Blowback (9 page)

T
hey awakened late, very late, the next day. Molly was glad she'd slipped a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door before they'd finally switched out the lights.

They'd slept, clasped tight in one another's arms, as if warding off the rest of the world. But they slept fitfully, waking every couple of hours, kissing, caressing, and then drifting back off to sleep. It had felt like she was living in a different world than she had a week before. Everything had changed, some of which she loved, and some of which she hated. It was the contradiction that was keeping her restless, and she knew that her tossing and turning had kept waking David too. But this was her big day, and the start of a new…something.

The G20 speech was the last scheduled talk on the tour she'd done, and she had nothing planned after she left Athens. Harry had work lined up for her if she wanted to take it, and last week she'd had every intention of helping out on an excavation in Indonesia, even though that culture wasn't her specialty.

But with everything that had happened, she felt less certain about her future. Less certain about everything. Less certain she'd even survive this week, with the Russians seemingly convinced she'd had something to do with Alexandre's death.

They ate a late brunch, quietly reading the newspaper that had been delivered with the food, and saying little. It was as if they were already prepared to say goodbye. And yet she still didn't really know what they were going to do after she gave her speech.

The newspaper strangely didn't have any articles about the bombing and Alexandre's assassination. She supposed that was good. When they'd turned on the television, the same was true. The G20 meetings had been relegated to third place in the news. A new presidential nominee and a flood in a southern state had taken the top spots.

“This is good, right?” she asked David.

He nodded thoughtfully. He'd made her promise that if the news was heavy on the incidents in Athens, then she'd agree to cancel her speech and leave with him. “Yes, I hope so.” A frown furrowed his brow though, and that did nothing to ease the tension in the room, or ricocheting around her mind and body.

Thirty minutes later, she changed into her light blue business suit and silk blouse while David waited at the window again. When she came out of the bathroom she was gratified to see his double take. He'd never seen her in anything so…normal.

“You look amazing. Authoritative. You're going to rock this speech…Then we're breaking for the border, all right?” he said, still looking tense.

She sought to reassure him, even though she was feeling as uncertain as he seemed to be. “I'm all ready to go as soon as I finish. The bellboy will come for my bag and they'll leave it in the lobby for us to grab on the way out.” She wondered if she should try to find Victoria to explain that she was leaving. She'd have to look for her downstairs.

He opened the door for her, and she walked through. Grabbing her arm, he stopped her short and planted a knee-melting kiss on her lips. For a second, all thoughts of speaking before a group of government leaders evaporated. She moved close to him and dug her hands into his hair as he deepened the kiss. The smell of his skin was intoxicating. She wanted him so much, and briefly wondered if they would have another chance to make love before they disappeared back to their own worlds. Her heart constricted at the thought, but she pushed the feeling aside. Better to have one perfect day with him than months of uncertainty.

They took the elevator to the lobby, David staying very close to her, every step she took. The comfort that gave her allowed her to concentrate on her speech. She'd emailed it to the teleprompter guy already, so all she had to do was remember to introduce herself.

“You're going to be great, sweetheart,” David whispered in her ear, as they entered the auditorium in the conference center of the hotel. Probably about fifty percent of the audience had already taken their seats. She'd been to enough of these events to know where to sit and wait to be introduced. She opened her handbag to grab her index cards, which were now somewhat battered by their frequent use. David squeezed her shoulder and took a seat about ten rows back on the end, presumably so he could make a quick getaway if needed.

She recognized a minister from Egypt and the culture and antiquities minister from Greece as they took seats with their small entourages. The head of the British Museum was chatting to one of the curators from the Louvre. Several prominent archaeologists were present too, and that was what gave her the biggest thrill. Her peers coming to listen to her speak.

The room filled up quickly, and she concentrated on her notes. She'd written a new first card, one that the teleprompter guy hadn't received, so she didn't want to mess it up.

