Blue Knight (7 page)

Olivia had been right—she was his age and up until this morning he had been able to keep her a well-blended part of the scenery. She had managed to blast apart that defense inside eight—no, six hours, with an offensive worthy of Wellington himself. He reached for his glass of sour punch and wished it was single malt scotch. Fuck.

His body was a strung bow of tension, wound up so tight a single pluck could destroy the balance, blow him apart and send the pieces flying. All it had taken was a single look into those huge, deep blue eyes, so different from his own.

I can’t seduce you, Daniel. I’m invisible to you.
So calm. So…indifferent.
I’d sooner bed a walrus.

Daniel gave in to the need to move. He dropped his head into his hand and massaged his temples with his forefinger and thumb. His whole skull was throbbing. Her eyes. All he could see was her eyes. Staring at him. Plus the blue shirt that matched her eyes exactly.
Silk
, her voice whispered. Then there was the unfettered breasts he now knew lay beneath the shirt. His hands itched to stroke her breasts through the shirt. To tease the buttons open. To have her panting as he slid the lacy thong from her body….

He realized where his mind was wandering and swore to himself. His body had tightened up again, and now his cock was pounding with the effect of the potential images. Those legs! He could see them, feel them wrapping around his waist as he slid into her.

He stood up abruptly and as he fussed with the last of his drink, he carefully adjusted his trousers to hide as best he could his raging erection before turning to face the room.

She was reading a
National Geographic
, her long legs crossed, the gorgeous blonde hair the color of sea foam piled up on the back of her head. One black clip held it all there. His hand twitched to pull out the clip and watch the long tresses tumble back down around her shoulders.

Christ, get a hold of yourself, mate!
He strode over to the barrier ropes, compiling stumbling, badly-phrased Spanish to ask for permission to go to the washrooms, knowing the little humiliation of having to ask would please the
insurrectos
enough to let him through.

It would also give him a chance to get away from her presence, which seemed to draw all the oxygen from the room.

* * * * *

Minnie tapped on Calli’s office door, her notebooks under her arm. She stuck her head around the frame and backed up a step when she realized she was interrupting an earlier meeting. Nick, Duardo and a captain she didn’t know already sat in front of Calli’s desk.

Calli stood up. “Minnie, come in,” she called in Spanish.

Minnie stepped into the room. “I’m interrupting.” She responded in Spanish as well.

“No, this is your meeting.”

Minnie clutched her notebooks. “Then I’m officially confused.”

“I want everyone to hear what you told me this morning. I want you to walk them through it, too.”

Minnie grimaced. “Calli, this stuff is just shopping.” She felt sweat pop out at her temples. “You don’t call in the President of the country for a shopping trip!”

Calli’s eyes narrowed. “Duardo, quickly—”

Barely before she spoke, Duardo had moved. His arms were under Minnie’s, holding her up, moving her to his chair, propping her up. Minnie gripped the edges of Calli’s desk as Nick took her notebooks from her and gasped in big gulps of air. After a minute, she nodded. “I’m okay.”

Duardo cocked his head. “We can reschedule.” He glanced at Calli. “No?”

“If we must,” she agreed.

“No, let’s get this over with,” Minnie said. “I’m only going to get rounder and sicker if we delay.” She held her hand out for the notebooks and Nick gave them back.

Duardo indicated the captain sitting on the far side of Calli’s desk. “This is Captain Rubén Rey. He is the loyalist army’s quartermaster and a computer geek. Calli thought he should hear this, too.”

Rubén Rey nodded at her. He looked impossibly young to be a captain, but intelligence shone from his eyes. Minnie nodded back.

Nick leaned forward. “Tell us about this scheme of yours,” he coaxed. “Calli says you can shave twenty percent off the household food budget as Rosetta had it set.”

Minnie snorted. “Try forty-five,” she said. She flipped open her notebooks and began to talk.

Fifty minutes later, she finally came to a halt, drained of information and with a new respect for Rubén Rey. He had done most of the cross-examination, carefully probing her scheme with some surprising questions she hadn’t considered before, even coming up with some efficiencies she leapt on with delight, scribbling them down on a new page in one of her notebooks. Some of the variations he offered up, though, she dismissed instantly. They wouldn’t work. She had taken her time to explain why, because she knew that he would understand why they wouldn’t. He had finally understood despite her weak Spanish and sat back with a satisfied air.

