Unmasking Kelsey (16 page)

And the very fact that Kelsey had not reported in, nor gone through official channels for the information he had required told Hagen more than his agent would have liked. Told Hagen, in fact, a great deal.

Really, Hagen thought vaguely, he should turn
his talents toward matchmaking on a grand scale. He seemed to be good at it.

Dammit.

Elizabeth was rather fascinated by Kelsey’s elusive partner, introduced to her simply as Derek. A big man like Kelsey, he was blond and startlingly handsome with lazy eyes and a faintly drawling voice. He had arrived late in the morning after being called by Kelsey, and they were all three sitting in the living room with coffee, planning.

And Derek fascinated Elizabeth because she had the unnerved feeling that nothing she or anybody else could ever say or do would surprise him. There was something in those lazy eyes that was older than time, infinitely tolerant, and faintly amused.

“Sounds right to me,” he said now as Kelsey finished explaining the conclusions he had come to, lighting a cigarette.

“Mallory’s on his way over here,” Kelsey told him. “Elizabeth called him.”

Derek cocked an eyebrow. “Going to deck him?”

Elizabeth giggled despite herself.

Kelsey frowned at both of them, but his eyes were bright. “No, I’m not going to deck him. Unless he provokes me,” he added as an afterthought.

“The way you feel about him,” Derek murmured, studying the glowing end of his cigarette, “a polite good morning would provoke you.”

Kelsey ignored that. Pointedly. “I want to know why in hell we haven’t heard from Raven. That isn’t like her.”

“I imagine we could call the jet.”

“Jet? What jet?”

“Company jet. A Lear, I think. Hard to know which one they’d take, though. There are—what?—six or so in Long’s fleet?”

After a moment of silence, Kelsey sighed. “Do you know for sure they’re coming down here, or just guessing?”

“Calling it an educated guess. I know Raven, and from what I’ve heard of her husband and that crew of his, they wouldn’t just offer information or advice. They’d come down here suited up and ready to get in the game.”

“They wouldn’t
all
come,” Kelsey protested.

“All who?” Elizabeth asked, bewildered.

There was amusement in his eyes, but Kelsey sighed in a long-suffering manner. “Once upon a time, I had a partner named Raven. She was good, damned good. But one night she accidentally knocked a man flat on his back in a hotel hallway, which rattled him so much that he proposed to her.”

“Marriage?” Elizabeth asked, smiling.

“Orange blossoms and all. Unfortunately, Raven was in deep cover working an assignment, and I was on the sidelines providing backup. The man, to the consternation of us all, turned out to be Joshua Long. Heard of him?”

“Who hasn’t.” Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “I suppose he didn’t just dismiss her from his life?”

“Hardly. When she gave him the slip—being undercover and in a rather dangerous position—he promptly called out his bloodhounds. A lawyer, an ex-marine security chief, and an ex-cop turned investigator.” He reflected broodingly. “Things got kind of crazy after that. Anyway, at some point
our esteemed boss Hagen caught them in a weak moment and deviously swore all four of them in as federal agents, and has spent the past year and more drafting them one by one to help him out.”

“Is that legal?” she wondered.

“It isn’t ethical,” Derek murmured, blowing a smoke ring and studying it critically.

“They don’t care,” Kelsey told Elizabeth. “It’s a bit odd in this day and age, but all four of those men are dragon slayers. Zach’s the only one of them who really
looks
the part, but all four swing a mean sword.”

“You left out the best part of the story,” Derek complained mildly.

Kelsey gave his partner a suspicious look. “And what part did I leave out?”

“Matrimony.” Derek looked at Elizabeth and said lazily, “Each of those men emerged from his respective assignment with a wife in tow. I understand Hagen is beginning to consider himself quite a matchmaker.”

“I thought you didn’t know the story!” Kelsey said accusingly.

“A little bird must have told me.”

“And I can guess her name, I suppose.”

Elizabeth decided not to comment on that aspect of the story. “They sound very unusual. What about the women?”

