Play It Safe (The Safe House Series Book 2) (6 page)

“Get it to my hand.” He rotated beneath her so his grip met hers. She passed him the inhaler as the bronchospasms rippled through her airway, mostly because she could no longer muster thoughts or plans. Her vision clouded.

“Now sit.”

Samson stood and braced himself, feet planted crazy-wide like a captain on the deck of a deep-sea fishing ship caught in a hurricane. Mostly she just watched, unable to act. He backed up until his hands were at face level and commanded her to stay with him.

“Angela, lean forward. Come on.”

She did as she was told because the lights were low and there was so much movement of his flawless ass in her line of sight and the world dropped away.

“Angela, stay with me.”

“This…wasn’t…. supposed… to… happen.”

“Don’t talk. Put your lips around it, Angela.”

She did. He squeezed the inhaler in his grip.

A cool puff of air blasted past the roof of her mouth and into her airway. She unsealed her lips and started her four-count breaths, eyes closed. In four, out four. In four, out four.

Her lung sacs stopped quaking like dry leaves, but she still had no room to think or plan or be. She leaned forward for another dose.

Samson complied. Again and again, five times in all, until Angela felt as normal as was possible while being abducted and imagining the shadowed, dimpled contours of Samson’s ass, naked.

“You should keep this on you.”

“Pocket?”

“They may find. Use it for compliance. Bra would be better.”

He reached for her collar then cursed. “Why do you keep so buttoned up?”

“There was a chill in the air.”

“Liar.”

The interior was dark, confessional. She thought she might be able to say anything without repercussions, but she stopped herself just short of the truth:
because I’m afraid of what will happen if I don’t
.

Despite the jostling of the van, Samson zeroed in on a button near her chest, unfastened it, and slid the inhaler past the crest of her boob to nestle it where her strap met the cup. His large hand filled her shirt’s opening completely, so much so that the taut fabric between buttons was reluctant to release him. He dropped beside her on the bench.

In all the ways she had fantasized his first touch, careening down the road in near-darkness to an unsure fate didn’t come close. She imagined his disappointment at her size, so far from all those lacy underthings at the safe house. She imagined that he thought it an unpalatable necessity, touching someone who had betrayed him so intimately. Worst of all, she imagined it destroyed any chance that it would ever happen again.

“Sam—”

“Don’t.” He tipped his head back to rest against the side of the van. “Just don’t. We’re going to get out of here and get you to a safe place. Then you can finish that sentence.”

“What if we don’t?”

“What ifs aren’t an option for me.” He slid off the bench, knees to the floorboard. “I know it’s dark, but I need to you to do what I do, exactly as I tell you. No going rogue this time.”

“I promise.”

“Sit on the floor and slide your bound hands under your rear. Thread your legs through the opening your arms make so the zip ties are in front.”

He demonstrated. Mostly her brain was still back on the boob thing.

“In front. Got it.”  She did as he instructed. Three advanced degrees and that simple move wouldn’t have occurred to her. She straightened her catawampus glasses.

He rose to his feet, did something with his mouth near the ties, and in one swift motion his arms broke free.

“How did you do that?”

His hands reached for her ties. “These have to be tight for it to work. Sorry.” He cinched them until the plastic bit into her skin, and she felt her brisk heartbeat throb through her hands.

He turned her around, her back to his front and demonstrated the proper arm motion to snap the fastener. “Firm up your stomach. Yank your elbows down like you’re going to strike you hipbones. One fast motion. Everything you’ve got. Ready?”

Angela nodded.

He took a step back.

She planted her feet wide, wanting more than anything to appear stronger and more capable in Samson’s eyes. Determined the ties would snap on the first try, she channeled all her strength into the motion.

The plastic bit into her dermis then released. It took a few seconds for her mind to process that she had been successful, about the same amount of time it took her to realize that Samson may not know the Periodic Table by heart, but that he was a genius in his own way.

“I did it.” She didn’t recognize her voice—so vibrant, so infused with energy.

He didn’t take time to celebrate. Brakes squealed. The van stopped.

For good.

Doors near the cab slammed.

“We just ran out of time.”

Samson expected a cold-storage warehouse with impenetrable doors or a sparse, high-tech interrogation room or a pit where they could bulldoze dirt on top of him and make him part of a landfill.

He didn’t expect Julian Simkins’s private office.

After the informal meet-and-greet at their destination, three of Julian’s men probably wished they hadn’t come to work that day. And Samson’s right hand was, most likely broken in several places. His main objective, to keep Angela with him, had been successful, right up until Julian let her loose in a stocked laboratory and instructed her to recreate JNXN. From the crow’s nest of Julian’s office, Samson followed Angela’s movements like a mouse in a cage.

“We meet again,” said Julian, by way of opening old wounds. “Seems if we’re moving in the same circles, we should be on the same side.”

“We’re not in the same circle. Not anymore.”

Angela donned a white lab coat and busied herself with toggling various switches on the machines. She paused long enough to glance up through the wall of windows and make eye contact with Samson. Her eyes were so wide they damned near filled the lenses of her glasses.

