Hot Intent (Hqn) (18 page)

Warning bells clanged wildly in his head. Of course he hadn’t told the CIA everything about himself during his simulated interrogations last year. He’d been trained from the bloody cradle to be secretive as hell. So. His employers still didn’t trust him, huh? He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. But it still pissed him off.

Did they seriously think he was going to break under drugs? He was fully trained in how to resist the effects of interrogation drugs—unless they’d developed something new that they planned to try out on him. Mentally, he frowned. They usually tested new toys on enemy combatants and not their own assets.

In the meantime, he needed to deal with the asshole in front of him. He let a flash of derision over the idea of being drugged show briefly in his eyes and then resumed his deadpan expression. Doe reeled back in his chair. The guy wasn’t sure what he’d just seen, but it was giving the man pause.

“Who are you?” Doe burst out.

No need to answer. His identity had already been established well before either of them set foot in this room. His ploy now was to occupy this man for as long as possible. Good Lord willing, Doe was the only interrogator on this, the nonprison side of the naval base. Keeping him occupied in here meant he wasn’t messing with Katie.

Where was she, anyway? A few minutes alone with lie-detector boy, and he’d have had the kid telling him where she was. The key would be to get rid of Dr. Doe for a while. To that end, Alex stared blandly at Doe’s continuing antics and flatly refused to be provoked into any reaction whatsoever.

Finally, Doe shoved back his chair and stormed out of the room. Aware that he still had an audience, Alex didn’t alter his position by a centimeter.

“Dude, you really ought to talk to him. It only gets nasty from here,” the guard murmured.

Alex didn’t bother to acknowledge the guy. Whether the remark was scripted or a genuine warning, he didn’t know and couldn’t care less. He merely closed his eyes and worked through a mental relaxation exercise.

By his reckoning, it would be dawn soon. Lie-detector guy would go off shift. If he had to guess they would replace him with a bruiser of a guard trained to hit stuff very hard. Not that it mattered. He knew how to deal with that type, too. Pain was a transient thing, blocked easily enough.

Doe stuck his head into the room and barked an order at lie-detector guy. Something about taking him upstairs to Room 10 and preparing him for medication. Going straight to the mind-altering drugs, were they? Good call. He was actually surprised, though, that Doe didn’t give himself the satisfaction of watching a thug beat the crap out of him first.

Two more guards joined the first one, and the trio oversaw riding upstairs in an elevator, taking off his undershirt, laying him down on a hospital bed and strapping him down tightly.

Doe came back with a woman in surgical scrubs, who efficiently set an IV in the back of his hand and taped the needle down securely. He briefly considered resisting her, but the guards were big guys and more manpower would be nearby.

The IV drip started. For now, it was a simple saline solution. But a stainless-steel tray with several loaded syringes stood on a table beside the bed.

Doe picked up the first syringe.

Alex broke his silence to say, “I guarantee that no one in this room has the proper security clearances to hear what I have to say. Unless you want to create a severe shit storm of security violations that will land on your head, you might want to reevaluate who’s in here if I start talking.”

“Oh, you’ll talk.” And with that, Doe injected the serum into the IV line. Alex didn’t feel any pain at the site of his IV. Must be one of the new-generation meds, then. A couple of the old ones burned like fire on their way into the body.

“We’ll give that a few minutes to work, Dr. Peters, and then I’ll be back to have a little chat with you.”

Alex ignored him. He was already hard at work filling his mind with harmless images from his childhood. Soccer games on Saturday mornings. The dew had been cold and wet on the grass, a silver-gray cobweb over the soccer field. His shin guards, too big, slid down inside his tube socks and bugged him. Grass clippings stuck to the wet soccer balls. The more minute the details he filled his mind with, the better.

He registered vaguely that the guards did indeed step out into the hall when Doe came back. Alex’s vision had narrowed to a brightly lit tunnel with dancing images at the end of it. Shouting kids. Harassed coaches. Matching T-shirts.

“Can you hear me, Alex?”

“Yes, Coach. I’m listening.”

“Why are you in Cuba?”

“To play soccer.”

“Who sent you here?”

