Courting Passion (13 page)

The office was small, barely large enough for them to both stand in without pressing up against the desk. Garth walked around the wooden table, bending down to check that no one was hiding out of sight—which was standard procedure in a sweep such as this. Nothing was more embarrassing than to not clear a room as safe and be ambushed because of laziness.

“Empty,” he grunted. Katherine turned around and walked out, Garth following. She repeated the same procedure with the next door down. Thrusting the door open so no one could hide behind it, she entered with her gun raised. Garth guarded her back. Katherine’s gaze roamed around the room, nearly identical to the previous one but with different photos, prints hanging on the wall and personal effects. She checked any hiding places.

“Empty,” she sighed and caught Garth’s gaze. He shrugged—they hadn’t expected it to be easy—and moved out into the corridor.

“Clear!” she heard Peterson shout through the offices. Katherine frowned, concern creeping up on her initial adrenaline rush.

“No one’s called out that they’ve found Connor yet, have they?” she asked. Garth shook his head as they moved down the hall to the second last office. Footsteps sounded at the entrance of the corridor and Katherine and Garth both raised their weapons and focused on their backs.

Walters entered the hall and held his free hand palm up.

“Peterson will be here in a second. We’ve restrained four people we found in the middle meeting room. Had to gag two of them. Not very happy with us, I can tell you.”

Garth returned to face the door and Katherine turned to face him but spoke over her shoulder to Walters.

“Front two offices are empty, no one so far,” she informed him, her body coiled tight with tension. Garth slammed open the door and, immediately, this room was different.

“What? Hey, it’s you! Help! Help, I’m being mugged.”

The voice was high pitched and whiny. Katherine frowned. Garth hadn’t even entered the room yet, so the occupant was more than prepared to lie. Walters held out a bandanna and Katherine took it, wound it around her hand, so it would be close to gag the man, and followed Garth inside. Garth had already pulled out a cable tie with one hand, the gun held in the other.

“Help! Help!” Connor continued to scream as he pulled plugs from the hard drive to disconnect it from the laptop he worked on. Connor struggled to push the small black box into his backpack. The scruffy blond looked left and right wildly, a cornered animal seeking escape.

“Let’s do this the easy way,” Katherine tried to soothe the hysterical youth. “The windows don’t open at all, there isn’t another way out except past us. Garth here is going to tie your hands together and, if you keep on shouting, I’m going to gag you. That’s your choice.”

“Somebody! Please help me, they’re going to kill me!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Katherine swore under her breath as she placed her gun in its holster, grabbed the tie from Garth’s hands and came around the desk and punched Connor in the side of his jaw. The young man collapsed over the desk, weeping, though she’d put almost no force behind the movement. She pulled his hands behind his back and snapped the tie tightly around his wrists. She threaded two fingers under the tie to be sure it didn’t cut off his circulation.

It was as she unwound the bandanna from her hand that she heard the shouts.

“I’ve got Jennings!” Peterson called out. Heavy footfalls thumped down the corridor and Katherine swung around to see Garth crossing to the door as both Walters and Peterson sprinted past the office and all but flew towards the area they’d not checked yet.

“Damn, he’s really here,” Garth swore. Katherine took one glance at Connor, who still sniffled and whined, and dropped the bandanna on the desk. In a few seconds she shoved both the laptop and hard drive into the backpack, zipped it up and pulled it on.

Then she pulled her gun out again and made her way around the desk to follow Garth. As they left the office, they nearly collided with Jack and Skye. Katherine shrugged out of the backpack and hurled it at them.

“The laptop Connor was working on and the hard drive are both there,” she snapped out. “Walters and Peterson are chasing Jennings. Garth and I will follow. We need you both to keep tabs on Connor, work out if he’s managed to download anything or unencrypted it and then destroy it all.”

“But I thought—” Jack said but Garth cut him off.

“There’s too much interest in this, it will never go away. Wait until we’re all assembled again and we’re going to have to destroy it ourselves. The Agency will just have to deal with it, I think.”

