Kentucky Confidential (7 page)

“Not willingly.”

“How can you say that?” He strode away from her, needing distance, needing to breathe. “You let me think you were dead, Risa. One phone call could have fixed that. One stupid phone call!”

Her face showed signs of starting to crumple, but she fought it off, her chin coming up even as her lips trembled. “I know.”

Somehow, her strength of will only infuriated him. “
What
do you know, Risa? Do you know that I used to dream every single night for weeks that you’d shown up, safe and sound? That you showed up on the doorstep of our apartment with a smile, telling me that it was all a mistake, that you never got on the plane in the first place?”

He saw her throat bob as she swallowed hard, but she didn’t speak.

“I had that dream for weeks. Months. After a while, I lost track. It was the same thing, over and over. I’d wake up, elated, thrilled that you were alive, that you were with me again, and then I’d turn over and look at that empty, cold space on my bed where you used to lie. And it was like losing you all over again.”

Her face had gone pale, and she looked as if she were going to be sick. “I’m sorry, Connor. I made a terrible mistake in judgment.”

He couldn’t stay in this house a moment longer. Grabbing his jacket from the back of the sofa, he headed for the front door.

“Where are you going?” she called after him.

He didn’t answer.

* * *

S
HE
WASN
’
T
GOING
to cry. She’d done enough crying a few months ago, when she’d made the decision to become another person and leave her old life behind. There wasn’t much point in second-guessing the decision at this point. It was done. She couldn’t change it.

But maybe she could change the future. Starting with whatever danger might still be hanging over her head.

And Connor’s.

So far, all the online articles she’d found regarding Martin Dalrymple’s death had been cursory at best. His body had been found in Rock Creek Park early in the afternoon on the previous day. She tried to remember when she’d last spoken to him in person. Three weeks ago? They’d met at a diner in Covington, Kentucky, so he could give her a photograph of a couple of people of interest he wanted her to watch for.

After that, everything she’d received from Dal had come by encrypted email.

He hadn’t responded to the last message she’d sent, which made sense, given that he’d been lying dead in Rock Creek Park.

God, Dal was dead. She didn’t even know how to feel about that news. Sad? Of course. But she hadn’t really been friends with her old boss, had she? Friendships between colleagues could be a liability in the kind of work she’d done for the past decade. She’d learned that from Martin Dalrymple himself.

Had he ever seen her as anything but a useful implement in his espionage toolbox? Had she ever thought of him as something more than a puppeteer, pulling her strings and positioning her exactly where he needed her?

She rubbed her gritty eyes and refreshed the search engine page, hoping a new article had been added to the queue. Because she couldn’t shake the growing certainty that whoever had killed Dalrymple was the real danger hanging over her head.

And if she didn’t figure out who’d put a price on her head, and soon, she might not get out of this mess alive.

* * *

A
WATERY
SUN
had finally begun to break through the clouds overhead, adding an additional layer of warmth to the rising temperatures that had turned the snow underfoot into slush. In the woods surrounding the safe house, snow slid off pine boughs at regular intervals, hitting the ground with soft whooshing plops. Birds sang in the treetops, and somewhere in the distance, he heard the faint rumble of traffic moving along a nearby highway. But otherwise, the world around Connor remained quiet and still, a stark contrast to the maelstrom of disquiet inside his head.

He had to get his feelings under control. Giving in to his anger only gave the situation power over him.

Gave
her
power over him. And he couldn’t afford to let that happen. He’d fought damned hard to escape the abyss of grief and despair he’d fallen into after the plane crash. He couldn’t go back to that dark place again, even if it was now awash with anger instead of grief.

Maybe especially because of that.

She had made a mistake. They both had. Thinking they could have any sort of real relationship, being the people they were. He was a warrior. She was a spy. They could, at times, be colleagues of a sort, people who shared the same overarching goal, at least, if not the same tactics.

But they never should have tried to be more than that. Never let a few nights of physical release turn into a reckless, hopeless desire for happily-ever-after. It was doomed to disaster from the start. He understood that now.

Maybe she’d done him a favor, proving it sooner rather than later, before their lives became all tangled up with mortgages and—

And what, McGinnis? And kids?

He rubbed his tired eyes. He was going to be a father. With a woman he didn’t trust.

And did he even love her now, knowing how she’d hurt him? Would he ever love her again?

That certainly qualified as a whopper of a tangle, didn’t it?

