Hot Intent (Hqn) (27 page)

His vocabulary was rough, but she got the idea. They were going to break out of this position and she should expect to shoot her way out. She backed deeper into the crevice until her back touched his, keeping her vision trained on the slice of forest still visible beyond the boulder. Alex eased away from her and she slid backward again until she connected with his back once more.

She felt his body gather in preparation to leap, and she did the same. Without warning, he jumped up.

A man shouted from what could not have been more than twenty feet away. She spun low out of the crack just in time to see Alex double-tap the attacker in the face, rendering the guy no longer human.

Another man roared over the top of the boulder from behind them, practically on top of Katie. Terrified beyond any ability to think, she reacted instinctively, whipped up the barrel of her weapon and fired as fast as she could pull the trigger. The weapon jumped hard in her hand three times, but the fourth time it merely clicked. Empty. Crap. Those had been her last three shots
.

Her target yelled and crashed on top of her, knocking her down hard as his weight slammed into her. She grunted, her breath knocked out of her, and shoved in panic at the man. He was bleeding profusely from a neck wound, soaking her with hot, metallic-smelling blood. He twitched convulsively and then was still on top of her. She heaved for all she was worth and managed to pull her legs free of the corpse. Gasping for air, she scooped the pistol out of the guy’s hand as Alex gestured urgently from a dozen yards away for her to get moving.

She leaped to her feet and ran for him. His weapon rose fast to point at her and she swerved hard out of his line of fire as he opened fire at someone behind her.

Jeez! How many guys were out here, anyway?

Alex moved out walking, but fast, placing his feet with catlike lightness. She tried to mimic him but it was damned hard work, and she was still trying to catch her breath. They half ran through the trees for maybe five minutes in silence. Well,
he
was silent. She panted like a hot dog and crackled leaves far too often for safety. Had they eliminated all the bad guys or not?

The longer they went without being shot at, the more her heart rate dropped to something commensurate merely with strenuous exercise. But then her hands started to shake. And then her whole body started to shake.

She popped out the clip of this weapon—a
Russian
make of pistol. What did
that
mean?
Were these attackers freaking Russians?
She yanked her attention back to the gun in her hand. Mike had brought a similar model of weapon home from a mission a few years ago. All her brothers had tried shooting it, and not to be left out, she’d insisted on trying it out, as well.

She was relieved to count eleven bullets in the clip. Alex had to be getting low in his weapon by now, too. On cue, he ejected a clip and rammed a new one into place. She rested against a tree and took several blessedly deep breaths while he extracted the two remaining bullets from the first clip and pocketed them.

She knew from experience that he usually had at least two spare clips on his person whenever he was packing a weapon. They were back in business for a little while, at least. Thank God for his paranoia and his associated obsession with preparedness.

Hopefully, they would not need their remaining firepower.

And...she was wrong.

Alex froze abruptly in front of her. She peered over his shoulder and saw a man in a black leather jacket poised beside an SUV, wielding a sawed-off AK-47 alertly.

The guy spoke aloud into a wireless earphone device and her jaw dropped as she identified the language he spoke to be Russian. Alex frowned faintly beside her, but she dared not break the silence to ask what the man had said.

Alex backed up a dozen feet, placing the crest of the ridge between them and the man below. Alex eased down quietly behind a thicket of weeds and brambles, and she joined him. He lifted away a few leaves to reveal wet, black earth. In the soil, he drew a crude car. He pointed at his own chest and then drew an arc to the left. He pointed at Katie and then drew another arc to the right. He then drew two lines from the stick figures from him and her toward the man.

He mouthed the words, “Field of fire,” and she nodded immediately. By flanking the shooter below, the two of them had to be careful not to end up shooting each other. Alex was lucky she’d grown up in a military family and knew about such things!

“Shoot when I do,” he breathed. Without any further ado, Alex moved away from her. Lord, she felt naked out here without him beside her. Every tiny sound made her jump, and she felt as twitchy as a marionette on a string.

