Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (9 page)

“This is Mark. Mark Templeton. I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you. We’ve never met but…”

Templeton
? The name clicked into recognition. Talia O’Brien’s live-in lover. A man Mercy had spoken of often and seemed to hold in the highest regard.

Sebastian felt the knot of tension beneath his ribs wrench tighter. Had Templeton received word of Mercy’s mother’s fate? He could only think it must be the worst possible news, since she’d been missing for so long. But what if this wasn’t about Talia? What if something had happened to Mercy? His heart nearly vaulted out of his chest.

“Yes, Mark, this is Sebastian. Go ahead, please.”

“I’ve been trying to reach Mercy, but I can’t raise her anywhere. I’m really worried. She told me if I ever needed to contact her and couldn’t that you might be the one to reach out to. Your ranch manager said you were staying at the Hay-Adams in DC, so I thought… Is she there with you? May I talk to her?”

Sebastian’s fingers clenched around the phone, knuckles aching. He switched hands. “I haven’t been able to reach her either,” he admitted.

“Christ! You don’t think she actually flew off to search for her mother on her own, do you?”

The very possibility made his head hurt. “The last I heard, the State Department still had her passport flagged. TSA will stop her before she can board an international flight.”

“Yeah, right.” Mark groaned. “I guess I’m just overreacting. Thinking what else can go wrong, you know? After the carjacking and all.”

“
Espera!
What carjacking?”

“You haven’t heard? I don’t know much,” Mark admitted, his voice sounding stretched thin with anxiety. “Mercy’s assistant, Evelyn, called to tell me about it. Some guy jumped Mercy when she was leaving her art gallery.”

“Was she hurt?” Sebastian could hardly breathe. He paced back and forth in front of the window, phone pressed to his ear, his gut wrenching into a hard ball.

“Evelyn assured me that she was all right. Shaken up and a bit bruised, she said, but I’m not sure she’d even seen Mercy after the incident.” Mark sighed. “Apparently Mercy’s physician recommended a spell at a rehab clinic for rest and physical therapy.”

“Where?” Despite the coolness of the room, Sebastian felt as if he was running a fever.

“I have the address.”

Sebastian snatched a pen from the top desk drawer, along with a sheet of the hotel’s engraved stationary. “Phone number?”

“I can give it to you, but I doubt it will do you any good.” Mark rattled off an 800-number. “I’ve been calling for days. The place is called Summervale. The Nazi receptionist answering the phone refuses to put me through to Mercy’s room. Apparently there’s a no-through-calls policy to protect their clients’ privacy. I’m beginning to wonder if she’s there at all. It’s all so strange.”

Sebastian closed his eyes and shook his head. Stranger still that Mercy hadn’t called to tell him about the assault.

There was a metallic scraping sound through the phone. Sebastian knew very little about Templeton. Just that he was confined to a wheelchair since a teenage diving accident left the lower half of his body paralyzed. He imagined the man holed up in the Manhattan apartment he shared with Mercy’s mother, waiting to find out if the woman he loved was still alive. Now her daughter had as good as gone missing. It was a wonder the poor guy hadn’t lost his mind.

Sebastian was sure
he
would have in Templeton’s place.

Mark continued, his voice cracking on every third or fourth word. “I know what you said about the airlines. But what if Mercy’s lying to her manager? What if she really has gone in search of her mother? I can’t bear the thought of her putting herself in harm’s way. I’m the one who should man up and go looking for Talia!”

“
Mi amigo
,” Sebastian said, “do not blame yourself for things you cannot control.”

“Damn legs. Fucking wheelchair!”

“Stop,” Sebastian said. Hearing the other man’s panic and frustration had the reverse effect on him. Emergencies settled him. His mind cleared. Then he knew what to do. “I will track down Mercy, then we’ll see if this has anything to do with her mother, or not. Maybe there’s something I can do about Talia, too.”

“How? I’ve tried everything, believe me.”

“I am blessed with a few business connections that are...let us say, unorthodox.”

Mark sounded as if he was trying to laugh but choking instead.  “Mercy described you as Zorro meets the Godfather. I wasn’t sure what to expect.”

Sebastian rather enjoyed the comparison. “If I find out anything, I’ll call.”

“She won’t like you meddling,” Mark warned. “I mean, if she’s okay and just lying low for some reason.”

Sebastian grimaced. “At the moment I’m not sure I have anything to lose as far as our relationship goes.”

There was silence from the other end. Sebastian thought for a moment that the other man might have hung up. Then, “I’ve known her for seven years, Sebastian. Mercy has a mind of her own. She’s taken risks—with her art, with the man she married, and whenever she thought she could help people she cared about.”

“I know.” These were traits that made her all the more appealing to Sebastian. He too was a risk taker. When the stakes were high and the outcome really mattered, what choice did one have?

Mark said, “I can tell by the way she talks about you that she respects you deeply, Sebastian. She cares for you. But, I um—”

“But you don’t think she’s ready to commit to someone like me?”

Mark groaned. “It’s not that. I expect you’re a refreshing change from that pompous ass of a husband.”

Sebastian smiled sadly. “One point in my favor.”

“I’m just not sure she’ll be able to truly trust another man for a long time. She gave up everything for Peter and his career. In return, he deceived her, cheated on her. Now, for the first time in her adult life, she’s tasting freedom and making a life of her own choosing. I’m not sure she’ll be able to give that up anytime soon.”

“I see,” said Sebastian. And he did, all too well.

                                          9

The second week at Red Sands camp started much the same as the first. Instruction by video, lectures and demonstrations by experts, shouting and threats from Bull when she didn’t measure up to his expectations, and nights of pain so wretched she was sure she’d never be able to sleep. And yet, exhausted as she was, she did sleep…then managed to crawl out of bed the next morning and do it all over again.

