Match Play (11 page)

“Yeah,” he echoed. “Wow.”

She wasn't quite sure she liked his expression. It was one part satisfied lover, two parts possessive male as his gaze skimmed over her flushed face.

“Any time you want lunch delivered to your bathtub, Pud, just let me know.”

“I will. Now, I think we'd better get dressed and get to work.”

As if to add emphasis to her statement, the house phone buzzed. Dayna reached across Luke's naked chest to snag the receiver.

“This is Victor Woodhouse, Ms. Duncan. I've retrieved the surveillance tapes. The images are best viewed on the high-resolution monitor here in the security center. It's on the ground floor, next to the business center.”

“Thanks. We'll be down in ten minutes.”

While Luke put the razor he'd purchased in the gift shop to work, Dayna scrambled into clean underwear, gray linen slacks and a short-sleeved silk turtleneck in emerald green that covered the whisker burns on her neck and shoulders. Her hair went into its usual ponytail but, mindful of the media that would descend on her in a few hours, she added mascara and eye shadow along with her lip-gloss.

Not that she needed either. The woman who stared back at her from the dresser mirror showed zero signs that she'd curled up on the floor in agony less than twenty-four hours ago. This woman buzzed with energy and impatience to get on with the task that had brought her to St. Andrews. She also wore the look of a woman well loved.

Whoops. Wrong choice of words. Love didn't constitute part of the equation. She and Luke had agreed on that.

So why did the sight of him emerging from the bathroom with his jeans riding low on his hips make her pulse jump and skip like a barefoot kid trying to cross an asphalt road on a hot summer's day?

Throat tight, she watched him remove the wrapping and pins from the shirt he'd bought in the gift shop and drag the red knit over his head.

“Ready?” she asked when he'd shoved his feet into his loafers.

“Ready.”

 

Woodhouse was waiting for them in the security center. The man took Dayna's hand in his bulldog grip. When he reached for Luke's, his nostrils twitched and a surprised look came over his face.

Dayna bit her lip. Unfazed, Luke supplied the answer to the man's unspoken question.

“Gardenia bath salts.”

“Yes, of course. I've cued the surveillance tapes to an hour before your attack, Ms. Duncan. I think you'll find this sequence very interesting.”

With Dayna and Luke at either shoulder, Woodhouse seated himself in front of a flat-screened monitor displaying a frozen image of the kitchens.

“As you may suppose, several of the women competing in the tournament require special diets.”

The screen showed what looked like the vegetable prep area of the kitchen, where several cooks' helpers washed fresh fruit and vegetables with an oversized sprayer.

“Miss Wu is especially particular about her meals. Her trainer supplies us with a daily menu designed, he tells us, to provide her with maximum energy and power. He delivered today's menu yesterday morning, an hour before your attack.” Woodhouse rolled the tape. “There he is.”

Her jaw tightening, Dayna leaned forward and watched the Korean confer with the head chef for several minutes before turning to leave. On his way out of the kitchen, he paused beside a cart containing ice buckets lined up in neat rows.

“The buckets are empty,” Dayna observed.

“The bottles that went into them are still in the wine cooler,” Woodhouse explained. “But each of the buckets was tagged with a card identifying the recipient and her room number.”

“So our friend saw a bucket would be delivered to my suite. But how could he know which bottle would go with it?”

“He couldn't.”

Keying in a series of commands, Woodhouse switched to a video showing the length of a hallway. The scene he cued up showed elevator doors opening. A skinny male in his early twenties pushed a cart out of the elevator and rolled it down the hall.

“Do you recognize the waiter who delivered the champagne to your room yesterday, Ms. Duncan?”

“I wasn't there when it arrived.”

“I was,” Luke stated. “That's him.”

“His name is Benjamin Howard. He's a local bloke, has worked for us for three years. He started his deliveries on the second floor and worked his way up. In this sequence, he's delivering a bottle to Ms. Wu's suite. When he knocks on the door, note the time on the screen.”

One-seventeen. A half hour after Dayna had come off the course.

“Here he is, exiting Ms. Wu's suite. Again, please note the time.”

