White Heat (23 page)

He
liked
her? She didn’t really register all of his words over the grinding of her teeth. Why did it always come down to the packaging? It took a while, but somehow she managed to fall asleep in the middle of Max trying to dig himself out of the hole he’d dug.

DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT WAS ONE OF THE THREE LARGEST airports in the world, and not even for T-FLAC would air traffic control change the flight patterns circling above their designated landing strip. The Bombardier Challenger just had to wait its turn, which meant circling fourteen thousand feet away from Tillman and his answers.

The plan was to make a pit stop to drop Max off in Denver, then his two operatives would accompany Emily to HQ in Montana. Even so, Max didn’t feel comfortable letting her out of his sight. But there was no logical reason to keep her with him when she’d be safer at T-FLAC’s secure underground facility.

Unfortunately, logic didn’t come into play when her safety was of utmost importance to him.

Utmost
importance? No. But of
prime
importance, and a matter of international security, was getting to the bottom of Tillman’s involvement in all this. Emily’d gone from soft and malleable in his arms to prickly and unresponsive in a heartbeat. He had no idea what he’d said or done to turn her off like that. But it was for the best.

He’d never regretted giving a woman the “T-FLAC is my world” speech more than he’d regretted giving it to Emily. But he respected her too much to lie to her and make false promises. On the other hand, she’d gone from hot to cold before he made his point.

There was no future for them. No permanency. He loved the work he did for T-FLAC. It wasn’t a job. It was his life. It was who he was. T-FLAC took everything, leaving nothing behind for him to offer a woman.

No matter how strong the desire.

It just was.

Life vs. T-FLAC.

No contest.

Women.
“Don’t take your eyes off her,” he told Keiko as he sat the two female operatives down for a final briefing in the aft cabin.

“I won’t’ Keiko assured him. She was so new, so intense, so eager it hurt his teeth.

He was depending on her. Cooper, he knew, had eyes in the back of her head. He was trusting two women to keep Emily safe while he was thousands of miles away.

She was up front in the cockpit, fascinated by all the dials, and, Max bet, talking the pilot into letting her handle the controls for a while. Or grabbing a parachute and jumping to get away from him.

Hell if he knew

She hadn’t spoken directly to him since she’d woken up this morning. “I don’t expect them to know about her Seattle connection, which is in our favor. And even if somehow it does occur to them, she has at least six hours’ head start. Unless—” He paused. “Unless they planned ahead and are waiting for her there. She wants to go and see her mother in rehab. Says an hour will do it.”

“We’ll be ready,” AJ assured him. “We always anticipate the worst.”

“Yeah, and we’re usually right,” Max muttered, rubbing a rough hand around the tension gripping the back of his neck. He pulled his buzzing phone out of his pocket. “Aries.”

It was Darius with more flicking bad news. “The Blessed Virgin of Vladimir in Brisbane was hit three hours ago,” he said in his well-modulated, nothing-fazes-me tone. “Russian orthodox. Two hundred seventeen people dead. Hundred and eleven injured. A team from Sydney is already on the scene. I’m coordinating with Navarro and Daklin on this. Shit. Hold.”

Max switched his communication from his phone to the monitor so the two operatives in the room with him could see and hear Dare’s latest intel. “We seem to be in a permanent holding pattern,” he told the two women. The T-FLAC emblem blinked on the large black screen, waiting for Dare to finish his other call. “Might as well make yourselves comfortable.”

The coffee had been turned off in anticipation of landing, but he got up to pour himself a cup of lukewarm sludge anyway. He didn’t care if his caffeine fix was warm, hot, or cold. Caffeine was caffeine. He drained the mug and poured another while he waited.

The T-FLAC logo blinked out, and Dare’s face filled the screen. He had a face only a mother could love, and now he was sporting a long, angry scratch on the cheek opposite his scar. It was a tight shot of him, just head and shoulders, but from the little Max could see in the background Dare wasn’t in T-FLAC’s underground facility in Montana, he was somewhere else.

Christ. Was the poor bastard still on Paradise? It was a sore spot, so Max wasn’t going to ask. “Problems?” he asked instead.

