Dangerous Liaisons (3 page)

The padded, red, leather door swung closed behind Jesse, dulling the painful blare of punk music from the West Side club dance floor. She paused on the dimly lit landing and gazed down the stairwell leading to the private room where The Professor said he would be waiting. The narrow tunnel of stairs disappeared into a murky bottom. She had been lucky so far, but luck was like baking a soufflé in a blasting zone. Plus, the hour had just struck midnight; the witching hour.

A dull thump, thump resonated through the walls, and Jesse shook her head in an effort to clear the calamity of music from her mind. She grimaced. The snakes and spiders she’d encountered in Colombia were preferable to the solid wall of skin, leather, and pierced body parts she’d slithered through in order to reach the back of the club.

She started down the worn treads. A lone black light at the bottom landing cast iridescent shadows off purple walls, and her sneaker laces shimmered as if energized. She hesitated before continuing forward. A blind man could spot her shoelaces a mile away. Leave it to The Professor to pick a place like this. She hit the landing and turned left down a narrow hallway. Jesse spotted the door he said she’d find and stopped just short of it. She pressed her back to the wall, reached out, and rapped with her knuckles.

“Come,” he called from within.

Jesse slipped inside. More black lights lit the room. Two white floor lamps were located beside the two stained red leather sofas, and two beanbags sat beneath glowing, florescent-colored posters of Jimmy Hendricks and Bon Jovi. The velvet painting of Elvis that hung behind the sofa where The Professor sat added the finishing touch of tackiness to the odor of moldy leather and BO tinged with dried semen.

The Professor reclined on the sofa, a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger. His eyes exuded sparkling innocence. His nerdy persona didn’t quite hide the good-looking devil lurking behind his dark brown eyes. At forty-four years of age, in three years, he could retire with thirty years in the service. Government intelligence was one place a teenager with three Ph.D.s could get a job. In many ways, he was still a kid.

“What a god-awful place, Tom,” she said.

He chuckled. “Don’t knock it. Anyone following wouldn’t make it past the skinheads upstairs. One is my sister’s husband.”

Jesse strode to the sofa, dropped to a squat in front of him, placed a hand on his shoulder, and kissed his cheek. He returned her kiss with one on the mouth. Affection rippled through her. He was the only Blue Team member she had any real affection for. He was The Professor to her Mary Ann. Or would she be Ginger? She sat beside him and crossed her legs.

“You’re in deep,” he said in a conversational tone.

“Uh huh,” she replied.

“You’re lucky I owe you,” he said. “This will square us for Lisbon.” Jesse raised a brow, and he grinned. “All right. I would do it for you anyway.”

He meant it. She had saved his life in Madrid when the gun dealer took him hostage—imprisoned and tortured him, is what the bastard had done. Jesse had gone in for him.

She smiled gently. “I know.”

“I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon,” he said.

“Good. I’m counting on Green Leader thinking the same way. The longer I wait, the deeper he’ll burrow. Not to mention, he’s got his wife’s family connections. The last thing I need is for him to call in favors. He’ll bury me six feet under and piss on my grave if I give him the chance. Right now, it’s still early. He’s got to figure I’m running scared.”

“I don’t know how scared he is. They’re keeping quiet. But I heard he tracked you, and you stayed ahead of him.” Tom put his cigarette in his mouth and clapped softly. “Bravo.”

Jesse frowned. “Those things will kill you.”

He took a long drag, then snuffed out the butt in an ashtray on the floor beside the sofa. “They’re my only vice. Besides, our friends have enough of my DNA to grow me new lungs.”

“They probably could, at that.” Jesse folded her hands on a knee. “As for me, I’m expendable. He cleaned out my safe deposit box.”

The Professor scrutinized her. “I hope the information he’s after is somewhere safe.”

Jesse nodded. She had debated whether or not to tell him about the disc, and decided against it. She'd dragged him into this mess, but wouldn’t take him down if she fell. If Lanton deciphered the encryption, she would never confess that Tom had been involved in it ending up in her possession.

In the meantime, Lanton would drive himself crazy trying to break the encryption, but wouldn’t chance handing it over to anyone for fear it contained evidence that would incriminate him. Too bad she hadn’t saved the article written by DC’s most prominent gossip columnist Zoe Shelby about a certain
RL
who had been spotted in an off-the-beaten-path restaurant with a swanky uptown escort. The information was public knowledge, but the look on his face when he found the article in her safe deposit box would have been worth a year’s salary.

Gossip columnists thrived on stories that turned a boring marriage between a civil servant and socialite into a
debutant done wrong by playboy husband
story. They weren’t off the mark this time. The pre-nup Helen Beaumont’s family insisted Lanton sign hadn’t stopped him from squandering her considerable fortune over the past eighteen years on women and fast living that had graduated into BDSM at its best.

Jesse could imagine Helen’s face when she received the first
consoling
phone call from one of her socialite friends. Pissing away a woman’s fortune was one thing. Being seen about town with prostitutes was another. Lanton’s penchant for BDSM had yet to leak. Would that be enough for Helen Lanton to divorce him?

