Smoke and Mirrors (4 page)

Mr. Kingston was already there, along with the Chief of Staff, the Chief of Security, and members of the JTAC, JIC, and DIS. A few minutes later, the president of British Petroleum, the Columbian ambassador to Britain and a high-ranking CIA official entered.

She entered the minutes onto a specially modified iPad that was encrypted and could be neither copied nor forwarded by her.
Another of IT’s babies
, she thought, eyeing the souped-up device with professional interest.

It might have seemed strange that no one ever considered that
she
could remember what had been said at the meetings. But then, her current position had been given her because she was so closed-mouthed. Furthermore, she prided herself on her work. A second generation Englishwoman, her British Colony-born, Indian parents could not have been more pleased with their daughter’s line of work.

Not that they knew anything more than that she was an employee of the British Government.

Two women entered the annex to C’s office, and she added their names and the time of their arrival. One was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist group and the other headed up MI5’s anti-drug branch. Then, when C gave her the go-ahead, she closed the door and typed 120 wpm with 98% accuracy. The meeting concluded three-and-a-quarter hours later.

Luckily, it was still early enough for her to meet her boyfriend at their favorite club, which she did, consciously forgetting the barrage of information she had processed onto the electric screen.

•   •   •

C had more trouble dismissing the day’s affairs. It took him three stiff whiskies and Chopin’s
Nocturne in C Sharp Minor
to finally unwind. Then he played five moves in an online chess game against an Eastern European friend and went to bed in the guest room.

He didn’t sleep for some time. Once, sex would have done some good. Now, age and indifference won out over baser yearnings. He lay flat on his back, relieved that his head was still the same distance from the bed’s cherry frame. It might not be much, but he was still as tall as he’d ever been.

Tall like Brad. Tall like Parker.

Had he done the right thing? The other members of the night’s meeting had expressed a variety of reservations. But in the end, agreeing that the goals may have shifted, C held the ultimate say, so she’d gone. He’d have given anything to be a fly on the wall when she showed up at the Cagliari villa.

A smile flickered on his normally serious mouth. They certainly were a well-fitting pair if they could stand the fireworks such relationships ignited. He’d known about that once, long ago.

When at last he fell asleep, he dreamt of a dark-haired woman, Colombian drug cartels, stolen Russian weapons and F & M’s royal label blue Stilton cheese.

I
was left standing on the bougainvillea-scented doorstep of an enormous Italian villa while the driver presented my card to an impeccably dressed maid. Nerves aside, my alias wasn’t as different from me as I thought she might be, because Alasdair MacLeod, SIS Cobbler and DIF, was a genius.

I could hear the melodic strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata drifting through the open-windowed mansion. I managed a soft smile, hoping to encourage the reluctant woman.

Of average height, with an unexpectedly severe expression, her black hair was twisted professionally behind the lines of her smooth, dark and rather patrician face. She had frowned up at me and berated The Firm’s undercover driver for my unexpected presence. Undeterred by her remonstrations, he gave my credentials once again and waited until she calmed.

“Dottoressa Hermanas, mi scusi per difficoltà. It’s just,” she said, eying me with further skepticism, “Signor De Torres has only ever dealt with your predecessor. It is highly unusual for a…a–”

Feeling the secondary language roll off my tongue, I said, “A woman to be a man’s physician?”

Her head tilted once. “Sì. Your driver says you are filling in for il Dottore while he’s away?”

I offered her my license and a handwritten note from ‘il Dottore’ himself. “You’ll see; I’ve only been hired temporarily by Dottore Mancini, while he visits his daughter in Canada. She’s had a baby; so he’s gone to meet his first granddaughter. He’ll be back within a month. If you would rather me send another doctor – a man, perhaps?”

But she was already shaking her head, shooing away the driver and gesturing me in. “How lucky for him. You must tell him to send photos. I was not blessed with a daughter.” Her finger waved before my eyes, brandishing the God who had been so cruel to her. “Five sons. And not one of them has a daughter.”

Her words filtered into one compartment of my mind, while I filed every detail of my palatial surroundings to another. De Torres certainly lived well; I marveled at the understated opulence evident in everything from the polished marble floors to the murmuring fountains.