He heard the sound of the door opening behind him and turned to find Risa standing in the open doorway, her arms wrapped around her pregnant belly as if she could protect herself—and the baby—from the cold. “Connor?” she called.

He crossed the crusty yard and headed up the porch steps, nodding for her to get back inside. He shook the snow off his boots and followed her into the house, closing the door behind her. “Is something wrong?”

She turned to look at him, her brow furrowed and a jittery look in her warm hazel eyes. “I found an article online a few minutes ago. With a little more detail about Dal’s murder. You know he was found late yesterday afternoon at Rock Creek Park, right?”

Connor nodded.

“Well, the latest article had a quote from the police detective in charge. He said they believed Dal had been dead for at least twenty-four hours before he was found. Maybe even as much as forty-eight.”

“So?”

“So, who was it who sent me an email yesterday morning, asking for an update on my mission?”

Chapter Seven

“What do you think it means?”

Risa stopped her pacing to look at Connor, who was watching her from his perch at the breakfast bar. Compared to her own agitation, his calm was preternatural—and downright annoying. “I think it means someone pretending to be Dal has been corresponding with me for at least the past day. Or maybe two.”

“How many messages are we talking about?”

“At least two if it was the past twenty-four hours. Five if it’s as much as forty-eight.”

He nodded at her laptop, still sitting open on the breakfast bar. “Can you show me?”

She crossed to the computer and pulled up her emails. “The most recent one was from yesterday morning. It came in just before I had to leave for my ob-gyn appointment.”

He looked over her shoulder. The email program was set up to decrypt the incoming emails from Dal, but even without encryption, Dal used a letter-substitution cipher on all the messages he sent to her. She translated for Connor. “He’s asking if I’ve located the Hawk.”

“Who’s the Hawk?”

“That is the big question.” She sat on the stool beside him. “One of the reasons Dal hid me in Cincinnati was to find the Hawk. According to some of our intelligence sources, the Hawk is in the US, setting up some sort of terrorist attack that will rival that of the attacks of 9/11.”

“Never heard that boast before.” His tone was dry.

“I know. Every Mohamed Atta wannabe talks up his big plot as if it’s the next coming of the attack on the Twin Towers. But Dal seemed to think this latest intel was legit and needed to be investigated.”

“So he sent you? A pregnant dead woman?”

She worried her lower lip between her teeth, wondering if she should tell him what she suspected about Dal’s operation. There wasn’t any reason to keep it secret at this point, was there? Dal was dead and she was nearly five hours away from Cincinnati and unlikely to go back there any time soon.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Connor’s tone was neutral, even relaxed, but she saw a wariness in his blue eyes that made her heart ache.

She’d put that wariness there. Earned it fair and square.

“I don’t think Dal was running this operation with official sanction,” she said.

“Meaning?”

She wished she didn’t have to admit this to Connor, on top of all the other reasons he had to hate what she’d done to him. But if she ever wanted to find her way back into Connor’s heart, she had to stop lying to him.

She took a deep breath and said, “I think the CIA believes I’m dead, too. I don’t think they know what Dal was doing.”

* * *

B
RIGHT
DAYLIGHT
POURED
through the window of Alexander Quinn’s office, the afternoon sun glinting off the melting snow. Campbell Cove Security might be a high-tech government-contracted security facility on the inside, but the outside looked like the sprawling brick and concrete high school it had once been, nestled in the little town of Campbell Cove just a few miles east of Cumberland, Kentucky—and about a fifteen-minute drive from the safe house where he’d sent Connor and Risa McGinnis.

He wondered if they were feeling as tired as he was. He was getting a little too old to run these overnight covert operations without feeling the consequences.

The door to his office opened without a warning knock, and two people entered without hesitation or preamble. One was a sandy-haired man in his early forties, with blue eyes and a golden tan that seemed to have lingered from the years he spent bumming around the Caribbean. The other was a slender, handsome woman in her midforties, with golden-brown skin that showed little of her age, black hair worn in a short, neat cut and sharp brown eyes that missed nothing. They were Maddox Heller and Rebecca Cameron, the closest thing he had to partners.

Over the years, Quinn had learned that he wasn’t really partner material.

“We need to talk, Quinn,” Cameron said.

“About what, Becky?” He was taking his life in his hands, using her nickname without being asked to do so. Only her close friends called her Becky, and along with being a lousy partner, he wasn’t exactly great at being a friend, either.

