Hot Intent (Hqn) (24 page)

He didn’t bother denying it. She knew him too well for him to successfully lie to her.

She demanded, “Why do you still have it? Weren’t you going to hand that over to André?” She paused, but then continued in a breathless rush, “Are you using that as insurance to make your escape?” She didn’t even stop for him to answer. “How could you? We were supposed to give that to André. It’s vitally important to America’s national security that he get it!”

“Are you done?” he snapped.

“No, I’m not. No wonder everyone and their uncle is running around trying to catch or kill us. You need to send that to André immediately. He can clear up this whole mess if you let him. Do your job. Show you’re a good agent and can be relied upon. I’m sure that’s all it will take for the dogs to be called off.”

“Hah,” he retorted. “For all we know, the only reason the dogs haven’t already killed us is because of this flash drive. If I hand it over, they may blow us to smithereens.”

“You told André you’d get him the proof,” she accused.

“No, you told him that.”

She opened her mouth, but shut it again as it obviously dawned on her that he was right.

“There’s actually a good argument to be made for destroying this evidence,” he said thoughtfully.

“That sounds like your father talking.”

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. My father is not always wrong. If what’s on this drive were to come to light, a massive international crisis on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis would follow. Do you trust your government to do the reasonable thing and save the world this time around?”

She got a stubborn look on her face.

He added, “Even if you do trust your own government, do you trust the Russian government to get it right? Do you see the current regime backing down meekly and removing the chemicals from Cuba?”

That made her wince.

“My point exactly. I think the best thing to do is destroy the drive.”

She tilted her head questioningly. “Then why haven’t you already destroyed it? I think part of you does want to hand it over to the Americans. I think you do want to prove to the CIA that they can trust you and that you’ll be a good operative for them.”

“Bah!” he scoffed.

“You accuse me of lying to you, but don’t lie to yourself, Alex. I
know
you.”

Damn her, she did.

She pressed her own point home. “If you truly were the rogue agent you claim to be, you’d have let me bleed to death on that sidewalk. Even if you didn’t have a single feeling for me, and even if you weren’t first and foremost a doctor at heart, you’d have looked out for yourself first. But you didn’t. You’re not a bad person, no matter what you try to tell yourself.”

“Lord, you’re such a Goody Two-shoes.”

“Yup, and I wear rose-colored glasses, too,” she replied cheerfully. “I’m not apologetic for having a positive outlook on life. You could use a little more of that, by the way.”

He rolled his eyes and didn’t deign to answer. She seemed to think she’d gotten the last word and buried her nose in her book once more.

Irritated, he stared down at his computer screen. Thanks to Blondie, who’d given her life for him without knowing that was what she’d done, he had the means to get into the CIA’s mainframe. And thanks to Katie and whatever political games her uncle was playing, he now had both a name and an operation to investigate. His father said Claudia Kane was running Operation Cold Intent. What in the hell was she doing with it?

Did he dare break into the CIA’s secure server to search for an answer? Alex put his hands on the keyboard. He would have to move fast. He might have two, maybe three minutes once he got in. Better to stick with a two-minute time limit. He set up a stopwatch on his cell phone and started typing.

Blondie’s algorithm was subtle. It did not take a sledgehammer approach to getting past the CIA’s firewalls. Rather it wormed its way in through tiny code gaps and by taking a massively circuitous, randomized route into the mainframe. Each time the hacking program was used, it would take a different route into its target, which meant it would be nearly impossible to create countermeasures to stop it. It was reusable, in other words.

The algorithm ran for nearly a half hour, but his patience was rewarded when a CIA search screen popped up. He started the timer and typed in his mother’s name and the Cold Intent name.

A minute passed.

A minute and a half. Crap. The information was buried too deep. He would never find it in the limited amount of time he could afford to stick around waiting.

All of a sudden, his screen lit up. A list of file names associated with the search parameters “Cold Intent and Claudia Kane” scrolled down his screen.

