Spartan Resistance (19 page)

In that picture, she and Brenden were no longer standing on the step they had been on seconds before.

Rob appeared in that empty spot in the next image. Laszlo and the woman had barely shifted position, so his appearance really was as sudden as the images made it look. Mariana didn’t know a lot about how the vampires jumped. They were reluctant to talk about it because it was a psi skill. She did know that jumping into a crowded area was a huge risk. Someone might move into the place where they were jumping to, if they even knew where to jump in the first place. Brenden had relayed the position to Rob before Rob had jumped. But that took even more psi talents that Mariana didn’t even know they had.

Then she noticed Kieran standing at the far corner of the table, hovering by Nayara’s elbow. Like always, he was standing in the background, out of the focus of the group.
He
would have the necessary skills and Brenden had said something about Kieran taking care of it. He would have taken the location from Brenden and given it to Rob, in the few seconds between Brenden jumping away and Rob landing in the same place.

Mariana looked at Deonne. “What now?” she asked. “Does this change anything?”

Deonne frowned, looking down at the images. “I don’t think so, although I would like to run a few regression analysis trials using different variables before I say that absolutely.” She glanced at Nayara and Ryan. “This is going to intensify interest around Mariana and vampire rights. That will mean polarization.”

Ryan crossed his arms. “Perhaps that will help. If people take sides, it means they give a damn. That’s a lot better than the world playing dead on us like it has been for two centuries.”

“Caring means passion and passion is an energy that can move mountains,” Laszlo said.

Everyone looked at him and he shrugged. “Von Bismarck,” he said. “A Prussian general from a few centuries ago.”

“A Prussian spoke of passion? I was of the understanding that all Prussians were military fighting machines,” Rob said.

Deonne smiled. “Weren’t all the Scots fighting machines in your time, Rob?”

“Aye.”

“And wasn’t it their passion for freedom that made them fight?”

Rob grinned. “Ye have me there.”

Deonne laughed and turned to Nayara. “I’ll run the analysis right now and get back to you in…an hour? But our best course right now is to do nothing. Go about our lives and our daily business. Let the issues build pressure by themselves.”

Kieran stepped forward. “I suggest we continue to guard Mariana when she’s not on the agency grounds and perhaps Mr. Wolffe, too. Tonight’s attack was coordinated with at least two people involved. That means organization. Whoever organized it won’t like it when they realize that Mariana looks more sympathetic than they do.”

“How did they know I would be there?” Mariana asked. “I didn’t announce it. Do we have a leak?”

Deonne shook her head. “The guest list for the event was widely publicized by the gallery. Glitter draws glitter and the more high powered the guest list, the more people they would subscribe. I believe you’ll find that Mr. Wolffe has been on that list almost from the start.”

“Laszlo, please,” he said. “And yes, I go to the summer launch every year.”

“They guessed you might be with him and their guess paid off.” Deonne shrugged. “Although I don’t think they expected Mr.….Laszlo, to show resistance. No offence.”

“They didn’t bargain on Brenden or Rob, either,” Laszlo pointed out. “My contribution was to dive flat and preserve my own skin.”

“Aye and he did a fine job of it, too,” Rob added. “I had a devil of a time wrestling him back up onto his feet.”

Laughter broke up the meeting and as everyone drifted away, Mariana saw Nayara glance at Ryan, then slip through the same door Brenden had taken.

Mariana drew in a deep breath and let it out, then she reached for Laszlo’s hand. “Come with me,” she told him.

* * * * *

It took longer than Brenden expected for someone to show up at the door. He had also thought it would be Ryan who came to slap him down. He stepped back, hiding his confusion. “Nia. Come in.”

She moved inside with a gracious nod and looked around. “Greeks and Romans…so much in common and such bitter rivalry. It would be easy to think you were in Athens, stepping in here. But the room is almost unchanged from the original villa specifications.” She smiled at him. “It’s nicely austere,” she added.

“Nice? And you lived in Byzantium, the land of gilded everything,” he chided her.

“You’re reading one of your precious books.” She walked over to the table where the leather-bound volume laid open and turned her head to look at it. The script was old Greek.

