Unmasking the Mercenary (17 page)

“Crap,” Haley hissed lowly. She opened the door to one of the cabs and climbed in.

“Wenceslas Square,” she told the cab driver.

The dark-haired, dark-skinned man pulled into traffic. Haley twisted to look behind the car. Sure enough, the man had gotten into the second cab.

She faced forward. “Drive faster.”

The driver looked in his rearview mirror and didn’t respond. Nor did he drive faster. Traffic was heavy.

“Stop the car!” she yelled.

He pulled to the side of the road and after tossing money at his lap, she bolted.

Wenceslas Square and the shop where Rem had gone to find the
hawaladar
wasn’t far from here. Besides, she didn’t want to lead the man following her to Rem. And she needed Rem right now.

She ran. A quick check confirmed the other cab had stopped, too. She ran into a café. Dodged tables and gaping people on her way back to the kitchen. A man shouted at her in a foreign language. She spotted a back door and ran for it. Outside, she ran up an alley until she came to another door. She tried it. Locked. She ran to another one. This one was open. She ran inside of a tea and coffee shop, making her way from the back room to the front, where people took up two small, round tables and a waitress looked over her shoulder at Haley as she ran past. Back outside, she ran up the street toward the boutique where Rem had gone.

At last, she saw a sign above a shop window that said Josef’s. Breathing hard, she looked down the street. No one followed. She opened the door and stepped inside. It was quiet. No one else was in the shop, not even a clerk. What if Rem was no longer here?

She saw a door leading to a back room and went there. Opening it, she peered into what appeared to be a stockroom and office all in one. She entered, leaving the door open behind her. Movement to her left made her jump. Rem put his gun back into the waist of his jeans.

“Rem.” She breathed her relief and more. Seeing him after what had transpired between them felt different now. More intimate. Which also made her feel vulnerable.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

That settled her well enough. She focused on the present. “Someone followed me. I lost them before I came here, but he was in the lobby at the hotel. I was going to grab breakfast when I noticed him.”

He went to the door, opening it to check the front of the shop. When he closed it, she knew no one had come in after her.

She spotted a computer on a small desk. It was on and the email software was open. Rem had been searching it. Something on the floor caught her attention. Two feet stuck out from behind a stack of boxes. A man was lying there.

She shot Rem a glance. His jaw flexed and his eyes turned hard with angst.

“What did you do?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. She marched toward the man on the floor. Rem put his arm out and stopped her like a gate. She pushed his arm and forced her way past him. She rounded the stack of boxes and sucked in a shocked breath of air.

A man lay in a pool of blood, some of it having soaked into the floor-level boxes. He’d been shot in the chest. The second
hawaladar
.

She gagged and put her hand over her mouth. When the nausea faded, she faced Rem. “What happened?”

With intensifying annoyance, he turned back to the computer and didn’t answer.

She looked at the body again, at the signs of struggle around the room. Tipped over boxes. Paper. Blood…

Rem continued to click away at the computer.

“Why did you kill him?” She was too appalled not to stop and think. After sleeping with him…

He clicked the computer mouse, opening an e-mail. “What makes you think I’m the one who killed him?”

“Didn’t you?” Confused emotion whirled inside her. It looked as if he had, but…

He straightened from the computer and sent her a furious glance.

A sound in the front of the shop made them both look toward the door. Rem pulled out his gun.

“Stay here,” he ordered with a feral gaze arrowed at her, and went through the door.

Haley followed, but kept herself concealed at the door. She heard talking, harsh at first, then calmer. Rem reappeared, gun once again stowed in the waist of his jeans and another man following.

She moved aside when Rem and the man entered. The man had dark hair and was not very tall. His dark eyes found the man on the floor and with a sound of anguish, went there.

“He said he was a friend of Josef’s,” Rem told her. “His name is Alan.”

After a moment, Alan straightened from the body and came around the boxes, wiping his eyes as he stopped before Rem and Haley.

“You found him this way?” Alan asked Rem.

