At Any Cost (3 page)

“Maybe he called your office,” Tom suggested.

Fallon dialed her office voicemail, entered a passcode, and was informed by an electronic tube voice that she had two messages. The first message was from Gwen, who asked if she might join her at the club tomorrow morning for a swim. The second message consisted of rushing air and fuzzy background noise. It lasted only three seconds. Puzzled, Fallon replayed it, but only dead air echoed through the line.

Huh. Well, maybe it had been a hoax. She dropped the phone back into her purse.

Her cup was almost empty, but she did not feel inclined to leave. She wanted to see what might happen if she simply stayed here indefinitely. Would Tom offer an apology, or beg forgiveness, or explain why he acted like a complete ass and left her on Paxos without a word?

She noticed his hands, now flat on the table. They were large and good looking, with short clipped nails. No wedding ring, though that was not a reliable indication of a man's marital status anymore. Particularly for agents: none of hers wore wedding rings.

The possibility that he might be married gave her pause. That would certainly explain why he'd dropped her like a bottle of anthrax in Greece. Or maybe he was called back to D.C. on a super secret mission. Or maybe he was dying and needed an emergency heart transplant.

Ugh, a girl could go mad trying to guess at the motives. And she wasn't going to waste all her emotional energy on trying to puzzle out some douchebag who left her heartbroken years ago.

“I should get back to the office.”

Walking back was tempting—the bracing air might help clear her mind—but she was acutely aware of how long she'd been gone. Her competitive, backbiting, sharky coworkers undoubtedly noticed her absence too.

Fallon gathered her things and walked outside, flinching at the cold. Pausing thoughtfully on the curb, she peered back down 15th Street, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone who could be Antoine Campbell. Pedestrians huddled in their coats and scarves trudged back to their homes and offices, but there was no one who appeared to be looking for her, nobody who desperately needed her help.

Fallon reluctantly climbed into the heated leather interior of the limo. Although she did not look at Tom in the front seat, she was acutely aware of his presence, registering his tiniest shift or movement in the confined space of the vehicle as it inched through traffic. So strange that she still felt magnetically attracted to him when she should despise him for his bad behavior. Surely if she confided in Gwen about the affair in Greece, her friend would advise Fallon to demand a new detail leader and never deign to speak to Tom again. Gwen was very certain about how things should work in a relationship, but Fallon wasn't. Her relationship with Tom had existed outside the jurisdiction of normalcy; there was lots of room for interpretation. She still clung to the belief that their time together had meant something important, that it had been real and honest, which made his vanishing act even more perplexing. He was, she thought, like a subtly provocative professor—the one whose class was supposed to be an easy
A
but accidentally changed her life.

The limos edged to the curb on G Street in front of Johnson Sloan Pruitt, nearly skinning off a hubcap, and Tom radioed the follow-up vehicle, instructing one of the agents to walk with Avalon up to her office.

He glanced in the rearview mirror, taking measure of the street behind them. Media had been following Avalon since her father's victory, but today they seemed to have picked up some other story, which made his job easier. No threats. He stepped onto the sidewalk and swung open Avalon's door. As she stepped out, she glanced up at him with a sweet smile that made him wonder what the hell he was doing here. A gust of wind tousled her blonde shoulder-length hair, sending it flying across her face. She used her knuckle to push the tresses out of her eyes and blinked up at him with big round eyes the color of the earth as viewed from space. In the past, one flash of those babies made him go goofy. Now they made him queasy with guilt because her fundamental goodness was so obvious in them, and he had dimmed that glow a little bit with his stupid, bad behavior.

This was never going to work, not when he was still as attracted to her as he'd ever been. He slammed the door closed. Another agent walked with Fallon inside the building, Tom following a few paces behind.

As Fallon and Kevin White strode toward the elevators, Tom diverted to the small room, called a down room, that sufficed as the Secret Service command center while their protectee was upstairs in her office. He ignored the two other guys in the room and grabbed his laptop. He didn't actually have any pressing work to do but he wanted to emanate harried busyness to give out the distinct vibe that small talk was not welcome.

He felt a little breathless, a little antisocial at the moment.

He had not been sure how it would play out, seeing Fallon again. She looked different than the young free-spirited girl he had once known. Her radiant innocence, he recognized at once. The work-worn lawyer in a sleek Chanel suit, not so much … but he liked her anyway. Her face was framed by thick platinum hair and defined by high cheekbones and those enormous cobalt eyes that reflected everything going on inside her. When she saw him, all the questions and confusion played across her face like shadows, and he'd wanted to blurt out an apology right then. He felt ashamed of himself in that moment, but he covered it well, as he always did. Fallon, however, was still incapable of playing it cool; every flickering emotion was right there on the surface for anyone to see—one idiosyncrasy, among many, he had loved once upon a time.