“I see,” he said. He looked at Duardo. “It is an excellent system, Colonel,” he pronounced.

Calli grinned at Nick, who nodded and got to his feet. “I need to be elsewhere,” he said. “Thank you for your time and expertise, Minnie. This has been very instructive.” He left, with a pat on her shoulder.

Calli was reaching for something next to her desk. She straightened up and lifted it over. Duardo lowered it onto the desk next to Minnie. It was a laptop computer, still in the manufacturer’s box.

“That’ll make your work a lot easier,” Calli said.

“I don’t know a lot about working on computers,” Minnie pointed out.

“But I do,” Captain Rey said. “I will teach you and you will teach me.”

“My work?” Minnie repeated, looking at Calli.

“You’re my new right-hand man,” Calli told her. “Civilian quartermaster. We can come up with a prettier title for you if you want. You and Captain Rey are going to be best buddies, because you’re going to have to work together to supply the army, too.”

Minnie sat looking at Calli, letting it sink in. “Bugger me,” she said finally, in English.

Rubén laughed, proving his English was adequate, too.

* * * * *

Nick looked up as Duardo was shown into his office and stood up. Duardo stood at ramrod attention, but did not salute, as was correct.

“At ease, Colonel,” Nick told him, moving around the big desk.

Duardo relaxed into parade readiness. “Sir, it is my very great pleasure to ask your permission to marry Ms. Minerva Benning, an American citizen, at sunset tomorrow afternoon.”

“Do you consider your intended in any way to be a threat to Vistaria?”

“No, sir.”

“Then permission is granted.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Nick held out his hand and Duardo accepted it stiffly.

He looked Duardo in the eye. “You’re a lucky bastard, Duardo. Welcome to my family.” He hugged him.

Duardo grinned and slapped Nick on the back. “You think I don’t know how lucky I am?” He sobered. “You weren’t there, Nick. I saw what she did to defy Zalaya.”

Nick took a breath. “The debriefing was enough for me.”

Duardo nodded. “You should know how honored I am to have my family be joined with that of
el leopardo
.”

“I think the honor runs the other way, Duardo.” He headed back to his desk and waved Duardo to the chair in front of it. “I never imagined that two American women would entangle our politics and lives so much, but I’m glad it is so.”

Duardo grinned. “They have a way of making things happen.”

Nick nodded. “There’s another matter. It’s delicate.”

Duardo didn’t move, but Nick could almost feel the man switch mental gears. His eyes narrowed. “I’m listening.”

“When Carmen was roaming the palace while you were Zalaya, she got a message out via MSN Messenger, do you remember?”

“She wiped the cache. They never did figure out who she spoke to.”

“Indirectly, she was warning us that Zalaya had Minnie but that she, Carmen, was leaving the palace that night.”

Duardo leapt on the key word. “Indirectly?”

Nick nodded. “She spoke to an old friend of hers, a Boston-based businessman, Richard Menzies, who called us. We vetted him at the time and have more thoroughly investigated him since. He’s who he says he is—an intimate friend of Carmen’s. I took a call from him earlier today.”

“He knows Carmen is on Vistaria?”

“Yes.”

“Then?”

“Because of Carmen, he is on our side. So he phoned to warn us, I guess. He is well connected and heard rumors, followed them and confirmed enough to warrant the call.” Nick grimaced. “About six weeks ago, the UN sent a party of diplomats and businessmen into Vistaria to oversee the democratic process. Remember?”

“I remember them arriving on the main island. All very formal and official. Serrano was triumphant. He saw it as official recognition of his victory. I warned him it was nothing of the sort.” He shrugged.

“About a week after you came here, Menzies tells me, any news about the group completely ceased.”

Duardo shrugged apologetically. “I was not functioning fully at that time.” The psychological fallout from his time as Zalaya had set in and Duardo had spent a week or so withdrawn from the world, pulling himself together.

“You were up on your feet fast enough after that,” Nick assured him. “Remember them returning home?”

Duardo blinked. “No,” he said flatly. “Are they still there?”

Nick lifted his shoulders. “No one seems to know.”

Duardo leaned forward. “A whole group of UN diplomats cannot simply disappear. You would hear the scream all the way from New York to here.”