Kelsey returned his attention to her, feeling his body and senses react just to looking at her and no longer surprised by it. He cleared his throat determinedly.

“Well, Raven was in this business for a number of years, so she certainly knows the ropes; and she’s a dragon slayer by nature as well as training. Rafferty—he’s the lawyer—married another of Hagen’s agents; Sarah does research primarily and doesn’t seem to care too much for field work. Zach—the security chief—married a redheaded spitfire who stumbled into an assignment he was on; Teddy looks more like the princess being rescued from the dragon, but she swings a pretty sharp sword herself. And Luc—the investigator—married a lady named Kyle, who is very beautiful, very bright, and very courageous; she wouldn’t wait to be rescued either.”

Elizabeth, fascinated, felt a distant throb of pain when she realized that each of those extraordinary men had apparently found women who matched them on every level and who were perfectly capable of going into battle with their men.

And she suddenly felt inadequate. Kelsey had seen and done so much; he was an epic dragon slayer in his own right and had been for fifteen years. What was she? She, who raised sisters and peaches, lived in a small town in the back of beyond, and when danger had threatened, had sat back biting her nails and waiting for someone else to act.

Swing a sword? She couldn’t even find one to lift!

“Excuse me,” she said suddenly, and escaped to the kitchen on the pretext of getting more coffee.

She stood in her safe, bright little kitchen, staring around at the familiar haven that was her tame little world.

The wildness inside her had always been controlled before now, escaping momentarily in brief winging periods, and settling quickly afterwards.
Like the owner of some rare and fragile bird, she had opened the cage, let it out, and strictly controlled the limited flight, calling it quickly back before it could totally escape. But the passionate time spent with Kelsey had, she realized vaguely, changed something.

She couldn’t get the cage door shut this time, not completely. And the bird, with a new kind of freedom sampled, wanted more. Much more.

And a tiny, wise voice from deep in her mind—or her heart—whispered that her only means of truly understanding the man she loved lay not in him, but in herself. Kelsey flew by instinct, never returning to a cage but only to some more settled part of himself, and if she were to ever fully perceive the man he was, she would have to learn to fly that way as well.

She wasn’t even sure that what had been caged and tethered for so long could take wing completely now in total freedom. She wasn’t entirely certain that she had not, after all, forgotten how to really fly.

But her love was stronger than her fear.

Elizabeth had barely disappeared into the kitchen when Kelsey and Derek heard a car in the drive.

Derek lifted a questioning brow, and Kelsey shrugged. “I don’t suppose it matters now,” he told his partner, replying to the question of Derek’s anonymity. “Mallory will have to know who I am, so he might as well meet you. We need his cooperation too much to waste time with games.”

“Okay by me,” Derek murmured.

Kelsey went to the front door, which was standing open, and held the screen door back as Blaine Mallory stepped up onto the porch. Keeping his voice cool and unthreatening, Kelsey said, “Good morning. Would you come in?”

Mallory’s face darkened. “You’ve certainly made yourself at home, haven’t you?”

Kelsey felt the hairs on the nape of his neck stirring, but held on to tranquillity. “I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t noticed. This way.” He led the way into the living room, introducing Derek, who rose politely, as his partner.

Blaine Mallory stood staring at both men, his face expressionless, eyes cold. “Where’s Beth?”

“In the kitchen making coffee,” Kelsey told him. He leaned lazily against a chair, and continued speaking in a calm, but subtly more authoritative tone of voice. “My partner and I work for a federal agency, Mr. Mallory. We received a tip and came to Pinnacle to investigate Meditron.”

Mallory lifted a disbelieving brow.

They stood confronting one another, neither noticing that Derek had returned to his chair and lighted a cigarette while he thoughtfully studied them.

After a moment of strained silence, Derek said mildly, “Marquis of Queensberry rules, or just a glorious free-for-all?”

