Femme Fatale (9 page)

She waited by the cracked-open door, both patient and impatient as he snapped the rig together and settled the
Browning in place. Her face held no fear, only alert readiness. She said, “If Egorov’s man is in the CIA as Lyeta said, and the CIA also thinks I shot Lyeta, then the mole would have no trouble committing resources to my capture.”

More information in one casual sentence than he’d managed to pull from her all day. He took it in stride, refraining from comment—although if he’d known the agency and not a smaller wanna-be organization had been behind the earlier foray in the hotel lobby, he would have been more circumspect about bringing her back to the room. No doubt they’d paid off the desk clerks and the concierge and even the bellboys to keep an eye out for Beth’s reappearance. And while he and Beth had been circumspect upon return…

Someone, somewhere, had obviously seen them.

The CIA. Compromised.

If he’d known.

It was an old phrase from an old song.

He tucked it away for another time, accepting that he, too, bore some responsibility; he hadn’t learned the identity of those whose arses he’d kicked so readily in the lobby. He’d concentrated on finding Beth, rightly figuring that they were after her, not him, and wrongly figuring that they would continue to focus on her, not him. But the CIA had the resources to do both.

Obviously.

He made a hasty job of pulling his motorbike jacket on, coming up against Beth’s back as she carefully checked the hallway. “They’re frustrated by now,” she said. “I’m sure they expected to have me before this. They didn’t go straight for their weapons the first time, but I wouldn’t care to assume they’ll do the same in the future.”

“We won’t,” he said, visualizing the hotel floor plan. Like so many of them, the halls wound around themselves in a confusing maze with exits to fire stairs at crucial points. “They can’t cover the elevators and all the stairwells. I say we make for the exit on the other side of the floor and head down. There’s a bizarre lower passage leading to the parking garage from there.”

She glanced back at him, her lips still soft but her eyes hard and ready. Eager, almost. “You know the way?”

He nodded, and she immediately moved aside. “Your lead, then. Time to blow this joint.”

“Lovely idiom. Let’s avoid taking it too seriously,” he suggested, giving a quick glance down the hall in both directions and then moving out at a fast clip. She came behind him, silent on her bare feet and close enough to cover his back, not so close as to impede him. He realized instantly that in spite of their differences, he could count on her to work
with
him and not just near him, actively partnering in a way made him grin fiercely.
Me and thee against the world.

Once they passed the bank of three brass elevators, Jason picked up the pace considerably, startling several blithe hotel guests who chose just the wrong moment to emerge from their rooms. Beth effortlessly kept pace, flip-flops in one hand, the other ready to dive for the Sig. “Just around this corner,” he said, turning his head just enough so she could hear him.

Just enough and too much, as from the corner of his eye he saw a body in motion. He reacted instantly, diving away but brought up short by the opposing hall wall, still fully exposed—

And this team had come in aggressively, ready to extract what they wanted and kill whoever got in their way. Even from the corner of his eye, Jason had recognized
the lump of a sound suppressor at the end of the pistol aimed his way. Heard the sharp double
phhut
of the gunshot, and jerked at the astonishing burn as metal drilled through his biceps and into the wall, leaving blood splatter along expensive wallpaper. Bracing for a second impact, he scrambled to get out of the line of fire even as he reached for his gun—and then heard a third shot, a strange noise that didn’t quite seem right.

Because it wasn’t a gunshot at all. It was Beth, bounding in with those silly flip-flops, smacking them across the gunman’s fingers, using her momentum to twist around and roundhouse the man’s face with her bare foot, her legs long and lean and wielded with astonishing control. The man’s head bounced off the wall. In the mere instant that he sagged, she snatched his gun, smashing it into his temple and barely hesitating to watch him go down. “You on your feet?” she asked, glancing back only for an instant before riveting her attention on the stairwell they’d been aiming for.

“Good to go,” he said. “Looks like they have more manpower than we anticipated.”

“Looks like they’re not holding back this time, either.” She nodded at the stairs. “These? Or a different set? And I ought to mention that from the sound of it, we have maybe fifteen seconds before someone comes through that door.”

Bloody hell, that hurts!
“We’ve lost too much time—this is it.”

“Fine. Leg up?” She gave his arm a quick, questioning look.

He tried to flex it fully, failed, and offered her a quick grimace as he looped his hands together anyway, bending to offer her a stirrup even though he wasn’t quite sure yet what she had in mind. “At least it’s not spurting.”