Fate. Karma. Words Fallon used to say came back to him now, mocking him. Yeah, maybe being here really was some universal retribution. After the way he left her, he definitely deserved to get his ass kicked by fate; there was no profit or use in denying that.

He tried to rationalize away the chemical ramp-up of excitement and the sudden spike in his heart rate when he saw her face. Just a reflex from long ago established patterns, that was all. Totally normal. Cause and effect. Man and woman.

No, that wasn't true. Other women didn't turn him into a raiding sexual Hun, leave him aching, his body thrumming with adrenaline and amped up on testosterone. Her beauty and sweetness still spoke to a part of himself he had long ago locked away—the part that once understood poetry and love and gentleness … the human part. She still had the ability to momentarily jolt him out of his self-imposed exile.

Four years of uneasy celibacy had not been easy for him; he was naturally highly charged and enjoyed the company of women. But total abstinence, after Fallon, had been necessary for his survival. What had begun right after 9/11 as an attempt to prevent himself from ever feeling as cracked and vulnerable again solidified into an inability to feel anything at all. He was quite content to live in a world of cold, hard reality.

But seeing her again had just about obliterated the barriers he'd erected around himself. Just one look and he felt that warm expansion in his chest, his cock twitching and lengthening in his pants, and the silly, puppyish desire to make her happy.

He slumped in his chair and rubbed his temples, trying to figure out how the hell he would make it through the day.

To his dismay, Tom found himself using his old trick—the 9/11 trick—of focusing on a small, quiet place inside himself. The place where he could look at the bodies and think,
okay, get to work
. Or look at the vast empty nothingness that was his life and think there has to be a reason not to fucking blow your own brains out.
Your job is to find that reason
.

He had managed to keep his shit together through 9/11, through losing Bethany and leaving Fallon. He could get through seeing Fallon Hughes again too, even if it killed him.

Claudia Wells, the vice president-elect, lifted herself from the damp, quivering body of her much younger lover and enjoyed the view. His perfectly muscled body was the stuff of cologne and European car ads, every silken inch of him sculpted and hard, with a light sheen of sexual perspiration glistening on his skin. All that raw masculine power, his youthful endurance, and his charming submission to her every whim … it was all just perfect. God, she loved her life.

Richard Mullinax was breathing heavily, his hands still poised over his head, where Claudia had been pinning his wrists. His gaze dropped to her full swaying milk-white breasts and he licked his lips. She had not allowed him to climax in several days, and he was no doubt nearing the end of his compliance—a state of tension that Claudia found almost unbearably exciting.

“Amazing,” Claudia whispered, and lifted herself from Richard. He moaned with a little protest as he slipped from her body and lifted his hips, trying desperately to stay inside.

“Have some mercy,” Richard muttered.

Claudia flopped down beside him with indifferent insolence. She was thoroughly satisfied, glowing from the inside out; Richard's plaintive mewling did not even register through the cone of sublime happiness. She reached over to the bedside table and grabbed her BlackBerry.

Stacks of emails had collected since she'd been off the radar for the last two hours, secreted with her lover at the dingy Motel Fifty on Route Fifty in Arlington, Virginia. They always chose shoddy, cheap motels—places they would be unlikely to be recognized and allowed quick getaways. Plus, they were honest: dirty places for dirty deeds. Had Richard ever suggested a pleasant location with clean sheets and adequate amenities Claudia would have been insulted. It would have felt like a lie.

A text from Claudia's husband reminded her that their daughter was coming home from England and asked that she make arrangements to pick her up from the airport since he had been called to do an emergency angioplasty for a German diplomat. Claudia typed an acknowledgement then set the small device back on the faux-pine table.

Richard placed his hand on the flat plane of her belly, allowing the shaft of his penis to press insistently against her taut thigh. “I need you,” he breathed into her sweet-smelling hair, and then took her mouth as his hand moved down between her legs. “I need this.”

Claudia calculated the time she would need to get to National Airport and decided to take mercy on him. Sort of. She gently gripped his penis, and as always when his eagerness was so apparent, she felt the sensual spark of excitement in the simple acknowledgement of all that youthful exuberance so beautifully disciplined for her.

She had not always liked younger men. Indeed, she had been shocked and flattered when Richard Mullinax approached her at a gala six months ago and introduced himself as the Deputy Director of the National Security Agency. The youngest official to ever hold the title, he told her with unmistakable self-satisfaction. His cockiness both grated and amused her.