Startled, he typed as fast as he could, attempting to download them, wholesale. No go. They were write-protected. It would take a whole other decryption algorithm to bust the protections preventing them from being copied.

In desperation, he clicked on the most recently dated file.

It opened to reveal an innocuous-looking document. He scanned it fast. An intel report on... His jaw dropped.

On Peter Koronov and his father’s odds of becoming the next director of the FSB. The analysis deemed Peter far too effective a spy and charismatic a leader to be allowed into the position. The report speculated that, under his capable direction, the FSB could be rejuvenated into a formidable intelligence apparatus.

His phone beeped that his two minutes were up. He swore and clicked to the end of the report quickly. The conclusion was too damned wordy to read in its entirety, but he scanned it fast. The report concluded with verbiage having to do with agreeing with the director on the optimal plan for taking Koronov out of the running for the post of FSB chief.

His computer beeped an incoming query warning, and he slammed the escape key. He powered the computer completely off and unplugged it from the wall.

Operation Cold Intent was an op to take down his father? He could see his mother being involved with that. It certainly answered the question of how Mommy Dearest had felt about his father. Why would a working group with that goal go after Katie, then? What key piece to the puzzle was he missing? How did Katie McCloud, kindergarten teacher extraordinaire, fit into all of this? He’d seen her reflex reactions in life-threatening situations before; he knew without a shadow of a doubt that Katie was
not
a trained field operative. A sparrow, maybe. But not a spy.

He turned over possibilities in his head for some time. He eventually noticed her nodding off in her chair and he muttered, “Go to bed.”

She jolted upright. “That’s okay. I’ll stay up.”

It hit him suddenly what she was doing. She was standing a flight watch on him. Terrified he was going to sneak out and leave her again, was she? Katie was trying to stay awake and keep an eagle eye on him. It would be cute if he could trust her even a little.

“I’m not going to leave until I figure out why the Cold Intent team is trying to kill you, Katie.”

She stared at him long and hard. “Promise?”

“I give you my word of honor.” She sagged abruptly in the chair, and he smiled sardonically. “Go to bed. I’ll be here when you wake up. Or, if I’ve stepped out, I’ll be back momentarily.”

She stood up, but instead of climbing into bed, she came over to stand in front of him. “You do know that I would never betray you, right?”

He stared up at her. He might accept that the drug they’d fed him had messed with his head, but his heart was another matter. He’d been betrayed so badly in his past it was hard for him to trust anyone the way she was asking him to. It was as if the cannabis extract had flipped on a paranoia switch in his brain, and he had no idea how to turn it off.

Maybe the paranoia had been there all along. And now that it was exposed to his conscious mind, he couldn’t put it back in the unconscious box it had come from.

Paranoia or no, his gut was telling him to stay in spy mode. Not to let her seduce him out of that cold, detached place in his mind where life and death were merely two decisions among many.

She sighed. “I’ll find a way to prove to you that I wouldn’t turn on you, Alex. That’s my promise to you.”

He had no frame of reference to know how to answer a statement like that. Everybody turned on everyone else eventually. It was why relationships were so dangerous.

He picked up the pad of notebook paper lying on the room’s desk and started writing notes and drawing lines between them, looking for connections he’d missed before. And when he gave up for the night, he burned the entire pad and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

One thing he knew for sure. He was being used by somebody. And whether it was Katie or his parents or someone else altogether, he didn’t like it. He was not going to play ball and be a good little spy. Not by a long shot.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

K
ATIE
WOKE
WITH
a jolt. Crap. There was some reason she wasn’t supposed to sleep. No, wait. Alex had promised he wouldn’t run out on her and abandon her again. She sagged back to the mattress in relief. Except something was still wrong. But what?