Fuck
. How was he going to get them out of this?

“I’m not the enemy, Caine.”

Julian’s milky, pallid skin, took on a greenish hue in the unnatural laboratory light bleeding in from below. He moved behind his expansive desk and lit a cigarette—a pretentious fucking gray one with a tiny gold band near the filter. He held the cigarette like he’d picked up the foul habit in the LeMarais district of Paris on leave, summer of ‘06—delicate-like, as if he had sucked off half the guys around.

“I’m the last patriot left in the South African province of which you’re so fond.”

“Patriot?” Samson choked out a laugh. “You’re delusional. Patriots don’t allow innocents to die.”

“
Don’t
talk to me about innocents.” Julian’s words erupted from his dour mouth with a hushed, psychotic sibilance. His nostrils bloomed wide and red. “I was down the road when the rebels ambush the embassy. I ran when I heard her screams, like an animal at slaughter. They bound my hands and feet and did the same to the others—a translator, a secretary, some coward the State Department sent in for training purposes that cried the entire time. But not Marianne. Her goddamned blond hair. They obsessed over it.”

Samson’s throat swelled. He wanted Julian to shut up. He couldn’t bear to hear the details he knew were coming. Riley loved Marianne like a sister. They had met when Riley was a missionary and Marianne was a conversationalist with a degree in political science. Marianne was butchered because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Still, Samson tracked Angela’s movements.

Julian shot to his feet, unable to navigate the delicate tightrope he had established of a wealthy, political vigilante under complete control. He paced, stopping to brace himself and take a shaky drag every so often.

“They made me watch as they raped and sodomized and took turns pissing on my wife, and when her spirit broke and no sounds came from her open lips, they doused her with lighter fluid and set her hair on fire.”

Samson tried to block the onslaught of words. He didn’t want Julian’s dark memories any more than he wanted his. But the images ambushed him, others in Marianne’s place, first Riley then Angela, and his throat burned like he had swallowed accelerant.

“Five American sub-level diplomats died that day and our government did nothing out of fear it would imbalance the region. After I’m finished with them, those who killed Marianne will know imbalance and justice.”

Samson tried to speak, failed. He cleared his throat. “At the cost of more innocent lives.”

“This is war, Caine, backed by a secret alliance of nations with political and economic interests in the region. In war, natives are nothing. With nothing. These villagers grow up in pestilence and poverty and see no hope but the meager survival these rebels promise. I’m doing them a favor. All of them.”

Julian withdrew a photo from his pocket—the same photo his thugs had lifted on a shake-down of Samson’s possessions—and dropped it on the table beside Samson. The same photo Riley had carried on her every day after they had come across the young African boy selling bags of ice on the road to his village to make money for his family. The same photo Samson carried on him since the day Riley died, as a reminder of what emotional attachment gets you in this life.

Pain. Crippling, debilitating, soul-shattering pain.

Samson reared up, gripped Julian’s fancy blue lapels and shoved him, bodily, against the pristine walls of his office. Julian’s bodyguard, stationed at the door, stormed the tangle of two men until Julian plucked himself free and Samson corralled his mind back from the verge of wanting to choke the same prick who once called Riley a whore while on a bender in Cape Town.

Julian brushed his palms down his wrinkled suit and fished his half-length cigarette from the Armenian rug where it landed. “I thought that might get your attention.”

“Leave Manny out of this.”

“Emmanuel, as well as the others, will be given a choice. Leave when warned or die with the rebels.”

“The people in Mthatha and the surrounding villages don’t have the resources to leave. You know that. They have no more choice than you gave Angela’s brother. Had there been doctors in the region that day--”

“Marianne still would have died.”

Samson watched Angela load a vial containing a mossy liquid into a centrifuge and close the lid. Her wild-eyed expression was gone, replaced by confidence and an unyielding concentration he had only ever seen when she emptied six rounds into a target.

“What do you want, Julian? I must be part of your plan or you would have killed me by now.”

“You were a surprise insurance policy. A guarantee of sorts that Angela McAllister would play right into my hands and not go to the authorities. I know the disdain Rockwell feels for the usual government channels of law enforcement. We both bend the rules a bit to get what we want.”

“And now?”

“I’m in a position to return the favor.”

“I’ll never accept favors from you.”

“Surprising, given that the loves of our lives were such good friends and, coincidentally, both taken too soon.” Julian sat in the leather chair opposite Samson and crossed his legs. “I’m prepared to make you a proposition. Emanuel Jacobs and full papers allowing him protected status in the United States. Effective immediately.”

“And what of Angela’s brother?”

“Reunited on home soil by week’s end.”

“And in exchange?”

“I want you on the ground in the region. You know the terrain, the people, the language, the infrastructure. You know the soft spots, the weaknesses, the enemy’s jugular. I want you to lead operations. Eliminate the rebel faction responsible for Marianne’s death. Think of it as a higher purpose. Here, you protect but one. But in Mthatha and the remote villages that have no voice, no power, you’ll be protecting them when they cannot protect themselves. And, you’ll have the chance to atone for your…
choice
…in leaving Emmanuel behind.”

