Hot Intent (Hqn) (28 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A
LEX
MIGHT
HAVE
spent the past eight hours more or less motionless, observing a quiet farmhouse, but he felt like he’d run a damned marathon. The strain of knowing his mother was inside that building was almost more than he could stand.

He’d imagined her incessantly for pretty much his whole life. He’d dreamed about her. Had pretend conversations with her. Imagined her hugging him good-night and tucking him into bed. He’d even answered the hard questions for her in his own mind. Why did you leave me behind when you left my father? Did you want me? Did you
love
me? Why didn’t you come back for me, or at least contact me?

He wasn’t even sure he wanted to hear the real answers. She’d been an insubstantial ghost hovering over him for so long, he was apprehensive of giving her an actual face or a voice.

“How late do you plan to wait before you approach her?” Katie murmured into his earpiece. She was positioned behind the house to watch for movement there.

Truthfully, they could probably go in now. It was almost 10:00 p.m. The local civilian populace would be in bed and safely out of the way, leaving the night to his kind of people.

“Getting cold?” he asked her through the microphone mounted on his earpiece wire.

“A little,” she admitted.

“Any sign of movement over that way?” He already knew the answer. She’d been faithfully reporting rabbit and squirrel sightings for the past eight hours, whether out of boredom or nerves, he couldn’t tell.

“Nope. All’s quiet on the western front.”

“We’ll give it a little while longer. Once a few more lights go out in the house, I’ll head in.”

“What’s this ‘I’ stuff?” she demanded in quick alarm. “I’m going with you.”

“Um, no. You’re not. You’re my backup. If things go wrong, I’ll need you to call in the cavalry.”

“How will I know if anything goes wrong unless I’m with you?”

“You’ll know,” he replied dryly. Spies didn’t usually go down quietly or without a fight.

She huffed in his ear.

They sat in their respective hides for maybe another fifteen minutes. The silence between them was actually kind of companionable. It was nice having company on a boring surveillance mission. One of the things he appreciated most about Katie was her ability to be with him without feeling a need to fill in the silences with meaningless chatter.

Without warning, though, the woods around the farmhouse erupted with movement. All of a sudden, men were moving through the woods fast. They swept the area like a Special Forces team, spaced evenly, big-ass weapons at the ready. Night vision goggles and throat-mikes identified them as pros.

Stunned, Alex ducked behind the beef steer that had wandered over to his position some time ago and been grazing quietly nearby. What the hell?

The bastards didn’t even bother to be quiet. They shouted back and forth, coordinating their search and reporting possible targets to one another. He didn’t even dare whisper instructions to Katie. There were too many men and they were too damned close. She was on her own.

And then he heard a sound that made his blood run cold. A woman’s voice raised in fear. Katie’s voice. The entire search team rushed toward the back of the house.

Panic roared through him. He was responsible for her. He’d dragged her out here, put her in harm’s way. His entire body tensed with a need to rush over to her position and rescue her.

He watched from underneath the steer as a pair of big men hauled Katie up the front steps of the house. The door opened and light spilled out into the night. A tall, slender, blonde woman stood in the doorway.

It was her.

His body went hot and cold at the same time, and he could not stop himself from staring hungrily at her face. He hadn’t gotten her far wrong in his mind. She was beautiful. And even from here, she looked cold. Her expression was harder than diamonds as she gestured to the men to bring Katie inside.

Why hadn’t the bastards shot her in the woods where they’d found her? These guys had to be Cold Intent’s core operatives. The same people who’d been shooting at Katie for the past few weeks. Why not just kill her now?

Of course, the answer was obvious. Claudia Kane had a few questions for Katie about her son. And
then
they would kill her. Knowing Katie, she would hold out against questioning as long as she could. And God knew, the McClouds were a stubborn bunch.

But Claudia would break her. Katie was no professional operative. The good news was that after the sweep netted Katie, the team of men had all trooped back into the house behind her. The bad news was he had maybe an hour to rescue her from his mother. At most.

