Lord of the Wolfyn and Twin Targets (26 page)

Browned out was more like it,
Sydney thought, but she didn’t want Celeste to feel like she was hovering.

Over the past eleven months she’d missed her sister like crazy. They’d never been apart for more than a few weeks at a time before, and she’d pictured their reunion like one big party, had figured that after she was home everything would go back to normal.

But that was before she figured out what Tiberius really wanted from her, and how far he was willing to go to get it.

“What happens now?” Celeste asked.

“There’s an agent on his way named Hugo Thorn-ridge,” Sharpe said. “He’s going to take care of you.”

Sydney drew a breath to speak, but Celeste silenced her with a look before saying, “Take care of me how, exactly?”

“He’s a registered nurse with medic training.” The agent paused. “He’s also a sniper-trained sharpshooter, has a black belt in one of the martial arts and throws a hell of a punch in a bar fight.” A touch of a smile suggested there was a story there. “He’ll help you monitor your health, and he’ll be in charge of your safety.”

“You’re putting me in witness protection,” Celeste said. It wasn’t a question.

He shook his head. “Not exactly. WITSEC is a formal program, complete with paperwork and processing. We don’t have time for that, and frankly I’m not sure it’s as secure as it needs to be when dealing with someone like Tiberius. You and Hugo are going underground. He’ll check in with me regularly, and leave updates on your position when he deems prudent, but other than that, you two will be totally off the grid.”

Sydney made a sad, pained noise. Danielle and Jay were dead. Celeste was going to be running for her life. All because she’d gone to work for Tiberius.

“Hey, Syd.” Celeste made a faint motion with her hand. “You didn’t do this. Tiberius did.”

Sydney stifled a sob and took Celeste’s hand, pressing it to her cheek. But she didn’t say anything, because they both knew the truth was that Tiberius hadn’t been acting alone. She had played along with him for far too long, and now she, her sister and the people around them were paying the price for her mistakes.

So much for a joyous reunion, where she brought back a cure for her sister and money for them both to live on abroad, then phoned in an anonymous tip on Tiberius and his island of horrors.

Instead, she’d returned home to two more innocent victims and a sister she barely recognized.

While Celeste and Sharpe spoke briefly, Sydney stared at her sister. She still looked the same. Her straight, midbrown hair was bobbed at her shoulders and her face was a slightly thinner rearrangement of Sydney’s own features, with the exception of blue eyes instead of brown. Her arms and legs were far too thin, due to the wasting effects of the disease, and for the most part the only motion came from her mouth and eyes, with an occasional laborious hand gesture for emphasis. There was nothing really stand-out different about her.

She was the same. Yet she wasn’t. She’d gotten herself out of bed and hidden, outsmarting a pair of trained killers. And she’d snapped at Sydney not once but twice, when before she would’ve agreed that yes, she was tired. Yes, she should rest and not get overexcited.

Did I hold her back?
Sydney wondered now.
Did I make it too easy for her to be sick?

“Sydney,” Sharpe said, his voice sharp enough to indicate he was repeating himself. “You with us?”

“Sorry.” She shook her head, trying to clear it. But how could she possibly clear everything that was inside her skull at this point? It was all tangled up together in one big messy knot: the joy of finding Celeste unharmed; the hurt of seeing that she was doing okay—if not better—on her own; the pain of two more people dying because of her… “It’s all too much,” she whispered.

It wasn’t until Celeste squeezed her hand that she realized they were still sitting close together, that she finally had her sister by her side once again.

Then Celeste said, “Hugo’s here. We need to say goodbye now.”

“But—” Sydney stopped herself and bowed her head to hide the tears. “I know.”

A big man appeared in the front doorway, filling it from one side to the other. He had short blond hair and pleasantly regular features, with a glint of humor in his light blue eyes. Wearing cargo pants held up by a web belt, combat boots and a khaki T-shirt stretched across his wide chest, he practically screamed ex-military, and instantly made Sydney feel better about Celeste going into hiding.

She looked up at him. “Please tell me that you’re Hugo.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Celeste murmured from beside her, and Sydney stifled a grin, feeling a little lift beneath her heart at the realization that somehow, somewhere, she’d gotten back a part of the sister she remembered.

“That’d be me.” He looked at Celeste and raised a golden eyebrow. “You ready to boogie?”

“Yes, please.” Her face clouded. “I’d like to get out of here.”

Sydney felt a pang at the realization that they’d probably never share their pretty little house again. Not only would she need to sell it to cover the legal bills she was no doubt racking up by the second, but she also couldn’t imagine either of them wanting to live there after two people had died so horribly in the kitchen.

“Hey, sis.” Celeste used her faltering strength to tug on her hand. “Take care of yourself.”

“You, too.” Sydney bent and hugged her sister, harder than she probably should have, but needing to prove to herself that they were both there, that they were both okay, for the moment at least.