At five-ten, two hundred pounds, and a balding head, he didn’t fit the profile of a playboy with a rich wife and lovers. High priced hookers and exclusive BDSM clubs would be a thing of the past if his wife cut him off. At best, his GS-13 salary would buy him a back alley fuck.

“How’s Amanda?” Tom asked.

His question pulled her back to the present and the fear that hovered too close to the surface. “No one’s bothered her.” Jesse pictured Amanda’s face as it lit up whenever Jesse appeared. Despite Amanda’s chronological age of thirty-five, her smile was that of an innocent eight-year-old—hell, she was an eight-year-old.

“She’ll be all right,” Tom said.

Jesse smiled with affection. Tom was one of the few people who appreciated Amanda’s special gift of statistical calculus. He would want to help keep her safe, but Jesse wouldn’t drag him any deeper than this one meeting.

“Madrid and Hong Kong convinced me Lanton was dirty, but massacring his own team shocked me.” She blocked the mental picture of the two Green Team members’ deaths before it rose this time. “He deserves a slow death.”

The Professor raised both eyebrows. “Remind me never to piss you off.”

Jesse took a deep breath. “I thought you felt the same way.”

He grinned. “Well, seems I’m going to have the last say, doesn’t it?”

“If we can track the source of the two million dollar Swiss account you will. That has to be the money Amadeo Perez paid for Green Team’s slaughter.” She paused. “What do you know about them, Tom?”

“Nothing. Sorry. You didn’t ask—”

“No.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

He paused for a long moment, then added in a hushed voice, “Those men aren’t the only ones who died as a result of Lanton’s double-cross.”

Jesse remembered Martinez, and started to agree, then realized what he meant. “No!” she cried. but saw the truth in his eyes.

“How—I didn’t hear—she was twelve years old,” Jesse choked.

She had seen pictures of Maria Hamilton. The girl shared her mother’s Ecuadorian dark hair and brown eyes. She would—
should
—have grown up to be a real beauty.

“Tom.”

Jesse reached toward him, half blind. His fingers closed warm around her hand as her mind flashed back to the moment she’d turned away from the village and Green Team. She’d decided she had to stay alive so that she could prove Lanton’s guilt and save Amanda. She’d told herself that Amadeo Perez wouldn’t chance losing such a valuable hostage as Maria Hamilton by leaving her in the village where U.S. agents could find her. Maria wasn’t there. There wasn’t a thing Jesse could do to help her.

“What is it?” Tom demanded.

Jesse shook her head. “I could have gone in for her. I left her behind to be butchered by those animals.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “I’ll kill the mother-fucker.” She started to stand.

Tom seized her shoulders. “You didn’t kill her.”

“The hell I didn’t.”

“Jesse, she—”

Jesse tried to pull free.

He held fast. “You didn’t kill her. She was sighted in southern Colombia, Florencia, an hour after Green Team went in.”

Jesse stared.

“Wasn’t that about the time you were at the village?” he asked.

She wanted to believe. “You’re lying, that’s too easy.”

“I’ve never lied to you.”

He hadn’t.

“You couldn’t save her any more than you could have saved Green Team.”

She pulled free. “Don’t lecture me about Green Team, Tom.”

He leaned back against the cushion. “All right. How about Amanda, then?”

Jesse hadn’t forgotten Amanda. For the thousandth time she wondered how she could get her autistic sister underground and keep her there unnoticed. Amanda couldn’t live just anywhere. She needed medical and behavioral specialists, and around-the-clock care.

She’d checked with Harris that morning and he’d reported she was fine at Houghton House. If anyone could take care of Amanda, Harris could. For the thousandth time, Jesse sent a prayer of thanks for the night she’d saved Harris’ ass in that Boston bar. The Vietnam vet was the best thing that had ever happened to Amanda.

“How did it happen?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Tom.”

She winced, then jammed her eyes shut in hopes of damming up the tears that had a long way to go before hitting dry ground. He sighed, and she steeled herself as he said, “They delivered her to the Senator in pieces.” Jesse gasped, but he went on, “OIA didn’t want to give FARC anymore ammunition, so they kept it out of the papers.”

“FARC,” Jesse sneered. She snapped open her eyes. “The
Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. What a fucking joke. They’re nothing but a terrorist group selling to the highest bidder, and right now that’s Perez and the cocaine trade.”

“Too bad the Senator didn’t keep out of it,” Tom said. “Nothing’s changed as a result of his efforts to curtail the cocaine trade. The only reason the U. S. government set up Plan Colombia in the first place was to pacify the bleeding hearts here in the States. They had no intention of burning the cocoa fields, and the Colombian government's efforts to fumigate the fields have done more harm to legal crops than to the Colombian drug trade.”

Jesse frowned. She liked Senator Hamilton. When he’d gotten wind of the Colombian cartels’ construction of a submarine beyond that of the supersub discovered last year in Ecuador, she’d felt the U. S. was going to do step up their efforts to stop the drugs making their way into even the elementary schools.

