An Affair of Deceit (15 page)

“I
SPENT FIVE
years getting on the inside of Kral’s organization. It all ended here in Arles,” said SOCA agent Oliver McCrea in a smooth Scottish burr. Even sitting, he was unusually tall, and he possessed a hard jawline, buzz-cut brown hair, and bright golden eyes. Since he and his raven-haired CIA partner, Evangeline Quill, had arrived at the dingy Arles safe house five minutes ago, Abigail had yet to see him smile.

She understood. There was nothing to smile about at the moment. Evangeline, on the other hand, flashed her pearly whites at Riley like he was a mark she was trying to pick up.

Abigail hadn’t liked the way the woman looked at him, but judging from the enormous diamond solitaire on her left ring finger, she had to assume that Miss Quill was about to become Mrs. McCrea. The foursome sat in pairs on small love-seats placed on either side of a scratched and stained oak coffee table. Abigail and Riley sat together, their thighs an infinitesimal inch apart, but there was no room to scoot away. Ever since he’d worked her out of her ropes in that interrogation room, she’d been disconcertingly aware of his body. Like now, with him just a breath away, she tried not to think about how easy it would be to let her hand brush against his muscled leg, and how firm it would feel.

Determined to focus on the interview, she leveled a frosty look at Evangeline that the other woman misinterpreted as distress.

“You must be upset. I’m so sorry about your dad.” Evangeline leaned forward, her dark eyes sympathetically rounded. “He’s a good man. We’ll find him.”

“Certainly,” she responded, unwilling to tell this woman that she really had no idea what sort of man her father was, but unable to pretend otherwise. She despised small talk.

“I’m sorry we didn’t meet under better circumstances,” Evangeline continued.

“How could we possibly have met before?” Abigail asked, hearing sharp peevishness in her voice.

“We couldn’t have, not really. I just wish we had.” Evangeline smiled, but her eyes were soft, and she looked a little sad. “We share something. Your father has been my field supervisor for the last few years. He’s my first, the only one I’ve ever had. He’s not an easy man, but he’s been more like a father to me than a boss.”

Abigail’s stomach clenched. Evangeline Quill was yet another person who knew her father better than she did.

Riley gave Abigail a quick, supportive smile before turning back to McCrea and Quill. “How long were you undercover before you actually met Kral?”

“Five years,” McCrea said.

“Tell me about him,” Riley probed. “I understand that you and Evangeline spent time with him at his estate.”

“Yes.” McCrea glanced at Evangeline.

The sexy spy brushed her long, curly hair over one shoulder. “I don’t know how much you know, but let me assure you: Kral is disturbed. He’s smart, certainly, and cautious.”

“Paranoid,” McCrea added.

“Yes, paranoid. And he’s convinced himself that he’s some sort of Robin Hood, funneling a chunk of his black-market money to the colony that lives in that insane mountaintop
hideaway of his. The villagers are his family, imported from the Czech Republic after the fall of the Soviet Union made mass emigration possible.” She sneered, her small mouth managing to make the expression look sensual. “But he lives like a king in a castle while they live like serfs in the village below it.”

“Serfs who saved your life,” McCrea mumbled.

“Serfs nonetheless,” Evangeline reiterated, shooting her fiancé a sharp look. “They drive produce and other goods into Arles for the big market every Saturday. I snuck a ride in the back of a cart after I drove McCrea’s car into a ravine and convinced everyone that I was dead.”

McCrea’s eyebrows lifted a millimeter. “You told me you jumped out first. Didn’t you? Tell me you didn’t climb up that cliff.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m gutsy, not crazy.”

Riley wrote something on his notepad. “You had to fake your death because Kral ordered McCrea to kill you, right?”

“Yeah.” Her face froze. “Kral has a habit of ordering the deaths of CIA officers.”

“How so?” Riley asked.

This time McCrea answered, his voice betraying no emotion. “A few years back, he killed Evangeline’s parents, both of whom were CIA.”