“Plutarch?” she asked curiously.

“‘Life of Lycurgus’,” Brenden confirmed. “It’s part of
Parallel Lives
.”

“Lycurgus was a Spartan?”

“If he existed, yes.”

“You don’t remember him?”

“Before my time,” Brenden said shortly. “But they say he was the inventor of the Three Pillars…do you know them?”

Nayara surprised him by replying, “The three pillars of Spartan society. Equality, military strength and austerity. Is that why you’re reading it right now?”

“Is that why you’re here? To make sure I snap back into line?”

She touched the book, very gently. “It looks like you’re already on the way.”

Brenden sat back down with a sigh. “Working on it,” he said gruffly. Nia was a friend and probably understood him better than anyone else in the world. It was difficult to lie to her. Perhaps that was why she had come to see him and not Ryan.

Nayara sank down onto the chair opposite him. “Did you know I once worked for a national espionage organization?”

Surprised, he shook his head. “Which one?”

“It doesn’t really matter. They all worked the same way. I was an analyst, very low on the totem pole. This was in the early twentieth century. Women weren’t valued for their brains, then.”

Brenden grinned. “Hard to imagine you letting them get away with that.”

“You know how it goes. It’s just the way things were and we knew no better than the humans around us.” She shrugged. “There was a situation they presented to me. A branch of the organization in another country had been leaking information. It was an odd set up. They already knew they had a spy from a counter organization working in the office. They had been running him for months—”

“Running him?” Brenden asked.

“They left him alone and fed him only unimportant information, or information that looked important but was wrong in small ways that made it essentially useless. He was also useful for leaking information to the opposition that we wanted them to have, in a way that would make them think the information was good.”

“I see, yes.”

“The information that was leaking from this office wasn’t the information they had been feeding him.”

“A second spy?”

“Exactly. When the first spy had been discovered, the remaining staff in the building had been vetted carefully, more closely than ever before. All of them passed inspection. It was all done very quietly, so no alarm went up that the real spy would notice. But when the leak continued, they came to me for my opinion. They used to call it a woman’s intuition in those days.”

Brenden smiled. “They used to call it something else, where I was living, then.”

“I’m not the least surprised.”

“What did you figure out, about the spy?”

“They were all looking at the work everyone did in that office. What information flowed across what desk, who had access to the sensitive facts that the opposition obtained. Very analytic, very methodical.”

“You looked at the people,” Brenden guessed.

Nayara smiled and it was her warm smile, the one full of pleasure. He could imagine Ryan and Cáel being on the receiving end of those smiles and finding it hard to refuse her anything. It wasn’t that he was jealous, but sometimes he watched the three of them together, the simple happiness that seemed to radiate around them when they were and a little stab of envy would strike him.

That was usually when he went off to the tavern in ancient Athens, or New Orleans, or contacted one of his lady friends that Mariana seemed to find so objectionable. Distraction was a great way to paper over voids. “You found the second spy,” he said to Nia. “How?”

“The known spy was a division manager and he supervised the typing pool, which was all women.”

Brenden heard in his mind the clack of old typewriters. Upright Remingtons, all steel grey and dull green, rattling like submachine guns as he walked past the big room where dozens of women attacked the keys with ferocious speed, while men would pause to look in the windows and discuss the morals, or lack of them, of each woman. Yes, he remembered it well. “He recruited one of the women,” he guessed. “Her background and bona fides would have checked out, but she was actually working for the opposition. For him.”

“Yes, but when I suggested that, I was told that he didn’t favor any of the typists above the rest. He was a good manager, even-handed and fair.” Nayara’s gaze caught Brenden’s. “So I spent a day in the typing pool, posing as a temporary employee. I watched. By the end of the day I knew who the recruit was. When they scrutinized her life and followed her for a week, I was proved right.”

“How did you know which one it was?”

Her gaze wouldn’t let him go. “She was the typist he berated the most. The one he treated with the most distain. The one it appeared he thoroughly disliked.”