The director of the archaeology museum in Athens took the stand. “As you know, Dr. Solent, our speaker this evening, helped foil a company's plan to loot an archaeological site and sell its artifacts on the black market. And in stopping this outrage, she uncovered years of illegal antiquity trading. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in archaeology and geology. She did her masters at the University of Chicago with a focus on Medieval Europe and her doctorate in archaeology at Oxford University with a focus on Ancient Greek texts.” The director paused and smiled. “I'm not at all saying that she is more qualified than me, but you will have to pry this job out of my cold, dead hands, Dr. Solent.” Laughter rippled through the auditorium. “Needless to say, she is uniquely qualified to speak to us today. So without further ado, I present Dr. Molly Solent.” He turned to her, joining in the applause, and walked from the stage.

She walked up and smiled at the audience. “Before I start, I'd like to pay tribute to Professor Alexandre Doubrov, a beloved fixture of our field's conference circuit, a mine of information, and a willing sharer of his vast experience. He was killed yesterday, here in this hotel, and we have no idea why. Alexandre, you will be missed.” She paused for a few seconds before continuing.

“The worst thing about working in our field is the absolute knowledge that there are people who are willing to steal and trade the most valuable parts of our cultures. To rob citizens of the right to their own past and their own history. To rob scholars of the opportunity to study their countries' legacy and to learn from it. It is both an intellectual and a physical crime.”

She held her audience rapt in her point of view. No one fidgeted, no one rustled papers, and no one looked at their watches. David felt inexplicably proud of the way she held herself on stage, how she kept their attention, and how she spoke with such passion. He looked around. He felt smug that he was almost certain that he was the only one present who had experienced all of her passion. Jesus. Even thinking about her gave him a semi.

His phone vibrated in his pants, and he got up carefully and made his way to the door so as not to disturb anyone. Once the door was closed behind him, he answered it.

“Church.”

“David. How are things going there?” It was Baston, the owner of his company, and his boss.

“About as well as you would imagine,” he answered, not wanting to give anything away to the few people lingering in the lobby.

“I hear there's been an arrest warrant issued by the Greek police. For your friend.” He said it almost casually, like he was telling them she'd been invited to a clambake.

“I did not know that. How long ago?” His heartbeat kicked up.

“An hour or so. I think the Greeks are under a lot of pressure from the Russians right now. Regardless, Church, this isn't your fight. I've seen the footage, and it looks like she was into something.”

No kidding. David replayed the scene in his head. Molly trying to slip Doubrov some kind of note.

“You've seen the footage?” David winced. That meant he would have seen David go for Molly instead of his principal.

“Just come back immediately. I need you in the office tomorrow morning. You're being reassigned. You have no backup there. Mal's already deployed elsewhere. You haven't officially gotten into any trouble yet, but associating with someone wanted for questioning in relation to an assassination, well that might just be pushing the limit. You get me?”

“I get you, sir. I have plans to be at the airport in a matter of hours.” He omitted that he was going with Molly, but at least that gave Baston plausible deniability.

“Good. See you in the morning.” He hung up.

David looked at his phone. He'd basically agreed to leave Molly. He glanced back at the door to the auditorium and heard people laugh. She must be rocking her speech.

This was the right thing to do. Put her on a plane out of Greece, away from her arrest warrants, and say goodbye. It was the best for her, and the best for him. He still needed to get himself on firmer ground. But right now he had to get her away from the hotel before the police came. Christ, couldn't they have a minute without having to run and hide from someone?

He slipped back into the auditorium, in time to see Victoria enter from the opposite side. They met each other's eyes, nodding acknowledgment. She took a seat at the back, and David took his original seat.

Molly was showing a slide of a woman depicted in a mosaic, as David planned their escape. He'd get the bellboy to pull David's SUV to the back of the hotel. He figured that at least some people would know exactly where Molly was, so time was of the essence. It wasn't like her speech hadn't been on the G20 agenda for months.

Applause startled him out of his plan. Molly stepped away from the podium and nodded, smiling at the crowd. She stepped down from the stage and headed toward him. He jumped up and opened the door for her. “We've got to go now. They've issued a warrant for your arrest.

“What? Why?” she asked trying to keep up with him.

“Don't. Just don't pretend you don't know what this is about, okay? Not with me anyway.” He turned away to pick up both their wheeled suitcases from the bellboy, slipping him a twenty-euro note and the car keys before asking him to drive it around the back entrance.