When she deemed that she’d reached the position Alex had drawn for her, she inched forward toward the top of the ridge on her belly, pistol at the ready. Using the largest tree she could find, she stood up and peered out from behind the trunk.

The shooter was looking off toward Alex’s position intently. Focused. Had he seen or heard Alex out there? The guy’s AK-47 swung up from his hip to a shooting position as she planted her forearm against the tree trunk to steady it, blew out her breath and lined up the sight on the front tip of her gun barrel with the sights mounted above the trigger. Oh, he was so not getting off a shot at
her
man.

Screw Alex’s signal. Without hesitating, she went ahead and fired. She was sure she’d hit the bastard. Although he staggered, he didn’t go down. The man swung his weapon toward her and raked the hillside with a barrage of automatic fire as she dived behind the tree.

Was the guy wearing a Kevlar vest under that bulky jacket?

Alex opened fire from across the ridge, and the sweeping gunfire swung away sharply from her and toward Alex’s position. She wasted no time stepping out from behind the tree far enough to take aim and fire again, this time at the man’s head.

She missed twice and was forced to duck back behind the tree as he sprinted toward the back of the SUV. She only waited a fraction of a second before swinging out from behind the tree again. The shooter was going to take cover behind the vehicle and possibly take to the woods beyond it. Their lives would be immeasurably more difficult with this jerk and his vastly superior firepower roaming around in the forest hunting them.

Alex shouted something in Russian and the man shouted back as she took careful aim one more time on the guy’s head. She held her breath and squeezed off the shot.

The man’s legs crumpled and he dropped to the ground. She held her position and scanned back into the woods in the direction she and Alex had come from. She heard Alex crashing out of the tree behind her. She turned in time to see him running fast and low, zigzagging as swift and nimble as a cheetah, toward the downed man.

“Come down!” Alex called out in Zaghastani.

She stepped out of the woods fully in time to see Alex extend an arm straight out from his body at a downward angle and fire two shots into the prone man’s head. It was brutal. Cold-blooded, even. She could shoot at an armed attacker who could shoot back at her, but she severely doubted she could’ve taken those shots. Alex had just
executed
that man. Shock and horror roared through her.

He crouched, patting down the dead man’s pockets. He straightened, a car ignition fob in hand as she reached his side. “Did you have to kill him like that?” she demanded, appalled to her core.

“Get in the car. I’ll drive.”

She piled into the SUV as Alex punched the ignition button. The big engine roared to life. He steered the vehicle toward the fresh tracks in the grass at the edge of the clearing and they bumped down a rough driveway of sorts.

“Buckle your seat belt,” he ordered without taking his eyes off the path ahead of them. How could he sound so damned calm? Didn’t he care in the slightest that he’d just murdered that man?

As she clicked the seat belt across her body, she asked incredulously, “Aren’t you the slightest bit upset that you just executed a helpless man like an animal for the slaughter?”

He glanced over long enough for her to reel away from the cold calculation in his eyes. “I never claimed to be a Girl Scout. You knew who I am, what I do, when you signed up for this. Deal with it or leave.”

Just like that?
“It’s not that simple—” she started.

He cut her off sharply. “Yes. It is. This is my life. If you want to be part of it, don’t ask me to change. I can’t be someone else and survive. I have no choice.”

She subsided against the cushions. Was it really that simple?

“Check the back for weapons,” he bit out.

She clambered between the front seats and into the back. She leaned over the bench seat, reaching into the far back to pull up a canvas tarp and peek beneath it. “Two AK-47s, a wooden ammo box and two pistols. I think they’re Makarovs.”

Without waiting for him to tell her, she dragged all the weapons forward to the backseat. The ammo box was heavy and gave her more trouble, but she horsed it into the seat, as well. She rejoined Alex, panting.