“What’s this about you going to Cincinnati last night?” Heller asked flatly, pulling up one of the chairs in front of Quinn’s desk.

Quinn arched one eyebrow. “Have a seat.”

“Are you running an op without consulting us?” Cameron asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s not my op.”

“Then whose?” Heller asked.

“Martin Dalrymple’s.”

“The dead spook?”

Quinn slanted a hard look at Heller. “Martin Dalrymple served this country with honor and distinction, at great sacrifice to himself. A little respect for a fallen hero, please.”

Heller looked suitably repentant. “Was he in contact with you?”

“Not exactly.” Quinn unlocked the lap drawer of his desk and withdrew a phone he kept locked away most of the time. It was a burner, a phone not even his partners had the number for. It was for old contacts from his days in the agency. Martin Dalrymple had been one of those contacts. “I got a text message from Martin two days ago. It was a code we’d used years ago on another op. He knew I’d remember it.”

Cameron’s shapely brows lowered, carving a couple of small lines in the smooth skin over her nose. “What kind of message?”

“It said, ‘Get her out.’”

“And you knew he was talking about Risa?”

“I’d contacted Dal when we spotted Risa in that surveillance photo,” Quinn said. “I asked if he was running an op with her.”

“What did he say?”

“He never replied—until that text message.”

“So you have no idea what he was up to?” Cameron asked, her curiosity apparently beginning to overcome her irritation with Quinn.

“I’m hoping Risa McGinnis can fill in some of the blanks,” Quinn answered calmly. “But I imagine she’s skittish at the moment, so we’re going to let her calm down and feel safe again before we approach her.”

“She won’t talk to you,” Heller warned. “She ain’t stupid.”

Quinn looked across the desk at Heller, then turned his gaze to Cameron, taking in her neat-as-a-pin blue business suit, immaculately manicured nails and tasteful, barely-there makeup. Unlike Quinn, the spy, and Heller, the former marine, Rebecca Cameron was all diplomat, which was the role she’d filled for nearly twenty years before a personal loss had driven her out of Foreign Service and into academia. When Quinn had been asked by an old friend to create Campbell Cove Security and the in-house academy as a resource for the government’s war on terrorism, Rebecca Cameron had been one of the first people he’d thought of to bring on board.

She looked like a person who could be trusted. She
was
a person who could be trusted.

“Did you ever meet Risa McGinnis?” he asked Cameron. “Did your paths ever cross while you were in the Foreign Service?”

“No, though I heard about her later, of course. After the plane crash.”

Quinn nodded. “She’s eight months pregnant. She could probably use another woman to talk to.”

Cameron’s dark eyes narrowed. “What are you up to, Quinn?”

“Dal’s been murdered. Risa may be a target. And meanwhile, we’re hearing sporadic chatter from known and suspected terror groups suggesting there’s something in the works for the US.” Quinn leaned forward, folding his hands in front of him and gazing at his partners across the desk. “If we can stop it, we’ll get more assignments in the future.”

“This is about money?” Heller stared at Quinn with a look of disgusted disbelief, but Cameron, Quinn noted, had a more thoughtful look on her face.

“I have all the money I need,” Quinn said simply. “This is about protecting the people of the United States. That’s what it’s always been about for me. Are we clear?”

Cameron inclined her head in answer. Heller just pressed his lips together and gave a gruff nod.

“Cameron, I want you to make contact with McGinnis after lunch. Use a burner phone, just in case. See if there’s anything they need.” Quinn looked at Heller. “I want you to go to Cincinnati, Mad Dog,” using the former marine’s old service nickname. “Ask about renting a room in the building where Risa was living. And visit The Jewel of Tablis for lunch. Keep your ears open. I want to know if people are talking about her sudden disappearance.”

“Will do.”

Quinn waited until his partners left the office before he picked up his own burner phone and made a call to an old friend. “It’s me.”

On the other end of the line, a smooth baritone answered him with a mixture of pleasure and wariness. “What’s up this time, Quinn?”

“I need to know everything you can tell me about Martin Dalrymple.”

* * *

T
HE
WANING
COLORS
of sunset clung to the western sky as if unwilling to let go of the day, but what heat the sun had offered was long gone, and to ward off the cold, Risa curled up with her laptop in one of the armchairs next to the fireplace, leaving Connor to come up with something for dinner.