“One-thirty six,” Dayna read. “Almost twenty minutes later.”

“After which he took the elevator to your floor and delivered your bottle.”

This stretch of video showed Luke opening the door to the waiter. Howard carried the silver tray containing the ice bucket and a crystal flute into Dayna's suite. He exited again a scant three minutes later.

“He stayed inside just long enough to deposit the tray and pocket the tip I gave him,” Luke confirmed.

“Back up to the sequence at the doors at Miss Wu's suite,” Dayna instructed tersely. “Right there, after he goes inside. Can you zoom in on the cart?”

“Certainly.”

Clicking the keys, Woodhouse enlarged the cart until the champagne bottles tipped to the side in their silver buckets looked like a row of drunken soldiers.

“Not one of those bottles is uncorked,” she pointed out with a serrated edge to her voice. “Now cut back to the sequence at the door to my suite and zoom in on the bottle.”

There it was, larger than life. The silver bottle stopper in the shape of a thistle plugging the bottle the waiter carried into Dayna's suite.

“I want to talk to Mr. Howard.”

“So do we,” Woodhouse said. “Unfortunately, he didn't show up for work this morning. When I rang up his house a bit ago, his mother indicated he didn't come home last night. She wasn't unduly worried. Apparently he plays on a local rugby team and has caroused all night with his mates before.”

“But…” Dayna said with a hollow feeling in her stomach, sensing what was coming.

“But,” Woodhouse continued heavily, “none of his mates have seen him, either.”

D
ayna received a signal from Hawk as she and Luke were on the way back to her suite. In response to his terse request, they detoured to his room.

When he opened the door, she could see at a glance he was
not
a happy camper. His mouth was drawn into a tight line and what looked like a permanent crease was carved into his forehead.

By contrast, the reason for his sour mood brimmed with energy and enthusiasm despite what must have been a killer flight. Jilly's calf-length suede skirt swirled around her ankles as she rushed across the room to envelope Dayna in a fierce hug.

“You gave us all one heck of a scare, girlfriend!”

“I gave myself one, too. But the docs say I'm good to go.”

“Hawk told me.”

Jilly's blue eyes raked Dayna from head to toe, as if to verify her condition for herself. Whatever she saw drew her inky black brows into a V.

“You've got some kind of a rash on your neck. Did you show the doctors? It might be a reaction to whatever those bastards put in your champagne.”

Dayna took a quick look in the mirror over the console table in the entryway and saw that the cowl of her silky turtleneck had slipped down enough to expose the skin reddened by Luke's whiskers. Shooting him an accusing glare, she tugged up her collar and turned back to Jilly.

“It's not a rash. Just an itchy patch.”

When her friend looked unconvinced, Dayna distracted her with introductions. “This is Captain Luke Harper. Luke, meet Gillian Ridgeway. She's currently on sabbatical from the State Department and filling in at the agency Hawk and I work for.”

Jilly didn't appear overly impressed by Luke's rugged good looks or friendly smile. Probably because Dayna had let down her guard after a couple of glasses of wine one evening and described how a certain jerk of a pilot had bruised both her heart and her ego.

Gillian shook his hand with a hurt-my-friend-again-and-you-die look in her eyes. Then her expression suddenly altered. Sniffing delicately, she glanced from Luke to Dayna and back again.

“That's a very distinctive after-shave, Captain Harper. What is it? Garden rose? Magnolia?”

“Gardenia.”

“Interesting,” Jilly murmured, with a speculative glance at her friend.

The exchange baffled Hawk, which didn't particularly improve his mood. He and Jilly must have duked it out royally at the airport. Dayna couldn't wait to get a private report from one or both of them.

“Did you talk to hotel security?” he wanted to know.

“We did.”

All business now, Dayna related the sequences she and Luke had viewed on the security videos. She relayed, as well, the grim news that the waiter who delivered the champagne to her room had gone missing.

“No one's seen or heard from him since he finished his shift last night.”

“Has anyone contacted the police?”

“Woodhouse said he was going to talk to the mother again and ring the police if she didn't. The guy has been missing less than twenty-four hours, though. They probably won't launch a formal investigation.”