“I’m sorry,” Riley said.

“What’s done is done,” Evangeline said firmly. “What matters now is bringing him to justice.”

“Agreed.” Riley nodded. “Tell me more about Kral. How many close associates does he have, and how does he treat them?”

“Few. I was close to him. He’d started calling me ‘brother,’” McCrea said, his lip curling with disgust. “I assumed the attempt at fraternity was part of his master plan, whatever that is. He does nothing that isn’t carefully calculated.”

Evangeline frowned. “I’ve had the same thought about Mason—not the brother business, but the idea of being extremely
deliberate. I don’t mean to be rude, Abigail, but your father is the definition of cunning.”

“Craftiest bastard I ever met,” agreed McCrea.

Evangeline elbowed him gently. “Kral is clever. He interrogates like a concerned best friend and listens better than a therapist.”

“Is he skilled with weapons or at hand-to-hand fighting?” asked Riley.

“Hard to say. I always assumed so,” McCrea answered. “It was in his eyes. Palest I’ve ever seen, and as cold as death. Eyes like that belong on an animal, not a man.”

“He looked like someone who’d killed before and knew he’d someday have to kill again,” Evangeline added. “He was completely at ease with that knowledge, though. I think he feels that his evil and illegal actions have all been justified, maybe even necessary. He’s warped and dangerous.”

Riley tapped his notepad with the end of his pen. “So what’s he afraid of?”

“Betrayal,” McCrea answered immediately. “That’s why he wanted me to kill her before he took me to see the Stingers. It would have proved my loyalty, in his mind.”

Riley rubbed his jaw with one hand. Lost in thought, he let his leg relax against Abigail’s.

She didn’t jump—she wasn’t a prim schoolgirl, and she had no desire to have these hardened secret agents think her one—but as her skin absorbed his heat, her underarms moistened. A bead of sweat formed on her chest and dripped slowly to her bra line. The wetness left a cool trail on her skin that she felt as clearly as she would a finger running between her breasts.

Pull yourself together, Abigail.

He wasn’t that hot; surely she could stand the fairly minute contact he’d accidentally established. But it wasn’t the actual physical heat of his body that tingled her skin and made her sweat. It was the anticipation, the hope, even, that he might let one of his hands fall to her knee.

A second passed, and then two, and she couldn’t take the contact anymore. Crossing her legs as casually as she could manage, she broke the electric connection between their bodies.

Riley glanced at her blankly, as though she’d interrupted his thoughts by shifting away from him. Then his eyes focused on hers and he smiled, one corner of his mouth lifting higher than the other in his trademark lopsided grin. His olive eyes sparkled in the warm incandescent light.

What a handsome man he is!

She wondered what his cheek would feel like if she lifted her hand to touch it. Would it be rough like sandpaper, with the bristle of a day-old beard, or smooth like silk, as it was when he’d kissed her at the restaurant yesterday? Would a shock of electricity pass into her palm when she made contact with him?

If she pressed her nose beneath the curve of his ear, would his neck smell brightly of tea and lemons, or would it smell darker, like a rainy day or the sadness that sometimes threw a shadow across his eyes?

A throat cleared. Startled, she looked across the table to find Evangeline smiling wider than ever. Abigail’s perturbation had been noted.

Riley spoke up first. “Whatever is going on in Kral’s mind now, it seems clear to me that he has a history of familial trauma, something violent and abrupt, possibly involving the loss of a key male figure, maybe a father or brother. Did he ever mention his family?”

Evangeline piped up. “He delighted in telling me about his former wife, Eliska.”

Riley tensed. “She’s not in our files.”

“This probably happened before the revolution. He said he was a young man.”

“Wow. OK. Tell me everything he told you. Spare no detail.”