“Come on,” he said striding toward the doors that took them down to a kind of loading lobby and out to the back door. He dropped the cases outside the sliding doors and they waited.

“Here,” David said, nodding toward the approaching SUV and picking up the bags.

A flare lit under the car, and in front of his eyes, the whole vehicle exploded with a white-hot blaze.

Boom.

He dropped the bags and grabbed Molly to shield her from the heat of the blast, pushing her back through the doors and turning his back to the explosion. Glass and burning material showered down around them, but David's mind was already working at a hundred miles an hour.

It wasn't a firebomb. It was an expertly placed explosive device, designed to totally annihilate anyone sitting inside. The whole vehicle had been destroyed. No chance for the bellboy. Someone definitely wanted them dead.

S
irens sounded, and people came running around the corner into the alleyway. Her ears were still ringing, and the skin on her arms was red where the heat from the blast had hit them.

“We've got to run,” David said. “Leave your bag.”

“Give me a second.” There was no way she could run anywhere in her high heels, not on the cobbled streets of Athens. She ripped open her bag and kicked off her heels, grabbing her sneakers and slipping them on.

David slapped her ass, not once but a few times. What the…? “This is not the time—”

“Your skirt has embers on it.” He slapped her a couple more times and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “Come on.”

She didn't take the time to look at the state of her skirt, but grabbed the sundress that was on top of her clothes, and took his offered hand.

David took off with her half a step behind. They ran away from the debris, and the people who were shouting and pointing, and headed to the loading dock. Once they'd cleared the hotel block, David slowed, but still ran.

“Smile,” he said, as they passed late night shoppers. He grinned at her and she smiled back, wondering what the hell he was thinking.

They continued to run, laughing and smiling until they reached a residential neighborhood. David stopped. “I think we can stop here. Are you okay?”

“I think so. I'm not sure.” She was being honest. A poor man had just got blown up, and yet she was glad it wasn't her and David. Which made her feel like an awful person. And someone was obviously trying to kill them.

David grimaced and rolled his shoulders.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Sure. A little blast shock, but I'm fine. I've seen worse.” He turned to look at a bus stop street map, and she saw his back.

“Jesus. Your shirt is shredded! Let me look”—she pulled up one of the ripped tails of his shirt and saw his back was red raw—“It looks like you have really bad sunburn.” She winced at the pain he must be in.

At that second his phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and answered. “No. We're both okay. They've what?” He nodded a few times. “Thanks, Mal.” He paused. “Just fuck off.”

He shoved the phone back in his pants and paced in front of the church they'd stopped in front of. “They've closed down the city. No one in and no one out. The police have road blocks on all the roads leaving the city.”

“So you don't think we'd make it to the airport?” she asked, wondering what had happened to her life in the past two days.

He remained silent, obviously processing this new information. She didn't press him. She sat on the small wall of the church and took a breath. That poor bellboy. Why would someone bomb their car? Was it because of Brandon's note? Did she set off the chain of reactions that led to that poor man's death?

David stopped pacing and crouched in front of her. She tried to keep her eyes on his face, but her imagination was working overtime. Did the man have family? Did they know yet? “Okay, this is the plan. We're going to take the metro to Piraeus port, where all the tourist boats set sail to the Greek islands. You're going to take out as much cash as you can at an ATM and then you're going to use your credit card to buy one ticket to the farthest island we can find. That way they'll think that you've left the city and we've split up.”

She recognized that he was detailing a plan, and she could hear the words, but she couldn't concentrate on what he was saying. The car kept exploding in her mind.
Ka-boom.
And then that second of silence, followed by the clang of falling car parts. Over and over. She tried to visualize what the bellboy looked like, but she couldn't remember if she'd ever seen him.

“We can't go to the airport, and frankly the boats would be easily caught by a police launch, so the best thing we can do is hunker down somewhere anonymous and try to figure out what the hell is going on.” He pointed down the road to the metro station, and then looked back at her.