“Problem—singular, but new intel, too. First, we received the autopsy results on your father. The bruising on his upper arms and chest indicated that he was grabbed from behind while he was in a seated position. The trajectory of the body, as you mentioned before, proves he was thrown. The tox screen shows he was on some high-powered cocktail of pharmaceuticals. But those had nothing to do with his death. Conclusion, he was literally picked up and tossed over the balcony.”

Nothing new there. “What else?”

“Another art restorer has turned up dead. An Elaine Ludwig of Bellevue, Washington. See what, if anything, Miss Greene can tell you about her.”

Max nodded to Keiko to go get Emily. The woman quickly pushed away from the table and strode off to the cockpit. “Do we have the body?”

“Affirmative. We also got someone else. The man who killed her. Ludwig’s husband’s a Marine. Just got back from Iraq. Literally. Came in the house unexpectedly in the early hours to discover the man leaving the bedroom. Didn’t ask any questions, just took him out with his Beretta 9mm.”

“Semper Fi,” Max said, pleased they had another lead to follow. Emily and Keiko came back into the room, and Emily shot Max an inquiring glance before looking at Darius on the monitor.

Dare’s eyes connected with Emily’s and her shoulders stiffened as if preparing for a blow.

“What do you know about Elaine—”

“Ludwig,” Emily finished dully. “I knew her well enough to say hello to. Is she dead?” At Dare’s nod she reached over and gripped Max’s hand. Her fingers were like ice. “This is insane.”

“Hmph,” Dare agreed. “Yeah. But we’ll get to the bottom of it. Stay with Max. Your plane will be next to land. I’ll keep you posted.”

“What’s the new intel?” Max wasn’t about to let Dare off the hook.

“The guy our Marine offed?” Darius said. “Black rose tattooed on his ass. And our Queensland bombing? Traced the Semtex to the Black Rose cell responsible for the bombing in New Zealand last September.” There was a tense pause.

“You’ve got yourself an authenticated Black Rose clusterfuck, here, my man.”

Twelve

THE FORTY-FIVE-MINUTE DRIVE TO TILLMAN’S ESTATE JUST OUTSIDE Denver was a long time to be sitting in a confined space with a man Emily couldn’t seem to take her eyes off of. She tried her best not to find anything interesting to look at out of Max’s window, because she didn’t want to inadvertently look at
him.
She needn’t have worried. They were about as far apart as they could be without one of them straddling the outside of the car. While he seemed to fill the entire space with his presence, Max appeared completely oblivious to her, and the desultory conversation she was having with the two women in the front seat.

Because of the death of Elaine Ludwig, Max had decreed that she remain with them, and not go on ahead to Seattle. Emily was fine with that. People in her world seemed to be dropping like flies. She wasn’t safe with Max emotionally, but she was a hundred percent sure of her physical safety when they were together.

For the past half hour, he’d been poking, amazingly rapidly, a chrome stylus at a small black handheld device. Even though he was in his customary uniform of unrelieved black, today he’d opted for black dress slacks and a beautifully cut jacket over his black silk T—shirt. Black suited him.

She, however, had protested wearing the all-black, all-the-time outfit that AJ had offered her on the plane. Instead she’d opted to wear her own clothes. Jeans, tan high-heeled boots, a navy cashmere sweater, and a camel hair jacket. It wasn’t until she was dressed that she realized she was color-coordinated with the T-FLAC jet.

The short jacket might be attractive, but she was going to freeze her ass off when she got out of the car. More so because she’d gotten bold, and adopted the “go commando” part of the T-FLAC dress code.

Max’s appearance had very little to do with what she found so appealing about this annoying man. Looks weren’t that important to her for obvious reasons. Yes, he was handsome in a rugged, get- the-hell-out-of-my-way way. But she was intrigued by his focus. His drive. His chivalry, even if it was somewhat overwhelming when directed at her, was ingrained. She liked the way he treated his two female operatives exactly the same way he treated the men he worked with. She loved his big, tanned hands, and the way his eyes turned to green when he looked at her, like a barometer of how much he wanted her.

This probably wasn’t the best time to try to make sense of her feelings for Max. She was on too much sensory overload as it was.
I’m in such big trouble here,
she thought as her heart clenched. She turned her head to look blindly out of her side window at the passing scenery.

