Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (8 page)

“What was that supposed to prove?” she gasped, hands still locked on the sweat-slick steering wheel. Her heart hammered in her chest. She released her grip and yanked off the blindfold.

“Trust. Isn’t that what I said?” He didn’t smile, just puffed on his cigar, fogging the inside of the car with a noxious yellow-gray cloud. “And now you know you can do it.”

It had been pretty amazing, she had to admit, now that her pulse was easing down from coronary red-alert.

Day Three, her team ran six miles cross-country then took on a rope bridge over a frothing river. The rapids swallowed up more than one hapless trainee, who had to be rescued downstream. But the river reminded her of the C&O Canal, which had saved her life. It didn’t frighten her at all. So what if she fell in? At least no one was shooting at her. This was fun!

That afternoon an explosives expert demonstrated how easy it was to construct a bomb using C-4 and Clorox. And then he made another IED (Improvised Explosive Device) by connecting a cell phone to a plastic container of volatile fluid. He chose Mercy to be the one to plant the device beneath a rusty VW bug and detonate it by calling the phone. One ring, and the thing went up like the Fourth of July. Again, sort of fun—except that now she realized how easy it would be for someone, like Yegorov, to blow
her
up.

Rather than becoming more confident with each day’s instruction, she felt increasingly on edge. Which, she supposed, was the intention. Fear created obedient students. It also intimidated and kept others in the class from asking questions. But that didn’t stop her.

“So now we know how to make a bomb,” she said. “How do we defuse one? What if I find one and want to stop it from going off?”

“That’s a job for the pros,” the ordnance guy said. He was a short man with steel-gray hair and gentle eyes. He reminded her of her sixth-grade teacher—a kind soul who liked nothing better than coming up with creative science experiments for his students. “Your best bet is to get yourself, and anyone else in the area, clear. You find something that looks like it might go boom, don’t assume someone has to be close by to set it off.”

“Like today with the cell phone detonator?” She was the only one in her group of twelve trainees asking questions today. But she sensed the others were intently listening.

The man nodded. “Or there might be a reverse trigger, programming the IED to go off on a particular day and time, unless the mechanism is manually disconnected before then. A reverse trigger can be used to destroy weapons or valuable property rather than lose it to the enemy. There are endless ways to trigger a device.”

Like trip wires and pressure plates, she thought. Everyone knew about the deadly IED’s that had taken untold limbs and lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and anywhere else guerrilla warfare raged. The brush of an arm, tread of a foot, or weight of a vehicle running over the plate would set off the explosion.

Day Four was Maritime Strategies. Great! More water. She loved it. But these exercises started out far more boring than she’d hoped for.

The class studied the basics of reading marine charts then practiced navigation using GPS. Theoretically, such skills would enable her to figure out where the heck she was if marooned on an island or adrift in the middle of the ocean. But even some of the more experienced trainees messed up their calculations, throwing off their locations by hundreds of miles.

The afternoon turned into a liquid version of Crash & Burn. They were bussed to a nearby lake where two sleek, high-powered cigarette boats—rumored to have been confiscated from drug runners—waited at dockside The objective was to outmaneuver and outrun anything that came after her. Mercy loved driving the low-slung powerboats. It was like being a kid again, playing water tag while propelled by massive twin 150hp outboard engines.

Finally, at the firing range that evening, her STG—Small Training Group—was given Beretta revolvers. Bull stood behind her shouting delightful encouragements like: “You’ll be a fucking corpse before you get off one decent shot!” Eventually she was able to consistently hit a man-shaped paper target in the kill zone. She progressed to a Browning pistol. Then a sawed-off shotgun.

Finally, Bull handed her a stocky, black AK-47. She thought she saw an evil glint in his eyes. “Last weapon of the day, Princess. Make it count.” The thing nearly ripped off her shoulder. Bull looked infinitely pleased when she walked off the firing range rubbing torn muscles.

Day Six was hand-to-hand combat. Terrifying! But she figured she’d made it this far, so what the hell. One way or another she was determined to last out the two weeks and prove she was at least as good as the other trainees. She didn’t want to give Bull an excuse for failing her. Failure meant the end of her agreement with Red Sands, and no search-and-rescue team for her mother.

“One day is all I have with her?” said Derek, the young personal-defense instructor. He scratched his blond brush-cut and stared in disbelief at Bull after the TI brusquely explained her accelerated education. “You’re kidding, right?”

Bull smirked. “Just see if you can keep her alive in a one-on-one.” He gave Mercy a disparaging head-to-toe scan. “They gang up on her, she’s dead meat anyway.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she muttered.

“Just being realistic, Princess.” Bull watched Derek move away from them to collect gear. To her surprise, the TI’s metallic gaze softened as he turned back to face her. “You still can tell the bastards to fuck themselves, you know.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Red Sands. Whatever they want you to do can’t be worth risking your life. And don’t for a minute think that’s not what they’ll expect.” His tone was dead serious, all the macho bullshit gone. He very nearly sounded sympathetic. “Just tell them to take their offer and stick it. You’re not interested. Walk away. It’s pretty obvious you don’t want to be here.”

She looked at him, more shaken by this uncharacteristic show of concern than by his harassment and defeatist attitude.

“I can’t.” She met his gaze. “I won’t.”

He stared at her for a moment then nodded. “Yeah, well, that’s too bad then. Cause you ain’t got an icicle’s chance in August, sweetheart.” He swung around on his boot heels and stomped away.

Mercy stood in the middle of the gym, watching her classmates slam each other down on padded fight mats. They looked like they’d been practicing for months. She felt chilled to her core, truly and thoroughly terrified. She had seen her demise in Bull’s eyes. Was she destined to lose?