“Nevertheless, that seems to be what has happened. They’ve been off the radar for four weeks. No one has heard from them. The very curious part, the factor that made Menzies call me, is that the UN is not braying about it. They’re deathly silent. So silent, that he had trouble even confirming that the group went to Vistaria at all.”

Duardo frowned. “Why?
Why
? Why cover up a disappearance of your own people?” he muttered.

“I was hoping you would figure it out for me, with your pretzel mind, as Josh puts it.”

Duardo absently put his cap on the desk and stood up. Nick could see his mind was in overdrive and kept silent. Duardo walked to the recently repaired windows. The limp from the bullet he had taken in the leg while posing as Zalaya was barely noticeable now. He stared out at the sea. “They’re afraid,” he said at last. “If they acknowledge the group went to Vistaria, it will be used against them.”

“How?” Nick said simply.

“Leverage,” Duardo said softly.

Cold fingers walked down Nick’s spine. “That implies that they’re being held as hostages somewhere on Vistaria.” He blew out his cheeks. “Jesus wept. Is Serrano that mad, Duardo? Mad enough to hold UN diplomats as hostages?”

Duardo turned to face him. “He’s not mad at all. He’s a cold, calculating and ruthless son of a bitch, with no morals and even less conscience, but he is paranoid.”

“Enough to do this?” Nick asked.

Duardo considered. “You say the diplomatic party disappeared a week after Zalaya did?”

Nick nodded.

“He lost Torres and Zalaya on the same day and his whole intelligence base with it. That might have been enough to build his paranoia to a scale big enough to justify this, yes. The prize he’s going for would justify it, in his eyes.”

“What prize?”

Duardo’s grimace was sour. “He thinks he can force the United States to back him, not us, if he threatens to kill the hostages. All he has to do is find an American among them.”

“Oh my god, will you look at all those uniforms!” Minnie hissed, looking out the window down onto the beach below.

“Swords, too,” Calli said calmly. She tapped Téra on the arm. “Her zipper isn’t all the way up,” she said in Spanish, then said into her cell phone in English, “Yes, I’m holding for the Chief of Staff.”

“Swords, too?” Minnie squeaked. “Which Chief of Staff?”

“The United States, I think,” her father said from across the room, as Téra calmly zipped up the top of her wedding dress.

Beryl, sitting on the chair next to Josh, fanned herself. “Oh dear….”

“This is way too much fuss,” Minnie said, looking out the window again. “What were you thinking, Calli?”

Calli held up her hand, listening to a voice at the end of the phone. She nodded a couple of times. “Thank you, I will.”

Then she shut the phone down with a decisive snap and looked at Minnie. “This is precisely the right amount of fuss one deserves when one marries a senior officer in the Vistarian army. He’s a colonel and the President’s right-hand man. Nick can’t do without him and Duardo is getting married. What’s more, the cousin of Vistaria’s Chief of Staff is getting married and that deserves pomp and circumstance, too.” Calli turned Minnie to face her. “On top of all of that, Vistaria’s new civilian quartermaster deserves to be honored on her wedding day, too.”

Minnie tried to smile. “Well, if you put it like that….”

Calli smiled and handed Minnie her bouquet, which featured native Vistarian wisteria. She picked up two smaller bouquets and gave one to Téra. “I do put it like that,” she said firmly.

“But a twelve-foot train?” Minnie demanded, kicking back at the lace wafting behind her.

Calli leaned down to kiss her cousin’s cheek. “You’ve got at least three hundred soldiers in formal uniforms, wearing swords and gloves and boots shined to a gleam. They’re going to give you twenty-one gun salute as you walk down a red carpet. Nothing less than a twelve-foot train was going to compete, honey. Take a deep breath and pretend you’re a queen, because you’re about to be treated like one.”

“Ah, hell,” Minnie murmured as her father took her arm.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Calli called.

“Yeah, twelve feet behind,” Minnie muttered.

* * * * *

Her dad must have sensed her nerves and discomfort, because all the way down to the beach, he kept up a running commentary designed to keep her mind distracted. The beach had been cleared of army equipment, raked smooth and laid with temporary flooring. Chairs had been set up, along with lights, decorations and the most perfect backdrop of all, the sun setting into the sea.