“How old are you?” she'd asked bluntly, her candid gaze unflinching.

“Twenty-seven.”

She suppressed a teasing smirk and tried hard not to roll her eyes.

“Is that too young for you?” he asked, equally blunt. His eyes liquidly dark, striking against his Chesapeake-tanned skin, seemed impossibly beautiful. Cherubic, except for the sexual energy that emanated from him like an irresistible cologne.

Claudia felt her face flame. Her mouth felt dry so she lifted the drink to her parched lips. “No,” she replied and took a sip.

The champagne made her unusually loose, willing to entertain a flirtation. But the alcohol could not be blamed for her willingness to be seduced. She saw them suddenly with a third person's eyes: a powerful woman in her late forties and the young, tall man teasing her, getting away with it in the middle of a party where her husband stood only few feet away, chatting with the Secretary of the Interior. She knew then, with great certainty, what would happen. Saying no was never in the cards.

She'd meant it to be a one-night stand, a quick, forgivable indiscretion. But what began as a secret summer fling had evolved to an all-encompassing sexual obsession.

Richard's position gave her confidence that the affair could go on for as long as they wanted it to. Politically, he was her equal.

On January 21, she would take her oath of office in front of millions of people on the west steps of the US Capitol. Less than two weeks away. Thus, her position in the administration was not something she could afford to risk. She had worked many years to cultivate an All-American public image, Ms. American Professional and Family Woman and Mother. To succumb to a sex scandal—the most clichéd kind—with a man twenty years her junior would make her the laughingstock of the nation and destroy everything she had worked for. Her famous cardiologist husband, astronaut son, and Rhodes Scholar daughter would be humiliated. What would her children think of their mom having kinky sex with a man their own age? It was too awful to contemplate.

Richard Mullinax had no desire to embarrass her by posting pictures of their trysts on the Internet or bragging to friends about their rendezvous. With his high-level job, he had as much to lose as she did if this thing went public.

Claudia called the shots in this relationship because she did not want to fall into the same boring holding pattern she had with her husband, so she pushed for control. Her husband worked all the time, she felt neglected, and the world tasted like gravel when he was around. Richard added color and movement. And actual
fun
. She could not remember when or how she'd simply stopped having fun, but now that it was back in her life, she wanted it all the time. Controlling this sexy man was as pleasurable as climaxing for her. It was kinky fun and her private secret … and it was the best part of her day.

Claudia gently pushed him back onto the thin pillows. Grasping his shaft, she slowly began to stroke. She bent down and took him in her mouth, which made him groan. He slid his hands into her hair, and she grabbed his wrists, holding them down by his side while she sucked. He began to thrust faster into her mouth, and as his moans became low and gasping, she knew he was there. She simply pulled back, letting semen shoot helplessly onto his belly and chest. Without friction contact, he cried out and instinctively reached to finish himself off, but Claudia, hovering over him, used her leverage to keep his wrists pinned securely at his sides. She watched with cool fascination as his chest and throat and face beat bright red, veins popping out in his throat and arms, an expression of agony scrawled across his face.

Finally his climax ended, but his penis was still ironhard, and he was nearly sobbing with frustration. Claudia giggled and kissed his mouth. “Sweet boy,” she cooed. “You are so beautiful when you're hurting like that.”

“Oh my God …” Richard was speechless, in torment. He had climaxed, but not to completion. His whole body was confused and sensitized, infuriatingly still needing more release.

Claudia stood up by the side of the bed, posing with her hands on her hips. “Where did you throw my panties?”

“Claudia, please …”

She found her nude satin underwear on the filthy carpet by the television and stepped into them.

His expression pleaded with her to be reasonable. “You aren't going to leave me like this …”

She smiled. “Yes, I am. I have a life to return to. So do you, ostensibly.”

He looked down at himself as if he could not comprehend the cruelty that had befallen him. Claudia wondered if he saw himself as she did. Adorable, sexy. There was simply nothing she enjoyed more than a man on the very cusp his ability to control himself.

Claudia finished dressing, then collected her chic leather handbag from a horrid puce chair with torn stuffing bursting from the ragged seams. “I will call you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Richard replied huskily.

“Don't sulk.”

“I'm not.” He allowed a soft smile to prove he was a good sport about Claudia's casual cruelty.

She blew him a kiss and sashayed out the door.

Richard waited until he heard the low growl of her Mercedes engine and the tires crunching over shale as she piloted onto of the lot onto the highway. When he was sure she was gone, he gripped his penis and began to stroke himself. Just as he felt he might be close, his phone began to ring from under his pants on the floor. He tried to blot out the annoying noise and concentrate, but Beethoven's Fifth ringtone kept penetrating into his fantasy.