When Rem nodded, Haley struggled whether to believe it was the truth. Alan clearly was Josef’s friend. If Rem had killed Josef, wouldn’t he want to appear innocent? And yet…

“You are that man,” Alan said. “The one who is looking for Farid. You are Rem D’Evereux. No?”

Haley’s awareness sharpened and she sensed Rem do the same.

“How do you know me?”

“Josef told me about you. He said that Ammar warned him you might come. Josef told me he was afraid of what Ammar would do. He also said that if anything were to happen to him, I was to find you. Come.” Alan headed for the door. “I have something to give you.”

Haley exchanged a glance with Rem, just as surprised as him. They followed the short man out of the shop. Haley searched with Rem for the man who’d followed her. He looked at her and she shook her head. She didn’t see him. Alan led them into the shop next to Josef’s. A gift shop filled with colorful and gaudy baubles. Behind the counter, Alan bent and retrieved a manila envelope.

Rem opened it and slipped out a handwritten note with a South American address. Argentina. Locke had told him the truth.

“Josef said if you came and he was dead, that he hopes this information will help you avenge him. He hoped you would kill Farid and his son.”

“Are you sure Farid went back to his ranch in Argentina?” Rem asked. “It’s the first place our government would look.”

Haley could see Rem’s disbelief, and maybe his chagrin that he hadn’t thought of it himself before now.

“Josef said that Farid was a fool for hiding in plain sight. He said if your government didn’t find him, that he hoped you would. He was counting on it. If you would have come before Ammar got here, he would have told you everything himself.”

“Wouldn’t that be dangerous for him?” Haley said.

“The only danger Josef faced was from Farid and his son. Josef was an honest man. Farid and his son are not.”

“I’ll find Farid,” Rem said.

Alan nodded, the satisfaction of vengeance in his eyes. “Then on behalf of Josef, I thank you.”

Rem led Haley out of the shop. He ought to be celebrating finally locating Farid, after all the careful planning and patience. Instead, all he felt was anger. It consumed him. He still couldn’t believe Haley actually thought he’d killed Josef. How easy it had been for her to think it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to kill a man for not telling him what he wanted to know. Whatever happened to her observation that he wouldn’t have killed the courier without a good and just reason?

Rem caught himself. What the hell was he doing? Why did her opinion of him matter so much?

It didn’t help that thoughts of last night kept filtering into his head. Watching the haunting effects of Iraq fade in the wake of Haley’s passion. The sight of her face would be forever burned into his memory. He doubted if any other challenge had ever felt more gratifying. Wiping a terrible experience from a beautiful woman’s mind, an experience that didn’t belong in such a pure and lovely body. He’d exulted that he’d been the man to do that for her, if only for a few incredible moments. He’d tasted that. Intoxicating pleasure. Nothing standing in the way of its absolute intensity.

Now she was contradicting herself, believing he’d murdered an innocent man for not giving him what he wanted. Had she been playing him all this time? Why? To uncover what he was hiding? Maybe Cullen had put her up to the task. Maybe he’d learned more than he’d let on and Haley was his way to get Rem, put another notch on his long list of conquests.

Waving down a cab, he opened the back door for Haley, looking up and down the street before getting in after her. He spotted a dark car parked along the street with three men inside. Ammar. Whoever had tailed Haley had probably summoned him. He smiled. Now Ammar would follow him to South America, and after Rem killed him, he’d take care of Farid.

“Rem.”

He turned his head to see Haley nodding toward the black car. He faced forward. “I know.”

“We don’t want them to know we’re going to South America,” she said. “How are we going to lose them?”

He didn’t answer, just waved a cab and opened the back door for her. She hesitated before getting in, sending him a purposeful look, one full of disbelief.

“It’s Ammar,” she said.

“I know. Get in.”

“If we don’t lose them, they’ll know where we’re going. They’ll follow us.”

“Get in the cab.”

She stared at him. But finally she complied, sliding over on the backseat with sharp blue eyes focused on him intently.

“Are you mad about earlier?” she asked.

Knowing she was referring to her quick assumption that he’d killed Josef, he leaned back against the seat and let her assumption take flight.