Alex was curled on his side facing her, sleeping quietly. Lord, he was handsome with his hair tousled and his face mashed against a pillow. Even in sleep, though, he radiated pain. She’d give anything to lift it away from him. For his mother to be a lovely woman who had desperately missed her son over the years and adored him in absentia. But Alex seemed to think she was somehow tied in to their current predicament. He was so suspicious of everyone and everything. She thought she’d gotten past that with him, but at the moment, she seemed to be included in his lengthy list of people not to be trusted.

It was dark outside. She checked her cell phone. A little after 4:00 a.m. Restless, she slid out of bed and padded over to the window. She lurked beside the curtains like she’d seen Alex do before and peeked sideways around them without disturbing the hanging drapery.

A car was just pulling into the motel parking lot. Weird hour for that. Even weirder as it turned the corner that its headlights were off. It parked beside another car of identical make. It must have been the noise of the first car pulling in that woke her up. A warning vibration erupted in her gut.

“Alex,” she called low.

He lurched awake and was out of bed in a single catlike lunge. Talk about reflexes. Dang. Remind her not to startle him out of a hard sleep when she was within arm’s length of him.

He stopped in the middle of the room just long enough to see what she was doing and then he slid over to the other side of the window. It took him about two seconds to announce, “Get dressed and head into the bathroom. Lie down in the bathtub.”

“What are you going to do?”

He ignored her question and ordered, “Call 9-1-1 on your cell phone and tell them there’s a shootout in progress.”

“But there isn’t any shooting—”

Alex lifted the pistol he’d been holding down by his side. “There’s about to be.”

Where... He must have been sleeping with it under his pillow.
Paranoid, much?
“Who’s out there?” she asked in quick alarm.

“Go, Katie.”

She grabbed her clothes, closed the bathroom door and felt her way to the tiny bathtub in the dark. It wasn’t long enough to stretch out in, so she curled on her side in it. Extremely awkwardly and with copious mental swearing, she managed to pull on her clothes. But they were all crooked and pulling at her in weird places. She finally gave up and stood up to adjust the darned things.

A tremendous explosion of sound erupted from the living room and she instinctively dropped like a rock into the cold, hard tub. Holy mackerel! Sometimes she forgot just how loud gunshots were, particularly in a confined space. A dramatic fusillade of return fire from the parking lot finished deafening her. That was at least three weapons firing back at Alex, maybe more.

“Alex!” she shouted. “Are you okay?”

Another round of gunfire exploded from the living room. She would assume that his shooting back at whoever was outside constituted proof that he was still alive. Abruptly, the bathroom door flung splinters of wood every which way. She yanked the shower curtain shut, not that it would do a lick of good, and covered her head with her arms. Something metallic and fast moving pinged off the cast-iron bathtub, and his order to climb in here suddenly made sense.

The bathroom door burst open and she jumped violently.

“Get up, Katie. We’ve got to go.”

“Out there?” she squeaked.

“Window,” he grunted. “Hurry. I’ve set a timed charge in the front room.”

Omigosh. She leaped to her feet and jumped up on the toilet seat as he disappeared out the open window. She dived after him, and he caught her under the armpits, pulling her legs through and setting her upright.

She opened her mouth out of habit to thank him, and he held an urgent finger to his lips. Stealth. Got it. She nodded and followed him as he eased into the light woods behind the motel.

Another round of gunfire erupted from behind them, and on cue, a tremendous explosion lit the night around them. The ground shook and Katie staggered as Alex steadied her and dragged her onward.

The tree line turned out to be thin and gave way to a farm. The place was pitch-dark. Old-fashioned. Alex crept to the big, red barn and carefully slid open a huge door a few feet.

He disappeared inside after signaling for her to wait here. She fretted for about one minute and then stared in shock as he led out a giant horse. The chestnut had on a bridle but was otherwise bare of tack.

“Give me your leg,” Alex breathed.

“You want me to get on that monster?”

“Trust me. It’s better than running all night.”

She was no horsewoman! Stunned and terrified, she let him hoist her onto the broad back of the beast, who shifted under her weight and stamped a foot.
Ohgod, ohgod.

