversion to being noticeable. The local library was a dingy beige building, mostly deserted inside. Alex sat down at a carrel with a computer in it, and she pulled up a chair beside him to watch him work his magic.

“What are you going to do?” she asked curiously.

“I’m going back in for more information on Cold Intent.”

“Are you crazy?” she exclaimed under her breath.

“Do you have any better ideas?”

“We could talk to Uncle Charlie.”

“He told you to stay away from it. He knows what the operation is all about, and somehow the two of us pose a threat to it.”

“Is there any way you can figure out who gave the order to have you—” she dropped her voice to a whisper “—drugged?”

“I gave the MPs in Gitmo André’s phone number. It came through that chain of command.”

Katie frowned. “At first, the Marines were nice to you, right? They gave you the samples from me and let you go to the hospital on your own.”

He leaned back to stare at her. “Follow that train of thought. See where it takes you.”

“After they let you go, they called André. He told them something that made them go to the hospital, arrest you, interrogate you and drug you. And that something made them hold me and not let me join you.”

“Go on.”

“André likes you. He must have called his boss and was relaying the boss’s orders. So, why did the boss want the cops to go after you? You had information the CIA desperately wanted. Why not bring you in with all possible speed?”

Alex stared at her, his gaze dark.

She continued. “The boss had to have told them I was not a threat, but that you were. And the two of us were to be separated. I presumably knew as much as you did about what we found in Cuba, so I was as big a threat as you to whatever’s going on. Since they didn’t formally detain me, I have to rule out the information about the chemical weapons as the cause of your arrest.”

Alex looked startled at that.
Shock. She’d actually outthought the genius for once?

She continued more enthusiastically. “Why separate us specifically? What’s the big deal about the two of us being together?”

Alex frowned. “The CIA thinks you’re keeping me in line. That I won’t go off the reservation if you’re around.”

“Then why would they take me away from you?” A nasty connection dropped into place. She spoke slowly, feeling her way through the logic. “Alex. Not only did they take me away from you, but they gave you drugs to make you paranoid. What if they made you suspicious of me intentionally?”

He tilted his head, considering. “It’s a bit of a stretch, but it is plausible.”

“What do I bring to you that you can’t do for yourself?” she asked.

“That’s easy. Stability. Predictability. And control over my more dangerous impulses.”

“How’s that?”

“I am known to have feelings for you and Dawn. Threaten the two of you, and I’m forced to stay in line and behave myself.”

She was dismayed that he thought she was such a big vulnerability. “I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged. “It was my choice to get involved with you. My fault.”

Fault? She was a fault in his life? She’d been a mistake for him right from the beginning. He’d tried to warn her, but she’d ignored him and thrust a relationship and even a daughter on him whether he liked it or not.

The two of them could never make it as a couple if all he saw when he looked at her was a potentially lethal error in judgment. The last thing she wanted to be to him was a fatal vulnerability. He was right to leave her. A sob escaped her throat, and she bit back its sibling as it bubbled up in her chest.

“As soon as this is over, Alex, I’ll let you go. I get it now. If my being with you puts you at so much risk, then we can’t ever be together. I’ll walk away and never look back. I love you too much to be the cause of your injury or death.”

For just an instant, his gaze raged with some turbulent, unnamed emotion. And then, as usual, all expression drained from his eyes. His face went smooth and still, completely unreadable. Lord, she wished she knew how to do that, too.

Her vision swam in tears and she looked away from him hastily. The computer screen was the only nearby target for her unseeing stare. “Let’s finish this,” she said fiercely. “The sooner, the better. Every day we’re together puts you at risk.”

He made a tiny sound that might be a laugh half-formed, or maybe something else...like pain. Either way, he placed his hands on the keyboard and started to type. He played the machine like a virtuoso, and she couldn’t begin to understand the lines of code that flashed across the screen almost too fast to read. But she did recognize the Central Intelligence Agency seal when it briefly flashed up on the monitor.

“When I tell you to, start counting the time,” he muttered as he plugged a flash drive into a port in the side of the monitor.

“Okay.” She pulled out her cell phone and set up a stopwatch app.

“Go,” he murmured. She started the counter.

A list of files came up on the screen quickly enough. He didn’t mess with them, though. Instead, he pulled up another window and appeared to commence running another program. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Trying to break the write protection on those files so I can download them.”

He typed frantically for another few seconds and then stopped. “Okay. That’s it. Now we have to let the program run and see if the algorithm can break through the copy protection protocols on those files before we’re kicked out of the mainframe.”

“That’s two minutes elapsed,” she murmured.

He nodded tersely. They stared at the monitor in silence as his decryption program did its work.

“Three minutes.”