*

K
ATIE
STARED
AT
the woman who’d given birth to Alex. Claudia Kane was as elegant and cold as she’d expected the woman would be. Tall, thin, blonde, silver-eyed, and wearing her middle years with hard grace. A bit of a dominatrix vibe came from her. Or maybe that was just the severe wool suit and black patent leather stilettos talking. Any mother who could abandon her newborn baby to the clutches of a spymaster like Peter Koronov couldn’t have much of a heart.

Claudia, seated in a big wingback chair across the elegantly furnished living room, studied her closely, as well.

The men who’d dragged Katie up off the ground and into the house had released her arms and now stood quietly in the corners, weapons still drawn, alert and wary. It was clear they were waiting for Alex to make a move to rescue her. She was bait.
Sit tight, Alex,
she thought desperately.
It’s a trap.

Claudia finally broke the silence. “Tell me about my son.”

“He has your eyes,” Katie blurted. Although Claudia’s might contain a tiny bit more blue than Alex’s gray eyes, both sets of eyes were sharply intelligent and observant.

“Where is he?”

“I have no idea.”

“Don’t lie to me. You’re not any good at it.”

“But I really don’t know.” Technically, she didn’t. He could still be in the pasture in front of the house, or he could have fled somewhere else entirely in his efforts to avoid Claudia’s men.

“What are you doing here?” the woman demanded. Her voice lashed at Katie’s waning courage, shredding what little she had left.

“Sitting, at the moment.” As irritation flashed through Claudia’s eyes in the exact same way it did Alex’s, Katie added less confrontationally, “I’m curious actually. I’m wondering why you chose to surface now. Why you thought you could use your son to destroy your ex-lover, and why you would hold such a grudge against Peter Koronov after all these years.”

Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did the woman react to Katie’s accusations. Cool customer. Had Katie not dealt with the woman’s equally cool son for so long, she’d have been scared to death of this woman. But Katie
had
dealt with Alex, and she
did
know how to read his moods and tempers. Katie sat back patiently in the wooden chair they’d hauled in here from the kitchen. She could wait out the mother the same way she waited out the son.

“How did you meet Alex?” Claudia threw out.

Katie knew the technique. She did it with her kindergartners. Get them talking about something, anything, innocuous, and then shift the conversation to the thing she really wanted the child to talk about once they were already gregariously chatting. She replied, “I suspect you already know that. How long have you been watching Alex? A few years? His whole life, perhaps?”

“I’m asking the questions here,” Claudia snapped.

She could ask all she wanted. It didn’t mean Katie was going to answer. She wasn’t about to spill Alex’s innermost feelings to this woman.

“Why did the two of you go to Cuba?”

Katie frowned. “You don’t know? I would have assumed you were of sufficient rank in the CIA to have been briefed on his activities. If nothing else, I would have thought you’d know what the primary operative in your operation was doing. Yet, here you are, asking me? Interesting.”

Claudia’s pale stare narrowed. It actually was interesting seeing Alex’s eyes in a blond, fair head instead of contrasting with Alex’s dark hair and bronze skin. “You’re in too much trouble to be flippant with me, young lady.”

“How am I in trouble? Call the police and accuse me of trespassing if you’d like. I haven’t done anything else wrong.” A flash of the dead bodies she and Alex had left in a forest in New Jersey zinged through her mind’s eye. But she pushed the grisly images away.

“You’ve interfered with a secret, high-level government operation.”

Katie jumped on that one, replying casually, “You mean Cold Intent? Sheesh. That’s no secret. A ton of people know about that.”

Even the guys in the corners lurched at that salvo.

“Who knows?” Claudia bit out.

“Well, there are Alex’s hacker friends. I don’t know how many of them helped him with the research on Cold Intent. Could be dozens. Oh, and there’s Alex’s boss at Doctors Unlimited. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You’re the one who had André relay your orders to have Alex and me separated and Alex drugged at Guantánamo, aren’t you?”

Claudia’s eyelids flickered slightly.
Hah.
Katie’s stab in the dark had struck true.