Hugo had pulled a specially outfitted van up very close to the door, since the garage was roped off with crime scene tape. He draped a pair of Kevlar vests over Celeste for the short trip out in the open.

The precautions reassured Sydney. At the same time they made her want to throw up.

“Tell me she’ll be okay,” she said to the man she sensed standing directly behind her.

“Hugo’s one of the best,” Sharpe said. “If anyone can keep her off Tiberius’s radar, he can.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

He said nothing, though she didn’t know if it was because he didn’t want her thanks, or if his mind was already elsewhere, moving on to the next topic, the next fight.

She turned to him, battling the almost overwhelming compulsion to lean on him, just for a moment, and absorb some of the strength he seemed to wear like a second skin. “What happens now?”

He glanced down at her. “We’re going to put you in a safe house under full guard. At that point I will have fulfilled my part of the bargain by getting you and your sister protected to the best of my ability. Then it’s going to be your turn.” His voice went low, but not in the slightest bit soft. “You’re going to tell us how to fight Tiberius and keep him from taking down CODIS.”

S
EVERAL HUNDRED MILES
away, sitting in the elegant kitchen of a renovated Vermont farmhouse that was owned under the little-used alias Kyle Cross, Tiberius slapped the phone shut with a bitter oath.

The thick-maned redhead sitting at the other end of the long breakfast bar, still wearing one of the skin-tight flight suits she favored when piloting Tiberius’s chopper, looked up from buffing a chip out of one of her nails. “Problem, darling?”

“Nothing that can’t be dealt with,” he responded, feeling a measure of calm at the knowledge of just how true those words were. His guards might have let Sydney Westlake escape from the island—and they’d be punished for the lapse—and the contractors he’d hired in Maryland might’ve screwed up the sister’s capture, ditto on the retribution, but that didn’t mean he was entirely without options.

He tapped the computer screen of his high-tech phone, bringing up an encrypted list, and keyed in the code required to translate the names, revealing a list of key FBI personnel that he’d either found useful in the past, or who had weaknesses he knew he could exploit. A quick comparison between that list and the names he’d gotten for John Sharpe’s major crimes team, followed by a brief phone call, and he had himself a new employee.

Sydney wasn’t going to know what hit her.

S
YDNEY SPENT THE NEXT
four days in a safe house outside D.C., downloading her brain into huge databases and modeling programs run by two of Sharpe’s people—pretty, soft-spoken Grace Mears and quirky, geeky Jimmy Oliverra.

There was no sign of Sharpe. He didn’t visit, didn’t call. He might as well have taken Celeste away himself, because she hadn’t heard a peep from either of them.

Telling herself he didn’t owe her an accounting of his whereabouts, Sydney forced herself to focus on the laptop screen, which showed a satellite photo of Rocky Cliff Island. It was near dusk on day four, and she was losing her edge. She was sick of the safe house, sick of being cooped up, sick of going over the same information again and again, until it was all starting to blur together in her head.

She’d already told them everything she thought was relevant about the DNA vector, and the computer programs currently guarding it. Now they were working on constructing a virtual model of Rocky Cliff Island. At first the agents had been concerned that Tiberius might have left the island for good; none of the initial passes of the retasked satellite had shown evidence of him being in residence. But that didn’t make any sense—there was no way for him to get the DNA sequence off the island without the password, short of moving each and every computer without disrupting the networked connections.

Sure enough, on the previous day his helicopter had touched down on the pad just uphill of the mansion, and word had come down from Sharpe—relayed through Jimmy, of course—that they were to model “every damn last beach plum on the godforsaken piece of rock” in case they needed to plan a raid.

Sydney was pretty sure that was close to verbatim, and she was more than a little horrified that she kept replaying the words in her mind, imagining the way they’d sound in his deep, resonant voice.

Forcing herself to focus on the job at hand, she pointed to a small white box on the extreme eastern point of the narrow, oblong island. “That’s a guard shack, one of the big ones. It’s got some sort of weapon on the top, hidden under a second, false roof.” She glanced at the others and shrugged slightly. “Sorry, but I only saw it once on my way in. I’m not sure I can do much more with the details.”

Jimmy broke off the low, tuneless whistling he maintained while working his machines. “Don’t be sorry. Just do your best.” That was pretty much Jimmy’s attitude toward life, which made him a good match for type-A, intense Grace, who immediately began tapping away at her computer.

Within seconds, the screen in front of Sydney had the guard shack labeled as such. Next, Grace tapped a few more keys and a new page popped up, showing schematic renderings of some seriously nasty-looking turret-type guns that looked like they could take out anything from an airplane to a medium-size boat. “Anything look familiar?” she asked.

Sydney closed her eyes, trying to remember what the weapon had looked like. “It was longer and…thinner at the end, I think.” They went through a few iterations before she nodded. “That’s as close as I can get.”