“Who were those men back there?” she finally asked as the SUV burst out onto the main road and Alex stomped on the accelerator. “Russian weapons. The shooter was speaking in Russian. Did your father order this hit on us?”

Grimly, Alex fished out his cell phone and punched in a number, one-handed, as he drove. He jammed the phone to his ear and snarled, “I know it’s the middle of the damned night in Moscow. Did you order a hit on me?”

It was as angry as she’d ever heard Alex. He listened in silence for a few seconds and then swore under his breath. “Check it out and let me know,” he snapped.

“He denied being behind this, didn’t he?” Katie asked grimly.

“Bingo.”

“Do you believe him?”

Alex shrugged. “I think he believes he can still convince me to work for him. If that’s true, he wouldn’t kill me.”

“Would he have some thugs fake a hit on you to give you credibility with the CIA?”

One corner of Alex’s mouth turned up briefly. “There may be hope for you yet. You’re learning to think like a spy.”

If that meant she was learning to be suspicious of everyone and not take anything at face value, she supposed he was right. “Could it have been someone else in the FSB?” she asked.

Alex frowned. “I fail to see how they could have picked up our trail from that library so quickly. I could see the CIA picking us up that fast, however, particularly if they were already looking for us in the New Jersey area. But not the Russians. They only have a certain number of resources on short-notice call in the States, and Russian wet teams aren’t just cruising around New Jersey for grins and giggles.”

“Why would the CIA send a team to kill you?”

He was silent long enough she thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said grimly, “I am controversial within the agency. I have many detractors.”

“Yes, but a hit team masquerading as Russians?” she challenged. “That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to. I mean, they even spoke Russian to one another.”

Alex frowned and did not answer. She gathered she’d asked the right question, then. He steered the SUV out onto the highway, pointing it to the north.

“Now what?” she asked.

He smiled slightly at her trademark question. “New York City for the moment.”

As it became clear they hadn’t been tailed, she relaxed and took a look around the SUV for clues as to who their kidnapper and assailants had been. She opened the storage console between the front seats and peeked down inside.

“Hey, look what I found,” she exclaimed. She reached down into the compartment and pulled out a cell phone. It was a high-end model like someone might own for personal use, not a cheap burner phone.

Alex grinned wolfishly. “Well, well, well. The kindergarten teacher hits the mother lode.” He added more seriously, “Speaking of which, that was some nice shooting back there. You’re a hell of a markswoman.”

“For an amateur?” she added wryly.

“You saved my hide a couple times. That’s as much as I could ask of any pro.”

She sat back, shocked by the compliment. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

“We make a good team,” Alex commented offhandedly.

Whoa. She wasn’t anywhere close to being in his league and never would be when it came to being a spy. But it was the first time he’d ever acknowledged that she wasn’t always a dead weight on his back. She liked being able to hold her own beside him...at least a little.

Silence fell between them as he found the New Jersey Turnpike and navigated the increasingly heavy traffic.

Eventually, she asked, “What are you going to do with that phone?”

“Strip it of all the information it’ll give us and form a plan based on what we find.”

“Should we ditch this vehicle?” she asked.

“If we didn’t kill all of our attackers, it’ll take any survivors a while to figure out we’ve fled in their car and to report in. In the meantime, it’ll throw off whoever’s tracking this SUV on GPS when they see it moving. They’ll assume the mission was accomplished.”

“This car’s being tracked?” she squeaked. God, would they never escape the constant surveillance? She was beginning to think they were living in a high-tech police state. Oh, Lord. And now he had her thinking just like him about the United States government being Big Brother.

He said casually, “I figure we’ve got another hour in this car before it’s burned. But we’ll be in New York City by then.”

“Then what?”

“I’m sick and tired of sitting back waiting for these assholes to come after us. It’s time for us to go on the offense.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

K
ATIE
WAS
ALARMED
when they ditched the SUV in front of the FBI headquarters in New York City. But since Alex pointed out that no one would think the government plates were out of place, it made sense to her. If someone was tracking the vehicle, they could easily assume the occupants had needed some sort of official assistance of one kind or another.