“My father. He wants me to fit in.”

“What were you testing in the lab?”

“My hands. Best part of playing goalie is getting to use them.”

“We’re going to give you another drug, Alex. It will amplify the effect of the CCRE.”

CCRE?
What was that? He’d never heard it mentioned in his training last year.

The door opened behind Doe and a nurse came in. Different nurse from before. This one was blonde. Pretty. Had big blue eyes. She looked just like someone he knew named Katie. He liked Katie—the real one. The hallucination made him smile a little. Yup, she was the reason he would fight to the bitter end. And win. He had to win this soccer game. He sank farther into his boyhood memory, wrapping it around him like a thick blanket as the second drug was injected into his IV.

His head was starting to spin pleasantly and his body felt heavy and languid. But as quickly as that sensation registered, panic followed it. What had they done to him? How had they known to make the nurse look like a girl he liked? They were all out to get him. Was
she
part of the plot, too? It was brilliant to use her. Evil.

“Gotta win,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” Doe leaned down a little closer to hear him.

And that was when the nurse pulled a rock out of a wrapped towel and clobbered Doe across the back of the head with it.
Holy shit.
The interrogator fell across Alex’s lap and then slid to the floor, with Katie-nurse attempting to slow the guy’s fall.

That was a good ploy to get him to trust her. He watched, bemused, as the hallucination frantically unbuckled the leather straps from his wrists, neck, waist and, finally, feet.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she whispered. “Can you walk?”

“If I can play soccer, I can walk.” And hey. If she wanted to bust him out of here as a head game to gain his trust, far be it from him to stop her. He could always get away from her later.

She ran over to the window and looked out. “Can you jump out the window? We’re on the second floor. Did they teach you to drop and roll in soccer?”

“Of course,” he answered indignantly. “I’m a damned goalie.”

“Does your daddy know you talk like that?” she asked, amused.

“Hell, no!”

“Keep your voice down,” she ordered sharply. “Help me take this guy’s shirt off. It looks about your size.”

“But it’s white. Team colors are purple and black. Dumb colors, if you ask me.”

“It’s a nice shirt. It’ll look good on you.” She buttoned him into Doe’s white shirt like he was a five-year-old. Katie knew about five-year-olds. She was a teacher.

“I pretend my mommy’s a teacher sometimes.”

“The fact that you have gnarly sex with me on a regular basis makes that comment wrong on too many levels to count,” she retorted dryly as she eased the window open.

“I’ll go first,” he announced. “I’m the boy and you’re only a dumb girl.”

“Fine. Just get out of the way when you land. I’ll be right behind you.”

“’Kay.”

He swung a leg over the sill and was just about to go when the woman stopped him with a hand on his arm. “No shouting on the way down. You have to jump without making any noise.”

“Poopyhead,” he muttered. He’d been looking forward to a good whoop as he went for a fly.

Grinning widely, she gave him a little push. “Have fun. Just be quiet about it. We’ll get in huge trouble if we get caught.”

“I’m really good at sneaking around,” he whispered conspiratorially. He pushed off the edge and landed with a fall and roll his coach would have been proud of. He even remembered to roll again and get out of the nurse’s way.

While she clambered awkwardly over the sill, he turned away and jammed his finger down his throat. He gagged but didn’t vomit. He jammed his finger into his throat harder and held it there. There. He heaved and hunched over, retching.

The object he’d hoped would come up did. He picked the flash drive out of the remains of his last meal and shoved it in his pocket as the woman hit the ground beside him with an
oomph.
“Noisy girl,” he complained under his breath.

“Shh. Come with me.”

“Can I call you Katie?”

“Sure,” the blonde replied. “Just do what I say, okay?”

They got on a bus of some kind, and he got really sleepy as it started and stopped a million times. Crap. He couldn’t afford to sleep. He had to be ready to slip away from this woman when the time came.

“You can take a nap if you want,” Katie told him.

Her shoulder looked soft and inviting, just like he imagined his mother’s would. He laid his head down on it and closed his eyes. But he was faking. He had to stay alert. Wait for his chance to escape the woman and whatever twisted game she was playing.