“We’ll take it.” Jimmy spun the image of the island on-screen, focusing their view in on another structure. “How about this one?”

Grace’s e-mail program gave a
ping,
signaling incoming mail. Sydney automatically glanced at the screen. She saw
J. Sharpe
in boldface.

Grace spun the screen away from her before opening the message. She shot Sydney an uncomfortable sidelong look. “Sorry.”

“You’re just following orders,” Sydney said softly, “It’s not your fault he doesn’t trust me. It’s mine.” What she didn’t say was how much his mistrust bothered her, how much she wished things had started off differently between them.

She kept trying to tell herself it was the isolation of the safe house that had her hyperfocused on Sharpe, but that didn’t play because she’d been just as isolated—if not more so—in the lab on Rocky Cliff Island, and she hadn’t spent her time fantasizing about any of her guards, or thinking about her ex, Richard, or hell, imagining herself with Gabriel Byrne or one of the dark-haired hunks she usually gravitated toward in the movies.

No, she had Special Agent John Sharpe on the brain. Special Agent John Sharpe, who hadn’t spoken to her in four days and twelve hours, and who, as far as she could tell, wanted nothing more from her than information.

“He doesn’t trust anybody,” Grace corrected. “That’s why he’s so good at his job.”

“I’m betting it doesn’t make him much of a hit in the social department,” Sydney observed. She pushed back her chair at the kitchen table they were using as a workspace, and crossed the tiled floor to open the refrigerator and peer inside, just in case something interesting had magically appeared in there since the last time she’d checked. Which had been, oh, fifteen minutes or so earlier.

“Why do you ask?” Grace’s look was sly.

“Just looking for a weak spot.” Sydney sighed and shut the fridge before hiking herself up onto the kitchen counter. She was wearing jeans and a clingy red sweater she’d thought would cheer her up when she’d gotten dressed that morning. Her feet were laced into a pair of sneakers, even though it was doubtful she’d be going anywhere.

The shoes were a house rule, though: be ready to run, in case something bad happens.

“Sharpe doesn’t have any weak spots,” Grace said. “A few dents, maybe, but no gaps in the armor.”

Don’t ask,
Sydney told herself, but did it anyway. “Dents?”

That earned her a long look, but Grace answered, “There was a woman a few years back. A witness. It ended badly.”

“Ahem.” Jimmy tapped the computer screen. “Not to interrupt, but…”

“I saw men coming and going from that one once, carrying things,” Sydney said. “Storeroom, maybe?”

“Can you define
things?
”

“Not really. I was pretty far away.” Sydney tried to concentrate, but what she really wanted to do was ask about Sharpe’s ex. What sort of witness had she been? What exactly did “end badly” mean? Had it been a simple breakup that’d turned awkward, or had it been a double cross, like she’d had with Richard? Or worse, had it been a more final end, like
bang dead?

“We need a different satellite,” Jimmy groused, flipping through the views of the island. “I want thermals, high-def, that sort of thing.”

“Can’t do it,” Grace responded. “No tasking other satellites until further notice—Sharpe wants to keep all the info gathering in-house. His paranoia has kicked in. He’s got it in his head that Tiberius might be working with someone on the inside.”

That froze Sydney. “Why does he think that?”
And does it mean I’m not safe here anymore? Does it mean Tiberius knows where Celeste is?

“Because he’s a paranoid bastard,” a new voice said from the doorway.

Sydney gasped and spun, her heart freezing in her chest, then starting up again—entirely too fast—when she saw Sharpe standing there with his arms folded over his chest and his long, lean body propped up against the door frame.

He was wearing a dark gray suit and pale gray shirt, with a brightly patterned tie shoved in his breast pocket as though he’d worn it for a meeting and yanked it off immediately after. His eyes were dark, his expression unreadable, and the combined effect made the whole package seriously drool worthy.

A quiver took up residence in Sydney’s stomach. Damn it. She’d spent the past four days trying not to think about him—and failing miserably. Yet even at that, she’d forgotten how gorgeous he actually was.

Without meaning to, she took a step back, so she was even with Grace’s chair. Glancing down at the computer specialist, Sydney realized the woman hadn’t moved, hadn’t reacted to the surprise.

Ergo, she hadn’t been surprised.

“You could’ve warned me he was here,” Sydney muttered under her breath.

“Could’ve,” Grace agreed, “but I do so hate being predictable.”

She casually tilted the computer so Sydney could read the brief email giving his ETA at the safe house. The note gave no hint why he was there, nor did the closed expression on his strong, elegant face give any insight into his thoughts.

Suddenly, though, Sydney had the strongest feeling that he hadn’t come to speak with his teammates. He’d come for her.

“Is something wrong?” she took a step toward him. “Celeste?”