He might as well have said
selfishness
for the distaste with which he infused the word. Samson cut his eyes away from Angela to focus eye-darts Julian’s direction.

“Yes, Riley told Marianne everything in letters. How you weren’t ready for the responsibility of raising a boy. How you wanted time, alone, with your bride.”

Below, Angela shifted her eyeglasses further up her nose. She had hustled him—twice—to achieve her desired outcome. Why couldn’t he do the same to Julian?

“Angela wants no part of this,” said Samson. “It’s a perversion of everything she set out to do.”

“Her formula is a means to an end. Without her, there will be other ways. She’s smart. She’ll understand, in time, that choosing what benefitted her was really never a choice at all. Her brother will be returned. She will have no more call for protection and will resume her life, believing she saved her brother. The event will be isolated. A few international news agencies may pick it up. Largely ignored by the western world and masked as a climatological anomaly. It will take scientists years of posturing about global warming to uncover the truth. By then, nature will take care of all evidence.”

“In large doses, everyone on the planet will know.”

“That’s the beauty of aligning yourself with someone principled, Caine. I’ve witnessed the brutality of needless suffering. I simply want the concentrated and unequivocal justice our government is too cowardly to carry out.”

“And if the rebels simply move? Change locations to survive?”

“They’ll be contained by an alliance of warring factions.”

Samson rose to his feet, memorizing Angela’s movements as if he, too, would someday need to recall the formula to such a mysterious woman.

“You care for her.”

“I made a promise to protect her.”

Julian couldn’t know it went beyond mere duty the moment she disappeared at the open-air market and he knew loss. Again.

“Quite the martyr. I suppose no one understands this more than us. Those who have known love and lost it. Our lives ended the day theirs were taken. This is your opportunity to give Riley what she wanted all those years ago. And help someone you care about.”

“And if Angela learns the truth?”

“The deal is off.”

Samson watched Angela scribble something on a piece of paper. Christ, he hoped it wasn’t the correct formula. If it was, they were all as good as dead.

He opened his mouth to speak. Words of acceptance stalled on his tongue.

“You still have questions,” Julian said, more statement than anything.

“Just one.” Samson turned to Julian. “How soon do we go wheels-up?”

***

The laboratory had always been Angela’s safe zone: the second skin of a white coat, the residual heat of the burners, the ability to manufacture outcomes based on knowledge, nothing left to chance. Julian’s laboratory was no ordinary facility. His equipment and organization and materials were a chemist’s dream.

Except when that dream turned out to be a nightmare.

The only constant in the creation of her faux-formula was the frequency with which she sought out Samson in the windows above her. Every time she glanced up, without fail, he watched her. His words gyrated in her memory:
my objective is you
. She sank into the reassurance of those words. The lab may have been her element, but this world belonged to him.

“Doctor McAllister?”

Her skin rippled from the stark intrusion into her work-zone of humming machines and private calculations. Tension pooled in her gut. She turned.

“Yes?”

A ginger-haired man in a suit and tie stood beside the lab’s cornea-scan entrance. “Follow me, please.”

Angela glanced up at the wall of windows.

Samson was gone.

Her belly ache sublimated to the outer reaches of her body like a vapored carcinogen in a corked flask. “Where are we going?”

The red-haired man remained stone-faced.

She laid the glass stirrer she held forgotten in her hand on the cobalt surface, rearranged her lab coat so it felt less like a straight-jacket at her shoulders and squeezed the moisture from her palms against the pocket fabric.

He led her down a sterile hallway with no natural light source. They might have been underground for all she had seen after Samson bested half of their abductors. The remaining thugs had cinched blindfolds around his face first then hers. After a maze of three such corridors, the red-haired man paused at a door with a gallery of graphical warnings posted. He ushered her inside a storage room then retreated back the way they had come.

The silence was absolute, but for her stressed heartbeat against her eardrums.

A scuffle sounded in the corner.

The
whom-whom-whom
in her ears grew louder until she saw Samson round the far-end stainless steel cabinets. He cleared the distance to her before her instincts could pull back her internal defenses at being ambushed. Once he had her in his arms, a full-bodied hug that lifted her feet from the ground, she melted into him.

“I was so scared when I didn’t see you…” she said.

He set her down and threaded his fingers through her hair to her scalp. Forehead to forehead, breaths tangled, his eyes closed as if he fought off some explanation, some demon warring inside him for control. His memorable, comforting scent assailed her. She didn’t know if he wanted to ring her neck or…

His mouth parted to say something. Instead of releasing words, he captured her lips. The heat of his hands at her scalp was nothing compared to the fire he unleashed in his kiss.

The kiss was not born of relief, for that would have manifested as a brief brush of lips. It was not a kiss born of charity, for Samson demanded as much as he gave—the hot sparring of tongues, stroke for stroke—nor was it a kiss born of the scattered synapses fired off in the brain under duress. His body was fully engaged—arms that released his hold only to draw her against the full, solid length of him, hands that splayed low against her back and slid south ever-so-slowly, a knee that invaded the tight, parallel of her thighs.