“None of that nasty jaggedy bone sticking out, either,” she said, using his hand stirrup to launch herself up, and—
I don’t bloody believe it!
—climbed from his hands to his shoulder and upward to crouch lightly on the stout door-closing mechanism, balancing on one bare foot with just enough room to fit under the extra-high ceiling. Jason eyed her only long enough to convince himself she’d done it, then put his back to the wall just beyond the turn with the Browning in his hand.

Moments later, the doorknob snicked and turned; the quickest of glances showed him Beth, with incredible flexibility and balance, riding the door open with her free foot and jamming the stolen, silenced pistol down on the bald head just coming through the opening. A second man took aim at her from within the stairwell but by then Jason was in motion, squeezing the trigger on a round that slapped the man down. A massive explosion of sound echoed up and down the stairwell.

“Bugger,” he said, and to Beth, “Sorry.”

For the sound would bring the rest of them running, and the three they’d conquered would be as nothing unless they got out of here,
now.

“Considering you just literally saved my ass,” Beth said, “I forgive you.” Within the stairwell, the wounded man moaned. She glanced to see his weapon had fallen out of reach and ignored him, keeping her attention on her captive. “Let’s get this guy secured.”

Standard-issue cuffs scavenged from the two wounded men did the trick. Beth leaped lightly from her perch as Jason did the honors, and at no time did the aim of her weapon on the bald man deviate in the process. As Jason pushed the man up against the wall, Beth got right in his face. “Listen up,” she said. “If you’re Egorov’s man, it’s time to back off. You’re blown, and the word’s about to
come down—I’d take flight if I were you. If you’re not Egorov’s, then you’re plain old CIA being led around by the nose. Get off my back and start looking within your own ranks for the very poor sniper who killed Lyeta.” And without a second look at the man, she jerked her head at Jason—
let’s go
—and entered the stairwell.

Jason grabbed his laptop case and followed, but when she looked back at him she stopped short, jamming the silenced gun into her parka and backtracking impatiently to the wounded man. She produced a knife from…somewhere…to cut the man’s suit jacket sleeve off and then the fine linen sleeve of his dress shirt. “You’re leaving a blood trail,” she murmured, splitting the end of the sleeve in two as she approached him.

“Ah,” he said, holding his arm away from his body so she could work. “Your concern touches me to the core.”

She hesitated as she wrapped the sleeve around his arm, glancing up as if in spite of herself, with enough worry in those exquisite blue-green eyes to startle him and, in the midst of gunplay and danger and hard decisions, to touch him. Then she grew fierce, an expression to which he was more accustomed. Doubling one of the sleeve’s split ends back to tie off the bandage, she said acerbically, “Bleed slower. We don’t want to leave them any bread crumbs.”

“That’s better,” he told her, surprisingly chipper. And why not? No more stalking around on her trail, no more trying to outguess her, no more
waiting
for something to break on this assignment. They’d joined forces, they’d hit action—always his best thing—and damn, they were good together. He gave her a grin and was even more pleased as she returned it with a feral glint in her eye and led the way down the stairs.

With the bottom passage in sight, they heard the stair
well door open several floors above them, followed by the heavy tread of fast downhill footsteps, fast enough to include gaps where the pursuing agents skipped steps and ominous thuds as they jumped to the next landing. “Go,” Beth said to him, already lost in concentration as she steadied her borrowed gun on the railing where it bent to follow the landing and the final tier of stairs before the passage. “I’ll catch up.”

Jason watched her try one angle, then another, and when she opened her mouth to urge him on, he said, “I damn well think not.”

“Which of us is losing blood?” she snapped, choosing her vantage point and settling in. “Which of us is the better shot? Go!”

Jason glanced at the makeshift bandage and found it soaked, found fresh stain seeping back down the heavy material of his shirt. If nothing else he’d be leaving bread crumbs again, and soon. “Sod it all,” he muttered viciously. He gave her a warning look—a
don’t get killed
look—and headed down the stairs.

He made it only as far as the final landing. As right as she was, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. He looked up in time to see her take calm and steady aim, carefully squeezing the trigger twice in quick succession and then giving the borrowed pistol a startled look as the slide jumped back and stuck there, the magazine empty.

He’d heard bodies fall, but a third man came on. Beth swore a heartfelt oath and dove for the stairs, jumping the entire flight and lurching forward at the bottom to smack into the wall opposite them. Jason lifted the Browning just in time to drill her pursuer before the man targeted Beth. The man’s wayward bullet hit high on the concrete block wall of the stairwell as he tumbled loosely down the stairs.