“They will once I brief our counterparts in British Intelligence. MI-6 needs to know about this and the possible source of the orchid extract.”

Possible
being the operative word. They still had no hard and fast proof the Koreans had supplied the substance or injected it into the champagne. The circumstantial evidence was starting to stack up, however.

“If it came from sumo-mama's bag of tricks,” Dayna said grimly, “I'll get a sample. The question we haven't addressed yet, though, is
why
the Koreans would try to sideline me.”

She'd been thinking about that. A lot.

“Kim Li's watchdogs have seen us talking. I don't think she was wired but I could have been wrong. If they heard talk of defection, they may have decided to make a preemptive strike.”

“That's one possibility,” Hawk agreed. “We also have to consider the odds Kim Li knew her conversations with you were being monitored. She and her father could be setting us up to take a fall and make the U.S. look bad in the process.”

“There's another consideration,” Luke put in. “Dayna burned up the links in the initial rounds. The media were all over her when she came off the course yesterday morning. Could be Tigress Wu decided to pull a Tanya Harding and eliminate her competition.”

The same thought had occurred to Dayna. She knew she wasn't any real threat to Wu, but she'd competed in too many national and international events to minimize the desperation or greed or twisted hopes that drove some athletes. And Wu Kim Li hated to share the spotlight as much or more than she hated to lose.

“Until we know for sure she or her father had a hand in the attack, we have to operate on the assumption they still want to defect.”

Hawk nodded. “So we don't let any of the Koreans, including Kim Li and her father, know we suspect them. Speaking of Dr. Wu…” He raked a hand through his hair. “I planned to bend an elbow with him in the bar again this afternoon, but you'll need back-up at the news conference and afterward.”

“I'll cover her back,” Luke stated flatly.

The two men locked stares.

“You know how to arm and fire anything smaller than a ten-thousand-pound bomb, Harper?”

“I can put a bullet where it needs to go. I'll have to swing by my flat and pick up my service pistol…unless you have a weapon here I can use.”

Hawk hiked one leg of his jeans and loosened the Velcro on an ankle holster. “Take this. I'll carry my Sig.”

He watched with a professional's keen eye as Luke angled away, slid the snub-nosed .38 from its holster, opened the cylinder and checked the rounds.

“Remington Gold Sabers.” Luke snapped the cylinder back into place. “They'll do. What about you?” he asked Dayna. “Are you armed?”

“I am.” She patted the fancy designer fanny pack that went everywhere with her. “A Kahr PM40 micro-compact double action.”

The realization she'd been armed the entire time they'd spent together put a kink in Luke's gut. He'd accepted the fact that she and Callahan worked for some super-spook agency he'd never heard of. He'd
almost
accepted the danger that obviously came with her job. The knowledge someone had spiked her champagne with a potentially lethal substance fueled a cold, deadly fury in his heart.

“I'll help, too,” the black-haired looker who'd just joined their group asserted. “I didn't have time to work a permit to carry a weapon through airport security, but if either of you has another spare I…”

“No way!”

Callahan's flat negative cut her off in midsentence. Unruffled, she met his glare head-on.

“You of all people know I can handle a weapon, Hawk. Or don't you have any faith in your instructional skills?”

“We agreed, Gillian. At the airport. With Rogue back in the game, you're here strictly as an observer. You don't leave my sight while you're in St. Andrews. Or Rogue's,” he amended through clenched jaws. “And I'm sure as hell not answering to your father if I let you carry concealed without a permit, here or anywhere else.”

“Fine. Then I'll simply provide Rogue and Captain Harper with another set of eyes and ears. What time is this media event, anyway?”

“Four this afternoon.” Dayna checked her watch and swore under her breath. “That gives me less than a half hour to bring you up to speed on my contacts with Wu Kim Li. Or has Hawk already done that?”

“He's filled me in on the basics. You and I can talk as we walk.”

Slinging her purse strap over her shoulder, Jilly accompanied Dayna to the elevators just across the hall. They left the door open for Luke. While he bent to strap the borrowed .38 to his ankle, Callahan muttered a less than complimentary remark about long-legged, hard-headed females with more brains and beauty than common sense.