“Easy, boy,” Alex murmured. He led the clopping beast over to an unpainted, wooden fence, handed the reins up to her, then climbed the fence and eased onto the horse behind her.

The animal’s back was warm and wide and alive. Scared to death, she wrapped her hands in the horse’s thick, flaxen mane and hung on for dear life. Alex’s arms came around her and he pried the reins out of her panicked fists. She felt his legs tighten around the animal’s girth behind her and the horse moved out, his hooves quiet on the grass.

At least Alex didn’t spur the beast into a mad gallop. Although, in her panic to get away from whoever was shooting at them, she almost wished he would send the horse on a mad dash to safety.

Alex breathed in her ear, “We’ll draw less attention moving quietly. And this is a draft horse. He’s designed to go all day at a slow pace, but he couldn’t run a mile without being totally winded.”

He guided the horse across the road in front of the farm and into another patch of woods. The animal found some sort of path and turned onto it of his own accord. Alex gave the animal free rein and let the horse plod along in the dark.

“Where are we going?” she finally ventured whispering.

“Away from the motel. As for what awaits us ahead, I have no idea. We’ll adapt when we get there.”

The horse walked for maybe twenty minutes at a steady but surprisingly ground-eating pace. All of a sudden, a clearing opened up in front of them. A simple, one-story building stood in the middle of it.

“That’s a one-room schoolhouse!” she exclaimed quietly. “Was that farm Amish?”

“Mennonite, I think,” Alex answered. “I saw a tractor in the barn.”

The horse strode up to a hitching post with a watering trough beside it and shoved his nose into the black water. After that, no matter what Alex tried shy of beating the beast, the horse refused to budge. Period.

Finally, Alex gave up, slid off the animal and helped her down. She watched as Alex slipped the bridle off the horse and gave it a sharp swat on the rump. The horse threw up its head, startled, and turned to trot back down the path it had come from.

“If I know horses, that guy’ll go right back to his barn and maybe even back into his stall. If we’re lucky, the farmer won’t report his stolen bridle to the police.”

To that end, Alex hung the bridle on the end of the hitching post, where it didn’t look at all out of place. “We’re on foot from here.”

Except before they could take a dozen steps, they heard something rattling toward them. Katie dived for cover behind the trees on the far side of the clearing and waited pensively for what would emerge from the dirt road beyond the schoolhouse.

A black, boxy carriage rocked into sight, pulled by a lean, dark horse, shambling along casually. A woman climbed down from the carriage and tied the horse to the hitching post before disappearing inside the building. In a few seconds, a soft, yellow glow illuminated one of the windows.

“How early do Mennonite kids start school, anyway?” she whispered to Alex.

“They’re early risers as a group. C’mon.”

“Are we going to steal a buggy now?” she asked in jest.

He nodded and indicated that she should climb up into the black conveyance. Stunned, she clambered between the narrow wheels awkwardly. The thing rocked and squeaked a little as she settled onto the seat. Alex threaded the reins inside the carriage, and as she held the ends, he leaped in considerably more gracefully than she had.

With a quiet slap of the reins on the horse’s rump, he guided the beast back into the night. Whether or not the teacher inside the school heard them or ran out to give chase, Katie had no idea. The grassy meadow and sandy dirt of the carriage path muffled sound tremendously well. If they were lucky, they’d gotten away cleanly.

The genius of Alex’s theft became apparent as the path gave way to a paved road. “Pull the curtains down and tie them in place,” he told her.

The entire interior of the carriage was shrouded in black fabric in a few seconds. Even the front window was covered, with only a narrow slit at eye height for Alex to see through to steer.

And when they approached a parked police car blocking the next intersection, the cop nodded respectfully and waved them past without stopping the buggy.

“Sonofagun,” Katie murmured.