She forced back the memory of the day her father died of a drug dealer’s bullet in the schoolyard where he taught seventh grade history, and said, “Senator Hamilton's discovery of the cartel’s submarine is important.”

Tom’s eyes hardened. “When President Uribe declared a state of emergency as a result of
Plan Colombia
, the kidnap rate in Ecuador increased over twenty-seven per cent in four years—and nothing’s changed since. The Senator might as well have handed the Colombians the knife that killed his daughter.”

Jesse stared. “No good deed goes unpunished?”

The Professor reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a package of Chesterfields and a gold lighter. He shook out a cigarette, lit it, then slipped the pack and lighter back into his pocket.

After a long drag on his cigarette, he blew it out and said, “Your case is locked down tight. OIA knows we’re friends and has been waiting for you to contact me.” He gestured to the seedy room. “Hence, the need to meet here.”

Jesse caught his arm. “We’re not going to meet again until this is over.” She ignored the thought that this might be the last time she saw him. “I’d rather die than drag you into this.”

He grinned. “I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

She wasn’t so sure. “What happened to Nielson? I can’t figure out why he was out of communication range when I called from Colombia.”

The Professor blew out a puff of smoke. “Blue Leader is on extended leave.”

Jesse started. “What does that mean?”

“He and his wife are out of the country.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Which means you won't get any help here in the States. I wish you’d contacted me from Colombia—which is where you need to be.”

“Lanton is holding on the cards,” Jesse murmured.

“The Cayman account and phone call transcripts are a damn good hand,” Tom agreed.

She gave a morbid laugh. “Hard to believe my call giving the
all clear
is being used against me.

“Having your second call edited to make your threat sound like it was directed at him is damning evidence. A pro edited the recording. Even I can’t recover the original. Everyone is buying the story,” Tom added. “The way I see it, you have three options. One: Get out of Dodge.”

Jesse shook her head. “Not an option.”

“Two: You can grab Lanton and force a confession from him.” The Professor lifted a brow.

Jesse laughed despite herself. “I’ve considered it.”

“A confession without concrete proof will be dismissed as coercion. After all, you are the liar, traitor, and murderer.” Tom drew on the cigarette and exhaled smoke through his nose. “Three: Trace the money trail from Green Leader to Perez.”

“That’s my only choice,” she said.

“Good. You work the Colombian end. I’ll work from the U.S. So far, I'm hitting dead ends.” A glint appeared in his eyes. “But I’m betting FARC keeps well-documented transactions for blackmail purposes.”

Jesse snorted. “Leave it to one genius to know what another genius does, no matter the language or side of the law they’re on?”

A corner of his mouth lifted. “Genius is genius.” He fished in his pants pocket and withdrew a cell phone. “Here’s a secure phone. I’m the only one with the matching decryption, but remember, even though they can’t eavesdrop, they can still trace the call, so use this only when you absolutely must.” He handed her the phone.

Jesse flipped it open. It looked like a standard Motorola model, including the power-up logo on the display. A small measure of comfort washed over her at the prospect of hearing Tom’s voice again in the near future. “How do I turn on the encryption?”

“Encryption automatically engages. My phone is number one on speed dial. My number is a private secure line. Leave your standard message on the machine. I’ll get to a safe location and call you back as soon as I can, but it might take a day or more, so be sure to check for missed calls. Call me back. If I don’t answer after one ring, hang up and we’ll repeat the procedure until we connect.”

Jesse powered down the phone, flipped it closed, then slipped it into the right front jeans pocket. “If you don’t hear from me, that means I couldn’t get anything, and had to disappear.”

She saw the alternative in his expression;
or I’m dead
.

“Am I to disavow any knowledge of your actions?” he asked, and she knew he wanted to voice what had been left unsaid between them far too long.

“After all I’ve gone through, if my efforts go to waste, I’ll likely return from the dead and haunt you.”

“There are worse fates,” he replied softly.

She rose and flashed an affectionate smile. “I know the perfect girl for you.”

He stood and waved off her suggestion. “I don’t need a matchmaker.”

But he did. At six-foot one, one-ninety, with a strong jaw and kissable lips, he would please any woman. Having skipped childhood and adolescence, he’d gone straight into OIA and missed all those boy-girl things that turned into men-women things. He needed a matchmaker more than anyone else she knew.

“Keep telling yourself that,” she teased.

He chuckled and drew her into his arms. “Maybe after I finish my thirty years.”

Jesse returned his hug and planted a kiss on his mouth. “When this is all over, we’re taking a long vacation in Hawaii.”

He squeezed and released her. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”

She smiled as she stepped back, then headed for the door. He was right. She needed more luck than any person had a right to expect. Her father used to say there was no such thing as luck. Grit got a person through.

The sweet smile Amanda reserved for those she loved once again flashed before Jesse’s mental vision. She had to expose Lanton and clear her name. For her sister and for the father who never asked, but depended on Jesse to take care of her sister when he knew he wouldn’t be around to watch out after his two daughters, for Green Team, for Martinez, and for Maria.