Luke jerked his chin up. “Are you saying she's a loose cannon?” he asked sharply. “If so, we don't need her adding to the mix.”

“Too bad you couldn't convince Rogue of that,” Callahan shot back. “You must have had plenty of opportunity for chitchat, seeing as the two of you waltzed in here wearing the same perfume.”

“It's bubble bath, not perfume, and this isn't about Dayna and me.” Dragging the hem of his jeans over the holster, Luke rose and hooked a thumb in the direction of the two women. “It's about that blue-eyed bombshell out there in the hall. Is she or is she not a liability?”

“Our boss doesn't think so,” the agent ground out. “Neither does Rogue.”

“But you do.”

“Yes. No. Hell, I don't know.” Huffing out a frustrated breath, he shoved a hand through his hair again. “I've known Gillian Ridgeway since her high school days. As she indicated, I was the one who taught her to shoot. She's smart, she's quick and she has sound instincts on the firing range.”

She also had Callahan torqued so tight a hydraulic power wrench wouldn't loosen his screws. Luke could sympathize with the man.

“Guess we'll both have to learn to live with long-legged, hard-headed females.”

“Live with?” The other man's glance whipped back to Luke. “You planning to make this temporary arrangement with Rogue permanent?”

“I'm thinking about it.”

“Does she know that?”

“Not yet.”

For the first time since he'd opened the door, Callahan's mouth relaxed into something approaching a smile.

“Good luck breaking the news. I've worked several ops with Rogue. She doesn't take kindly to being surprised.”

“You handle your woman, I'll handle mine.”

Callahan's near-smile disappeared. “Gillian isn't my woman. She's engaged to an Ivy-League type.”

“I didn't see a ring.”

“It's not official yet, and even if it wasn't…”

He bit back whatever he was going to say, leaving Luke with several unanswered questions.

Not least of which was how the hell he
was
going to break the news to Dayna that he didn't intend to let her walk away from him again. He'd figure that out later. Right now his number-one priority was keeping her alive.

 

Out in the hall, Gillian was putting her friend through a similar inquisition. “What's happening with you and the studly Captain Harper?”

“It's…complicated.”

“Not that complicated, or you two wouldn't smell like identical spring gardens.”

Hoping to escape, Dayna stabbed the elevator button. Jilly refused to be deterred.

“C'mon, girl, give! Last time Harper's name came up in conversation between us, you said something about roasting his chestnuts over a slow fire. When and how did he get a reprieve?”

“He hasn't. Not completely.”

“Sure smells like it to me.”

Trapped, Dayna threw a look over her shoulder at the two men. “We were playing to the cameras. Pretending a reunion to divert attention from the contacts Hawk and I made with the Wus. We got a little carried away with our roles, that's all.”

Jilly heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Do I
look
stupid?”

“Okay! All right! What's between us is as much pleasure as it is business, and that's all you're going to get out of me.”

“Until later,” her friend predicted.

Luke joined them then, putting an end to that conversation and kicking off another as the doors pinged open on an empty elevator cage.

“If you don't want to tip off the Koreans that we suspect them, what do we say caused your attack?”

“We'll leave it at cause unknown. Could have been anything. Overexertion, a twenty-four-hour virus, an allergic reaction…”

“Too many bubble baths,” Jilly offered with an innocent air.

Dayna ignored her. “And we probably shouldn't label it an attack. More like an episode. I got a little short of breath and we drove to the hospital to have it checked out.”

“Don't forget the ambulance crew,” Luke reminded her. “The reporters will have ferreted out the fact that they responded.”

“Then they'll also know the EMTs didn't provide any medical assistance. I was back to normal—almost—when the crew arrived.”

They had the details hammered out by the time the doors open again. The lobby was as crowded as usual. Dayna responded to the questions and concerns of a half-dozen golfers, sportscasters and tournament officials before escaping. Once out on the cobblestone street, she was stopped several times by well-wishers and fans requesting autographs. It was close to four when she, Jilly and Luke approached the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse, standing in majestic splendor just off the eighteenth green of the Old Course.