Beth wiped the silenced pistol clean of her prints and
dropped it on the man’s twitching body. “Five freaking shots in that clip,” she said in disbelief. “Who goes into a firefight situation with a half-full clip?”

“Not you, I’m sure,” Jason said. “Let’s not find out if there are any more of them. ‘Out’ is this way.” But the stairwell swooped around him, and although he thought he’d stayed upright Beth quickly grabbed his good arm, shoving her hip up against his. Deftly relieving him of the Browning, she shoved it back into its holster, grabbed up his abused laptop case, and got them moving. “I’m okay,” he said, unconvincing to his own ears. “Just need a place to sit down.” He glared at the world as he stumbled along, muttering, “What a cock-up.”

Beth snickered. If she was worried about his condition it didn’t show, and he found that oddly reassuring even if she
was
laughing at him. “Oh, right,” he said, unrepentant. “Different implication for you Yanks.”

“Just a little,” she said, still smiling as they entered the parking garage, discovering no sign of pursuit or surveillance. “Come on, then. I have just the right place. It’s absolutely meant for sitting.”

F
ast food has taken over the world.
“Thirty thousand franchises in one hundred twenty-one countries,” Beth told Chandler, handing over a paper-wrapped burger. “Forty-six million customers per day. Now you’re one of them. Eat up, you need protein.” She gave her own burger a skeptical look. “Guess I’m not sure just how much actual protein is in one of these things.”

He sat in the otherwise empty theater with her—front row seats, of course—and automatically took the burger she proffered. In a moment she’d pilfer the theater’s first-aid kit and rewrap his arm, but as long as the food was still warm and he had that pasty, used-up look on his face, they could just sit here in the barely heated auditorium munching burgers and fries. The franchise had been on the way, and she’d sat him down at one of the children’s miniature picnic tables while she ran in to throw rands at them and grab the goodies.

Not that it had been so long since their last meal. But
Beth was making up for lost time and Chandler needed to make up for lost blood. Far too much of it. At the moment he just sat there, looking around the dimly lit theater with what was meant to be a practiced eye, but she could see he wasn’t really tracking. She gave him a slanting glance as she reached for her milk shake, and pulled the straw out just far enough to make a series of horrible slurping noises. He started, immediately focusing on her.

“There,” she said, meeting his surprised look without concern. “If there’s anyone here, that should bring them running, don’t you think?”

“You said there wouldn’t be.”

“And there won’t. But you don’t believe me yet, so I thought I’d give you a little demo. See? No one.” She took a big bite of her cheeseburger, pretending it was actually juicy. “I know it’s a big comedown from that hotel food, but do you know how many calories they pack into one little French fry?”

“No, but I’ll bet you can tell me.” He offered her something close to a rakish grin, an expression she hadn’t expected to see from him. His hair, conservative as it was, still managed to look rumpled and even a little scruffy, and it went perfectly with that grin.

“Five hundred and forty total for a serving that size,” she informed him, pretending to be unaffected.
Yeah, and that kiss didn’t curl your toes, either.
“You can use ’em right now. So eat.”

Normally she wouldn’t worry about her curling toes. She wouldn’t worry about her response to him at all—she’d just let it happen and enjoy the moments. But Chandler…her reactions to him ambushed her. Repeatedly. When she’d seen him in that hallway, the instant she knew he’d been shot but not just where—

She’d almost lost it. She’d almost rushed to him instead of disarming the shooter. Superbly trained, highly experienced, and all she could see was the stunned look on his face as the bullet hit. Not a good sign, that distraction. Not good sign, the depth of her response to him. She thought she’d left those feelings behind when she’d walked away from her long-discarded fiancé, but now they hit her hard.

So she worried about her toes.

Chandler was oblivious, wrapped up in his pain and his sweat and his distraction. Thinking about their situation, no doubt. As a good spy should. He unwrapped the crinkly paper just enough to expose half the burger, and took a healthy bite. “I know this is an active theater. I don’t understand why—”

“Because they’re just gearing up for production. I should know, I auditioned here a few days ago. Waiting for callbacks, now. They do the auditions in the morning, fight over them in the afternoon, and leave the theater to me in the evening. Not that they know about it. But honestly, did you think I’d bring you to a place I hadn’t checked out? Or bring
me
to a place I hadn’t checked out? This theater is perfect.”