She nodded, because that's what he was waiting for. She was sure it was an excellent plan. He took her hand and led her to the metro station, buying two tickets with some coins.

She was still carrying her sundress, which she understood looked strange, so she folded it up as small as she could and clasped it in one hand as they sat on the train. She played with the buttons of it. What had she done? Had she killed the bellboy?

Wordlessly she slipped her hand in her pocket and passed David the envelopes that Brandon Peterson had given her.

His back hurt like fuck. Like someone had taken a blowtorch to it.
Throb, throb, throb
, in time with the motion of the train. Molly slipped her hand into his, and he took a deep breath of relief that she was still alive, that they had escaped death by virtue of tipping a bellboy to bring the car around.

He looked down at their clasped hand and a coldness trickled down his spine. There was something else in there too. He met her eyes, which looked as though wariness and pain were weighing her down. Hooking his finger under the paper between their hands, he slowly dragged it into his lap.

It was one, no two small envelopes. One had been opened. They had her name on them, small enough to be a florist's card. He opened the flap as she looked away. Inside was a small card.

Stamov extraction.

He was pretty sure Stamov was the Russian finance minister, and he suspected that his “extraction” wasn't referring to a visit to the dentist. He flipped the card over. The other side was blank.

What was a State Department employee doing contacting a foreign minister through a civilian? And why was he leaking what would probably be classified information?

He opened the other note.

Andropov extraction.

He thought Andropov was the Russian prime minister—yeah, that rang a bell.

He gave them back to Molly and took her hand again. They'd talk later. Much later, when no one was listening.

So the Russians were telling everyone that they were under attack from the US. Someone in the US government was warning them that it was true, and now someone was after Molly and David. At least he knew why, now. Someone very definitely didn't want Molly to give that note to someone in the Russian government. And that was either the CIA or…
Fuck
. He couldn't get his head wrapped around it.

Not that he necessarily trusted the CIA to do what was right in any given situation. He'd met too many intelligence officers in Afghanistan who were downright sketchy most of the time. But take down a government by picking people off? Unlikely.

The train terminated at the port city of Piraeus, where Molly took out five hundred euros and then paid for a one-way ticket to Cyprus, which was the farthest island served by the ferries. The ferry would leave just about the time they got back on the metro to return to Athens. It was a good plan, if he said so himself. It would keep anyone from following them and getting them in a pickle.
Another Mal-ism.
It would keep from getting them in a shit-ton of trouble.

They caught the train back to Monastiraki, which was the main tourist area of Athens. Much easier to blend in there. When they emerged from the station, it was dusk, and the partiers had come out to play. Throngs of people ambled in the street, so he adopted their pace and walked with his arm wrapped around Molly's shoulders like so many other couples.

He found a hotel in a graffitied backstreet, just a few doors down from a basement “adult” sex shop. The hotel lobby was clean and well furnished, looking more like a boutique hotel than the façade would have suggested. They checked in using cash and fake names, and eventually were given a key to a room on the third floor. The elevator took an age to come, and when it did they got in silently.

“What did…?” Molly started to say.

He placed his finger on her lips and then claimed them in a kiss. Just for appearances. Just in case there was an elevator security camera.
Yeah right.

A bolt of longing, need, and relief wrapped itself around his heart as she rose on her sneakered tiptoes and leaned into the kiss. Despite everything that had happened, this degree of need took him by surprise.

The door pinged loudly as it opened, echoing around the small space. Molly jerked away from the kiss, looking mussed and flustered, but there was no one there. No one in the short corridor either. He grabbed her hand, wanting to get a lockable door between them and the world as fast as possible.

As soon as the door swung shut on them, he lifted her up by her hips, finding her mouth again with his, because there were no words for what had happened. She kissed him back with a ferocity that lit a fire inside him.

He wanted to rip her clothes off, but he didn't know how long she could wear the sundress alone, how long they would be there, so instead he put her back on the floor and carefully, with shaking hands, undid the buttons of her blouse.