Not giving Jack or Skye any further chance to argue, Garth and Katherine sprinted off after Peterson and Walters before they lost them completely. The corridor ended in a door. Garth slammed his shoulder into it at almost a full run, opening it and throwing his body through it. They were on the landing of a second series of stairs running the length of the building.

The sound of scuffling could be heard from a floor or two down.

“You son of a bitch,” an angry, masculine voice screamed out. A gunshot echoed in the stairwell. Garth and Katherine scrambled down the stairs, Garth in the lead. Katherine’s heart hammered in her chest. Who’d been shot? Were Walters and Peterson okay? They wouldn’t kill Jennings in their anger or the heat of the moment, surely?

As they turned a corner, Katherine got a view of the floor lower down and saw Peterson and Jennings struggling together. Walters lay on the floor bleeding and trying to get to his feet. His right arm was streaked with red and hung limp at his side. The wound seemed to have made a mess of his shoulder, but otherwise Walters looked fine.

Jennings lifted his head, jerking back as he saw Garth and Katherine almost at him. Oscar cursed, dived for the floor and grabbed his gun again. The gun boomed in the enclosed space, the shot to Peterson’s surprised face, at such close quarters, lethal.

Garth snarled like an enraged beast. Casting his body at the man, Garth punched Oscar in the jaw and the two men grappled. One glance told Katherine there was nothing she could do for Peterson. She knelt at Walters and assisted the man to his feet.

“Can’t use my gun hand,” he panted, his face white and dripping sweat. “He is not going to go down easily—he’ll kill or wound us all before he gives in. Katherine, you have to shoot him.”

Walters leant back against the wall, sweat from the physical exertion and evident, extreme pain he was in coating his body. Katherine made certain he would not collapse in a heap if she let him go, then circled the twisting mass of the two men. They fought each other, the crunching sound of flesh beating flesh making her stomach roil.

“Give it up, Jennings,” she commanded, as she tried to get a clear shot of the man. “There’s more of us upstairs likely on their way down now. There’s nowhere to run. We have your laptop and the portable drive. It’s over.”

Oscar snarled something incoherent at her without turning his head, his sole attention focused on Garth. Jennings’ fist landed a solid blow to the side of Garth’s face and the skin at the corner of his eye split, a small spray of blood splattering his skin. Even though the blow hadn’t touched her, Katherine almost felt the pain herself.

Caution flew out the window.

She widened her stance, took a calming breath and narrowed her sights. When Oscar turned to the side, giving her a clear view of his profile, she took the shot, shooting his kneecap out. He screamed in agony and fell hard to the floor, blood pooling under him.

Katherine knelt at his side and removed his belt, tightening it as a makeshift tourniquet to slow the bleeding. Garth staggered and pressed a palm into the wall. When Katherine felt confident Oscar would not die owing to blood loss, she moved to touch Garth’s face. He grimaced but let her see to his wounds.

“You aren’t supposed to lead with your face, my love,” she chided him, caught somewhere between frustration and pride.

“Rather hard to fight fair when your opponent’s initial outlay is to knee you in the nuts and then fight dirty. Plus it’s not like a stairwell is the ideal place for hand-to-hand combat.”

“A learning experience, then,” she soothed him. He chuckled then winced, clearly in pain. Jack appeared behind them and whistled as he surveyed the general mess.

“Victor is upstairs. We’ve called in the Agency and some reinforcements. Looks like I might need to add an ambulance to that mix,” he said.

“You don’t want to move Jennings until you have at least three or four trustworthy agents present to escort him,” Katherine insisted. “Besides, he’ll be fine. It’s Walters who needs help with his shoulder.”

“Peterson will need assistance, too,” Walters said, his voice rough and husky. “I know he’s gone, but he has a family, a sister he’s particularly close to. They need to be called, and someone needs to collect him and make sure he’s treated right.”

They all nodded. Walters took a deep breath and sank to the floor again, looking on the verge of passing out. Katherine took another look around, then spoke with a hitch of emotion in her voice.

“Well, at least, this time, the building is still standing. We’re getting a bad reputation for flame throwers and rocket launchers.”

The men chuckled, but their faces showed bafflement as well as humour. Katherine figured they weren’t sure how much was genuine humour, and how much was just the let-down as the adrenaline left their bodies.