“Hugo hasn’t missed a check-in,” he said. It wasn’t the same thing as “they’re fine” but she knew it was probably the best she was going to get out of him.

Where have you been?
she wanted to ask.
Have you been busy? Were you avoiding me?
But she kept those questions to herself, because he didn’t owe her comfort, or an explanation. So instead she asked, “Why are you here?”

His eyes fixed on her and darkened, and there was a click of connection. Heat flared in her center, urging her to cross the short distance between them and touch the strong line of his jaw, tempting her to dig her fingers into his hair and hang on for the ride.

And from the heat that flared in his eyes when he looked at her, she wasn’t the only one feeling the urge.

“Grace said you were getting stir-crazy.” His voice had gone slightly rough, and the sound thrilled along her nerve endings like a caress. “She thought it’d do you some good to get out of here.”

“I’d kill to,” she said without thinking, then winced. “Figuratively, I mean. Sorry, I’m still not used to being around people who don’t necessarily consider that a figure of speech.”

“Noted.” Sharpe unfolded himself from the doorway and gestured toward the front door of the heavily guarded safe house. “You want to go or not?”

Sydney hung back, sudden nerves gathering alongside the heat of excitement in her belly. “Is it safe?”

“You’ll be wearing a vest and the location we’re going to is secure.” Again, not an absolute promise of safety. Just the facts, ma’am.

“Are you—” She broke off and swallowed hard. “Is this a plan to draw out the men who killed Danielle and Jay?”

“Would that bother you?”

“Not if I knew I was being used as bait.”

He gave her a long, assessing look. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to decide whether she was telling the truth, or if she’d surprised him. After a moment he said, “We already have the two men who broke into your house.”

“You captured them?” If that was where he’d been, he was entirely forgiven.

But he shook his head. “We found them…or rather what was left of them when Tiberius was through.” He paused. “The prints of one of the men match the partials from your kitchen—he must’ve been the one not wearing gloves. The other guy had traces of blood on one of his shoes. We’re running the DNA now, but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t match one or both of the victims.” He didn’t say where they’d been found or how they died and she didn’t ask.

She didn’t really think she wanted to know.

“That leaves us right back where we started,” Sydney said, staring at her toes on a beat of sadness. Guilt tugged at the thought of the domino chain she’d helped initiate. Yes, Tiberius was ultimately responsible for the killings, but so much of the violence had been initiated by her actions.

“Not entirely. We know more than we did before,” he countered. “And Tiberius is back on the island. I have a feeling things are going to break loose in the next few days, one way or the other.”

Sydney shivered, not wanting to know what “the other” might entail. “Can’t you just, I don’t know, blow up the island or something?”

His blue eyes glinted with a brief flash of amusement. “That’s not exactly kosher in the due process department. At the moment, we don’t even have enough to justify a raid on the mansion.” He grimaced, his frustration evident. “That’s according to our higher-ups, anyway. They want this done squeaky clean and by the books. He’s slipped away too many times before. We’re not taking that chance again. Besides—” now his expression turned sardonic “—I thought you wanted to protect your work. Isn’t that why you froze the machines rather than blanking them completely?”

“That, and because I figured I’d need the leverage if he caught me,” she answered honestly.

“You were going to trade the password for your freedom.” It wasn’t a question.

“Of course.” Her voice went defensive. “I was going to send everything I had to the authorities the moment I thought Celeste and I were safely hidden.”

“That plan has two major flaws,” Sharpe pointed out. “One, you and your sister will never truly be safe from him until he’s either dead or behind bars. And two, by the time you dropped the dime, he could’ve easily sold your bug. The damage would’ve already been done.”

Something in his eyes alerted her. “You know what he plans to do with the virus.”

He tipped his head. “We have a pretty good guess.” But he didn’t elaborate, emphasizing that he might be using her for information, but she wasn’t really part of the team. Glancing at Grace and Jimmy, who had given up all pretense of working and were avidly watching the exchange, Sharpe said, “Speaking of which, don’t you two have work to do?”

Jimmy grinned, unrepentant. “Yes, but this is way more entertaining.”

Sharpe grimaced and waved in the direction of the front door, and the deepening night beyond. He said to Sydney, “Do you want to get out of here or not?”

Something in his body language warned her that it wasn’t nearly that simple. “You’re sure it’s not a trap?”

“No. It’s pizza under armed guard by yours truly. You in or out?” He said it like he didn’t care which way she went, but there was a subtle challenge in his tone.

“I’m in,” she said finally, wondering why it felt like she’d just agreed to more than pizza.

“Good. I’ll get the Kevlar. Meet me by the front door.” He turned on his heel and strode out, leaving Sydney staring at the empty doorway.

She shot a look at Grace. “Was that a little strange, or is it my imagination?”

Grace looked torn, as though she didn’t want to talk about her team leader out of turn—especially with him potentially within earshot.