She continued. “I imagine André has told some of his staff about it by now. And then there’s my uncle, Charlie McCloud. You might know him? He’s the deputy director of Plans for the CIA. And then there’s my brother Mike. He’s Navy intelligence. And my other brother in the FBI. And my dad, of course. He’s a retired Green Beret and an ex-cop. And then my other brother—”

“Enough.”

The guys in the corners looked restless. They were watching Claudia with something akin to concern. Like maybe their boss was losing control of the situation. Katie pressed her advantage.

“What do you think, Claudia? Do you suppose Alex has told Peter about it yet?”

“You tell me.”

Katie shrugged. “You’d have to ask him.”

“Oh, I will.”

“You can ask. I doubt he’ll answer. You made a mistake, you know, leaving him with Peter. His father trained him superbly over the years. Alex is way too smart to fall for your machinations.”

“I hope for your sake you’re wrong,” Claudia retorted.

“What? You think this transparent little trap is going to catch Alex off guard? You really don’t know your son, do you?”

She probably shouldn’t have pointed out to Claudia that using her as bait wasn’t going to work. It made her useless to Claudia. The good news was she doubted Claudia would let the men shoot her in this pristine house. They would haul her outside to execute her. Good Lord willing, that would give Alex a window to do something miraculous to save her.

“Tell me something, Ms. Kane. Why did you leave your infant son behind when you left?”

Claudia leaned back and crossed one elegant leg over the other. Katie didn’t honestly expect the woman to answer, so she was surprised when Claudia said, “It wasn’t my choice, really. I had to get out fast before Peter had me arrested or killed. My escape route relied on stealth and speed. It wouldn’t accommodate a squalling newborn.”

“And yet,” Katie replied softly, “Alex and I managed to escape Zaghastan with a squalling newborn. You could have taken your son with you had you really wanted to. You’d have found a way. But you chose not to.”

For an instant, Claudia looked stricken. As if the woman had actually believed her own excuse all these years. But then, her eyes shuttered the exact same way Alex’s did. Katie had scored a direct hit with that one.

After a long, thoughtful pause, Claudia commented, “I may have underestimated you, Miss McCloud.”

Katie nodded sympathetically. “Everyone does. I think it’s the kindergarten teacher thing that throws people off.”

An unwilling smile tugged at the corner of the woman’s mouth. God, that was just like Alex. It was a little freaky looking at a blonde, female version of him like this.

A need to keep this woman talking, to buy Alex time to figure out a rescue plan or to call in the cavalry, pressed in on Katie. She murmured, “Peter must have been very angry when he discovered you were a spy. He told Alex he loved you.”

“He was furious.” Claudia shrugged. “As for having feelings for me, who knows? It’s complicated with spies.”

“Tell me about it,” Katie agreed fervently. “It’s all layers piled on top of layers, meaning buried within meaning, nothing straightforward, nothing black or white. It’s all shades of gray.”

“Said like a woman in love with my son.”

“Oh, I’ve never made any secret of my feelings for Alex. But as for how he feels about me...that’s anyone’s guess. You did quite a number on his head, Claudia. He doesn’t trust any woman farther than he can throw her.”

“For your sake, you had better hope he cares enough about you to reveal himself to me.”

Katie gulped. She honestly didn’t know if he would put himself on the line for her at this juncture. He’d been willing to play house with her and Dawn a year ago. He’d even pushed past his personal demons far enough to invite her to live with him.

But now? After his mother had turned on him? After the CIA had finished turning him into a killer? After the drugs in Guantánamo had unleashed his subconscious paranoia? After his mother had dived into the ongoing game of manipulating and controlling him? After she, herself, had refused to believe him when he’d tried to show her how dangerous the world really was? Who could he trust, really?

Tragically, she suspected the answer to that was no one. Absolutely no one at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

C
OMMON
SENSE
TOLD
him to back away from his mother’s house very slowly. To melt into the night and disappear. To leave behind everyone and everything he’d ever known and never look back.