* * * *

“I’m telling you, we should think about this before we react,” Garth insisted as Katherine stormed down the corridor on the top floor of the Agency.

Victor had indeed arrived, somehow magically checking himself out. Garth and Jack had a pool running as to whether Victor had been allowed out of the hospital or whether he had merely escaped. Katherine was tempted to join in and add five pounds to say Victor had talked his way out by convincing the nurses he was someone else. That man had a silver tongue.

“Since when have we swapped over?” Katherine insisted, with an angry glare at Garth. “If you’d asked me a week ago if I would be the one acting all rogue and cowboy-ish, breaking the rules and to hell with the consequences, I’d have laughed. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate the direct response and not beating around the bush.”

“Sweetheart, I am all for the direct approach,” Garth insisted. “But not when it comes to possibly sacrificing our place in the Agency. Emma Henley is not some small-time agent. She’s a team leader. We should lay out a plan, trap her even. Not storm into an upper management meeting and throw around accusations.”

Katherine shook her head, her pain and anger bubbling under the surface, pushing her to act, not think or plan. She could hardly believe the difference a few days—and a few deaths—had caused.

“Garth,” she hissed, her voice shaking and dangerously low as she halted in the corridor. No one else was around, but they still stood intimately close and whispered to each other.

“Tarek lies in a coma because of information this woman sold out on us. Peterson was shot into an unrecognisable mess as an indirect result of Emma’s betrayal. I will not sit on my arse and make some bloody plan, or set a trap with bait. Neither will I go in there guns blazing and get you fired. I’m a mess and emotional, but not suicidal. I genuinely believe the only way to win this is to take her utterly by surprise and hit her with everything we have.”

“And what if you’re wrong?” Garth growled. “Damn it, Kate, I’m not worried about going rogue or even being fired, though that would totally suck. I’m worried about you being upset when you calm down and take a breath. Since when am I the rational one of the two of us?”

Katherine laughed and wrapped her arms around Garth. Pressing their bodies together she kissed him with every ounce of passion and love in her body. Their lips slid over each other, their bodies flush together as if they both sought to melt into one another. Sparks of electricity arched through her body and her pussy dampened inside her jeans. Katherine wanted him, but she wanted to finish this more.

“If I’m wrong then you can help me plot a real plan when we’re sitting next to each other in the jail cell they’ll throw us in. And I’ll let you do anything you please to me when we get home. If I’m right, then I want full control tonight. I want you to make my every wicked fantasy come true.”

Garth licked his lips, his dark eyes blazing into hers.

“Done. Let’s go fry the bitch,” he ground out. Katherine threw her head back and laughed, delighted.

It had only taken a few questions to find out Emma Henley was in a group task force meeting with the higher managers to discuss the ‘possible traitor’ and the leaks to Oscar Jennings. Katherine knew this was a risk, but it was one she was more than willing to take. The only way this would end for good would be for all the upper managers to see with their own eyes the fact that Emma was the mole.

Otherwise, they’d never be believed and Emma would be able to do more damage. All the bullshit paperwork and red tape would slow the wheels of justice. Lesser cases had ground to a halt under the pressure. Neither of them wanted that to happen here.

Katherine pushed open the door to the meeting room with a bang. She strode in, covered in sweat, blood and the acrid smell of gunpowder. She recognised most of the men and women seated around an oval table. A few she didn’t, but that wasn’t her main concern for now.

“And so I really think we ought to—oh, Katherine, what’s going on?” one of the other division leaders blinked, clearly caught unawares.

 Garth took the folder from her hands, the folder of evidence that Victor had managed to accumulate in his hours of research. Katherine activated the screen to enlarge the phone records and other documents to present them before those gathered.

“Ladies and gents, I apologise for the interruption, but this simply can’t wait. We have uncovered the identity of the mole,” Katherine began. An excited murmur rose, but Katherine locked gazes with Emma.

The slender woman’s dark brown eyes caught hers, her long, honey brown curls twisted into a top knot. Katherine let her stare bore into the other woman’s, and it only took her a moment to understand what was coming. Emma stood and smiled.