“The Mennonites are peaceful people. Good citizens. In return, they ask that their religious customs be honored.
Meidung
is one of them. It’s a German term referring to social avoidance. Some Mennonites don’t like to interact with outsiders. A shrouded buggy is indicative of occupants practicing
meidung.
”

“Which means what for us?”

“Local authorities won’t screw with us. We should be able to pass any cops undisturbed.”

“Nice. So we’re making our big getaway in a horse-drawn carriage, huh?” She leaned back against the black leather cushions. The vehicle was actually kind of cozy in a coffinlike way. Which was somehow entirely appropriate to this fiasco.

Alex murmured, “We should be able to trade this rig for a motorized vehicle in the next town. Some Mennonites do drive cars. And this is a good horse and a brand-new carriage.”

Perplexed, she watched him drive with quiet confidence. “When did you learn how to ride horses and steer carriages? Was this part of your CIA training?”

He commented dryly, “I’m a man of many talents.”

“I’ll say.” Silence fell inside the carriage. She reflected on their flight for a few minutes, but then curiosity got the best of her. She couldn’t resist asking, “Who was that back at the motel?”

“Cold Intent. That was my fault. I broke into the CIA’s mainframe last night and stayed online too long. They must have traced me. Or maybe they think it was you in that room.”

“Why does this Cold Intent bunch want to kill me—or us—so badly?” she demanded.

“I wish I knew,” he answered grimly.

Hey. A sign of human emotion out of him. He wasn’t a robot, after all! She was worried about him. He’d just been through a gigantic shootout, and for all she knew, he’d killed a few guys back at the motel. Heck, he’d blown up a whole motel room without a backward glance. Shouldn’t he show at least a little reaction after the fact? Instead, he’d dropped into that cold, emotionless fugue state she was rapidly coming to hate.

It dawned on her abruptly that, as soon as he knew why Cold Intent was after her, he would probably leave her. Forever.

So...what? She should wish for him never to solve the mystery and for her life to be in mortal danger permanently? Ugh. This sucked. Be safe, lose the love of her life. Stay in danger, keep the guy, but probably die. And maybe break through his emotional walls someday.
Maybe.
What kind of choice was that?

Was she willing to settle for whatever scraps of affection he deigned to toss her way? Did she realistically stand any chance at all of getting through to him, or was she deluding herself? Maybe she should just cut her losses and run.

“What do you know about this Cold Intent operation, Alex? Did you learn anything last night?” When he hesitated, she added, “I think I have a right to know why somebody’s so set on killing me, don’t you?”

He exhaled hard. “I found out that they’re out to discredit my father.”

“By killing me?” she exclaimed.

“Yeah, I’m stumped by that one, too.”

She stared at his tense profile. What the heck?

They bumped along on country roads for several hours. The sun rose, and other vehicles, both motorized and horse-drawn, began to share the road with them. A small town came into sight through the slit in the window covering, and Alex found some sort of farmer’s market and feed store.

He duly bartered the horse and carriage for an ancient, black land yacht of a car, all of whose chrome trim had been painted a flat, ugly black. But it ran. And the bearded owner threw in a tank of gas and a paper bag full of the most delicious pastry-wrapped sausages that Katie had ever tasted.

*

T
HEY
MADE
W
ILMINGTON
by noon, ditched the car, which would look out of place if they strayed too much farther from Amish country, and caught a train from there bound for New York. As Philadelphia and then New Jersey sped by outside, Katie finally breathed a sigh of relief. They’d escaped yet again. She had no idea how many of his lucky nine lives Alex had left, but she was starting to feel like she’d burned through a few of hers recently.

“Are we safe?” she murmured as Alex leaned back in his seat and seemed to relax.

“There’s no such thing as safe in this world. The sooner you accept that, the better a chance you have of surviving it.”

She stared at him. “Do you really mean that?”

“Safety is an illusion. Bad guys are all around us all the time. Be they petty criminals who want your purse or terrorists who want your life, they’re everywhere. I’ve seen the shadow world, that other place the dark ones live in, and it’s closer to this world than you know.”