Alex’s head felt like it was going to explode as he watched the only two women who’d ever been important in his life through the window of that house. He was so full of conflicted feelings and thoughts he couldn’t make sense of any of it. What the hell was he supposed to do now? Was Claudia dangling Katie as bait to suck him inside, or was there more to their stilted conversation? Was it all an act? Had the two of them been working together all along?

Think.
Work through the logic. Except logic refused to come. Instead, feelings bombarded him from every direction. Voices. His father’s voice. André’s voice. Katie’s. Dawn’s. His mother’s. The voices of the people he’d killed. Those he had yet to kill. The cacophony deafened him.

He mashed his hands against his ears, but nothing would silence the mad chorus. All of them pushing and pulling at him, tugging him one way and then another. Back and forth like a rag doll. God, they were tearing him to pieces.

He squinted at the house, brightly lit from within, barely able to make it out as everything spun wildly around him. Something warm brushed past him. He threw a hand out to steady himself and his fingers sank into thick, coarse hair. The damned cow was back, looking for food.

He clung to its back for balance, for sanity, until it shifted away from him uncomfortably. But the animal had done its job, given him something concrete to focus on. Given him a second to find himself.

Slowly, laboriously, Alex pushed every thought out of his mind. Every sensation. He took a breath. Held it. Exhaled slowly. Again.

When all else failed, he returned to the beginning. To the most basic act of existence. Breathing. Cold air filled his lungs but was hot in his nostrils when he blew it out.

Better. He stretched his senses to include the night sky above him. Black. Pinpricks of light peppering it. Stable. Motionless for the moment. He moved on to including the darkness around him. The frost-crusted grass crunching beneath his feet. The rough warmth of the cow a few feet away, its earthy smell.

House. Barn. Trees. Light. One by one, he added the objects around him to his awareness. Cautiously, very cautiously, he added thought. Katie was inside. His mother’s men had snatched her. Bait. They were holding her to lure him out.

Decision. He had to make one. Leave Katie to her own devices. Or rescue her.

He loosed the reins on his mind enough to let it evaluate the threat. Not great odds of success if he went in. Better to make them bring her out.

The exercise of forcing his mind into a semblance of discipline was exhausting. More so than he’d expected. Faint surprise registered. Was this what it felt like to go mad? He’d wondered a few times in the past if he’d been losing it. He’d been wrong before.
This
was what total loss of mental and emotional control felt like. The scientist within him greedily registered and cataloged sensations and observations.

He started when abrupt movement filled the living room window. Two men, previously not visible to him, stepped out of the corners of the room to take Katie by the arm. They would take her out back, to the barn. That was where he would execute a prisoner. Out of sight. Sound muffled.

Except the men headed for the front of the house. Pushed her out onto the porch. Ahh. Getting frustrated with her little fishing expedition, his mother was. Tired of this game, she was. Claudia was going to force the issue. Maybe have her guys shoot Katie in the kneecaps.

His odd detachment retreated a little. The idea of Katie in pain burned away some of the haze shrouding his brain. Was that haze actually shock? Was this shock from the inside looking out?

Now what?
Katie’s trademark question floated through his mind. If he wasn’t going to let them kill her, he probably shouldn’t let them maim her. It would be a useless waste of her body.

But something stubborn deep within him, some part of him determined to survive, and furthermore to win, rebelled against meekly surrendering to those bastards. He spied the tall, slender form of his mother rising from her seat to follow Katie outside.

Now.

His body went into motion of its own volition, propelling him at a silent sprint toward the back of the house. His instincts had spotted the opening before his conscious mind had. His body had started exploiting it before his thoughts even began to catch up to his training. Peter might be a bastard, but he’d trained a hell of an operative.

And what his father hadn’t accomplished, his mother and her cronies at the CIA had finished off.

He was a creature of the night. Of shadows and stealth. Of cunning and violence. He was exactly the son his parents had raised him to be. For the first time in his life, he embraced what he was with a certain measure of peace. They’d both wanted a killer for their separate reasons—and they’d gotten one. He was better than either of them could even begin to dream of.