Kelsey blinked, glanced aside at his partner, and realized abruptly that his own posture had become decidedly stiff and alert in response to Mallory’s hostility and his own. He forced himself to relax, looking back to Mallory. “I don’t think it needs to come to that,” he said, addressing his partner’s remark. “Mr. Mallory has the reputation
of being an intelligent man. And we all want the same thing.”

“Which is?” Mallory asked flatly.

“Jo Conner free. The renegade major out at Meditron locked up in a stockade, with his toys defused.” The last was a guess, but Kelsey knew he had struck a nerve when Mallory’s eyes widened slightly.

After a moment, Mallory said, “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

Kelsey crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. “A reasonable question. The answer is—you don’t. Oh, we could show you identification. But everyone knows you can have those things made up in most novelty shops for a couple of dollars. I could give you the number of our home office, but since we aren’t listed anywhere you only have my word for it that you
would
be calling a federal agency.”

Mallory’s mouth twisted slightly. “You don’t inspire a lot of trust, know that?”

Softly, Derek said, “You could call the military brass in Washington. It’s what you wanted to do
in the first place. And they’d come tearing down here whether they believed you or not. They probably wouldn’t be too subtle about it, but it
would
bring the situation out into the open.”

“And blow Pinnacle off the map!” Mallory snapped.

Neither Kelsey nor Derek betrayed, by so much as a flicker, that Mallory had just confirmed their guesses.

Reasonably, Kelsey said, “He can’t possibly believe the threat would stall you much longer. The point is that if he’s crazy enough to make such a threat, he’s crazy enough to blow Pinnacle off the map anyway just to cover his tracks.”

“It’d be a hell of a diversion,” Derek noted.

“Diversion?” Mallory weighed his options rapidly, and came to the conclusion he needed help. Like it or not, he had to trust these men. “Diversion?” he repeated. “I don’t think you’ve realized it yet, but Thorn’s missile is nuclear—and the warhead is intact with a specialist standing by just waiting to launch the thing.”

In the act of lighting another cigarette, Derek
went still, his hooded gaze lifting swiftly to Mallory’s strained face. “Damn,” he said softly.

Kelsey’s expression had gone grim. “Thorn must really be out of his mind,” he said tautly.

Mallory ran fingers through his hair, looking suddenly older and exhausted. “He is. The missile is experimental—a prototype. It was designed, only God knows why, to be used on an extremely close target. The man who designed it called it a suicide device; it’s meant to be some kind of final resort. Maybe to destroy a command post or an intelligence center before it could be overrun by the enemy.” In a wry comparison, he added, “I suppose it’s something like the Rebels burning Atlanta before the Yankees could get it.”

Kelsey shook his head. “That’s the damnedest—How’s it launched?”

“It’s sitting on its launch pad right now. Maximum range is twenty miles; minimum … hell, you can turn on the timer and just walk away. If it’s launched and impacts before the timer runs out, the impact triggers it. If there’s no impact, but the timer is activated, it detonates when it
reaches zero. And if it were to be launched now without activating the timer, it would still detonate on impact.”

“And it’s aimed at Pinnacle?” Derek asked.

Mallory nodded.

“The military didn’t okay it?” Kelsey asked.

“Hell, no. Thorn okayed it. The specialist—a physicist, I believe—is a buddy of Thorn’s. He built the thing in secret at Meditron, and Thorn plans to sell it to the highest bidder, along with a huge load of conventional weapons. My contract with the military specified
only
conventional weapons manufacturing on a limited scale; they brought in the necessary personnel and I supplied the buildings. Meditron still manufactures medical equipment in two buildings, but the other four are for military use.”

“How did Jo Conner get involved?” Kelsey asked.

“My fault.” Mallory sighed. “I was mad as hell when I found out about the missile—and about Thorn shaving his quota and stockpiling weapons. I told Jo more than I meant to, and she went
looking one night. I’d already threatened Thorn that I meant to call Washington; he grabbed Jo before I got the chance.”