Suddenly she became aware of Derek speaking to her. “The goal is to not get yourself killed. No heroics. No dazzling kung-fu stuff. Got that?”

“Got it,” she said fiercely, to mask the tremor in her voice. She blinked away the heat that presaged tears. She wouldn’t cry. Wouldn’t! “Stay alive. Any other brilliant tips?”

“Don’t be a wise ass!” Bull shouted from the bleachers.

“Sorry,” she mumbled to the trainer.

Derek shrugged. “No big deal. Let’s just see what you can do.”

He demonstrated a couple of simple moves she could use to defend herself—all involving use of her attacker’s body weight and momentum. These she already knew, the senator having enrolled her in a self-defense course when she was a teenager. Derek added to the basics with a creative choreography of eye pokes, groin jabs, and instep gouges, intended to even up the odds between her and a stronger assailant, and buy her time.

“Your main objective,” he told her, “is to escape in one piece. Break free and run like hell. Even an experienced agent won’t pit herself against a trained assassin unless forced to it.” He hesitated, studying her for a moment before going on. “I heard about the incident with that Russian ape in Georgetown. Your instincts must be good. I understand you’re pretty fast too.”

“I do better in water than on land.”

Competitive swimming had given her a powerful stroke and more upper body strength than many women. Derek said she could use that to her advantage and showed her a few extra maneuvers.

Out of breath, muscles pinging and burning from a week that had pushed her body to its limit, she glared across the gymnasium at Bull, sending him a message:
I’m not dead yet! And I’m not a quitter.

                                          8

“You know how to reach me. Call me,
mi amor
.” Exasperated, Sebastian Hidalgo slapped the cheap burner phone down on the desktop. He’d use it for only one more day before trashing it, hoping she’d get back to him before then.

For nearly a week he’d been calling Mercy. No answer at her Georgetown home. Only a recorded greeting at the gallery. She hadn’t returned his messages. Neither had her assistant. He’d thought about calling his daughter at school but didn’t want to worry Maria. The girl had grown incredibly fond of Mercy.

Was Mercy intentionally avoiding him? Was it possible that she and her husband had reconciled? If she’d gone back to Peter Davis… His chest fisted at the thought. Given what the jerk had already had put her through—cheating on her repeatedly, lying to her about her mother’s situation—it seemed unlikely she’d ever take him back. Still, just the possibility of her giving herself to another man put Sebastian in an even darker mood.

He shoved himself away from the desk in the Hay-Adams’ suite and walked over to the soaring French windows on the south side of the hotel, overlooking the White House. Father Sun beat down from above, warming the early spring air, bathing the city in a rare golden glow, reminding him of the canyons of home.

How he wished things were different.

He missed his daughter terribly. But sending Maria to live in the US, with a new name, had been necessary for her own safety. The girl would make an ideal target if his enemies discovered he was working undercover for the Mexican government—and he suspected they were within a hair’s breadth of doing just that. Mercy too would be in mortal danger if they ever tied her to him.

Thus he couldn’t risk having either of his women at Rancho Hidalgo. He accepted this, for the time being. But what was he to think of this sudden silence from Mercy? Was it her way of telling him that she believed they had no future? That she was too afraid of the dangers he might bring to her?

“We’ll find time to be together,” she’d told him, tears in her beautiful eyes when they’d parted at the airport in Mexico City. She’d worn his mother’s ruby ring on her finger, a sign of their engagement, which couldn’t yet be made public knowledge. “Our lives can’t always be this insane.”

Maria, wise for her years, had made a point of giving her them a moment of privacy to hold each other and say their farewells. It was as if her teenage heart knew, without ever having experienced love herself, how Sebastian felt about the American woman. As if she understood that his caring for Mercy didn’t mean he’d loved her mother any less when she was alive.

“I will come to you in two weeks,” he’d promised.

“Come when you can,” she murmured, her eyes glittering.

But President Juarez had asked him to stay close because of rumors of an imminent drug cartel alliance. More weeks had passed, which turned to months. Had Mercy grown impatient and moved on?

He had to see her, speak to her―find out what was going on.

Finally he’d found an excuse for flying to Washington—a convention sponsored by the International Cattle Breeder’s Association. Ranchers from all over the world gathered in the American capital for the event. But he had little interest in the exhibits that filled two floors of the Washington Convention Center. All he wanted was to see
her
.

Sebastian stood at the suite’s window, staring down at the tourist buses, taxis, limos, and private cars flowing along Pennsylvania Avenue. He willed the phone to ring. It did not. He forced himself to focus on the glossy pamphlets and handouts he’d picked up earlier that day at the convention center. But his frustration was unbearable.

Coming here, he decided, might have been a mistake.

If he had been at the hacienda he would have distracted himself by saddling Hermanito and riding out across the lush river valley of his ancestors, toward the Sierra Madres capped with snow. This rich legacy, given to him—the last surviving male of his family—to protect and nurture. This precious land, bought with blood and hardship and heartbreak. How he cherished it!

But even on the back of the glorious white stallion, he knew he wouldn’t have entirely escaped the power this woman had over him.

Memories of Mercy came to him, as vividly as if she were at his side: Mercy, stealing Hermanito from him and taking off across the desert, a woman on a mission. Mercy, demanding justice, no matter the cost. She was brave and beautiful and maddeningly confusing. She argued with him as often as she agreed with him. And he loved every minute of it.

He missed her more than a man ought to miss any woman.

The phone on the desk rang. His heart leaped, ran wild. He reached for the receiver. “Si?”

“Is this Sebastian Hidalgo?” A stranger’s voice. A man.

He tensed. Who but his foreman knew how to reach him?

“Who is calling?”