He raced up the back steps to the kitchen door. The lock was so old and simple he didn’t even need a second lock pick to throw the tumblers. One did the job. He was inside in a few seconds. He padded across the marble tiles of the kitchen floor and glided down a short hallway. The front door was straight ahead.

Katie was visible on the porch, as were the restraining arms of her captors on either side of her. Alex waited, perfectly still, part of the shadows themselves. His mother stepped in front of the door, back a few feet from the opening.

“Go ahead, Katie,” Claudia ordered. “Call for him to come out. Feel free to tell him that my men are going to shoot you very painfully if he doesn’t.”

Katie whimpered a little and then shouted, “It’s a trap, Alex! Run!”

One of the men backhanded her viciously. Blood flew from her mouth in an arc that splatted on the white porch column as Alex lunged. In one blindingly fast move, he was at his mother’s back. His left arm went around her throat, and his right hand jammed a pistol to her neck, under her ear.

He growled, “Hi, Mom. I’m home.”

The men on the porch whirled and their weapons came to bear on him.

In his mother’s ear, he murmured, “You might want to explain to your thugs that my pistol has a hair trigger. Tell them how the impact of a bullet slamming into my skull will cause an involuntary reflex that makes my fists clench. Your brain will be sprayed all over the house along with mine. Shall we die together, Mother?”

Even he heard the acid in his voice when he said the word.

The woman in his arms went deceptively relaxed and then lurched violently, attempting to tear free of his grasp.

As if he hadn’t seen that one coming from a mile away. He tapped her almost gently in the temple with the barrel of his pistol. Just enough to daze her but not enough to knock her out cold.

“Tsk, tsk,” he chided. In the moment it had taken for him to subdue Claudia, Katie had managed to get herself turned around in her guards’ arms to face him. The voices were clamoring again in his head. He had a gun to his mother’s head. How fucked up was that?

Katie looked equal parts relieved and chagrined to see him. “I told you to run. To save yourself.”

“My mother. My problem.”

She stared at him closely. Worry blossomed in her big blue eyes. Dammit, she knew him too well. She saw how hard he was having to fight to hold it together. She spoke slowly, carefully, as if willing him to hear her. “She’s not worth it, Alex.”

His mother stirred in his arms, rousing to full awareness once more.

He ordered grimly, “Call off the dogs, Claudia. I’d hate to have to kill this batch, too.”

“It was a tactical mistake to call my ops center, Alexei,” Claudia said calmly. “It was obvious that you would make a run at me like this. You didn’t seriously think I would not take precautions to protect myself, did you?”

As if on cue, a half dozen weapons safeties disengaged behind Alex.
Sonofabitch.
She’d had an entire backup team just sitting in the woods, waiting for him to show himself. Bastards had probably had him in their sights all along.

“Disarm him if you please, gentlemen,” Claudia said pleasantly.

Hard hands grabbed him, yanked the pistol out of his hands and searched him roughly and rudely. He was manhandled back into the living room, along with Katie.

“Found this, ma’am,” one of the heavily body-armored men announced. Alex spied the flash drive of chemical weapons evidence in the guy’s palm.

“I’ll take that,” Claudia announced triumphantly. She moved over to the rolltop secretary’s desk in the corner and opened a laptop computer. The tableau of armed men and prisoners froze in time as the computer turned on and booted up. His mother plugged the flash drive into the computer and quickly opened the contents.

Photographs, the gas chromatograph readouts and his own case notes flashed onto the screen. “I’ll be quite the hero for bringing in this evidence,” Claudia purred.

“Other people in the agency will know where it came from and who obtained it.”

“Of course they will. The loving son shared it with his thankful mother just before an unfortunate accident claimed his life and that of his girlfriend. So many enemies my poor son had. One of them finally caught up with him.”

He watched dispassionately as she typed out a quick email, attached the contents of the flash drive to it and hit the send button with a flourish.