Alex ducked into the first drugstore they came across with her in tow. They bought hats, scarves and cheap raincoats they pulled over their clothing. Appearances changed, they emerged back on the street.

She opened her mouth, but Alex held up a hand to forestall her. “I know,” he murmured. “Now what?”

She grinned up at him from under her Yankees baseball cap.

He answered his own question. “Now, a crowded, public place.”

“Central Park crowded, or subway-at-rush-hour crowded?” she queried.

“Subway. Good idea.”

Stunned that he liked any idea she suggested, she followed him down the steps into a subway station. They caught a train headed northbound out of Lower Manhattan, and managed to snag a pair of seats. She kibitzed with him as he pulled out the stolen cell phone and took a brief look at it. Although, was it still stolen if its owner was dead?

Alex pulled out his own cell phone and initiated some sort of internet search. “What are you doing?”

“Reverse phone book. Getting a name for the owner of this phone.” His phone dinged an incoming message. “Voilà. The guy’s name was Brian Remolatto. Now. We do a quick search on him.”

“Why?”

“Looking for addresses and birth dates.”

“Because...”

“I need his numeric password for his phone.”

“Ahh.” She held her hand out. “Give me your phone. I’ll suggest numbers while you type.” He passed her his phone and she started rattling off old addresses, and the names and birth dates of various people associated with Brian Remolatto.

Alex made a sound of satisfaction and then muttered sarcastically, “How sweet. The guy used his mother’s birthday as his passcode.”

He started scrolling quickly, then cruising the dead man’s phone for useful information. He announced under his breath, “Huh. Here’s the mission tasking to eliminate us with extreme prejudice.”

“Both of us?” she asked, shocked.

“Looks that way.”

“Who sent it?” she demanded, aghast.

“An excellent question. Sadly, it looks like a numbered ISP address.”

“What’s that?”

“Without waxing technical, it’s an anonymous internet location that will be untraceable.”

“What about his contact list? Have you checked that out?” she asked over his shoulder.

“Well, lookee here,” Alex crooned. “A contact labeled Boss.”

She chuckled. “That’s either his CIA supervisor or his wife.”

“Given the number of women in his contact list, and the number of X-rated texts in his message folder, I’m going to postulate that young Brian was single.”

The train stopped, and they climbed the stairs into Grand Central Station. The place was mobbed with commuters striding in every direction across the cavernous space. “This crowded enough for you?” she asked under the din.

Alex nodded and unwrapped his headphones from around his cell phone. He put one earbud into his ear and passed her the second one. She huddled close to him to listen as he dialed the phone number of Remolatto’s boss.

A male voice answered. “Go ahead, Remolatto.”

Alex replied easily, “This isn’t Brian. It’s Alex Peters.”

“Peters?” the man exclaimed. “What the hell?”

“Hey, I need to get in touch with the director of the op. Something’s come up and I need to have a face-to-face conversation with the top brass.”

“Christ, Peters. I had no idea you were read-in on the op. I thought you were a blind asset.”

“Obviously not. Brian said you could hook me up, though.”

“Kane left the office about an hour ago. She’s on her way home if I had to guess.”

Katie’s jaw dropped. As in Claudia Kane? An icy chill passed over her. Alex’s mother was the director of the entire Cold Intent operation? Even Alex seemed staggered. He physically shook himself, swallowed convulsively and then said more lightly than she’d have been able to pull off, “I guess I’ll just have to call her there. How long will it take her to get home?”

“Well, she’s got to get all the way out to Fairfax. I’d give her an hour. Traffic’s a bitch at this time of year. Damned tourists flock to Washington and clog up all the roads.”

“No kidding. Can’t get a parking spot or restaurant reservation to save your life,” Alex griped.

The guy at the other end snorted in commiseration.

