An Affair of Vengeance (9 page)

So he’d played with her, let her know that he was on to her game. It was fun.

He had no time for fun.

He kicked a broken brick out of his path and continued on. Anger rumbled like sharp-edged stones in his belly. He should know better. Getting close to anyone was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

Which reminded him to pause and pat his pockets. She’d been close enough to slip any number of items inside, but his were empty, save for what he’d put in them. She hadn’t bugged him again. He guessed that she’d simply wanted to know where he
was going, since she hadn’t been able to listen in on the Ménellier meeting. The white-noise generator he’d activated in the center of his suite would have made electronic amplification impossible.

Well, at least he’d confirmed that she was a professional. No innocent waitress would fall into his arms and drop a tracker into his pocket one night, only to show up at his hotel and follow him the next morning. He didn’t buy her excuses. She was foreign intelligence, and he was her mark. Any smiles she dealt him would be constructed explicitly to cajole him into doing whatever in the hell she wanted him to do.

Even if she hadn’t so clearly been following him, he hadn’t met a woman he could safely assume had no ulterior motives since he first went undercover. Too many hard years now separated him from innocence to pretend that she was anything other than what she appeared to be: just another threat to his progress. Whether they were on the same side of the law or not made little difference to him. The more people involved, the greater the chance of someone blowing a hint into the wrong ear. It was hard enough accommodating the Home Office’s growing requirements. The CIA was bound to have a secondary motive that would conflict with SOCA’s. Meddling by another country was the last thing he needed in this final leg of his mission.

Then why did he find himself looking forward to seeing her again?

It had to be physical, that’s all. She was pretty, no doubt about that. Most men would want her in bed, if they looked closely enough at her to see what he saw. A man would have to be blind to not want to take her into his arms, tug down her shirt, and kiss her pale, slim shoulder. Unbutton it further, and kiss her breast. Take it full into his mouth, and hear her moan. Feel her hands on his back, pulling him. Wanting him. Calling his name.

She knew his real name, too, at least his real surname. Being with her would almost be real.

Except it wouldn’t be, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise.

He closed his eyes against the fantasy.

After thirty solid minutes of advancing and retreating through the back doors of the shops in the corner of the first arrondissement, McCrea opened a heavy metal door and entered a quiet, dusty old bookshop. Nodding at the grayhaired man behind the counter, he meandered through rows of leather-bound volumes to a staircase in the corner of the building. He bounded up the stairs and down a dark, wood-paneled hallway. At its end, he slipped a key into a door and entered.

The small, tidy room buzzed with electrical equipment. A bespectacled little man seated behind a desk looked up as McCrea entered.

“It’s about time,” said the man.

“Work is harder when you actually have to do it, Lamb,” McCrea snarled as he pulled out a chair and sat down, pressing his fingers to his temples.

“Tough day at the office?”

“Tougher than yours. Do you have information on the waitress?”

Lamb clucked. “I’ve never heard you so interested in a woman before!”

“She followed me from the hotel. She was all over the Ménellier meet.”

“Really?” Lamb frowned, pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose, and shuffled through the papers on his desk. “She’s… she’s nobody, just another waitress from California, been here a few years. Lives in the Noailles quarter above a Tunisian takeaway, very few known acquaintances. She’s been seen with Serge Penard several times—it seems she’s quite chummy with some of the Marseille crooks—but other than that, she’s nobody.”

“She’s hounding known criminals around town. She’s hounding
me
. She’s somebody. She planted some kind of wired toothpick on me last night. I tossed it into a stairwell, easily recovered.
Could be nothing. Could be CIA issue. See if they have anyone working Penard.”

“Of course they have agents in Marseille, but even if we ask, they won’t tell us a bloody thing. You know that. Friendly nations or not, we don’t share intel.” Lamb’s voice was soothing. “But more importantly, we can’t tell
them
a bloody thing.”

McCrea cursed and leaned back, crossing his fingers behind his head as he stared at the brown-stained ceiling. A desk fan waved a cooling breeze across his chest.

His old friend was right. He usually was. Even if the waitress was a foreign intelligence officer, and even if her agency would admit to it, McCrea couldn’t risk letting another group get a whiff of his mission, especially not now that he was so close to implicating Lukas Kral.

“I’m not going to sit around while she runs roughshod through my op,” he said.

“Fine, fine. I’ll check with the Yanks. I doubt they’ll give us a peep back. But in the meantime, you can’t hurt her, you know. If she is foreign intelligence, the Home Office would throw a fit if you tossed her off a roof.”

“I’m meeting her for drinks.”

Lamb’s eyes narrowed. “Keep your friends close, and your enemies…?”

“In your crosshairs.”

Hidden from public view and practically bug-proof, the old storehouse was normally an ideal meeting spot, but today its dark, oppressive clamminess was too stark a contrast to the breezy summer day outside. Evangeline sat in the empty room on a rickety metal folding chair. Every shifting of her body was accompanied by a screech several decibels too loud for the small gray chamber.

The adrenaline rush of the morning’s chase had emptied from her system, leaving nothing but a strange, jittery fatigue. She stared at the walls. She still didn’t understand why McCrea had let her leave on her own accord. He hadn’t seemed to believe her, and yet he was content to let her go free.

Why?

He was undoubtedly a monster, a terrorist of the worst sort, a man buying an arsenal of missiles that could be used to take down commercial airplanes.