“It’s hardly secure,” he pointed out. “We pretty much walked right in.”

“
This
part of it isn’t.” She stuffed a fry into her mouth and sucked the salt off. Ooh, so bad for her. No wonder it tasted so good.

He gave her a baffled look. “Backstage?”

Beth laughed. “You haven’t been around theaters much, have you? They’re wonderful when you want to disappear. This particular place has storage worthy of
Phantom of the Opera.
Once we go below, we’re off everyone’s radar.” A final bite of the burger, and she
balled the paper up and stuck it inside the bag. “Lean this way,” she said. “I’ll fix that arm up while you eat.”

“Not the best combination of activities.” But he did it, and she opened the kit on the seat beside her, twisting into a yoga-inspired shape to get a good working angle as they sat side by side. He said nothing as she worked, cutting the sleeve open and cleansing the wound. The natural distinct definition of his biceps had given way to swelling, and she wished she had antibiotics.

“Thank you,” he said when she had finished, although she was certain she’d hurt him. Sweat daubed his face, gathering in the well-defined groove between his nose and lips. She snatched her hand back as it rose to follow an impulse, fingers drawn to trace those lips. The upper lip looked a little stern, but the bottom lip…sensuous and full and waiting for more kissing.
God. What timing, Riggs. The middle of a cock-up mission.

Oblivious to her wayward thoughts, he said, “It’s time to talk, Beth.
Is
that your name? Beth?”

She hesitated, then nodded. And required no more prompting. He was in this with her one way or the other—he certainly wasn’t going to make any further easy contact with his handler. She didn’t think he’d noticed it yet, but while the first round fired had hit his arm, the second had gone astray and cored the laptop case. She said succinctly, “I met Lyeta to give her sanctuary in exchange for information. She was shot as we spoke. She told me she had a copy of the master security keycard that would give us open access to Krystof Scherba’s computer network. You know Scherba built Egorov’s system, right?”

Okay, not the entire truth. Nothing about the mini CD that Beth already had, and no hint of a definition of
us
— Stony Man. But all the same he seemed stunned to realize he was, at last and in one swift conversational dump, get
ting the information he’d been looking for. She waited until he nodded, and until his expression turned faintly eager at the thought of the keycard. Then she said, “All I know is that she stashed it somewhere to which the words
Blue Crane, under,
and
table
all apply.”

Chandler plucked a French fry from the bag between them; a smile showed in the quirk of his lips as he chewed. “And so I found you crawling under tables at the Blue Crane Winery.”

She shrugged, feeling her own amusement. “It was as good a lead as any. I’ve got a complete list of possibilities, but they’re extensive. The big problem is that we can’t find any record of where Lyeta spent her time the night before. If I could find that location, it might narrow things down considerably. If I could
search
it…”

Chandler smiled the kind of smile that shouldn’t be coming from a man at the end of a fight-and-run scene and who still bled from a bullet wound. “You may have gone to meet her at that dock, but
I
followed her there.”

He’d known? He’d known all along?

He just hadn’t known it mattered.

Beth said it out loud just to be sure, fighting the impulse to jump up right then and there, demand the information and run off into the night. “Then you know where she came from. Where she spent her last night.”

In spite of her restraint, Chandler saw the impulse. “Easy there,” he said. “The answer is yes, as much as anyone knows. But now is not the time to act on it. You’re exhausted—you’re going to make mistakes. So am I, and I don’t trust myself to cover anyone’s back in this situation, not when we have options. Besides, the location doesn’t come with lighting, and nature won’t provide any until nearly six in the morning.”

The location.
“You’re not going to tell me,” she said flatly, narrowing her eyes at him.

He winced. She didn’t know if it was from his arm or her glare and she didn’t care. He said, “As a matter of fact, no. Unless you tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you don’t want to dash off into the night and do something about it.”

She bounced up out of the theater seat and into the aisle, where she shed the flip-flops she’d worn on their hurried exit from the hotel and put her foot up on the back of an innocent seat in lieu of a stretching bar. He wasn’t wrong. She
did
want to act, and to act
now.
But that didn’t mean she
would.