“Sure. He says they met in a café in Prague. She was a simple girl, he said, who had grown up poor under the Soviets and
believed that money should be shared, not hoarded by any one person. He said they’d get together and chat about Kafka and about visiting the West someday. He’d give her little diamonds and tell her they were cheap crystals; she would have been ashamed to know that she wore the real thing. Then they married, and she saw how rich he really was. He told her he only took from the Communists and shared everything with his family. I don’t think she ever really believed him. He said that her name means ‘truthful’ in Czech, and that she was like a noble eagle. She could see right through him.”

“Did he say what happened to her?”

Evangeline’s narrow lips pursed. “Her throat was slit, and she bled out. He didn’t go into any further detail. I couldn’t tell if he’d killed her, or if someone else did the deed. He rambled, gesticulated, and clutched at my arm a lot. He really doesn’t seem sane.”

“So he was in love once, and she was killed,” Riley said, almost to himself.

“Could that be what set him off?” Abigail asked.

“He might have been playing me.” Evangeline held up a hand. “You can’t take anything he says at face value. I felt that he relayed the story just to make me feel threatened. He’d loved someone, and she’d been brutally murdered. It was like a warning. It might not have even been true.”

Riley tapped his pen twice on his notepad. “We need to know more. Who really knows the truth about this guy?”

“Why does it matter what makes a man a monster?” McCrea finally spoke up. “All I want to do is find the son of a bitch.”

“So do I, but he’s vanished, and you two were the last people to see him. Any ideas on where they could be?”

McCrea snarled and shook his head.

Evangeline shrugged. “My best guess is they’re back at Kral’s place in the hills, but good luck getting inside to find out.”

McCrea nodded his agreement. “Those villagers are his family. Someone probably knew him when he was born. If anyone knows why he’s such a crazy bastard, you’ll find them there.”

As they left the safe house, Riley pulled out his phone and dialed Greene. Abigail didn’t hear the bulk of the conversation, but it sounded to her like their interrogations in Kral’s town wouldn’t be as easy to arrange as they would be in the US.

Riley hung up and smiled at her, guiding her by the elbow through the narrow streets. “I’m not sure if we’ll get inside the village. For now, we wait.”

“Wait? Surely there’s something we should be doing.”

“There is. Eat lunch, for example.” He pulled up short in front of a small pizza establishment in a pretty, shaded square.

“I’m not hungry,” she said and meant it.

“You should be. When was the last time you ate?”

“This morning,” she lied. It’d been sometime last night, but she didn’t want to take the time right now to eat a meal. “Besides, this is hardly the time to eat.”

“With that kind of logic, I’d never eat. This kind of craziness is my life, Abigail, weird as it probably seems to you. I eat when I’m hungry, and I try to enjoy it when I do because I’m never sure when I’ll get the next opportunity.” Riley’s hand on the small of her back guided her toward a little chrome table on the sidewalk.

She wiggled out of his reach and slid onto a sturdy chair. “Fine, as long as it’s quick.”

“You’re in France. They don’t do ‘quick,’” he warned with a laugh as he settled into the chair next to her.

She huffed. What an illogical country. If you wanted to maximize your profits, you needed to move butts through seats with as much rapidity as possible. No wonder the town looked like
its economic heyday had ended a thousand years ago. Ancient Roman ruins built of timeworn, deeply pitted limestone blocks were hemmed in by closely packed medieval buildings painted in sun-washed shades of ochre, pink, and beige.

Did that paint come prefaded? She snorted. It seemed intentionally sentimental. Arles was a pleasant place to sit outside, though. Summers in Washington, DC, were generally ghastly, marked by an oppressive curtain of humidity that forced everyone indoors where air conditioners worked overtime. Here, though the sun burned like fire in the sky, the herb-scented air was breezy and dry, and refreshment was just a shady tree away.

It was a town created for leisure and love. Since she was here for neither, she felt uneasy.

“What’s the next step in uncovering Kral’s family history?” she asked.

Riley quickly glanced around and then angled his head back to her. “Let’s eat lunch and then discuss it. Not here. Please. Sometimes these things need to sit in my brain for a while before I understand them.”

“I attack puzzles. I don’t let them grow on me.”