“Fuck!” His shout echoed off the walls and he got up to answer the phone. The number that flashed on the screen made him instantly lose his erection. A dart of trepidation pierced his chest. “Yes?” he answered tersely.

“An issue has arisen,” the cool voice replied. “We need to meet.”

Richard looked around the shoddy room. Though it was private, it was also secret; he wouldn't invite him here. “Let's meet at Lincoln's steps in half an hour,” he suggested. Nobody had yet figured out how to bug a park; it seemed safe.

“Fine.” He hung up without another word.

Richard tossed his phone back onto the pile of clothes and considered the situation. Whatever Omar Koss had to tell him would be bad; they almost never met face to face. Richard wanted to postpone the confrontation for as long as he could.

He had enough time, he thought, and lay back on the bed to finish the job Claudia started.

It was four o'clock: a cold, blustery afternoon with bleached skies and the sparkle of snow hinting in the air. Bundled-up tourists and determined joggers moved through the west end of the National Mall in a buzz of constant, light activity, seemingly oblivious to the landmarks around them.

Richard, ten minutes early, walked past the Vietnam Memorial, regarding with the required solemnity the names etched on the black granite wall. The nature of war had changed since those men died. Modern war was won by knowing more about your enemies than they knew about you. For all practical purposes, the United States was at war with every country on earth, doing battle twenty-four hours a day. At the front lines of this invisible war was Richard Mullinax. Tip of the spear.

There was no country Richard did not have access to, no system so secure that he could not penetrate it. The world's secrets flowed into his office every day. It was somewhat ironic that despite the United States government's extensive ability to monitor every other country in the world, it actually had very poor infrastructure for monitoring itself.

Richard gazed over the Mall, seeking out Omar Koss. He felt certain that Omar was already here, watching him. Koss lived and breathed surveillance and covert activities; he would not be seen until he wanted to be seen.

Richard huddled in his coat and strolled to Abe's Greek Doric temple. Few tourists had braved the nasty weather, one reason he'd chosen this place to meet. Abraham Lincoln gazed into the modern world with calm, steely resolve. Like an ordinary tourist, Richard began to read the Gettysburg Address etched into the marble walls.

“We agreed to meet on the steps,” Koss said from behind him. He had approached with predatory silence. Cool as a cobra. His silence was positively unnerving.

“I didn't like being in the wind,” Richard answered, hating the whininess of his answer. He used a blank expression mask the unease he felt from being in the other man's presence.

“Surveillance cameras are all over the place,” Koss replied, stepping alongside him.

Richard risked a glance. Koss had an elegant, granite-sculpted face with a hawkish nose and an exotic hooded slant to his eyes that reminded Richard of shark's eyes. He was a big, solid guy who even in jeans and layered shirts and coats managed to convey supreme strength, like he could effortless destroy anyone or anything in his path. His true identity was something of a mystery; not even Richard, with all the world's resources at his fingertips, had been able to derive a complete and satisfactory answer to that issue. Mullinax smelled ex-spook or commando on him, but from what agency, he couldn't even hazard a guess. Presently, Koss operated his own intelligence service, the products of which he sold to whomever would pay the highest price. He had a network of buyers and sellers all over the globe. Anything you wanted, he could provide. Nukes, diamonds, babies, weapons, blackmail material. He was the middleman, making money on every transaction.

Koss said, “Let's walk.”

They strolled down the steps and continued down the pathway toward the Washington Memorial obelisk. The flags around the monument snapped in a sudden gust of stiff wind. Beyond that, the white marble cupola of the US Capitol loomed like an accusation.

“There's been a complication,” Koss said. “The kid … my partner had to neutralize him.”

Richard winced. The first stirrings of genuine concern began low in his gut. There were not supposed to be any “neutralizations.” Killing people would bring scrutiny—the one thing that Richard must avoid.

“The bad news …”

“There's more?” Richard blurted.

Koss continued as if he hadn't interrupted. “He told someone else what he'd discovered. I heard him on the phone taps.”

Richard's stomach began to cramp. “Just … take care of it,” he said.

“I will. But the person he told is Fallon Hughes. Considering this is somewhat more complicated than we planned, I want a bigger cut. Twenty-five percent.”

Richard, stunned to silence, risked another sidelong glance. He could not fathom what Koss was implying. That he was planning to kill the daughter of the president-elect? Ridiculous. Only Omar Koss was crazy enough to even conceive of a project so reckless, stupid, and audacious.

It was possible this was all a ruse to squeeze him for more money. In fact, the more he considered it, that seemed the strongest possible explanation. Richard answered with forced confidence. “No way.”