“I thought as much,” he said, jamming the litter from the meal into the bag it had come in and wadding the entire thing up with enough pressure to turn it into a diamond. “Don’t get a strop on about it. I had you pegged from the start. Why you think it’s perfectly fine to make impulsive decisions without consulting the other people involved—”

“Get over it,” she snapped at him, straightening from the tight straight-legged stretch, unaccountably wounded by his words. As if she cared what he thought. “Your attitude is exactly why I know better than to trust rule-book boys. You think you have the right to control everyone else, and if a thing isn’t done
your
way, it’s wrong no matter what.”

As if she cared what he thought.

Evidently, she did. To judge by the wrench of the anger within her, the hot pain deep in her throat…evidently, foolishly, she somehow cared a lot.

He had his mouth open to say something; she cut him off. “As it happens, you’re exactly right and exactly
wrong.
I wanted to run off and check the place out. But
I wasn’t going to. It’s the middle of the night, we’re exhausted, and you’re hurt. Do you even know how much blood you’ve lost? As it happens, I was going to
consult
you about how you wanted to proceed. So you can just—”
Go to hell,
she’d been about to say, except she realized how revealing it was, how personal she’d let things get. Beside herself in what would no doubt be labeled an impulsive little temper, she let her foot fall from the seat and stalked down the sloped aisle and then up to the stage. She had no particular purpose other than putting distance between them, enough distance so she had time to cool off. Official retreat, hiding the very personal retreat beneath.

She couldn’t make it
too
personal. She still had to work with him, to wait until morning and start the chase again. In spite of her anger, the anticipation gave her a little thrill—finally, Lyeta’s keycard, her dying legacy, and the tool that would allow Stony Man to target not only the remains of the dying Egorov’s legacy, but master hacker Krystof Scherba.

That Chandler would be there had nothing to do with it.

Damn toes. Stop curling.

She sat cross-legged at the back of the stage, massaging her feet. Dancer’s feet, flexible and pampered and at the same time always just a little bit abused. Tough and tender. Like he is, said an unbidden little voice in her head, and with some irritation she slapped it away.
Controlling,
she told it, arguing with herself.
Unyielding.

It made her glad for the deep shadows. Even with the various curtains drawn up in preproduction openness, the low light of the theater—a light she’d have to remember to turn off soon—barely reached her. It hid the stacks of
flats leaning against the interior brick and the selection of scrims off to the side and it hid her, although not so much that Chandler wouldn’t know she was there. He’d know she hadn’t committed some impulsive fling of a decision and left him there.

Impulsive fling
was perhaps not the best phrase to plant in her mind just now.

Beth sighed and switched feet, massaging each toe individually, letting her mind go blank, or trying to. She concentrated on deep breathing, dispelling anger and making way for relaxation. There. That was better. She stood, hand against the painted brick wall for balance, and lifted her foot high above her head, pulling down on her toes. Stretching again. What she always did when she needed moments of calm.

But when she looked away from the self-imposed focus point in the stage right wing where the dimly visible call board hung empty in preparation for the first list of callbacks, she found Chandler standing on the stage apron, immediately in front of the first row of seats. Gentle light from the auditorium limned his head and shoulders, leaving the rest of him in shadow. Amazing how much she could tell from that simple silhouette. That it was a non-confrontational stance, slightly hip-cocked; it lacked the precise squaring of the shoulders she’d seen him affect before action or argument. His arm bothered him; she could tell that, too, the way he unconsciously held it away from his body; in another moment she thought he’d tuck his thumb in his belt.

Just standing there, looking at him, balancing in her stretch, Beth felt a familiar curl. It had migrated from her toes to her lower belly, and it hovered there, pulsing quietly.
Ohh, I am in so much trouble…

Quietly he said, “Dance for me.”

That’s not what he’d meant to say. He’d meant to say, “I don’t want to argue with you,” and “I’m sorry, I jumped to conclusions,” and maybe something else besides, but when his eyes finally adjusted to the shadows of the stage, he lost those words entirely. She stood, stretching in a way to make her legs look impossibly long and her bottom impossibly firm. Instead of ballerina elegance she moved with lithe feline strength. Not a swan, but a panther—except for that impossibly long, graceful neck. A
kiss me
neck.

And so he lost all his important words, his body stirring. His pragmatic nature fled before her, and his mouth said
Dance with me.

Slowly she lowered her leg. She took several pantherish steps his way and said, “What?” in a wary, puzzled tone that let him know she’d heard him…she just didn’t know what to make of it.

He should just shake his head at her, and go back to his plan. The “I don’t want to argue with you” plan. The one where he didn’t embroil himself any further with a woman whose nature was so contrary to his, who was sure to rip new wounds over old scars.