“Okay, well, thanks, anyway, dude. Brian and I will take it from here.” Alex disconnected the phone. He passed her his earbud, and she wound the thin wire around her hand while Alex deftly pulled out the phone’s battery and SIM card.

“Killing it so they can’t track us with it?” she murmured.

“Yup.” He stowed the pieces in his pocket. “C’mon. We need to get to Washington.”

“Crud. Do we have to go back into the bad guys’ sandbox?”

“It’s my sandbox, too,” he replied grimly.

They spent the next hour getting to a car rental agency and using one of Alex’s seemingly endless supply of fake IDs to rent a car. They headed out of the city at a snail’s pace as rush hour ripened into a full-blown mess.

Finally, as they inched forward, she said, “Did you have any idea your
mother
was in charge of Cold Intent?”

“My father said as much. But I didn’t have confirmation until just now. It makes sense, though. The op is centered around screwing over my father.”

“So this has all been a feud between your parents? Are you kidding me?”

Alex rolled his eyes at her. “I suspect there’s more to it than that.”

“Well, yeah. They’re trying to destroy each other. And they’re freaking spies. That could get pretty violent.” She added wryly, “Divorce, CIA style. How special.”

Alex just looked grim.

God, that had to suck for him. Sympathy for him having to grow up in his screwed-up family coursed through her. His parents had really done a number on his head. Fierce protectiveness for the child Alex flooded her. Despite her misgivings about him going on the offense against his own family, she couldn’t bail out on him now. Not when he most needed her.

They drove late into the night and stopped somewhere in Pennsylvania to sleep for a few hours. Katie could seriously have used a cuddle and some comforting after the previous day’s trauma, and she expected Alex could use a little TLC after finding out his mother was behind his troubles. But no sooner had she climbed under the covers than Alex stretched out on the floor beside the bed.

“What on earth are you doing down there?” she demanded over the side of the bed.

“If you busted into this room looking for a shootout, would you expect someone to be down here?”

“Well, no. But won’t you be uncomfortable?”

“Hmm. Comfortable or dead,” he said by way of an answer.

Well, hell. She sighed. “Do I need to sleep down there, too?”

“If you want.”

“Yippee,” she muttered. She dragged her pillow and a blanket down on the hard, drafty floor beside him. “The things I do for love,” she grumbled.

“Your choice,” he murmured, already half-asleep.

She was sleeping on the floor of a motel room with a perfectly good bed right beside her. It was a fitting metaphor for her life. She really liked normal. She liked waking up in the morning and feeling comfortable and safe...in her own bed. Was she really up for this lifestyle, forever? Her idea of roughing it was a Holiday Inn instead of a Marriott. Who was she trying to kid? She wasn’t cut out for the
floor
of the freaking Motel 6.

Deeply conflicted, she wrestled with her choice until she passed out sometime before dawn. She woke up aching from head to foot and half-frozen. Alex was already gone from beside her. The shower cut off as she rolled over and sat up, groaning.

Alex spun out of the bathroom naked and wielding a pistol. She lurched, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” she gasped.

“I heard you moan.”

“I wasn’t in trouble,” she explained hastily. “I’m just sore from the floor.”

He made a disgusted face and retreated into the bathroom. She heard the faint scraping of a razor. Huh. He hadn’t shaved in several days. She’d figured he was using the dark beard stubble on his face by way of a disguise. Why the careful toilette today? Did he want to look nice for meeting his mother, perchance?

God, how weird must that be? Today, for the first time, he could meet the woman who’d given birth to him. She would be a wreck in the same situation.

Once Alex finished in the bathroom, she took his place and grabbed a deliciously hot and all too short shower. Funny how for granted she took the act of bathing until she couldn’t do it. When she emerged from the steam room she’d turned the bathroom into, Alex was distracted and uncommunicative. Obviously, his brain was in overdrive. She left him alone as they headed downstairs to the front desk.