His jaw muscles rippled like he was clenching his teeth, but he didn’t acknowledge her minute-by-minute count in any other way.

“Are you going to give up?” she asked.

He shrugged. “As long as their security guys don’t kick me out, I may as well sit tight and see if I can capture those files. I’ve got nothing to lose by trying, and I won’t get another shot at this. It’s now or never.”

“Eight minutes.” Every second crawled past, taking an eternity. The code in his second window continued to scroll past too fast to read. She counted all the way to fifteen minutes without anything appearing to happen. And then, all of a sudden, a download progress bar started to turn from white to blue across the bottom of the monitor.

“You did it,” she breathed.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he warned. The bar had almost turned most of the way white when all hell broke loose on the screen. A new window opened of its own volition and code started scrolling down the monitor. Alex jumped and started typing, his nimble fingers flying across the keyboard. He muttered unintelligibly to himself, and Katie sat frozen beside him, not wanting to distract him.

“Pull out the flash drive,” he ordered suddenly. “Now!”

She reached up and yanked the drive out of the port. The screen went black. “Did we get the files?”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said by way of an answer. He stood up fast and strode toward the exit with her half running beside him.

“Well?” she demanded as they burst out into the street.

“I won’t know until I open that drive and see what made its way onto it before the agency’s countermeasures kicked in. But first, we have to get away from this location.”

Her shoulder gave a warning shout but she ignored the flash of pain. She asked nervously, “It’ll take them a while to track down that computer terminal, right? We’ve got plenty of time to get away.”

“Not how it works,” he bit out. “These are the big boys we’re messing with. They have resources you can’t even begin to imagine.”

They’d walked briskly several blocks back toward their motel when Alex swore under his breath.

“Let me guess,” she muttered in dismay. “We’ve got company.”

“That would be correct. Don’t look back.”

But how? They’d been in the library a grand total of maybe twenty minutes. Unless the agency had figured out the two of them were on that train, and the CIA had sent agents into this general area already to search for them.

“There’s a cab over there,” she suggested. “Across the street just beyond the next intersection.” It was the only cab she’d seen in this dilapidated and mostly residential part of town. Finally. A piece of luck had broken their way.

“Stay with me,” Alex ordered absently as his eyes roved in all directions. “We’ll cross over to it in the middle of the intersection.”

She didn’t reply. He was obviously busy formulating plans and evaluating various contingencies.

She did sneak a peek behind them as they approached a stoplight. Darned if she could spot anyone following them. Was the tail real? Or was this all part of Alex’s elaborate paranoid delusion about how dangerous the world was and how people in it were out to get him?

They reached the stoplight and he didn’t pause. He plunged into the oncoming traffic, and she squeaked in alarm as cars swerved and honked their horns angrily. Scared to death, she dodged along with him, practically climbing on his heels.

They somehow reached the safety of the far curb, and Alex broke into a run. She kept up with him, but barely, gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulder as she jarred it pounding on the concrete sidewalk. He hailed the cab and opened the door for her to slide into the backseat. He jumped in after her and gave the cabbie the name of their motel.

She started to turn around to look behind them for pursuit, but Alex bit out, “Don’t look. Assume they’re following us.”

Too late. She’d caught a glimpse of a man in a beige raincoat leaping into the passenger’s side of a big, dark SUV way too frantically to be a regular civilian just going about his business.

God almighty. Alex wasn’t entirely wrong about his world colliding with hers at a moment’s notice. It was as if the curtain separating the two in her mind had suddenly become tissue thin. In times like this, she almost could believe Alex wasn’t crazy. Almost.

The taxi rolled for about five minutes, and then suddenly, Alex leaned forward and said sharply, “This isn’t the way to the motel.”

“There’s construction,” the cabbie replied. “I’m going around it. I’ll knock a chunk off the fare if you want.”

Alex subsided, frowning slightly. When he worried, she worried. He not only had a great deal of training she didn’t have, but he also had an incredible instinct for sensing trouble. It was no doubt part of what made him a great spy.

Abruptly, the taxi left the surface street and swerved onto a highway entrance ramp, accelerating quickly.

“Hey!” she exclaimed. This was definitely
not
the way back to the motel. She reached for her cell phone to call 9-1-1.

But Alex reached out to grip her forearm and forestall her. He shook his head infinitesimally in the negative. Crap. He was right. They couldn’t call the police. If they did, they’d be found by the CIA. Alex would be hauled in and drugged again if he was lucky, and killed as a rogue operative if he was not lucky. As for her, she would just get dead. The two of them were on their own with this lunatic and his cab.

She looked forward toward the driver and froze in horror. The small black bore of a pistol was pointed back at her.

She looked over at Alex in panic. What was happening? Were they being
kidnapped?