I walked beside his housekeeper, down the length of the flower-strewn courtyard and back into the parallel columned hallway opposite where I had entered the square villa. A medley of floral scents wafted on the warm sea currents, but it did nothing to assuage my mounting dread.

The past week had been a horror show. Brad waking at dawn wearing an impenetrable mask. He’d acted as though nothing had happened. All business, curt and refractory, he had checked himself out of the hospital and disappeared into Vauxhall HQ. I hadn’t troubled to follow him, knowing I didn’t–
don’t
–have it in me to be there for another person. Temporary. For the moment. Clinical and detached. All me. I wasn’t sure if I’d been born that way or if certain events made me forget whether I had ever had it to begin with. Either way, I wasn’t what Brad needed and, until this moment, I’d been glad for it. Brad was built for someone better, someone who could match his simmering passion, humor and deep faith that the world might not be as big a shithole as I thought.

My skin prickled with a foul sweat. How would he react to this? To seeing me? The element of surprise was a big part of C and Alasdair’s plan. Keep Giovanni at arm’s length and let it play out naturally so Alberto felt right about the situation.

I had liked that part the least.

And all at once, the adagio was infinitely louder.

We were in a whitewashed portico, surrounded on three sides by grape-covered pillars that soared up to a carved ceiling, spanning a flagstone surface topped only by a grand piano and its bench. The sea was smashing cliffs somewhere below us, and the entire scene was reminiscent of The Godfather.

Brad’s broad, white-shirted back was all too familiar in its openly sensuous posture: jean clad thighs spread the necessary distance, bared toes caressing the pedals, fingers doing the same to white, unbelievably white, keys. I knew his eyes were closed even though his thick dark hair was the only part of his head I could see. Knew this as I knew he had finished two large tumblers of the Highland Park sitting atop the piano with nose-thumbing Scottish pride. A Cuban cigar burned in a Deruta pottery dish, and I guessed Signora Personality must have shuddered to see it used as an ashtray.

She said, “Signor De Torres, il Dottore is here as you wished. Shall I leave you?”

Three more stanzas were played before he raised his left hand in an imperious gesture of dismissal. I fought an urge to snort. He was a master of theatrics, Mr. Bradley Milton. And too damnably sexy, I noticed begrudgingly.

She curtsied and raised an eyebrow at me, as if to wish me luck in an ill-fated situation, and disappeared behind the thick wooden doors I had seen when we entered. She closed them, and I waited until he finished the haunting piece of music. When the last note died, I couldn’t help but say, “Bravo. È un maestro pianista anche.”

“You’re not Mancini.” His words were a low growl of displeasure.

And then he turned. On the bench. Drink balanced with the tips of his fingers and the butt of the loosely held cigar. His hair was unkempt. His shirt unbuttoned, displaying a tanned and bandaged chest that took my breath and a few heartbeats away. Pleased he could read my annoying reaction, he stood and sauntered toward me. Appraising me plainly, he tilted his head back and drained the remainder of the third portion.

I held out my hand. “Dr. Alexandra Hermanas.”

He passed the drink to his opposite hand and lifted my fingers to his lips. “A pleasure to meet you, Alexandra.”

“It’s Dr. Hermanas.” I dropped my hand adding, “And you shouldn’t drink so much.”

A flicker of anger charged his handsome face. “I don’t pay a doctor to tell me how to live my life.”

I snapped open my bag, procuring several clean bandages. “Just to patch up your holes then? Take off your shirt.”

The dark eyes narrowed moodily, but he shed the garment, folding it before laying it on top of my bag, drink placed beside it. He sucked deep from the cigar. “You’re not at all like your predecessor,” he commented with a sideways blow of seductive smoke.

I had an odd sense of déjà vu as I yanked off the nearest plaster. We’d done this once before. In London. “You will make a mess of yourself.”

He didn’t answer me, just moved in any direction I pushed him, until at last, hands above his head, I straightened out, finished with the job.

“May I put my shirt back on?”

I forced myself to look him in the eyes. “You don’t seem to be completely sold on wearing one.”