It was almost laughable how easily Alex charmed the motel’s desk manager into letting him use her computer terminal. Katie took a seat in the lobby to wait for him, but he wasn’t online long.

She stood when he rejoined her with a terse nod. He said merely, “I got an address.”

*

T
HEY
HIT
THE
ROAD
, arriving in the rural outskirts of Fairfax, Virginia, in the early afternoon.

“So what are you going to do,” she asked. “Walk right up to her front door, knock and say, ‘Hi, Mom. It’s me. I’m home’?”

“I’m treating her as a hostile until indicated otherwise. We’ll set up a surveillance and information collection detail and see what we learn. Then we’ll formulate a plan from there.”

“Won’t she be pretty good at spotting surveillance?” Katie asked dubiously.

“Undoubtedly. We’ll just have to be better.”

Katie gulped. Suddenly she felt a great deal like a minnow swimming with a pack of sharks. Sharks who wouldn’t hesitate to turn on one another and attack in cold blood. She didn’t belong in the company of these experienced operatives jockeying against one another.

“What do you suppose she looks like?” Katie asked.

“We’ll find out soon enough.”

He guided the car to an address on a country road. A modest, two-story farmhouse stood well back from the road. It was white clapboard and traditional, with a broad covered front porch and a red barn behind it. A pair of horses and a dozen beef cattle grazed in a pasture around the place. Several mature shade trees cozied up to the house. It was all very placid and normal looking.

Alex drove on past without slowing down and continued several more miles along the road before turning, going a mile or so to the west and then turning back to the north on a parallel farm road to place them behind his mother’s house.

Seeing what he was doing, Katie grumbled, “We’re going to have to hike again, aren’t we?”

He smiled over at her a little.

“You’re a sadist, Alex Peters.”

“You have no idea.”

“Someday, you’re going to quit talking the talk and walk the walk,” she retorted.

He glanced over at her in surprise. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? It’s really about keeping a woman off balance. I don’t have to cause women any pain, or do anything at all for that matter, as long as they don’t know what’s coming next. The fear and anticipation does all the work for me.”

Her eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. “Are you actually giving away your trade secrets to me? Since when?”

He pulled the car off the road and parked it behind an abandoned barn that looked like the next strong wind would blow it over. He half turned in the seat to face her. “Since you killed a man. There’s blood on your hands now. And it won’t ever wash off. Whether you planned it or not, you’ve crossed a line into my world. You can’t go back now. I figured I might as well throw you a few survival tips.”

And with that, he opened the door and got out of the car.

Gee. That was...humanitarian...of him. Jerk. Except in the next breath, she had to admit she could use all the survival tips she could get. She was a literal babe in the woods out here, running around playing spy.

She stared at his back as he dug around in the trunk of the car in the bags of supplies he’d picked up at a Walmart somewhere in rural Maryland earlier. Was he right? Was she irrevocably consigned to his world?

Dismay and terror tore through her. No! She didn’t want this! She wanted to settle down with him in some small, quiet town. To raise their adopted daughter together and have a few kids of their own. She wanted rocking chairs on a porch and big family get-togethers on holidays.

A sob rattled silently through her chest as it dawned on her that the men she and Alex had killed would never get that with their families. She wasn’t a murderer.

She wasn’t! She was a good person. Kind. Considerate of others. Moral. A role model to little kids, for God’s sake.

And yet, the facts shouted otherwise. She was no better than Alex.

The thought froze her in her tracks. Had she really thought herself better than him all this time? Had she subconsciously been judging him? And knowing him and his brilliant perception, he must have sensed it, or even recognized it outright.

God, no wonder he wouldn’t commit to a relationship with her. She was no better than any of the other women in his life. They’d all judged him and condemned him. Just like she had.

Well, at least that problem was solved. She’d gotten down in the emotional muck of his shadow world and rolled around it shamelessly. She was every bit as dirty as him now.

What had she done to her life? To all of their lives?