“I’m sorry I…” Her pause revealed her struggle to find words. “It’s just…I didn’t know what happened.”

“It’s what anyone would have thought at first.” But he hated how it got to him, even for a few seconds, that she’d thought he’d mercilessly killed someone. He was not accustomed to caring what people thought of him. That she made him care threw him into a tailspin. He didn’t know what to do with all the clashing emotions. He was a merc. He was a merc who’d killed many, many times. But he was a merc who’d never taken innocent lives. Most people who knew anything about him shied away. The ones who didn’t were just like him. They understood what he did. But Haley…she twisted that concept of merc-with-a-purpose around in his heart until he could find no beginning or end in his soul.

Damn it! He was who he was. Why couldn’t she accept that?

“Rem—”

“Just let it go, Haley. It’s done. Over.”

Her sea-blue eyes beckoned him. “I know you wouldn’t have done it without a good reason.”

“You’ll change your mind after South America.”

That made her pause again, only this time in contemplative thought. She glanced out the back window. Rem didn’t have to look with her to know Ammar and his men followed. But what had she ascertained in that brilliant mind of hers? He was beginning to think the step ahead he’d thought he’d maintained was shortening faster than he was ready.

“What are you going to do there?” she asked, confirming his worry.

The cab came to a stop in front of the Prague Marriott Hotel. Without answering, he paid the fare and asked the driver to wait for them.

He opened the cab door and would have gotten out, but Haley’s hand on his arm stopped him. He looked over at her.

“No matter what you intend to do,” she said, her magnificent eyes intent, and then her smooth, sultry voice going in for the kill, “I trust you.”

The declaration arrowed through him. It found his weakness. The one Ammar knew too well. The one Rem tried so hard to avoid. And here she was, doing things to him that could ruin all his plans. His well-thought-out revenge. He needed that revenge. When he got it, he just might be able to go on with his life, to find the peace that he’d been seeking for so many years.

But that peace came without compromise. He wasn’t changing for anyone, least of all Haley. She represented too much of what had been denied him through his hardest times.

“You shouldn’t,” he said with more meaning coming out in his tone than made him comfortable.

And of course, she was relentless.

“I wasn’t talking about my heart.”

No, she was talking about killing with a reason. He battled with defenses that bordered on resentment, knowing his ego was fighting for the limelight. “Cullen was right about one thing, Haley. This
is
personal for me.”

She was totally unflustered. “I know,” she said tartly. “I also know you’re hiding something from me. Or maybe it’s Cullen you fear. But whatever it is, I’m going to find out, and when I do, I promise I won’t think less of you.”

He looked into her beautiful eyes, lingering in the gaze they shared. Bittersweet realization struck him that she would, in fact, uncover his secret. And when she did, the two of them could never be.

“Be careful what you promise, sweetheart,” he said, the gruffness in his voice manifested by his emotion. “Some promises are impossible to keep.”

Chapter 11

R
em’s words kept running through her head. Haley hadn’t said much on their way to Foz do Iguacu, which the locals called Foz. She was too preoccupied with her thoughts. Now she sat across from him at an outdoor table of a not-so-nice bar on the main drag, enduring his occasional and assessing glances between his surveillance of the street.

Why was he so sure she’d think less of him when she discovered what he was hiding? Had he done something to earn it? Another wayward set of circumstances not unlike the one when he was fourteen that had made him turn to drugs to survive? Or was he as unabashedly disreputable as he let people believe?

That last thought disconcerted her. How could she be so wrong about the only man who’d been able to breach the walls she’d erected after Iraq? Or had it required a man like him and she just hadn’t realized that yet? Maybe exactly what she’d needed was a ruthless man with good intentions in bed. Ruthless men had violated her in Iraq, despite her lack of memory of the attack. It made perfect sense that someone equally frightening would erase the negativity of her ordeal by treating her gently in the most intimate situation.

The idea of bringing terrorists down appealed to her, and on a deeper level she could relate to Rem’s thirst for blood. But he was so scary about it. Quiet. Lurking. Certain of his ability. She’d sensed that about him the first second she’d seen him outside Habib’s market.