In short, he was a bad, bad dude.

And yet Evangeline couldn’t forget the comforting smell of his shirt. When he’d cornered her in the market, she’d expected to feel a sharp knife or the cold muzzle of a gun poking into her back, not the warmth of his breath on her neck.

Her body hummed at the memory.

Stop it
.

She ought to smack herself for getting caught up in the masculine physicality of his presence. He’d turned the tables, morphed her from hunter to hunted. What had he called her? A little mouse? It was an accurate enough assessment. And he was an amber-eyed cat, watchful and deadly, playing with his prey. After all, he hadn’t needed to stay in that market until she’d arrived. He could have left before she’d seen him. It was as if he’d been waiting for her.

Perhaps he’d just wanted to confirm that she was following him. Well, he’d succeeded in that. But then why, when he’d trapped her in the aisle, had he touched her so intimately? Why had he chosen to speak to her like a lover instead of threatening her with bodily harm, as he’d done to Penard the night before?

She couldn’t imagine why, but for whatever reason, that criminal had caressed her when he could have harmed her. He’d been gentle when he could have been rough. He’d been attracted when he should have been repelled.

And so had she. Evangeline dropped her head into her hands. Damn it, but she’d liked the feeling of his chest against her back, and the scent of him in her nose.

Mason burst into the storeroom.

She jumped to her feet. “Do you have the meeting transcript?”

He pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the sweat off his brow. Evangeline couldn’t imagine Mason in a state of repose, but today he looked like he could use a nap. It brightened her mood.

She smirked. “Warm day?”

“I hadn’t noticed.” He raised an expectant eyebrow in her direction as he thumbed through a small manila file folder. He fanned his jacket, getting air to his core. “So?”

Nothing for free
, she reminded herself. “I followed him to a market, where he slipped out an alley door. I could have pursued, but it seemed unwise.”

“You went inside the market?”

“I had to. Those shops have doors to the back alley. He could have vanished.”

“He vanished anyway. Going inside the store only increased your chances of being made. What did you accomplish?”

“We spoke,” she said, and hurried on when Mason’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve secured a meeting with him this evening.”

She left out the part about it being a cocktail date. Mason was old-fashioned, trained during the Cold War, and preferred his operatives to meet with potential assets in distantly parked cars and abandoned warehouses. Most of Evangeline’s assets had been found and turned in bars.

“A meeting? He’s recruitable, then?”

“He’s interested.”

Mason wasn’t so easily fooled. “In what?”

“In me,” she admitted, and crossed her arms over her chest. “I can’t say what else. But he’s intrigued enough to not have threatened me when he noticed that I was tracking him.”

“He knows you were after him?”

“Yes.”

“And last night? He knows you were in the bar, too?”

“He does.”

Mason’s lips tightened. “You’re taking unusual risks.”

“I’m getting results.”

“Your overenthusiasm will ruin this.”

“My overenthusiasm had me hanging by my toes five stories up to film that meeting this morning.” Frustrated, she pointed at the folder he held. “Do you know what they discussed, or not?”

“All you need to know is that you’re walking a very thin line, Ms. Quill. Very thin, indeed.”

“That’s how I work, Mason.” She stalked closer to him, her rubber heels thudding dully on the concrete floor. “If I cared more about getting promoted than doing my job, I could sit back and pad my record with low-level nobodies like Penard, and he’d give us shit intel until kingdom come in exchange for millions of taxpayer dollars. But I want to make a difference, not just stay alive.”

“Let’s hope you don’t have to choose between the two.”

She couldn’t disagree. “Let’s stay on this. I’ll meet him tonight, see if I can push him over to our side. Barring that, I’ll try to figure out what he’s doing with Ménellier.”

Mason lifted one graying eyebrow. “I see you have no need for my direction anymore.”

She let herself smile. “No, I still need you. Who else is going to run my flash drives through tech-ops?”

That evening, Evangeline stood across the street from the Metro Hotel, watching purple arcs of light wash the open sky behind the opera house. A prettier-than-average dusk, to be sure, but she knew she was stalling. She needed to charge across the street and
into the hotel right this second if she was going to meet McCrea for drinks, as they’d planned.

Planned. What, like it was a date?

It felt more like a dare, and it could be an ambush. That foreboding explained her reluctance.

Or did it?

Denial helped no one, and as she stared at the hotel, amassing her courage, Evangeline couldn’t pretend any longer that this man was just another crook to her. Her body had responded to his touch. Her nose remembered the scent of his cologne. Her neck still sizzled with the memory of his lips.

None of that had anything to do with McCrea’s connection to Lukas Kral, and his connection to Krai should be all that mattered. Not the hunger he’d awakened, nor the confusion that came along with it. The memory of his touch should spawn nothing but disgust, but where loathing should reside was only a deep, yawning ache that she could only call desire.

Desire
. For a criminal.

She should know better.

In her training at the Farm, the lesson had been hammered home: avoid romantic entanglements. History was littered with the stories of decent officers who’d fallen for an operative of a rival agency. As a result, anything more than a one-night stand had to be reported, investigated, and approved, and the joke was that nobody wanted to deal with that kind of paperwork. In reality, the process for reporting a “close and continuing relationship”
was
a nightmare. Some field operatives resigned from the Agency just to avoid it, if a relationship was serious enough. But most CIA officers posted to foreign stations simply lived out their sexual lives as a series of disconnected one-night stands.