His jitters mounted as the bus started and stopped over and over. Why the hell were they doing this to him? They must think he would spill his guts to this woman. Hah.

People on the bus were watching him. He felt their stares on his back, but every time he turned to check, they were already looking away. He had to get under cover. Hide where they couldn’t find him. Away from the woman who was obviously leading them all to him. He had to get away from her if it was the last thing he did.

CHAPTER TWELVE

K
ATIE
DIDN
’
T
KNOW
whether to sigh in relief or panic as Alex leaned against her side. He wasn’t sleeping—he was far too tense against her shoulder for that. Worse, he was growing more tense by the minute, which panicked her, in turn. What on earth had him so badly wired? What threat did he see that she was missing?

It had been pure luck that she’d overheard a couple of Marines griping about the slowness of the shuttle bus into town while she’d been prowling through the operations center in search of Alex. She’d absconded with a stack of files from a desk and had been carrying them around as if she were delivering them somewhere. She’d also stolen the woman’s purse she’d found under the desk. In addition to a wallet with a military ID in it, the purse held some cash. Thank God.

It had taken a while to walk around the building poking into offices and eavesdropping to get a bead on Alex. She’d been deeply alarmed to hear a guard talking about the batshit-crazy doctor they were about to drug upstairs. She’d known immediately that it had to be Alex.

Once she’d climbed the stairs and slipped through a locked door behind a woman dressed in medical scrubs, it had been surprisingly easy to find the break room, put on a pair of scrubs she found there and literally walk into Alex’s room. Taking the doorstop from the break room, a big, gray brick, and hiding it in a towel had been a spur-of-the-moment improvisation. Funny how inspiration could strike at the exact right time, now and then.

She could use a little more inspiration at the moment. They had to get off the base somehow and hole up until Alex slept off whatever they’d given him.

But at least the two of them were back together. It was better than nothing, but she really could use Alex’s input on how to proceed. She was without a clue as to what to do next. She needed him alert and operating on all cylinders as soon as possible.

And it wouldn’t hurt to get a hug from him or at least a reassurance that he would take care of her. She’d had quite enough of being an independent woman sneaking around a foreign land in spylike fashion. Although she did have to admit Alex made a surprisingly cute five-year-old.

The bus passed off the naval station and she watched in minor disbelief as the huge fence retreated behind her. Surely, it couldn’t be that easy. Shaking her head, she watched the countryside pass by and worried as Alex’s body grew more and more taut next to hers.

Finally, she muttered, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he muttered back.

Bull.
He felt ready to explode at any second.

The bus passed through a couple of small villages before it pulled into a decent-size town that reminded her a lot of Baracoa. “End of the line,” the driver called in Spanish. “Guantánamo.”

Alex was practically vibrating with tension by the time they stepped off the bus. She looked around quickly and spied a coffee shop only a few yards from the bus stop. She knew they had to get off the street and out of sight, so she headed for the café with Alex in tow.

She ordered a pot of coffee and paid for it with cash from the stolen purse.

“Where’d you get the money?” he asked suspiciously.

“I liberated a purse from its owner before I rescued you,” she explained under her breath.

“Nice touch,” he commented.

Huh?

“What’s the plan?” he asked nervously.

She really didn’t like the way his gaze was darting around in constant motion like he expected a violent attack at any moment. “Relax. You’ll draw too much attention if you keep looking so uptight.”

If anything, his expression got more wild, but he did stop looking around so overtly. “Are you feeling all right, Alex? What did they inject you with?”

His eyes got that shuttered, stubborn look they got when he was refusing to tell her something. “I don’t feel so hot,” he announced.

“You need a restroom?” she asked in quick concern. “It’s down that hall.”

“Got it,” he said thickly. He rushed from the table in the direction she pointed, distinctly green about the gills.

She waited a few minutes for him to return, but he didn’t. Worried, she rose to her feet, moved quickly down the hall to the restroom and knocked on the door. No answer.

“Alex?” she called quietly through the panel.