It was a glorious day, with not a cloud in the crystal blue sky. The stands of pine trees on either side of the narrow rural road were laden with snow. Rust-and-white Hereford cattle stood ankle deep in it, big brown eyes watchful as the car passed beyond their fence. It was a beautifully serene, bucolic scene. She took a mental snapshot so she could paint it later.

But she’d add action and drama to the serenity by painting Max, leaning over the neck of a running black stallion, its tail flying in the wind as it soared over the snowy hills. She’d paint speed in the chunks of white spewing behind the horse’s hooves, and a plume of steam misting from the horse’s mouth as it galloped.

“Do you ride?” she asked Max casually.

He glanced up from whatever he was doing to give her a slightly puzzled glance at the non sequitur.

“Anything from a horse to a Harley. Why?”

Of course he rode a motorcycle. She’d dress him in black leather. Hell, she’d like to paint him in nothing at all. “No reason. It’s hard to believe we’ve been on his property for the past half hour,” she said, changing the subject fast.

“Tillman has some serious bank,” Max pointed out, his attention back on the device in his hand.

“No kidding.” Emily tried to figure out what some of the buildings were that they passed. Barns. Outbuildings holding farm equipment. Several large homes at the end of long, snow-covered driveways. According to Darius, Richard Tillman’s twenty-five- million-dollar, five-hundred-acre ranch, nestled in the hills between Denver and Colorado Sp rings, was a money machine. Besides owning one of the largest commercial real estate development companies in the Northern Hemisphere, he also raised cattle and bred quarter horses, both here and in Montana. He was
that
kind of wealthy.

None of that made Emily’s heart beat faster. What gave her heart palpitations and made her mouth go dry was the man’s art collection. “I’m going to ask—okay,
beg
Mr. Tillman to let me go into his private museum while you two talk,” Emily confessed as they drove down the tree-lined drive. “He has the most extensive collection of Renaissance paintings in the world’ she said aloud while mentally cataloguing the works she knew he had. Rembrandt, Raphael, and DaVinci . . . and dozens of other masters.

She almost salivated knowing that in a few minutes she was going to have the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of seeing them without hordes of tourists jostling for a better vantage point, or without having to work on them. She’d enjoy just looking at them for the pure pleasure of doing so. Without analyzing every brushstroke and technique, or having a hundred other people breathing down her neck. “And,” she added happily, “two full-time curators to oversee them. I have some serious art envy.”

“You haven’t met Tillman, have you?” Max asked, powering down the device, and shoving it into his pocket.

She shook her head. “I’ve always dealt with his assistant, Alistair Norcroft. Nice guy.”

Max rested his ankle on his opposite knee. “You get any kind of vibe from him?”

Not at all. I go for tall, dark, broody, James Bond types with whom I have no future.
“I only met him a few times. And each meeting was pretty brief. Usually he had a courier deliver and pick up the paintings, but sometimes he’d come himself. He appears to be incredibly efficient, and from the way he talked about his boss, devoted.”

“A hefty paycheck would go a long way in paying for that devotion.”

“That’s a cynical way to look at it. I suppose you could be right, but Alistair didn’t strike me as all that money-grubbing when we talked. You’ll see what I mean when you meet him. He’s a pretty low-key guy. He’s got an incredibly responsible job, but he’s extremely laid-back and calm. And boy, is he organized. I’ve never met anyone as compulsively organized as he is.

“Funny, I’m not even sure how old he is. He could be anywhere from thirty to sixty.” Like Daniel, he’d admitted to having a couple of procedures done. Very metrosexual of him.

“Maybe he had an eye lift . . . or chin jobs are common among men, aren’t they, Max?” AJ twisted around from her position in the passenger seat.

He lifted a brow. “Not among the men
I
know. But yeah— Norcroft had a face-lift in 1997, and some god-awful thing called a chemical face peel in ‘03,” Max said, surprising Emily. Why on earth would T-FLAC know or care about that? “He’s fifty-six.

“Went to Harvard,” he continued. “First in his class. Never practiced law. After a ten-year stint with another wealthy guy straight out of law school, he went to work for Tillman. Been with him ever since.”

They passed a heliport and more outbuildings. “If you know all that why did you ask me?”

“Because you might give me some insight that wasn’t in the dossier I got this morning. How about Prescott? Ever meet him?”