She batted his hands away and whipped the silky thing off over her head. The beige lace of her bra made her seem naked for a second. He trailed the backs of his hand lightly over her arms. Her skin was warm, alive to his touch. Alive. Thank God they hadn't evaporated into the night air in the car. He shook his head for a second to clear the image of the explosion, but instead his brain took him to his friend Danny, who'd been blown up in Iraq. They'd been dicking around…until they hadn't. Until Danny was gone forever. And they could have been too.

Molly took his face in her hands and he was back with her, yet overwhelmed with the euphoria of being alive. He tried to rein in his impulse to crush her to him, but when she looked in his eyes, she must have seen something. She stepped back and unzipped her charred skirt. In a second she'd wrapped her arms around his neck, dragging him to her mouth.

Proof of life had never felt so good.

“I need you now,” she murmured against his lips.

The lady didn't need to ask again. He sat her on the small dresser next to the window and yanked off her panties. He shoved his own pants down and her hand reached for him while she was wriggling to the edge so she could get closer.

She drew him to her, but he took her hand away and put it behind her so she was leaning back. He ran the tip of his dick over her clit, watching as her eyes fluttered closed and her mouth dropped open.

His body blazed with a need to consume her. He pushed into her in one hard stroke. Heat shot through his balls into the base of his spine. He was going to last no time at all…

He held himself in place, feeling her body pulse around him. “Maybe someone's watching us through the window,” he said. “Do you want me to open the curtains a little farther?”

She started for a second and then relaxed, her breathing kicking up as she twitched around his dick. She gazed into his eyes and gave an almost imperceptible nod.

It was all fantasy, the window faced a wall, but he pulled the net curtains open, flicking them across her back as he did. “Take your bra off.”

She didn't hesitate, she unfastened it, and allowed it to fall to the floor.

He pulled out of her slowly and grabbed her legs, swiveling her so she was lying across the dresser, giving the wall, and her fantasy, a better view.

He bent over her and dragged a nipple into his mouth. He held it between his teeth and flicked his tongue over its hardness.

His dick strained up, and he was thankful that she was in no position to grab it. He had no idea if he'd be able to hold it together if she did.

Her head fell back, and he wondered for a second if she was imagining someone else watching them. The thought sent waves of arousal through him that took him by surprise.

He gently bit her other nipple and plunged his hand between her legs. Jesus Christ she was so wet. So fucking wet. He dipped his head to her and ran his tongue and fingers over her clit.

Her legs dropped open to give him more access. He'd never been with a woman so open to his touch, so comfortable with her sexuality. It nearly blew his mind that she was his. He knew there was some mental correction to do there, but his mind was consumed with the taste of her. His dick ached to be inside her again. Literally throbbed to feel her hot and wet around him.

He plunged two fingers inside her and curled his fingers behind her clitoris. His whole mouth covered it, stroking it with the flat of his tongue.

Her breath became audible, and then she gasped his name as she contracted around his fingers. He didn't wait for her spasms to recede, he moved her back around so she was sitting at the edge of the dresser and just took her. No tentative pushes, no gentle strokes, just one thrust that blasted through his brain with stars and heat.

God, he needed to be farther inside her. He picked her up and laid her across on the bed, holding her legs open for him. He thrust, hard, his balls slapping against her. She moaned and raised her butt, giving him those all-important millimeters of access.

Everything in him tightened. Molly grabbed her breasts and, with her thumb and forefinger, pinched her nipples, her eyes on his. That was it. While hot heat pulsed from his lower back all the way up his spine to his head as he came.
Fuck, yeah.

“You're amazing,” she said, pulling herself up on her elbows. He felt her deliberately squeeze his dick. He eased out of her, by habit grabbing his dick to keep the condom on. Except…no condom. It hadn't even crossed his mind. Not even once. He'd never had sex without a condom. That was one thing that was beaten into them at bootcamp.

“Molly. I didn't use a condom. Are you…?”

“It's okay, I'm on the pill. And I swear I've been celibate since I met you. You bastard.” She shifted on the bed and laid her head on the pillow.

Relief…
didn't
flow through him. What was wrong with him? He climbed on the bed and lay next to her, pulling a sheet over both of them. “Why am I a bastard again? I mean, you're probably right, but why?”