Still no answer. She tested the doorknob. Locked. Crap. Had he passed out? Or worse? What the hell had they drugged him with, anyway? It was a simple lock. She fumbled in the purse, came up with a ballpoint pen and jammed its tip into the circular hole in the center of the knob. The lock clicked open. She threw the door open—

Empty. The tiny bathroom was empty! Where had he gone? She’d watched the hallway the whole time he’d been in here. No way had he slipped back out into the café without her seeing him.
The window.
It was closed but not locked. He’d bailed out on her? What the hell was going on with him? He’d separated from her back at the Zacara factory and now he’d ditched her in the middle of downtown Guantánamo?

Equal parts furious and terrified, she threw open the window and looked down the alley. No surprise, Alex was long gone. In the loose gravel of the alley, he’d left no footprints that she could see. Not that she was any kind of trained tracker, anyway.

Crap. Now what?

It wasn’t as if she could go back to the Navy base and ask to be let in again. Not after she’d busted the two of them out like that. Her brain felt wrapped in cotton candy. God, she was exhausted. She tried to remember the last time she’d slept, and nothing came to mind. Alex always said never to underestimate the power of food and sleep during an undercover op.

She retreated down the hall and asked the waitress in her halting Spanish where she could find a room to stay in, nothing fancy. Just a place to sleep. The girl named a place and gave her quick directions that Katie only half-understood. But she nodded her thanks and headed out.

Belatedly, it dawned on her that Alex would tell her the last place she should go was the one the girl had named for her. Katie wandered the streets for a little while, searching fruitlessly for him until it occurred to her that there were likely soldiers out looking for her, too. Not to mention Alex would never be dumb enough to roam around in broad daylight when he was a fugitive.

Clearly, she was way too tired to make smart decisions right now. She saw a cardboard sign in the window of a tiny, cluttered convenience store advertising a room for rent. She swerved into the bodega and grabbed the sign out of the window. It turned out to be upstairs, and the proprietor wasn’t thrilled about only renting it for the week. He was looking for a long-term renter. But when she plunked down a credit card and told him to charge a full month’s rent for the week, he shut up quickly enough.

It wasn’t fancy. A single bed against one wall. A phone-booth-size toilet and sink. A hot plate that looked like a severe fire hazard sitting on top of the lone dresser. That was it.

With a look askance at the cleanliness of the sheets, she laid down fully dressed on the bed. She could not
believe
he’d ditched her a second time! She would figure out how to escape from Cuba later, when she could think straight. One thing she knew: when she got home, she was going to find Alex and kill him. And if she couldn’t accomplish the deed by herself, she would sic her brothers on him.

*

A
LEX
CROUCHED
IN
the ruined house, looking around in panic. They were coming for him. He could feel it. They’d turned Katie, and she was after him, too. No one could be trusted. A little voice whispered to him that paranoia wasn’t healthy. But an answering voice inside his head screamed that it wasn’t paranoia if people were really coming after him.

Everywhere he’d gone today, he’d felt eyes on him. Stares, boring into his back. Cell phones being muttered into, reporting sightings of him. Reporting his position. Calling in spooks to snatch him and make him disappear. He even felt Katie’s fake concern reaching out to him to suck him into her trap.

Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. He crept into a small closet, pulled the warped door as shut as it would go and huddled in the corner, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth.

*

K
ATIE
HAD
NO
idea how long she slept. She woke up a couple of times to go to the restroom, but that was about it. It was morning when she woke based on the sun streaming in her east-facing window. Eighteen hours’ worth of sleep or so later, she finally felt human again. Alert. And pissed.

How could Alex abandon her not once but twice? If the guy didn’t want to be with her, all he had to do was say so. But ditching her in a hostile country to sink or swim on her own...what total jackassery.

What in the world was
wrong
with him? The Alex she’d met in Zaghastan would never have acted like this. What had the CIA done to him? Had they destroyed the Alex she’d known and loved? Was he gone forever?

One part of her, the hopeful part, wanted to stick around and fight through the crap to find that old Alex. But another, larger part, the fearful part, wanted to cut her losses and run from the train wreck that was the inside of his head.

Either way, pain tore at her heart, ripping out big, awful chunks of it and tossing them on the ground carelessly.