“Was Cold Intent really only about revenge against my father?” he asked curiously. “Did you love him so much, then?”

“Love—” She burst out laughing. “I hated his guts.”

He shrugged. “In my experience, love and hate are the two sides of the same coin. The opposite of love is apathy, Mother, not hate. If you actively hate Peter, you still have powerful feelings for him.”

He felt everyone in the room gaping at him. Of all the stares, the one he chose to meet was Katie’s. She was the only person here who would truly understand what he was saying. After all, she’d both loved and hated him.

Sure enough, she smiled wistfully at him just a little. Then she mouthed the words,
I love you.

“I love you, too,” he murmured back aloud. His gaze swung to his mother. “Thank you for that, Claudia. You may have been a complete failure as a parent, and I may have been raised in hate, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing I was conceived in love.”

“Love?” she screeched. “I despised Peter Koronov!”

“He never got over you, either,” Alex said calmly in response to her enraged outburst.

His simple words deflated her like a balloon. She collapsed into the same chair she’d been sitting in earlier. All of a sudden, she looked every year of her age and more.

She stared at a spot on the carpet for a minute, or maybe even a little longer. And then looked up and said simply, “Kill them both.”

Katie let out a cry of distress.

Alex laughed.

Claudia looked up at him sharply. “You think this is a joke? That I won’t do it?”

“I think you’re a fool for underestimating your own son, Mother.”

Claudia raised a hand to forestall the thugs from dragging him and Katie from the room.

“You asked me if I thought you wouldn’t see my approach to you coming. Let me ask you a question. Did you seriously think I would barge in here without a backup plan of my own?”

“You’re bluffing,” she scoffed. “I have access to every operational deployment order in the CIA. No team was sent out here to save you.”

He threw back his head and laughed richly at that.

“What?” she demanded.

“You thought I would call the CIA for help, knowing that you have the agency in your back pocket? That was a stupid miscalculation on your part. I guess we know which side of the family my brains come from, now, don’t we?”

Katie gasped. Smart girl. She’d figured out what he’d done.

Claudia half rose from the chair. “What have you done?” she demanded.

“What else, Mother dearest? I called Father dearest.”

The phrase
Father dearest
was the prearranged signal. Alex had just enough time to dive for Katie and knock her flat on the floor beneath him before every window in the house burst inward in an explosion of shattered glass, as a Spetsnaz team poured in, their AK-47s spitting death.

CIA men leaped every which way for cover, firing back as all hell broke loose. Dozens of razor-sharp cuts from flying glass sliced his arms, back and face as he covered Katie as best he could.

The lights went out, and the chaos was complete as muzzle flashes exploded from every direction. Something hot slammed into his left leg, and he grunted involuntarily in pain. It took a little maneuvering to roll on his side and tend to the wound, but he managed to tear off a length of his undershirt and tie off the gunshot wound without getting hit again.

“Can you move?” he yelled in Katie’s ear.

“Yes!” she shouted back.

He paused long enough to peel off one of the two cloth patches taped to the shoulders of his sweater and to slap it on Katie’s shoulder. The infrared marker cloth would identify her to his father’s men as a friend in the firefight and not a foe. His remaining shoulder patch would do the same for him. “Stay low and follow me!” he ordered as the worst of the gunfire moved outside the house.

“Ya think?” she retorted.

Grinning, he belly crawled toward the front door. Claudia’s men had made for the exits and were scattering to the woods as he looked on. Good call. The Spetsnaz team had superior numbers and the element of surprise on their side. The last thing the CIA team needed was to be pinned down in the confines of a house with wooden walls, entirely permeable to high-caliber gunfire. He’d have bugged out, too, if he were caught in the same situation.

Black figures chased other black figures into the woods, and sporadic muzzle flashes were accompanied by increasingly distant sounds of gunshots. He sat up cautiously on the porch, leaning back against the wall of the house. Katie did the same beside him. He didn’t know if she was even aware of huddling tightly against his side.