The upside of all the crazy drills and daily corporal punishment—she was physically stronger than ever. The downside—she felt totally cut off from the rest of the world. She hadn’t spoken to Evelyn in Georgetown for over a week, or Mark in New York, since before the Russian hitman’s attack. And it had been even longer since she’d last heard Sebastian’s voice. She missed him desperately.

On her final day at the West Virginia training facility, the day she’d looked forward to and thought would be a piece of cake after all she’d been through, Bull rousted her out of bed at three a.m. “Camos and boots, now!” he barked. Groaning, she fumbled for the clothing she’d been given, intended for more strenuous hikes through the woods. She dressed in the dark, confused by his singling out her and five others who were near the end of their training. The remainder of the group was left to continue sleeping.

What the hell?

The chosen trainees were among the brightest and most eager of the class. They had become a little friendlier toward her than when she first arrived at camp. Bull and two other Training Instructors blindfolded all six of them. They were prodded into a vehicle—a van, she guessed from the feel of stepping up into it and the rows of seats—and driven down twisting roads and (another guess) out of the mountains. Gauging the time it took before the vehicle rattled to a stop, she estimated they’d come at least ten miles.

When the doors creaked open a wave of sulfuric swamp stink hit her. She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

“Oh, man,” one of the trainees groaned, “that’s gross.”

Her blindfold was removed.

Each of the six received a backpack loaded with a map, compass, flashlight, GPS and rendezvous coordinates. No food. No water. She glanced from the sheet of paper handed her, to those received by of the trainees on either side of her. She was surprised to see that the finish line was different for each of them. They were being forced to split up. They’d also been given individual legends, fake identities.

“The enemy will be out there searching for you. Avoid all contact,” Bull warned. In the dark, his eyes were black holes with pinpoint reflections of the flashlights around him. He looked almost demonic.

Shit,
she thought.
Shit…shit…shit!
Maybe this was Bull’s last-ditch effort to cull her from those scheduled to graduate. If she failed at this final drill, he could claim she wasn’t fit for the job.

“Enemy troops have orders to capture and, if they need to, use torture to get information from you,” Bull bellowed, pacing up and down in front of them. The swamp seemed to swallow up his words the moment they left his mouth. Although Mercy knew this was just role playing, the word torture made her skin crawl. “If you get caught, stick to your legend, keep your head and try to escape. Those who survive and make it to their rendezvous before dawn will graduate today.” He shot her a long look that she took as a personal challenge.

Bastard!

Then the TIs climbed back into the van and drove off, leaving the six of them in the moonless, foul-smelling glade. Mercy watched the van’s red tail lights disappear into scrub trees. By the time she looked back to her classmates, they were silently slipping on their backpacks, acting like they all knew exactly what to do. Maybe they’d been through a similar drill before she arrived in camp.

Mercy plopped down on a nearby log, her stomach doing flip-flops. “Crap!” She watched the others, in their military-style camouflage, strike out into the dark. She’d never been good with maps. She needed more time to come up with a route. Wandering around without a plan was bound to get her lost.

Every breath she took tasted of slime, putrefying vegetation, dead creatures. She’d heard of boot-camp accidents, young soldiers who died during training exercises. It wasn’t beyond the realm of the possible that something like that might happen here, tonight, to her. And given Red Sands’ below-the-radar existence, who would ever know if one of their trainees never made it out of the swamp?

She focused the beam of her LED flashlight on the map spread over her knees. She used the red-light option so as not to night-blind herself, checked her current coordinates with her GPS. She logged them in, along with her destination. Double-checked her calculations. Slowly her head cleared and her mood altered from desperation to a kind of drugless high—an emotional cocktail of equal parts terror and exhilaration.

I can do this! I can beat his stupid drill.

She plotted two possible routes. Either she’d have to cut through approximately a mile of swamp or she’d need to hike more than three miles around it. As snakes—reptiles in general, actually—were among her least favorite creatures, and she knew for a fact that water moccasins thrived in the area, she opted for high ground and the long way around.

If her calculations were correct, her final goal would be five miles to the south, all of it across rough terrain. She stared up at the night sky through dense pinewood treetops and into a faint brightening from above. Smoky clouds scudded apart, revealing a white crescent moon. A smattering of stars broke the solid black of the night sky. She slung the pack onto her back and tramped off toward a line of barely visible trees.

After about two miles, the solid earth turned moist and springy. It felt as if it were shifting beneath her feet. Soon she was ankle-deep in a noxious quagmire. Chiggers and gnats rose up in clouds to gnaw at any exposed flesh—the backs of her hands, neck, face. She constantly swatted them away, now worried that she’d strayed from her plotted course. There seemed little to do but keep moving until she could find a place to sit down and reconsider her route. The underfoot glop sucked noisily at her boots with every step. If anyone else had been within half a mile of her, she was sure she would have heard them—and they her. But not another sound accompanied her clumsy plodding. Never had she felt so alone.

A hundred yards on, the ground began to rise ahead of her. She could move faster with drier, more solid footing. Then suddenly, miraculously, she was standing at the edge of a dirt road wide enough for two vehicles.

She checked her map under the flashlight’s blood-red pinpoint beam. If she was standing where the GPS told her she was, there shouldn’t be a road.
Damn!
Now she knew she was good and lost.

Was it possible for a GPS reading to be wrong? More likely Bull had given her a faulty map, intending to throw her off. Dirty tricks were part of the spy game. It struck her again that no one except a shady organization of mercenary spies knew where she was. If she never found her way out of this wilderness, would news of her disappearance be reported to Evelyn or Sebastian? And who would continue the search for Talia? Would she ever see her mother again?