Brenden felt his heart start up, all by itself. Nayara’s gaze just wouldn’t quit.

He swallowed. “Does everyone know?” he asked.

“No,” Nayara said gently. “But if you keep treating her the way you have, they’re going to guess, just as I did.”

He looked down at the tabletop, the Greek lettering of the book blurring as he stared through it. “She’s with that idiot.”

“That idiot helped you save her life tonight. Give him his dues, Brenden, or he’s going to be one of the first to figure it out.” Nayara rested her hand over his. “I can talk to Ryan. We can put Rob on her detail. Kieran can help. You can go back to your office and stay there as long as you need to.”

He shook his head. “No. I’ll finish the job.”

Nayara got to her feet. “That sounds more like you. Find your way through this, Brenden. There have been plenty of people in your life. There will be again. I prefer to see you happy.”

“Have you ever seen me happy?” he demanded.

She considered for a moment. “April 28, 1993.”

He snorted. “You didn’t even know me then.”

“I stuck a pin in the calendar.” Then she surprised him by leaning down a little and kissing his temple. “You old grouch, you.”

He growled.

“See. Now you’re happy.” Her smile was impish. She shut the door gently behind her.

Brenden looked around the empty quarters. He was alone again. The happy moment had fled.

Chronometric Conservation Agency Headquarters, Villa Fontani, Rome, 2265 A.D.

Mariana opened the door, stepped inside and turned on the lights. Then she held the door aside. “Come in,” she told Laszlo.

He moved into her sitting room almost cautiously, looking around. “You live here?”

“Yes.” She closed the door behind him and went over to the small table, which was on the far side of the room from where he stood.

“This is what Rob meant when he said I should stay behind the villa walls for the night?” he asked.

“Not exactly. Vampires are very good at compartmentalizing. He just wanted you behind the walls. What pillow you end up using and where that pillow lies, Rob doesn’t care. He figures it’s none of his business.”

She saw his gaze flicker toward the bedroom, visible through the connecting door.

“Yes, that’s the pillow you’ll be using,” she said.

Laszlo scrubbed at his hair. The borrowed sweater he was wearing rose, revealing a section of his flat belly. When he dropped his hand, the band stayed hiked up. Mariana wanted to tug the hem down, but at the same time she wanted to stroke the flesh she could see. He didn’t seem to be bothered by it, not like she was about her own top.

“There’s something on your mind,” she said.

He blew out his breath. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you.” He smiled briefly. “I’ve met a lot of people.”

“You don’t like me being so direct?”

“You’re not direct,” he said quickly. “A direct woman would climb into my lap, undo my trousers and help herself, all while telling me what she was going to do with me. And the whole time the look in her eyes is as hard as diamonds.” Again, the brief smile. “You are being ladylike in comparison. But you know what you want.”

“Yes,” she agreed and waited.

“When we kissed, earlier tonight….” He blew out his breath again. “Oh, hell, I’m dancing around on the edge of a sword here, trying to be delicate. But I think you prefer frankness.”

“
So
much more than obscurity.”

He stepped forward. A single step. “You’re not going to melt into a puddle of mortification if I tell you I’ve had a lot of people in my bed over the years?”

“I suspect you’ve probably bedded far more than even the media kept up with,” Mariana replied. “I don’t care,” she added.

“Suddenly, I do,” Laszlo said flatly. He pushed his hands into his pockets. “I want to be worthy of you.”

Mariana closed the gap between them. She wrapped her arms around his neck, one at a time. “You don’t think what you did tonight worthy enough?”

“If I were to repeat it every night for a decade, it still would not be nearly enough.” His gaze was steady, his voice low. His hands settled around her waist and the tips of his fingers brushed her bare skin. “I saw the way you were looking at him.”

Mariana jumped. She tried to find something to say, a way to dispute it. But she had let the silence draw out too long.

Laszlo cupped her cheek, his thumb stroking her chin. “You’re not standing in front of me now because you’re curious about my reputation. Not now. You’re not like that. I know it’s something more that made you chose me over him. You don’t have to tell me. Everyone has a past. But I want to honor your choice.”