Something approaching actual hatred coursed through her veins, hot and acid. Although whether it was hatred of Alex or his employer, she couldn’t say. First order of business, get home. Second on her to-do list, murder Alex. Slowly and painfully. Maybe she could recruit her brothers to help. One of them must know how to torture a guy.

She took stock of the contents of her stolen purse. It held enough cash to buy food for a couple of days. And the woman’s credit cards. Although they were probably cut off by now.

Tucking most of the cash in her bra, she took the rest downstairs to the bodega. She bought a couple of big bottles of water, a few apples, a box of crackers and a can of tuna. The city’s food supply was still pretty limited, but it would do.

A woman was working behind the counter this morning. Katie practiced the Spanish phrases she would need in her head and then approached the woman to ask where she could get access to a telephone with international service. The lady gave her a weird look and Katie added hastily that she could pay for the call.

The woman gestured with her head for Katie to follow and stepped behind a cloth curtain. Katie ducked into a tiny storeroom.

“Twenty dollars, U.S., for three minutes,” the woman said, fishing a cell phone out of her pocket.

That was probably double the going rate, but Katie wasn’t going to quibble about a little gringo gouging. “Done.” She pulled a twenty out of her bra and traded it for the phone. She dialed André Fortinay’s number and prayed the call would go through and not be traced by the Cuban secret police in the next three minutes.

“Doctors Unlimited,” a female voice answered.

Ashley Osborne.
The perky office assistant who’d sent her down here in the first place. “This is Katie McCloud. I need to speak to André.”

“He’s in a meeting. Can he call you back?”

“No. Interrupt him. I’ve got one shot at contacting him, and then I’m screwed.”

“Oh. Sure, then. Hang on, I’ll get him right away.” At least the girl had the good grace to sound alarmed.

“Hi, Katie. What’s up?” André murmured a few seconds later.

“I’m stranded in the city of Guantánamo, off base. I need to get out of Cuba ASAP, and I can’t go back to the military base.”

“Why not? Where’s Alex?”

“Long story and I’ve only got about two minutes on this line. I have no idea where Alex is. He ditched me.”

“You’re kidding. He’s nuts about you.”

“Right now, he’s just nuts. Can you get me an exit option, or am I hosed?”

“Where are you specifically?”

Katie stuck her head through the curtain and asked for the street address. The woman gave it to her and she relayed it to André.

“Can you call me back in an hour?” he asked her.

“I doubt it.”

“Okay. Hang on, then. I’m going to use the other line to make a phone call. I promise I’ll come back to this line.”

Katie waited in an agony of impatience as the seconds ticked by. The woman poked her head through the curtain and announced that her three minutes were up. Katie dug out another bill, a ten this time, and handed it to the woman.

“The police, they will come looking if you stay on the line,” the woman hissed.

“I’ll buy you a new phone. Just let me finish this call. It’s life-and-death.” Katie wasn’t sure the phrase
life-and-death
translated well into Spanish, but the woman backed out of the storeroom with a dubious look on her face.

“Katie? Still there?”

Thank God. André.
“Yes.”

“Make your way to the docks on the west side of the bay. Look for a freighter called the
Constellation Caelum.
That’s spelled
C-a-e-l-u-m.
Identify yourself as the onboard nurse who’s just been hired.”

“But I’m not a nurse!”

“Fake it. An asset on the crew will contact you with an egress plan once the
Caelum
has left Cuban waters. The ship sails in a few hours, so you’ll need to head down there immediately.”

“Thanks,” she murmured gratefully.

“Don’t thank me until you get home,” he replied wryly.

“Should I go looking for Alex and try to bring him with me?” she asked reluctantly. As livid as she was at him, it wasn’t right to just abandon him the way he had abandoned her.

“Alex can take care of himself,” André replied a shade tartly. “Trust me.”

“I think they drugged him. He had an IV drip in his arm when I found him, and there were syringes on a table. Two of them were empty.”

“I’ve got him covered. You just take care of yourself,” André said heavily. The man sounded unhappy, and she didn’t blame him. The guy had put a ton of effort into championing Alex with his superiors.