Dipping to unfold it, I saw him hide a smile of sorts. My vision lingered on the dark trail of hair that twisted its way down from his abdomen and under the top button of his low-slung jeans. I had glimpsed it before, but never admired it in the light of a Mediterranean afternoon. An inconvenient rush of heat filled parts of me I’d rather not have been thinking of at that moment.

He shrugged himself into the custom dress shirt, rolling the sleeves to his elbows and buttoning the center hole, cigar clenched between straight rows of elegant teeth.

“Better?”

“I didn’t say I liked it better,” I muttered, trying to look anywhere but at his amazing physique.

For a moment, Brad Milton glimmered in the closed depths of the dark eyes before De Torres repossessed them, moving back to the piano where he poured himself a fourth undiluted measure. I didn’t know how much of this was part of his legend, but I guessed it wasn’t per usual, as he moved without an alcoholic’s long-practiced walk.

“Will there be anything else, Signor?”

His back stiffened as he tilted his head and drained another large portion of the golden liquid. “You’ve done all that can be done.”

Can be done. Not should be.

I had an unexpected urge to touch him. Instead, I walked out to the car. Sat in the air-conditioned luxury. Watched the villa disappear from behind my reflective sunglasses. And felt inexplicably empty.

•   •   •

A few hours had passed, and I was washing instruments used to stitch a young boy’s foot, when Mancini’s secretary swept into the surgery.

“Signor De Torres is here to see you.”

My traitorous heart had a slight case of hysterics. Irritated, I half-growled, “Tell him to wait until I’m finished.”

She opened her mouth, seemingly poised to argue the point, when he strode past her into the green-hued clinic. I threw down the scissors and pressed my palms against the metal sink.

Sensing trouble, the secretary vanished in a mist of expensive perfume.

De Torres slammed the door behind her, turning the old fashioned key in its lock. He was seething drunk, but to his liver’s credit, he was still standing.

There was a conceit to his step, and I found my gaze narrowing as he stalked closer. His eyes were wild, and his shirt was, as I had last seen it, open at the neck and loose at the tails. He looked thoroughly disreputable and more than a little scary.

“I don’t need a fucking babysitter, Alexandra,” he said, his voice edged with the charcoal of fury. He pressed into my space, breath spiced with whisky. His shoulders were impossibly wide, his face like flint.

“No.” I turned from him, further perturbed by the fact his breath against my skin caused a slow roll of lust to work its way from my neck downward. “You need a cold shower and some etiquette lessons.”

I heard his jaw clench before he all but shouted, “Fuck you, Alex. Fuck C and fuck everyone else in bloody SI–”

The sound of my hand slapping his face reverberated in the small room, but it was nothing to the aftershock in my hand. The freaking man was made of iron.

“Shut up,” I added for good measure. Then I pushed him over so I could better unroll the blood pressure cuff. My hands were shaking, but as luck would have it, his eyes were on my face.

He appeared stunned, not from my relatively harmless hit, but rather from the shock of his almost blunder.

Taking advantage of his momentary silence, I unsnapped the cuff and rolled it around his muscular arm. His skin was hot. Dry hot. And he flinched when my cold hands brushed him. “Hold still.” I hoped to hell my own erratic vitals would choose to listen as well.

He frowned in displeasure. “Don’t do that.”

“Shhh.” I put my stethoscope to his inner elbow. Shaking my head a moment later, I pulled the stethoscope from my ears. “Does 212 over 110 mean anything to you?” His anger was surprisingly contagious. “But you don’t care, do you?” I had intended on adding ‘about your health’, but my subconscious left the statement ambiguous.

He rubbed his reddened cheek with long fingers, a thumb skimming along his tightened mouth. “Don’t imagine you know the first thing about me.” His voice was low now, mocking and cruel.

“I know you’re not the only one who’s lost someone,” I spat, annoyed at his ability to splinter his way beneath my skin.

He paused, and ever so slowly ripped the cuff from his arm. “So you noticed Sammy and Nigel died?” The meanness was punctuated by the sound of his heel stepping away from me.

“Fuck you.” My words reached a crescendo that sent Mancini’s secretary flying out the front door.

His gladiator’s gaze was devoid of life. “Touched a nerve, did I? My apologies, I didn’t realize you actually cared about people. I thought that self-sufficient, smugness went straight through you.”