Risa had always been an indifferent cook, happy to let him claim the kitchen in exchange for handling the cleaning and laundry duties. She’d already washed a load of clothes earlier that afternoon, returning from the small laundry room off the kitchen to inform him she was in the mood for eggs and toast for dinner.

He scrambled eggs for their evening meal, adding cheese and onions for a little extra flavor, and toasted the bread in the oven so he could melt butter on top while it was browning. He’d found some frozen strawberries in the freezer and thawed them so that she could get a serving of fruit to go with the carbs and protein.

“Tomorrow,” he told her when he brought her plate of food into the living room and set it on the table by her chair, “I need to go into town and find a grocery store. We need better food choices.”

She set aside her laptop and picked up the plate. “Cheesy eggs with onion. Do you know how many times I tried to replicate this dish over the past few months?”

“No. How many times?”

“At least two dozen before I gave up. I’m a complete loss in the kitchen.”

“You’re too impatient,” he said, allowing himself a smile as he remembered her whirlwind style of cooking. “Good food requires patience.”

She scooped up a forkful of eggs and took a bite. Her eyes rolled back and she gave a moan of pleasure that seemed to rumble through Connor’s body like an earthquake, finally settling in a low hum of desire in the pit of his belly. He hadn’t let go of his anger at her, or his frustration and pain, but he was nowhere near to immune from the passion he’d always felt when she was within reach.

He set his plate on the fireplace mantel, moving a short distance away to regain control of his hormones. “What do you want to drink? We have water, milk and orange juice.”

“Milk, please,” she said around another mouthful of eggs.

He poured milk for her and water for himself, then returned to the living room. As he sat in the chair beside her, resting his plate on his lap, he congratulated himself on recovering his lost equilibrium.

Mostly.

“So, any progress?” He nodded at the laptop computer lying on the floor at her feet.

“I’ve started a timeline of Dal’s emails to me, trying to see if there’s a pattern to them. I was hoping maybe they’ll tell me more specifically what he was actually looking for in Cincinnati.”

He frowned. “Why didn’t he just tell you what he was looking for?”

She cocked her head, her brow furrowed. “You know Dal. That’s not how he worked.”

“Quinn’s the same way.” He poked a fork into his eggs, the corner of his mouth quirking. “You know, that explains so much about the CIA.”

“There was a method to his madness,” she said with a touch of defensiveness. “Sometimes, on an undercover op where there are a lot of unknowns, you try to go in with no preconceptions. Or at least, as few as you can manage. Dal didn’t want me to assume anything about the Kaziris I’d be living with. He wanted me to assess them on my own, make my own judgments about them and then write up my observations.”

“Do you have copies of those written observations?” Connor asked. Maybe some of the things she had observed could add to some of the incomplete findings of their surveillance operation in Cincinnati.

“Of course. I’ll have to decrypt them for you.”

He nodded, uncomfortably aware that if she’d been any other operative, he might not have been willing to leave the decryption to her. Instead, he might have taken advantage of their forced proximity to sneak a copy of her notes to Quinn for Spear to decrypt.

But he couldn’t seem to function as an operative with Risa, no matter how much she’d hurt him by letting him believe she was dead. She was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a traitor to her country.

If she knew anything that could protect the US against a terrorist attack of any sort, she’d share it. He was utterly certain of that.

“Why did your company decide to do surveillance on the Kaziri community in Ohio in the first place?” Having finished off her dinner, she set her plate aside, tucked her legs under her and turned to look at him. Her left hand settled on her belly as if by habit, gently rubbing it the way she might soothe a fussy child. He couldn’t seem to drag his gaze away from her hand and the swell of her abdomen.

His child was in there, growing and getting ready to greet the world. A week ago, he’d been all alone without any real hope of having a family again, and now he was about to be a father.

Emotion rose in his throat, choking him. He forced himself to look away and struggled to remember what she’d just asked. “Quinn and Cameron—she’s the other partner at Campbell Cove Security—both had contacts in the government who believed that there might be al Adar operatives hiding in the migrant community. The only Kaziri groups seeking work visas in the US in any numbers were the non-Muslims being driven out of the southern part of the country by terrorist attacks on their churches and homes, and the Mahalabi tribe from north of Tablis. We didn’t think al Adar spies could easily hide among the Kaziris who settled in the Research Triangle in North Carolina.”